There’s a trick the Red Room has with their neural reprogramming (brainwashing, they call it). It’s hard - not impossible, but hard - to manufacture memories out of nowhere. It’s easier to paper over pre-existing ones - the actors change, the play stays the same. But now and then, the cracks show: mother hen isn’t something Petra Bulgakova says. It’s not something Harper Carlson says.
But somewhere, in the labyrinthine caverns of subconscious, Penelope May Parker still waits. (and waits.)
She rolls her eyes, grinning over - nothing out of the ordinary here, just a girl pleased that she’s going home with a cute guy. “Maybe not praaaaactical,” she says, vowels flat on the first syllable, dragging it out. “But I really hate having to crane my neck up at everyone.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “And they make my ass look great.”
Well-calculated, to get the Soldier thinking about her ass. And not about how reckless he’s being. Not about how she’s shifting her rings (one on her index finger, with a retractable needle and a knock-out drug, gets moved into position).
Petra plays him expertly, and he’s easy enough to play, not used to fending off this particular type of threat: the Winter Soldier had always been in-and-out, a brute fist punched through glass, leaving bullets and blood in his wake. When your brainwashed assassin is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. It’s not the subtle play, the social engineering, pushing the psychological buttons.
So they walk together as he leads the way towards his bleak little apartment on the edge of downtown, her leaning on his gentlemanly arm; at six feet even, Grant is tall enough to support her as they stroll. His nose crinkles into a smile.
“That’s a trap,” he points out. “If I don’t say your ass looks great, then I’m in trouble. So, humbly noted: your ass does look great.”
She hums, satisfied - Petra with how well the mission is going, Harper with the cute guy finally complimenting her ass. It’s not that she’s been trying to get his attention, but now that she has it, she’s not going to turn it down. At least, that’s for the friendly, flirty, somewhat reckless co-ed. The agent has other plans.
“Now I get to yell at you for perving out.” A grin, a flutter of eyelashes, and the trap is set. Something obvious. Teasing. Continue on with the verbal sparring, the back-and-forth, the way that banter steadily gets saucier as the night goes on. Seduction might not be Petra’s specialist, not in the same way it is for some Widows, but she’s done it many, many times.
“You talk to them much?” She asks. “Your brothers and sisters.” Innocent question.
“Mm.” A small noise, noncommittal, another slightest skip in the record where he’s not quite sure how to fill the silence before it turns too awkward.
He needs to pivot, get off the topic of his family and history— too many inconvenient questions without any real answers behind them, no real way to explain who he is, why did he ever think he could just have a normal night out with a cute girl—
“Not anymore. How about you? Any family bugging you with calls every day you’re overseas?”
Grant latches onto each memory as something to be treasured - dissected later, certainly, once he’s in private and able to think about his past without breaking down in front of a pretty girl. But Petra, Petra feels the stirring of a fifteen-year-old mutate deep within her bones, and years of Red Room training (and torture) forces her to suppress. To deny that they exist, that it was all weak bullshit anyway, that Madame will be furious when it’s in her report, so best to just bury it now.
She blinks. Wrinkles her nose. Shrugs.
“It’s nice being - you know - on my own for a bit.”
“Yeah,” Grant says, as if he understands, even though he doesn’t.
He is, he suspects, horrifically lonely. He’s seen old photos of the man he used to be, and even in those immediate days after his rescue, the pictures blurry and taken in the middle of a field camp, the man shaky and pale and with bags under his eyes from exhaustion and captivity, Bucky Barnes was surrounded by friends and compatriots. His arm slung over Steven Rogers’ broad shoulder, the Howling Commandos around them, an irrepressible weary grin on his face. There had been some sort of camaraderie there, with all of them at least going through hell together.
He wonders what that felt like.
There’s so many reasons which might have a college girl happy to leave home behind, though — from the more innocuous to the more sinister — so he doesn’t ask, doesn’t pry, and they keep sauntering along. It’s summer, but the night is cool enough that she won’t freeze in that halter top. He’d probably offer his jacket otherwise. (Idiot. Predictable.)
“So how long are you in Bucharest, Harper?”
They’re drawing closer to his building; he navigates the streets from memory, not having used a smart phone his whole time on the run. He learned by pulling out paper maps and walking, just walking, mapping each new city beneath his boots whenever he flees to the next one.
Harper isn’t lonely; she has her sisters. The other girls in the sorority, elsewhere at a football game, cheering on Romania and Italy indiscriminately. Petra has her sisters, the other widows, the ones that sneer at her when her back is turned, jealous of how she has Madame’s favor. Petra isn’t lonely, she has Madame Bulgakova. The woman gave her purpose, lifted her form a life of mediocrity and selfishness, showed her how to be useful. How to be powerful. How to be deadly.
Petra isn’t lonely. She has her mission. Recover the Winter Soldier. Glory to the Red Room. Kill your distractions. Weak begets weak.
(And a fish doesn’t know what water is.)
“Couple more days,” she says. These are the lies that don’t matter; no man wants to hear about plans further out from the next morning. She’s learned this lesson well: from the other Widows, from her briefings, from the bed of corpses. Besides, by this time tomorrow, she’ll have rendezvoused with the Red Room, mission finished. Maybe she’d have some wine to celebrate. “But I might come back. There’s some cool stuff here.”
