It was almost exactly a month from her arrival in Starklandia, and in the last few days, Natasha had been....she wasn't sure what the word for it was, really. Overly reflective? Taking inventory? A month wasn't very much time at all, when you got right down to it; a month was a span of time that could pass in the blink of an eye, how often was that a thing people said? I can't believe it's June already. Who gave October permission to start? Still: it was thirty more days than she had expected to live. Something had bought her thirty more days - if a person came to the end of their life, what wouldn't they do for the promise of thirty extra days? How would they spend them?
And all things considered - Natasha thought she'd spent them well. She'd told the people she loved that she loved them. She'd found some kind of work to keep her busy, even if it wasn't quite perfect. She'd tried to make some new friends. Nothing had felt like a risk anymore, but in the place she'd come from, they had all been impossible risks and here she'd been able to reap the rewards. Most of all, she'd mended some old wounds - though the converse was that maybe she had opened some new ones, in other people and in herself, but maybe that was just part of the calculus of being alive. Everyone left at least a little bit of damage behind them.
She had nightmares. She hated that she had nightmares and that it was always the same one, hated that it made her feel stupid and weak and a little bit sullen, which was probably why she'd only brought it up to Carol. But again, a little residual trauma seemed like a reasonable price to pay, for those thirty days.
James and all the rest of this was still another one of those wounds to address, and it was a little harder to know where to begin: some parts of it were so old, and some parts of it were so fresh. Where did she start scraping out and where did she start cauterizing? When he met her at the lake, she was twisting her necklace around in her fingers, staring at the water in a way that made her feel sort of like a character from a soap opera, but it was calming, the way the sun was sinking into it. And she had a smile for him, when she turned. A very real one.
"Thanks for doing it anyway," she said, though she knew he didn't mean it was uncomfortable. Just weird. "I just - I don't want to slink around in dark corners anymore." She tugged at the chain once more, then told herself to stop fidgeting, dropping it back down around her neck. "Do you want to go first, or should I?"
They may as well cut to the chase. They could do that, with each other.