Title: Threshold
Fandom: MCU/Captain America
Rating: PG-13
Length: 369
Content notes: Contains vague references to canon trauma.
Author notes: For fan-flashworks.
Summary: Post CA2, Bucky joins the Avengers. Natasha has feelings about this. (Natasha's introspection on her own past - movie-verse).



They say the present is the doorway between the past and the future.

To Natasha, this means that you can never really leave the room of your past. You are always just in the moment of stepping out of it, but the step is never complete.

She has never wanted to tell anyone this.

Until the Winter Soldier joins the Avengers.

He goes by Bucky now. And he has a score to settle with HYDRA, and SHIELD could sure use the help. But she sees it in him, that motion, that hovering between past and future, never really separate from either. She sees it in the way he shifts, slightly, like a machine with gears, from joking with Steve to pulling his gun when a threat appears, a smooth motion, graceful and lethal in equal parts. She sees it in the way that Bucky enjoys a good steak with Steve and Tony and Sam and everyone else at a restaurant, until he looks down and sees the knife in his hand, and his smile goes stiff, false.

She wants to hate him. He’s the only man that has ever truly terrified her, and she doesn’t want to forgive that.

But a month after his return he speaks to her alone. He’s leaning back against the wall, arms crossed, looking as little like a threat as he can manage, and he says, “We should probably talk. About what I did to you.”

She stares at him for a moment. There’s still a small part of her that would feel safer if she just took him out now, while he’s vulnerable. But she says, “Barnes, we got one foot in the future, and that future’s a damn big job. We don’t have time to talk about the past.”

He raises an eyebrow, pauses. Then he nods, expression neutral, but she can see the gratitude in his eyes.

She walks away, thinking about how strange it feels to forgive, how she wears it poorly, loose and awkward. As poorly as she wears heroics, as poorly as she wears truth.

She keeps moving anyway. She’s still in the Room, the suffocating room of her past, but she is halfway out and still stepping.