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1. Clint
“Nat, you okay?”
This wasn’t Natasha’s first mission with SHIELD. Ever since her transatlantic journey two years ago, her mission report pile only kept growing on Director Fury’s desk. When she had started, more frequently than not, she had been paired with Clint – assigned was likely the better word for that –, and the logic behind that decision hadn’t been lost to her. She had given the Red Room a fiery ending, and before Clint had caught her, she had planned it to be hers, too; her one chance at escaping. But, by no means, that would be sufficient to solidify her new allegiance. Trust needed to be earned. Clint had given her a shot, and even though his trust in her had meant more than words could say, the rest of the work needed to be her own.
This mission in particular, however… it affected her more than it should.
Natasha glances from the glass window in front of her to find Clint walking toward her. Like her, she finds him still fully clad in his suit. Unlike her, he hasn’t been standing in front of one of SHIELD’s medical rooms for the last forty-seven minutes.
She gives him a practiced smile. “Fine.”
Clint fixes his blue eyes on hers for a couple of seconds longer, his right eyebrow twitches slightly on his forehead, but when his jaw slacks and he looks like he’s on the verge of saying something to her – searching for a confirmation –, he doesn’t. He knows her better than that by now.
Natasha is entirely aware of his eyes continuing to bore into the side of her face when her gaze returns to the inside of the medical room, her arms firmly crossed in front of her chest.
There are a few moments of silence between them, the only sound coming from the steps and the indistinct conversation from the medical personnel that come from the inside, the occasional agent or doctor crossing the hallway. Clint, eventually, follows her gaze and nods to indicate the person being attended to. “What’s the word on her?”
Natasha tightens her right fist underneath her right arm – her wrist still smarts, possibly sprained from her quick reaction earlier. She had had worse in spades.
Her name is Naomi.
Or so it says on her file.
Clint and Natasha had been assigned to pursue and retrieve information on an underground organization that had popped into SHIELD’s radar about three months ago. It was a simple reckon mission with the odd minor goon that could be tied up and held for interrogation. They tracked their hideout to the south of a minimal town in Nebraska and, just as Natasha downloaded their local database into a flashdrive, they discovered they had taken a larger bite than they could chew.
In an instant, reckon turned into rescue.
There was a room, deeper within the bowels of the underground facility, where Naomi had been locked in. Natasha had only noticed her through a security camera feed on her screen, the other two displayed a handful of suits zeroing in on them from each side of the hallway, another group going for the girl. They had been prepared to jump out the facility as soon as Natasha finished corrupting their servers beyond salvation, but both Clint and she had silently agreed that neither of them would be leaving without her.
Natasha learned, as she went through the files in greater detail once all three of them had all been safe and rolling away in their getaway car, about the experiments they have been doing on her – another group of mad scientists trying to replicate the super soldier serum or something insanely worse from what she gathered from the documentation in her file. There were videos of her strapped down to a gurney, convulsing in agony as the plunge was pushed down on the syringe; of her, alone, in that room they had found her, bloodied and bruised, test after test after test. There were written reports that spanned a few dozen pages describing everything that those tests implied in vivid detail.
Naomi is eight years old.
I was younger.
Natasha’s eyes flicker across the length of the room and watches the SHIELD medic that had given her a brief report on the girl’s conditions no longer than ten minutes ago. “She’ll heal,” she informs matter-of-factly. “Physically. Whatever they were working on doesn’t brush the surface of any prototype serum SHIELD has tried to replicate; an healing factor didn’t seem to be on their list of first priorities, either. They’re trying to counteract the substance, and hopefully flush it out of her system completely.”
If she were lucky, there will be no permanent damage – physical damage. Mentally? Will she be able to have a normal life? Will it be possible for her to be reinserted into society? Even if, for some miracle or good grace, they are able to locate any relatives she might have still in the world, or if they find her a placement in a foster family, will Naomi have any shot at fully living?
It’s too soon to tell, the medic had told her.
Natasha is the first to admit that the last thing she knows is what normal is. Any traces of parental figures, of a home, have never been part of her file. She prefers to think that there have been neither of those things than to ever admit to herself that she had been denied that, that she had been abandoned or left behind… that her own mother hadn’t wanted her. Even though she can’t. She can’t keep herself from wondering about all of that, every single day of her life.
