It takes her a bit, to realize.

She had found Clint, but she hadn't done it alone. She'd had help, from Tony and Steve and Thor and Bruce and Rhodey and Pepper, from everyone she still has, and she may be bogged down by the people she doesn't have anymore, but that doesn't mean the living don't matter, and that doesn't mean she doesn't care.

She had asked for help without hesitation, and she hadn't been afraid.

She'd had no reason to.

Maybe she's healing, bit by bit by bit.

"You fucker," Tony says as soon as they walk back into the compound.

"Hey," Clint says tiredly, and his eyes widen just slightly when Tony pulls him into a hug, but he relaxes into it and just sighs into Tony's shoulder. After a moment, they break apart.

Steve walks up to them with a genuine smile that meets his eyes. "Clint," he greets. They clasp hands, and Clint smiles back. It's a little, shaky smile, but it's there, and it causes something to warm up in Nat's chest.

"You two are soaking wet," Bruce frets, throwing towels at the both of them. Nat shares a conspiratorial glance with Clint before wrapping the towel around her shoulders, which really does nothing for her dripping hair or squeaking shoes.

Rhodey looks them both up and down, eyes the umbrella she'd leant against the wall, and asks in mock outrage, "What'd you need my umbrella for if you were just going to get wet anyways?" Natasha shrugs.

Clint looks around the room as if he's expecting someone else. "Pepper's somewhere in the compound," she tells him.

"Kitchen," Tony clarifies. "And Thor's dealing with his people."

"His people?" Clint asks, brows furrowed.

"Yeah, Asgard was destroyed," Bruce tells him.

"The mythical place full of Thor's?"

Bruce winces. "Yes? But don't tell Thor that. He's having a hard time as it is."

"You missed a lot," Steve tells him warmly.

Clint grimaces. "I'm sorry," he says, but they all brush the apology away. They all know what grief does to someone. They've all experienced it.

"You guys need a warm shower or something," Rhodey tells them after a few seconds. "There's a reason I let you borrow my favorite umbrella, Nat."

"Wow. You're really stuck on this, aren't you?" Nat asks mildly.

"My umbrella!"

Clint waves a hand dismissively, and Nat watches as the lines of his face and his shoulders ease just a little, because this is banter and it is familiar and it is safe, and it has not been lost amidst all of this grief. "You don't want it back. I'm, like, 50% sure Hell's Kitchen has acid rain or something. That place has questionable sanitary conditions," he says in a deadpan voice, and Nat snorts.

The others stare at them.

"Riiight," Tony says.

"I've had better jokes," Clint has to admit.

"You think?"

"Hell's Kitchen is only unsanitary to you because you fall into dumpsters so much," Nat quips.

"Now that's funnier."

"I do not!" Clint protests, and it is almost familiar, this ribbing without consequences, with the surety that nothing will hurt. It's been a while.

Pepper walks into the room then with a casual hand resting on her stomach. If it were anyone else she maybe would have gotten away with it, but Clint is observant, and he immediately narrows in on it. "It's nice to see you again, Clint," Pepper says.

Instead of giving her a greeting in return, Clint blurts out, "Are you pregnant?"

At least Natasha had had the decency to confront them in private.

Tony throws his hands up in the air. "Can't keep anything from spies, I swear," he says, which is all the confirmation the others need.

"You're pregnant?!" Steve asks. When Natasha had first met him, she would have classified this tone of voice as him being scandalized. But she has learned that this is just how he sounds when he is surprised.

(Sometimes, it's possible to read too much into people.)

Rhodey groans. "I knew it," he declares.

"You did not," Pepper protests.

"I did."

"Congratulations!" Bruce says warmly, 'cause apparently he's the only other person in this room with tact.

"Pep, you're not even showing yet," Tony laments, then turns towards Nat and Clint, wearing identical grins. "How'd you guys find out?"

Well, nobody seems surprised that she had known before them. Maybe her reputation is still intact after all.

