They switch seats at the gas station and he doesn't know what state they're in until he goes in to pay for the gas and buy snacks for the road. Natasha steals his sweat shirt and raises an eyebrow at the powdered donuts he buys because they reminded him of something half forgotten that made him smile anyway.
Clint drives on aware that while he dozed she'd turned off the radio and replaced it with a slick silver mp3 player with an eclectic mix of music he recognizes and doesn't at the same time. She pushes his sweatshirt into a ball against the window while a woman who isn't Ella Fitzgerald sings 'Summertime' and closes her eyes.
He keeps telling her they'll drive until they hit Disneyland and she doesn't believe him laughing openly at the idea of a solider and a spy posing for photos outside Cinderella's castle with Snow White and the seven dwarves. She smirks as she says the Russian fairy tales are better. He is only joking a little until she says that and then he desperately wants her to see the Americaness, the unironic enjoyment and the commercialism. He wants to be there with her and make her wear mouse ears with Natasha written on them. After all, he thinks, isn't Disneyland where you go to celebrate a victory?
She sleeps, still as still can be. It takes him a moment to realize the soft mix of classical, jazz and blues has come to an end and now there is only silence, Natasha and the road. Instead of poking her and making her tell him one of the supposedly 'better' Russian fairy tales he picks up the mp3 player and with one eye on the flat straight line of road he flicks through the playlists. They are labelled in Cyrillic. Toward the end of the list he finds one that stops him. Ястреб.
He hits play, breathing through the sudden dread he's going to regret prying that rolls over him. The car fills with the ticking of a clock and then the static of Soviet speech. Before he has a chance to translate or let some SHIELD interred paranoia overtake him an English tenor interrupts and Clint finds himself laughing at the earnest cold war sentiment.
"There's no such thing as a winnable war," Sting sings, "it's a lie we don't believe anymore."
Clint finds himself singing along, in key this time, to a playlist of songs that he seems to have given Natasha Romanoff Stockholm syndrome for. Yeah they're going to Disneyland. That's a fucking victory in anyone's book.
