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After Jemma leaves, Phil spends a solid, terrifying, fifteen minutes trying to figure out if they’ll let him resign quietly. He’s halfway through plan B, which requires him to burn at least three safe houses and five separate identities all of which gets him approximately five or so years of relative peace. That’s assuming when Fury figures it out two years in, he lets Phil go until there’s an emergency big enough to override whatever lingering guilt the Director might harbor over being directly responsible for a good one quarter of Phil’s bad dreams. The indirect causes are too numerous to count. At least without a good bottle of vodka.
He comes back to himself, staring into the report that tells him his suspicions are either unfounded, in which case he has to work harder not to be flagged for psychological evaluation more than he already is, or that whatever happened to him after Loki is part of a much vaster conspiracy than he’s comfortable contemplating at the moment.
He’s left with shaking hands, a cold sweat and a lingering sour taste in the back of his mouth when Melinda comes in and catches him in his moment of incredible doubt. Her presence is a painful pang. It’s a solid reminder that she’s it. She’s all he has to unravel with because everyone else thinks he’s dead. Or they’re the director of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Melinda’s fingers on his chest, on his painful reminder that even being over prepared is sometimes not enough confuses him. Communal showers and dressing rooms have been a way of life for decades, a colleague, even one as spectacular looking as Melinda asking him to unbutton his shirt in a darkened office and soft voice shouldn’t make his cheeks burn but then, his entire body has been responding in ways that throw him for a loop every day. His muscle memory is gone. All of it.
Melinda leaves him with a crinkled slip of paper crunched in his hands and a small seed of relief slowly overtaking his unease.
That he picks up his office phone first tells him just how bad it is and it takes him long moments to remember his second cell strapped to his ankle. Old field habits die hard, and while he no longer spends his time completely submerged in field ops that require no contact with home base until the extraction, some habits die hard, even if his muscle memory sometimes falls short of his needs.
Four staticky and heart pounding rings later and a slurred but alert voice picks up.
“Jesus Christ Nat this better be good.”
Something catches in Phil’s throat even as Clint’s voice finishes soothing what Melinda could not. The assumption that only Natasha would be on the other end of the line of a 2am phone call with no caller ID gets a choked laugh out of Phil.
Phil is already at his door when Clint’s shocked intake of breath comes across the line. He closes it, locks it and then stalls, turning and sinking to the floor right there, curling up next to the well shined, faux wooden door. “Hey…” It’s more a breath than a word.
“…Phil.” Clint chokes out.
They both breath loudly for a long time, it takes a good number of seconds for Phil to get the words to form. “I’m sorry.”
“Holy crap, Phil, what the—“
“I’m sorry,” he interrupts again because he knows if he lets Clint go, he won’t get out what he needs and then it’ll be a very long conversation where Phil is told in exacting terms just what sort of asshole he is, and he’ll agree with every word. “I’m sorry, please, Clint, just, can we do that later? I had a really bad day.” The word day is choked off and it’s like his chest is once again a big gaping maw of pain. “I just need to..”
Clint takes three very loud breaths, each one carefully exhaled before he sighs. “Talk to me, boss.”
The aching cramp inside Phil loosens some more. “Well,” he says, a little hysterically, “it’s a long story, but a little while ago, I died.” Phil stops and lets Clint’s choked laugh peter out, “and when I woke up, the world had changed—wait, no,” Phil corrects, “I changed.”
“Funny thing,” Clint gets out after a long silence, “something similar happened to me too.”
“We should form a club.”
“So,” Clint’s voice is still wobbily, but stronger, “what’s different about today?”
Phil closes his eyes and listens to his body and gets back something he hasn't felt in a long time, some sense of equilibrium that he hasn't known was missing until Clint’s voice had come over the line. “Everything.” He says, "Everything."
End