She can’t help notice that Clint is looking right at her again. Clint has been her partner for two years, and over those two years he became something so much more than a work colleague. He became her friend, if Natasha had ever had one. And part of her tells her that he had connected the wires to understand how she thinks. He knows even if she had never told him anything.
Natasha works up a smile when she turns to look at him again. “Time will tell.”
2. Steve
Ever since they banded together against the alien invaders a few weeks ago, the Avengers have been hanging on the balance between heroics and recklessness in the public perception. Opinions diverged greatly when it came to the assessment of their individual and collective behavior in the battlefield, and a discourse had been open and ongoing about the necessities for a group such as them to even exist, as well as its liabilities. Arguments were being thrown left and right, pros and cons, in favor and against; and all of those arguments are now being shaken by the official numbers that just came out yesterday evening.
One hundred and forty-three dead. The wounded had tripled that.
For each of them, she lands one harder square punch, the punching bag recoiling on impact. For each of them, Natasha adds one more strike of red to her ledger.
Ever since coming out of the Red Room, Natasha had strived for nothing other than to wipe it out. She hadn’t been certain if reaching a point of conclusion on her task was achievable in her lifetime, but she had made it her life’s mission. She wanted to atone, even if she couldn’t forget. She wanted to one day be capable of looking herself in the mirror and see something more than what she had been made into – an asset, a trigger, an assassin – and to look into her own eyes and see something more than the ghosts she had left in her wake.
I remember them all.
All of their faces, always and permanently engraved to the back of her eyelids. Most of them have not been granted the opportunity to run, or scream. The ones that did, the ones that took one look at her and begged for their lives, she remembers their voices, too.
But most of all, she remembers the silence.
Natasha can never wipe their blood from her hands, their names and faces from her memory, and this… – one hundred and forty-three – this is only adding.
A tap on her shoulder catches her off-guard; the punching bag swings on its hold, a hand shoots up to catch it on its swing back before it hits any of them. When Natasha looks back around, she finds Steve standing there in front of her.
“Hey,” Natasha says, breathless, “I didn’t see you there.”
“I noticed,” Steve replies with a twinkle in his eyes.
Natasha reaches to unfasten the strap on her wrist to release her left hand from the glove and, clutching it to her side underneath her right arm, unplugs the bluetooth earbuds from her ears, Nirvana instantly fading into nothing as she focuses back on Steve. She lets out a ragged breath, her muscles sore and her skin sweating. “What-what’s up?”
“We agreed to go for a jog this morning,” he says, his eyes widening just slightly at the question. “Did you forget?”
“Hum,” Natasha releases a sigh at the information. Right. They did. And she had also forgotten… Holding the earbuds in the palm of her hand, she reaches for the strap on her right wrist to pull her other hand free as she heads toward the bench up against the wall. “No. No… I was just… I lost track of time.” From what she can see from her phone when she collects it to pause the music, she had lost track of over one hour apparently.
“We can reschedule for another day, if that’s better,” Steve offers promptly.
Natasha places her phone back down on the bench, the gloves beside it, and reaches for the purple water bottle on the floor in front of it. “No. No-no-no, it’s okay,” she says after a large swig of water. “Yeah, we can go. Let me just… catch my breath, and…” she indicates the bottle in her hand, “hydrate. Not all of us have infinite endurance, you know?”
Steve’s smile is reserved, but amused. He keeps an eye on her for a moment longer, however. “You sure you’re…”
“Yeah,” Natasha nods, and takes another swig that drains her water bottle to less than half.
“Okay,” Steve concedes quickly with a nod, his hands finding their way into his track pants pockets. “But, you know, if…” he starts, stopping Natasha from gathering her things to glance back at him. “I mean, I personally find it easier to unwind with a moving target,” he indicates the punching bag with a tilt of his head. “We could spar today, instead. The park will still be there tomorrow.”
Natasha smirks, her right eyebrow raises in her forehead. “Is that your way of asking me to hit on you?”
3. Tony
There’s a knock on her door.
