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“And we who love the world must learn the language of absence: days foreshortened, empty rooms, the irrevocable distance between the goodbye and the letting go.”
(Joe Bolton, The Last Nostalgia: Poems)
//
Maria gets the text on a Wednesday. It just says Tomorrow, 22:00, Echo's , then the address of a pub in the next town over. Maria hasn't seen Sharon in a while, but she knows it wouldn't be hard for her to show up at her doorstep, so she appreciates the choice to meet somewhere else. She also knows, if she doesn't, knocking on her door will probably be scheduled for Thursday, 6:00, Maria's doorstep.
She's trying to lay low. Her new address is Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Georgia. She doesn't want a CIA agent to come snoop around because she's bound to notice a couple things that would make it quite obvious that Hill is not the average law-abiding citizen that she makes herself out to be to anyone who's asked.
So, she goes. Early, too. Echo's a sleazy pub with the name bleakly flashing above its door, almost empty when Maria gets there; she doesn't anticipate it getting much more crowded even when it isn't Wednesday night. She makes sure to be tipsy by nine thirty just for the edge it'll give her; Sharon will think twice about whatever proposal she has if Maria makes it obvious, she isn't the same person she was before... well, before .
“Hill. I see you got a head-start.”
Maria glances up at the clock above the liquor shelves and then back down at her glass. “You're late.”
“I'm three minutes late, Maria. Aren't you happy to see me?”
“Late's late,” she takes a sip and finally turns her head to Sharon. “Nice suit. You're buying.” She flags down the bartender and gestures for two more glasses of what's in her hand.
“You look like shit,” Sharon sits down beside her.
“Thank you, there was an apocalypse in case you haven't heard.”
“Not your first one, was it?”
Maria gives a half shrug. “Wasn't invited to this one, was I? 'Cause if I'd been-”
The sentence stops there, and at the same time her glass stops mid-air. If she'd been, things would've gone differently. If she'd known about Thanos before it was too late already, if she had been amongst the spared people, if she'd just been... there. She doesn't need to say it for Sharon to know. Everyone who meets her knows, if Maria had survived the first time, she would be the one gone this time around.
Maria tips the liquor back and reaches for the other glass.
“So, what brings you here?”
Sharon glances around the place, her eyes lingering on rotting furniture and machinery made before they were born. “Nice town you picked.”
“I don't live in it, just come by every once in a while, for supplies. Got myself a nice place, no one around for miles and miles,” she doesn't try especially hard to mask the slur in her words.
“I'm aware. Not that I understand exactly why, but-”
“It's quiet. Calm. I grow my own greens. Even got a few chickens.”
“Sounds... boring. Unlike you.”
“People change. I'm retired. Retirement's supposed to be boring, so I've heard. Been catching up on my reading, on a few tv shows, too.”
“Retired, uh?”
“Re-tired,” Maria says slowly, almost splitting the word.
She drinks, and what burns might not be the alcohol, or at least not as much as the word. Retired had never really been in her plans. People do change, perhaps. Just mostly not for the better.
“How's the withdrawal going? The recovery from workaholic is bumpy.”
“Are you here to offer me a fix, Agent Carter?”
“What if I was?” Sharon asks, and finally picks up her own glass.
Maria hesitates. “I'd tell you I'm recovered from my addiction. And retired.”
“Come on, Maria. I don't know what you're planning out here but we both know retirement has never been in the cards for you. Whatever long con you're running-”
“No con. No plan. I'm retired, Sharon. I have chickens.”
“Sell them, then,” Sharon opens up her bag and fishes out a folder, opening it. She picks up a picture and slides it to Maria, slowly. “We need you on this.”
“Who's we?”
“Sam, Barnes, a few others. We're going to get a squad up and running again and-”
“Don't tell me, I don't want to know. I'm not playing, and the less I know about something I'm not gonna meddle in, the better.”
Sharon slides the picture closer. Maria finally looks down at it. She picks it up, studies it, traces the edge of it with her thumb.
