fic: Revenant (10/?)
Revenant: Chapter Ten
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
The meeting was in Fury's offices at the 44th Street headquarters instead of a conference room or, worse, an auditorium. The representatives from the various analysis desks, Hill, James, and Natasha. The analysts had been working on gathering a file on Belova; she had been in Africa, as James had said, securing resources for Latveria by seducing the right men, greasing the right palms, and slitting the right throats. James was willing to answer any questions about her, but he warned them that the already knew more of the specifics of her time in Africa than he did, although he did point out that two of the kills the Africa Section was attributing to Belova had really been his. She seemed to have disappeared from her official base of operations in Mombasa shortly after James had begun his revenge spree and nobody thought that those two events were unrelated. SHIELD was still trying to trace her movements in the greater DC/Virginia/Maryland areas; they didn't get a reasonable photo of Belova to pass on to local authorities until this morning and they weren't even sure if that was what she had looked like at the time of the shooting. But it was a start, which was more than they had had.
After the work on Belova and Lukin was done, the analysts were dismissed.
Once it was just the four of them, the conversation turned to Steve. Fury had read the updates and spoken to the doctors and to Peggy and he was under no illusions about the hard road Steve would travel from here on out.
"The house and the security detail will be his for the rest of his life," Fury told James. Natasha understood she was still here as a courtesy. "His current level of care will not change. I've made provisions to assure this as best as I am able."
"Provisions?" James prompted warily.
"We don't know what his natural lifespan is," Fury answered. "We don't even know if he will age."
Steve hadn't, really, not in the years that she'd known him. Although, granted, a man in his mid-late twenties wasn't going to be ravaged by the passage of time, serum or no, if he lived the kind of life Steve had. She hadn't considered immortality as a possibility, even before the shooting. She wondered if Steve had and, if he had, what he'd thought of it. Probably nothing good; he had already lost so much to the passage of time once, to do it again and again, to watch her and Clint and Tony and Pepper wither and die in the future, the way he had considered every moment with Peggy so precious now... no.
"The serum didn't make him immortal," James pointed out sourly. "The peak of human whatever-you-want isn't going to make him live forever."
"Two different variants of the serum let both of you survive experiences anyone else would have died from," Hill said, looking back challengingly when James frowned at her. "Look, Fury and I could get killed on the way back to the Helicarrier this afternoon. Or fifty years -- or a hundred years -- from now, some new Director of SHIELD could decide that the magical mystery fund for the house in Wyoming is a great place to cut budget. You're not actually upset that we're not going to turf him out now that he's no longer Captain America, are you?"
"No," James admitted. Natasha knew him well enough by this point to understand what he'd really been doing, which had been testing their resolve. Both he and Steve had lost their families over and over again -- their birth families, each other, the Commandos -- and it was instinct for James to wait for Steve to lose this one, too. "I just... no."
Fury waited a beat before continuing. "I am bringing this up now because I want your mind settled on that front," he said. "Through your and the Widow's contributions, we are now -- finally -- in forward motion. Motion that is only going to accelerate. Your plate is about to get a lot fuller and I want all of your attention on what is in front of you, not on what is or isn't happening in Wyoming. You will be kept updated and given as much access as your schedule will allow, but it will be as your schedule allows. Do you understand me, Sergeant Barnes?"
Three months ago, James had bridled at the appellation, but here he didn't protest it and in any other circumstance, Natasha would have cheered. "Just don't waste my time," he told Fury coolly. "I'm not here to be paraded around BS sessions like a trick pony. That was Steve's gig."
"You are not going to have any time for me to waste," Fury assured, standing up. The meeting was over.
Natasha followed James outside and was unsurprised when he gave her a quick peck on the cheek and said he'd speak to her tomorrow. Neither of them had been back in their respective apartments in more than a week, during which time they'd been together almost constantly and not always comfortably. She could use a little quiet time to herself and he most certainly needed more than the flight from Denver to Newark to absorb everything that had happened since Paris. She started walking north, doing her best to tune out the tourists and enjoy early fall in New York. And then her cell phone rang.
"Are you spying on me?" Natasha asked Tony instead of saying hello. Although once she asked, she realized it was probably more likely that Tony were spying on Fury.
"Um, no?" Tony replied, although he sounded far less mystified or insulted than anyone else would when presented with that accusation. "Barton said you guys were back in New York and Fury wasn't going to keep you forever. Pepper suggested drinks and/or dinner."
Natasha looked at her watch, debating whether to accept on her own behalf; James would probably not appreciate it, at least not today. Given her own druthers, she'd rather go back to her apartment, but she also knew that Tony and Pepper wanted more than whatever updates they'd been getting out of Clint during the week. She just wasn't sure she had what they wanted, which was either a definitive answer or the ability to get them out to see him. Nor was she sure she had the energy to bear their disappointment. "James is already on the way home," she said. "I think he'd prefer to stay in tonight."
"Then we'll expect you in, what, fifteen?"
"I've been up since four," she pointed out. "I've just been trapped in Fury's office for the last three hours. I'm still carrying my travel bag. I need to shower and sleep."
"We'll make it an early night," Tony promised and he didn't plead, he never pleaded, but this was whatever wasn't that.
Natasha bit her lip. "A drink," she said, firm enough to make it clear she didn't want to be arm-twisted into more, but light enough that it was still a social invitation and not the inquisition they both knew it would be.
"I shall make you a martini so dirty, it'll be X-rated," Tony assured, the unspoken agreement left just so.
It was early for Pepper to be done for the day, but Natasha didn't say anything about it in return for them not saying that she looked like something the cat had dragged in. The martini was indeed filthy, but Pepper made sure she at least ate a couple of the eggplant and pepper crostini and had some cheese because Natasha could drink alcohol like any other Russian, but on an empty stomach and after a long day, it would go to her head more than usual.
Tony waited until some signal from Pepper that Natasha didn't see to start asking about Steve.
"He's awake for longer stretches," Natasha told them. "But he's not... It's easy to try to see Steve in who he is now. To give meaning and purpose to what he does. But I don't... I don't know how much of it is real and how much is us wishing it was."
Tony was sitting on the couch across from hers, forearms on his thighs, tumbler in hand. He looked up at her. "He knows who Barnes is, though, right? That's something."
Natasha exhaled forcefully. "He knows he likes James," she said slowly, making sure she got her thoughts out correctly the first time. She hadn't said this out loud to anyone, not Peggy or Clint and certainly not James. "I don't know if he knows who James is per se."
She could see the impact of that distinction on Tony's face.
"We think he might just be missing memories, that he's stuck at twelve or seventeen or twenty-two," she went on. "And he might be, for all we know. But he's missing too much else for us to find out. He's not even trying to communicate, he doesn't react to anything, he doesn't smile or cry... there's a void where Steve used to be. I don't know how or if it gets filled."
She was thinking of Steve looking guilelessly at her, impassive and vaguely curious in an abstract way. Him not knowing her hurt, but him not knowing anything else hurt more.
"We didn't think we'd get this far," Pepper said, sounding exactly like she was trying to cheer herself up and failing. "It's Steve. He's got more miracles in him even if he doesn't know it yet."
Natasha stayed for her one drink and neither Pepper nor Tony pressed her to stay longer. It was still light out when she left and that perfect warm-cool temperature for walking, but she wasn't really in the mood to appreciate it. She got home, unpacked her bag by dumping the contents on the bed and carrying the dirty laundry to the hamper in the bathroom and then getting into the shower and washing away the travel and the frustration and the little bit of grief. Because she was grieving, she realized. Steve in his coma had been nonetheless full of potential, but Steve as he was now, the empty vessel with only his happiness at seeing James rattling around like the only coin in the piggy bank, that was the proof of loss.
She left the rest of her travel gear -- sundries, book, weapons -- on the bed and dressed in sweats and a tank top and went to see what she could dig out of her freezer because she didn't even have the energy to decide on delivery options. There was still some pelmeni and there was sour cream and there was some pinot grigio and that was good enough.
She had no intention of going in to 44th Street without a summons, so she spent the following day doing laundry, grocery shopping online, cleaning her weapons, and finishing writing up the notes on the trip to see Sonia because Fury wanted the file completely updated at all times, no really, he's not kidding about that, please stop laughing and start typing.
In the early afternoon, there was a text from Clint: Super-soldier with no gross motor skills is both hilarious and terrifying. (Everyone's okay.)
She took a break to go running in Hudson River Park; Central Park was closer, but she hated running there when the Drive was still open to cars. There was a breeze off the water, as usual, and a sun that wasn't quite ready to lose its summer fierceness, and it felt good. Running in Nebraska had been pleasant but boring; even in a park on the periphery in the middle of a weekday, New York was never boring.
When she ran past the Chelsea Piers, she made a note to herself to ask Clint if he wanted her to stop by his apartment and open the windows and get him some milk before he got back over the weekend.
Having done everything she could to procrastinate on the Croatia notes, she returned to them, only to find that James had submitted his own report and then four separate analysis units had submitted written questions to both of them and yes, Fury wanted these done ASAP, too.
"Wanna crib off each other's quiz papers?" James asked when she called.
"I'll bring dinner if you start writing out the answers now," she offered.
