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It is a cold morning in an unfamiliar city when Natalia first hears the news. It has been a good year for news, though it is only February: news of the space program and its successes; news of the trade pact with Cuba; news of the weapons tests she isn’t supposed to know about, great bombs exploding like fireworks over the taiga.
There is an imperceptible sense of change in the air that morning. Natalia Alianovna Romanova is twenty-two years old, the crown jewel of the Black Widow Program, and there is a certain peculiar lightness to her movements, as she steps off the railroad platform at Kaliningrad Passazhirsky and into the crowd. How could there not be? The world is changing. You could feel it all around, like a current under the earth or like electricity hanging in the air as a storm gathered: a paradigm shift; a change in the structure of the universe itself, in their favour.
Yes. It is 1962, and the world is changing.
Natalia has a meeting to attend, the sort you don’t want to be late to. She hurries from the station. She is pale, this girl, with a small nose, and red hair tied back in a modest fashion. Altogether she is one more unremarkable girl in a sea of unremarkable girls. You would not notice her, walking past. You would not be meant to. In books they call this camouflage, this talent of the wild thing to remain unseen. Both predator and prey are known to utilize it.
It is not yet clear whether Natalia Alianovna is predator or prey.
The station is crowded, more than the train from Moscow had been, and she clutches her bag close, as though she is afraid of pickpockets. She is not, but she has been taught the value of appearances. The unexceptional appearance is excellent camouflage. Thus she is dressed neatly and fashionably, in an understated modest way, in her grey dress and black wool coat, with a scarf to protect against the inclement February weather. She is only a slip of a thing. Your eyes alight upon her, and then slide past, uncaring.
She walks down the street and through the plaza, past the old pre-Revolution buildings in shades of pastel green and yellow, untouched by the war, and the new blocks, too, all red brick and grey concrete; unfinished shells of dwellings. The snow crunches under her feet where it hasn’t been swept away. It is still too cold for it to melt. People hurry past, their collars turned up against the chill. She is looking for an office. It doesn’t take her long. The office building is all red and grey brick as well, as it turns out. Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union! proclaims a banner painted on the side.
She steps inside. The interior is just as utilitarian. A simple long desk has a small woman in red perched behind it, leafing through papers. The walls are white and unadorned, but the ceiling is prettily carved, with ugly flat lights stuck to it as if to break up the illusion of wealth.
“Hello,” Natalia says, pausing at the desk.
The woman looks up at her through oversized glasses, waiting.
Natalia smiles sweetly. “I am here to see Comrade Bezukhov.”
“Ah,” says the woman. “You’re early. Here.” She directs her briskly, without leaving her seat.
Comrade Bezukhov’s office is on the third floor, up six flights of stairs, the second door on the left. The door is already open for her. His room is expensively lavish. Opulent, is the word for it, she thinks. The floor is carpeted in garish green. He has a finely carved wooden desk; imported, no doubt. All of his furniture—and there is plenty; two couches and three chairs—is expensive black leather. There are foreign paintings on the walls. It’s abstract art, all swirls of bright colours and blocky shapes, and Natalia suspects it was looted from Berlin during the war. Ivan had been there, after all, and to the victor, the spoils. She wonders who owned it before.
The trappings of patriotism are there also, of course—a flag hung behind his desk; a bust of Lenin on the mantel. A photograph of Chairman Khrushchev sits on his desk like a reminder of an absent lover. But that hardly matters. For he lives like a little tsar, in this private room, while workers wait in bread queues in the cold for hours and toil in hot fields to meet the Ministry of Agriculture’s relentless quotas. This is the reward for serving your country, then: to have tea and sweets and a silver samovar laid out on your desk for visitors, under the watchful eye of the little photo of the Chairman. Reminding you to be frugal, but only in public. It makes as much sense as anything else.
Bezukhov is sitting behind his desk, busying himself with laying out an array of jam and biscuits. He is in his fifties, now, but he dyes his hair black to maintain the illusion of youth. He grooms his thick moustache like it is a prized pet. He always had been prone to vanity.
She doesn’t know what to call him, now, it’s been so long.
“Ivan Petrovitch,” is what she settles on; formal, but not overly so.
He smiles. “Natasha.” Intimate, as if they are old friends. Like a father speaking fondly to his daughter. It’s close enough to the truth, she supposes.
She waits. Ivan begins carefully preparing himself a cup of tea, measuring out the thick заварка precisely. “Please,” he says, reaching for the samovar. “Please, sit.”
So she does. Even this chair is leather.
“Would you like sugar, Natasha? Milk? Lemon?”
Ivan always preferred his tea strong; dark and smoky and sweet. “Sugar, please. Only—”
“—one, yes,” he says with a smile. “I remember. It is good sugar. Courtesy of our friends in Cuba, of course. But ah, we are not here to discuss matters in Cuba, important as they may be.” He slides the cup and saucer across the table to her. “You have been well, Natasha? How is Moscow? It’s been far too long since I was there.”
She smiles back. “Moscow is lovely,” she says, only half a lie. Not that it matters: their relationship, such as it is, has always been founded upon half-lies. “They turn the heating off as soon as there’s a warm day, of course. But it’s a…valuable posting. Thank you, again.”
“Ah, do not thank me.” He waves a hand. “You deserve such things.”
They talk for a little while about pointless things. Lyudmila, Ivan’s secretary, is away in the Crimea; her mother is dying of cancer. Her replacement is apparently unsatisfactory. Yes, Ivan’s cat is still doing well, thank you. He demands more fresh fish than any high-ranking bureaucrat, do you know, Natalia? You should find yourself a cat, Natalia. Good pets. And your dancing, dear girl, do you still have time for it? On and on and on, like this. Not a word is said about their work; about the documents she is sent to covertly photograph or the officials she has been ordered to watch closely.
None of this, until suddenly, in a lull in the conversation, he frowns and asks, “Do you know why I summoned you here, Natasha?”
She blinks, schooling her features into careful indifference. “No, sir.”
Ivan sighs heavily and sips his at his tea, now no doubt cold. “Your country has need of you, Natalia.” She does not fail to notice the formal use of her name. She sits a little straighter.
He peers at her gravely over the rim of his cup, as if he is readying himself to break terrible news to a child: mother is not coming home, dearest Natashenka. Something like that. Ah, well. Mother has not come home for a long time.
“You are a spy, Natalia,” he says, picking up a folder and leafing through it almost sadly. “You are trained in espionage. You are immensely talented at this, I am told. You are,” here he glances at her, for a moment, “the perfect spy. Our best.”
None of this is a lie. She is a spy. She is a thief, and a liar, and a killer, sometimes. She is a survivor of the Red Room: one of a handful talented enough to bear the title Black Widow, with all that it implies. Espionage is her trade. It is the only life she has known. She’s living in a neat apartment in Moscow these days, as a reward for her services, but she remains at the beck and call of the State. In this country you belong to your nation, acting as an extension of it and always, always, for the good of it. You are one part of a whole: one gear in a well-oiled machine. You belong to men like Ivan, men who have received tea and biscuits and fancy offices for their service. Like so many others, Natalia is a tool in a neat dress, ready to be used.
He waits, and so she smiles faintly at the praise and sips her tea, with the uncomfortable feeling that she is waiting for the guillotine blade to drop.
And then he sighs, tossing the papers down. “We are not in need of spies. Not these days. They call this a war, in America, do you know that?”
She does, but it doesn’t matter either way. “I have heard this, yes, sir.”
He grunts. “This silly little game, it is not so silly anymore. They play with apocalypse like it is a toy, these Americans, like a trifle. Mr. Kennedy wants a war, and Comrade Khrushchev is going to give him one, it seems.”
Ivan sounds disapproving. Whatever news he is about to deliver, he is unhappy about it. She sits very still.
“Tell me, Natasha, how do you win a war?” he asks.
She hesitates. “With soldiers.”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, indeed. The Motherland does not want spies. She wants soldiers. And you are not a soldier.” His gaze flicks to her. “But you can be.”
Ah, she thinks. There it is; the blade slicing through so fast she doesn’t yet feel the wound.
“The world is changing, Natalia. We must keep up, or we will die.” There isn’t a trace of bitterness in the words. There isn’t a trace of anything. He’s only repeating what he’s been told. “We will win this war, of course, but to win battles we must have soldiers to fight them. To that end, a request for your reassignment has reached me. You will be sent to Novaya Zemlya for further training, with—with Department 13.”
Department 13. The division of the KGB responsible for wetworks: assassination, kidnapping, making enemies of the state…disappear. She has heard rumours of darker things than that, in her time: of the Kamera, the secret facility for Department-sanctioned scientific experimentation; of monsters and horrible constructs and ubermenschen.
There is a subdivision within it so secret it has no name, marked on forms with only an ‘X’. Natalia is not supposed to know of it. It is run by a General Vasily Karpov, a war veteran who had survived Stalin’s purges simply by virtue of being—rumour said—crueller than even old Josif Vissarionovich himself, God rest the bastard’s soul. He is aging now, but no less feared. He has a fondness, she has heard, for the sort of curiosities the Red Room and its ilk produce. He is that certain sort of man who would sew two living dogs to one another in the name of ‘scientific progress’. Such men and their work are thought to be instrumental in bringing about the socialist utopia.
If they want to send her to him, it can mean nothing good.
“You must know,” Ivan says, “that I am displeased with this. But we must each of us do our duty, Natalia.”
“I understand,” she says, setting down her empty teacup. She does. If each citizen fails in their duty the cause is for naught; the battle lost. You work for the good of the whole. Always for the good of the whole. The Motherland demands of you what she must.
“I know you do,” he says, like this is the problem. “I know you do. Dear girl.”
*
She gets a train north the next morning.
She must go to Archangel, and then north again, further still, to where the lands are always empty and it is always winter; to Novaya Zemlya and whatever awaits her there. She wonders if there will be trees. There are trees here, sliding past as the train rattles along: rows of spindly birches studding the edges of the frozen fields, reaching up heavenwards as if in supplication. She wonders what they are pleading for. There is a song about a birch tree, isn’t there? Someone had sung it to Natalia, once, though she cannot remember their face now. Во поле берёза стояла. The little birch tree, all alone in its field. In the field there stood a little birch tree, she hums, under her breath. Nobody shall break down the little birch tree.
No, nobody shall break her down.
*
Natalia first sees the Winter Soldier on a snowy night at Novaya Zemlya.
She does not know at first that it is him. All she knows is that they bring in a man in the middle of the night, secretly, and that he is dead.
There is no other way to describe it. Natalia has seen misery before, many times. She’s seen people wander with their heads bowed through Moscow snowstorms, heading home after late factory shifts (The revolution does not stop at dark, comrade! reads one banner she has often seen), their faces lined with the twin stresses of overwork and hunger. She has seen panic and fear, fighting for dominance on a target’s face when the poison kicks in. She has seen a certain forced stoicism, too: when soldiers receive the order to shoot; when they break a girl’s wrist just to see if she’ll scream (Natalia never did). There’s none of those things here; no careful mask of indifference on the man’s face. There’s nothing at all.
She’s been there for three days when they bring him in. There is not, in the end, much of anything at all at the Department’s facility: snow and ice for the most part, with a few low concrete research buildings dotting the tundra. There are certainly no trees. There’s a military settlement a few kilometres to the south that they aren’t allowed to visit, and an airbase near the barracks, too, though it’s not much more than a few big hangars and a runway. They clear the tarmac every evening, she finds, and huge bombers fly in under cover of darkness. The students aren’t told any of this, of course. Whatever else is happening here, it is clear that they are not supposed to know about it.
Natalia is in the habit of watching the planes taxi in from the barracks windows. There are more trainees than just her here, she knows—perhaps a dozen students in all; a few she recognises from her childhood days in the Red Room—but they keep them separate, to discourage gossiping and friendship and other undesirable things. She has yet to do training of any sort, in fact. For most of her time she has been locked in her small grey room, feeling like a sardine. It has only the essentials: a bed, a trunk to keep her things in, a bucket in the corner in case she needs to piss in the night. But it has a window also, and when she can’t sleep those first few days, she sits up in bed with the blankets wrapped around her and presses her nose to the cold pane and stares out at the dark runway. On the third night there’s a commotion, and that’s when she sees him for the first time.
The flood-lamps are lit, illuminating the landing strip and the big silver transport plane parked on it. It’s snowing again. Little eddies of it swirl and drift in the bright light. A truck rumbles up to the tarmac, headlamps shining, packed with a half-dozen soldiers and other military types. More cars follow it, hanging back. Some of the troops—the ones seated, instead of the ones hanging onto the back and sides clutching rifles—have stars on their shoulders to match the ones on their hats. She knows, now, that something important is happening.
They train every single gun they have on the man who is being escorted from the plane. A political prisoner, Natalia thinks at first. A scientist, maybe: the scientists in particular are often reluctant to leave their homes and families to serve the Motherland. The ones deemed most valuable get given nice houses in new cities and access to the hard-to-find commodities to ensure their loyalty. Only the best, naturally, for Mr. Khrushchev’s wunderkind, who will win this war for them.
A reluctant scientist doesn’t get dragged off to a lab before dawn at gunpoint, is the conclusion. Maybe once they would have. But this isn’t Stalin’s Russia, anymore. They don’t send people to die in camps. Do they?
He’s dressed all in black. The wind whips his long dark hair into his eyes; she can’t make out his face. Over six foot, solidly built, the rigid alert posture of the well-trained military man. Not a scientist, then. One of the officers barks an order and they surround him, herding him with rifles pointed at his head into the back of the truck.