Talking about the future is dangerous. He can’t promise that he’ll still be in Bucharest if she comes back. He can’t tell her what countries he might move onto next, either. Can’t just drop in a blithe Hey, look me up, maybe we’ll hang out again,
so he resolves himself to just enjoy this standalone evening for what it is. They reach his building, and he fishes out the metal key for the front door. No fancy intercoms or digital keypads here, it’s all charmingly analog, purposefully-chosen. No security camera unblinking from the corner of the entryway.
Grant shoves his shoulder against the building door, “It sticks a little,” he says, apologetic, and leads the way up the creaking stairs to his place on the third floor. (This apartment block is across from an empty field; far enough that a sniper can’t get a good bead through his windows, but high enough that he could jump out to one of the adjacent buildings. He knows. He’s checked.)
When he leads the way in, there’s a faint sheepishness to him which would apply no matter what: a bachelor, self-conscious about his living space. It’s a studio apartment, all one room. A lumpy brown two-person sofa right by the kitchenette, drab peeling walls, a mattress right on the floor but neatly-made. He winces, seeing the whole place through someone else’s eyes for the first time.
“Sorry, I, uh,” jesus christ, “I don’t host much. You want some water?”
Or something harder, but he’s not trying to sound like he’s plying her with alcohol.
Petra’s been in more shithole apartments than she can count. Dives hastily rented for a mission; abandoned condos in condemned buildings for a sniper’s den; little hideaways she shares with a corpse. Sometimes one she put there. So stepping into the Soldier’s sorry excuse for a home does little to phase her - she’s pretty sure she’s seen that mass-produced throw rug before.
But Harper, Harper needs to feel special. Needs to make Grant feel special. So she does a little visual sweep, lets the emotions play out openly on her face: horror, amusement, fond indulgence. “Grant,” she says. “Babe, you need to get a bedframe. If nothing else so you’re not just a freakin’ cliche.”
(She’s slept on rocks, on dirt, in branches, on rooftops. She doesn’t care. Even her cot back at headquarters is purposefully not too comfortable).
“Water would be good,” she says, slowly taking off her purse to drop it next to the door. “Kinda drank a lot, huh?”
Kinda. He flashes her a rueful smile, before he heads for the kitchenette to rustle up two glasses, and fill them with cool filtered water from the fridge.
“Bedframes are expensive, and you don’t technically need one,” Grant points out, and if you didn’t know the truth, it sounds plausible enough. A young man saving money, something right out of /r/malelivingspace.
Despite the bleakness, though, there’s a few small homey touches which soften the barren look of the room: a throw blanket hanging over the couch, a bowl of fresh fruit from the market. The mattress, such as it is, is tidy and clean and made with military precision, all the edges tucked in. He automatically scoops up a small stack of notebooks and shoves them into a battered backpack, and hangs it on a hook on the wall, before looping back around to hand Harper her glass of water.
Obviously more fidgety than he was in the bar, some of that charisma rattled. It’s his first time bringing someone home since— Well. Since decades. He’s a little nervous. Better stop thinking about it.
Half-jokingly: “You’re in an Airbnb. That’s gonna be an unrealistic snapshot of most people’s lives, c’mon.”
This - this is good, isn’t it? People banter, tease each other, give and take shit about wall hangings and mismatched silverware and bedspreads. She’s certain (well, nearly certain) that the Soldier wouldn’t risk vermin. They are alike in that way; for those that spend half their lives in field missions and with fleas, a clean bed is paradise.
Harper meanders around, exploring the meager studio room. She doesn’t overly pry, doesn’t open up any notebooks or root through the cabinets. She just takes it in. Looks out the window, a girl checking out the view - out of sniper range, what a clever boy. With how much she’s been camped out away from him, watching from afar, it’s only natural to want to enjoy the satisfaction of finally, finally making it inside.
She sips the water, slow, deliberate, and plucks a pluot from the bowl. “It’s, uh. Rustic. C'mere.”
C’mere, she says, a gentle tug at the metaphorical leash, and something in the Soldier and James Barnes alike is wired to obey and drift back over to her side of the room. Ready to comply.
Grant sets his glass back down on the table, barely touched, clearly having just been a pretense to keep his hands busy. But then he’s come closer and standing in front of her.
She’d be short, if it weren’t for the heels. He’d noticed that on their walk over, with his arm slung over the girl’s shoulder, but it’s something different to be sizing each other up face-to-face, too close in each others’ personal space. He finally reaches out, his gestures just as slow and deliberate, and hooks a finger in the loops of her trousers to draw her closer.
“I’ll pass on the critique to the landlords,” he says, warm.
Continued satisfaction. A wry smile, a cat playing with a mouse. She doesn’t say it, he doesn’t need to hear it, but strike a cryogenically frozen dog long enough and it knows what to do. Good boy.
“Great,” Harper says, setting her own glass down. She still holds onto the fruit in her hand, tapping rings against the skin, bracelets jangling with each move. “See if you get that deposit back.” Another joke, that sort of effortless, self-centered remark a girl from California should be good at.
She bites into the pluot - tart and sweet and juicy. He tugs at her shorts (but only the loops, what a gentleman!) and Petra obliges. They’re close now, enough that she can smell the alcohol on his breath, the inexpensive and bland deodorant he uses. She takes another bite, letting the juices drip on her lips.
That’s right, soldier. Think about it. Let your imagination run wild.
If he were still under HYDRA’s thumb, a regimented machine under tight rein, operating only within incredibly narrow parameters of what he was expected to do— then the Soldier would have been all strict focus and hyperfixation. He would care about the mission and nothing else but the mission, with no room for distractions. He’d never notice a pretty face walking around on a pair of heels, unless he was being assigned to kill it.
