A Bolt from the Blue

Chapter 25

Everybody soon walked into the lounge and Natasha looked at each of them expectantly first, and then with relief.

They all sat down, Steve across from her, and watched her.

'It better be important, Romanoff,' Tony said as he slumped onto the couch. 'Bruce and I were working on a revolutionary concept."

'I'll give you revolutionary,' she assured with a smirk.

Tony raised an eyebrow at her, tacitly challenging her to give him something spectacular. Natasha glanced down at the floor and cleared her throat.

"What if I told you I just came back from a time jump? A long time jump," she said.

All frowned except Tony.

"I'd be torn between congratulating you and resenting you for the rest of my life for not taking me with you," he answered.

Natasha remained imperturbable, not the least surprised by his response. She slipped a hand into her pocket and pulled out an object hardly bigger than a five-cent coin.

Thor jerked forward to the edge of his seat and furrowed his brows.

"How did you come in possession of an Asgardian device?" he asked.

Steve and the others averted their eyes from the demigod to Natasha.

"You gave it to me," she said simply. "In another timeline."

Thor stared at the object lying in the center of her palm.

"So the legend is true?" he murmured almost inaudibly.

"Oh it is very true," she assured.

The room was silent and everyone was now hanging to her lips. She pinched the chip between two fingers and held it up.

"This is the device Thor gave me to travel through time."

Steve's heart skipped a beat in anticipation and eager to ask the most relevant question possible after hearing such a shocking revelation. But somehow he couldn't ask it himself. Part of him was too afraid of the answer he would get.

"To where?" Clint asked, then frowned to himself. "Or do we say to when?"

She swallowed the lump in her throat. "1942."

The words rang out like cathedral bells in his ear and he felt himself fall through the couch and the dozens of stories this tower had all the way to the abyss. Natasha's eyes went up to him and she gazed at him with the apologetic expression of a guilty person. They stared silently at each other, fighting off the tears on the verge to rise to their eyes.

This had been an improbable –impossible– idea to consider for the three years he had known Natasha only to be told today that indeed two of the most important women in his life were one and the same.

"In the timeline I come from," Natasha began again, getting back on track, as the tone of her voice hardened. Her eyes swept across to him. "Steve died." A heavy silence filled with long and awkward glances ensued. "Killed by an assassin. That's when Thor got hold of the device and we decided we would use it to prevent all this from happening."

"When did - when would it have happened?" Bruce asked.

"Yesterday," she said. "That's why I only came back today," and she turned to Steve as if she seemed to apologize for having taken so long, for deliberately letting him go through the torture of meeting her future self without her recognizing him. "I had to be sure I had succeeded."

Her eyes screamed sorry and he felt unsettled to look into Natasha's eyes but only find Natalie in them. It was as if that past he had endeavored to put behind for the last three years had jumped all the way over to him again. There was no doubt it was Natalie (or should he say Natasha, now?) who was now sitting in front of him.