A name on a network could be deceptive. Anyone -- hell, even an AI -- could mimic patterns and play at being a human. That was easy stuff. Give the mind enough to make a leap between what it wanted and what it thought it saw, and it would scramble to cross the divide just to make whole something broken. Replace something missing.
Clint knew that. A couple trips down a path of wishful thinking had never ended well. He unlearned that thinking as best he could to be a SHIELD agent. Then, he’d pushed it out further when Thanos played at god. And again, after Natasha.
Wishing didn’t do a thing. Making sure to take out a Titan was more proactive, anyway. Living the life Natasha had saved… that was the only way to make it all make sense. Because what did you do when someone shoved you back from a ledge and took the fall instead? Live. Keep going. Make it so her choice was honored. Some days he cursed her for the burden of it, but she knew his nature. A little grousing was his way. And she’d quip in return with that dry wit.
It was a dry wit he hated to think someone could replicate, but pragmatism was also a fundamental part of the Barton psyche. Besides, he had always relied on his eyes. Seeing was believing. If someone claimed to be Natasha…
If someone even came close…
Then they would have to come back out the door to his left. The flash of red hair vanishing inside some time ago was enough proof to know that this was the stake out spot. He leaned against the brick of the Peaslee Theater and focused on the view ahead while the minutes ticked on. He didn’t think about what would follow when the woman reemerged. Stake-outs weren’t for dissecting social scenarios, anyway.
He waited.
When they were SHIELD agents, Fury had trusted them with the security of the helicarriers. They would often play games on who was the one to break through security first, who could do the most damage, and if they could do it without running into one another. It was a game to them — a bonding experience that ended up seeing them paired up on missions more often than not.
Natasha could sniff out Clint Barton without so much as a breeze on the wind.
Last night had ended in a resolution, one that she'd half expected. Just maybe not from the place it had come from. When she'd woke this morning, she allowed herself the luxury of mourning what could have been for just a little while, before she got up. She showered. She made coffee. She discovered new people arrived all at once.
So now it was time for action.
She'd seen to it that the Peaslee Theater's wardrobe department had enough stock for new arrivals. They just hadn't planned on how many had shown up. She'd planned on going to check in at the clinic, with Doctor Frankenstein, to see if they were fully stocked because an influx like this meant people who might need medical assistance. Some people arrived with wounds, the way they reset every week, and some people might have medical needs.
But first, a run-in with Clint Barton.
She'd caught sight of him a few times while he was doing recon. He was good, but she knew Derleth better than he did. She knew its line of sights, where the reflections on windows hit, and the paths to take to keep away from most traffic. When she left the Peaslee Theater, she didn't head along the broken up sidewalks. She wandered into the Green, down a small path that had only begun to get worn down.
Once they were a safe-ish distance away from the places most people would walk, she stopped but didn't turn around. "What's the last thing you remember from our dimension?"
He wasn’t abrupt with his movements: the mark of a trained field agent who could compartmentalize. He’d picked up that she knew she had a tail, but this was their language, too. Quietly following the other. Reading the signs and the hints. Small glances were full sentences in their own right.
No one could feign that. No one spoke this way, either. Definitely none of the other Avengers.
She stopped. He stopped, too.
When was the last time he’d heard that voice? Outside of recordings, outside of what his memory tried to occasionally patch together because if he let it slip too much he might never recall her rasp the way it hit on certain syllables.
“Being home with the family. Thought maybe we’d all go to New York City for the holidays. Don’t laugh, I was outvoted.” He was quiet for a pause, then asked the only thing to ask. “What about you?”
It's okay. Let me go.
It was like it had happened last night all over again, but every reset was like that. The memories of cold air caught in her throat as she jerked her chin down to look at her hands. There wasn't much rope burn when you wore gloves save the spots where the skin was exposed. She rubbed her thumbs across the faster healing wounds. Superhuman powers meant super-healing too.
"Forcing you to let me go. Watching you turn into a tiny fleck against that cliffside."
Then Derleth.
Always Derleth.
She turned to look at him finally, trying not to get her hopes up. The Clint who had been here before knew about Vormir, knew about what she'd done, but he didn't have his family. She assumed there were other tiny details that were off too. He'd just kept his distance.
"Hey Clint."
He let her speak, and had to replay some of her words back in his mind to make sure he wasn’t trying to prise a reply that hadn’t actually been given. Training aside, he was still just a human guy, hoping that the same incomprehensible thing that had dumped him here wasn’t playing a cruel game. Hope got dangerous.
Hey, Clint.
There were a million questions about how this was happening, but he was all out of caution at this point. If he was going to get his heart skewered now for believing that his best friend was actually, physically standing a few steps ahead, then it was going to get skewered. Screw it.
