Archive of Our Own ^beta

In the years following the blip, Natasha Romanoff throws herself into her work. It’s always been her sort of thing - to force herself to keep going until she physically couldn’t anymore, and then to keep going some more. Conditioned from childhood to have that sort of mindset and still unable to let go of it years after she’d escaped from the Red Room and left that life far behind her.

The losses weigh heavily in the pit of her chest. Sam. Wanda. Barnes. Vision. Hill. Fury - for real this time. Laura, Cooper, Lila, little Nathaniel. Tony’s kid - Peter…Peter something?

Peter Parker, her eidetic memory supplies helpfully. For once, she curses the brain that never lets her forget about anything. It’s been five years, and she can still see it; she can still feel it. Every last detail, every last memory. She hears just how silent it had gotten, feels the eerie stillness of the air on her skin. When half of life had been wiped out by that psycho purple idiot, her life had been cut in half too - into the perfect sections of before, and after. There was nothing else.

There’s no use dwelling on the past, so Natasha does the only thing she knows how to do. The one thing she’d been doing since she had stepped forward, at eleven, to take punishment from Madame in place of doe-eyed six-year-old Olya, who’d only been looking for something to eat. The one thing she’d been doing since she’d taken the call from Coulson in that dusty old warehouse what felt like centuries ago, and agreed to join a team to save the world from a certain unhinged alien god in leather boots.

She protects people.

What little there is left to protect, anyway. Half the world is gone, so while the amount of people willing to cause trouble has decreased significantly, those who do are doing it at a much higher rate, wreaking havoc in the strangest and most inconvenient of places.

They’re still no match for Natasha, of course. Managing the team is almost therapeutic, in a way, sitting there day after day in the compound, taking video calls from Okoye, whose dry comments always fall flat because of the thinly veiled concern that tinges her voice whenever she asks about the last time she slept - in a real bed, Nat, not in that creaky old chair. Responding to Rocket’s update emails like having regular correspondence with a space raccoon is the most normal thing in the world. Dodging Rhodey’s questions and his tentative gaze whenever he brings up yet another group of foreign mercenaries killed by what could only have been a meticulously-shot explosive arrow.

It’s not her place to interfere with whatever the fuck Clint’s been up to. If he wanted to talk to her, he would’ve done it already. If he wants to go off alone to be a vigilante on some other continent, so be it. Clint’s had enough people telling him what to do to last a lifetime. She doesn’t want to add herself to the list.

Natasha would be lying if she said she didn’t miss his company, though. She misses everyone’s company, but she would never admit it out loud. She misses Steve and Tony’s loud banter echoing across the quinjet on their way back from destroying Hydra bases; she misses the exasperated glances she would share with Hill whenever Fury got that weird gleam in his eye that meant he’d found something (or someone) new. She misses the chatter of Clint and his family as she sat on the porch of their farmhouse, drinking lemonade while Lila showed off with her brand-new bow, never once missing a shot.

She knows she’s lucky to be alive, lucky that the particles of her aren’t just floating around somewhere in the universe. But it’s getting harder to be grateful when she spends every waking hour in her little office at the compound, with only her thoughts and the increasingly depressing statistics displayed on the holograms for company.

As for the rest of the team… well, they’re certainly a sight to behold.

She knows that Thor lives in new Asgard, but she hasn’t heard from him since the day he’d stormed out of the compound after getting back from decapitating Thanos. She hasn’t heard from Bruce either, but she’s seen stories of him on the news helping families in California and teaching at some medical school. He’s always big and green in the news clips, but he wears a tight smile just for the cameras.

Tony’s retired to some secluded lakeside cabin out in the middle of nowhere with Pepper and his daughter. They don’t ever talk outside of Nat’s emailed updates, but she’s silently glad that Tony is getting to live the life he deserves with the people he loves. At least one of the Avengers has gotten their happy ending.

Tony sends her Christmas cards every year, and Natasha thinks they’re his idea of a joke, because she can’t think of anyone else he’d be sending them to besides maybe Rhodey. It doesn’t stop her from staring, transfixed, at the photos of the little brunette girl nestled in between her parents, smiling at the camera with eyes that are unmistakably Tony’s and a tiny nose identical to Pepper’s. She feels her heart break as she thinks of Yelena.