He glances around before he obeys. He looks right at her, and she freezes, worried that she has been caught. She gets a clear look at him, finally, for just a moment—and wishes she hadn’t. His eyes are blue, and haunted. No, not even that: they’re blank. They are completely dead. There is nothing behind them. What are they doing? What do you need an empty soldier for?
The convoy heads off with the dead man in silence, the wind howling outside.
*
She sees him in daylight the next day.
General Karpov himself has requested a meeting with her: for ‘inspection’, or at least this is what she has been told. Rumours have been spreading fast since breakfast on the base, amongst the KGB operatives and scientists and soldiers who make up the bulk of the staff there. The higher-ranking officers make some attempt to contain them, but it doesn’t matter. The presence of a Department legend on base is too exciting an event for the threat of a beating or a week in solitary to quell the chatter.
Natalia is typically quiet during breakfast. She keeps to herself, eating alone in the mess, making no attempt at forging friendships. She knows from experience that too few of these men and women will still be living ten years from now, or even one. She won’t risk friendship. But this rumour is one she can’t help overhearing.
“The Winter Soldier is here, you know,” says Marina, an overtalkative and under cautious woman (stupid; she’ll die young) who works for the Propaganda Department.
This gets Natalia’s attention. All of them know rumours about the Winter Soldier, the Department’s most famous operative. He is the perfect assassin, she knows, who never misses a shot, and who always, always, completes the mission. They keep him frozen when they don’t need him, in a tank like a fish, and that’s why he never ages.
She has heard darker things also: that they lobotomized him, and that’s why nobody has ever heard him speak, why he always follows orders. That he was Stalin’s personal bodyguard. That he was a Nazi experiment, liberated when the Red Army took Berlin and repurposed to the Soviet cause. That he fought for the Russian Empire and was granted immortality by the Tsar in thanks, blessed—or doomed—to serve the Motherland in perpetuity. That he is not a man at all, but a machine made in some Arctic lab, incapable of ever betraying his country. All of these things she has heard, and many more besides.
“Who did you hear that from?” Natalia asks, trying to keep her expression neutral.
“Sasha; he was working the nightshift yesterday. Says he saw them bring the Winter Soldier in, secretly. He’s to be partnered with one of the new operatives, apparently.”
She would dismiss this as fanciful nonsense, except—except Natalia saw this as well, the man with the dead eyes brought to them in the middle of the night.
“Why would they bring him here?” asks Yelena. “Alek says the Winter Soldier isn’t even real, you know.”
“Alek is a fool,” Natalia says.
Marina laughs. “That’s true.”
“He is right, though,” Yelena insists. “He says he’s just made up, a monster to scare us all into obedience. I believe it. You know the sorts of things they get up to in Propaganda, Marina.”
Yelena’s right, of course, or at least right about some things: much of what they are told about other operatives is a lie, to keep any one individual from knowing too much. There is no reason to think the Winter Soldier is more than a legend. But all through the day she thinks of the man she saw last night, with the dead eyes.
In the afternoon they summon her to Karpov’s office. He is sitting at his desk in full dress uniform, all of his medals polished and gleaming. She has never seen him before. Later, she will learn that this is a habit of his; this constant wearing of a uniform. Everyone should wear uniforms, he says. It helps to dissolve boundaries of class and rank.
There is a man standing in the corner of the room when she comes in. He is dressed all in black, and he is standing perfectly still. He’s wearing a mask that covers the lower half of his face, but she can see his eyes. Ice-blue, and hollow. She tries not to startle, when she realises that his left arm is made of metal.
She stiffens, and does not look at him.
“Agent Romanova,” Karpov says.
Natalia salutes. “Comrade Karpov.”
“Sit down,” he says. He gestures at the chair he has set aside for her. Plain and Spartan: nothing like Ivan’s furniture.
She sits.
“So,” he says. “You are the fabled Natalia Romanova, then. The best graduate of the Black Widow Program. The only one, some tell me, deserving of the name.”
She hasn’t heard this. “I am Natalia Romanova, yes, sir,” she says, after a pause.
“I have been reading your file, Natalia Romanova. You show exceptional skill in your field. Your test results are consistently—impressive, to say the least. You haven’t failed an assignment in five years. You should be commended for your service to your country.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But it’s not this that interests me,” he says, raising a finger. “I don’t care who you are, Agent Romanova, or what you’ve done. I care about what you are. A Black Widow. And what is a Black Widow? An enhanced operative. An ubermensch, if you must. A super-soldier, to use the American parlance. I believe the future of the KGB lies in the hands of men and women like yourself. It is why I have created this facility you find yourself in. So that we may create more like you, when the time comes.”
“You,” he continues, his tone sharp, and she panics for a moment, thinking he’s talking to her still. He’s not. “Soldier. Come here.”
The man she knows for certain now is the operative known as the Winter Soldier steps forward, coming to attention. She stares at him in open curiosity. That’s what Karpov wants from her, she knows: for someone to admire his most deadly toy.
“You know what this is, I presume,” he says, gesturing at the man. What, not who. “The sole product of the Winter Soldier Program. I have spent many years of my life perfecting it. This is a real super-soldier. It was developed from a German variant of the genuine serum, procured by myself at great personal cost. It is an incredibly effective field agent. It never fails a mission it has been given, as I am sure you have heard. So how do I improve upon it? How do I make the already perfect operative better?”
“I don’t know, sir,” she says. The Winter Soldier stares coolly through her.
“I create more. I increase production, you see,” he tells her, clearly satisfied with the way he has phrased this. “How do you double the production output at a weapons factory, do you know? Forget mathematics. Forget cybernetics. It is simple. You double the amount of machinery. Two machines, and suddenly twice as much of everything is made.”
Ah. She understands, now, even before he says it.
“You see: you are to be my second machine, Agent Romanova.”
*
General Karpov tells her that she will be working with the Winter Soldier. He will be training her at first, testing her on all the tricks she learned in the Red Room, and teaching her new ones besides. She will stay at Novaya Zemlya, in her little concrete bunker, until the Winter Soldier is satisfied with her progress. Then—and only then—will they be sent out into the field, to do the Motherland’s bloody work.
She is more excited by this than she is willing to reveal to men like Vasily Karpov. When she had been small, just a little thing in the Red Room, she had heard dozens and dozens of stories about the Winter Soldier; about just how good he was. He was something they could all aspire to be. The perfect agent. She had wanted to be him, even, at first, until she realised that it was better to be Natalia Romanova than a stranger. But still she wants to know: who is he? Where did he come from? Most importantly of all, is he as good as they say?
*
Natalia plans immediately to find the Winter Soldier alone, and talk to him.
It takes her five days to get the opportunity. On the first day they train together he is accompanied by handlers, always. The room they’re brought to is large and well-lit, nothing like the underground spaces she fought in at the Red Room. Comrade Karpov has more money than them, it seems, or perhaps just more of the right sort of friends. There’s a row of tall windows along one wall, revealing the tundra beyond: black gravel and wet brown earth and white snow, stretching out as far as the eye can see. It’s cold enough that if she went outside in the training uniform she is wearing now she’d be dead in half an hour. She wonders if the same can be said for the Winter Soldier. He, at least, seems like he belongs in this desolate place. They bring him in with three scientists and an armed escort. He does not so much as glance at her, as he kneels down outside the boxing ring to unlace his boots and remove his tactical vest. A small painting of Stalin frowns down at her from the wall behind him, just in case she had any illusions about the sort of people she was now dealing with.
They want him shirtless to intimidate her, Natalia knows. Underneath the leather and Kevlar he is built like a tank, like a bear: all carefully held power and thick muscle, crisscrossed with old scars. They must let him scar; withhold treatment and make him heal on his own. Why? To put fear into young girls like her, she supposes.
But it’s the arm that gets most of her attention. It’s a beautiful thing. The metal plates lock together in imitation of real muscle, shifting, she is interested to note, when he does. It makes him hold himself strangely, favouring his left side, walking in a strange sort of lope. Weighing him down. She will learn to use that against him. Natalia had imagined it connecting seamlessly at the shoulder but it doesn’t, not at all: it’s an ugly thing where it joins the rest of him, taking up the space where his collarbone and scapula should have been, the skin pulled tight over underlying steel like stretched leather. The scarring is horrific. Thick knots of white scar tissue spread outwards from his shoulder, spidering across his chest and down his side. She tries to imagine the surgery that made this machine part of him. How much of him is metal, she wonders? Is there anything real left of the Winter Soldier at all?
He lifts the rope at the edge of the ring and ducks underneath it, taking up a fighting stance opposite her, relaxed and calm. His eyes are sharp and glacial, considering every small movement she makes. He’s wearing the mask again. She can’t tell what he’s thinking.
(A mask, she calls it, because that’s what it technically is, meant to obscure his identity. But his silence wears on her throughout the day, and midway through she realises:
It’s not a mask. It’s a muzzle. They keep their most prized attack dog muzzled and chained, purposefully silent. Why? This is what you do with dogs, she supposes, but not tame ones. Tame dogs do not require muzzles. What are they keeping here, at Novaya Zemlya? What sort of wild thing is this?)
It’s clear from the way he’s looking at her that he has no intention of making the first move. That’s alright. She knows she’s going to lose this fight. All that matters is that one day she won’t. Natalia tilts her head, considering him, and there is absolute silence in the moment before she lunges.
He’s fast; too fast. That’s the only thing she has time to consider. He’s on her in an instant. She tries to sidestep him, to get behind him and utilize a blind spot, but he’s too quick for that. He swings and kicks at her just hard enough to make her stumble, and grabs at her shoulder with his metal hand, wrenching with enough force to make her cry out and wonder, briefly, if he will break her arm. She hits the ground hard. All the breath is gone from her.
He blinks down at her calmly. He is not even breathing hard. She grits her teeth and gets to her feet again. They don’t stop until the afternoon, when she has deep purple bruises all along her ribs.
*
For most of the first week this is the routine she settles into. She has a sparse breakfast before dawn, when hardly anyone else is in the mess, followed by stretches in her room to prepare herself for the day. Early in the morning they take her to the same training room, and she fights the Winter Soldier while little fat scientists watch and take notes. She fights until she can’t physically fight any longer; until all of her feels like one big bruise. They usually don’t stop until late in the day. On the fourth day they must decide he is unlikely to snap and kill her, because there are no guards with rifles lurking in the corner of the room. On the fifth day it is only the two of them. She has waited for this.
When the sparring session is over, and Natalia should be limping to the showers, she stays behind. The Winter Soldier lingers as well. She had hoped he would. He goes to the low bench set along one wall, and pulls a bag out from beneath it. Without acknowledging her presence, he begins unwrapping the tape from around his flesh hand.
Natalia perches on the edge of the bench and watches. When he’s through with the tape he reaches up and carefully unbuckles the muzzle. She hopes she isn’t staring too obviously. He’s younger than she imagined, with it gone. He has a soft face: he’s her age, surely, or not much older. There’s a few days’ worth of stubble darkening his jaw, like he hasn’t shaved since he arrived. He is an enigma. She tilts her head.
“Hello,” she says.
He turns, and glances at her, no recognition or interest in his gaze. After a moment, he goes back to storing his gear away.
When it becomes clear that he isn’t going to speak, she says, “It’s polite to return a greeting, you know.”
His mouth twitches. “Hello,” he says dutifully. It is the first time she has heard him speak; his voice crackles with disuse, rough.
“I’ve heard about you,” she tells him. But she realizes too late that she has made the mistake of making this a statement, not a question or command. She isn’t surprised when he stays silent. And yet he looks back over to her, after a moment, watching. Waiting, patiently.
She tries again. “The soldiers tell stories about you. Everyone tells stories about you.”
He blinks, once.
Natalia feels out of place, now; awkward in this room full of objects. Nothing here is real, she feels, except her. He blends into the background, another piece of silent equipment.
“Don’t you want to know what they say?” she asks, gentler, like she is talking to a child.
“No.”
Here he is, then: the perfect Soviet man, just as the Central Committee would want, efficient and quiet and uninterested in hearsay or rumour or the opinions of outsiders. The Winter Soldier can do without fine new clothes or a new dacha in the countryside or sausage from the market weekly. The Winter Soldier needs nothing at all. He is the ideal citizen. The irony of this does not escape her.
He shoulders his bag and turns to go.
“Tomorrow, then,” Natalia says, because she must say something.
He pauses at the door. “Tomorrow.” He says it like it is a concept unfamiliar to him. Animals do not understand the passage of time.
*
He is there tomorrow, of course. Where else would he be? He’ll be there the next day too, and the next day, and the next day: on and on forever, if they order it. He comes in early and they spar as the sun comes up, like always. Only this time is different. This time he talks.
She lands a surprise blow; manages to kick him in the jaw. He grunts and stumbles back, looking as taken aback by this event as she knows she must. He blinks at her. “Good hit,” he says slowly, in American-accented English.
Natalia tilts her head, but responds in kind. “Thank you.”
Her accent is awful and he tells her so; gives her tips on how to correct it. The entire day he is kinder, like something has changed in him overnight: he helps her to her feet when he hits her too hard, and allows her breaks when she starts to falter from exertion. From then on they speak only English to each other, at Novaya Zemlya.
*
“What’s your name?” she asks the Soldier two weeks later, when he’s lying belly-down on a rooftop with her in the freezing cold, teaching her how to shoot. “Your real name, I mean.”
He tilts his head, as if he’s considering this. He has become more responsive to her and her questions as time has gone by. Keep him out of the ice long enough, she thinks, and he starts to thaw. “I don’t know,” he says. His tone is almost thoughtful.
“Well, you must have a name,” she reasons. “Everyone needs a name.”
