Just watched the Jeremy Renner interview about what happened on New Year's, so I needed some happy alternate-universe Hawkeye in my life.

The Headphones:

When Clint got home from work, he found Lila sitting at the kitchen table coloring and listening to music. Ever since she got headphones for her birthday a few weeks ago, she had them on more often than not. Her continued love of them surprised him, given that most kids her age would beg for something for months and then use it for a mere week or two.

"Hey sweetheart, how was your day?" he asked. Clint watched her face for a response. His hearing aids were tucked away in his work bag and without them he had maybe a twenty percent chance of understanding enough to actually get the gist. Reading lips upped those odds to around seventy or eighty. Lila didn't respond, though, so Clint repeated his question a little louder. Still nothing. He waved his hand in front of her face. That finally succeeded in getting her attention.

She smiled and greeted him in sign. "Hey, Dad!" Then, she raced to hug him. Man, this never got old. Clint loved his job, but nothing beat the feeling of coming home after a long day to hugs from kids excited to see him. He did not look forward to the days when they'd outgrown this.

"How was your day?" he asked verbally.

"I can't hear you," she signed back, then pointed to her headphones.

"Take those off then," he teased, reaching to remove them. Lila clapped her hands over them to hold on and ducked out of the way.

"This is my favorite song!"

Clint supposed having headphones on during a conversation didn't count as rude if said conversation was signed. That was a perk of being a hearing kid in a half Deaf family. However, he knew Laura wouldn't allow this to continue if she knew about it.

"Where's Mom?" he asked.

"Upstairs. Folding laundry."

Clint unpacked his lunch from work, making sure to put the Tupperware in the dishwasher in Laura's preferred configuration. Otherwise, she'd admonish him for not optimizing the space while aggressively rearranging it. When he finished with the dishes, Clint climbed the stairs to their bedroom.

"Hey honey."

"Hi. How was work?"

He grabbed his hearing aids from his bag and popped them on, listening to the familiar startup tune as he explained, "We'll have to push grouting for another day, but at least there won't be an out-of-place seam in a highly visible location," he concluded.

"Thank goodness," Laura said. "Nobody wants an out-of-place seam in a highly visible location."

"Trust me, you'd notice it."

"Not everyone has your eye for detail."

"I know, I know. But I refuse to do substandard work."

"I know. And that's what I love about you." She leaned in for a kiss.

"Lila's still loving those headphones," he said when they pulled apart.

Laura shook her head. "Crazy. I never even knew she liked music so much."

"To be honest, I don't even know what she's listening to. We didn't hook those up to the internet, did we?"

"They're plugged into your old iPod shuffle, so it's got to be something on there."

"All I have on that iPod is heavy metal, hard rock, and EDM."

"I didn't marry you for your music taste."

Clint shrugged. "I like to feel the beat."

"Was she still listening to them when you came home?"

"Yeah."

"We need to start setting time limits. She's going to give herself headaches."

"Okay. You can do that, and I'll maintain my "good cop" parent status. Besides, I'm not exactly a good role model for auditory safety, or whatever you'd call it."

"That's very true. I'll talk to her about it tonight before bed."

"Thank you."

~0~

Dinner that night was a signing only affair, as Nate had come home from school and decided he was absolutely done with listening for the day. One would think that made the evening a much quieter affair, but it was actually the complete opposite. Nate still wasn't quite old enough to understand that other people perceived the world differently than he did, so as far as he could tell, nobody could hear any noise he made with his cochlears off. Thus, he made even more noise. Clint found this endlessly amusing, but that was probably because he had the option to tune most of it out too. Laura, Cooper, and Lila weren't so lucky. Nobody really minded, though, unless it was before seven o'clock in the morning.

Laura planned to take charge of bedtime for Lila and Nate, but informed Clint that Lila outright refused to complete any of her bedtime routine unless he was the one to help her with it. She came running into his room in her pajamas, headphones still on her head. Clint picked her up, swung her around, and carried her into the bathroom to supervise teeth brushing.

"One thing I like about sign language," she said, with her left hand only since the right was busy brushing her teeth. "I can talk with my mouth full."

Clint laughed. "Yeah, me too."

Lila picked out a book for him to read to her. Clint had barely read the first sentence aloud before she slapped the page he was reading to get his attention. She pinched her index finger and thumb together and twisted them against her throat. "Voice off."

Clint sighed and smiled solemnly. As much as he loved and appreciated having a fully accessible language for Nate, English would always be his first. And at the end of a long day, he sometimes found it difficult to properly translate the English sentences of the book. "Lila, you can get away with it here because I'm your dad, but it's not nice to force people to communicate according to your preferences."

