InsaneJournal

Who: Natasha Romanoff and Bucky Barnes
What: I have an emotional bomb, you have an emotional bomb, everybody's got an emotional bomb!
When: A day or so after Natasha's arrival.
Where: A walk in the woods.
Rating: Moderate, maybe some swearing! Also BIG WARNINGS FOR ENDGAME SPOILERS.



I remember everything.

Of all the things that had happened in Natasha's life over the last forty-eight hours - and it had, admittedly, been a hell of a forty-eight hours. When all was said and done and she looked at the final tally, she figured it wouldn't even be a contest, it would end up being the absolute most eventful forty-eight hours of her life entire - this was the thing that had put her down hardest and quickest.

Everything-everything. I just never got to tell you before Thanos.

The idea of it floored her. James Barnes had been the first scar that that had ever been sliced into her heart, long before she'd been aware that a heart was anything she'd had in the first place. And it had always stung, in some small, quiet place, to know that Steve had stayed somewhere in his mind while she'd been blotted from it entirely. It was nobody's fault, of course, nothing deliberate; that was the way of these things. Natasha better than anyone else knew that was how it ended up sometimes. There were things nobody got a choice in. It wasn't as though she'd spent the rest of her life pining, agonizing, never moving past it, never loving anyone else again.

But she had carried it. She'd carried it for both of them, and even she wasn't immune to moments of wistfulness every now and then. The RMS What Might Have Been was a ship that Natasha tried not to sail too often on a lot of fronts, not just the James front. This, though, this was another thing that dying had thrown into perspective: what could have ever been gained by suffering nobly in silence? Why had she never brought it up? Never even hinted at it, or offered him the choice for her to tell him herself, long before Shuri had fixed what Hydra had done to his mind? It wasn't that anything would have had to have come of it, exactly, but with it all unspoken - how had her own private grief over so many things ever been of service to anyone, especially herself?

He was here now, though. And so was she. Five long years since last she'd seen him, and when she reached the wooded area he'd told her to come to - told her to hurry, even - there he was.

It had been emotional with Clint, with Tony, with Carol. So far the last forty-eight hours had been a nonstop rollercoaster of vodka and emotions, but if the alternative was death, she was taking it, and gladly. "You're very late, James Barnes," she said, and if her voice was aching, the smile that split her face was nothing but genuine. "What took you so long?"