kaywa

Sam was asleep with his head tipped back against the wall. Steve sat across from him, pretending to read the mission report on his tablet even though his eyes had closed at least three times already. Clint was busy picking dried blood from beneath his fingernails with a look of complete boredom.

You had every intention of staying awake.

Really.

It wasn’t that the mission had been particularly difficult it was just… long. Twelve hours of surveillance, a fight that lasted far longer than anyone had planned, and the adrenaline crash that always came afterward.

Your eyelids grew heavier.

Across from you, Natasha watched quietly, pretending not to notice.

“You should sleep,” she said, her voice low enough that only you could hear.

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve said that three times in the last ten minutes.”

“I am.”

“You just blinked for about fifteen seconds.”

A tired laugh escaped you. “Wasn’t that long.”

“It was.”

You opened your mouth to argue again, but another yawn betrayed you.

Natasha’s lips curved into the smallest smile.

“C’mere.”

You frowned. “What?”

She patted the empty space beside her.

Your brain was too exhausted to question it. You shuffled across the narrow cabin until you were sitting shoulder to shoulder.

“Happy?”

“Mhm.”

You leaned back against the seat, determined to prove that you wasn’t actually tired.

Less than a minute later, your head tipped sideways.

It landed gently against Natasha’s shoulder.

You didn’t even notice.

Natasha glanced down at you, expecting you to jerk awake and apologize.

Instead, your breathing slowed, your body relaxed, and within moments you were completely asleep.

She smiled to herself.

Without saying a word, she shifted just enough to make you more comfortable, careful not to wake you.

Across the cabin, Clint looked up.

His grin was immediate.

“Oh,” he whispered.

Steve followed Clint’s gaze, then smiled knowingly before setting his tablet aside.

No one said another word.

For the rest of the flight home, Natasha didn’t move an inch.

Even when her shoulder started to ache.

Even when the quinjet hit turbulence.

Even when Clint quietly offered to swap seats so she could stretch.

She only shook her head once.

“No,” she murmured, never taking her eyes off you.

The kitchen in the Avengers Compound was usually loud, chaotic, and filled with the smell of burnt toast or over-extracted espresso.

But at six in the morning, it belonged entirely to Natasha.

She sat at the kitchen island, a steaming mug of black coffee cupped between her hands, staring out at the mist rolling off the lawn. Her shoulders were slightly relaxed—a rare posture for her—but her mind was still doing its usual quiet loop of threat assessments, mission logs, and upcoming schedules.

"You're awake early."

Natasha’s head turned, a soft, genuine smile instantly replacing her neutral mask. "I could say the same about you."

You walked in, wearing an oversized hoodie and slippers, rubbing the sleep from your eyes. But despite the groggy expression, there was an unmistakable spark of nervous excitement in your posture. Behind your back, you were hiding something.

Natasha raised an eyebrow, setting her mug down. "What are you hiding?"

"Nothing," you lied badly, sitting down on the barstool next to her. "Well, not nothing, just... happy anniversary."

She blinked, her brain immediately cross-referencing dates. Six months. It had been six months since the two of you officially decided that whatever was happening between you wasn't just a fleeting distraction, but something real.

"I didn't forget," Natasha said quickly, her voice softening. "I have something for you upstairs, but—"

"Nat, it's fine, you don't have to defend yourself," you laughed, setting a small, wrapped paper bag and a slightly lopsided envelope on the counter between you. "Mine isn't fancy. I actually handmade it."

Natasha looked at the items on the counter as if they might be rigged with explosives. "You... handmade it?"

"Yeah. Open the card first."

Nat reached out, her fingers surprisingly careful as she picked up the envelope. Your handwriting was scrawled across the front: To Nat. She slipped her thumb under the flap, taking extra care not to tear the paper.

Inside was a handmade card. You had folded a piece of heavy cardstock in half, drawn a surprisingly good little doodle of the two of you on the front, and glued small dried flowers near the edge. When she opened it, her eyes scanned the handwritten message. It wasn't just a standard greeting; it was a page full of quiet memories—the time you spent three hours making pasta from scratch, the way she took her tea when she was tired, how much you loved the quiet moments no one else ever got to see.

Natasha read every single word slowly. Her thumb stroked the rough edge of the paper, her breath catching slightly in her throat.

"And, uh, open the bag," you murmured, suddenly feeling a little self-conscious as the silence stretched. "I know it's silly, but..."

Natasha set the card down gently, taking the small paper bag. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, were two woven bracelets. They were intricately braided with dark red, navy, and gold threads.

"I made matching ones," you explained, rubbing the back of your neck. "I had to watch like four YouTube tutorials on bracelet knots, so the pattern isn't totally perfect, but.."

"You made this?" Natasha’s voice was barely above a whisper.

"Yeah. Took me a few nights while you were on that briefing tour last week. The gold thread is supposed to be—"

Natasha hadn't looked up from the bracelets. A single, clear tear had slipped free from her eye, tracing a quiet line down her cheek before landing on the marble counter.

"Nat?" You panicked slightly, shifting closer and reaching for her hand. "Hey, what's wrong? If you don't like them, it's totally okay, I know they're a little juvenile—"

"No," Natasha choked out, her voice tight. She quickly reached up with the back of her hand to wipe her cheek, but another tear followed it. She shook her head, looking at the braided thread resting in her palm as if it were made of pure diamond. "No, it's... it's not that."

"Then what is it?" you asked softly, wrapping your arms around her waist and resting your chin on her shoulder.

Natasha leaned into your touch, letting out a shaky breath. She held up the card and the bracelets, her fingers trembling just a fraction.

"No one... no one has ever spent hours sitting down, picking out thread, learning how to weave it... just to give me something pretty like that." Natasha said quietly, her voice thick with an emotion she rarely let show.

She turned in her seat to face you, her green eyes bright and glistening with tears.

"No one has ever put that kind of time into making something special just for me," she whispered, looking at you like you had just handed her the key to the universe. "Just because they love me."

Your heart melted right there in the dimly lit kitchen. You reached out, gently cupping her face and using your thumb to brush away the wetness on her skin. "Natasha... you deserve things that take time. You deserve people who put effort into you."

She closed her eyes, leaning into your palm, taking a deep, shuddering breath. When she opened them again, the fierce, guarded Black Widow was nowhere to be found—there was only Natasha, raw and deeply touched.

"Put it on me?" she asked softly, holding out her left wrist.

"Of course."

You took the red, black and gold bracelet and carefully tied it around her wrist, making sure the double knot was secure. As soon as it was on, Natasha held her wrist up, admiring the way the colors sat against her skin. Then, without a word, she grabbed the second bracelet, picked up your wrist, and tied it on you with meticulous care.

Once both bracelets were secured, she didn't let go of your hand. Instead, she pulled you closer, wrapping her arms tightly around you and burying her face in the crook of your shoulder.

You held her close, feeling the steady beat of her heart against yours, resting your hand on her back as she held onto you like you were her anchor.

"Thank you," she murmured against your skin, her grip tightening just a little more. "I'm keeping the card forever."

"Good," you smiled, kissing the side of her head. "Because I'm planning on making you a whole lot more of them."

Nova is around eighteen or nineteen when the thought really starts bothering her.

By then, you and Natasha have been married for years. You’ve been in Nova’s life since she was two and there are no memory of hers where you aren't present — Christmas, Halloween, Easter, school presentation and more.

You helped with scraped knees, school projects, nightmares, first-day-of-school tears, teenage attitude, heartbreaks, and every ordinary little thing in between.

You never tried to replace anyone, you were simply there. And somewhere along the way, Nova stopped introducing you as “my mom’s wife.”

You were just her mom. Which is why, one random afternoon, while filling out some paperwork for college, Nova realizes something — Legally, you aren't.

This fact becomes deeply, personally offensive to her so, Nova starts dropping hints.

Unfortunately, she inherited Natasha's idea of subtlety.

“It’s interesting that some stepparents adopt their stepchildren.” she tells you during breakfast.

“Yeah. Blended families come in all sorts of forms.”

“...Right.”

“Do you want more coffee?”

“No.”

Natasha watches the entire interaction over the rim of her mug. But Natasha knows something Nova doesn't, so she keeps her mouth shut.

A few days later, Nova sends you an article about adult adoption, no context. You reply with a heart and Nova nearly throws her phone.

“She sent me a heart, Mom.”

Natasha has to turn away because she's trying not to laugh. “Maybe she thought it was sweet.”

“I wasn't trying to be sweet. I was trying to communicate.”

“You could try words.”

Nova looks genuinely appalled by the suggestion.

“I'm your daughter. We don't do that.”

Natasha can't even argue.

The hints become increasingly ridiculous. Nova starts leaving adoption-related tabs open on the family laptop. She casually mentions that she has “always thought hyphenated surnames were cool.”

One evening, she asks you, completely out of nowhere: “If I committed a crime, would you still claim me as your daughter?”

You don't even look up from your book. “Depends on the crime.”

“Ma.”

“Alright, fine. Yes, I would.”

“Legally?”

That finally makes you look at her but makes Nova panic. She shrugs immediately and walks away. “Never mind.”

The truth is, beneath all the comedy, Nova is nervous. Because wanting you to adopt her feels strangely vulnerable.

You've never made her feel like anything less than your daughter. That's almost what makes asking harder.

What if you never brought it up because you didn't want to? What if you thought she was too old now? What if it mattered more to Nova than it did to you?

Eventually, after weeks of increasingly unsubtle hints, she has enough.

You and Natasha were having lunch at the kitchen table one Saturday when Nova marches into the room. Natasha sees the papers in her hand and immediately looks at you, because she knows what's coming.

You, meanwhile, are peacefully eating your lunch.

Nova drops the papers onto the table.

Natasha takes a very slow sip of water. “What's this?”

“Adoption papers.”

“Oh.”

Nova's courage immediately begins abandoning her. “I know I'm grown, and obviously you don't have to, and I know it's mostly paperwork because you're already—” She gestures vaguely at you. “—you. But you've been my mom basically my entire life, and I thought maybe you could officially—”

You suddenly stand, Nova stops talking. “Wait here.”

“...What?”

You disappear from the kitchen and Nova slowly turns toward Natasha, a worried look on her face. “Was that bad?”

Natasha is biting the inside of her cheek.

“Ma!”

“Hmm?”

“Why are you smiling?”

“I'm not.”

“You are literally smiling.”

Before Nova can interrogate her further, you return carrying a folder.

You sit back down. Open it. And slide another set of papers across the table.

Nova looks down, then back at you, then down again.

They're already filled out. Your part is already signed. “I was waiting for you,” you tell her softly.

Nova just stares.

“I didn't want to ask and make you feel pressured. You're old enough to decide what you want, and I never wanted you to think marrying your mother automatically meant I expected to become—”

“You've had these the whole time?”

You glance at Natasha who suddenly becomes fascinated by her lunch.

Nova's mouth falls open. “You knew?!”

“Maybe.”

“MA.”

“You were dropping articles on the kitchen table, Nova. You weren't exactly subtle about it.”

“I was being subtle!”

You and Natasha both answer at the same time. “No, you weren't.”

Nova looks personally betrayed, but then she looks back at the papers.

And all the indignation disappears.

“So... you really want to?”

Your expression softens immediately. “Nova, I've wanted to be your mother in every way you'd let me since you were little enough to call my stethoscope a necklace.”

“Well, I was two.”

“And very confident.”

Nova laughs, but her eyes are suddenly glossy. “You're already my mom.”

Your own composure breaks a little at that. Natasha watches as Nova comes around the table and wraps her arms around you. And despite being fully grown, Nova still somehow folds herself against you the same way she did when she was five.

You hold her tightly.

Later, when the papers are finally completed, Nova stares at the signatures for a long moment.

Natasha comes up beside her and rests her chin briefly on her shoulder. “Happy?”

Nova tries to shrug casually. “It's just paperwork.”

Natasha hums. “Right.”

A few seconds pass then Nova quietly admits that's actually really happy.

And that's how, after nearly her entire life of already being loved like your daughter, Nova Romanoff finally makes it official.

Before you, Natasha Romanoff’s mornings were usually going on by routine. The Russian was already up before dawn, swallowing down a glass of water then going for a ten miles run. At her return, she'd shred a heavy bag in the compound gym, shower, and drink her black coffee in silence. She was a creature of early dawn and quiet efficiency.

Then, she fell in love with you.

And suddenly, the fearsome Black Widow discovered a brand-new, highly formidable weakness: the warmth of your arms.

. . . . . .

The digital clock on the nightstand glowed a soft seven forty-two am. The sun was already filtering through the gaps in the blinds — casting lazy, golden stripes across the duvet.

You shifted, gently trying to untangle your legs from the heavy warmth of the sheets, intending to slip out of bed and put the kettle on. But the moment your hips moved more than two inches away, the iron-clad grip around your waist tightened.

A protesting, sleep-heavy groan rumbled against the bare skin of your shoulder blade.

“Where are you going?” Natasha’s voice was a low, raspy purr thick with sleep and heavily laced with her slight Russian accent that only came out in moments like these—a side of her she only let guard down for you.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” you whispered, turning your head to smile at her. “I was going to make coffee. And maybe get a head start on the day.”

Instead of letting you go, she buried her face deeper into the crook of your neck, inhaling deeply. The redhead's nose was cold against your skin, making you shiver, but her body was like a furnace pressed against your back. She threw a shapely leg over yours, completely pinning you to the mattress.

“No,” she mumbled, her lips brushing your collarbone as she spoke. “Five more minutes.”

You let out a soft laugh, reaching up to run your fingers through her tangled red hair. “Nat, It’s almost eight.”

“Then I need ten more minutes.”

“That's not how bargaining works, Romanoff.”

“I am a master negotiator, I dictate the terms,” she murmured, tightening her arms around you until there was absolutely no space left between you. She was incredibly clingy in the mornings, a sweet, needy contrast to her sharp daytime persona.

She liked to be wrapped around you like ivy, anchoring herself to your warmth.

“What happened to the woman who used to be up and about by dawn?” you teased gently, tracing the line of her jaw. “The one who told me sleeping past six was a waste of valuable training hours?”

Natasha opened one eye, looking up at you through a fan of thick eyelashes. A lazy, incredibly fond smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

“She realized that training doesn't hug back,” she replied softly.

“And your morning run?”

“I rescheduled,” she shrugged, kissing the sensitive spot just beneath your ear, making you gasp softly. “I do night runs now. The pavement is cooler, the compound is empty, and...” She paused, trailing her fingers lightly down your arm, interlocking her fingers with yours. “..it means I don't have to miss a single second of this.”

Your heart melted a little.

It was still hard to grasp sometimes—how a woman who had spent her entire life running, fighting, and surviving now fought so hard just to stay still with you. The fact that she had completely restructured her rigid, lifelong routine just to hold you in the quiet hours of the morning was a testament to how deeply she loved you.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes,” she whispered, leaning in to press a soft, slow, lingering kiss to your lips. When she pulled back, she rested her forehead against yours, her breath warm on your skin. “I am a hostage to this bed. You'll have to stay and keep me company.”

“Well, if it's a hostage situation, I suppose I have no choice,” you smiled, wrapping your arms around her neck and pulling her close.

The Russian let out a contented sigh, burying her face back into your chest, her hand gently tracing soothing circles on your lower back. Within seconds, her breathing evened out into a calm, steady rhythm.

The coffee could wait. The world could wait.

Part 5

The next morning, the compound moved like a body waking for war.

There was no army roaring in the courtyard or banners snapping from castle walls. There was the same feeling beneath everything. People spoke in short sentences, tools passed from hand to hand and quantum suits were checked, sealed, recalibrated, checked again, then checked a third time because no one wanted to admit the fear was not in the machinery.

Natasha moved through it all with purpose because purpose was the only thing keeping her from thinking too hard now. If she thought too hard, she would remember the night before. Your hand in hers, your voice against her skin. I love you still.

She had woken before you and for a few minutes, she had allowed herself to lie there and look at you in the gray early light, your white hair loose across her pillow, your face softer in sleep than it had been in years. One hand had been curled near Natasha’s waist. She had not moved for a long time, there had been missions before, so many missions and mornings of leaving warmth behind because the world demanded blood, secrets, lies, rescue, sacrifice. But this morning had felt different. Because for the first time in five years, she had woken with something she wanted to return to.

That made leaving feel dangerous when she found you in the hangar. You stood inside the Quinjet with the ramp lowered, one hand braced against the open frame and looking out across the compound grounds. You were already dressed for the mission and your hair had been braided again, though not as tightly as before. Natasha stopped at the bottom of the ramp and for a second, she simply looked at you. She smiled before she could stop herself and you noticed without turning your head. “You are staring.”

Natasha climbed the ramp. “I’m allowed.”

Your mouth shifted faintly. “Are you?”

“After last night? Definitely.”

That did make you look at her. The faintest warmth touched your eyes and Natasha felt it land in her chest like a hand closing around something bruised. Then she saw it fade and her smile softened. “What’s wrong?”

You looked away. The hangar was full of movement beyond the Quinjet, but inside the aircraft, the world narrowed. You stood in the center of it like a queen trying to decide whether to confess treason to her own heart. “Nothing.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow and you exhaled through your nose. “Do not do that.”

“Do what?”

“Look at me as if I am already lying badly.”

“You are.” Natasha stepped closer. “Talk to me.”

For a long moment, you said nothing and she waited. That was something she had learned with you: pushing too hard made you become stone, waiting gave the woman beneath the crown a chance to decide whether she wanted to be found.

Your fingers flexed against the Quinjet wall and then you said, “We could leave.”

Natasha went still, at first, she thought she had misunderstood. “What?”

You looked at her then and there was something in your eyes she had not expected to see. “We could leave.” you said again and Natasha’s chest tightened. “You mean not go?”

“I mean go somewhere else.” You took one step toward her. “Your machine can open time. We do not have to return to the exact places they choose. We do not have to step into the parts of the past where the Stones wait surrounded by enemies and consequences.” Your voice was low and that made it more frightening because you were trying so hard to remain calm. “We could choose another time..”

Natasha stared at you and you kept going and the words came faster now, as if they had been trapped behind your teeth for hours. “A quiet year..before the war. Before Thanos or Wakanda or my crown. Before all of it.” Your eyes searched hers. “We could stay there.”

Natasha did not answer. For one impossible second, she saw it. The thought arrived cruelly and fully formed, like a life outside consequence. Somewhere before the Snap, before the world broke, before the compound became a grave and your throne became a punishment. A small place no one knew..Just you and her.

Natasha hated how badly the image hurt and you saw it. “You see it too.” You stepped closer until there was barely any distance between you. “We could change things from there, not with their plan or with one attempt and no mercy if something goes wrong.” Your voice trembled, “We could prevent so much, Natasha..Save my parents before the ash ever touches them, save your sister from the years she lost, save all of them before grief teaches us what we are willing to become.”

Natasha closed her eyes briefly at Yelena’s name. Her sister, found too late and still somehow alive. One more impossible thing Natasha had been given after thinking the world had taken everything that word could mean and when she opened her eyes, you were watching her. “You have a family here..” you said softly. “But you could have them whole. You could have them before the damage.”

Natasha’s voice came out rough. “And what happens to everyone here?” Your face tightened. “Their pain would never happen.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know enough.”

“No.” Natasha shook her head. “You know what it feels like to want that to be true.”

Your expression changed and anger flashing beneath the hurt. “Do not speak to me as if I am a child asking for a fairy tale.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m speaking to you like someone who knows what running sounds like when it dresses itself up as strategy.”

You recoiled slightly and Natasha hated herself for it, but she did not take it back, because she knew. She knew what it was to look at a mission and see a door hidden inside it. To see the chance to leave the blood, the guilt, the people waiting for you to be better than you were. She knew what it was to want one clean betrayal if it meant one private peace. But she also knew what happened when you kept choosing escape and called it survival.

“You think I want to run?” you asked.

Natasha looked at you carefully. “I think you want to stop losing.”

Your mouth closed, because there it was. The truth neither of you had touched.