“I don’t,” he says, simply, as if this is the way of things. They name people. They name dogs. They name storms, even. But they don’t name the Winter Soldier. This knowledge leaves her feeling disturbed.
It takes her another week to realise that this is something they have taken from him. She knows that he has been carefully conditioned; that the reason he is always watched so closely and with such anxiety is from fear, fear that he will refuse his programming and reject the Department, reject being the Winter Soldier. He didn’t volunteer. He didn’t volunteer, and giving him any information that might remind him of who he was before is banned.
He is not allowed to know.
*
In the end they train together for two months. He teaches her everything he knows: martial arts, American English, sharpshooting. Tactics, and poisons, and torture. How to take pain without flinching, whether from a shallow cut or a broken arm. How to disappear in a crowd. How everything, in the right hands, is a weapon. How she, too, can be a weapon, if she wants. She does want. She has never wanted anything more.
They spar daily in the boxing ring, with General Karpov and his military hangers-on watching from behind two-way mirrors they both pretend aren’t there. They are a spectacle to him: a two-headed dog that he has lovingly created. At first she loses every time. The Winter Soldier is not gentle with her. He doesn’t pull his punches. She respects this. In the real world, beyond their island compound, nobody ever pulls their punches. The fights are over very quickly, in the beginning: one good blow from the Soldier and that’s it, you are gasping in pain on the floor or being carried out of the room by the guards. He breaks her leg tossing her out of the ring in the first week, and she bites back a scream, grateful that it will heal in days. When she goes to the showers at night she’s covered in bruises, mottling every inch of her skin.
But she improves. With time, she improves. She learns to fight brutal and bloody, to take every shot she can, no matter how low. Once, he has her in a chokehold she can’t escape from, and she lashes out behind her, kicking him between the legs. It works. He congratulates her, when he can speak again without wincing. She learns the way he fights, and by the end of the second month Natalia can disable the cybernetic parts of him in just forty seconds on average. They have timed this. She can put him flat on his back in a boxing ring in under two. For five minutes, in an open exercise where she is allowed to improvise and he is allowed whatever weapons he wants, she can survive. She can survive five minutes against the Winter Soldier, and this is no small feat.
Survival is the most important thing.
“Congratulations, Agent Romanova,” says General Karpov, when he witnesses this. “Most impressive. I believe you are ready for field work.”
*
Their first real assignment is in Paris, a place Natalia has never visited before. It’s springtime, by now, the air crisp and fresh and warm when they leave the train station. Train station, yes. She would have preferred to fly (though not via Aeroflot of course; every week, it seems, Natalia hears quiet word of another crash) but for whatever reason they are told to travel by train. The Winter Soldier seemed to like it. She’d let him have the seat closest to the window, and he’d rested his cheek against the glass, watching the world go by, talking to her occasionally about what he saw out there. Not once during the trip had she seen him sleep: she woke up sometimes, in the night, and he was still there, blinking at her in a quiet both contemplative and content, the train rattling along around and beneath them. He seemed—happy. In his own way.
So, then: Paris, in the spring, pollen heavy in the air from windowsill flowerbeds. Their target is one Mykola Petrenko: a 59-year-old Ukrainian émigré (ex-UPA, Natalia’s file says) and a known anti-communist, who has attracted the ire of the state for his repeated newspaper articles and speeches criticising the Soviet regime.
“Tell me your plan,” the Soldier says, in perfect French, as they move through the crowd at Gare de l’Est. They’re walking arm in arm, easy; nothing disarms people as much as a young and happy couple. She can feel the hard line of metal under his jacket. Her plan, he says: she is in charge here. This is a test. It is always a test.
“Reconnaissance today,” she says, after a moment’s hesitation. “Scope out where he’s staying. Find out if he’s alone, where he does his shopping, where he gets his newspaper in the morning. Where the best ways in and out of his building are; what he likes.”
“And then?”
“Then we use that to our advantage. Take him out when he’s alone. When nobody’s going to come looking for him. They’ll know it’s us; we’ll have to be long gone when they find the body.”
“Your call,” he says easily. It’s casual enough that she stares at him, surprised, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed.
“I know what I’m doing,” she says.
“I know.”
There is silence.
“Hotel is this way,” he says.
*
They stop by Petrenko’s favoured corner shop first: to check for acceptable vantage points, and blind spots to be aware of, and all the rest. It’s a tiny place, the sort you would struggle to fit five people in, but Natalia is stunned by the array of products on offer. All these bright colours! The bold lettering covering everything! There is fresh fruit and vegetables, bouquets of flowers of all kinds, a fridge full of milk in the corner. There are a dozen different types of candy bar, at least. The food here, in this one tiny place, is more than she has ever seen at once in the state-run shops in the Soviet Union. Women in headscarves would murder one another in the bread queues for this luxury.
She looks around in a daze as the Winter Soldier, posing perfectly as an American tourist in leather jacket and sunglasses, chats in English to the store’s owner. He had tried deliberately-awful French before, until the poor shopkeeper asked him to stop. “Well, this is where we’re staying,” he says to the man, pointing at a map. “I can’t really pronounce it, sorry, pal. And where are we now?”
The man points at a different place.
“Right. Right. Say, you know any good places to eat ‘round here?”
He strokes his beard, thinking, but reluctantly reveals what he considers the best place to have lunch is. Easily done. Just like this, they have a place Petrenko is likely to pass by; somewhere they can sit and wait for him.
“Thanks, buddy,” the Soldier says, and buys a newspaper and a pack of American cigarettes. He is the perfect actor.
(She suspects, secretly, that some of this is not acting.)
*
“Hey,” he says to her suddenly, in English, after they’ve been sitting at the café the shopkeeper had recommended, staking out Petrenko’s apartment across the street, for an hour. “Natalia. You ever been to Paris? Before this?”
She tilts her head at him. He’s like a different person, away from his handlers. A correction, perhaps: he is like a person, finally. Gradually he has become more relaxed around her, willing to joke and even smile. He is, she finds, a man, underneath it all. She has come to a realization in the past few weeks: that she likes him just as much like this, with his American drawl and easy body language, as she does when he’s a killing machine, teaching her how to break necks.
“No,” she says, with a small smile. “I never have.”
“I have,” he says. “I think. I remember that. We went for a walk, down by the river. There were—tanks in the streets. Lotsa lights. Lotsa people.”
Tanks in the streets. There haven’t been tanks in the streets of Paris for years, not since the war. He must be mistaken. “That must have been nice.”
“I guess. Can’t really remember.”
He shouldn’t be remembering anything at all. “I think I’ll order some more tea,” she says.
The Winter Soldier laughs at her. “More tea? We’re in Paris. C’mon, live a little.”
Natalia taps her forefinger on her chin, smiling, far more charmed by this behaviour than is entirely correct. “Alright, Soldier,” she says slowly. “What drink would you suggest?”
He wrinkles his nose, thinking. “You ever had Coca-Cola?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“Well, you’re gonna have some now.”
He calls the waiter over and orders it for her, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, talking too loud like any American tourist. She shares a sly glance with the waiter; commiserating over her uncouth but charming partner. She supposes to other people they look like that: like partners.
It arrives in a big glass. The Soldier slides it across the table to her with a crooked smile. Their fingers brush when she takes it from him. “For the lady,” he says. “America’s finest.”
“It’s just black lemonade,” she accuses, after she has a sip.
He laughs, leaning back in his chair, and lights a cigarette. They talk for hours.
*
The decision is made, after careful observation, to corner Petrenko in his own home.
He is a thin and weedy old man, as it turns out, who resembles nothing so much as an owl, or perhaps a wading bird. The comparison is only heightened by his oversized glasses. He doesn’t seem like the sort of man who would be a sworn enemy of the Soviet state. She has a hard time imagining him with the UPA rebels, blowing up tanks and ambushing patrols in thick pine forests. But this is who they are fighting, in Khrushchev’s new war: thin little men who fight with words, not guns. She feels that General Karpov would tell her that guns are more effective than fountain pens in battles, despite the saying.
Certainly Mykola Petrenko is about to learn the truth in this. They discover quickly that their target is a loner. He lives by himself, shut inside most of the day. No doubt he is working on his subversive literature. They watch him all afternoon and he only leaves once: to place a thick envelope in the mailbox down the street.
Loners make easy targets. Nobody misses them. Nobody comes looking for them until bills go unpaid. Nobody would be particularly surprised to find his rotting corpse on his kitchen floor, gun in hand. These artsy sorts, people will say: they’re all a bit odd, aren’t they? It was bound to happen.
So in the evening Natalia and the Winter Soldier leave their café vantage point, heading back to the hotel. They waste a few hours. He stands sentry by the open window, smoking and watching the Parisian traffic go by. Natalia decides to stretch out on the floor and practice ballet moves, drilled into her in childhood and never forgotten. She catches him watching her several times, out of the corner of her eye. She smirks, and is very careful to exaggerate every movement from then on. Once, he licks his lips, predatory.
When it’s close to midnight they leave again, and make their way back across the city to Petrenko’s lonely little apartment. Natalia’s coat is just heavy enough to conceal the handgun she is wearing underneath. They clatter up the stairs to his door, steps too loud on the wood, play-acting drunk. Only when they’re sure they’re alone does the Soldier knock at Petrenko’s door.
It takes him a moment to answer. “Yes, yes, hold on,” he calls in Ukrainian-accented French. “Hold on, I am coming.”
When he opens it the Soldier steps forward; crowding him, leaning against the doorframe like he’s an old friend and not a killer. Death is the oldest and closest of friends, she supposes. “Hey, pal,” he says lowly.
Natalia pulls her coat aside just enough to reveal her small hand curled around a gun. “Hello, Mykola.”
“Oh, God,” Petrenko says. He takes a step back into the apartment. The lights are all off inside; it’s late. He was probably asleep. “You—oh, God.”
“Call for help and I’ll break your neck,” the Soldier tells him.
Natalia affects the softest and gentlest expression she can muster. Patience with those about to die is always wise. “You should let us in, Mykola,” she says.
He does, of course. He has a gun pressed to his sternum, after all. Wouldn’t you? His apartment is small and cluttered, with mail scattered all over the table. There are rotting bananas in the fruit bowl. The wallpaper is aging and green, streaked through with golden swirls. The whole house smells of flowers. This is how their enemies live, then.
Petrenko swallows; pushes his glasses up. “Are you—are you going to kill me? Is that it?”
“No,” says the Winter Soldier.
“Of course not,” says Natalia, with the deadliest of smiles. “We’re going to make you do that yourself.”
*
He writes the suicide note with trembling, spidery script. He’s crying as he does it, sitting at his kitchen table, shoulders shaking. Fat teardrops land on the page and blur the ink. She watches dispassionately with her gun levelled at his back—she must; this is a test—but the Soldier is frowning by the window. Petrenko writes in messy Cyrillic:
Lyubov.
Lyubov, forgive me. I am tired. I am very tired. All will be well.
That’s all. After that he signs his name and sets the pen down. Lyubov. Love, this means. Love: a name, and an endearment, too. She wonders who he is writing to. She can’t imagine this little man being loved by anyone. But she supposes someone must have.
“It’s alright, Mykola,” she says when he’s done. “Come on. Get up. Like you said: all will be well.”
He gets to his feet shakily, swiping at his eyes. “You’ll make sure that someone knows,” he says, looking between them. “You’ll make sure someone—finds me.”
“Sure,” says the Winter Soldier, lifting his head, his face half in shadow.
*
Natalia moves him where she wants him, until they’re standing together by the table, his back against her chest like they’re dancing. She keeps the gun pressed against his temple. He won’t be making the shot, of course. She’s not so stupid as to hand their target a weapon. Posed like this, it will look like he did it to himself.
“Ready?” she murmurs, as if anyone ever can be. He sucks in a breath and starts to hyperventilate, sobbing wet and messy. She keeps smelling lilacs. “Nice and easy. Nice and quick. All will be well, Mykola. With me, on three.”
One—
two—
three.
The handgun is silenced, of course. It sounds like someone clapping; like the drop of a plate or a book hitting the floor more than murder. The brass clattering on the wood seems louder than the shot itself, to her ears. There’s a small spray of blood. Petrenko goes slack against her immediately, and she lets him fall, stringless puppet. Natalia unscrews the suppressor and drops the gun near his open twitching fingers.
It’s messy. She doesn’t know why that should surprise her; she’s killed before. But there’s blood spilling out of Petrenko’s head and seeping into the carpet, and chunks of bone matted with dark hair and pink brain matter lie scattered on the floor like broken glass. Living bone is not like in films. In films, bone is: cattle skull bleached and cracking in a distant desert; yellowing ribcage of a criminal hanging from a tree, dried dark sinew still clinging to his anonymous remains. But when it’s fresh, bone is pale cream, pinkish with marrow. His brain is pink also, with fat dark veins running through it—like cheese, she thinks, as if from a distance—and slick with blood. Living bone.
All these parts of Petrenko are living still. His cells still struggle on heedless, unaware of the trauma that has occurred. She doesn’t know how to feel about this. Blood is almost black in dark rooms, she discovers. For a moment she can only look at it, feeling detached. Removed from herself.
“That was good,” the Soldier says then. “Good work.”
Natalia lives for this praise. She hates herself for it, but she does. She smiles, lifting her chin, and resolutely does not look at the blood on the floor. “Thank you, comrade. The mission is a success, I think.”
“The Department will be pleased,” he agrees. There’s a hint of bitter humour in his tone, in the slight upwards curl of his mouth. For not the first time today she finds herself drawn to it.
He notices and shifts, moving out of his languid slouch in the shadows. “Natalia Romanova,” he says. His voice is pitched low; his accent thick. “You’ve been watching me all day. All month. You thought I wouldn’t notice?”
