Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s a martyr between Natasha’s legs.

He’s her own personal San Sebastián, leaking reed arrows and sin, and he’s going to die in three weeks’ time. He looks enough like Clint Barton, a cheap facsimile, that Natasha’s willing to have sex with him before she passes over Scrapper-67, like she’s passed over the rest. He’s very good at eating her out. He’s very good at doing what she asks of him. He’s very good at being nothing like Clint in every way that matters. Sometimes, her and Clint had sex. Sometimes, they didn’t. It never made it easier. He kept dying for her and she kept trying to save his life, and she kept thinking about curling into his arms and ceasing her breathing.

She keeps thinking about what would happen if they both threw themselves off that fucking cliff. She keeps thinking about how they’d have made a hiding place out of their own bodies to delay their parting, and how with broken ribs and one last kiss, it would be the only time that Natasha Romanov died warm.

Every morning, it’s another chapter of the same story where the heroine shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning it’s the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out: You will be alone always, and then you will die. Natasha will look in the mirror and wonder whether she should cut her hair short again. She doesn’t notice it grow, but it’s ghosting against her knees again, and she’s never worn it this long in life.

Giancarlo is forty-six years old, and his wife was murdered during the Blip, and he wasn’t there to protect her. Her life fell apart, she lost the house, the kids ran away, one of the kids weren’t there to run away, her sister hit a tree on an empty road and her case was closed as a suicide, but he doesn’t fucking believe that. He says that she’s murdered, and that he’s going to figure out who did it. Natasha meets him because he’s the owner of New York’s best food truck, serving the greasiest street meat. It never closes, or if it does—Natasha’s never seen it close. It closes when Giancarlo wants to be away, and she’s eaten a lot of subs on Giancarlo’s glorified bird feeder.

It's two days after T’Challa dies in battle with a cancer festering in his gut, and Natasha’s still just a woman, so she doesn’t know that yet. She’s catching a plane in three hours, and it’s going to Wakanda. You can take international travel to Wakanda now, and she doesn’t have to bribe Coulson, who she’s pretty sure is currently alive but she never knows with that guy, to get her a Quinjet. She just booked a Qatar Airways because they’re not great, but her other option in a pinch was British Airways, and she fucking hates British Airways on principle because they lost her bags once. It’s two days after T’Challa dies when Natasha learns that Giancarlo is partial to rolled-up dollars bills and alien conspiracy theories.

“I don’t actually think that the Black Panther died in battle like the news is saying,” Giancarlo says while Natasha’s biting down on her usual deli meat of choice. Steve thinks her taste is disgusting, but Steve’s dead and doesn’t get to critique the fact that Natasha likes cheap mortadella. Steve threw himself in front of Thanos and got his head ripped right off his shoulders. He threw himself in front of Bucky, not Thanos. Thanos was just there and wanted to hurt someone. Bucky killed himself in Sam Wilson’s guest bathroom.

“That’s not how superheroes die,” Giancarlo continues. “It wasn’t even aliens! It should be aliens. It was just terrorists.”

Tony died of an antibiotic-resistant infection in a Wakandan hospital after harnessing the Infinity Stones and being in a coma for eleven weeks. Clint died on Vormir. Natasha knows a lot about Vormir, now. Natasha knows every nook and cranny of fucking Vormir. Natasha knows that if she punches the Red Skull in the face, nothing happens even when she swings with all her might. T’Challa got shot in the back of the head by someone he didn’t see after taking off his helmet to comfort a frightened child. Natasha doesn’t know where Thor is. She doesn’t know if he’s still alive. She doesn’t know if he wants to be. Bruce is somewhere in Asia, giving classes over the internet and he’s still green. Natasha’s eating a sub from a guy who sells meat in the heat, on the street. Hey, that kind of rhymes.

“Well,” Natasha says. “That’s just the way that people die. Superheroes are, at their core, people. Wasn’t that the whole shitshow with the Accords? Wasn’t that what we were all fighting about?”

“Well,” Giancarlo huffs. “I just don’t believe it. You people are supposed to be death-defying. Practically indestructible. Superheroes never die. Have you ever read a comic book? They just wait to be resurrected.”

Natasha really tries to make a life for herself or at least remind herself that she’s still living. She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to age, and she doesn’t know how much time’s actually passed for her. She knows that she doesn’t look older, and that sometimes she can’t touch people because her skin will burn them. Once, she fell straight through an upholstered, wooden chair, because her just sitting on it set it alight. T’Challa joked about suddenly gaining an appreciation for cement furniture. Her golden tears burn her sun-swallowing cheeks as they fall.