Your eyes shimmered, but your face hardened instinctively and Natasha stepped closer before the crown could come back over you completely. “You saw your mother yesterday.” Your jaw clenched. “You heard her voice. You saw your dragons. You touched the past and it touched back.” Natasha’s voice softened. “Of course you want to go there and never leave.”

You looked away and she followed your gaze. Outside the Quinjet, Tony laughed bitterly at something Bruce said. Scott dropped a tool, apologized to the tool, then picked it up. Steve adjusted the straps on his suit and Thor sat alone, staring down at his hands. Broken people preparing to break time because nothing else had worked.

Natasha looked back at you. “I want it too.” You turned sharply. The confession seemed to surprise you more than refusal would have and Natasha gave a sad, small smile. “You think I don’t? You think there isn’t part of me that wants to pick some year where nobody knows my name and just stay there with you?” Her voice caught and she forced it steady. “I spent my whole life running from rooms where people tried to make me into something useful. I know how to disappear. I could do it better than anyone.”

Your face softened despite yourself. “Natasha…” She shook her head once. “But I found Yelena, I found my family again. Not perfectly but here..in this wreckage and this team…” She looked toward the hangar. “This team is what’s left of me too. If I run now..” Natasha said, “when there is finally a way to bring them back, then what was all of it for? The five years? The work? The pain? The people who kept standing because we did?”

Your eyes dropped and Natasha moved closer, close enough to touch but not touching yet. “And you.” Your gaze lifted. “Look at what time made you.”

Natasha reached for your hand then. “Do you really want to risk becoming this again in another timeline?” she asked. “Another version of grief? Another war? Another set of dead because we thought we could outsmart consequence?” You looked down at your joined hands and your thumb moved once over her knuckles, almost unconsciously. “I could save them..” you whispered and Natasha squeezed your hand. “You still can.” she said. “But not by abandoning everyone else.”

You closed your eyes and for a moment, Natasha thought you might pull away but you didn’t. When your eyes opened again, they were wet, but the decision inside them had changed. “If we fail..” you said, “I will remember that I almost chose differently.”

Natasha nodded. “So will I.” A faint, broken laugh left you. “That is a poor comfort.”

“It’s the one we have.” You looked at her then, really looked at her and something warm passed through the grief. “You would have come with me?”

The question was quiet. “Yes.” She lifted your hand and pressed a kiss to your knuckles. “That’s why I can’t.”

You stared at her for a long moment. Then you stepped forward and rested your forehead against hers. “After..” you whispered and Natasha closed her eyes. “After.”

“We find them and we bring them back. We return the Stones. Then…” You stopped, as if the future was a language you had forgotten how to speak and Natasha finished softly, “Then we figure out what a life looks like.”

Before Natasha could continue, Steve’s voice carried from the hangar. “We’re ready.” You released Natasha’s hand slowly, like letting go was something that needed discipline. Then you squared your shoulders and the queen returned by degrees.

The team assembled around the quantum platform like mourners around an altar. They stood in a loose circle beneath the machinery Tony had built, each of them carrying more history than the platform could possibly hold.

“The Stones are out there in our past. Six chances, one round trip each. No mistakes we can’t carry. No second chances waiting if we lose our nerve.” Steve’s eyes moved from face to face. “Most of us have spent the last five years trying to live with what happened. Some days that meant fighting and some days it meant just standing back up. But today, we have a chance to do more than live with it.” He paused and Natasha glanced at you. You stood beside her, face calm and eyes fixed on Steve. “We get the Stones. We bring them back..everyone.” His voice hardened. “Whatever it takes.”

The words moved through the platform and Natasha looked at you. For a second, you did not speak, then your eyes flicked to hers. “Whatever it takes.”

Steve stepped back into position. “See you in a minute.” Natasha said, her eyes met Steve’s. Tony activated the sequence and the platform lit beneath them. For one suspended second, Natasha felt everything at once, till the world vanished. There was light and pressure and color folded into shapes Natasha’s mind refused to understand. The quantum tunnel tore open around them like a storm given mathematics and Natasha held herself steady because panic would not help and because beside her, through the blur of impossible motion, she could feel you. Then the world slammed back into shape.

The ground stretched around them in cracked plains and jagged stone, reddish-brown and gray under a sky heavy with storm clouds and wind dragged grit across Natasha’s suit. Rhodey landed with a grunt and looked around. “Charming.”

Rocket’s voice crackled over comms from another timeline, faint but present through the linked system. “Everybody alive?”

Natasha ignored the chatter and looked at you. You were staring at the horizon as if time had a sound and you were trying to decide whether it was lying. Nebula adjusted her device. “The temple is that way.”

Rhodey followed her gaze. “That’s us.”

You looked at Natasha, because this was the split. Morag for the Power Stone and Vormir for the Soul Stone. Natasha moved toward the small vessel waiting where Nebula had said it would be. A sleek, battered ship belonging to a dead year and a future no one here would get to live if they failed. Rhodey stopped beside her before she climbed in. “You good?”

She softened slightly. “Be careful.”

“You too.”

His eyes moved to you and for a moment, Rhodey seemed to consider saying something, then he only nodded. “Your Majesty.”

Your brows lifted faintly. “Colonel.”

“Try not to stab space.”

“I make no promises.” Rhodey almost smiled.

Then Rhodey and Nebula turned toward the temple and you and Natasha boarded the ship. The flight to Vormir was quiet at first.

Morag dropped away beneath them, the ship cutting upward through storm clouds and into the black. Natasha handled the controls with careful attention while the autopilot followed Nebula’s coordinates. You stood behind her at first, one hand braced against the back of the pilot’s seat, watching stars stretch across the viewport. After a while, you sat in the co-pilot’s chair and Natasha glanced at you. “You okay?”

Your mouth curved faintly. “You ask that often for someone who dislikes dishonest answers.”

“I keep hoping you’ll surprise me.”

“I am not okay.” Natasha nodded and you looked at her. “Surprised?”

“No.”

Outside, space opened around them and you looked at it for a long time. “When this is over..” you said, “where will you go first?”

Natasha’s fingers stilled briefly over the controls because the question felt dangerous. But she allowed herself to think about it. “Yelena.” she said and your eyes moved to her. Natasha kept looking forward. “If this works, she comes back to a world that has had five years to change without her. She’ll be angry.”

“She is your sister.”

“That’s her natural state.”

You considered that. “Will she like me?”

Natasha huffed softly. “No.”

You blinked and Natasha glanced at you and smiled. “Not at first.”

“Why?”

“Because she’ll think you hurt me.”

Your face went still. “She would be right.”

Natasha regretted the words immediately, but you did not seem wounded by them. “Then I will accept her hatred.”

“She might come around.”

“What would convince her?”

“Probably you threatening someone who deserves it.” Your brows lifted and Natasha sighed. “Don’t look pleased.”

“I am not pleased.”

“You are.”

“I enjoy having clear objectives.”

Despite herself, Natasha laughed and she looked away before it became too much. “What about you?” she asked. “Where do you go first?”

“My mother.” Natasha’s hands softened on the controls. “I do not know what I will say..”

“You don’t have to plan it.”

You breathed out, almost amused, then your expression shifted. “I was angry with her the last morning I saw her.” Natasha looked at you. “It was nothing, something foolish.”

Natasha said nothing and you continued, quieter now. “I left without kissing her cheek.” Natasha’s heart ached. “She was dust before I returned.”

“She knows you loved her.”

“You cannot know that.”

“No.” Natasha glanced at you. “But I know what mothers hear even when daughters are being impossible.”

The ship began its descent and Vormir appeared from shadow like a dead thought. The planet was dark and jagged, wrapped in heavy clouds and cold light. Only stone and mist and a mountain reaching upward as if it had been built not by nature, but by something that wanted visitors to understand they were not welcome. Natasha felt the hairs rise at the back of her neck and beside her, you went very still. The ship cut through atmosphere and landed on a flat stretch of black ground near the base of the mountain.

The ramp lowered with a hiss and cold air entered the ship like a warning and Natasha looked up. “Of course it’s at the top.”

You began the climb together. At first, there was only the sound of boots on stone and wind moving between cliffs. The path was steep, narrower in places than Natasha liked, with drops vanishing into fog on one side and black rock on the other. She moved carefully, eyes scanning for threats and you moved with the grace of someone raised on mountains, though the place did not seem to please you. “This mountain is wrong..” you said after a while.

Natasha glanced at you. “Wrong how?”

“It has no memory. All mountains remember something.” Your eyes moved along the rock. “Fire, water, buried roots or old bones. This remembers nothing but waiting.” Your face was turned upward, eyes on the path, but your expression had gone somewhere else.

“What would she think of me?” Natasha asked suddenly.

Your steps slowed. “My mother?”

“Yeah.”

You looked at her now. “She would watch you too closely at first.”

“That sounds fair.”

“She trusted slowly. Especially with people I wanted near me.” Natasha’s chest warmed despite the cold. “And after watching?”

“She would see you are dangerous.”

“Still fair.”

“And sad.” Natasha looked down and you continued gently, “She would not mistake that for weakness.” Natasha swallowed. “She would ask you questions you did not want to answer..Then feed you while pretending not to notice you avoided them.”

Natasha smiled faintly. “I think I would have liked her.”

“She would have liked you.“ The answer came too quickly to be anything but true and Natasha looked at you. Your expression softened in a way she had rarely seen since the night before. “She liked women who survived what should have ended them.”

You climbed higher and the air grew thinner. Natasha had been trained to ignore fear when it had no visible source, but Vormir made that difficult. Every ledge felt watched and every shadow felt aware. After another stretch of silence, you said, “If this works, what are we?”

Natasha nearly missed a step and you caught her arm immediately. She recovered fast and gave you a look. “That’s a hell of a question for a death mountain.”

Your hand remained on her arm for a second longer than necessary. “I would rather ask it before than regret not asking after.”

“What do you want us to be?” Natasha asked.

You looked down the path behind you, then at the dark sky, then back at her. “I do not know how to be casual with you.”

Natasha’s lips parted slightly and you went on, “I do not know how to make you a quiet thing or a secret in a room. A comfort I take when grief has exhausted me.” Your eyes held hers. “I tried to make you smaller in my memory, easier to survive, it did not work.”

Natasha’s chest ached and you stepped closer on the narrow path. “If we live through this..” you said, “I want to learn the shape of a life with you.”

Natasha looked at your hand still resting near her sleeve. “What about your kingdom?”

“It is part of me.“

“I know.”

“And you have your world.”

“I know.”

“Then we will be inconvenient.” Natasha huffed a small laugh, eyes burning. “We already are.”

Your mouth curved faintly, then grew serious.

“I cannot promise softness every day..” you said. “I cannot promise I will not be difficult, or angry, or too much queen when you need only me. I cannot promise that the blood on my hands will vanish because I love you.”

Natasha reached up and touched your face. “I’m not asking for perfect.”

“What are you asking for?”

Natasha’s thumb moved along your cheek. “You. Trying and staying. Letting me tell you when you’re becoming a knife again.”

You looked at her for a long second. “That sounds irritating.”

“It will be.”

“Good.”

Natasha smiled and you leaned forward and kissed her, like a promise made against cold wind on a mountain neither of you understood. Natasha kissed you back with one hand curled against your jaw and the other gripping your sleeve because the path was narrow and the universe had terrible timing. When you pulled back, your forehead rested against hers. “After.” you whispered again and Natasha closed her eyes. “After.”

The summit drew closer, though the path seemed longer with every turn. The sky above had darkened into a bruised purple-black and the wind had gone thin and sharp. Natasha could feel the mission settling over her again, but underneath it, there was you. Your shoulder brushing hers when the path narrowed. Your hand steadying her once when loose stone shifted beneath her boot. The quiet knowledge that you had nearly asked her to run and she had nearly wanted to. The knowledge that both of you had chosen to climb anyway.

At last, the path leveled. A flat stone platform opened before them, carved into the mountain’s peak. Beyond it, the world dropped away into endless dark and Natasha stopped, you stopped beside her.

At the far end of the platform, a figure waited in the mist. The wind moved around him without touching him and Natasha’s hand went to her weapon and you hand went to your sword.

The figure lifted his head and in a voice that seemed to know both of you before you had spoken, he said, “Natasha, daughter of Ivan.” And Natasha froze, then the figure turned slightly toward you. “And you, daughter of Vaelor and Maeryn.”

Natasha looked at you and your face had gone white. “The Stone you seek is near,” he said. “But it carries a price.”

Natasha kept her hand near her weapon, but the hooded figure did not move like something that could be fought. That was the first thing she noticed. There was no weight in him or breath clouding in the cold. The wind moved around the long black fabric of his cloak, but not through him. The mist seemed to gather at his feet like even the mountain knew what he was and did not dare touch too closely.

Your hand tightened around the hilt of your sword and Natasha stepped half a pace closer to you before she looked back at the figure. “Where is the Stone?”

The figure turned his head toward her. Under the hood, there was only the suggestion of a face. “At the foot of the mountain.“

Natasha’s brow tightened and the figure lifted one long arm and pointed past them, toward the edge of the platform. “To claim it, you must lose that which you love.”

Natasha stared at him. “What does that mean?” The figure’s voice remained calm. “An everlasting exchange. A soul for a soul.”

For a moment, there was no sound. Then your voice came from beside “No.”

The figure looked at you. “This place has only one law.”

“I said no.”

The words cracked through the air like a blade drawn too fast and Natasha turned toward you fully. “Wait.”

But you were already moving. You crossed to the edge of the cliff before she could stop you. Natasha followed, her pulse rising with each step, though part of her already understood. Part of her had understood from the moment the hooded thing said lose. You reached the edge first and Natasha came beside you. The drop fell farther than it should have. It vanished through layers of mist and shadow, down into the belly of the mountain where red light glowed faintly against stone like something bleeding beneath the world. Far below, a flat black surface waited.

Natasha stared into it and felt her stomach turn cold. A soul for a soul.

Her mind rejected it at first. No. There had to be another way. There was always another way. A trick, a mechanism, an angle, a flaw. Everything had flaws. Locks, men, systems, gods. Natasha had built her life finding the place where impossible things could be opened with enough pressure.

You stepped back from the edge and Natasha looked at you. “No.” you said again, quieter this time, as if arguing not with the figure but with reality itself. “There will be another way.”

Natasha said nothing and you turned from the cliff and began pacing, one hand pressed against your mouth, the other still gripping your sword. “It wants a soul, fine. What kind? Living? Dead? Bound? Blood? There are rituals that speak in riddles. There are old magics that call sacrifice by one name and accept another if the words are right.”

“Y/n-”

“No.” You pointed at her without looking. “Do not say it.” Natasha’s throat tightened. “You do not know this place and neither do I. That thing is a guide, not a god. It speaks as if law makes it truth, but every law has wording and every wording can be broken.” You turned toward the hooded figure. “Who made this law?”

He did not answer and you took one step toward him. “Who enforces it?” Silence. “What happens if we refuse?”

“The Stone remains.“

“What happens if we take it by force?”

“You cannot.”

Your mouth curled without humor. “Many have said that.”

The figure looked past you, toward the abyss. “Many have stood where you stand. Something in Natasha went still, because thought arrived with terrible clarity.

Thanos. He had stood here and Thanos had come to this mountain with Gamora, but had left with the Stone. Gamora had not.

Natasha felt the truth click into place so brutally it almost made her sway. She looked at you and you were still staring at the figure, furious and calculating and alive. Natasha knew then that there was no plan..only a choice. And choice had always been the most dangerous weapon in the universe.

You turned back toward her, already speaking. “We should test the boundary. Scan the cliff. There may be another access point below. If the Stone appears at the foot of the mountain, perhaps-”

“There isn’t a plan.”

You stopped and your face changed. “What?”

Natasha looked toward the edge, then back at you. “There isn’t a plan.”

Your eyes hardened. “Do not do that.”

“Thanos came here with his daughter.”

“No.”

“He left without her.”

“No.”

“And he had the Stone.”

Your jaw tightened until Natasha could see the muscle jump. “You do not know what happened.”

“Yes.” Natasha said softly. “I do.”

You stared at her and anger rose in your face, but underneath it was fear. “No.” you said. “No, Natasha.” The name in your mouth almost broke her. “Maybe there’s another way.” you said, but the words were weaker now. Natasha stepped closer. “There isn’t.”

“Do not accept that.”

“I have to.”

“No, you do not.” Your voice sharpened. “You are not allowed to become noble now. Natasha almost laughed. You stepped toward her, “We have not come this far for you to decide the universe gets to take you. We found a way, we have time and we can think. We can-”

“Hey.”

Natasha reached for you and you caught her wrist before she could touch your face. “Do not comfort me while planning to die.”

The words split something open and for one second, neither of you moved. Then Natasha saw your eyes flick toward the cliff. You had realized the same thing and had not been trying to save her from choosing. You had been trying to buy enough time to choose first, so Natasha moved fast.

She twisted out of your grip, stepped inside your guard and swept your legs with a force that took advantage of surprise more than strength. You hit the ground hard, breath leaving you in a sharp sound as your back struck black stone and your eyes flew wide.

“Natasha-”

“I’m sorry.”

She fired before you could rise. The Widow Bite hit your chest in a burst of electricity and your body arched. Pain flashed across your face, shocked and furious and the sight nearly tore Natasha in half, but she was already running. The cliff was only a few yards away and the edge rushed toward her like an answer and for one second, she let herself think of everyone.

Yelena, Steve, the team, the empty compound and you. Especially you.

Suddenly a dagger buried itself in the ground inches from her boot and Natasha’s foot caught. She fell hard, shoulder slamming into rock and pain burst down her arm, but she rolled instantly, already turning. You had torn the Widow Bite off and your face was twisted with pain and fury, but you were on your feet, running past her toward the edge with your cloak snapping behind you like a black wing.

“No!” Natasha lunged and she hit you from the side before you reached the cliff. Both of you crashed to the ground, the impact knocked the breath from Natasha’s lungs. You groaned beneath her, then shoved violently, trying to throw her off and Natasha hooked one leg around yours and pinned your wrist, but you were stronger than she expected.

“What are you doing!?” you screamed and Natasha grabbed for your other hand. “I’m not letting you do this!”

“You do not get to decide that!”

“Neither do you!”

You slammed your head back against hers and pain exploded behind Natasha’s eyes. She lost her grip for half a second and that’s was all you needed. You twisted, drove your shoulder under her weight and threw her over. Natasha hit the ground on her back and before she could rise, you were above her with one knee planted hard beside her ribs and a dagger in your hand. You did not strike and that hesitation saved her..or doomed you. Natasha kicked up, caught your wrist, and rolled. The dagger clattered across the stone and you snarled and drove an elbow toward her throat. She blocked it barely and you used the motion to break free entirely.

You staggered up, so did she and for a heartbeat, you faced each other across the black stone, both breathing hard, both bleeding now from small cuts, both looking at the other like the enemy and the beloved had become the same impossible shape. Your voice shook with rage. “You have a family who values you.”

Natasha froze and you pointed toward her with one trembling hand. “Yelena is waiting in your world, people who chose you, who know you, who will come back and need you!” Your face twisted. “You have a life to return to.”

“So do you.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No!” The word broke across the cliff. “I have a throne. I have a crown. I have people who need a symbol, a weapon, a queen. They desire what I can do for them. They kneel to what I represent.” Your voice cracked. “They do not love me as I am.”

“That’s not true!”

You laughed once, broken and furious. “Is it not?”

“Your people love you!”

“They love the queen who fed them and killed their monsters. They love the Khaleesi who brought dragonfire to their enemies. They love the daughter of their dead king.” Tears filled your eyes now, “But you, Natasha. You are loved as Natasha. Not widow, not Avenger. You.”

Natasha shook her head. “No.”

“You are.”

“I’m not letting you make me the reason you die!”

Your expression softened for one devastating second. “You are the reason I would like to live.”

That nearly stopped her, then you moved and Natasha moved too. You both knew this fight now. No more pretending there might be another outcome if one of you could just speak fast enough. You ran for the edge and Natasha caught you from behind and drove you down harder this time. Your body struck the stone with a sound that made Natasha flinch. Pain tore across your face and you gasped, one hand clutching at your ribs and for half a second, you could not move. Natasha hated herself, but she ran. The cliff came fast and did not look back. If she looked back, she would stop.

