20/20 (cap, bucky/natasha)
TITLE: 20/20
RATING: PG-13
FANDOM: Captain America
CHARACTERS: Bucky/Natasha, slivers of Nick Fury, Tony Stark
SUMMARY: Bucky thinks he really sees her, now and again, but time covers them up like snow over fields, like bodies on the floor.
Now
They live in plain manila folders and on the tops of asphalt; places where things move and places where they don't. Today it's an A.I.M. base holed up in an old part of the city, stacked with broken beams and metal points. All around, men in beehive yellow suits come running out in droves. The blueprints say there's a square room without windows somewhere amongst the halls, keeping its secrets from the sun.
Natalia trips one of the goons and kicks another down with a hard pirouette. Bucky thinks he really sees her, now and again, but time covers them up like snow over fields, like bodies on the floor.
***
Thirteen Days Ago
There are bits of Lukin's brains lying on the pavement someplace where the rubble will cover the bones like a blanket. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents have all evacuated, by now, and Sharon-her name is Sharon-is safe away with Sam. Natasha explains all of this, the palms of her hands pressing against the car's red enamel, holding all of her weight. James looks like he's run through Thebes' seven gates, as if for once he'd let the world take a piece of him. Maybe now he'll let himself admit that even a few broken ribs can make it hard to breathe, that his shoes still make tracks in the ground. Maybe now he'll stop calling her Natalia like a ticket-taker reading her passport.
"She's shaken," Natasha says, "but Sharon's a survivor. She'll be-"
He cuts her off, right then, mumbles something that might be an apology or a prayer, and kisses her full-stop. It is like nothing that she remembers.
"Sorry," he says, "but I've been meaning to do that for a while."
***
Four Weeks Ago
Most of Bucky's names are ordinary; they live in his back pocket on little squares of plastic. He needs to pull them out sometimes, to visit hotel rooms and bars, or when he decided to buy that motorcycle instead of just stealing it. Fury gave him a fresh set a few months back-one of them even has a real picture of him, from sixty years ago, all doctored up to look like new. That one says he's from New Jersey, born about nineteen-eighty. It says he is called Ivan and that he's allergic to penicillin, neither of which is true.
But the suit he's wearing now is too tight for pockets. There's not enough room for guns, either, he has to carry those outside. No, it's just Bucky and the same stupid truths that follow him wherever he goes and other little things he's trying hard not to think about right now. Manhattan has a lot of roofs, lots of nameless squares of light. From where he's standing, the city seems like a bright swarm of mouths and a whole list of symptoms. Parts of him are itching, parts of him are sick, his left hand isn't real and there's a yellow-edged bruise on his knee from that MODOC hoard two nights ago.
He's about to do maybe the stupidest thing he's done in his whole stupid life.
Natalia buzzed him nine minutes past to say that she was coming with a stealth plane and a job they needed him for. Not him, not really-the thing he'll be wearing, the colors cross his chest. When she sets down he is looking out towards the horizon, its dry-mottled colors and inorganic shapes. There's something in the darkness that he can't quite put a name to, like the blank spaces on the walls of Steve's apartment. But Natalia says "ready to go" like it isn't a question. So Bucky pushes himself together and makes like it's not.
She calls him James, and that sparkles like vinegar in the wound. God, he hated that name when he was a kid.
***
Five Weeks Ago
They have him strapped to Tony's freshest machines, so that the doctors can get into his mind more easily. Natasha watches from the other side of the thick-mirrored glass, trying to remember all the things they are scrubbing out. She was always faster hand-to-hand, but he was the quicker with a knife. He told her about knives, once, with his curiously bright way of speaking. But different things have different points.
"This is a big mistake," she feels herself saying. "That man isn't ready to carry this burden. It's more than likely he's not even right for it."
Tony says something imprecise about how Steve would disagree, how dead men want things just like the rest of us. But she's breathed in shadows that he can just see the corners of. There are only so many places you can force your feet to take you. The dirt on the bottom of your shoes doesn't ever go away.
