All the Dreaming Nights (Bruce/Natasha--PG)
Title: All the Dreaming Nights
Author: sororexitium
Pairings: Bruce/Natasha, Tony/Steve, Clint/Darcy, Thor/Jane
Summary: The clock blinked 01:37 at her in bright blue numbers.
Natasha counted in her head the moment JARVIS’s satellite- connected feeds switched the time, counting down another minute that she couldn’t sleep. Russian and binary language filtered in her head, but her eyes stared unblinkingly at the holographic display until it switched to 01:38.
Disclaimer: I'm just playing with someone else's toys.
Warning: Insomnia
Notes: This is the first story I've written in like...three years with a het pairing as the center focus...so I understand if it sucks.
The clock blinked 01:37 at her in bright blue numbers.
Natasha counted in her head the moment JARVIS’s satellite- connected feeds switched the time, counting down another minute that she couldn’t sleep. Russian and binary language filtered in her head, but her eyes stared unblinkingly at the holographic display until it switched to 01:38.
Tonight was the fourth night sleep had eluded her.
Stark’s tower was mostly quiet, or at least the apartments on the top few floors. The perimeter was secure. She and Clint checked it every night before they ‘turned in for bed’. Stark assured them they didn’t need to, but as much as she trusted his sentient AI system, she felt calmer after having surveyed the area herself with her oldest and most trusted partner at her side.
Clint was currently asleep in his room. Darcy wasn’t with him tonight, as she was currently visiting her mother in Santa Fe. She couldn’t hear any noise denoting that his was sleeping, but she knew her friend. She knew everyone who slept in the tower now, and she knew their sleeping patterns sometimes better than her own.
Clint could sleep for seven hours at the very most. In the eight years she had known him, she could hardly recall a day that he had slept more than those seven hours, and those few times he had, he had been delirious with fever. He could function on much less. She had seen him lie down after twenty-four hours of being awake, and reach for his weapons an hour and a half later and still never miss his mark.
Darcy on average slept for five hours during the week, but could sleep for fourteen hours straight. Part of Natasha’s mind attributed that to college, but mostly it had to do with the fact that she was employed for an astrophysicist for a year, while taking classes at her college, and then moved to work for SHIELD. No one had much time for sleep when a disaster came up in SHIELD.
Thor was a little up in the air when it came to his sleeping patterns. As a demi-god, he didn’t always need sleep, so he could and had gone up to a month without closing his eyes. He had also slept an entire week away, solid.
Steve averaged about four hours of sleep easily with the serum.
Stark, Bruce, and Jane varied most on their sleeping rituals.
Jane tended to sleep during the day, almost as if the ‘internal clock’ was programmed backwards. She easily went to bed as the sun came up and stayed there until two in the afternoon. Sometimes she went to bed at a mostly decent hour, but that was mostly on movie nights, when she and Thor laid down together and the unnatural warmth of the god lulled her to sleep.
Stark had a sharp, cruel case of insomnia that could and often did make hers look kind. He could stay up for six days straight, living off cat naps and protein drinks, and surrendering to numbers, schematics, and science, all the while escaping nightmares.
Nightmares like hers.
Bruce, though, Bruce could be a different matter. He had his nightmares, many she saw on his skin and in his eyes. Dissonance within himself. He’d become much better at adapting Hulk into his life, but to be quite honest, he was still hiding a monster inside human clothing. His insomnia almost rivaled Stark’s, but sometimes he would fall asleep on the little cot his lab came with, thanks to Stark’s forward thinking. Sometimes he slept three hours out of the day. Sometimes, he actually went to his room for a night’s sleep. Sometimes, he just stared down the eyepiece of a light microscope until the world eased away from him.
The display hit 01:42; officially two hours since she had laid down for bed, completely exhausted only to stare listlessly into the blue-shined darkness of her room as soon as her head settled on her pillow.
She had methods to force herself to sleep, some safe, some not so much, but that way laid nightmares and monsters that even with all of her training, she had no ability to defeat while she slept. She’d had courses of course. She could will herself into a half-sleep, just conscious enough to move the dreams as she wanted them to. She had the ability to catch signs of oncoming nightmares. It didn’t help when the first thing she closed her eyes to were fires, killshots, and decisions she still didn’t want to make today, let alone so many years ago.
Natasha debated on whether she should stay in this room this night.