The edge reached her and jumped. For one impossible instant, there was no ground beneath her, only wind. Then something slammed into her wrist and pain tore through her shoulder as her fall stopped violently. Natasha cried out and looked up. You were above her, sprawled against the cliff edge on your stomach, one hand locked around her wrist. Your other hand had fired her own grapple line. The cable stretched from Natasha’s belt to a jagged stone outcropping several feet above you, wrapped tight around it.

Natasha looked at it and understood. You had not caught her to pull her back..you had caught her to make sure she could not fall.

“No..” Natasha breathed and your face was pale with pain. Blood ran from a cut near your brow and down the side of your face and your breathing was ragged, but you smiled. “It is all right.”

Natasha’s terror became rage in the same breath. “N-No, it is not!“

She tried to swing her free hand toward the cable release, but the angle was wrong. Her body hung over the abyss, weight pulling at your arm and the cable keeping her from dropping far enough to reach anything useful. You had planned it in the seconds between falling and catching her.

“Pull me up!!” Natasha said and you did not move. “Pull me up!”

Your grip on her wrist tightened briefly for one last time. “I won..”

Natasha’s breath broke. “You don’t get to say that!”

Your smile trembled. “I believe I do.”

“N-Noy.” Natasha’s eyes burned. “No, you don’t. You don’t get to win this, you don’t get to leave me with that..”

Your face softened, the queen was gone now. The Khaleesi was gone. There was no war left in your expression, only love. Only a terrible calm that made Natasha want to scream until the mountain cracked.

“Natasha.”

“No.”

“Listen to me.”

“No.”

“You must.”

“I said no!” Her voice tore out of her and for above, the hooded figure watched in silence.

Your thumb moved once over the inside of Natasha’s wrist and the gentleness broke her more than any force could have. “Look after Vhassar.”

Natasha shook her head violently. “Don’t.”

“There is a reason he let you in.”

“Stop.”

“He knows you.”

“Stop it!”

“He trusts what I was too afraid to.”

Tears spilled down Natasha’s face now and you smiled through your own. “He will be angry..Be patient with him.”

“I am not taking care of your dragon because you are going to tell him yourself!”

Your mouth trembled and for the first time, fear touched your face and Natasha saw it and reached upward with everything she had, straining against the cable, against gravity, against the law of a place that had already decided what love was worth.

Your fingers slipped slightly and Natasha gasped. “Y/n-”

Your eyes met hers. “Do not call me that.” The old name, the placeholder of a life before queen, before crown, before sacrifice. Natasha choked on a sob. “Then don’t make me lose you.”

You closed your eyes briefly and when you opened them, they were full of tears. “I love you.”

Natasha broke. “No.”

“I love you, Natasha Romanoff.”

“Then stay!” Natasha screamed. “Stay and have it with me!”

Your face twisted and for one heartbeat, Natasha saw you almost change your mind. That was the worst part but then you looked past her, toward the red glow below and your expression steadied. “I am sorry.”

Natasha’s voice collapsed into a whisper. “Please, no..” Your hand loosened. “No.”

She tried to grab tighter, but blood and sweat and gravity had made both your hands slick. Her fingers dug into yours so hard she felt skin tear. “Please!” she begged. “Please, don’t. Please!”

You smiled one last time as the woman who had stood in Natasha’s room and confessed love like it had survived despite every attempt to kill it. “After.” you whispered and you let go.

Natasha screamed when your body dropped away from her. White hair lifted around your face in the wind and your cloak opened like broken wings. For one impossible second, your eyes stayed on hers and then the distance took you. Natasha fought the cable, fought the air, fought the mountain, fought every law of the universe with a sound torn out of something deeper than grief. She looked away before you hit but the sound came anyway.

Natasha’s scream died in her throat and for a moment, she hung there, suspended over the abyss, body shaking so violently the cable hummed against the stone. Slowly, because horror demanded its own obedience, Natasha looked down. Far below, you lay on the black stone at the foot of the mountain.

White hair spread around your head and one arm bent wrong beneath you. Your cloak pooled dark around your body and you were too still. Natasha stopped breathing. There was no blood she could see from so high up. No motion or last miracle. No dragonfire tearing through the sky to catch you. Only you. At the bottom of the mountain.

The world went white and swallowed everything. The cliff vanished and the scream in her throat became silence and then she was lying in water. For one second, she did not remember her body, then she sat up with a gasp and her hand was closed around something. Natasha looked down and the Soul Stone rested in her palm.

This was what the universe had taken you for. A sound came out of Natasha that did not feel human and curled over the Stone, one hand pressing it against her chest like she could crush it back into nothing, like she could force it to become you, like if she held it tightly enough the exchange might reverse itself out of pity. The water rippled around her knees and Natasha sobbed. She had come to Vormir with you and was leaving with a rock. Before she could stand, before she could think, before she could even say your name aloud, the quantum device on her wrist activated.

The water vanished again and then she was gone. The compound snapped back into existence all at once. “We did it! Wait, did we do it? I think we did it!”

Everyone was back, till Natasha hit the platform on her knees. Pain shot up her legs, but she barely felt it. The Soul Stone was still in her fist, the other hand slammed against the metal floor. Around her, the excitement faltered and Steve’s smile disappeared first. He saw her face, then he saw the empty space beside her. “Nat?”

Natasha could not answer and the room went quiet by degrees. “Where is she?” Bruce asked and Natasha looked up. Her face was wet, she did not know if she had been crying since Vormir or if the water had come back with her or if grief had simply drowned her and left the evidence.

Bruce’s voice broke. “Natasha…where is Y/n?”

The name struck like a blade and Natasha opened her hand. The Soul Stone glowed in her palm and for one second, everyone stared at it. Then Natasha threw it and the stone flew across the room and struck the far wall with a hard, ringing crack before dropping to the floor. No one spoke and Natasha’s hand remained outstretched from the throw, fingers shaking. Then she folded in on herself.

A few hours after Vormir, the compound had become a room full of people trying not to look at the empty space beside Natasha. No one said your name because your absence had weight. It sat in every room before Natasha entered and waited there after she left. It moved through the compound like smoke, slipping between machinery, gathering beneath the platform, curling around the orange Stone no one wanted to touch. The Soul Stone sat on the table now, contained beneath a transparent field of light.

Natasha had not gone near it again. Every time she looked at it, she saw your hand slipping from hers and every time someone spoke of it as a necessary piece of the plan, her throat closed so violently she had to turn away before anyone noticed.

Tony worked because Tony worked. That was how his grief moved when he could not afford to feel it. He built around pain until the pain had a shape, a circuit, a housing, an interface. The new gauntlet took form on the central table beneath his hands and Bruce’s careful supervision, a thing of metal and Stark design made to hold the power of gods. The others watched from a distance, because there was only so much help a person could offer when the object being made might burn through anyone who wore it. Natasha left before the gauntlet was finished and outside, the compound grounds were too green. That was the first thing she hated.

Natasha walked until the building was behind her and the field opened ahead then she stopped and her legs simply refused another step. She stood with her arms folded tightly across her chest and looked at nothing. The last moments came back without mercy. Your face over the cliff, blood near your brow and your hand wrapped around her wrist. Natasha closed her eyes and that only made it worse.

I love you, Natasha Romanoff.

“Nat.” Steve stopped a few feet away, giving her space because he knew better than to take it without permission. For a long moment, neither of them spoke, till Natasha said, “We told each other yesterday.”

Steve’s face tightened and she stared out over the field. “Yesterday.” she repeated, because time had become obscene. “We spent five years not saying it. Five years surviving around it, hurting around it, pretending it was something else because something else would have been easier. Then last night…” Her voice cracked and she swallowed hard. “Last night we finally said it.”

Steve said nothing. If he had tried to comfort her too quickly, she might have broken his nose. “She said she loved me too..” Natasha whispered. “She said it like she was angry it survived.” Her eyes burned. “I told her I loved her.” Natasha laughed once, but it was empty and brutal. “And now she’s gone forever.”

Steve stepped closer, “Natasha…”

“No.” She shook her head. “Don’t.”

“I’m not going to tell you it’s okay.”

“Good. Because I would hate you for it.”

“I know.” She looked at him then and he looked awful. Grief had hollowed him from the inside, not only for you but for all of it. For Bucky, for Sam, for Wanda, for everyone, for the fact that the world kept asking him to lead people into sacrifice and then keep breathing afterward. “She chose.” Steve said quietly.

Natasha looked away before the tears could fall. “I was supposed to be faster.”

“Nat-”

“I was.” Her voice sharpened. “I knew what she was doing, I saw it. I still let her get the rope secured. I still let her-”

“You didn’t let her.”

“She died holding my hand.”

Steve closed his eyes and Natasha’s voice dropped. “And I came back with a Stone.”

Steve moved then and pulled her into an embrace she was not ready for, only to stand beside her, shoulder close enough that she could lean if she chose- Suddenly, inside the compound, something thundered and the ground lurched under their feet. Natasha’s head snapped toward the building and the sky split open. A blast of fire tore down from above and struck the compound dead center. For one impossible second, the building held..then the world exploded.

Natasha hit the ground hard and pain flashed through her side. She pushed herself up on one elbow and looked toward the compound. Half of it was gone, the building that had held their last desperate hope had collapsed inward, smoking and burning under a sky now darkened by something enormous. A ship..Thanos.

The name moved through Natasha before anyone said it, her grief became something else instantly. Steve was already on his feet, shield in hand, blood running from a cut near his temple.

“Nat?”

“I’m okay.”

They ran toward the wreckage and everything after that became impact and smoke. Natasha crawled through broken concrete with blood in her mouth and your last words still burning behind her ribs. She found Scott trapped beneath rubble and helped him force a passage wide enough to drag himself through. She heard Rhodey’s voice over comms, then Rocket’s, then Bruce roaring somewhere under collapsed steel as water began flooding lower levels. The gauntlet and the Stones. That became the center of the world again, because apparently the universe had a sense of cruelty too refined to leave grief alone for more than an hour.

Clint found the gauntlet first in the tunnels beneath the wreckage and when Natasha heard his voice over the comms, she almost laughed from the brutality of it. Clint, alive and breathing in this version of the world, running through the dark with the thing your death had bought. “Clint, move!” Natasha shouted into comms as alien creatures flooded the corridor beneath the compound.

The battle did not begin all at once, it rose, like something dead standing. Thanos’s forces poured from his ship and the broken earth around the compound. Natasha fought in the rubble because that was where she was when the first wave came. The battle widened around her and the fight went on and on, until it narrowed to Thanos again.

The gauntlet was nearly his till tony moved. Natasha saw it only in pieces through smoke and bodies. The Titan raising the gauntlet, convinced of victory even now, even after everything and a snap was heard, but nothing happened. Thanos looked down and the Stones were gone. Tony stood several feet away, his armor crawling with impossible light, the Stones embedded across his own hand. His face was already burning from the power and Natasha understood before he spoke.

Tony looked at Thanos and snapped his fingers. The light exploded outward and for a second, the entire battlefield disappeared inside white. When the world came back, Thanos’s army began to turn to dust. This time, the silence belonged to them. Thanos watched it happen to his army, watched his victory become nothing in his hands and then he sat, like an old man suddenly tired.

The Titan looked across the battlefield at everything he had failed to stop, then he too came apart and dust moved where Thanos had been. Natasha watched it drift away and felt nothing like satisfaction. Only the terrible knowledge that the universe had demanded another price and Tony had paid it.

Pepper reached him first and Natasha did not move toward them. Not because she did not care, because some griefs needed the people closest to them first. She stood in the ruin of the battlefield, blood on her face, ash in her hair, your death in her chest, Tony’s sacrifice unfolding in front of her, and Vhassar roaring somewhere above because he still had not found you.

The world had been saved but it did not feel saved. Days passed strangely after that and the world came back wrong and right at the same time. Families reunited in streets, in hospitals, in homes where one side of the bed had been empty for five years. Children returned to parents who had aged without them. Husbands reappeared in kitchens where wives had learned to eat alone. Mothers dropped grocery bags when sons vanished five years ago and appeared again in the same doorway asking what had happened.

The vanished called it moments, the living called it five years. Both were true and that made every reunion ache. Wakanda received its king, the mountain kingdom received its dead. Your parents returned to a world where their daughter had ruled for five years and died before they could see what she had become. Natasha avoided thinking about that as long as she could.

Tony’s funeral was quiet for the amount of worlds he had helped save. There was sunlight on the lake, too soft for what had happened. People stood in black and said very little and Pepper’s face held a grief so controlled it made Natasha ache. After the wreath drifted away, people slowly scattered in small groups. Some stayed near the lake, some went inside. Some touched Pepper’s shoulder and said words that could not help but still needed saying.

Natasha remained by the trees and Steve found her there. For a while, he only stood beside her. Finally, Steve said, “T’Challa came to me.” Steve’s voice was careful. “Her parents are asking for you.”

“No.”

“Nat-”

“No.”

“They know she’s gone.”

The words struck anyway and Natasha’s jaw clenched so hard it hurt. “They know her death bought the Soul Stone..” Steve said. “They know it wasn’t for nothing.”

Natasha turned on him then. “She is dead, Steve.” He went quiet. “She is dead. Their daughter is dead. I came back with a rock and she came back as a story people are already making noble because noble is easier to live with than what actually happened.”

Steve’s face tightened and Natasha’s voice broke. “It should have been me. It should have been me..” she repeated, “She had parents waiting, a kingdom. Dragons. People who knew her before she became whatever grief made her. She had-”

“You.” Steve said quietly and Natasha stopped. „She had you.”

That hurt so much she almost hated him for saying it. “She chose.” Steve said and Natasha looked away. “She knew you would try to take her place.” Steve continued. “You knew she would try to take yours. That’s not failure, Nat. That’s love making the same stupid decision from both sides.”

A tear slipped down her face before she could stop it and Natasha wiped it away angrily. “I was holding her hand..”

“I know.”

“I lost her anyway.”

Days passed again and you haunted her with precision. You came in pieces, your mouth near hers in the dark or fingers gripping the strip of gown. The way you had said Vhassar’s name. The way you had told her to look after him like there was a future where Natasha could stand beside a dragon and explain why his rider had not come home. One night, Natasha woke with your voice still in her ears.

Look after Vhassar.

She sat upright in bed, breathing hard. For a moment, she did not know where she was. Compound? Safehouse? Your chambers? Vormir? Her own grief had turned every room into the same room eventually. Then she saw the jacket on the chair and the desk where the strip of your gown had once rested before she folded it into a small box and hid it because seeing it and not seeing it both hurt.

An hour later, she was in the air, by dawn, she was on the water. The route to your kingdom had changed since the world came back, like the mountain passes were guarded more openly now and the outer villages were full of returned people trying to learn the shape of the five years they had missed. But Natasha did not take the main roads. She took a small boat through a cold northern inlet, following the old waterway that curved beneath the black cliffs and led toward the hidden harbor carved into the mountain’s base. It was the same route she had taken five years ago when she came to tell you they had found a chance.

That realization hit halfway across the water and Natasha gripped the side of the boat until her fingers hurt. Would you still be alive if she had never come? If she had left you in your kingdom with your grief and your blood and your crown, would you still be ruling now? Would your parents have returned to find you hardened, yes, cruel in places, yes, but alive? Would Vhassar have roared over the courtyard in welcome instead of searching battlefields for a body that would never answer? If Natasha had not brought hope to your chamber, would you still exist?

By the time the boat touched the hidden dock, Natasha was shaking with cold and something worse. She barely stepped onto the stone before soldiers emerged from the shadows. She lifted her hands slowly. “I’m here to see the king and queen.”

One soldier’s face hardened and another looked at her hair. Natasha realized too late what he had seen, the silver clasp.

She had braided it into her hair before leaving. She had not fully understood why, maybe because she was going to your home. Maybe because she could not bear to arrive without something of you visible. Maybe because part of her wanted them to know before she spoke that you had once marked her with your witness.

The soldiers exchanged looks, then one stepped behind her and took her weapons. They brought her through the harbor tunnels without a word and the castle rose above the city as it always had. They led her through the throne room doors and at the far end of the hall, your father stood from the throne. King Vaelor was not as Natasha had imagined him and exactly as she had. His grief was not quiet, it was barely contained behind the dignity of a returned king standing in a hall his daughter had ruled without him.

The moment he saw Natasha, fury crossed his face so violently several guards shifted. “You.”

The word carried through the hall and Natasha stood still. She did not defend herself when your father descended the dais one step and his hand went to the sword at his side, but before he could draw it, your mother moved.

Your mother came down the steps alone and Natasha had seen her only once in the past. She stopped in front of Natasha and for a long moment, she simply looked at her. Your mother’s eyes moved over her face, the cuts fading from battle and the sleepless shadows. Then her gaze lifted to Natasha’s hair and your mother’s breath broke.

One hand rose to her mouth and your father saw it too. “She gave you that..” your mother whispered and Natasha’s throat closed. “Yes.”

The queen’s eyes filled. “She would not have given it lightly. She marked you.”

Natasha’s hands curled at her sides. “She said it was her witness.” Your mother’s face crumpled. For one terrible second, the queen disappeared and there was only a mother hearing her daughter’s voice through a stranger.

Natasha broke first. “I’m sorry.”

The hall was so silent the words seemed to fall onto stone. “I am so sorry.”

Your father’s jaw tightened. “Tell us.”

Natasha looked at him..and told them. She told them about Vormir, about the stonekeeper speaking their names, the cliff and the price. About how both of you understood before either wanted to say it. Your mother’s face went white and your father stood like stone. Natasha told them how she tried to stop you, how you fought her, how you told her she had a family waiting and how she jumped and you caught her.

For a moment, she could not continue. Then Natasha forced herself onward. “She told me to look after Vhassar..” she said and your mother closed her eyes. “She said there was a reason he let me in.” Natasha’s voice broke. “She said she loved me.”

Natasha shook her head. “I failed her.”

The words tore out before she could stop them. “I failed both of you. I brought her into the mission. I told her there was hope. I took her to that place and I came back without her.” Her hands shook. “It should have been me.”

Your father’s expression hardened, but your mother stepped closer. “No.”

Natasha stared at her and Queen Maeryn’s tears were falling now, but her voice did not shake. “No.”

Natasha’s chest tightened painfully. “You don’t understand-”

“I know my daughter.” The words stopped her. Your mother looked at her with grief bright and terrible in her eyes. “I knew her before crowns and dragons. Before war taught her to bite before she cried. I knew the child who would stand between an injured animal and grown men with spears because she had decided its life was hers to defend.” Her mouth trembled. “I knew the girl who would rather bleed than let another person pay a cost she believed belonged to her.”

Your father’s voice came rough from behind her. “She was always impossible.”

Your mother let out a broken breath that might have been a laugh if grief had not crushed it first. “Yes.”

She looked back at Natasha. “If she chose, then she chose with her whole heart. Do not dishonor her by making her sacrifice your failure.”

Natasha’s eyes burned. “I was holding her hand.”

“Then she did not die alone.” That broke something and Natasha looked away, but the tears came anyway. Your mother reached for her and Natasha flinched instinctively.

Then, slowly, she let your mother take her hands and the queen’s fingers were warm.

“She loved you?” your mother asked and Natasha could barely speak. “Yes.”

“And you loved her?”

Natasha nodded. “Yes.”

Your mother’s face crumpled again, but this time, she stepped forward and pressed her forehead briefly to Natasha’s. “You carry enough.” she whispered. “Do not carry what she would refuse to give you.” Natasha closed her eyes, the blessing did not heal her. It did something worse. It gave her permission to live, and she did not know if she wanted it yet.

When Natasha left the castle, the sun was beginning to sink behind the mountain. The city below glowed with torches and evening fires. Natasha walked alone down the outer path toward the hidden harbor and by the time she reached the lower cliffs, the wind had turned cold. The boat waited where she had left it, tied to the black stone dock and Natasha stepped toward it.

Behind her, stone shook and she stopped. A low rumble rolled through the harbor tunnel and she closed her eyes, No.

