They give her a funeral.
It's quick, it's quiet, and it's not nearly what she deserves, but of the five of them, not a single person seems able to string together more than a couple sentences about what Natasha meant to them. Everyone starts, stumbling through a few choked-up words, then fades into a despairing silence with a shake of their heads.
Steve thinks, somehow, that this is more fitting anyway. She'd always been content to let silence do the talking—she might've liked that their love and pain hung in the air around them, unburdened by clumsy turns of phrase and awkward word choices that could never quite capture what a person could feel.
The real emotional eruption comes after, when the silent tears are interrupted by Tony's quiet question.
"Do we know if she had family?"
Two little gravestones by a chain-linked fence.
"Yeah," Steve answers, his voice low. "Us."
Thor grunts, and Steve knows exactly what is coming before it does—he has experienced the all-too-familiar spiral of denial Thor is about to embark on too many times. He doesn't move as the god in front of him spouts theories he knows are impossible, making plans Steve knows will never work. He doesn't flinch as Clint starts yelling about floating red things, and as his voice gets louder and angrier the pit inside of him seems to eat away at more and more of his chest.
If it was the other way around, and it was down to me to save your life—would you trust me to do it?
"It was supposed to be me," Clint says, his voice suddenly much smaller. "She sacrificed her life for that goddamn stone. She bid her life on it."
Steve lowers his head, eyes closed in an effort to stem the tears streaming down his face. Bruce gives a terrible, heartbreaking roar, and as Steve looks up to watch the bench go flying over the lake he feels a flare of white-hot anger at the sight of the sheer stillness of the water.
How dare the earth look this good when she is not here to see it? How dare—
"We have to make it worth it," Bruce says, and Steve stands to meet his eyes he feels an aching determination start to form in his stomach.
Where else am I gonna get a view like this?
"We will."
-
Clint finds him after they've all shuffled inside, a slightly sheepish look on his face.
"When we—when this is all over, and we put the stones back," he mumbles, fingers jammed inside his pockets, "I—um, I don't think I can—I just can't go back there—"
"I understand," Steve says softly, a sense of resolve settling in his gut. "I'll do it. I want to—I want to talk to her, say a real goodbye."
Clint looks up, the pain in his face a direct replica of the one currently tearing its way through Steve's heart. "She loved you, you know."
The grief writhing in Steve's stomach like a monstrous parasite starts thrashing even harder, and even though Clint's eyes are kind Steve finds it inordinately difficult to meet them. "She loved all of us."
"Yeah, but you, especially—you helped her, a lot. She told me what she told you, what you did for her. You were there for her, all those years, when I—when I wasn't."
Steve gives him a sad, knowing smile and shakes his head. "Don't beat yourself up for that."
"If I had just—we could've had more time—"
"You didn't know," Steve says resolutely. "None of us did. Trust me, if I had, things would be different right now."
-
Vormir is freezing.
It's the first time he has been truly alone since the Quantum realm, and as he climbs, the icy ground crunching beneath his boots, Steve feels a dull hollow start to expand inside of him. it is achingly painful and he ignores it, even as it becomes harder and harder to disregard—he does not want to be alone with it, does not want to confront the dark abyss that has appeared where Natasha once was.
She had climbed this mountain, too; she might have even taken this path, his feet could be landing where hers did, minutes earlier.
They'd climbed a similar one, on Earth, back before the snap, before the world seemed so irreparably full of despair, and she'd joked about going rock climbing sometime, to see which of them could scale a wall faster. They had never gone—and now he would never know—
He thinks he might be hallucinating, because every now and then he thinks he can see her, shivering but still excited, cracking jokes and smiles with her old friend, completely unaware of the terrible bargain awaiting her at the top.
The cliff comes slowly into view, the top surrounded by swirling clouds and what looks like smoke, and as he stares at the sky Steve sends a brief prayer of thanks to his past self for leaving the soul stone for the end. Ice and snow coat every inch of the ground, and the temperature seems to drop with every step he takes.
The suitcase in his hand seems to grow heavier as he approaches the top, and his grief is briefly replaced by unease as a black, shadowy figure begins to form in front of him.
"Steven Rogers", the figure says, his voice sending a burst of adrenaline through Steve's veins, "Son of—"
"You," Steve snarls, fingers curling into a fist.
"Me," Red Skull says calmly, floating forward so that his face, as grotesque as ever, is brought into the dim light of the sky. "Welcome—"
"I killed you."