For the previous nights she had been awake, she had gone down to one of the gyms Stark set up for them just to throw herself into something. She had moved through many katas from all the martial arts she had picked up in her life. She had practiced her gymnastics until she almost couldn’t find any fault in her form. And then, just to torture and relax herself, she had worked on the well beloved steps and forms of ballerinas, going so far as to pull out her favorite pair of slippers from beneath a floorboard JARVIS assured her no one but her would ever see into.
She sometimes wondered at the thoughtfulness of Stark in the deep of night, but by morning it was usually lost for growing irritation and fondness.
Taking a deep breath, she pulled herself from her bed, her hand releasing the gun under her pillow to push through her hair, while she used the flat of the knife in her other hand to scratch irritably at an itch on her neck. With a glance at the large computer screen across from her bed, the sensors showed that the perimeters were still secure.
“JARVIS, show me the heart rates of the team.” She’d checked it every night she couldn’t sleep, not believing that her insomnia was a precognitive warning of trouble, instead, taking a creature comfort in knowing how others that she cared about were doing.
A small window popped up on her computer screen, showing seven heart readouts as JARVIS understood team to mean everyone in the penthouse Stark had let them live in for the past year and a half. It was odd not to see eight, but Darcy was in Santa Fe and Natasha knew hers wouldn’t be displayed. It still just didn’t look right.
Everyone was about where they should be, beats-per-minute-wise. Clint’s, Thor’s, and Steve’s all denoted that they were sleeping. Jane, Stark, Bruce, and hers showed that they were awake.
Just like the past three nights.
She sighed and pulled a hair-tie from her bedside table.
Another night of working out never hurt anyone.
+++
“You actually learned in China.” Bruce said from behind her.
Natasha didn’t stop in her movements, letting the Tai Chi flow through her body almost subconsciously. She’d known he was in the doorway for a few minutes now, since he came in, presumably to do his meditations, yoga, or maybe his own Tai Chi. She knew he practiced it, too. He sometimes offered to practice with her, but usually she was finishing as he was offering and no further attempt was made.
She breathed out as she moved her arms outward, answering simply, “Yes.”
It seemed to be all he wanted to say, and she was glad for it.
Certain forms of exercise called for conversation, she felt. There were sparring sessions that called for mocking, cajoling, and praise, but Tai Chi was a quiet one, like ballet, and sometimes yoga.
He, however, didn’t leave. He didn’t move, didn’t speak; he hardly even made a sound. The only noise she could hear of him was the quiet even inhalation and exhalation, whisper soft and matching her own paced breathing.
When she was finished, a thin layer of perspiration on her skin, she turned to see him in his own workout clothes, loose and easy to move in. His eyes were on her, still, they had never moved. The constant swirl of conflict was in his eyes, but when they caught her gaze, a tired smile pulled at the corner of his lips, barely there but strong.
“Would you like to meditate with me?”
She considered it, very strongly. She was decent at meditation, had learned it and several techniques for it over the years so that she could compartmentalize and ease her mind when she first couldn’t sleep. It helped her as an assassin. Her random bouts of insomnia were impervious to the hours she spent finding inner balance.
“Thank you but no,” she said, for no particular reason other than she didn’t want to at this time.
He nodded and came further into the room, stepping out of the immediate path of the door politely.
Always so polite.
A trait she found both endearing and annoying, much like the rest of her team.
+++
A few weeks went by and she slept when she was tired throughout them. Sometimes she thought she felt insomnia setting in, but then she would close her eyes and wake up four to six hours later with JARVIS telling her the time, date, and temperature.
They were refreshing, but it didn’t mean her insomnia had just stopped.
03:52 in the morning, she ventured out of her room on her way to the living room where she had left a book of Latin poetry. The halls around her room were darkened, not pitch black; a warm sort of dimness that JARVIS facilitated in all parts of the penthouse after midnight. It was soothing, though she had no reason to verbally admit it, and it didn’t stop her from taking her knives with her just like every night she moved around.
In the living room where most of the team spent their time, because there were four living rooms in the house, her book lay on the end-table with a few things stacked on top of it. She would have gone closer to inspect the array her book had collected, but just as she noticed the book, she also noticed that the kitchen’s lights were at about sixty percent.
She imagined it must be Stark or Bruce, as everyone else in the penthouse was asleep.