***
Nine Weeks Ago
Bucky isn't sure where he grew the taste for vodka. Not in the obvious place, the one he tends to think his way around. Karpov didn't like for him to drink on missions, and alcohol doesn't mix with the Warsaw Pact prosthetics anyhow. And Steve's picture was somewhere in the dictionary right next to no fun, so that ruined most of him and Toro's chances of a real night on the town. Not that he didn't sneak a bottle of Scotch every now and then, but Cap was always there shaking his head when he did it.
Now he lives in bars, sometimes, rough hands on polished wood, in the swell of sad-sack faces and neon jukebox music. He's careful not to become a regular feature. But New York has its share of dives, all the same lukewarm brown with the same cheap television playing news in the corner. That's where he sees her for a second time, in the background of one of Stark's conferences. Her hair might be a little different, but it's the same old Natalia through and through. Ghosts are funny things, he decides; Bucky doesn't want to work out why the red stuff tends to stay.
The old potato water's sticking him with some small fire, and on the TV Stark's still waxing monotonous about his ace new team. Here's to a man who knows how to lose the battle and win the war.
***
Ten Weeks Ago
It was a whole shock of colors to see him moving again, not strangled under the weight of water and glycerin. He must to have been kept part-drowned for half a century, at least, for his face to have so few cracks in it. Natasha remembers what they used to say about him, in the bloodless concrete bunkers. Every whispered reason for his John Q. Public smile, the stories they made up about how he lost the arm. Just to think of it pulls at unquiet strings inside her-relics of Red Room drugs or the dentist-chair psychotechnics. Standard issue sickle-and-hammer conditioning. She used to be a real patriot.
Now, Natasha finds herself sliding open sure glass doors and making her way to the nearest mess of machinery. The console asks for her S.H.I.E.L.D. clearance, level ten, and she types in the numbers through heavy plastic gloves. Fury took all the files on the Winter Soldier when he pulled his stupendous disappearing act, but the rest of it's still there. The Invaders mission debriefs, the footage of Lorraine crosses stacked against the sky.
There's a name that comes with it all, too, standing quietly on edge of the screen. She takes a moment to breathe, lets it fill up the room.
***
One Day Before That
It's exactly how he would have done it, and that impresses him more than it should. The armored trucks stream out of the garage one two three four, but Bucky keeps resting on his haunches. A silver sedan marches out next, with the one thing he wants inside. Time to make his move.
The pavement is thicker in this New York, and the streets run another shade of crowded. But there's no one around to see him strangle the car's pipes and workings. It falls down fast into the wide line of sidewalk, kicking dirt and sand into a rough-tasting cloud. And then she swings open the cold metal door and kicks him straight in the chin. The rubber soles of her boots hit him like a long drop into very cold water, and then Natalia is standing there with Steve's shield at her back. The air makes his limbs feel heavy; the star he painted on his left shoulder holds an awkward weight.
What he likes to do, normally, is shut out that old part of his mind, make like that other person with his hands and eyes never was or came or saw. But she is throwing open his curtains like one of Gorbachev's last speeches. Bucky remembers how to fight her, the beats he needs to dodge, the arcs his body's got to move in. None of that is enough. Oh, he knocks her to the pavement, after a while, after running his gloves forceful through her hair. But that just sets his anchors askew. Because at the end of it she's a lump on the ground, and he's thinking maybe it was better when he wasn't checkered through with questions, when his still had equations had equals signs and he knew what it was he was doing. At least he used to know what he was doing.
Bucky half expects it to burn his hand off, the shield, like something high and holy out of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. It doesn't.
***
Five Months Ago
Here's a story Fury told him: some crazy Swiss scientist got it into his head to weigh bumblebees with mathematics. And what all his circling equations and oscillated aerofoils found was that the damn things can't fly.
"This is stupid," Bucky says. "They can fly."
"Nah, what they do isn't really flying. It's a special, bouncy kind of falling. But it's close enough to flying that ya might as well call it that."
"Still stupid. What the hell are you trying to get at?"