But here, Bucky Barnes is distracted.
With that boot finally off his neck and free to look where he likes and admire what he wants, he’s putty in her hands, lonely and touch-starved and subject to falling for exactly this: he leans in and reaches out to swipe some of the sticky pluot juice off the side of Harper’s chin, the corner of her lips, and then he finally closes the gap with a kiss.
It’s too early to declare the mission a success, but Petra allows herself a moment of absolute smug satisfaction. If pressed, if the target takes notice, it’s no matter: Harper’s happy to get laid by a handsome, tall American. Surely, he can overlook the hum of satisfaction in her throat, the way her lips curl when she’s kissing him back.
She moves quickly (too quickly? physically, a shade too fast?), dropping the fruit and letting it roll on the ground. Harper grabs the collar of his shirt, bunching the fabric in her fist, and pulls him forwards - down, further into her embrace. Her other hand moves up, so she can drag a finger on the sandy stubble of his jawline and up into his hair -
And, as a bonus, so she can get the knockout injection closer to his neck. Wait for the right opportunity, which should be coming -
The kiss deepens, perhaps a little surprisingly fast; he’s used to women from a century ago who could still be brazen, but it’s been a while. His mouth opens against hers, hungry, and Harper hauls him closer by the neck of his shirt and he makes a small noise into her lips, warm and amused.
A moment later, James can’t even consciously say what’s wrong with this picture. Because it’s not conscious, just some undefinable gut instinct (a spidey sense, if you will). A slight angle of her hand which isn’t right, her hand floating but her palm not flattening against his neck for some reason, the weight of something in her fingers and something glassy brushing the edge of his unruly hair because he hasn’t cut it lately enough. He’s realising it too late: there had been something in her hand while he was distracted by the pluot in the other one. Effective sleight-of-hand, tremendously well-trained,
but he’s been trained for longer.
The cold press of a metal needle. It punctures skin, and he reacts without realising it. Hard-wired muscle-memory, all the times again and again and again that HYDRA had shot him with sedative and tranquiliser, a single sharp impact like a bolt-gun to the head of a factory cow, as cold and impersonal as that, darkness and oblivion swallowing him up in ice and putting him to sleep over and over and over, he is so fucking tired of being asleep —
He jerks, his metal arm swinging up to slam Harper’s away from him. Something goes winging out of her hand, clattering on the floor. His neck is bleeding. He didn’t decide to do this; his body had reacted without him reviewing and approving the decision, all the programming of the Soviet machine still kicking in, and thank God for it, apparently.
But Petra Bulgakova is well-trained (even if her experience is measured in years, not decades), so maybe there's a way to salvage this. She's clever enough to keep in character – little Harper looks confused, put off that the cute guy she'd been making out with has pushed her away. “Hey – what the fuck?”
Maybe if her voice squeaks just right, things will be alright. If she rubs her forearm where the Soldier had smacked it away,bruise already forming. If she looks put out and pouty and pathetic, and -
Oh, he's bleeding. Well, at least the injection worked. Maybe? Call it fifty-fifty. She could go all Florence Nightingale - baby did I hurt you, I knew that ring was a cheap piece of crap - and take a look at the wound. But no, that was a full counter, he could tell it was purposeful -
Stall. All she needs to do is wait until the knockout drugs kick in. (Somewhere inside her, a memory that the Red Room didn't have current information for what it took to subdue the Soldier, they were going by an old dose, one that he might've built a resistance to - )
“Ow - ow!” She holds her wrist, bending down like she's hurt. A little tremor in her tone, some dampness in her eyes, and the Widow uncoils like a spring with an uppercut to the Soldier's annoyingly perfect jaw.
There’s a brief moment where the Soldier’s instincts are warring with (James’, Bucky’s): part of him is still in fight-or-flight mode and ready to throw down, while the other part of him trips on Harper’s dewy eyes and feigned wounded paw, and it makes him want to apologise and step forward. Take her wrist, check what damage he did. Was it all a mistake, a stupid mortifying misunderstanding —
That second instinct, the single second of stuttering hesitation, throws him off enough that the punch collides with his jaw.
A crack of startling pain, his head snapping to the side — oh, she’s strong, stronger than she should be, that feels like the serum or something like it — and the rest of those foolish weak impulses fall away like scales from his eyes. The Soldier’s metal hand, the left hand of HYDRA, snaps out again and clamps straight onto her white throat: gloved fingers tightening, trying to compress a wind pipe, crush her breathing, suffocate her. The blunt approach.
(A normal human likely wouldn’t be able to wriggle or thrash out of it, but she isn’t normal, is she?)
He’s silent. He’d always been silent, when he worked.
So, the funny thing? Strong as the impact was, she was still pulling her punch.
Being a Widow is about perfect control: of emotions, of the job, of your body. In one of her first training sessions, Petra punched the broad-shouldered sneer of a man hard enough to pulverize his jaw. From then on, it was drilled into her: Leave no mark. Hide who you are, what you can do. Your talents are not yours; your talents, and your life, belong to the Red Room.
The Soldier’s hand wraps around her slender neck, and Petra stamps down on the instinctual panic. Again, control. She grabs at the metallic wrist, squeezing, trying to see if she can dislocate - no go. There’s a moment between them, when her wide eyes lock with the Soldier’s narrow, impassive gaze, and she gurgles something that might be a laugh.
