So This Is How We Came to Be
From above, it looks almost like an I Spy puzzle—an amorphous pile of arms and legs and stuffed animals in a too-small bed. Tony spoons Bruce, who has his legs wrapped around Clint, who is somehow not suffocating underneath Steve, who has his arm wound around Tony’s waist. And Natasha is buried in it all somewhere, happily warm under the blanket of her tangled boys.
Finding Nemo was the movie of choice for a night in. The big screen turns the whole room a soothing blue. The once-bouncing boys are now all breathing softly into each other, eyelids quickly drooping. There are only a few more moments until they’ll all be fast asleep. JARVIS turns the volume down, dims the lights and draws the blinds. A soft darkness falls over the room, and then it’s just a waiting game.
Bruce falls first. One moment he’s fighting to stay awake, and the next, all the control is drained out of his body. He falls as limp as the blanket draped over the bed, and he breathes free, his little chest rising and falling.
Natasha loves watching him when he’s like this—just how unrestrained he seems in his sleep in comparison to his waking life. But she remembers a dark night, and a timid knock, and a pair of shuffling feet—she remembers the shame dripping from Bruce’s voice as he told her through the crack between her bedroom door and the doorframe, “I don’t want to be alone right now.”
She remembers the whispering silence that followed, and the words that sort of erupted out of her mouth before she really had the chance to think about what she was saying: “You don’t have to be.”
And he wasn’t, not after that.
“You don’t have to be.” The words echo in the purple darkness above her. She feels Steve’s body sort of seize into the fetal position. He snuffles his face against her side. He’s asleep, too.
Steve cried a lot, just after New York. Natasha knew—well, they all knew—and chose not to intervene. After all, what kind of comfort could she offer to a man who’d recently woken in a different part of space-time than he’d ever known? Especially with the world no longer ending (immediately, at least) and too much time to sit around and ache.
She caught him on accident.
He was sitting in the kitchen on an afternoon the tower was meant to be empty. Natasha watched from a distance, as is face became overrun with tears and his ankles wrapped childishly around the legs of his chair.
She didn’t intend to stealth-attack him or anything, but quiet as she was, he heard her. His head snapped around, and they looked at each other, as if for the first time. And they didn’t stop looking at each other, for at least another beat or two.
Natasha crept closer, as if she was had a jar in one hand and the lid in the other, chasing after a firefly. She got close enough to kneel down next to him, and she put her hand on his thigh.
“I miss Bucky,” he said.
Natasha had read the file, and she’d been to the museum—she knew who Bucky was to Steve, but she didn’t know him. But that terrible sad look in Steve’s thunderstorm eyes, it was enough to make her feel like she had. She almost missed Bucky, too.
She runs her fingertips through his blond hair and watches him sleep. He’s coiled up into a ball, all of his softer parts hidden by elbows and knees. It’s a protection position, Natasha realizes, the kind you assume to protect your most vital organs during an attack.
But he seems almost natural like this. His lips are lax—smiling, sort of. He must be in a different time in sleep.
“Goodnight, Mommy,” comes Tony’s soft whisper. He closes his eyes, but he won’t be asleep for another half hour, at least.
“Goodnight, sweetheart,” Natasha whispers back, and even in the dark, she can see him smile back.
Tony had come to her.
She was drinking a beer at the bar in the kitchen when Tony walked in behind her. “You think you could…make me something to eat?” He had asked.
Natasha had a snarky retort on the tip of her tongue—something along the lines of, “Don’t you have JARVIS configured to do that?”—until she realized that his voice was completely devoid of sarcasm. She turned around to look at him. He was all soft in a stretched-out t-shirt and baggy jeans, standing shamefully with his hands stuffed into the back pockets.
She got up and made the poor man a grilled cheese.
It had always been a feat for Tony to ask for something, especially something like this—something that exposed a vulnerability. Natasha recognized that Tony had always had these sort of survival tactics he used to keep himself at arm’s length from anyone who dared get close. And now—even now—as he lies still, he lies stiffly. He won’t let his guard down, even in sleep.
But he’s let Steve wrap his arm around him—so, he’ll get there, Natasha thinks.
Clint is the last of the boys to fall asleep, which Nat knows is an old spy thing. If you’re the last to fall asleep, you can be at least pretty sure that you can trust everyone else sleeping around you. And, she supposes, if he finds it safe to fall asleep before her, he must trust her quite a lot.
It would make sense; she remembers the night, not all that long ago, when she found herself taking care of Clint—but not for the first time. They were partners, so they’d always sort of looked after each other in the field. Natasha knew it was dangerous to get attached to someone like Clint, especially in their line of work, but it never really stopped her.
New York affected Clint, too—perhaps more than any of them. He didn’t trust himself around his new teammates, and especially not around Natasha. So, that’s how she found him that night, scared and trying to take care of himself while grappling with his infantile headspace. He needed her. And she came for him.
Clint sleeps like an actual rock, silent and perfectly still. His eyelids flutter, and his face looks so peaceful.
Natasha leans back, and she feels that familiar rush of warmth swelling in her chest, which, despite the dark, feels quite like the sun rising inside of her. She inhales, exhales. She feels at peace.
It’s a sort of peace she never thought she would feel—would be able to feel—until rather recently. It all—the ageplay, the little family they have, that is—feels something like a guilty pleasure to her. Selfish, almost. The peace, the warmth in her chest, it’s like an addiction. She lives her life in pursuance of that particular sensation. Her state of utmost peace comes in making others feel at peace, and that can’t be all that bad, she reasons.
After she finally hears Tony’s soft snoring, she lets herself wind down. She relaxes her shoulders, lets her head fall on her neck, wraps her arms around her boys. She’s ready for a few good hours of sleep.
Except.
There’s an image that has been nagging at the corner of her vision for a while now. She knows not to be frightened by it; it doesn’t seem threatening or an immediate danger, and it could almost be ignored, but Natasha is curious.
She turns her head to look at it: a large man peeking through the doorway. Thor. Natasha notices the wideness in his eyes as they make momentary eye contact. Then he disappears, almost as if he’d never been there in the first place.
A dozen questions flood her head, but she’s still calm. Her fingers find themselves twirling through Bruce’s hair, and her other hand skates gently up and down Clint’s back. There is no telling what will happen in the morning, what Thor will say or do—but she remembers to breathe.
Thor hasn’t really left; he sits with his back against the wall in the hallway so he’s not seen. Little does he know that Natasha can hear his stressed, rattling breath, and his soft movements.
Natasha falls asleep, eventually, after she hears Thor finally shuffle out of the hall.
Whatever happens, she decides, it’s going to be alright.