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Natasha Romanoff was a survivor.
It was one of the first lessons the Red Room had taught her. You always survived. It didn’t matter how hard the mission was, how many injuries you sustained, or how many people you had to kill. You always survived. You always lived to see another day, another mission, another person to kill, and etcetera.
Maybe that was why, in the aftermath of the white flash from Thanos’ Snap, as the titan himself disappeared through a wormhole and she struggled to her feet, Natasha already knew what was going to happen next. She could feel it in her bones; her very soul seemed to scream with the knowledge of it.
“Thor, what happened?” Steve panted as he walked up towards them, a hand clutched at his side. “Thor, where did he go?”
Thor never got a chance to respond.
Because in that moment, he turned into dust.
Then, one by one, the rest of her family turned into dust in front of her very eyes. Bucky was first, his body coming apart with Steve’s name on his lips. Steve was after him, turning to ash as he scrambled towards where his best friend had once been. Then went Wanda, from where she was ten feet away, mourning over Vision’s grey and lifeless body.
Bruce was last. He came stumbling out of the forest from behind her, where Thanos had thrown the Iron Hulk suit, and she spun around. For a moment, their eyes locked, and there was so much she wanted to say to him. Like “where have you been for the past three years,” or “don’t you dare leave me again, Bruce Banner,” or even “I love you.”
Yet, despite how the moment seemed to stretch into eternity, she couldn’t. The words wouldn’t escape her mouth.
“Nat?” Bruce asked her, his eyes wide. “Nat, what – ”
It was the last set of words he spoke.
Because Natasha Romanoff was a survivor, and just like how she had survived all of the girls at the Red Room who hadn’t made the cut, it figured she would survive both of her families, too.
~~~
Two days later, Natasha sat in one of the living rooms at the Compound, dressed in a set of sweats as she watched the death tolls in front of her get higher and higher...and then even higher.
The Compound hadn’t been the first place she had gone to in the aftermath of what Thanos had done, as the Wakandans – the very world, really – shouted and screamed around her. No, the first place she had gone to, once she had gotten the quinjet ready, was a farmhouse in Iowa. It was the only place she could think about, the only thing she could think about outside of the steady mantra inside her head of Clint Laura Cooper Lila Nathaniel Alexei Melina Yelena Tony Clint Yelena Clint Clint Clint –
In the end, however, hours after what had happened, when she got to the farmhouse, there was no sign of her partner or his family. There was just dust and ash, as there was everywhere else on the Earth, floating in the wind, forming a barrier between the ground and the sky. She didn’t have to be a genius to read between the lines and knew what it meant. The Bartons were dead.
And Yelena, Alexei, Melina...they were all dead, too.
Her families, both of them, had been killed by Thanos in one, sickening blow.
Natasha did not cry at the realization, not even when she got back to the Compound, her one and only true home. She didn’t cry, either, when her fingers ghosted over a hologram that Rhodey had left open after they had left for Wakanda, causing it to play a video from something called the Darth Vader Protocol, because of course Tony would title the video he had left for his son to tell him about their biological connection that. And nor did she cry when Carol Danvers arrived, first asking about Fury and then, once she heard he was dead, agreeing to go out looking for Iron Man and Spider-Man to see if they were still alive.
No, the tears would come later.
The tears would have to come later.
...If they came at all, that is.
“You are made of marble, Natalia.”
This was what Natasha thought about as FRIDAY announced to her softly, “There’s someone at the gates, Ms. Romanoff.”
Setting down the mug she was holding, Natasha looked up towards the ceiling. She didn’t think the AI liked her very much, for understandable reasons. But she was the last of the Avengers still on Earth – the last of the Avengers, period, a dark voice whispered in the back of her mind – so the AI seemed to be taking some sympathy on her. Especially since the only other person who could’ve told her to do otherwise, Pepper Potts, was dead.
For a moment, she almost wished that Tony was dead, just so he wouldn’t have to find out his fiancée was, too.
Closing her eyes, she brought a hand to her head and asked, “Who is it?”
Wordlessly, FRIDAY projected the video camera feed from the gate. She knew this because, when she opened her eyes again, there was a holographic screen in front of her, depicting two kids she instantly recognized as siblings. The first was a boy, around sixteen, with strange brown-and-blonde hair and blue eyes. The second was a girl, around ten. Her hair was only blonde. The two of them almost reminded her of – no, don’t think about them.
“Can they hear me?” Natasha murmured.
“They can now,” the AI informed her.
Pushing aside her emotions, locking them into the old and broken box she always did when she didn’t want to think about them, she made her voice even and suspicious. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Relief flashed across the boy’s face. Looking up at the camera, he waved. “The name’s Harley Keener,” he said. His voice sounded cheerful enough, despite the fact that half of the universe had just died and the world had ended as they knew it. “I’m a friend of Tony Stark’s. If you don’t believe me, ask FRIDAY. She’ll confirm it. As for what I want...uh, our mom died. We have nowhere else to go. Can you let us in?”
Natasha was not good around kids. She was good around – don’t say their names, don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it – but they were very much the exception to the rule. The Red Room had been very successful in beating any maternal instincts out of their girls. Maybe even too successful, some would say.