She flitted towards the light, her hand dragging across the smooth, cool paint on the wall, catching a shadow as it stretched and moved across the floor. From the distortion it was hard to tell which occupant the kitchen held until she turned the corner.
Her eyes landed on Bruce, his back turned away from her as he set a kettle onto boil, moving his hand up to one of the cupboards to start searching through the rather impressive amounts of tea he had stashed.
She moved to a seat at the kitchen island, scooting herself into it without a sound. “What are you having tonight?”
He jumped with a loud gasp, causing a small smile to turn Natasha’s lips upward as he whipped his head around. He stared at her with wide, tired eyes for a moment, then simply shook his head with his own smile working at his lips. “Has anyone ever tried to put a bell on you?” he asked, and she had heard the line before, threatened irreparable harm for it, but Bruce said it as an exhausted joke that was meant to be taken as seriously as the cartoons Clint loved watching.
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “None that have lived to tell the tail.”
“Of course,” he murmured. He padded over to another cabinet to pull down another mug for her. She nodded her appreciation, and pulled it closer to herself, waiting patiently for the water to boil. He went back to his tea collection, looking it over and making small hmms and hahs. “Does jasmine sound good to you?”
“That’s fine,” she said, just as the kettle whistled.
He nodded pulling the kettle and tea leaves over to the island.
“I thought you had a kettle and tea in your lab,” she said conversationally.
“I do,” he replied. “But all of my burners are being used at the moment. I started a few experiments a few days ago, so…”
He settled in across from her, blowing on the hot liquid in his cup.
“How are they going?”
Bruce gave a chuckle. “Well, nothing’s blown up yet, so I’m currently counting that as a win. Everything is going as I predicted it would, but I won’t know for sure if the serums will work until I’m finished.”
“This is to help you control better when the Hulk comes out?” she clarified, taking a tentative sip of her tea. She had heard him talking about it to Stark a few times, and she had seen the notes when they were presented to SHIELD. It all looked legitimate. It looked like it would help him have better control over himself, while not getting rid of the Hulk completely.
Natasha wasn’t sure the Hulk could leave anymore. She wasn’t sure anyone wanted to Hulk to leave. The green guy had a way of growing on you.
+++
A few days later, another sleepless night, but Natasha didn’t go to the gym, or to the living room or kitchen. She took the elevator down to the lower levels of the tower, where Stark had set up his and Bruce’s personal labs.
When the elevator stopped in the lowest level of the tower, she went by Stark’s darkened lab, the man actually asleep tonight in Steve’s room. Further in the underground hall, a light shined bright and artificial, signifying the glass walls and entrance to Bruce’s lab. She moved toward it, silent as she keyed in her code to enter his domain.
The smell of chemicals and fire came to her first, then the small undertones of tea and a little bit of sweat. Bruce was actually facing her, so his eyes pulled away from his microscope instantly when the door hissed open.
He looked confused, but to his credit he didn’t ask her why she was there. Instead, he simply said, “These sleepless nights are becoming a thing for us.”
Natasha smiled. “What’s another interpersonal bonding session between us, Doctor?”
He smiled back, but then returned his focus to the specimen under the lens. Natasha had been down to his lab a few times over the previous year and a half, for various reasons, from checking to see if he was ready for the meeting with Fury, to just making sure the man hadn’t died down here while JARVIS was preoccupied with making sure Stark didn’t set himself on fire. Sometimes she came down her to check his notes and see where everything was in his experiments. She was a spy. She did it to almost everyone.
The lab, bright and polished, and definitely more organized that Stark’s, was in a state of small disarray, but for the most part exactly how it always was. In one corner was a small kitchenette. In another little alcove there was a little cot. Everywhere else, there were Bunsen burners, pipettes, Geiger meters, and other various scientific supplies to help Bruce in his studies.
“Tony came over before he and Steve went to bed,” Bruce said without looking up again. “That’s why the place is a mess. He has very active hands.”
Natasha moved to a small computer chair over in the corner, settling down to watch him. “I’m sure Steve appreciates it.”
“I try not to think about it,” Bruce replied with a small smirk. He glances up at her for a moment, his brown eyes soft, but still tired. She sometimes wondered if her eyes ever looked as tired as his, or if Stark and Clint were right and the only thing in her eyes was a controlled bloodthirst. It would probably be better if it were the latter. His smirk morphed into an endearing smile. “You know…your accent is thicker when you haven’t slept in a while. Or…well, it shows up when you haven’t slept.”
