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To begin with Clint resents the fuck out of the ring-tone that stabs itself down into his dreams. Nat's asleep and he's asleep and in both cases it's real sleep, comfortable sleep, totally unaided by alcohol or soporifics. And now something, someone, is making a phone make noise and the noise is ruining that, because the universe thinks it's funny and it isn't.
That's not actually what he thinks as he climbs out of the warm dark pit of sleep towards something resembling consciousness. What he actually thinks is noooo, fuck you, in true whiny four-year-old style. (Well. Any four-year-old with his blood family, anyway.) But he means all of that.
The room's small enough that the bed's up against the wall, which means Nat's already pulling herself over Clint's torso to reach for her phone where it sits on the only bedside table - it being the one that buzzed, and rang, and generally interrupted glorious rest. Clint frowns at her shoulder, which is right in front of him. "Thought you had all those on vibrate," he complains, and then Natasha's pushing herself up to sitting via one hand on his ribcage and frowning hard at the phone.
"I do," she replies, tersely. "Everyone except Maria and Steve, and that one's Steve's - " and then she stops, her phone unlocked and the text on the screen, staring at the digital words and blinking. Her mouth shapes what Clint thinks are the beginning of exclamations and curses in Russian, and then she shakes her head just a little, almost like a convulsion, and breathes, "Fuck."
Clint frowns at her. "Okay, now that I'm really concerned - " he says, and holds out his hand for the phone; Natasha shakes her head a little as she hands it over.
"He's at Steve's place," she says, voice flat. "Barnes. The Winter Soldier. Whatever he is right now. He went there."
And Clint's reading it off the screen as she says it, reading Rogers' he's here. he came here. and feeling his own eyebrows try to make friends with his hairline; he passes Natasha back the phone and she stares at it again for a second.
"That's . . . " Clint sorts through a few words, including terrifying, or a problem, and maybe potentially a serious fucking disaster and settles on, "unexpected."
Natasha puts her phone down on the bed, puts her face in her hands and then pulls them back until it's just her forefingers and thumb on temples and jaw. That means she's caught flat, caught completely out of reckoning, because it's one of the few gestures she makes without thinking - and only when something does catch her like this. Her voice is still uninflected when she says, "But he's alive. He's texting me. Clint, I need your head, that means something and I'm stuck."
Clint sits up, rubbing his own forehead. Stuck means, well, stuck - stuck in mindsets she grew up in, stuck in looking at the world a particular way, and Clint's not surprised. Fuck, he might be stuck, because he's having a hard time parsing this himself. Like there's the reality where Steve's dead, which makes sense and then there's a huge question mark on this one that doesn't make sense, and he can't think how he's going to be any help figuring this out if she can't.
At least not until she looks at him with her distant-wide eyes and says, "Clint. He wasn't raised to this. He's not like me. They had to unmake him first, there's other - there's reasons I haven't felt, why - " she stops and takes a deep breath, puts her hands together palm to palm and touches them to her lips, looking upwards. "Imagine when Loki went instead of just going it took everything you remembered," she says, in Russian. "Imagine you came back to me anyway. Why? Why would you do that?"
First off, it's a nauseating thought, but Clint puts that aside, groping at what she means, what she wants. Because fuck it, she's right (and if he's not entirely sure what the urgency's about he'll go with it) - with Nat there wasn't anything before except being a little, little kid, but this might be different. Well. Obviously was, somehow, given Steve wasn't dead and the guy was there: more importantly, the difference might depend on having a life before, even if he didn't remember.
In the end, he shakes his head.
"Because it's safe," he says, lifting one hand and then letting it fall. "I mean, so I don't know anything except . . . maybe what I hear on TV, what I find out when I look shit up on Google, whatever, there's a lot he could fucking learn looking shit up on Google if Rogers kept telling him who he is, who Rogers wants him to be but I don't know it. I don't know anything except maybe when I think about you, when I see you, when I read shit, something says that's safe. And - " and he really doesn't want to be thinking about it, but okay, fine, he doesn't actually want Rogers to get killed either, he'll play, " - and maybe I don't trust that, not right away but fuck, Tasha, it's been - what, months? With fucking nothing else in the world? Jesus," Clint says, shaking his head, "it'd get to a point you either see if the feeling's right or you eat a bullet and you can always eat a bullet later."
Tasha's frowning, sides of her index fingers still touched to her lips until she moves them away to say, "But only if I don't do anything that makes you stop feeling that way." And she picks up her phone.
Clint gestures wordless acknowledgement and then gets up because he now officially wants something either alcoholic or really hot to drink, and he thinks he saw a kettle and some kind of tea tucked away in one of the cupboards. "What time is it in New York, anyway?" he asks, as he fishes them out, fills the kettle and puts it on the tiny burner that's this place's stab at "self-catering".
