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Natalia lowered the telegram transcript with icy hands. She was still reeling from the news, the news that Captain Rogers' team had been ambushed just outside of Azzano, Italy. Of the names of those still missing, only one stood out in perfect, horrible clarity: SGT. JAMES B BARNES. Her knees suddenly began to wobble, and she had to stumble to a chair before she collapsed completely.

She hadn't known about this. None of her encrypted transmissions had even hinted at such a bold move. But was it very surprising? HYDRA had its tentacles in so many branches of government, military, and economies all over the world, it was almost impossible to find any given one uncorrupted by that hellish organization. And she, for all of her deadly training and unspeakable skill, was but one cog in that massive, massive wheel.

The paper suddenly crumpled in her fist, her knuckles whitening with the force of her grip.

Natalia got to her feet, brows lowered over cold green eyes as she strode for Howard's office. She slipped a small, rumpled piece of paper beneath his closed door, hearing him puttering about inside. On it, she'd hastily scrawled, Be back soon. Have business to attend to. XO--Natalie.

A quarter-hour later, she was on her way south, moving as only a ghost could - swiftly and silently. She was going to do what no one else could; what the combined might of the Allied military couldn't accomplish: she was going to infiltrate one of HYDRA's largest and most invisible bastions and retrieve those who didn't, could never belong there.

And she was going to do it alone.

Getting captured by HYDRA had never been part of the plan.

Bucky thinks he could have managed to get through a German POW camp or an Italian one but HYDRA is a whole other beast. They've tortured him mercilessly since he's gotten here and it seems like he's someone they've pulled out special to experiment on. The scientist who has him is particularly cruel, he thinks, and he keeps getting injected with shit over and over until he ends up passing out.

Still, he's going to get out of here. He's going to get out and then he's going to come back and kill every single one of these damn HYDRA soldiers with his bare hands. He's got the war effort, he's got his family, he's got Natalie. There's a hell of a lot of reasons he's not going to die in here.

The Wehrmacht were not to be taken lightly. Hitler's elite crack unit of specialized troops, to a man they were merciless, unyielding, and absolutely ruthless. HYDRA, however, had obliterated the German garrison in northern Italy, and now held that region with an iron fist, thus denying both Allied and Axis regimes admittance into those mineral-rich mountains.

But one of their own, reared in their own facility, a product of their particular doctrine since before she could even remember, young but absolutely fearless when it came to infiltration, destabilization, and espionage, one of their very own could pass through their nets like a specter through the air, leaving not even a ripple to mark her passing. A ghost, nothing more than a whisper, leaving no trace, as silent as moonlight upon the water.

Natalia arrived at the Weapons Facility less than forty-eight hours after leaving Howard's laboratory in Switzerland, gaining entry into the compound with ridiculous ease. The soldiers here were good, yes, but they hadn't endured the level of training a Black Widow had received. The halls were quiet; only the back-up lighting was operational, as it was well after working hours. She moved like a wraith, merging with every shadow, until she reached the containment level. The logical place to look for prisoners.

She recognized Dugan and Jones, along with a few other troops she'd seen back at the Allied compound, but the one she'd come for wasn't among them. Swearing silently, she melted back into the blackness, not bothering to alert the others to presence. It wouldn't avail them much, and she still needed to keep her deep, deep cover.

"Why don't you just kill me? It's like you're lookin' for something and let me tell you, there's nothing here. Basically just an infantry man and nothing else. I don't know what to tell you. Nothing to tell."

Running his mouth has basically become Bucky's defense of choice. Eventually they'll knock him out or put him in so much pain he'll shut up but for right now, he can taunt his captors and try to get a rise out of them. He was never a bully in school but he beat up enough of them to know their style and he plays every dirty trick he has in his playbook. It's just not a lot against HYDRA.

"Why they got you experimentin' on me anyway? Didn't wanna screw up one of your Nazis? Heard you weren't so friendly with them anymore anyway."

The masked technician didn't reply, of course. He simply went about his work, recording readings on the ever-present clipboard and ignored the American's invective. He stood at the end of the stretcher upon which Barnes was strapped, and casually flicked a switch that would send more muscle-numbing serum flooding into the specimen's body. Its effect was two-fold: the first was that it thankfully silenced the man's everlasting mouth, rendering him comatose for several precious hours, and the second was that it continued its intended work of reprogramming the subject's internal workings, although it was only a bastardized version of Erskine's original formula.

