He might have not been facing her, but Natasha knew him. Even if only in some residual level, she knew him. She could see the tension in his back, in his shoulders, could hear it in his voice. There was an odd squirming sensation in the pit of her stomach, like a worm wriggling inside. Seeing him perturbed disturbed her.
Truth be told, she did not know what she wanted, either. What she wanted him to say, what she wanted him to do, what she wanted to say or which path to take.
“I’m not sure”, she admitted, confessing to him more easily than expected. “To recover what was taken from me, I think. To understand what was taken from me. I think I did figure out what it was, though. I remember… I remember some things.”
She hesitated, gaze aimed somewhere outside through a window. This was an awkward conversation, one she wasn’t certain anymore she was capable of having – she was even more incapable, however, of letting it sit and fester inside of her. “I’ve recovered memories of you. Memories of us. They’re too scrambled, I can make little sense of them. But I know…” Her voice, her posture took on a certainty she did not have. “I know we were involved.”
Involvement was not all, though.
“I was not his target. You were. I was only… a way for him to hurt you.” She turned her eyes back to James again. “You loved me, didn’t you?”
Getting Bucky to panic is no easy feat, yet here he is, standing in his kitchen with his heart pounding at a volume he can’t imagine Natasha can’t hear, a cold sweat breaking out across the back of his neck. It’s the sort of helpless feeling he remembers feeling when he lost her, each time he lost her, except now -- now she’s telling him that she remembers, so why is this the feeling that overtakes him?
Natasha has always had the unique ability to make him feel with incredible strength, but this?
His voice just above a whisper, he only offers a sideways glance, still unable to manage meeting her eye while feeling such shame and guilt. I believed you would never remember our lives together so I gave up. Isn’t that what it boils down to, really? He gave up.
The silence drags on a little too long so he pulls in a breath that burns in his throat, forcing himself to remain calm.
“Leo Novokov was angry with me for -- I’m not sure, really. For being happy. For not saving him and the others like him. He wanted to punish me by taking that happiness away. So he took you.”
“The doctors tried to get your memories back, but -- there was only so much I could let them poke around in your mind, and all of the signs pointed towards the loss being permanent.”
