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They make her watch.
A punishment for her transgressions, and her own stupidity. She’d believed herself safe. Believed that they believed she was loyal. After all, they’d let her go free while it was her soldier who was dragged off, half conscious, and thrown in cryo while still awake.
She should’ve stuck to the original plan. Get out, don’t look back. He’d have wanted her to do that. She was a fool for trying to save him. A naive fool, and now she pays for that.
But she knows he’d never have left her behind, and why should he be the only one who gets to self-sacrifice for love?
Natalia will not play their games. They want her to feel helpless. They want her to fight her restraints. They want her to look away. They want her to beg them to stop as her soldier screams.
She stays silent, keeping her breathing under control and she will not look away. She will remember everything they do and she will pay it back a thousand times over.
Even if her soldier forgets she tells herself she will remember. She will remember him, remember what they’d been to each other.
His name is James. He’d remembered that much about himself.
His name is James and he is beautiful when he smiles. He loved to press his forehead into hers rather than kiss her (but he’d loved to kiss her, too) because he knew the pressure calmed her, grounded her. He’d loved the feeling of her fingers running through his hair. He had hesitated to touch her with his metal hand, until she’d taken it in her own and brought it to her lips.
It was a part of him. It could never scare her.
He would hum old songs when he maintained his weapons, American in origin and a decade out of date. When he sang it was sometimes – usually – in English.
He would hold her so gently, as if she deserved gentleness. Protectively, as though she was worth protecting.
It ends, eventually. When Karpov orders him to stand he does. She knows him well enough to know he’s in pain but he makes no sign of it. The look he gives the table he’d been strapped to is barely a glance. Disinterested.
She ignores Karpov when he gestures to her, she keeps her gaze focused on the solider. There’s no recognition in those brown eyes. She doubts there will be again.
“Do you know this woman?” Karpov asks.
“No, sir. Should I?” He stares back at her, through her. If she believed in a god she’d pray for a sign he’s lying.
“Natalia Alianovna Romanova,” Karpov pauses, and she knows he’s waiting for any sign he recognises this. There is nothing.
“She is a traitor,” Karpov continues. “She planned to defect, and steal from us a valuable and powerful weapon.”
She doesn’t roll her eyes at this, she doesn’t snap out that the solider, James, is no-one’s weapon. She wont give Karpov the satisfaction.
“Kill her.”
The solider carries no weapons. But that’s never been a problem for him. His metal fingers close around her throat and she fights to keep her eyes open, and fixed on his. If she is to die it will be looking into the eyes of the man she loves.
The world fades and there is darkness. She hears Karpov’s voice, very far away, bark out an order to stop.
She hears the next words, faint as they are, but takes no meaning from them:
“Have him wipe her and then put him on ice. This will not happen again.”