ʙᴀʀᴛᴏɴ (cauterising) wrote in somerealityrpg, @ 2019-08-20 21:16:00 |
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Entry tags: | active: clint barton, active: natasha romanoff |
WHO: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanoff
WHERE: Nat's Room
WHEN: Just after this happened
WHAT: Events get to Nat leading to night time stresses.
WARNINGS: PG-13; cussing and subject matter; death, fears, alternate worlds.
STATUS: Complete
It wasn’t like Clint had spent a lot of time in his own room. He’d been there, sure. He’d spent the odd night there, yes, but he’d hardly really had much interaction with either of his roommates. From what he could tell they were chill, but he wasn’t especially good at staying still for long at the moment, and even less so when it came to being alone with thoughts and memories.
So he camped out with Natasha. And it might’ve been a little annoying with both of their leprechauns getting into some mash up challenge, but now that those little buggers were gone it was semi peaceful again. It didn’t seem to make it any easier for Clint to fall asleep.
All the talk of SHIELD and starting up some semblance of it, it really threw a wrench in his system of not thinking about things. It was hard enough constantly surrounded by everyone basically. He was just lying on Natasha’s floor, staring at the ceiling while listening to the slow, rhythmic breathing from the redhead.
It shouldn’t really be comfortable, given the state of his mind, how tired he was and the fact that it was the floor. But it was, oddly, becoming a rather decent comfort.
Natasha wondered if anyone knew where Clint was spending most of his nights. Not that she cared but she didn’t want to have to punch someone who might comment on it. Thankfully Jim was cool and he seemed to understand what was going on, the fact that right now Nat needed Clint and vice versa even if neither of them would say it out loud. They had developed a routine born from years of working together, one showered at night, one in the morning. Who did what when even though there were two empty bedrooms in the apartment. It never crossed their mind to take advantage of that fact. She didn’t want to admit it but Nat felt better with him there. In the month that she had been in Goodland, she’d learned a lot of things and most of them were life-changing. It was a lot to process and Clint was the only one who understood her when it came to some things. Most things really. He had his own demons, she knew that, and dealing with watching her die was one of them so for now this is what they did and she didn’t regret it.
The dreams came and went, sometimes worse than others, she would wake up but usually she would go back to sleep after a while. Tonight was different though, tonight she was standing on a cliff and she was alone. There was no sign that anyone had been there in a very long time. It could have been Vormir but she didn’t know, she’d never seen it and Clint hadn’t described it to her. Wherever it was, she felt like she was being smothered and her heart was racing. She was at the edge of the cliff and she tried to back up but she couldn’t because every time she tried, something held her back and pushed her forward. There was never any sound and she never actually fell.
Tonight was different.
A voice spoke out of the empty space around her telling her that she had to jump, people far better than her needed to live, she had nothing to live for, she was alone. Everyone she loved was gone. She might as well jump because if she did they could be happy, They’d get their lives back. What had she done to deserve a life? She’d done a lot of bad things, a lot of people had been hurt because of her and those were only the parts she remembered. She’d had her memory wiped at least once and did she really want to know those parts of it? Before she could say anything, she felt a giant gust of wind and she cried out as she fell and then her eyes popped open and she was sitting up in bed shaking, crying, saying “No, no no! Please.” but she was still sleepy enough that she didn’t realize someone was with her and she was clutching them as she repeated the word no over and over.
The shift in Natasha’s sleep was easy to catch; like with everything, Nat was so controlled in her sleeping, not a lot of tossing and turning on the good nights. Sure, there were always dreams, but nothing that made her breathing change, made the soft whimper happen, and the second he heard that, Clint wasn’t even pretending that sleep was coming easily.
“Nat,” she’d started crying out, his fingers touching lightly to her wrist so as not to startle a fully trained assassin, “Tasha, hey.” There was no response beyond the twist and a thrash and then Nat was jerking upright and Clint only just got his head out of the way to stop a collision as the shakes started.
It was automatic to climb onto the bed, arms around her shoulders to pull her into a lopsided hug, rocking a little while he felt the shaking going through her, the shoulder of his t-shirt getting damp. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, I’m here, I got you.” He kept up the quiet mantra, holding Natasha close while she clung onto him, a hand cupping the back of her head to keep her close, “It’s okay, you’re okay, I got you.” He couldn’t tell her it was just a dream, because a lot of the time, it wasn’t just a dream, it was never just a dream.
But he could always tell her he was right there for her.
When she heard ‘Tasha’, she knew she was awake now, she knew where she was and who was holding her. No one else had ever called her Tasha and it was that which helped her breathing slow and finally relaxed against him. After a moment, she pulled back to look at him but didn’t leave the circle of his arms. She wasn’t ready to do that, not yet. “Thank you,” she said and wiped her cheek then patted his shoulder. “I got you all wet. I’m sorry.” It was inane but it was all she could manage at the moment. She’d tell him about the dream but she had to make sure she was ready.
