The fall wasn't what she'd imagined it to be. In her lifetime, Natasha Romanoff had faced death more times than she could count, this time would be the last.
She wasn't totally sure what she had expected, fear maybe, an all consuming panic as she desperately clung to the last moments of her life. But it didn't feel like that, instead she felt empty, lonely even. Time felt almost frozen. Her previous conversation with Clint still rang in her ears.
"Damn you," Clint had said as he looked at the grappling hook which was currently the only thing stopping him from plummeting to his death.
"Let me go," Tears burned at the corners of her eyes and despite her best efforts to stop them, her fingers betrayed her instinctively reaching towards Clint in attempt to grab onto him.
"No. Please no," He'd pleaded.
"It's okay," Her voice sounded strained and the tears threatened to spill. She looked up at him allowing the rest to go unspoken. There was so much she wished she could have said to him, that she could've thanked him for sparing her all those years ago. For helping her find her way out a the dark. For giving her a home and being her family. She was sure he understood her, just as she could read his sorry expression. They'd been best friends for a long time and somewhere along the way they'd learned to read each other. A weak smile which tugged at her lips and she nodded at him.
Her heart broke in the moment, she felt so distant from the people she loved, which she was, but this was different. And then there was another feeling, one she'd never experienced before, she felt at peace. Before she joined S.H.I.E.L.D. or The Avengers she'd had no place in the world. Natasha had spent most of her life trying to wipe the red from her ledger. "Can you wipe out that much red?" It had been Loki who asked her that. Of course the question itself was empty, a sorry attempt to distract her, but the words stuck with her. Yes. Arguably, Natasha had succeeded in clearing her ledger when she joined The Avengers or even before that, when she agreed to work with S.H.I.E.L.D. She couldn't pinpoint the exact moment it had happened, but it had. She hadn't realized it then, she'd spent her whole life thinking she was a monster, but now she could finally forgive herself.
"There are worse ways to go," she'd said to Steve during the battle of Sokovia. "Besides, where else am I going to get a view like this?" She'd said with a small smile.
It's not that she wanted to die per se, but if she had to, this is how she wanted to go.
Natasha and Clint had sat by a weak fire, it had been after one of their first missions together, both were pretty banged up, waiting for extraction in the freezing cold.
"We're gonna freeze to death," Clint said, mostly joking.
"Relax we're not gonna freeze to death," Natasha scoffed leaning closer to the fire, despite being Russian, she too was miserably cold.
"We're going to freeze to death," Clint repeated.
"Okay, well if that's the case this sucks," Natasha played along, "Freezing to death is so not how I wanted to go out."
"There's a way you want to die?"
"I mean I don't know... I guess I want it to be meaningful. To be for something."
"Someone?"
"Something," She said again, this time more sure of herself.
And she was dying for something, and someone. For Wanda, Sam, Bucky, T'Challa, Fury, Maria, Peter, Shuri, and the countless others who'd died in the snap. This felt right. She wasn't just Natalia, or Black Widow; the master assassin, somewhere along the way she'd become her own person, she'd become Natasha Romanoff, an avenger, a hero. So with acceptance she allowed her mind to stop and she braced herself for the pain. It never came.