Work Text:
She’s sitting around an old wooden kitchen table in the Bartons’ kitchen. Lila is coloring next to her, her little elbow occasionally bumping into her as the girl concentrates on the picture of the butterfly in front of her, bringing it to life with blues and oranges and pinks.
All around Natasha, the people she cares most about in the world are standing or sitting or are draped over various pieces of furniture. She sees Clint with his arm around Laura’s waist and she doesn’t miss the way Laura looks at him, like she’s so proud of who he is and who he has become.
Tony is leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, a picture of nonchalant, but she can see he’s worried, his teeth chewing on his bottom lip. He also has that look in his eye that he gets when he’s coming up with a plan.
Bruce is across from her, avoiding her eyes, but she wishes he wouldn’t. For as much as she wants to pretend, she knows they were never a match, but he’s smart and capable and she needs him to work with Tony now to figure this out.
And then there’s Steve. Steve, who always looks at her like he can’t get enough. Steve, who makes her stomach squirm with his attention. Somehow this man — this optimistic, idealistic man who is the symbol of everything good and pure in this world, forever the opposite of her very being — has become one of her very best friends. He senses her looking at him now and he looks up, meets her eyes. She smirks at him, and he rolls his eyes and looks back at Nick Fury, who is talking.
There is no part of Natasha that worries about what will happen next. They have always been able to save the world when they’re together.
Sitting there, surrounded by people she cares about — people she probably even loves, if she would let herself acknowledge that — she has no idea that within the next half hour they will have a plan, and that plan will call for them all to go their separate directions. She has no idea that an hour after that, she and Clint will be taking off in a spaceship Nick Fury just so happens to have in hiding, waiting for them. She has no idea that this moment — this mundane moment in the Bartons’ kitchen — is the last time she’ll see any of them, except Clint, alive.
She has no idea this is the beginning of the end. The end of her life as she knows it. The end of her friends.
The end of her world.
Instead, she just smirks at Steve and smiles at Lila, forever oblivious, as the clock to the end counts down.
--
Natasha wakes with a start, her heart pounding in her chest as her breath seems to stall in her lungs. Sunlight pours through the huge window of her new room that was created for someone who is definitely not her.
She takes a moment to catch her breath. The colorful sheets and comforter that are on top of her suddenly seem suffocating, and she throws them off, letting the cool blast of the air-conditioned room hit her sweaty flesh.
She’s dressed in black yoga pants and a black tank top, the same type of outfit she used to have hundreds of, but these ones aren’t hers. Not really. They feel like trying to put on someone else’s clothes.
But then everything feels wrong, like she’s trying to live someone else’s life.
She gets out of bed, no longer able to stay still, and stumbles to the attached bathroom, throwing open the door and fumbling for the light switch. Bright fluorescent light floods the room, and she makes her way to the sink, leaning heavily against the counter when she gets there, her chest heaving. Her eyes feel like they have pins inside of them, and she blinks to try and get rid of the pain, but it’s no use.
She tries to concentrate on staring at herself. It is her she sees in the mirror, the same her she has seen in the mirror for years and years and years. The same hazel eyes. The same red hair. The same sharp cheekbones. The same nose.
She looks older, though. Like she’s aged a hundred years in just … in just what? She doesn’t really even know how long she was there, days and nights blurring together in an almost indescribable, unending hellscape. She had tried keep tracking of the time at one point, by making marks on the wall of the underground bunker she had found, but then she hadn’t stuck around there for very long, and what did it matter anyway? What was time when it was only you?
She thinks it’s probably been about six months since that day in the Bartons’ kitchen. At least judging by the time here. But she isn’t completely sure if that’s how time works, and there isn’t anyone she can really ask. Or anyone she wants to ask.
She closes her eyes and tries to think back to that day, tries to remember every little detail, but just like the past few days when she’s tried, she realizes in horror that her memories are fading. She can’t remember what dress Laura had on. Or what Steve was eating. Or what color crayon Lila had in her hand.
The sob bursts out of her before she can help it, and she shoves her fist into her mouth, biting down on the skin of her knuckles so hard she draws blood, but she doesn’t care. She’s terrified of what this means — what if soon she can no longer remember the sound of their voices? Or the smell of the kitchen? Or what they were like?
She’s the only person in the whole universe who can remember them and she’s already forgetting.
Another sob bursts out, around her fist, and she stumbles backward, hitting the wall hard with her back and sliding down to the floor. She pulls her knees up to her chest and drops her forehead on to her knees and lets herself sob, the agony of everything bubbling up and spilling over.
She hates herself for crying, for being this person. She’s a survivor. She’s always been one, and now she is one in the truest sense of the word. And being a survivor means going forward, moving on, not letting the past — not letting what once was — hold her back. And she needs to move on, more than she needs to do anything else. She knows this, she understands this. The Watcher put her here to give her a second chance, not to let her wallow in her grief.
But everything hurts and everything is different and she is so, so incredibly lonely. She hates admitting that to herself, because she has always been alone. So much of her life she was alone, even when surrounded by people, and it was never a problem. In fact, it was always better that way.
But this is different. This is different in a way she can’t articulate even to herself.
She’s just lonely. Painfully lonely, lost in a world she doesn’t know if she will ever really belong in.
She presses her fists to her eyes and cries harder, letting the tears come, and for once, she doesn’t try to stop them.
--
The knock on her door is quiet, tentative. She takes a few moments to compose herself before she opens it, making sure there are no traces of her tears from that morning.