Yet, as FRIDAY quietly informed her the boy was right, he was a friend of Tony Stark’s, she knew what she had to do. If not for him, then for Tony, at least. She could practically hear him now, if he came back to find out she had turned away his second (or was it first?) protégé. “Seriously, Nat? The kid just asked you to let him in and you couldn’t even do that?”
So, she let Harley and his sister, Abigail was her name, into the Compound.
Once she had properly explained to both of them what had happened, how the heroes they and the rest of their generation had idolized so much had lost, as well as what little hope remained, she tried to maintain a healthy distance between them. She treated them just as she had – don’t say it – them, ish, at least when it came to meals. The rest of the time, though, she pretended to busy herself with other things, like reading books which had lost all meaning or training until she didn’t feel human anymore.
“I have no place in the world.”
Somehow, however, the lack of affection did not deter Harley. If anything, it made him more determined, at least when it came to the subject of fighting.
“Teach me to fight,” he insisted, a fire burning in his eyes...and probably in his bones, too. She knew the look well, having seen it many times on her own face. “I want to learn how to fight.”
Teaching him was calming, in a way. He reminded her a lot of some of the girls at the Red Room, the ones who had never made the cut. Unexperienced, unsure, and unknowing of the fact that his prosthetic leg was both his greatest liability and his greatest asset, yet also completely and utterly determined to prove himself.
“Ugh, do you always go this hard on people?” he groaned one time, from his usual spot on the floor.
She smirked. “Actually, I thought I was going pretty easy on you.”
He groaned again in response, and lifted up a hand to flip her off with.
But the tentative peace and ignoring of how the world had collapsed all around them couldn’t last. Three weeks after Thanos’ Snap, Carol returned with a ship containing the only survivors from the fight against Thanos on his home planet. Well, survivor. Even before the other woman had told her there was only the one, only Peter Parker without his right arm, some part of her instinctively new.
The only good thing about the entire situation, besides Peter being alive, was that there was a chance, no matter how small, they could bring everyone back. Thanos had used the Stones for the second time, revealing his location to be on a planet called the Garden.
~~~
“What are you going to do if this doesn’t work out?” Carol asked her softly, from the captain’s chair of the Benatar.
She had spoken so quietly, Natasha almost hadn’t heard her. The view of space, and the reminder of all they had lost, took up all of her attention instead. It was so beautiful out here, but also...quiet, vast. She couldn’t imagine what it must’ve been like for Peter to be out here, relatively speaking, all alone, thinking he would die long before anyone would be able to find him.
“It’ll work,” Natasha said. She didn’t really believe it, but someone had to be optimistic, and since Steve was gone...
“But if it doesn’t?” Carol repeated, voice lilting. When she didn’t respond, she continued with, “He’s been through a lot. So have Harley and Abigail, I bet. Someone’s going to need to look out for them.”
“And you want that person to be me,” Natasha stated. Neither of them brought up the fact that, technically, she was already Peter’s legal guardian and had basically been acting as one for the other two for three weeks now.
Silence lapsed between them.
At last, Carol said, “I think you could be, if you wanted to. Peter and Harley are what, sixteen? Almost seventeen? Abigail’s around ten? It wouldn’t be like raising them.”
Natasha knew she should say no, at least for herself. She wasn’t a mother. An aunt who liked to stop in from time-to-time and shower her nephews and niece in gifts? Yes. A mother? No. Again, the Red Room had taken that from her. And Wanda...while the two of them may have been on the run together for two years and she may have been seventeen during the events of Ultron, she had never wanted a mother, nor even a sister.
Then again, perhaps Peter, Harley, and Abigail wouldn’t want her to be those things, either.
“You’re right,” she agreed finally, to more than just one of the things Carol had said. She just wouldn’t admit to it out loud. “It wouldn’t be like raising them.”
And it was a very good thing that she did.
Because only a couple of hours later, Thanos had told them he had destroyed the Stones, etching what he had done into the fabric of the universe. Permanent. Irreversible.
Like with before, she didn’t cry at the news.
But it was a very near thing.
~~~
Parenting Peter, Harley, and Abigail was a...weird experience. Not that Natasha would call what she was doing parenting; sure, she may have attended all of their extracurriculars and kept them fed and clothed and in semi-stable mental health states, but what she was doing was a world away from parenting. From being a mother.
(Or so she liked to think.)
Abigail was the least difficult of the three to deal with. Maybe it was because of her age, or maybe it was because it was just her warm and bubbly personality, but she was able to adjust to the post-Snap world amazingly well. She went to school and made friends, drew pictures of Black Widow and Spider-Man fighting side-by-side (although everyone else thought he had been killed in the Snap, since the damage of starvation on Peter’s body was keeping him out of commission for at least a year), and even participated in dance. Natasha was her teacher for the latter, the girl having turned to her with wide eyes one night and asked, “You teach Harley fighting, why can’t you teach me something, Nat?”
And Natasha hadn’t been able to say no, even though the eyes she was looking at were deep blue instead of dark brown and the girl who used to give her the same look was long-dead. So, she taught her how to dance. Fighting would came later, when she was old enough. Natasha would ensure it, if only to make sure Abigail would be able to defend herself from anyone who wished to harm her.