Claws struck rock and Natasha turned. Vhassar emerged from the shadowed archway behind her and filled the passage like night given teeth. Natasha remembered the first time he had let her touch him. You know me. Now he looked at her as if knowing was the wound.

Natasha faced him and for a long moment, neither moved. Then she turned back toward the boat and Vhassar followed. Each step sent a faint tremor through the stone.

Natasha kept walking. “Don’t.”

The dragon kept coming. She reached the boat and untied the rope with hands that had started shaking again and Vhassar’s shadow covered her. Natasha looked up and he stood at the edge of the dock now, head lowered, eyes locked on her.

“Go home.”

Vhassar did not move and Natasha stepped into the boat. The dragon’s head lowered farther, blocking her path out into the water. “Move.”

A low growl rolled through his chest and Natasha laughed once, “No. No, you do not get to do this.”

The growl deepened and she stepped back onto the dock and walked toward him. “Go.“

Vhassar’s eyes narrowed. “Go back to the castle.” Smoke slipped from his nostrils and Natasha shoved both hands against the side of his snout. “Go!”

Her voice cracked through the harbor and Vhassar rumbled and Natasha shoved again. “Stop following me..” He stared at her and suddenly she hated him. The way his eyes looked past her every few seconds as if expecting you to come around the bend with a half smile and blood on your sleeve and tell him to stop frightening the widow. Natasha hit her palm against his scales. “She’s gone.”

Vhassar went still. “She’s gone.” she said again, louder. “Do you understand me? She is gone and she is not coming back.”

The dragon’s head lifted slightly and his eyes changed. Natasha’s grief burst open. “She told me to look after you, but I can’t. I can’t even look at you without seeing her. I can’t hear you breathe without hearing her say your name. I can’t stand here and be what she left behind for you.”

Vhassar made a wounded sound and Natasha stepped closer anyway, tears spilling now and anger and sorrow tearing through each other until she could not tell them apart. “She let go!” Natasha screamed. “She let go and I lost her,ä and I can’t fix it, and you standing here waiting will not bring her back!”

Vhassar roared. Stone dust rained from the arch above and even the water shuddered. The roar did not sound like fury, it sounded like grief too large for a body, even one as vast as his. Natasha covered her ears for a second, then dropped her hands and shouted back even though he could not understand every word, even though maybe he understood enough. “I know!”

Vhassar’s wings flared, filling the tunnel with black shadow. “I know!” Natasha screamed. “I miss her too!”

The dragon froze and the words tore out of her after that, no longer controlled, no longer useful. “I miss her. I miss her and I had her for one night. One night after five years and then I watched her fall. So don’t look at me like I have her somewhere. Don’t look at me like I can give her back to you.”

Vhassar lowered his head slowly and for one terrible second, Natasha thought he might press into her hand the way he had once pressed into yours “No.” The dragon stopped and Natasha wiped her face with the heel of her hand and climbed into the boat.

This time, Vhassar did not block her. He stood at the edge of the dock while she pushed away and the boat drifted out into the dark water. Natasha took the oars because doing something with her hands was better than collapsing. Behind her, Vhassar roared again and the sound followed Natasha out of the harbor and into the open water. It rolled across the cliffs and broke against the evening like thunder with a heart.

She did not look back at first, till the roar came again, ragged and endless and Natasha turned. Vhassar stood silhouetted against the black stone dock, wings half-spread, head lifted toward the darkening sky. Fire glowed faintly in his throat but never came. Natasha gripped the oars until her hands hurt and the boat carried her farther away.

Weeks passed and the world kept going. Yelena found Natasha in pieces and tried, in her own angry way, to pull those pieces into something that still looked like a sister. She came by without warning and left food Natasha did not eat. Sat on the floor beside her bed when nightmares got bad and said cruel little things about Natasha’s coping mechanisms until Natasha almost smiled.

The worst nights were the quiet ones. Just your voice, soft in the Quinjet before the mission, asking for something that had sounded impossible then and now returned to Natasha with the cruelty of prophecy.

We could leave.

We could choose another time.

What if we stayed there?

Natasha would wake before dawn with those words moving through her like a blade and lie very still in the dark, staring at the ceiling of a room that had survived the end of the universe and still did not feel like home. At first, she told herself it was grief, then she told herself it was guilt. Then, weeks later, while standing in the compound hangar and watching Steve prepare to return the Stones, Natasha understood it was something worse.

It was a choice.

The quantum platform had been rebuilt after the battle, cleaner now, quieter, stripped of the frantic desperation that had surrounded it the first time. The Stones were sealed in separate containers, each one carefully prepared for its return. The repaired case sat at Steve’s feet like a box full of stolen time. Bruce stood near the console, going over the return sequence and Sam leaned against a railing nearby, arms folded, trying not to look as uneasy as he felt.

Bucky stood apart and watched Steve more than the machine. Steve wore the quantum suit with the shield strapped across his back and that expression on his face. The one that meant he had already made a decision and was only waiting for the world to catch up. Natasha watched him from the edge of the platform and for a while, neither of them said anything. Then she asked, “What’s your plan?”

Steve looked over. “To return the Stones.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow and he sighed faintly. “Nat.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m not lying.”

“No. You’re just leaving out the part that matters.”

Steve looked down at the case and back at her. There was no point pretending, not with her. “I have to put them back.”

“And after?”

Steve’s face softened in a way that made him look younger and older at the same time. “I don’t know.“ Natasha smiled faintly, that was also a lie.

“Take me with you.”

Everything stopped and Steve stared at her. Behind him, Sam straightened. “Wait, what?”

Bruce looked up fully now. “Natasha-” But Natasha’s eyes stayed on Steve. Steve’s expression shifted through shock first, then concern, then something quieter and more painful because he understood before anyone else did. “No.“

Natasha almost laughed. “That’s your argument?”

“You don’t want this.”

“I do.”

“You’re grieving.”

“Yes.”

“That is not the same thing as choosing.”

Natasha stepped closer to the platform. “You’re going back to Peggy.”

Steve’s jaw tightened. “You’re going back.“ she said. “You’re going to put the Stones where they belong and then you’re going to take the long way home.”

Steve’s silence answered and Natasha nodded once, like something had clicked into place. “I’m coming.” Steve shook his head. “Nat, you have people here.”

“So do you.”

“That’s different.”

“No, it isn’t.”

His eyes sharpened. “Yelena needs you.”

“She needs her sister alive.” Natasha said and the words hurt because they were true and not enough. “She has that now. She has a world with people in it again. She has choices. She’ll hate me for leaving, then she’ll understand, then she’ll hate me again because that’s what sisters do.”

The hangar seemed to narrow around them. Natasha looked at the platform, the Stones, the machine that had already torn open time once and stolen you from her in the same motion that brought everyone else home.

“I keep waiting..” she said. “For the part where it gets lighter. For the mission to be enough. For the world being saved to feel like something I can stand inside.” Her mouth trembled, “It doesn’t.”

Steve’s face broke by degrees and Natasha hated that he understood but loved him for it too. “I am glad they came back.” she said. “I am, I would do it again. I would let her make the same choice if that was the only way.” Her breath caught. “But I wake up every morning in a world she died to save and I do not know how to live in it without her.”

Steve looked at her for a long time and wanted to argue. He wanted to say Yelena again. Clint, the team, all the words he had used on himself and failed to make obey. But Steve, more than anyone, knew what it meant to save the world and still belong to another moment. Finally, he asked, “Are you sure?”

Natasha almost smiled. “No.” That surprised him and she continued. “But I’m more sure than I’ve been about anything since she fell.”

Behind them, Bruce drew in a shaky breath. “This is not how this is supposed to work..” Bruce said carefully. “You return the Stones, then come back through the platform. That’s the plan.”

Natasha turned to him. “Plans change.”

“Not with time travel!”

Natasha looked at the case of Stones. “We’ll return them.” she said. “All of them. Where they belong, when they belong. We do that first.” Steve nodded. “Then?” Sam asked.

Natasha looked at him and Sam’s face was tight, hurt already forming because he knew what this was becoming. “Then Steve makes his choice.” Natasha said. “And I make mine.”

Bruce approached, looking enormous and miserable and helpless in the way only someone brilliant could look when intelligence had no answer. “Natasha, I can’t promise-”

“I know.”

“The branches-“

“I know.”

“Theoretically, if you remain in an alternate timeline, you won’t change this one, but there are still variables we don’t-”

“Bruce.” He stopped and Natasha smiled gently. “Thank you.” He hugged her carefully, like he was afraid of hurting her and more afraid of letting go. When he pulled back, his eyes were wet. “You both have five seconds.” he said, “From our perspective, rerun sequence is locked to the platform. If you don’t come back…”

“We know.” Steve said and Bruce looked at him, then Natasha.

He set the coordinates and Steve picked up the case. Natasha stepped onto the platform beside him and for one moment, she looked around the hangar. The place that had held her together badly for years, then she touched the clasp in her hair and Steve looked at her. She nodded and he nodded back. Bruce’s hand hovered over the controls. “Ready?” Steve breathed in and Natasha did too.

“For what it’s worth.” Steve said softly, only for her, “I hope you find her.”

Natasha looked straight ahead. “I will.”

Bruce pressed the button and light took them. Five seconds passed and Bruce counted them because that was his job. His hand hovered over the return control and Sam stared at the empty platform, when he pressed the button, the platform lit..and nothing happened.

Sam stepped forward. “Try again.”

Bruce’s face had gone pale. “Sam-”

“Try again.”

Bruce looked at the empty platform and swallowed. “They should be here.”

Bucky’s eyes had shifted to the lake beyond the hangar windows and his face changed first. “Sam.” He looked at him and Bucky nodded toward the trees outside. There was a bench near the water and a man sat on it.

Sam frowned confused, then moved toward the doors. The old man did not turn until Sam came close and he looked up. “Steve?”

“Hi, Sam.”

Sam stared. “What happened?”

Steve looked out over the lake and for a long moment, he said nothing. Then, quietly, “I lived.”

Sam’s breath caught, the answer was too simple for what it meant. Steve had gone back into time, returned the Stones and then found the life he had been carrying like a wound since 1945.

Sam sat beside him slowly and a thousand questions moved through his face, only one came out first. “Where’s Natasha?”

Steve’s smile changed. He looked toward the lake, sunlight catching in the lines around his eyes. “She’s living too.”

Far away, in a time the restored world would never reach, the mountain kingdom woke beneath a younger sun.

The castle stood black and ancient against the high cliffs, banners moving in a clean morning wind. Below, the city had not yet learned the silence of the Snap and the wall of names had not been carved. The throne room still held voices that would one day become ghosts and then, by some miracle, never need to. Above it all, three dragons cut through the sky. Vhassar flew highest, black wings stretched wide against the morning and beneath him, his sibling, snapping playfully at the other one as he rose with a stolen sheep clutched in his talons. The sheep was very dead…the argument over it was extremely alive.

On the balcony of your chambers, you leaned against the stone rail and watched them fight over breakfast like creatures with no dignity and every right to the sky. You were younger here. Your hair was loose down your back, half-braided only because your mother’s attendants had lost patience and you had escaped before they could finish. You wore a dark red morning gown, soft at the sleeves, embroidered with tiny silver wings along the hem. The same gown Natasha had once seen only as a torn strip in your hand.

You smiled when Vhassar dove between the other two dragons and stole the sheep outright. “Thief!” you called.

Then arms slipped around your waist from behind and you stilled for half a breath. A familiar body pressed gently against your back and red hair brushed your shoulder as Natasha tucked her face against the side of your neck and breathed you in like someone still proving the world had allowed this.

“You’re awake early.” you said and Natasha’s voice came rough with sleep and something softer. “You have loud dragons.”

“They are expressing themselves.”

“They’re fighting over a sheep.”

“Passionately.”

Natasha huffed a laugh against your skin. You covered her hands with yours where they rested against your waist and for a moment, neither of you spoke. There were still things that had to be carried here, Natasha had told you enough, but noteverything at once. Some grief was too large to pour into a single morning. But she had told you about time, about the Stones, about a future that had been saved and lost and saved again. She had told you that there was a version of you who became queen too young, a version who brought armies to Wakanda, who loved her, who died on a mountain so half the universe could return.

You had listened and had wept. Then you had held Natasha until she stopped apologizing out loud. As Vhassar banked closer to the balcony, sheep still in his claws, eyes flicking briefly toward Natasha and he huffed smoke. Natasha lifted one hand from your waist and pointed at him. “Don’t start.”

The dragon rumbled and you smiled. “He likes you.”

“He tolerates me because apparently another version of him made a terrible decision.”

“He has excellent judgment.”

“He dropped a deer outside my window yesterday.”

“A gift.”

“It was still moving.”

“An enthusiastic gift.” Natasha laughed again and you turned in her arms. The morning light caught her face, she was not the Natasha from the future entirely, though she carried that life inside her. Her hair was longer here than it had been when she first arrived, the hard line between her brows had softened, not vanished. Some griefs did not vanish, they became part of how a person looked at sunlight.

The silver clasp was still braided into her hair. Your promise from a battlefield that, in this world, had not yet come. You touched it gently and Natasha went still.

“Do you ever regret it?” you asked and her eyes moved to yours. “The life you left.”

Natasha did not answer quickly. Below, the castle bells rang the hour and Natasha looked out over the kingdom. “Sometimes I miss them.” she said honestly and you nodded “I miss Yelena. I miss Steve and the others.” Her thumb moved slowly against your waist. “I wonder if they’re angry. I wonder if they understand or wonder if my sister is telling everyone I’m an idiot.”

Then her expression softened. “But regret?” She looked back at you. “No.”

Your throat tightened. “No?” Natasha shook her head. “I saved the world and still didn’t know how to live in it.” Her voice lowered. “You asked me once to run with you. I said no because we had to save them first.”

“And you did.”

“We did.”

Your hand tightened around hers and Natasha stepped closer. “Then I came back to you.”

You lifted your hand to her face and Natasha leaned into it. “You know..” you said softly, “this will not be simple.”

Her mouth curved. “Good thing we hate simple.”

“My parents will ask questions.”

“They already do.”

“My mother likes you.”

“She interrogated me for two hours over tea.”

“That means she likes you.”

“Your father threatened to throw me from the western wall.”

“He did not mean it.”

“He absolutely meant it.”

You smiled. “Only a little.”

Natasha laughed and rested her forehead against yours. The dragons roared overhead and the kingdom moved beneath you. Somewhere inside the castle, your mother’s voice rose in irritation at a servant, followed by your father’s answering laugh from the corridor. You closed your eyes briefly at the sound, still not used to how much a living voice could heal and hurt at once.

Natasha heard it too, her hand found yours. “After..” you whispered. It had been a promise once, a fragile thing spoken before a mountain demanded a soul. Now it was morning and Natasha smiling with tears in her eyes as she understood exactly what you meant. “After.” she answered and you kissed her then.. Natasha’s arms tightened around you from behind again and you leaned back into her and looked out over the land you had not yet lost, the future you might still change carefully, the family alive inside the castle, and the woman who had crossed time not to save the world this time, but to stay.

Together.

-

-

-

The End.

Part 4

Two weeks should have been enough time for the world to begin making noise again..but it hasn’t.

That was the first thing Natasha noticed after the Snap. Not the empty streets, though there were too many of those or abandoned cars left crooked across bridges and highways. Not the phones ringing in houses where no one remained to answer them, not even the news broadcasts that had stopped sounding like news after the first three days and had become nothing but lists, emergency orders, missing persons appeals and anchors trying not to cry on camera.

Natasha had lived most of her life learning how to survive aftermaths. She knew how to step over bodies, how to read panic in a crowd, how to make herself useful when everyone else was screaming. She knew how to fold grief away until it became small enough to carry under her ribs without slowing her hands.

Half the universe had become dust and two weeks after Wakanda, everyone looked older. Steve stood at the head of the briefing room with his arms folded and his face hollow in a way Natasha had never seen before. He had bruises fading yellow along his jaw and a cut near his brow that should have healed faster, but grief had a way of slowing the body down.

The hologram above the table turned slowly, showing casualty estimates that were not estimates anymore. They had become admissions. Governments fractured, emergency services collapsed and entire towns vanished down to a handful of survivors. In some places, the dead from the accidents after the Snap were still being counted separately, as if arithmetic could make the first impossible number more bearable.

“Confirmed global population loss is holding at forty nine point six to fifty point three percent depending on region.” Bruce said quietly. “The variance comes from incomplete reporting. Some areas still haven’t reestablished communications.”

Steve’s eyes stayed on the projection. “And off-world?”

“Everywhere..” Rocket muttered.

Natasha had stopped looking at the numbers after the first hour. She knew what they said, everyone knew what they said. The universe had been cut open with one hand and the wound was too wide to close. She looked instead at the empty chair beside her. It had not belonged to anyone in particular, but that almost made it worse.

Steve followed her gaze and something in his face shifted and looked at Natasha. “What about Y/n?” The room changed and Natasha felt the question pass through everyone like a blade finding places already bruised. Y/n..

For two weeks, Natasha had tried not to think your name unless she had somewhere private to bleed from it. She remembered ash in the air, Vhassar wounded and lowering his massive head around you. She remembered soldiers vanishing in front of you and the exact moment understanding entered your face.

Then the mountain men had come and had surrounded you on the battlefield without speaking. A wall of blackened armor and blood-soaked cloaks closing around their princess while Wakanda still smoked around them. Their eyes had been wild with grief and fear and devotion, but none of them looked at Natasha. Not one.

You had looked once over her shoulder. There had been so much blood on her that Natasha could not tell where you were hurt. Your white braid had come undone in torn strands around your face and one hand still rested against Vhassar’s jaw and the other was closed around nothing, as if it still held dust. Then Thor’s bridge had opened one last time, burning rainbow fire across the ruined field, and you had disappeared into it with the remains of your army and your wounded dragon.

Natasha had not seen you since. She felt everyone waiting for her answer and hated that she did not have one. “I don’t know.”

From the far side of the room, Okoye shifted her weight and swallowed once. Her eyes moved briefly to the empty place where T’Challa should have been and straightened. “The mountain kingdom has fallen under her rule.”

The words did not make sense at first, not because they were complicated, but because the mind rejected them. Natasha felt her own body refuse the sentence for half a breath. Steve’s voice was very quiet. “What do you mean?”

“Her father is gone. Her mother as well. Their chief advisor vanished with them and several members of the high council. Their line of succession was not broken, but it was burned down to one name.”

Natasha’s fingers curled against the table. Your parents.. For one sick second, all Natasha could see was you on the battlefield, asking what was happening while ash slipped through your hands.

“She is not only Khaleesi now..She is queen.”

The room remained silent and Steve looked at Natasha as if he wanted to say something and could not decide whether it would help or only break another thing that was barely standing. Natasha said nothing, but inside her, something cold and sharp began to move. She imagined you returning to the kingdom with the castle corridors that had roared with war now hollowed by absence and the throne room half empty.

Bruce cleared his throat, “There’s more.”

The projection shifted before anyone could ask. A burst of energy appeared above the table and carol leaned forward slightly. “This was detected two days ago. Same energy signature as the Snap.”

“The Stones..” Bruce nodded. “Another surge. Smaller, but still massive. Wherever Thanos is, he used the gauntlet again.”

“Can we track it?”

Nebula’s eyes stayed fixed on the table. “I know where he said he would go.” Thor finally lifted his head.

“After he finished his work, he planned to rest. He called it a garden.”

Rhodey stared. “A garden.”

Steve put both hands on the table and leaned forward. “If he used the Stones again, then he still has them.”

Bruce’s eyes flicked up. “Maybe.”

“Then we take them.” Steve said. “We use them to bring everyone back.”

The thought of hope had barely formed when the room filled with thunder. The lights flickered once and glass along the far wall hummed. Everyone moved, Steve reached for his shield and Carol’s hands lit gold. But when the light vanished, you stood in the center of the room.

For a second, Natasha forgot everything else. You had always carried attention like a blade, even before Thanos. Even in soft rooms and half lit mornings, there had been something in her that made the world adjust around her. But this was different..This was not the princess from the balcony anymore, this was not even the Khaleesi riding a dragon over Wakanda..This was someone grief had crowned and failed to kill.

