Notes:

I wrote the bulk of the first part before endgame came out, thinking I was preparing for steve's death. i…don't even know what to say

these two parts aren't strictly related, but they're both Natasha-centric, and I didn't want to have a ton of one-shots floating around, so. all aboard the pain train

please come cry with me on tumblr stolethekey

He finds her downstairs.

The rest of the facility is as eerily quiet as it has been the past five years, filled with the same dull despair that has filled everyone's thoughts since that ill-fated day in Wakanda. The light of the moon filters gently through the windows, casting a dim glow on the dormant computers and monitors that were once whirring with life, in use by hundreds of people all united in the pursuit of a common goal.

Steve has no idea how many of them are left.

He can see a sliver of bright yellow light through the door leading to the gym, so he pushes through it, and even though he knows exactly what he's going to find, the sight on the other side sends a slight pang of concern through his body.

Natasha is facing away from him, pummeling the punching bag in the middle of the floor with a force and ferocity that would make an unknowing bystander think it had been one of her worst enemies in an earlier life. The thuds each time her fists connect with the slightly-worn leather are punctuated by hisses of breath, and Steve notes with a twinge of dismay that her hands are not gloved.

"Natasha," he says, but she appears not to hear him; she lands another combination on the bag with a lethal precision and speed as he shakes his head slightly.

"Natasha," he says again, louder this time, and she spins wildly, the intense and terrifying focus in her eyes dissipating slowly at the sight of him.

"Hey," she says, almost meekly, letting her arms fall to her sides. "I'm pretty much done, anyway."

He raises an eyebrow as he walks toward her, eyeing the two gloves that lay abandoned on the floor behind her. "Oh, I don't need a turn. I woke up and you weren't there, so I thought I'd come find you."

"Sorry," she mutters, fingers toying at the edge of her tank top. "Couldn't sleep."

"I figured."

She gives him a slight smile and turns to walk to the benches near the wall, picking up her gloves and letting them dangle from her fingers as she goes. He follows her, sitting down beside her as she starts to unwrap her hands.

He lets out a hiss of surprise as the wrap comes off her right hand and he catches a sight of raw, pink flesh where the skin has been rubbed clean off her knuckles.

"It's nothing," she says hastily, shoving her hand out of sight. "I've had much worse."

He grabs her left hand, only to see the same ghastly sight, and his jaw clenches as he undoes the wrap as gently as possible. "Natasha—"

"It's okay, really, it heals quickly—"

"You could also just wear the gloves. That's what they're for, you know."

"Actually, they're for support—"

"Okay, but incidentally, they also prevent skinning. And given what your hands have been through, one round on the bag wouldn't do that. Which means you're consistently ditching the gloves when you should be wearing them."

"I don't want them," she mutters, taking the wrap from his hands. "I want to feel it."

His brow furrows slightly, and she lowers her eyes to her hands, slowly rolling the wrap into a tight spiral. "I like the physical pain that comes with it. It's a distraction from everything else, but it also—it makes me feel like I'm doing something. Like I'm not just sitting here, waiting."

"We go tomorrow." He reaches for her hand and she looks up, her eyes a green ocean of stormy anguish and dangerous determination. "And you should be as prepared as possible. Which means not ripping the skin off your hands."

She sighs, her head dropping back down as her elbows land on her knees. "We can't fail."

"I know."

Her eyes shut briefly before she whispers her next words. "But what if we do?"

It's a question that rises unbidden in his mind every night as he falls into bed, but hearing the words out loud makes the possibility seem much more real.

He stays silent for a while, his fingers brushing lightly against hers, and when he speaks his voice is slightly hoarse. "If we lose—if none of this is enough—we have to at least do it with the knowledge that we didn't hold anything back. That we threw everything we had at this, and there was nothing more we could've done. I don't think I could live with myself otherwise."

She digs her heel into the ground with such force Steve is surprised she doesn't actually make a small hole in the mat, but when she speaks her voice is soft. "What we're doing, playing with time—there is a very real chance neither of us will live through this anyway."

"I know," he says quietly, terribly aware that this is the first time they've had this conversation, as overdue as it is. "There has always been that chance."

"Yeah, but it's much higher this time—"

"I know," he says again, and she meets his eyes this time, her hand tense and unmoving in his. "But that's always been the nature of what we do. The best we can do is make sure the world is still here when we're not."

He pauses. "The sun will rise, even if we don't. We just have to make sure it's rising on the world we want to see."

She flexes her fingers and winces slightly, but his concern about her pain is buried as soon as she whispers her next words. "And if it's only one of us?"

Something very sharp lodges in his heart, and the compass in his pocket seems to weigh a little heavier. "Then we just keep going," he says quietly, unable to tear his eyes from hers. "We have to. To maintain everything we've fought for."

The muscle in her jaw tightens.

"You once told me," he says, his voice low, "that we have what we have when we have it."

She smirks slightly, the sardonic glint in her eye duller than usual. "Are you going to tell me to listen to my own words and live in the present? Because I may not have a sandwich, but I will find something else to throw at you.'"

He gives a slightly strangled laugh. "No," he says, shaking his head. "I was going to say that I didn't fully appreciate what I had, back then. I didn't see that you were there until you were gone."

The faint, lingering trace of amusement evaporates from her eyes.

"If this is really it—if this is the end—I want to make sure I don't take that for granted again." He tries to chuckle, the choked sound sending an involuntary shudder through his body. "That's what I was going to say before you ruined the moment."

Natasha tilts her head, her eyes somehow simultaneously soft and piercing. "You didn't trust me for a long time."

"You didn't want me to."

She snorts, her eyes shutting briefly as she shakes her head. "No, I did. I thought you did. I thought New York changed things; I thought it made me part of a team whose members trusted each other implicitly. Then I realized that you didn't, and that Nick didn't, and the deeper I got the more I realized that things were exactly the same. Everyone was still keeping me at arm's length because they thought I could turn around and double-cross them at any second."

