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New York hits her like walking out of air-conditioned rooms into desert sun at noon baking asphalt and concrete: the feel of the place hits her like a physical force. Natalia knows Clint notices; she doesn't mention it, though, and neither does he.
They bring almost nothing, and they drop it at cheap hotel. It's three am and the nice thing about Steve having a place and a reason to stay attached to it is that it makes him easy to find. Natalia takes enough time to dye her hair back to red and then shower before she pulls on unremarkable clothes, uses a curler on her hair to make waves, and puts on her coat. While she'd been showering and doing her hair, Clint'd decided to doze; now he stretches, rolls off the hotel bed and slides his shoes and coat on.
Neither of them are carrying weapons, not right now: it's too much of a risk if they're caught with them, there's nowhere to hide anything big anyway, and if they end up having to deal with anyone using anything smaller, she and Clint can just take theirs. As a pretty young white girl in thrift-store hipster clothes, Natalia knows she's more or less invisible, and with his outfit and posture right now so is Clint, but it's still not worth it. She reminds herself of that again and leaves her knives in the locked case hidden under the bed.
Clint doesn't say anything. With most people Natalia doesn't like silence: it's too easy to lose track of what the other person, the other people are thinking, the impulses they might be building, anything. Here she doesn't mind so much, maybe because she knows exactly what Clint's thinking and if he's not happy about what they're doing and what he's reading off her, well.
She doesn't expect him to be.
The faster she can find Steve and make sure he knows what he needs to know, the faster they can leave and New York can stop battering her and attacking her equilibrium from every god-damn side.
"Could be worse," Clint had remarked, before they got on the plane. She'd looked at him and he'd said, "Could be Moscow."
Natalia couldn't find any way to reply that wasn't a curse.
Sam sends her daily updates, compiled from what Steve's sent to him, told him, hinted at. And Natalia's spent hours and hours poring over what he sends, what he tells her, what he adds from his own experience and expertise, and the thing is -
The thing is she doesn't actually think Steve has a hope in hell.
She wants to be wrong. God, and she doesn't even really believe in one, does she want to be wrong. For more reasons than Steve could even understand - she wants to be wrong for him, she wants to be wrong so that this doesn't end in the grief and the horror and the misery that he'll have to swallow if she's right. But she wants to be wrong for other reasons, because of other things: mostly, she wants to be wrong because people shouldn't be able to do this. They shouldn't be able to make it so there's no way back.
And Natalia wants to be wrong because there are other women out there who used to be girls, like her. And if the head is years off the snake, if the nest was burned out years ago now . . . still. Some of them might be still alive. She is. And if she's wrong, if even a man who used to be named James can come back from where the Winter Soldier ended up, it means -
It means a lot of things. So she wants to be wrong. But she doesn't think she is.
They're only in New York for twenty four hours. Her choice. Right now she doesn't think she could even stand to get off a plane in Moscow. Not unless the world's ending, not unless there's something worth carving under a scar to where she can still bleed.
It's only been like that once before. DC would be the same. Any place she lived, as herself, as what she though was "herself" even if - even if. Even if self is complicated. Any place she lived, maybe, where she tried to choose who to be, or accepted who someone else made her. She can't handle them, can't handle the idea of them, because she can't be those people anymore. Because she broke that. And because she hasn't . . . made herself again, yet.
She lived here. She spent days-weeks-months other places, being other people, on assignments. Deployments. Missions. But she lived here. She tried to be a person, here. And in DC, after the first time everything broke. And Moscow -
Then there's Moscow. Over and over again.
A week after the Winter Soldier - or whoever he'll turn out to be - showed up on Steve's door, Natalia broke down and texted Maria.
She hasn't actually spoken to Maria since the night Insight died, since they put Nick on the ground and back into his doctor's tender care and left Sam to look for Steve, or (it seeming more likely at the time) Steve's body, and then wordlessly went to do what neither man could, which was try to clean up a bit of the mess. Natalia had kept herself shut off, distant, until after the mess at the bank vault was dealt with, until the tech was in the ultimately pointless police custody.
Then she'd run. And she hasn't talked to Maria since.