Her grip tightens, steadying herself, and she lifts her entire body off the ground. He’s strong enough to hold her, yes - but when her torso curls in on itself in a second, when her thighs slam into his neck, it’s with enough force to send him staggering back. Enough force for an opportunity to wrench her neck out of his iron grasp, to gasp for air and cartwheel off of him.
He rebounds off his kitchen counter, a sweep of arm accidentally colliding with the abandoned glass of water, where it rolls onto the floor and shatters. Glass ricochets off their legs. For a moment, some long-dead humour stirs upon realising that they were making out just a minute ago and how the fuck did this go so wrong so quick,
but there’s something in that particular move with the thighs which makes his gaze narrow in suspicion. That acrobatic, balletic cartwheel. He’s been almost choked out by a specific redhead’s legs often enough that he just has to ask:
“Are you a Widow?” James demands, frowning at her. As if he didn’t have enough to worry about already, with HYDRA and SHIELD alike coming after him —
She is as still as silence, posture hardened into battle readiness. Like a coiled snake prepared to strike, waiting for its opponent to make a move, analyzing which of a dozen different responses would be most appropriate. Grant – James – the Soldier – asks the question of the hour. Damn Romanoff, that fucking little turncoat, for the intel she's offered up to the enemy. Well, her handlers say she's the best since Romanoff. Petra says she's even better. Time to prove it.
The snake sheds its skin. Harper Carlson melts off of her: gaze narrows, gin spreads across her face like oil, the relentless energy of a devil-may-care horny co-ed dissipates. “Oh, obviously.” Even the accent's gone: SoCal vocal fry replaced with her (not) natural tongue. “Just like I told you. Men, all the same. You've had your fun - “ He throws a punch, and Petra steps to the side easily. “Running around. A little taste of being your own man.”
She ducks under the next blow, sweeping a kick to his legs. He stumbles, but doesn't fall – no matter, it puts her in a position to leap, taking a few steps up the wall to backflip over him, landing on his back with an arm around his neck. Chokehold.
“But we are not our own, Winter Soldier. We belong to the Red Room, you and I. Come home.”
Come home, she says, but thank god, oh, thank god she doesn’t seem to have the actual activation phrases. Otherwise, she could’ve whispered those to him anytime during their walk over here. The Red Room wants him and HYDRA wants him, but it seems neither of them want to play nice with each other. If she’d been sent by HYDRA, this could’ve played out so differently: a few carefully-deployed words punching straight into his cerebral cortex, rendering him limp and compliant once more.
So instead, it’s a fight. A spider hanging off his back, arms strangling his throat. James slams backward into the counter and some flimsy shelves break, sending plates clattering to the floor; his poor little Romanian studio apartment’s getting wrecked, the neighbours are going to have so many questions about all the crashing and banging in here,
don’t think about that right now, even if you survive you’re not staying here,
and gasping for breath, he finally just tips backward and lets his body-weight drop, a sudden plunge and landing directly on top of her, driving the breath out of her. He’s heavy, both from his size and that crudely-wrought titanium in his arm. Then they’re scrambling across the floor and he goes for— the sink, the cabinet door under the sink. There’s a gun there, taped to the pipe. Just need to grab the gun.
(Down the hall, there’s the sound of another crash. A stairwell door kicked in. Boots approaching.)
Muscle memory takes over. Petra tightens her grip, thighs clenching around his chest as she digs the heel of her palm against his trachea. Go to sleep. Come home to Mother Russia. Everything will be okay. But he ruins it, and a part of her admires him for being stubborn. She does her best to twist out of his way, to avoid being crushed, but she’s too closely entangled to escape.
“Motherfu - “ Cut off with his chest on her stomach, at her head painfully slamming against the floor. She growls, throwing jabs against his neck and shoulders. Two knuckles protrude out slightly, pressure concentrated, just a little more pain. She has her mission, yes, she is to recover the asset. But now, with everything fucked up, she wants to hurt him a little, too.
One of her fake nails breaks off. There’s grooves in the wooden floor where her jewelry’s digging in. Barnes reaches underneath the sink, and she tries to kick the door closed, but it’s his metal arm, so it just bounces off. And then she sees the all too familiar glint of cold, dark steel in his hand.
Petra lets go of him completely, stops her assault, and flicks her wrist towards the ceiling. Her canisters activate - it’s the large pleather cuffs on her wrists, the ones just a little too big, that she masked by leaning into the idea that little Harper Carlson likes bangles and bracelets. She shoots out webbing and pulls, lifting herself into the air like a gymnast so he’ll just shoot at nothing. She twists, lands on the ceiling, and sticks there.
(A HYDRA squadron stomps through the apartment. Above them, three AIM scientists prepare the charges to blow through the ceiling. Across the street, through the window, the field is a deterrent for a sniper. But Benjamin Pointdexter is no ordinary sniper).
His bullets punch into the plain wall, but she’s already gone.
“What the fuck,” James says, and this time that reaction is just him, gobsmacked and colloquial, staring into empty air where she’d bizarrely swept up to the ceiling.
It means there’s a wide open space between the window and him, and Bullseye staring down the sights. James’ gaze drifts downward at the bloom of red light on his chest, and some well-honed instinct makes him start to jerk out of the way just in time that it’s not a killing blow: but it hits him and James drops again like a stone, the bullet embedding itself in his shoulder.
