Chapter Text
Steve had never slept well, for one reason or another, through most of his life. Before the serum it had been his asthma, heart trouble, and other health concerns that either woke him up or caused him too much pain to sleep in the first place. During the war and especially after the ice it was nightmares that plagued him, too many bad memories and worse fears haunting him to allow for restful dreams.
Having Natasha in his bed didn’t stop the night terrors from coming. Steve wished it would, but his sleeping mind didn’t know or care that she was there beside him.
What did change was that when the dreams woke him, he wasn’t alone in a cold bed with nothing but the memories to keep him company. He could roll over, draw Natasha close, and soak up the warmth of her body as a poultice against the pain. She’d murmur drowsy complaints - she didn’t mind sharing the bed but didn’t like actually sleeping in contact with him - but she never pulled away when she felt him shaking.
Every so often he was the one who would wake to find Natasha huddled up against him, so he knew he wasn’t alone in finding comfort through contact. He’d wrap his arms around her and let her stay until her shivering stopped, and neither of them said a word about any of it in the daylight.
Considerably less of the base’s operating budget needed to be allocated to punching bags after Steve and Natasha became an item. They didn’t share space every night, but it was frequent enough to make a difference.
The best part, though, was waking up in the morning with her there. They were both accustomed to rising with the sun, and that meant they usually had a while before they needed to get up and be anywhere. Steve thoroughly enjoyed waking her with his hands and mouth on the intimate places of her body, so that by the time she opened her eyes she was already teetering on the edge of orgasm.
Although given how quickly Natasha woke under any other circumstances, he suspected she might be deliberately playing possum until the pleasure was too much for her to stay quiet any longer, just so he wouldn’t stop ‘waking’ her. Whatever the case, it was a pretty damned good way to start the day.
The warmth of the first rays of light through the big east-facing window woke him as usual. Steve left the glass undarkened most of the time, because there was nobody out there to see anything and he thought Natasha looked gorgeous clothed in nothing but the morning sun.
When he reached for her, however, his searching hand found nothing but cool, empty sheets. Confused, he opened his eyes and scanned the room, confirming what touch had already told him - Natasha was nowhere to be found.
Dawn came very early at this time of year, so for her to have been gone long enough for the sheets to cool and the dent to leave her pillow meant she’d gotten up in the middle of the night. Frowning, Steve rolled out of bed and grabbed the first clothing that came to hand. If she’d gotten up and left instead of turning to him for comfort, her dreams must have been really damned bad.
He hurried out into the rest of his suite - and stopped short in the doorway of the living room. Natasha was slung sideways on the couch, her back supported by a mound of pillows she’d piled against the arm, surrounded by a slew of holographic readouts. The data pad generating the images was on her lap, and she was flipping through a series of graphs and text and diagrams with a frown of intense concentration on her face.
Reassured that she wasn’t alone somewhere struggling with her demons, Steve turned in the other direction and headed for the small kitchen unit. He rarely used it for meals, but the coffeemaker was top of the line and fully stocked with both of their favourite blends. It only took a moment to get two steaming cups, and then he carried them back into the living room.
It wasn’t often that he could sneak up on her, but she was so absorbed in whatever she was doing that he did it by accident. She jumped a little when he tapped the side of the warm mug lightly against her shoulder, and looked up at him wide-eyed. She seemed tired, as he’d expect if she hadn’t gotten any sleep, but not haunted the way she would be if the cause had been nightmares.
“You’re up early,” he commented as she took the cup from him.
“Mmm, and you’re a saint,” she said with sincere appreciation after taking a sip. “Is it dawn already? I didn’t mean to be at this all night, but I guess I lost track of time.”
Pulling most of the pillows out of her pile, Steve perched on the arm of the couch and let her lean against him for support instead. Reading over her shoulder, he frowned as he recognized some of the text. “Isn’t that the data we retrieved from Chernobyl?”