She finds Steve on the other side, smiling at her while looking a little unsure. For a moment, her heart stutters in her chest and she’s looking back through time.
Captain.
Ma’am.
You’ve been quite the talk around here.
But this isn’t her Steve. Her Steve had been through too much by the time Ultron rolled around. Everything he had seen, everything he had done, so much of it by her side … her Steve was harder around the edges, a little less naïve than he had once been, back when she first met him.
This Steve, the one in this world, still looks like a man fresh out of time, thrown into a world where nothing is how it is supposed to be, but he still comes with the optimism of his own time. This Steve doesn’t know that Hydra has his best friend — if Hydra in this world has his best friend, but Natasha figures they do. She also figures that somewhere out there is Sam, and once again her heart twists as she thinks of her friends and all the time they spent together and realizes for the millionth time that those memories and those moments are gone and she can’t recreate them in this new world no matter how hard she wishes she could.
She realizes Steve has moved a little and then notices he’s holding out a steaming mug of coffee to her. She recognizes the logo as being from the shop around the corner. A shop she never tried in her world because Clint liked to make everyone coffee.
“I wasn’t sure how you take it,” Steve says, sounding a bit unsure. “I got you black.”
She takes it from him, and he digs into his pocket, pulling his hand back out, his palm now overflowing with creamer and sugar.
“Thank you,” she says. She’s not sure if she should invite him in. The room Nick gave her is clean and sparse — it’s not like she has any belongings of her own — and more like a hotel room than a living space, but it feels awkward to invite him in. She and her Steve spent all their interactions at the Triskelion and on missions for months before they even started to get personal. And even then, she never once invited him to any of her apartments or her safe houses. Hell, she never really let him into her room in Avengers Tower either.
But, she reminds herself for the millionth time, this isn’t her Steve, nor is it her world, and things are different here.
They are both standing there awkwardly, when Steve breaks the silence again.
“There’s a huge training gym downstairs,” he says. “I know we just defeated Loki and could probably rest for a few days, but if you wanted to train at some point …”
“I’d love to,” she interrupts.
He blinks at her. “You’d love to?” he repeats. “Now?”
Natasha nods. Training has always been her safe place. It’s the one thing she can do without having to think about it too deeply and too closely, and it’s the one thing she hasn’t been able to do in months. It’s hard to care about your training when you’re trying to save the universe from a psychotic, power-hungry AI and your friends are all dead.
But here, a place she has only been for three days, she is finding that all she has is time. Time for thoughts and memories and the unyielding ache of grief, and she needs to do something to forget. Or at least do something that will help her think about something else for a change.
She hasn’t really thought about her life in this world. The Watcher dropped her in during the middle of the battle against Loki and this world’s version of Ultron — luckily a far less powerful one who didn’t get very far. And when it was over, after they had won, the others just accepted that she would be coming back with them, that she would be part of the team. And honestly, she’d accepted that too. She didn’t really want to think about what if she didn’t want to be part of the team? What if she didn’t want to live this life again?
What would she do without the Avengers? What would she do without this life? Who would she be without this life? Could she really just disappear and live a normal existence after everything? What would she even do? Could she really spend her life with people who she couldn’t talk to about what had happened to her? Because who would believe her besides these people? They saw her show up out of nowhere, a doppelganger of a different version of her who died long ago. They didn’t know exactly where she came from, but they had more of an idea than anyone else, and maybe some day she could talk about it with them. With other people, that wasn’t even an option, not if she wanted to pretend to be normal.
“We’re not normal,” Clint had said to her once.
She realizes she’s getting lost in her thoughts again and she sees Steve watching her carefully, as if she’s a fragile piece of glass that might shatter if he makes a sudden movement, so she steps out into the hall and closes the door behind her.
“Lead the way,” she says, and he does, walking her down a maze of hallways and elevators.
The training floors are located on the third floor of the building. In her world, this would be Avengers Tower. It technically is Avengers Tower here, too, but it’s only really the same in name. It was Stark Tower still when this world’s Tony died — the circumstances of how everyone died are still a little murky to Natasha — but Pepper signed it over to Nick Fury not long after to use for his pet project — the Avengers — and for various other agents of SHIELD.
It doesn’t look at all how Natasha remembers it — more formal, more white and chrome, more sterile, less like Tony, less labs, less personalization. In her world, Tony had given everyone their own floor, designed them all himself to make them feel at home. Natasha’s floor had a dance studio in it. She used to hide in there for hours when she needed to be alone.
This Avengers Tower reminds her more of the Triskelion, everything neat and shiny and gleaming. The equipment is all high-tech but none of it is Stark tech. It feels weird to Natasha, like something is missing.
The training floor is nice though. It’s huge, with plenty of space to work with. She and Steve find a room that no one else is using, and Steve changes the “Vacant” sign on the door to say “Occupied.”
They sit down in the middle of the floor, on a mat that spreads out almost wall to wall, to finish their coffee before they get started. It’s the first time she’s really left her room since Nick led her to it just a couple days ago. It’s the first time she’s wanted to.
“It must be hard,” Steve says quietly as they sit, both sipping their coffees. “Being here.” He once again looks a little uncomfortable, like he’s not sure if he can, or should, ask her about her other world or not.
She contemplates him, her mind traveling back to the past.
“It’s hard to trust someone when you don’t know who they are,” her Steve had said to her once.
“Who do you want me to be?” she’d answered, still not ready to trust a man who had been her partner for two years, still not willing to let down any of the walls she had spent her whole life building up.
