Scary story: my file got corrupted so I thought I lost 10k words of work on Beyond Gravesen but I was able to find a more recent autosave so I got it all back! Huge relief. Anyway, go watch No Way Home if you haven't already and are able. It gave me many feelings which I will probably turn into stories eventually. Feel free to message me if you want to scream about it.
What If...Clint Lost His Hearing Another Way?
Clint always spent Sundays in the workshop. Technically, he spent Monday through Friday in and out of the workshop too, but that was on-the-clock in the workshop. Sundays, he could work on whatever he wanted. For the past two weeks, he'd been designing and building a new kitchen table for the house.
He stood at the saw, ready to cut the next leg to length. Measure twice, cut once, his father's words echoed through his head. Dad taught him everything he knew, and he looked forward to teaching Cooper, Lila, and Nate. The older two had already begun helping him out with certain things—safe things, like painting and screwdriving. Clint hadn't let any of them use power tools yet, though Cooper and Lila did get to observe sometimes if they were working on a project together. He made sure they always wore ear protection.
Clint pulled the trigger to start the saw blade spinning and lowered it towards the wood. The hum of the whirring blade was muted, like it came from a distance or through a poor signal. He never wore his hearing aids in the workshop. What was the point? It was the noise of his tools and Clint's own misguided decision to forego wearing ear protection that caused his hearing loss in the first place.
The cut complete, he released the trigger and let the spinning blade come to a stop. Before it stopped, however, something behind him made a noise even he could hear unassisted. The stack of paint cans he kept in the corner came crashing down in a cacophony of metal on metal. Clint flinched, then heaved a sigh of relief when he thought about how much worse that could've been. If he'd been startled any earlier, he could've cut off a few fingers. He turned around to find Nate standing in the middle of a pile of fallen paint cans.
Nate rubbed his right fist in a circle over his chest. "Sorry."
Clint looked at him closely and noticed the sides of his head were bare. "No ears, why?"
He held both hands near his forehead and pointed them at each other. "Head hurts." Then, he added, "I want quiet."
Okay. Nate was old enough that he put his ears on and took them off of his own accord—ears meaning the processors to his cochlear implants. Without them on, he couldn't hear anything. He was the only person on Clint's or Laura's side of the family to be born deaf, though Clint's hearing was only marginally better after the years of abuse he'd put it through. However, he hadn't learned ASL until they learned of Nate's deafness. Before then, he'd relied only on his aids and lip reading.
"Lila and Cooper turned off captions."
Clint sighed. That probably meant they were fighting over something. Nate was clearly furious with them; his eyes narrowed as he said each of their names. For Lila, he merged the sign for "flower" with the letter L, and for Cooper he merged a C with the sign for "chicken" because the first time he learned that chickens live in coops he thought that meant his older brother (whom Clint and Laura often called Coop) was full of chickens.
Clint placed the newly-cut table leg beside the others and followed Nate out of the workshop and back into the house. He snagged his hearing aids where he left them on the counter and put them in before approaching Lila and Cooper in the living room. Sure enough, the TV was on, but the subtitles were not. Between Clint and Nate, they stayed on all the time, and nobody was supposed to turn them off.
"What's going on?" Clint asked.
Lila and Cooper both stiffened up and turned around almost comically slowly.
"He started it." Lila pointed accusingly at Cooper.
"What? No!"
"Mom went to the store and she said we could watch a show. Cooper wanted to watch this, but he said it's got bad words in it so we can't let Nate read them."
Cooper proposed his conflicting story: "Yes I did turn it on, but Lila's the one who said we should turn off the captions so Nate doesn't see the bad words."
Clint took a closer look and listen to the TV and realized they were watching Hell's Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay. He resisted the urge to laugh because why would his kids even want to watch this shit? Someone in Coop's class must've told him about it. But all three of them were too young for this kind of language. Laura would have his head for knowing he let this man grace the screen at his most vulgar in front of their kids. "Turn it off," he said calmly.
Cooper reluctantly picked up the remote and shut it off.
"This is not a show you are allowed to watch. And if you ever watch something that you think Nate's too young for, I want you to take a second and think about whether you should be watching it either, okay?"
"Okay, Dad," they said solemnly.
"No more screen time today. Go to your rooms."
They marched off without a word, heads hung.
Clint didn't know how much of that conversation Nate had managed to follow, but he asked him, "You want to watch what?"
"Spongebob."
"Attaboy." Of all the annoying kids' shows, Spongebob had always been his favorite. Although, he spent several years watching little but Looney Tunes on mute because his parents were in such a state of heightened irritation that the sound of the TV set them off. He found the cartoonish violence was more enjoyable than anything else if he couldn't have sound along with it, and Nate agreed once Clint introduced it to him. Fortunately, his folks went to couples therapy and figured their shit out before things got truly nasty. Now, they were fantastic grandparents.
Spongebob, though. Spongebob was the superior cartoon. He'd watched it unironically throughout high school and all of his adult life, even forcing Laura to watch with him sometimes. Jokingly, one of the reasons he'd wanted kids was so he could watch it regularly without judgement. Well, maybe he wasn't joking all that much. Clint turned the TV back on and reactivated the closed captions. Nate curled up next to him and turned his attention to the screen. The kid was only six, but he was above his reading level due to all the extra practice he got with subtitles.
He stayed for one episode before giving Nate a pat on the head and going back to the workshop to finish the table legs. Clint left his aids in the same spot on the counter and reminded himself to talk to Laura about their kids' interest in cooking shows. Maybe they could find one more appropriate. MasterChef Junior was bound to be kid-friendly, right?
Some things are the same in every universe. And Hawkeye being hard of hearing should be one of them. The MCU is finally coming around to recognize this, but it should've been that way from the beginning. If the grammar of some of the signed dialogue seemed weird, that's because ASL places question words like "who, what, why, etc." at the end of a question. I've only been learning the language for a few months, so I have only a very basic understanding of its grammar, but I do know that much.