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It was dark when the Widow found him. He had stopped to rest, had to rest. But it had given her time to catch up. He should have heard her coming, but by then he’d barely slept for six days and was hardly at his best. She was fresh, all the resources of the resurrected SHIELD behind her. The fury on her face though, that was all her.
He remembered her, a little. As the memories of Steve and Brooklyn came back, so did the memories of missions. Snatches of faces, cut off screams, explosions, gunshots, knives in the dark. The memories mostly came in jumbled dreams, screaming into his head when he finally closed his eyes.
Yeah, he didn’t sleep too much these days.
It was the hair that did it. That red hair, not like blood, but like fire. He remembered seeing the hair through his sights. He’d had a headshot, but why waste a bullet. He’d only needed one to take out his target. Straight through her side and into the Dr’s heart.
There was pride in a clean kill. It was the only thing he’d really had for himself back then. Before. When he had been the Winter Soldier and not Bucky, not James, not whoever he was now.
“You’re tired,” she said. Her voice was deeper than he’d thought it would be in person. Even now, even here, her training kept it sultry, hoarding any possible advantage.
There was no point in lying to her. She’d know. He’d worked with a Widow before, once. She’d known whenever someone lied to her too. Except him. He hadn’t had enough emotion for her to read back then. She’d been surprised when she died. He remembered that suddenly. Surprised when their handler had told her she’d failed the test. He wondered how much better this Widow had to have been to have passed and escaped. He was afraid he was about to find out.
“Yeah, I’m tired.” He slowly stood up from the pile of tarps he’d been trying to sleep on. “Are you supposed to bring me in or make me disappear?”
“Either, or. They’re not too picky.”
They stood there for a moment, in the dark, just two former Soviet assassins. Neither one holding a weapon because they were the weapon. Everything else was just set dressing. Finally, he moved. She tensed as he shifted his weight, but she didn’t draw even though her fingers curled a little.
“Just sitting down again,” he told her. Too tired to have this fight. And after all, if someone was coming, she had more right than most. Her. Stark. And of course, Steve. But Steve was the only one he could count on not coming. Not for this. Not... not to end things.
“The Winter Soldier is giving up?” she asked, an accent trickling into her voice like rancid honey. Contempt, he discovered, made her more Russian.
“I’m not going to fight you,” he told her. “And I’m not that thing anymore.”
“You’ve still got the star on your arm,” she barked at him.
“And you’ve still got the scar on your belly,” he shot back, angry at this woman who had apparently come to cut him to death slowly.
She reared back, a hand unconsciously creeping toward her abdomen. They both knew it wasn’t his scar she was reaching for. “How...”
“I worked with a Widow, once. We compared training notes.”
Her brow furrowed, trying to think of when that could have been, which Widow. “Her name was Irena Nikolovna.”
“She was killed on a mission,” Natasha said. “When I was seven.”
“No. She failed a test. She was killed in the Red Room. By me.” He looked at her when he said it. She didn’t flinch.
“Failure was not tolerated in the Red Room,” was all she said.
He wondered whether she had been the instrument of death for any other unsatisfactory recruits. He suspected she had. Killing one of your own was a good test for the sorts of people they had been turned into. “So, what now? I won’t go quietly,” he told her, almost hoping she would just finish it.
She studied him for a long moment. He knew he looked like hell. His hair was long and falling in his face. His clothes were dirty and he hadn’t washed or shaved in two days, four countries ago. But the woman in front of him would not be moved to underestimate him because he was dirty and tired. She had seen him move, seen the damage he could leave behind in the world, in her own body. So, he waited. He didn’t want to fight her. Not now. She had stood by Steve. She was the sort of person he had been. Once.
She looked at him silently while he breathed slowly and tried to keep his heartbeat steady, tried not to let his instincts take over. He could still win. He knew that. In an all out, even as tired as he was, he could take down this Widow if he wanted it badly enough. He just didn’t want it anymore.
“You’re not him anymore, are you?” she finally asked.
“No.” It didn’t matter which him she meant. He wasn’t either of them anymore.
She nodded and pulled a single sheet of paper out of a pocket on her jumpsuit. She held it up until he focused on it and then she let it go. It fluttered down to the ground while she turned on her heel and walked away.
He didn’t move for a full half hour, just in case. When he finally picked up the paper it was a printed address and a handwritten note that said, “He got a tip you’d been spotted. He’ll check here tomorrow. You should be there.”
He left as soon as he’d burned the sheet of paper. It was time to see if Steve wanted to rescue him one more time.