Natasha barked out a laugh, a bitter sounding thing, the kind that had no real humor in it. "The world isn't changing after this, Bucky. No matter what Steve wants to believe. Whatever we tried to shove into motion, you know as well as I do that the whole thing gets put down the minute somebody takes Steve out. God, please tell me you don't really believe otherwise. You don't really believe that Clint and I are going to have a poignant and tender kiss before dying, and I make it back here, and I squirt out a kid with Clint's eyes that grows up to do anything other that head into the ring itself whenever Stane decides it's old enough for maximum interest level."
And on some level, she believed all of that was true. That this really might be a last doomed errand for all of them, no matter what Tony and Scott and Hank said about the contacts in 13, that there was a plan, that they only had to stay alive and keep Steve that way, too, just long enough for someone to swoop in from above. Most of the time, it felt like a child believing in Santa Claus, like she had to believe it or she would utterly and completely lose her entire mind.
"I know, okay? That's why I lived with him for the entire last month, I wanted - I wanted him to have something," she said, and now anger was creeping into her voice. It wasn't fair, really; Bucky hadn't made the world, and he hadn't shoved her into the role she played in it. That had been the work of someone else entirely, but he was the one who was here. "Clint is a good man, and I'm carrying his kid, and he deserved to be happy, he deserved to have what he wanted, but I would have loved to have lived at least one year of my life without everyone I know telling me that I'm responsible for what Clint wants. What would make him happy. No one ever asked what I wanted. And do you know what really pisses me off? I can't even blame any of you for it. Even other victors, coming to me to tell me about a man I could make happy. The context might have been different than Stane, but when you get right down to it, nobody has ever looked at me and saw anything besides a thing that some guy wanted so he could be happy. Not even you."