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“You took the word and made it heard
And eased the people’s pain and for that
You were idolized, immortalized
You were not the same after that.”
- Ben Folds, “Not the Same”
Phil Coulson stared at his hands. They looked normal, lines and calluses intersecting across the palms, mixing with old scars that he barely remembered getting. Except, was there one less scar here? An extra scar somewhere else? Had his hands always looked like this? Before New York, he had never taken the time to check.
Phil Coulson looked at the clock. It was 2:30 in the morning, and he felt awake. He hadn’t needed to sleep more than three hours a night since he got back from Tahiti (it’s a magical place). At first he had attributed it to being well-rested from his first vacation in fifteen years. Then he had started to stay up later and later and later. Once he stayed up for three days straight, just to see if he could. By the end of the third day, he knew he could have gone for at least two more, and that scared him so much that he went to bed.
Phil Coulson sighed and stood up. Sleeping was a lost cause tonight, apparently. He might as well get some work done. As he slid out of his bunk (slightly bigger than all the others- there were perks to being the boss), the Bus was dark and quiet. As he started to walk, he clenched and unclenched his hands.
Sometimes he felt so full of energy, like he was vibrating, like he was an atomic bomb hurtling towards the earth, kinetic energy crackling. He releases the energy in a joke, a smile, an admonition, anger, trust and satisfaction, but it was never enough to release the shaking tension underneath his skin.
Without realizing it, he ended up outside the door to the cockpit. This is where he ended up most when he felt too caged inside his skin, inside this plane. After all, of all his old friends, Melinda May was the only one who still looked him in the eye.
Phil Coulson knocked on the door and walked in. Melinda was there, her back straight and her eyes forward. She gave no sign that she noticed him.
“It’s a beautiful night sky,” he told her, “Though I suppose it’s morning now.”
She gave no reply, but he wasn’t expecting one.
He leaned against the doorway, crossing his arms. “Do you remember, about six or seven years ago, that mission in Dubai?”
More silence. He took that as agreement.
“After the mission, when I had a bullet in my shoulder and you had a stab wound, and we were waiting to be picked up. We had the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life at the little place where we were waiting. I wish I’d thought to remember its name.”
He stared at the back of Melinda’s head until she said, partly annoyed and partly amused, “It was a McDonald’s.”
“Oh,” he said. At least that was the same.
She didn’t say anything else, and so he slipped quietly out of the cockpit and walked to his office.
He spent the rest of the night looking through his own case files. They all matched his memory exactly to the letter, every detail the same. The energy inside him seemed to grow.
In the morning, Phil Coulson put aside the papers, made himself a cup of coffee, and went to work. He still caught himself staring at his hands sometimes.
“Your stitches are all out
But your scars are healing wrong.”
- Regina Spektor, “One More Time With Feeling”