She waited for the FreshDirect delivery, calling in an order to Mission Chinese as she headed for the subway.
They made it a working dinner, batting around ideas about Lukin and Belova and HYDRA, speaking in the shorthand that came easily to them now, a mixture of shared experiences and past history that wasn't uncomfortable the way it had been at the start. They had both been bad people, the difference in duration less than in degree, and with that came a certain lack of reticence and a disinterest in hiding their darker thoughts from possibly judging ears. There was no one here to shame them unless they did it to themselves. James the POW twice over would do it gladly, but James the master operative accepted that he saw the world differently for having been a good soldier for the wrong side and could use it to do battle for the angels now.
But something was bothering James, she realized. He wasn't skirting the edge of the abyss of despair that came with his accessing his past as the Winter Soldier, but something was eating at him.
"Out with it," she ordered, sipping at her wine.
"I slept with her," James said, pushing his kung-pao pastrami around his plate with his fork. "Belova. I let her seduce me. I didn't get why Lukin found it so amusing when he found out about it. He made a crack about me and spider webs and the two of them must have found it funny as hell that I was repeating history and didn't know it."
Lukin wouldn't necessarily have told Belova about Natasha and James, she knew. But it had hardly been a great secret in the Red Room and Belova had probably heard all about it when she was trying to surpass the last Black Widow. Seducing James had been taking one more prize away from Natasha, even if one of the principals didn't know it.
"You remembered me later on," she offered, since there was no reason he needed to apologize. And that's what this confession was.
It was possibly not the right thing to say, since her proof of his remembering had come when he'd taken care to verbally twist the knife right into her heart in Doomstadt.
"Not all of it," he said after a long moment. "Not most of it and what there was, it was out of order and out of context. I wasn't sure how much I dreamt and how much I imagined and what was real. That was happening by the end, a lot of weird shit in my head that made no sense but I knew I didn't have the imagination to come up with on my own. Nothing from before the fall, just... I think whatever they did to me after we got found out, it was starting to break down a little. I remembered your smile -- your real one -- and I remembered at least part of what happened in Kaliningrad. I wasn't sure if the first was real. I was pretty sure the second was."
He gave her a smirk and a wink that made it clear which part of the adventures in Kaliningrad he remembered. Kaliningrad had been their most spectacular adventure as professional partners, not to mention also resulting in an astonishing amount of damage to the hotel room once they'd returned, high on adrenaline and lust and, maybe, love. The next morning, surveying the damage, James had joked that he was going to get punted back to the Monster Factory when their bosses saw the bill for damages. It hadn't been funny three weeks later and the way the grin faltered reflected that.
"We could make sure you remembered it properly this time," she said casually as she plucked a potato out of the container with her chopsticks. When she looked up, James was staring at her. She cocked an eyebrow challengingly. She'd thought about this. About what she wanted, about what James might want, about what both of them might need. She was familiar enough with who he was now -- and that was still a changing thing -- that she knows she liked this Bucky-James, enjoyed spending time with him even as he frustrated her. They were very different people than they'd been in the Red Room, but they were still compatible in the ways that mattered. She'd never had anyone in her life with whom she shared so many fundamental experiences and she had been surprised at how comfortable that was turning out to be, how easy they were together despite all of the crap he was going though. How easy it had been to care for him.
"Natasha," he began warily.
"If you are about to imply I am making this suggestion for altruistic purposes, I am going to take off your shiny new arm and beat you to death with it," she warned. "Besides, even fabulous sex isn't going to make you any less screwed up in the head."
He laughed then, genuinely.
"Finish eating," she told him, gesturing to his plate with her chopsticks. "You'll need your strength."
"Yes, ma'am."
The bedroom stayed intact this time; they were neither high on adrenaline nor racing against stolen time nor fueled by the fear of discovery or punishment. At least not in the same fashion.
"What?" James asked when she started to giggle as they lay tangled in each other and the sheets.
"I think it just hit me where we are," she admitted, embarrassed. "We had sex in Captain America's bed."
It's not that she had forgotten that this was Steve's apartment, not with so much of his personality still pervading the space. But James had gotten over his initial feelings of unworthiness and he'd stopped treating the place like a museum months ago. He hadn't changed the furniture or anything, but it looked liked he lived here, too, now.
James chuffed out a laugh, rubbing at his face with the hand not pinned down where was leaning on his right arm.
"Someone should," he said airily. She smacked his belly and he reached down to knot his fingers with hers. His hand didn't quite feel like muscle and bone under skin, but it didn't feel robotic, either, because he had such fine control over it. He was comfortable enough with it now that she'd forgotten entirely that it wasn't flesh when he'd been touching her earlier. "Besides, it's not the first time. Or the second. Well, the first time he wasn't Captain America yet."
She lifted her head up so she could see his face. "Do I really want to know?"
He grinned at her, laughter in his eyes, and she could see both Steve's Bucky and her James and the man they'd grown into. "Depends. How do you feel about dirty stories?"
The next morning, Natasha went back to her apartment and James went in to headquarters to talk to the analysts about the questions they'd sent and then his shrink about everything else. Including her, presumably.
Her email inbox, the private one she used for contacts and other non-SHIELD business was fuller than she expected and her first inclination was to check her official account to find out what had happened. But reading them through, she realized that there hadn't been any particular event, just the cumulative situations. The Russia-China conflict hadn't broken into open warfare yet, but it was getting closer, especially with the unofficial escalations -- the Chinese were hacking into all of the Kremlin's servers, the Russian ultra-nationalists were making life dangerous for the Chinese nationals (or anyone with slanted eyes, which could mean Koreans or Kazakhs). People were getting curious, a few were getting nervous, and Natasha was a natural choice to turn to for an answer. She was careful in her replies; no matter how off-the-record she claimed to be, anything she said was still going to be interpreted as bearing the imprimatur of SHIELD.
Clint had said yes, please to her offer to open up his place, even though he was pretty sure he was going to be sent to North Africa to look for Belova as soon as he was activated, so she made sure she had cash and his keys on her when she went out for a run.
Sonia had replied to her questions about Belova by the time Natasha got back and showered. Belova had been spotted in Europe in the last several months, apparently on the hunt for whoever had been upsetting the Latverian apple cart -- James on his spree, although nobody had known it at the time -- but was still primarily an Africa expert.
Sonia had told them that Belova was the presumptive candidate to run Africa for Lukin, but despite that, Sonia hadn't known any more than James about which one of Doom or Lukin Belova was really loyal to. "Her primary loyalty is to herself," Sonia wrote now. "She'd rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, but which one Latveria qualifies as, I could not tell you." She deferred to James's knowledge about Belova's relevant skills to have been Steve's assassin, but absolutely believed that Belova would have jumped at the chance, whoever had asked it of her. "She's more than a little fixated on you, still," Sonia warned. "Everything you did, she wants to do it better. Anything you couldn't have done, she wants to prove she can."
James called her in the late afternoon. He was still at 44th Street and had just gotten free of the analysts. He was going to shoot at the range and use the gym because he was too cranky to be let free on the streets of Manhattan, but after that, did she want to do something?
He didn't sound like he was asking her to be his stress toy or his shrink and he had none of the hesitation he'd occasionally shown during their first time together in New York, like he thought he might be imposing on her. This was yet a new James, nothing at all like the very first one and yet so much like him at moments that it was disorienting.
"Call me after you've showered," she told him. "My answer will depend on how much crankiness you can wash off."
James laughed. "I'll even clean behind my ears."
They met at a diner on 10th normally favored by John Jay students, an old place that looked like it hadn't changed much since it had opened, allegedly in 1952. Clint had taken her and Steve here once because, he had said, the fries were fresh-cut and he had wanted Steve's opinion on the egg creams. But he'd really been a little mopey because it had been his brother's birthday, which was why Natasha had agreed to go when she normally avoided places that offered breakfast food for dinner. She was choosing it now because James was not nearly the adventurous eater Steve was and, while he'd never complain and he'd eat whatever he ordered, she could let him off the hook by choosing someplace with straightforward fare.
James thought the menu was hilarious. The descriptions of the options were fulsome and ridiculous, which Natasha hadn't noticed until it was pointed out because she hadn't needed an explanation for what "cheeseburger" or "open-faced tuna melt" was.
"Right before the war, I used to wait tables at a place around the corner from headquarters, pretty much, Broadway at Forty-Third," he explained. "Toffenetti's. Place was the size of the Helicarrier and the menu was written up like the food version of a ladies' magazine. 'Precious beauty, born of the ashes of extinct volcanoes, brings divine enjoyment, strength to dare and do. Its farinaceous beauty makes life a perfect poem. What a gust of feeling it brings.'"
He recited the quote with a straight face and a voice that tried to minimize his Brooklyn accent and sound vaguely high-class English. Which perhaps only made her laugh harder.
"You know what that's for?" he asked in his usual voice. "Go ahead, guess."
She shook her head no, wiping tears from her eyes. "I couldn't even begin to try."
"It's a plain baked potato," he told her and she started to laugh again, making him smile. "I'm a guy from Red Hook who barely understood half the stuff I read in high school English and I'm supposed to spout this baloney with a straight face. And if that was the lingo for a potato, you could imagine what the daily specials sounded like. I didn't know what 'farinaceous' meant until Steve went and looked it up in the dictionary. It means starchy, in case you ever need a Scrabble word."
