Chapter Text
Metal fingers tighten incrementally along the forearm of the rifle and he lets out a slow, steadying breath as the familiar blond head lines up in his scope. Underneath it is the more subdued uniform in blue and silver instead of the star-spangled eyesore, but Rogers has lost or foregone the helmet.
The shield stands out like a fucking target against the snowy landscape anyway, and it’s tempting to put an ineffectual round into the center of the star-shaped bullseye, just to make a goddamn point.
There’s a whisper of movement behind him, and then a leg is wrapping around his torso, a knee pressed hard into his metal left shoulder, short limbs on a deceptively strong, narrow frame. The bite of a garrote wire against his neck threatens to pull his focus from the scope, but another deep breath keeps his attention forward and down the hill from his makeshift nest and he adjusts his aim marginally as a low voice murmurs hot against his ear.
“Captain America, your last target; I wonder, is he the only mission you’ve ever failed?”
He grits his teeth and fires off a round. A slumping body and a spray of red across the snow confirm the kill.
“There was another,” he admits, voice hoarse from disuse. “A long time ago.”
Rogers affords himself a moment of distraction to peer up the hill and sketch a salute, acknowledging the shot. The non-metal fist clenches reflexively, and the mouth up against his ear turns away slightly, the wire disappears from his neck, and he hears a low acknowledgement. “No problem, Cap. All clear.”
He whirls and slams the figure down into the snow with his metal hand fisted in her jacket. Red hair is tucked under a white hat, but he doesn’t need it to recognize her increasingly-familiar face that just peers up at him unimpressed.
Instead of fighting back, a dry half-smile twists her lips, brows cocked in calculating curiosity. “So you did pull him out of the river. He insisted you had; the rest of us called it wishful thinking, figured he retained consciousness long enough to drag himself to shore.” Her expression twists further, into something mocking, almost cruel. “But I guess he did have a lot of holes in him at the time.”
A derisive snort escapes him and he releases his grip, rolling over onto his back and sitting up to reach his rifle and begin breaking it down. “You had the shot; why didn’t you kill me in Kaliningrad?”
“You kidding?” Sitting up and crossing one leg over the other in a posture that maybe would be relaxed somewhere besides a snow-covered slope outside a dilapidated HYDRA base, she watches him work with sharp eyes but sans commentary on the impressive arsenal he packs. “You provide the cover and I get the credit, why would I pass that up?” She pauses, then adds seriously. “Whoever… whatever you are… it would devastate Steve. You must know he’s been looking for you.”
“Capture, then,” he amends irritably.
“I don’t flatter myself.”
He recalls their furious fight in the streets of D.C in scattered snapshots, that final memory wipe breaking down without time in cryo to fortify it. Her ingenuity had nearly been the match of his firepower, but he’d have had her, were it not for Rogers’ timely intervention. “You shot me,” he frowns, not sure if he means it as rebuke or compliment.
Her grin suggests easily enough how she takes it. “You shot me first.” His brow furrows slightly. “Odessa?” she prompts, hand drifting absently down to her lower midriff, and he shrugs. “You don’t remember?”
“Remembering was never part of the protocol.”
“I- yeah,” she nods slowly. “I read your file. I just thought…”
She trails off as his hand spasms, like he’s forcibly fighting down the urge to seize her again, knock her back to the ground, demand what he wants and acquire it through any means necessary…
Deep breath. Mild tone. “I haven’t. It wasn’t part of the information dump.”
Tongue darting out to nervously lick cold, chapped lips is the only betrayal of her apprehension at his shift in temperament. “No. I had to get creative. Can’t have a ghost story if there’s too much proof out there that the ghost is real.” Her gaze shifts back down to where his spasming hand has clenched into a tight fist. “Is… is that what you were doing in Kaliningrad? Before you threw in with our lot?”
“I didn’t throw in with your lot, and I don’t give a damn about your missing alien spear.”
“Scepter,” she corrects wryly. “Then why follow us here?”
“Because I’m starved for leads and no one’s yet told Rogers that the paint job on that damn shield of his was the dumbest tactical decision of the twentieth century.”