"You thought you killed me, just as you thought you killed HYDRA. But I am not dead; instead, I have been assigned to a fate far less desirable—"
"Save it," Steve says roughly, ignoring the pounding in his chest. "Where is she?"
"I'm afraid you are too late," the Skull says softly. "Your friends have already gone."
The double meaning of the word is not lost on him.
"I know," he says, trying to ignore the fresh grief that has just jolted through his body. "I'm from the future. I'm here to return the stone. And to take her back. A soul for a soul, right? That was the deal."
"There is nothing that can be done. Surely Barton told you? It is irreversible."
And he knows, he knows, he has known since Clint's knees buckled in front of his eyes, but there is something in him that keeps him fighting even though he knows it is futile.
"Then take me. Take me instead—"
"It will not. What's done is done. You may keep the stone—"
"I don't want the stone, I want her."
The man that was once Johann Schmidt merely looks at him, an almost detached look on his face. "Is this love, Captain Rogers?"
Steve laughs, a bitter, hollow sound that rings through the nothingness around them. "Love. Nothing more than an empty, meaningless word when you're too late."
"But you knew you were going to be too late," Red Skull says quietly. "And you came anyway."
"Yeah," Steve says, voice cracking slightly. "I wanted to make things right, as much as I can. She spent her whole life thinking she was alone. I'm not gonna let her die that way, too."
There is a moment of silence before Red Skull speaks. "For what it's worth," he almost murmurs, "She did not die alone. Her friend—Barton—"
"I know," Steve mutters, ignoring the pang in his heart as Clint's grief-stricken face swims into his mind. "But I wanted to be here too. I couldn't—if she's really gone— "
"What an honorable thing to do."
"Listen," Steve snarls, frustration seeping into his voice. "She was my anchor to this life, my guide through the labyrinth of moral ambiguity that is the present. I owe her this, at least."
"The man out of time," Red Skull says softly. "Yet somehow always cursed with too much."
"You did that," Steve spits, his nails digging deeper and deeper into his palm. "I lost everything because of you. Everything. She showed me there was a purpose. That there's a reason to keep fighting. She gave me back my life. The least I can do is try and do the same for her."
"There is nothing you can do," Red Skull says simply, seemingly unaware of Steve's mounting anger. "The stone—"
Something snaps. "I—DON'T—CARE—ABOUT—THE—STONE!" he roars, slamming the case onto the ground. The latch breaks open, and the orange gleam of light that beams into the air sends another jolt of fury through Steve's body.
"Take the stone," he snarls, both hands clenched tightly at his sides. "Take it, and keep it for the next sick person who wants it for some revolting, demented purpose—I never want to see it again."
He stops, breathing heavily, and Red Skull holds his gaze steadily, a calm and indifferent look on his face.
Steve's voice is cold and eerily calm when he speaks again. "I want her body."
"I'm afraid that's impossible."
"It's down there. I can get it—"
"No," he says softly, a strange glittering in his eyes. "You may talk to it, pay your respects. But you cannot take it. It must stay here, as a reminder of the sacrifice made for the stone."
"Fine," Steve growls, as another surge of anger washes over him. "I'm going."
"It's a long way down."
"I'll walk."
The trek down the mountain is more painful, somehow, than the one up it. The cold silence, broken occasionally by a sharp gust of wind, becomes more unbearable with every step. He climbs downward, jaw clenched against the wind, and wonders briefly where the Skull lives when he isn't greeting people on the way to their death.
The trek down the mountain seems endless, but as Steve's feet hit solid ground and he sees the body crumpled at the foot of the cliff, it seems to come to an end much too quickly.
He approaches the body as if in slow motion, hardly daring to breathe, and as he catches a sight of achingly familiar red hair a sob starts to make its way out of his chest.
His knees buckle as he reaches her side and sees her face. Her eyes are closed—he wonders if she'd done that on purpose—and her expression is so calm that if he didn't know better he'd think she was simply pretending to sleep, ready to leap up and scare him at any moment.
Natasha, once so strong and full of life, is lying limp and broken in front of him, and despite himself he feels a wave of futile denial crash through his body.
See you in a minute, she'd said, her eyes dancing with excitement, so giddy that she'd hardly been able to stand still in her suit.
