"Of course I would have stabbed you when I was a teenager. I wasn't a superhero, but I was excellent at my work," Natasha said, and smiled a little; it was a bad joke, a dumb joke, but it was a joke nonetheless, and she nudged her knee against his a little to let him know that's what it was supposed to be, anyway. If she'd come after Tony as a teenager, it wouldn't have been in an advice-getting capacity. Though it was almost fun to imagine, for a moment, herself as someone more along the lines of Gwen than the person she had actually been. She wondered what that would have been like.
Still: it was pretty far from the matter at hand. And it was a sobering thought, wasn't it. The idea that Peter had disappeared, for no discernible reason or cause, without a word or a sign - of course the only assumption could be that he returned back where he came from.
Where he'd come from.
Natasha's hands went cold, her mind running several steps ahead, but she reeled it back: this was not hers. This was Tony's, and it was no real effort to keep it off her face. "You know... you aren't wrong, about how much he cared for your opinion," she told him, still gentle. "But I think you're wrong. I think with or without you, he would have ended up in the middle of that fight somehow. Like you said - the kid had a pretty firmly developed sense of right and wrong, where he was needed. The little stuff matters, but sometimes - sometimes you look at a big thing, and it's too big to be ignored and even if you're outclassed, outmatched, you can't live with yourself if you don't get up and take a swing at it anyway. He didn't die because of you, Tony. He died because by the time Thanos touched down, it was already too late. And it may not help you right now, but where I'm coming from, you figured out how to buy it back. You didn't let him down. You brought that kid home. Whatever he went back into - there is no way that it's not only a temporary thing."