"I'm good at reading people," she says. "If you want to keep it a secret, maybe don't press your hand against your stomach all the time."

"I'll keep that in mind," Pepper says with a rosy smile, not seeming at all upset over the revelation of their secret.

Clint points at Pepper. "Sure, you might not be showing yet," he tells her, "but I've lived with my wife through three separate pregnancies. I know what it looks like." His smile fades, before he realizes and gives them a more strained version.

Nat squeezes his shoulder. Tony walks to his other side and places a comforting hand on his back. "Come on. Go shower, you two," he says. "We'll have warm food waiting for you."

This is how it goes, for a month.

Natasha wakes up. She gets ready for the day. She eats breakfast with at least one other person. She saves some for Clint and goes to wake him up. She gets Clint to eat breakfast.

They leave to do their jobs for the day.

They come back home, eat dinner, hang out with whoever's there, and go to sleep.

Natasha wakes up the next day, and it starts all over again.

"He okay?" Valkyrie asks her once when they are unpacking supplies in what will be New Asgard. Valkyrie tilts her head towards Clint, who is sitting nearby in the grass, watching the ocean waves crash onto the shore far below. Thor sits next to him, and they are silent with their thoughts, the sound of children running and playing the only barrier between them. "Never mind, stupid question," Valkyrie mutters, and Natasha realizes she's zoned out.

"He will be," she tells her. "Everyone will be."

"Losing everyone you've ever had a home in is hard," Valkyrie replies. "You can't get over that too easily."

Nat frowns, admittedly a little hurt over the implication that Clint has lost everything, because he hasn't, because she's still here. But that's how things work, with grief and the dead: they overshadow your life until there is nothing left, or until you can claw your way out of the darkness, opening your eyes and realizing there's still light.

She's working on the notion herself, but Clint...

"He loved them," she says, as if Valkyrie doesn't know that, as if Valkyrie knows who Laura and Lila and Nate and Cooper had been.

Valkyrie pauses in her work, hands freezing over the box in front of her. "That just makes it hurt more," she says after a second.

Natasha can't help but agree.

When the work comes to a temporary stop, Nat drags Clint across the country to do some more personal work.

She's not calling it a break, not this time.

They visit Sarah Wilson and her two toddlers in Louisiana, and Nat wishes that Sam could have seen them more, wishes that half of the team hadn't had to go on the run, wishes that half of the team weren't dead.

"Call us if you need anything," Clint says as he watches AJ and Cass sitting on the carpet and playing with their toys, bittersweet memories flashing behind his eyes. Natasha tries to smile reassuringly, but doesn't quite succeed. She feels helpless.

"Sure," Sarah says noncommittally, not quite looking them in the eye as she washes the dishes. "But you have your own problems, and I have mine. You don't need my help, and I definitely don't need yours."

Not exactly the most successful interaction, but at least she's alive.

Sam would be relieved, Nat thinks, to know they are looking out for his little sister (growing older by the minute), even if from a distance.

"So where are we going?" Clint asks later from the passenger seat of one of Tony's cars. Natasha had opted to drive this time after Clint had driven them from New York to Louisiana. After all, they don't need to travel to the other side of the world. Nat's done with Russia, for now.

"San Francisco," she says, keeping her eye on the road.

"Why?" Clint asks. "Wait...Scott?"

"Yup." Her hands are tight on the wheel.

"You'd think that when half the planet died, he would've called if he was still alive."

Nat shrugs. "I don't know," she says honestly. "We kind of left him there." They had left Clint, too. "Maybe he felt like he couldn't."

Clint scoffs. "Nat..."

She sighs. "Let's just do this, Clint, just this last one. I just need to make sure." She glances at him out of the corner of her eye, sees his frown. "I had to make sure for you, too. And look who I found."

"Only me," Clint says tiredly, and there is silence for a few moments as the endless fields on both sides of the road pass by.

