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Natasha
The theatre was cold and dark, the curtains dusty and fraying at the bottom, the stage lights long since burnt out and where an audience once sat was only darkness. But the stage floor was swept and in good condition. Natasha was oddly fond of this abandoned stage as it was the place that she could go and forget about who she needed to be at the time.
She dropped her bag and shed her overcoat, slipped off her outside shoes and replaced them with the pair she kept carefully maintained and hidden in every mostly-permanent residence she had lived in near this sanctuary of hers. She finished knotting the ribbons around her ankles and stood to begin to stretch. Once warm she flowed through the exercises permanently drilled into her mind from the first time she tied the ribbons of her first pair of pointe shoes.
The near endless series of plies and releves, of tontus and echappes familiar motions that loosed up her muscles and mind and finally she felt human enough to pull out her phone and put on music.
Now Natasha could never dance to the classics again without remembering the Red Room and all of its blood and nightmares, so instead she danced to everything that wasn't traditional. She used perfect technique to dance to rap, with perfect lines, just the same as she danced contemporary en pointe, twisting her body into strange shapes.
Natasha could spend hours dancing there in her sanctuary, wearing out her shoes in a bout of insomnia fueled passion or she could simply stand there in that space that smelled still of rosin and hairspray lost in a cloud of repressed memories and raw emotions.
Only Clint knew of this particular hidy hole of hers, although he himself had never set foot in the place, she protected the location of several of his hidey holes in return for his silence.
On this particular day, she had come full of the restless energy of being on the end of a required medical leave too full of waking nightmares to sleep anymore. Her movements started out stiff and technical and as song bled into song her turns became sharper, her developes harsh battements, her hard lines, harsh angles, her movements manic flowing and sharp at once. Once soft steps thudded harshly on the stage, her once perfectly curled hair a halo of disarray around the hard lines of her face. Her blouse had come untucked from her slacks and her skin was flushed with exertion and anger.
The song came to a close with a final thudding downbeat, and silence rang throughout the theatre, punctured only with Natasha’s harsh breaths. Her crimson waves hung in front of her down-tuned face, her breaths shuddering through her deceptively delicate frame. The anger and fear and passion flowing from her tense frame with every exhale, with every inhale she drew her identity over her frame once more with the mantra, “ Natasha not Natalia, Natasha not Natalia,..” thudding through her mind.
She put herself through her usual cooldown stretches as if this was just another workout, and carefully removed and stored away her shoes once more, strengthening out her blouse and tying back her hair, reapplying lipstick and tugging her overcoat and outside shoes back on. She slipped a pair of sunglasses on to hide her tearstained eyes, and left the stage still illuminated with the neon billboard above the building, the harsh light shining through the clear tarp covering the hole in the roof. Her sanctuary abandoned until she came to grace the audience of bats and rats and dusty curtains with her grace once more.
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Bucky
James Barnes didn’t know why he enjoyed lurking in this particular building so much. There was something oddly nostalgic about the smell of the floor wax and lingering floral scents of those that once danced here. Barnes would sometimes sit in the dusty decaying theatre seats of the audience and let the flood of memories overwhelm him, or he could stand beneath the spotlight of the false skylight and let the white noise of New York wash over him.
He danced for the first time on that stage on a frigid January night after several weeks of sleepless nights, he had felt like he was vibrating with pent up energy and was attempting to work it off through shadow boxing, he had set his phone to softly play music to distract his mind from spiraling into blood-soaked thoughts.
Barnes, too caught up his memories, didn’t notice that his rhythmic punches and kicks had slowly tuned to careful footsteps and the music surrounding him had switched to the familiar brass of his youth. And so the man who was once the Asset but wasn’t quite Bucky Barnes, danced under the faintly neon spotlight, his only dance partner, his memories.
When Barnes finally stopped, exhausted, it was near dawn and the memories of swing music and beautiful women and a tiny blonde ball of righteousness, had replaced the memories of pain and silence and blood. Barnes feeling mostly human again pulled his greasy hair from his eyes and shoved it beneath his baseball cap once more, slipped his shoes on once more, and slunk back into the barely-night to return to his tiny, impersonal apartment and try to sleep once more.
Barnes returned to the theatre many more times after that and even gave up the pretense of shadow fighting after he found himself dancing instead of fighting enough times. He would put on swing music or even eventually more modern pop music and dance with the memories of past partners, the familiar steps and counting rhythms would often lull him into a haze of happier memories, of dancing and laughter and Steve. This old, forgotten theatre remained a safe haven for him, a place for just him to exist as a human, with human emotions.
Naturally these two former assassins never ran into each other here or mentioned this safe haven of theirs’ to the other. And so these two poor souls never danced together in this space and no one ever found out about this incredible old theatre.
Or did they meet? Or did they share this space with others?
To be continued? (maybe…?)