Harley was a bit more difficult. The teenager was snarky, had a tendency to hide his emotions behind sarcasm, and was overly-protective over Peter in a way that made even her a bit concerned. They had formed a bond, between their parents dying and both of them having lost limbs before replacing them with metal ones, and they did everything together. Sometimes, she had to remind herself she was looking at two teenagers, and not a SHIELD agent who had given a Russian spy a second chance.
“Just like Budapest all over again!”
“You and I remember Budapest very differently.”
Then there was Peter.
Peter was...well, what Clint probably would’ve described as a “clusterfuck of emotions.” He was an open book, very readable, even when she wasn’t exactly sure if she wanted him to be. He wore his sadness, his anger on his sleeve like his heart, and twice, she debated on whether or not to put him in therapy. Once, she debated on approaching him herself.
But, she didn’t. She let him come to her instead, one night about halfway through the school year. He stood in her doorway like a ghost, his face pale and bags underneath his eyes, caused by both his still-healing body (though he vehemently tried to deny it) and a lack of sleep. His teeth were biting into his lip as he seemed to struggle with trying to find what to say to announce himself, not knowing she already knew he was there.
Deciding to put him out of his misery, she looked up from the book she had been “reading.” “Паук, what’s wrong?” she asked. Peter, Harley, and Abigail all liked nicknames, though they would all deny it if you asked them and there were several that were off-limits, like “kid,” “sweetie,” “Underoos,” and etcetera. She had given them nicknames of her own because of this. Паук, боец, балерина.
When Peter only gazed at her, tentative and uncertain, she patted the duvet of her bed as an invitation. “You want to come sit and talk about it?”
The invitation seemed to be all that he needed. Stumbling forwards, he climbed onto her bed and then sat down, crisscross-applesauce style. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again as he attempted to broach the subject they had both known he eventually would for a while now. “Can you tell me about Clint Barton?” he asked.
It was terrifying, how Natasha’s heart clenched at the mere mention of his name, and yet not terrifying enough. Carefully, she put the bookmark into her book and closed it, before setting it on her nightstand. “What do you want to know?”
“Did he really train with my parents – erm, I mean my mom and my stepdad?”
She didn’t bother trying to convince him he could still refer to Richard Parker as one of “his parents,” nor did she call him out on asking about Clint as a roundabout way to getting more information about him and his mother. There was no point in the former, and she couldn’t fault him for the latter. Hell, she didn’t even know who her parents were. “He did,” she confirmed quietly, her lips twitching as she recalled one of their many conversations in the vents in Budapest. “Back in the ‘90s. He hated how much your mother listened to Electric Light Orchestra.”
Peter’s face lit up as he let out a small laugh. “Yeah, they were one of Mom’s favorite bands,” he said, and after a pause, “What else did he say about them?”
If the universe was fair, Natasha would not have been the one he had to approach about this. It would have been Clint, and if not Clint then Tony, and if not Tony then...well, she wasn’t quite sure, and she supposed it didn’t matter. The universe wasn’t fair, and it was only by sheer luck that Mary Fitzpatrick Parker’s long and complicated history with SHIELD (read: HYDRA) hadn’t been revealed during the data dump of all of their files. It was only by sheer luck that he hadn’t had to learn her history through the internet.
So, with a deep breath and a brief closing of her eyes, Natasha said, “What do you know about the Koroleva Project?”
~~~
Some nights, Natasha slept a restful, dreamless sleep.
Most nights, she didn’t. Most nights, she woke up from dreams of watching Thor, Bucky, Steve, Wanda, and Bruce all turn into dust in front of her eyes. She woke up from dreams of the Red Room, of Yelena being pulled from her arms, and of Mary Parker glaring down at her and demanding to know “what gave her the right” in telling her son about how she had once been HYDRA’s perfect child soldier. She woke up from dreams of standing on a cliff with Clint, except his edges were blurry and he was telling her “I’m sorry,” over and over again.
He was always in her dreams, somehow, even the ones where he didn’t belong. In the ones where he wasn’t front-and-center, he was always in the background, edges still blurry, a gentle smile on his face and sorrow in his eyes. She could never figure out why, after the obvious. Every time she tried to ask him why he was there, she woke up, drenched in a cold sweat and her eyes suspiciously wet.
When she woke up from these dreams, often in the middle of the night, she went down to the communal kitchen and poured herself a glass of water, ignoring the memories of how Steve – the paranoid asshole – had used to patrol the hallways, never able to sleep for more than a couple of hours, or how Vision and Wanda had used to play durak in the dark for some reason. She also tried to ignore, too, her feelings for Clint, but was never quite able to.
Because he wasn’t her brother, you see, or her lover. She didn’t think anybody else had ever quite understood that, except for Laura. He was something...more, something undefinable.
(He was her soul.)
~~~
It was a very good thing, Natasha decided as she took in Harley and Peter as they walked out from the airport, their hands clasped together, that Quentin Beck was dead.
Otherwise, she would have killed him herself.
