The name slips so easily from his lips, so naturally, that he isn't even aware of having said it. Natalia. Not a call but an echo, memory pushed past his lips and whispered against the soft warmth of her skin.
(He isn't supposed to call her by name. He isn't supposed to call her anything. But he does all the same.)
In his lap, she is memory spun into reality, the most tangible thing he can remember ever knowing. Rogers doesn't count; Rogers is still indistinct, more the wish for recollection than actual recognition. But she, she...
She is a lifeline, a tether. The knife that slices through the fog obscuring his past. She is not gentle, for all that she tries to be; she is the bullet in the gun he presses knowingly to his own forehead.
"Natalia," he says again, a rich but broken sound he presses to the delicate shell of her ear.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-07-17 05:20 am (UTC)(He isn't supposed to call her by name. He isn't supposed to call her anything. But he does all the same.)
In his lap, she is memory spun into reality, the most tangible thing he can remember ever knowing. Rogers doesn't count; Rogers is still indistinct, more the wish for recollection than actual recognition. But she, she...
She is a lifeline, a tether. The knife that slices through the fog obscuring his past. She is not gentle, for all that she tries to be; she is the bullet in the gun he presses knowingly to his own forehead.
"Natalia," he says again, a rich but broken sound he presses to the delicate shell of her ear.