“This was taken three days ago, just outside Odessa, Ukraine.”
Maria looks at it closely, she looks for something she knows it's impossible to find, she looks for a detail, a trace of something that isn't there. She puts down the picture and turns back to her glass when she's sure there's nothing there to spot.
“It's not her.”
“How do you-”
“It's not her, it can't be.”
“She was equipped for time travel at the time-”
“Listen to me, Sharon,” Maria's voice is suddenly clear. “Clint saw her fall to her death, she sacrificed herself for him, for us, she died on an alien planet while I was erased from reality, alone and scared and wondering if we'd ever make it back. The news called her a hero for it, and we buried a flag in her grave. My wife is dead. I don't know who this is,” she pushes the picture back to Sharon, “but it isn't Natasha Romanoff.”
“Banner said Steve went to him. He was old and with one foot out the door already, and he asked for a time travel suit with two charges, left and never came back. Clint helped him with coordinates, wouldn't say where he went or why he hasn't returned.”
Maria knocks the liquor back, throws a few bills on the counter and then gets up.
“Steve's gone to die alone, somewhere nobody except Barton knows, because he didn't want his DNA to be recovered and used to make some other super soldier, Sharon. It's why he never had kids. If you ask Clint he'll tell you: the old man just wanted to die in peace somewhere not cold enough to preserve his corpse past its due date. Let him rest. Let Natasha rest, too. They're done, Sharon. They've given this world... everything they had to give. Let them be.”
She walks out, stops when the cold air hits her. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, her lungs and throat hurt, but she barely feels the cold due to the alcohol in her body. She knows Sharon will chase after her, because there's just one thing left to answer at this point, once they've accepted the red-haired girl with a Black Widow suit on, fighting criminals, isn't Natasha Romanoff. Just one, little, small, detail: who is she, then?
The door opens and closes behind her and Maria opens her eyes.
“Let me see it again.”
Sharon hands her the picture. Maria studies it silently, she looks at the shadows and edges of it for something she's missed, but the picture won't reveal its secrets to her. It's just a picture from a shitty security camera, it's just a picture of a redhead fighting criminals, it's just a picture of a black widow from three days ago.
“Fuck.”
“We leave tomorrow morning at six.”
Maria sighs. “Damn it.”
“It'll just take a few days, then you can come back to your retirement.”
She really thought it'd stick, this time. She even got attached to the chickens. She should know by now, it never really sticks for them. “Fuck.”
//
It's two weeks after Tony's funeral, when she decides she's had enough. Of the stares. Of the pats on the back. Of walking familiar streets she doesn't feel she really knows anymore.
Five years. Natasha's had to do it for so long, kept sane by hope, a heart-wrenching purpose, and a handful of friends. Maria lasts days.
There's a picture of her wife smiling, head tucked under Maria's chin as she stares at the camera with a glint in her green eyes that has always made Maria think of sunny days and happiness. It's staring at her as she shoves another shirt in her bag, and it seems to be holding a judgement that Maria knows to be coming from within herself.
“Don't look at me like that,” she tells the framed image that won't move. Natasha was always the strong one, it's preposterous she now requires Maria to go on. “Yeah, well. You shouldn't have left if you wanted me to stay so much.”
She picks the picture up and shoves it in her bag, tucking it between two pair of sweatpants, partly so she won't have to look at it anymore, and partly because she has no idea what a home without that picture in it looks like anymore.
The door gets locked. Liho's in the car already. The cat damn near hates her, but they're all the other has left of Natasha now, so they gravitate to one another somehow. The house's still full of memories and things that Maria's not about to get rid of, but she leaves them behind so she'll have this place to come back to once she's ready.
Ready for what, she doesn't know. Not yet.
Maybe work. Maybe death. Maybe even – although she can't really imagine it – for life to go on again.
Well, life does go on. Despite her contempt, despite her standing her ground, stomping her foot, clinging to what was with teeth and nail, life does go on.
So, she packs up and decides she wants to see none of it.