They ordered, James temporarily confusing the waitress by using the menu's florid description instead of just saying "reuben on rye." He was clearly in a good mood, enough that he'd volunteered memories of his old life without them being pried out or forced and, even better, without them bringing him down afterward, as they so often did when it was with anyone but Peggy or Steve. If she were crass -- or if Clint or Tony were present -- they would make a comment about what good sex did for him, but she knew better. The sex had indeed been good, but it was really the everything else that was letting him be comfortable enough to touch the past without expecting to get burned.
Which was why she felt she was still in safe territory when she suggested that the egg creams were acceptable here.
"Steve turned you on to those?" he asked with what might have been approval.
"He had one here," she corrected. "I don't mind them, but I don't have the... cultural tie to them that he does. But he liked to make them, so I drank them. That's why there's a Sodastream in your kitchen, by the way."
"A what?" James looked confused.
"Seltzer maker," she offered, but he only changed his look of confusion.
"I found the seltzer maker," he said slowly. "And it looked exactly like the ones we grew up with."
He must have found the one Steve had been using before Clint had given him the Sodastream.
"It's either right next to that in the cabinet, or it's hiding in the storage closet with the Roomba and all of the other Twenty-First Century toys that baffled him," she suggested. "His relationship with modern technology was not as smooth as he would have liked to believe."
They went back to her place afterward. James was frankly curious about her apartment, wandering from room to room as she put up water for tea.
"Is this by choice or necessity?" he asked and she didn't misinterpret what he was asking about or why. Was this what he would have to do, he was asking, if he ever tried to settle down for real: live in a house that looked like a hotel?
Her apartment was tastefully appointed, attractive, and completely devoid of personal touches save for the clutter currently on the dining table and a few pieces of art Steve had made for her.
"Neither. Both," she admitted with a shrug that was more self-effacing than casual. "It's probably far less necessary than I think it is, but... I'd never really had a home, so when I got this place, I treated it like every other crash pad I'd ever occupied. I had no other frame of reference. And even later on, once I had realized that there was a permanence to this and not just a place where I stored my things and slept... I think I was afraid to jinx it."
Which was the truth, maybe more truth than she'd have otherwise liked to admit, but it was perhaps also not the entire truth. This was not the first time she'd been asked that question, challenged in that way. Steve had brought it up, carefully and gently and out of concern for her and not, as James was doing, as if she might be a Ghost of Christmas Future warning him to mend his ways. And so she knew that the rest of the truth was that she didn't know what to do to make it a home. She didn't have hobbies, she didn't build or make anything, she didn't buy movies or books with an eye toward building a collection she could look over or display, she didn't collect anything at all. She had an iPod full of music she liked, but that wasn't the wall of CDs Clint had in his apartment. Her music was private and portable, hidden from view as if made her vulnerable and ready to run when she was.
Thinking about it depressed her.
"Steve was on a mission to make the place look 'lived in,'" she said, gesturing to the sketch on the kitchen wall. The sketch, in colored pencils, was a caricature of her, poking gentle fun at her lack of cooking skills but proficiency in reheating. There was no signature but James would know Steve had drawn it. She had two other pieces by him, a watercolor in the living room and an oil painting in the bedroom. "He said it was time to stop running."
The watercolor, a rainy day in Manhattan with a muted palette of grays and blues save for a flame-haired woman in a dark green raincoat, had been a 'welcome back' present after she'd been cleared (or near enough) of espionage, before she'd been formally reinstated by SHIELD but after she'd already started working with Fury to lay the ground for what would become the assault on Minyar. "One more thing to tie you down so you don't fly away," he'd written on the little note, which was tucked behind the matting if anyone bothered to open the frame. She hadn't realized he'd forgiven her until he'd handed her the wrapped package; he probably had much earlier, but she hadn't wanted to confuse hope with fact, so she'd waited for some kind of proof. Which might have been why he'd given her the painting in the first place.
"Gonna have to go bid at one of the art auctions to get my own reminder," James said, then smiled. "I used to have to shove his sketches aside to find a clean surface to put something down on and now they're worth tens of thousands. What a world!"
There had always been a market for Steve's art -- anything that hadn't been collected and stored by the government after Steve's plane crash had found its way into circulation and had commanded good money over the decades -- but his 'death' in June had sent the value skyrocketing. Steve had never produced anything for profit since his return, but he had done work for sale at charity auctions and he'd drawn doodles during his visits to hospitals and other appearances and those, now, were worth fortunes.
"You don't have to bid on anything," she retorted, turning off the stove as the kettle started to whistle. She poured the water in the teapot and two cups, then emptied the rest into the sink and started again. "You can ask SHIELD to cough up the boxes they're storing for Steve. You'll probably find your old clothes and your sword and whatever else got packed up when he enlisted. I don't think he threw away anything of yours and there was a lot of his stuff that he didn't want to keep in the apartment."
She knew for a fact that SHIELD still had all that had remained of Bucky Barnes's life; Steve had gone through it after he'd found out about the Winter Soldier.
James made a face. "I don't think I want my eighty-year-old ratty undershirts," he said. "But maybe my hats. I miss my hats. I miss everyone wearing hats."
It was Natasha's turn to scowl. "Only because you never had to worry about what one did to your hair," she told him, elbowing him gently so that he'd move from in front of where the tea box was. "You'd look very strange walking around in a fedora."
"I happen to look very good in a fedora," James replied loftily, leaning back against the counter after she retrieved the tin. "But I don't wear anything that needs a fedora anymore. I can still wear a flat cap, though."
"You'd fit right in with the hipsters," she said and laughed at his horrified expression. He didn't get to make a rebuttal because his phone started ringing in his pocket.
"Peggy," he mouthed as he answered it, then gestured with his head toward the living room.
As the water boiled and she filled the teapot again, she could hear James talking to Peggy and then to Steve. He told Steve about the bureaucracy at SHIELD and then the diner, then told him that she was "maybe my girl now. She's maybe always been my girl, but I didn't remember for a long time. It's one more thing they took from me that I'm trying to take back... Yes, Miss Carter, I know she's not going to want to hear me calling her that. But me and Steve are old fellas... he did, too. We all did. Well, Dernier called you Steve's cherie, but that's just French for the same thing... because it made Steve blush. And because it's true."
She would have rolled her eyes if she'd been in front of him when he'd called her his girl, but she had honestly gotten used to James's occasionally dated English usage (his Russian was as contemporary as hers); after spending so much time with Steve, she hardly noticed it most of the time and James was actually better than Steve had been at the beginning. And word choice aside, being James's anything, having him say it out loud to people he cared about and without any hesitancy... it felt strange. Good strange, because she hadn't ever been anyone's anything, not for real, not without an artifice and a cover story, since the last time she had been James's anything.
She loaded up the tray and brought it into the living room as James was telling Steve about the new bakery around the corner from the apartment that only sold things made out of flax and quinoa, which he pronounced wrong, then was apparently corrected since he then repeated it properly, if sarcastically, and "other kinds of birdseed, nothing normal people eat, but there's always a line out the door" and about how they were searching for the woman who'd shot him. His voice got cold when he promised that he was going to kill Belova.
"I know you don't want to hear that, that you don't want any more blood on my hands and not in your name, but if you really want to stop me, you're going to have to say the words. And even then, I can't make any promises because I need to do this, Steve. I want to do this. And I don't like what it says about me and I know you don't like it, either, but there it is. This is who I am."
He was looking at her when he said this and she realized he was warning her, too. So she handed him a mug because she already knew this about him and she was okay with that. It was who she was, too. And James was going to have to fight her for the privilege of paying Belova back bullet for bullet.
"Give Steve and Peggy my best," she said, reaching for the ginger-lemon shortbread cookies she had put out.
James woke up screaming in the middle of the night and, this time, she didn't leave him to some imagined private shame because she was right there next to him. She turned on the light when he started scrabbling as if to take his arm off because she wasn't sure if he was awake and understood what he was doing.
"Something's wrong with it," he gritted out as he turned to put his feet on the ground, eyes full of tears that might have been just from the pain, since he was clearly in agony. "Fucking thing gave me flashbacks to Zola's lab."
She scooted over beside him, ignoring for now the victory that was him admitting out loud what was bothering him in his head. "What can I do? How do we get it off?"
The instructions were straightforward, even if the process was a little weird, visually; Tony had designed it so that it could be done by James alone if he had to. James gasped lungfuls of air once it was off, rubbing his face with his remaining hand. Natasha got off the bed and took the arm over to her vanity, leaving it on the bench before returning to him.
"Do you want something for the pain?" she asked, reaching out to hold his face gently in her hands. He shook his head no, not trying to break out of her hold. "Then drink some water and let's go back to sleep. You can call Tony in the morning for tech support."
She let him go so he could reach for the water glass on the bedside table, but didn't back away lest he decide to do something stupid like go sleep on the couch to avoid disturbing her. Once the lights were back off, she curled herself around him and he made an amused noise, which she took to mean he knew very well what she was doing. She wasn't much of a cuddler and disliked trying to sleep using her partner's torso as a pillow and James knew this, so maybe it was obvious. She didn't care.
