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"I'm just saying, I'm all for beaches," Hunter suggested, again.
He glanced over at Bobbi in the passenger. She had her foot up on the dash and her head back on the chair, gaze roving over the view from each window as though it were habit (it was) from years of scoping and casing, not because she was interested in looking at it.
"Just keep driving," she commented, no more thought in it than her looking out the windows.
He had to keep his eyes mostly on the road, he was driving, but he could sigh in frustration without disturbing their safe travel down the empty stretch of highway before them. "I mean seriously, Bob. Didn't you say you wanted to get away?" Just take the next left and behold, beaches. Beaches with Bobbi.
But her tone was curt. "From everything."
"The beach is—"
"I can't—" The rising note of her frustration. She cut herself off. "Just... Drive."
He fell silent at that, the small sounds of struggle in the back of her throat. She had never been a talker when it came to feelings, and both of them knew the whole thing with Ward and Kara had taken more of a toll than she would admit, but that sound. She had as good as thrown her vulnerability in his face.
"No beaches," he capitulated and glanced over again.
She stared forward, hand shoved into her hair, eyes full of nameless pain. She caught him looking and cast him the smallest of smiles.
Every once in a blue moon, they just got each other, just worked.
Her fingers wound through his, the free hand he wasn't driving with. He squeezed and held on, miles flying away beneath their tires. Away, away from everything at all, especially SHIELD.
Bobbi didn't know how to stop being a spy around other people, just needed ten minutes outside of that skin, ten minutes where she learned how to drop the angles Hunter always accused her of maintaining even around him.
No beaches, no people, no memories eating her from the inside out.
They stopped at the first crappy motel with a vacancy after dark. Hunter would have kept on driving, she was fairly certain, but he was tired, she was tired, and the night was ripe for an accident if they didn't turn in at some point and fix that. She'd slept in worse with worse company.
They didn't talk as they stripped haphazardly and stumbled into bed. She curled herself around him and clung like a kitten.
"Hey, hey. You're okay." He held her arms around him and rubbed the backs of her hands soothingly.
Hunter was like that. He had to fill the silences, and it wasn't that he just loved to listen to himself like she always accused when he was irritating her the most. He just had to listen to something, and she wasn't always in the mood to oblige. She wasn't this time.
Speaking would make her admit it wasn't herself she was worried about. It never had been.
"Do you have a death wish, Agent Morse?" he'd asked her once, when he was still just Hunter and new to all she represented instead of her husband and full of exasperated history good and bad.
"Nah." She shook her head. "I just don't care."
His hand stopped moving through her hair, the other stilled against the bare expanse of her back. They'd fallen into bed early, and she protested wordlessly and stretched against him.
His grip tightened in her hair, just edging pain. "I care, Bob. You can't just—"
"What?" she'd demanded, sitting up, all narrowed eyes and hard voice. "Risk my life for something bigger than myself? You're a soldier. You're going to tell me I don't have that same right?"
His mouth had snapped shut, but the conversation wasn't over, just gone silent until it had reared up ugly again and again throughout their marriage.
Ward's voice, Kara's voice—they echoed in her dreams, her waking nightmares as she held on in a cheap motel bed between scratchy sheets. Hunter dying because of her. Closure.
Hunter had always needed to fill the empty silence, too many bad memories wrapped up in the nothing quiet eye of a storm.
"We could go see the monuments or something. You've been to Rushmore?"
A beat of silence. "Maybe. Does coordinating a midnight live capture count?"
"Seriously, Bob." He considered it. "Did you actually see the mountain?"
Bobbi's soft 'huh' was half understated laugh, and he counted that a win. "I think I noticed one of the guys had a big nose."
"Well, then." Hunter grinned. "Rushmore it is."
She stayed with him long enough to see the mountain before the role-playing and the crowds got to be too much. It was all too easy for Bobbi to paste on her happy vacationer smile and tuck her hand in his arm and laugh. Just another layer of the masks between her and the world, another habit from work, another 'angle.'
She lost him in the gift shop and caught a ride with some women headed out for drinks, then ditched them too and hiked out along an abandoned walking trail.
If she thought about it, what she really wanted was just to be with Hunter and figure out if she could let all the things she'd always kept hidden go, be just that normal person he wanted her to be and she never could. It was suffocating. She wanted to hide herself anywhere with anyone who didn't know her so she could hide everything away without feeling guilty about it.
There was only one thing she knew for sure: she'd come out onto this road trip for a reason, and she always saw things through to the end.
He heard her come in through the door and close it. Her boots thumped quietly on the ground and he heard the rustle of cloth as her clothes came off behind them.
When she crawled into bed, he expected her to pull away or give him the cold shoulder. Instead, she pressed her body into his and her face into his chest. She didn't say anything, didn't show any sign of opening up to him, and didn't cuddle into him, seeking comfort. She simply lay there, eyelashes fluttering against his skin as her eyes closed. But her body was warm and her face was damp, and he wrapped his arms around her and let her be.
Motels didn't have dining rooms, and Bobbi's idea of breakfast was a quick stop by the fast food place nearest the exit back onto the interstate.
"You talking to me again?" he asked.
"Careful," she snapped back. "I'll make you let me drive."
"You can do that any time you want, love, but since you are talking to me," he said breezily, "how about you pick somewhere you actually want to go?"
Hunter glanced over to see her eyes shut as she shook her head then looked out again with that same expression haunting her, so tired he could feel it in his bones.
"Just keep driving," she said at last.
For once, he didn't argue. He kept driving.