She doesn’t think that she’s aged, since she drank it down. She feels like she has, but she doesn’t look it. Her hair keeps growing like it used to. She moves from her half-hearted base on Sakaar because she misses the seasons of New York. She meets Loki in a bar and buys him a drink. He doesn’t ask what happened to her, or why she doesn’t seem to need to breathe air. He tells her that she should learn how to braid her hair, instead of just letting it bury her in curtains of red. He compliments the colour choice of her leather jacket.

He buys the next round, and they don’t talk about New York. Instead, he tells her that if she’s interested in killing alien beasts and tanning their hides, she should go to Scrapper-33, where there’s a mean fuck of a varren that’s ripped adventurers apart for fifty years. Natasha snorts, asks him if he’s trying to get rid of her. He just smirks, and Natasha thinks about New York, even though she doesn’t want to. She thinks about how she promised him that if she ever got the chance, she would torture him with a car battery hooked onto his balls for what he did to Clint.

She’d show him that she knew exactly how to torture, and that it didn’t matter that he was a god or an alien prince, or whatever the hell he was supposed to be. She was Natasha, and she had a bone to pick with him, and that was enough. She didn’t even have to be the Black Widow. And now he’s buying her drinks, and she’s letting him, and her tears burn her cheeks when she cries.

The TVA’s trying to kill her, and she’s not sure that it’s because of what she’s done. She doesn’t think that she was supposed to swallow a sun and become a half-goddess.

She doesn’t ask Loki what happened to him, or why he’s not dead. She writes down how to get to Scrapper-33 and tells him that she already knows how to braid. The few times she died, she died with her hair braided.

Natasha’s not supposed to be here, but she made a promise when she left for the cause. She said that she’d do whatever it took. If that means making a life out of chasing a ghost, she’s going to do it. If it means giving everything she’s got, letting it take everything she’s ever had—as long as it’s just her it’s taking from, she doesn’t care. She said she’d do whatever it took. She’s going to keep her promise. She’s looking at the power to change her life, bottled down.

Natasha didn’t think about the consequences, and she doesn’t remember the days after.

Sam and she agreed that they had to keep an eye on Bucky, and Natasha agreed to start calling him Bucky instead of James when doing just that made him sob uncontrollably and Natasha swallow awkwardly, Sam glaring at her from where Bucky had buried his face in Sam’s shirt, clutching at it. Sam was frantically signalling for her to do something, and Natasha was too tired and dust-stained to figure out what he wanted, so she just walked off and took a shower.

She tried not to think about it, when she was scrubbing herself clean, rubbing her skin red and raw. She tried not to think about the last time. She tried not to think about falling to her knees in Wakanda, skinning them, and she tried not to think about raising her hands, dust-stained, and thinking: Oh my God, it’s people. Oh my God, it’s everywhere. Oh my God, I’m breathing in people. I’m going to scrub people off me. Oh my God.

When she walked out into Sam’s living room, Bucky was passed out and Sam was slowly tilting him towards the couch. There was a used intramuscular on the coffee table. Natasha didn’t say anything about it, just grabbed Bucky’s right side before he could pitch forward and bury Sam. Sam took his left, and they got him on the couch.

Natasha dropped down to sit cross-legged with her back against the side of the couch when they were done.

“I’m not good at this shit,” she said.

“Yeah, I gathered,” Sam answered. “Neither am I.”

“You are,” Natasha insisted. “You’re the only person I know who’s good at this shit. You’re not allowed to tell me that you’re not good at this shit. I’m going to start screaming if you do. Throwing plates and shit. Right at your face.”

Natasha’s hair was wet and disgusting against her back, limp, and Sam was still filthy. So was Bucky.

Van Sayako is “twenty-six in your Earth years”, blue-skinned and sporting a bright red mechanical arm made from stolen scrap. She’s not from Sakaar, no one really is, or that’s what she tells Natasha, but she lives there and she’s making a time machine. She’s making a time machine because she had a brother, and then she didn’t, and she blames both Thanos and the Avengers for it. She doesn’t really know who the Avengers are, but she’s heard of their name. She’s heard that they’re the ones who undid what Thanos did in the first place. Van Sayako has a body plan like a human, or close to it, and a chip implanted in her neck that’s meant to translate her native language into one that Natasha speaks, and vice-versa. Van Sayako’s debating whether she wants to kill the Avengers.

