#wartime

The mission went sideways fast.

They were expecting a weapons cache. Maybe some human experimentation—the usual Hydra horror show—but instead, tucked beneath the snow-covered Alps, they found something they couldn’t make sense of.

A machine.

It was massive, built like a generator, whirring quietly in the centre of the underground lab. Strange glyphs were carved into the metal. Not Wakandan. Not Skrull. Not anything they recognised. Tony circled it, eyes sharp beneath his visor, muttering theories under his breath.

“Definitely not from this century,” Bruce had said, crouching down beside a panel.

That’s when one of the Hydra agents, half-dead but grinning like a zealot, slammed his bloody palm on a red switch.

Everything went white.

When they came to, it was cold. Snow drifted in the air. Old-growth pine trees stretched high above. No satellites. No cell service. No sign of the bunker.

Just a rusted sign nailed to a tree:

“U.S. Military Training Grounds — Camp Lehigh.”

Steve went still. His mouth parted slightly, eyes distant. “This… this is where I trained. Before the serum.”

They were in the past.

Not metaphorically. Not in a ‘Hydra’s behind old tech’ kind of way. But literally, irreversibly in the past.

1943.

Steve looked like a ghost. Bucky was eerily quiet. And Natasha? Natasha adjusted the straps of her tactical vest, swept snow from her boots, and said calmly, “We need to blend in. Quickly.”

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The plan, insane as it was, came together faster than expected.

They faked identities. Claimed to be a European special ops unit sent for coordination. Natasha, Wanda, and Sam infiltrated the camp first, using forged papers, heavy accents, and enough charm to get past the half-curious, half-exhausted guards. Steve and Bucky—this era’s versions—were somewhere on the base. That was a problem.

A few nights in, they sedated them. Took their clothes, their roles, and stashed them with a trustworthy medic deep in the countryside. Steve had insisted on it being non-lethal. “They have to survive. It’s the timeline.”

And so, just like that, the Avengers became ghosts among ghosts. Soldiers who never existed. Shadows in old photographs.

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You first met her on laundry duty.

You were scrubbing a blood-stained sleeve in a freezing tin bucket, your breath clouding in the morning air, when the redhead with foreign eyes walked past.

She paused. “You use cold water for blood?”

You glanced up. Her uniform didn’t match anyone you knew. Neither did her voice—smoothed by years of languages, all of them layered over Russian.

“Warm sets it,” you replied. “Cold gets it out.”

She tilted her head. “Not bad. What’s your name?”

“People just call be Dovie.”

“Dovie,” she repeated. The name sat strangely gentle in her mouth. “I’m Natalia.”

And she didn’t leave.

You expected her to keep walking—most did—but instead she knelt beside you, dipped her hands in your bucket like she’d done it a hundred times, and said, “Give me a sleeve.”

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You didn’t fall in love with her right away.

It started in pieces.

A look across the canteen. The way she smiled, but only for you. How she spoke a dozen languages under her breath and never flinched when the bombs went off nearby.

She wasn’t like the other soldiers. She wasn’t like anyone.

But God, she made you feel safe.

You grew closer, in stolen moments. She would sit by your bunk late at night, whispering stories from “home” that didn’t quite add up. Cities that didn’t exist. Wars that hadn’t happened yet. You thought she was grieving. You didn’t press.

There was a tenderness to her that didn’t match the violence you saw when she fought. A contradiction. You liked contradictions.

One night, under the brittle stars, she kissed you like it might be the last time. Like she already knew how this story ended.

From then on, you were hers. And she was yours.

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Time didn’t feel real.

Not when she was holding you. Not when you were laughing in the mess tent, or stealing sheets from the officers’ quarters, or dancing slowly in the supply closet to a crackling old phonograph.

You asked her once, when things quieted, “Do you ever think about after?”

She looked at you too long. Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“I try not to,” she said. “But with you, I almost wish I could.”

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They found a way back.

Tony, Bruce, and Shuri—whom they’d brought accidentally via a failed beacon jump—had been quietly reconstructing the time device in the ruins of an old chapel. A makeshift lab. Wires, stolen plutonium, scavenged parts.

“Two more days,” Tony said. “And we’re out of here.”

Natasha stood silently in the doorway, your dog tags wrapped around her fingers.

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She didn’t tell you. She couldn’t.

She said she had to go to the front line. A reconnaissance mission. Just a week. Maybe two.

You didn’t argue. Not at first.

You just looked at her for a long, quiet moment. Then:

“You’re not coming back, are you?”

She froze.

You stood there, arms crossed, jaw trembling. “It’s in your eyes. You already said goodbye.”

Natasha looked down. Her silence said everything.

“I don’t know what you are,” you whispered, voice cracking. “But you’re not from here, are you?”

Still, she didn’t answer.

“I don’t care,” you said. “I love you anyway.”