She tilts her head coquettishly, smirking at him, everything in her body language daring him to come closer. “I was counting on you noticing.”
But then: voices on the stairwell. Men’s voices, in French: too loud and laughing; drunk probably. They both freeze, heads snapping towards the sound, and the moment falls away, forgotten.
Natalia doesn’t quite dare to breathe. She can feel her heart thudding in her chest. Footsteps clomp on the wood outside, too loud in the quiet. The men are talking about football, and then about a girl—Kind word ‘n some flowers, one says, and then she’ll let you stick your fingers in her cunt, easy as anything—and then the other one’s laughing and fumbling for his keys, sliding them with a click and scrape of wood into the lock. The door across the hall creaks open.
“We’re leaving,” says the Winter Soldier, lowly, as the voices disappear. “Now.”
She glances around the room. “The window.”
They’re three stories up. His mouth curls down, but he nods.
They move at the same time. He’s closer and gets the window open first—the night air that rushes through is chill and scented, improbably, with lilacs—but he motions for her to go ahead of him. Natalia pushes Petrenko’s ugly yellow curtains aside and jumps. She lands hard on her toes in a flowerbed, rolling forward with the impact. After a moment he drops down next to her, silent and catlike.
They stare at each other for a moment. He glances back up to the windowsill. His nose wrinkles; lip curling back like he’s tasting the air. Then they run.
*
They make it back to the hotel in record time. Both of them are breathing heavily when they unlock the door and stumble in. She’s high on the adrenaline shock of it all, light-headed with how close they came to being caught. She has killed a man. She has gone all the way to Paris with the Winter Soldier—the very best there is—to kill a man. Natalia is important. She is valued. She has done her duty.
She looks over at the Winter Soldier, leaning up against the door next to her, panting. She means to congratulate him. To say something. But instead she laughs, startled.
He glances at her. “What?”
Natalia reaches a hand up to his hair. He flinches back, but she’s fast, and draws her hand back in an instant. There’s a crushed purple flower held between her fingers.
“Lilacs,” she says solemnly.
He blinks at her. She smirks, and then he smiles, just a little, with a flash of teeth—and then they’re laughing, somehow, both of them, breathless and relieved and full of adrenaline; his head thrown back and teeth bared while she giggled ridiculously into her hands.
“I could smell them before,” she manages.
“—was driving me mad, you have no idea,” he interjects. “Oh my God, Natalia. Jesus Christ.”
“From his flowerbed.”
“It’s a nice accessory, though, huh?” he wants to know, running a hand through his hair to dislodge any more stray petals. “It looks good on me.”
She shouldn’t allow this behaviour, she knows: this casualness, the way he’s speaking less like a weapon and more like a man. But he’s grinning at her in the low light, blue eyes bright and alive. He looks so young. He is young. So is she.
So she presses him back against the wall—this is dangerous; he blinks at her, startled, for a moment, and she’s sure he’s going to lash out in a panic and break her neck—and cups his face in her small hands. “Very good,” she says decisively.
They stare at each other. He licks his lips reflexively; his eyes are wide and focused on her mouth. That’s invitation enough. She kisses him. He smells like lilacs.
It’s not gentle. She kisses him as hard as she can, like she’s trying to crawl inside his skin, and after a moment of stillness he kisses back, bruising, and God, it’s good, so good. It’s what she’s wanted for months now, without knowing. She’s wanted to do this to him, with him, for so long. He grabs her shoulders and she sucks in a breath. He kisses like a drowning man; like someone clutching at straws; like a feral thing.
When she pulls away he just blinks at her. They’re both breathing hard, sharing the same air. His mouth is very close, and very wet. “Natalia,” he says, and then for the first time he corrects it to, “Natasha. Natasha.”
He swallows. “What was—that.”
She tilts her head. “They call that a kiss, Soldier.”
That makes him laugh, shaky, a huff of air more than anything else, that she can feel against her lips. “Yeah. No, I—I know that.” He looks uncertain for an instant; fragile. “Why? Why would you do that? Because of what I said, before?”
“Because I want to,” she says. “Isn’t that enough?”
“I,” he starts, and swallows. “Yeah. Okay.”
When she moves in to kiss him again he arches up to meet her, opening his mouth as she licks at his lips. She bites down hard. He groans, sliding his tongue along hers, electricity sparking down her spine at every touch. They kiss like they’re starving, violent more than sensual, her hands roaming up and down his sides.
Suddenly his metal hand fists in the back of her jacket, and he spins them with one effortless movement, slamming her hard enough against the wall that she grunts in pain. It’s alright. She doesn’t even care, because then his mouth is on hers again, and his hands are pinning her, holding her in place.
There’s a sense of danger here: the Winter Soldier can kill her in an instant like this, with her so vulnerable, without any trouble or chance for her to fight back. In the boxing ring at Novaya Zemlya, where she can plan ahead of time, mapping his moves, she can win 40% of the time. Like this? With his hands leaving fingers bruises on her shoulders; his hips rocking firm against hers? She has no chance. She can think of a dozen ways he could kill her here. He is a wild animal, after all. She surrenders anyway, to this possibility of death.
She surrenders to the feel of his mouth on hers; to the raw sweet animal feeling she feels jolting through her, hot and hungry, when he pushes his thigh between hers and slides his hand up her leg. Clever fingers trail over the damp fabric of her panties, rubbing insistently there until she gasps and gives in to him completely.
They fuck right there against the wall. He’s not gentle, but she doesn’t want him to be. How can they ever be gentle, killers that they are? They have seen a man die, not half an hour before. They killed him for no other reason than they were ordered to. His corpse is still there; still cooling in an apartment that smells like lilacs. She is dizzy with the thrill of a successful hunt. So she clamps her thighs around the Winter Soldier’s hips, and he fucks up into her, rough and savage and good, his human fingers working at her clit until she sobs and cries out and is gone. They are wild animals. He leaves an almighty hickey on her neck, over the throb of her pulse, and Natalia wishes only that she bruised like other girls; could carry that part of him around with her for days, a private tattoo.
“Natasha,” he breathes when he comes, mouth wet on hers.
“Yes,” she says, and swallows the sound of her name; down and down and down, where it’s for her alone, and she can keep it safe.
*
They run fourteen missions together, in all. They are singularly successful, blending into any crowd, and they never leave any evidence for the Centre to be concerned with. The perfect operatives.
They’re in Moscow for May Day, garrotting a corrupt general in a back alley in the shadow of the Kremlin, as the parades of tanks and missiles go slowly by. In June it’s London, grey even in summer, sent to dispose of a dissident artist. Natalia takes the target out to dinner at an expensive restaurant, laughing and hanging on his arm, luring him out into the open so that the Winter Soldier can put a bullet in his head from a nearby rooftop. In August, Havana: blood seeping slow and sickly over banana leaves and tropical earth. In September they go to Kiev, where the Railways Minister is suspected to be embezzling state funds. Natalia tortures her to get the information, pulling out her teeth one by one. The Soldier watches in the background with a smile. The war is changing in their favour, thanks to his and Natalia’s work, thanks to the bodies they dump in rivers and leave in alleys.
Every chance they get, they fuck. They can’t stay away from each other these days. They’re not together all the time—he has missions of his own to run, and so does she—so when they are they make the most of it: kissing sweet and soft in alleyways; rutting against each other in fancy hotel rooms, animalistic and laughing. She becomes used to the taste of him; the way his moans sound; the smell of the ridiculous American cigarettes he won’t stop smoking. He sneaks into her room at night, in the bunker at Novaya Zemlya, and he’s always gone before dawn, like they’re teenagers afraid of getting caught.
Every week he gets a little more human, a little less like a machine. It leaves him unpredictable. There are days when he rages, pacing and spitting and snarling, sparring with her so roughly she’s left with purpling bruises. Then the next day he’ll laugh, smiling crooked and sweet at her in meetings and during target practice. The worst are the days when he does nothing at all. On those days he sits someplace quiet and out of the way, in some high-up secret perch if he can find one. He stares off into the middle distance for hours at a time. He’s lost in his own head, she thinks, and she’s sure he’s getting things back. Remembering, in snatches.
She can’t figure out, at first, what he sees in her, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Is he seeking absolution, some twisted way of repenting for his sins? Love? Affection, the kind not afforded to their sort? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, none of it. What matters is this: that he tells her dirty foreign jokes to make her laugh; that he teaches her how to account for the heat of the rifle barrel when she takes a shot; that when they haven’t seen each other for weeks he’ll drop to his knees without prompting and lick at her cunt until she screams. She gasps under him at night, biting his mouth and throat until he bleeds, and he murmurs sweet nothings into her collarbone in return, things he’ll never say in daylight. Natashenka, he says to her, so very softly. Natashenka.
The officials at Moscow Centre write glowing reports on their skill as a team. Ivan sends her gifts of tea and chocolate as rewards. Nikita Khrushchev himself calls, once, to congratulate them on their good work serving the Soviet state.
Natalia has not yet learnt that good things do not last.
*
It’s October when the world ends, or almost does.
She hears about it on the radio at Novaya Zemlya; from the other agents: there are bombs in Cuba, and Kennedy doesn’t want them there. He draws an invisible line in the ocean and warns the Soviet ships not to cross. She sits down on the threadbare carpet with Yelena and Marina and the other girls, huddled around the one radio in the barracks, and for 13 long days they wait for apocalypse. The end of the world no longer seems far away: instead, in that awful fortnight, it seems inevitable, looming large over everything. It is suddenly a question of if, not when. When she says her farewells at night and goes to her room she finds herself inexplicably lonely. She finds herself scared. The Winter Soldier is in the field again, off hunting some dissident. Natalia surprises herself by missing him.
Now, more than any other time, she wants him crammed in that small hard bed with her, curled around her warm and steady. She wants to feel his mouth on hers again. She wants to hear him laugh, to see that crooked cad grin directed at her in the dark. It’s the end of the world. Isn’t that what people do at the end of the world?
But then, of course, the world doesn’t end. This is typical of Soviet workmanship, isn’t it? Apocalypse found to be critically flawed; postponed for some future date.
The world doesn’t end, no. Not for everyone.
*
They send Natalia and the Winter Soldier to Berlin two days after the world doesn’t end. How to feel about this news? In the autumn of 1962 Berlin is not a safe place. Berlin, Mr. Khrushchev says, is the most dangerous place on Earth. When the next great war comes, Natalia will not be surprised if it begins in Berlin, just as it did last time. It’s a carved-up city in a carved-up country, fought over as spoils of war by nations like pi-dogs fighting over scraps. Tanks rumble through the streets there, even now. But it is Mr. Khrushchev who demands they go, and so they do.
It’s in Berlin that it all finally falls apart.
*
Natalia thinks, that if she ever had occasion to run away, to defect like all these targets do (even the thought feels like treason), she would not go to Berlin. Berlin is the obvious answer. You get yourself forged papers and jump happily from one side of the city to the other, and that’s it, problem solved. Welcome to the West, comrade. This is why they built the Wall, she supposes. Not so easy to jump now.
No, she would go to Finland. It would be difficult, of course, and cold. The border is poorly watched for a reason. But Natalia isn’t afraid of a little snow. She’d cross the border unseen, and they’d presume her lost, dead in the tundra. No assassins would be sent after a dead girl.
Sergei Ivanovich Sokolov is not so lucky. He goes to Berlin, not Finland, and now he has to die. He was with the KGB before he decided to defect. Nobody important or even particularly high-ranking, but he was a friendly and sociable fellow, the kind who would happily share his vodka with you and then buy you some more just to make you smile. That sort of person tends to hear many secrets. They’re not told exactly what it is he knows, but it’s clear that some high-up drunken Party official has told Sokolov things he shouldn’t have: the Chairman himself calls Dmitri, one of the officers, concerning it, sounding flustered, and demands their very best agents be sent to contain the damage.
The Winter Soldier and Natalia share a knowing look when they receive this news. Chairman Khrushchev no longer possesses the same clout he did a fortnight ago; no longer commands the same loyalty he might have a year ago. Kennedy called his most dangerous bluff, and he gave in like any beaten cur. The wizard behind the curtain has been revealed to the world. The country sees him now in daylight: one more sad aging bureaucrat, small and fat in his coat with all its medals.
But orders are orders, and all orders must be obeyed. They travel to Berlin the next day. They’re innocuous in nice clothes as they check into the hotel in the West, a young wealthy couple here on a holiday, laughing and clutching suitcases and speaking perfect American English. The very best lies are made up of half-truths.
The problem starts early on.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been to New York,” says the girl behind the counter in the lobby, with a smile, when she picks up on the Winter Soldier’s accent. “Cold there yet?”
He freezes. His mouth opens and then shuts again, as he blinks rapidly. The girl looks at him in concern.
Smoothly, Natalia says, “Getting there. Nice this time of year, though. You should visit again.”
The Winter Soldier frowns to himself. “You gotta—you gotta—dress warm though, hey,” he says, inexplicably, out of nowhere. “Pack an extra coat. Don’t want you gettin’ sick again.”
The girl smiles at him politely, confused. “I’ll be sure to do that. Well, uh—here’s your room key, anyway, sir.”
Natalia holds her breath until they’re safely upstairs, focusing on keeping her movements relaxed and natural.
“I—I’m sorry,” he says, as she locks the door to their room behind them. “I don’t. I don’t know what—”
“It’s alright,” she forces herself to say. “It’s fine. No harm done.”
No harm done, she says, and that’s a lie. She knows what she’s just witnessed. He’s remembering things, pushing up like hardy weeds through the haze of his conditioning, and she has no idea what to do about it. Report it? They’d kill him, and her as well, maybe.