A small rustle sounded at the door; the tech glanced up, then suddenly tumbled over backwards as a large electric current tore through his body and immediately fried his brain. A petite frame broke away from one of the shadows and rushed over to the man strapped upon the table, absently kicking the smoking technician out of the way.

"James," Natalia almost sobbed, tugging at the straps that held him immobile on the table. "James, look at me." She gently patted his cheek, turning his head to make him look up at her. "Moya zvezda," she managed to smile, though her eyes were glassy. "Long time no see, da?"

Bucky blinks a little and his brain isn't working because he has no idea why Natalie is inside a HYDRA prison. His brows knit as he's trying to work this out and he isn't quite sure she's actually there.

"If this is more of that injection shit, I don't appreciate it," he bites off, frowning as he tries to see if the scientist is still there pumping things into his veins. He'd gotten jabbed enough before coming overseas but at least that was for shit like cholera, not stuff that made him hallucinate.

"Don't know how you got me to see my best girl, though. I'll give you that."

While he blithered, she was busy with the machines, flicking switches and finally unplugging the lot, then it was time to get the IV's out of Bucky's skin, which took a bit of doing, but at last she had him ready to unstrap from the table. That took a bit more maneuvering, since HYDRA was overly complicated about everything, but a few minutes later, she had the body straps undone and was trying to lever her lover to his feet, grunting with the effort of his head weight.

She rolled her eyes to his protestations, but at least managed to get him sitting up and blinking at her. "James," she said sternly. "Focus. Look at me." A sharp slap across his cheek emphasized her words. "I'm not a hallucination. I'm here and I'm going to get you out. Get on your feet. We don't have a lot of time."

Minutes, if she knew any better. As soon as someone discovered the monitoring equipment to this particular room had been disabled, someone would come investigate. They had to move. Quickly.

The pain from the slap clears his head and the stern words help him separate real from not real. Natalie is here and she's doing something to bust him out of this prison. How does she know how to do this? She works for Stark, doesn't she? Isn't she just a secretary?

"Doll, why in the hell are you here?" He gets to his feet because he can recognize an order when he hears one but he still has no idea why Natalie is here or how she knew to come here and find him. Even the US Army's probably written him off at this point.

"What do I need to do?"

"Questions later." Or, never, if she had her preference. She held out a handgun, its magazine fully loaded, and stated, "Take it if you feel you can use it. Dugan and several others are two levels down, being held in the containment cells. We can get them out, but only if we move quickly and quietly. Focus, James." She glanced at the machines behind her.

"I don't know what they dosed you with, but it doesn't look like vitamins. Clear it out of your head and let's go."

Then she took him by the hand and all but melted into the long shadows near the door. Once she'd cleared the hallway, she flowed into the corridor and ghosted along its dark edge until she reached the stairwell. At that door, she halted, squeezing Bucky's hand in warning to be silent as slow steps echoed down the empty hallway.

One heartbeat, two, then Natalia struck, taking down the roving sentry with two precise blows, dragging him out of sight and confiscating his weapons. "Stay here," she instructed, handing over the machine gun and the additional ammunition. "I'll send them up to you. The exit is just down this hallway, an access door on the left." She paused long enough to kiss his cheek, then she vanished once again.

When the gun gets pressed into his hand, Bucky shakes his head and tries to get back into the game. Shit is getting real now and no matter what those goons dosed him with, he's got to get out of it and save his own ass or anything that Natalie's done so far is going to be useless.

When she says the others are two floors down, he gives a quick nod. "If we get them out, they can help us." He barely gets it out of his mouth before they're faced with a sentry and Natalie takes him down faster than any SS or Commando he's seen. Who the hell had trained her for this shit? Was she a spy or something? Russian spy?

She presses a gun into his hand and kisses him before leaving and it's not long before he's busy leading the rest of the men out of the damn place and doesn't have time to puzzle out exactly who his girlfriend actually is.

There was a cabbage truck waiting for the Americans at the end of the service road leading up to the facility. The last POW had just clambered into the bed amid the vegetables when the night sky suddenly lit up with a massive explosion, the compound going up in a wild ball of fire, sending debris raining out over the countryside for nearly half a mile.

The driver wasted little time in getting the hell out of Dodge, the men in the back jounced around amid the cargo. Gabe Jones reached over and clapped Bucky on the shoulder. "Good one, Barnes! Hotdamn!"

Dugan chortled, grinning despite his bedraggled appearance. "How the hell did you get that guard to let us out, Barnes? Short little fucker just showed up and opened the door, pointed at the stairs, then we see you up there waitin' on us. Goddamn, man!" The others joined in the chorus, needing something to lift their spirits, after two weeks in hell.

