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The last few months had been hell.
After leaving Brooklyn, she had burned her way through covers, using them to hunt down any living Department X personnel. None of them had the information she needed, and she knew that almost immediately after interrogations began, but she reveled in their pain. She left them alive, minus a finger or two, and continued on.
It was after the third one turned up dead in her wake that she knew James was following her. He was always good at that; it didn’t matter who she was pretending to be or how much she changed her appearance: he would always find her. That ability had come in handy once or twice in the past. Now it was like a giant red X had been painted on both of them.
Finally, in Romania, she confronted him. She had no reason to believe there was anyone of import in Bucharest, but it was familiar to both of them. She didn’t stand out too much, not like she had in Brazil, anyway. There were plenty of pale, redheaded women in the city, many of them speaking a slightly different dialect or accent. No reason for anyone to be suspicious as she browsed the markets, buying apples for a fictional pie she was making.
James had slipped in next to her, molding to her side as if they had been made for each other. He was wearing civilian clothes: a black Henley, jeans, motorcycle boots, and a leather glove over his metal hand. His smile was easy as he lay his hand on her waist, and joked about finally finding her in the crowd. The man behind the booth smiled at both of them and wished them a lovely day.
James had led her out of the market to a waiting grey sedan. Very nondescript. Smiling at him, she climbed into the passenger seat, tossing the apples into the back seat. Once James was in and settled, she turned to him and was met by…not James.
At least, not the James she knew. And not the James that she had seen recently. This James looked lost and scared. His eyes were wet, as if he was trying his hardest not to break down crying in the car. She had never seen this before. And she had thought that she had seen everything.
She nodded to him, signaling him to drive. They made their way to his safe house wordlessly, carefully avoiding touching him even though he clearly needed it. She was afraid that if she were to make contact something in him would break. And that could leave them both vulnerable and compromised, or it could leave her dead on his kitchen floor. It all depended on how he reacted to having any walls crumble inside his already obviously fragile mind.
They stayed in the safe house for around two weeks. She wasn’t sure. They entire time, she wondered how Steve was doing. She wondered if he had ever been to the city, as it was especially beautiful in the autumn. She made a mental note to bring him back and picnic in Herastrau Park.
All the while, she and James existed in a strange orbit. He had come across a photo of Bucky Barnes with the Howling Commandos and had taped it up in the bathroom. She could hear him sometimes, reciting a mantra to himself when he didn’t think she was listening.
“I am James Buchanan Barnes. I am not the Winter Soldier.”
She hated hearing it. And she hated the photo in the bathroom. However, it had been useful. She had found herself looking at it out of the corner of her eye while brushing her teeth. She tried to outright look at it, but developed a minor headache doing so. She tried again a few hours later. James found her passed out on the bathroom floor with blood coming out of her ear. The third time, she had made James hold the picture up next to his face, and had vomited. Clearly, there was something wrong.
At that point, they decided to look up any memory modifiers in Russia who could possibly have ties to the Red Room. They had found a doozy in little Ivan Rodchenko. Ivan’s grandfather had been the very same professor who had so thoroughly fucked with them when they were still Department X’s tools. It seemed that Ivan had taken up his grandfather’s mantle and now had his hand in pockets all over Russia.
They moved to Moscow the next day.
She had set up an emergency alias as Elena Petrov and got a job at a restaurant favorited by Ivan. She was very careful never to serve him directly. He came in multiple times a week with different men, always in the finest of suits. They were always the restaurant’s biggest patrons.
When Ivan was not at the restaurant, he was being tailed by James. Ivan had a family, James reported. That was his weakness. She didn’t feel comfortable about it, but she knew what she needed to do.
Routine surveillance continued for the next month. Autumn turned colder, and then it was the Russian winter. She and James hated it for different reasons, and for the same reasons. They woke each other every night it seemed, reminded of the horrible things of their shared past. He hated being cold, she noted, and kept the radiator in their little apartment on all the time. The cold didn’t bother her much, but she was reminded a little too harshly of her childhood growing up in Department X.
And all the while, she missed Steve. She wanted nothing more than to call him, to hear his voice. She didn’t even care that she had been lied to by everyone. She just missed him, more than she had probably missed anyone in her life.
That’s probably why she didn’t bolt when Steve and Clint had shown up to the restaurant. But even as she faked a smile for her “cousins,” and climbed in the cab with them, she knew what she had to do. Even as she caught Steve up on her adventures and let him know about the wall in her mind, she knew she had to leave. And when she climbed out the hotel window, she couldn’t stop herself from crying.
She had made it about a kilometer away from the hotel, sans coat and hat in the Russian winter night, when Clint caught up to her. Wordlessly, he gave her his jacket and pulled her in for a hug.
“How long do you need?” he asked into her hair.
“Just give us three days,” she replied, eternally grateful to have someone like Clint on her side. “Three days, and I’ll come home.”
“You got it.” And then he was gone, heading back to the hotel.
Natasha sped up and made it back to the apartment in an hour. She was greeted by a muzzle to the temple. Sighing, she took Clint’s coat off and tossed it aside before brushing James’s gun away. She was early, and he had probably seen Steve and Clint haul her into a cab. Any good spy would be paranoid, but she hadn’t heard him cock the gun, so she knew she wasn’t in any immediate danger.