"I dunno, kid, you tell me."
Really, what Bucky thinks is that it's nice to have voices in his head he can turn off.
***
Fourteen Months Ago
There's something alive inside him, something new. What it is, he hasn't got a name for: a bird maybe, a collection of feathers. It fills him up with twitches and syncopations, writing strokes across his insides that he can't quite squint to see. Well, maybe it's a place, he thinks, maybe it's London, or Shelbyville, or that same on-and-on stretch of Siberia. Maybe it is the dust in Karpov's beard, maybe Madripoor, maybe just the pebbles on Norman beaches that filled up his shoes once upon a time.
But the Cube has stuck him breathing in some dead corner of Virginia, with clocks and other things ticking in his head. Bucky leaves Camp Lehigh with quick and quiet steps; he finds the nearest drugstore and tries to erase the dirt. The place isn't open, so he has to punch the window in. Glass scatters across the sidewalk like seeds in a field. Or like tiny silver stars; he can't decide. Without thinking, Bucky takes two great bottles of vodka from aisle number four, possessing them like every other thing he hasn't paid for. He knocks over a row of t-shirts, trying to find something new that will fit him.
The liquor tries to suffocate that long-legged thing within him, but it keeps flapping at odd angles. While he drinks, he remembers-- not just winter, not just Steve, or Natalia, but the look on that poor kid from Iowa's face while he bled out on the field. That awful hush that falls across your countenance while your insides gurgle out of you. Some of your insides, anyway. Some of them stay put.
***
Two Years Ago
Somewhere southeast of the Urals there's a wide reach of bunkers that shine occasionally in the sunlight. An old man has told her that this is where her home really is, that this is her native geometry. Natasha can feel the lurching of it moving up her stomach, like some kind of spider. That's irony for you.
She remembers Yelena, what that girl had wanted down to the nerves that kept her spine in place. That one was all caught up in being the Widow, as though it's hard to be an insect, as though a name could fill her up whole. Natasha almost laughs, because there is nothing unique about it. There are- were -twenty-seven Black Widow operatives, each made with the same spread of benzophosphates, here in the wild grey yonder. Natasha almost laughs, but there are other things caught in her throat.
It isn't that she hasn't had time to think about it, or that her head's too fogged up from the painkillers to see straight. She can make out the two guards standing watch around the perimeter, see every sharp thing hidden in the grass just fine. What she can't make out are the questions spinning inside of her-the parts of her past that aren't really there. This is the place, some voice of hers is saying. Where they pulled open her little girl self and stuffed it full of string and wire and pink ribbons and tulle and all they could to hold a spy together.
"You can enjoy the memories themselves," the doctor had told her, the edges of his face turning pea-green in the Muscovite shadows. "That's what they were put there for."
But she remembers other things-- calling herself Laura, pretending to be a teacher in upstate New York, hanging crowded crayon portraits on the wall. She knows the old Avengers, remembers how Hank Pym once said that a person couldn't change. And how all her colors once turned upon themselves, sharpening her, making her brighter. After all these years she isn't sure if the red will ever bleed out. But she washed the dye from hair a long time ago. She has made do with her own revolutions.
The guards up in the tower do not know what they are keeping safe, do not know why so many pretty girls come crawling through the nowhere with slices of steel between their fingers. They think, maybe, like Yelena did, that there is something in all of this worth fighting for. But countries are fitted together with reams of paper and stacks of cinderblocks- all of the same thirsty parts. What matters is hands upon hands, the stick of bread in one's belly, the parts of a person you can't put in a file.
They don't see Natasha until she's already behind them, gun at the ready. She doesn't feel the need to give them her name.
***
Thirty-Six Years Ago
The senator's floating face down in the pool. By the time they find the body it'll look exactly like a heart attack, like it was the man's own inner workings that gave up on him. That's not the problem. The mission's not the problem, he's never got a problem with the mission. It's the humidity that's gone to his head, maybe. Summer's always awful in Virginia.
