Chapter Text
"No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away."
— Terry Pratchett
NATASHA
"Please," Clint begs, and with a sudden yank, Natasha is falling.
She blinks past the strands of blood-red hair that are torn free from her braid by the screaming wind, trying to focus on Clint’s face as he gets smaller and smaller. There is only a few seconds between her decision and her death, but it stretches out into infinity. All she can do is hope that her sacrifice will be enough to pay for a lifetime of blood on her hands.
She hits the stone with a resounding crack. Clint is barely distinguishable above her, but Nat smiles anyway. The pain is unlike anything she has ever suffered through; it is hellfire, clinging to every inch of her skin and burning through her body.
Faintly, she wonders whether it’s ash or snow that melts into the blood that pools beneath her, and then there is nothing.
Natalia Alianovna Romanoff has never considered herself to be religious, but when she wakes up with the sun beating down on her after dying, her immediate assumption is that she’s in Hell.
Golden sand burns her hands as she struggles to sit up, blinking rapidly against the raging sun. The scorching dulls to a bearable pain and she raises a hand to block the light, slipping on the uneven ground as she scrambles to her feet.
From a certain angle, the beach looks like the front cover of a travel magazine. The sun reflects off the water that caresses the shore, causing it to glitter like a polished sapphire, and the gilded, unbroken ripples of sand stretch out as far as she can see.
It isn’t long before Natasha starts to see the flaws.
The heat causes the picture to wobble; the endless ocean is inky black, not blue, and the closest thing to a palm tree on this beach is the charred branches of an elephant tree behind her. Nat scales the small dune to her right in a few unsteady steps, sand seeping into her boots, and that’s when she sees the approaching storm.
The sky before her is gray with angry clouds, who rumble with the promise of lightning. Glancing backwards at the scorched tree, Nat decides that she needs to find shelter, and quickly.
She slides down the other side of the dune without a second thought, skidding on the sand as she breaks out into a run. There’s an outcropping of rocks about four hundred meters in front of her, and on an exposed beach, she won’t get better protection than concrete. She is fighting her own body; everything aches, sweat is dripping down her temple and her heart is beating dangerously fast.
Twenty-four hours ago, she had been sitting on familiar couches surrounded by her friends as they planned to save half the universe. It was supposed to be easy — this time, they were all supposed to survive. Logic told her that the chances of all of them coming home were slim, but Nat had nothing left but hope. Not for herself, these days: but for the possibility that Clint’s family — her godchildren — and Yelena could come back.
Nat skates to a halt when she spots something buried in the sand. The storm is closing in on her, but she still stops to dig, hoping that it’s something she can use.
The moment she uncovers the two sticks bound together in the shape of a cross, however, she knows she’s made a mistake. Dropping it in horror, Nat crawls backwards, failing to get to her feet before the ground opens up underneath her. Sand pours into the pit — the grave — but Nat doesn’t wait to see who it belongs to. Scrambling to her feet, her fear pushes her to sprint towards the outcropping of rocks even faster than before.
This better have been worth it, she thinks as she races towards safety, the air growing more humid with each second that passes. You better save everyone, Clint.
She had never been cocky enough to make a retirement plan, but Clint had talked about it all the time. He had a family to spend time with and a farm to call his home. Nat knew then that she would never be so lucky, but she has to admit, she had been hoping for a better afterlife than this.
She glances upwards at the dark clouds now gathering above her head, gritting her teeth against the sand flying into her face. The rocks reform into a pile of rubble as she gets closer, steel rods sticking out of the debris, beckoning the lightning.
Tears begin to fill Nat’s eyes, a mix of the salty air and her frustration. Stopping a safe distance away from the rubble, she assesses her options. Time is running out, and while she survived a much more gruesome death less than ten minutes ago, she isn’t going to rely on a second miracle. The waves on the horizon have grown to the size of houses, and the black clouds pulsate above her head with flashes of furious red light. Part of her wants to sit down and let herself be taken by the apocalyptic storm, but she didn’t fight so hard her whole life to be beaten now.
Nat takes a deep breath and forces herself to look ahead for anything that could be used as a shelter, and that’s when she sees the footprints leading away from her.
She doesn’t have time to hesitate. Nat races alongside them, hope flaring in her chest like the lightning above her. One set of footprints is joined by a second, smaller set, and then a third set with men’s shoes, and then another, and another. She follows them to the top of another dune, and stops short when she sees what’s ahead.
Below her, hundreds of people are huddled together, all of them peering over each other’s shoulders at something lying on the sand. She skids towards them, scanning the crowd for any familiar faces, but finding only strangers. A few of them have hands over their mouths, others shake their heads, and one on the fringes of the group is dry heaving onto the sand.
As soon as she reaches them, Nat starts shoving her way through the crowd, elbowing people out of the way without apology. Apart from a few worried glances towards the sky, no one appears to be aware of the danger they are in, but they don’t have time to stand around gawking.
Then, the crowd begins to shrink. It takes her a moment to notice, but her path becomes undoubtedly clearer as she makes her way to the center. Horror freezes Nat to the spot as the young man next to her gradually turns into dust, floating down to mix with the sand.
Whipping her head around in desperation, Nat spots a familiar face on the other side of the thinning crowd. Swallowing around the lump in her throat, she begins to wave frantically, barging people out of the way as she tries to reach her sister.
"Yelena!" she shouts. She looks up, a wild look on her face as she looks for Nat, but her eyes glide right past her. There are so many people in her way and Nat doesn’t know what to do but continue forwards, praying to anyone who may be listening that she reaches her sister in time.
All the theological questions she has are answered the moment Yelena turns into dust, all traces of her carried away towards the water.
The hundreds of people become one hundred, and then fifty, and then two. Tears well in Nat’s eyes and she brings up her sleeve to wipe them away before they can fall, embarrassed to display her emotions so plainly.
She looks back at where the crowd had been, reduced to only her and an older man who is watching the sky with his arms folded. Nat turns her attention to what everyone had been so desperate to get a look at, and her heart plummets.
For a moment, she didn’t recognise the burnt and broken body on the floor. Then, she sees the tell-tale light flickering on his chest, and she realizes it’s none other than Tony Stark.