widows_kiss | Appointments Post

[That draws a strained laugh from her and she lifts a hand, brushing her hair back from her face as she lifts her eyes to meet his gaze.] You have no idea when I was born.

[She fidgets, giving herself a moment to carefully choose the words in how she would begin this. She'd practiced it a thousand times in her head over the past few months but all her careful words had fled her now.]

Actually, I don't even know the exact date I was born. Spring, probably. Maybe late winter. But the year was 1928.

[Bucky is silent for a long moment, and then he sits down slowly.]

Jesus.

I think you'd better start from the beginning.

There's more of a beginning than that? [Her tone is wry but she stares at her hands now, as if having her gaze focused there instead of him will make this somehow easier to tell.]

I... don't know how to tell you any of it, except through what happened to me. And what I'm about to tell you... let's just say that "classified" is a severe understatement.

I don't remember my parents. I was young when they died. There was a fire, I'm told. I was found by a man who pulled me from the snow and rubble. He was a soldier and he handed me over to the government, leaving my upraising to Mother Russia, along with many other young orphaned girls. I was brought up by an organization known as Department X, at a facility called the Red Room. There were many of these, all over the country. They took in children at a young age. Ones no one would miss or ask questions about. Ones that had nowhere else to go.

They trained us, conditioned us, raised us to be the perfect soldiers for our country. [Her voice had gone quiet, her gaze distant, recalling the story with an emotional detachment, as if it had happened to someone else and was nothing more than a just that. A story.] I was part of a training regime that was known as the Black Widow Ops. We were supposed to be the best. They... enhanced us. There was experimentation - similar, I later discovered, to what the Red Skull and Hydra tried in duplicating the serum of your Captain. As you can see, it had some affect, if not in the same way.

[She glances over at him then, her green gaze steady on his face as she paused and licked her lips, trying to find the words for this next part.] When I was older, I was among the most promising in the program. It qualified me for more specialized and intensive training and I was given a mentor to train under. He was... he was an assassin for the Red Room, one only whispered about, because his reputation was so secret and terrifying. No one knew his real identity. He was only known as the Winter Soldier.

He's the one who taught me how to fight. How to survive. Almost every trick I know, I learned from him, or the basis of it. I've had a long time to build off them, make them my own, but at the core... At the core, they're all him. He was the most important person in my world. One of the only ones I trusted in those days, because trust was seen as a weakness. Any emotion was. I was designed to be a killer. Emotionless, detached, deadly. He'd had the same training. Worse, maybe. I don't know what he endured before I met him. I don't know how much he knew either. The Red Room was... fond of mental manipulation. Brainwashing. Implanting memories or orders in your subconscious so you didn't know what was real or what wasn't.

He didn't know who he was. He had no memory of a life before the Red Room. They'd created him, pieced him together and started him as a blank slate. But even then he wasn't perfect. He'd have dreams sometimes. Flashbacks. And even physically... He was a deadly assassin, but he had scars. Many scars. And his arm, his left arm. It was bionic, something the Red Room had created for him, supposedly to replace the one he had lost.

[He nods at the very beginning. He doesn't expect to like what he's about to hear, but he can respect her privacy, and whatever official red tape there is keeping her past under lock and key.

It starts off familiar enough. Lost parents, lost children... but then it becomes so much worse. One of his hands is balled into a fist in his lap, and he curls the fingers of his other hand over it, feeling the pressure of them tense and release as she speaks. He's looking at his hands but not seeing them at all. He thought Hydra was a nasty piece of work, indiscriminate as they were, but this Red Room had deliberately used children as lab rats and tried to mold them into killers. And in a horrible way this, too, is a part of the legacy Steve left. People think men like him can be made, then made into weapons. They experimented on children. On Natasha.

He doesn't know how she speaks so calmly, because he's not sure he can speak at all at the moment. He's caught somewhere between anger and a hollow kind of grief for what was done, and what wasn't. What can't be changed.

