Chapter 2
On very few occasions has Natasha felt the world was aligning itself just for her.
The first time was spring of 2005. She’d just turned 22 years old—she thinks. She’s not exactly sure what year she was born, but SHIELD had run some tests on her when Clint had brought her in two years prior and determined she was about twenty years old. Clint and his fiancé, Laura, were seated on the sofa in house together. Natasha was curled up in their La-Z Boy rocking chair. Americans were so funny, naming their furniture after the rest of the world’s view of them.
They were watching something on the TV that Clint and Laura called “March Madness.” Natasha had done her research; it was a basketball tournament for collegiate-level teams, beginning with a bracket of 64 teams, with only one winner emerging. Natasha understood all too well the concept of having only a single winner; she was the only Black Widow alive in 2005.
She just didn’t get why people seemed so obsessed with it.
The game they were watching was the finals—North Carolina versus Illinois. Both Clint and Laura had gone to Illinois, Natasha had learned, and that was where they had met. Laura had forced Natasha to put on a gaudy, awful, neon orange shirt with “ILLINI” on the chest. Clint and Laura were both donning “ILLINOIS CLASS OF ’94” tee shirts and orange face paint. Everything was University of Illinois-themed: the cups they were drinking from, the blanket Clint had thrown on the floor during the first half, the foam finger on Laura’s hand, even their dog was wearing a blue and orange jacket Laura’s mother had mailed in.
Natasha wonders how this had become her life.
When the game is over, and North Carolina has claimed apparent victory, and Clint has drunk himself into slumber due to disappointment, Natasha isn’t angry about it. This is her life, but she likes it. She and Laura quietly clean up the pizza leftovers they’d ordered, fold the blankets, take down the orange streamers they’d thrown over the TV, and within thirty minutes, it’s like the game never even happened.
Except for the fact that Clint, whose orange face painted has smeared from his face to the arm of the sofa, is passed out drunk, clutching an empty shot glass that reads “Fighting Illini.”
With Natasha’s help, Laura manages to drag Clint up the stairs, down the hall, and into their bedroom. It takes them longer than Natasha cares to admit.
“Wait, Tasha,” Laura calls as she’s exiting the bedroom. Natasha stops. She’s gotten used to Coulson and Fury calling her Natasha instead of Romanoff or Widow, and she’s gotten used to Clint calling her Nat, but Laura calling her Tasha is still new.
“What’s up?” Natasha asks.
“Um, Clint wanted to wait to ask you, but I figure now’s as good a time as ever. We’ve been engaged for almost five years now…”
Natasha likes to pretend sometimes that she doesn’t have a heart. It makes everything easier. It’s times like this one, where her heart skips a beat and feels like it drops from her chest, that she is painfully reminded she possesses one.
“…and we were wondering if you wanted to be my maid of honor.”
Natasha swallows. When she meets Laura’s hopeful eyes, she can’t help but choke out, “Of course. I’d love to.” She clears her throat and masks her emotions. “So, Clint’s finally agreed to a date?”
Laura chuckles, looking lovingly down at Clint, still fast asleep on the bed. “Yeah. Yeah. Director Fury was nice enough to give us this big house, and all this land, when we got engaged and Clint started going on more missions. I think it’s time we turn it into an actual home, for adults—”
She rubs her belly. “—and kids.”
Laura has never once surprised Natasha. This is her first time; it won’t be her last.
“You’re…pregnant?” Natasha asks.
The ceremony is necessary. For you to take your place in the world.
I have no place in the world.
Laura grins, nodding. “Just five or six weeks along, the doctor said, but my parents are sort of traditional, and we figured they’d like us to be married before we bring a baby into the world. But that’s not the point. Do you want to be my maid of honor? It wouldn’t require a lot, we don’t really want a big ceremony, but—”
“I’d be happy to,” Natasha says, nodding. She’s surprised that she means it.
Laura’s parents, Natasha learns, are both scientists based out of Germany. The ceremony ends up being Laura’s roommate from college, Coulson, and Natasha.
The day ends up being one of the most memorable of her life.
~
Another day Natasha felt the world was aligning itself for her is when she and Tony are stuck in God-knows-where, face-to-face with one of the daughters of Thanos herself.
Natasha thinks back to what Nebula had told them about her sister. Gamora was fierce, but good, and a warrior. She had died for the Soul Stone, but unlike Natasha, she hadn’t done it willingly.
Natasha is willing to bet Gamora wants to get out of here—back to her life, back to that Quill guy, even that raccoon.
“How did you get here?” Gamora demands, accentuating every syllable harshly, her stance defensive.
“Well, considering we don’t know where here, is, exactly…” Tony mutters, shrugging. He looks around dramatically. “You wouldn’t happen to know where we are, would you?”
“Ignore him,” Natasha recommends, and does just that when Tony loudly scoffs at her. “My name is Natasha Romanoff. This is Tony Stark. We knew your sister, Nebula.”
Gamora doesn’t flinch. “Many people know my sister. Many people would like to see her dead. That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
“Thanos got all of the Stones,” Natasha tells her. Gamora looks disappointed but not surprised. “He used them to kill half the universe. Our team, along with your sister and Rocket, went back in time to get them to undo what he did.”
