Natasha knows the difference between silence and absence.

Missions go quiet all the time. Signals drop. Timelines stretch. She’s lived in that uncertainty long enough to recognize it. But this is different. This is the kind of quiet that presses in on her chest and refuses to let go.

Her girlfriend was supposed to check in three hours after insertion.

She doesn’t.

At first, Natasha waits. She tells herself it’s terrain interference, a delay, a complication. By the end of the first day, her jaw is tight and her patience razor-thin. By the second, she’s barely sleeping. By the fourth, she’s stopped pretending this is routine.

Natasha doesn’t say the word missing out loud. She doesn’t need to.

She replays the mission over and over, memorizing routes, enemy placements, timing. She traces possibilities on maps until they blur together. Fury tells her they’re searching every lead. Clint tries to distract her. Steve offers quiet reassurance.

None of it helps.

Because this isn’t just a teammate. This is the person who knows when Natasha needs space and when she needs grounding. The one who touches her like she’s something fragile and unbreakable at the same time. The one who makes the world feel quieter when it gets too loud.

By the sixth day, they find something.

A HYDRA facility buried off-grid. Too isolated. Too clean. Natasha doesn’t wait for permission. She’s moving before the plan finishes forming, heart hammering in a way she refuses to acknowledge.

Inside, it’s cold and sterile and wrong.

They find her alive.

Barely conscious, restrained, clearly held for days longer than anyone should have survived. Natasha is at her side instantly, dropping to her knees, hands steady even though everything inside her is screaming. She says her name softly, urgently, like it’s a promise instead of a plea.

There’s no response. But she’s breathing.

Natasha doesn’t let go.

She stays through extraction, through the medics’ careful efficiency, through the blur of transport back to base. She refuses to leave the infirmary, seated close enough that her knee presses against the bed, fingers wrapped around her girlfriend’s hand like it’s the only solid thing left in the world.

When she finally wakes, it’s slow and disoriented. Her eyes struggle to focus — and then they land on Natasha.

Relief hits Natasha so hard it almost knocks the breath from her lungs.

She leans in, forehead resting gently against hers, voice low and rough. “Hey,” she murmurs. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

Later, when the room is quiet and the danger has passed, Natasha lets herself say the things she never does.

That the waiting was unbearable. That the silence scared her more than any enemy ever could. That losing her, even for a week, felt like losing gravity.

She doesn’t cry.

But she holds her girlfriend close, protective and unyielding, like someone who came terrifyingly close to a world without her — and will never take her presence for granted again.