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They know each other's stories, if only in part. Bits and pieces have been traded over time, used like currency with one another to buy trust. The more this commerce continues, the less and less necessary it becomes as each of them gather small fortunes of the other. When you know the numbers well enough, you don't need to check the books.
Or perhaps in this case, you don't want to, especially since a good deal of the money's laundered. Protection through plausible deniability.
Maybe though, just maybe, if so much of the money is dirty, it's safer to look out for one another and guard your hoards from prying eyes together. And maybe, just maybe, if there's little red stains on the bills, you see yourself enough in them to look the other way as you look your co-conspirator in the eyes.
She says I know exactly how many people I've killed, and trusts Niko with the number even as it grows.
He says I've lost track and don't want to know, and trusts Collie with the knowledge that he'd been conditioned not to ask.
They both hear I see you.
She says hell is Iraqi sands and seeing the dead and dying bodies of friends through the scope of your rifle, and trusts Niko with the fact that she got an honourable discharge after being caught in the explosion of an IED, and wears tiny, hidden CIC hearing aids because her eardrums nearly got entirely blown out.
He says hell is a frozen wasteland and the dead bodies of men and women you don't know why you killed, and trusts Collie with this as the explanation for why he memorizes mission briefings; he needs to cling to reasons because his work has to be different from what he was made to do before he came to SHIELD.
They both hear I see you.
He knows that she cannot break the habit of making her bed perfectly each morning, sheets pulled military-tight into hospital corners, and that one of her blankets has the name Bob Morse -- its former owner (don't you dare die on me mockingbird that is a direct order from a fucking superior don't you dare) --stitched into the bottom left. The side with the name is always downwards, hidden from sight.
She knows that he still sometimes dreams of red banners in anonymous buildings, and of his first kill: a scared man backed in to a corner, pleading in broken Russian to be let free, that he had a family, to please let him go. The sound of the man's neck snapping between a thirteen year old Nikolai's hands is followed by the smile and praise of a man as anonymous as the building.
He knows that she had a special comm earpiece made to accommodate her hearing aids. It's modified SHIELD design, and yet no-one in the organization's employ would be able to tell the difference unless they were to examine it closely. Which, of course she does not let happen seeing as she doesn't want to have to tell the story, or need the pity that would result. The comm is either on her person or in a small lock box kept under her bed.
She knows that when he showers, the water is always scalding hot. He will stand there, anywhere between five and fifteen minutes, hands braced against the wall as the water falls, burning away whatever the previous day had held, and he hums waltzes to himself. He used to dance -- or thought he did, it's still unclear -- and the music is still in there.
And so their small economy grows with each piece of themselves that they give, either small (always six inches between the top edge of the blanket and the sheet, one-two-three-one-two-three-ma-ti-senti-morir) or large.
They palm each other these bills, be they damaged or ripped or stained, long past when the amount has ceased to matter. It's all in the trusting one another enough to trade.
I see you.
I see you.
I see you.