“I don’t get it -- ” He was speaking mid-step. Instinct was its own gravity, and it pulled him towards her. “Hell, I don’t get a lot of things right now, but…” Arms swept wide, forewarning of an embrace. She could avoid it if she wanted; he stalled a moment to give her the out if she needed it. If she wanted it. If he was just a big idiot falling for some trick. If, if, if.
She would have told him that anything was possible. After all, they'd traveled across the universe in their lifetime to a planet at the center of celestial existence. They'd witnessed a whole lot of things they didn't get. They were spies and agents, not Guardians of the Galaxy. Not Asgardians.
She wasn't about to side-step that hug or wave it off. He was allowed to hug her until she had trouble breathing if that's what he needed at the moment. She knew that there was a time between her death and everyone else coming back that things probably looked even bleaker to him. Natasha hated that she had to do that to him, but she couldn't let Laura and the kids come back to find out their dad had died on some distant planet because the choice was Auntie Nat or him. And Natasha let him die.
She would never forgive herself for that, not with everything else she'd done in her life.
Her arms tightened around him, her face buried against his shoulder. She didn't realize when she'd started crying, but it didn't matter. He'd expect no less. "I'm sorry, Clint. I'm so sorry."
There was a length of immeasurable time between the point when he’d paused and the point when his fingers at first grazed her back before his hands descended. She was warm, solid. She was here, and the instant he felt her clenching back he’d tightened his embrace -- she could handle it, she wasn’t fragile -- and pressed his cheek against the top of her head.
“Ah, no.” She was apologizing? “No -- no, no, no.” His voice broke. He didn’t care. She’d seen plenty of his worst already, and he knew that something so trivial wouldn’t change anything between them. Who even worried over appearances when someone who was supposedly gone for good and gone forever was tangible and so very here? He knew she was crying. He was barely keeping his own tears at bay as it was, and that was only because shock was still working its path through his state of being.
“Hey, I got them all back. I got them…” One of those incredulous laughs escaped Clint. The kind that worked in when you were trying to convince both yourself and someone else that there was some silver lining that would take all the pain away if the perspective changed. It was unfair. They had gone on a mission that had been rigged from the start. They just hadn’t known it.
“You got them for me. Okay? You saved them.”
She knew this was likely something that Derleth was throwing at them. So many people showing up all at once had to be some part of the experiment, right? Was he going to turn into an alien hell-bent on taking over the campus? Or would he just disappear the next week when everything reset? Natasha didn't want to think about that right now.
"Wanda showed me — got a wish that gave me the memories. I saw that you got them." She didn't think of how that sounded, but if he'd said something like that to her, she'd assume it was Wanda's mental powers. She'd put her into her Red Room memories; she could probably show someone else's memories.
Natasha's sacrifice might have been pivotal, but she wasn't the only one to pitch in. She wasn't going to take full credit for anything. Especially knowing what she did about Tony, Steve, Vision… Sobering thoughts that she wasn't going to let get in the way of this reunion. "How are they? Do you have pictures?"
She was right. His depth of understanding about Wanda was that she waved her hands and stuff happened. She could make people see into other worlds? Sure, that checked out. Why question it? If she ever dedicated that power to learning archery, then he’d probably have to ask for a little more background, right? Things like, ‘Hey, how accurate is magic? Does it know how to grip an arrow properly? Oh, it’s magic so that doesn’t matter? Cool.’
“Okay, I hear you asking about pictures, but I’m just gonna stand here for a sec.” He breathed in and opened his eyes for a moment. His arms held on tighter for a moment, as if she might disperse if he let go. Last time they broke apart from each other, and he’d come to alone in the shallow waters of Vormir. And she was gone.
“They’re all good -- mama’s good. Everyone grows up too fast, you know all that standard kid stuff." Standard kid stuff that Natasha should've been around for, even if it was a yearly visit to boggle at how much Nate was growing.
He finally loosened his grip. "You good, Nat?" A short question, but a loaded one.
"It's been — I've been here for months," she told him. It wasn't an explanation by any means, but it was a beginning so that she wasn't deep diving into trauma as soon as Clint arrived. Things had happened here, a lot of them were pretty messed up. And that didn't even begin to cover all of the thoughts she'd had about her death, what being here meant for her sacrifice, or how she felt about any of that. There hadn't been too many people she was eager to share that information with.
Natasha swiped at her face before she dropped her forehead against his. It was a long time custom of theirs, and she didn't want to give that up.
"This place is weird, Clint. Every week, you reset to how you were when you got here. Some people come in wounded. Some people come in from their deaths. Some people have hangovers. Some people come from various points in our timeline. Steve was here. He was from right after the Snap. Tony was before he was an Avenger, when he still knew me as Natalie Rushman."