The anger isn't rational, and neither is the overwhelming sense of betrayal. Nick's choices aren't Maria's fault. Natalia knows that. Eventually, she'll have enough of a handle on herself that knowing that matters, means she can deal with it and stop acting like an unreasonable child. It's embarrassing as all fucking hell that she can't make that happen right now, but being embarrassed won't make it happen faster. Maria Hill knows enough that she should be able to understand, but in the end, she either will - or she won't. Natalia can't do anything about it right now.
But she broke down and texted her, nobody's giving steve grief. why.
She knew Maria would know what she meant, that by nobody she meant CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS or the nameless agencies, the strings of meaningless department names that come and - the minute they fuck up - go. Or, for that matter, any fucking law enforcement at all.
There was no way they didn't know. Steve has never been cautious or quiet or careful enough for that: that's not what he and Sam are good at, not what they're for. Someone, more than one someone up there knew who and what was in a little condominium in Brooklyn and they weren't doing anything about it. Not even threats.
If there were threats, Steve would have told Sam, at the very least. And Sam would have told her.
Within the hour Maria texted back, Stark. Legal to hit in every possible jurisdiction. Tower to become residence. StarkSec to deny entrance to Tower.
And Natalia had stared at the screen, at Maria Hill telling her that Tony Stark would essentially start a war over this.
That if anyone pushed, the second American Civil War would start in Manhattan, over Steve Rogers' choices, over Steve Rogers' friend, and Tony Stark would start it himself if he had to. But that first he might just be satisfied with destroying the government of the US over legal responsibility for HYDRA's crimes, destroy influence and standing abroad, drag every piece of dirty bloody laundry out into the light and throw it in the whole world's face.
Make the United States of America a pariah among nations: force them either to admit their guilt, or to say out loud and in public that they were above even their own laws, and follow that road where it led.
Would Steve let him do that? Natalia doesn't know. Six months ago she would have said no, no chance in Hell, but six months ago she didn't know that the lost best friend was any bigger, as far as a hole in Steve's psyche went, than the lost true love or the lost everything else. And six months ago SHIELD hadn't been hiding (she hadn't known SHIELD had been hiding) an evil parasite, six months ago Steve had still believed in his own country specifically as a force for good - in potential, at least. At its best. Now?
The last time she'd seen him, standing in the graveyard, she'd been looking at a man who would still let the Winter Soldier beat him to death, because he didn't want to live in a world where someone who wore his friend's face would do that. Could do that. He'd made that choice.
He'd done his duty first, yes. But then he'd so obviously seen it as done. So obviously felt he'd discharged that duty so completely that nobody had any claim on him anymore. That his life was, not so much expendable (he always thought that, she knew), but that it was his to spend and spend however he damn well wanted.
She doesn't think he'd ever thought that before. Thinks that even in the Valkyrie over the Arctic (the crash so obvious as passively suicidal in nature now, at least to Natalia), he had to trick himself into thinking he needed to stay in the pilot's seat, that if he didn't guide the aircraft down the whole way it wouldn't crash.
Which is ridiculous, if you think about it. Think about how aircraft work. But he'd needed the excuse.
On Insight C he hadn't. He'd dropped his helmet, dropped his shield (he'd told her he did it, lying in the hospital) and spent his life where he wanted, in the service of nobody except himself and the man he refused to kill.
Staring at Maria's words then, Natalia didn't know if Steve would stop Tony from doing anything on his behalf. Not over this. She still doesn't. That says everything.
On her phone, the next text from Maria said, Long-standing intention: de los Santos had informal memo drafted. Current location of the individual known as the Winter Soldier _officially_ unknown to any agencies of the US government. Interest of any foreign parties rigorously discouraged. Steve Rogers having new roommate no concern of the White House, Pentagon, Langley, Quantico, etc.
Meaning that everyone had decided to pretend that they didn't know what they damn well knew, and were waiting to see what happened. Stark Industries playing chicken with the US government. She hoped they knew that at least as far as Anthony Stark went, they'd blink first.
steve aware she asked, and Maria replied, No.
There is a scale to this that makes Natalia's head light. She'd texted "out" back and put away her phone and gone to sit in the bath for an hour with water hot enough to turn her skin pink.