“Come on,” Natalia says, to draw his attention back to the matter at hand. Reluctantly his gaze focuses on her. “Show me the files the Centre gave you. We’ll plan this now. Get it over with.”
*
She plans it, in the end. He’s too unsettled and distracted for that. He perches on the edge of the desk in their room, watching her while she goes over photographs and maps and contemplates trajectories.
“Not here,” he says once, pointing at the building she’s marked out for him to take the shot from. Natalia will be ground support. There’s no reason for her to engage Sokolov directly; better to have her watching down low and the Winter Soldier watching up high, with a rifle. It won’t be subtle, but it will be fast. It has to be fast. Both of them agree that Sokolov is likely to leave the country in a day or two.
“No?” she asks, chewing on the end of her pen as she frowns at the page.
“No. Too close. Not enough cover. Might be spotted.”
“If they spot you we’ve done something wrong,” she says, but circles another building instead. “There. Better?”
“Better,” he agrees, and she still can’t stop herself from smiling at the praise.
*
Sokolov is staying with a sympathetic diplomat in a nice townhouse. A decent neighbourhood; the sort you might raise your children in. She tails his car back to it, a two-way radio tucked into her coat pocket.
“Two bodyguards,” she murmurs into it, sitting on a bench down the street. “Bad at their jobs, though. Didn’t notice me following them.”
“They won’t be a problem,” says the Soldier, perched on a nearby roof. She can hear clicking and rustling; he’s assembling his rifle. “When you hear the shot, get out of there.”
“Yes, I have done this before, thank you,” she says.
He doesn’t respond. He’s been off all day. It happens, sometimes. The woman at the hotel spooked him.
Finally Sokolov’s bodyguards are done with their perimeter checks. They motion for him to open the car door, one standing close to him and the other at the door of the apartment. “Got it lined up,” the Soldier murmurs, as soon as Sokolov appears.
Sokolov is a heavy-set man, with a moustache to rival Stalin’s, dressed in heavy autumn clothes that will do nothing to stop a bullet. None of this surprises Natalia; it was all in the file they were given. No, what surprises her is the child that comes running out of the apartment to greet him: a little girl, seven or eight, with dark hair and a bright blue coat. She thinks frantically, trying to adjust for the unexpected event. A civilian shield? Would he be so cruel? Others, yes, but him?
The girl jumps into her father’s arms, and a moment after that she hears the crack of the shot.
Sokolov cries out. The little girl screams. The shot wasn’t fatal, she sees immediately. He is only bleeding at the shoulder.
“Fuck,” the Soldier swears over the two-way. “Jesus fuck, where did the fucking kid come from?”
The bodyguards are poorly trained, but even they know where to look for a sniper. They pull out their guns, scanning the rooftops. Sokolov stumbles to his feet and grabs his daughter’s hand, running into the gathering crowd. Natalia thinks fast, cataloguing escape routes in her head. She knows where they’ll go. She can cut them off.
She hears two more shots as she runs along the rooftops: from a rifle, not a pistol. The bodyguards are dead, then. Idiots. She drops into the alleyway just as Sokolov runs into it, as predictable as she thought he would be.
He cries out, stumbling backwards in fear. “Ah! Oh, God—don’t—we haven’t done anything—”
The Winter Soldier stalks silently up behind him, metal arm gleaming.
Cornered, now, Sokolov looks between them frantically, panting. “I haven’t done anything,” he repeats.
“You know what you’ve done, Sergei Ivanovich,” Natalia says gently. “You know what the price is.” This is the price; always the price.
He closes his eyes. “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t hurt my daughter. Please.”
She expects the Soldier to ignore this, but then he says, very quiet: “The girl, Natalia. Take the girl away. She doesn’t need to see this.”
She nods and walks over, picking up the squalling sobbing child and taking her away from her father. The girl just cries harder, beating her tiny fists ineffectually against her chest. “No!” she screeches. “No! I don’t want to. No, no, no.”
There’s red all down the front of Solokov’s coat now. “Go with her,” he says through gritted teeth. “It’s alright, dear one. You can go with her. Everything is alright.”
Natalia kneels down a short distance away, keeping a tight grip on the girl, as the Soldier steps forward behind her, eyes dead. The alley already smells like blood.
“Look at me, little one,” Natalia says, and smiles when the girl obeys, her face blotchy and tear-stained. “That’s it. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
She sniffs. “Raisa.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
Raisa scrubs at her face and nods, making the little hiccupping sobs of children. “That’s—that’s what everybody says.”
Natalia takes a risk and looks over her shoulder. The Soldier draws one of the knives holstered at his thigh, glinting in the light, and meets her eyes. She lets out a breath and turns back to the girl. No child should witness this.
“What’s happening?” Raisa asks, eyes huge and confused. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
“We’re here to help your papa,” Natalia says.
“He’s hurt,” she sniffles.
“Yes, but don’t you worry about that. My comrade over there is fixing him right up, hmm? He’ll be just fine. You just need to sit with me for a moment. You just need to look at me. Can you do that?”
Raisa nods frantically, her lower lip trembling, and all of a sudden Natalia finds herself with an armful of child, squeezing her tight and burying her face in her collar. “Hush,” Natalia says. From behind her she hears a grunt; the wet gasps of someone trying to breathe through blood flooding their mouth and lungs. “Hush, Raisa, little one. You’re okay. We’re okay. Everything is okay.”
She closes her eyes and holds on, murmuring nonsense words and lullabies to quiet her. Во поле берёза стояла, she sings, the song from a childhood spent in dark rooms and torture chambers and boxing rings. Во поле кудрявая стояла. Люли люли, стояла. Люли люли, стояла . Over and over, until she hears the Winter Soldier come up behind her and knows it’s done.
“The Centre will want us to bring her in,” he says, dull and quiet.
She doesn’t say anything.
“If we take her,” he continues, “you know what they’ll do to her. You know what happens.”
“I know,” she says. God, does she know. The little girl squeezes her tighter. Can Natalia do that? Doom this sweet small thing to that life? There’s no escaping it. Not alive. She can’t turn this child into a killer. She wouldn’t wish that upon anyone. She’s seen what the Red Room does to girls like Raisa.
“There was a struggle,” Natalia hears herself say, as if from a distance. “It was regrettable, but she couldn’t be allowed to escape. They’ll believe that.”
There’s a pause. The Winter Soldier tosses his handgun on the ground next to her, smeared with blood where his fingers touched it. “Do it.”
He won’t do it himself. This is a test, she thinks. It’s always a test. She has to do this, to save her own life, and the Winter Soldier’s, and even Raisa Sergeyevna’s, in the end. But she can’t do this as herself. Not if she wants to sleep at night. All these dark things must be done from a distance. It’s what she has always admired about snipers. Her fingers close around the gun.
She casts off Natalia Romanova like a shroud.
The Black Widow puts one neat silenced bullet into the base of Raisa’s skull.
*
They throw the bodies in the Spree, their jackets weighed down with stones. It’s not unusual. In the months since the Wall went up dozens have died in the river trying to make it to the West, shot at by the border guards or left to drown or both. Their handlers will punish them for this, but the plausible deniability is there, at least, and she knows the state will make it work. Natalia used to laugh at people for wanting to leave. She doesn’t now.
The Winter Soldier is quiet while they work. He’s a gory mess; his torso and arms and neck slippery with someone else’s blood, his clothes soaked through with it, his gaze vacant. She had to give him her woollen coat to wear over his clothes until they made it back to the hotel. He took it from her numbly, shrugging it on and doing up the buttons mechanically. He’s somewhere else entirely, all hollowed-out and empty. She doesn’t know where he’s gone or how to reach him, but he lifts up Sokolov’s cooling corpse and tips it over the riverbank without needing to be told, and walks in silence back to their hotel after that, sticking to alleys and dark corners. He doesn’t forget his training.
They go in through the fire exit. They make it to the room unseen around dusk, the Soldier trailing behind her. Neither of them talks about what has just happened: a mission that was almost a failure, with both of them spotted in broad daylight, the assassination attempt and exactly who ordered it all too apparent. Department 13 does not tolerate failure. In hours, they will know of this; know that the fabled Winter Soldier missed a shot because he couldn’t kill a child.
She strips out of her uniform as soon as they’re inside, drawing the curtains and changing into a nightdress. He doesn’t watch her. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the opposite wall, frowning, lost in his own head. He’s dripping blood onto the floor. She sits down next to him, waiting.
Eventually she tires of this. “Get up, Soldier,” Natalia says, pulling him to his feet. “You’re getting blood on the bed.”
He blinks at her dazedly.
“Come on,” she says then, hand on his shoulder to guide him where she wants, and she isn’t the sort to pity yet she pities him now; struck with a sudden pang of sorrow at the sight of this useless thing, this stringless puppet crumpled and blood-splashed in her hotel room. He follows without a single complaint. Of course he does.
Natalia sits him down on the edge of the sink, in the end; kneels down in front of him to unlace his boots like he is a child. He sits hunched over, gripping the porcelain so tight she half-expects it to crack; staring right through her, at nothing. Expression blank as it had been when she’d first seen him, all those months ago.
She tugs off his boots, and then his socks too, and maybe on another day she would have smiled at his innocuous bare feet, but as it is she only moves on to remove his kneepads, the small sharp knives he has buckled at his thighs, the guns holstered above them. She unbuckles his belt and lays it on the sink with his other gear. The weapons look strange arrayed between the wrapped soaps and complimentary hand towels; violence unexpected and shocking amongst all that domesticity.
Natalia has to stand up to work on the straps of his shoulder holster. This is where the blood is worst. It’s everywhere, so much of it that she wonders if he had held Sokolov against his chest while he bled out. Her fingers slip on it as she undoes the buckles. There is blood drying on his throat; gummed in his stubble. He looks like a wild animal after a feast. She slides the holster off his shoulders.
He stinks of warm metal and cordite, pressed against her like this. They are so close here; close enough that she can feel his breath on her neck, like lovers, or maybe a mockery of them. She has his vest unbuttoned, and is pushing aside the leather to pull down the zips underneath when he grabs her hand. She stills. “Don’t,” he says. “You don’t need to—I can do that.”
It is the first thing he’s said in hours. She steps back. “Sure.”
He undresses then, with shaky perfunctory movements, no performance in it now. It isn’t the time for that. His right hand trembles. She turns to go, feeling like a stranger.
“Natasha.”
She looks back at him. He stands there naked under the harsh light, jaw clenched and shoulders tense. There is nothing sexual about it: he looks small, and sad, and scared. Natalia is struck again by how young he is, with his hair tucked behind his ears and eyes wide. He is just a child, covered in blood and confused. Had she ever been so young? Or had youth been stolen from her with everything else?
He licks his lips; swallows and looks away. “Stay?”
He asks haltingly, like even this simple request would be denied. He asks in English.
So she stays.
They stare at each other for a moment, standing there in the quiet of the bathroom, before he reaches out and touches her shoulder with trembling fingers, curling them around the strap of her dress, where she hadn’t quite managed to wipe all the blood away. Bruises are blooming there from an old fight. “You need to. Get clean,” he says.
“So do you,” she says.
He swallows, throat working. “Yeah.”
She turns away, then, shucks her thin dress on the tiles and turns on the faucets, him waiting behind her like a good little pet. The pipes squeal in protest when she turns the heat up. He likes it hot, she knows, hot enough to colour your skin in seconds. She supposes he spent so much of his life in the cold.
“Come on, then,” she says once the water is running. He steps under the spray. Quietly, he moves to sag against the wall, cheek pressed to the tile and eyes closed. Natalia lets him. She has her own routine to follow; shakes out her hair and tips her head back, angling it into the jet of water. This is supposed to be a romantic action, isn’t it? Isn’t that what people said? Take a shower with your young lover: crammed in a small space with the steam getting to your head, with your hips and thighs and shoulders touching; you won’t get clean, but at least you’ll be relaxed by the end. Young lovers: giggling; touching; carefree. Normal.
Instead she just feels—disquieted. The space is small but it’s oppressive, a little cage of glass and porcelain, and the lights are too bright, reveal too much. The steam hangs in the air like fog. They aren’t touching. She washes her hair in silence.
When she’s done she looks over her shoulder: and yes, just as she thought, there he is, still unmoving. He must feel her staring because he opens his eyes after a moment, watching her quietly. His real hand is curled over his stomach. It looks like he’s shielding some dreadful injury from her. Maybe he is. How can she help him? A machine you can repair; a dog you can comfort. The Winter Soldier she could order to be calm. He hasn’t been the Winter Soldier for weeks. She doesn’t know what he is now. The water around their feet is tinged red.
She sighs. It’s not long-suffering, just pained. It’s hard to watch him like this. “Soldier,” she says, and that gets his attention, his eyes lifting to meet hers.
“Natasha.” His voice is rough. Ah, yes: the girl with a name, and the machine without one; known only by its profession. It’s an ugly contrast.
She steps closer, takes his hand in hers to curl her fingers around the bloodied metal of his wrist. “You need to wash this off,” she murmurs, as if it were that easy. As if all blood washed away so cleanly, with just hot water and some care.
He stares at their hands, at their one point of contact, as if it’s an alien thing, not to be trusted. Natalia is so much smaller than him. He could break her arm in an instant if he wished it. She doesn’t quite know why she trusts him not to, even unstable as he is.
“I don’t,” he tries, and has to stop. “I can’t—I—”
“I know,” she says quietly. Does she? It doesn’t matter. “Here. Let me help.”
