Title: Remembrance
Author: mitchpell
Pairing/Characters: Clint & Natasha, Clint/Laura, Lila, Cooper
Word Count: 4388
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Mild language, canonical Major Character Death, and canonical typical violence.
Author’s Notes: Belatedly written for mayaaa and kiss_me_cassie promptathon prompts.
Summary: It’s been months and he’s used every excuse he can think of to avoid it, but it’s time to bite the bullet. It’s time to clean out Natasha’s room.

*~*~*~*~*

Chapter #1: They can’t Stop the Nightmares

May 2024

“Dad!” Lila called as she bounded up the stairs, stretching her legs in order to hurdle two steps at a time. When she reached the landing, she started to turn towards her parents’ room, but the sight of the open door on the next level had her skidding to a stop. Brow furrowed, she glanced back down the stairs, as if it were a trap, and she was expecting to find someone waiting to catch her.

It wasn’t as if they weren’t allowed in Aunt Nat’s room. It was more of an unspoken rule, one they all followed out of respect for her privacy. Even Mom and Dad would only venture in on rare occasions, like to change the sheets before a planned visit or that one time Cooper accidentally threw a baseball through the window. Now that she was gone, the thought of someone breaking that rule, of violating her space, twisted a knot in Lila’s stomach. Sparing one more glance downstairs, she rounded the landing and slowly climbed the last four steps up to Aunt Nat’s room.

She wasn’t really sure what she expected to find when she peered through the half-opened door. Maybe her mom, having broken down and deciding to clean the more than five years of dust and dirt that had accumulated. Maybe Nate, curiosity having finally got the best of him. It certainly wasn’t her dad, sitting on the far side of the bed, his back half turned toward the door, staring down at a small object that he kept turning over in his hands.

“Dad?” she called out softly. Too softly and from his bad side, she realized when he didn’t look up, which was yet another new thing on the ever-growing list of changes they’d faced since returning to the world.

She knew her dad had been having problems hearing for a while now. They all did, despite his best efforts to hide it. The TV was always overly loud in the rare instances he watched alone, and the radio in his old truck was either cranked so high it was painful or turned off altogether. More telling, however, was how often he’d asked them to repeat stuff, especially on the phone or when they went out to eat. If she were being honest, it had been a little frustrating at times.

Now, it was simultaneously much better and so much worse. Better, because his fancy Wakandan hearing aid made it almost impossible to tell he had problems hearing, unless you were on his bad side. (His right ear was so damaged it basically didn’t work at all anymore.) Worse, because without the hearing aid, he was essentially deaf. He’d argue hard of hearing, but either way it was bad enough that Mom was making them all learn sign language. Something she might have found cool if not for the necessity of it.

Losing Aunt Nat, her dad’s hearing loss, learning that she’d been erased from existence, dusted and gone for five years, only to come back to find half her classmates, half of her friends, had grown up and moved on without her. (They were wrapping up their freshman year of college, whilst she was just finishing junior high.) These were the things she was still trying to deal with, trying to cope with, since the Snap or Blip, or whatever you wanted to call it.

At times, it was all too much—too much to think about, too much to believe. She longed for things to go back to the way they were, knowing full well that they never would. Mom encouraged them to press on, to keep moving forward day-by-day with their usual routines, with the hope that eventually things would start to feel normal again. Sometimes, it felt like it was working. She could get up and go to school and not think about how much had changed, about how much she’d lost. Then there were times when the slightest thing, like a door that was supposed to be closed, brought it all crashing down around her.

Pushing those negative thoughts aside, Lila rapped her knuckles against the door, as she called out to him one more time. “Dad?”

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