"Don't make me knock you out," she warned as a whisper in his ear.
"You'd love that," he retorted with a chuckle she felt as a rumble beneath her.
"You know me too well."
In the proper morning, well after the sun came up, they woke again and, after breakfast, James called Tony while Natasha looked for a bag that could accommodate James's arm, since it wouldn't fit in a shopping bag.
"Oh, absolutely not!" James protested with alarm when she held up the pink floral-print rucksack. "No."
She stood her ground. "I think last night should be sufficient proof of your heterosexual masculinity to be able to bear the indignity of it for the fifteen minutes it will take to get over to Stark Tower on the subway."
Apparently Tony heard that part, or maybe just her voice in the same room as James's first thing in the morning was enough for Tony's dirty mind to draw the correct conclusion because James's next words were to him. "Shut it, Stark. It's none of your business and it ain't healthy for you... I won't have to do anything. She'll kill you first."
For that bit of respect-giving, she put aside the ruck and went to look for what else could be used. The yellow backpack couldn't fit the arm inside without the fingers and most of the palm poking out because the arm was locked at the elbow and that just looked horribly creepy. She emptied out the gray duffel at the bottom of her cedar chest that she kept extra weapons in, so it ended up smelling like cedar chips and gun oil, but the arm fit easily. Unfortunately, it also looked like there was still a shotgun in it and it had no shoulder strap, so James wouldn't have a free hand while carrying it. It was poor tactics, but it was a short enough trip that James was willing to be a little nervous rather than a lot metrosexual.
"You are showing your age," she told him tartly as he headed out.
Twenty minutes after James left, Tapper called her and asked if she were up for a short assignment. She said yes so long as it didn't interfere with the hunt for Belova, which was the reason she'd been recalled to New York in the first place.
"It's related," Tapper assured. "Also, it's a quick trip to wine country in Portugal and you always complain that I never send you anywhere nice."
The briefing packet came five minutes later over email. Tucked into the Douro valley was a small estate belonging to Edward Templeton-Graham, a former MI6 mandarin enjoying his retirement in sunny climes. Natasha recognized the name; Templeton-Graham had been a Sovietologist back in the day, a not-very-crypto Communist that the KGB had never stopped trying to turn and the British security services had watched like a hawk even after they realized he would likely never accept. Templeton-Graham had seen too much of what had really gone on in the Soviet Union and had preferred to hold out hope for a British worker's paradise, although his willingness to keep his patriotism quiet and tempt the Soviets into thinking he could be the next Kim Philby had allowed him to produce some truly spectacular intelligence product over the years. It would be fun to meet him, Natasha thought.
It was fun. Templeton-Graham, from a distance, was just another English expat living well on his pension in Portugal's weaker economy, perpetually lightly sunburned and very well fed. But while he took her on a tour of a nearby vineyard and they strolled through the fields, he spoke in Russian and told tales of startling darkness.
He and Lukin had been in Bonn together back in the day when it had been a national capital; Lukin had been rezident there, very young for the post, and his tenure had been drenched in blood as he had hunted down defectors and dissidents and always, always sent a message in large font with each missing finger or mutilated corpse. But Lukin had also been suave and urbane and the two of them had met at embassy events and a few social ones and they had kept up the acquaintanceship over the decades since because Lukin had been arrogant enough to believe that he would be the one to finally reel the big fish in.
"I never believed he'd just graciously retire from the game of thrones in Russia," Templeton-Graham said as they strolled. "He insisted he'd had enough, that he has a wife and young children now and Russia is too cold and too poor and he wanted to conquer new battlefields where the casualties were metaphoric. But I know of five men and three women he personally cut an ear off of. This is not a man who prefers metaphoric bloodshed, no matter how much time has passed. Latveria is merely a rest station on the climb to the summit. Do you know what he says when asked why he chose Latveria? He says that Russians are constitutionally incapable of functioning in a free society, that they went from Tsars to the Party and now the last twenty years have proven that they don't know what to do when presented with control over their own lives and destinies. So he chose a place where nobody is free, but the weather is nicer and the food is better."
Templeton-Graham's theory was that Lukin has been cultivating his own cult of personality within Russia's elite. Not the oligarchs, the big fish and bold names who lived and died by Putin's pleasure whether they were in St. Petersburg or London, but the ones with the real power if not necessarily the real money or titles: the CIOs and CFOs, not the CEOs, the under-ministers and deputy secretaries, those who would either eventually be promoted to power or would continue to wield it behind the curtains. He was filling their heads with talk of a future great Russia, nationalism without the taint of xenophobia, which was ironic because Lukin was a proper racist himself. Lukin's new Russia would herald a new golden age, unpolluted by the corruption and decadence of Putin's new Tsardom, an oligarchy of the worthy.
"Straight out of a HYDRA press release," Natasha said sourly.
"Indeed," Templeton-Graham agreed. "But without the globalism. A very Russian-flavored version, preferably accomplished by straining out the Caucasus populations and the Muslims and other undesirables, but he could live with them if he had to. He's spent long enough in Latveria to appreciate how Baron von Doom has built up a solid foundation of nationalism without it curdling into jingoism, at least in public."
Natasha left Portugal gifted with several bottles of fine port and a long list of names of people and companies Templeton-Graham thought Lukin had already enlisted in his private army.
She went to Paris from Portugal, having a few things to take care of after she and James had left so suddenly, then stayed for an extra day because Clint was going to be there on a layover between New York and Algiers because yes, he'd been punted right into the hunt for Belova.
She hadn't spoken to James every day she'd been away, but they were exchanging texts and emails regularly. His arm was fixed, something to do with the interface Tony had had to redesign. Otherwise, SHIELD was making him crazy by telling him that they had a lead on Belova and then they didn't, he'd had an amazingly awkward conversation with Miranda Tung, and Tony and Pepper were going to Chicago next Thursday for an event Stark Industries was hosting and then they would drive out to Wyoming for the weekend.
Steve was showing small improvements, which mostly meant that he was becoming a more difficult patient and, not unrelated, Peggy had told James that they were letting Steve's hair grow out a little. He still was still essentially non-communicative, but he'd started turning his head away from things he didn't want (he was being fed orally now, purees and liquids, to mixed success) and making more use of his limbs, which he still had no real control of. He was being classed for the time being at infant-level -- at least that was the layperson explanation -- but the neurologists had noted differences between the scans done when he'd first woken and the most recent set. They wouldn't give anyone an official reason to hope, but it was something, anything, they could hang on to.
James was probably going out to Wyoming soon -- there wasn't anything he needed to be in New York for so long as the analysts couldn't find Belova and the doctors wanted to see what kind of influence he might have on Steve's development.
She told Clint all of this when she saw him. They rented a hotel room for the night -- two beds -- and that required her telling him about her and James, especially because Tony already knew and that information really should come from her.
"I'm glad for you," Clint said as she poured out one of the port bottles into the hotel room tumblers. "I'm not surprised -- you two were pretty obviously kiss-or-kill from the get-go. But I'm happy for more than just not having to help you hide the body."
She gave him a nod of appreciation as she handed over one of the tumblers.
"He making you happy?" Clint asked, losing the smug grin and watching her carefully. "He's a complicated part of your past, which isn't always so much fun in the present. And he's still bugfuck crazy, even if he's getting better."
Natasha gave him a proper smile. "I'm happy. Things are still complicated, perhaps even more so, but I'm happy."
Clint held up his tumbler and she raised hers so that they could clink them together and drink.
"Good," Clint said. "Because I'm still gonna have to give him the Some Kind of Wonderful 'you break her heart I break your face' talk, but I'd rather not have to back up that threat because this is the guy who shot me twice for kicks."
Natasha arched an eyebrow. "I will take care of any necessary face-breaking myself. He only shot me once."
Conversation inevitably turned back to Steve, which made them a little maudlin, especially after a couple of tumblers of port. Clint thought that if Steve didn't progress much, if this was how it was going to be, then maybe they should move him back to New York. There were conspiracy theories about Captain America still being alive and sightings like Elvis, but the world had accepted Steve's death, mourned, and moved on except for the occasional ratings-chaser television news editorial about why his killer had not yet been brought to justice.
"The plan worked, nobody's looking for him, and he shouldn't have to spend the rest of his life surrounded by just Peggy and strangers," Clint said, leaving unsaid the part that it would be just strangers at some point, earlier than later.
"As far as Steve understands right now, there's no difference between Agent Hochimura and Peggy and Tony and Joanne-the-night-nurse," she pointed out quietly.
"That's not the point and you know it," Clint retorted with some heat, then relaxed. "Peggy would love to get back to civilization and Tony would turn over as much of Stark Tower as Steve needed."
"I wouldn't even take a bet on Tony offering to do just that when he goes out there," Natasha agreed.
The following morning, her Paris-to-New York ticket was exchanged for a Paris-to-Rome boarding pass because an old case, unrelated to anything to do with Steve or Belova or Lukin or HYDRA, had reared its head.
"You keep asking to be sent to Paris because it's a good gateway to other places," Tapper reminded her when she expressed frustration. "Don't get pissy when your bullshit magically turns into truth."
By the time she got back to New York, James was already in Wyoming. She was surprised by the depth of her disappointment.