“Right after getting involved in a land war in Asia?” He blinks; she shakes her head. “Never mind. If you want information on who you are, just go to Steve. Believe me, it would be his pleasu - oomph,” she cuts off with a grunt as she’s hauled to her feet and slammed into a tree.
“Not him,” he whispers harsh in her face. “I’ve been to the museum, I know about his… his Bucky. The friend, the fallen, the hero. I want what came after.”
She studies him a moment, unconcerned with the forearm pressing against her sternum. “Not a pleasant road you’re looking to travel.”
“Wasn’t really counting on a happy ending, sweetheart.”
He releases her with a huff and half-turns, running a hand through his matted hair, but she doesn’t move for several seconds, watching him, head tilted slightly to one side, discerning. “How about a trade?”
He turns back sharply. “I’m not coming in.”
She waves him off. “I’ll get you a copy of the file. All the gritty details. You point us towards our scepter.”
After a moment of consideration, looking for the catch: “Why?”
“Oh, come on,” she rolls her eyes. “At best, you’re a lost loose-cannon having an identity crisis; at worst, an assassin with no resources, whose former handlers would probably like to see him dead more than any potential enemies. I don’t give a damn what hellish rabbit hole you want to crawl down into your past, and quite frankly, you’re irrelevant next to the potential the scepter carries for chaos and destruction.”
He mulls that over a moment. “And you won’t tell Rogers?”
“His head needs to be in the game right now, not 1944.” She smiles tightly at him. “You’re bad for business, Barnes.”
Letting the discomfort at being addressed by a name he doesn’t particularly recall being his pass by, he finds the decision easy enough, in the end. He has literally nothing to lose but his own farce of a life, lost in the world since turning his back on the people he was programmed to serve at the behest of a flag-draped man he can only recall with the foggy sense of a dream slipping through his fingers, falling faster and faster the harder he reaches for it.
He’d entertain the fantasy of grasping those memories at last and clinging to them as ferociously as every other scrap of information he can recall since the last brain wipe, if he weren’t so sure he’d never live long enough to do anything about it.
“There are whispers,” he tells her, “if you know how to listen. Something new, something… unnatural.”
“Do those whispers come with a name and address?”
“Wolfgang von Strucker.”
She nods grimly, unsurprised. “I know Baron Strucker.” It occurs that this was at least partially a test of his good faith and intentions.
“Give me a week and I’ll point you in the right direction.”
“Provided you’ve got your file.”
“There is that,” he acknowledges unashamedly, slinging his pack onto his back.
As if on cue, she tips her head to the side, listening to her earpiece, and then touches it lightly with a finger to turn the mic back on. “Yeah… uh-huh. Copy. Roger, Rogers.” He’s already weaving through the trees when she turns back and calls after him, “How do I find you?”
He doesn’t turn. “You don’t; one week, Romanoff.”
He’s two kilometers away when the compound goes up in an impressive series of explosions. He only pauses at the sound of the Quinjet rising above the terrain, and turns to watch it streak off towards the west, silhouetted in the setting sun.
X---X
Eight days later, undercover at a swanky state dinner in Marseille as a favor to Fury, Natasha takes her seat and smiles charmingly across the table at the chief financier of the remaining HYDRA operations in Europe. Under the guise of unfolding her napkin into her lap, she swipes the brochure tucked beneath her plate, hiding it under her thigh until a moment comes that she can peer quickly down at the Cyrillic letters.
Visit Beautiful Sokovia
When she returns to her opulent hotel suite three hours later, pamphlet folded and tucked into the band of her thigh holster beneath her dress, there is no sign of a forced entry but she already knows what she’ll find.
Leaping nimbly down from the bathroom counter after reconnecting the fan and replacing the vent cover, she thumbs open Barnes’ file folder and finds that the contents have been replaced by a single sheet of plain paper with a scrawl of numbers in two rows. Coordinates. Not expecting anything else, she’s surprised when she flips the page over to reveal another line of hastily scribbled writing.
You’re going to want a bigger team.