And that's when it stops making sense, when all the Russian criss-crossing through his mind turns into some kind of backwards-r alphabet soup. If you open up a bird's brain you'll find tiny pieces of iron-magnets that the earth can steer home. Those are what keep them flying true when they go south for the winter. But he's missing all those pieces, he's pretty sure. No choice but to keep on going somewhere and hope all the math evens out. Because there's a face he thinks he might be seeing, blue eyes and patriot syllables. Maybe that's his true north. Well, it ain't like he's got a choice.
The body in the water is still watching. It bobs up and down like an apple at the school fair.
***
Fifty-Two Years Ago
He talks in his sleep sometimes, with words that don't fit together. There's not much of him that does-she's seen him take his arm off, once or twice. Natasha asked him about it, once, about where the real one went, but he doesn't have an answer. "I don't know. I can only remember having the one arm." Some of the officers tell imaginary stories of how he must have lost it. It was a mishap in the factory, tovarishch, making leaded glass bottles with the big machines. He cut it off himself, when he was a child, to feed the peasants during the Great Famine of 1933. The missing limb is trapped inside Sputnik-2, orbiting the earth every hundred point three minutes, in the place of a dead dog. Lots of stories. Most people don't even believe he really exists.
But Natasha knows he does, knows that he climbs each night through her window, no matter how hard the snow tries to paint the sky. She knows also that none of this can last. They have another man for her, other stories. They are still hewing her parts. But so is he-the edges he wears down in sparring, the things he is taking off now. When they kiss she doesn't even pay attention to the kissing. It is the feeling of his hands on her back, the slow press of his heartbeat, her hands through his hair. It is their whole world's dearth of color, the old grey of the sky, and all the parts of her flying open, even the ones she didn't realize were locked.
One night Natasha hears him speaking German through his dreams, eyes closed, whispering a war he is too young for. He doesn't know a thing when he wakes, not a thing but her and the winter. Well, he tells her that doesn't matter, that he knows all the important notes. They have finished him off, and he is whole. But it still strikes her as strange. Hindsight is supposed to make things clearer.
RATING: PG-13
FANDOM: Captain America
CHARACTERS: Bucky/Natasha, slivers of Nick Fury, Tony Stark
SUMMARY: Bucky thinks he really sees her, now and again, but time covers them up like snow over fields, like bodies on the floor.
Now
They live in plain manila folders and on the tops of asphalt; places where things move and places where they don't. Today it's an A.I.M. base holed up in an old part of the city, stacked with broken beams and metal points. All around, men in beehive yellow suits come running out in droves. The blueprints say there's a square room without windows somewhere amongst the halls, keeping its secrets from the sun.
Natalia trips one of the goons and kicks another down with a hard pirouette. Bucky thinks he really sees her, now and again, but time covers them up like snow over fields, like bodies on the floor.
***
Thirteen Days Ago
There are bits of Lukin's brains lying on the pavement someplace where the rubble will cover the bones like a blanket. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents have all evacuated, by now, and Sharon-her name is Sharon-is safe away with Sam. Natasha explains all of this, the palms of her hands pressing against the car's red enamel, holding all of her weight. James looks like he's run through Thebes' seven gates, as if for once he'd let the world take a piece of him. Maybe now he'll let himself admit that even a few broken ribs can make it hard to breathe, that his shoes still make tracks in the ground. Maybe now he'll stop calling her Natalia like a ticket-taker reading her passport.
"She's shaken," Natasha says, "but Sharon's a survivor. She'll be-"
He cuts her off, right then, mumbles something that might be an apology or a prayer, and kisses her full-stop. It is like nothing that she remembers.
"Sorry," he says, "but I've been meaning to do that for a while."
***
Four Weeks Ago
Most of Bucky's names are ordinary; they live in his back pocket on little squares of plastic. He needs to pull them out sometimes, to visit hotel rooms and bars, or when he decided to buy that motorcycle instead of just stealing it. Fury gave him a fresh set a few months back-one of them even has a real picture of him, from sixty years ago, all doctored up to look like new. That one says he's from New Jersey, born about nineteen-eighty. It says he is called Ivan and that he's allergic to penicillin, neither of which is true.
