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The hotel in Prague feels like it's been taken from a different age. Maybe a different world. One very far away from the cold reality of aircraft that can reduce a city to rubble, or satellites that can read DNA. It's a softer world, maybe.
Natalia's never been under the delusion that soft and good are synonymous. Not, at least, as long as she can remember.
Clint is asleep beside her, on his side, turned towards her. Curved towards her, a little. His head is on his arm, and he's still in his clothes, but it's one in the morning and the only light comes through the window. Most of it's moonlight. Praha at this end isn't a bright, busy city. The brightness is in the other Praha. She remembers it better; she spent more time there. She thinks.
She's been braiding and unbraiding her hair for more than an hour now. Little braids and big, simple, French, herringbone - all kinds. Ones and twos and dozens all over her head. It keeps her fingers moving and it tugs against her scalp, the sensation keeping her rooted, keeping her grounded in her body. Keeping everything from reversing, until her body's only a tool for her mind: that's the kind of thing that only helps her lose her grip, until truth and reality start matching up only by coincidence and she stops knowing anything for sure.
Reality is difficult. When you know how easy it is to manipulate, to construct, to falsify, paranoia becomes second nature and no amount of skill feels secure.
Natalia braids and rebraids her hair in the middle of the night, sitting cross-legged on the bed while Clint sleeps, because she's thinking. Something like thinking. Turning a thought, a piece of a thought, over and over in her head until she's maybe used to it, or at least used to it enough to put it down and think about something else. Like sleep.
It might take a while.
It's just after one-thirty when Clint stirs. He reaches over and puts his free hand on her thigh and asks, drowsily, "Are you gonna sleep? Because you didn't last night." And there's the unspoken thing under that, thought or maybe warning, that if she skips tonight as well she'll need to take a sleeping pill to make sure the next night takes, because nobody needs her finding the edge of REM-deprivation psychosis, especially not her.
"Maybe," she says. She combs the last braid out with her fingers.
Where he comes from is barely better than where she does. They've argued about that. He thinks she's wrong; she doesn't think he's capable of looking at it clearly. But it's funny, she thinks, how that past-life-bad can go in two different directions, and Clint's has always struck her as intensely human. Hers taught her to be the embodiment of an ideal; his taught him that he should probably take the opportunity to eat more of the better food when he could. Or stay in the nicer place. Or whatever else it is that makes life more like he wants it right now. Enjoy what you have right now: someone might always shoot you tomorrow.
After a second hesitating, she leans back against her still-undisturbed pillows, and looks at him. She knows she looks . . . off. Knows there's a frown on her face more suited to a child than an adult, and even at that . . . a child who's distant and strange. Knows Clint knows what that means. And that . . . doesn't bother her.
Not even when she looks at it closely.
Clint rubs his eyes and then frowns in a way that's completely normal, and if a bit sleepy, also completely present.
"Do I need to sit up for this?" he asks, and she's struck for a second just the way that the question is his, sounds just like himself, and should sound stupid or thoughtless or something, and doesn't - because he knows exactly what she is, because he knows exactly what she is right now as she sits here, and he's still asking that question, that way, because it's what he'd ask anyone. Because he's tired and drowsy and he'd rather stay where he is, but that means he'll stay drowsy.
So if he shouldn't, if she needs him to be awake and thinking sharp, he should sit up.
It's all logic, it's all matter of fact, it's all like he's lying in bed beside a human being instead of . . . what she was made to be.
Like he's not afraid of her. At all.
For just a second all of that cuts through everything else and makes the world a different texture, a different colour. Just for a second.
But that's part of the point.
Natalia shakes her head and then tilts it to the side for a second, before she tells him, "I trust you."
Clint props his head up on his fist and says, "I noticed."
Natalia feels herself smile, shakes her head again a little: it seems like a stupid statement, superficially, given that she's here, given that if she does have to sedate herself, if she does need to try to reboot her brain and remind it what sleep-cycles feel like, she'll do it as long as he stays awake and watches, given . . . a lot of things. Self-evident, a lot of people would probably call it.
