Flashbacks and Nightmares
There have been a few times this has happened. Not all of them were natural, but most have seemed to be. This time, it had to be something natural, as there was absolutely nothing else around to have triggered the slight (yet sudden, always so sudden) buzz in her brain that said something was wrong. Not big bad wrong just that faint bad that meant she'd be staring off into the distance at some point in the next day or two. Day. Few hours, probably, let's be fair.

Nat likes to pretend these things don't happen to her. She's gotten ridiculously good at hiding the oncoming storm (and even the storm that has taken over) from those around her, and if she's denying they happen, that means they don't. That's the way reality works. It was easier to pretend when James wasn't paying attention. When his entire world was wrapped up in Steve and Tony and missions and Nat was tucked away in some dark area of the tower, far away.

But when he was paying attention, it was different. When he spoke to her at just the wrong time, or asked the wrong questions (though, inevitably, he would claim they were the *right* questions), and he could see through the carefully constructed ruse. Benefit (or downfall) of his having been there when some of the most intense of the memories were made, she supposed.

There are those that look upon their past with each other with drawn brows and frowns that betray their feelings about it, but Nat knows (and she's sure, if she ever asked him, James would agree) that in a sea of terrible things, their shared past was an island where they had had a bref few moments of something different:a choice. Where she could stroke her fingertips lightly over his muscles and watch a small smile quirk his mouth up. Where she could be touched and choose if she wanted to say yes or no. Where they kept each other the nearest thing to sane they could be then. They didn't call it love (at least, not then), but it was. Love was dangerous. It is less dangerous now. When it isn't less, it tends to tie back to those days, when freedom was found only in small shared moments between desperate people who still sometimes find it hard to say the word "love".

She doesn't realize the edge is close that day. James sends her a message. A simple request. She answers him, and even in an answer she thinks is normal (or at least, normal enough) he immediately knows something is wrong. She argues, but he knows, and when he does, he will not let her face whatever it is alone. He knows without words said. They shared it once, and he will share it with her a thousand times over, no matter how much it hurts to remember. No matter what kind of damage it does to him.

It is not the worst time. It is not the easiest time. He wraps himself around her so she can fight when she needs to, and she can be protected when he deems it necessary. It takes too long for her to start coming back to herself, and when she does, she's so exhausted, still half-trapped between her two worlds. She starts to nod off, to lose the tight haunted pull to her face, and as she does, she calls him something she has been careful to never say in that tone to him since he came back into her life. She is tired, and untethered, and floating between then and now, and she feels him with her, but she's so confused, and the word slips out of her before she can grab it back and clench it between her teeth. The second it happens, her eyes go wide and wild, and she breaks away, anger and regret and shame already burning her like the sun.

It hurts. It hurts to have said it, to bring that part of his past to this place that has nothing to do with that time, to this room where they've learned to talk as friends, and only recently to seek out the thing they never called love then, but sometimes manage to do now. She's stained the walls with one word, broken something so fragile between her hands. If she could be like Clint and find her way into the air ducts, she would, just to hide from it all. But she can't, and she doesn't, and when he finally gets her back in his arms, she is weak with it, trying not to weep bitter tears into his collarbone. He's absorbed enough of her tears for several lifetimes worth already, he doesn't need to bear more of them even if he doesn't mind. He soothes her into sitting, and then finally laying down again, and at some point, she finally passes from the here and now to the land of dreams, where memories are free to spin themselves into webs that catch even the slipperiest assassin.

When she wakes up, she will never be able to explain her dreams. Red, black, silver, blue. Flashes of light. The feeling of her body moving against others in ways that are not beautiful (training, they called it, and it was, of a sort). The ache of muscles pushed to their limits and beyond. The haunted faces of children. The haunted eyes of people she loves, changed.

She wakes with a start in the darkness, and feels a soothing hand stroke over her shoulder, trace her arm down to her hand, and hold it, there in the darkness. "Спать," he says, his voice soft with the pre-dawn, "детка, спать." She closes her eyes tight, forces her body to sink into his chest, and tries. She doesn't want to go back to the dreams, but she is ashamed to be awake with him, too. "Я тебя люблю," he says, and she forces herself not to feel the tears that try to come.

This time, as she starts to drift, it is a different murmur that comes from her lips. "Я тебя люблю," she breathes, and she sleeps.