She used to know where she fitted. The place had changed, changed drastically, but there'd still been a place for her, defined and delineated.
She doesn't know that anymore.
And now she's standing on a corner near a Starbucks, waiting for Steve to come out. It's grey, the light is flat, but the wind is unexpectedly warm and Clint's claim that he's going to find a hotdog aside she knows he's up on a rooftop somewhere, watching. And right now she's not actually sure she could tell which he's more concerned about: someone following them, or just her.
Steve's wearing his blue coat, a black t-shirt, jeans, and an absent frown. There's a coffee in his hand - venti - and until he looks up and sees her there's a distance in his eyes. When he does look up and catches sight of Natalia standing where she is, that distance evaporates, and his gaze comes right into focus.
She waits, looking at him, until she's sure he's recognized her and he's not going to wave it off as a coincidence, and then turns and takes a few steps to hit the button for the pedestrian signal. For just a moment, just one, she wonders if he's going to actually walk away, if he wants to talk to her: it's been weeks, and he's texted her since that night, and she's stared at his words and closed the app because she couldn't make anything she wanted to say work for the medium, and she knows that's not the most friendly thing she could do.
By the time she starts to walk across the street, though, he's walking beside her and asking, "Back on this continent already?"
It's like someone's turned a switch in Steve's head. It's enough that it's hard not to stare.
What Natalia says to him at first is, You look exhausted, and it's not a lie. His eyes have the slightly sunken look of someone who isn't sleeping as well as they should be, when he's got nothing to react to his face falls into the preoccupied frown of someone with too much on their mind and not much of it pleasant, and when he he moves it's with the subtly minimal steps and gestures of someone who's so tired they've stopped thinking about it, and their body's just trying to compensate wherever it can. So it's true: he looks exhausted.
But it's dishonest. It's so dishonest.
Natalia's known Steve Rogers for two years now, and only in this moment, looking at him as they talk and walk together, does she know that for all of those two years he's barely been half alive. That, far from being too concerned about him for all those months - the ones full of nagging attempts to get him to socialize, to build human connections, to find new friends, to make a life - far from being too concerned, she wasn't anywhere concerned enough.
Only now, and in this moment, can she actually see the man who could walk into a wartime prison camp and end up coming out as the one in command. Who could tell a whole chain of military command and national organization to go fuck themselves, because he was keeping the Japanese soldier, the black soldier, that he'd brought out of the woods and he gave less than a flying rat's ass about their reasons for segregation. Who could just go, point himself the direction he wanted, and people would be happy to be swept up in his wake.
There'd been flickers, maybe, on the day the Triskelion fell, or earlier, at Sam's house after they survived Pierce's bomb. But only flickers, compared to this - and to this, as he fucking walks beside her and looks like he could just sit down on the sidewalk and go to sleep.
"You know," she finds herself saying, "exhausted isn't really the word. It doesn't really capture it."
Somewhere up on the rooftops around her, Clint's watching. She knows. Before Steve finds an answer, she goes on, "Working for SHIELD you spend a lot of time looking after scientists and engineers and analysts," and she knows it's purely somatic, that for a second it feels like the scar on her abdomen contracts.
"A lot of them have the situational awareness of a dead cat," she says. "But you put them in front of their projects and give a deadline that should be impossible to meet and you can watch them burn through caffeine like it's the end of the world." She pauses. "Even when it isn't," she notes. Because sometimes, well.
Sometimes it is.
"They get rings under their eyes and they yawn all the time and their tempers get short and touchy as hell, but underneath that, the good ones . . ." Natalia looks at Steve's face, knows he doesn't understand a single fucking thing she's saying and knows that she's failed at keeping a sad smile off her face because that just tells her how hard, how hard this is all going to be for him.
While everything else about him tells her that the only options are that he does it, or that he fails; that walking away really isn't an option. That it's not even that he won't, but that he can't. That if he did it would be killing himself as much as anything else could be.
She finishes, "They're more alive than you'll ever have seen them before. And that's how you look right now, Steve. That's how you feel."