"You make people write sometimes if they don't know sign."

"That's not preference, that's necessity. You understand me when I speak. For me and Nate, it's hard to understand spoken language."

"OK." She signed it so dejectedly that the K looked more like a P. Still, she listened politely as he read the book and then climbed into bed without complaint. Clint reached up to take off her headphones, but she clamped her hands over them to stop him.

"No, you can't sleep with headphones on," Clint insisted. "Come on, off."

With an adorably defiant huff, Lila removed the headphones. As soon as they came off her head, Clint could hear the music blaring from them. He didn't even have his aids turned all the way up.

"Honey, is this how loud you're listening to this stuff?" he asked.

Lila definitely sensed that she was in trouble. She nodded slowly, tears already forming in her eyes.

"That's really bad for your ears," Clint explained. "Did you know that?"

She kept her gaze firmly locked on the wall off to his right. Clint didn't think she was going to answer, but then she nodded.

"If you knew that, why would you do it anyway?"

Clint had to bite his lip to keep from crying as he watched Lila fight off tears. He hated seeing his children upset. Especially when he didn't know how to fix it.

"Lila, sweetie, tell me what's wrong."

She either wouldn't or couldn't answer and began full-on sobbing. The sound Clint hated most in the world. He hugged her tight and let her cry it out, wondering what on Earth could've made his normally jubilant daughter so upset. When she finally calmed down enough to answer, Clint became even more distraught.

"I—I want to be Deaf too," she blubbered, wiping snot from her nose with her pajama sleeve. Until now, Clint had absolutely no inclination that she felt this way. She was normally so open about what she wanted or how she was feeling, but this she must've kept buried deep down.

"Why would you want that?" he asked.

"Because it's special!" she proclaimed. "Nate has a special drawer for his ears, he goes to a special school, and he gets so much special time with you."

Clint and Laura expected their kids to get jealous of one another. That was inevitable among siblings. But he never paused to consider how Nate's deafness would factor into that. Everything Lila said was true. Clint and Laura warned her and Cooper never to touch the drawers where they kept spare parts and batteries for hearing devices, because it was all so expensive and they couldn't risk it getting lost or broken. Nate attended a Deaf preschool, and starting next year he'd go to the Missouri School for the Deaf, which operated like a boarding school for kids from families who lived outside a reasonable daily commute radius. He and Laura had spent a lot of time discussing it, discussions which Lila probably heard a lot of. Lila and Cooper just went to the local public school. And Clint did go out of his way to take Nate to Deaf events, in order for both of them to improve their signing and meet new people. He brought the rest of the family sometimes, but they weren't always available.

"You're right that being Deaf is special," Clint began. He had to tell Nate the exact same thing on the rare occasions he grew upset that he couldn't hear like his siblings. "But everybody is special in their own way. Your brother and I are Deaf, but you're a CODA. That means you get the best of both worlds. How many kids your age know two languages?"

Lila shrugged.

"Those kids wish they could be as special as you."

The barest hint of a smile appeared at the corner of her mouth, but soon fell away. "Most of them don't know or care that I can sign."

"That's because they're hearing. They don't really understand the value of a visual language," he explained. "To them, ASL just looks like complicated hand waving. But, you know what?"

"What?"

"One day, you're going to meet someone. Maybe it's a teacher, or a doctor, or a summer camp counselor. You might be alone, or you might be with some of your friends. But one day you're going to meet a Deaf person, and when they find out that you know ASL, they're going to be so happy and relieved. They might not tell you or show it on their face, but I promise it's going to mean a lot to them." Clint knew this from his own personal experience and from stories he'd heard from other Deaf people. They always met new people with the assumption they'd have to work hard to understand them. Discovering that a person could sign, even a little bit, was often a huge relief.

"I guess that's kinda special."

"You bet it is. But do you want to know what I think is the most special thing about you?"

"What?"

"You have the sweetest heart of anybody I know. When we told you that your little brother couldn't hear, the first thing you asked was how we were going to talk to him. You had to make sure that he wasn't going to be left out. And now, when we're with Mommy's family, all those aunts and uncles and cousins who don't know sign, you make sure that Nate knows what they're saying. And even when your brothers are being annoying, you're never nasty to them. Your mom and I are very grateful for that."

She remained silent for a moment, thinking over everything Clint just said. "Thank you, Dad. I feel better now."

He kissed her atop the head. "Good. Now, we're not going to take away your headphones, but there will be limits on what volume you can use and how long you can have them on."

"Okay."

As Lila laid down to go to sleep, she raised her right hand, thumb, index, and pinkie fingers extended, towards Clint. He got the message loud and clear.

"I love you too."