It might amount to nothing more than fruitless strategizing, in the end, but at least they weren't doing nothing. At least this time, they weren't frozen helpless in front of the Justice Building, waiting for their names to be plucked out of glass balls that were considerably less tightly packed this year, and that felt like something. So there was that, and in a few days, there would be Tony's strategic meeting of the minds, which was a place Natasha didn't want to show up empty-handed, so to speak. Sitting down with Clint tonight had been more of a way to get the bad ideas out of the way before they landed on useful ones than anything else. If they were walking in there together, she wanted to walk in with a clear list of points and not let anything else derail her once they got going.
There was a lot to push into motion, and she didn't have a lot of faith in anyone else to get the ball rolling at this point. Not properly, not in a way where all the rest of them ended up sacrificial lambs. Though thinking that way just sent another flicker of Steve-Rogers-aimed malevolence flickering through her, and that was a thing that she had been trying to clamp down on. So it was all his fault - so what? His fault but now they were in this situation regardless, and spending too much time blaming him would wear her out, eventually.
And Natasha was tired, by now. They'd been going over this all day, now, poring through notes, discarding options, putting new ones on the board only to immediately discard them again, and now they'd circled back around to this one. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands as Clint kneaded her back, crowded close behind her as she sat half bent over everything spread out on his table. "We went through this," she said, though it wasn't admonishment in her voice, more of just a reminder. "It might have worked a few months ago, it would have been great then, but now that they've announced the theme of the next Games, you can't announce your retirement. There's no impact to that when everyone's still taking book on which Victors are going back in. It's too late for that to be a cover."