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There’s a singular moment in time when they are all reunited, when she feels mildly safe, when she worries about nothing and embraces everything, when she is content and sees a brilliant future cresting on the horizon. But, like all the light that she’s experienced, it fades harshly. It starts to fade when Sam grips his new shield so hard that his nails almost break. When Steve disappears from their present and future. When James takes the smallest of steps away from her. Their perfect happy ending only lasts a second, and then they keep moving.
Sam peels off first, citing the VA and DC and any other acronyms that he can think of, but she knows that the shield is a heavy burden to bear and he needs time. Most importantly, he needs time away from Steve’s memory; a memory adhered to the skin of James Buchanan Barnes and Natasha Romanov. So, he leaves as soon as he can. When he does, the man perpetually standing beside her takes another step away.
In Wakanda, they are separated by their own volition. He goes back to his small home and she’s put up near the city’s center. Neither offer to go with one another – they quietly drift apart. Their relationship had always been alight in the darkest times, times of murder and regimes and violence and war. Without the scene staged and set, Natasha is unsteady. She doesn’t protest when he disappears, but then again, she’s not entirely clear on who disappears first.
Instead, she clenches her teeth when she smiles, tightlipped and falsified, until she can return to her temporary home and finally feel the true absence of metal and warmth.
She doesn’t take note of the length of his absence, instead focusing on her own recovery to pass the time. She sees him every now and then, in the city, in the palace, in the field, but he mirrors her own hardened smile. The cool planes of his face are etched with exhaustion, guilt, and pain, and his eyes reflect the color of the sky after a storm. She sees in them the private hell that he’s been navigating and tries to understand the separation. James had been many things: a child, a soldier, a lover, a friend, a murderer, all ones that she had been too. She recognizes the discomfort of starting over anew; she sees it in his heavy walk and hung head – he’s working to find which version of James Buchanan Barnes he wants to be. Which one can survive.
She’s sitting on her bed, thumbing through a mindless newspaper that barely holds her focus when he appears in her doorway. She doesn’t look up.
“What can I help you with?” She asks casually, ignoring the onset of dizziness. He doesn’t respond. She sighs.
“James,” she folds up her newspaper, “why are you here?” She looks up and freezes at his haunted look. His hair is disheveled, stubble overgrown, hands shaking. She moves off of her bed and crosses toward him. She places her hands on his face, searching for some semblance of the man she knew.
“Come back to me,” she whispers in Russian, because she doesn’t know what else to do, and he finally meets her eyes. He falls to his knees, burying his face into her stomach. He whimpers and she sighs. “Oh, miliy moy,” she says.
She lets him cry, hands running through his hair as sobs rack both of their bodies, before she meets him on the ground. She pulls him into her chest and steadies his breath.
“You’re okay,” she murmurs. “I’m here. We’re here.”