What Vormir Gives Back

The water at the bottom of Vormir wasn't cold. That was the first thing Natasha noticed when she started noticing things again: it should have been freezing, and it was the exact temperature of her own skin, so that she couldn't tell where she stopped and it began. The second thing was the sky. It was orange, the color of a struck match, and it didn't move. No clouds, no sun. Just that endless glow, like the inside of an eyelid. She lay there for what might have been a minute or a year. She knew she'd fallen. She remembered Clint's fingers locked around her wrist, the way his face had broken open when she told him to let her go, and the small, stupid push of her feet off the rock wall that made the decision for him. She remembered thinking, quite calmly on the way down, that she had finally found something to put on the other side of the ledger that weighed enough. After that there was the water. And after the water there was this. "So this is it," she said aloud. Her voice came out flat, swallowed by the air. "Very minimalist." Nobody answered. She'd half expected somebody to. Her real mother, maybe, whom she didn't remember. Or the girls from the Red Room, the ones who hadn't made it out. She'd even thought, in a small and private corner of herself, that it might be the farm—Laura's kitchen, the kids' drawings on the refrigerator, Clint arguing with a tractor in the yard. A heaven built out of the only place she'd ever been allowed to just be Auntie Nat. Instead there was the orange water, and the stillness, and a kind of patience that pressed on her from every direction, like the whole world was holding its breath. She sat up. The water came only to her waist. Around her, the shallow lake stretched out flat and featureless in every direction, and she understood without being told that she could walk forever and never reach its edge. This was where the stone kept what it was paid. She was a coin in somebody's pocket. Fine. She'd been worse things. She didn't know how long she sat. Time didn't seem to apply. She counted her own heartbeats to stay sharp, the way they'd taught her in the Red Room, until she noticed she didn't have any. She switched to counting the people she'd lost instead, which took longer. She thought about Bruce, whether he'd finally gotten that gauntlet on, whether it had hurt him. She thought about Steve. She thought about how she'd told him, sitting across from him at the compound with that half-eaten sandwich between them, that she'd gotten her one big family and lost them, and how he hadn't tried to fix it. He'd just stayed. That was the thing about Steve that nobody ever put on the posters. He stayed. The light changed. It was so slight that at first she thought she'd imagined it. The orange deepened, then flickered, like a candle when a door opens somewhere far down a hall. The water around her went from perfectly still to trembling, tiny rings spreading out from nowhere. Then the pressure lifted. All at once, the way the air goes out of a room when a window shatters. She was falling again. Or rising. The orange folded in on itself, and there was a sound like a cathedral bell rung underwater, and then— Stone under her back. Real stone, sharp and freezing, digging into her shoulder blades. A sky so dark it was nearly purple, full of strange, slow-moving clouds. Wind. Actual wind, smelling of rock dust and snow, and her lungs dragging it in so hard it hurt. And a voice. A voice she would have known anywhere, in any century, saying her name like it was the only word left in any language. "Nat. Natasha. Hey. Hey, look at me." She opened her eyes. Steve Rogers was kneeling over her in the blue-and-white quantum suit, his face streaked with rock dust, his hands on either side of her head like he was afraid she might roll away. Behind him rose the black tower of the cliff, and at its foot, very calm, stood a tall figure in a long dark cloak whose face was the color of dried blood. "Hi," she said. Her voice came out as a croak. "You look terrible." Steve laughed, or tried to. It came out wrong. His eyes were wet. In all the years she'd known him, she could count on one hand the times she'd seen Steve Rogers cry. "I put it back," he said. "I came to put the stone back. I put it in his hand, and he—" He jerked his head at the cloaked figure. "He said nobody had ever returned it. He didn't know what would happen. And then the ground shook, and I looked down, and you were just lying there. In the snow. Like you'd never—" He couldn't finish. He didn't have to. Natasha pushed herself up on one elbow. Every muscle she owned reported in, outraged. She looked past Steve at the figure by the cliff. "Red Skull," she said. "Huh. Clint didn't mention that part. He just called you the creepy guide." Johann Schmidt regarded her with eyes that looked like they'd been burned hollow. "The stone