Also posted at DW.
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
The meeting was in Fury's offices at the 44th Street headquarters instead of a conference room or, worse, an auditorium. The representatives from the various analysis desks, Hill, James, and Natasha. The analysts had been working on gathering a file on Belova; she had been in Africa, as James had said, securing resources for Latveria by seducing the right men, greasing the right palms, and slitting the right throats. James was willing to answer any questions about her, but he warned them that the already knew more of the specifics of her time in Africa than he did, although he did point out that two of the kills the Africa Section was attributing to Belova had really been his. She seemed to have disappeared from her official base of operations in Mombasa shortly after James had begun his revenge spree and nobody thought that those two events were unrelated. SHIELD was still trying to trace her movements in the greater DC/Virginia/Maryland areas; they didn't get a reasonable photo of Belova to pass on to local authorities until this morning and they weren't even sure if that was what she had looked like at the time of the shooting. But it was a start, which was more than they had had.
After the work on Belova and Lukin was done, the analysts were dismissed.
Once it was just the four of them, the conversation turned to Steve. Fury had read the updates and spoken to the doctors and to Peggy and he was under no illusions about the hard road Steve would travel from here on out.
"The house and the security detail will be his for the rest of his life," Fury told James. Natasha understood she was still here as a courtesy. "His current level of care will not change. I've made provisions to assure this as best as I am able."
"Provisions?" James prompted warily.
"We don't know what his natural lifespan is," Fury answered. "We don't even know if he will age."
Steve hadn't, really, not in the years that she'd known him. Although, granted, a man in his mid-late twenties wasn't going to be ravaged by the passage of time, serum or no, if he lived the kind of life Steve had. She hadn't considered immortality as a possibility, even before the shooting. She wondered if Steve had and, if he had, what he'd thought of it. Probably nothing good; he had already lost so much to the passage of time once, to do it again and again, to watch her and Clint and Tony and Pepper wither and die in the future, the way he had considered every moment with Peggy so precious now... no.
"The serum didn't make him immortal," James pointed out sourly. "The peak of human whatever-you-want isn't going to make him live forever."
"Two different variants of the serum let both of you survive experiences anyone else would have died from," Hill said, looking back challengingly when James frowned at her. "Look, Fury and I could get killed on the way back to the Helicarrier this afternoon. Or fifty years -- or a hundred years -- from now, some new Director of SHIELD could decide that the magical mystery fund for the house in Wyoming is a great place to cut budget. You're not actually upset that we're not going to turf him out now that he's no longer Captain America, are you?"
"No," James admitted. Natasha knew him well enough by this point to understand what he'd really been doing, which had been testing their resolve. Both he and Steve had lost their families over and over again -- their birth families, each other, the Commandos -- and it was instinct for James to wait for Steve to lose this one, too. "I just... no."
Fury waited a beat before continuing. "I am bringing this up now because I want your mind settled on that front," he said. "Through your and the Widow's contributions, we are now -- finally -- in forward motion. Motion that is only going to accelerate. Your plate is about to get a lot fuller and I want all of your attention on what is in front of you, not on what is or isn't happening in Wyoming. You will be kept updated and given as much access as your schedule will allow, but it will be as your schedule allows. Do you understand me, Sergeant Barnes?"
Three months ago, James had bridled at the appellation, but here he didn't protest it and in any other circumstance, Natasha would have cheered. "Just don't waste my time," he told Fury coolly. "I'm not here to be paraded around BS sessions like a trick pony. That was Steve's gig."
"You are not going to have any time for me to waste," Fury assured, standing up. The meeting was over.
Natasha followed James outside and was unsurprised when he gave her a quick peck on the cheek and said he'd speak to her tomorrow. Neither of them had been back in their respective apartments in more than a week, during which time they'd been together almost constantly and not always comfortably. She could use a little quiet time to herself and he most certainly needed more than the flight from Denver to Newark to absorb everything that had happened since Paris. She started walking north, doing her best to tune out the tourists and enjoy early fall in New York. And then her cell phone rang.
"Are you spying on me?" Natasha asked Tony instead of saying hello. Although once she asked, she realized it was probably more likely that Tony were spying on Fury.
"Um, no?" Tony replied, although he sounded far less mystified or insulted than anyone else would when presented with that accusation. "Barton said you guys were back in New York and Fury wasn't going to keep you forever. Pepper suggested drinks and/or dinner."
Natasha looked at her watch, debating whether to accept on her own behalf; James would probably not appreciate it, at least not today. Given her own druthers, she'd rather go back to her apartment, but she also knew that Tony and Pepper wanted more than whatever updates they'd been getting out of Clint during the week. She just wasn't sure she had what they wanted, which was either a definitive answer or the ability to get them out to see him. Nor was she sure she had the energy to bear their disappointment. "James is already on the way home," she said. "I think he'd prefer to stay in tonight."
"Then we'll expect you in, what, fifteen?"
"I've been up since four," she pointed out. "I've just been trapped in Fury's office for the last three hours. I'm still carrying my travel bag. I need to shower and sleep."
"We'll make it an early night," Tony promised and he didn't plead, he never pleaded, but this was whatever wasn't that.
Natasha bit her lip. "A drink," she said, firm enough to make it clear she didn't want to be arm-twisted into more, but light enough that it was still a social invitation and not the inquisition they both knew it would be.
"I shall make you a martini so dirty, it'll be X-rated," Tony assured, the unspoken agreement left just so.
It was early for Pepper to be done for the day, but Natasha didn't say anything about it in return for them not saying that she looked like something the cat had dragged in. The martini was indeed filthy, but Pepper made sure she at least ate a couple of the eggplant and pepper crostini and had some cheese because Natasha could drink alcohol like any other Russian, but on an empty stomach and after a long day, it would go to her head more than usual.
Tony waited until some signal from Pepper that Natasha didn't see to start asking about Steve.
"He's awake for longer stretches," Natasha told them. "But he's not... It's easy to try to see Steve in who he is now. To give meaning and purpose to what he does. But I don't... I don't know how much of it is real and how much is us wishing it was."
Tony was sitting on the couch across from hers, forearms on his thighs, tumbler in hand. He looked up at her. "He knows who Barnes is, though, right? That's something."
Natasha exhaled forcefully. "He knows he likes James," she said slowly, making sure she got her thoughts out correctly the first time. She hadn't said this out loud to anyone, not Peggy or Clint and certainly not James. "I don't know if he knows who James is per se."
She could see the impact of that distinction on Tony's face.
"We think he might just be missing memories, that he's stuck at twelve or seventeen or twenty-two," she went on. "And he might be, for all we know. But he's missing too much else for us to find out. He's not even trying to communicate, he doesn't react to anything, he doesn't smile or cry... there's a void where Steve used to be. I don't know how or if it gets filled."
She was thinking of Steve looking guilelessly at her, impassive and vaguely curious in an abstract way. Him not knowing her hurt, but him not knowing anything else hurt more.
"We didn't think we'd get this far," Pepper said, sounding exactly like she was trying to cheer herself up and failing. "It's Steve. He's got more miracles in him even if he doesn't know it yet."
Natasha stayed for her one drink and neither Pepper nor Tony pressed her to stay longer. It was still light out when she left and that perfect warm-cool temperature for walking, but she wasn't really in the mood to appreciate it. She got home, unpacked her bag by dumping the contents on the bed and carrying the dirty laundry to the hamper in the bathroom and then getting into the shower and washing away the travel and the frustration and the little bit of grief. Because she was grieving, she realized. Steve in his coma had been nonetheless full of potential, but Steve as he was now, the empty vessel with only his happiness at seeing James rattling around like the only coin in the piggy bank, that was the proof of loss.
She left the rest of her travel gear -- sundries, book, weapons -- on the bed and dressed in sweats and a tank top and went to see what she could dig out of her freezer because she didn't even have the energy to decide on delivery options. There was still some pelmeni and there was sour cream and there was some pinot grigio and that was good enough.
She had no intention of going in to 44th Street without a summons, so she spent the following day doing laundry, grocery shopping online, cleaning her weapons, and finishing writing up the notes on the trip to see Sonia because Fury wanted the file completely updated at all times, no really, he's not kidding about that, please stop laughing and start typing.
In the early afternoon, there was a text from Clint: Super-soldier with no gross motor skills is both hilarious and terrifying. (Everyone's okay.)
She took a break to go running in Hudson River Park; Central Park was closer, but she hated running there when the Drive was still open to cars. There was a breeze off the water, as usual, and a sun that wasn't quite ready to lose its summer fierceness, and it felt good. Running in Nebraska had been pleasant but boring; even in a park on the periphery in the middle of a weekday, New York was never boring.
When she ran past the Chelsea Piers, she made a note to herself to ask Clint if he wanted her to stop by his apartment and open the windows and get him some milk before he got back over the weekend.
Having done everything she could to procrastinate on the Croatia notes, she returned to them, only to find that James had submitted his own report and then four separate analysis units had submitted written questions to both of them and yes, Fury wanted these done ASAP, too.
"Wanna crib off each other's quiz papers?" James asked when she called.
"I'll bring dinner if you start writing out the answers now," she offered.
She waited for the FreshDirect delivery, calling in an order to Mission Chinese as she headed for the subway.