Finally after a few moments of just sitting there, she looked up at him. “I’ve had the dream before but this time it went on longer. Before I was on the edge of a cliff, I was about to fall or jump, I don’t know which but I always woke up. This time I didn’t. This time there was this voice......I didn’t recognize it. It told me that I had to jump because I didn’t deserve to live, I’d bring everyone back, I’d hurt too many people. I tried to back up from the edge but I couldn’t, and then I woke up but I know I fell. It felt so real.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.” He wasn’t bothered about a little damp spot, but he knew it was about coming back to herself. It happened infrequently that things got this bad, but they happened enough, with each other, that they knew how to deal with it.
It was easier with Nat, getting through things, he knew how to process things. He could just sit there, let her take whatever comfort she wanted, give her what she’d take and wait it out, she’d talk when she was ready. Because they knew better by now, knew better than to keep everything inside to the point that they might make stupid mistakes.
When she started, it was like a punch in the gut, but he had to stay focused, on Nat, on helping. “Hey, it wasn’t real, okay? It’s not, and you know that’s not true,” Natasha’s psyche was probably a constant battle of her own demons, the Red Room teachings and everything she didn’t think she deserved. “You deserve it more than anyone I know.”
He pressed a kiss to her forehead, still choking down the notion that she deserved it far more than he did, the knot in his gut that she might, somehow, be remembering Vormir. Or imagining it because of what he told her.
She closed her eyes when he kissed her forehead, enjoying the comfort of his touch. They knew each other so well, knew when to speak and when not to, it was pure instinct and she knew how rare that connection was. Neither of them had grown up in a way that was anywhere close to normal, they’d had to figure out a lot of things for themselves but somehow they had made it and had found each other and she was very glad that he was here right now.
“I know it wasn’t real,” she said softly and looked up at him. “But it felt real. I think I’ve had too much shit thrown at me the last few weeks. Just a lot of information that would be hard to handle any time but especially when you’re kidnapped by the Ostrich god or whatever and you don’t know what you’re doing here anyway.” Bad dreams weren’t anything new for her, she’d had them before but there were periods of time when she didn’t have them and things had been pretty stable before she’d gotten here. “I’m kind of surprised that this is the first time I’ve had a really bad one,” she said.
Between finding out she was dead, taking on all the kids, SHIELD being brought back up and all the things it represented to them, well, it was understandable that Natasha’s brain would be churning out something she didn’t necessarily want to deal with. A lot of their traumas were buried deep, because that was just how they got through the day, but they rattled loose sometimes.
“You can only compartmentalise so much, that’s for sure.” Maybe that was why he wasn’t sleeping. Clint knew he could run on a good few days with no sleep, being a sniper meant honing his body to deal with extreme conditions for long periods of time, and that included battling off sleep exhaustion.
But it felt like Natasha’s heart wasn’t racing to the point of bouncing out of her chest, which was something, “You wanna talk about it.” Even if she didn’t remember a lot of it, or know what it was about or like, there was likely something that triggered things. Staying put, prepared to just deal with whatever Natasha needed, Clint didn’t bother unwinding his arms from around her.
“Yeah, I do. Not want to maybe but need to. You’re right we can only stuff so much down before it spills over.” Even if it was easier, Natasha knew it wasn’t healthy. Like most SHIELD agents, she’d been through enough psychological evaluations and therapy sessions to last a lifetime. If she’d learned anything from that it was the simple fact that it wasn’t going to help unless you let it help. You had to give up that control and open yourself up to someone else and that wasn’t always easy, especially when the nature of your job meant you were paranoid anyway.
“Like I said, I’ve had this dream before. I guess it started right after I got here? But there have been different versions over the years. This was the first time it got that far,” she shuddered and without thinking, rested her head on his shoulder. It was just too heavy to hold up right now. “I know it’s because of everything I’ve found out since I’ve been here, that makes sense. I want to make a life here, I kind of don’t have a choice really but I guess part of me is afraid that I can’t do it. That I’ll fuck it up somehow. And James…..that was one hell of a shock. I want to get to know him but I can’t just jump in like Steve has, maybe it’s because I never thought what it would be like to have kids because I couldn’t.”
It probably wasn't the first time that Natasha had dreamt of dying, or almost since there was the automatic wake up, but probably this particular scenario came about because of everything that was happening right then. Between the new world they'd been pulled into, the mess they'd left behind and everyone's baggage just being dumped around each other. It'd be too much to expect that anyone was properly adjusted to it.
Getting Nat to shuffle back with him, leaning against the top of the bed and shifting the pillows, since this felt like possibly one of those nights to talk it out, Clint kept an arm around Nat to keep her close, knowing that the presence tended to help. "Your subconscious is trying to catch up with everything, yeah," He'd had a period of that after Loki, the mind fuck that came with being pushed out of his own brain and everything being blended up to suit someone else. It took some time to work through, and it wasn't always easy.