Which is, ironically, what saves him when the HYDRA ground-forces reach his front door and send another smattering of gunfire through the apartment at what would have been chest-height, except he’s on the floor and Not-Harper is on the ceiling, and so it misses both of them. The fruit-bowl explodes into shards of ceramic, the ancient fridge takes a beating but somehow doesn’t break.
Okay. Definitely not getting his security deposit back. Everything is fucking happening so much. James watches and feels his makeshift little life evaporating around him, blood seeping into his shirt, a distant pain; the Winter Soldier had always been good at shoving aside personal pain as irrelevant.
The thing is, after their original collaboration all those years ago, HYDRA and the Red Room aren’t exactly on speaking terms anymore. Dreykov and Karpov rising through the ranks of their respective organisations with aspirations of their own, and that meant there wasn’t room in their plans for yet another power-hungry former Soviet general, too many wolves eating at the same table.
So when the HYDRA soldiers enter, they’re staring in bafflement at the shape clinging to the ceiling. A muttering of Russian, “Get her,” and the gunfire resumes while James starts army-crawling toward the back exit.
He’d thought they were reinforcements, coming in to back her up, but— maybe not.
There are five men. HYDRA soldiers, picked for their brutality and sharp-shooting skills, led by a man who’s killed as many people as a plague. And she is one girl, five-foot-something, in heels and a halter top designed to draw attention, not provide any real support. It’s almost a fair fight. Maybe she ought to give them a handicap.
They raise their guns, and the Widow uncoils, flinging herself down to land on the shoulders of the closest. Unlike with Barnes, she doesn’t choke him out - just grabs, jerks, and snaps his neck. Four. A handspring, and she brings her force down on the knee of another. He screams and falls to the ground, while gunshots pop off around her. She doesn’t stay still, but jumps again, letting them turn, letting them try to aim, letting them waste bullets as she pinballs around the apartment. She fires webbing, sticks a man’s feet to the ground, snatches a gun, and shoots him in the head. Three.
Her Spider-Sense screams at her, and she twirls to the side as the ceiling above her collapses. One of the AIM scientists is caught with a HYDRA bullet to the neck, while she grabs another and hurls him through the window. Three.Six. Four. The last one panics; she throws him into the surviving HYDRA agents, sending them toppling to the ground.
One of them - a sneering man built like a linebacker on top of another linebacker - throws his gun away, draws a knife, and lunges at her. In a single motion, she jumps and curls her knees to her chest, flipping over him and slips her shoes off. When she lands, barefoot, he turns, and Petra drives the stiletto heel into his eye.
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But somewhere, in the labyrinthine caverns of subconscious, Penelope May Parker still waits. (and waits.)
She rolls her eyes, grinning over - nothing out of the ordinary here, just a girl pleased that she’s going home with a cute guy. “Maybe not praaaaactical,” she says, vowels flat on the first syllable, dragging it out. “But I really hate having to crane my neck up at everyone.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “And they make my ass look great.”
Well-calculated, to get the Soldier thinking about her ass. And not about how reckless he’s being. Not about how she’s shifting her rings (one on her index finger, with a retractable needle and a knock-out drug, gets moved into position).
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So they walk together as he leads the way towards his bleak little apartment on the edge of downtown, her leaning on his gentlemanly arm; at six feet even, Grant is tall enough to support her as they stroll. His nose crinkles into a smile.
“That’s a trap,” he points out. “If I don’t say your ass looks great, then I’m in trouble. So, humbly noted: your ass does look great.”
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“Now I get to yell at you for perving out.” A grin, a flutter of eyelashes, and the trap is set. Something obvious. Teasing. Continue on with the verbal sparring, the back-and-forth, the way that banter steadily gets saucier as the night goes on. Seduction might not be Petra’s specialist, not in the same way it is for some Widows, but she’s done it many, many times.
“You talk to them much?” She asks. “Your brothers and sisters.” Innocent question.
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He needs to pivot, get off the topic of his family and history— too many inconvenient questions without any real answers behind them, no real way to explain who he is, why did he ever think he could just have a normal night out with a cute girl—
“Not anymore. How about you? Any family bugging you with calls every day you’re overseas?”
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Grant latches onto each memory as something to be treasured - dissected later, certainly, once he’s in private and able to think about his past without breaking down in front of a pretty girl. But Petra, Petra feels the stirring of a fifteen-year-old mutate deep within her bones, and years of Red Room training (and torture) forces her to suppress. To deny that they exist, that it was all weak bullshit anyway, that Madame will be furious when it’s in her report, so best to just bury it now.
She blinks. Wrinkles her nose. Shrugs.
“It’s nice being - you know - on my own for a bit.”
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He is, he suspects, horrifically lonely. He’s seen old photos of the man he used to be, and even in those immediate days after his rescue, the pictures blurry and taken in the middle of a field camp, the man shaky and pale and with bags under his eyes from exhaustion and captivity, Bucky Barnes was surrounded by friends and compatriots. His arm slung over Steven Rogers’ broad shoulder, the Howling Commandos around them, an irrepressible weary grin on his face. There had been some sort of camaraderie there, with all of them at least going through hell together.
He wonders what that felt like.
There’s so many reasons which might have a college girl happy to leave home behind, though — from the more innocuous to the more sinister — so he doesn’t ask, doesn’t pry, and they keep sauntering along. It’s summer, but the night is cool enough that she won’t freeze in that halter top. He’d probably offer his jacket otherwise. (Idiot. Predictable.)
“So how long are you in Bucharest, Harper?”