“How about a friend?”
She’d almost rolled her eyes at his innocence. “You might be in the wrong business.”
Natasha looks away from this Steve, blinking hard to keep the tears at bay. Does she really want to do this again? Get close to someone, get to know them and then maybe lose them? But can she really not even try?
The decision is standing right in front of her. She can tell this Steve she doesn’t want to talk about it, and she has a feeling he won’t push her or even ever bring it up again. He’ll spar with her still, sure, maybe even train with her on a regular basis, but he won’t ask questions and he won’t get close. They’ll be coworkers. Teammates. Maybe never anything else and he’ll be okay with that because he has the others — Carol (whose counterpart Natasha never knew), Rhodey, Pepper.
But what will she be? A loner? A recluse? Forever an outsider, just as she was her whole life until Clint saved her?
Her heart almost clangs in her chest.
Clint. What would he say if he knew what she was thinking?
She thinks about the alternative, thinks about trying something different this time. She could talk to this Steve, befriend him, get to know this man who is so much like the one she knew but who doesn’t know her yet. But who could get to know her. Someone who maybe might even understand more than anyone else in the world possible could what it’s like to be thrown into a world that isn’t yours. A person out of time and out of place.
She turns back to Steve. He’s still waiting for her answer, whether it’s hard being here. She studies him for a moment, meets his impossibly blue eyes and finally makes her decision.
“You probably know the answer better than anyone,” she says.
He looks almost a little embarrassed before shrugging. “It’s not really the same.”
“It’s close,” she says. “You left one world and ended up in another with different people and a different time and different experiences.”
“Yeah,” he says. He looks thoughtful. “There were Avengers in your world?”
She nods. “Different ones,” she says.
“The ones who died here?” He seems to know a little. She figures Fury must have filled him and the others in.
She nods again. “In my world,” she says, “Hank Pym retired from SHIELD a long time ago. I’d heard his name when I became an agent, but he had nothing to do with SHIELD anymore. I don’t even know if he had a daughter.”
“So he definitely didn’t kill anyone?” Steve asks.
She shakes her head. “No,” she says.
“Tell me about your Avengers,” Steve says, but then he must realize what he says and shakes his head, a flush of shame coloring his cheeks. “Only if you want,” he adds quickly. “It must be hard to think about them. I didn’t mean …”
She’s looking away again, once more blinking back tears. She has an urge to leap to her feet, tell this Steve she is ready to spar and spend the next few hours punching away memories. But she reminds herself that she can’t go back to living like she is the only person on her earth, and Steve is just curious. The way she is curious about her friends on this world — she knows they all died, her included, but she doesn’t know how or who they were before they died, but she knows she would like to know.
She turns back to Steve, taking a deep breath and gaining control of her emotions.
“There were six of us,” she says to Steve. “We kind of came together when the Chitauri were attacking New York.”
Steve’s face darkens. “Loki,” he breathes.
“He didn’t get very far,” she says. “We stopped him.”
“Your Avengers must be stronger than ours,” he says to her.
Natasha shrugs. “Just different,” she says.
“And after Loki and the Chitauri?” Steve says. “Did you stay a team?”
“Yes,” she says. “Until the very end.”
She has to stop at that, a lump forming in her throat, too big for her to swallow. She feels her eyes pooling with tears, and she once again has an urge to jump to her feet. But something warm is on her arm, and she looks down to see Steve’s palm, his hand gentle but firm on her.
She manages to smile at him, even as her eyes glisten with tears.
“I can’t even imagine,” he tells her sincerely. “But I’m very sorry.”
She knows he is, and she’s surprised how much it means to her to hear him say it.
“Thanks,” she manages. She points to the mat in front of them. “Do you want to get started?”
“I’d love to.”
--
She’s surprised how well they work together for their first time, though she realizes later that it makes sense. He might not be her Steve, but he still moves like her Steve, still reacts like her Steve, and she knew her Steve’s moves like the back of her own hand.
He doesn’t know her as well as she knows him, or at all, really, — all he’s seen of her is the small part of the fight against Loki that she helped with — but like her Steve, he’s a fast learner, and it doesn’t take him long to realize that she’ll be where he needs her to be because she knows him. It’s a strange sort of situation that neither one of them acknowledges, but it works and is mostly comfortable and it makes Natasha feel, for a least a moment, that she might someday be okay in this new world. Or at least with one piece of it.
She worries about training with the other Avengers. She’s worked with Rhodey, of course, but not in any serious capacity, she doesn’t know Carol at all and the Pepper in her world didn’t have any powers — at least not when she’s been around her. She’s heard rumors and stories of what happened with the Extremis powers, but it was never something she saw in person, and she isn’t even sure that’s what this world’s Pepper has. From the fight against Loki, she recalls Pepper’s suit looks a lot like Tony’s Iron Man suits.
But none of those are things to worry about today, so she doesn’t. Instead, she just concentrates on training with Steve, throwing his shield back and forth as they tag-team the mannequins and the robots all over the training room.
Steve asks her if she wants to do some sparring after they’ve demolished all the other training equipment, but she excuses herself to go back to her room. She used to spar with her Steve all the time, and she realizes that despite how nice of a time she’s having, she’s not quite ready for that yet.
She sees the slight disappointment in Steve’s eyes at her words, and she finds it almost a little disconcerting that he cares about her so much when he barely knows her, but then she realizes that maybe this Steve is a lot lonelier than her Steve came to be.
