AUTHORS NOTE: This is kind of a pointless drabble, but as much as I love writing reunion Buckynat - I've really wanted to try writing some Red Room/Initial relationship stuff. Because that's what makes the modern stuff so GAHHASDFGHJKL; So I wrote this to get me started and figured I might as well post it anyway. Mix of comic canon and MCU. Enjoy!

It was not love at first sight.

The infamous Black Widow was, broadly speaking, just another assignment. It was the first of this kind. Other than a number of extraction missions, the Winter Soldier was most comfortable in assassination tasks.

Once before, he'd been used as target practise. A punching bag. They'd called it training then. As the Soldier understood it, he was intended to actually teach the Black Widow from his own experience this time.

In the Red Room, where they'd first met, when he'd seen her tumbling bloody red curls, full lips, and mysterious green eyes – he had registered her without opinion. Other than that she looked ready to fight. Ready to kill. And that was a good thing.

It was the first time she caught him off guard. Gun pointed at his head and thumb ready over a grenade, she'd explained his options. Limited. Both ending in a bang. She'd won. The Soldier had smirked. His first facial expression in decades. This was it. The sort of thinking that would worm through their bosses plans and take them by surprise. She was not smarter than them. Not yet. But her mind was different to theirs. Her mind would outsmart them. The Soldier knew this for certain. She had outsmarted him – and that was one and the same thing. At the time, he had not known why it had brought him peace. Neither of them wanted to outsmart their superiors.

Next, the Black Widow alarmed him. He'd read her file and understood that she was like him. His handlers were an alien species to him. There was something superior in their eyes, the distracted tones in some of their orders. The Soldier could hear that they were capable of a thousand other thoughts. The way they laughed at his blank submissiveness had only vaguely puzzled him for years. Emotionlessly, he watched them laugh with other spies. Reading about the Black Widow, he saw none of this. No ulterior motive. No personal agendas. No comrades that she would laugh with.

He did not realise that the idea of communicating in rehearsed phrases with another blank slate had pleased him until he'd realised she wasn't one. Natalia Romanova smiled at him. People did not smile at the Winter Soldier. Not like that. There was a slyness in each of her smirks. Something in her eyes when she teased him. He hadn't experienced teasing before. He took it as insults to start with. Something in the silence after she made jokes. Dark mostly. Punch-lines pertaining to corpses. Something about her seemed to expect that he was like her. Moulded. Weaponised. Okay with that. But still ticking away underneath.

Despite the attitude Black Widow took with him in training. Not friendly. Not flirtatious. There was no word for it. The Winter Soldier remained mostly silent. He spoke only to give orders. Explain what was required of them today. Tell her where she could improve. Black Widow was immensely skilled, improvement was only needed in the slightest of details. It was after the Soldier had found himself laughing at one of her one-liners without meaning to, that she started to change her performance. Hold a gun ever so slightly wrong. Make a move in a fight that wasn't the best option (although she never took the worst). Making the Soldier talk more seemed to concede him. He gave up trying not to laugh when she made him. If he had a retort for one of her remarks on his performance he would give it. His handlers had never told him not to – because these things had never occurred to him before.

Eventually, he realised that he was not disappointed to find that Natalia Romanova was more than a blank slate. One day, he realised that somewhere down the line she had made him feel more than that himself. Their partnership developed gradually. They were never friends, exactly. They weren't those sort of people. Often, there was a tension between them when their sparring ended in a compromising position. Which seemed to happen more often as time went on. Even when, inevitably, they became lovers, it was hard to find an adequate label. They were strictly unique. Under all their programming, amongst the tangled knots of puppet strings - One labelled pull the trigger, one labelled drop kick, one labelled choke, one labelled stab, one labelled kill – they were tugging the strings of what was left of their humanity.

They were ordered onto missions together. They washed themselves of blood together. Watched the red turn to pink in the water. The Winter Soldier enjoyed those missions. He had not enjoyed missions before. They were simply something that he did. Maybe that was what pulled on the humanity string a little too hard. Even as he was opened up to enjoying the fights he and Natalia executed. The way they played off one another. As if murder was ballet to her. Even as his emotions were shaped over what he had become, he'd find himself groaning with English inflections when lost in ecstasy. He'd wake up shaking, images of stars and stripes and old American army uniforms in his head. He'd hear daring Americans in an alleyway that was not familiar to him from Russia – I could do this all day – and the Soldier would get up, ready for the door, before he questioned why he felt there was something out there he needed to protect.

Whilst waiting for a target, he saw a brother and sister playing in the street. When the younger girl tripped and grazed her knee, he did not hear the Russian conversation she had with the boy. He heard another girl speak.

"I'm fine, James." The girl had said through tears. "Please don't tell mom, she won't let me out again."

"Don't be ridiculous, Becca. You're coming home. I'll carry you."

James. His name. His name. Natalia had asked him for it once. That had been the first time he'd realised that he did not know it. Well, not anymore. He was remembering now. He'd found Natalia immediately. It had taken a while to realise that the name made him feel joy. He didn't want to answer to Soldier ever again. He wanted to make Natalia moan it. He wanted her to call him James so often and so casually that he got bored of it. That he didn't even realise he was answering to something that had been taken away from him anymore.

The Winter Soldier and Black Widow were executioners.

James and Natalia were in love.

That was their first mistake.

Fatally, the Soldier's handlers had left out a few details of one of his targets. It had never been a problem before. Consequently, the Soldier refused to kill the child hugging the father who he'd been assigned to murder. His masters had yelled at him. Blamed his mistake on his entanglements with the Black Widow. So, they'd known. It hadn't mattered until he'd made a mistake. The Soldier yelled back. He didn't register the shock on the faces of the men in suits. He didn't register that this was the first time this had happened. Natalia had nothing to do with it.

When they asked whether he'd even known he was yelling in English, he knew what would happen. He did not want to go quietly. Eventually, they forced him too. The freeze was particularly cold after the burning Natalia had brought out of him.

When the coldness fell away. When years had passed and his body returned to room temperature in front of a new face. There were shocks through his head. Agony. A selection of words. And he didn't remember ever feeling anything but ready to comply.

Odessa: He shot a man through a redhead. He did not know why he'd not killed both her and his target. He'd had to shake her off for months after that. He would not make the same mistake again.

Washington DC: He'd wanted to deal with the redhead personally. He did not know why. His mission was to execute the Captain. The following fight had felt familiar. There had been a moment, as she'd jumped around and he'd aimed his gun. When there was something screaming in his head. And then…another fight. The outcome of that was more complicated. Memories were punished.

Berlin: Memories were punished. His only response to pinning the redhead onto a table was to choke harder. Eliminate the threat of what they did to him when he remembered.

Wakanda: Well, crap.

AUTHORS NOTE 2: Title is taken from the first song that came up on shuffle from my Bucky playlist. "Broken From the Start" by Jon Foreman. I have lots of other Marvel stories on my profile. Feedback always welcome.

Peace out!