'Dinnertime' was a concept that had come and gone, but Natasha had known Tony Stark for a decade, and her first introduction to him had involved the care and keeping of his schedule. A lot of the time, he ran on his own clock; not always out of spite or malice or intent to slight, but he could get caught up in projects, work, mired in his own head...a whole host of things. And when Barbara had informed her of the names of the missing, well, Natasha could connect enough dots to know that she shouldn't expect him in a timely fashion. To be honest, she was surprised he'd arrived at all.
Peter Parker - the one from their world - wasn't someone she'd personally spent a lot of time with, but she'd known the boy enough to feel a little fond of him. Tony, though. She knew what he'd meant to Tony. And Tony was not a selfish man; Tony had pulled the weight of the world onto his back the day he'd crash-landed out of a cave in Afghanistan, and if he had carved out some peace for himself in a little lakeside home with Pepper and Morgan, she knew he would remember the weight of it. When they had come to him with an explanation of what they wanted to pull off with the time heist, she was mostly sure that knowing this would save billions would be motivation enough. But on the off chance he had wanted to hold onto that peace, if he would have held to his conviction that he'd carried the world long enough - the promise of bringing back Peter, she thought, would have always been the thing that tipped the scales.
She had lost children that hadn't belonged to her back home. She understood the weight of this.
And Tony had pulled the weight of the world on his shoulders here, too, in this community. A lot of people seemed to only show him the back of their hands for it, but here he was, still trying. Still getting back up, still working, and now - when she came downstairs and cut through the rooms they were still trying to build out into a library, when she met him at the door in the dark, something about his face. Something about his face right now hit her in the same place it had when she'd showed him those pictures of Morgan for the first time. She knew that look. It was someone lost and trying to follow whatever tiny scraps of a map had been left to them.
Natasha took his hand. "Upstairs," she said, gently, and gave him a tug inside, closing the library door behind him. "Do you need something to eat? I've got a few things."