She smiles at him as they head out, not wanting him to take any of this personally, and asks if maybe they can do this again tomorrow?
“Maybe even the talking,” she says, trying not to flush as she says it. She’s not used to being so open with people she barely knows, even if she feels like she knows him incredibly well.
“I’d love that,” he says.
He goes with her back to her floor and walks her back to her door, pausing there while she uses the biometric scan to unlock it.
“If you ever need to talk …” he starts to say and then trails off. He looks down the hall, almost as if in embarrassment.
She appreciates the gesture though.
“I know where you live,” she jokes, and Steve stares at her a second before laughing. He’s still shaking his head and laughing slightly as he walks away.
--
There is a laptop in Natasha’s room that is hers to use. She hasn’t looked at it very closely, and she has a feeling she won’t find too much on it — she’s not actually cleared for any clearance level here, but if the Natasha of this world was anything like she is, and she has a feeling that she was, then she knows Fury and Pepper know she can probably access anything she needs to.
For the most part, though, she doesn’t care about SHIELD’s dirty secrets or what Nick may or may not be telling her. She has ideas, because of things that happened in her world, but none of those really concern her right now. Those are just situations she will deal with if and when they start to affect her. For now, she is focused, for once, on her own circumstances.
She takes the laptop into the bedroom and crawls into bed with it. She tries not to think about all the nights back home when she would work on something, usually hacking into various files or servers, while Tony and Bruce fiddled over their newest piece of tech and Clint flipped channels on the television, finding the most annoying thing he possible could to break her concentration.
It was like a game, which of the four of them could snap first, and it was almost never her.
Natasha pushes away these thoughts as the laptop loads. This is going to be hard enough as it is without reminiscing about the past, but she needs to know. She needs to know how much this world started out like her own. She needs to know what happened and how things got to where they are now. And maybe she needs something else too — maybe she needs to see their faces, even if they aren’t exactly the people she remembers. She’s terrified of forgetting any part of them and she needs something she can hang on to, even if it's technically someone else’s life.
She starts with Tony. No one has given her the full details, but she has a feeling that’s where it started.
It’s easy to find. A philanthropist weapons dealing billionaire being murdered is huge news. She reads all the articles she can find, pausing often to look at the photos. He looks just like her Tony did when she first met him, back when she was undercover at Stark Industries.
She has a thought and goes in search of the Stark Gala, the one she attended with Tony before he ever knew who she really was.
Those articles are also easy to track down, though it takes her slightly longer to find what she’s looking for, but when she does, she freezes, her finger hovering over the mouse. It’s almost like she’s staring into the past — her real past. The same outfit, the same hair style, the same innocent look in her eyes.
She stares at it for a long time, the picture of her and Tony, captured by a photographer that night. Neither one of them is looking at the camera, but instead looking at each other, the dutiful assistant and the big important boss.
Natasha has to bite down on her lip as she stares at the image. This world’s Natasha was just like her, it seems, right up until the moment that Tony dies instead of being saved by the injection she gave him.
She closes the laptop, tears once again flooding her eyes. She feels like she can’t catch her breath, like the world is closing in on her.
She’s long since stopped wishing that her life is an awful nightmare that she needs to wake up from but acknowledging the horror and the pain has yet to help her deal with it or, more importantly, stop the huge gaping ache in her chest. She sometimes wonders if it will ever go away.
She presses the pillow over her face and lets herself sob.
--
It takes her the rest of the night to get through everyone else. The pain keeps building with every article she pulls up, every picture she sees, and she feels like she’s going to drown in the grief and the sorrow, but she also can’t stop, not until she’s finished.
There isn’t very much on Thor, but he wasn’t on earth very long in this world. The public never really found out who he was, even when Loki appeared. But reading through the articles about Loki’s arrival and the Chitauri, Natasha realizes it’s because of Thor’s death that Loki became what he did on this earth. He didn’t have his brother to drag him back to Asgard after the Avengers defeated the Chitauri. Instead, he escaped with the Tessaract and then came back more dangerous than ever, using the Tessaract to control various forms of AI that Tony had made but never gotten to use.
There’s more on Bruce and the Hulk, about the monster he was and the destruction he left in his wake. He never had a chance in this world to prove he was more than just an abomination of science. As Bruce, he tried, but he didn’t get far. Natasha realizes as she’s reading that this world’s Natasha never recruited Bruce to SHIELD, never met Thor, never even met Steve either. She died before any of them could really come onto her radar.
She can only find a few stories about Clint, mostly written after his death, and those make her heart clench with more pain than any of the others. She can barely get through a sentence without her vision being blurred by tears. She tries not to remember the way her Clint grieved for his family in the days after Ultron killed off everyone in their world. She tries not to remember the way she begged him to help her kill Ultron, persuading him that he needed to get revenge for what happened.
This Clint didn’t even have all his children. She wonders about the Laura on this world, where she is and how she’s dealing. She thinks Laura must have met this Natasha and she wonders what would happen if she tracks her down and shows up on her doorstep. But she knows she can’t do that. Doing that would only serve to maybe ease her own pain a little, not Laura’s, and besides, what would she tell her? That in her own world she let her Clint sacrifice his life for her because he was with her when he should have been with his family when they all died?
After she finishes reading everything she can find on Clint, Natasha stops and thinks for a long time about breaking into the SHIELD files. She wants to find the reports on this world’s Clint and Natasha, she wants to read the cases they took together, the missions they succeeded on, the ones they failed on. But she knows they will be the same ones in her world. Maybe differences here and there but not by much.