Natasha looks up from her duffle bag, her clothes and gear still in the process of being stored in her dresser, and, with a glance over her shoulder, finds Tony standing in the doorway. He has one hand pushed down his pants pocket, the other still balled in a fist where he had knocked on her open door. When she turns, he drops the hand, his fingers wringing in a nervous tic as he leans heavily on the doorframe.
“Liking your room?” he vaguely indicates her surroundings with his chin.
The move into the Compound is now officially permanent after the incident at the Tower. The facility had been undergoing reconstruction under the premise to relocate the Avengers to a less centered, more versatile location.
Natasha glances around with a raised eyebrow. “It doesn’t have a turret, but I’ll manage,” she quips when she turns to look back at him. The humor doesn’t last long in his eyes, either. “You’re leaving,” she states more than asks.
His head hangs slightly, his chest deflates with a deep exhale. “Yeah,” Tony nods. “It’s what’s best after… everything.”
After aliens invaded New York three years ago, Natasha had thought that she had seen just about everything that was left for her to see. With her mission historic and an extended knowledge of what SHIELD had come to discover over the years, she didn’t think there was anything else that could surprise her. And yet, Ultron had taken it personally and lifted a whole city in the air. Under heavy fire from hundreds of murders robots coming in from all sides, Natasha remembers thinking that was going to be her last ride.
Natasha had never been particularly religious. The doctrine that had been ingrained in her allowed no room for belief or hope – any straying thought such as those, or feelings, were considered dangerous and had to be eradicated – or the idea of there being a life, any sort of existence, after death. Dead was dead; and death was a job. Hoping for there being anything beyond the bullet out of the barrel was nothing short than opposing their own religion.
For a moment, however, when the city had gone through the ocean of clouds, the crust of the Earth hidden away from sight everywhere she looked, she remembers the feeling of finality giving way to something else… For a moment, she had hoped.
If there’s any, this is the closest to Heaven that I’ll ever be.
“And besides,” Tony continues, his dark eyes fleeting from hers as he fidgets, “I have to go back downtown, rebuild the Tower, ship the rest of the gear upstate, and…” he sniffs, “well, without JARVIS running it, it’s…”
“Pepper needs you back,” Natasha finishes for him.
“Yeah,” he breathes out.
Despite his admission, Tony makes no move away from her threshold. Tony has been evasive since they got back – all of them have. But while the general discourse had tended toward regrouping and bringing the new additions up to speed and training as soon as possible, Tony had kept out. Natasha doesn’t know the particulars of when the decision had been made, whether right after Ultron emerged from the scraps of the Iron Legion or when he had a city raining down on him, but Tony was filing in his retirement.
For the whole lot of five minutes that decision usually lasted. She can’t fault him for that, not really. Not when she had just done the same herself – well, technically, it has been done to her, but she could have decided to take her own jet and fly off wherever the wind took her.
It’s just not how she is built.
Natasha sits back down on the edge of her bed, her elbows propped on her thighs, her fingers fidgeting with her own fingernail, and her eyes fix back on him. Tony isn’t as opaque as he might believe he is; not to her, not anymore. A few years ago, he could have fooled her. But now she only wonders why she hadn’t brought it up sooner.
“You saw something,” she says, searching for his reaction to that statement, “didn’t you?”
Tony only blinks, his eyes lift from the carpet to a specific point of interest on the wall behind her, and shrugs the shoulder that isn’t pressed against the doorframe. No one had seen it, and she hadn’t either, not until the twins caught up with them in Johannesburg. But after that, it made sense. “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” he replies emptily. His eyes focus on her after that. “What did you see?”
The vision Wanda had implanted in her mind had thrown her off the railings more than she would have liked to admit. One moment she had been in the underbelly of the vibranium traffickers’ hideout, and the next she was stepping into a reality she had long since been trying to forget. Ever since she can remember, she had been thrown into the routine. Day in, day out, her body had been pushed to the limit of breaking, her mind sharpened, her reflexes enhanced, all of her barriers had been broken, her thoughts wrangled and siphoned to the completion of her mission.