For a moment they walk in silence and the wind picks up, and Natalia watches Steve struggle with that, try to sort it out. Watches how abrupt his movements are as he pauses to throw away his coffee-cup and knows he failed even before he says, "Well - firstly, I have no idea what you're talking about, and secondly," and here he pauses, making her stop, too, and turn back towards him, "I don't think you're here to catch up and see how I'm doing."
Damn it, Steve, Natalia thinks, but it's a sigh in her head and there's no force. She shrugs with one shoulder and smiles at him on purpose this time.
"Maybe not," she admits.
There is nothing that she has to say that he wants to hear.
It breaks her heart, a little, which isn't something that happens often. Things make her sad, or make her angry, or make her regretful, but the actual ache, the physical knot of pain that emotion makes in the middle of the chest . . . she doesn't get that very much. But she gets it now, as she tells Steve the things he doesn't want to hear, but has to know.
And even anger, even the tendrils of despair he's refusing to acknowledge are there - even those things are brighter, more alive than the Steve she's known.
There's pain, pain and glimmers of a kind of terror in his face when she tells him what kind of damage he could do by accident and the thing that breaks her heart is she gets it. Looking at him now and seeing the difference, seeing him wholly alive, Natalia gets it and wishes she could tell him something else.
She tells him, He doesn't have anything, and watches Steve retreat, move to put a wall against his back and let it hold him up. And most of the time she doesn't notice the years between them - real years, years lived in, lived through, experienced - but right now, just now, she feels old and small and sad.
She goes to lean on the building beside him. Pierce gave him missions and targets and punishments and now he doesn't even have that she tells him, and the thing is, inside and ten steps back from the space metaphorically right behind her eyes, Natalia feels a phantom that used to be her, and feels it cringe at the idea of -
Of losing even those. Of having nothing
Natalia tells Steve, He's just got pain, and confusion, and fear, and you.
And maybe she should tell Steve, tell him how she knows. Maybe he'll ask. Maybe she'll have to tell him that it wasn't just that SHIELD was who she worked for, was what she thought would be redemption, it was that SHIELD was home. Have to explain how she clung to missions and orders, parameters and structure. How the differences mattered, oh god, yes, it fucking mattered that it wasn't a cage, that she could open the metaphorical door and walk out if she wanted, that she could refuse a mission, that she could do . . . anything, and that sometimes she did just to check, just to make sure - but she always came back, because the world out there with none of those things was chaos.
Is chaos. Right now every fucking thing is chaos.
Maybe she'll have to tell him exactly why she's so fucked up right now. Maybe he'll ask. She would, if it were her. How do you know? How could you possibly know that? She would ask.
So she waits for him to ask it, and he doesn't.
Instead he asks, "So how does someone come back from that?"
And because he's looking at the ground she just has to make the startled breath she takes silent. And she remembers sitting on Sam's spare bed and asking Steve if he'd trust her, hearing him say I would now. And a part of her thinks I didn't mean with everything, you idiot - because, because that's what he's doing.
Because he trusts she wouldn't be saying this if she didn't know. Because he doesn't need her to tell him. And Christ, Steve, you credulous -
Natalia cuts that thought off. Now isn't the time for it. And besides: people trust. It's a thing people do. She reminds herself that: that the world of lies and suspicion she's always inhabited, the world that's always been hers, is the strange one. Is the one most of the world would find alien and cold, and that Steve had twenty-three years of living in that normal world before he got dumped into hers.
And because he trusts her, Natalia says, "I don't know," because it's not just true, it's honest, as honest as she can be. "With great difficulty. Carefully. Slowly. With a miracle. When I told you you might not want to pull this thread, Steve, I had good reasons." She sighs. "Sometimes there isn't a way out."
She doesn't say, And you know that. Because you can't watch your mother die of TB and not know. Sometimes there isn't a way to win.
You know it, but you won't admit it. And I bet you wouldn't then, either.
Natalia watches Steve force his jaw to let go enough for him to say, "You can't know that," and she -
Lies.
Maybe doesn't lie?
She doesn't even know anymore, not right now. What she does know is for Steve, right now, any admission of possibility is fuel for the kind of hope that isn't really hope, because it doesn't admit the possibility of disappointment. The kind of hope that's really faith, belief, and blind.