Your eyes did not move to Natasha, they went to Steve first, then Thor and to the projection above the table. Six soldiers stood around you, each in black armor, each with a hand near a weapon. One had his arm in a sling and still stood like he would kill everyone in the room before allowing anyone to touch you.

“Where is he?”

“All respect-”

“Where is Thanos?”

Natasha took one step forward before she could stop herself. “Y/n-”

The soldiers moved and Natasha stopped. Not because she was afraid of them, because you had not told them not to. She looked at you and you looked back at last. There was no relief in your face or a flicker of the woman who had once stood behind Natasha and braided survival into her hair. Natasha felt something in her chest go very still and Thor stepped forward. “I gave her leave.”

Steve turned his head. “What?”

“The Bifröst answers to Stormbreaker. I told her if she needed passage, she would have it.”

Your gaze did not leave the projection. “You found him.”

“We tracked an energy surge..” Bruce said carefully. “Same signature as the Stones. He used the gauntlet again.”

Steve watched her. “We’re not going there for revenge.”

Your eyes moved to him. “Then you are already lying to yourself.”

Steve did not flinch. “We’re going to get the Stones.”

“And use them.” Bruce added quickly. “To reverse what he did. Bring everyone back.”

For the first time, you were still in a way that looked less like command and more like impact. “Can you do that?”

“Maybe.”

Natasha wanted to hit him, because now you looked at him. “Maybe.”

Steve stepped in before the air could split open. “We don’t know what condition the gauntlet is in. We don’t know what condition he’s in. But if the Stones are there, this is our best chance.”

Carol’s voice was steady. “I can scout ahead. If he’s alone, we hit fast.”

“I am coming with you.” You said and Natasha’s stomach clenched and Steve looked like he had expected it “This isn’t-“

“I did not ask your permission, Captain.”

Your title for him was polite enough to draw blood. Steve held your gaze for a long moment till he looked at Natasha and she hated him for it. Because the answer was there before either of them said it: If they told you no, you would go anyway. If they tried to stop you, people would get hurt. And if Thanos still had the Stones, they needed every powerful ally they had left. And if there was any chance of bringing back the vanished, there was no world in which you stayed behind.

Steve looked back at her. “We leave now” and you gave one nod. The meeting broke apart into motion and weapons were gathered. Natasha waited until your soldiers were all gone and you turning toward the hangar. She caught up to you before you reached the ship. “Y/n.”

You did not stop and Natasha moved faster and stepped into your path. “Y/n.”

Those pale eyes lifted to hers and up close, the changes were worse. Your face was thinner and the softness had not vanished exactly, but it had been buried beneath sleeplessness and command. There was a faint bruise still shadowing your throat where Thanos’s hand had closed around it.

“What happened back home?” Natasha asked and you stared at her. The question was useless as if there were any answer small enough to fit between them. But Natasha needed to hear you speak, needed to know there was something beneath the armor that had not turned entirely to steel.

You moved to walk around her but Natasha caught your arm. The reaction was immediate, your gaze dropped to Natasha’s hand on your arm and for one second, Natasha felt the entire corridor freeze.

“Let go.”

Natasha did not. “Talk to me.”

“There is nothing to say.”

“There is everything to say.”

“You want a report?”

“I want you!” The words came out before Natasha could stop them and for a moment, something cracked behind your eyes. “You should have thought of that before you brought my kingdom to your war.”

Natasha’s hand loosened, because the words hit exactly where you meant them to. You looked at the place where Natasha still touched you, then back at her face. “I came back, do you understand that? I came back through the Bifröst with the wounded, with the dead, with my dragon bleeding onto the stones of my own courtyard and no one was there.”

Natasha said nothing and your eyes glistened “No one came down the steps. No horns or healers waiting because the healers were gone and my parents too.” Natasha’s throat closed. “My father’s crown was in the ash beside his chair.”

“Y/n…”

“I agreed to enter your war..I agreed because you asked me. Because I believed you. Because I thought if the world was ending, then perhaps the world deserved everything I had to give it.” Your voice lowered. “And what did it cost?”

Natasha could not answer and you stepped closer. “My knight is dead. My parents are dust. Half my people vanished while calling my name. My dragon screams in his sleep and my kingdom kneels because there is no one else left standing.” Your eyes searched Natasha’s face with something almost like hatred and almost like begging. “Tell me, Natasha. What did it buy?”

Natasha’s grip fell from your arm and you looked at the empty space where her hand had been. For one moment, you seemed smaller than the armor, then you turned away and Natasha watched you walk toward the ship and did not follow.

No one spoke much after takeoff. You stood instead of sitting at first, one hand braced against the wall as the ship lifted from Earth. Natasha watched from across the cabin and saw the exact moment the planet disappeared beneath them and space opened around the windows.

Rocket climbed into the pilot’s seat and looked over his shoulder. “All right, who here hasn’t been to space?”

Steve raised his hand, Natasha did too. Rhodey, Bruce and you followed after a beat. Rocket stared at them, then barked a laugh. “You people are going to hate this..”

Outside the ship, the stars stretched into lines and the jump hit like the universe had grabbed the ship and pulled. The ship pushed deeper into dark and for hours, no one said anything that mattered. Coordinates were checked, weapons loaded and plans repeated until they became less like strategy and more like prayer.

The planet appeared slowly and it was..green. Everyone had expected darkness, like a dead moon, but the world below them was green and gold and blue in places where water caught the light.

Carol’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll go first.”

She moved before anyone answered, light gathering around her as the airlock opened. For one brief moment, sunlight from the planet spilled across her face, then she was gone and the ship remained in orbit.

Then she came back, “He’s alone.”

They landed in a field where tall grass bent under the pressure of the engines. They moved in formation toward the small hut at the edge of the garden and saw smoke curled from the hut’s chimney.

Then Carol moved and the door exploded inward. Everything happened at once: Carol hit Thanos before he could fully rise from the chair, the force of it drove him through the back wall and Steve and Rhodey moved in and Bruce containment tech locked around Thanos’s torso. Thor came down with Stormbreaker in both hands and the blade flashed. A heavy, wet sound split the air and Thano’s left arm hit the ground with the gauntlet still attached.

For one second, no one moved, till Rocket lunged for it, “I got it! I got it!”

Natasha’s eyes snapped to the gauntlet and..it was ruined. The metal was blackened and warped, fused in places to what remained of Thanos’s severed arm. The sockets where the Stones had once burned were empty.

You saw it at the same time Natasha did. The hope went out of their faces so quickly it looked like death. Bruce dropped to his knees beside Rocket, his hands moved over the gauntlet, “No. No, no, no…”

Steve stared at it. “Where are they?”

Thanos lay in the dirt, one side of his body burned beyond recognition. Thor stepped toward him. “Where are the Stones?”

Thanos’s eyes opened and for a moment, he looked at all of them without surprise. Then his gaze found you and for the first time, his expression changed. “You..”

You stood in the broken doorway, with no expression on your face. Thanos breathed through the pain. “The child queen.”

Natasha’s skin went cold and you stepped inside. “Where are they?”

Thanos looked at the ruined gauntlet. “Gone.”

Bruce shook his head. “No.”

Thanos’s eyes stayed on You. “Reduced to atoms.” The room seemed to lose air and Rocket looked from the gauntlet to Thanos. “You used them two days ago!”

Thanos’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “I used the Stones to destroy the Stones.”

“That’s impossible.”

Thanos blinked slowly. “It nearly killed me.”

You walked closer and stopped at Thanos’s severed arm. You looked down at the gauntlet and at the empty sockets. For a moment, your face did nothing till you crouched and Natasha tensed. You reached toward the gauntlet and touched the edge of one empty socket with two fingers. “Bring them back.”

Thanos watched her. “I cannot.”

You looked at him. “Bring them back!”

“The work is done. It always will be.”

You rose. “The work.” You repeated and Thanos looked up at you from the floor. His body was broken, his arm was gone and his blood was under your boots. “I destroyed them because temptation is the enemy of balance..As long as the Stones existed, what I gave the universe could be undone.”

“What you gave?” Bruce whispered and Thanos’s eyes did not leave you. “Mercy.”

The word entered the room like rot and your head tilted slightly. “You call it mercy?”

“I saved what remained.”

“You murdered what was whole.”

“Whole?” Thanos drew in a painful breath. “You were a ruler before you understood the word. Tell me, child. Did your kingdom never take life to preserve itself? Did your armies never burn enemies to keep your borders? Did your dragon never turn men into ash because you called it necessary?”

Thanos looked almost pleased by her silence. “You understand more than they do..That is why you hate me. Not because I am a monster. Because I did what rulers pretend they are too moral to do. I chose the necessary slaughter.”

You stepped closer. “My mother had a garden.” The sentence made Natasha’s throat tighten because you said it with the same coldness as everything else. “She grew white roses in a place where nothing gentle should have survived. She used to say the mountain only looked cruel to people who did not know where to touch it.” You looked around the hut. “You came here to grow things.”

Thanos’s expression did not change, but your voice lowered. “With their dust still under your nails.”

Carol’s grip tightened around his throat and Thanos looked at you for a long moment. Then he said, “I do not know your mother.”

Your sword came free fast and Natasha moved at the same time. You did not swing for Thanos’s throat, that would have been cleaner, no, you drove the blade down through his remaining hand. The steel punched through flesh and wood beneath, pinning him to the broken floor and he roared. “Y/N!”

You did not look away from Thanos. His fingers spasmed around the blade and blood welled up and running along the fuller of the sword. You leaned over him. “Learn one name before you die.”

Natasha grabbed your arm. “Stop.” You did not move and Thanos breathed hard through his teeth and your eyes were black with rage and empty of heat. “Her name was Maeryn. She was my mother and liked winter apples. She hated council meetings, laughed when my father was angry because it made him angrier. She touched Vhassar before anyone else dared.” Your voice did not break and that made it worse.

“My father’s name was Vaelor. He taught me the weight of a crown before I could lift a sword, told me fear was a poor ruler but a useful guard dog.” Your hand tightened on the hilt, twisting the blade slightly and Thanos made another sound.

Natasha’s grip tightened. “Y/n!”

“My knight was Seraya. She died with your creature’s arm through her body and apologized to me while drowning in her own blood.” The room had gone absolutely still and you leaned closer. “Say one of their names.”

Thanos looked at her and for a moment, his face showed pain. “No.”

Your expression emptied completely and Natasha knew then that she had lost her. You pulled the sword free and lifted it for his throat but Natasha caught her from behind. Natasha’s arms shook with the effort of holding you back. “Killing him won’t bring them back!” Behind them, Thor moved and Natasha saw it from the corner of her eye when Stormbreaker lifted and coming down.

Blood struck the floor in a heavy spray and a body jerked once beneath Carol’s hands. Thanos head rolled across broken wood and stopped near the ruined gauntlet, eyes open, mouth slack and the last certainty gone from his face. For one second, the only sound in the hut was the slow drip of blood through the floorboards and Thor stood over the corpse, “I went for the head.”

You stared at the body, while Natasha still held your wrists. She let go by degrees, ready for you to move again, but you did not. You looked at Thor, then at Thanos’s head. “No..”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, they left the garden with Thanos’s blood still dark in the grass and the ruined gauntlet wrapped in containment cloth that no longer mattered. No one looked back except you. You stood at the ship’s ramp for one final second, staring at the quiet hut, the rows of crops and the smoke still rising from a fire someone had lit as if he deserved warmth. Then you turned away.

Five years later:

The world had adapted and some people called it proof. They whispered it first, then they said it louder. Then some of them wrote articles and formed groups and stood outside government buildings with signs that said things like Thanos was right.

Some of them had lost no one. Some of them had lost everyone and decided pain needed meaning badly enough to accept any lie that gave it shape.

Natasha understood that more than she wanted to. The world had settled into the aftermath because there was no other choice. People remarried, children grew and governments rebuilt badly. But Natasha had not settled, she worked. The Avengers compound had become a command center, a shelter, a grave and sometimes, if she was exhausted enough to be honest with herself, a punishment. She slept in the same building where empty rooms still held people’s names. She ate at a table too large for the living and answered calls that were not hers because no one else was there to answer them. She stayed because the world was broken and someone had to watch the cracks.

The holographic screen in front of her flickered blue over the dark meeting room. “All right.” Natasha said, scrolling through the reports on her tablet. “Earth side reconstruction in the Eastern European zones?”

“Stable enough.” Carol said. “If your definition of stable includes three governments arguing over border authority while half their labor force is gone.”

Natasha made a note she would probably reread at four in the morning and hate herself for not being able to fix. Her eyes shifted to Rhodey and he had gone quiet. Natasha leaned back slightly. “Where are you right now?”

For a second, he said nothing. Then he exhaled through his nose. “Mexico. For now.”

Natasha’s fingers stilled over the tablet. “I picked up information about a series of killings. Different cities, but same pattern if you know what to look for.”

Natasha’s stomach dropped before he finished speaking. Okoye’s voice sharpened. “Barton?”

“No.” Rhodey said and looked at Natasha, because she already knew. Clint left bodies like a man trying to cut out the parts of the world that had survived instead of his family. He went after organized crime with the precision of a blade that did not care whether it broke in the wound. This was not him..

Rhodey continued, “These aren’t cartel hits. Two men involved in trafficking, a father who beat his children badly enough that one of them won’t walk right again. Another guy who burned his wife and walked on a technicality.”

The room chilled by degrees and Natasha looked down at her tablet, though she was no longer reading. “Method?” she asked and Rhodey watched her. He knew. She could see it in his face that he knew she knew.

“Brutal.” he said. “One had his tongue cut out and nailed to the table beside the gag order he paid for.” Rhodey looked directly at Natasha through the screen. “Not Barton.”

Natasha closed her eyes for half a second. “Send me everything.” Rhodey did not move. “Nat.”

Natasha’s jaw tightened. “The meeting’s over.”

The screens blinked out one by one until Natasha was alone with the rain, the empty chairs and the report Rhodey had sent. She opened it and photographs filled the tablet. A man tied to his own dining chair, eyes open, throat cut cleanly and documents spread across his blood soaked table. Another in a warehouse, hands severed and arranged over police files he had buried. A third on the steps of a courthouse with a brand burned into his chest in a language almost no one on Earth could read..Natasha could.

She set the tablet down very carefully. Then she bent forward, both hands gripping the edge of the table and the breath went out of her like something had punched through her chest, torn from somewhere too exhausted to protect itself anymore.

You were somewhere in the world carving justice into bodies because justice had not arrived fast enough through courts, governments, kings or gods..and Natasha had not reached you.

Five years.

Five years of reports, rumors, closed borders, unanswered messages, Bifröst flares over places where murderers stopped breathing. Five years of Natasha telling herself you were ruling and surviving. Five years of knowing survival could look like a blade in the dark.

“Nat?”

Steve stood in the doorway. He had always had the worst timing and the best instincts. Natasha straightened too fast, wiping at her face with one hand. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough.”

She gave him a look that would have frightened most people. Steve only walked in and stopped beside the table and glanced at the dark screens. “Rough meeting?”

Natasha laughed once. “They’re all rough.”

For a while, neither of them spoke. Then his eyes moved to the tablet lying face down on the table. “Rhodey?”

Natasha’s mouth tightened. “He found bodies.”

Steve’s expression changed. “Clint?”

“No.”

Steve understood almost immediately and Natasha looked away. Steve then sat beside her, “What happened?”

“What always happens.” Natasha said. “Someone falls through the cracks and someone else decides the cracks are the problem.” Steve was quiet.

“She’s killing them..Rapists, traffickers, abusers..People who paid their way out of punishment and men no one bothered to stop.”

“And you’re sure it’s her?”

Natasha looked at the tablet. “No.” A beat. “Yes..” Natasha stared at the empty projection table. “She saw what this world became after the Snap.. saw governments collapse and people disappear into systems that were already broken before half the people running them turned to dust. She saw the worst people survive and the best people become memorials.” Her voice hardened. “And Y/n does not tolerate unfinished punishment.”

Steve looked at her carefully. “Have you talked to her?”

Natasha smiled without humor. “She sealed the kingdom.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“I tried.”

“How hard?”

The question struck exactly where he intended and Natasha turned on him. “Do not do that.”

“Nat.”

“No. You don’t get to sit there and make this about me not trying hard enough.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m saying maybe you stopped because part of you was afraid she wouldn’t answer.”

Natasha went still and Steve’s face softened in that unbearable way of his. Of course she had been afraid..afraid you would hate her. Afraid the woman she found would no longer be the woman she remembered and that five years of grief had made Natasha into someone who only knew how to lead a dead team from an empty room and call it purpose.

“She blamed me..In the ship. Before we went to Thanos. She said I asked her to risk everything.” Natasha’s throat tightened. “And she was right.”

“She made her choice.”

“She made it because I asked.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“It feels the same.”

Steve looked at her with a grief so familiar it almost made her angry. “We all asked people to follow us.” he said. “Wakanda. The Asgardians and her kingdom. We asked them to stand between Thanos and the universe. They did.” His voice dropped. “And then he won anyway.”

Steve looked toward the dark windows. “How is she?”

Natasha laughed softly. “I don’t know-“ Suddenly a crackling sound came from the corner monitor and both of them turned. The camera feed outside the compound gate flickered and a man’s face filled the screen, “Hi, uh, is anyone home?”

Natasha stared and Steve stood. The man leaned closer to the camera. “This is Scott Lang. We met a few years ago? At the airport? Germany? I got really big and then really small. I had a mask!”

Natasha and Steve looked at each other while Scott waved awkwardly into the camera. “Can you buzz me in? I think I might have a crazy idea.”

—

Inside the mountains, the kingdom had changed too.

The old royal banners still hung from the black stone towers, but beneath them flew new cloth: ash-gray, black and deep red. Mourning colors that had become national colors because grief had lasted long enough to become identity. The city below the castle had been rebuilt in careful layers after the Snap gutted whole districts. Homes once empty were filled by refugees and market squares were quieter than they had been before the war, but not dead.

Children still ran through alleys, bread still baked and smiths still hammered steel into useful shapes. At sunset, bells rang for the vanished, every single day and in the castle courtyard stood a wall of names. Every person taken by the Snap and soldier who died in Wakanda. Every civilian lost when the kingdom’s systems collapsed in the days after. The letters were carved into black stone and filled with pale metal so they caught moonlight like wounds refusing to close.

At the center of the wall were three names larger than the rest. The king. The queen Seraya. The first knight sworn to you

The queen did not visit the wall when others could see, but every morning, fresh white roses appeared beneath those names and the people noticed. They noticed the way their queen walked through the lower city without a crown and listened to old women complain about grain storage. They noticed the way she knelt to speak to children instead of making them look up at her. They noticed the way no hungry person was turned from the kitchens during winter and they noticed the way widows of Wakanda received letters written in the queen’s own hand when the bodies of mountain soldiers were finally sent home.

They loved her, but feared her too. Because mercy had survived in you, but it had grown teeth. When a village lord beat a servant girl so badly she lost an eye, he was dragged before the queen’s court in chains. He pleaded his bloodline, his service and loyalty to her father.

You listened and asked the girl whether he had begged when he hurt her and the girl said no. The lord was executed before sunset. When three soldiers attacked a refugee boy in an alley and thought their armor would save them, you stripped their ranks herself and one died by your hand. Two were sent to the mines with their names removed from the rolls of honor.

The kingdom learned and the queen was kind to those who had been hurt. She was merciless to those who hurt because they thought no one would stop them and sometimes, when the moon was dark and the court believed she slept, you left the mountain.

The world beyond your borders had taught you too much. You saw what Natasha’s world had become: the abandoned systems, reports filed and forgotten, the wealthy buying clean names with dirty money and men who hurt families behind closed doors and walked free because half the officers were gone, half the judges buried grief in whiskey, and half the governments cared more about stability than justice. You did not ask permission from governments that had failed their own people. You just crossed borders like weather. Five years made you into a legend twice over. Once, as the queen who fed orphans and again, as the shadow that came when the law refused to.