She picks up the soap, lays it over his chest. That wasn’t what he’d meant, probably, but it would have to do. It seems to soothe him. He quietens, watching her wipe the blood from his skin, work gentle fingers through the hair on his chest to work the soap into a pink lather. He shivers when she runs her hands over his shoulders and closes his eyes, wet hair falling into his face.
“Natasha,” he says, sounding miserable and wrecked, swallowing over and over. He hides his face in the crook of her neck. “Natashenka.”
There’s nothing she can say. How could there be? What platitudes can Natalia offer; what reassurances? There are none to give, or at least none that don’t feel hollow. She holds him close, takes hold of his metal hand again and lifts it up. Water runs off it in little rivulets. There are gaps in the plating where she can see the circuitry underneath, all gummed up with blood that isn’t his. It feels uncomfortably intimate, like she is staring at his insides, all fragile and exposed, like he is a rat laid out on a dissection table. Is this him, underneath it all? Just wires? Or is there yet bone beneath the servos and cables; something still human lurking at the centre? And if he’s not human, not anymore, then—Christ, the thought makes her sick—what does that make her? What is she, this killer of children? What is she?
She digs her fingers in and cleans the blood away.
Red runs down the drain. The water beats hot down over her back. He’s quiet for a long time, as she combs out the knots in his hair with her fingers. When he finally speaks it’s unexpected. “I’m sorry,” is what he says, like he’s remembered how to speak again, into the silence. He has his real arm around her back, clinging. “I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” she reminds him.
He laughs, quiet, hoarse and pained. An ugly sound. “Liar. I couldn’t take the—the fucking shot, Christ, Natalia, Natasha,” and there it is, again, these unfamiliar colloquialisms and the casualness, and she’s not surprised when he runs a hand through his damp hair and continues in English, “I don’t even know why, God, that stupid kid. What do kids matter? I’ve killed kids before. How many kids do you think I’ve killed? Ten? Twenty?”
He’s looking at her, eyes shining, and she doesn’t think he expects an answer and doesn’t have one to give, anyway, just shrugs.
“It didn’t matter,” he says. “They—the handlers—they didn’t care. It shouldn’t matter. So why did—why does it matter to me? What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” she says, slowly.
He makes that choked laugh again, gaze flicking to her hand on his arm. “Why are you doing this?”
She lets go abruptly; steps away. “Do you want me to stop?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Natalia stares at him.
“You don’t have to,” he says. “You shouldn’t.”
She lifts her chin, forces herself to look confident, wet and naked in a room with a killer. She won’t say it, can’t tell him something so cruel, but. “You know why.”
His brows crease, mouth curling into the start of a snarl: but then he understands, and his expression goes slack for just a moment, like he’s been shot in the gut. “Natasha—”
She doesn’t want to look at him, doesn’t want to hear whatever platitudes or stammered apologies or—even worse—silences he has to offer. She clenches her jaw, turns away. He doesn’t stop her when she pulls back the glass screen, or when she steps out onto the tile and gathers a towel around herself, her movements jerky and furious. He doesn’t say anything at all.
*
In the main room Natalia busies herself with menial tasks: moving around the room and picking clothes off the floor, rearranging the small collection of personal items she’s left on the bedside table. In the end she stands in front of the cheap mirror glued to the wall and combs her hair. She’s tugging too hard, angry at herself, and when the brush snags she hisses and tosses it at the floor. Natalia pinches the bridge of her nose. Her reflection looks tired. Harried. What’s left of her makeup is smudged, but she can’t summon the energy to get rid of it. What a mess. Stupid girl, her conscience chastises. She’s not surprised that it sounds like Ivan. Stupid, stupid girl.
The shower shuts off behind her. Of course he wouldn’t take any longer than necessary. She tenses, staring resolutely at the mirror as he walks out, naked and eyes downcast. He reclaims his previous spot on the edge of the bed, and they stare at each other for a moment in the mirror.
“I’m sorry,” he says abruptly.
She turns around with a sigh, shoulders slumping. “You keep saying that.”
He offers her a shrug.
She goes to sit next to him. He watches her; she watches the floor. The carpeting looks like it hasn’t been changed since the war.
“Gonna keep saying it,” he says eventually, into the silence. She looks at him questioningly. “Sorry. I mean. Got a lot to be sorry for.”
Don’t we all, she thinks. “Don’t dwell on the wrong you’ve done,” she says. “Forget about it. Better you’re alive and a liar than dead and a martyr. The game is survival. There’s no right or wrong way to play, as long as you’re alive at the end.”
“Is that what you think?” he asks. “Or did they tell you that?”
“That’s what I have to think. Don’t tell me you want to die.”
“Not right now,” he says, soft.
Natalia looks at him, and—she can see every single emotion raw on his face, so ridiculously human now that the blood is cleared away. She can’t help it; she tilts his chin up with one finger and leans in.
He shakes his head. “Natasha, wait.”
She does.
“I’m not a good person,” he murmurs sad against her mouth, like this is some terrible secret: a warning; a stay back. Don’t feed the wolves, little girl. Don’t feed them, or else they will come back, again and again, licking the blood from your palms and letting you run your fingers through their fur, until the cold day comes when your sacrifices are not enough and they turn on you, snarling and wild-eyed in the snow.
That day will come. She doesn’t doubt this. They will punish him for this transgression, she knows, and the next time they meet he will be muzzled again and his eyes will be dead, and when it comes to a fight there will only be one survivor. But that day will not come just yet. Besides: she does not fear feral things. She learned long ago that the only way to survive amongst wolves was to become one. There is only one answer she can give.
“Neither am I,” she says, and kisses him.
He makes a wounded noise, low in his throat, and kisses back. His lips are chapped and rough from hours of him biting at them, and she can taste the smallest hint of blood still. He’s gentle, but she wouldn’t mind if he wasn’t. Her hand comes up to cup his jaw, rubbing her thumb along the stubble there, and he sucks in a breath, eyes slipping closed as if to help him focus on it. She leaves hers open; watches the raw emotion on his face. She won’t forget this. She kisses him with her eyes open because she has to remember this. If they take it from both of them then—then did it happen at all? If there is nobody left to recall something, and there are no histories in which it was recorded, then it ceases to be. This is the lesson Natalia has been learning all her life.
She licks at his mouth to feel him tremble. He lays his metal hand over hers, and she can feel the alien coolness of it, hear the clicks as tiny false finger bones adjust to align with her real ones. She turns her hand over so that they are touching palm-to-palm. He threads their fingers together immediately. In a rush she realises that she has seen men die from this grip, now so gentle on her skin.
She lets her other hand roam, from his jaw across his throat where she can feel his pulse jumping, can feel him swallow at the touch, and then further down, tracing his collarbone and ghosting her fingertips over a nipple—he jerks; pants against her lips—and down and down again, running over the jut of his hip, until her hand is on the inside of his thigh. When she touches his half-hard cock he groans; tugs his head and his hand back and stares at her, like he’s afraid of what he might do if he keeps touching her with the weaponized parts of him. That he’d crush her or rip her throat out with his teeth, too caught up in the animal feeling. His eyes are very blue, though, and they are human. Natalia isn’t afraid.
“Natasha,” he says, tongue darting out to wet his lips. He looks at her and then away, as though it’s too much for him, gaze flicking down to where she’s stroking him. He swallows. “Natasha,” he says again. Like a mantra; like a prayer.
She smiles, releases her grip to place a hand over his warm human shoulder and push him back against the sheets. He blinks up at her dazedly amongst the pillows and smiles back, tentative; that crooked mournful smile she loves so much. “You,” she says, because she has no name for him.
“Me,” he agrees. Me, he says, because in this room they can acknowledge self. They are their own people here. Natalia undoes her towel and lets it fall to gather around her hips. He tugs at it, tossing it aside to land somewhere on the floor. Then he arches up to kiss her, his hands covering her hands, and she meets him halfway. It’s gentle. It’s human.
There are none of the animal behaviours of the first time, now: no stalking, no lunging, no growling and roaring and rending of flesh. They could be tame. They were civilised beasts, civilised beasts for Comrade Khrushchev’s civilised shining future, where all the animals would walk upright in nice new dresses and live in bright new dachas; forgetting their wildness, stamping it out like cigarette butts in the name of common unity. They had come to him as wolves and he had asked them to be dogs again, and here they were, actors to the end, licking and panting softly and whining into each other’s mouths. Show your belly, beg for forgiveness; forget the shine of your partner’s teeth in the dark.
He gathers her up in his arms, so she’s straddling his thighs, and kisses messy and sweet at the corner of her mouth; over and over, desperately, asking dog-like for salvation. She can’t give him that. What can she give him? A chance to feel real, maybe. Something that they both need. She sucks his lower lip into her mouth, gasps when his metal hand finds her breast and strokes, thumb rubbing over the nipple.
His real hand slides down her spine and comes to settle on her hip. She can feel his cock against her thigh, fully hard now. She rolls her hips against his to make him moan. “What do you want?” she breathes, their mouths still touching.
“Nothing,” he says, metal fingers straying to her belly, brushing through the wiry hair lower down. “You.”
She smiles, just a little. “You can have that.”
So he runs the tips of his fingers over her, presses their mouths together again. His touch is sweet and cautious. Some of the surety of the last time is missing. She wonders which is closer to the truth, to whatever man he had been once, but then again, people like them have many truths.
His fingers slide further back, the metal tracing cool along her labia, and she knows what he’s doing—squirms with it; gasping—so she’s not surprised when he slips two inside her. She lets out a shaky breath anyway and bears down on him, on the ridged alien part of him, squeezes around the digits as if he could feel it. He can’t. He bites his lip anyway.
Natalia rocks back against him, fucking herself on his hand, as he watches, at once reverent and mournful. He angles his wrist so that his thumb can rub at her clit. She groans.
“You like that, huh,” he murmurs, crooking his fingers to press against her insides right where it’s sweetest.
She makes a choked sound. “Sure,” she says, voice shaky.
His mouth curves up into a little ghost of a smile, as he teases her inside and out. “Sure,” he echoes.
“Thought you were going to fuck me, though,” she manages to say. “Isn’t that what you want?”
He tilts his head, movements slowing, and she realises that she’s said the wrong thing.
She looks down at him. “Because that’s what I want,” she says. “I want that.”
He nods, and slips his fingers free, rubbing his thumb over her clit one more time as he pulls his hand away. She circles her thumb and forefinger around the base of his cock and braces herself; hand splayed over his heart as she lowers herself onto him with a shaky sigh.
It feels good. Not just the animal pleasure of it—though that’s sweet also, the feel of him heavy inside her, dragging against her with every little movement and pulling gasps from both of them—but something else, ephemeral and less easy to define. Something about the light, and the closeness, and the way he’s looking at her. She pulls herself up; lets gravity tug her down again. He swallows, and murmurs her name, hands running over her hips and sides and belly, tracing over her clit and further back, where they’re joined, his eyes fluttering shut as she moves. He barely needs to touch her, she feels hot and wet and swollen already, aching with it. But he does anyway, and it’s good, it’s so good.
They’re pressed together. The world narrows to jolts of sensation, of experience, breaking through the haze of pleasure like sun through shaded clouds. His fingertips trace the line of her spine. She breathes against his throat. His heartbeat is thunderous beneath her hand, thudding in her ears: or maybe that’s her own that she hears and feels. There’s no difference now. They’re the same creature, joined together. It’s ugly and scarred, maybe; monstrous and misshapen, but it’s alive. It’s alive. He’s alive, and she’s alive too, in this place. She wants to not be afraid.
When he comes he’s quiet, tipping his head back. “Ah,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut, metal hand fisting in the sheets. “Ah—I—Christ, Natasha. Natasha.” He shudders, shaking underneath her. His damp hair falls across his face. She can feel him come inside her, feel the heat and the wetness of it, the way his cock twitches. She holds him close until it’s over, him breathing shakily in her ear while she presses kisses to the side of his face.
He turns his face half into the pillow, hair falling into his eyes, mouth red and swollen. His face is wet; she realises all of a sudden that he’s crying. He’s beautiful like this. “Natasha,” he says again, quiet, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to say it—voice what she won’t—but. No. He doesn’t. “Hey. C’mere. Come up here, baby doll.”
Not once has he ever called her that. His voice is thick with misery. There’s a foreign accent curling around his tongue like smoke, and she feels a sudden pang of grief, of regret, of love: for the people they are now; for the child he must have been and she never was; for the future she knows lies in wait for them when they return to the daylight world. The Winter Soldier was a person once, and she knows a ghost of that man is looking at her now. Did he have friends, in whatever life he’d led before? Did his mother love him, not knowing that the smiling boy she was raising would grow to be a killer? Had he walked in an American spring with some other girl, happy and in love, and called her sweet things also? All of these things are lost to them.
She goes to him willingly then, pulling off his softening cock without wincing, and he settles her thighs around his shoulders, hands cupping her ass to hold her in place as he licks sweet up into her. She’s wet, so wet and open—can he taste himself on her?—and she cries out at the first touch of his tongue, soft and warm.
“Oh—oh,” she starts, hand tangling in his hair; and here is where she’d murmur his name, but they took that from him, too. “Good boy,” she says instead. “Just like that. Good boy.”
He groans at the praise, rewarding her with firmer swipes of his tongue. He’s not trying to tease, now, intent on giving Natalia her own release, and he mouths at her gently, licking over her folds and around her clit steadily; over and over until she’s gasping above him. She tells herself she’s going to watch, to keep her eyes open, but he looks up at her through his lashes and she’s not sure if she can.
She’s close, so close, and then he gets his mouth around her clit and sucks hard, and that’s it, she’s coming hard, head thrown back and eyes squeezed shut. Her orgasm crashes over her, overwhelming and violent, and she thinks that somewhere in the deafening pleasure she hears the Soldier murmur her name. Natalia clutches him close and holds on.