Van did the implantation herself, because she didn’t have money, but she did have a good head on her shoulders. She’s got long black hair, slick down her back like an oil spill, and moving to grab a screwdriver for her when she needs it. Natasha watches her move through her laboratory-slash-auto-shop, sitting on the counter where she serves customers. She’s got thick binders of all the ways she can modify anything that can fly through space. She’s done work for Peter Quill. Peter Quill’s the reason that Natasha Romanov knows about Van Sayako. Van Sayako has bright yellow skin and ridges on her face, and she’s got an electric blue prosthetic arm made from spaceship parts after hers got torn off by a varren.

Natasha thinks that Tony would like to have met Van, even if he’d have hated Van’s taste in alcohol. Van’s drinking the alien equivalent of a cheap-ass screw-top wine, and she’s swaying her hips to thrashing industrial music, welding together parts of the time machine that she doesn’t bother to explain the workings of to Natasha. Natasha’s here because Quill, despite barely having a single conversation with her, vouched for her aim. Van needs someone who can shoot, because she’s missing an eye and she hasn’t figured out how to fix her depth perception yet even though she’s willing to rip a hole in spacetime or something.

Tony would really love Van Sayako. Tony would get a kick out of getting her drunk, and making a god particle in the basement or passing out trying. Quill recommended Van Sayako when Natasha was getting him drunk, and she admitted that she’s considered leaving Earth. She hadn’t considered leaving Earth until she’d blurted it out. She didn’t know what she was considering doing. She should probably go search for something. If she wasn’t a coward, she’d find Yelena, but she just didn’t know how she’d face her. Maybe she could find Alexei and sleep on his couch instead of Sam’s, but then she’d have to listen to him loudly fuck Melina and get fucked by Melina. Somehow louder.

“I think that there’s some secret facility where they waterboard aliens until they pick new trends,” Giancarlo tells her as he’s serving her usual and Natasha’s sitting in front of him, and she’s listening, like she always does. She’s trained to know where she’s got people, and Giancarlo is unpredictable and Sam’s nagging her to get victims for the post-Blip (stupid name) support group that he’s attending. Maybe if she brings him Giancarlo, he’ll fuck off her back about her attachment style and she’ll stop thinking about how she should set fire to his collection of self-help book and be a good sort-of-roommate instead. “That’s why everyone suddenly had an air fryer at the same time. I had that guy—what’s he calling himself—Star Lord, eating here the other day. Should’ve asked him, but he was too busy talking about some alien bitch makin’ a time machine.”

Van Sayako doesn’t give a shit about why Natasha wants the time machine. Natasha comes recommended by Quill, and Quill gave Van Sayako money when she really needed it, and she fixed Quill’s ship when he was fucked up a shit creek. That’s how he phrases it. Van Sayako says that she’ll fix anything for the right price. Natasha can’t stop looking at the ridges on her skin or listening to the sharp metallic twang of her voice when she speaks. It sounds like James’ arm smashing against Steve’s shield. The only thing Van Sayako cares about is that Natasha was there, when Tony Stark and Bruce Banner built a time machine, and Natasha remembers enough about how they did it for Van to reverse-engineer.

Natasha isn’t sure whether she believes they’re actually going to pull it off, but Van isn’t Tony, and Natasha isn’t Bruce and Natasha didn’t believe in it the first time, either but they did it and Natasha looked her past in the eye, and Steve fucked up, and Clint died, and Natasha fucked up. She doesn’t have anything to lose, and she sees a whole new world, while she’s waiting for Van to finish up their prototype.

She goes out for drinks and orders in languages she doesn’t have a hope of understanding, and visits cities with names that don’t make sense to her, layouts that seem like they’re from a drugged, discordant dream of hers, when the world was still big and Natasha still missed Ohio.

Natasha almost misses everything going wrong, and then everything going terribly, terribly right, because she’s out drinking. Fuckin’ Russians. And then she’s in Van’s little shack that’s mostly the remains of all the ships that came before her, and there’s a flash of bright light, someone’s restraining her, and it’s bright orange and there’s another flash of light and Natasha’s dizzy and weak, and she thinks she might’ve screamed but never begged, and then she’s in a cell. And Natasha Romanov has never been good at being in cells or being told she did something she wasn’t supposed to.

Van’s recalibrating her fake eye and sighing at Natasha.

“I was supposed to be the god,” she moans, her syllables clipped and clashing, sputtering and sparking. Something’s snapped in her circuitry, and she’s not letting Natasha help her fix it. Natasha’s just the idiot who holds the flashlight, and she can’t even do that. She’s shaking too much. It feels like she’s burning up from the inside. Maybe she is. Van agreed that whatever she did, it might be what kills her. Natasha doesn’t know what the fuck she was thinking. She’s repeated that many times. She didn’t know what she was thinking, and it wasn’t on purpose, even though she drank it down. And now, she might die.