She also knows she could just ask Nick if she could see them, and he would probably just let her. But as much as she’s tempted, she knows she’s not ready for that yet. Maybe someday, but not today.
She reads more articles instead, this time about this world’s Natasha. It’s disconcerting to read about someone who is her but not really her all at the same time. In some ways, they have the same past, the same life, the same memories, maybe even the same thoughts. But then this Natasha put the antidote in Tony Stark’s heart and he died, and her life became something very different from Natasha’s.
She reads the articles that called this world’s Natasha a murderer, that said she killed Tony. She reads how this world’s Natasha escaped from custody. She reads how Hank Pym was finally declared the culprit, and Natasha was credited with helping everyone figure it out. It was Natasha who realized the why behind Pym’s actions — revenge for the death of his daughter.
This world’s Natasha died a hero.
Natasha closes the laptop after this. She doesn’t know how to feel about someone who is and isn’t her simultaneously. She doesn’t feel like a hero in any sense of the word anymore. After all, heroes save the day, and in her world, they didn’t save the day. They failed, and not only a little. They failed more spectacularly than anyone in any universe possibly could. It was their failure that almost cost the multiverse, that almost gave Ultron unlimited power. The fact that she helped stop him didn’t make her a hero at all, she knows. It just makes her a little less of a failure.
But this world’s Natasha is a hero. She died saving this world. And Natasha doesn’t know how she’s supposed to live up to that. She doesn’t even know if she wants to.
She thinks back to the night her Clint died, to the way he sacrificed himself to save her. Sometimes she wonders if maybe she should have been the one to sacrifice herself, if she should have been the one to die.
She’s always been a survivor, but she doesn’t know how to survive this. She doesn’t know how to go on. But she’s also never been a quitter, and after everything, how can she just quit now?
She puts the laptop on the table beside the bed and lies back on the pillows, letting her eyes close. She feels the familiar sting of something hot against the back of her eyes, and she’s so tired of crying. But where is she possibly supposed to go from here?
She falls asleep trying not to cry.
--
Steve knocks on her door the next morning, minutes after she finally falls asleep. Or at least that’s what it feels like. She stumbles out of bed, her head aching and her eyes heavy. The world feels like a weight on her shoulders, and she’s tired and miserable.
She opens the door, too groggy to realize she is not at all dressed like Steve is probably expecting her to be.
He stares at her for a few moments, taking her in.
“Are you okay?” he finally says.
“Ye-,” she starts, and the word is halfway out of her mouth before she realizes that she’s tired of lying and that she promised herself she was going to be someone new in this world.
She shakes her head, and she feels the tears starting up again.
“No,” she manages to say, and she wants to step back inside and slam the door and retreat to her bed as fast as she can, but instead she is standing there, rooted to the carpet, in front of Steve Rogers, tears streaming down her cheeks and her body shaking.
If she had even an ounce of self-control at the moment, she would be horrified and would never let herself live down the embarrassment.
But instead she’s standing there crying, lonely and sad and miserable, and then suddenly arms are around her, pulling her in to something strong and firm, and it doesn’t even occur to Natasha until a lot later that no one has ever really held her like that before. But Steve holds her, cradling her in his arms as she sobs, pitifully and miserably.
He gets her back inside and sits her on the couch and holds her against him as she cries. He strokes her hair and rubs her back and she thinks he’s whispering some words into her ear but she’s not really listening and she can’t really make them out and she doesn’t think it’s that important anyway but it feels nice and so she clings to him as he holds her and she just lets herself cry — cry for the friends she watched die from up in a spaceship, cry for the man who sacrificed himself to save her, cry for the world she left behind and that is nothing now but a barren landscape devoid of life, cry for the memories that are beginning to blur and for the people in this world who were also lost and who she never knew and she cries, too, for the Natasha of this world who died a hero and for herself because she’s so lost and so alone and she doesn’t know what to do.
She cries for all these things until there are no tears left to cry, no sobs left to take, and she is just lying limply in Steve’s arms, her breath hiccupping as her face and her throat ache. She can barely breath, her nose so stuffed up from her crying, and she thinks she must look a mess, all red-faced and tear-stained, but Steve just holds her, long after her tears stop and long after he must be bored of just holding her.
Finally, when he seems to be sure that she isn’t going to collapse again, he gets her settled against the couch and covers her with a blanket and hands her a box of tissues, and then he disappears into her kitchen and returns a few minutes later with a mug of steaming tea and a piece of cake that she can’t for the life of her figure out where it came from.
He hands her the tea, the cake and a fork and sits back down beside her.
“You should eat,” he tells her, and her stomach growls as if in answer.
She takes a bite and then another, trying to choke it down over the lump in her throat. She knows she should be embarrassed by breaking down in front of Steve, but right now she doesn’t have the energy to be. She just feels so tired, so drained. Even when she was the last one left standing in her own world, she doesn’t remember feeling this exhausted.
She lets the fork drop with a clatter on to her plate, just staring down at it. She sits there for a while — it could be seconds or minutes or hours — until she sees Steve reach over and take the plate from her hands when he realizes she’s not going to eat anymore and then he slips his own hand under one of hers, entwining their fingers and squeezing hers between his.
With his other hand, he grabs the remote she has lying on the coffee table and flips on the television, scrolling through until he finds some romantic comedy.
An image flashes through her mind as he leans back to watch the movie.