*
They lie next to each other, after, their legs tangled together. Neither of them speaks for a long time. He blinks at her. The low light from the lamp behind him casts highlights on his hair; throws his face into shadow. She reaches out to run her fingers over his lips. His face and mouth are still wet with spit and her slick. At the touch he closes his eyes. He leans into it, so starved for touch that even this is something good to him.
“Natalia,” he murmurs. She hums, brushing his hair back from his face, tucking the long stray strands behind his ear.
They’re both still; both gone to that quiet place you go after sex, warm and gold and solitary. She feels—she feels—calm, lulled into a sort of dreary restfulness. This feels wrong, somehow. How can Natalia be quiet? How can she be calm? It’s over, all of it; they fought their battle and lost. She knows how this has to end. The Department won’t tolerate these breaches of protocol. They’ll kill her, probably, once she delivers her report. She doesn’t think they’ll kill him—he’s too valuable for that; too much money and time spent on him—but she knows at the end he’ll wish he’d died. Or he would, if he knew that much. They know how to bring even the wildest dog to heel. He’ll have those dead eyes again.
She’s aware in the background of the Soldier’s movements. He gets up, crosses the room. The light in the bathroom goes on for a moment. There’s the sound of running water. The light goes off. The bed dips as he sits down next to her, hand warm on her shoulder. She looks up at him.
“Here,” he says, offering her a white washcloth. She wants to laugh at this mundane gesture, but she knows that would spook him, skittish as he is. Instead she smiles, sitting up to take it from him. She runs it over her thighs first, and then between her legs, cleaning off the slick mess there. The Soldier watches her calmly, in the eerie still way he does.
Natalia tilts her head, considering. “Come here,” she says, and he does, shifting closer with a tiny frown. She puts a hand on his chin, holding him in place, and wipes at his jaw gently with the clean side of the cloth. His eyes widen faintly in surprise. He doesn’t move away, though, and with more care than she’s done anything in her life Natalia cleans the last traces of her from his skin. There’s some finality about this action: a sacred obliteration, water removing all the sins committed during the night. Is this a baptism, in its own way? She is unfamiliar with holy things. What can’t water remove? Blood, passion, tears. All of this washed away. They will have to be blank slates again.
“Lie down,” she tells him when she’s done. “Turn the light off.”
He does. Natalia pulls the blanket over their shoulders and gathers him close, moonlight and the glow from the city striping the bed in stark black and white. He hides his face in her neck.
“If you hadn’t been there today,” he says then, his breathing ragged. “If you hadn’t—”
“You would have chased him down eventually,” she says. “Nobody outruns people like us. You did well. You did your duty.”
He laughs, and asks, voice dull and hoarse: “Did I? Is that what that is?”
She shouldn’t answer him, she knows. She shouldn’t encourage this—malfunction. But he’s been malfunctioning for a long time now. “We all have to do our duty,” she says, though it feels hollow. “You have to suffer, sometimes, so that other people don’t have to. We do what we do for the good of the Soviet state.”
“Like good little soldiers,” he agrees, bitter, in English.
“You are a soldier,” she reminds him gently. “We’re both soldiers.”
He’s quiet. Then he says, blasphemous in his New York accent, ragged and angry and exhausted: “I’m tired of being a soldier.” In his voice there’s fury, and pain, and misery. “I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of killing. I’m tired, Natasha. I’m—tired. Just tired. They told me I’d get to go home. I wanna go home.”
She doesn’t know who ‘they’ is, but it’s not the Department, she’s sure of that much. Never would they say that to him. Who, then? Someone else; something dragged up from the mess of his mind, whatever he’s starting to remember. He’s not supposed to remember, she knows. He’s not supposed to question orders; he’s not supposed to miss his shots; he’s not supposed to buy her Coca-Cola and laugh with her in cafes and take her to bed. She can’t think of a single thing to say, except—except. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” he says, his voice thick and wet. “I know you are. I know. God, Natalia. Jesus—Jesus fucking Christ. I know.” His voice cracks on the last syllable, and then he’s crying for real, shoulders shaking as he sobs into her collarbone, gripping her tight enough to bruise.
She doesn’t cry. She can’t cry. She knows sorrow and hurt and misery well, is old friends with every single one of those wretched things, but she exhausted all her tears years ago, had them beaten out of her along with the tenderness she shouldn’t be feeling now. Natalia has never allowed herself the comfort of tears. There were always people watching. There were always new reasons to not give in to the sick and heartsore feeling in her chest: the girls in the Red Room, at first, who she had to love and be strong for, else nobody would; later, sneering men in military uniforms who she spat at in handcuffs and refused to give any satisfaction to, not any, and tears would have been most satisfactory of all.
No, she doesn’t cry now, but it’s a near thing. “It’s okay,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut. “It’s okay. Shush, beautiful. We’re okay.” She rubs her hand over the line of his spine, like she’s seen people do in films. “We’re okay.”
He sobs quietly for a long time. It’s uglier and messier and more intimate than the sex ever was.
*
“They’re going to,” he says finally, in a whisper, or tries. He swallows; tries again. “I’m—defective.”
Yes, she wants to say. Yes, you are, and so am I. We are dogs gone rabid. Do you know what they do to dogs gone rabid?
But now isn’t the time for those sorts of truths. He is seeking comfort, and Natalia has always been a good liar. No, she wants to say, no, you are not, and it will be alright, everything will be alright: but finds with surprise that the words will not come. “Hush,” she says instead, clutching him to her breast. “Hush. Go to sleep, солдат. Go to sleep.”
“Sleep,” he repeats. His voice is rough and grainy. He snuffles and coughs; pulls his human hand away from her back to rub at his eyes. “Right. Right.”
He puts his hand in her hair, this time, instead of where it had been. He hums quietly to himself, and starts brushing his fingers through the strands. It’s nice. He keeps it up for a while longer, but it’s clear that he’s tired, worn down in the way that impotent rage and tears will make you.
They are curled around one another, like this, his face tucked into the line of her collarbone and his metal fingers pressed over her scapula. He doesn’t like to sleep on it, the arm. It must be uncomfortable. She should be surprised that she knows this, but then again, she has always been good at details.
Eventually, his movements slow, and still, his hand still tangled loosely in her hair.
*
After, when she’s certain he’s sleeping the sleep of the exhausted and is dead to the world, she gets up, quietly, and goes to the balcony. She slips on her dress, discarded on the bathroom floor, and as an afterthought takes his matchbox and his American cigarettes from their place near his rifle. Not a lighter but a matchbox, with little kitschy German art on the outside. So charmingly old-fashioned. She thinks of Ivan, and his stolen German masterpieces. All of these threads converging, in her little hotel room in West Berlin.
The city is vast beneath her. It looks like a child’s toy, from this height. It’s dark, but she can imagine it, if she could float above it and see: see the West, festooned with lights and shopping malls and new cars. In the East there are fewer lights, and less people on the streets, but new apartment blocks rise empty and skeletal out of the gloom. Progress marches on regardless of what Mr. Kennedy says. Floodlights illuminate the Wall where it snakes through the city, all concrete and barbed wire. Everywhere the scars of the past are visible. If you know where to look you can see the ruins of cathedrals and factories; stretches of road and homes torn-up and never repaired. The ghost of the war lingers here still.
Ghosts, though: ghosts are dead things; shadows flickering on the wall. They can’t touch you. They can’t hurt you. Can this be a ghost, if its presence is felt so keenly still? It’s not a gust of wind or old photograph but something tangible, all around them, affecting everything even now. Deep down, Natalia doesn’t think the war ever ended. It just became something else. It dressed itself up nicely, and signed a treaty, and moved into the fancy house of its vanquished foe, but it was still the original thing underneath. It’s colder now, maybe. The battlefields are different, and so are the soldiers. But it’s still the same old war. She shakes a single match from the box into her palm, and holds one of the cigarettes between her teeth. Drag, scrape. The light flares up fragile in her hand.
She closes her eyes. Ghosts. Their whole world; everything they fight to preserve. Won for them by ghosts. The promise of Mr. Khrushchev’s shining Soviet utopia beckons, shining bright in the gloom, drawing all weary eyes to it. It will be over soon, comrades, it whispers. It will be over soon, and you shall suffer no longer, fed always on milk and honey. You will live in brilliant sky-scraping cities, wanting for nothing, and you will go to the stars, with handsome young Yuri Gagarin in a rocket. The stars! Even this is not out of the reach of the Soviet state, comrades. Just a little longer, and then it will be over. It will be over soon.
It will be over soon. How many times has she said this to dying men and women, bleeding in her arms or choking at her feet? How many times has she repeated this, kindest of lies? What do they suffer and toil for, her comrades? For a little bit more wheat; for the smallest increase in annual production. For beef and candies that go to the tables of men like Ivan Petrovitch, and to their tables alone. They struggle and bleed and die for Mr. Khrushchev’s petty war.
Comrade Khrushchev in his comfortable throne is a tsar, ruling a kingdom founded on bones. They say this about Leningrad, greatest of cities. It is the city built on bones. Bones under the earth, the bones of hundreds of thousands: the skeletons of the serfs conscripted from across the kingdom to build Peter’s perfect city; to put its fine Parisian avenues and Grecian columns and Italian palaces in place. It was the fever that killed them, and the hunger, and the cold, and the wolves, too, when cruel winter set in. They gave their lives so that Peter the Great’s empire might live instead. Of course it is not Peter’s anymore. It belongs to Vladimir Ilyich these days. Natalia does not think he minds a little blood watering his earth.
Mother Russia has always required the services of creatures like the Winter Soldier, it seems. The Winter Soldier: who was once a man, until they took that from him with everything else. She thinks, as she smokes his cigarettes, of his haunted eyes; the softness of his mouth and the smile that sometimes lingers there. Does it matter, that this one misshapen boy is doomed to such an existence, if it helps bring about utopia? What is one man feeding the earth as fertiliser, compared to one hundred thousand? Progress marches steadily on, ignoring the blood pooling at its feet, the bones its triumphs are founded upon.
Onwards they go, upwards and upwards; up to the stars and even further still, in Yuri’s little rocket. Natalia recalls what she had heard on the radio, the day they announced the success of the Vostok mission. The Chief Designer—the rocket engineer; they never said his name—had been nervous, the newsreader said. A man, in space? In their time? Ludicrous! Something would surely go wrong, and when that happened, the engineer would be blamed. Goodbye, Chief Designer. He was so anxious that he needed pills to calm his weak heart.
What about Gagarin? Was he not worried? Maybe someone else would have been, but not Yuri Alekseyevich. At the moment of rocket launch, the Chief Designer says to him, Everything is all right. All is well. Yuri doesn’t need the reassurance. “Поехали!” he shouts back, crackling on the radio. Poyekhali! Let’s go! Let’s go, he says. To the stars; to a brighter future. It doesn’t matter how you reach them.
Yes, everything is all right. Поехали! She takes a drag of the cigarette.
*
They don’t talk about it in the morning.
Natalia had pulled the blackout curtains closed the night before, when she came inside and shut the windows and slid back into bed next to him, so the room is dim when she wakes up. Light spills through the gaps in the curtains, slanting across the floor and illuminating their gear in tiny strips: the detritus of their existence scattered across the carpet. She can see piles of bunched-up cloth, the gleaming stock of a rifle, the hairbrush she’d thrown so childishly at the floor.
The Winter Soldier, she finds—she feels uncomfortable calling him that, now, but has nothing else to name him—has curled around her in the night. His metal arm is slung low over her belly, his head resting on her breast. His face is slack with sleep. His mouth is open, just slightly. She watches him, for a while, because she can; trying to preserve every detail in her mind. He looks so innocent now, so childish. The young man he is underneath it all is revealed to her. She doesn’t want him to wake up. She doesn’t want to have to confront this. She wants to—she wants to stay here. Stay here.
But he does, eventually, of course. It’s not slow, because if you wake up slow in this line of work then one day you’ll wake up dead. He just opens his eyes, blinks at her a few times, and then he’s awake.
“Morning,” he says after a moment.
“Good morning,” Natalia says back, and then: “We need to leave.”
There’s a flash of something on his face—regret, maybe, or something else that stays unspoken—but he nods and sits up. He swings his legs over the side of the bed; runs his hand through his hair. His back is to her. The bed is warm where he’s been sleeping. “Right,” he says, and that’s that.
She gathers her things; gets dressed. He’s watching her while he does the same, she knows. She can’t bring herself to look at him. It seems like it will be easier this way: easier if she doesn’t look. There are stories they tell about this. If she turns around and meets his gaze, then like Orpheus, she will find that all her efforts will be for naught. She can’t look, or else she’ll—she’ll—press him up against the wall and kiss him until he stops making that sad face, and murmur sweet nothings to him, and run away with him like she wants to, secretly and desperately.
She can’t look. She doesn’t look.
He locks the door behind them. Click. They walk down the hallway together, Natalia looking ahead and the Winter Soldier looking behind, like prisoners heading to their executions. All the way to Moscow they say nothing about it, not a thing.
*
Moscow Centre calls them in to deliver their mission reports separately, in different parts of the facility. She is ordered to report to Dmitri Alekseyevich, an aging and unkind man with a bushy grey beard and tobacco-stained fingers. He sits in a small chair at an oversized desk, fingers steepled before him as he squints up at her. He does not offer her a seat.
“You have achieved the mission objective again, Black Widow,” he says.
Natalia stares straight ahead, staying very still.
He looks at her grimly. “That is all I can say in way of praise. The mission was completed. Barely.”
