Nightmares
Pepper sighs.
Worry consumes her as she watches over her partner.
She can’t sleep, not when he’s so volatile in his. When he’s tinkering in the workshop, she’ll rest then, but for now, she’ll wake him when the dreams get bad.
Her book is interesting anyway.
Getting up to stretch, her legs take her to the hall where she finds Clint wandering too.
Smiling, she stops, greeting him with a small wave.
“On lookout too?” She asks, unsure if she’s overstepping her boundaries in asking.
“Just needed a bit of a break.”
Clint gives her a half smile and takes his hands out of his pockets, offering her a hard candy.
She knows it’s odd, but takes it anyway.
“Does she have nightmares too?” She guesses, unwrapping the candy, and sits on the floor, gesturing for him to do the same.
As he slides down next to her, she notices how tired he looks.
“I haven’t got much sleep,” he admits, copying her in unwrapping sweet and popping it into his mouth.
“It’s hard, isn’t it? When someone is going through something and you can’t do anything to help.”
He nods and they sit in silence.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Pepper asks him, knowing he’ll decline.
Predictably, he shakes his head.
“Do you?” He asks, kindly, offering her another candy.
She smiles tiredly and stands.
“Maybe another night.” He stays seated as she moves away, knowing the predictable cadence of Tony’s sleep, and that it’s likely he’ll wake soon.
“Thanks for this,” she calls behind her, and unwraps the second candy as she walks away.
.
Clint scrolls his phone.
He’s learnt more about nightmares than he ever thought he would.
There’s so much research out there around nightmare frequency and nightmare distress, about its relationship to wellbeing.
The research papers are dry, but with little else to do, and it being the only thing on his mind, it holds his attention.
All he really wants to know is strategies to help.
Maybe he can even talk to Pepper about it. He leans back on the recliner chair, thankful that Tony at least thought this through when outfitting rooms in the medical wing.
They’re only here for a short time, the only concern now is how much sleep Natasha seems to be needing.
He’s mostly worried about how out of it she seems, but the doctor assured him it’s the medication. It’s likely the increased dosing, he thinks, but also, her body needs to heal.
Closing his eyes, he rests his phone on his chest and thinks.
.
“Tony.”
Natasha sits upright, eyes glazed.
She’s been on the edge of waking, as Clint sat over her, reading his research paper aloud as a joke to himself.
Clint tries to be reassuring as her eyes search his. He wants her back to sleep. It’s 3am and he’s exhausted.
“He’s in the other room,” he tells her, tiredly.
“He’s dead,” she insists.
“No, no he’s not,” he argues.
She bites her bottom lip.
“It’s my fault.”
She’s not hearing him. He’s loathe to go and get Tony, but he will if she escalates.
“Nat, he’s fine, ok?” He tries, pulling out his phone.
“He’s dead, I killed him,” she says, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.
“Oh god, Pepper, I need to tell Pepper,” she moans.
She rests her face in her hands as she bites back a sob.
“Natasha,” he says firmly, “look at me.”
She begrudgingly does.
“Tony is not dead. Do you need me to call him?”
She pouts.
“I don’t…”
He waits.
“I…”
He sees memories pass and she holds up her hand to find it splinted still.
“He’s ok?”
Clint nods, holding up a photo he took of Tony sitting by Natasha the week before.
She settles back down.
“Oh.”
Closing her eyes, she covers her face, running her hand over it as she groans.
“It’s ok, Tash, take some deep breaths. You saved him, remember? That’s it. Sleep yeah?”
She shakes her head.
“What are you reading?” She asks quietly.
He turns his phone around, showing her the block of words on his screen.
“Want me to keep reading?” He asks her.
She moves across, and he climbs in bed with her.
“Bad dreams or nightmares occur, when there are distortions within the affective network. In addition, the question whether nightmares become a clinical problem, depends again on the more trait like factor “affect distress”,” he pauses, and she looks up at him with tired eyes.
He continues, “which is defined as a dispositional or trait‐like factor consisting of a long‐standing tendency to experience heightened distress and negative affect in response to emotional stimuli.”
He hears the soft rise and fall of her breath as she’s lulled back to sleep and he kisses the top of her head.
“Nielsen and Levin,” he reads, “state, that it is affect distress which determines how much distress one will have during and after a nightmare.”
He puts his phone down and pulls the blanket over the top of them.
Clearly, her affect distress in waking is overloading her unconscious mind.
He wants nothing more to lessen it, and though he’s been hesitant to agree, he wonders if he should talk to the doctor about sleeping tablets.
Opening his phone again, he starts looking into medications, resolving to talk to Natasha when she wakes fully.
.