The Red Room had turned her into nothing but the shell of a human being, her body became a weapon, one that they could use and dispose of as they wanted. A hellsend soulless killing machine. The process was slow and painstaking. She remembers the numbers of empty beds increasing at the end of each day. She remembers the faces that she didn’t get to see ever again. She remembers the long dark nights when they had nothing but each other’s whimpers to hold onto. And eventually, after the initial group had been reduced from fifty-eight to eleven, the pressing of a trigger could be executed on muscle memory alone.
Natasha shrugs. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
4. Bruce
“Nat…”
This is the largest hit they had ever taken. There have been countless other times when everyone and every possible and imaginary thing has been thrown against them, but the Avengers have prevailed; against all odds, and despite the losses, they have handled the situation. This is a loss like they have no record of having ever before.
The field surrounding the Wakandan palace has been turned into a battlefield; the Chitauri that they had once managed to repel had evolved beyond recognition into even more murderous dogs of war like they haven’t seen before, more ruthless, more bloodthirsty; and to top all the destruction his army had wrought, Thanos came down to Earth, and none of them could stop him from collecting the last Infinity Stone and obliterating half of all sentient life into nothingness. Natasha could only watch as people started to dissolve into dust right in front of her eyes.
No. Not people… friends, family…
Natasha sniffs. “Bruce,” she replies, her eyes trailing forward where the clean-up efforts are taking place.
Bruce comes forward. He comes to stand beside her in front of the large floor-to-ceiling windows, his arms crossed in front of his chest, and his head inclines to look at her with a slight furrow of his eyebrows. He’s searching for words. After everything, none of them knows what to say. “I just wanted…” he starts, but his sentence trails off with a shake of his head. His eyes lower as a sigh draws out of him. Then, after a few seconds, he looks back up at her. “How are you holding up?”
Natasha tilts her head to the right, the corners of her mouth twist into a frown, her shoulders shrugging in a half-shrug. “As well as anyone can, I suppose.”
They had lost – there is nothing else to add to that.
Silence stretches between them for a long time. All ideas have been launched into the table, all options that any of them could think of have been discussed, overanalyzed, and finally turned down given the impossibility to make them a reality. There is nothing else, no more brilliant ideas, there is nothing else anyone can do… Nothing else for anyone to say.
They had lost. And they had lost an immeasurable amount.
Bruce licks his lower lips, his head shakes. “I’m sorry I left,” he says in almost a whisper. “I mean, it wasn’t entirely my decision. Or rather, I wasn’t entirely in it. Well, I was, I suppose, in part. It was fully conscious in a sense… except that I didn’t have full, well…”
Natasha shakes her head. “It’s okay, Bruce,” she says, her own voice sounding like a shout in the echoing emptiness of the world. “You don’t have to explain anything.”
“I think that I do…” Bruce raises his eyes to look back at her again.
Natasha smiles, a mechanic smile that does nothing for the brokenness in her eyes. “It was a good dream,” she admits, “while it lasted. But I think that both of us know that it wouldn’t have been more than a dream. Even if you had stayed.”
5. Thor
As if one loss wasn’t enough, the second immediately followed suit. One month apart.
After a surge of energy of the same intensity as that of the Snap had appeared on their radar, as a beacon of hope radiating lightyears away from the end of the Universe, they had found Thanos’ retirement planet. But it had been too late.
The Infinity Stones were gone, reduced to ashes as they had reduced half of the life in the Universe.
“I aimed for the head.”
Thor had come to take the other end of the bench in the lake platform, his gaze trained forward to watch the ripples tha soft gust of wind blows on the surface of the lake.
“You did,” Natasha tightens her grip around her knees, pulling them closer to her chest.
“It didn’t work,” he lets out, his usual booming voice reduced to a breath.
“It didn’t.”
A larger gust of wind blows right past them.
“My brother, the idiot that he was, thinking he could fight back on his own, died in front of me,” Thor says; he needs to get it out of his chest as much as any of them does, and Natasha lets him. “My home was destroyed, my people – thousands of them – murdered… Loki faced him alone. And Thanos s-snapped his neck… right in front of my eyes… It was all for naught.”
Natasha blinks, her smile sad in empathy to the man. Thor had lost so much more than any of them can begin to comprehend. The shockwave on Earth had been too great, but the Asgardians had been the first line of defense, broken into as if they were powerless. If Thanos had beaten them, what chance could they have possibly had on Earth? He had lost his home, his people, his family.
