29 April 2018

Look, I don't know why I'm writing in this stupid thing. If Barton ever finds out he'll have a field day.

But I'm doing it anyway, writing things down, because I've run out of ideas. I don't know what else to do. What are you supposed to do when half the universe turns to dust because you fucked up?

I'm trying to figure out where we went wrong, think of what we could have done differently. Killed Vision right off the bat? Not an option. Talk to Shuri sooner? We got to her as soon as we could.

Kept the team together? Maybe.

Only a few days have passed but, in case you can't tell, this particular pill is a bitter one to swallow. And it keeps getting worse.

There's still no word from Stark.

Not sure why we're expecting to hear anything. Thanos had the Time Stone. Thanos watched Wanda kill Vision. Thanos rewound time to bring the android back to life, only to kill him again for the Mind Stone. The Time Stone had been with Doctor Strange, who had been with Stark. Either he's dead or very close to it.

I hope I'm wrong.

I want to be wrong.

Shellhead's a pain in the ass but his heart's in the right place. Steve keeps saying there has to be a way to track him down. And honestly, if the World War Two vet with a seventy year nap to his name is the one to figure out how to narrow down the space search, then I will go skinny dipping in the Volga at the height of Russian winter. I mean, how do you track a single man down in the depths of space? Is he even in our galaxy? Is he further out? What was even waiting for him on that ship?

Stark's probably the only one who could figure it.

Pepper's checking in every day. She's frantic. I've settled her down in my room for the moment, not like I'm gonna be using it. When I left her she was crying in her sleep. I want to help her, but I don't know how.

That was always more of a Wanda thing.

She's intuitive.

Was.

29 April 2018 (again)

We found Nick's car today.

Abandoned in the middle of the road with a 90s style pager lying on the ground next to it.

He was always such a presence, it's strange to me that something got the better of him. I hacked into the CCTV footage of the road and watched it unfold. Hill was with him when it happened. She looked scared. I've never seen her scared before.

The pager was the last thing Nick went for.

Why is it so important?

The doc's set it up so we can monitor it. Nick's not a man to waste time, especially his last few seconds.

I watched the footage again. Several times. Saw them disappear over and over. I still don't understand what I'm feeling.

Steve, Bruce, Thor, Rhodey and Rocket (a gun-toting, talking racoon version of Stark - I wish I was making this up) are all here. Just like me. Pretending to be useful. Not having a single idea what to do.

I just hope this pager leads to something. We could use a win, however small.

30 April 2018

Hey, so I guess I'm back. You must be a good listener, even if I'm not good at talking.

Everything's a mess. Half the population might be gone but that hasn't halved our problems. Though Steve and I are officially no longer fugitives. Yay.

We're not trained to deal with this type of threat. Hell, we're not even trained to comprehend it.

I don't even know why I'm wasting time with this journal. I need to find Clint. I know he's alive, all his gear is gone and there was debris all over his living room floor that looked like it might have once been an ankle monitor.

I need to find him. Maybe one of the others will be with him. Maybe he won't be alone.

If Laura, the kids - I can't. I can't even go there.

2 May 2018

Just when things seem as crazy as they can possibly be, shit gets weirder.

I miss the good old days where the weirdest thing in my life was my partner.

Nick's pager finally paid off. It stopped transmitting and the next thing I know there's a blonde woman standing behind us, in some sort of tactical suit, demanding to know where Fury was.

It was difficult to get a read on her. She didn't seem hostile but there was definitely power there. She didn't look like a threat but I doubt we could stop her if she decided to attack. She didn't know any of us but she knew Nick.

That man and his secrets.

Turns out she's Carol Danvers. In the corridors of SHIELD hers was a name conspicuous only because of the silence that always followed. It reminded me of the Red Room and the way the higher ups would only whisper about the Winter Soldier.

Except my fellow brain-washee had nothing on her.