takes what it is given," he said, in a voice like wind across an empty grave. "It has never been offered back. I did not know that a debt returned would also be a debt repaid." "Neither did we," Steve said, without turning around. "You are fortunate, Captain." "Yeah." Steve's hand found hers and held on so hard the bones ground together. "I know." The Red Skull inclined his head, a gesture almost courtly, and stepped back into the shadow of the cliff. When Natasha looked again, he was gone. There was only the wind and the long, long drop above them, and somewhere at the top, the place where she'd let go. She let Steve help her sit up. Her hands were shaking. She looked at them with some interest; they never shook. "What year is it?" "Here? 2014. Back home, about five seconds after I left." He glanced at the device on his wrist. "That's the plan, anyway. Bruce said if I'm not back on the platform in five seconds, he's coming after me with a very strongly worded speech." "You were going to stay," she said. He went still. She knew him. She'd known him since New York in 2012, and known him properly since a stolen truck in Washington and a kiss on a mall escalator that hadn't been a kiss at all. She'd seen the way his face changed every time someone said Peggy's name, the little hitch, like a door in him that had never quite shut. She'd heard the pause in his voice when Bruce explained how the return trip would work. Five seconds for everyone back home. As long as he wanted, out here. "I thought about it," Steve admitted. He was looking at the snow. "I had the whole route worked out. Return the stones, last stop 1949, find a little house somewhere. I was going to let myself have it. One dance." He let out a slow breath. "And then I came here first, because this was the one I couldn't stand to do last. And I saw you." "Steve." "There's a version of this where I don't come back," he said. "Where I get my dance and you're still at the bottom of that cliff, and Clint spends the rest of his life with your weight in his hands. I don't want to be the guy who lives in that version." He finally looked at her. "Peggy had a whole life. A good one. She'd be the first to tell me to stop circling her like a plane that won't land." Natasha's eyes were stinging. She blamed the wind. "That's very noble," she said. "You know she'd also tell you you're an idiot." "She always did." He smiled, finally, a real one, crooked and worn out. "Can you walk?" "I just came back from the dead, Rogers. Give me a minute." He gave her a minute. He gave her three. He sat in the snow beside her on a dead planet at the edge of the universe and didn't say anything, and she leaned her shoulder against his and felt, for the first time since the snap, the thing she'd been chasing for five years. It was small and stubborn, and it had no grand name. It was the feeling of not being the last one left in the room. Then he stood and pulled her up, and she held onto his arm, and they finished the trip together. Morag, then Asgard in 2013 with a hammer to hand back, then a Manhattan street in 2012 still smoking from the Chitauri. Last came an Army base in New Jersey in 1970, where Steve put a case of Pym particles back on a shelf and then walked past an office door with Peggy Carter's name on the glass. He didn't stop. Natasha squeezed his hand and didn't make him. When the light of the quantum tunnel finally spat them out onto the platform in upstate New York, it was bright afternoon, and Bruce was standing at the controls in his oversized gray T-shirt, mid-word. He saw her and dropped the tablet. It clattered off the platform. Behind him Sam Wilson took one step forward, then stopped, his face going slack. Bucky Barnes, who never looked surprised by anything, put a hand on Sam's shoulder like he needed it to stay upright. "Hi, Bruce," Natasha said. "Miss me?" Bruce made a noise that was not a word, and then the biggest arms on Earth were around her and lifting her clean off the ground, careful of the ribs, careful of everything, and she pressed her face into his shoulder and let him. Later, there would be questions. There'd be Tony's funeral to grieve all over again and paperwork for a dead woman and Fury's face when he found out. There'd be Wanda, and the long conversation they owed each other. There'd be a great deal of explaining. But first she borrowed Sam's phone, because hers was somewhere at the foot of a cliff on another planet, and walked out to the edge of the lawn where the grass sloped down toward the water. She dialed a number she'd known by heart since Budapest. It rang four times. Then a click, and a breath, and a voice worn down to nothing by four days without sleep. "Yeah." She looked out at the lake, at the ordinary blue sky over it, at the clouds that moved. "Hey, Barton," Natasha said. "You still have that tractor? Because I think I'm coming home."