"I still have to try," she says quietly. "Scott wasn't alone. He had his family, and he had Hope van Dyne and Hank Pym. Someone must be alive."

"50% of the world turned to dust," Clint points out, "and yet 80% of my family is dead. Fuck the stats; the stats are not sound. You can't just assume at least one person is going to be alive when all of them might as well be dead."

She knows. She knows the consequences of hope. But she can't help but think...

"Nobody deserves to be alone." It feels good to voice the thought out loud. "If I can help in the tiniest way, then...then it must mean something, it has to."

Clint laughs a little, shaking his head tiredly. "Sometimes I think you're too kind, Nat." Which is not a way she has ever heard herself described.

But. She's trying to make a point here, so, "In this world, I think I'm just kind enough."

She bets Thanos had never accounted for that.

They make a pit stop somewhere in western Texas, just parking the car right there at the side of the road and spreading a blanket in the grass to lay on and watch the night sky. It almost reminds her of their SHIELD missions years ago, when it had been just the two of them against the world.

"You see that kind of 'W' shape over there?" Nat points out.

"That looks more like a squiggly line than a letter, but sure, I see it," Clint replies softly, lying on his back with his hands tucked beneath his head.

Nat lowers her hand to her side and continues watching the stars. "That's Cassiopeia."

"I don't know how to spell that."

She snorts. "You don't need to. Anyways, in Greek mythology, she always boasted about her beauty."

"Yeah, if I were made up of stars, I would boast about it too," Clint says, and she's not entirely sure if he's being sarcastic or not, but she side eyes him anyways.

"She wasn't always a constellation."

"That makes sense."

Nat rolls her eyes. "It does, doesn't it?" And that's when she closes her eyes, trying to remember how Matt had told the story. Matt, who had loved the night sky and its stars and constellations. Matt, who hadn't been able to see it, exactly, but had had a book engraved with constellation shapes and a girlfriend who could describe the sight to him, and that had been enough, when he'd still been alive. She had been enough. "As the myth goes," Nat continues, "Cassiopeia bragged that she and her daughter, Andromeda, were more beautiful than even the sea nymphs. Poseidon took revenge by sending a sea monster to destroy the kingdom." She opens her eyes, frowning. "Cassiopeia was the queen, by the way, and her daughter the princess."

"Much needed bit of context," Clint murmurs.

Yeah, she's not as good at story telling as Matt had been. Or like, talking in general. "Well, when Cassiopeia found out, she had Andromeda chained to a rock as a sacrifice to appease Poseidon and stop him from destroying the kingdom, but Andromeda was saved at the last moment."

"By Hercules!"

"Wrong hero, it was Perseus," Nat says, laughing.

"I've never been good at Greek mythology."

She shakes her head. "Me neither."

"Then how do you know this?"

"...The constellations are nice. Anyways, the squiggly line you see is supposed to be a 'W', but sometimes it's an 'M' depending on what time of year it is."

She glances at Clint out of the corner of her eye as he furrows his eyebrows. "How is a squiggly line supposed to be an apparently beautiful queen?" he asks.

"It's kind of in the shape of her throne," Nat tries to explain.

"Ah."

"You don't get it, do you?"

"Ah."

"Clint."

"Yeah, no. I don't see it, but go on."

Nat sighs, knocking against his shoulder with fondness. "Half of the year, she's a 'W', and the other half, she's an 'M', because she's constantly rotating around the sky. The 'W' is right side up, and the 'M' is upside down."

"Why?"

"Because. Basically, Poseidon put her in the sky as a punishment, so that she'd spend half of eternity upside down."

"That's stupid."

"Maybe so," Nat admits. But it had meant something to Matt, and so, it means something to her.

"I know Perseus is a constellation somewhere, but is Andromeda in the sky, too? 'Cause it sounds like she deserves it more than her shitty mother." There is a small smile curving around his words, and Nat is secretly glad because this may have been worth it, after all. (Maybe they can heal, after all.)