Van’s mean enough to point out that Natasha doesn’t seem very stressed about it. Natasha’s hand keeps shaking as she holds the flashlight, and she says how she used to always have steady hands. She wouldn’t have lived this long if she didn’t, she adds.

“Well,” Van reminds her. “You just did something that’s very close to drinking the power of a sun. I’d be more surprised if your hands weren’t shaking. To be honest, I’m surprised you’re even alive.”

Natasha doesn’t answer that, and she watches Van fix herself. They didn’t save Van’s brother, and they didn’t save Clint and Natasha’s sorry, but she doesn’t know how to say that without sounding like she’s rubbing salt in the wound or pouring blood all over an old cut. And she’s not sure whether the blood’s hers, anymore.

Natasha thinks about the burning as Van works. She thinks about the burning, and she thinks about her fathers and her mothers, and she thinks about how Steve smiled at her and told her she was the first person to take him seriously as something other someone who had all the right answers, or a comic book character, pulled right out of the pages. Natasha thinks about she hates calling it The Blip, and she hates Tony’s suggestion, The Decimation, even more.

She thinks about Yelena, and she thinks about the burning in her hands, and how they shake as she holds the flashlight. She thinks about how she did something she shouldn’t have, and something she doesn’t know the consequences of, and she thinks about how Van shouldn’t be alive, and neither should Natasha. She thinks about how they were going to be killed for wanting to change things, and she thinks about how nothing’s really different, even blown up to the proportions of a space opera, and then she thinks about Tony and Thor and Bruce who was stuck in space and who said it wasn’t worse than the times he spent trying to find himself in Asia and then she thinks about Coulson, who lost his head and got it back and thought he was in Tahiti and she looks down at her shaking hands and she thinks about how, after Ohio, she prayed to God. She prayed to God to send her a brave swordsman, a knight to save her. Look down at your hands, Natasha. There’s always been a knife.

Nothing’s gone wrong yet, and Van Sayako and Natasha Romanov are the closest thing they’ll ever get to friends. They’re splitting a bottle of vodka, and a bottle of something bright green that Natasha can’t pronounce, but Van assures her won’t kill her. Natasha probably shouldn’t have thrown her head back and started necking it, but she did. It burned going down, and Natasha savoured it. And now they’re drunk. And they’re talking. And it’s not terrible.

Van Sayako’s real name isn’t Van, it’s Lyvania. Van’s the nickname her brother used, and she never liked Lyvania. That was the name her mother, who beat her brother and tried to beat her, shouted. Van called herself Van so if her brother ever came back, he would find her, and she wouldn’t be Lyvania. And now she’s asking Natasha why Natasha’s here.

“Shouldn’t you be sipping margaritas on Earth, being some big hero?” Van questions.

“I have a best friend who I can’t ever see again,” Natasha answers, and she doesn’t remember if she slurred her words. The room was spinning. “Or I’m going to kill him. I’m sure his divorce is dedicated to me. And everyone I ever wanted to protect is dead, or dying, or can’t look me in the eye. Everything is wrong and I need to fix it.”

Natasha doesn’t agree with the TVA, even before they tried to kill her. In the TVA’s defence, they didn’t give her a lot of time to form an opinion on their organisation before they tried to kill her, but that’s neither here nor there. Natasha thinks the thought of a sacred timeline is fucking nonsense, and she thinks it’s even stupider that they gave her a chance to join them after she killed three of their agents in less than a minute. The first one had held a sparking rod against her throat, and Natasha hadn’t wanted to die, so she’d killed him, and then she’d wrenched that sparking rod out of his hands and used it on his two colleagues. That was before she knew of the term pruning or that she was supposed to be pruned.

For her disobedience in the face of death, Natasha was offered a job.

Sam was the only person she told.

She was sitting cross-legged on his floor, and they’d both decided to stop pretending that they cared about what was playing on Animal Planet. It might’ve been Shark Week. Steve used to like Shark Week and so did Tony. Once, they put it on in Avengers Tower after a gnarly mission. Sam asked Natasha if she wanted to order terrible greasy takeout, and Natasha blurted it out. Bucky was passed out in the guest room, and Natasha said that she was leaving.

“To where?” Sam asked.

“To space,” Natasha answered. “I’m going to go find one of Peter Quill’s friends.”

“When are you going to be back?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” Natasha answered.