Three dollars and some change

So I had this idea for a post CA:TWS story where the Winter Soldier/Bucky is stalking Natasha while she's on her "finding myself" tour but does nothing violent just following til one day she turns on him and is all like "either try to shoot me or fuck right on off".

Then he asks her why she isn't helping him, like she's done before.

Since the only time Natasha has laid eyes on the Winter Soldier was when he shot her in the gut, she kicks him in the face and takes off.

One month later, he's perched on a fencepost on a deserted road outside Belgrade when she's done dismantling an old Hydra installation single-handed (Clint offered to help but he's still knitting broken ribs from his cover breaking after the Triskelion) and this time he's a bit more talkative (as in, nearly three full sentences) and says that her name is Natalia and she was a dancer and he's known her for as long as he's had his metal arm.

(Her name is Natalia and her trainers did have her take ballet training, along with gymnastics and martial art, but she is literally twenty-eight years old and does not know him. She tells him that).

And then he says, "You say that every time."

~~~

It's a old and buried Hydra facility, deep in the Russian tundra, where he find their answers.

Video and audio recordings of the Black Widow program, only instead of what Natasha thought she knew, of the small cohort of children her age being brought under the Red Room's wing after the fall of the Soviet Union, this program stretches back since before the Second World War.

Natasha watches as countless little girls are led into a chamber, are strapped down and subjected to the painful procedure of memory implantation. Not all of them survive the procedure.

The girls are identical. Only the dates change.

The Winter Soldier changes the tape one last time, and this one kicks Natasha's feet out from under her; she's walked that path before, can still feel the straps holding her down.

The girl on the screen is her, only weeks after she was taken from the people who claimed to be her parents (always, always, they had looked at her like she was a stranger).

She remembers the pain. She remembers becoming the Black Widow.

Across the room, the Winter Soldier coughs. "That’s how I knew your name is Natalia."

His words ring in Natasha's ears as she stares at the photograph, date-stamped 1941, a hollow-cheeked woman staring with dead eyes at the camera. Romanova, Natalia Alianovna.

Black Widow Project: Specimen Alpha.

Natasha is staring at a photograph of herself.

"Your name is always Natalia."