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On the stage, she is veiled and resplendent, wearing a diadem of stars over her red hair which has been let loose in grief.
Her eyes are greedily rimmed with black and dark tracks glisten artfully down her cheeks, as if she's choked on burning coals. She is Anna Yaroslavna, wife of the great Rus Prince of Kiev, Igor Svyatoslavich. She dances wantonly, a mawkish display of despair and yearning, hands clawed towards the sky, dress ravished, copper stars tangled in her locks, because she has been waiting for years, it seems, for her son and her husband to come back from the war.
He reads the gist of it on the booklet ("a bold new interpretation of Borodin's opera"), but the broken English doesn’t allow him to know more. His Russian is rusty at best. Bucky would have been able to translate for him, but he’s not come here for his old friend. It’s not time yet.
He has come here for her, selfishly.
Other selves be damned.
Natasha doesn't sing. She dances her story away. He reads her body, the ballerina's gestures of impotence, the tumult underneath. She hates being powerless, even during make belief.
The chorus of young women sing angelically, their voices disturbingly sweet, like children begging for chocolate.
Steve shifts in his seat. Natasha brings her hands to her face, opens her mouth and wails silently as she turns and turns and turns on the flute of her foot, red hair weaving into a red mantle of blood. Arrows fly across the stage and seem to shoot her down. The enemies are here.
She falls in a heap in the middle of the stage.
The chorus prostrate before her, the young women sing and bend low in a frenzy, kissing her white arms many times over.
Steve stares at the perfect pallid skin, how easily she becomes a corpse.
He swallows, discomfited. He wants the whole thing to end.
By the last act, she is revived, without explanation, without miracle. As if the arrows were only a figment of his imagination.
He looks around him, wondering if anyone else noticed, if anyone else cares. The public is atrophied. They sit and watch sedately, half-yawning. Only Natasha’s darts of violent dancing have any sort of rousing effect.
She is awake in time to see a defeated Prince Igor return home on horseback.
She runs to him in a scalloped dance and embraces both horse and man.
It’s a real horse, as far as he can tell. They’ve brought a real horse on stage.
Natasha hides her face in his mane.
Steve feels something like guilt churning in his gut.
He knows she can’t be innocent, not by this point. She’s already been trained by the Red Room Academy for years, though she can’t be more than twenty. She’s already a seasoned spy.
But tonight, she dances at the Mikhailovsky Theatre and wears her hair loose, tangled and beautiful, and those must be real tears that thread through the horse’s mane like bottom-of-the-sea pearls.
Yes, he could see why this display works on her targets. Many a cool-headed man would want to go after her, just to get a taste of the fair Yaroslavna, a woman of the people, a princess and a peasant, a girl made of simple flesh, embracing a horse.
The after party is opulent and garish. The balancing act of post-Soviet Russia in the early 2000s is a matter of light. The darkly lit reception hall hides the moth-eaten damask and the greenish color of fraudulent champagne. Yet every person is bedecked in their finest, a glittering altar to new capitalism.
Steve stands out in his rather simple suit and tie. In fact, he’s sheepishly alien. He rubs his bearded chin and regrets not having shaved. He doesn’t follow her with his eyes like all the men in the room. He knows from experience that she will come to him, eventually, because he’s a foreigner who screams "disoriented American" and therefore, might be a person of interest.
It’s difficult, though. Not to stare.
She’s changed into an evening dress, dark blue, a waterfall against her bare back. There's still a bit of dark eyeliner under her eyes. He thinks about all the times he spent in cars and elevators and freighters and space ships with her. All the times he could’ve said something. But they could never get the hang of talking. They’d both been trained in silence. You bury what you feel not because it’s worthless, but because it’s worth everything.
He remembers one nostalgia-fueled night in November, before they got the team back together, before they built the time machine, just the two of them in the control room at Headquarters sharing a bottle of Bourbon as they talked about what they would do if they could undo everything, if they could go back.
“If I could go far back enough,” she murmured, “I’d...I’d break both my ankles so I could never dance. I’d fail most of my school exams so they’d think I’m simple. The KGB don’t waste time with idiots. I’d play dumb all my life. I’d wash dishes and change diapers until I got away. And then I’d figure out who I am. If there was something left.”
Steve looked at her as if he could see that other girl, broken in and domestic, moderately happy. Not her.
He thought, I wouldn’t change anything about you, not even the bloodshed.
And that scared him. That he was willing to forego the bad, that he wanted all of her, even the part where, sometimes, innocent people died.
Some people grow, some people move on.
We don't.
He put the glass down. Maybe he’d had one too many.
“And you?” Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow. “You’d want to go back to Peggy, make her happy. Wouldn't you?”