(Talos, she also decided, was only going to wish that he was dead by the time she was through with him.)
Both of the teenagers looked tired, and of course had no luggage since Beck had blown it all up. They were practically dead on their feet.
“Harley! Peter!” Abigail screeched as she ran up to them, blissfully unaware in that way all kids were.
Natasha followed at a more sedate pace, a gentle smile resting on her lips as she finally approached them and wrapped her arms around all three of them, pulling them into a hug. “Boys,” she greeted, tone teasing, voice soft. “How was Europe?”
“Oh, you know, just great when we weren’t getting blown up,” Harley joked with a crooked grin.
“We’re fine now, though,” Peter added.
Except they weren’t.
In the days and weeks to come, and then the months, it couldn’t have been made more obvious to her. Beck trying to kill them had been bad enough, but revealing that Peter was Spider-Man and Tony’s son, then trying to frame him for his murder? Worse. Thousands of times worse.
It wasn’t the smear which weighed heavily on Peter’s soul, though. It also wasn’t the public’s opinion. She knew it was the imagery of Harley possibly dying, she could see it in his eyes. And that, combined with how the two of them started to share Harley’s bed a few months afterwards, suddenly made her realize two important things:
First, that the two of them were not her and Clint. If anything, they were a super soldier and his “best friend,” who had both been willing to go to the end of the line for each other.
And second, that it was only a matter of time until the two of them got together. Oh, sure, both of them denied it when she sat them down and asked, point-blank, if they had (romantic) feelings for each other, but she could tell that Harley was lying.
Just like how she could tell it would only be a matter of time until Peter realized he was, too.
~~~
Natasha often wondered whether or not she was doing the right thing with the kids.
The parenting books she read – and oh, she could practically hear Tony and Clint teasing her about them, even though they had originally been Tony’s and Clint had been a father himself – liked to speak in terms of “well-adjusted,” “thriving,” or “managing,” but those terms did not apply to their situation. There was no becoming “well-adjusted” to a world where almost everyone you knew was dead, and there was certainly no “thriving” in it. “Managing,” well...that was debatable.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered to herself on more than one occasion when she was alone in her room, her head in her hands.
It was not Madame B. that replied to her on these occasions, never Madame B.
It was always Clint.
“I don’t know, Nat, seems like you’re doing a pretty good job to me,” he always said. “Besides, you were always good with the gremlins.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it, really?”
She never bothered trying to explain it to him, never bothered trying to tell him how aunt-ing for his kids was so much different than talking things out with Abigail whenever she had her night terrors, which was often, or worrying about if Harley and Peter had crossed the line into codependency yet. There was no point. He was dead. He wasn’t coming back.
She did become tempted, though, when Harley approached her one day and set a notebook in front of her, one filled with designs for a red-and-silver suit that she knew would just mean trouble. It was obvious, in how her heart clenched and visions of the girls at the Red Room dying, of Harley dying, flashed behind her eyelids.
Still, she didn’t. She gave Harley her “approval” and waited until Carol came back to visit instead to vent, waited until it was just the two of them and a bottle of wine late at night in the kitchen. “I’m afraid he’s going to get himself killed,” she admitted. With Carol, it was not a hard admission to make.
“Are you afraid of him dying because you don’t think he’ll be able to do it, or are you afraid of him dying like you’re afraid Peter will?” Carol asked in return.
Frowning, Natasha looked up at her. “What?”
Carol smiled at her from over her wine glass, her eyes glinting mischievously. “Remember our conversation on the way to the Garden?” she said. “I think we were both wrong. You should see how you interact with them, from an outside perspective. It’s really...enlightening.” She paused then, before she shook her head. “Anyways, you and I both know that Harley can do it. It’s not a matter of that. And if you’re worried about him dying ‘cause you gave him your approval, well, 1) he probably would’ve done it anyways and 2) what do you think Tony would’ve done?”
Natasha snorted. “Probably would’ve given his approval too, before fucking it up somehow like he did with Peter at the start.”
“Exactly.”
That wasn’t going to be Natasha, however. Doing the right thing with Harley may have been giving him her “approval” anyways, but she was still going to set some ground rules. She waited until both he and Peter were ready, or as ready as they would ever be, to do so, and ignored how her heart spasmed in her chest at their lighthearted snark.
The mission itself was easy. It was a reconnaissance-and-retrieval mission at a HYDRA base, in search of all of the missing Avengers-related things which had gone missing over the years, especially since the Snap. As the last Avenger, not even she could stop them from stealing their paraphernalia, like Steve’s shield or Thor’s axe from the Battle of Wakanda.
It was easy, that is, up until it wasn’t.
Vision.
Just not for the reasons she was sure Harley and Peter thought.
Clint.
~~~
The realization occurred to her a few months later in the warehouse, while Abigail was at school, Harley was working on bringing Vision back to life, and Peter was doing whatever he did to serve as a distraction to that. Probably working on his suit, or doing the homework he loved to complain about so much.
...Well, actually, it had occurred to her sooner. Much sooner. But Natasha had pushed it into the back of her mind, as she did most things about the two families she had outlived, because she couldn’t bear to accept the truth. She couldn’t bear to acknowledge the fact she had failed him.