"How'd you get away?" "What did they do when they dragged you out?" "Did you see anyone else?" "What the hell was that place, some sort of freak-weapons factory?"

"Whatever it was, Barnes blew the fucker right off the map, goddamn!" "And saved our sorry asses, ain't that right?" "Hell yeah! Let's hear it for Bucky Barnes!"

"Look, we blew it up and we're fucking out, aren't we? We're all goddamned heroes, not just me!" Bucky wants to deflect because he can't take credit for this, not when Natalie had broken him out and he still didn't know how she'd gotten in or how she knew he was there. Didn't the Army have him listed as KIA or MIA? Surely they had already. Maybe she had connections through Stark and got training from Carter or something. There's a way it all fits together even if he can't figure out exactly what it is.

"Don't be slapping medals on me just yet, boys. Still gotta live through the rest of this war." He doesn't have any illusions that they won't be shipped back out once they're cleared by medical but he hopes he gets a chance to see Natalie again before he does. He gets back to the Allied Base and sent straight to triage to be looked over. Other than exhaustion and starvation, there's nothing wrong with him, and he's cleared to go to the mess with everyone else. When he's there, he sees Steve, but he keeps the greeting short. He's looking for Stark.

He finds where Stark and Carter are holed up and sticks his head in the door. "Natalie anywhere around here?"

Peggy and Howard looked up with a bit of surprise at the intrusion. "Sergeant Barnes," Peggy said, rising from her chair and giving him a polite nod. "Welcome back. My commendations, on your exceptional bravery and courage under such drastic conditions." Howard eagerly seconded her sentiments.

Then his brows furrowed when Barnes asked about Natalie.

"Err, no, actually. She's not. I sent her and Jarvis into town with a shopping list, they should be back later this afternoon." Stark drummed his pencil on the table. "Something wrong, Sergeant?" That Rogers' best friend had a "thing" for Stark's pretty little secretary wasn't exactly the best kept secret on base, but no one had bothered to make an issue of it.

"I'll let her know you're looking for her, if you like."

"Uh, yeah. Just let her know I came by."

Bucky has the sense that Natalie's still out cleaning up the mess of the HYDRA base but he doesn't want to breathe a word of it to Stark. Something tells him that Stark doesn't know about it and it seems like Natalie knew too much about the way HYDRA worked for her to be someone who came from Carter's office. It's a little disconcerting, honestly, to think about Natalie being wrapped up in HYDRA shit. Does he know her at all? There's been things all along that indicated that she was smarter than she tried to let on in public but Bucky had chalked that up to wanting to keep herself at arms' length of most men. Most people were going to see her as a pretty face and slide by but he hadn't and he wonders if she'd had some ulterior motive or if he'd been an accident.

He also doesn't know if this relationship is as real for her as it is for him. Those things haunt him as he goes back to bunk down and get some rest. It's not good sleep, punctuated with nightmares, but it's still sleep and he's not locked up anymore.

The following morning started off as per the usual; Howard was in his laboratory, muttering to himself over coffee, and Natalie was sitting at her smaller desk adjacent, taking running notes of his solitary kibitzing. One of the techs had brought breakfast, and a half-eaten box of donuts sat on the edge of Stark's large, cluttered desk.

It was only when Peggy came in that things began to slant sideways, and it started with Agent Carter's casual observation of, "Oh, Natalie, Sergeant Barnes asked after you yesterday. He and the others were cleared by medical, and out of quarantine, if you want to step over later and say hello."

Smile frozen, Natalie thanked her for the message, but managed to find enough to do to keep her firmly busy in the armory until the sun was heading for the western horizon. There'd be questions, and she didn't have any satisfactory answers.

Bucky had thought Natalie would come see him after she got his message but she hadn't come all day so he figured that either she wasn't back yet (plausible) or that she didn't want anything to do with him now because he knew her secret (more plausible).

It makes him wonder if any of it had been real. It had felt real for him, those feelings, and he hopes she returned them. She'd called him moya zvezda and looked at him tenderly when they were together. His mind is reeling about what he'd seen her do and his heart is questioning if the sex and the connection had been real or some kind of cover.

He's not hopeful.

Once she made up her mind, Natalia left Stark and Carter to their work - it was well after dark by now, and the workday was over - and headed off across the base in search of her particular Sergeant. During the trek, she went over exactly what she was going to tell him, and worked herself into an appropriately girlish level of emotional upset, so that her eyes were bright and glassy, and she was sniffling just the right amount by the time she found Bucky in the mess with Captain Rogers and a few of the other Commandos, and didn't hesitate to hurl herself right into his arms, sobbing quietly against his chest.