She sounded so sure, like she wasn't giving him any other choice. Like she was afraid to.
He nodded helplessly.
"Yeah, back to Peggy. Nowhere else I'd rather be."
He thinks about that night now, but doesn’t wonder if he should’ve gone back to Peggy. He doesn’t wonder what could have been. This is how he knows he’s where he’s meant to be. No part of him wants to explore another possible universe.
“You are not from around here, are you?”
Her English is accented and halting. A foreigner would be spooked by anything else.
He’s not ready, but he’ll never be. He turns to her, holding his breath.
“What gave it away?”
Natasha smiles. “You sit very…” and she mimics his hunched shoulders and guarded back, “...very inside yourself. We Russians are very open, vsegda, always.”
He laughs self-deprecatingly. “I see. I was just thinking to myself.”
Natasha sweeps a few curls from her face. “What about?”
“Your performance,” he replies, signaling the waiter for another glass of champagne. “I didn’t understand much of the opera, but you were lovely. Remarkable, in fact.”
“Remarkable? Coming from an American…that is good.”
Steve nods shyly. “I guess.”
“In Russia for business or pleasure?” she asks, eyeing him coolly, despite her open demeanor.
“Neither,” he says, handing her the flute of champagne.
“A man of mystery,” she murmurs in that half-feint of an accent.
Steve can see a flock of admirers trying to get her attention, to take her away from the boorish, uncultured American who’s worn a striped tie to the opera.
“You seem to be in high demand,” he remarks as the other patrons glare at him for monopolizing her attention.
The chandeliers above their heads wink at a private joke.
Natasha looks over one bare shoulder. “All of those men asked me to dinner at their hotel. You did not.”
Steve notes her accent is less strong. He shrugs with a smile. “Not yet.”
“What is stopping you?”
“I don’t think you’d like it. My place is pretty cheap.”
“Ah, well,” she says, as if she's lost interest, though it couldn’t be further from the truth. “At least you are honest. Honesty is not cheap, you know.”
“I do.”
Natasha must read something unguarded in his eyes - like a memory coming to the surface - because she lowers hers. She doesn't like to witness people slip up. She doesn't like mistakes. She wishes everyone was made of marble. No ripples, no depths. But then, then she wouldn't be able to make them bend.
“Which one are you going to have dinner with?” he asks, nudging his head towards the bevy of impatient middle-aged men.
Natasha shrugs. “Whoever dares to interrupt us first.”
Steve cocks his head to the side. “Why don’t they? I’m no threat.”
His casual way of speaking, a man out of time, humble and undiscriminating, should put people at ease. But it’s the exact opposite.
And he probably knows that.
“You choose for me,” she says coyishly, a hint of artifice, but also a note of pure curiosity in her voice. “Choose one of them.”
Steve leans forward, inhaling her scent as they both survey the famished wolves.
He whispers against her hair.
“I don’t think it matters what I choose. You won’t go to dinner with any of them."
"Oh?"
"You’ll wait for me to leave, follow me to my address. Then tomorrow, when I’m not there, you will break into my room and search through my things. But you’ll do it so carefully I won’t notice a thing.”
Natasha has gone rigid next to him, but her smile doesn’t falter. There are thin lines at the corner of her eyes.
Her voice is chilled wine. “You give yourself too much credit.”
Steve’s breath warms her shoulder. “You don’t have to pretend with me. You can come look through my things, if you want. You can come with me for free.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because if you want me to... I’ll break both your ankles so you can never dance again.”
Natasha lifts her head.
Ghosts brighten her eyes. She is shaken. She looks naked and frightened, Yaroslavna in disarray.
The sentence she never dared utter, her secret wish, her wretched fantasy.
She swallows. He is more dangerous than she could have imagined.
She smiles a tremulous smile.
“I will leave you now. Enjoy your evening.”
Steve watches her walk away with a sinking feeling in his stomach. But she will come back. She never leaves a puzzle unsolved. She neutralizes every threat, has been known to kill enemies before they even think to act.
He can be an enemy.
He’ll wait. He has all the time in the world.
She comes to him on the third day. He’s sitting in his grubby two-star hotel room overlooking a derelict warehouse whose garages have been converted into newsagents and flower shops. He stares at the old women trying to sell chrysanthemums to insensible passers-by. Stray dogs bite into the stems. The old women have to shoo them away. Somewhere in the distance a car engine bursts and barks louder than the dogs. Steve leans his head against the window.
She enters his apartment soundlessly. She stands in the middle of the small living room. The linoleum muffles each step.
She’s got a silencer in one hand.