Because there was a watch. There was a watch which should have been among the objects HYDRA had amassed, a watch which wasn’t Clint’s and yet had been in his possession all the same, a watch which she had searched through the inventory for five times already and yet couldn’t find. Couldn’t find, because of a fact which twisted at her soul and made her crumple to her knees, the tears streaming down her face before she could stop them.
Clint was alive.
Her partner, her soul, was alive. She couldn’t believe it, had gone so long thinking he was dead just like everyone else that trying to think otherwise was like trying to stick a square peg into a round hole. But it was true. It had to be true. Clint. Was. Alive.
He hadn’t been there at the farmhouse, when she had arrived, and his truck hadn’t been gone. Or had it? She honestly couldn’t remember. And either way, it didn’t matter. She had assumed. And she had kept on assuming, because it was convenient for her. It was convenient for her to think that Thanos, the universe, or whoever had decided who would get turned into dust and who wouldn’t would’ve killed off Clint with the rest of his family, instead of leaving him alive. It was convenient for her to play family with the kids, even though she wasn’t their mother, and to ignore the truth.
Clint was alive.
Abruptly, Natasha’s stomach rebelled against her. Clamping her hand to her mouth, she stumbled to her feet and ran to the only bathroom in the warehouse. She heaved up that morning’s breakfast violently, but it was only a mild penance for what she had done.
Clint Clint Clint Clint Clint –
“Natasha – ”
Was that what her brain had been trying to tell her all along, she wondered as the contractions ended, leaving her gasping on the bathroom floor? The dreams, his voice? Was that what he had been trying to tell her? They had always been connected, two halves of the same soul. “Platonic soulmates,” Laura had once called them with a laugh. Had he been reaching out to her, all this time?
If you had told her about the idea before, she would have laughed and told you it was impossible. The universe didn’t work like that.
But the universe had also killed off half of all life at the behest of one person, so did it really?
“Natasha – ”
Where had he gone? What had happened? All this time, he had been alive, and he had never come to find her? Not once? Not after everyone they knew had died? Not when it was just them and the kids, against the world?
“Natasha!”
She blinked.
The lights in the bathroom were turned down, dimmer. She didn’t remember it happening, but then again she also didn’t remember clutching a hand into her hair.
“Natasha, it is 2:06 PM, February 16th, 2020,” FRIDAY informed her softly. She hadn’t shouted her name, Natasha realized, but then again it hadn’t been the AI’s voice that she had heard doing so. “You are in the bathroom of one of the warehouses at the Compound. You are having a panic attack. Natasha – ”
Shakily, she sucked in a breath. “N – not anymore,” she said, letting the hand in her hair fall down to her face. “Thank you, FRIDAY. You can stop now.”
“You’re welcome,” the AI replied. Then, added, “Would you like to talk about it?”
“No,” was the instant reply from Natasha. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Because if she told FRIDAY, the AI would tell Peter, and neither he or Harley could find out.
Not until she truly understood what had happened first.
~~~
Tracking down Clint wasn’t hard.
No matter how hard he had apparently tried to avoid her, he was like the back of her hand. She knew him well. Plus, the trail of blood he left in his wake was already a mile long, and it kept on growing in length. Not that she cared about that.
She didn’t judge people by their worst mistakes.
Natasha found him on top of a low-rise building in Seattle, the late March air cool against her skin. It was March, because fate had kind of just worked out like that and it was easier to keep Harley and Peter oblivious that way. Both of them were knees-deep into their midterms, so they hadn’t protested too much when she had told them this was a mission she needed to go on alone. They hadn’t even bothered trying to ask her what the mission was about.
For the first time since she could practically remember, she caught him by surprise. She came at him, arms swinging, dancing in the familiar rhythm they had had between them long ago. It was soothing on her soul; too long, she had been sparring with Harley and Peter, and just Harley and Peter. They weren’t bad, of course, not by any means with her as their teacher, but they weren’t him. They weren’t even Steve, or Bucky, or Tony, or Bruce. They were their own people.
Much to her surprise, however, Clint did not fall into the familiar rhythm. He did not fall into a rhythm at all. He came at her with a man possessed, not aiming to kill like he had everyone else when wearing the suit he was, but definitely aiming to maim. She parried his blows, the ones aimed for her chest and her stomach instead of her arms and legs, disbelief coloring her voice as she said, “Clint – Clint, it’s me, it’s Natasha. Clint – ”
He didn’t listen.
It was only once he successfully pinned her to the ground, slamming her onto the rooftop so hard the air was knocked out of her lungs, that she realized what was going on. She looked into his eyes as he took out a knife and held it up against her throat, so tight she could feel it draw drops of blood, and saw an expression she had only seen once before. It had been in 2001, the first time they had met, with the positions they were in now reversed. She had seen the expression in her own eyes, through the reflection in his. The expression of somebody who had lost it all, and didn’t care about what happened next.
The expression of somebody who had no place in the world.
“ Не заставляй меня убивать тебя .”
“Don’t,” he snarled at her, his expression alight with a fury she had never seen on him before. Not even after Loki had controlled him. “Don’t give me hope.”
