Chapter Text
She makes the shot between one heart beat and the next, with winter’s bitter bite on her tongue and her lips pursed to hide the cloud of white that billows out on her next breath. The single glass pane in the secluded cabin's window shatters on the third heartbeat following the shot, and bright crimson spatters on the wall with the fourth. In the fifth and sixth and seventh, she pushes herself from her belly to her knees and disassembles her gun. Fingers numb, but still nimble, pack away the pieces in her hiker’s backpack before she stands and brushes the layer of pine needles and powdery snow from her insulated white tac suit.
Like a spectre, she slips away into the night, sticking close to the sanctuary of tree trunks to disrupt her shadow and hide her from prying eyes. When she is certain she has not been followed, having trailed backwards and forwards and around and around in a five square mile merry goose chase, she opens up her comm. line.
“Vdova, report.” They’re waiting for her. They always are.
“Eliminated,” she breathes, voice as low as will be audible over the comm., but still too loud in the trance-like hush of the forest. The deep freeze means all the little creatures huddle away in their burrows, asleep beneath the snow. So there is no birdsong, no hooting of owls, no brush of the wolverine or scurrying of voles to hide her. There’s not even any wind to stray her bullets tonight, nor carry her voice on a breeze. It means any noise she makes hangs in the air like a bad omen, pregnant with danger.
“Excellent. Proceed to the extraction point.”
“Understood.”
She disables the comm. again, tucking the earpiece into her breast pocket and doing up the zipper. It too is loud in the silence, but under it she thinks she hears something. Someone. A branch snaps nearby, and her favourite carbon-steel blade is in her hand in the next heartbeat, having materialized in her grasp without a conscious thought.
Her eyes dart, to the left and the right, searching the bruised-purple shadows of the trees, drawn long and heavy by the high, white moonlight. They contrast so sharply with the sparkling, powdery snow, and it throws her off as her brain tries to make sense of the visual noise. And speaking of noise, the silence has returned. But it isn’t a hush like all world’s asleep. Rather, it’s like the forest holds its breath, just waiting. She grips her knife more tightly, flirts with the idea of going for her gun and then discards it because a gunshot would tell them where she is, and instead presses on.
She is a shadow now. She is earning her name in this moment. Death’s Shadow haunts the tree line with the blackened edge of her blade glimmering only faintly in the moonlight. She barely dares to breathe, the huff of her exhales purposefully slow and shallow to keep the white puffs of warm steam to a minimum. And perhaps it is her insistence on being careful, silent and shadowed and slow, that gives the other the advantage.
They’re on her in an instant, dropping from a tree right behind her. The part of her brain that detaches itself from her body in a firefight, the part that allows her to win, scolds her for her carelessness. The rest of her has to throw off the urge to panic, and it costs her precious seconds. She bites the hand over her mouth, but only gets a taste of old leather for her efforts. A wide chest slots against her back, and when she tries to pitch forward and throw them off, to use their own weight against them, her attacker counters her by yanking back. They are stronger than her – unnaturally so – but it is the crooning voice in her ear that calms her frantic efforts.
“Shh… Shhh… You are sloppy, little spiderling.”
“Yasha.”
Too loud in the silence, too relieved. The appropriate response would be to quiver in terror. Even the Red Room would forgive her for that. Instead, she turns in his loosening grip and throws her arms around his neck, squeezing tight. His own arms encircle her waist, squeezing back through her thermal layers with his hands splayed across her ribs, near crushing her to him. When she pulls off her balaclava, and he pulls away his mask, the smile on his lips is its own kind of deadly. Heartbreaking, really. She surges up to kiss it away, to warm his wind-parched mouth and taste the bite of winter on his tongue. One hand – gloved in leather and cold enough to make her shiver – cups her face, and the thumb traces the apple of her cheek.
“What are you doing here?” She breathes, yanking off his hat and running her own gloved hand through his short-cropped hair. They cut it for a mission in America, and it’s a shame really because she liked the way it looked curling around his ears. But still, it glitters so prettily in the moonlight.
Yasha’s head tilts to the side, and oh that smile has returned, but the crinkle around his eyes is sad. A sour feeling springs to life in her belly at that smile, and all the weight it carries.
“I am a Widow now,” she hisses, even if she is not angry with him, “I do not need to be babysat.”
“I know, Natalia,” he whispers in return, achingly gentle, “But I am not the one that needs convincing.”
