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They don’t hold a funeral for Natasha.
There’s no body, firstly - nothing physical to honor. She was a ghost, lived out of her box of a room in the Facility, kept a toothbrush and knife anywhere else. She’d known from a young age that objects meant little, and only weighted you down. So she packed light.
Clint calls it in. He pulls up a chair at the ruins of the Facility and just waits it out by the lake. Some sort of cosmic sign, that he knows may not come, but he needs to do something for her. As construction crews begin the tedious process of unearthing and rebuilding, he wishes she’d had any lingering nostalgia. Something to hold onto that he isn’t liable to cut himself on.
Bucky joins him, unexpectedly. He looks healthy, and Clint sort of wants to laugh. But he’s also not as dumb as he looks, and he can put two and two together - kidnapped and trained by the Soviets, within a decade of each other… He does laugh, a little, and then he passes Bucky the bottle of vodka he’s nursing.
“Pull up a chair, have a drink… Cap isn’t here to chastise us for drinking on government property.”
“The way he went out, I don’t think he had it in him to care anymore,” Bucky replies with a chastened smile. They take a moment of silence, for the luck of America navigating his own continuum of completion. And then Bucky cracks open the half-empty vodka, and raises it to his lips. “You know, I knew her,” he says, a whisper into the glass bottle. He takes a sip, long, and lingering. “I knew her.” Clint doesn’t say anything, knowing his time to talk comes later. “I knew her, and then I forgot about her. All those years, and I kept thinking I’d tell her.”
“Tell her what?” Clint reaches for the liquor then. He hates vodka, but it reminds him of her. She never liked it much either; it was, in her words, better as antiseptic.
“Everything. I don’t… remember much, as the Soldier. Every time they would wipe me. Not at the end, of course. I remember my hands around her throat. I recognized her. I never told her. I never apologized. ” He can barely make out the words, as he chokes them down. “They wiped me, but I could never forget her. Not those hands on me. That’s…” he struggles then.
“That’s love, Clint says, looking down. “She’s got that effect. When Loki took me, the only thing that could snap me out of it was her.” the water ripples and they both still, but it’s just a fish, and Clint exhales like he feels stupid for hoping otherwise. “Part of me hoped the bruise would never heal. We lived through so much and all we got out of it were corny souvenirs and bruises.” Maybe that’s what he’ll frame - all of the trucker hats and shot glasses they collected. It’s something, yet far from enough. Nothing is enough. Five years of mourning and instead of spending it with her and her vigil, he took it out on the world. Selfish.
“She shot me in the face in DC,” Bucky notes. “Still got the cracked mask, somehow,” and Clint howls with laughter.
“That’s her love. That’s what remains, right?” he breathes a harsh, angry note. “Violence. That’s how I met her. You know this story? Seems like everyone does.”
“No.”
He sighs, and leans forward. The low smile he casts towards Bucky makes him readjust in his seat. “I was sent to kill her. She was my assignment - someone like her couldn’t live, not with her body count. So SHIELD sent me to take her out. Instead, I brought her home. She had her legs around my neck and I knew I couldn’t kill her. Getting her back here was like pulling teeth, even when they cleared her for recruitment. You can defect from the KGB, but the KGB doesn’t exactly let you, I guess… You’d know something about that, huh?” He can’t stop the grin, though his eyes begin to water. "Couldn’t leave her side for an instant. Not for years, and so she was my partner, though death and beyond.”
“Strike Team Delta,” Bucky intones in characteristic Russian slant. “I knew about that. Makes sense you had to try to kill her first. Trying to hurt her used to be the only way to let her know you cared. Even then, caring was not like the Red Room. The nights I was made to beat her, the pretense of training… and she would still let me in. Men didn’t deserve the pleasure of Natalia. I didn’t deserve it. I wish I’d gotten to see her grow. She was always too much for anyone else to handle.”
The only thing notable in the silence that follows is their complete lack of breath.
“She talked about you,” Clint admits, after a strung out moment of holding back tears. “I didn’t realize it until- until now. When she told me about the Red Room, she mentioned she had one small solace. Some man, cracked like her but she’d never see him again. Found broken and put back together in a worse way. That’s you.” he tips his face down, choking up. “Jesus, Barnes, she was never meant to die, not with how much went into making her. There’s no chance I find her seventy years from now.”
“Steve was the only one they got right. They had to break me. They broke her too. Under their control… you almost want to die. The issue is, you want it on your own terms, which means you really want to live. Dying for being too much of a disappointment bears no honor at all.” He doesn’t know what to say to the bold-faced praise; Natasha wasn’t one to waste her words, and she rarely commented on the somber state of her past. They were, in the dead of night, forbidden, and drawn to each other in a way that only desperation can breed. Instead, he rests a hand on Clint’s back, and lets the man cry.
They part ways without much to say, just burdened under the weight of their own misery. No more Aunt Nat giving Russian lessons to Nathaniel, no more shared glances across a sea of growing faces. Bucky rests on his knees at the edge of the water for a long time, empty bottle in hand.
“успокойся, мой паук.”*
Clint starts up his motorcycle and hides behind the glass visor.