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The month is June, 2004. Natasha is nineteen years old, and it is her first time experiencing an American summer, though she has been on a boat for the two days since it began.
Her hands clench around the boat's cold metal railing as Lady Liberty's stoic green face comes into view. Chatter and excitement fill the air around her, tourists raising their cameras to get a good shot of one of America's propaganda machines. "Un symbole de liberté et de choix, elle l’est!"
Spare her.
Natasha (Natalia, Natalia, Natalia) turns away from the view and makes eye contact with burningly familiar eyes set into the face of a stranger. Piercing steel blue, steady but intense, sharp, the eyes of a sniper; the harsh winters of Russia but warm like the fireplace in Comrade Svetla's room. Natasha's blood turns to ice in veins, the urge to run invades her, yet the longer she stares the more she feels a deep calmness inside of her, as if this stranger is lulling all of her anxieties to sleep.
She knows him.
How?
"Natalia. Your aim is off."
He says this coldly, his tone disapproving, but the faint impressions of his eyes in her blurry memory are gentle; imploring. What is the matter, Comrade? You have not made a mistake such as this since you were first inducted and you had not learnt yet that mistakes were unacceptable; fatal. Natalia knows. She knows.
"Apologies, Comrade," Natalia says, "It will not happen again."
"I know." His voice is raspy, accentless. "Take aim, Natalia."
"Da."
Her first remembrance of him is that he was kind.
"Excuse me!"
There is a middle-aged blonde woman with obnoxiously thick black glasses standing in front of her, her camera held aloft and her lipstick-smudged mouth pulled into a harsh frown. Her glare is as harmless as another blonde girl's was at age five.
"Apologies," Natasha murmers, stepping to the side, Comrade almost falling off her tongue before she reigns it in. The blonde woman is not her Comrade, nor is the stranger still watching her with familiar eyes, no matter what her unreliable brain tries to tell her. She can rarely trust it these days.
He gives her a little smile, startling in how it makes him look a decade younger; boyish and free, like a movie star in one of those American films. As handsome as Comrade Aleksandr, with his strong jaw and pleasant facial symmetry.
He makes his way towards her and she cannot look away, locked in this stalemate with his eyes and her brain and her heart until he is standing before her and she has to strain her neck to look up. She does not feel as if she is breathing.
His eyes are kind, knowing. Familiar. "Hello, Natalia," he says in a raspy, accentless voice. It is warm. "I always knew that you would escape. Too clever for your own good, Natashenka."
Her heart is beating a frantic rhythm in her chest.
His eyes scrunch at the corners. "Ah, don't worry. It takes a while for the memories to return. Then you'll remember." Kind. The fireplace in Comrade Svetla's room. He looks towards Lady Liberty. He becomes reminiscent. "Ah, that's a view I woulda loved to see in 1945. 'Stead, got to see Zola's. Face like that makes you forget what freedom even looks like."
The ship's horn blares. They've landed at Ellis Island.
The man grins at her, bright and excited, like a young boy. "Welcome to the Land of the Free."
Da.
--
"Natalia. One day you will wake up and you will realise that there are other ways to live, and this one is not the correct one; not that there is a specifically correct way to live. But I will be satisfied if you and all of my other little ballerinas are happy and healthy and able to live a life where you will never need to look over your shoulder for danger. Of course, you will not need to because I will be looking over your shoulder for you, and I will kill all your enemies so that you do not have to do so. That is my hope."
- The Winter Solider, December 4th 1993, two and a half months out of cryo, 62 months before defection.