They made it a working dinner, batting around ideas about Lukin and Belova and HYDRA, speaking in the shorthand that came easily to them now, a mixture of shared experiences and past history that wasn't uncomfortable the way it had been at the start. They had both been bad people, the difference in duration less than in degree, and with that came a certain lack of reticence and a disinterest in hiding their darker thoughts from possibly judging ears. There was no one here to shame them unless they did it to themselves. James the POW twice over would do it gladly, but James the master operative accepted that he saw the world differently for having been a good soldier for the wrong side and could use it to do battle for the angels now.
But something was bothering James, she realized. He wasn't skirting the edge of the abyss of despair that came with his accessing his past as the Winter Soldier, but something was eating at him.
"Out with it," she ordered, sipping at her wine.
"I slept with her," James said, pushing his kung-pao pastrami around his plate with his fork. "Belova. I let her seduce me. I didn't get why Lukin found it so amusing when he found out about it. He made a crack about me and spider webs and the two of them must have found it funny as hell that I was repeating history and didn't know it."
Lukin wouldn't necessarily have told Belova about Natasha and James, she knew. But it had hardly been a great secret in the Red Room and Belova had probably heard all about it when she was trying to surpass the last Black Widow. Seducing James had been taking one more prize away from Natasha, even if one of the principals didn't know it.
"You remembered me later on," she offered, since there was no reason he needed to apologize. And that's what this confession was.
It was possibly not the right thing to say, since her proof of his remembering had come when he'd taken care to verbally twist the knife right into her heart in Doomstadt.
"Not all of it," he said after a long moment. "Not most of it and what there was, it was out of order and out of context. I wasn't sure how much I dreamt and how much I imagined and what was real. That was happening by the end, a lot of weird shit in my head that made no sense but I knew I didn't have the imagination to come up with on my own. Nothing from before the fall, just... I think whatever they did to me after we got found out, it was starting to break down a little. I remembered your smile -- your real one -- and I remembered at least part of what happened in Kaliningrad. I wasn't sure if the first was real. I was pretty sure the second was."
He gave her a smirk and a wink that made it clear which part of the adventures in Kaliningrad he remembered. Kaliningrad had been their most spectacular adventure as professional partners, not to mention also resulting in an astonishing amount of damage to the hotel room once they'd returned, high on adrenaline and lust and, maybe, love. The next morning, surveying the damage, James had joked that he was going to get punted back to the Monster Factory when their bosses saw the bill for damages. It hadn't been funny three weeks later and the way the grin faltered reflected that.
"We could make sure you remembered it properly this time," she said casually as she plucked a potato out of the container with her chopsticks. When she looked up, James was staring at her. She cocked an eyebrow challengingly. She'd thought about this. About what she wanted, about what James might want, about what both of them might need. She was familiar enough with who he was now -- and that was still a changing thing -- that she knows she liked this Bucky-James, enjoyed spending time with him even as he frustrated her. They were very different people than they'd been in the Red Room, but they were still compatible in the ways that mattered. She'd never had anyone in her life with whom she shared so many fundamental experiences and she had been surprised at how comfortable that was turning out to be, how easy they were together despite all of the crap he was going though. How easy it had been to care for him.
"Natasha," he began warily.
"If you are about to imply I am making this suggestion for altruistic purposes, I am going to take off your shiny new arm and beat you to death with it," she warned. "Besides, even fabulous sex isn't going to make you any less screwed up in the head."
He laughed then, genuinely.
"Finish eating," she told him, gesturing to his plate with her chopsticks. "You'll need your strength."
"Yes, ma'am."
The bedroom stayed intact this time; they were neither high on adrenaline nor racing against stolen time nor fueled by the fear of discovery or punishment. At least not in the same fashion.
"What?" James asked when she started to giggle as they lay tangled in each other and the sheets.
"I think it just hit me where we are," she admitted, embarrassed. "We had sex in Captain America's bed."
It's not that she had forgotten that this was Steve's apartment, not with so much of his personality still pervading the space. But James had gotten over his initial feelings of unworthiness and he'd stopped treating the place like a museum months ago. He hadn't changed the furniture or anything, but it looked liked he lived here, too, now.
James chuffed out a laugh, rubbing at his face with the hand not pinned down where was leaning on his right arm.
"Someone should," he said airily. She smacked his belly and he reached down to knot his fingers with hers. His hand didn't quite feel like muscle and bone under skin, but it didn't feel robotic, either, because he had such fine control over it. He was comfortable enough with it now that she'd forgotten entirely that it wasn't flesh when he'd been touching her earlier. "Besides, it's not the first time. Or the second. Well, the first time he wasn't Captain America yet."
She lifted her head up so she could see his face. "Do I really want to know?"
He grinned at her, laughter in his eyes, and she could see both Steve's Bucky and her James and the man they'd grown into. "Depends. How do you feel about dirty stories?"
The next morning, Natasha went back to her apartment and James went in to headquarters to talk to the analysts about the questions they'd sent and then his shrink about everything else. Including her, presumably.
Her email inbox, the private one she used for contacts and other non-SHIELD business was fuller than she expected and her first inclination was to check her official account to find out what had happened. But reading them through, she realized that there hadn't been any particular event, just the cumulative situations. The Russia-China conflict hadn't broken into open warfare yet, but it was getting closer, especially with the unofficial escalations -- the Chinese were hacking into all of the Kremlin's servers, the Russian ultra-nationalists were making life dangerous for the Chinese nationals (or anyone with slanted eyes, which could mean Koreans or Kazakhs). People were getting curious, a few were getting nervous, and Natasha was a natural choice to turn to for an answer. She was careful in her replies; no matter how off-the-record she claimed to be, anything she said was still going to be interpreted as bearing the imprimatur of SHIELD.
Clint had said yes, please to her offer to open up his place, even though he was pretty sure he was going to be sent to North Africa to look for Belova as soon as he was activated, so she made sure she had cash and his keys on her when she went out for a run.
Sonia had replied to her questions about Belova by the time Natasha got back and showered. Belova had been spotted in Europe in the last several months, apparently on the hunt for whoever had been upsetting the Latverian apple cart -- James on his spree, although nobody had known it at the time -- but was still primarily an Africa expert.
Sonia had told them that Belova was the presumptive candidate to run Africa for Lukin, but despite that, Sonia hadn't known any more than James about which one of Doom or Lukin Belova was really loyal to. "Her primary loyalty is to herself," Sonia wrote now. "She'd rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, but which one Latveria qualifies as, I could not tell you." She deferred to James's knowledge about Belova's relevant skills to have been Steve's assassin, but absolutely believed that Belova would have jumped at the chance, whoever had asked it of her. "She's more than a little fixated on you, still," Sonia warned. "Everything you did, she wants to do it better. Anything you couldn't have done, she wants to prove she can."
James called her in the late afternoon. He was still at 44th Street and had just gotten free of the analysts. He was going to shoot at the range and use the gym because he was too cranky to be let free on the streets of Manhattan, but after that, did she want to do something?
He didn't sound like he was asking her to be his stress toy or his shrink and he had none of the hesitation he'd occasionally shown during their first time together in New York, like he thought he might be imposing on her. This was yet a new James, nothing at all like the very first one and yet so much like him at moments that it was disorienting.
"Call me after you've showered," she told him. "My answer will depend on how much crankiness you can wash off."
James laughed. "I'll even clean behind my ears."
They met at a diner on 10th normally favored by John Jay students, an old place that looked like it hadn't changed much since it had opened, allegedly in 1952. Clint had taken her and Steve here once because, he had said, the fries were fresh-cut and he had wanted Steve's opinion on the egg creams. But he'd really been a little mopey because it had been his brother's birthday, which was why Natasha had agreed to go when she normally avoided places that offered breakfast food for dinner. She was choosing it now because James was not nearly the adventurous eater Steve was and, while he'd never complain and he'd eat whatever he ordered, she could let him off the hook by choosing someplace with straightforward fare.
James thought the menu was hilarious. The descriptions of the options were fulsome and ridiculous, which Natasha hadn't noticed until it was pointed out because she hadn't needed an explanation for what "cheeseburger" or "open-faced tuna melt" was.
"Right before the war, I used to wait tables at a place around the corner from headquarters, pretty much, Broadway at Forty-Third," he explained. "Toffenetti's. Place was the size of the Helicarrier and the menu was written up like the food version of a ladies' magazine. 'Precious beauty, born of the ashes of extinct volcanoes, brings divine enjoyment, strength to dare and do. Its farinaceous beauty makes life a perfect poem. What a gust of feeling it brings.'"
He recited the quote with a straight face and a voice that tried to minimize his Brooklyn accent and sound vaguely high-class English. Which perhaps only made her laugh harder.
"You know what that's for?" he asked in his usual voice. "Go ahead, guess."
She shook her head no, wiping tears from her eyes. "I couldn't even begin to try."
"It's a plain baked potato," he told her and she started to laugh again, making him smile. "I'm a guy from Red Hook who barely understood half the stuff I read in high school English and I'm supposed to spout this baloney with a straight face. And if that was the lingo for a potato, you could imagine what the daily specials sounded like. I didn't know what 'farinaceous' meant until Steve went and looked it up in the dictionary. It means starchy, in case you ever need a Scrabble word."