He feels her gaze on him and looks up to meet her eyes, nodding just slightly for her to continue. He realizes as soon as she says he's the one who taught me how to fight that this where he comes into the story. It feels like all the air has been punched out of his lungs. It can't be true. He wants to argue, but he can't bring himself to, right at that moment. There's something in the quiet cadence of Natasha's voice that rings too true.

He helped them do whatever it was they did to her, and who knows how many other people like her. He doesn't know how or why in God's name he lived for that, but suddenly it seems like death was easy.

His arm seems like a small thing to lose in comparison, and he thinks dully of when Steve had scolded him for joking about just that. He can't decide if it's less funny or more now.]

I don't... I don't know how to... [He swallows, and makes himself look at her, at least.] I'm sorry. For everything.

Edited 2013-03-16 02:14 (UTC)

You don't have to apologize to me, James. You never did. Not for anything.

[Her voice is soft as she shakes her head, watches him, her gaze steady and serious. She wasn't sure what he was thinking - he'd never been so easy to read and Bucky was just enough different to throw her off even further. Then again, everything she'd just told him... that was a lot to take in. A lot to even believe, considering he'd known her so short a time. Had little reason to trust she was telling him the truth. She meets his gaze, her expression calm, because she hadn't told him this for him to feel guilty, even though she knew he would. Still, she tries to explain that part a little more clearly for him.]

I don't want your apologies. I didn't tell you this so you could blame yourself for things that haven't happened yet, and that you had no choice in. You followed orders, but you weren't like them. Before I met you... I followed orders and I was. I didn't know anything differently, didn't think for myself. I only obeyed. They'd made me a weapon and I was one of the best. You... you changed that. You taught me to think. To reason. To feel.

I know this is a horrible fate for you to contemplate. Completely different than everything you struggled and fought for, believed in. I didn't want to tell you for precisely that reason. But I don't want your apologies, James, because if it weren't for you... I wouldn't be alive right now. I might never have been alive, never been more than a weapon aimed at a world I've come to love. I owe you... everything.

[He can read between the lines enough to hear what Natasha's talking around. They got involved, maybe they fell in love, and maybe they found something human in each other, there's no way for him to know. It hasn't happened yet. But either way he thinks Natasha is giving him too much credit for some things, and not enough blame for others, if everything she says is true.]

No. The only thing you could possibly owe me was the truth about what happened between us, and that's out now.

[There's a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He needs to get out of here and sort all this out. He cards his fingers through his hair.]

I think I should go.

[She doesn't visibly flinch at his words, but she feels it all the same, her hands tightening for the briefest moment in her lap, knuckles white, before she forces them to relax again. The movie's still playing on in the background, but now its just noise and she pays it no attention as she gets to her feet. She feels numb.]

Alright.

[There's something telling about her stillness, and the near total lack of reaction. He realizes too late that his first instinct has been to run, and it's going to hurt her, but it's too much.

He can't make himself stay, and he can't just leave things like this between them.]

Natasha... [When they get to the door he starts to reach for her hand but stops himself short, fingers closing on air before returning to his side.] We'll talk later.

[She meets his gaze for the briefest of moments before giving him a nod, her expression carefully blank and controlled. She opens the door and steps back to give him room. She almost feels like she should apologize, but... she doesn't even know where to start. She doesn't have any words that will make this any better. Instead, she just falls back on the same answer, because she doesn't know what else to say.

She can't make this right. She's not sure anything can.]

Alright.

[He can't read her expression or the response after it. He doesn't know what else to say either, or if he wants anything like an apology from her. On the one hand, he wishes she'd told him from the start, but on the other, some small cowardly part of him wishes she'd never told him at all, and it's just enough for him to understand.

He nods in return and steps out. He doesn't look back as he heads back down the hallway. Faint notes of music from the movie follow him until she finally shuts the door.]

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