So we have no fic submissions to post this week. Really, unless Youtube is trying to tell me something. (Google ships Clint/Natasha?)

SO SEND US YOUR FIC, PLEASE AND THANK YOU. I PROMISE IT WILL HELP MOTIVATE YOU!
bc.unfinished@gmail.com

So this week, I'm pulling something from my own archive of Fics I Badly Need To Finish. This is the beginning to the sequel of The Only Soldier Now Is Me, which was always intended to have a sequel, but I have been stuck on it forever.

This picks up where the other stops, and probably will not make a whit of sense if you haven't read the first one. (Though if you choose to look at this blind, you'll need to know that Lev=Bucky, it's the name they gave him when he became the Winter Soldier.)


Lev doesn't remember.

He knows there was a life before, a time growing up and getting here. He doesn't remember it, and he doesn't think he ever will.

He remembers waking up and having to be taught, like a baby, how to speak and read and not shit himself. He remember the gift of his arm, of a name and an identity. He remembers who the Winter Soldier is, and he remembers Natashenka, warm and pliant in his bed, he remembers her blood on his shirt when he took her down to sleep.

And he remembers jobs.

He remembers waking and waking and waking, no time between but the world moving forward and his dreams, a thousand dreams of lives he never lived and places he's never gone. A blue-eyed boy with golden hair, a game in the street, a mountain sheathed in fog. He wakes and he wakes and he wakes and the dreams recede, and he leaves bloody footprints as he walks in the world.

And he sleeps again.

The last time his handlers wake him, they're in a frenzy, words spit about aliens and Gods and he wonders who these people are, what kind of Communists, that they would embrace any God at all, even one they met.

But they don't tell him to kill anyone. They don't give him a gun - they thrust a microphone into his hands and point a camera at him.

"Tell the world," a woman says - and he doesn't know who she is, only that she had the code words that mean she can tell him what to do - "that the Black Widow is a traitor. Tell them we do not recognize the word Avenger as any kind of power, and tell them to return our rogue asset."

He thinks for a long moment about words, about how he can say the things she demands. And then he stares down the lens of the camera.

"Natalia Alianovna Romanova," he says, "the Black Widow, is an enemy of the state, and should be returned to us for justice."

---

They show him footage of his Natashenka fighting shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-back with Captain America, the very man they were created to destroy, the enemy of the people.

They show him footage of the battle that aired on the news, and something stirs in him. It's not Natashenka, no. He knows her and he loved her and he paid for that love.

But Captain America stands in the flames, his cowl blown off or removed, and Lev's stomach twists. He sees the blue eyes and the straw-colored hair, the jaw and the hands and he thinks I know that man.

He couldn't know that man, not any more than he knows the archer or the monster, but still, there is a familiarity in his gut that he cannot shake.

When his handlers fall asleep that night, Lev sneaks from the room they've given him and into the control room, where they keep their information.

He finds a name in the computer there, a town in the Harz Mountains in Germany, where they recovered his body.

Lev smiles to himself and secrets the information away until, a week or so later, when Dr. Sokolova has her back turned. He smashes her across the back of the head with the IV stand, and makes his way to the street, to freedom. To Germany.

---

"Sir, this really isn't necessary."

Director Fury scowled at Natasha. "You called in an emergency extraction team because of a TV signal that we have no record of."

Natasha, using all of the strength of will that she possessed, did not slam her hand on the table, because they'd been going back and forth about this for a day and a half, since she and Clint returned from Bishkek in a frenzy.

He wanted her to go under Hill's care again, wanted to test her for hallucinations, because Clint didn't speak Russian and had no way of corroborating her story.

They said it was PTSD from the battle, that she was remembering Lev because she needed something stable.

She didn't laugh in their faces, but it was a tight squeeze. Lev was an earthquake, an avalanche; he shook Natasha to her core. Stable wasn't even skirting the truth.

"Sir," Clint spoke for the first time since the initial debrief, which was heartening because Natasha had started to wonder if he'd gone into some kind of hibernation.

Fury gestured for him to speak.

"Do you trust me right now, sir?" Clint asked.

Fury sighed heavily. "You're not shackled, are you?"

Clint shook his head. "You trust me, I trust Natasha."

Natasha felt her heart flutter at that, at the idea that he trusted her, the stray he brought in from the cold, enough to make his gesture.

Fury shook his head. "I don't like it."

Clint nodded. "I hear that, sir. Give us sub-q trackers, set a team on us. But give us permission to chase this guy."

"I suppose if I don't, you two will break out of whatever cell I put you into anyway," Fury said.

Clint gave a grin that Natasha had always categorized as insubordinate, but Fury let him get away with, for whatever reason.

"Alright," Fury sighed. "I'll give you a week."

Natasha shook her head. "We need a month to find him."

Fury glanced from Clint to Natasha and back again before sighing heavily. "If it were anyone else--"

"Thank you," Natasha breathed.

"If you're out of radio contact for more than 48 hours," Fury cautioned, "I will send Stark and Rogers to pick you up and bring you back."

Clint smirked. "You think Steve and Tony could find us?"

Fury made some kind of face that, on anyone else, might have been a smile, but on him was just a vaguely terrifying grimace. "No, but I can."

Natasha, against all reason, laughed.

And two days later, trackers implanted in both of their necks, she and Clint headed out to find her past.