Untangling a Memory

Lovers in a dangerous time

Natalia and James continued on in their training as they had been, each morning meeting well before the other girls had even woken up. But their bond was continuing to grow, day by day.

James had still felt that in some ways Natalia just looked at him as a trainer and mentor. But after she asked him about his name, he realized that she saw him as more than that and she wanted him to see himself as more than that as well. She didn't see him as a monster; she saw him as flesh and blood... human.

He had his memories completely taken from him years before, so this was the first time he knew of that he had been treated as anything more than a machine. She saw that he had a heartbeat and might even be able to feel. He struggled with this at times, having been trained to put any and all emotions aside, but he saw the way she operated around him and he longed for those feelings. He tried to open himself, break the armor, and allow her in on some level.

Natalia saw how a wall had begun to break down in James since he'd learned his name. It turned out that in the process of finding his name he had seen his file and learned other things about himself from before he was wiped completely. But he felt so detached from that person that he really didn't feel that he could explore that history. That man was a someone else, a body that had been preserved and used to make him. He was a sort of Frankenstein's monster, put together from pieces and brought back to life, but never who he was before. The only thing he allowed himself was his old name.

Though she had tried to ignore any feelings she had developed for James before, she was giving way to them now, if only slowly. Like him, she had been and was continuing to be trained to function without emotion, since it would compromise her and would make her a less efficient weapon for her country. But James tugged at her heart through the way her looked out for her and cared about her success.

In class, James was never overt in how he doted on her, spreading his attention amongst all the girls. However, he had begun to focus on lessons that would benefit Natalia most. If she needed more time working on her language development, the classes focused on that. If she hadn't learned how to use a specific firearm yet, practices were set up for as many days as needed to perfect their use. He knew that her ballet classes were helping with both her foot work as well as development of a cover, so he pushed the requirement for the students. All of girls developed their skills further, but Natalia was becoming the most deadly asset of her class.

This had become exceedingly important, that she was the best widow, as there were only 3 left in her class. If she was ever to get out of the school, she needed to be the top student, and James understood this. After years of being used as a weapon for HYDRA, he couldn't stand the thought that she had gone all this way and wouldn't make it out or even that she did make it out somehow, that she'd never have the skills to survive in the field. He didn't want her to become like him, but he also couldn't let her be "removed" from the widow program.

With all of this additional focus in classes, their daily meetings each morning had become particularly important as well. This is where they did most of their sparring and Natalia was quickly advancing. Many days she got the upper hand on James, having developed strategies that worked for her small physique and quick reflexes.

But their sparring was more than training for her. While neither would admit to it or even necessarily realized it, they both longed for the touch of another. When they sparred in class, they hit, punched, or otherwise threw around the other students. In their private sessions, their fights were aggressive, but also emotionally intimate. They cared for one another and when their skin touched each others, it was electric, lighting up the nerves across their bodies. They somehow often ended up in positions where they were face to face, starring into each others eyes and breathing each others breaths, before one of them attacked again. The attraction, both emotional and physical was clearly there, but always unspoken.