She last paid us a visit in the 90s (explains the pager) when Nick was still an agent - around about the same time I was learning how to perform a killer arabesque, literally. A bunch of shape shifting aliens, Skrulls, were paying a visit to Earth. I'm guessing they weren't here for the sights.

Apparently she was in an accident in the 80s - I imagine this was one of the few times I was doing something any normal kid would do, like throwing a tantrum - and she ended up absorbing the power of, wait for it, yes, the Tesseract! So she has powers from an infinity stone.

Long story short, shit happened, the good guys won (which actually happened to be the Skrulls) and she had to leave. But not before handing a customised pager over to Nick and saying it was for emergencies.

When Danvers said this, Thor snorted.

"Your Agent Fury left it too late. He was already turning to dust."

I disagree.

As long as there is blood left running through my veins and breath left in my lungs, there will always be hope we can get everyone back.

Still no sign of Clint.

3 May 2018

Hey.

Carol's gone. She boosted our space monitoring systems and found a signal identical to Stark's suit tech. Apparently, in the grand scheme of things, he's not too far from Titan, which was Thanos' home planet.

When did I start living in a sci-fi?

She's out there looking for Stark. We haven't told Pepper. What would be the point in getting her hopes up?

Still no sign of Clint. How is it we can track Stark from the other side of the galaxy but we can't find a man running around with a bow and arrow on our own planet?

3 May 2018 (Part II)

So I bit the bullet.

I already knew the answer but I needed it confirmed. I had Friday run facial recognition across the population. There was not a single match.

They're gone.

I just want to hear Coop's laugh.

See Lila's smile.

Play one of Nate's ridiculous games.

And I need one of your pep talks, Laura. Not that I deserve it, I'm letting you down. I can't find him.

6 May 2018

Hey.

I've decided I'm going to call you Tom.

Getting bored of not knowing how to start talking to you. Maybe a name will help. I'm actually missing the small talk.

So, from now on it's Tom. Taken straight from Harry Potter because it's Lila's favourite. Much to Clint's dismay. He always griped about how there weren't any proper archers. I think he just didn't like it when Lila giggled and called him Firenze or Bane. He tried to get her to read Hunger Games, until Stark started calling him Katniss. Poor guy, could never win.

But that's what he gets for being such an easy target.

So, Tom. I have one favour to ask of you. Play nice and don't use everything I've written against me. I'm in no mood to fight a basilisk.

There's already enough going on in my head.

Outside of it, too.

Rhodey isn't coping. He's good at keeping the mask on, but I'm better at ripping it off. He's worried about Stark, he's having nightmares about the ash, he clings to Pepper as much as she clings to him. His jokes are hollow. Smile stilted. Eyes haunted.

Steve is running, all the time. Even with the serum the hours he spends circling the compound can't be good for him. When he's inside I follow him from time to time to make sure he's alright. He pushes himself so close to the edge with the exercise and no sleep and ends up being sick. He wants to feel something. When he's not doing anything his eyes go distant and I know he's replaying Bucky's disappearance. I ask him to sleep and he tries. I ask him to eat and he tries. I ask him to tone down the stress on his body and he tries.

Rocket walks around mumbling. He has to be the most foul-mouthed racoon I've ever met. He mumbles about people I don't know, he mumbles insults at them, at us, at himself. Every now and then I see him pounding a small fist into his leg, voice catching as he calls himself a moron. We share jokes, cutting remarks, lace ourselves with barbed insults coated in sarcasm.

Bruce is Bruce. He's thrown himself into doctor mode, he monitors us as best he can. Nags us to take better care of ourselves while not bothering to take any of his own advice. Hours go by and he barely registers. Sometimes I've been able to sneak in and leave him food and tea without him noticing. He always eats it. Which is more than I can say for the rest of us.

I've never seen Thor look so broken. Everything has drained from him, his fight, his desire, his joy. Out of all of us he can claim to have lost everything. But he shoulders the burden of blame like it belongs to him alone. It's eating away at him and it doesn't matter how many times I tell him it's not his fault. It doesn't matter when I say what we all could have done better. It doesn't matter when I tell him I failed to keep the team together. It doesn't matter.

