Archive of Our Own ^beta

Everything is gray here.

James’ world has become nothing but thin, watery dawns that illuminate cold, frozen ground. Short, chilled days that bleed too quickly into long, starless nights.

It’s gray here. And nothing ever seems to thaw long enough for life to push its way out again.

That is, until he meets her.

+

She’s the first warm thing he’s seen, striking color and vibrant heat, burning so bright that the air should shimmer around her. And maybe it does; he’s too distracted taking in every shade of her to notice much else. He’s strolling the room, circling the group of recruits he’s supposed to be inspecting, but all he can concentrate on now is trying to recall the last time he saw that much color.

For the first time since they woke him, he feels something strange twist in the pit of his stomach. Something sickly, lonely. Tired. Something that reaches out with trembling fingers and grasps, searching.

James squeezes his eyes shut against it, just for a moment. Then, he finishes the orders he’s been relating and leaves without a backward glance.

+

Too quickly, though, she becomes undeniable. Scarlet hair swishing with every hit, a matching pink flush crawling along her cheekbones from the near-constant combination of biting cold and exertion. She’s all sharp edges wrapped in soft angles, steel bound in silk. And always, two sea-green eyes calculating, reasoning; sparkling with intelligence and looking right through him. Measuring. Exacting.

Soon, she’s surpassed even James’ own trainers, and it falls to him to continue her education. He gets good at looking past her, looking through her, too – anything that stops the trembling thing in his stomach from distracting him. But she’s a force of nature, power and quiet intensity coiled tight in her lithe muscles and more often then not, his unplanned moments of appreciation are foiled by a knee colliding with his unguarded face.

Still, James does his best. He’s her trainer; his job is to mold her, bring her up into his way, the way of the Red Room. But it’s difficult. Every day it’s harder to watch her hurt, harder to stop himself from offering a hand up when she falls. Harder to cage the trembling thing that’s long since migrated from his gut to his chest, beating against his ribs in time with her harsh breaths.

But there are times when he sees in her flashes of brightness, glints and teases of the things their masters are trying so hard to rid her of. Joy and humor and silent, rebellious strength reflect back at him from her wide eyes and he knows he’ll never hear it, but he imagines that her laughter sounds like the clear ringing of church bells.

+

Call me Natalia, she says, when he finally gathers the courage to ask, and he realizes he’ll never know her as Comrade Romanova again.

He brushes off his question with a grunt in the back of his throat, half-forming an excuse to continue their conversation before she catches him off guard (like always) with a hand on his arm.

Speak English. I need the practice.

And suddenly he’s aware of all the other names he could have for her, secret ones, dear ones, words that he could spend years defining yet never get just right, just her, so he answers her in the mother tongue to keep his wishes behind his teeth, where they belong.

Not today, Comrade Romanova.

+

James has spent months teaching her to deal in shadows, to seduce and betray, to carry herself like the enemy. He’s taught her how to kill a man without flinching, how to disappear and how to conceal, and all the while she’s played the ultimate double-cross.

She’s crawled underneath his skin; she’s humming through his veins, all color and warmth and the black rush of anxiety. She’s tapping her fingers on the table in rhythm with the beating in his chest and he wishes that it would hurt like a blow to the head.

He wishes it hurt at all.

Pain is easier to ignore. Pain can be pushed aside.

+

The Winter Soldier doesn’t dream.

At least, that’s what they’ve told him. He isn’t made to; dreams are wasteful, they sap energy and power. Dreams are for children, they tell him. Dreams are for the weak.

Which is why he has to believe there’s a part of him, however small, that resists. The part that still screams when they take him into the Room, the part that still wishes for the green of spring. The part that dreams of her.

Always, and only, of her.

+

One day, James wakes to find that things aren’t gray anymore.

The tepid light outside illuminates frozen ground, the previous night’s snow is white dust upon the ground, but he’s not gray. He can’t see it, can’t feel it.

The trembling thing in his chest has grown, pushed apart his ribs and taken root. He can feel it grow with every stolen glance, every whispered conversation. Somehow, she grew with it; wrapped around his chest and mind until she’d reached every dark corner of him. She’s unending, beautiful and effortless, as unexpected and rare as the delicate spidercracks of frost that gild his windowpanes each morning. As much a part of him as his eyes, or his hands, or the shallow breaths he has to remind himself to take when she’s near.

And the part of him that dreams of her, that has named her for every dear thing, that has catalogued every shade of scarlet in her hair and longed to trace the snowflake patterns of every blue vein beneath her skin, the part of him that doesn’t care about consequences or orders or chains of command, wakes as well.

Everything stops, thaws, and for the first time in what James thinks has been decades, it feels like spring again.

+

He doesn’t have words for it; he doesn’t think he ever will. James tries to force out a thousand different, half-formed things, all at once, but none of them make it out of his mouth before “I love you.”

It’s the first English thing he’s said to her. The first door he’s opened, the first breath he’s taken freely since the day she crossed his gates.
Forcing his eyes away from her face, he braces for the slap that doesn’t come. Instead, she reaches for him, echoes his words and he feels her bloom inside his chest.

And he was right. Her laughter does sound like church bells.