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Natasha knows how to read a room. Hazards, cover, exits. Her threat assessment is second nature. She can calculate the likelihood of survival and success to unerring accuracy. When it comes to a mission, survival and success are not the same thing. Sometimes they cannot even exist together.
There are times when the whole world changes at once. When everything that was normal is snapped in half and you're left standing in the wreckage of the life you used to know. What would you give for it to be undone? Think of it this way. Trading your life for half a world. Not for a pretty gem ornamenting a shiny glove.
*
"You were my first real friend here," Steve tells her, in the dark.
Natasha wants to tell him she should have been a better friend, or that in this world broken in half, she might end up being his last friend too. But she knows his confession is a gift. She has lost a sister, he has lost a brother, and they are the walking wounded. He doesn't know how to quit, and neither does she.
"We're still in this together," she tells him, and she moves closer.
*
When Natasha falls, she falls into forever.
Vormir is a hellscape, and the Soul Stone is its mirror. Natasha sits in the centre, prepared for an eternity of being imprisoned, alone with her thoughts.
The walls are translucent as amber, clouded with fissures and fractures. From the outside, they were orange as a burnt sunset sky. From the inside, they are darkened to a bloody red.
Her own face is reflected back at her, in myriad ways, like glimpses of multiple lives in multiple worlds. The facets of a jewel, where one becomes many. The cells of a hive, where pawns become queens.
"Come with us," her other self says, and holds out her hand.
*
When Natasha comes back from the dead, she goes to get the Time Stone.
Dr Strange tells her, "You can't change anything. We had a one in a million chance to defeat Thanos. Interfering with that could destroy everything we fought and died for."
Natasha thinks about saying, she's already fought and died for it. She thinks about saying, is this really the best of all possible worlds? What she actually says is, "What if you're wrong? What if we can change everything?"
Thanos said, I am inevitable.
Natasha thinks, Like hell you are.
*
Natasha finds Peggy in 1950. But not Steve. He has been and gone.
Peggy is not surprised to see her. "He came to keep his promise. One last dance."
"He didn't stay?" Natasha wonders, genuinely stunned. "I thought he wanted to settle down. Here. With you." She's tongue-tied and awkward. She's never tongue-tied and awkward.
Peggy gives her a kind and understanding smile. "Neither of us is the type to settle down."
"Then why--" Seventy years is a long way to go for a dance.
"He had some things to tell me," Peggy says. "About the future."
So much for preserving the timeline. Then again, Steve Rogers has never been one for following the rules, not when other things mattered more. Natasha understands now. Steve isn't going home. He's going on. For as long as his Time Stone lasts. They are on the same mission. Their paths will cross again.
Some people move on. But not us.
"I have some things to tell you too," Natasha says, boldly. She knows where the bodies are buried. Will be buried. And--if she has her way--never will be buried.
Peggy says, with a glint in her eye, "I thought so."
*
Natasha burns down the Red Room training facility, before it can even become operational. She spares a moment to wonder if she is erasing her future self. If a world without a Black Widow--without all the freed Widows--will suffer for it.
Then she imagines looking Yelena in the eyes someday, and admitting that she did nothing in the face of evil.
Natasha lights the fuse.
Maybe she won't know Yelena at all. But the facility burns, and burns, and she still remembers her sister, and she has to trust that the same is true in reverse.
Natasha has been taught too much of martyrdom to believe in it as a fairytale. Death is the easy way to expiate your sins. Life is the hard way to wipe the red from your ledger. She has never crashed a plane into the ice, trying to bury a cargo of poison and herself. But she has flown a plane through a hail of gunfire, trying to stay aloft while someone else is bleeding out beside her.
She is learning to fly the plane again. Not because she is best at it. Because she is there and it needs to be done.