I had a sister, too.
After they had returned to the Compound from Wakanda, that first week after the Snap, Natasha had tried to reach her. One month later, Yelena hasn’t responded to any of her calls yet. Yelena always responded. But she had known, long before she had made her first call – that first voicemail Natasha had locked herself in her room to leave her, and right after which she had cried her eyes, her throat, her lungs, her heart out at the thought that she would never see her sister ever again – and right from the moment of the Snap, that Yelena wouldn’t respond. She had felt it in her soul – her sister had dusted.
Tears well to her eyes. “You’ve avenged them.”
“I avenged nothing.” Thor shakes his head. They really hadn’t… Killing Thanos had meant nothing in the end. Not after the Infinity Stones were destroyed, not after their last bit of hope had been so close, and yet… so far. “How do you do it? How do you move on from this?”
Natasha shakes her head. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how to keep on living with the amount of guilt and grief that have buried into her core; she feels like the weight might just pull her down below the surface and that she will never be able to come up to breathe ever again. She doesn’t know how she will ever be able to get up on her own two feet and walk forward.
“You hold onto what you have left,” she sniffs. “And, eventually… it will be alright again.”
1
“You know the party is in here, right?”
The hustle and bustle of today has given into a pleasant, peaceful evening of early Spring in Upstate New York. The faint breeze still carries the faint undertones of Winter, and the air feels much colder against her flushed cheeks. Natasha had stepped out moments ago, not long enough to go further away from the courtyard’s limits. The railing feels cold through the thick fabric of her jacket, her arms crossed over it as she leans forward, her eyes sweeping the horizon, but they’re unfocused.
“Tasha?” Tony’s voice carries out, now from a closer distance.
“Mhm-huh,” Natasha bobs her head in a nod.
Another time, Natasha would have chuckled, maybe even replied with an equally witty remark. And maybe that’s what stops him in his tracks. Tony’s tone shifts abruptly, something he had undoubtedly acquired over the last six years. It still gives her whiplash at times. “Hey, what’s wrong?” he asks, coming closer. “Are you okay?”
Natasha nods again, this time more firmly, but her throat is too constricted to speak.
The first thing she remembers after the leap is a haze of orange. There was nothing else, just endless, everlasting orange, and she thought she was going to stay there forever, aimlessly wandering for all eternity – maybe that’s what life after death was, just orange and emptiness. She doesn’t know how long she had been there, or how she had stepped out the door, if there was one, but after what had felt like centuries with her eyes closed, her lungs had filled with a deep inhale of air and she had woken up on Vormir.
Clint had never once given up on her. Even after she couldn’t return the favor when she should have.
She had woken up to a restored Universe, her sacrifice paid for in full when Clint returned the Soul Stone to its rightful place, and brought her back to an assembly of people, survivors and returned alike, old friends and new ones, all of them reunited again. An impossibility for the previous five years living not only in a broken Earth, but a broken Universe. Fixing that was the only wish she ever made in all her life.
Her nod suddenly jerks into a shake of her head, her eyes closing shut as a surge of emotion rises in her chest. Natasha doesn’t know why she feels like this; she should feel… relieved. But it’s like there’s something crushing, deep down in her chest, and it’s crushing her from the inside out. “No,” her voice breaks as she speaks.
No point in lying to him now. No point in hiding this to him, either, not when Tony had admitted it to her that he had been there himself – in the orange; endless, eternal orange – a few weeks into his recovery after waking up from the coma using the stones all at once had put him under. The fool.
Her hands clutch into her arms tighter, her fingers digging into herself through her jacket. She feels him coming to stand beside her by the shift in the evening air, and the warmness of his hand presses to the small of her back. “What’s going on?”
Natasha shakes her head again, her sight blurred when she opens her eyes to glance up at him. His side against the railing, his right arm tucked in a sling, the scars that had crawled into his face had receded only faintly and – in true Stark fashion, as she had started to call it since they had met nearly fifteen years ago – he veiled them out of sight in occasions like these. The veil technology didn’t fully reach his hand, however, where they were more prominent. In hindsight, having thrown herself off a cliff mustn’t have been half as painful.