The fact that Natasha knew she needed to make Goodland work, the notion that regardless of what happened, this was it, this was all that could be, it stuck a little with Clint. Given all they'd been through, the idea that she couldn't do something shouldn't be a sticking point for Nat. "Hey, you can make this work, I mean, let's face it, is there anything you can't make work?" There were probably things she might not want to make work, but Clint had a fairly good understanding that there was little Natasha couldn't do and well, "You don't need to be his mom you know. Because you're not. Whatever his world was like, that's not you."
For one thing, Clint still had trouble picturing Natasha and Steve as anything but co-leaders and friends, but that might just be him and Natasha being his not-quite-over ex. But it sounded a lot like James' world was pretty messed up, "You can be a friend, you don't need to leap right in and start giving him a curfew."
She snorted. “I highly doubt that giving any of them a curfew would do much good. Except Freddy. He would actually obey it, the rest of them? Not so much. I did kind of try at first before Jim got here when it was just me but they all seem pretty responsible so I just check in on them unless Jim does it.” It felt good sitting here like this, finally being able to talk about what was bothering her. It wasn’t often that she opened up but Clint was the only person that she felt she could be herself with.
“From what he’s said, it was a pretty messed up world. Ultron took over and there were killer robots and the fact that he and the other kids survived is kind of a miracle. Although I’m curious to know who your other self knocked up and why did you name your kid Francis?” she grinned at him. “But no, I told James from the beginning that this was going to take time. I can’t have kids, I accepted that a long time ago and I won’t lie to you and say that sometimes I wish things were different but they aren’t and I can’t change that. Besides sharing DNA with someone doesn’t necessarily make you a parent. We’ve both seen that over the years. He seems like a good kid though despite everything and I wouldn’t mind getting to know him but I’m not ready.” She rested her head on Clint’s shoulder. “But I’m not his mother. I wouldn’t try to be because she’s gone, and from what I’ve gathered, we were different people. There’s also the fact that I love Steve like a brother, I can’t imagine the two of us having a kid. Just no.”
All in all, it wasn’t like Natasha needed to babysit</b> these kids; none of them seemed too out of control, so it was probably just about making sure they weren’t starving to death or something. And if it was a case of protecting them from something, then Natasha probably didn’t know how suited she was to the role.
Clint’s fingers toyed at the ends of Nat’s hair, letting her talk at his shoulder about James and her complications with getting through that. Which Clint could get, there were issues with the pair of them when Laura’d first gotten pregnant with Cooper and Clint danced around things with Nat, trying to be sensitive but just making things worse on the whole. “I’m not in the least bit curious about that kid or why my other self thought torturing the kid his whole life would be steadfast parenting.” Francis, who did that? “But yeah, blood is just blood, we don’t gotta be blood to be something like family.” And as far as parents went, well, yeah, they both knew what a shitty parent could be.
Steve and Natasha ran a team together, they trained the new wave of Avengers together, they were close, and Clint got that, even if there was a moment when Tony and Cap had their little spat the fucked with everyone’s lives, Nat and Steve ultimately came through it better than before. And Clint was only a tiny bit jealous, but he knew it was just something he had to deal with. “That’s probably one of the biggest shifts. That and Thor, I mean, apparently Thor dumped his kid on Earth and fucked off.”
Which, really? Didn’t sound like the Thor he knew. Loud and brash and overly enthusiastic, sure. Shitty dad? Eh, considering Thor’s dad, probably not.
She loved it when he played with her hair and it had been a long time since he’d done it. After he was married, they still often worked together but moments like this didn’t happen any more and she missed it. Neither of them had been the type to touch another person in an affectionate way, that representing trusting someone and neither of them trusted easily but with each other it had been different and the fact that he was doing it now meant that maybe he was beginning to adjust to being here. She couldn’t say that she was completely comfortable with it but having him here had helped a lot.
“I can’t imagine Thor doing that either,” she said. “But it also sounds like the world was very different and none of our other selves were completely like us. The whole concept of a multiverse was hard to understand when I first got here and I still don’t get it but it means that I’m alive and I’m not going to complain about that.” Without even thinking she moved closer and rested her head on his shoulder a little more securely. “It feels nice when you play with my hair,” she said, her voice starting to sound sleepy.
It was peaceful enough, as Natasha slowly relaxed into him, that Clint could put everything else to the side for now, just embrace the here and now, in her dark room, listening to the steadying beat of her heartbeat with his. His fingers kept trailing through her hair, occasionally brushing against the back of her neck.
The multiverse theory was definitely something that it took some getting used to, but given that Natasha wasn’t dead, Clint was fully prepared to accept it right there and then. “Sounds like complete insanity, but since when has anything actually made sense?” Before there were gods and monsters and portals to space, things made so much more sense before all that.
Her soft admission was enough to keep him doing it, tangling a few locks around his fingers as she settled more, “Get some rest, Tash,” he kept his voice low, pressing another kiss to her forehead, staying still after, “I’ll stay right here.” Close enough that he could tell if something was starting to get to her, hopefully enough to soothe any nightmares that snuck up on her.