Her Steve, in her world, laughing beside her on the couch as she twists around to lie with her head in his lap, a huge bowl of popcorn in her hands.
“Natasha, I’m watching this!”
“I’m watching it too.”
“No, you’re distracting me with flying popcorn.”
She reaches into her bowl and throws a kernel up in the air, expertly catching it in her mouth.
“Like this?”
He gives her a mock glare. “I hate you,” he says, and she can tell he’s trying not to laugh.
“You love me!” she corrects, beginning to laugh now as Steve rolls his eyes at her. In the background, above the sounds of the movie, she can hear the popcorn maker, and she knows Sam is making her even more than she already has in her bowl.
The Steve of this world must feel her tense because he turns to look at her, studying her carefully.
She avoids his eyes. “My Steve liked to watch this movie,” she says quietly. “He was a big ol’ sap.”
Steve keeps studying her. “Were you two close?”
“He was my friend,” she says. She wants to say that maybe he was her best friend, besides Clint, but she doesn’t.
“It must be weird to be here with me.”
Now it’s her turn to study him. She sees the apprehension in his eyes, the worry, like maybe he’s thinking he should leave her alone. The thought of that causes her heart to start to race, her hands to start to sweat.
“It is,” she says to him before she can dwell on that more. “But it’s nice.”
“Is it?”
She nods. “It’s nice to have someone who reminds me of home.” She pauses, trying to think of how to put into words what she really wants to say. “I know you’re not the Steve from my world, but maybe we could be friends in this one.”
He is still looking at her. “I would like that,” he says. “I don’t have many friends.”
“I don’t have any here,” she says and tries to smile, but it comes out as a grimace.
She realizes he’s still holding her hand when he squeezes her hand in his.
“You’re wrong,” he tells her. “You already have one.”
She doesn’t say anything to that — she thinks she might cry again if she tries — but she hopes he can see from the expression on her face what that means to her.
She turns back to watch the movie, staying close to Steve on the couch. He doesn’t let go of her hand, and she doesn’t pull hers away. Occasionally he squeezes it, and she realizes it feels nice.
Slowly, as the day goes on and the movie plays out, she feels the pain in her heart start to lessen just a little. It is nothing close to healing, but maybe it’s a start.
--
Somewhere during their movie marathon, Natasha dozes off. When she wakes up, it’s dark. The lights have been turned off and so has the TV. A blanket that she’s never seen before covers her, and she feels warm and protected.
It’s also very quiet. She listens carefully, and when she confirms to herself that she is indeed alone, she feels a pang in her chest — a different sort of pang than the constant companion of grief and sorrow over the world she left behind.
She shakes her head at herself. She is being stupid. Of course she is alone. No one in this world really knows her, none of them are really her friends, but she still feels such a profound sadness. For a moment, sitting on the couch with Steve, she almost felt understood.
She sits up, intending to drag herself to bed, when the light of the moon outside glances off something on the floor.
Picking it up, she realizes Steve left her a note.
You were sleeping so peacefully, I didn’t want to wake you. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Training and breakfast? — Steve
Natasha smiles to herself, holding the note in her hand as she curls back up on the couch. A memory flashes in her mind.
A message on the mirror. Written in the steam.
Avengers Assemble!
Natasha had rolled her eyes, told her Steve she couldn’t be part of a team with him if he was going to be a dork like that. He’d told her she should have more team spirit. She’d said that was the last thing she should have. He’d told her he could think of things she should have less than that. She’d rolled her eyes at him and told him to come on, they had a team to go assemble with.
The memory fades away, and Natasha sighs. She wonders if there will ever come a time when something in this new world doesn’t remind her of the old one. Or if she will ever be able to remember her old world without this massive pain in her chest.
Almost unconsciously, she places her palm against her chest and reminds herself to breathe through the pain. The same way she was taught as a child to overcome the pain. But back then, it was physical pain. Sometimes mental. It was bruises and broken bones and isolation and starvation. No one ever taught her how to overcome the kind of pain she is feeling now.
“Attachment is weakness,” she was taught, over and over and over.
Natasha presses her palm even harder against her chest, tears filling her eyes as she does so. To prevent them from falling, she forces herself to close her eyes, trying to will herself to sleep. As she does, she wonders if maybe she should have listened more to her instructors.
--
Steve comes by in the morning, just as he said he would. She manages to wake a half hour before he gets there, giving her time to shower and change her clothes and look somewhat put together. She doesn’t want to fall apart on him again today. He was kinder to her than she had any right to expect from him, and she doesn’t want to scare him away or make him regret spending time with her. He is the only person she can talk to in this new world, and for as much as she wishes she didn’t, she knows she needs him.
She also knows she can’t let him know how much she needs him, even if her actions the night before probably led him to sense she does.
She greets him with a smile, and he looks at her carefully, as though trying to gauge how she really is doing, but he must decide she’s okay enough to carry on with their plans because he holds out a bag to her.
“Cinnamon rolls from the best bakery in Brooklyn,” he says.
She blinks at him. “You went to Brooklyn this morning to get me cinnamon rolls?”
“No,” he says, and she feels a slight sense of relief. “I went to Brooklyn this morning to get us cinnamon rolls.”
She blinks at him again, trying to imagine what time he had to get up just to do something like this for her. She doesn’t even remember her Steve doing something like this for her.
He must grow self-conscious from the way she’s staring at him because he shrugs at her and smiles sheepishly. “I just thought you might be getting tired of the food here.”
