Steel Hearts

- 40 -

We returned to the platform, all of our feet slapping the cold metal beneath us. Looking to my right, I ensure that Steve and Tony had made it back. Both were wearing different clothes, but they had made it. Everyone that was holding one of the stones, held it high in the air with a grin.

"Did we get them all?" Bruce asked, looking around at everyone holding a stone.

"Are you telling me this worked?" Rhodey asks.

There was a gap on my left.

Barton fell to his knees beside me and our excitement came to a jarring halt. Natasha wasn't there.

"Clint where's Nat?"

Tears started to well up in my eyes as the realization dawned on me. She was gone.

Natasha had died on Vormir. She died getting the soul stone. Handing the shield and scepter off to the closest person to me, I march off of the platform.

As soon as I was out of everyone's field of vision, I blindly made my way to the dock by the edge of the water. Crumbling under what felt like the pressure of the world, I curl myself up on the bench. Letting my head fall onto my knees that I had pulled as close to my chest as physically possible, I finally let the tears fall.

My fears of our plan going askew and someone not making it back had come true.

Regardless of our rocky start to our friendship, Natasha and I had been a constant in each other's lives since I started working for S.H.I.E.L.D. almost fifteen years ago. Both of us were reserved and mostly kept to ourselves at first, but the more time we spent together the more we opened up and let the other in. She was one of the few long-term friends that would forever be there regardless of how much time had passed.

Natasha, of course, never told me everything about herself. Although, she didn't have to for me to know what a good friend she was. She taught me basically everything I knew up to this point. Funnily enough, she became the closest thing I'll ever have to a sister. Even if she felt like she was alone in the world, she wasn't. None of us are. The Avengers would always be our family, no matter how dysfunctional we may be sometimes.

I had been sitting there for some time before the rest of the original Avengers joined me. They had been a team long before I joined, but eight years is a long time. First joining the Avengers seems like such a long time ago. We've all been through so much since then.

Steve sat next to me on the bench, sniffling away his grief for our friend. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, eyes trained on the wooden planks of the dock below us. The six of us silently grieved, far away from the rest who didn't know her as well as we did or who weren't as close to her.

Tony lifted his head to break the silence, "Do we know if she had family?"

"Yeah," Steve breathed, "Us."

"What?" Thor asked, appalled at our emotions, "What are you doing?"

"I just asked him a question."

"Yeah, no, you're acting like she's dead. Why are we acting like she's dead? We have the stones, right? As long as we have the stones, Cap, we can bring her back. Isn't that right? So, stop this shit. We're the Avengers. Get it together!"

Thor's denial brought, even more, salty tears to my eyes. Wiping them away roughly, I simply stare at the water. Normally it would've been calming, but in light of the situation, it wasn't.

"We can't get her back," Barton had distanced himself from the rest of us. He was her best friend and had known her longer than any of us. She was a part of his family.