Work Text:
For a second, when the door vanishes with a single gesture from the Watcher, she forgets how to breathe. She doesn't want to go back into her universe (alone, the only person alive, alone ), but seeing the possibility of choosing to be snatched from her hands feels like another defeat.
In the end it doesn't matter. Everyone has always taken things from her, and she has always been able to adapt, this time it is no different.
She wants to get angry, to claim this god who only watches worlds destroy themselves without interfering, however, in an instant the ceiling is replaced by a sky almost unrecognizable in its beauty, and every word that she was willing to say dies along with the fury in her chest.
It is a beautiful sky, with a shade of blue that she has not seen since before, when she still had a world to call her own, people who cared for her, and a team that, with time, she could call family.
Natasha thinks she might cry. She does not do it.
She takes a deep breath. There are trees, grass, flowers, graves; she is in a silent cemetery.
Natasha doesn't fit in there, not with her outfit, her blood and sweat, not with her losses yet unmourned, not when she's alive while no one else is.
Except that she does. The grave in front of her has her name on it.
"Where we are?"
“On a world that lost their Widow”
Natasha died. She is not so much surprised by that as by the fact that someone went to the trouble to bury her.
Clint, maybe? It's something he would do.
"They weren't ready to lose her." There were flowers and photos, candles, stuffed animals and all kinds of souvenirs at her grave; Natasha was loved. Maybe she should cry now. There was a universe where she had been loved, and she thinks, frustrated, that this is something she could have had, that this was what Ultron took from her. "You could do a lot of good here."
There is nothing to think about, no decision to make. Uatu would not show her this world without any intention, she knew from the moment she saw that sky that she would stay here.
Seeing how loved she was, just made her really want this to be her home.
She would stay, even if she had to fight over it.
"It will not be easy. This universe has many things to face yet. "
Natasha smiles, nonchalant but grateful to the Watcher's warning, and he takes a moment to smile back, then--...
"It's gonna be fun."
A broken, doubtful whistle interrupts their conversation. Almost forgotten memories take shape again with that single sound, and when she turns, nervous and incredulous even when her lips move in response with her own whistle, a feeling of longing invades her heart.
"Natasha?"
"Yelena "
This universe is not hers, not yet, but she will protect and love it like the Widow before her.