verb.
To come or go back to a place or person.
noun.
The firing of a weapon to counter a shooter's shot.
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They recoiled from their pasts, and in doing so found each other.
But the universe isn't kind enough to let a moment of peace last.
It took se...
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Kat couldn't remember ever attending many funerals.
There hadn't been one for her father. Hydra had never given her a body to bury. There had been no place to put her grief. No grave to lay it before, no opportunity to say goodbye. She had simply had to carry her grief with her.
It had been the same with the Snap. That burden of grief had grown heavier, unbearably so. Sure, there had been memorials erected. Vigils, services – none if it felt like it was for her, they weren't the right places to lay down her burden. And now part of that had been lifted, but she didn't feel stronger for having borne that weight for so long. It was almost as if there was still a ghost of it lingering with her. A phantom pull on her shoulders, a pressure on her chest trying to hold on to its old home. Or perhaps the tangible losses she still mourned measured an equal weight. Perhaps grief simply couldn't be quantified. She just felt desperately tired.
She hadn't had anything to wear. The plain black dress she had chosen sat uncomfortably on her frame, picked up at some strip mall they had passed on their route to that peaceful house in the woods. It didn't feel like it belonged to her. The only other earthly things she owned were her tactical suit and the mismatched articles of clothing she had scrounged from the ruins of the Compound, so the dress was really the only option. It must have looked strange with her back combat boots, the mud and grime of the battlefield polished from the leather. Bucky had helped her, he still remembered how to get them to shine, the way he had needed to in the 107th.
She wondered if, stood several feet ahead of her, Steve was wearing the black suit he had picked up with the same heavy heart.
Bucky hadn't picked up anything for the memorial. In fact, he had pointedly been avoiding the subject in the days leading up to it. In fact, he had barely acknowledged that a world existed beyond clearing the Compound, building the Quantum Tunnel, and the nights in their cabin. Mentions of anything that had happened before the battle, or anything more that was to come in the aftermath were simply brushed off. The headlines featuring stories about a fractured world and five years passing without him were seemingly too much to absorb right now. They were too much for Kat to talk about.
He was shouldering it quietly, his focus singularly on her – and that was something that, now, in the world outside their tiny haven on the edge of a battlefield, made Kat's chest tighten with guilt. Even without the world in the state it was, this would still have been the first time he had been outside of Wakanda in over a year – in his lifetime, of course. It was the first time he had experienced the world as a man free of his programming. The first time he had really been able to spend any time with Steve. Hell, he was still in the first few weeks of using his new arm. She hadn't anticipated any of it being difficult for him, she had been so wrapped up in her own wallowing, her own grief and elation and other tangled emotions.
He almost hadn't come to the memorial. She hadn't asked him directly until the night before. Until she had found her hands trembling at the thought of standing there, actually having to confront the fact that Tony Stark was gone, and everything that would come with that. Because if she said goodbye to Tony, did that mean she had to say goodbye to Natasha too? She wasn't sure she was ready for either.