“I woke up at two in the morning with a revelation, and it wouldn’t leave me alone until I came out here to double-check the numbers,” she told him ruefully. “I figured there was no point in making you lose sleep as well, especially since it might have been a wild goose chase.”
“We’ve had the computer run that data half a dozen times. What else is there to find?” Steve studied the screens, but he didn’t see anything more than every other time he’d looked at this information. The readouts she was looking at were all reports on the cryostasis chamber they’d kept Bucky in when he wasn’t active.
“With the exceptions of Ultron and Vision that very much prove the rule, computers can only give you what you ask them to.” She took another sip of her coffee. “They can’t make true leaps of logic or intuition, though programs as advanced as Jarvis can fool you into thinking that they can. If he’d really been able to, we wouldn’t have needed Tony for the actual breakthroughs.”
“Yeah, so?” Steve wasn’t sure where she was going with this. Certainly there had been other information in the data they’d recovered, things like troop movements and supply lists and statistics from the radar array, but there was no reason to care about any of that now.
Natasha made a sweeping gesture with her free hand, and the screens spun until they settled out into a succession of graphs. “This is six months of the cryo data for Barnes. Heartbeat, respiration, internal temperature, brain activity, the works. There are wobbles here and there,” she pointed at a place where the lines dipped to nothing and then jumped again a few days later. “Presumably when they removed him and put him back. Overall it’s pretty consistent, as you’d expect it to be.”
Studying the graphs again, Steve still had no idea what had gotten her worked up. It all looked exactly as she described, steady readings with a few aberrations. “So?”
Flicking her fingers, Natasha raised the existing screens, then tapped at the pad and produced another row of six beneath the first. “So, what the hell are these?”
With the two sets side by side, the difference was glaring. The second group was just as consistent as the first, without even the variations to indicate there had been a change in status - but the numbers didn’t match.
“That... that can’t be Bucky,” Steve exclaimed, leaning closer as if decreasing the distance would force the data to make sense. “Can it? What would cause such a significant change that would then stabilize into a new norm?”
“Look at the dates,” Natasha said, pointing at the numbers printed at the top right hand corner of each of the reports.
“They’re the same.” Steve stared at the readouts, stunned. “Those are two sets of graphs for the same six months. They had two people in the ice? How did the computer miss this?”
“We asked it to analyze the data and tell us everything it could about Barnes. It sorted out which charts were the ones that belong to him based on height, weight, muscle mass, et cetera,” Natasha said. “Then it discarded the non-conforming data with the rest of the irrelevant material, just like the info from the radar array. Something in the back of my mind kept bugging me about it, and last night I finally remembered I’d seen a graph that didn’t match when I was looking at the raw data in Chernobyl.”
“Who is it? Is there any indication?” Had they created a second weapon like the Winter Soldier? Why, when keeping Bucky contained and programmed had to be a huge resource drain? In case something happened and Bucky was hurt?
“No sign of a name, but then Barnes’ info was all under ‘asset’ with no hint of his identity, either.” Natasha shrugged. “She’s labelled as ‘control’, but if they wanted a control subject for comparison to Barnes, it makes no sense that they’d choose someone so different from his physical stats.”
“She?” Steve’s attention was riveted by that one word.
“Computer says high probability it’s a woman, based on the bio monitoring readouts.”
A thousand possibilities spilled through Steve’s mind. “A female counterpart. Someone to handle your style of wetwork, maybe?” Bucky was one of the best snipers Steve had ever encountered, and they’d found indications that he sometimes killed up close as well, but he wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. It was difficult to picture him sidling up to a target without attracting significant attention, but sometimes HYDRA might have wanted something other than an obvious assassination or an ‘accident’.
But Natasha was shaking her head. “What I do requires a lot more freedom of thought and worldly knowledge than Barnes appeared to have,” she told him. “Wiping and programming someone wouldn’t be enough. That’s why they created the Red Room in the first place - they started training us so young they got the absolute loyalty without the need for extreme conditioning, and the result is an asset who has the flexibility necessary to work as a spy and assassin instead of a killer. I am his female counterpart.”