"I don't mean that," she says, "I mean . . . it feels different, I mean - "
"Natalia," he says, cutting her off almost, but not quite, gently. When she tilts her head to the other side and stops talking, he repeats, "I noticed."
After a heartbeat, two, and blinking at him, she frowns. "It unnerves the fuck out of me when you do that," she tells him, and Clint half-smiles.
"I know," he says. "It's kind of an unavoidable side-effect, though." He pauses, waggles a hand and then says, "Or maybe a cause. Doesn't matter." He pats her knee. "Pretty sure anyone else would think I'm just projecting, though, or maybe delusional, if it helps."
"You know it does," she says, deliberately giving him an annoyed look.
Then she lets her gaze move to stare out the window for a minute instead. "It's a very, very strange feeling," she admits, finally: it's the best phrasing she can find, and it still jars a bit. She hears Clint take a deep breath and let it out.
"Honestly, Tasha," he says, "I'm impressed as all fuck-off you're sitting there dissecting it instead of freaking the fuck out." It startles a laugh out of her; when she looks down at him again he shrugs. "Seriously. You should still try to sleep, though. Maslow's hierarchy, all that shit."
There's a trill of almost hysterical giggling, childish giggling, trying to thread its way across the top of her thoughts. As much to push it away as anything else Natalia pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs, this time reaching for grounding in cadence and syntax. "Yeah," she says. "I know. Do you ever resent," she asks, even though she knows the answer, "how every damn thing in the world ends up revolving around sleep?"
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water," Clint says as she reluctantly tries hauling out one pillow and lying down properly. "After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
"I swear to god that's the only piece of Zen bullshit you know," she retorts, letting the back-and-forth help her settle.
"Not true," Clint disagrees. "I also know the one Lucas stole and bastardized for the Jedi. The one about walking and standing."
Natalia rolls her eyes out of habit, and then tries closing them. This time, she gives a purely internal sigh: if she is going to sleep, it's going to be a production, an extended process of going through every muscle in her body and coaxing it into relaxing enough to let her. Starting with her eye-lids, which don't want to close as much as flutter.
"Tasha," Clint says after a minute, his voice quiet enough that if she'd managed to drop off immediately she might've been able to ignore him. She lets her eyes open, since they're fighting her so much, to look across at him.
"I trust you," he tells her. Like a reminder. Like something she needs to put back in her calculations. Like something she might have forgotten since he said it in Bogotá.
Like something that changes in context, given what she just said.
"That's probably a bad idea," she says, because she can't help it. Because suddenly echoes and games built on things that weren't games the first time she said them feel important, and she feels like she needs to have a handle on them. Hear them again.
"I've had worse," he replies, as he rolls over onto his back and settles with his hands folded on his chest. Then he adds, "Breathing exercises would probably help with the sleep thing."
"Oh fuck you, Barton," she says, and doesn't even manage to be annoyed that now when she closes her eyes, with the tension broken, it's easier to keep them that way.
Natalia listens to the occasional voices in the street outside - even at this hour - and she listens to leaves rustling in the wind, and she listens to Clint breathing, and she listens to the sleeping silence of the hotel, and she counts her goddamn breaths and uses rote remembered order to systematically make her body relax. There's a knife under her pillow, right by the hand of the arm she's leaning on, and she knows there's a gun under the one above Clint's head.
Security blankets for the violent and the lost, she thinks sleepily - finally sleepily - given there's really not that much practical advantage of a weapon under the pillow versus the weapon on the floor beside the bed or on the night table beside it. Brains are funny like that. And on the very wavering edge of sleep Natalia reminds herself that she decided, chose to trust Clint Barton a long time ago, chose to let him find all the codes and the keys and the lies and handed most of them to him herself, so this isn't really any kind of change.
Feeling should just make it easier.
She's not sure she's convinced. But eventually, she manages sleep.