Natasha entered the mountain kingdom through an old northern pass with no escort and two knives she knew would not save her if the mountain decided she did not belong. Natasha knew she was being watched long before she saw anyone and then a shadow moved once above her and the dragon landed in front of her.

Vhassar came down without warning, black wings snapping open hard enough to throw snow and stone dust into the air. Natasha staggered back and barely kept her footing. He was larger than she remembered or maybe memory had made him smaller because remembering the truth was too much.

His eyes fixed on Natasha with molten, terrible recognition and he lowered his head. The sound in his throat was not a roar, it was more like a warning growl that made the snow beneath Natasha’s boots tremble.

Natasha’s heart slammed against her ribs. “Hey..”

The dragon’s lip lifted just enough to show teeth longer than her forearm.

“Yeah..” Natasha breathed. “Fair.”

Her knife suddenly felt embarrassing and she removed her hand from it. Vhassar’s eyes followed the motion. “You know me.”

The growl deepened and Natasha swallowed. “You do.” She took one careful step forward and the dragon’s head moved closer, so fast the air shifted and Natasha froze. Heat rolled over her face and her body screamed at her to move and to run. To do anything except stand in front of a creature that could end her with one breath. “I’m not here to hurt her.”

Vhassar’s pupils narrowed and Natasha almost laughed, “I know.” she whispered. “I know I already did.” Natasha took another step and her hand shook when she lifted it. The space between her palm and his scales felt impossibly wide and impossibly small. One wrong movement, one breath he did not like and the mountain would have one more name to carve.

Natasha touched him and he exhaled. The breath nearly knocked her backward, but he did not pull away and Natasha closed her eyes for half a second. “Please..”

Minutes later, Vhassar did not fly toward the gates with her but towards the castle. Toward the balcony carved into the side of black stone and Natasha realized what he intended half a second before he landed.

“Wait-”

Vhassar struck the balcony with terrifying precision and Natasha barely held on as his wings folded and his massive head swung toward open doors leading into a chamber she remembered too well. She slid down from Vhassar’s back and landed silently on the balcony and inside the chamber, you moved.

Natasha saw only the flash of your hand, till a dagger flew toward her face and Natasha twisted. The blade cut past her cheek close enough that she felt the air move, it struck the stone wall behind her and buried itself to the hilt.

For one suspended second, neither of them moved. You stood near the center of the room in a black robe belted over trousers a second knife already in your hand. Natasha straightened slowly. “Hi.”

For the first time in five years, Natasha watched shock break through the queen’s face. “Natasha.”

Her name sounded strange in your mouth now. Vhassar shifted on the balcony behind Natasha and your eyes flicked to him, then back to Natasha. “How did you get in here?”

Natasha glanced over her shoulder at the dragon. “Vhassar.”

“What?”

“He brought me.”

You looked at Vhassar and he lowered his head through the open balcony doors with the smugness of a creature too large to be questioned by anyone but you. For one brief, impossible second, your mouth changed.

“Traitor..” You said softly in the old tongue and Vhassar rumbled. Natasha looked between them. “I’m choosing to believe that means welcome.”

“It does not.”

You set the knife down on the table with careful precision. “You should not be here.”

“I know.”

“Then leave.”

“No.”

Your gaze returned to her slowly. Natasha had stood in rooms with assassins, war criminals, gods, monsters. She had faced guns held by men who wanted her dead and smiles from men who wanted worse. None of them looked at her the way you did now.

“You come into my chambers after five years, through my skies, on my dragon and your first act is refusal?”

Natasha swallowed. “Not my first act.”

“No. Your first act was silence.”

That hit, but Natasha let it. “I wrote.”

“You sent letters.”

“I tried to come.”

“You turned back at the third pass.” Natasha went still and you knew. “You thought I did not watch my borders?”

Natasha’s jaw tightened. “I thought if you wanted to see me, you would let me through.”

“And if I had let you through then? What would you have said?”

Natasha had no answer for that. Five years ago, she would have said she was sorry. That the world was broken. That she did not know how to fix anything. That she missed you. That she was afraid of what you were becoming and more afraid that you had become it because Natasha had asked you to join a war. Five years ago, none of that would have been enough.

“Leave before the court knows you are here.”

Natasha stepped into the room and you stopped. Vhassar’s head shifted behind them and Natasha moved carefully, not because she feared you would kill her, but because part of her feared you would let her speak and still feel nothing. “I know what you’re doing, Y/n..”

You stood with your back half-turned. “I rule.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

Natasha looked at you and saw the terrible truth of it. That was why this was so hard, because you had not been hunting innocents. You had found people who had turned survival into permission to harm and you had ended them. The world had become quieter after the Snap and you had filled the silence with screams no one mourned.

“That is not the way.”

“Your way left them alive.”

Natasha inhaled sharply and you walked to the table and lifted one of the reports, barely glancing at it before setting it aside. “I have spent five years watching your world ask the wounded to be patient while the cruel reorganized. I have watched councils debate what to do with men whose crimes were known to every person in the room. I have watched mothers stand outside locked offices with photographs of daughters no one intended to search for.” Your eyes returned to Natasha’s. “Your world is very fond of procedure. It keeps its hands clean while others bleed.”

Natasha’s voice softened despite herself. “What happened to you?”

You looked at her and for a second anger flashed. “What happened to all of us.”

“No.” Natasha stepped closer. “This is not the same.”

“Five years and you still believe there was a version of me waiting to be preserved.”

“I know there was.”

“You knew a princess.”

“I knew you!”

Your eyes sharpened. “No. You knew what grief had not taken yet.”

Outside, Vhassar shifted and you looked toward him briefly and something in your face eased by a fraction. Natasha saw then that your softness wasn’t gone..It was just guarded by teeth, fire, law and five years of blood.

“I came because we found something.”

Your gaze snapped back to her. “No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“No.”

“Y/n-“

“No!” This time the word cracked through the room, even Vhassar lifted his head. “Do not!”

Natasha stopped and your hand gripped the edge of the table. “Do not come here with that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“Hope..”

The word was almost spat and Natasha’s chest tightened. “Do you think I do not recognize it? I wore it into Thanos’s garden, I carried it across stars like a fool. I stood over the gauntlet and believed, for one breath, that the universe had left me one mercy..It had not.”

Natasha took a slow step forward and you stepped back. “Do not give me hope unless you are prepared to watch what it does to me when it dies.”

Natasha’s throat worked. For five years she had imagined this conversation a hundred ways. She had imagined you blaming her. She had imagined you refusing to see her. She had imagined violence, silence and tears. She had not imagined this.

You standing in the room where Natasha had once been allowed to see her scars, begging without begging not to be made vulnerable again. “I wouldn’t be here if it were nothing.”

You stared at her. “That is what everyone says before they ask a queen to bleed.”

Natasha reached for her and you watched the movement as if it were a weapon. Natasha’s fingers touched your hand and you went very still. For a second, Natasha saw the battlefield again. Your hand catching her sleeve to make sure she was real and Natasha covering it and saying, I’m here.

“Someone we know was trapped somewhere. Somewhere outside time as we understand it. For him, it was hours, for us? It was five years.” You did not breathe, Natasha felt it through her hand. “Bruce thinks it may be possible to use that. Not to find the Stones now, but go back to when they existed.”

Your face lost color and Natasha tightened her grip. “We found a way.”

“No.”

“It’s real.”

“No.”

“Y/n-”

“No!” The word broke from you again, “Do not say that to me..”

Natasha held on and you tried to pull her hand away, but Natasha did not let you. “Listen to me.”

“No!”

“Listen!”

Your eyes burned. “You do not get to come here after five years..” you whispered, “touch my hand and tell me my dead may not be dead.”

“I know.”

“You do not know what those words do.”

“I know what they do to me.”

You looked away violently, but Natasha stepped closer, refusing to let the moment close.

“We have a chance, Y/n..” Natasha said. “Not a promise or certainty. A chance.”

You inhaled like the words had struck you. “And if you fail?”

“Then we fail.”

You laughed, but it broke halfway through. Your hand twisted in Natasha’s grip, not pulling away now but gripping back with sudden, painful force. “And what am I supposed to do if I become that fool again?”

Natasha stepped closer until there was almost no space between you both now. “Then I’ll be one with you.”

Natasha lifted her other hand and touched your face and you closed your eyes at the contact. Then, finally, one tear escaped and slipped down your cheek and over Natasha’s thumb.

“I cannot bury them twice..” You whispered and Natasha leaned her forehead against yours. “I know.”

“I cannot.”

“I know.”

“If this is another garden-”

“It isn’t.”

“You do not know that..”

“No.” Natasha said. “I don’t.”

You opened your eyes and Natasha held your face still so, so gently. “But I came anyway.”

You looked at her for a long time, then your gaze shifted past Natasha to the balcony. Vhassar watched you both, his scarred wing folded close, but his head remained lowered towards you and you spoke in the old tongue.

Vhassar rumbled and Natasha did not know the words, but she knew the sound of a creature being told something it did not want to accept. You pulled away from Natasha and crossed to the balcony and placed one hand against Vhassar’s jaw. The dragon leaned into your touch with a low, wounded sound that seemed too gentle for something so enormous. For a moment, you stood there with him, moonlight catching the white of your hair and the black of your robe, queen and dragon framed against the mountains that had kept them both alive.

Then you looked back at Natasha and the tear was gone from your face. “Tell me everything.”

You said nothing as you walked through the compound. You still wore the black traveling cloak from hours before. Natasha kept glancing at you and you pretended not to notice. The compound smelled faintly of rain, old coffee, machine oil and loneliness. It smelled like people had once filled it and then stopped. In one hallway, you passed a framed photograph of several people standing together, smiling as though the world had not yet learned how to punish them for being alive.

There were faces she knew from Wakanda, but there were so many kinds of absence now. At the end of the hallway, voices carried from a large workroom and Natasha stopped just outside the doors and looked at you

“You don’t have to like them.”

Your brow lifted. “Am I expected to?”

“No.” Natasha almost smiled.

Then the doors opened and the room beyond was chaos wearing the costume of science. Screens glowed along the walls, diagrams floated in the air and tools covered half the tables. In the center of it all stood a narrow platform surrounded by metal arms, wires, and glowing blue white rings that hummed softly with contained power.

“I’m just saying, the rules of it are not normal rules. I mean, obviously, because I was gone for five years but it felt like five hours! So either time is broken in there or it works differently and if it works differently, maybe we can use different differently!!”

Tony looked up from a tablet. “That sentence just committed several crimes.”

Scott pointed at him. “But you understood me!”

Then Bruce turned and you stopped. For a second, you simply just stared, because he was..there and was green. Not the mild, nervous man who had spoken too quickly and looked at her dragon with scientific terror in his eyes, no, this was something between and beyond..both. Massive

He smiled carefully. “Prin- Your Grace..”

“Dr. Banner.”

Scott looked between them. “You know her?”

Bruce lifted one large hand in a small wave. “We met before.”

Your gaze moved over him slowly. “You were not green.”

Bruce’s smile faltered into something sheepish. “Yeah. A lot happened.”

Scott raised his hand slightly. “Hi. Sorry. Medieval execution committee?”

Natasha gestured faintly. “Scott Lang.”

You looked at him and Scott straightened. Your gaze then dropped to his shoes, then returned to his face. “You are the insect man.”

Scott blinked. “Okay. That has come up twice now and I feel like maybe there’s branding damage happening..”

Tony snapped his fingers toward Scott and your attention returned to the machine. “Explain it.”

It took exactly one hour until they got through the most important details and you found yourself following along and despite yourself, having to admit that it might actually work.

“We identify when and where the Stones existed, go back, retrieve them, bring them here, use them to undo the Snap, then return the Stones to their timelines before reality sues us.”

You looked at Bruce. “Can this really be done?”

Bruce hesitated but Tony did not. “Maybe.”

Your gaze turned to him. “We’re past certainty. Certainty died five years ago with half the universe. What we have is math, a rat, Scott’s weird survival story, my brain, Banner’s brain body situation and a prototype that might either work or turn someone into soup.”

You looked at the platform again and Natasha did too. “Someone has to test it.” Bruce said quietly.

You stepped forward “I will do it.”

“No.” Natasha stepped towards you and Bruce as well. “We need more calibration. More safety checks.”

Your eyes stayed on the machine. “Then calibrate.”

Natasha crossed the space between them. “You are not doing this. You do not get to walk into this building after five years and throw yourself into the first machine that might kill you because you want proof.”

“That is exactly what I get to do.”

“No.”

Your gaze hardened. “I am not one of your agents.”

“I know.”

“Then do not speak to me as if I am waiting for permission.”

Natasha took one step closer. “Then do not act like dying is just another way to make a point.”

Bruce cleared his throat softly. “There are risks.”

You turned to him. “What kind?”

“Temporal displacement..Memory disturbance. If the suit fails to anchor you, you could be lost in the Quantum Realm..”

You listened without flinching. “Send me.”

Natasha’s jaw clenched. “Y/n-”

“I need to know if hope has a body..” You said quietly. “Or if it is another ghost.”

Natasha felt her anger falter. That was the cruelty of it, because you’re not being reckless because you thought you could not be hurt. You were being reckless because you had been hurt so much that pain had stopped being persuasive.

You saw the circle of silent permission forming and stepped onto the platform before anyone could make it more formal and Natasha followed instantly. “Y/n!”

You did not turn around as Bruce approached with the suit components. The test suit was sleek and strange, black and white with red accents, designed to fit over clothing and seal around the body. It looked too modern against your dark leathers and old steel. Bruce adjusted the wrist controls with careful fingers and Tony handed him a helmet.

You looked at it and then at Natasha. “You said there was a chance.” Natasha’s throat tightened. “There is.”

“Then let me look at it.”

Natasha wanted to refuse, wanted to drag you off the platform. Wanted to say no until the word became law, wanted to take every weapon from your hands, every crown from your head, every grief from your body and put them somewhere safer than this humming circle of metal and impossible science. But you had spent five years being queen of the dead. Natasha could not ask you to trust hope blindly, so she stepped closer and helped seal the collar of the suit.

Her fingers brushed your throat, the bruise from Thanos was long gone, but memory was not. Your eyes flicked down to Natasha’s hands and neither of you moved for one breath. Then Natasha lifted the helmet and you let her put it on.

Tony moved to the console. “We’re sending her back and pulling her out after ten seconds subjective and no souvenirs.”

Your eyes cut to him through the helmet and Tony pointed at you. “I mean it. Time is not a market, don’t steal anything.”

You said nothing and Natasha stepped off the platform slowly. Every instinct screamed at her not to.

“Ready?” Bruce asked and you looked at Natasha. Then you gave one short nod and Tony’s hand hovered over the controls.

“Three.”

Natasha’s hands curled into fists.

“Two.”

Steve’s shoulders tightened.

“One.”

Tony pressed the button and the platform flashed white and you vanished. For one second, nothing happened, then everything happened somewhere else.

You opened your eyes in your own room. Not the room as it was now, or the queen’s chamber full of reports, knives, maps and grief. Your room, five years ago-

No. More than five..way before because the air hit your first. The faint spice of the oils her mother’s attendants used to polish the old wood centuries ago..the smell of the mountain before ash became its second skin.

You couldn’t move. Your bed stood near the far wall, carved posts draped in pale fabric and a gown lay across it. Your fingers lifted without permission, and remembers the last time she had worn it, her mother had stood behind her and complained that you never stood still long enough to be dressed properly. Your father had laughed from the doorway and told the queen she should be grateful their daughter could stand still before armies, even if not before seamstresses.

Your hand clenched in the gown. No. No, no- Suddenly a roar split the sky and you turned so fast the room tilted. You stumbled toward the balcony and outside the kingdom lived. The courtyard below was full of voices, soldiers crossing between gates and servants carrying baskets. Children chasing one another near the fountain before a guard barked at them and failed badly at hiding his smile.

Then shadows passed over the towers. Three dragons flew across the mountain sky and you stopped breathing. Vhassar was first, younger by years and untouched by the scars Wakanda had burned into him. Beside him flew two others. A silver gray dragon with long narrow wings and a red crest like a wound of flame down her neck and a bronze one, smaller but faster, cutting through the clouds with a cry that made the windows tremble.

Your knees almost failed. “W-What?”

They were dead. They had been dead before Wakanda, before Thanos and Natasha. Lost in the old wars of the mountain kingdom, buried in stories you carried like bones beneath your skin, but there they were..alive.

You made a sound that was not a sob only because there was not enough time for it to become one when suddenly l a voice called from the corridor. “Y/n?”

The world stopped because it was your l mother. You turned from the balcony so violently your shoulder struck the doorframe. “Y/n, are you dressed? Your father will start the council without us if you make him wait again.”

You ran. You did not think, did not remember Tony’s warning, did not remember the suit or the compound or the machine or Natasha. There was only that voice, that impossible, living voice moving away down a corridor that had been silent for five years.

“Mother!”

Her own voice came out ragged and suddenly a distant signal began beeping in your ear. “Mother!” You reached the chamber door and tore it open. The signal in your ear screamed, white light took the hall and you hit the compound platform on your knees.

The impact cracked through the room and Natasha was moving before anyone else understood you had returned. Your hands slammed against the metal platform, your breathing came too fast and one fist was closed around something red and black.

Natasha dropped in front of you. “Hey, hey..”

You did not seem to hear because your whole body shook. Natasha grabbed the helmet release with fingers that fumbled only once and the seal hissed. You gasped like someone dragged from drowning and Natasha cupped your face. “Look at me.”

Your breathing hitched. “Look at me.” And your eyes found hers. For a second, Natasha was not sure you knew where you were. Then you looked down at your hand.

You had brought back part of the gown and Tony stared. “She brought back a souvenir.”

Bruce looked like he might cry and Scott whispered, “Oh my God.”

You touched the fabric with your free hand and looked up. At Natasha first, then to the others. “It..works.” The words came out barely above a whisper.

Natasha did not look away from you and saw how your eyes filled. “It works..” you said again and this time, the room heard the second meaning. They were alive somewhere..somewhen.

Hours passed and the compound became something it had not been in five years. People moved quickly now. Screens filled with timelines, locations, energy signatures, historical records, old mission files. Tony and Bruce argued with the speed of men trying to outrun doubt. Scott told the same Quantum Realm explanation three more times and made it worse each time.

You sat on a couch near the back of the room and had not let go of the fabric. The strip of gown lay across your palm, your thumb moving slowly over the embroidered silver wing, again and again. You had said very little since the test and that worried Natasha more than tears would have. She crossed the room while Tony and Bruce argued over branching timelines near the holographic board. “Hey.”

You looked up when Natasha sat beside you. “You okay?”

You looked at the fabric. “No.” After a moment, your voice came softer, “I saw my room. The way it was before the war. Before all of this. The gown was on my bed.”

Natasha watched your face and you looked toward the windows, “I saw them.”

“Your parents?”

Your mouth trembled once. “My dragons.”

Natasha stilled and you looked down at the fabric again. “All three of them..” your voice changed on the number, “Vhassar and his two siblings I buried before him. They were flying together.”

Natasha remembered enough of old stories and quiet confessions to understand. “I thought I remembered the sound of their wings, but I didn’t..”

Natasha’s hand moved before she could stop it, covering yours where it gripped the cloth.

“Then I heard my mother. he called my name from the corridor..It has been so long since I heard her voice without dreaming it wrong.”

“You saw her?”

You shook your head and a tear finally slipped free. “No..”

Natasha looked at the strip of gown. “But you brought this back.”

“Yeah.”

“Then it was real.”

You inhaled carefully. For five years, hope had been a thing you killed on sight. Now it sat in your hand wearing your mother’s embroidery. You looked toward the glass board where Tony had begun writing possible Stone locations in aggressive strokes. “When do we go?”

Natasha’s answer was immediate. “As soon as we can.”

The planning took hours..The universe had hidden its salvation across time, space and several bad decisions. They gathered in the main briefing room once the initial calculations stopped exploding into arguments. The table filled with holograms of the Stones: Space, Mind, Reality, Power, Time, Soul. Six colors hanging above them like accusations.