“Sir,” she begins, “I would like to apologize for my actions on assignment. The errors were mine al—”
“Oh, stop,” he snarls.
Startled, she falls abruptly silent.
“You think we are blind, here? Because we no longer work in the field, is that it? We know you. We watch our agents. We are well aware of your…infatuation with the Winter Soldier. We saw this! And we have allowed it, for a time. We have allowed it because your handler, Comrade Bezukhov, told us to allow it. That it was nothing to worry about. That you were a little girl, with a crush, and that was all.”
A little girl. Natalia knows a thing or two about being a little girl, and what that means. She will not be one again.
Dmitri thins his lips. “It is clear that this is not the case. Do you know what the Winter Soldier is, Agent Romanova?”
Yes. Yes, she does, now. A machine. A legend. A man, miserable and angry and frightened.
“The Winter Soldier,” he tells her, “is our most effective agent. Our greatest creation. The Winter Soldier is a model of Soviet obedience; science; warfare. In thirteen years, the Winter Soldier has never failed a mission it was assigned. It has never missed a shot. Not in thirteen years. Until today.”
He shuffles papers around on his desk. “Our scientists have informed us that the Winter Soldier may be attempting to—resist its conditioning. First this disaster of a mission! Played out in public, where our enemies can shame us for it, and now this—this relationship, too. Any other agent would be taken away and shot for such disobedience.”
“Yes, sir,” she says.
“But we have spent too much money on Project Winter Soldier for that, I am told, and on you as well, it seems. Favoured child of Mother Russia that you are.” He heaves a sigh. “Listen closely to me, Agent Romanova.”
Feeling cold, and full of dread, she does.
“The Winter Soldier is to be taken in for reprogramming. This is the only way to prevent further—incidents. You are to immediately cease all contact with the asset, and tomorrow morning you will report to Centre command for disciplinary action and reassignment. I—strongly advise that you comply. You are not as valuable as the Winter Soldier, Black Widow. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Natalia says again, because it is the only thing she can. She salutes. “I understand.”
*
The Soldier comes to her that evening. They have given her a private room, with a large bed and a desk and a chair, as befits her rank. She has locked the door, and the hallway is watched, but that means nothing to people like him. He slips in silently sometime after midnight.
He doesn’t say anything. There’s a bruise on his cheek that hadn’t been there this morning. His lip has been split. He stares at her, silent.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she says eventually.
“I know.”
“You can’t be here.”
“I know.”
“If they find you here—”
“I know,” he says, vicious. “I know. I don’t care. They’re going to do it anyway, though, aren’t they?”
Quiet, she says, “Yes.”
He makes a low and wounded noise. “They told you that?”
She can’t lie to him. “Yes. They did.”
“I’m not going to go with them,” he says. “They can kill me, I don’t care—I’m not going. I’m not leaving. Natasha.”
He’s tense and panicky; shaking. This room, she knows, is bugged. They will know he’s here already. They won’t be long, now.
“Come here,” she says, one last time. He goes to her and they stand together in the middle of the room, on her imported rug, his arms around her waist and his face pressed to her neck, laying gentle kisses there. She closes her eyes and tries to feel it; tries to focus on the smell and weight and warmth of him, before it is taken from her.
It takes the armed guards seven minutes to arrive.
*
There are twelve of them, in all, each with a rifle. “Winter Soldier,” one says, as he and Natalia break apart, “you are here without authorization, against explicit instructions. Stand down. Come quietly.”
He stares at them unflinching.
“Stand down,” the man repeats. “That is an order. You would disobey a direct order?”
Yes. Today, he will. She knows. The Winter Soldier has no masters today. His gaze flicks to her and then around the room: assessing, silently; cataloguing numbers and escape routes and trajectories and movements. He has the same mechanical calculating look on his face that she has seen a dozen times before a kill. This is cybernetics, then, as Glushkov tells it. Everything is zeroes and ones: governments, economics, machines and people. Yes, no. Yes, no. One. Zero. One. Zero. Ten thousand, ten hundred thousand times a second, until the map is drawn and the decision is reached.
The Soldier grins, slow and crooked and dangerous. In English, he says, in a drawl, “Fuck you, pal.”
There is a single hushed moment, and then the fight begins.
He twists, a blur of movement, and comes in low at the closest guard. The man has no chance: the Winter Soldier has snapped his neck in an instant, holding the corpse against himself like a shield as the others lift their guns, firing wildly at him in a panic. He doesn’t go for a gun. At these close quarters he doesn’t need one. He tugs a pair of knives from his belt and that’s good enough, deadly enough, for someone like him.
He raises his left arm to block the barrage of gunfire, bullets sparking uselessly off of it. Another man makes the mistake of coming too close. One of the knives flashes in the Soldier’s hand, and blood arcs bright and arterial in the air. The man falls to his knees clutching at his severed trachea.
The rest hang back, terrified—they are ordinary men, only soldiers; no match for a wild thing like him—and he seizes the opportunity, rushing them before they can get their bearings. Bullets thud into the walls, shattering glass, and the Soldier grunts like he’s been hit, but he doesn’t falter.
Natalia ducks behind the overturned table to avoid the fire. Stray shots slam into the wood, but none of them break through. They’re not aiming at her. She should fight with him, she knows. She could. Like that, they’d take a dozen men without issue. Two dozen, even, or more. But eventually there would be too many. She knows, also, that she has never been as valuable an asset as the Winter Soldier. If she lashes out now they’ll kill her for it. They might not, if she stays where she is. She is just cold enough to value survival over the glamour of a last stand.
There’s screaming, and shouting, individual words lost in the chaos. The room stinks of smoke and blood and fear. The crack of gunfire is constant, but it’s erratic: the Soldier moves too fast for them to aim, she knows. He throws a knife at one man’s neck; kicks another so hard in the chest she hears a crack, the blow sending the man flying. She understands now why they call the Winter Soldier a weapon. He is inhumanly fast, covered in blood with his teeth bared; a feral and savage beast. He is a force of nature. You can’t outwit a lightning strike. You can’t defeat an earthquake. You can only wait for it to be over.
The dozen men they sent to subdue him are dead in minutes. More pour in; this time armed with cattle prods as well as guns. For just an instant he pauses, flinching from the crackle of the electricity. It’s enough time. It’s just enough.
They rush him and he snarls, head-butting the closest one and kicking another back, but these are Department officers this time, well-used to putting down malfunctioning experiments like this. He has his metal hand around a man’s throat when one of them manages to get him in the ribs with the cattle prod. He cries out, grip loosening, and swings around to strike out blindly at the source of the pain. A mistake. Two more rush in close, bringing their batons down, and the Soldier growls, stumbling.
He is distracted by the pain and the vicious fighting. This is what they want. He doesn’t see the man with the needle in his hand until the syringe has already been emptied into his neck.
*
The soldiers force both of them to their knees, pulling on Natalia’s hair and kicking her in the ribs to move her into place. When they call in General Karpov, Ivan Petrovitch trailing behind him sadly, all she can think is: It was worth it. It was all worth it. I am a person. I am a person. I am not afraid.
*
“I am disappointed in you,” Ivan says lightly as they restrain her. “Natalia Alianovna. You were our brightest student. My greatest creation.”
She rebels against this notion; struggling futilely against the guards that wrench her hands behind her back. A creation, yes—this is what she has always been, a creation by the state and for it; a little girl broken down to her component parts and remoulded, as if on assembly line, into a weapon; suffering herself and bringing suffering also so that all need not suffer; tending, Vestal, the sacred fire of the state—but his creation, no. She is her own. She is her own. She is Natalia Alianovna Romanova, and they have not taken this from her yet. They will not take this from her. She does not belong to anyone.
She spits blood at Ivan’s feet.
He clucks his tongue. General Karpov, in the background, looks at her grim and disapproving, and steps forward.
“Why have you done this, Natalia?” Karpov asks. “A petty act of rebellion, perhaps? You should know by now that the state has ways of dealing with rebellion. You cannot think your actions would go unnoticed. You knew you would be punished. So why, then? Do not tell me it was for love. You are not so poetic as all that.”
Natalia is a liar. She has always been a liar. She is immensely talented at it. But she is hurting, and scared, and shaking. It must show on her face, even if only for an instant.
“Ah,” he says. “So it was love, then. You surprise me. I would not have thought you capable. You would love this—thing; this broken machine?” He gestures at the Soldier (her Soldier; hers), tranquilised and bleeding from the mouth, on his knees with a half-dozen guns pointed at the base of his skull. She does not flinch, but it takes effort.
Karpov scoffs. “Do you know what love is, Natalia? Love is ugly. Love is cruel. You do not need love. Your lover is the Motherland, Natalia, and her alone.” He looks almost proud. “She seeks to keep you safe. She keeps you fed, and clothed, and warm in the winter! You would have both died forgotten and unmourned in the snow if not for her tender embrace.”
You would have both died, he says. You would have both died. Never has she heard a single word on the man the Winter Soldier had once been. They will not let her keep this information. She knows, now, what they plan for her.
He smiles, as if he knows. “Yes, both of you. Ivan found you, you know, Natalia. In Stalingrad, when we retook the city. Ah, you were only small then. All alone, in the cold! You would have starved, if not for him, or frozen, if the world was kind. But the Motherland saw you, and saw what you could become. You owe her your life.”
“And you,” he says then, turning away from her. The Winter Soldier lifts his head and tries to focus. His eyes are glassy, like ice. “You. Sergeant Barnes.”
The Winter Soldier goes deathly still. Those rime-blue eyes widen in wordless shock. Through the haze of the drugs he understands; starts to struggle. But there’s no point now.
“Yes, that’s right, Sergeant. You remember that, then. I thought you might. You, what were you? A Nazi plaything? An American puppet? You were nothing. Nothing. Uncared for; left abandoned by your own countrymen to die in agony. Mother Russia heard your cries, and witnessed your suffering, and took it away. She gave you a new life, and new purpose. She took your fear from you and your pain also. I did this! I did this for all of us. For you. You are better now.”
To both of them, he continues: “Yes, better. Both of you are better now. You serve a higher purpose. With you, through you, we will bring about utopia. What can be more worthwhile, more holy, than this? The Motherland thanks you for your service, but you are not relieved of your duty just yet, soldiers.”
Ivan is looking at them both, on their knees before him. His gaze is kind, and gentle, and sympathetic. Natalia and the Winter Soldier—no, no, Sergeant Barnes, Karpov had said; at last, at the end, she has a name for him—stare at one another. She can see plain on his face all the terror he feels, all the fury and the bitterness and the love and the devotion. All these human things. She cannot—she cannot think—there is something she should say; so many things she should have said, that she now never will. She meets his gaze steadily, unflinching, and hopes that is enough.
It has to be enough.
“Well,” Ivan says, and turns to leave. “I am sorry. I hope you have both learned from this. You may start up the machine, General.”
*
It is 1963, and the world is changing.
Natalia Alianovna Romanova is twenty-three years old, and there is a certain peculiar lightness to her movements, on the morning she steps out of the Moscow State Academy of Choreography and into the crowd. She is pale, with a small nose, and red hair tied back in a modest fashion. She is also one of the most accomplished young ballerinas the school has ever seen.
Her life has been simple and tragic and full of hard work, exactly as the Motherland likes it. She had a doting mother and father, once, who had raised her in a small quaint rural cottage not an hour north of Moscow. Unfortunately they had both been killed in the war when she was small. They had died serving the Motherland, though, so that was all right. After that little orphaned Natalia had been adopted by a Mr. Bezukhov, who was a decorated war hero, and who nurtured all her many talents, and who only ever smiled kindly. She loves him very much.
He had been the one to suggest that she should practice ballet. She enjoys the dancing very much, and it furthers the glorious goal of Soviet cultural supremacy, so she is happy. She has been a ballerina for as long as she can remember.
Her work is tiring. It always leaves her exhausted and sore at the end of the day. But she would not trade it for anything. She has one vice, to deal with the stresses of the constant practice, and she fishes in her coat pockets for it now: a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes, procured at great personal cost on the black market. They’re American. She doesn’t really know why she likes them. Maybe it’s just the taste.
Natalia bundles her light coat closer around her, the wind whipping her hair around, the late afternoon sun lighting the edges of it up in brilliant copper, and goes to sit on the edge of the great fountain outside the building. She cups her hand around the cigarette as she lights it. She has been feeling troubled of late, as if she’s ill, or haunted. Sometimes she feels like someone who has set something important down on the kitchen table and turned away, and looked again only to find it gone. She feels like she has—misplaced something. What was it? It dances at the corner of her mind. Just out of reach. The fingers of one hand trail lazily in the water.
She sighs and takes a long drag of her cigarette; shakes the feeling off. Natalia thinks that she has a good life. She lives in a dormitory with other young women, and she has many friends amongst them, and she has sausage on special occasions and chocolate on New Year’s, and the heat in her room stays on all through winter. It’s a nice evening in late summer, with the lamps just being lit, everything around her alive and green. The breeze is light and cool. She has a good life. She should be happy. She is happy.
The radio and the newspapers all promise a great future. She believes them; why shouldn’t she? They are destined for glorious things. Change is coming. They will win this war, and on that day, Natalia will dance on stages in theatres in every nation, victorious. It is summer. She is content. She must be content. What is there to worry about?
She exhales smoke; watches the wind carry it upwards. The same wind pushes against the birch trees lining the square, making their leaves tremble with unseen force. The winds of change, that is what they say, somewhere. The winds of change have come to Moscow with the summer, and she will rise to meet them unflinching. She cannot quite recall now whatever it was that had troubled her.
Ah, well. It could not have been important. She drops the cigarette and crushes it under her heel, and strides forward, into the summer night, into a bright new future.