A/N: Mental's second half will be ready soon. As soon as school gives me some free time, I promise. :
This is half the story, so do leave me some reviews and let me know if you want it finished! It's really basic, and I hope you're in the mood for angst. Do go and read Mental, too. I'd appreciate it.
Clint is pretty damn sure that the world stops when Natasha dies.
They tell him over the phone. It was a struggle, Agent Barton, and she fought to the last. She was strong and she didn't want to leave. We're sorry for your loss, Agent Barton, we know how close you were. We're going to be making arrangements for her. What would she have wanted, Barton? Where should she want to go?
The first thing he thinks is that he knows she'd have wanted to see London – to be there in more than simply photographs, to have gone to the libraries. He knows that she would have gone to steal candy from a shop – just for the rush of being a child, being out of pocket money, running in and out to sate the craving for adrenaline. He knows she'd always wanted to see the circus with him. He knows, he knows, he knows–
He knows that she'd have wanted more. Anything but the walls of the white room she'd been locked in, caged to her end. They had always wanted her collared, always wanted her in their sight, and even in her weakest hour, they had treated her as a simple animal. And he knows that the world still takes a long breath and stops when she passes. Because Natasha had always been there for them. She had always been reliable.
He rattles off the quickest answer he knows, and he knows they'll follow his instructions to a T for Fury's favourite. But he isn't at her funeral. He isn't at the cremation, isn't at the memorial service. Instead, he watches through a video feed, with the lag setting him back seconds after the others. He is alone in his cot, holding the phone as he watches the little coffin slide into the fire. It becomes too much. He hangs up.
After all, he is still deployed in Germany for months more. She would ask him to focus on his work.
Agent Natalia "Natasha Romanoff" Alianovna Romanova
died 29th September 2016 in the care of S.H.I.E.L.D..
Two weeks after her death, there is a letter and a card.
The first is a declaration of her death, clean and simple, printed on a small card. It stings, really, knowing that was what she'd been to them. An employee, and yet they'd been her only semblance of family. He reads her name carefully, his eyes running over it over and over again. For once, he notes, they've printed a legal name. It looks strange, now. No one had ever addressed her by it. Not there.
Natalia. Natasha. Natalie Rushman. He wonders sometimes if she had ever liked the cover names. She never said – she was always a chameleon with her identity, always assuming the one that was required by her. Even he had required her to be 'Tasha', and he hadn't the slightest clue if she had enjoyed him or not.
Instead of a letter from the agency, however, he pulls out a thick stack of worn paper. Each sheet has been creased in more than one place, obviously read over and over by someone with careless fingers, or shaking so hard she could hardly have controlled the weight of the stationery. He is shaken, it is true – something from her. It is for him, his name written clearly at the top, her script so familiar and so deliberately shaped.
There is a story, he knows, behind this. There is a story behind the words spun under her fingers with the last her mind offered her. With every last piece of strength her body could offer, he sees at the end, where the words become shaky and the choices become flawed. Where she loses the English and forces herself to continue, almost insisting she will complete it. And he sees the final stroke of a pen through the sheet. Where she'd gone limp.
And he can picture it all. He can picture the way she speaks in her words, and he has never felt so lost – so he returns to the start. It begins with his name, and it ends with the words she'd never said to him. A whole cycle, he muses quietly. She had always... chosen his name as her way of saying it. Of not saying it.
It begins with 'Clint,' and immediately, she is there. She is holding him and she is speaking into his ear. Or she is sitting in her desk at the hospital, and he can't help but think she is still beautiful. She is alone, he knows, and she is lonely. But he will be with her, and she will never leave.
He knows that she had loved him. He knows that she would have wanted to leave with him. He knows that he would have let her.
He isn't there when she leaves him. And now it is not her who is alone.