Explaining their sudden new lead pointing them to a facility in a country most of them couldn’t even place on a map would take some careful consideration but, when Fury calls her three days later and pulls her out of an initial brainstorming session with Steve and Tony to inform her of their Marseillais financier’s sudden, tragic death in a freak accident aboard his yacht and apologizing for the waste of her time, she decides that it’s worth the trouble.
X---X
Clint’s probably the least recognizable of the team, and she’s the best adept at disguises, so six weeks later they take Barnes’ advice, however tongue-in-cheek, and visit beautiful Sokovia – reconnaissance in the form of a honeymoon package at a resort in the mountains south of the capital city where Barnes claims HYDRA is operating in plain sight. Not that they shouldn’t have every confidence in doing so, given how very nearly they’d come to bringing the world to heel from within the ranks of S.H.I.E.L.D. itself.
They dropped by to visit Clint’s family before leaving the country, and having his pregnant wife and their two children send them off on their ‘honeymoon’ would never not be just a little bit weird.
She almost doesn’t recognize him, and spares a moment to wonder if she’s slipping or he’s just that good at blending in, given the proper circumstances. Crowded market in a tourist trap, cold enough to justify a thick enough coat to hide the extra bulk of his metal limb… only the intensity of his stare and distinctive length of his hair make him apparent as he observes them from a table outside a café, pretending to sip idly at a coffee.
Biding her time, she and Clint take a lap around the town square, stopping for pictures and feeding one another snacks purchased from wheeled carts and ducking into overpriced souvenir shops so he can ask for help deciding on gifts for his ‘sister and her family,’ and she offers honest advice on what she thinks Laura and the kids would like.
Once they’ve made enough of a show of being nauseatingly love-struck and on vacation, she suggests that he return his shopping finds to their room and arrange for a car so they might spend the evening exploring the capital, where Strucker’s base is purportedly located.
Natasha meanders her way a bit outside the square and follows signs towards a church claimed to be the oldest standing in Sokovia. Times for daily services are advertised, as well as organized tours; a glance at her watch assures her it is currently in between either, and she ducks inside and sits in a pew towards the back. A half dozen people are scattered about the quiet space, heads bowed, praying, reflecting, perhaps just resting their legs.
She’s just starting to get antsy about making it back to the square in time to avoid awkward questions from Clint when she senses the approach of a figure moving surprisingly quietly for his size and build. He slides onto the bench by her side just as a group ends its tour, stepping through a door in a front corner of the room and shattering the calm stillness while families account for their children and belongings, some sitting to peruse brochures and maps while most of the room’s prior occupants stand to leave.
And in the sudden noise and commotion, a low voice murmurs for her ears alone, “You’ve a sense of humor to match your moniker.”
“I once poisoned a priest during mass, there’s only so much a person can be damned.”
A beat passes. “Did he deserve it?”
“Questions like that are why HYDRA’s idea of a perfect assassin was one with dozens of impossible kills he couldn’t even remember.” She holds, tensing for a reaction, but hooded eyes just stare forward under a curtain of dark hair. “How did you find your reading?”
“It was…” he trails away, goes quiet for a long minute until she turns to look at him, catching a brief glimpse of haunted eyes before he shifts and closes off again. “It was less than satisfying.”
“Because it told you what you are, but the question you really want answered is what you’ve done.” His silence is affirming enough, and her tone turns to a harsh whisper. “Your file was a glorified how-to manual, for the next time HYDRA wanted an upgrade. You’re not going to find a resume out there somewhere, there is no written list of your sins. You’re best off confessing the ones you remember, and being grateful for the ones you don’t.”
“Is that why you brought me to church?” He shoots her a mischievous grin with a gleam in his eye that rocks her straight back to old photos of Steve’s and footage from the Smithsonian exhibit.
The effect disappears so quick she wonders if she might’ve imagined it. “So what now? I hadn’t counted on seeing your face again, after that sleight in Marseille. You’re… unnervingly good at what you do.”
His eyes search her face, brow furrowed deeply. “So were you, once. You left.”
“Didn’t you?”
“I had nowhere left to go, it isn’t the same thing.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t have saved Steve from drowning. If that were true, you could turn yourself over to Strucker tomorrow and be re-primed to fight when we take him on.”