They’re drawing closer to his building; he navigates the streets from memory, not having used a smart phone his whole time on the run. He learned by pulling out paper maps and walking, just walking, mapping each new city beneath his boots whenever he flees to the next one.
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Petra isn’t lonely. She has her mission. Recover the Winter Soldier. Glory to the Red Room. Kill your distractions. Weak begets weak.
(And a fish doesn’t know what water is.)
“Couple more days,” she says. These are the lies that don’t matter; no man wants to hear about plans further out from the next morning. She’s learned this lesson well: from the other Widows, from her briefings, from the bed of corpses. Besides, by this time tomorrow, she’ll have rendezvoused with the Red Room, mission finished. Maybe she’d have some wine to celebrate. “But I might come back. There’s some cool stuff here.”
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so he resolves himself to just enjoy this standalone evening for what it is. They reach his building, and he fishes out the metal key for the front door. No fancy intercoms or digital keypads here, it’s all charmingly analog, purposefully-chosen. No security camera unblinking from the corner of the entryway.
Grant shoves his shoulder against the building door, “It sticks a little,” he says, apologetic, and leads the way up the creaking stairs to his place on the third floor. (This apartment block is across from an empty field; far enough that a sniper can’t get a good bead through his windows, but high enough that he could jump out to one of the adjacent buildings. He knows. He’s checked.)
When he leads the way in, there’s a faint sheepishness to him which would apply no matter what: a bachelor, self-conscious about his living space. It’s a studio apartment, all one room. A lumpy brown two-person sofa right by the kitchenette, drab peeling walls, a mattress right on the floor but neatly-made. He winces, seeing the whole place through someone else’s eyes for the first time.
“Sorry, I, uh,” jesus christ, “I don’t host much. You want some water?”
Or something harder, but he’s not trying to sound like he’s plying her with alcohol.
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But Harper, Harper needs to feel special. Needs to make Grant feel special. So she does a little visual sweep, lets the emotions play out openly on her face: horror, amusement, fond indulgence. “Grant,” she says. “Babe, you need to get a bedframe. If nothing else so you’re not just a freakin’ cliche.”
(She’s slept on rocks, on dirt, in branches, on rooftops. She doesn’t care. Even her cot back at headquarters is purposefully not too comfortable).
“Water would be good,” she says, slowly taking off her purse to drop it next to the door. “Kinda drank a lot, huh?”
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“Bedframes are expensive, and you don’t technically need one,” Grant points out, and if you didn’t know the truth, it sounds plausible enough. A young man saving money, something right out of /r/malelivingspace.
Despite the bleakness, though, there’s a few small homey touches which soften the barren look of the room: a throw blanket hanging over the couch, a bowl of fresh fruit from the market. The mattress, such as it is, is tidy and clean and made with military precision, all the edges tucked in. He automatically scoops up a small stack of notebooks and shoves them into a battered backpack, and hangs it on a hook on the wall, before looping back around to hand Harper her glass of water.
Obviously more fidgety than he was in the bar, some of that charisma rattled. It’s his first time bringing someone home since— Well. Since decades. He’s a little nervous. Better stop thinking about it.
Half-jokingly: “You’re in an Airbnb. That’s gonna be an unrealistic snapshot of most people’s lives, c’mon.”
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This - this is good, isn’t it? People banter, tease each other, give and take shit about wall hangings and mismatched silverware and bedspreads. She’s certain (well, nearly certain) that the Soldier wouldn’t risk vermin. They are alike in that way; for those that spend half their lives in field missions and with fleas, a clean bed is paradise.
Harper meanders around, exploring the meager studio room. She doesn’t overly pry, doesn’t open up any notebooks or root through the cabinets. She just takes it in. Looks out the window, a girl checking out the view - out of sniper range, what a clever boy. With how much she’s been camped out away from him, watching from afar, it’s only natural to want to enjoy the satisfaction of finally, finally making it inside.
She sips the water, slow, deliberate, and plucks a pluot from the bowl. “It’s, uh. Rustic. C'mere.”
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Grant sets his glass back down on the table, barely touched, clearly having just been a pretense to keep his hands busy. But then he’s come closer and standing in front of her.
She’d be short, if it weren’t for the heels. He’d noticed that on their walk over, with his arm slung over the girl’s shoulder, but it’s something different to be sizing each other up face-to-face, too close in each others’ personal space. He finally reaches out, his gestures just as slow and deliberate, and hooks a finger in the loops of her trousers to draw her closer.
“I’ll pass on the critique to the landlords,” he says, warm.
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“Great,” Harper says, setting her own glass down. She still holds onto the fruit in her hand, tapping rings against the skin, bracelets jangling with each move. “See if you get that deposit back.” Another joke, that sort of effortless, self-centered remark a girl from California should be good at.
She bites into the pluot - tart and sweet and juicy. He tugs at her shorts (but only the loops, what a gentleman!) and Petra obliges. They’re close now, enough that she can smell the alcohol on his breath, the inexpensive and bland deodorant he uses. She takes another bite, letting the juices drip on her lips.
That’s right, soldier. Think about it. Let your imagination run wild.
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If he were still under HYDRA’s thumb, a regimented machine under tight rein, operating only within incredibly narrow parameters of what he was expected to do— then the Soldier would have been all strict focus and hyperfixation. He would care about the mission and nothing else but the mission, with no room for distractions. He’d never notice a pretty face walking around on a pair of heels, unless he was being assigned to kill it.