You sat beside Natasha this time and Tony stood near the board with a marker in one hand and the expression of a man trying very hard not to admit he was enjoying the puzzle because the stakes were too obscene.

“Same year, same place, Mind Stone was in Loki’s scepter.”

Bruce pulled up another image. “And the Time Stone was with the Ancient One. Also in New York.”

Rhodey leaned forward. “Three Stones in one place?”

“One city.” Tony corrected. “Not one place. And it’ll still be a mess because we were also there, the Chitauri were there, S.H.I.E.L.D. was crawling everywhere and half of us were emotionally less developed.”

Steve gave him a look and Tony tapped the marker against the board. “Some of us.”

Natasha studied the timeline. Three Stones in 2012. It was almost too clean. “If we time it right, three teams can hit New York at the same point.”

Tony looked at the last hologram. The Soul Stone.

Nebula’s voice went flat. “Vormir. 2014.”

Steve looked at her. “You know it?”

“Thanos found it there.”

“How?”

Nebula did not answer quickly. “He sent Gamora with him.” she said at last. “He came back with the Stone but without her.”

The room chilled and you looked at the orange light while Natasha looked at you.

Steve leaned forward. “So that’s six Stones. Three in New York, one on Asgard, one on Morag, one on Vormir.”

They began assigning teams. Tony, Steve, Bruce and Scott to New York, 2012.

Thor and Rocket to Asgard, 2013.

Rhodey and Nebula to Morag, 2014.

Then the room turned toward the last Stone and Natasha knew before Steve said anything. Maybe because she had lived long enough to recognize the shape of her own road before seeing its end. “I’ll go.”

You spoke at the same time. “I go with her.”

Natasha turned. “No.”

Your eyes moved to hers. “Yes.”

“You do not even know what Vormir is.”

“Neither do you.”

Steve looked between them. “Nat-”

“No.” Natasha said and you leaned back slightly, “Are we doing this again?”

“You are not coming with me because you think every dangerous place is yours by right.”

“And you are not going alone because you think dying for the mission is a personality.”

The room went silent and Natasha stared at you. There were years between them. Blood, ash, letters unanswered and hands held too late..Finally, Steve said, “You two are the best fit.”

Natasha looked at him sharply and Steve’s expression was gentle and terrible because he knew exactly what he was doing and hated it. “Vormir is unknown territory. We need someone who can move quietly, read danger fast and get out if something goes wrong. That’s Nat.” His gaze shifted to you. “And if something bigger is waiting there, we need someone who can survive it.”

Natasha hated the logic because it was sound. The teams settled around the table like pieces on a board no one trusted and hope had shape now. By the time they stopped, night had folded fully around the compound, but no one called it sleeping.

They called it resting. Anything but admitting they were going to lie down with the possibility of tomorrow pressing against their throats. Tony left first and soon everyone else followed, but you remained seated after the room emptied. Natasha stood near the door. “I’ll show you your room.”

You both walked through the compound in silence. It was different now with the building dark and the glass walls reflected them as they passed. Natasha opened a door near the guest wing and the room beyond was clean. You stopped at the threshold and Natasha watched her face. “It’s temporary.” Natasha said.

You looked at the bed. “At the compound, I mean. We leave in the morning.”

Your fingers tightened around the fabric. “It does not feel like a room..”

Natasha looked inside. She had never thought about it that way before. Now she saw it through your eyes, no books worn by hands, no weapons within reach except what a guest brought in. No scent of smoke or leather or old stone. Just a place to place a body until morning.

Natasha’s voice softened. “No. It doesn’t.”

You looked at her then. For the first time since the test, uncertainty crossed your face without armor rushing immediately to cover it. “Could I…” The sentence died.

Natasha waited and you hated asking, Natasha could see it. This was a woman standing outside an empty room after seeing your dead almost alive and not knowing how to be alone with it. Natasha stepped closer. “What?”

You looked away. “Could I stay with you?”

Natasha’s chest tightened. “Yeah.” Way too fast, but she doesn’t care. You looked back and something moved between you then.

“This way.” Natasha said quietly. Her own room was on the other side of the compound. She had chosen it because it was close to the operations center and far enough from the rooms that hurt most. It was smaller than the guest suite, but less empty, though not by much. Natasha opened the door and stepped inside first. “It’s not much.”

You entered behind her and the room changed with you in it. Not because it became warmer, because Natasha suddenly saw every part of it as evidence. The exhaustion she had folded into this room night after night because no one else had been there to see it. You stood in the center, looking around quietly. “This is where you live.”

Natasha closed the door. “Yeah.”

Your gaze moved over the desk. “You work here too..?”

“I work everywhere.”

You looked at her then. The tension from the hallway had followed you inside and grown teeth. Natasha felt it under her skin too. You placed the strip of gown carefully on the desk and turned back. “You kept going.”

Natasha leaned against the door, because standing upright without support suddenly felt too honest. “So did you.”

“Do not compare them.”

“Why not?”

“Because what I did was not noble.”

Natasha’s mouth tightened. “Neither was all of what I did.”

“You answered calls. Held your team together. Led what remained.”

“I hid in work because the alternative was sitting still long enough to feel everything.”

You stared at her because the truth shifted something. Natasha stepped away from the door. “You think I don’t know what it’s like?” she asked softly. “To turn pain into a job because at least jobs have rules? Reports, targets, missions or people to save so you don’t have to count the ones you didn’t?”

Your jaw tightened and Natasha took another step. “I know exactly what you’ve been doing.”

Your voice dropped. “Then you should know not to stand too close.”

Natasha stopped and you looked at your hands. “There is blood on me you have not seen.”

“I’ve seen blood.”

“Not this kind.”

Natasha’s face softened despite the ache in her chest. “Y/n.”

“No.” You looked up sharply. “Do not say my name like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you remember me.”

Natasha’s breath caught and you looked away, but there was nowhere in the small room for either of them to hide. “I do remember you.” Natasha said and your mouth trembled once.

“I remember your hands in my hair. I remember the way you looked at me when you gave me your clasp. I remember you on Vhassar above Wakanda. I remember you kneeling in the mud with Seraya in your arms. I remember you in that garden, asking where to put your grief.”

You closed your eyes and Natasha stepped closer. “I remember all of it.”

“Then you remember that I blamed you.”

“Yes.”

“You should have.”

“I did.”

Your eyes opened and Natasha was close now. Too close for five years of restraint but not close enough for five years of wanting. “I did blame myself.” Natasha said. “Every day. For asking, surviving..For not following you through the Bifröst or stopping outside your borders. For being relieved when you didn’t answer because it meant I didn’t have to hear you tell me you hated me.”

“I did not hate you..”

“I know.”

“No.” You stepped closer now. “You do not know. Hatred would have been cleaner. I tried, I wanted to hate you. I thought if I made you part of the wound, then maybe the wound would have a name I could speak without breaking.” Natasha’s eyes burned. “But I missed you, Natasha.”

You looked furious with yourself for saying it. “I missed you.” You said again as if repetition could punish the softness out of it. “While I buried my dead. While I wore a crown I did not want. While I judged people and killed monsters and stood before my people as if I was not still kneeling in Wakanda with ash in my hand. I missed you and I hated that too.”

Natasha’s breath shook, you were close enough now that Natasha could see the faint line of a scar near your mouth, the silver thread at the edge of one braid, the places where grief had altered you and failed to erase her. “I missed you too..” Natasha whispered.

You looked at her mouth and that was all it took. Five years collapsed and Natasha moved first or maybe you did, it did not matter.

They met in the middle like two storms that had spent too long pretending to be weather systems instead of hunger. Your hand caught Natasha’s waist and Natasha’s fingers slid into your hair, careful for half a second and then not careful at all. Their mouths collided hard enough to hurt.

Natasha backed into the door with a soft, sharp sound and pulled you with her. Your body pressed against hers and Natasha kissed you again, deeper this time and you made a sound against her mouth that broke something open in Natasha’s chest.

Her hands fisted in the front of your cloak and yanked it open, shoving it off your shoulders so it hit the floor in a heavy pool. Your own hands were already under Natasha’s shirt, nails dragging up her ribs like you wanted to mark her, like you needed proof she was real and not another ghost. Natasha gasped into your mouth when your thumb brushed the underside of her breast.

She shoved a thigh between your legs and you ground down against it immediately, a broken sound escaping you that Natasha felt all the way down to her bones. She bit at your jaw, your throat, the place just beneath your ear that had always made you shiver. Your hands were in Natasha’s hair now, yanking her head back so you could look at her. “I wanted to hate you..” you hissed. “I tried so fucking hard.”

“I know.” Natasha’s voice was hoarse. She slid her hands down to your thighs and lifted, and you wrapped your legs around her waist without hesitation. Natasha carried you the few steps to the bed and dropped you onto it, following you down. “I wanted you to.”

You pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it somewhere behind her. You stared up at her for one suspended second, eyes glassy and furious and so full of want it hurt to look at. Then you surged up and kissed her again. Your hands went to Natasha’s belt, yanking it open with impatient fingers.

Natasha pushed you back down and kissed her way down your body like she was relearning it. She bit at the curve of your breast, soothed it with her tongue, then moved lower, dragging her mouth over your stomach, your hip, the inside of your thigh. You were already shaking when Natasha settled between your legs.

“Look at me.” Natasha said and you did and Natasha licked into you like she was starving for it. Your back arched off the bed. One hand flew to Natasha’s hair, gripping tight, the other fisting the sheets. Natasha didn’t go slow, she licked and sucked like she was trying to pull every sound you’d held back for five years out of your throat. Your thighs trembled around her head and you made a noise that was half a sob and half a curse and Natasha groaned against you, the vibration making you jerk.

“Natash-” Your voice broke on her name. “Fuck-”

Natasha slid two fingers into you without warning and you came almost instantly, clenching hard around her, with a broken moan tearing out of your chest. Natasha didn’t stop and worked you through it, then kept going, gentler now but relentless, until you were gasping and pulling at her hair, “Get up here..” you rasped. “Now.”

Only then did she crawl back up your body and shoved her fingers back inside you without asking and buried her face in the curve of your neck, breathing you in like she needed it to live.

“I fucking missed you..” she whispered against your skin, her fingers curled deep, fucking you slow and rough at the same time. “Missed the way you taste. Missed the way you sound when you finally let go.” She bit at your throat, not hard enough to mark but enough to feel. “Missed being the one who makes you fall apart.”

You made a wounded noise and grabbed her wrist, not to stop her, but to hold her there. Your other hand was still in her hair. She fucked you like that until you came again, quieter this time, your face turned into her hair and your body trembling under hers. She stayed pressed close the whole time, whispering against your skin between thrusts, how she thought about you every night, how she wrote letters she never sent, how she was terrified you’d never let her touch you like this again.

When you finally pushed her onto her back, it was with shaking hands and a look that said you were done being taken apart. You straddled her stomach, completely bare and Natasha went still beneath you. Her eyes dragged over every inch of you like she was starving. The way your body moved when you breathed, the way your hair fell around your face. The queen and the woman and the girl she had slept with before the world broke.

Natasha’s hands came up to your thighs, gripping tight and thumbs stroking over your skin like she couldn’t believe you were real. You leaned down, kissed her once and slid down her body until your mouth was between her legs. Natasha’s head fell back against the pillow the second your tongue touched her. She was already soaked, already shaking from how worked up she’d gotten just from touching you.

Hours after hours passed, till you finally crawled back up and collapsed half on top of her, both of you were shaking. Natasha pulled you in immediately, one arm locked around your waist, the other hand stroking your hair with trembling fingers. Your face was tucked into her neck and neither of you spoke for a long minute. Till you whispered, “Why did you come for me?”

The question was simple but too simple for what it carried. You looked at her. “Not for the mission..not because I can fight or because I am useful.” Your voice lowered. “Why did you come?”

Natasha stared at you. There were so many answers, because Scott came back and the world had changed again, because you deserved to know, because the kingdom deserved its vanished, because Natasha could not bear the thought of you discovering hope from anyone else.

All true and none enough.

Natasha looked at the ceiling, then back at you. “Because I never stopped looking for a reason to.” She forced herself to keep going before fear could close her throat. “I told myself I stayed away because you closed the borders. Because you didn’t answer or maybe you hated me and maybe you had the right to. I told myself you were better off without me standing in front of you with apologies that couldn’t bring anyone back. But the truth is, I was afraid.” Natasha said. “Afraid you wouldn’t let me in or you would. Afraid I’d find you and there would be nothing left of the person I-” She stopped but it was too late.

Your eyes searched hers. “The person you what?”

Natasha closed her eyes briefly. All the things she had survived and this was still the place her courage thinned. When she opened her eyes again, you were watching her. Natasha reached up and brushed a loose strand of white hair from your face.

“The person I loved.”

The words were barely louder than breath but the room heard them and you heard them. Everything stopped and for a second, you did not move at all. Then your eyes filled so quickly it looked painful.

Natasha’s chest tightened. “Y/n-”

“No.”

Natasha froze and you shook your head once, but your hand clung to Natasha’s like letting go would drop you through the bed, through the floor, through every year between them. “Do not take it back.”

Natasha’s breath broke. “..I wasn’t going to.”

You stared at her. “You loved me?”

Natasha gave a small smile. “That’s what I said.”

“Before?”

“Yes.”

Your voice was fragile now. “Before Wakanda?” Natasha nodded. “Before the garden?”

“Yes.”

“After?”

Natasha’s eyes burned. “Especially after.”

A tear slipped down your temple into your hair, you looked almost angry at it. Natasha reached for it, but you caught her wrist. “I tried to kill it..” You whispered and Natasha’s smile faded. “What?”

You looked at her with a grief so open it felt like being trusted with a wound still bleeding.

“What I felt for you, I tried to kill it. I thought if I could make myself cold enough, if I could bury enough of myself under the crown, under the names, under all the blood, then it would die too.”

Natasha’s throat closed. “It did not.” Your fingers trembled around Natasha’s wrist. “It survived everything I did to it. I hated that most..” You whispered. “Not you. The wanting.. the way I could stand before my people and command executions without shaking, but then hear your name in a report and feel like the floor had gone out from under me.”

Your breath caught. “I loved you too.” You said and the words sounded almost unwilling, as if they had been dragged from somewhere too guarded for language. “I loved you when I left Wakanda. I loved you in Thanos’s garden. I loved you every time I told myself I had become something that could not love anyone anymore.”

Your hand rose to Natasha’s face, “I love you still..” You shifted closer under the sheet until your forehead tucked against Natasha’s collarbone. The movement was small, almost awkward, like you were remembering something your body had learned before the rest of you forgot. Natasha wrapped an arm around you and held on.

Natasha pressed a kiss into your hair. “I love you.” she whispered again, because now that she had said it once, keeping it back felt cruel. Your fingers tightened against Natasha’s ribs. “I love you.”

-

-

This wasn't the first time this had happened.

It was always men, and it was always the ones who just didn't seem to get it. You liked to think you were a nice person—you genuinely tried to be, tried to lead with warmth and give people the benefit of the doubt—but maybe that was exactly the problem. Maybe the polite nod and the friendly smile read as something other than what it was, which was you being too kind to say what you actually meant, which was: please stop talking to me. Please take your cologne and your name-dropping and your incremental lean and redirect them toward literally any other person in this building.

Kate and Yelena had been gone for twenty-three minutes.

You'd clocked what they were up to the moment they'd both excused themselves to the bathroom at the same time, with the poorly concealed urgency of two people who had been eye-fucking each other across the table for the better part of an hour. You'd checked your phone with resignation, having seen this coming from the moment Yelena had suggested this particular bar—which had, you'd noted upon arrival, a single-occupancy bathroom that locked from the inside. You were happy for them. Genuinely, completely happy that they were in love and passionate about it in bar bathrooms on Friday nights. You were also alone now, your drink getting low, with a man standing approximately eight inches closer to you than he'd been when he first materialized at your elbow, and the gap was still shrinking.

He had been talking for a while now. You'd stopped absorbing the content of it around the five-minute mark, somewhere in the middle of his third celebrity name-drop, which you were fairly certain represented a one-time encounter he'd since promoted in his memory to a close personal friendship. Since then you'd been performing the minimum facial expressions required to sustain the impression of a conversation—a small nod here, a neutral sound there—turning your glass slowly on the bar and waiting for literally anything else to happen.

"—so at that point I just told him, look, I know more about this than you do—"

"Mm," you said.

"—and honestly the numbers backed me up completely—"

"Hm."

He shifted his weight, leaning further on the bar in a way that angled his whole body toward yours, and you noticed immediately. He had the confidence of someone who had never seriously entertained the possibility that this conversation might be going worse than he thought, not aggressive but something almost worse than aggressive, simply and completely certain of himself in a way that made your skin prickle. He'd had you at hello, if you were being honest with yourself. You had thought he was nice and this would simply be a casual conversation.  And then he'd opened his mouth, and here you were.

He leaned in slightly when he laughed at something he'd said, and his breath reached you, and you thought very privately that he could use a mint. Several, maybe. A whole pack and a lifestyle change.

"You know what I mean?" he said.

"Totally," you said, having retained nothing.

He smiled, encouraged—the wrong reaction on your part, you knew it the moment his posture opened up—and his eyes dropped to your mouth in a way he'd been doing periodically for the last ten minutes, a recurring check that had started to make the back of your neck prickle. He looked back up and seemed to think the eye contact was going well.

"So what's your sign?" he asked.

"Stop," you said, laughing it off because it was a little funny, like a stop sign. You were still trying to be nice.

He laughed too. "You’re a funny one. Can I buy you a drink?”

"I'm good," you said, lifting your current one to demonstrate.

"Come on," he said, with the smile of someone who had decided your no was a negotiating position rather than an answer. "Let me get you something. I know the bartender."

You looked at him steadily. "No, thank you."

He smiled again, wider, like your refusal was a move in a game rather than a conclusion, and you thought if you had a dime for every name he'd dropped tonight, for every thinly supported claim, for every moment of this conversation—you'd be somewhere considerably more pleasant than this bar stool. He said something else, something about a rooftop bar nearby, and you were doing the math on how bad it would actually be to just text her, whether that was the nuclear option or just the sensible one, when his hand settled at your hip.

He wasn’t aggressive about it, not trying to hurt you or restrain you. He genuinely thought this was a reasonable course of action based on the way he perceived the conversation to be going.

It wasn't.

You went very still, but he kept talking. You weren't hearing it anymore. You pulled out your phone, angled it away from him, and typed. You knew she’d be able to decipher the words being typed, so it didn’t worry you that you couldn’t quite see the entire keyboard as your thumb slid against it.

Bar n Clement. Kate and Ylena in bthroom. Man tlking to me 

The three dots appeared before you'd finished the sentence.

Are you okay?

He wont take th hint

On my way.

You locked your phone, tucked it away, and turned back to the man with the polite expression of someone who had just quietly solved the problem and was simply waiting for the solution to arrive.

"Sorry," you said. "You were saying?"

He was saying something about interest rates. You chose to sing the ABC’s in your head to pass the time.

(-)

You heard the motorcycle before the door opened.

It cut through everything—the music, the hum of conversation, the man who had now progressed to telling you about his apartment—and it didn't go to your ears so much as land somewhere lower, somewhere that didn't require conscious processing. A sound you'd learned to recognize the way you recognized her voice. Your body knew it before your brain had finished the sentence, some deep-wired thing that had developed over a year and a half of her arriving places and your nervous system treating it like a fixed point.

The door opened and she was moving before you'd fully located her in the room.

The leather jacket was the dark one, worn soft at the elbows and fitted to her like it had been made specifically for the geometry of her shoulders, which knowing Natasha it might well have been. Dark jeans, her boots, her hair down and longer than it had been last spring. She had all her ear piercings in, the small silver ones climbing the curve of her left ear, the simple ones in her lobes. When she was just herself, the version of herself that existed in the spaces between everything else, and you thought every time you saw her like this that it was your favorite version, which was saying something because you were partial to all of them.

She wasn't scanning the room. She already knew where you were. She'd known before she walked in.

