. (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} hourglasss) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} snapthread, |
Natasha went quiet for a moment. Not an angry silence, or a vindictive one, just...a processing silence. There were a lot of parts to this, there were so many things to unpack, and it mattered that she do it carefully. She didn't want to say the wrong thing, muddle her way through it, clumsily press against a bruise that had already burst to the surface. It couldn't have been easy - not only the things he had to tell her themselves, but this much talking at all, from someone that she knew always preferred action, preferred showing to telling as an easier way to express himself. It made something ache inside, a little, the thought that he'd been willing to split himself open this much for her. She wanted to show the same kind of care in return.
"We're all a work in progress, James," she said, finally a little more sure. And she smiled, a little. Something sad in it, but mostly - accepting. A lot of this wasn't news. "And some of that - not to deny you the absolute courage it took to say all these things, of course, but some of this, I already knew. I was there when he saw you again, after all those years. I saw what he was willing to give up and who he would put aside when you were in danger. I saw the way he pulled into himself and never really crawled back out again, after you - the Snap. And I knew you felt... I knew you remembered him. In DC, he was clear about it, that he was the one thing you remembered. You saw him and it cracked what they did to you in half. It made sense, you know, I'm not too bad at figuring things like this out. It just wasn't any of my business to bring it up."
Besides, she'd worn her heart around her neck for years. She was still wearing it. Be a pretty poor showing if she'd begrudge him loving someone else before her, and then tangled up along with her.
The rest of it, though. That was the part that was hard to take, that was what made the rest of it click into alignment. She had told Steve that she had died, and she hadn't - heard from him, not since he and James had talked. She hadn't expected that, but it made sense, now. Perfect sense, and it made her shoulders slump, a little. You deserve to know how loved you are. "You know - well, of course you know, you were there. They designed girls like me to be disposable. I don't think that ever really bothered me, until DC - until we saw you again, but I think maybe up to some point, you can only do so much about the thing you've been built to be. I think I've been good at that. I think I'm very good at filling in for whoever it is a person wishes they could be standing next to, on the bad days. I probably should have known eventually....eventually Steve would realize that's what I really was. A very good placeholder."
She slid her hand out of his, after a second. It wasn't his fault. He'd said something lovely, there, especially at the end, but in the moment, she didn't want to be touched, and she tucked them both into her pockets. Breathing with it. "Thank you," she said, so quietly. "Thank you for saying that you and I - that it was real." So much of it wasn't, in the end, was it? So much of it was just hope and fantasy and desperation to convince herself that she mattered somewhere, to someone, to know that at least once she had been prioritized, even if it had only been once. Before now, anyway, she amended, out of fairness to Clint.