It would be honest to say, I know about me. It would be honest to say I know about the others, my not-really-sisters, the ones that I had to kill to get away, to get here. It would be honest to tell Steve how fucked up she is, how she's never sure she's "come back" from what they did to her and all they had to use on her were voices and fists and drugs and time.
That would be the honest answer, to Steve pleading, You can't know that.
Instead she tells the truth, and only the truth, and says, "And I don't," so maybe she'll deserve it when she has to watch him burn.
Now, though, Steve looks up at her in surprise and she shrugs. "I can't see the future, Steve," she tells him. "I don't know what can and can't happen. I'm just warning you. You, Stark - one way you're the same. Neither of you likes to hear that there isn't a way to win."
Stark's name doesn't faze him, doesn't really click. Steve just keeps looking at her, and Natalia knows that if this does all end in blood, that's the image of his face she'll remember. For the rest of her life - if she lives through it - that's what she'll see.
Fuck. Well. That's the door she's chosen now, she supposes, and she might as well do what she can. She takes a deep breath. "But there's one thing that'll make the difference," she tells him. "If anything does."
Steve still doesn't like what she tells him. It hurts him, and to be honest, she regrets that. Some of the reasons are even selfish: there's something appealing about the kind of innocence he had before. Where he believed he could step out of the world of power and its uses and abuses, that just by not domineering he could make everyone free and trust that everything they did came from that free kind of choice.
The innocent belief in everyone, that they could be trusted to look after themselves, and he could move through them without concern.
It's not worth his life, though, and that's what it'll cost him if he keeps it. And if there was time maybe she'd try to lead it to him gently but right now, she can't: he has to know now, has to start now, and that means hitting him in the face with the whole world.
Including the part of it that means if he fucks up, his best friend will kill him, and then won't have anything except pain, and rage, and fear. Nothing at all.
Natalia watches him struggle with that, and adds the last bit, maybe the worst bit, keeps her voice soft. "And remember that the self he finds to be," she says, "might not be your friend."
Steve's head jerks up, at that; Natalia keeps her sigh silent as he says, flatly, "He is my friend. He is now. He was then. People change, life changes them, but that doesn't."
"I think you know what I meant," Natalia answers him, keeping her voice quiet. Because this is something he has to understand.
After a second of fighting to keep his face clear, Steve admits, "I do." He swallows, and says, "I just . . . I think you should know what I mean."
He keeps his voice so even that Natalia has to look away. She wants to hit him. The last time she wanted to hit someone this much, it was Nick.
She doesn't expect him to clear his throat and say, "But you're right." She ends up blinking at him, startled; his face is softer when he says, "Thank you."
Fuck.
Natalia drags up a smile. "Believe it or not, I don't have so many friends I can afford to lose one," she says. And then, "Come on. It's getting cold."
It isn't, but she can't stay here anymore.
On the way to his building, Steve apologizes for the Lemurian Star.
Natalia doesn't expect that. But he does, and he means it. He's a terrible liar and she's good at seeing lies, and she can't see any in his face or hear any in his voice. He apologizes, and pokes fun at himself, and repeats the apology. Natalia thanks him because . . .because she can't think of anything else to do.
Steve says, Next time, tell me so I can take it into account. Tactically, I mean.
And it startles her so much she ends up laughing because she doesn't have any other response to fall back on. The assumptions - that there will be a next time, that on that next time there might be something to tell - are like marbles under her mental feet and laughter's all she has left.
Fortunately it's one that works.
The silence between them for most of the rest of the way to Steve's building would be comfortable, if this weren't New York and she weren't made of edges sharp enough to cut herself with. Natalia catches sight of his friend watching them from the front window about a building and a half away, the slightest sliver of extra shadow alongside the curtains hanging on each side of the wide rectangle.
Maybe someday she'll be able to ask him what he's thinking right now. She doesn't even know enough to guess what the sight of her walking with Steve might mean.
In front of the walk, Steve says, "Say hello to Barton for me. Unless you want to come in."
And she'll give him this one for free, because she only just dropped everything on his head and he hasn't had time to think, but fuck she hopes he learns to think about things like that and why they're such a bad idea. For now, she demurs, "I don't think that would be fair. Don't look - I don't think you'd see anything anyway - but your friend is watching us from your window now, and I don't think he's up to guests."
