"Was bleeding, technically," Natasha corrected, and wiggled all five fingers on her hand to demonstrate where it had mostly dried up by now. "Just a scratch. I didn't even notice until it happened and then all of a sudden there's blood on my jeans. I hope it comes out. Jan worked so hard to find me a pair that actually fit. Well - not just that I thought fit, she made me try on a couple so she could be the one to give her final approval. I don't want her to think I'm not appreciative."
Why was she talking about her jeans? Nobody gave a shit about jeans. Neither of them had shown up here because they were worried about additional loads of laundry.
James was standing next to her. Clint was kneeling in front of her. She tried to focus on his face, but her gaze shifted past it, to the blacktopped parking lot on the other side of the door. "You know what I never told you?" she said, though she was addressing it mostly to the streetlight. Her voice was still calm. "Back home, you lost your goddamn mind. Entirely. When Laura and the kids died, I mean, you just lost it. Turned into this absolute death machine. Drug lords, crime families, general unsavory characters - you were racking up a spectacular body count, you might have put my numbers to shame by the end there. In the first year, I begged you to put it down and - I don't know. Grieve constructively. Come back. And you were right in front of me, but it was like you weren't...seeing me. It was like talking to a ghost. Because Thanos took half the world and he took good ones, but he didn't take the garbage. Nothing I said made a difference so in the end, I just let you do what you needed to do. Until Tony figured out how to fix it. That was the first time in five years you looked at me like you remembered me. Anyway. Nebula said you're okay now. So there's that. I fixed that much."
She scratched her fingernail over the edge of the cut on her palm, picked at it like she was scratching an itch that didn't want to scratch out. When she turned her head this time, she looked up at James. "You must be kind of thrilled, right?" she asked him. "Because if I'm angry about what Tony did, you get your way and the transitive property means I should know that I'm an idiot, too. Right?"