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Going after him's a dead end. I know. I've tried.
Clint spent too much time beside her hospital bed, haggard and weary with a worn spot on the button where the number for his speed dial to Laura ought to have been.
Natasha didn’t say much at the time, just let them save her life and patch up the bullet hole through the middle of her body, then let herself recover. She didn’t share her partner’s general paranoia of medical facilities. In a strange way, she found such facilities comforting and chalked it up to too much time as a child under the knife.
“Just promise me you’re going to be okay?”
She read the knowing, concerned look in Clint’s eyes. He’d been down this sort of path before, brother against brother, and she’d let him go off book and do what he’d had to do. She’d followed him from a distance and picked him up and picked up the pieces after it became clear that was a dead end trail to a brother who would never be his again. He should have left it alone. But she knew from the look behind his eyes that he also knew there was no dissuading her from doing the same.
“I knew him,” she said after a moment, a breath. Her lips turned up in a reflexive smile briefly, then melted away so quickly into troubled memory she doubted anyone less observant would have noticed. This was Clint. He'd probably noticed. Good memories, bad. Clint would understand that. “He trained me.”
She struggled to sit up and Clint’s gaze flickered over her bandages. She waved off his concern, coughed over her pains and discomforts, and ignored the incredulous look creeping over his face. He always made more of her injuries than she thought necessary.
“His name was James,” she said. The Winter Soldier. She bit her lips over the name, soldát, for it was a legend Clint was doubtless familiar with and something he would keep her from following up on.
“He shot you,” Clint pointed out.
His phone buzzed. Laura. Natasha watched him read off the name and flip open his ancient phone she’d tried to replace several times to no avail.
“Hey,” he said, all the hardness in his voice softening for the woman on the other end of the line. “Yeah. She’s fine. Just planning a ghost hunt.”
It almost made Natasha laugh. The Winter Soldier had always been the ghost story of the Intelligence Community. Chasing him was probably the most foolish thing she would ever do.
There was a little girl once in the room. She was young enough to not know yet what the room really was, that it was the Room and the color of that Room was red.
She stepped up on her toes en pointe. She danced and twirled with the discipline of endless hours of training that her adoptive father had ensured she had. She was the best of her age in her company—strong, composed, and stunningly beautiful with an ability to learn quickly and sink deep into her roles, to become them.
This was her audition before the woman with pale blond hair and a hard, beautiful face and the man beside her with dark hair and a metal hand showing beneath his sleeve.
The little girl was Natalia, and she was exactly what Mother Russia wanted.
She traced him through where he had come from, where he had gone, one trail on top of the other, and she knew in the distance that Clint was trailing her to make sure she came out of this okay. He knew she would survive the same way that, long ago, she had known he would never let his brother kill him. But he didn’t know how much James had meant to her or whether she would need the backup. He only knew that anyone important enough for Natasha to go digging into her past to unearth was somebody she might not leave unscathed.
There was a new scar digging into her hip, and she touched it over her shirt, gently, as though she were afraid of ripping it open again as the train trundled onward into the heart of an eastern European country she hadn’t visited in years. She never used to scar when she was in the Room. She had her share from the ballet years—the Room preferred to choose its candidates from athletes with proven stamina and charisma—but nothing from afterward until her hysterectomy. She had never stopped to wonder how they wiped away the traces of their brutal training and the battles scrabbling for blood against her sister spiders.
Natasha caught in a breath at the sight of familiar mountains, taking in the persona of a sentimental woman returning to her homeland. The details came to her naturally, built up in a moment as she took this new person deep into her bones and created them out of her need. She became Ilyana Alianovna, half a name true and half a name a lie, a calling card if she’d ever written one in red.
His trail was not as good as what she expected, not so well hidden as he had trained her himself, to wipe out the footprints in the snow behind him. She found sloppy images left on cameras, grainy but undeniable to one who knew. He did not work as cleanly and quietly as she remembered, and she felt the frown deepening in her face, felt the hesitancy that limped into her steps as she followed this trail to a hidden cabin deep in the woods outside of town.
He let her come to him, and by that, she knew he was expecting her. That much Natasha had supposed would happen, but everything felt off in ways she could not qualify. She came to the door and let herself in, glad she had at least clothed herself in kevlar beneath her outerwear.
She closed the door and looked at him. He was standing in the middle of the open room, metal arm bared to view, gun aimed at her heart.
“James,” she breathed.
He shot you, she remembered Clint saying.
He looked at her, frown between his drawn brows. “Who is James?”
Something cold ran through her. She’d heard of... But no. They hadn’t done that to him. He had always known her every time they let the Winter Soldier and the Black Widow go out together and bring back blood over the snows.
”Soldát,” she spat out coldly in the Russian they both knew and had murmured together when he taught the little Widow her work. “Do you know me?” she demanded.
He was the last piece of her past, the last that mattered.
He stared at her, hand steady on the gun. “Leave,” he said after the longest silence, too long, too long with eyes that held no recognition. “Or I will shoot you.”
There was something there, the slightest hesitation, not like the hesitation of memory, but the hesitation of knowledge that she had not come to harm him and they had once held something in common that made her life acceptable for him to allow.
But it was no idle command, and she did not wait for a second warning she knew would never come. She left.
He followed her, and Natasha was glad she had not immediately returned to her partner. She was still reeling and stunned, but she had expected this as well, somewhere in the training she had stored within her bones.
He followed her and she was a street corner ahead of him. She turned and sprinted for the next, lunged for the fire escape, and climbed quickly to get above him. It would be a fight, and one of them would die if she could not find some way to knock him out.
Natalia was still buried within her, a little girl obsessed with perfection who had become the best Black Widow they’d ever known. Natalia would have killed him and left him bleeding red into the snow. Her scar began to ache, but Natasha knew she could never kill him.
She could kill him. If she had to.
But she wouldn’t have to. She had a partner. She had a—
She leapt from overhead, tense and fluid in equal measure, garotte at the ready, knife behind it to plunge into his side. He was trying to throw her off and shoved his own knife upward, letting hot blood out of her leg as she gasped.
She would not lose this fight because if she did, he would kill her and she could not kill him.
She jammed her bite into his arm and threw herself off while he shuddered under the electrical rush.
An arrow hit the soldier’s side. He staggered, stared upward at the archer on the roof, then fell at last into the bloody snow.
Natasha fell back against the wall, breathed out pain and nervous energy. She should have killed him. She could admit that. She should have had her own sedative ready for when everything went wrong.
And there was Clint crouched in front of her, his back to the soldier’s prone form. There was no question in his face or the lines of the body, just patient waiting for her to tell him what to do.
Dead end. Nothing left. She should have known it would be exactly the way it was before.
“He’s a ghost,” she whispered. A ghost left behind when the man was gone.
Clint’s brother had tried to kill him. She knew he would understand.
He held out his hand and helped her to her feet. “Let’s get you bandaged up.”
They paused near where the soldier lay. Natasha stared down at the man who had shot her, who had stared at her with no recognition in his eyes. He was the last piece of her past that mattered.
“Leave him,” she finally said.