Natasha speaking English and Natasha speaking Russian were not the same person at all. When she spoke her mother tongue, it was like allowing someone into her snowfield. There, everyone would be struck by the same thing: beneath that skin, already beautiful beyond measure, was an even more beautiful and solemn soul.
Bucky looked as though he was about to lose his mind. Their conversation had not even truly touched on the past yet. He had merely heard a language he had once heard from young Natasha's lips, and he had already fallen apart. He felt as if he had shattered into millions of pieces, drifting down through the gaps in his chair like fine snow falling from the eaves.
He could not help bracing his elbows on the table and covering his mouth, as if that could conceal his loss of composure. He was like a vegetative patient who had slept for years and suddenly awakened, realizing in that instant exactly how he had fallen in love with Natasha.
The altered Winter Soldier was a killing machine. He had originally possessed no desires. In other words, his love was a malfunction caused by the code generated within him breaking past its limits. And what had caused that malfunction was, in truth, Natasha's soul.
Back then, she had still been a steadfast warrior, full of ideals and hope, like the sun over a snowfield. It was as though every folk song of the north had been written for her. She was the Russian girl in every Soviet writer's work: beautiful, strong, sorrowful. The sturdy limbs forged by labor could be cast upon the vast earth and never seen; a lifetime's worth of love and hatred could not become even a worthy line in that grand and turbulent age.
Bucky could