Her lips parted. Her eyes, rimmed red, finally met yours. “I love you too.”

And it was the truth.

It had always been the truth.

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That night, you danced.

In a quiet corner of the chapel-turned-lab, with soft light spilling through broken stained glass, Tony found an old phonograph.

He put on a record.

“Kiss me once, then kiss me twice…”

You were already crying by the second verse.

“…then kiss me once again… It’s been a long, long time.”

Natasha held you like you were the last real thing in the world. You swayed slowly, cheek pressed to her shoulder, trying to memorise the shape of her hands on your waist.

“If you ever end up visiting Brooklyn,” you whispered, “come find me.”

Natasha didn’t speak. She just nodded.

And that night, she made love to you like she was trying to etch herself into your skin. Slow. Deep. Reverent. As though if she touched you carefully enough, she could stay.

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When you woke up, she was gone.

The blankets were still warm. Her side of the bed smelled like her.

You sat up slowly, already crying.

On the pillow beside you, she’d left your dog tags and a small, folded scrap of paper. You opened it with trembling hands.

It said, in her sharp, slanted handwriting:

“I’ll find you. In every life. —N.”

There was a smudge of lipstick at the corner.

And nothing else.

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Back in the present, everything resumed like nothing had happened.

Natasha was quiet. Focused. Efficient. She kept the pain buried like she’d buried everything else.

But at night, when the tower went still, she sometimes put on that same song.

She’d lean against the windows of her floor, watching the city lights, eyes glazed with memory.

And she’d whisper your name to the wind, hoping time might be cruel enough to let it echo back.

“It’s been a long, long time…”

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The mission was done. The machine had worked. The past had closed around them like a wound.

And yet, Natasha never healed.

She walked the streets of Brooklyn in silence, years later, half-hoping, half-dreading she’d never find a trace of you. You belonged to another time. Another life.

But then she saw you.

Or — no. Not you.

A girl. Young. Laughing. Balancing two coffees and a bag of bagels, coat flapping in the wind.

You.

Exactly.

Same eyes. Same mouth. Same walk.

Natasha stopped dead on the corner, wind slicing through her like ice. She watched the girl disappear into a brownstone with ivy crawling up the bricks. A name was etched onto the buzzer.

L/N.

She stared at it.

Then pressed the button.

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The girl opened the door like a hurricane. “Sorry, my hands are—oh.”

Her smile froze.

You — this echo of you — looked at Natasha with a weird kind of familiarity. Like a dream she half-remembered from childhood.

“Can I help you?”

“I… I knew your grandmother.”

There was a pause.

Then: “You’re her Natalia, aren’t you?”

Natasha’s breath caught. “What?”

The girl stepped back, stunned. Her eyes watered instantly. “Oh my God. You’re real.”

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Inside the flat, photos lined the walls. Most were old. Sepia. A few in colour. There you were, smiling in every one — young, older, elderly — always with that same spark.

“She talked about you every day,” the girl said, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, still in her coat. “Said you were a ghost from the war. The red-haired soldier who stole her heart, danced with her in the dark, and vanished like smoke.”

Natasha stood frozen, fingers trailing the edge of a black-and-white photo. It was you, in uniform, a crooked grin on your face.

“She left you something,” the girl said. “Said it wouldn’t make sense until you found me.”

She disappeared down the hall and returned with a small, battered tin box. Natasha opened it with trembling fingers. Inside:

• The old dog tags

• A folded piece of paper — her note from that night

• And a letter.

“To Natalia.

If you’re reading this, then you did what you always said you would — you found me. Not the me you left behind, but some piece of me. That means everything.”

“I never forgot you. Not for a single day. And when I saw her — my granddaughter — I knew she had your fire in her future.”

“Please don’t love her because she looks like me. But if you love her at all, love her for her own soul.”

“But if you choose to walk away — I’ll understand. You gave me your only forever. Thank you.”

— Dovie

Natasha’s eyes blurred. She had to sit down.

Across from her, the girl — your granddaughter — was crying quietly. “She always said you’d be the great heartbreak of her life. But she never sounded sad about it. Just… grateful.”

Natasha looked at her. And suddenly she wasn’t sure if the ache in her chest was loss or something dangerously close to hope.

“I’m not her,” the girl said, voice trembling. “But if you want to talk, I make a killer cup of tea.”

Natasha smiled, exhausted. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

She stayed for an hour. Then two.

You weren’t there. But your memory was. Your warmth had been passed down like an heirloom. This girl had your curiosity. Your laughter. She showed Natasha old journals, records, a locket with your photo in it.

And when Natasha finally stood to leave, the girl asked, shyly:

“Do you think… we could talk again sometime?”

Natasha hesitated.

Then nodded.

“Yes.”

She visited again a week later. Then again.

Never pretending it was you.

But letting herself fall — slowly, uncertainly — in love with the life you left behind.

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A/N: Part 2?