Cross-posted on Ao3. I am very excited for Clint and Natasha to finally get the time together they deserve in Avengers: Endgame. EIGHTEEN MORE DAYS.
The snap can only be described as a sound. Deafening silence, just for a moment, in which the grasses cease to whisper against each other and their enemies cease spitting and roaring and and all the other sounds of the jungle of Wakanda are extinguished. It presses down on her ears, smothering.
For a single moment, all is silent.
Even as she struggles up from the final bands of earth trapping her against the ground, she knows something is horribly, horrifically wrong. She feels it in her bones, her skin, her very soul, or whatever tattered piece is left of it. She feels it the same place she felt it when Madame B informed her of the final task before becoming the Widow. She feels it in the same place as when Clint had first been taken by Loki. The same place that had ached the day S.H.I.E.L.D. fell.
Natasha jumps to her feet with electro-staves at the ready, but there's no enemy to fight. The moment has passed and she can hear again, calls and gasps of despair reaching her ears but coming from too many sides to follow.
So she trusts her instincts, the ones she has honed over so many years and so many deaths, and sprints uphill, trying to find the team. Dust floats in the air, choking her, clouds of it sprinkled within the close-set trees of the jungle.
When she finds them, it's only five and Vision's bleached corpse on the ground, the Mind Stone missing from his forehead. She knows then what has happened, as Steve collapses on the ground next to another cloud of dust.
"What is this? What the hell is happening?" Rhodes looks to him for answers, but the Captain is incapable of giving any.
"Oh, God…"
So it is Natasha who rallies them. Natasha who has not lost anyone, yet, because she can't bring herself to check her phone when the team needs her—can't bring herself to check her phone when she knows what she finds may just break her. She accounts for all of the dead except her own, forces her fellow Avengers and otherworldly aliens and everyone else who fought for their side to speak. Cap has lost Bucky. Rhodes, Sam. The raccoon, the tree. Okoye, when they finally track her down, T'Challa. Wanda is nowhere to be found. Tony Stark, and everyone else who took the battle away from Earth...lost. Status unknown.
They leave Wakanda in shambles, half its warriors missing and another fourth slain on the battlefield. The monsters, thankfully, have disappeared, but that is one small mercy on a day that does not believe in mercies. One Quinjet is enough to hold all that's left of them. Natasha takes the pilot seat herself, while the radio broadcasts confirm all of their suspicions and fears—that the nightmare they are now living in has spread well beyond the battlefield, the world in chaos as half its people disappear.
Only then, streaking toward the Avengers Compound and whatever bleak future it holds, does Natasha dare unzip her pocket and take out her phone. One press of her thumb lights up the screen. No new messages.
She swallows, once, hard, and almost puts it away right there, but forces herself to unlock it anyway, and send a message that he will probably not even receive. It's in code, their code, but she knows if he's alive he'll decipher it in a heartbeat.
Are you there?
Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear from you - even if it's just a keyboard-smash of excitement/terror for Endgame. Because, same.
Three more (slightly longer) installments to come.