But the suit he's wearing now is too tight for pockets. There's not enough room for guns, either, he has to carry those outside. No, it's just Bucky and the same stupid truths that follow him wherever he goes and other little things he's trying hard not to think about right now. Manhattan has a lot of roofs, lots of nameless squares of light. From where he's standing, the city seems like a bright swarm of mouths and a whole list of symptoms. Parts of him are itching, parts of him are sick, his left hand isn't real and there's a yellow-edged bruise on his knee from that MODOC hoard two nights ago.
He's about to do maybe the stupidest thing he's done in his whole stupid life.
Natalia buzzed him nine minutes past to say that she was coming with a stealth plane and a job they needed him for. Not him, not really-the thing he'll be wearing, the colors cross his chest. When she sets down he is looking out towards the horizon, its dry-mottled colors and inorganic shapes. There's something in the darkness that he can't quite put a name to, like the blank spaces on the walls of Steve's apartment. But Natalia says "ready to go" like it isn't a question. So Bucky pushes himself together and makes like it's not.
She calls him James, and that sparkles like vinegar in the wound. God, he hated that name when he was a kid.
***
Five Weeks Ago
They have him strapped to Tony's freshest machines, so that the doctors can get into his mind more easily. Natasha watches from the other side of the thick-mirrored glass, trying to remember all the things they are scrubbing out. She was always faster hand-to-hand, but he was the quicker with a knife. He told her about knives, once, with his curiously bright way of speaking. But different things have different points.
"This is a big mistake," she feels herself saying. "That man isn't ready to carry this burden. It's more than likely he's not even right for it."
Tony says something imprecise about how Steve would disagree, how dead men want things just like the rest of us. But she's breathed in shadows that he can just see the corners of. There are only so many places you can force your feet to take you. The dirt on the bottom of your shoes doesn't ever go away.
***
Nine Weeks Ago
Bucky isn't sure where he grew the taste for vodka. Not in the obvious place, the one he tends to think his way around. Karpov didn't like for him to drink on missions, and alcohol doesn't mix with the Warsaw Pact prosthetics anyhow. And Steve's picture was somewhere in the dictionary right next to no fun, so that ruined most of him and Toro's chances of a real night on the town. Not that he didn't sneak a bottle of Scotch every now and then, but Cap was always there shaking his head when he did it.
Now he lives in bars, sometimes, rough hands on polished wood, in the swell of sad-sack faces and neon jukebox music. He's careful not to become a regular feature. But New York has its share of dives, all the same lukewarm brown with the same cheap television playing news in the corner. That's where he sees her for a second time, in the background of one of Stark's conferences. Her hair might be a little different, but it's the same old Natalia through and through. Ghosts are funny things, he decides; Bucky doesn't want to work out why the red stuff tends to stay.
The old potato water's sticking him with some small fire, and on the TV Stark's still waxing monotonous about his ace new team. Here's to a man who knows how to lose the battle and win the war.
***
Ten Weeks Ago
It was a whole shock of colors to see him moving again, not strangled under the weight of water and glycerin. He must to have been kept part-drowned for half a century, at least, for his face to have so few cracks in it. Natasha remembers what they used to say about him, in the bloodless concrete bunkers. Every whispered reason for his John Q. Public smile, the stories they made up about how he lost the arm. Just to think of it pulls at unquiet strings inside her-relics of Red Room drugs or the dentist-chair psychotechnics. Standard issue sickle-and-hammer conditioning. She used to be a real patriot.
Now, Natasha finds herself sliding open sure glass doors and making her way to the nearest mess of machinery. The console asks for her S.H.I.E.L.D. clearance, level ten, and she types in the numbers through heavy plastic gloves. Fury took all the files on the Winter Soldier when he pulled his stupendous disappearing act, but the rest of it's still there. The Invaders mission debriefs, the footage of Lorraine crosses stacked against the sky.
