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"James?"
The Winter Soldier looked up from cleaning his weapons against their return to the Red Room. Natalia was looking at him with that serious-faced mask she always wore when she was real, nothing but flickers of expression about the edges.
They both had times and seasons, days and hours when they became someone else and smiled or laughed as needed. It was part of being a spy. But Natalia did it better than he did. He only needed brute strength and skill. She needed to slip between personas as though they were her very self. When she took them off, there were no smiles underneath.
"Natalia." He set aside his gun and held out his arms so she could slide into them and settle on his lap. Her fingers wound tight into his hair; her forehead leaned against his.
"I'm leaving," she said.
He froze. She should not have told him this, his Natalia, his little flame. If they asked him, he would have to answer.
"They won't ask you," she whispered, her gaze steady and strong. She had read his worry in his eyes and the fractional tightening of his metal grip. "I want... James. I'll take you with me if I can."
The Winter Soldier looked at this woman who had once been a little girl dropped into the Red Room's arms from out the window of a burning building. He looked at what had grown from the girl he had trained and guarded among the other Black Widow candidates and their handlers. He looked at the light burning in his darkness between the freezings.
"You can't," he said flatly, certainly.
Under her soft trembling, there was steel that told him Natalia would do what needed to be done. She would leave without him.
He let her go, pushed her arms gently from him, and stood. She would go and she would smile and become the woman that little girl should have had not Ivan caught her and brought her to the Red Room and the KGB. She would go and leave the Winter Soldier in his dark prison because not even his Natalia was skilled enough to break him free.
"If they send me after you, I will kill you," he told her honestly, desolation in his heart if not his tone.
He saw the trembling leave her. She breathed in the Russian air. "You will try," she said. She breathed out.