"Andromeda's a whole galaxy," Nat tells him with a grin of her own.

"Good," Clint says promptly. "Where is she?"

"Great question," Nat murmurs, eyes fluttering around the night sky before she remembers. "Look again at the 'W'."

"You mean the squiggly line?"

"Shut up." Nat rolls her eyes. "One of the 'V's' in the 'W' should be deeper than the other, and it points towards a disc like thing. That's not a star; it's a whole galaxy."

After a few moments, Clint murmurs, "I think I see it."

"I hope you do. I thought you had better eyesight than me, Hawkeye."

Clint snorts. "I don't feel much like Hawkeye right now, though."

"Yeah," is all Nat can say. She hasn't felt much like Black Widow lately, either.

They wake up to the rising sun and return to the car, continuing west.

Clint makes sure she eats a sandwich they had packed so she doesn't pass out, which she greatly appreciates. Sometimes it feels like Clint is more broken than her, but other times it feels like he actually has it more put together than her.

They cross the border between Arizona and California before Clint says, "Are we fated to be punished?"

Natasha glances at him for but a second. "What do you mean?" she asks.

"Only half of our families should have died, but it feels like we were the only ones who survived," he says.

"That's not true," Nat mutters through the sudden lump in her throat.

"It feels like it," Clint tells her. "And I kinda feel like the queen from last night. Poseidon attacked her entire kingdom just because of something she'd said. Her mistakes almost killed her people and her innocent daughter."

Natasha blinks. "I hadn't meant for that story to be a metaphor," she says helplessly.

"I know. But I can't help but think..."

Nat sighs, loosening her aching grip on the steering wheel. "We can't blame ourselves for what happened," she tells him, but it feels like she's talking to herself, too. "We couldn't stop him, and when he snapped, we couldn't control who died and who lived."

"Why us, though?" Clint asks, voice suddenly filled with anguish. "Why are we alive when they aren't?" His voice cracks, just the tiniest bit, and he clears his throat, looking out the window away from her.

Nat swallows. "It just is," she whispers.

"That's not a good enough answer."

"Well that's the only answer I have," she tells him. "Surviving is harder than dying, y'know."

"Sometimes life doesn't feel hard enough."

"Life is already pretty hard without you punishing yourself," Nat tells him firmly, glancing to the side and meeting his eyes for maybe half a second before looking back at the road so they don't crash. That wouldn't be the most ideal way to end this road trip.

"I could say the same to you," Clint says dryly, and Nat does not know how to respond.

She is afraid, sometimes, that she has done more harm than good, that nothing in the world will ever make up for the red in her ledger, that her life will never be worth more than death.

After all, public opinion had been against enhanced individuals for years, are still against enhanced individuals, and what is ironic is that Natasha and Clint are only human, and they had been sucked into the war, too.

Sarah Wilson had not been all too happy to see them, and Nat understands, in a way, that she maybe blames them for having taken away her brother when she'd needed him most.

So, she is afraid that they will get the same lukewarm reception (or worse) in San Francisco.

"Aren't you going to go in?" Clint asks. They have been parked across the street from Jim Paxton's house for the past 30 minutes.

"You know what?" she says. "I'm not too keen on going in there anymore. I doubt Scott's ex-wife knows or cares where he is."

"Then what did we drive across the country for?!"

Nat sighs, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "I wanted to talk to Cassie," she says quietly.

"Scott's daughter?"

"Yeah."

Clint sits there for a few moments, staring out the windshield. "Well, it's awfully hard to do that when you're just sitting in the car," he says.

"Shut up."

A few minutes of silence pass.

Natasha turns on the engine and proceeds to drive down the street away from the house.

Predictably, Clint asks, "Where are we going?"

"The Lost and Found," she answers. After the Snap, designated places in every city had become storage for the unclaimed belongings of those who had been snapped away.

"...Why?"

She shrugs, not feeling too sure herself. "You know Scott had his ants. If he or van Dyne or Pym were alive, they would've already known we were here."