And then, just like that, he was gone.
Natasha, not knowing what else to do, did the only two things she could. First, she let him go. And second...
~~~
“Bad mission?” Harley asked her when she got back to the Compound, boneless and tired and just wanting to throw herself into her bed. He was sitting at the counter in the kitchen, his left leg drawn up towards himself and his laptop sitting on the granite surface in front of him.
He was the only one around; neither Peter or Abigail were in sight.
Natasha smiled at him softly, even as she rubbed at the bandage on her neck with her right hand. “Something like that,” she agreed softly. She wasn’t going to tell them the truth about Clint, not now when he was dealing with what had happened through self-destruction and being a danger to others. It wouldn’t be safe for them.
(Maybe it never would be.)
~~~
From then on, whenever she dreamed about Clint, which was still practically every night, she dreamed about him as she last saw him: his hair cut short, his left arm covered in tattoos, and a fire in his eyes she would never be able to put out. Not by herself.
She knew as much from her own, agonizing experience.
~~~
Getting Vision back was like healing one wound, only to rip open another.
She was proud of Harley, so proud of him. It didn’t take a genius to realize how hard it was to rebuild a one-of-a-kind android mostly from scratch, even without all of the months it took him to do it. It also didn’t take an empath to know the reason, or reasons, for why he did it. One of them was Peter, and the other was her. It was clear as day in how determined he was to do it, despite the reactions she received.
And she was happy he did it. Really, she was. She and Vision may not have been close, per se, due to them only really interacting with each other for a year (but then again, a year wasn’t all that much compared to the three she had with Alexei, Melina, and Yelena, and the four she had with the Avengers, not counting the two she was on the run with the other “Rogues”), but it was good to see his face again. He wasn’t the first ghost she had seen since the Blip, after all.
But then...
“Even if you could find a way to get into the quantum realm, which you can’t, because Hank Pym is dead, quantum fluctuation messes with the Planck scale, which then triggers the Deutsch Proposition. In layman’s terms, it means you’re not coming home. It’s a suicide mission. Believe me, we know. It was one of the first simulations that Harley and I did in the labs at NYU. I get that it feels like it just happened for you, but it’s been two years for us. There is no going back from what happened. You just need to accept that.”
Natasha’s heart did not break when she heard those words, if only because she did not have enough left of a heart for it to do so. But it did come close. Out of the kids, she had always known that Peter struggled the most. Abigail, she was still too young to fully appreciate what had happened, and Harley had managed to cope by covering everything up in sarcasm and shutting out anybody outside of their family. Peter did not have that luxury. He wore his heart on his sleeve, for all to see, never once hiding his emotions.
And yet, somehow, she had never quite realized how hopeless he felt.
Somehow, she had never quite realized just how close he was to becoming like Clint.
She found her boys in the aftermath of the argument in Harley’s bedroom, teary-eyed and cuddled up against one another, though they pulled apart when she sat next to them on the bed; another sign of their inevitable relationship, she was sure. She told them things she had never told them before, about hope and the third family she had formed with them from the ashes of her first two, and yet still did not tell them everything she should.
They weren’t ready for that, and neither was she.
Later, after the two of them and Abigail had all gone to bed, she went back down to the kitchen and grabbed a wine glass, opening up the fridge to fetch her Merlot – she always preferred her reds chilled, even if it went against wine culture – from it. Vaguely, she heard the sound of Vision walking into the room, but she pretended to ignore it. He would say something when he was ready to talk.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, the android asked softly, “Natasha?”
She didn’t look up from her glass, swirling around its contents slowly. “Yeah, Vis?”
“I’m sorry if I overstepped my boundaries.”
He sounded genuinely regretful.
Chuckling to herself, she looked up and reached over, patting his shoulder. He looked so...innocent, just like he had in the aftermath of Ultron, back when he had only been a few days old. Entirely unaware of what was going to happen to them, just like she. “I know,” she said gently. “And don’t worry, you didn’t.”
Uncertainty flashed across his face. “Natasha – ”
“You didn’t,” she repeated. “Peter...he just needs time.”
Silently, she added, we all do.
~~~
When the news started to report on a vigilante in Manhattan called Hawkeye, for a moment, Natasha allowed herself to hope far beyond what she previously did.
It was only for a moment, of course. Even before she clicked on one of the articles about the vigilante, she knew it wasn’t him. It wasn’t Clint. The Ronin was still killing people left and right, trying to make sense of why his entire family had been dusted while so many monsters were left alive. Besides, purple wasn’t really his color.
Staring down at the photos of the new Hawkeye, she took in the girl. She was around the same age as Peter and Harley, with their same awkwardness and charm, an easy smile resting on her face despite all that had happened to her. That information, Natasha found out on her own, since it wasn’t in the news or anywhere else on the internet. Nothing that Kingpin did would be, especially not when it was about him trying to force the daughter of one of his dusted “clients” into his syndicate. Especially not when it was about him trying to kill said daughter when she refused. Kate Bishop.