Her eyes found you and she read the situation in the two seconds it took her to cross half the distance—the man at your side, the placement of his hand still at your hip, the careful neutral set of your face that she knew was not relaxed neutrality but managed neutrality, which were two different things and she had always been able to tell them apart. Something in her expression did a thing, like the physical look of a decision completing itself. She was already done deliberating before she reached you.

Natasha didn't look at him at all.

Her hand came to your jaw—warm, certain, the cool familiar weight of her rings—and she kissed you. You tasted coffee and underneath it the warmth that was just her, and you felt it move through you from the point of contact outward. Down your spine, into your fingertips, somewhere warm and low. The man ceased to be a factor you were tracking for several consecutive seconds.

Her thumb moved once across your cheekbone when she pulled back. Those green eyes, darker in the bar light, asked their question without asking it out loud.

You were fine. She already knew you were fine. She was checking anyway, because she always checked, because that was who she was underneath everything else.

The man had recalibrated. You could hear it in the way he broke the silence. "Okay, so—" his hand hadn't moved from your hip, and now his other arm was beginning to move, angling toward Natasha— "if you're both—I mean, I'm very open-minded—"

Natasha looked at his hand on your hip.

Then she looked at his face. The sequence of it was very controlled, very still, and you watched something happen to his expression in real time—the beginning of the understanding that he had fundamentally miscalculated something—and then his arm finished its motion, trying to loop around toward Natasha's shoulder.

She caught his wrist. One hand, smooth and immediate, and then she had his head and it met the bar with a sound that made the nearest tables go completely quiet. The efficiency of someone who had done this many times and saw no reason to perform it. He made a sound that was both startled and pained. She let him start to straighten and her knee found his stomach before he'd finished the motion, and the air went out of him entirely, and he folded. She stepped back and looked at him on the floor for a moment with the expression of someone completing a checklist, and then, almost as an afterthought, she placed one boot on his crotch and applied just enough weight to make her feelings on the matter clear.

She held it for a moment. Then she stepped off when she was satisfied.

The bar was very quiet.

Natasha reached past you for a cocktail napkin. She wiped her hands—methodical, unhurried, the way she did most things—and set it down. She looked at her hands briefly, checking, and then looked at you with an expression that had loosened around the edges, the loosening that happened when the thing she'd been carrying since your text had been handled and set down.

"Ready?" she said.

You looked at the floor. You looked at her. "We should probably—"

"No," she said.

"But—"

"No." Her hand found the small of your back, steady and familiar through your shirt, and she steered you toward the door with the calm certainty of someone who had already closed the chapter.

Outside, the night air was cool and smelled like the city, and the motorcycle sat at the curb where she'd left it, and Natasha was already pulling the spare helmet free and holding it out.

You took it and stood with it in your hands, looking at her in the low light from the bar window—hair loose around her shoulders, rings catching the light, the leather jacket, the small silver piercings along her ear—and felt the thing that had been sitting warm in your stomach since the sound of the engine on Clement Street.

"Nat."

She raised an eyebrow.

“Aren’t you—”

"He had it coming," she interrupted. The corner of her mouth twitched into her familiar smirk.

The laugh arrived before you could do anything about it. "Okay," you said. "Okay. But are we—should we be worried about—"

"Get on the bike, baby," she said.

You didn’t argue with that tone. She swung on in front of you with the easy automatic grace of someone who had been doing this for decades, and you wrapped your arms around her waist and pressed your face between her shoulder blades and felt the warmth of her through the leather, the solid reality of her back against your chest. The engine came alive beneath you both—low and certain, a sound you felt in your sternum—and just before the helmet went on, she paused.

"The cops know better by now," she said.

You didn’t question it.

(-)

Natasha kept her eyes on the road and let the rhythm of the bike work through her the way it always did, stripping things down to their simplest version.

She'd been moving before she'd finished your text. She had just grabbed her jacket and her keys without deliberation. The whole ride over she'd been running the numbers on how long you'd been sitting there being polite while some man who didn't deserve a minute of your time had taken twenty-four of them, and by the time she'd walked through that door she'd already decided.

She hadn't been angry, exactly. Anger was loud and imprecise and she'd never found much use for it. What she'd been was certain, in the way she was certain about things that mattered to her—clear-eyed and calm and entirely, completely sure of what was going to happen next.

You pressed closer against her back through a long curve and she felt your arms tighten at her waist and one hand press flat against her stomach briefly, just a moment of contact, and it moved through her chest and settled there warm in a way she'd stopped trying to catalog because the catalog had gotten too long.

Mine, something in her said, the way it always said it. Simple and blunt and not interested in being argued with.

Yeah, she told it. I know.

(-)

The apartment was quiet when you got in, smelling like home, and Liho appeared from the hallway within seconds—black cat, hazel eyes. She wound around Natasha's ankles with focused thoroughness and then, after visible deliberation, extended the same courtesy to you.

"Hi, Liho," you said. “Have you behaved?”

Liho walked away, which was the typical response you got.

Natasha hung up the leather jacket and turned, finding you watching her with an expression she recognized—that look, the one you had when you were feeling something large and hadn't decided what to do with it yet. She crossed the room, taking your face in her hands and kissing you. You got your hands into the front of her shirt, and she walked you toward the bedroom without breaking the kiss.

She sat you on the edge of the bed and stood in front of you in the lamplight and just looked at you for a moment, really looked, the way she let herself look in rooms like this one when there was no performance required of her. She'd seen you in lamplight hundreds of times by now, in this room and in rooms that weren't this room, and she should have been past the part where the sight of you did something to her chest. She wasn't past it. She suspected she never would be.

She reached for her own shirt first and pulled it over her head, set it aside, stood there in the unselfconscious way she'd arrived at gradually over years—the scars, the map of everything she'd survived written into her skin, none of it something she needed to manage or explain. You looked at her the way you always looked at her and she felt it land in the place it always landed, which was the place she'd never thought to armor because she hadn't known anyone would aim there.

She reached for you, undressing you with careful hands, each piece of clothing removed deliberately, her eyes following what her hands uncovered with the focused attention she gave to things she found worth her full care. By the time she pressed you back against the pillows there was warmth in her chest alongside everything else, something she'd stopped trying to name because naming it hadn't ever done justice to it. She settled over you and looked at your face again in the lamplight.

She kissed your throat first, finding the spot below your ear that she'd mapped the very first time and committed to memory because your breath changed there without fail. She let herself stay there for a while because she wanted to, her mouth warm against your pulse point, feeling your heartbeat quicken under her lips while her hands moved down your sides in long, slow strokes. She found your breast and her thumb traced circles against it until you arched into her hand, and she kept the pace deliberate, not rushing toward anything, letting the warmth build at whatever pace it wanted to build.

She kissed down your body after—your collarbone, the center of your chest, the soft curve of your ribs—pressing her lips to each place with intention, spending time where your breathing changed. She found the birthmark at your hip and pressed her mouth there, acknowledging it, and felt the small sound you made above her move through her chest. She kissed along the inside of your hip where the skin was thin and sensitive and felt you shift against the mattress, and she took her time there too, not because she was teasing but because she was here and she wanted to be here, wanted every part of this the way she'd wanted it since the first time she'd understood that she wasn't going to stop wanting it.

She pushed your thighs apart gently and settled between them, looking up at you with dark eyes that seemed to explain everything she wanted to do to you.

She slid her hand up the inside of your thigh and found you through your underwear and pressed, and the sound she made at what she felt there was involuntary and entirely sincere—quiet and satisfied, something low in her pulling tight in response. She pressed again, feeling the soaked fabric give, and felt your hips tilt toward her hand before you'd decided to move them.

"Christ," she said softly, almost to herself. She rubbed slow circles against your cunt through the fabric, learning the pressure that made your thighs tremble, and listened to the sounds you were making above her get less managed. "You're soaked through. All of this is for me?"

“Natasha—please—"

"I know,” she said, grinning at you.

She hooked her fingers into your underwear and drew them down and off in one smooth motion, and then her hand was back and there was nothing between her and you. She slid through your folds slowly, thoroughly, the way she always started—learning you again even though she already knew every part of you. She pressed two fingers to your entrance and felt you clench toward them and held them there, not pushing in yet, just letting you feel the promise of it.

"You did a good job,” she said. “Texting me tonight. I hate that you had to deal with that.”

"Natasha," you said. "Please—can you just—”

She pushed inside, both fingers deep and immediate, your back coming off the mattress before she'd finished the motion. She curled them on the first stroke, finding the right place with the accuracy of someone who had learned you completely, and the sensation of that curl dragging against your inner walls made you make a sound that filled the room entirely. She held that angle and started to move—not slow, because tonight wasn't a slow night, because she could feel how wound up you were and had been since the bar—purposeful and steady, the curl on every stroke deliberate, her thumb finding your clit and pressing in circles that matched her rhythm. Her free hand spread flat across your lower stomach and she felt the movement of her fingers from the outside and you clenching around her.

"Natasha—" Your voice was already broken at the edges. "I'm already—I'm going to—"

"Not yet." She eased the pressure by a fraction, held you right at the edge with the particular patience of someone who found the edge interesting. "You can wait."

"I really—I genuinely—Nat—please—"

"You can," she said, against your hip. "You're going to be so good about it." Her fingers pressed deeper and you made a sound that wasn't a word. "Aren't you?”

"Yes—yes, please—I'll wait—"

"Good girl." She felt you clench hard at that, the immediate response you always had, and the pull in her stomach went sharp and low. She added a third finger gradually, feeling you stretch around them, heard the sound you made—different from the others, fuller—and held there for a long moment, just letting you feel it, before she began to move again. The fullness of all three, the curl on every stroke, her thumb working your clit without mercy,  was intoxicatingly intense and you were gripping the sheets in both fists, making sounds that had moved well past language.

She built it and held it and built it and held it—watching your face the whole time, reading every shift and sound and the way your expression kept cresting toward something and falling back—and when she finally pressed her thumb hard over your clit and curled her fingers one final time and said "okay", the orgasm that broke over you came from somewhere compressed and suddenly released, rolling through you in long deep waves. Your back came fully off the mattress, your thighs locked around her hand, and she worked you through every second of it without stopping until you were trembling and pulling weakly at her wrist.

She slid free, looking at her hand for a moment. Then she started moving down your body.

Her lips at your ribs, your stomach, the soft skin below your navel, each place acknowledged with the warm press of her mouth. She found the mark she'd left at your hip and pressed her mouth there briefly, and then settled between your thighs and looked up at you.

She let the spit gather slow in her mouth and released it—warm and deliberate, landing directly on your cunt—and the sound you made was completely undignified and she felt a low pull of satisfaction move through her at it before she lowered her head.

The first press of her tongue was thorough and exploratory, moving through your folds like she was relearning something she already knew. She didn't go to your clit first. She mapped the rest of you with slow attention, the taste of you moving through her, and you found her hair with one hand and held on without directing. Her tongue moved and she heard every sound you made in response.

Then her hands slid under your thighs and pushed them wide.

She was strong, and the experience of her using that strength to hold your thighs open and simply keep them there—while your body tried instinctively to close them against the overwhelm and found that it couldn't, that she was simply holding you where she wanted you without apparent effort—registered in a category entirely its own. She held you wide and lowered her mouth to your clit and the sound you made was loud enough that she was briefly aware of Liho somewhere in the apartment making a mildly concerned noise, and she didn't slow down at all.

She worked your clit with focused attention, in tight circles that varied just enough to keep your whole body chasing, pressure building and redirecting, her arms locked around your thighs. Then she sealed her lips around it and sucked once, brief and precise, and the sound you made filled the room completely.

She pressed the flat of her tongue against you and held. She didn't move and your hand in her hair was not gentle anymore and she didn’t care. She held your thighs wide and stayed exactly where she was, your back coming fully off the mattress again. The orgasm arrived enormous and deep, rolling through you in long waves that started in your chest and moved outward, and she stayed through every second of it—licking you through each wave, easing gradually as the oversensitivity built—until you were trembling and making sounds that were nearly the word stop.

She lifted her head, looking at you. You were flushed, your chest heaving, barely coherent—exactly what she loved seeing. She crawled up your body again, strong biceps supporting her weight over you. She cocked her head to the side, an idea visibly forming on her face.

"Say ahh," she said, her voice very close to a coo.

Your brain processed that slowly and opened your mouth.

She grinned in satisfaction, leaning over you and letting the spit gather and fall from her lips to your tongue in one slow, warm drip. You felt it land on your tongue, the weight of your taste left in her mouth and the thought of what had just happened at the same time, and then she kissed you—deep and slow, her tongue moving against yours. You barely kept up, your body still reacting to the act in ways you didn’t know how to explain. She pulled back and looked at you for a long moment with that open expression, the one that only surfaced in rooms like this one, and then she reached for the nightstand.

She got the harness on with practiced efficiency, no ceremony, the way she approached everything she'd already decided. She checked the reservoir carefully, ran her thumb along it, and came back between your thighs and looked down at you in the lamplight.

"Still with me?" she asked.

You made a sound that was approximately yes.

"Good." She settled her weight, lining the strap up against your entrance, and she pressed forward slowly, watching your face the entire time. She felt you stretch around the strap as she pushed inside, the ridging catching at your entrance and dragging along your inner walls on the way in, each ridge distinct and registering clearly in your oversensitized body. 

Once she bottomed out inside of you, she held there for a long moment—both of you breathing, the strap fully seated, the base of the harness against her clit—and she let you feel the fullness of it, the warmth of what was already inside you, before she started to move.

The rhythm she built was deep and deliberate, long strokes that gave you everything on every push forward, the ridging dragging back along your inner walls on every pull. She felt the base grinding against her clit on each stroke and the accumulation of it was something she had to focus through, the pleasure building steadily alongside yours. At the deepest point the strap filled you completely and she held there on each stroke for a half-beat longer than necessary just to feel it, just to hear the sound you made at the fullness of it.

"You feel incredible," she said in a low tone, and she meant it completely. "So perfect. Taking me so well." She moved deeper and you made a sound that went straight through her. "Mine. You understand that? All of this is mine."

"Yes—" Not really a word.

"Good—fuck—good girl." She kept the rhythm steady and deep, her breathing going less even with each stroke, the base working against her. The sounds you were making were just sounds, incoherent and unmanaged, filling the quiet apartment. She groaned softly on a particularly deep stroke, the sensation of the base against her clit sharp and exact, and she felt your nails in her back at the sound.

Natasha was shaking slightly with the effort of maintaining herself through it, the base relentless, and she pressed the mechanism at the bottom of each deep stroke, small measured releases, and felt more fake cum filling you each time. Every time she bottomed out she could feel it, the increasing warmth and fullness of you around the strap. 

She pulled out and grabbed your hips and flipped you, and before you'd finished registering the position change she pushed back inside from behind. The angle was entirely different—deeper, more direct—and you dropped onto your forearms with a sound that filled the room. She grabbed a handful of your hair, gentle enough not to hurt, tilting your head back slightly, and she felt you push back toward her, your body asking for more before you could have formed the words.

She gave it to you. Of course she did.

She moved fast from here, the rhythm she'd been managing coming loose, her hips striking yours with a sound she felt in her sternum. She was groaning on the deep strokes—the base against her clit, the feeling of being inside you, the sounds you were making below her all layering into something she was losing the edges of.

Her hand came down on your ass—clean and sharp—and she felt you clench hard around the strap at the impact and she hissed through her teeth and smoothed her palm over the heat before doing it again, lower. You made a sound that was not a word and she groaned at it and reached around to find your clit with her fingers.

"Come on," she breathed. "Give it to me. You're so—god—" Her rhythm stuttered slightly and it took her longer than either of you expected to steady it. "So perfect. Mine. Say it."

"Yours—" Not quite a word. "Yours—please—"

She felt you clenching toward another orgasm and moved harder and you came apart. She groaned through it with you and then pulled you upright—her arm hauling you back against her chest, the strap still buried inside you, your back against her front. She held you there with one arm across your chest and her hand splayed across your stomach, and you grabbed her forearm with both hands and held on.

She rolled her hips slow and deep and from this angle the strap hit somewhere new and the sound you made against her throat was broken and helpless. You both loved it.

"I've always protected you," she said, into your ear. Low and certain, nothing performed in it, just true—the way the truest things came out of her, plainly, like stating something decided long ago. "I'll always protect you. You know that."

It was said in desperation, like she needed you to know. She needed you to understand it. You were hers, and she would never let anyone harm you. She’d slam every man who annoyed you into a bar, and she would break any law she needed to, if it meant you were safe and happy.

"You're mine," she said. "So fucking mine." Her hips thrusted deeper and you sobbed. "And you're going to feel that. Right now. You're going to feel exactly who you belong to."

You came completely apart.

She held you through every wave and then eased you down—one hand gentle between your shoulder blades, pressing you forward until your face was in the pillow and your hips were up—and she moved with everything she had left. Her arms were trembling on either side of you with the sustained effort of it, the base of the harness grinding against her clit on every stroke, and her groans were real and uncontrolled as she approached her own orgasm. Each thrust brought her close, and it was the way you arched into her even in your current fucked-out state that allowed her to fall over the edge.

She pushed deep and held there, pressing the mechanism for the last time, giving you the full release. Her whole body was shuddering, her breaths uneven through her parted lips, beads of sweat forming on her brow.

Natasha’s forehead dropped to the back of your shoulder, both of you breathing in the quiet apartment. When she could move without falling on top of you, she pulled out slowly, shushing you softly when you whined.

She reached between your thighs after removing the strap—gentle now, entirely gentle, the shift from one thing to this happening without a gap or an announcement, just a change in temperature—and felt where the fake cum had begun to slip out. She pressed it back in slowly, two fingers careful and deliberate. You made a small sound, and she kept going, until she was satisfied.

"There," she said softly. Maybe it was to you. Maybe to herself. Maybe just to the room.

She cleaned you up with a warm cloth from the bathroom—careful with every mark, her lips pressing briefly and without comment to the ones at your hips—and got you into the sheets with the efficient tenderness she brought to this part every time. She lay down beside you, and you turned into her immediately. She let you, her arm coming around your back, her chin at the top of your head. Her fingers began their slow arcs along your spine.

You lay there in the warmth of her and felt your heart rate making its slow return to something resembling normal. The city outside did whatever cities did, and in here there was just the lamplight and both of you breathing.

The mattress dipped, and Natasha smiled into your skin.

Liho landed with the authority of a cat executing a decision that didn't require anyone's input. She walked the full length of the bed, assessed the situation with hazel eyes that missed nothing, turned in a precise circle, and settled against Natasha's side. Her small warm weight pressed against you both. 

One small black paw extended and came to rest on your neck, and you didn't move it.

Natasha's hand migrated from your back to Liho's fur and then back, the same slow rhythm for both without any apparent awareness that she was doing it, and you felt that somewhere in your chest in a way that didn't need explaining. The tenderness of being included in the same motion as something else she loved and would never fully admit to loving.

A long quiet settled. Liho purred. Your eyes were closed.

"She’s beautiful, isn’t she?" Natasha mused quietly to Liho, the way she talked to Liho when she thought you were asleep. 

Liho purred once, an agreement.

"There was a man," Natasha said, with the serenity of someone reporting mild weather. "He had his hand on her hip." The hand in your hair stilled briefly. Then resumed. "He made a miscalculation."

Liho made a small sound, and Natasha interpreted it as a knowing laugh.

"She's mine," Natasha said, the way she said things she had decided were simply true and required no further support. "And I’m glad she trusts me with that.”

Liho flexed her small paw against your neck.

"Think I’ve been softened up," Natasha laughed, sighing at the end as she stared at the ceiling for a few moments before her eyes came back down to Liho. “Did you ever expect that?”

Liho purred again. Natasha could’ve sworn the cat said “yes, I did”.

Natasha laughed once again, closing her eyes and burying her face in your neck. You smelled like yourself, but you had her scent as well, and that comforted her in a way nothing else could.

Liho was the last to fall asleep, settled against both of you like she knew it was right where she belonged. 

And somewhere, probably at home with his golden doodle named “Gracie”, the man from the bar held a bag of frozen peas to his crotch and whimpered with every breath he took.

He still probably didn’t take the hint.