She knows that’s a lie. She hasn’t been here that long, and even if she had, Avengers Tower has a chef to make them whatever they want, but she decides it’s not worth it to contradict him. Whatever his reason, he did this for her.
“Thank you,” she says instead, and it comes out a lot quieter than she expects it to.
“You should try them before you thank me,” Steve says.
“You said they’re from the best bakery in Brooklyn, so they have to be good, right?”
He laughs, and the sound goes straight to her heart. “I did say that.”
They sit outside on one of the many balconies that surround the Tower and eat the cinnamon rolls and drink the coffees Steve also brought with him. Down below, the traffic rolls by non-stop. They can’t hear the people on the sidewalks from up here, but she can picture them in her mind — crowds of people jostling each other, loud voices rising over one another.
It’s a sharp contrast to the world she left behind, and the thought of that awful, barren world almost makes her choke on an unexpected sob.
Steve hears it and turns to look her.
“Natasha?” he asks, and the way he says her name makes her heart clench in pain.
“Natasha?”
It’s Steve. She’s halfway across the lawn, heading toward the spaceship that Fury commandeered for them, already focused on the mission ahead. But his voice stops her. He hasn’t said her name like that in a while. Like he’s worried about her.
She turns back and waits for him to get to her. He looks serious, apprehensive.
“I’ll be fine,” she says before he can say anything.
His lips twist up in a smile, and he says it anyway. “Be careful up there.”
She gives him a mock salute. “Yes, Captain.” And then she lets the smirk fade away. “You be careful too,” she says. “Don’t do anything stupid till I get back.”
He snorts and shakes his head. “Go on, Romanoff,” he says, still laughing. “I’ll see you when you get back.”
She winks at him and turns away, heading once again to Clint and the spaceship and the mission ahead. She doesn’t know that will be the last thing Steve ever says to her. She doesn’t know she’ll never see this version of him again.
“Natasha?” Steve is calling her name again.
She blinks, realizing she doesn’t know how long he’s been trying to talk to her.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, feeling her cheeks flush.
She feels something warm and weighted on her hand. She looks down. Steve’s fingers. She glances up into his face. She expects to see pity reflected there, but instead she sees understanding.
“In some ways,” he says quietly, “I got off easy. I look around and it’s an entirely foreign world. There are no memories for me in these streets.” He gestures out in front of him.
“Do you still think about it, though?” she asks. “Your time?”
It’s a question she never really asked her Steve — but then, she knew the answer without asking.
“Not as much anymore,” he says.
She thinks about that, suddenly wanting to know more, wanting to talk about someone or something that’s not connected to her. She knows this Steve has been in the present for almost three years, about the same amount of time that Loki had been in control of this world. She knows these Avengers had to fight an entirely different battle than her and her Avengers.
“How did you get here?” she asks Steve now, and then realizes what she’s asking. “If you’re okay talking about it?”
“I am,” he says.
He tells her about going into the ice in the quest to stop Hydra — the same story she has heard before but never from Steve himself. Her Steve didn’t tell her about it, and she never asked. The same way he never asked her about her past, and she never told him. But then, her Steve probably never read the file report on her. He was too good for that, too pure. Natasha wasn’t — not then and not even now.
But listening to this Steve, watching the way his eyes shine with sadness and joy and nostalgia, she wishes she would have asked her Steve and not just gotten the details from Clint and Coulson and history books and SHIELD files.
“Were you scared?” she asks him. She doesn’t know why she asks; fear has never been something that has defined any of the Avengers.
Steve looks at her carefully before answering. “Not then,” he says. “But maybe if I would have known what was going to happen.”
She nods. “Dying?”
“No,” he says, his words sounding like he was choosing them carefully. “Living. Here.”
They look at each other, and she feels herself getting almost dizzy under his gaze, something that has never happened to her before in her life. But she knows he understands something about her that she can’t even put into words.
Finally, he glances away, clearing his throat.
“And then I woke up,” he says, breaking the moment completely and going back to the story. “I’m in a hospital, and this man I’ve never seen before is standing over me.” Steve shakes his head and chuckles a bit. “‘Captain,’ the man says. ‘We need you.’ I’m still trying to figure out where I’m even at and why everything looks so different, and he’s already giving orders. He doesn’t even tell me his name until I ask.”
Steve runs a hand through his hair and his smile widens a little. “He did send Carol in shortly after to better explain things to me. She was a bit nicer in her approach.”
“And you just got up and joined the fight?” Natasha asks.
The smile on Steve’s face fades just a little.
“Yes,” he says. “But don’t think I didn’t think about it. Part of me wanted to run. I don’t even know where I would have gone … back to Brooklyn maybe? I just wanted to get away. The last thing I remembered was a fight, and it cost me everything. And now I was going to jump right into another one?”
“But you did.”
Steve nods, his face now completely serious. “It was easier than being alone with the pain. Plus, what would I have done really? My whole life I’d dreamed of joining the fight. It’s who I am. Couldn’t just walk away.”
Natasha looks away from him, her gaze roaming back over the cars and the people below, but she’s not really seeing them. She lets Steve’s words sink in, washing over her like maybe she was the one who said them.
“No one will judge you if you don’t want to stay.”
It’s as if Steve can read her thoughts, and for a quick second she feels the urge to just get up and walk away. Clint was the only one who had ever really understood her. She wonders now if maybe she just didn’t give her Steve a chance.
