I want you to do whatever the hell you want, but I want you, too. If there was a simpler, cleaner way to lay it out, Natasha had never heard it, and for a moment, she stilled, rooted somehow by the words and that I-don't-actually-mean-this grin. Honesty was a relatively new thing, between the two of them. Or maybe that wasn't quite right; maybe the honesty had always been there, but they'd buried it underneath layers of other things, in true Capitol fashion. Swathed it in pithy comments and airy rejoinders, fluffs of cotton covering up a vein of iron embedded in the rocks beneath. It had been enough for so long for there to be an unspoken understanding between them, about so many subjects, and now that they'd arrived in this place with a clock on it, where there could be a limited amount of words left...everyone was choosing now as the time to make their deathbed confessions.
She wouldn't have thought seeing something plaintive in Tony Stark's eyes would have been a thing that would puncture a soft place inside her anymore than she'd have thought Trevor Slattery dressed like a battery would have been the thing to level her completely.
Natasha knew how she would have responded months ago, a tinkling laugh and a sardonic comment about how gorgeous their kids would be, any one of a hundred ways she'd deflected it when buyers got too flowery with her. She'd turned down Justin Hammer's marriage proposal twice (but had still kept the ring, which she'd summarily sold to buy two excellent pairs of shoes, a new set of knives, and paid for bar and catering on two very wild parties.) This now, though, this was - this was something raw. And unprocessed, unfiltered, it had things we don't talk about stamped all over it.
And even with his own personal bias clearly flagged and marked and circled in red, there was truth enough in what he was saying. That maybe there was a world out there where she could imagine being someone different, where debts and debtors didn't have to be the first priority after survival.
Natasha scrubbed a hand over her face, making a worse mess of the painted flowers. "I don't know what I want. I've never thought about wanting much beyond staying alive, even before the Games. And sometimes I don't - I don't even really know why. What the point of constantly fighting this hard to stay alive is when I don't - I don't ever touch the ground." Her voice hitched on the syllable, in a way that she hated, her voice gone soft and vulnerable. All of her clearly aching, and about things that were theoretical and didn't pertain at all to the enormous shitstorm they were all about to wade into.
But it was happening and she couldn't buy it back. "If any of us make it out the other side of this, I want at least one thing to be real. I want to know what that would be like just once. I'm so exhausted with being endlessly malleable, Tony. There's been maybe three bright spots in my life since I was a kid and you've been one of them. But I want to finally want something. I haven't let myself do that since I was seventeen. I don't even know if I know how."