“So you are my ghost,” Natalia prompts, her eyes flickering when she searches his, even though the anger is already fading. Yasha smiles again, in reference to one of his many monikers. Soldat, the Ghost, the Spectre, Death. Of course, there are less favourable ones – Asset, Experiment – but Ghost is an honourable title. It is a testament to who he is, his skill and his competence.
“Of course I am,” Yasha insists, earnest in a way that might make her heart ache, if she had such a thing. Even still, her belly does a cartwheel and she doesn’t try to hide her smile. Yasha leans in again, kissing it away and pressing his forehead to hers. Somehow, without either of their conscious thought, their hands intertwine and squeeze once, twice, thrice in a two-pulse beat, in time to their hearts.
“Natalia,” he murmurs just then, so close his breath brushes over her face. It should be warm – he is always so warm – but now it's like the icy chill of an Arctic breeze and it near freezes the flesh from her face. Dread fills her belly, from the cold and the sudden warning in his tone. The hands in hers grow hard, grip punishing. Blunt fingertips dig between sinew and bone until her metacarpals grind together. When Natalia cries out, tries to extract her hand, rears back to look at him, his face is hard like stone with icy eyes that bore into her very soul.
“Natalia,” Yasha says, without affliction, an animated corpse, “Run.”
In an instant, she is aware of someone behind her, the safety of a pistol clicking off and the bite of the muzzle into her scalp. Yasha’s face breaks into a grin now, too wide and with too sharp teeth that glint like bone in the white of the moon. She rears back again, only to press herself more firmly into the gun behind her. Mind racing, Natalia searches for escape – any escape. Except she knows it is no use. Widow she may be, at the of her class - the sole survivor - but the Winter Soldier broke and remoulded her in his image. And he is still the master. He is still Death – she is only it’s shadow.
And now, she doesn’t know which is worse - the smile on his face now or the dead-man’s repose of seconds before. As the milliseconds pass, she starts to think she prefers the lifeless void.
“Run, little spider. Run.” The gun goes off with a bang.
---
It’s not often that Natasha sits bolt upright anymore, breathing so hard and so fast her vision goes spotty from too much oxygen. With one palm, she massages her sweaty forehead, while her other hand grips and re-grips at the worn handle on her favourite knife. Carbon-steel, black save for the serrated silver edge. A gift long given, and one she was allowed to keep for the warning it served. This is all you have left of him, little spider, this is all you will be allowed to keep.
Natasha discards the knife, hears it skitter across her bedside table and clink against the lamp. With her eyes still adjusted to the dark room, she searches for enemies and outliers, and only finds that Liho has knocked a book from her dressing chair in her quest to find a comfortable spot to sleep. Pale yellow eyes blink at her from across her room, and Natasha snorts.
“Don’t look at me like that, you little devil.”
Although she considers thanking Liho for the wakeup from a rather unpleasant dream, Natasha discards the thought because it sounds crazy, and she talks to Liho enough as it is. Besides, she’s not foolish enough to think Liho regards her as anything more than a convenient source of food. Speaking of which… Well, the clock on the nightstand says quarter to five, and she has a briefing at the new Avengers compound at the ungodly hour of eight o’clock, and she knows she isn’t going to sleep more tonight. So Natasha casts back the coverlet and the sweaty sheets and sashays into the attached bathroom, as if she can shake off her demons with the sway of her hips.
It works. Or maybe it doesn’t. She catches the subway from Little Ukraine to the stop nearest the compound, and even if the hour is early, New York never sleeps. On every corner, at ever street light, she swears she sees a spectre brushing past. Hood up, head down to hide the ridiculous square of his jaw, but with a swagger so distinct she could pick it out from space. Natasha catches glimpses, flickers of a life past, and actually manages to get herself slammed into and spun right around by an early morning commuter that gives her the finger as he walks away.
"Fuck," she grunts and rubs at her bruised shoulder. It aches something fierce, and then fades away. But what doesn't fade - what she can't shake - is that upset deep in her gut. Something’s rattled her. That damn dream has gotten to her – shaken her chains like nothing else in years – and she can’t even blame it on a lack of sleep because she’s gone longer, far longer with less.
“Fuck,” Natasha breathes again and scrubs at her face, before setting her shoulders and turning her collar against the bitter midwinter breeze. She stalks to the Compound with her hands shoved in her pockets and her pace at double time, damn near marching. As if it might help her outrun the ghost that follows, flitting between buildings and fading into their shadows like he was never there.