Steve says, "Someday," and Natalia keeps herself from shaking her head. Instead, she steps forward to kiss his cheek like she did in the graveyard, and then steps back back with a wave, and then leaves him there, to whatever he's going to manage. Or not.
Natalia doesn't run to the corner where she and Clint arranged to meet. If she starts running now she might not stop. She needs to get out of this city. She needs to get out of this country. She needs -
The thing is, she can't - her memories are all at least a little bit uncertain, of things before the second time in Moscow. She's been to the fucking city hundreds of times but there will always, always be the first time and the second time, and everything before the second time she has to take a little on trust. And she does.
She stood in a hallway and shot a man. Once in the head and twice in the heart and then the rest of the clip to the centre of mass as he fell, and his gun fell out of his hand, and Clint got up off the floor and said, Tasha? and she decided, yes. Yes: she was Tasha. She was Natalia. Those parts of memory, of the stories she knew about herself in her head, were real; those were true.
She wore a hospital gown, and the man she emptied a clip into had sworn . . . a lot of things, but swearing that SHIELD had fooled her, SHIELD had brainwashed her, was top of the list. That he and the others had rescued her. That she was home, where she wanted to be. That everything she remembered - thought she remembered - was half-truth at best, things she'd been tricked into believing. Lies.
There'd been drugs. She thinks. They kept her awake past the point of psychosis. Lights in patterns. Reality is wasn't stable: when they got to the helicopter for extraction (quinjets still five years away) Clint told her she'd been down there for two weeks, when she'd thought it'd been two, maybe three days. And you can be convinced that you remember things you don't, convinced that when you remember one thing it was actually something else, convinced of a lot of things. That two weeks are three days.
That your name isn't your name.
She'd shot the man who claimed to be her father and had surely, definitely been her handler: once in the head, twice in the chest, and then emptied the clip as his body fell. In that hallway, Natalia had decided, and then once they were back in New York she spent another two fucking months deciding over and over again: what was true, what wasn't, and why. What was real and what was false and how to tell the difference.
There was help, there was Clint and Nick and Melinda and Maria god fucking knows how many files, but she still had to decide and she decided here, and -
Clint's waiting for her where they arranged, but he has all their stuff. So she doesn't actually have to say, I want to go to the airport. Just go, now.
Operationally it's a little less secure: longer in an airport means longer under tighter security and observation. But they know how to deal with that, too. And this isn't an operation. And Natalia needs to get out of New York, now.
She fumbles around for someone to be, ends up with Nadya and so Clint slides into being the kind of guy Nadya would travel with, and they have conversations that end in loud, coarse laughter and if anyone looks at them twice it's from wishing they'd shut up and get lost, which means nobody looks hard.
They make a thing about taking the first class upgrade and everyone else in first class ends up with the looks that mean they hope if they ignore Clint and Natalia hard enough, the two of them will get the hint and go away.
When they're settled, the door's closed and the engines start, Clint murmurs, "That seemed intense."
Natalia's leaning her head on his shoulder; she exhales, struggles with words for a minute and then says, quietly, "You remember when I mentioned I couldn't tell how worried I should be about Steve?"
"After I joked about not being able to tell if he was reckless or suicidal," Clint replies. "Yeah."
"It was suicidal," she says. Clint's breath comes out in a sharp push, acknowledgement without words.
"Seemed different today," Clint notes, and Natalia nods infinitesimally.
"He was," she murmurs. "He's not looking for a reason to die anymore." And this time it's the slow inhale that tells her Clint understands what she's not putting enough words together to say.
Clint doesn't ask her if she thinks Steve can do this, or if - now that he's not looking for a reason - he's going to get himself killed anyway. And that's probably for the best, given she doesn't know.
When they finally land in Johannesburg Natalia feels like she can breathe. When she turns her current phone back on, there's a text from Steve saying, Thank you.
She responds with, Anytime and then turns off the ringer.
When they get to the hotel she runs a bath hot enough to turn her skin pink. Clint digs out something called Dave Barry's Bad Song Book and reads it aloud to her, sitting leaning on the doorframe, and eventually she can make enough sense of the words to hear the jokes, and laugh.