It was easy for the girl, with her quiver of arrows and the optimism she displayed despite the fact that she was homeless and usually on the run, to remind her of Clint. But he wasn’t the only person who she reminded her of. Sometimes, in the videos she watched of her, she saw Wanda in her, scared yet slowly becoming confident in who she was and what she could so. Sometimes, she saw Yelena in her, with the stupid jokes and over-exaggeration she displayed.
Sometimes, she also reminded Natasha of herself.
It wasn’t because of who she reminded Natasha of that she quickly decided, after having watched all of the videos she could of her, to eventually bring the girl back to the Compound. No, it was because of something else, something which she refused to define.
After all, she was already raising two idiotic, teenaged superheroes plus one of their sisters, what was one more to add to the mix?
~~~
Some days were bad.
Most days weren’t great, naturally, seeing as how no one could ever fully ignore that half of the universe was dead. Not with how their souls constantly seemed to ache, to scream with it. Yet most days, they could also push that knowledge to the side. They could pretend, at least for the most part, their patchwork family was not one formed of dust and ash and blood, but something else. Most days, they could scrape by with dry humor and smiles on their faces and ignore the bags underneath all of their eyes.
Some days, they just couldn’t. Some days, like the day of her first period (and wasn’t that a nightmare for Natasha to explain, seeing as how she hadn’t had one for twenty years), Abigail just couldn’t bear to get out of bed. Some days, Harley was all snark and nothing else, a vicious sneer on his face and anger in his eyes. Some days, Peter refused to let anyone else except the other boy touch him, flinching away whenever they tried.
Some days, Natasha could scarcely remember what it was like to feel human.
This day was quickly turning into one of those days, she decided as she listened to Harley with growing horror. Apparently, Peter had gotten bored while she and Vision had been out on a mission, bored, so he had decided he wanted to take down Kingpin, with only Harley for backup. Of course, Harley wasn’t able to deny him anything, not for the world, so the two had done just as he wanted. In the process, something had happened with this machine called a collider, sending her Peter off to God knows where and bringing in a handful of “variants” of him, as well as a kid named Miles Morales and another named Gwen Stacy.
She didn’t know which part of the story was worse, they were all equally bad. Her only consolations were that: 1) the problem could be fixed; 2) Kate Bishop was finally safe at the Compound, just like she had wanted; and 3) Harley and Peter were both being punished enough through their forced separation. There was no need for her to figure out what to do with them, not when Harley couldn’t sleep and anything Peter was going through was probably worse.
(Not that she wanted to see either of them in pain, far from it.)
“So,” Peter B. Parker said later that night, after the rest of her family and his motley crew had left the room. Honestly, she didn’t quite know what to make of him, or any of them except Miles and Gwen. The pig was creepy, the Noir guy was what her Peter would probably call “edgy,” Peni Parker was a little too much, and he was just old...and sad. “Are you like his Aunt May, or something?”
Natasha, who had been in the middle of cleaning up the last remnants of the dishes, long-forgotten about between all of the stories the Spider-people had had to share, paused. She didn’t look up at him, because she didn’t have the strength to. Not right then. “He had an Aunt May,” she said quietly. “She was killed in the Blip.”
“Oh,” Peter B. Parker said lamely. The Blip was one of the first things they had explained to him and the others about their universe. It hadn’t gone over well. Such a scale of death, it just wasn’t fathomable in their eyes.
Still, just like how she didn’t know what to make of him, he seemed to not know what to make of her. He looked at her, eyes squinting, trying to fit her into her Peter’s life in the only ways that he knew how. “So you’re his...?” he asked, trailing off uncertainly.
She shrugged. How did you explain to someone who hadn’t gone through the sheer loss you had what you were to another person? How did you explain to them that you weren’t really his mother or his aunt, but had still spent the past two-and-a-half years raising him nonetheless?
“I’m all he has.”
~~~
It was Harley who cracked first.
She had been waiting for the day a long time now, ever since she had finally accepted her role in their lives. It was inevitable. It didn’t matter that the word wasn’t really true or applicable, that it had no real merit. One of them was going to say it eventually, she knew.
Admittedly, she had just thought it was going to be Peter or Abigail to say it first, maybe even Kate. Not Harley.
It happened during Saturday breakfast. She was making them her signature syrniki, the same recipe Bruce had used to smile softly at and Tony had mockingly complained about. Peter, Harley, and Abigail all loved it, though. Even Kate, still groggy and clutching a mug of coffee in her hands like it was a lifeline, seemed to enjoy it, at least when she wasn’t busy looking like she was going to fall asleep on her plate.
“Hey, Mom, can you get out the new container of sour cream?”
It was just one word, a single word, and yet it had a visceral reaction. Both Vision and Kate looked up from their respective crossword puzzles and mug of coffee, Kate’s eyes wide as she muttered a, “Holy shit,” under her breath. Abigail dropped her fork. Peter, who had been back from the multiverse for a few weeks now, flinched violently, his mouth dropping open as he turned to look at his boyfriend.
Harley’s face turned white as a sheet as soon as he realized what he had said. Stumbling, he pushed himself away from the table and limped out of the room without another word, his metal leg lagging a bit since it was hard for it to both walk and run at the same time.
After a moment, Peter stood up from the table as well, and followed after him.