But here, Bucky Barnes is distracted.
With that boot finally off his neck and free to look where he likes and admire what he wants, he’s putty in her hands, lonely and touch-starved and subject to falling for exactly this: he leans in and reaches out to swipe some of the sticky pluot juice off the side of Harper’s chin, the corner of her lips, and then he finally closes the gap with a kiss.
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It’s too early to declare the mission a success, but Petra allows herself a moment of absolute smug satisfaction. If pressed, if the target takes notice, it’s no matter: Harper’s happy to get laid by a handsome, tall American. Surely, he can overlook the hum of satisfaction in her throat, the way her lips curl when she’s kissing him back.
She moves quickly (too quickly? physically, a shade too fast?), dropping the fruit and letting it roll on the ground. Harper grabs the collar of his shirt, bunching the fabric in her fist, and pulls him forwards - down, further into her embrace. Her other hand moves up, so she can drag a finger on the sandy stubble of his jawline and up into his hair -
And, as a bonus, so she can get the knockout injection closer to his neck. Wait for the right opportunity, which should be coming -
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A moment later, James can’t even consciously say what’s wrong with this picture. Because it’s not conscious, just some undefinable gut instinct (a spidey sense, if you will). A slight angle of her hand which isn’t right, her hand floating but her palm not flattening against his neck for some reason, the weight of something in her fingers and something glassy brushing the edge of his unruly hair because he hasn’t cut it lately enough. He’s realising it too late: there had been something in her hand while he was distracted by the pluot in the other one. Effective sleight-of-hand, tremendously well-trained,
but he’s been trained for longer.
The cold press of a metal needle. It punctures skin, and he reacts without realising it. Hard-wired muscle-memory, all the times again and again and again that HYDRA had shot him with sedative and tranquiliser, a single sharp impact like a bolt-gun to the head of a factory cow, as cold and impersonal as that, darkness and oblivion swallowing him up in ice and putting him to sleep over and over and over, he is so fucking tired of being asleep —
He jerks, his metal arm swinging up to slam Harper’s away from him. Something goes winging out of her hand, clattering on the floor. His neck is bleeding. He didn’t decide to do this; his body had reacted without him reviewing and approving the decision, all the programming of the Soviet machine still kicking in, and thank God for it, apparently.
“What—”
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But Petra Bulgakova is well-trained (even if her experience is measured in years, not decades), so maybe there's a way to salvage this. She's clever enough to keep in character – little Harper looks confused, put off that the cute guy she'd been making out with has pushed her away. “Hey – what the fuck?”
Maybe if her voice squeaks just right, things will be alright. If she rubs her forearm where the Soldier had smacked it away,bruise already forming. If she looks put out and pouty and pathetic, and -
Oh, he's bleeding. Well, at least the injection worked. Maybe? Call it fifty-fifty. She could go all Florence Nightingale - baby did I hurt you, I knew that ring was a cheap piece of crap - and take a look at the wound. But no, that was a full counter, he could tell it was purposeful -
Stall. All she needs to do is wait until the knockout drugs kick in. (Somewhere inside her, a memory that the Red Room didn't have current information for what it took to subdue the Soldier, they were going by an old dose, one that he might've built a resistance to - )
“Ow - ow!” She holds her wrist, bending down like she's hurt. A little tremor in her tone, some dampness in her eyes, and the Widow uncoils like a spring with an uppercut to the Soldier's annoyingly perfect jaw.
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That second instinct, the single second of stuttering hesitation, throws him off enough that the punch collides with his jaw.
A crack of startling pain, his head snapping to the side — oh, she’s strong, stronger than she should be, that feels like the serum or something like it — and the rest of those foolish weak impulses fall away like scales from his eyes. The Soldier’s metal hand, the left hand of HYDRA, snaps out again and clamps straight onto her white throat: gloved fingers tightening, trying to compress a wind pipe, crush her breathing, suffocate her. The blunt approach.
(A normal human likely wouldn’t be able to wriggle or thrash out of it, but she isn’t normal, is she?)
He’s silent. He’d always been silent, when he worked.
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Being a Widow is about perfect control: of emotions, of the job, of your body. In one of her first training sessions, Petra punched the broad-shouldered sneer of a man hard enough to pulverize his jaw. From then on, it was drilled into her: Leave no mark. Hide who you are, what you can do. Your talents are not yours; your talents, and your life, belong to the Red Room.
The Soldier’s hand wraps around her slender neck, and Petra stamps down on the instinctual panic. Again, control. She grabs at the metallic wrist, squeezing, trying to see if she can dislocate - no go. There’s a moment between them, when her wide eyes lock with the Soldier’s narrow, impassive gaze, and she gurgles something that might be a laugh.
Her grip tightens, steadying herself, and she lifts her entire body off the ground. He’s strong enough to hold her, yes - but when her torso curls in on itself in a second, when her thighs slam into his neck, it’s with enough force to send him staggering back. Enough force for an opportunity to wrench her neck out of his iron grasp, to gasp for air and cartwheel off of him.
“Stay down, pretty boy.”
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but there’s something in that particular move with the thighs which makes his gaze narrow in suspicion. That acrobatic, balletic cartwheel. He’s been almost choked out by a specific redhead’s legs often enough that he just has to ask:
“Are you a Widow?” James demands, frowning at her. As if he didn’t have enough to worry about already, with HYDRA and SHIELD alike coming after him —
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The snake sheds its skin. Harper Carlson melts off of her: gaze narrows, gin spreads across her face like oil, the relentless energy of a devil-may-care horny co-ed dissipates. “Oh, obviously.” Even the accent's gone: SoCal vocal fry replaced with her (not) natural tongue. “Just like I told you. Men, all the same. You've had your fun - “ He throws a punch, and Petra steps to the side easily. “Running around. A little taste of being your own man.”