She took out her knife and itched her scalp with the dull of the blade, regarding him curiously. “I’m sure it does,” she said, keeping an ear on the pronunciation of her syllables. “No one’s ever mentioned it before though.”
His eyes flickered to the knife in her hair. “No surprise there.”
She hummed but otherwise made herself content to watch him work.
As the nighttime hours whittled away, she found herself regularly with a mug of tea at her elbow, and randomly he had dug out a copy of Through the Looking Glass for her to read and keep herself some semblance of amused.
It was a nice way to spend the night.
+++
A few more months went by, and her sleepless nights grew to have a routine to them that, while sleep would have benefitted her better, were relaxing nonetheless.
Natasha would try to sleep for two hours, and if nothing came, she would head to the gym for some exercise. Then she would go down to Bruce’s lab. Sometimes on her way she would meet Jane or Thor, and in Stark’s lab, she often saw him and Steve. Steve often waved at her; Stark was oblivious.
Inside Bruce’s lab, the computer chair was often open, and on the floor next to a filing cabinet was a growing collection of the books she would sometimes come down here with and never take back up as well as a few sci-fi thrillers that Bruce would hand to her when none of her own seemed appealing. She would settle down on the chair, both of them silent mostly, although sometimes they would engage in a small conversation.
In the later morning hours, she would head up to the kitchen, and sometimes Bruce would go with her and they would have breakfast. Sometimes everyone was there. Sometimes it was just the two of them. She liked it either way, though she did enjoy Bruce’s company a little more.
She liked the way he met her eyes, sharing tired smiles and talking about his work, or their shared work, and once surprising her by talking about his travels while on the run from the government. They compared notes on where they had been for an hour that night and talked about the restaurants. Bruce liked foreign food. Natasha liked foreign drinks.
It was comforting, and one night she fell asleep in his computer chair.
+++
She woke up to Bruce calling her name. Her eyes snapped open, her body tensing for a moment before Bruce’s face came into focus and she felt his hand on her shoulder. His eyes were kind and tired and he stroked his thumb over her collarbone briefly before pulling his hand away.
“Do you want to lie down?” he asked. “It would be more comfortable.”
She stared up at him, feeling fatigue in her bones for several seconds, before she nodded.
He helped her up, and followed her out of the lab, shutting everything off with a simple, “JARVIS?”
“I’ll monitor everything until your return, sir,” the AI replied.
In the elevator, Natasha leaned back against the wall for the forty-seven seconds it took to get to the penthouse. Bruce’s eyes were on her, his attention focused and for the brief moment she looked over at him as the door opened, his eyes looked just a little less tired, a little less conflicted.
She stepped out of the elevator and held her hand out for him to take this time.
His hand was soft in hers and she drew him out of the small space, into the large sprawling layout of their living area, dragging him close into her personal space.
She pressed her lips against his, soft and unhurried. It could have been a thank you kiss, or a kiss goodnight, if it weren’t for the nip she gave his lip before soothing it with her tongue. His hand tighten marginally in hers, while his free hand rested against her shoulder, his thumb playing with the tendons in her neck and at her collarbone. Taking that for the encouragement she needed, Natasha stepped closer, her own unhindered hand falling to Bruce’s hip as she licked at his lips until he let her in.
The kiss was still slow, tired, and familiar to her in the way Bruce just accepted it without hesitation, pulling her closer while letting her lead. Their tongues against each other were still tired and languid as she mapped his mouth and tasted the lingering white tea and a hint of something sweeter, like honey.
With a gentle squeeze to Bruce’s hand she pulled away, seeing his eyes shine in the dimness of the penthouse.
“You should come to bed too,” she said.
He nodded, understanding her offer to share her bed with her this evening, even as he asked, “I’m not going to be stabbed by an errant knife, am I?”
She smiled. “Trust me, Doctor.”
He did.
+++
The clock blinked 01:37 at her in bright blue numbers weeks later.
Natasha rested her head on one elbow and watched as Bruce slept beside her. Russian and German swirled together in her head as she watched the man beside her in the blue-shined darkness of her room.
He was asleep for the night, and although insomnia plagued her she watched as his chest rose and fell evenly, her free hand resting against his stomach.
The rest of the team was in their rooms, and though she could go exercise, train, or read, this was almost as good as sleep.