Untangling a Memory

Chicken and egg

Natasha woke early that morning after the first full night of sleep she'd had in recent memory. Where she normally woke with her stomach turning, her skin covered in sweat, and her heart racing, she opened her eyes feeling as refreshed and relaxed as ever. It was almost alarming to her to experience such calm.

This was a dream, a memory, that visited her only once in a very great long while. Normally, she felt the need to immediately push it from her mind, finding it distracting and frustrating, leaving her longing for sweeter days. But she was in the unlikely position of having the man who had held her in the dream back in front of her on a daily basis now.

While he was no longer the Soldier that she had known while she was in the Widow program, she still got flickers of the man she had seen through his hard exterior back then. It was what had drawn her to James at the time and allowed her to be vulnerable in an untenable environment. Now, she saw as he shed layers of hardened armor that had held him back over the years, preventing anyone from getting in. He was allowing himself to become more and more exposed and she returned to the emotions she knew all too well from long ago.

Natasha could only assume that the building feelings inside her were what had triggered the memory to come to her in the dream. While she had been trying to defend herself from developing feelings towards Bucky since she'd returned to Wakanda, each day had made it more difficult. Moments like the previous night, where they had danced on the veranda together, had pulled on heartstrings she'd developed long ago and buried. But Natasha still felt defensive.

Natasha didn't know where Bucky stood in respect to her and his feelings about her. And while it seemed like he could be remembering some things about their history together, she couldn't be sure. Opening up to him about what had happened previously and what she was feeling now seemed dangerous. She'd known his feeling back then, both of them a port in a storm for the other, but now they weren't in such dire circumstances. It might be different for him.

But this morning, Natasha chose to let herself experience everything she felt in the dream. It was such a blessing and a rarity that she wanted to hold onto it, just as she did the previous night. She was reminded of how it felt to be held by him, the security and comfort it provided. It wasn't something she was ready to let go of so soon.

Bucky, on the other hand, didn't sleep at all that night. Lavender. It was all he could think about.

Spending the night running over all the pages in his journal, he searched for every note about lavender. All of them had been in his dreams until now, that one particular dream about the shoulder that stayed with him all the time. He had no notes of smelling lavender in the present, let alone associating it with Natasha, but he had notes around another familiar unidentified scent. This was of particular interest to Bucky, wondering why he would have made a note of such an insignificant detail, but clearly it was important enough to him at the time that he'd written it down.

So, as always, it went back to the chicken and egg scenario- was current life bleeding into the dreams or were the dreams showing him part of his past life? He wrote notes in his journal that seemed to circle and circle and circle back again.

Some of the entries showed that specifically Natasha had smelled familiar to him. Did her perfume smell familiar to him because he was already dreaming about lavender and it was a coincidence to have the memory at the same time or was the memory triggered by originally smelling the scent on her? These both seemed like reasonable possibilities.

Then Bucky's mind drifted back to question of his name. This had been a similar situation- was he making the association between his dream and reality because he wanted a connection to be there or because there was one. It seemed like a big coincidence that this would keep happening, but he also knew she already was filtering into his memories. It felt like her green eyes were throughout everything he saw when he closed his eyes at night. His current reality of seeing her everyday was all over his dreams.