They ordered, James temporarily confusing the waitress by using the menu's florid description instead of just saying "reuben on rye." He was clearly in a good mood, enough that he'd volunteered memories of his old life without them being pried out or forced and, even better, without them bringing him down afterward, as they so often did when it was with anyone but Peggy or Steve. If she were crass -- or if Clint or Tony were present -- they would make a comment about what good sex did for him, but she knew better. The sex had indeed been good, but it was really the everything else that was letting him be comfortable enough to touch the past without expecting to get burned.
Which was why she felt she was still in safe territory when she suggested that the egg creams were acceptable here.
"Steve turned you on to those?" he asked with what might have been approval.
"He had one here," she corrected. "I don't mind them, but I don't have the... cultural tie to them that he does. But he liked to make them, so I drank them. That's why there's a Sodastream in your kitchen, by the way."
"A what?" James looked confused.
"Seltzer maker," she offered, but he only changed his look of confusion.
"I found the seltzer maker," he said slowly. "And it looked exactly like the ones we grew up with."
He must have found the one Steve had been using before Clint had given him the Sodastream.
"It's either right next to that in the cabinet, or it's hiding in the storage closet with the Roomba and all of the other Twenty-First Century toys that baffled him," she suggested. "His relationship with modern technology was not as smooth as he would have liked to believe."
They went back to her place afterward. James was frankly curious about her apartment, wandering from room to room as she put up water for tea.
"Is this by choice or necessity?" he asked and she didn't misinterpret what he was asking about or why. Was this what he would have to do, he was asking, if he ever tried to settle down for real: live in a house that looked like a hotel?
Her apartment was tastefully appointed, attractive, and completely devoid of personal touches save for the clutter currently on the dining table and a few pieces of art Steve had made for her.
"Neither. Both," she admitted with a shrug that was more self-effacing than casual. "It's probably far less necessary than I think it is, but... I'd never really had a home, so when I got this place, I treated it like every other crash pad I'd ever occupied. I had no other frame of reference. And even later on, once I had realized that there was a permanence to this and not just a place where I stored my things and slept... I think I was afraid to jinx it."
Which was the truth, maybe more truth than she'd have otherwise liked to admit, but it was perhaps also not the entire truth. This was not the first time she'd been asked that question, challenged in that way. Steve had brought it up, carefully and gently and out of concern for her and not, as James was doing, as if she might be a Ghost of Christmas Future warning him to mend his ways. And so she knew that the rest of the truth was that she didn't know what to do to make it a home. She didn't have hobbies, she didn't build or make anything, she didn't buy movies or books with an eye toward building a collection she could look over or display, she didn't collect anything at all. She had an iPod full of music she liked, but that wasn't the wall of CDs Clint had in his apartment. Her music was private and portable, hidden from view as if made her vulnerable and ready to run when she was.
Thinking about it depressed her.
"Steve was on a mission to make the place look 'lived in,'" she said, gesturing to the sketch on the kitchen wall. The sketch, in colored pencils, was a caricature of her, poking gentle fun at her lack of cooking skills but proficiency in reheating. There was no signature but James would know Steve had drawn it. She had two other pieces by him, a watercolor in the living room and an oil painting in the bedroom. "He said it was time to stop running."
The watercolor, a rainy day in Manhattan with a muted palette of grays and blues save for a flame-haired woman in a dark green raincoat, had been a 'welcome back' present after she'd been cleared (or near enough) of espionage, before she'd been formally reinstated by SHIELD but after she'd already started working with Fury to lay the ground for what would become the assault on Minyar. "One more thing to tie you down so you don't fly away," he'd written on the little note, which was tucked behind the matting if anyone bothered to open the frame. She hadn't realized he'd forgiven her until he'd handed her the wrapped package; he probably had much earlier, but she hadn't wanted to confuse hope with fact, so she'd waited for some kind of proof. Which might have been why he'd given her the painting in the first place.
"Gonna have to go bid at one of the art auctions to get my own reminder," James said, then smiled. "I used to have to shove his sketches aside to find a clean surface to put something down on and now they're worth tens of thousands. What a world!"
There had always been a market for Steve's art -- anything that hadn't been collected and stored by the government after Steve's plane crash had found its way into circulation and had commanded good money over the decades -- but his 'death' in June had sent the value skyrocketing. Steve had never produced anything for profit since his return, but he had done work for sale at charity auctions and he'd drawn doodles during his visits to hospitals and other appearances and those, now, were worth fortunes.
"You don't have to bid on anything," she retorted, turning off the stove as the kettle started to whistle. She poured the water in the teapot and two cups, then emptied the rest into the sink and started again. "You can ask SHIELD to cough up the boxes they're storing for Steve. You'll probably find your old clothes and your sword and whatever else got packed up when he enlisted. I don't think he threw away anything of yours and there was a lot of his stuff that he didn't want to keep in the apartment."
She knew for a fact that SHIELD still had all that had remained of Bucky Barnes's life; Steve had gone through it after he'd found out about the Winter Soldier.
James made a face. "I don't think I want my eighty-year-old ratty undershirts," he said. "But maybe my hats. I miss my hats. I miss everyone wearing hats."
It was Natasha's turn to scowl. "Only because you never had to worry about what one did to your hair," she told him, elbowing him gently so that he'd move from in front of where the tea box was. "You'd look very strange walking around in a fedora."
"I happen to look very good in a fedora," James replied loftily, leaning back against the counter after she retrieved the tin. "But I don't wear anything that needs a fedora anymore. I can still wear a flat cap, though."
"You'd fit right in with the hipsters," she said and laughed at his horrified expression. He didn't get to make a rebuttal because his phone started ringing in his pocket.
"Peggy," he mouthed as he answered it, then gestured with his head toward the living room.
As the water boiled and she filled the teapot again, she could hear James talking to Peggy and then to Steve. He told Steve about the bureaucracy at SHIELD and then the diner, then told him that she was "maybe my girl now. She's maybe always been my girl, but I didn't remember for a long time. It's one more thing they took from me that I'm trying to take back... Yes, Miss Carter, I know she's not going to want to hear me calling her that. But me and Steve are old fellas... he did, too. We all did. Well, Dernier called you Steve's cherie, but that's just French for the same thing... because it made Steve blush. And because it's true."
She would have rolled her eyes if she'd been in front of him when he'd called her his girl, but she had honestly gotten used to James's occasionally dated English usage (his Russian was as contemporary as hers); after spending so much time with Steve, she hardly noticed it most of the time and James was actually better than Steve had been at the beginning. And word choice aside, being James's anything, having him say it out loud to people he cared about and without any hesitancy... it felt strange. Good strange, because she hadn't ever been anyone's anything, not for real, not without an artifice and a cover story, since the last time she had been James's anything.
She loaded up the tray and brought it into the living room as James was telling Steve about the new bakery around the corner from the apartment that only sold things made out of flax and quinoa, which he pronounced wrong, then was apparently corrected since he then repeated it properly, if sarcastically, and "other kinds of birdseed, nothing normal people eat, but there's always a line out the door" and about how they were searching for the woman who'd shot him. His voice got cold when he promised that he was going to kill Belova.
"I know you don't want to hear that, that you don't want any more blood on my hands and not in your name, but if you really want to stop me, you're going to have to say the words. And even then, I can't make any promises because I need to do this, Steve. I want to do this. And I don't like what it says about me and I know you don't like it, either, but there it is. This is who I am."
He was looking at her when he said this and she realized he was warning her, too. So she handed him a mug because she already knew this about him and she was okay with that. It was who she was, too. And James was going to have to fight her for the privilege of paying Belova back bullet for bullet.
"Give Steve and Peggy my best," she said, reaching for the ginger-lemon shortbread cookies she had put out.
James woke up screaming in the middle of the night and, this time, she didn't leave him to some imagined private shame because she was right there next to him. She turned on the light when he started scrabbling as if to take his arm off because she wasn't sure if he was awake and understood what he was doing.
"Something's wrong with it," he gritted out as he turned to put his feet on the ground, eyes full of tears that might have been just from the pain, since he was clearly in agony. "Fucking thing gave me flashbacks to Zola's lab."
She scooted over beside him, ignoring for now the victory that was him admitting out loud what was bothering him in his head. "What can I do? How do we get it off?"
The instructions were straightforward, even if the process was a little weird, visually; Tony had designed it so that it could be done by James alone if he had to. James gasped lungfuls of air once it was off, rubbing his face with his remaining hand. Natasha got off the bed and took the arm over to her vanity, leaving it on the bench before returning to him.
"Do you want something for the pain?" she asked, reaching out to hold his face gently in her hands. He shook his head no, not trying to break out of her hold. "Then drink some water and let's go back to sleep. You can call Tony in the morning for tech support."
She let him go so he could reach for the water glass on the bedside table, but didn't back away lest he decide to do something stupid like go sleep on the couch to avoid disturbing her. Once the lights were back off, she curled herself around him and he made an amused noise, which she took to mean he knew very well what she was doing. She wasn't much of a cuddler and disliked trying to sleep using her partner's torso as a pillow and James knew this, so maybe it was obvious. She didn't care.
