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Phil Coulson lay awake in his fold-out bed on the Bus. The bed was nice. It was larger than he was used to and ergonomically correct. No, it wasn’t the bed’s fault, he blamed the pain in his bruised and bloody face for his insomnia. By all accounts he should have been exhausted and he knew, distantly, that some part of him was. Before New York he had not been a man to question orders, but now that he had answers forcibly thrust into his mind, it was harder to pretend that those questions weren’t only real, but possibly immediately relevant.
Fury had lied to his face, and while this was hardly a new or uncommon occurrence in the past, Phil found he now resented it. He had two sets of memories vying for his attention. The kind version where warm winds and massages were the norm, this one now seemed but a distant fantasy of a hopeful and delusional mind. Tahiti wasn’t what was keeping him from rest, at least not directly. A new memory, a real one, had taken its place and was now running a broad and bloody track through his already raw mind. He remembered the agony in his head and chest; the cold metal slab against his bare skin. The agony had extended several days with no respite, just moment after nerve screaming moment of earth-shattering pain. He had no way to tell the passage of time except that five times he was left alone in the dark with only the demons he conjured for company.
He had begged to die, yes. But he had been used as a human experiment, so maybe he could be forgiven that. It wasn’t something he’d wanted anyone to see, let alone Skye. The girl had suffered enough trauma and pain without having to doubt her safety with him.
Phil sat up and ran a hand over his brow in distress. He wasn’t getting any sleep tonight either. The clock showed nearly 3 am, but they were somewhere over the Pacific and he knew it was light outside. He stood and glanced at himself in the mirror. Even the dim light couldn’t disguise his exhaustion and the black eye made him look even more ragged. He shook his head at himself.
“So much for ‘taking it easy’,” he said aloud to no one. He was on his first day of his two days off, and it was obviously not going well. It only gave him time to think. Dressed in his grey sweat pants and matching t-shirt that served for pjs, his bare feet relishing the texture of the close-cropped carpet, he padded out into the common area. Two fingers of whiskey wouldn’t help him sleep, but it might numb the pain pulsing behind his eyes.
The lights were low and the comforting hum of the jet engines permeated the cool night air. In an attempt to keep everyone on the same circadian rhythm, at sun-down in New York the plane slipped into ‘night mode’ on the upper floor unless directed otherwise. The shudders went down over the windows, the air was cooled to promote sleep. It was rather clever, really, and Coulson had insisted on it. Sleep was important, and he saw it as essential that his people have a quiet, dark place to retreat to when they were ready for rest.
One of the small windows was not shut against the sun. Skye sat next to it. She was covered with a grey, standard-issue blanket and had a knee drawn up to her chest, her eyes turned toward the clouds, but fixed on a point well beyond them. He allowed himself a moment to study her. She wasn’t brilliantly beautiful, but the longer he knew her, the more beautiful she’d become. Her long, chestnut hair was tied in a hasty and efficient mess at the crown of her head. She too was in her pj’s. The sunlight filtered through her hair and for a moment, she shone.
Phil cleared his throat, still at a distance, afraid to startle her. She turned her haunted brown eyes to him and smiled. “Hey,” she said, her voice rough either from drowse or emotion. He hoped it was the former. “I was just thinking about you.” Ah, so the later, then.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked, side stepping her attempt to bring up what she’d seen and how he was feeling. It was a tactic with a relatively low success rate. That didn’t stop him from trying.
She scratched her neck sheepishly and gave him a small smile that he couldn’t help but mirror. “You’re one to talk,” she chastised lightly.
“You’re the one who condemned me to two days off,” he said, sitting across from her in the white chairs by the sunny window. She offered him half the blanket and he took it with a word of thanks, the warth as welcome as the gesture. A beam of light in the darkness, indeed.
“I condemned you to a week,” she said, stretching her legs out over the low table between them. “You negotiated it down to two days because May can’t take your puppy-dog eyes. I’m wise to you.”
That amused him. No one made May do anything. He only got away with ordering her around because he was her commanding officer. He suspected that Melinda knew, as well as he did, that a week of letting this monster of a truth run amok in his head would do more harm than good.
“What does that have to do with your sleeping habits anyway?” She asked, nudging his knee with her sock-clad toe.
“Everything,” he said, before he could stop himself, his thin lips slipping into a deep frown.
“Yeah,” she said at once, agreeing, understanding. Sleeping meant nightmares; days off meant days alone with his thoughts. Neither were ideal and he knew that she knew what he had meant.
Skye turned her attention back to that fixed point beyond the clouds, while Coulson blessed her for being so utterly human and stunningly clever.
“Thank you,” he said at once.
“Hm?” she asked, her mouth pressed into the hell of her hand, but she tore her staring eyes away from the sky to regard him, her eyes heavy with sleep that would not come. “For what?” she clarified, but her face was begging him not to say it aloud for both their sakes.
‘For comforting me,’ was the true and honest answer, but they were both too strung out to talk about this right now. It wasn’t even that he sensed it, it was written all over her face. Skye couldn’t deal with them discussing it any more than he could. So he let the matter drop and simply gave her a smile. She tried to return it but must have known how pathetic the attempt looked because she turned her face back to the window. It struck Phil then how young she was. How little Skye deserved the burden of his past when she was so burdened with her own.
“You want some whiskey?” he asked, moving the blanket aside to stand. She shook her head ‘no’.
Coulson walked across the Bus to the bar and poured himself a shot of whiskey, took it, then poured a bit more in a new shot glass and brought it back over to his young friend. He set it on the part of the table not covered with the blanket or her legs and sat down next to her. Her shoulders were shaking.
“I’m ok,” he assured her, placing a hand between her shoulder blades.
“I know,” she said, but her voice was thick with tears.
“You do?” After his death he’d become much more tender. Or maybe that was old age. Either way, he was off duty and Skye was crying. He rubbed her back gently with his hand, reminding her of his presence. She turned into his shoulder with a sob of relief and he wrapped his arm around her easily, his cheek resting on the top of her head.
After he’d let her cry for a time, he handed her the shot, which she took with a disgusted and over-dramatic sound that made him smile. “What do people see in this stuff?” she asked, resting her head back against the juncture where his shoulder met his chest. She studied the empty shot-glass studiously, as if the answer would be in it.
“I’m not sure,” he confessed. “I only drink it when I’ve had a bad day.”
“Why? To make it worse? Yuck.”
He gave a scoff of a laugh at this, even as she drew the blanket over his legs again. The jokes were good, her closeness was even better. She gave so freely of herself, without any awkwardness or thought of repercussions. He admired her.
She wiped at her wet cheeks and took a shuttering little breath, unable to tear herself away from him. He was alive and mostly happy, she assumed. Strong. Warm. Himself. The memory of him begging to die terrified her.
“Hey, Coulson?” she said softly, setting the little glass on the bench beside them.
“Hm?”
“I’m glad you’re alive…I mean I’m glad they didn’t…” She gave a frustrated noise, unable to communicate what she was thinking without sounding either insensitive or stupid. But he didn’t make her struggle on with it. Not when he knew what she meant.
“I know,” he said in his soft voice. “Me too.”
“Really?” She looked up at his face and he smiled down at her.
“Really.”
She settled back against him and soon her breathing evened out and her shoulders relaxed. He moved slowly and managed to get the window closed, then leaned back and simply enjoyed the rise and fall of her ribs against his side until he too was lost to a deep, dreamless sleep.