There's a name that comes with it all, too, standing quietly on edge of the screen. She takes a moment to breathe, lets it fill up the room.
***
One Day Before That
It's exactly how he would have done it, and that impresses him more than it should. The armored trucks stream out of the garage one two three four, but Bucky keeps resting on his haunches. A silver sedan marches out next, with the one thing he wants inside. Time to make his move.
The pavement is thicker in this New York, and the streets run another shade of crowded. But there's no one around to see him strangle the car's pipes and workings. It falls down fast into the wide line of sidewalk, kicking dirt and sand into a rough-tasting cloud. And then she swings open the cold metal door and kicks him straight in the chin. The rubber soles of her boots hit him like a long drop into very cold water, and then Natalia is standing there with Steve's shield at her back. The air makes his limbs feel heavy; the star he painted on his left shoulder holds an awkward weight.
What he likes to do, normally, is shut out that old part of his mind, make like that other person with his hands and eyes never was or came or saw. But she is throwing open his curtains like one of Gorbachev's last speeches. Bucky remembers how to fight her, the beats he needs to dodge, the arcs his body's got to move in. None of that is enough. Oh, he knocks her to the pavement, after a while, after running his gloves forceful through her hair. But that just sets his anchors askew. Because at the end of it she's a lump on the ground, and he's thinking maybe it was better when he wasn't checkered through with questions, when his still had equations had equals signs and he knew what it was he was doing. At least he used to know what he was doing.
Bucky half expects it to burn his hand off, the shield, like something high and holy out of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. It doesn't.
***
Five Months Ago
Here's a story Fury told him: some crazy Swiss scientist got it into his head to weigh bumblebees with mathematics. And what all his circling equations and oscillated aerofoils found was that the damn things can't fly.
"This is stupid," Bucky says. "They can fly."
"Nah, what they do isn't really flying. It's a special, bouncy kind of falling. But it's close enough to flying that ya might as well call it that."
"Still stupid. What the hell are you trying to get at?"
"I dunno, kid, you tell me."
Really, what Bucky thinks is that it's nice to have voices in his head he can turn off.
***
Fourteen Months Ago
There's something alive inside him, something new. What it is, he hasn't got a name for: a bird maybe, a collection of feathers. It fills him up with twitches and syncopations, writing strokes across his insides that he can't quite squint to see. Well, maybe it's a place, he thinks, maybe it's London, or Shelbyville, or that same on-and-on stretch of Siberia. Maybe it is the dust in Karpov's beard, maybe Madripoor, maybe just the pebbles on Norman beaches that filled up his shoes once upon a time.
But the Cube has stuck him breathing in some dead corner of Virginia, with clocks and other things ticking in his head. Bucky leaves Camp Lehigh with quick and quiet steps; he finds the nearest drugstore and tries to erase the dirt. The place isn't open, so he has to punch the window in. Glass scatters across the sidewalk like seeds in a field. Or like tiny silver stars; he can't decide. Without thinking, Bucky takes two great bottles of vodka from aisle number four, possessing them like every other thing he hasn't paid for. He knocks over a row of t-shirts, trying to find something new that will fit him.
The liquor tries to suffocate that long-legged thing within him, but it keeps flapping at odd angles. While he drinks, he remembers-- not just winter, not just Steve, or Natalia, but the look on that poor kid from Iowa's face while he bled out on the field. That awful hush that falls across your countenance while your insides gurgle out of you. Some of your insides, anyway. Some of them stay put.
***
Two Years Ago
Somewhere southeast of the Urals there's a wide reach of bunkers that shine occasionally in the sunlight. An old man has told her that this is where her home really is, that this is her native geometry. Natasha can feel the lurching of it moving up her stomach, like some kind of spider. That's irony for you.
She remembers Yelena, what that girl had wanted down to the nerves that kept her spine in place. That one was all caught up in being the Widow, as though it's hard to be an insect, as though a name could fill her up whole. Natasha almost laughs, because there is nothing unique about it. There are- were -twenty-seven Black Widow operatives, each made with the same spread of benzophosphates, here in the wild grey yonder. Natasha almost laughs, but there are other things caught in her throat.
