"You know, you should consider stockpiling these apologies for the future," Natasha told him, and when she smiled at him, it was genuine, it was a smile she meant. "Those get a little thin on the ground with me, I tend not to do a lot of apologizing if I don't think I'm wrong." It had never necessarily been her best quality, but she was aware of it, at least, and if she was being perfectly honest, it wasn't something she minded about herself. Natasha was big on convictions and the courage it took to hold them; the life she used to lead, the life they had all used to lead, really, meant that there would always be points where hard choices would have to be made and sometimes there was never a good option between them. It mattered to be able to defend the choice, whatever it was.
Sometimes yourself was the only person you'd ever have to justify it to, and if Natasha had always been an excellent liar, she'd never really bothered much about lying to herself. It didn't serve anything. If she kept her own counsel a lot of the time, it was important to be accurate about it.
"I'm better than I was," she admitted, because that was true. "I think I've just - I've ended up a little bit in my head about it. You and I both know the only thing that ever really matters is the moment you're in and not the things we can't change. But it's hard to think about Clint - on this complete break from who he's always been, dark and angry and a little bit scary, where nothing mattered, and... and now I'm dead, back home, and it's like the last five years have been canceled out entirely. It. It makes me feel like I didn't - like I couldn't have mattered, all that much. Which is maybe also me reading a lot into what Nebula said, but - that's a hard thing to feel. It's one thing for me to feel like I died and it was a fair trade, I guess, it's... something else entirely to think that's how other people might see it, too."
And that was it, wasn't it? That was the worst thing, that small selfish seed. "It feels shitty to think it when our Clint, yours and mine - the way he looks at me. Nobody's looked at me like that since I lost you," she said, a little wistfully even though there was nothing to be wistful about, the man in question was here and real with his arms around her and his face in her hair. "I never want him to think that he doesn't measure up to some other version of himself. That he's not enough as he is. We have a pretty great life here, the three of us. I have friends, and work I like. I have you. I'm grateful I ended up here. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm - alive, and not just surviving. And all of this just reminds me of how empty my life really was, back there. How lonely I had gotten and how I spent all my time never really - building anything, for myself. And I'll never get to, there."