"Your person is the only one asked for this to happen," Natasha said, flatly, and it was a wonder that she was able to keep anything more venomous than that out of her voice. No matter what had been said at the roundtable discussion about not holding anyone responsible for it, waste of energy, we're all in it now, past is the past, she was perfectly comfortable holding Steve responsible for it. There were no soft feelings that she possibly could have mustered on his account. He had been warned. He had been told, over and over again, in unsubtle direct language. It had even been spelled out for him that his own life was not the only one he was playing with, and he hadn't given a shit.
The finger could be pointed at Stane, his regime, the world they lived in, but everyone else had figured out how to abide by those rules. Every other victor knew where their own personal death toll stopped, but Steve - Steve, who had been too good to let his own hands get bloody in the arena, he was the one whose numbers kept climbing. He'd brought this upon himself and he was bringing all the rest of them down with him.
Steve's death would be the only one she would feel nothing but a grim sense of satisfaction over. He'd been begging for it for years. He'd finally get his wish.
Though at least she was self-aware enough not to say that no one else deserved it. No one survived those Games if they were someone who deserved to. It was just that in the end, turned out that Steve was no real exception.
"And whether you want to call it picking a favorite horse or not, that's what it is, Bucky. It's an inevitability. I'm saying I'm not holding it against you, I'm just also saying - call it what it is," she added. "You've been in there. You know as well as I do that want is not a thing that factors in. There aren't shades of gray anymore. Not for any of us."