Clint kind of likes small Georgian hotels and guesthouses. They've got variety and refreshing idiosyncrasies.
"Around eleven," Nat says, frowning at the screen again. Then she sighs, puts it down and murmurs, "God damn it, Steve."
Clint quirks an eyebrow at her and she tosses him her phone again: he scrolls down the exchange of Well done and didn't actually do much.
Tasha'd answered that with Next time I see you, Steve, we have to talk about the limits of your perspective. They're cute, but they're probably not going to serve you very well here. And then Steve asked what do you mean?
"I think I need to go back Stateside," Natasha says, in English, dropping her hand to her knee. Clint watches her fingers dig in, just a little, denting the faux-satin pjs she's wearing. "He doesn't . . .know what he's doing. He doesn't understand. I - it's not surprising," she says, with a sigh. "But Barnes came to him - "
"So if he doesn't figure it the fuck out," Clint finishes for her, "he's going to get himself killed." And she nods.
And as Clint thinks about it, leaning on the little counter with the burner on it, she's not wrong. If the guy came back it means he hadn't run off to find whoever's herding HYDRA leftovers now, probably meant he'd been stalking Rogers most of the time Steve was looking for him, and then decided to see if Rogers's better than suicide. There's a lot of fucking ways to put a foot wrong with that, and with this guy that'd be like stepping on a land-mine. Or worse.
Tasha's got the first two fingers of either hand on either side of the bridge of her nose, eyes briefly closed. "He doesn't understand power," she says, slowly, putting each word into place like building blocks, "and he doesn't want to, it scares him, it makes him uncomfortable and even if he's had it since the second he agreed to the fucking procedure he doesn't - " she drops her hands and lets out her breath.
"He ignores it until he uses it," Clint finishes for her again, "and assumes the consequences are simple. I know, Nat. I get it." Then he shakes his head, trying to think ahead and running into a lot of road-blocks. "But unless we want to wave at Stark and all that shit that goes with it - "
"Fuck, no," Natasha interjects, grimacing, and Clint opens his hands.
"Then it's gonna take time, Tasha," he says.
He's taking as read that killing their way through border agents isn't an option either.
"I know," she says. "I think . . . there's some time. Just not a lot." She rubs her neck and adds, "Sorry."
Clint shrugs and pours the now-boiling water over the cheap tea. "Admittedly I missed the whole blow-up-the-helicarriers bonding experience," he says, lightly, bringing hers over and handing it to her before he sits down on the bed again, "it's not like I don't like the guy."
She smiles a smile that on someone else would count as "wan" and blows on the tea. Then the corner of her mouth twists up. "He's not going to want to hear it," she says. Clint shrugs again.
"So you give him the nice advice version," he tells her, "and if that doesn't convince him, I'll hit him over the head with the ugly version and he can get pissed off at me for it."
Natasha leans against the headboard and wrinkles her nose. "Seems kind of cowardly," she says and Clint snorts.
"What," he says, "having the one of us who doesn't actually have a useful relationship with him tempt the stubborn tantrums of Captain Pissyface?" Natasha snorts a laugh, almost unwillingly and Clint follows up with, "I mean granted it was at Sitwell so I basically approved, but I was there for the Murdoch mess, Tash. The guy can mix disappointed, cranky and affronted up better than my grandma."
Natasha suppresses a smile and says, "Granted."
"He trusts you," Clint goes on, "so if he ignores you he's just having a complete snit. So I'll poke some holes in him and paint it as worse than it even is, and he'll fall back on your version. S'basic." He hesitates for a second before he says, "Frankly I'm kind of more worried about you going back to the States yet," figuring he might as well be honest and get it out there. Adds, "I think you can handle anything you want to, Tasha, but that's not the same as - "
Natasha winces slightly. "I know," she says. "We won't stay. Just - phones and texts and emails, even fucking letters . . . it's too easy for him to pretend they're not real, I think."
"I get it," Clint tells her, and he does. She sips her tea for a minute and then turns her gaze on him, contemplating before she says anything else.
When she does, she starts with, "It's probably not the best idea, thinking of me as s - " and that's when Clint raises one hand slightly and she stops.
"One," he says, curling all fingers but the index, "I love you, but two," and he adds the middle one, "we are not having this conversation right now. You wanna talk about this tomorrow, fine. But not at three am when goddamn stupid time-displaced super-soldiers just knocked your brain out of place. And mine, for that matter."
Natasha gives him a Look over the top of her cup. "I knocked your brain out of place," she corrects, or at least gives a shot at correcting, but Clint shoots her a Look back.
"How about we drink tea," he says, with slightly exaggerated patience, "and try for another couple hours sleep before breakfast, okay?"
Natasha rolls her eyes at him and pointedly drinks her tea.
Later, when they've both worked their way back under the covers and both cups are on the bed-side table she says, "Thank you," quietly.
"Any time," Clint replies.