His gloved metal fist tenses, but he slumps slightly, shoulders hunched in defeat. “I don’t want to fight you.”
“But ignorance is bliss, and there’s a certain appeal to the idea of forcibly forgetting everything you’ve learned since D.C.” Part of her wants to probe further, ask if the file and any further research he’s managed into the online data dump have prompted his memories, either of his time as HYDRA’s fist or his time as the Bucky Barnes who Steve knew and loved growing up and in the war; she refrains, for fear of alienating him irrevocably. “There’s no balancing the ledger for people like you and me,” she confesses softly. “I once thought…” a bitter laugh escapes her. “Even the years I thought I was chipping away at the red in my book, I may as well have been working for HYDRA. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s dead, and I don’t know if the Avengers are going to be enough, when the next catastrophe strikes.”
He shoots her a sly sidelong glance. “And so you keep a secret which would shatter Rogers’ faith in you for fear that if you don’t, your team will dissolve that much sooner.”
“On balance, it was the right decision.”
“Because you think I killed Stark’s parents.”
His tone betrays nothing, and she can’t stop the question from slipping out. “Did you?”
He just shrugs. “Couldn’t tell you.” She assumes from his blasé demeanor that, if there is anything he remembers, working with Howard Stark during the war is not included. “And what will you do when you’ve reacquired your scepter, or when Rogers and his very tenacious friend finally run me to ground?”
“Provided you’re still in your right mind? Whatever you want me to do.”
“Why?”
“Because I read the damn file, okay? After seventy years, someone owes you some semblance of free will.”
That sly look returns. “Even with my ledger so very out of balance?”
“Getting tossed in a top-secret CIA detention center to be poked and prodded and evaluated certainly won’t help anything.” She runs a frustrated hand through her hair and then checks the time. Clint will be returning soon with a car. “Steve means well, but he hasn’t thought it through. He thinks that bringing you in means going back to another life, when you were different people, just picking up back in Brooklyn where you left off in the 1940s. But the truth is, the intelligence community knows the ghost story was real – HYDRA put all their eggs in one basket with Project Insight and sending you against Steve. The opinions are still split on whether you died with the helicarriers. But the only place Steve could hope to bring you in and keep you off the radar of any interested parties is Stark’s fortress in Manhattan, and deep down he knows that’d be problematic in its own right, or he’d have told the rest of the team who exactly you are.”
“And who is that?”
Her reply is blunt. “His tortured and brainwashed best friend. And even if you don’t remember that, fighting him on the helicarrier should be ample proof that he will never, ever let you go, now that he knows you’re out there.”
He turns to fully face her, eyes flickering quickly back and forth, light frown ghosting across his lips. “I shot him.”
“Yeah.”
“I shot him and he came back for me.”
“He loves you.”
“I don’t know him.” His eyes squeeze shut and a hand fists into the fabric of his coat. “That’s not… it’s in there. He’s in there. I just can’t…” Tortured eyes open and meet hers desperately. “I don’t know what to do.”
She’s getting emotional whiplash from his mood swings, but just asks calmly, “What do you want to do?”
There’s very real fear behind the determination in his eyes when he says, “I want to go back to where it started.”
At first, she thinks he means home – Brooklyn. But this isn’t Bucky Barnes sitting before her – not yet, anyway. “The train.”
“Can you make sure his friend – Wilson, with the wings – looks the other way for a few days?”
“Yeah,” she agrees after a moment’s pause, mouth suddenly dry. “I can do that.” Another reminder about the depressing nature of the dark road he plans to travel would simply fall on deaf ears, but she’s surprised to find something akin to grief welling deep inside her on his behalf. It’s probably a good thing that her phone buzzes with a message from Clint, wondering where she’s run off to, before she threatens to turn sentimental on the wayward man before her. “I have to go.”
“If there’s anything…” he starts awkwardly, then frowns down at the floor and tries again. “If there’s anything you need of me, in exchange for your assistance – another trade?”
It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell him just to watch after himself, but something else slips out. “Yeah – get a haircut. S’too distinctive long.”
His bark of laughter surprises her. “Sure, trusting a stranger at my back with a pair of scissors next to my jugular – you are funny, Widow.”