She finds a place she likes; it's a little isolated, but it's nice. Cheap to buy. Easy to fix. Just the right amount of lonely.
She sits in silence a lot, reading, watching television. She talks to Liho to check her voice still works; the little devil spawn lives outside, comes and goes as she pleases, but hasn't yet found a way to cross the fence that goes around the property. Or, if she has, she comes back quickly enough that Maria doesn't notice.
The house is big. Built for more than one person, surely. Maria walks from one room to the other, learns its nooks and cranes, studies it's edges attentively. She likes the place, silent and far from everything as it is, but some days her own thoughts are too loud.
It's like living with a ghost.
Maria takes the right side of the couch, sleeps on the right side of the bed, keeps all her things in the shower on one of the two shelves, fills half the cabinets in the bathroom. There are two coasters on the coffee table, even though she always only uses the one on the right.
Natasha's always there, even when she's not, even though she hasn't been for a while. She's never even seen this house.
Maria still carves her a place in it.
It's a visceral thing, perhaps. She thinks back to the day Steve walked her to Natasha's room in their makeshift headquarters before he disappears for his back-to-the-past shenanigans, how everything there was leaning on the left side of every surface. Complementary to a missing spot that Maria's now filling in this new place.
And just like living with a ghost, Maria sometimes feels her there.
She's in the shower and rushes out because she thinks she heard Natasha's voice from the living room, just to catch a guiltless looking Liho napping on top of the remote and some anchor woman in the news talking with a cadence vaguely reminiscent of Natasha's. She's reading and hears a laugh from the kitchen. She knows it's her brain, telling her: “That's a funny bit. Natasha would've laughed there. By the way, here's what it sounded like, so you don't forget.” She still checks the kitchen every single time it happens.
Maria even – although she would never admit it to anyone that isn't Liho – talks to her. Like a fucking lunatic.
It's just to the picture, at first. It found its home on a shelf in the living room and it just so happens to be the right angle to look disapprovingly at when someone's being an asshat in the news. So Maria gives Natasha the side-eye as to say: “Can you believe the nerve?” and relishes in Natasha's silent agreement from the shelf.
Then, when cleaning, she starts saying a sentence or two. Then it's not about the picture anymore, it's about the little heavy stones permanently embed in her chest, as Maria likes to think about that... That heavy feeling in her lungs that won't go away. That knowledge that... this time, this time it's not temporary.
They've been dead before. But not like this. Not for good.
So she talks, to lessen the burden of grief. She talks while hammering poles into the ground, and tells Natasha about the small shed she's building for the chickens she plans to buy. There's a greenhouse out back, and so Maria, the least nurturing person on the planet, takes up gardening. She grows flowers, vegetables, and plants a couple of trees. They're small, but they'll grow.
When her hair is grey, and she feels too tired, she'll sit in the shadows of the tall grown trees, and think back to these few first weeks and months, when life hurt so much it felt like she wouldn't make it to grey.
//
Maria has a backpack and waits for Sharon just outside her property. Sharon doesn't ask to be let in, doesn't intrude more than the time of a quick peek at the front yard, isn't even sure she could stand all the grief and pain bottled up inside that house, so she wouldn't dare open its door.
Maria looks like she hasn't slept much, but she's sobered and showered, so Sharon takes it as a good will sign. She sits in the car in silence, stares out the window a lot; she's never been talkative but it hasn't been this tense between them in a while.
“Sam's got a jet ready for us as soon as we hit Atlanta, they'll meet us in Odessa. Some old friends are doing the leg work and as soon as we're there we might get some intel on her location, depending on where she is we'll either move by car or jet. Or do the ground work ourselves. If she's already disappeared-”
“Won't have. She's not that good. Got herself caught on camera.”
“Even the best ones can slip up every once in a while. And it's a cheap shot, we couldn't even get her face.”
Maria doesn't fall for the bait twice. But when Sharon turns to glance at her, she rolls her eyes.
“Look, maybe if-”
“It's not her.”