She turns back to the man beside her — this kind, idealistic man who believes in her and wants to help her, even though he barely knows her or who she is. Her heart clenches at the thought of walking away and being completely alone once again, but there is another feeling inside her now that is unfamiliar and disconcerting.
Fear.
Not fear of being alone. That she can handle. She always has.
This is a different fear. A deeper fear, more insidious.
She thinks of what life would be like, all alone, without a single other person to care about her. Once, that had been her life, but then she had found Clint. Or he had found her. But he broke down her walls and pushed through her defenses, and she trusted him in a way she had never trusted anyone else.
Until now, she realizes, as she looks at this Steve, who is still looking back at her. And the idea of throwing that away scares her so deep inside that she almost wants to get up and run because she never wanted to trust anyone that much, and then she trusted Clint that much, and then he died — then everyone died — and she only made it through on sheer willpower alone, but now she is here and she’s not sure she can go through any of that again. She’s not sure she can take the risk, because if she gets close to these people and then something happens … Well, she’s honestly not sure she would survive.
But she also is starting to think she won’t survive being without them either. Or at least being without this man who is still sitting next to her.
She feels the now-familiar lump in her throat start to form along with the stinging sensation in the back of her eyes, but then something heavy is placed over her hand once again, and she feels her body almost collapse with the relief.
He waits until she pulls herself together enough to look into his eyes. Then he smiles, just a little, his lips curving up at the edges.
“No will judge you if you want to stay either. We all did.”
Natasha is quiet for a while after that, thinking about what Steve said. He is quiet, too, letting her take her time.
Finally, she asks another question that has been on her mind.
“Does it get better?” she says. “The pain?”
This time Steve takes a moment to answer, but he is staring right at her when he does. “It’s starting to get better now.”
For a wild second, she thinks he means Loki. That defeating him was what he needed to start healing. But then she realizes he’s still looking at her, like he’s trying to see inside her, and she feels her body flood with warmth.
She looks away before she does something stupid, like let him see her blush.
“I’m sorry,” Steve says after a beat, “I shouldn’t have said that. Not like that. I just meant …”
“It’s okay,” Natasha interrupts.
Steve shakes his head. “No, it’s not. You’re going through something unimaginable. I shouldn’t be …”
“You shouldn’t be what?” Natasha says. “Trying to be a good friend?”
Steve shrugs. “Trying to flirt with you.”
“Maryanne in HR would be a good catch.” They’re pressed together in a small, dark cave. Down the hill, the weapons traffickers they’re following are bickering about something. In a few minutes, they’ll be able to make their move.
“I’m not dating anyone in HR.”
“Do you have something against HR?”
“Of course not,” Steve says. “I just don’t want to date any of them.”
“Well, is there a department you do want to date from?”
Steve turns to her, his face deadly serious. “What if I said you?”
She almost falls over. She stares at him for a moment, completely lost for words. And then he laughs. She shoves him, hard enough that if he were anyone else, he would have toppled over, but he’s Steve freakin’ Rogers and he’s now laughing at her.
“I hate you,” she says, but she’s laughing too. And when they both catch their breath, she grins at him, her lips already twisting into a smirk.
“What about Darlene in the cafeteria?”
“I used to try and set him up,” Natasha finds herself saying to the Steve next to her. At his confused look, she clarifies. “My Steve.”
“Yeah?” he says.
“I thought he — you — would want a nice, safe girl. You know, someone who could give you that whole American dream thing. White picket fence, two point five kids, house in the suburbs …”
The Steve next to her laughs. “You think I — he — okay, this is weird — but you think the Steves in your life want a house in the suburbs?”
Natasha shrugs, but she’s smiling too. “Maybe.”
“Maybe he and I are different,” Steve says.
“Maybe you’re the same.”
“We’re not the same.”
“How do you know you’re not the same?”
“Did he date you?”
Natasha pauses. She doesn’t know why, but she feels like how she answers this might just change the direction of her relationship with this Steve. Maybe even the direction of her life. But she also thinks that sounds melodramatic and ridiculous, and it’s just a simple question.
Or is it?
She’s honestly not sure. She and her Steve use to flirt all the time. They even kissed a couple times, mostly as part of ruses to fool the bad guys but once because she wanted to shock him, and she knew that would do it.
But this feels different. This Steve feels different.
Maybe it’s the way he looks at her. Maybe it’s the way he seems to understand her. Maybe it’s the way he just makes her want to be around him.
But, she also reminds herself, he doesn’t really know her yet. Who she is or what she’s done. Her Steve found a way to look past all that, but would this one?
She doesn’t want to think about that. Not now. Instead she grins at him.
“Are you asking me on a date, Steve Rogers?”
He doesn’t look even the slight bit embarrassed.
“Maybe,” he says, but then he adds, “Not now, though. I know you need time. But maybe … maybe someday.” He pauses. “Would that be okay?”
He looks so worried now, she reaches out, almost impulsively, and this time, she’s the one covering his hand with hers.
“I think I would like that,” she says.
“Really?”
“Really.”
He looks relieved. “Okay, then,” he says. “It’s a future date. But maybe in the present we should do some training?”
He gets to his feet, reaching out to help her up, even though they both know she is entirely capable of getting to her feet on her own.
She glances over the railing at the cars below once more before heading inside, Steve behind her. He is so close, she can almost feel his breath on the back of her neck.
She thinks about what it could be like to have him behind her always. It’s not anything she’s ever experienced before, but she thinks that maybe she meant what she said to Steve. She thinks that maybe she might like to find out what it would be like.
Not today. But someday.
Definitely someday.