See you in a minute, she'd said, her face full of the first glimpse of genuine happiness he'd seen from her in over five years. She'd been so joyful, so relieved to have gotten her family back, so excited to be saving the world with them again.
See you in a minute, she'd said, and then she'd gone—
He wonders what her last words were.
"Hey," he murmurs, taking her cold, limp hand. Something hot starts to prickle behind his eyes. "You know, when I told you to get a life, this was not what I meant."
"I just—we just wanted to tell you: we did it. We won. Because of you."
She doesn't respond, and the silence gets more unbearable every second, so he starts talking. He tells her about the funeral, about the way Bruce threw a bench into the sky, and then he keeps going—his voice breaks every few sentences, but he tells her about Bruce's snap, about the final, big, battle, about everyone coming back just in the nick of time, like they always do—
He falters slightly when he gets to Tony.
"I never—I didn't realize until after—I never really apologized to him. We just kind of moved on. I guess I thought, if we actually won, we'd have the rest of our lives to fix things."
His eyes shut, ever so briefly.
"I keep thinking about that, too. How I never say things until none of it means anything anymore. How little words mean when you're too late."
He sighs, trailing a finger along her cold, stiff palm. "Grief and regret. They're like old enemies to me, now. I'm no stranger to them. But it still hurts, every single time."
"I suppose, objectively, that the cost we pay is nothing compared to what we get. But I look at the world we saved, the world we brought back, and I just—I don't know if I have a place in it, anymore. It feels different without you."
Ice crystals are starting for form on her hair, and Steve runs a hand down a few strands, wiping them clean as much as he can.
"For you, it hasn't been that long since you—since you fell. But for me, it's been days, and I really—I just really, really miss you. You worked so hard to make me see that I belong in that world, but—I don't know, Nat, I think I always just belonged with you."
"So I don't know what to do anymore. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I wish you were here to tell me."
Her skin looks so pale in the shadow of the cliff.
"Anyway, I know you can't hear me. And if you could, you'd probably chew me out for walking a million miles in the snow just to talk to someone who can't respond. But I guess I just—I didn't want you to be alone."
Her hand is freezing and unmoving in his, and his voice, hoarse and full of tears, fades away as his eyes rove over her pale, lifeless face. He lets the silence sit with them for what feels like hours, only moving when he feels his body start to go numb from the cold.
He buries her, there in the cold, his fingers scraping at the icy dirt in a sort of numb desperation. He finds a sharp rock to use as a spade and starts digging. The wind, unforgivingly harsh, bites at his skin as he works, but he hardly feels it at all—he digs with a kind of cold fury, deeper and deeper into the cold, hard earth. He funnels his grief into work, just as he always has; he welcomes the sharp, physical pain of the cuts that form on his hands and lets it wash over the ache in his heart.
In that way, he thinks, they have always been similar.
In this world, time is of no consequence, and he is completely unaware of the amount of it that passes. He sinks deeper and deeper into the hole, fingers raw but always working, and when it finally seems deep enough he looks up to find that the sky looks exactly the same.
He lifts his companion, his guiding light, as gently as possible and lowers her into the grave, arranging her limbs so that she appears to be sleeping. As he straightens up, he remembers Tony's funeral—the beauty of the lake and the sky, and the rows and rows of people, of families, all there to pay their respects.
And here she lies, in a rough, hand-dug hole in the ground on a completely foreign planet.
He covers her in the earth, eyes never leaving her body, and after she is completely obscured from view he reaches into his pocket.
The makeshift gravestone expands in his hand, whirring softly, and he leans over to tuck it into the earth near her head. He doesn't understand the technology, but Bruce had said that it would find roots in the ground, that it would work its way into the planet and stay there. A semblance of permanence, an eternal monument for the one who had given everything for the chance to make the world right again.
He glances at the stone, which is still buzzing steadily, and runs a final hand along the dirt beside it.
"Bye, Nat," he murmurs softly as he gets to his feet. "We miss you, and we—I—love you."
Long after Steve has disappeared back into the night, the humming stops. A completed marker stands, small but erect, at the head of a makeshift grave at the bottom of the cliff. It will stand there for the rest of eternity, for nobody and for everybody. On the surface of the stone, a hand-written conscription has taken form, carved painstakingly by a multitude of different hands.
Here lies Natasha Romanoff,
One who would give everything and ask for nothing in return.
May the world remember her for who she was:
A spy, a hero, a friend.
A loved one.