Chapter 330: I Scattered Natasha's Ashes
Clint Barton walked toward Ethan, eyes red-rimmed, and dropped to his knees the instant he reached him.
He couldn't see Natasha. He had no idea whether she could see him. But he knelt anyway.
He hadn't forgotten what that floating red thing had told him — that a soul sacrificed to the Soul Stone was erased. Wiped from existence entirely, forgotten by the world, gone forever.
But now here was Ethan — a man from an entirely different universe — apparently able to pull Natasha's soul straight out of the Stone.
Had that red bastard lied to him?
Whatever the truth was, Clint felt something in this moment he hadn't felt in a long time: relief. Pure, weightless relief.
The guilt and self-loathing that had been sitting on his chest all this time seemed to lift, just like that. He thought he could see a sliver of hope — the kind he'd never once let himself believe in.
"Is there any way for the rest of us to actually see her soul?" Steve asked, urgency and hope tangled together in his voice.
Ethan looked like he didn't have the bandwidth to field questions right now, so the group turned instead to Strange — the other magic-side person present.
Strange could see Natasha's soul just fine. It hung suspended in midair, looking, more or less, like it was fast asleep.
The soul in question also happened to be entirely unclothed. Fortunately, Strange had spent a career as a renowned surgeon — there wasn't much of the human body he hadn't already seen.
Still, with this many people crowded around, staring at an undressed Natasha probably wasn't doing the poor woman any favors.
Strange just shook his head. "I've got no way to make her visible to the rest of you. All I can tell you is that her soul appears to be asleep right now."
That was when Tony cut in with the question that mattered most. "Finding her soul doesn't automatically mean we can actually bring her back. Does it?" His voice came out low and grim, and the mood in the room dropped right back into heaviness.
Tony's question landed like a hammer blow, striking everyone equally hard.
Strange thought it over for a moment. "In principle — there is a way to bring her back."
That answer brought a collective exhale of relief from the Avengers. Then Strange's next line dragged them straight back down.
"But at my current level, I'm not strong enough to actually pull it off."
Whether through Kamar-Taj's own magical tradition or the spells he'd picked up from Ethan, there theoretically existed a way to restore this woman named Natasha to life — Strange's own power simply wasn't quite up to the task.
Right now, on this entire planet, there were exactly two people who could.
"Maybe... Ethan could do it," Strange said.
The words reignited hope across the room instantly.
Clint immediately dropped fully to his knees before Ethan. "Mr. Ethan — if you can bring Natasha back, my life is yours. However you want to spend it."
"Please, Mr. Ethan. We were wrong about you earlier," Steve said, solemn and sincere.
Tony, ever the pragmatist, went straight for the point. "A billion dollars. Just bring Natasha back and it's yours!"
Banner didn't say anything, but the hope in his eyes said everything anyway.
Ethan had only just finished analyzing the Soul Stone when he looked up to find Hawkeye bowing full-out at his feet.
"All right, all right. I never said I wasn't going to save her," Ethan said, sighing.
Truthfully, he'd only been running his analysis on the Soul Stone — and thankfully, it had paid off in an unexpected way.
Turns out the Soul Stone didn't actually require the soul of a specific beloved — any soul would do, full stop.
The whole "sacrifice your beloved" rule was just some sadistic little game cooked up by that Red Skull character.
Half of it was Red Skull getting off on watching people tear themselves apart choosing between love and duty. The other half — Ethan suspected — was that he was terrified of becoming someone's sacrifice himself.
Well, now that Ethan knew the truth, the whole thing was trivial. Next time he actually went to claim a Soul Stone, he'd just toss Red Skull off the cliff himself.
For now, all that was left was waking Natasha back up.
With that settled, Ethan turned to the assembled Avengers. "Where's her... body?"
The question left the whole room staring blankly.
"Right — the body! Where's Natasha's body?"
Clint blinked, caught completely off guard. "The body... what do you need her body for?"
Ethan rolled his eyes. Was Clint really this dense?
Was every single one of these Avengers built like this? Not a functioning brain cell in the whole lineup?
Maybe the universe balanced the books — handed them unbelievable combat power, then clawed back the IQ points to compensate.
Ethan was already starting to miss his own team back home.
Thankfully, at least one Avenger still had some functioning gray matter.
"You're saying we need to find Natasha a vessel — a new body. Right?" Tony said, catching on instantly. Not for nothing was he the sharpest one on the team.
"Exactly. Had to be you, Tony. This team without you would be like a body with no brain. Or, hey — hand me any male corpse, that works too.
Assuming none of you mind Natasha coming back as a man," Ethan added, deadpan.
A collective shudder ran through the Avengers. None of them could bring themselves to picture what "Natasha, but a man" would actually look like.
They rounded on Clint immediately, shouting.
"The body! I'm asking you where the body is!"
"Barton, what the hell — you told us she died and you just... didn't bring her body back with you?!"
"Please tell me you didn't cremate her! Tell me you did NOT do that!"
"I swear to god, if Natasha comes back and finds out she's a man now, she is going to kill herself all over again!"
Clint had gone completely white. "I— there wasn't— there was nothing I could do about it—"
They'd come back through the Quantum Realm. There was no version of that trip where a body could have just tagged along on its own.
And clearly, there was no way Clint alone could have carried it back either.
One look at his face and the rest of the Avengers already knew how this ended.
Not that they could really blame him. None of them would have managed to bring the body back either, in his position.
"Is there another option?" Steve asked, urgent.
"Maybe we clone her body. Might take a little time, though." Tony frowned, already working the problem — they'd need Natasha's own cells and DNA, and her actual body was gone now.
S.H.I.E.L.D. probably still had some cell or DNA samples of hers on file somewhere, but even for Tony, growing a full clone body from scratch would take real time.
The only question was whether Natasha's soul could hold out that long.
Strange pushed back on that immediately.
"Actually, it doesn't need to take nearly that long. Cloning a body is a fairly trivial problem for a sorcerer."
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