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Natasha is long past believing in fate; there might have been a time when he made her re-evaluate that, in some distant life she tries her best not to think on. Times like that, under the veil of lethargy-induced haze and the low lights of the communal kitchen, she allowed the guard to slip and imagines she can feel the remnant of a string tying her heart to his. There is no other way to make the jerking tug she feels in her chest at the sight of him tolerable.
She doesn’t leave, defending her perch on the kitchen counter as the coffee machine beeps in distress beside her.
James has been there such a short length of time. So much emphasis has been put on easing his transition that nobody has noticed how haunted he looks when he is around her, and nobody noticed how haunted she has become in return. It’s like sharing a space with a ghost. In a way, that’s exactly what they are doing; the press of a life that would never have had the chance to be.
“They don’t know?” He hadn’t needed to ask, but he does anyway- an excuse to talk with her if nothing else. An excuse to hear her voice.
He sounds different in English, softer. The sound twists her stomach, and she lowers the cup from her lips with a grimace, trying to hide her discomfort in the taste of the coffee as she pours it down the drain. All it does is remind her that he isn’t her James.
“No. No one.”
“Dirty little secret?” He jokes, voice low and fatigued. The humour is palpable but tense, as though the sentiment remained, and Natasha thinks that maybe the early-hours ambiance is getting to him too – drawing the dregs of memory and feeling out of the deepest, shadowed part of his mind, giving them a taste of sunlight.
Neither of them have been built for sentiment; nothing reminds her more that they are no longer who they had been than he did.
“Did you want to be?”
James shrugged, sipping at his coffee leisurely. His eyes continue to draw patterns over her face; warm and tender, so far removed from the distant and calculating gaze the other’s got from him. That twists her stomach too- she remembers being the only one who got her James' soft looks back then too.
“I know it’s not the same coming from me instead of from him,” he starts, losing steam as fast as he gains it. Where his posture had been strong before, now he looks meek and worn “…but I missed you, Natalia. Even when I didn’t know who you were, I still missed you or, at least a part of me did.”
“Right person, wrong time.”
“Right person, not enough time,” he corrects.
She smiles at that, fingers tightening on her empty mug as though massaging the porcelain would also massage the tension out of her shoulders. “I suppose we have all the time in the world now. It’s a shame that in order to get here, we had to grow into the wrong people.”
And she means it, surely? A part of her does, or at least did. She feels herself losing conviction in it almost as quickly as James had. Not quite regretful, just far too overdue. So overdue that it felt like digging up a lost moment, one that should have stayed buried.
His laugh is tense and just a little sad, and when he says “yeah” it almost sounds bitter.
And that pulls her heart into her throat, the string connecting them tugged taut. It pushes her conviction over the edge. Natasha doesn’t believe it anymore: that they became the wrong people, that they could ever be the wrong people for each other. She doesn’t think she ever did.
Tears gather at her lash-line, not enough to fall but enough to threaten. She was long past worrying if it made her look weak. She wants to look weak; she wants him to know that he still held such a vast part of her that he could.
Because she misses him, and she has missed him. Even when he didn’t remember her anymore. Even when she didn’t remember him anymore. Time, and distance, and the Red Room, and Hydra, and all the bullshit that came with it… it found them there, together, standing under the florescent lights of the kitchen, in a building they both call their home. In the early hours of the morning, surrounded by the smell of burnt coffee and the quiet calm of a life that neither of them could have imagined the last time their eyes had locked, she feels the thunderous beat of her heart stutter.
It isn’t lost on him. In a blink James’ expression switches from sad reminiscence to something akin to heartbreak. Who knows what that means for the future; James seems to care as little as she does.
He closes the distance in a handful of long strides. Standing between her legs, so close to touching her but not quite, he allows the fingers of his right hand to ghost her cheekbone and jaw, her lips, her nose; he maps out her face like a man looking for something that he cannot find.
The relief on his face is followed by a smile before he is finally, finally closing that distance; wrapping his arms around her waist he buries his face into her shoulder, firm and unrelenting, the silent admission that he is glad to be back.
As if in instinct, her legs wrap around his waist in response. Pulling him close and pinning him there. Natasha rests her chin on his shoulder, too content to lose herself in him, bury her face in his neck, and drink in the heat from his body, allow herself to believe that he was finally back with her.
Except her breaths are too fast, too hard. The thought is drowning her, and he is holding her under almost as much as he is holding her above the water.
Tears gather at the back of her throat, unshifting against her swallows as she gulps in air. And it occurs to her, far later than it should of, that the sounds of tear-saturated and barking breaths that accompany sobbing aren’t hers alone.
James’ chest presses back against her own, gentle convulsions accompany the tense and release of his grip around her. Like her own, the tears don’t fall freely but they do gather in the base of his throat and he is trying, and failing, to swallow them down. Drowning.
That’s how they are found, in a manner of speaking: her legs wrapped around his waist and his hands gripping her's in return. Only now the sobs have settled and their breaths have calmed. They are talking in low, muttered Russia as her fingers card through his hair, foreheads pressed together, and shared soft smiles. Both are too aware of the world around them to not know that their solitude had been disturbed, but they don’t move.
“You guys let the coffee burn. That’s sad.” Clint signs, pulling the coffee pot from it’s place under the machine. “And I don’t wanna break up the moment or anything, but the others are gonna be all over-” he waves his hand in their general direction, coffee pot and all “-this. Like, you’re about to experience a really intense game of twenty questions but it’s gonna be, like, two-hundred real invasive ones.”
In place of a reply, both gave out their own low, breathy laughs. As it turned out, not even their respective handlers had been capable of splitting them up. Natasha thinks, their teammates can try... she isn't planning on letting go again.