She ducks under the next blow, sweeping a kick to his legs. He stumbles, but doesn't fall – no matter, it puts her in a position to leap, taking a few steps up the wall to backflip over him, landing on his back with an arm around his neck. Chokehold.
“But we are not our own, Winter Soldier. We belong to the Red Room, you and I. Come home.”
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So instead, it’s a fight. A spider hanging off his back, arms strangling his throat. James slams backward into the counter and some flimsy shelves break, sending plates clattering to the floor; his poor little Romanian studio apartment’s getting wrecked, the neighbours are going to have so many questions about all the crashing and banging in here,
don’t think about that right now, even if you survive you’re not staying here,
and gasping for breath, he finally just tips backward and lets his body-weight drop, a sudden plunge and landing directly on top of her, driving the breath out of her. He’s heavy, both from his size and that crudely-wrought titanium in his arm. Then they’re scrambling across the floor and he goes for— the sink, the cabinet door under the sink. There’s a gun there, taped to the pipe. Just need to grab the gun.
(Down the hall, there’s the sound of another crash. A stairwell door kicked in. Boots approaching.)
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“Motherfu - “ Cut off with his chest on her stomach, at her head painfully slamming against the floor. She growls, throwing jabs against his neck and shoulders. Two knuckles protrude out slightly, pressure concentrated, just a little more pain. She has her mission, yes, she is to recover the asset. But now, with everything fucked up, she wants to hurt him a little, too.
One of her fake nails breaks off. There’s grooves in the wooden floor where her jewelry’s digging in. Barnes reaches underneath the sink, and she tries to kick the door closed, but it’s his metal arm, so it just bounces off. And then she sees the all too familiar glint of cold, dark steel in his hand.
Petra lets go of him completely, stops her assault, and flicks her wrist towards the ceiling. Her canisters activate - it’s the large pleather cuffs on her wrists, the ones just a little too big, that she masked by leaning into the idea that little Harper Carlson likes bangles and bracelets. She shoots out webbing and pulls, lifting herself into the air like a gymnast so he’ll just shoot at nothing. She twists, lands on the ceiling, and sticks there.
(A HYDRA squadron stomps through the apartment. Above them, three AIM scientists prepare the charges to blow through the ceiling. Across the street, through the window, the field is a deterrent for a sniper. But Benjamin Pointdexter is no ordinary sniper).
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“What the fuck,” James says, and this time that reaction is just him, gobsmacked and colloquial, staring into empty air where she’d bizarrely swept up to the ceiling.
It means there’s a wide open space between the window and him, and Bullseye staring down the sights. James’ gaze drifts downward at the bloom of red light on his chest, and some well-honed instinct makes him start to jerk out of the way just in time that it’s not a killing blow: but it hits him and James drops again like a stone, the bullet embedding itself in his shoulder.
Which is, ironically, what saves him when the HYDRA ground-forces reach his front door and send another smattering of gunfire through the apartment at what would have been chest-height, except he’s on the floor and Not-Harper is on the ceiling, and so it misses both of them. The fruit-bowl explodes into shards of ceramic, the ancient fridge takes a beating but somehow doesn’t break.
Okay. Definitely not getting his security deposit back. Everything is fucking happening so much. James watches and feels his makeshift little life evaporating around him, blood seeping into his shirt, a distant pain; the Winter Soldier had always been good at shoving aside personal pain as irrelevant.
The thing is, after their original collaboration all those years ago, HYDRA and the Red Room aren’t exactly on speaking terms anymore. Dreykov and Karpov rising through the ranks of their respective organisations with aspirations of their own, and that meant there wasn’t room in their plans for yet another power-hungry former Soviet general, too many wolves eating at the same table.
So when the HYDRA soldiers enter, they’re staring in bafflement at the shape clinging to the ceiling. A muttering of Russian, “Get her,” and the gunfire resumes while James starts army-crawling toward the back exit.
He’d thought they were reinforcements, coming in to back her up, but— maybe not.
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They raise their guns, and the Widow uncoils, flinging herself down to land on the shoulders of the closest. Unlike with Barnes, she doesn’t choke him out - just grabs, jerks, and snaps his neck. Four. A handspring, and she brings her force down on the knee of another. He screams and falls to the ground, while gunshots pop off around her. She doesn’t stay still, but jumps again, letting them turn, letting them try to aim, letting them waste bullets as she pinballs around the apartment. She fires webbing, sticks a man’s feet to the ground, snatches a gun, and shoots him in the head. Three.
Her Spider-Sense screams at her, and she twirls to the side as the ceiling above her collapses. One of the AIM scientists is caught with a HYDRA bullet to the neck, while she grabs another and hurls him through the window.
Three.Six.Four. The last one panics; she throws him into the surviving HYDRA agents, sending them toppling to the ground.One of them - a sneering man built like a linebacker on top of another linebacker - throws his gun away, draws a knife, and lunges at her. In a single motion, she jumps and curls her knees to her chest, flipping over him and slips her shoes off. When she lands, barefoot, he turns, and Petra drives the stiletto heel into his eye.
Three.