She sniffs, fully aware that he’s still waiting for an answer. “I was just… I keep getting these… you know, flashes…”
“Of the pumpkin variety?” Tony hums quietly, and Natasha doesn’t think she needs to confirm it. “Yeah…” he breathes out.
“Yeah,” Natasha echoes quietly, “and it’s not great.”
“No…” Tony agrees, his eyebrows furrowing on the middle of his forehead in a slight frown, “it’s really not.”
Natasha sighs. “It-it used to be more contained, just once in a while when I was sleeping after I got back,” she admits.
She had woken up in jolts, drenched in sweat and crying more than a handful of times after she got back… Steve had come to find her more often than not – the perfect excuse to take her jogging in Central Park at 4:00 AM – and even Bruce had slipped in on occasion to calm her down with a moment of company over tea or a movie. Bruce has been suffering from the same; maybe he had needed the company as much as Natasha.
“And it wasn’t… constant, it would happen only once in a while… But now, I…” she lets a huff through her nose. “I don’t even know what or where it comes from, I mean… I was just getting more juice from the fridge, and…” she shakes her head.
“It’s like you’re back there,” Tony finishes for her. “Yeah…”
Natasha looks him in the eye as if she’s searching for the best well-kept secret in the Universe. “You’ve been there the longest, of the three of us… How do you do it?”
A puff of air drains out of his chest. “I… honestly don’t have an answer for that,” Tony admits. “I’m sorry.” He keeps his eyes on her after she lowers hers. “However,” he continues, “usually, I find it easier to switch back gears without breaking out the door. I know it kind of goes against the fresh air rule in a way, which is strange if I’m honest… I don’t know, cramped up kind of feels nicer than…” he vaguely indicates the darkened sky above them with a tip of his head – or rather, what’s beyond it.
Natasha huffs out a strangled sigh. “Yeah… Didn’t want to put a dent on the re-inauguration party,” she shrugs.
“Oh, please,” Tony snorts at that. “Is it even a party without at least one major crisis or a collapse of any kind? Have you met me?”
Natasha rolls her eyes. “You’re an idiot.”
Tony smirks. “Yeah, well… every ragtag superhero group needs at least one idiot. Sometimes more than one, but that’s just why they also have the princess to keep everybody in check.”
Natasha raises one eyebrow. “I don’t suppose you’re making me the princess, are you?”
“No, of course not,” Tony replies quickly. “I’m also the princess, you have to figure out your own title.”
Natasha snorts. “I would hit you if I didn’t pity you so much…”
Tony shrugs his one good shoulder, his eyebrows raising in his forehead as his head inclines to his left. “Made you laugh.”
Her lips press into a thin lopsided line at his ingenuous affirmation, and her eyes lower from his. He’s an idiot, and a fool… and it had surprised exactly no one that he became the attentive, loving father that threw himself at the grenade to give his daughter a future.
“Oh, come on,” Tony sighs. “I’m a soft idiot now, too, come here.”
Natasha turns to him fully, her arms wrap around his neck as he braces her back with his one good arm, the other awkwardly slotted between them in the sling, and she can feel his embrace tightening around her as she ducks her head into his shoulder, his temple pressed to the side of her head.
I was a child when they made me into a monster.
But monsters don’t remember their prey, do they? Monsters won’t search for or ponder on the concept of Heaven, will they? They don’t miss, or mourn, or hurt, or suffer, or grieve – so, why do I?
We only were children when they tried to break us – oh God, how they have tried…
“What’s going on here?” Steve’s worried undertone carries from behind her through the evening air.
“Nothing to see here. Go march to the anthem some other place,” Tony replies without letting go of her. From the looks of it, that isn’t enough to send Steve away – shocking – and Tony continues: “What’s the part of ‘go away’ that you don’t understand? Definitely not the ‘go’ but this is the absolute opposite of ‘away’, this is toward, buddy. Good God, I’m talking to a wall.” A chuckle rattles his chest. “What do you want?” he asks as Steve’s shadow shows up in her blurred line of sight.
A pause. “Is Clint here?”