“We have three days,” she said, pulling out her suit. “It’s the best I could do.”
Six hours later, they were hauling a trussed up Ivan Rodchenko up to the front door of an abandoned Department X facility in the mountains. A wave of nausea rolled over her as she looked at her childhood home. There were warning signs everywhere, declaring the facility to be a radioactive hot zone. She knew that was a lie, of course, to keep civilians from wandering inside and discovering the secrets the government had kept from them for decades. It had been abandoned in a hurry, it looked like. There were still vehicles parked near the doors and she saw that some of them still had personal effects in them. Broken glass and snow glittered like diamonds in the new morning sunlight.
James made quick work of the door, using explosive gel to detonate the locks. It swung open heavily, and James headed inside, pistol drawn. Natasha, hauling Rodchenko, followed reluctantly. She didn’t want to be back here. Even three feet inside, her mind was bursting with things she had hoped she had forgotten. But no, it was as if she were experiencing her poor excuse of a childhood all over again.
The training room was the second to last door that they went through. It was hard, she noted, being here. This was where she had made her first kill, where she had had her first kiss, and where she learned to use her body as a weapon. The floor was still shining, the mirror and barre were dusty. How strange, she thought. She looked at James, and he looked back at her. Someone had definitely been here recently.
The made their way through the training room and into a back hallway that led to her worst memories.
The Red Room.
The door had been painted red, and with age had turned the color of blood. She had always found it fitting, given what happened in there. Shakily, she pushed the door open and drew in a breath. Everything was shining, as if it were used frequently. Nothing looked outdated; there was even a holographic touch screen on the wall similar to what SHIELD used. The chair was still there, in the corner, ready to receive any disruptive students or dangerous soldiers. She could feel the tension in the air, could see James fighting with himself. He wanted to kill Rodchenko, she knew it. She did, too. But first they had work to do.
Ivan laughed mercilessly as they made their demands. He laughed as James struck him across the face, and he laughed as she removed his fingernails one by one. He didn’t stop laughing even as he hooked Natasha up to the machine, as the clamps came down on her face, as the thin needle entered her brain. She blacked out as the walls, most of which she didn’t even realize were there, came down in her mind.
When she finally came to, she was covered in blood and vomit. Rodchenko was tied up again, unconscious or sleeping, she couldn’t tell. James sat next to her on the floor, staring at the photograph of Bucky. He shifted slightly as she adjusted, and handed her the photo.
Bucky had a slight smirk and kind eyes, despite the horrors he had seen under the treatment of Arnim Zola. He was much younger, his dark hair combed to the side. Compared to the James who sat at her side, Bucky was innocent and happy. He had no idea what lay in store for him.
“It worked,” she said, exhausted.
James pulled her into a hug. “I’m glad,” he whispered into her hair.
They stayed like that for a while, until Rodchenko woke up. He looked at them and spat. “Ridiculous selfish wastes! You should be ashamed. You would have made your country so proud and instead you become Captain America’s whores!”
Carefully, so not as to topple, she stood up and walked to Ivan Rodchenko. Kneeling down so that she was at eye level with him, she gripped his throat tightly. James sat by while she strangled the Russian, not seeing anything wrong with the scene unfolding in front of him.
“You did this to us,” she hissed. “You messed up everything we were, down to our very core. We had every fucking right to leave.” She knew it wasn’t this Rodchenko who had hurt them all those years ago, but this Rodchenko was alive, here, in her grasp. She didn’t care. He was representative of every evil person who had ever hurt her or forced her to hurt others. He was the face of the organization that had ripped James away from her and forced her to defect. She hated him.
His eyes were bulging. Being restrained, he was unable to claw at her hands, so he resorted to trying to flail his body loose. His eyes darted to James, begging for help, but James only stared back. Finally, when she released him, he fell to the floor and did his best to scoot as far away from them as possible.
“Fix James,” she said. “Fix him, and maybe we won’t kill her son.”
Rodchenko looked at her incredulously. “You would never kill a child,” he gasped. “My son is innocent in all this.”
She just stared at him. “You think we haven’t killed innocents or children before?” she asked him coldly. “My first kill was a child. She was 9 years old. I snapped her neck. I have no reservations, surely you know that.”
James put a hand on her shoulder at that. Turning her towards him, he shook his head. “I’ve been doing well on my own. It’s been long enough. I won’t go back in that chair, never again.” If she hadn’t known better, she would have considered this begging. But James would never beg. Not her James, anyway.
She looked over her shoulder at Ivan, who was still whimpering in the corner. Sighing, she nodded. “Fine. I understand. But we still have some information to gather from Ivan here.”
“I’ll handle it,” James said. “Check the perimeter.”
Two hours later, James emerged from the Red Room covered in blood. “Alexander Lukin. He’s the one who ordered all of this. Your mind wipe and aversion, and Steve’s assassination.” He had to go slow when he said Steve’s name, she noticed. He was doing well, but there were still walls there. “He’s who we go after next.”
Natasha, still weak from the Red Room, shook her head. “No. Now we go home.”