Tear into my heart, make me do it again;

[grimvisaged]

The rose itself surprised him less than the name on the note. Not hers, but his own, the one he's coming to share with Barnes a begrudging inch at a time, nudging into a neutral ground. She's the one who pins it upon him—Rogers remains too skittish, too fiercely optimistic to insist upon a name at all—and he accepts the compromise because she bestows it with such surety. He has to have a name, to her, because it's an anchor when her memories fail her as readily as his own. It puts them on equal footing.

The flower he dropped dutifully into a cup filled with water, but the note he neatly folded and slipped into his right pants pocket. Days now he's been carrying it, reaching down to feel the outline of the paper through the fabric. There's so much written between those two lines, so much he is incapable of deciphering. It tugs on him like leash. He thinks, dimly, that perhaps it always was that way with her.

And so he's waiting again, perched dutifully in the far-flung shadows of her room, the note an ember in his pocket as he watches the door.

Comments

[regimes_fall]

There might've been some tickle of her conscience, some niggling of reason that told her this was too fast, that she should take a step back and breathe and really think about what they were doing there together, but old habits died hard and all the reasoning in the world could not keep her away from him.

The taste of him, the lift of his hips when she'd settled down against him that brought them grinding against each other, the very reality of him, after so long wondering if this chemistry might've been a dream, was too much. She rocked her hips mindlessly back down against his, keening against his lips at the resulting friction that was almost enough, but not quite.

She had no idea what she might've done next, no idea where her body and her instincts would've led her had he not chosen that moment to break the kiss and leave her dazed and gasping, her lips still tingling from the ferocity of his mouth against hers. She breathed fast and shallow, her hands instinctively shifting in his hair to hold his head against her when he pressed his face into the crook of her neck, but it was only at his soft, broken sound that she realized what was happening. What she had done.

She cradled him against her with her arms and her hands, pressing her body tight against his now in an effort to soothe. "Shh, James," she murmured against his ear as she pressed a kiss to the side of his head, one hand stroking over his hair while the other dropped to gently rub between his shoulders. Guilt was a hollow ache in her stomach, but she spoke no words of apology just yet as she held him. "It's all right."

[grimvisaged]

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.

[regimes_fall]

Fire split open her insides as he spoke her name, her real name, first so softly she was sure she was mistaken, and then clearer as his lips brushed against her ear. It was a single word, one she’d heard often enough even if it was not the name she claimed for herself in this new, tarnished life, and somehow from his lips it was more than enough to have her crumbling before him - a confirmation where there had only been vague memories and hazy speculation before.

She sobbed out a breath against the side of his head, unaware that her cheeks were wet until she felt the resulting dampness of his hair where she wound it around her fingers in her feeble attempt at holding him against her. Unbidden, her heart began to pound, pushing her through sensory memories of what it had been to fall twisting and lightning quick into love with him, and the slow, years-long agony of his loss and their combined suffering. The fight or die instinct in the back of her skull, the same, red blaze that has kept her alive more times than she can count, told her to run. To leave him. That no matter how much she thinks she still needs him, he is as good as knife at her throat for all he will cost her in distraction and inevitable damage.

“Lyubov moya,” she whispered instead, forgoing his name for an endearment that rolled easy and familiar from her old tongue, sounding just right to her own ears, muffled as it was by the scratchy flesh of his jaw. “Stay. Right here. With me.”