It wasn’t a direct answer. SHIELD training involved learning how to pick up on evasion in people -- that was just part of learning to read situations and figure out how to approach people to keep missions on track. It meant Natasha knew that he picked up on it, too, and that in itself was telling. A non-answer was an answer between them. It was something to come back to another time when more shallow layers of this were dealt with.
He nodded his head forward against hers and let the moment sit, just like that. It was their greeting, their goodbye -- it was something quiet and intimate that came with a number of missions together and a trust of each other that had been earned and forged and strengthened. It was the one thing that Natasha could do that would erase any doubt that she was his best friend.
“I hear what you’re saying, and I’m also hearing that time is really, really broken here.” There was a lot more to it than that, but he’d always been a boil-it-down-to-basics type. General situation grasped, then make the next reasonable move. “Is it safe to talk? Here? I took a survey of this place, but you know it better. You go, I follow.”
"It wasn't us," she told him before he wondered if the time travel they did to get everyone back had caused this. She was 98% sure it wasn't them, but that mysterious group from the voicemail. The 2% was only because she always allowed for a margin of error. "And it's safe to talk here. Everyone on campus was taken out of their dimension from different points in their timelines. Some of them were from another place outside their dimensions."
Like Bruce. Like Rey. Like that new Margo.
"The best thing when you talk to people is to get a gage on what point in our timeline they came from. Tony didn't want to know his future, until he did." Then he'd prodded Natasha to tell him, and she'd become a walking Wikipedia. Still didn't mean he was the Tony she knew, because he had not been through the same things they had during their Avengers career. He wasn't even a team player at the moment. "Most people are erring on the side of caution on future events, but some people will just dump everything on you."
At some point, she'd tell him about how people had told her how much they missed her, and she hadn't even really come to terms with being back somewhere or her own grief for her sacrifice.
"You got the paper airplane?"
“Oh, good.” The laugh that escaped Clint was one born of seeing a mess and sensing that there wasn’t a whole lot to be done to straighten it out. Besides, if anyone had tried to, he knew it was Natasha. “Tread eggshells, brace for truth bombs. Hey, could be worse. I can learn to deal.”
And that was a remark that reached deeper. He knew that. It wasn’t only navigating the assortment of people here, then, it was navigating it without having any insider track on some of them. He’d thought that over loosely in his first perusal of the network, but it had been put on the backburner until he’d figured out if this wasn’t just a hallucination. And, more than just dealing with the people who were here, so came the reality of the opposite end of that. Dealing with people who weren’t here -- or at least the absence of them. Good thing he’d had years of getting used to that, huh? ‘Good’ only because he knew he’d survived that once already. ‘Good’ being a loose definition here.
“Got the letter. Not too worried about that right now. Unless something is actively trying to kill us -- that’s not the case, right? Because I was hoping we could grab a seat and… look, I don’t have a plan beyond that.”
"I wasn't sure where or when you were from, so I didn't want to drop a load of garbage on you as soon as you got here." Thus the It's been. If she was going to dump on anyone, it would be Clint, but if he had come from a point where he'd had no hope… She couldn't do that to him. "Some people are not so thoughtful."
She thought about the times the various Avengers had come and gone and lamented her death immediately. They just assumed she knew about it, and if she hadn't, she was having to console them over a death she'd never experienced. Instead, she'd been having to console them over a death she did experience. The sentiment was appreciated, but it meant she almost never wanted to talk about it.
"Right now? Doesn't seem like anything's trying to kill us. But that doesn't mean it won't. A lot of new people showed up at the reset — you included — which means something's going on. So grabbing a seat's not on my agenda at the moment. Making sure we have enough food and supplies and places for them to sleep is." She gave Clint's hand a squeeze and then gestured for him to follow her without letting go of his hand. Seeing his face made her realize how much she'd missed him.
"Don't worry though. Our world's still there, though. It's like we never left for them."
That was Natasha. Forward-facing and never letting a setback put her off her game. Even for those years when the Avengers were more than halved -- when he’d set off solo, she kept the machine running. It wasn’t a shock to find out she was calling the shots here, or that she had a handle on emergency aid. He just hoped that she stopped every so often to care for herself. If there was one thing he did understand, it was bearing the gift of surviving and living and not being able to see it for what it was because the conditions of doing so weren’t always ones to be grateful for.
There were often snags.
Surviving meant loss. Somewhere, in some capacity. Loss was always a part of that.
“That’s about right. I’ve been here barely half a day, and there’s work to do.” She didn’t have to pull on his hand much to ply him along. He said and he’d meant it: you go, I follow. “Give me the mission, I’m in.”