“Your loyalty wasn’t absolute,” Steve pointed out, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Speaking of exceptions that prove the rule.” Natasha smiled up at him, but her eyes were shuttered, her real emotions buried beneath the mask. She didn’t do that as often with him anymore, not to this extent, but talking about her past always shut her down. “My defection is the result of a set of extraordinary circumstances that had never happened before, and that they’ll make sure will never happen again.”
“Barton winning you over instead of killing you,” Steve said, nodding.
“That wasn’t the only factor, but it was certainly the deciding one.” There were a hundred things going on behind Natasha’s eyes that Steve couldn’t read, but now wasn’t the time to push her. It was never the time to push her; if she was going to trust him with any of it, he knew it would have to be on her terms and her timeline.
Instead, he focused on the more urgent matter at hand. “So that still leaves us with the question, who the hell is this?”
“They had her at the Chernobyl base for exactly the same period as Barnes, but they took him out a half dozen times, and her only twice,” Natasha said, expanding the screens to show several years worth of graphs. “They also never left her out for more than a day, but sometimes he was out for weeks. Whatever they had her for, I doubt it involved leaving the base.”
“And it can’t be a coincidence that she was brought in and out at the same time as Bucky.” Steve frowned at the graphs, but he still couldn’t make sense of it. “You don’t... you don’t think they were breeding him, do you?” The idea made him sick.
“No, the cryo would have messed with her cycle too much. Even if it were possible for her to conceive, an embryo could never survive the freezing. Although...” she paused, and her expression darkened. “It could have been a reward for him, I suppose. Both times she was awake were at the end of two of his longer periods of activity, and then they were both put back to sleep. You’d think it would be easier and cheaper to hire a whore and kill her after, though.”
Steve honestly wasn’t sure which thought was less appealing - that they’d forced Bucky to have sex with someone in order to breed new supersoldiers, or that they’d provided him with a ‘reward’ in the form of a woman presumably too broken to object or fight back. “So where is she now?”
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it.” Natasha tapped the pad again, bringing up a new set of data - shipping records, from the look of it. “These are the chemicals and supplies HYDRA would need to run the cryo chambers. Stark gave us the breakdown after he reverse engineered the equipment we found in Chernobyl, but I assumed it wasn’t helpful to us since we know Barnes isn’t being kept in the ice right now.” She highlighted one of the entries, with a receiving address in Latveria. “This is the only ‘factory’ ordering the exact combination and amounts of the necessary materials in recent months. Presumably she was in D.C. with Barnes, but they must have moved her after all the chaos started.”
Steve stood, careful to make sure she didn’t tip over without him behind her anymore. “We need to find her, get her out of there, and see if we can help her. Chances are good she’s as much a captive as Bucky, and that means she was probably an ally at some point.”
“She may not be any more, Steve,” Natasha cautioned him. “If she’s as broken as Barnes, she’ll be just as dangerous and she won’t have his hesitation to hurt you. On the other hand, it does give us a chance to test our theories for how to deprogram him. And you’re right, if she’s a captive she deserves to be rescued, even if it ends up being just so we can put her out of her misery.”
“We’re not killing her,” Steve said firmly. “We hit the base, we get the cryo chamber, and we bring it back here. If our techs can’t figure out how to wake her safely, we’ll call in Stark.”
“Are we bringing the others? Might be a good training exercise for them, and Maximoff should be able to read her even through the ice to tell us how bad it’s going to be.”
Steve considered it, then shook his head. “No, they’re not operating as a team, yet. Maximoff can tell us if she’s a threat just as easily here as there. It’s not like we’re going to wake her up. You and I should be able to handle it.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Standing, Natasha set her coffee aside and stretched, grinning at him. “Let’s go rescue Barnes’ girlfriend.”