"But we do know that Cassie Lang is alive, so we could have just knocked on the front door of the house!" Clint says, like she's being absurd. Maybe she is. She doesn't know anymore. "I've never known you to run away from anything, Nat."

(Clint doesn't know that she had been running away from everything for years, and the only reason she has finally stopped is because she's lost places to run to.)

Natasha sighs. "Just...Scott hadn't had a lot, y'know? He went to prison and had his kid half-taken away from him. It'd be nice to save his things if they're still there, which they most likely are, since practically all of his people are gone with him."

"If you say so," Clint says doubtfully.

"Besides," she adds, "it'd be nice to know what was up with that shrinking building. Like, what the heck were they doing at Fisherman's Wharf? It was a perfectly good pier."

"What are you talking about?"

She glances at him. "You didn't see the news? Right before the Snap, Lang was dealing with some freaky shit when he definitely was supposed to be on house arrest." Like you, she doesn't say. "He somehow didn't get caught, though, so I have to give him some credit."

Clint winces. "I was a bit busy with my own family at that point in time," he lightly reminds her. And then they are there.

"We came here for a beat up van?" Clint asks incredulously.

Nat shrugs. "Everyone needs a form of transportation," she says neutrally.

Clint shakes his head in mock disappointment. "And here I was, thinking he just rode ants everywhere."

She snorts at the mental image his comment creates.

"Do we even have the key for this, or did it turn to dust with him?" Clint wonders out loud. "Because I dunno how exactly we're getting this out of here otherwise."

Natasha can think of plenty of other ways to get Scott's van out of here, but she's certainly not going to tell him that.

She walks around to the front of the van while Clint walks around to the back. Nat blinks and finds something that looks like a control panel. She honestly doesn't know what it is, but she does know that this isn't typically found on a beat up van. "Let's see what's inside," Clint says as Natasha brushes a cautious hand against the buttons—not pressing, just feeling—and tries to understand. She hears the back doors open, and after a second, Clint asks, "What the hell is this? Nat, come look at this."

"What is it?" she asks, walking back around to see some kind of metal tunnel thing.

Clint shrugs helplessly. "Looks less like Scott's and more like Pym's handiwork, to be honest."

They stare at it for a moment longer before Natasha says, "Found some kind of control panel with buttons up front."

"We're not exactly the tech people on this team."

Well then. Natasha takes out her phone, dials a familiar number, and brings it up to her ear.

"Hey, Nat. How's your vacation going?"

Nat frowns. "Not a vacation."

"What am I supposed to call it, then?"

She rolls her eyes. "Tony, I got something for you to look at."

"Good something or bad something?"

"Something something."

It turns out to be a good something, a very good something.

"Maybe this was what Strange was talking about," Tony conspiratorially says to her back at the compound as they watch Scott enthusiastically greet everyone with Clint exasperatedly shaking his head by his side.

He'd flown out to San Francisco as soon as possible. They had taken the risk of turning on Hank Pym's machine just to see what would happen (it's not like they had much to lose by then), and out had come Scott.

Scott, who claims he can fix all of this.

Time travel. What the heck.

"I'm not so sure about that," she says back to Tony.

He frowns at her. "Why can't you ever admit that you've done something good?" he asks, not judging but inquisitive, which is how the old Tony had always been. This resurgence is concerning, she thinks. It means there's hope for something that may not happen.

"We got Scott back, sure," she says, "but that doesn't mean we're going to get everyone back."

"We still owe it to everyone to try," Tony tells her, and he knows that she knows he's right. He glances at her and, after a moment, says, "If it weren't for your determination to confirm everyone's deaths and visit all of their families, we wouldn't be here right now."

"It's not enough," Nat says. She wraps her arms around herself in a mock embrace. "Nothing will ever be enough."

"It will be," Tony tells her determinedly. "You'll see, it will be."

She has no choice but to believe it.