“-if she doesn't have her memories, or... or if she-”
“It's just not her, Sharon. It can't be her.” Maria knows her voice's too harsh. But she also knows she's right. “It's been four years.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Sharon tries again, but it's weak, not even convinced anymore. “We've seen stranger things happen.”
“Right. Like clones, life model decoys, Skrulls, witches, sorcerers. Androids. Or just a copycat, even. It could be any number of highly strange thing, whatever is going on in Odessa. One thing it's not, is a fucking resurrection.”
Maria turns the radio on, and that is all the hint Sharon needs to finally shut the hell up.
There is news in Odessa waiting for them. Melinda comes through with the intel they need and it's about two days later when they have a trap ready.
One point goes to Sharon: it's not a clone, a Skrull, or a magic trick. It's a black widow alright.
Just not... not the one everyone wanted her to be.
They find her waiting for them in an interrogation room, but they know they won't be able to hold her for long, with no charges.
Her name's Ava Orlova. Maria leaves her a card with her number on it and asks her to give her a call anytime, if she needs help or anything else, because they have a common friend . The last two words, she says in Russian, pointing at Ava's hair, hoping she understands Maria's hinting at its colour.
She scolds Carter, then leaves. Sharon yells after her “who's been taking care of the chickens?” and Maria flips her off without turning back.
She waits for a couple of day, helps Sharon with some reckon, treats herself to some Russian food, stalls without making it look like stalling.
Just when she's ready to give up and get back to her life, the call comes.
Ava asks for her help, and Maria picks her up and brings her to the jet that's waiting for them at the airport.
She hugs Melinda and says goodbye to Sharon in a way that feels more final than it has any right to be. Maybe, Maria tells herself, an ending is just a different way to frame a beginning: everything that ends has to have started somewhere.
“Will you be able to train me? To make me as good as she was?” Ava asks her after the silence has engulfed them for hours.
“No. I couldn't. But I know someone who could.”
//
Maria's been at funerals before. She's buried people, and left them there. She sees graves as an ending, a fixed finish line. She doesn't want to visit Natasha's.
Instead, she plants a cherry tree, one day, and calls it Natalie.
It's stupid, maybe, but it was one of Natasha's alter egos. One way she was rebirthed, once upon a time. She used to joke about Natasha having nine lives, like cats, but now she knows Natasha had many, many more.
So maybe, maybe this cherry tree, or Liho, or whatever, something close to Maria can be her next reincarnation. So she doesn't have to be gone gone; so she can live on, in the space around Maria. Gone, yes, but still lingering. Gone but present, like an echo, living through the things it resonates off of.
It's not easy. Not always. Not even most of the time, really.
She has a meltdown one day when she walks in and sees the picture: it's a reminder of a future she's lost forever, of a different kind of retirement she used to dream about, one not shared with a cherry tree and a cat, but rather with a very much alive Natasha.
Alas, Natalie and Liho are all that's left, so she waters the first and feeds the second, and closes her eyes when the sun grazes her face so she can almost feel its warmth again.
Life's still beautiful: it infuriates her.
Nature heals, itself and Maria alike. Life sparks into flowers and insects and birds chirping, spring bursts the wilderness to life and Maria kinda hates it a little bit.
Days seem meaningless yet richer, until she understands the meaning's not gone: it's changed; Maria doesn't manipulate the course of the world anymore, no, but she appreciates everything in it more. The things mankind can't touch, can't change, they resonate deeper, emanating their own meaning.
When a hailstorm in June freezes over everything that was growing outside the greenhouse and making half her work go to waste, she gets angry beside herself, but learns a lesson essential to her healing: some things, some unpredictable, unjust things, cannot be foreshadowed, or stopped. And what ruins two months of work for her, brings much needed water to others; tragedy isn't tragedy for everyone, it's the beginning of rebirth for someone else.
And life doesn't just go on, it thrives.
Humankind's strong again, it recovers, it betters itself.
One day, in July, she sits outside, beer in hand and afternoon sun grazing her face, and feels her chest full of stones again. Breathes them out. Realizes she can never really heal; this is her new normal: the longing is part of her.