Natasha knows that she must’ve gotten dusted, because there’s no way Yelena would go this long without contacting her, worldwide catastrophe notwithstanding. She tries to brush it off, but she can’t help the lump that appears in her throat every time she opens her closet doors and sees the vest hanging there.

The first time she takes it off after the battle, she holds it to her chest and hears the rising inflection of excitement in her sister’s voice as she does a thorough demonstration of the amount of stuff she can fit inside its pockets.

After that, she tries not to think too hard about the vest. Or Yelena. Or Melina. Or - for christ’s sake, she really is getting sentimental - Alexei.

Steve comes to visit, sometimes. He’s normally off somewhere in D.C. doing his own thing - Natasha knows he’s started a support group (“It’s what Sam would’ve done,” he tells her glumly), but she doesn’t know much else, and she doesn’t press him for details. The loss of the other team members has weighed hard on him too - Bucky more than anyone, she knows, because anyone with eyes who’d been within ten feet of him and Steve could feel what was going on between them.

She never brings it up, because she doesn’t want to cause him any more pain. And he knows that she knows about it, anyway, so it’s not like he was going to be divulging anything else.

Most of the time, Steve comes in, knocks on the door frame, Natasha makes him a sandwich, and they sit in a companionable silence, listening to the perpetual dings of notifications emitting from her holo-tablets.

It’s not necessarily nice, per se, but it’s quiet. Natasha takes it for granted.

It should’ve just been another one of those days. Natasha’s just gotten off another call, no updates except that Carol would be remaining off-world for a while. Okoye’s unwavering, judgmental stare had burned into her, even through the hologram, as she’d explained to Natasha that no, they could not effectively restrain one of earth’s tectonic plates to keep it from causing an earthquake.

She’s using her famous black widow death stare on her peanut butter sandwich and contemplating her life’s existence like a fifteen-year-old having a gender crisis when Steve arrives, leaning against the doorframe smoothly.

She cracks her joints and brushes off his concerns as they settle in for yet another afternoon of Brooding With The Two Last Avengers Who Haven’t Yet Moved Out-Of-State.

That is, until she turns around and sees movement on one of the security cams by the front gate.

Scott Lang paces back and forth in front of them, fresh out of the quantum realm, with the sort of crazed look in his eyes that Tony used to get whenever he was trying to explain one of his nerd-brain epiphanies.

What Scott is implying is insane. But yet.

But yet.

She finds herself thinking of the emptiness that’s filled her life for the last five years, of the silent city, and of the stagnant air that’s still palpable whenever she dares to step foot outside.

She thinks of the haunted expressions of those she’s seen standing at the monuments, of the tears rolling down their cheeks as they trace the outlines of their loved ones’ names on the unforgiving black marble.

She thinks of Steve, of the carefully-folded old photo of Bucky that he keeps in his breast pocket and pulls out to stare at when he thinks other people aren’t looking.

She thinks of the team, of Okoye fighting for Wakanda even without her king and princess, of Nebula and Rocket flying through space with five empty seats on their spaceship. Of Rhodey, still fighting, still strong, despite everything he’s been through.

She thinks of the broken shell of a man Clint has become. She thinks of Cassie Lang, spending five years all alone in an abandoned house without her dad. She thinks of Morgan Stark, a perfect, tiny reflection of her two parents, barely four and oblivious to the state of the world past their little log cabin and glittering lake.

She thinks of the olive green vest hanging just upstairs in her closet, of the hard look on her sister’s face as she’d handed it to her. The last time they’d seen one another.

Natasha takes it all in, for a second. She blinks hard, tries to stop the exhaustion from settling onto her bones.

She exchanges a look with Steve. He’s already made up his mind.

She knows what she has to do. She knows, in her heart, that she owes it to everyone to keep trying.

To Okoye and to Wakanda. To Clint, and to his family. To Rhodey. To Rocket and Nebula and the rest of the guardians. To Scott and Cassie. To little Morgan Stark. To Bucky and Steve.

To Yelena. Her own sister. One of the only people she had left.

To the rest of the world, and to the ones who were lost.

With an inkling of hope unfolding deep inside of her chest, Natasha Romanoff throws herself back into her work.