“And, I might add, it worked,” Tony piped. “At the cost of our two lives. Shit happens, I’m sure you know that. But now we don’t know where we are or why.”
Gamora sits down on the sand. “My father sacrificed me to obtain the Soul Stone. I don’t know where we are, exactly. I think we’re in a place where…nothing matters. I feel like I’ve been here eons, and not once have I had to eat, or drink, or sleep.” She looks at Natasha, and Natasha recognizes pain behind her eyes. “I tried to drown myself in the water. Multiple times. Nothing happens. We can’t die because we already have.”
Natasha bristles. She had a feeling she was dead; that’s what she was prepared for when she launched herself off a cliff in front of her best friend. However, she hadn’t been prepared to be able to feel or even be conscious after it, so there was a part of her—a hopeful, stupid part of her—that wanted to believe she wasn’t dead. That she could still go back.
“Okay, no,” Tony called, making a time-out motion with his hands. “I don’t know about you, miss, but Natashalie and I have things worth getting back to. I put on the gauntlet with the stones to snap away your daddy-o, and it killed me, because I guess the universe wasn’t too fond of little humans back in the day, but whatever. But her?” He points to Natasha. “She willingly launched herself off a fucking cliff so her best friend wouldn’t have to, so that he could see his family, who died when your father killed half the universe. She isn’t meant to be here. Neither are you. And our friend Thor, you know him, Quill and the rest of your gang did, said that when people died, they went to Valhalla.”
Natasha remembers when Thor told them about the supposed Great Hall. She remembers T’Challa telling her about his culture’s view of death.
Death is not the end. It’s more of a stepping off point. You reach out with both hands, and Bast and Sekhmet lead you into the green veld, where you can run forever.
She also remembers the Red Room training on death. They viewed it as something to happen to the weak, something that should not be rejoiced or welcomed.
You’ll break them.
Only the breakable ones.
At the mention of Quill, Gamora’s hardened expression softens and she stands.
“Okay,” she says. “You’re right. I’ve heard of Valhalla. And I don’t think this is it.”
“Damn right, it isn’t,” Natasha replies. “We died for the rest of the universe. We have nothing to lose by trying to get back.” She holds out her hand down to Gamora.
Gamora takes it and stands up. “What now?”
~
Gamora had been staying in a tall house overlooking the beach. She leads them back there, and although it doesn’t come close to Natasha’s old suite in the Avengers HQ, it’s a far cry better than the simple room she had before Tony found her.
“I can’t believe I’ve been here for five years,” Gamora said, shaking her head. “It feels long, sure, because there’s been nothing to do. But five years…so much could have happened.”
“Not much did,” Natasha reassures her. “Not many people were able to move on after half the universe was gone. Suicide rates went up for awhile, and then leveled off. Crime rates went up, then leveled off. Pollution and poverty went down, way down, but many governments fell too. It’s hard to say if Thanos’ goal was even fulfilled.”
Gamora shook her head. “It was. He was sick. But no pollution? No hungry mouths? That’s the only thing he ever wanted. Who cares about bureaucracy if everyone is healthy and happy?”
Tony suddenly angrily looms over her. “I’m sorry, are you agreeing with him? Because millions of people died because of your dad! Everyone lost someone! The world would have been better off without him acting like…acting like God!”
His chest is heaving. Natasha almost instinctively goes to check the arc reactor before she remembers. They’re dead. It doesn’t matter.
Gamora shakes her head. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. This is just a lot to process. I’m trying to think like Thanos, remember what he knew. See if there’s some way out of here.” She looks at both Tony and Natasha, her expression sober. “I promise I’ll try everything I can to get us back. I have…someone I love still out there. I’m sure you both do also.”
Love is for children. I owe him a debt.
Damn, Barton, Natasha thinks playfully as she watches Gamora and Tony argue about the state of death they’re in. I hope I repaid you.
~
Tony exhales. “You know, I’ve been thinking it over, and I’m not really sure about this shit—”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Natasha snaps. She sets down her knife in the sand and marches over to Tony. “I haven’t said anything since you got here because I wanted to be nice to someone who just died, but I can’t just sit back and let you say things our friends who are still living wouldn’t like.” Her serious expression quickly gives way to her trademark smirk. “Watch your damn language, Stark. Seriously.”
Tony stares at her for a moment before chuckling in disbelief. Natasha cracks a grin, and the two of them are laughing hysterically together in a matter of seconds while an amused Gamora watches them.
“Oh, I have to say, I do miss the good captain,” Tony says, shaking his head in amusement. “I wonder what he’s doing without both of us. I wonder if he grew that beard back. Pep showed me pictures, and I gotta say, I might even prefer the beard.”
“I did,” Natasha says seriously.
“Okay, Tony, are you actually ready?” Gamora asks patiently. She has the most difficult job in the plan they’ve messily concoted.
The plan entails…dying again. Natasha never thought she would be so used to talking about dying.
There are worse ways to go. Besides, where else am I going to get a view like this?