The onlookers hesitated, shuffled their feet, and one by one melted away, leaving Natalia to cling to her soldier and cry, eventually lifting her head to gaze up at him with wide eyes, and throw her arms around his neck and pull him down to her for a trembling kiss.

"...thank God you're back and safe," she finally managed to whisper in the small space between them. "James, I was so scared when we found out what happened--! I thought you were never coming back--!" She clutched him tight, hanging on for what seemed to be dear life.

Bucky frowns deeply; why would she be worried when she'd been there to get him out herself? This isn't a conversation for eavesdroppers, though, so he drops his arm around her shoulder and guides her outside. It's cold enough that there's no one hanging around and he looks down at her.

"It's a good show for everyone but you were there," Bucky says, voice low and rough in the dark. "You're the one who came in and got me out of there. You killed a guard, set an explosive, told me where to go. I couldn't do shit but what you told me to do and they're callin' me a hero. I'm gonna get a medal or something because you waltzed into that base like you owned it. So tell me the truth."

Green eyes blinked up at him, puzzled. "...what? No. No, I wasn't. James..." Natalia shook her head, chilly fingers clutching the lapels of his jacket. "How could I have been there?" She bit her lip, contrite and confused. "...Agent Carter said they'd dosed you with some sort of drug... You were hallucinating, or something."

She placed a hand to his cheek, rubbing her thumb over his cheekbone. "I was so worried," she said, voice catching. "I wanted to come sooner, but Howard sent me into town for supplies, and I wasn't able to get away until just now." Heaving a huge sigh of relief, Natalia wrapped her arms around Bucky's waist again, dropping her head to his chest.

"...you have no idea how scared I was...thinking that I was going to lose you, James..." That, at least, was the truth.

"You were there," Bucky says, though it isn't with as much conviction as before. He had been drugged over and over, tortured - it's a miracle he came out with most of his brains intact. Does it make sense that he'd think about his best girl? Maybe? But she'd killed those soldiers when Stark's plane crashed, too, and Bucky isn't sure what's going on.

"I remember you helping me because you knew where to go. You knew the base and I didn't know it. I remember that."

"No..." She shook her head, placing her fingers over his lips. "No, I wasn't. You were dreaming, James. They gave you something...some sort of drug. And it made you see things that weren't there." Peggy had said that; she'd overheard it when Agent Carter and Captain Rogers had been discussing the medical debriefing yesterday.

"You escaped," Natalia reminded him, "and helped the others break out, too. You're a hero, James Barnes. And I'm so, so glad you came back to me. I didn't know what I was going to do, if you never came back..."

"I don't know what's real."

It's something that's never happened to him before and he's never felt vulnerable the way he does now. He'd left for war as a man with self-confidence and assurance that he was going to be someone someday. He'd do his bit in the Army, come home, get a job and marry a nice girl and end up having a good life. This...this is different. This is having the stark memory of something but not being able to trust it, being told it wasn't real by the one person he knows would never lie to him.

"Are you telling the truth? That you weren't there?"

Although it made her writhe inside, Natalia nodded without hesitation. "I wasn't, James. I swear to you, I wasn't." It seemed to her that the entire universe stopped for a split second, so enormous was the gravity of that lie. But it was necessary, and the ends always justified the means, didn't they? Didn't they?

But thank God that the door not far away opened, spilling soldiers and light out into the darkened courtyard. Natalia suddenly shivered, realizing that it was quite cold outside, although it wasn't snowing. Yet. She tugged her coat tighter around herself, unconsciously burrowing into Bucky's side.

"...it's freezing out here," she noted. "Want to go inside? Before my fingers and toes fall off?"

Bucky brings her back inside and spends a little bit of time taking each one of her small hands between his bigger ones to help warm them. He's got a whole mountain kit, actually, but he's not wearing it right now so he can't give her the gloves; he's just in his regular fatigues today.

"Any way I can come and sleep in your room tonight? I'd invite you to my place but there's about six other loud guys snoring. Not a place to bring a lady."

That image actually made her giggle, though she couldn't keep the tinge of sadness out of her tone. "Of course, as long as you don't get in trouble. My place, as you call it, isn't much bigger than a broom closet, but at least it's across the compound, and more or less quiet."

Howard would be working in his laboratory most of the night, she knew, and Jarvis with him. So there was only a small chance of any disturbance, if all went well.

"Come on, let's go."

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