“Yeah, I’ve got Barton in my pocket, where I keep him at all times,” Tony replies. “What do you think?”
“Well, I just saw you out here,” Steve explains, “and I thought he’d be here by—”
“Do you see Barton anywhere?” Tony interrupts. “Me neither. Now, carry on sauntering… This courtyard is ocupado; search your own courtyard for whatever the two of you do together if you’re that much in a rush, dear God! We’re… nutcrack-ing my arm and… baking a cake…”
“Shi—” Natasha pulls back from him with a jump. “I’m so sorry.”
Tony shakes his head with a sigh. “I was joking,” he deflects, but a slight roll of his shoulder gives him away, “...mostly,” he adds after Nat directs him a pointed look.
“Nat,” Steve calls out to her, “you okay?”
Natasha brings her fingers to wipe at her eyelashes and takes a deep, calming breath before looking up at him. “Getting there,” she breathes out.
Steve furrows his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”
“Hey, I take offense to that,” Tony points out. He circles around her and slings his left arm over her shoulders with a huff. “I’m great at this kind of stuff, FYI… And besides, Tasha was mine before she was yours. That takes precedence over—”
From the distance, a stronger gust of wind carries out a whistle.
Natasha glances between the two of them with a frown and then looks behind her and Tony, his hand lowering from her shoulder when she turns. “Huh, friend of yours?” he questions with a frown.
“Yelena…”
A distinct mop of blonde locks billowing in the wind, hands pushed down her jacket pockets, Yelena comes up the walkway toward the Compound’s main building. Natasha heads toward the staircase with a spring in her step and jumps down the stairs two at a time; Yelena picks up her pace toward her. “Nat!”
“Look what I found trying to climb up the fence,” Clint shouts, following after Yelena at a distance.
“Lennie!” Natasha’s breath is knocked out of her when Yelena barrels into her, their arms entangling in a long-awaited embrace. “You’re okay.”
Yelena nods into her shoulder. “Yeah, I’m totally okay. And… and you’re okay. And you’re here,” she says hastily, pulling back just enough to look at her. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. You weren’t returning any of my calls. Well, I lost my phone… Or like, it was disposed of, I guess, without even asking me, which was so entirely rude, right? I mean, it was mine. And then, I tried to get a hold of you, and I had no idea what had happened… So then, I was on my way to New York, you know, and that jackass found me…” she points at Clint behind her. “Which was really creepy, by the way. And… you’re here…”
Natasha smiles as she listens to Yelena ramble on about how she had gotten here, her hands come to the sides of her face as she takes in the face she had missed so much for so many years. The face that had existed in her mind when she jumped, hoping against hope that her sacrifice would bring her sister back. And it did. It worked.
Natasha pulls Yelena back into a long embrace, tears fully returning to her eyes as she cries, and laughs. “Thank you,” she mouths to Clint as he comes closer, to what he only winks.
“Look alive, guys. Blonde Black Widow,” Tony comments as he and Steve reach the bottom of the staircase. “I thought all of you were redheads.”
“You must be the sister,” Steve says.
“Wait… You told Captain America about me?” Yelena questions, her eyes widening as she glances back at Natasha and back at them again over Natasha’s shoulder.
“You’re sort of a legend in the building, kid,” Tony replies, and Yelena’s jaw slacks. “Though it was edging closer to the urban type, if I’m honest…”
“I, for one, wouldn’t have minded the mirror summoning,” Clint shrugs. “At the risk of getting something out of there, wouldn’t have been worse than… trying to track the menace.”
Yelena rolls her eyes at him. “I said I was sorry already,” she says. “I didn’t know who you were. And besides, I don’t like being followed…”
“What happened?” Steve asks with a worried eyebrow.
“Don’t ask…” Clint shakes his head and heads toward the staircase, passing them all as he starts back into the Compound’s main building. “You all gonna hang out here like a bunch of assholes; or did you manage to kill the party while I was gone? I swear to God, I can’t trust any of you with a goldfish.”
Natasha loops her arm with Yelena’s with the easiest smile she has had in years. “I would say, it’s about time we introduce you to everyone properly; don’t you think?”
Only children when they broke us apart – but we’re not broken, not yet.