In all of them I see a bit of me. Broken reflections everywhere I turn. Dogged by answerless questions. How do you stay strong in the middle of all this? How do you act whole when the most important parts are missing?

How do you grieve when you don't even know what you're grieving?

How do you find a man who doesn't want to be found?

Where are you Clint?

With a snap of the book, Clint brought everyone back to the present. The words swimming in front of him were so Nat. He could hear her raspy voice and the deadpan way she liked to deliver some of her jokes. He saw the smirk when she made him smile. But he also saw through her.

He saw through her jokes and her written words and could see the pain she was struggling with. The pain he had helped cause; and the confusion and the desperation. The constant deflections and the crossing out of things that she probably needed to get down. She was writing like she spoke, edited. With a cool and measured head. As soon as she felt herself cracking she kept it short and abandoned ship.

It was choking him.

But he could also sense the looks he was getting from the others. While he had no doubt Fury and Hill knew of his extracurricular activities, he hadn't told his family. It's not the sort of thing you can just slip into conversation.

Hey honey, I picked up some groceries on the way home, I noticed we were running low on milk. Oh, by the way, while you were gone I might've gone a bit mad and killed a whole bunch of people, so don't ever leave me again. Kay? Bye.

That wasn't going to go down well. But in typical Nat fashion, she was forcing him to face his mistakes. Granted, managing it from beyond the grave was impressive, but that was just Nat.

"Where were you, dad?" It was Lila. Of course it was Lila. She was daring him to lie to her.

"By this point? I'm not sure."

"Bullshit."

"Lila!" Clint and Laura said at the same time.

He wasn't ready to admit to his sins. He wasn't ready to look them in the eye and confess everything he'd done. But he had to throw them something.

"Look honey. You disappeared. All of you. You were gone, dead. I might've still been here. Walking, talking, breathing. But I was dead too. Grief does strange things to a person."

She went to say something but Laura shushed her.

"All I can say right now, all I'm able to say, is that I'm not proud. I didn't react well," Clint whispered. He could almost laugh at himself. Understatement of the century, right? Steve hid behind those meetings and ignored his duties as an Avenger. Thor isolated himself from everything that triggered the pain. Avoidance and depression were legitimate responses to grief.

Murder?

Since when was that a legitimate response to anything?

Hill cleared her throat and Clint looked the former deputy in the eye. She held his gaze, offering him a touch of sympathy. He didn't deserve that. He wasn't any better than the guys they chucked behind bars.

Tearing his eyes away from Hill, he caught Laura's gaze, then Coop's. Neither understood what was going on in his head but they knew him well enough to know not to push. So, instead, they each gave him a soft nod, eyes flickering to the book in his hand. Nate crawled onto Laura's lap.

Could he carry on? So far she'd kept mostly to the facts, ignoring emotions in favour of logic. The only one she seemed willing to actually entertain was humour. And that was already difficult enough for him. But there was so much on her mind, so much she was holding back. He knew the dam would break, not even Natasha Romanoff could stoically handle the loss of half the universe. It was just a matter of when.

"Dad," Cooper nudged gently, "do you want me to carry on?"

He had to continue, as much as the thought of what lay ahead tore him apart; Cooper, Lila, Nate and Laura all deserved this. Their sense of closure.

He opened the book again.

A/N: This ended up being heavier than I thought, so heads up, the next chapter won't have much light in it either. Though I will try and lighten things up a little after that. I just imagine Nat's frame of mind at that point in time wouldn't be the clearest or the brightest.

Speaking of Nat, I'm not sure if she comes across as a little OOC - let me know if you have any concerns. And regarding the dates, I decided to base the timeline from when Infinity War was released, so 26 April would have been day zero and she started the journal a couple of days after they lost the battle.

Thank you as always for your follows, faves and reviews. I really appreciate all of them :)

Disclaimer: I don't own Marvel or anything vaguely recognisable.