It isn't that she hasn't had time to think about it, or that her head's too fogged up from the painkillers to see straight. She can make out the two guards standing watch around the perimeter, see every sharp thing hidden in the grass just fine. What she can't make out are the questions spinning inside of her-the parts of her past that aren't really there. This is the place, some voice of hers is saying. Where they pulled open her little girl self and stuffed it full of string and wire and pink ribbons and tulle and all they could to hold a spy together.
"You can enjoy the memories themselves," the doctor had told her, the edges of his face turning pea-green in the Muscovite shadows. "That's what they were put there for."
But she remembers other things-- calling herself Laura, pretending to be a teacher in upstate New York, hanging crowded crayon portraits on the wall. She knows the old Avengers, remembers how Hank Pym once said that a person couldn't change. And how all her colors once turned upon themselves, sharpening her, making her brighter. After all these years she isn't sure if the red will ever bleed out. But she washed the dye from hair a long time ago. She has made do with her own revolutions.
The guards up in the tower do not know what they are keeping safe, do not know why so many pretty girls come crawling through the nowhere with slices of steel between their fingers. They think, maybe, like Yelena did, that there is something in all of this worth fighting for. But countries are fitted together with reams of paper and stacks of cinderblocks- all of the same thirsty parts. What matters is hands upon hands, the stick of bread in one's belly, the parts of a person you can't put in a file.
They don't see Natasha until she's already behind them, gun at the ready. She doesn't feel the need to give them her name.
***
Thirty-Six Years Ago
The senator's floating face down in the pool. By the time they find the body it'll look exactly like a heart attack, like it was the man's own inner workings that gave up on him. That's not the problem. The mission's not the problem, he's never got a problem with the mission. It's the humidity that's gone to his head, maybe. Summer's always awful in Virginia.
And that's when it stops making sense, when all the Russian criss-crossing through his mind turns into some kind of backwards-r alphabet soup. If you open up a bird's brain you'll find tiny pieces of iron-magnets that the earth can steer home. Those are what keep them flying true when they go south for the winter. But he's missing all those pieces, he's pretty sure. No choice but to keep on going somewhere and hope all the math evens out. Because there's a face he thinks he might be seeing, blue eyes and patriot syllables. Maybe that's his true north. Well, it ain't like he's got a choice.
The body in the water is still watching. It bobs up and down like an apple at the school fair.
***
Fifty-Two Years Ago
He talks in his sleep sometimes, with words that don't fit together. There's not much of him that does-she's seen him take his arm off, once or twice. Natasha asked him about it, once, about where the real one went, but he doesn't have an answer. "I don't know. I can only remember having the one arm." Some of the officers tell imaginary stories of how he must have lost it. It was a mishap in the factory, tovarishch, making leaded glass bottles with the big machines. He cut it off himself, when he was a child, to feed the peasants during the Great Famine of 1933. The missing limb is trapped inside Sputnik-2, orbiting the earth every hundred point three minutes, in the place of a dead dog. Lots of stories. Most people don't even believe he really exists.
But Natasha knows he does, knows that he climbs each night through her window, no matter how hard the snow tries to paint the sky. She knows also that none of this can last. They have another man for her, other stories. They are still hewing her parts. But so is he-the edges he wears down in sparring, the things he is taking off now. When they kiss she doesn't even pay attention to the kissing. It is the feeling of his hands on her back, the slow press of his heartbeat, her hands through his hair. It is their whole world's dearth of color, the old grey of the sky, and all the parts of her flying open, even the ones she didn't realize were locked.
One night Natasha hears him speaking German through his dreams, eyes closed, whispering a war he is too young for. He doesn't know a thing when he wakes, not a thing but her and the winter. Well, he tells her that doesn't matter, that he knows all the important notes. They have finished him off, and he is whole. But it still strikes her as strange. Hindsight is supposed to make things clearer.