Natasha has been part of her for a while, after all, so it's only fair that this dark and heavy thing has taken her place. Liho jumps on her legs and hides her face against Maria's stomach, meows mournfully, and Maria pets her and calls her “old girl”, but is grateful for the unusual burst of affection when she needed it most.
The black cat follows her closely, almost watching over her, from then on. Maria tells herself she's just getting older, but Liho acts worried about her. And as Liho starts getting between Maria’s feet, almost making her trip every time she leaves the house, as she headbutts her elbow when she’s sitting on the couch to be let on her lap, as she lays beside Maria on the porch when she’s soaking in the sun, her tail tangled around Maria’s wrist, something unpredictable happens. Maria realizes it one day, when it’s far too late to do anything about it: she actually loves the little devil. Not just loves – which is easy, because Liho depends on her and, as silly as it is, most days Maria depends on Liho as well, for company and sharing memories (“Remember when she… yeah, that was funny as hell”). Not just loves, no. Maria likes her. She pats the cat’s head and sighs.
After her many heartbreaks, Maria still can’t help but care for mortal things.
//
The TV’s on, a soft light is coming from the living room, and Liho’s chewing on the bottom of her pants before she’s even done hanging her jacket.
She bends down, pats her head, checks that she has fresh water. Liho waits patiently, well-behaved like she’s never been in New York. Then again, Maria didn’t pay much attention to her in New York. Sometimes, she wonders if she’s trained Liho, or if Liho’s trained her. Maybe a little bit of both.
This has been their home for four years. They’ve grown in it together, grown older together, and maybe a little softer with each other. It doesn’t mean they haven’t been hard on each other, too. But life without the other doesn’t seem possible anymore.
There have been days when Maria has longed for the first few weeks, when they passed by each other once a day, unintentionally, and scattered quickly as if to try and fill the empty rooms as much as possible. Now, they’re often by one another’s side, and it’s rare that if Maria’s gardening, Liho isn’t chasing butterflies close by; or if Maria’s sitting on the couch, Liho isn’t meowing at her feet or sitting next to her.
“There's an extra room upstairs, there's a bed although not much else. But if you want it, it could be yours. I'm sure you'd fill it, eventually. Things have a way of accumulating if you stay in the same place too long,” Maria says, subtly kicking one of Liho's toys out of the way so Ava can keep following her into the house. “We don't have many guests, no one will bother you here.”
“We?” Ava asks, glancing at the cat and back at Maria, trying to gauge if she's just followed a crazy cat lady halfway across the globe.
Maria almost smiles. “Yeah. I told you I'd bring you to someone who could train you.”
//
It’s been six months, five she’s spent here: Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Georgia.
Maria likes it here, most of the time.
She’s learned to love empty spaces, silence, even the foreshortening of the days now, in October, doesn’t seem so tragic. She’ll spend more time indoors, read more, rest more. It’ll be fine.
It isn’t until Liho’s tail stops moving for a moment, while her ears shoot up, that Maria knows something’s amiss. The cat scurries away and she’s halfway to the fence before Maria even looks up and the world stops spinning.
She realizes that, no, the world hadn’t been alright a moment before: it had still been spinning. All her healing, all her moving on, and still she had been light years away from ever feeling fine again. She’d been floating by, a pale echo of the person she used to be, an empty shell with echoes of everything she had once felt – and couldn’t anymore.
Like light at sundown.
And here Natasha is – the sun raising up again.
“This is nice, never thought retirement would suit you this well. I like it here.”
Maria sees grief around the house, it covers its every surface like dust, slips through every crack like sunbeam, soaks everything like water. But it’s home now.
“Can we stay?”
She thinks of the cherry tree outside, as Liho meows from her spot on the couch. She thinks of the chickens, the plants she’s growing, the bathroom tiles it’s taken her two months to fix.
Natasha is here: there is no grief anymore, if not for the lost time.
“Yeah. Sure, we can stay.”