Steve rubs his thumb against the fogged window. He can’t see her reflection, but it doesn’t matter.
“You’re not going to do it,” he says quietly as she lines the gun to his head.
“Give me a minute,” she says in that husky, humorous, devil-may-care voice he’s heard so many times before. The real her.
God, he misses her so much even when she’s a breath away.
Steve turns his head slightly, catches her eye. She still looks vaguely frightened.
“I missed you, Nat,” he confesses, because what’s the point of coming back and still keeping things buried?
Her hand shakes a little. “You don’t know me. I don’t know you.”
Steve drinks in her features. Her beauty was never more unpalatable. No one could love such a face, it would blind them.
“I do know some things. I know you want to be good, and no one will let you. I will. I'll take care of them for you. Come with me. You can be whoever you want to be...with me.”
She clenches her jaw. “I’m fine not getting in bed with the CIA.”
“I’m not with the CIA, which you already know.”
Natasha’s lip trembles. “You’re a dead man. You died in 1945. There are photos. It - it doesn’t make sense.”
Steve smiles his most winsome smile. “I believe you once called me a fossil.”
She breaks into a short, panicked laugh. Her finger glitches. She should push the trigger.
Steve takes hold of her wrist.
She could still do it.
“You saved my life so many times. Let me save yours," he says like it's the most natural thing in the world.
He strokes his thumb against her pulse. His eyes, now that she really looks at them, are warm and feral. He could break her arm. He could break all of her. He could make good on his promise. She’d never have to dance again.
But how did he know? How does one know these intimate, unspeakable things?
Supposedly, dead men know everything.
Steve drags her towards him, kissing the white of her arm, worshiping the fallen Yaroslavna.
Natasha, inexplicably, starts to cry.
She feels the arrows sinking deep.
She makes a rookie mistake, which shows she’s not yet ready.
She goes to bed with him.
She could fool herself into thinking she is trying to get back some control. She lied about not getting in bed with the CIA, of course she’s done it before.
But this isn’t that. This is not anything remotely familiar. He’s not the target, she is.
She’s sleeping with a dead man, who knows her, deeply. She doesn’t know how, but he does.
They don’t even undress. They don’t even go to bed, actually.
She careens into his lap. He kisses her mouth chastely, at first, as if to remember their first kiss when he was on the run from HYDRA. He had often dreamed of her taste and punished himself for it. But now he’s not worried about what’s right and wrong. He knows it’s right. He grabs the side of her face and deepens the kiss, telling her wordlessly how much he’s wanted to do this, how long he’s waited for her. She feels warmth pooling in her belly recklessly. She unzips him. He breathes harshly against her mouth. He’s sick with desire, for her body and beyond. He doesn’t know where to begin, his hands roam without destination. They can’t even get their clothes off. All he manages to do is shakingly pull down her jeans and panties, touch the wetness between her legs, and groan against her mouth before she sinks around him.
She whispers in his ear that she's been wet since she stepped through his door, maybe even earlier, and he cups her ass and kneads the skin, feeling boyish pride, a wave of lust that turns their fumbling into fucking. There's little poetry in it, and he succumbs to it happily. They fuck in the window alcove, where everyone and no one can see. He kisses the side of her neck, open mouthed kisses without teeth, just softly probing her skin, testing that she’s really there, warm and alive, moving against him so trustingly, like she might know him too. He loves the feeling of being inside her, of finding a home there.
He doesn’t know how to translate it. No one else could help him find the words.
But Nat puts her arms around his head and holds him to her as she cries out his name for the first time.
He follows her in ecstasy, kisses the front of her shirt ardently, right between the breasts, feels the imprint of a golden cross under the sweater. Natasha is such a good spy because she actually believes, he thinks.
He thinks of the young princess embracing her husband’s horse, burying her head there.
He has a selfish thought. He doesn’t want her to embrace any other man or animal or living thing ever again.
He wants this embrace to be only his.
He holds her tight across time, holds her until dusk colors the sky a bruised violet and the old women below have to close shop. The gutters are filled with flowers. The street lights cast yellow halos across the city.
“Don’t let go,” he says against her mouth.
“I won’t,” she says, surprised with herself, yet completely sure.
(Decades later, Sam asks him about the ring around his finger.
“You wanna tell me about that?”
Steve thinks about his Yaroslavna waiting for him in Sankt Petersburg with their three daughters and one son. They’ve traveled the world, done things they're proud and unashamed of, but Russia has remained home.
He won’t return on horseback, but she’ll be just as happy to see him. She always is. It’s a different kind of joy, not mundane, not sacrificial. They are who they are, only to each other.
Steve smiles.
“No, I don’t think I will.”)