"Don't make me knock you out," she warned as a whisper in his ear.
"You'd love that," he retorted with a chuckle she felt as a rumble beneath her.
"You know me too well."
In the proper morning, well after the sun came up, they woke again and, after breakfast, James called Tony while Natasha looked for a bag that could accommodate James's arm, since it wouldn't fit in a shopping bag.
"Oh, absolutely not!" James protested with alarm when she held up the pink floral-print rucksack. "No."
She stood her ground. "I think last night should be sufficient proof of your heterosexual masculinity to be able to bear the indignity of it for the fifteen minutes it will take to get over to Stark Tower on the subway."
Apparently Tony heard that part, or maybe just her voice in the same room as James's first thing in the morning was enough for Tony's dirty mind to draw the correct conclusion because James's next words were to him. "Shut it, Stark. It's none of your business and it ain't healthy for you... I won't have to do anything. She'll kill you first."
For that bit of respect-giving, she put aside the ruck and went to look for what else could be used. The yellow backpack couldn't fit the arm inside without the fingers and most of the palm poking out because the arm was locked at the elbow and that just looked horribly creepy. She emptied out the gray duffel at the bottom of her cedar chest that she kept extra weapons in, so it ended up smelling like cedar chips and gun oil, but the arm fit easily. Unfortunately, it also looked like there was still a shotgun in it and it had no shoulder strap, so James wouldn't have a free hand while carrying it. It was poor tactics, but it was a short enough trip that James was willing to be a little nervous rather than a lot metrosexual.
"You are showing your age," she told him tartly as he headed out.
Twenty minutes after James left, Tapper called her and asked if she were up for a short assignment. She said yes so long as it didn't interfere with the hunt for Belova, which was the reason she'd been recalled to New York in the first place.
"It's related," Tapper assured. "Also, it's a quick trip to wine country in Portugal and you always complain that I never send you anywhere nice."
The briefing packet came five minutes later over email. Tucked into the Douro valley was a small estate belonging to Edward Templeton-Graham, a former MI6 mandarin enjoying his retirement in sunny climes. Natasha recognized the name; Templeton-Graham had been a Sovietologist back in the day, a not-very-crypto Communist that the KGB had never stopped trying to turn and the British security services had watched like a hawk even after they realized he would likely never accept. Templeton-Graham had seen too much of what had really gone on in the Soviet Union and had preferred to hold out hope for a British worker's paradise, although his willingness to keep his patriotism quiet and tempt the Soviets into thinking he could be the next Kim Philby had allowed him to produce some truly spectacular intelligence product over the years. It would be fun to meet him, Natasha thought.
It was fun. Templeton-Graham, from a distance, was just another English expat living well on his pension in Portugal's weaker economy, perpetually lightly sunburned and very well fed. But while he took her on a tour of a nearby vineyard and they strolled through the fields, he spoke in Russian and told tales of startling darkness.
He and Lukin had been in Bonn together back in the day when it had been a national capital; Lukin had been rezident there, very young for the post, and his tenure had been drenched in blood as he had hunted down defectors and dissidents and always, always sent a message in large font with each missing finger or mutilated corpse. But Lukin had also been suave and urbane and the two of them had met at embassy events and a few social ones and they had kept up the acquaintanceship over the decades since because Lukin had been arrogant enough to believe that he would be the one to finally reel the big fish in.
"I never believed he'd just graciously retire from the game of thrones in Russia," Templeton-Graham said as they strolled. "He insisted he'd had enough, that he has a wife and young children now and Russia is too cold and too poor and he wanted to conquer new battlefields where the casualties were metaphoric. But I know of five men and three women he personally cut an ear off of. This is not a man who prefers metaphoric bloodshed, no matter how much time has passed. Latveria is merely a rest station on the climb to the summit. Do you know what he says when asked why he chose Latveria? He says that Russians are constitutionally incapable of functioning in a free society, that they went from Tsars to the Party and now the last twenty years have proven that they don't know what to do when presented with control over their own lives and destinies. So he chose a place where nobody is free, but the weather is nicer and the food is better."
Templeton-Graham's theory was that Lukin has been cultivating his own cult of personality within Russia's elite. Not the oligarchs, the big fish and bold names who lived and died by Putin's pleasure whether they were in St. Petersburg or London, but the ones with the real power if not necessarily the real money or titles: the CIOs and CFOs, not the CEOs, the under-ministers and deputy secretaries, those who would either eventually be promoted to power or would continue to wield it behind the curtains. He was filling their heads with talk of a future great Russia, nationalism without the taint of xenophobia, which was ironic because Lukin was a proper racist himself. Lukin's new Russia would herald a new golden age, unpolluted by the corruption and decadence of Putin's new Tsardom, an oligarchy of the worthy.
"Straight out of a HYDRA press release," Natasha said sourly.
"Indeed," Templeton-Graham agreed. "But without the globalism. A very Russian-flavored version, preferably accomplished by straining out the Caucasus populations and the Muslims and other undesirables, but he could live with them if he had to. He's spent long enough in Latveria to appreciate how Baron von Doom has built up a solid foundation of nationalism without it curdling into jingoism, at least in public."
Natasha left Portugal gifted with several bottles of fine port and a long list of names of people and companies Templeton-Graham thought Lukin had already enlisted in his private army.
She went to Paris from Portugal, having a few things to take care of after she and James had left so suddenly, then stayed for an extra day because Clint was going to be there on a layover between New York and Algiers because yes, he'd been punted right into the hunt for Belova.
She hadn't spoken to James every day she'd been away, but they were exchanging texts and emails regularly. His arm was fixed, something to do with the interface Tony had had to redesign. Otherwise, SHIELD was making him crazy by telling him that they had a lead on Belova and then they didn't, he'd had an amazingly awkward conversation with Miranda Tung, and Tony and Pepper were going to Chicago next Thursday for an event Stark Industries was hosting and then they would drive out to Wyoming for the weekend.
Steve was showing small improvements, which mostly meant that he was becoming a more difficult patient and, not unrelated, Peggy had told James that they were letting Steve's hair grow out a little. He still was still essentially non-communicative, but he'd started turning his head away from things he didn't want (he was being fed orally now, purees and liquids, to mixed success) and making more use of his limbs, which he still had no real control of. He was being classed for the time being at infant-level -- at least that was the layperson explanation -- but the neurologists had noted differences between the scans done when he'd first woken and the most recent set. They wouldn't give anyone an official reason to hope, but it was something, anything, they could hang on to.
James was probably going out to Wyoming soon -- there wasn't anything he needed to be in New York for so long as the analysts couldn't find Belova and the doctors wanted to see what kind of influence he might have on Steve's development.
She told Clint all of this when she saw him. They rented a hotel room for the night -- two beds -- and that required her telling him about her and James, especially because Tony already knew and that information really should come from her.
"I'm glad for you," Clint said as she poured out one of the port bottles into the hotel room tumblers. "I'm not surprised -- you two were pretty obviously kiss-or-kill from the get-go. But I'm happy for more than just not having to help you hide the body."
She gave him a nod of appreciation as she handed over one of the tumblers.
"He making you happy?" Clint asked, losing the smug grin and watching her carefully. "He's a complicated part of your past, which isn't always so much fun in the present. And he's still bugfuck crazy, even if he's getting better."
Natasha gave him a proper smile. "I'm happy. Things are still complicated, perhaps even more so, but I'm happy."
Clint held up his tumbler and she raised hers so that they could clink them together and drink.
"Good," Clint said. "Because I'm still gonna have to give him the Some Kind of Wonderful 'you break her heart I break your face' talk, but I'd rather not have to back up that threat because this is the guy who shot me twice for kicks."
Natasha arched an eyebrow. "I will take care of any necessary face-breaking myself. He only shot me once."
Conversation inevitably turned back to Steve, which made them a little maudlin, especially after a couple of tumblers of port. Clint thought that if Steve didn't progress much, if this was how it was going to be, then maybe they should move him back to New York. There were conspiracy theories about Captain America still being alive and sightings like Elvis, but the world had accepted Steve's death, mourned, and moved on except for the occasional ratings-chaser television news editorial about why his killer had not yet been brought to justice.
"The plan worked, nobody's looking for him, and he shouldn't have to spend the rest of his life surrounded by just Peggy and strangers," Clint said, leaving unsaid the part that it would be just strangers at some point, earlier than later.
"As far as Steve understands right now, there's no difference between Agent Hochimura and Peggy and Tony and Joanne-the-night-nurse," she pointed out quietly.
"That's not the point and you know it," Clint retorted with some heat, then relaxed. "Peggy would love to get back to civilization and Tony would turn over as much of Stark Tower as Steve needed."
"I wouldn't even take a bet on Tony offering to do just that when he goes out there," Natasha agreed.
The following morning, her Paris-to-New York ticket was exchanged for a Paris-to-Rome boarding pass because an old case, unrelated to anything to do with Steve or Belova or Lukin or HYDRA, had reared its head.
"You keep asking to be sent to Paris because it's a good gateway to other places," Tapper reminded her when she expressed frustration. "Don't get pissy when your bullshit magically turns into truth."
By the time she got back to New York, James was already in Wyoming. She was surprised by the depth of her disappointment.
Also posted at DW.