Natasha was able to get out the new container of sour cream, as asked, before any of the other three said anything. She set it on the table silently, eyes watching them, waiting.
“He’s never said that to you before, has he?” Kate half-guessed. Only half, because she had been living with them ever since before Peter had returned. She knew. Of course she knew.
She shook her head. “No.”
“He didn’t mean it,” Abigail whispered, her eyes filled with tears. “He – he didn’t mean it! You’re not our – ”
“Of course not, балерина,” Natasha replied, gently reaching up to card her fingers through the girl’s hair, and secretly pleased when she did not refuse her. “Of course not.”
She found them in the gym this time, later, after having fixed the rest of the syrniki – even if they weren’t eaten now, they inevitably would be later, thanks to Peter’s metabolism – and cleaned up the kitchen. They were sparring, moving so fluidly both in spite and because of their metal limbs, and Natasha had to take a moment to admire their dance. Telling them to always be together when fighting had been a good thing. It had made their codependency, or whatever else you wanted to call it, into their greatest asset. She was proud.
Peter was the one to notice her first. Abruptly, he looked at her, probably due to his “spidey-sense” tingling, and his eyes widened. He stopped fighting, reaching out to gently touch Harley on the arm instead of hitting him, and his lips moved. She pretended to not notice what they said.
Harley did not look at her. He walked away from both of them, all fire and rage as he headed towards one of the punching bags. She could remember a time where they had been used by Steve instead, up until he had broken them all, one by one.
“I don’t think talking to him is a good idea right now,” Peter told her softly, concerned. When she didn’t reply, he added, “Nat – ”
“I’ll be fine,” she soothed him, remembering the words she had first spoken to Harley long ago. “Don’t get any funny ideas. I can still kick your ass in a heartbeat.”
“I put the rest of the syrniki in the fridge,” she continued out loud, patting his shoulder for emphasis.
Peter gave her another uncertain look, but ultimately acquiesced to the implied ask, walking out of the room with one last glance Harley’s way.
She did not say anything as she approached him, walking around the punching bag to steady it for him. Neither did he; his eyes glinted with recognition at the sight of her, before his face twisted up into a snarl and he began to punch the bag even harder. For a long time, they stood like that.
“You’re not my mother,” Harley said at last, though he didn’t stop punching the bag.
Natasha didn’t even blink. “Я знаю.”
“My mother was Evelyn Rose Keener,” he continued viciously, hitting the bag three times in a row for emphasis. “She was from Rose Hill, Tennessee. She got pregnant with me when she was seventeen. My dad didn’t want to marry her, so Abigail and I took her name. He left before she was even born.”
“Я знаю.”
“Mom worked her ass off to keep us in our house, especially after I got cancer,” he said. “She was the only person we had. We didn’t have anyone else.”
“Я знаю.”
“She had blonde hair and blue eyes. She always liked to wear dark red lipstick.” Suddenly, he stopped punching the bag. His hands came up to clutch at his hair, brown-and-blonde. “She was – she was my mom.”
“Я знаю.”
“Then why did I call you her?” Harley asked, eyes squeezing shut.
Wordlessly, she walked over to him and pulled him into her arms. He didn’t try to fight it, his head coming to a rest on her shoulder. She threaded her fingers through his hair.
“When you and Abigail first came here, I first thought of you as like Clint’s kids,” she murmured into his ear. “Then, when Peter came, I thought of you and him like me and Clint. Then Steve and Bucky. It was...easier, that way, for me to cope with losing everyone.”
“But wh – why now? It’s been two-and-a-half years,” Harley protested.
“Grief has no time limit, боец. That’s one of the worst things about it,” she whispered, her lips quirking. “But your mother is still your mother, just like how Tony is still Peter’s father. Just like how Clint is still my – ”
Abruptly, she choked, unable to say the word for more reasons than one.
“Я знаю,” Harley whispered after a few moments, sniffling.
But he didn’t.
Not really.
~~~
That night, she dreamed about Clint again, as she always did.
They were back on the cliff, their foreheads pressed against each other as she stared into his eyes. Strangely, there was no anger in them, not this time. Just...loss. So much loss.
“I have to tell them,” she said quietly.
He smiled. “You can’t.”
“I have to,” she insisted. “We don’t keep secrets in this family. Not this one. And I have to bring you home, too.”
“You can’t,” he repeated.
“Clint – ”
“Natasha.”
Unimpressed, she pulled away from him, to glare at him. He looked back at her, chuckling. It was a harsh and broken sound. “Not yet, Nat,” he said. “I’m not ready.”
“When will you be?”
His head turned, his gaze going out towards the edge of the cliff. Craning her head, she followed him. The view was beautiful. An orange horizon, filled with clouds and a sun, forever caught in an eclipse. Shivers went down her spine, seeing it.
“You’ll know when,” he replied cryptically. “You’ll know, and I’m sorry, because I won’t be able to let you do it. I won’t let you die for them. You’re a survivor, Nat. You always will be.”
~~~
(It hurt later, for her to know how much she wished that wasn’t true.)
~~~
(Clint Peter Harley Abigail Kate Vision Clint Peter Harley Abigail – )