Each of the three of them hold a weapon. Natasha holds her tiny knife from her belt, Gamora a foreign-looking weapon with double-sided blades, and Tony a sharp spear that Gamora had made from her time here. The plan is for them to kill each other at the same time.
You can’t die twice. They have to go somewhere after it happens.
Or maybe, the cynical part of Natasha thinks, nothing will happen, and they’ll just be left weaker and bloodier than they were before.
Gamora, for the first time since Natasha has met her, looks scared. “Maybe there’s someone else still out here. Someone who can do it for us. With all three of us looking, we should find something.”
“It should be us,” Natasha argues, gripping her knife. “We can’t trust anyone else. It has to be us.”
Staying together is more important than how we stay together.
“Okay,” Tony eventually agrees. “Let’s just do a triangle thing here. Nat, you kill me, Fiona, I kill you, and you kill Nat over here.” He shakes his head. “I literally hate that those words just came out of my mouth.”
Gamora doesn’t say anything about the Shrek joke. Natasha realizes she probably doesn’t even understand it.
“Make sure you go for the carotid, Tony,” Natasha advises.
“I’m offended that you think I can’t kill someone, Nat.”
“Three,” Gamora cuts in. “Two. One.”
Blackness. Again.
Well, shit.
~
Natasha awakens on a cold, rocky surface. Her hair whips around her face from the wind. She keeps her eyes shut, pretending to be unconscious still, before she gets a better understanding of her surroundings.
She hears Gamora and Tony moving to her left. So they’re…not double-dead. That’s a good sign.
She determines that her neck is fine, along with the rest of her body, so they truly can’t get injured in this place. When she’s confident there’s no one else with them, she slowly stands up.
“Where the hell are we now?” Tony asks, looking around.
Gamora and Natasha share a wary look.
They’re on the cliff on Vormir. The purple sky and the wind in the air are exactly the same as when Natasha fought with Clint over who would throw themselves off the cliff.
“Vormir,” Natasha answers, looking around.
“Oh, little bit of a rough spot for both of you. Sorry,” Tony says. He sits down on a rock. “Who are you looking for?”
“The one who told us about the Stone. I think he’s the guardian here,” Natasha answers. “He…wasn’t human. He floated.”
“The Stonekeeper. His skin was red,” Gamora adds. “I don’t know what species he comes from. Not any that I have encountered.” She paused. “Natasha, you said it was 2014 when you and your friend took the Soul Stone?”
Natasha nodded.
“He was a Stonekeeper. His only job was to guard the stone. Once someone gets it, he’s free to do as he wishes,” Gamora explains. “You said your friend, the Captain, put it back. That’s how Thanos and I came here in 2018. But Thanos got the stone, and he never put it back…”
“So, Red Guy is gone,” Natasha finishes, nodding. “Okay. So why did we end up back here when we died again?”
“This guy,” Tony cuts in. “He wouldn’t happen to look like a skull, would he?”
“He…did, actually,” Gamora answers.
“Romanoff, back me up here…Hydra…1940’s…Adolf’s good friend…there’s no picture evidence of him, but—”
“I’ve heard of what happened to Schmidtt,” Natasha tells him. She sits down next to him, thinking. There’s no way Johann Schmidtt, or Red Skull, is the floating figure who calmly watched her and Clint fight over who got to throw themselves over the cliff. She’d heard stories, back before SHIELD revealed itself to be HYDRA, about Schmidtt. He’d gotten a hold of the Tesseract one day, the one thing he’d cared about, and just…disappeared.
Is it possible he ended up on another planet, made to guard the stone? Could this connection somehow lead them back?
You never know. You hope for the best, then you make do with what you get.
God, Natasha misses Fury right now. He’d know what to do.
“Let’s find him,” Tony decides, standing up. “If his goal was to work with the stones, figure them out, use them, he’s going to be looking for the other ones. Probably the Tesseract, since that’s the one he was most familiar with, after the Soul Stone.”
“The Tesseract. The Space Stone?” Gamora clarifies. “It can open portals from one part of the universe to another. If we find him, he could lead us to the Space Stone.”
“Which could help us get back, if we’re in the same universe as the people we know,” Natasha finishes. “We have to think this through. We don’t even know what year it is now. We don’t know if we opened some weird, alternate timeline. So many things can go wrong.” Mainly, she doesn’t want to get her hopes up.
“They could,” Tony agrees. He smirks at her. “Since when has Tony Stark taken the boring route?”
“Since never,” he finishes for himself, standing up. He takes a dramatic bow and begins making his way down the steps. Gamora nods at Natasha and follows him.
“You coming, Nat?” Tony asks, turning around.
Natasha takes a deep breath. She’s followed Tony when he was dying from palladium poisoning; she’s followed him when aliens destroyed her favorite city in America; she’s followed him when his creations were the ones wreaking havoc on an entire country in the sky; she’s followed him when her best friend didn’t, couldn’t, Laura wouldn’t let him; she’s followed him through fucking time travel. Is this where she draws the line?
Even if there’s a small chance…we owe it to everyone who’s not in this room to try.
“Yeah,” she answers, smiling. “Right behind you.”