"I'm not gonna take offense unless you dub me the living dead girl or something else horrible," Natasha assured her friend. She did understand, though - to a degree, at least. This place was what had saved Natasha; it had afforded her opportunities that didn't exist back home, conversations and connections and mended fences. It had, for whatever reason, plucked her from her own nothingness and planted her somewhere with a degree of relative safety. And added to that, it was somewhere without the relentless crushing despair of a world that had lost fifty percent of its value while everyone left mostly spent all their time trying to figure out a way to cobble a life out of the wreckage.
Starklandia might be slow, and quiet, and underpopulated. It might not have the kind of convenient resources of most people's homes, it might have lacked a few things, but to Natasha: here was a gift, and there wasn't another lens to view it under. But that did not mean it was the same for everyone else, and it would have been just as disrespectful for her not to acknowledge that. Plenty of people had actual lives they've been plucked from, people who would miss them, things to get back to. Plenty of people felt trapped and frustrated and boxed in, bored and understimulated and out of practice at being able to sit with their own thoughts.
It did not surprise Natasha in the least that Carol was one of those people. She was too vibrant, too alive - she chafed under constraints long before Natasha had entered the picture.
"Talk to me?" she asked, quietly, and it was a request, not a point of pressure, not an insistence. It was what it sounded like: if I can help, I will, even if it's only to listen. I would like to be here for you, but you'll have to creep forward a little.