The best thing about dying was that the dead person wasn't usually the one who had to deal with the aftermath. They didn't have to break the news, or console the ones left behind. They made a mess and walked away with zero consequences: it was the ultimate somebody else's problem. Natasha could believe that the rest of them would find solace in the fact that they pulled it off, if they pulled it off. Thor, Bruce, Tony even - though Tony had been making a very hard case for the fact that it wasn't the sort of thing he could shrug off. Clint would have his family, and those were all things that she could convince herself would be enough.
Steve, though.
Oh, Steve, though, and every time she had told herself that Steve would be able to look to Bucky, and look to Sam, and square his shoulders and let it be what it was - Steve who had already lost so many people, so many, had lost his friends, and his own timeline, and his culture, his own life, who knew loss and knew how to live in it, she had convinced herself that Steve would be fine, and quickly, and she had done it because she had needed to convince herself of that.
I don't have family, I just have Steve was what she'd told Carol. And now he was standing in front of her, five years younger than the last she'd seen him when she herself was wearing the weight of those years like a ballast, with her wildly different hair and exhausted eyes and the faint lines that had started to creep in around them -
How had she ever let herself believe for so much as a moment that the reverse wasn't true?
It was standing on Tony's porch all over again, only worse. She did not remember what it had felt like for her body to strike the ground on Vormir and shatter against it: looking at Steve now, like this, must have been what it felt like, and for a fleeting instant, she thought she'd trade the sensations in a heartbeat, if only she didn't have to be standing here right now. If only she didn't have to look at that lovely, familiar smile and know that she was about to wipe it away entirely.
Her mouth trembled. Once. "Took the long way around," she said, roughly. His hands were in his pockets. She hated that he hadn't reached for her. He would have reached for her before, and it wouldn't have even occurred to him to think twice about it. "You like the hair? Rest of the guys have cast their votes to keep it. Even Thor. You know how picky he is."