Work Text:
Steve stared at the screen in front of him. Fury sighed, scrubbing a hand across his scalp. “Listen, Cap. You have to admit, it all looks really fucking bad for her. You said she began yelling in Russian? That she knew the Winter Soldier? That she told him to get out?”
“His name is Bucky,” Steve replied. “She knew Bucky. She was kissing Bucky when I walked in.”
He didn’t want to believe it, but he knew Fury was right. This looked awful. This looked like Natasha lured Steve into a false sense of security and set him up to be murdered by her lover. Of course, it also looked like Russia declared war against the American intelligence community. Either way, Natasha and Bucky were fugitives.
“There’s no way we are going to find her,” Steve said finally, still staring at Natasha’s photo on the screen. “Not unless she wants to be found.”
***
She had been gone for months. Steve was still technically dead, so he wasn’t allowed to leave SHIELD without the photostatic veil, and Fury refused to get “Magnus” any sort of identification that would allow him to leave the country.
Clint brought back news from his missions of a redhead seeking information all over the world. She had been in Rio de Janero, Bucharest, Stockholm, Krakow, and most recently Kiev. Because Clint was late getting the information, Natasha was long gone by the time SHIELD showed up. There were also rumors of a man with dark hair and a gloved hand in the area around the same time.
Steve knew that if Natasha didn’t want someone to know where she was, that she was still alive, she wouldn’t risk being seen by people who were connected to SHIELD. She was sending them a message. What that message was, it was still unclear.
“What if there were still hidden triggers? Maybe he got to her a while ago and flipped some switch in her brain?”
Clint stared at Steve, a crease between his eyebrows. “You mean you think she was brainwashed into this? That would still mean that everything between you wasn’t real.”
“But at least it wasn’t her. It was programming.”
Clint sat back in the chair. “I mean, it would make sense. One assassin rebrainwashes his assassin ex-lover into killing her new lover and running away with him.”
Steve sighed in defeat. “Now you’re mocking me.”
They had been doing this every day for the last month. Shooting ideas back forth about how Natasha could possibly have done what SHIELD was accusing her of. Everything led back to Bucky.
Bucky. Steve had poured over every mention of the Winter Soldier that SHIELD had ever found. The Winter Soldier had been in operation since the mid-50s, taking out any and all enemies of the USSR. The Soldier’s appearances in history began to slow around the late 60s, until he was only attributed to an assassination once every decade or so. Like the Black Widow, it was assumed that the Winter Soldier title was passed on to worthy students of Russia’s Department X. However, new evidence pointed to this not being the case, instead Russia had found a way to prolong the lives of Natasha and Bucky almost indefinitely.
After Natasha had disappeared, Steve had been briefed on Natasha’s entire history. At least, every single thing that SHIELD knew about her, including what her life had been like before she had defected. Clint also filled in a lot of the details, things that Natasha had told him in confidence over the years they had known each other. Steve felt guilty, knowing all these things that Natasha had kept locked away from him. But he didn’t blame anyone. This was a life or death situation.
Bodies began showing up almost immediately after the brawl in the Brooklyn house. The victims had been Russian ex-intelligence or oligarchs with hands deep in the Russian underworld. No one felt badly about these deaths, but SHIELD felt honor-bound to stop Natasha and Bucky and bring them in.
“She started acting strange when she fell for you,” Clint said, almost absentmindedly. “She was happy. I’ve never seen her happy. I mean, not like that. She was so emotional. Like a schoolgirl.”
Steve nodded. It made sense. But if it had all been an act… He didn’t want to think about it.
***
He remembered being shot. The bullet had somehow missed his heart. It had been determined that the shooter had only been a few hundred feet away, most likely disguised as a civilian in the park, and that had saved his life. He had been in recovery for a few days while his healed, but he wasn’t allowed to see Natasha.
He had been forced to let her mourn alone, right up until she was shot on a roof in DC.
***
She had been seen multiple times in Russia.
Clint had managed to get Steve a passport for Magnus, and the photostatic veil was in place. As the two of them boarded the plane bound for Saint Petersburg, he wondered where he would find her and what the reunion would be like.
***
Steve sat on the train, watching the Russian countryside slip by the window without really seeing it. His mind was back in Brooklyn, in his apartment.
Natasha had insisted on making dinner for him. “Something traditional,” she had said. “Something I learned on one of my missions, something I never forgot, even though they wanted me to.”
She had served up a feast of Russian origin. His favorite had been the pirozhki, which she had filled with potato, herbs, and cheese. He had asked her to make that regularly, and she had obliged, despite her arguments that cooking was definitely not one of her strong suits.
Now she was in Moscow, working at a restaurant. Steve almost laughed at the thought, but as he and Clint walked in, he saw her chatting with a couple at a table, taking their order. She looked up and caught his eye and paled, then closed her eyes and nodded once. She finished chatting with the patrons, then went up to who Steve could only assume was her boss before making her way towards the two men who had followed her around the world.
***
Back at their hotel, Clint had left to give them some privacy.
Natasha sat stiffly in a chair while Steve paced, photostatic veil hanging off the edge of the table. Neither of them had said a word since Clint had left, and Steve didn’t push the matter.
Finally, she sighed. “I knew.” She wasn’t looking at him. “I knew about James.”
And then she talked. She told him about the Red Room, filling in the blanks that even Clint didn’t know about the training and the memory implantation and the triggers that could be activated by certain smells or words or phrases. She told him about meeting James – Bucky – when she had been a student, how he had trained her, how they had fallen in love and then how he had died. She then told him how she remembered learning about Captain America and his Howling Commandos, and how she could never recall their faces afterwards, even though she knew she had spent hours pouring over old photographs and files of their missions. Eventually, she had given up trying and had moved on. She became a part of SHIELD. A loyal agent. She was good at her job, she was an Avenger, she fell in love. And then Steve had died. And she broke. And then James was alive and she told Steve that it was like she was Natalia again when she saw him in the bedroom that night. Something in her brain had been unlocked when the three of them had been together and she told him that she had to know that truth. She tracked down every leftover piece of scum from the Red Room until she had been led back here to Russia, to the son of the doctor who had turned her mind into a trap.
“I’ve been trying to figure out the truth, that way I could help him,” she told Steve. “At this point I don’t even care that you lied to me. I just want to help us all understand what the hell is going on.”
Steve just looked at her, impressed by how well she was compartmentalizing all of this. She hadn’t relaxed since sitting down nearly an hour earlier, her body was still tense and waiting to spring up and fight. He knew that if he were to try and hold her, if he moved toward her at all, she would strike.
She seemed to know exactly what he was thinking. “I have to finish this,” she said. “I’m the only one who can.”
They sat in silence for a while. He watched her stare out the window at the winter sky, nothing on her face giving away what she was thinking. Steve wanted nothing more than to go to her, pull her into his arms and reassure her that he was on her side. But he restrained himself. He had broken her trust, even though he’d had to. She wouldn’t let him anywhere near her for a long time, if ever again.
He didn’t blame her.
After a while, Natasha sighed and stood up. “I’ll take you to him. At least, to where he last was. Just let me get cleaned up first. I smell like borscht.”
Steve nodded, and watched as she made her way to the bathroom and shut the door behind her. He listened as the sink faucet turned on…and never turned off again. Swearing silently, he opened the door to find the window opened and the ring he had given her sitting on the counter. She had used soap to write on the mirror.
I’m sorry.