They called time of death at exactly 4pm.

Clint had hardly been home for a full hour, and now he was a widower and a single father to a three-year-old. He had yet to let go of Hope until the doctors delivered the bad news. At first, he had left Hope with a kind nurse while he went into the hospital room; upon seeing his wife, her eyes closed and body stiff, he broke down. His wail almost definitely reached the waiting area down the hall and the crash of the monitor he kicked over alerted the surrounding nurses. A soft-spoken woman spoke to him and rubbed his arms as he buried his face into the bed and held Holly's barely warm hand. For a moment he felt lost and hopeless, the thought of having to tell his daughter that her Mommy won't be going home with them killed him.

But he had no choice.

*

A week later and Fury had pulled some strings to arrange the funeral.

Annie had sat in the front row with Clint and Hope along with the empty seats with a framed picture of Holly's parents that she claimed to have been taking days before the accident that killed them. The rest of the church was filled with SHIELD agents and parents from her MummyandMe classes. Annie sobbed through her speech. Clint had managed to hold back his tears through her reading, and again when he helped Hope read out the poem she had helped him compose, and again when they tossed red and pink carnations into the grave along with the coffin.

It was at the wake where he felt the most numb. An hour in and his pint of beer was hardly half-drunk as he leaned on his hand and watched everyone else socialise. Hope was sat at a table with Annie, nibbling distastefully on a ham sandwich. He must have zoned out because the feel of Hope's hand sliding into his shocked him to the point that he nearly spilled his drink everywhere. He still couldn't bring himself to smile at her even when she forced a crooked one.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, darling?" She squeezed his hand, looked down at her feet and then back up at him again. Her voice was quiet, but he didn't need his hearing aid to hear her request.

"Can we get ice cream?"

*

He wasn't quite sure what led him to drive across town to the ice cream shop where she had died, yet he finally felt peace since she died sitting outside the store with Hope. The two of them eating ice cream as, down the street, pigeons snacked on a week-old ice cream cone.