Steve casts around for the right words to say, but she starts talking again before he finds them, her eyes trained on a spot on the floor near his shoe.

"Clint might've, but he had his family. He had a life. Had something to lose, something to fight for. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn't have anything."

She looks up again, a faint, sad smile ghosting at the corners of her lips. "You were the first one to change your mind."

His grip on her hand tightens. "I'm glad I did."

"You made me see that I had to start opening up, that being a secret was no way to live a life," she says softly. "You may make the world a better place, but you also made me a better person. You helped me find my family. And I'm never going to forget that."

"For what it's worth," he says, trying to swallow the emotion rising in his throat, "Trusting you was one of the best decisions I've ever made."

She narrows her eyes. "What was better?"

"What?"

"You said 'one of the best.' What was better?"

"I'm trying to have an important conversation here—"

"Was it going with me to Vegas on New Years that one time and pretending to be my dumb hot boyfriend while I bankrupted a bunch of rich douchebags? Because that's the only thing I can think of that would be acceptable."

The tension breaks as he laughs, rolling his eyes, but when the quiet settles back into the atmosphere the mirth has faded from Natasha's eyes, replaced by a wistfulness that makes his heart sink.

He pulls her hand toward him and she complies, tucking her feet onto the bench and resting her head on his shoulder. Neither of them moves or speaks again, even as the sky outside the window gets steadily lighter.

A dazzling ray of light hits the punching bag as the sun emerges from behind the horizon, and as they both take in the faint pink and pale orange he feels Natasha shift slightly.

"This may be really cliché," she says quietly, her voice soft and comforting in the warm glow of the sunrise, "But sometimes I wonder what this is all for, whether all the pain and suffering we go through is worth it, and then I see something like this and I decide the world actually is worth saving."

"Yeah," Steve breathes, wrapping an arm around her. "It really is a beautiful place."

She hums, almost contentedly, as the sky shifts again, the gradient gradually becoming more and more blue. "I've said this before," she murmurs, "But there are definitely worse ways to go."

And as the light catches her hair, turning it the brightest mixture of red and gold he's ever seen, he finds that he's inclined to agree.

…

Time slows down as Natasha falls.

It's either that, or her brain has suddenly evolved and is processing thoughts at ten times their normal speed.

Given what she's learned the past five years, she's pretty sure either is possible.

She falls, past miles of cliff and past jagged ledges that could probably hold her weight if she would just reach out and grab one.

She doesn't.

She falls, and as the wind rips through her hair she starts counting the clouds in the sky.

One, and Thor's face flashes before her eyes, unkempt, anguished, and utterly defeated. Then, his face from five years ago—still full of pain, but also full of determination, of power, of life.

A reason for her to fight.

Two, and she sees Bruce, hears him speak about what it's like to feel like you may unravel at any moment. She feels him understand, sees him make peace with his inner monster just as she has been fighting to do.

A reason for her to try.

Three, and it's Tony, sassy and sarcastic but truly, genuinely terrified of the future and willing to do anything to ensure that it is a safe one. The first one she'd met, one who understood what it is like to owe the world a debt that may never be repaid.

A reason for her to love—not one person, but the people and the world around her.

Four, and Steve's eyes are there, piercing so deeply into her soul she feels like she's revealing her darkest secrets all over again. The one she completely and irrevocably trusts, the one somehow least like her and most like her at the same time.

A reason for her to stay.

Five, and her eyes return to Clint, his last, strangled please still hovering in the air. There are tears falling freely down his face, and as her eyes rove over the aged, rough skin of his face she feels a fresh pang of pain in her chest.

The reason for her to go.

She feels lucky, almost. For it—for her—to end like this.

Lucky, that she found what she did before she had to leave.

Lucky, that she had so much to lose.

So many people wanting her dead, and yet—she is the only one who has succeeded. Walking her own path. Paving her own way. Making her own choices.

Even for the end.

It's the only way she's ever wanted to go out.

And for all the time she thought she wasn't going to get that option, for all the time her life was spiraling out of her own control—

She's gotten it back, now. Her life, and her death, fully in her grasp.

She can sense the cold, hard ground coming up underneath her, can feel the end rushing toward her. A faint, sad smile graces her lips as she takes one last look at Clint, still dangling off the cliff side, the ghost of his last scream still etched on his face.

She drinks it in, remembers it.

The upcoming darkness, and whatever comes after—that's her doing, and no one else's. She has chosen its arrival.

She closes her eyes.

Three billion people. Not back, yet, but she's giving them a chance. A chance they otherwise wouldn't have.

The work she's done the past twenty years, the pain she's gone through, was all for something like this. Incremental bits of progress, baby steps toward righting the world.

All of that was important, but it all fades in the face of this, today.

The rest of them are going to mourn her loss of freedom. They'll say that she had to do this, that she had no other options.

But she is as free as she has ever been. This is her choice.

There was a time she thought she'd never even get one.

So, this? This is nothing, but it is also somehow everything.

Her back hits the ground, and the pain that bursts through her body doesn't hurt her at all.

End Notes:

I have…a lot of thoughts regarding nat's death, all of which are too long and complicated to share here. maybe I'll write a long thinkpiece about her character journey and its end on tumblr later, maybe I won't. instead, I'm just gonna say that it has been a privilege growing up with her character. she was the first and only female superhero 12-year-old me had, and I saw a lot of me in her. I grew, as a woman, as a person, while natasha was doing the same; I came into my own and found my identity as I was watching her do the same onscreen. in many ways, she represents the mcu for me, but she also represents a journey that was made easier for me because I had her.

anyway. thanks for reading.