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Trip died.
Skye changed.
And Phil remembered.
He remembered eyes that shifted from blue to grey to green. He remembered broad shoulders and strong arms and hands with callouses that caught against his hair and his skin. He remembered the sound of half a dozen different kinds of laughter from self-depreciating to incredulous joy. He remembered heat and sweat and surrender.
He remembered a ring.
He remembered promises.
And because he was Phil Coulson and those rumours the junior agents used to spread about him being a robot had to have come from somewhere, he held it together until Skye was safe on the bus and the few agents he had to hand were in the tunnels and the pieces of shattered carbon that had been Antoine Triplett were being carefully carried out into the light and then he walked to where Agent May kept watch.
There were a hundred questions he wanted to ask, but only one that mattered.
"Does my husband believe I'm dead?"
May twitched, a movement so minimal he'd have ignored it had she been almost anyone else. Given who she was, it spoke volumes. It was, however, all she said.
"You were at the ceremony." Phil wanted to scream, to shout, to howl, but he kept his voice level. Calm. "You and Nick and Natasha. You made us boutonnieres out of honeysuckle, and told us they represented commitment. So answer the question; does my husband believe I'm dead?"
She sighed and turned to face him. "No, he doesn't."
Phil couldn't breathe. When he finally managed to draw in a lungful of heated air, all he could manage was, "Then why?"
Why wasn't he here? Fury couldn't stop him, not if he... not if he wanted...
May shook her head, denying the pain Phil knew had to be showing on his face. "He gave me a flash drive. Told me to give to you if you remembered."
"But you know..."
"I do. But you should hear it from him."
Phil carried the flash drive around for the rest of the day. And the next. It had been two and half years. Had his memory loss been used as an easy way out? Was he too old? Too boring? Too invisible? Or was it simpler than that? Their vows had said until death do them part and he'd died. Had been dead. For days. Who wanted to stay married to a corpse?
On day three they were over the Atlantic. Heading... not home.
Phil wasn't a coward. He'd never been a coward. He hadn't changed that much.
He hit play.
His laptop screen filled with text. This is a private and personal message. If you're the person this drive was intended for, enter the name not answered to. If you're not the person this drive was intended for, fuck you. You have ten seconds. Nine.
The countdown was at six when he typed Marcus. Fury still called him Cheese and not answering Nick Fury had never been a viable option, but Nick refused to answer to the name out of their shared past.
The screen cleared and showed Clint sitting at a desk staring into a laptop camera. He didn't look like Agent Barton, one of SHIELD's top assets. He didn't look like Hawkeye, World's Greatest Marksman, the only unaugmented human on a team of superheroes. He looked like shit. He'd lost weight. His eyes were red rimmed and deeply shadowed. His eyelashes were spiked into damp triangles – he'd been crying, Phil realized. And Clint didn't cry. Ever. Applied fists, broken bones, and scars had ensured he'd absorbed the real men don't cry ideal even more deeply than most men of his generation. What could make him break that conditioning?
"Hey, you."
Oh.
"So you remembered." One shoulder rose and fell in a minimal shrug. "Or you found this drive in May's stuff and decided to check it out. Or it's way in the future and someone else found it and figured out how to open it and cracked the password with future tech." He frowned, drew in long, shuddering breath, and his mouth twisted up into the shadow of a smile. "I'm just gonna go with you remembering, okay?"
"Okay." Phil couldn't not respond. Couldn't not touch the screen.
"And I'm gonna hope remembering hasn't driven you crazy. Like really crazy, not crazy wanting to know what the hell is going on because yeah, that second thing's pretty much a given."
"Pretty much."
The shadow of a smile returned. "You just agreed with me, didn't you? Okay, I don't know how much you remember, beyond me and us, so I'm going to start at the beginning." He ran both hands back through hair that needed washing. "Fuck. Okay. You died, Phil. Not for a few second or minutes, for days. Loki fucking speared you, shoved it right through you, and you died. And I mourned you and I maybe went a little catatonic until Nat refused to put up with that shit and Fury wouldn't release your body because hey, senior agent killed by a god with a magical weapon right? No surprise SHIELD slapped you into a box marked do not open. So I got it together enough to see that son of a bitch off to his intergalactic prison and I was holding it together, sort of, mostly, I mean life was shit because you were dead and then Fury came to me and..."
Clint pressed his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes. Five seconds. Six. Then he opened them again.
Phil nearly stopped the recording, not sure he wanted to know what had put that look in his husband's eyes. His right hand rose to press against his chest, against the scar, and he prayed to gods he hadn't believed in for years that his cobbled together heart was strong enough.
"Me and Fury, we took a little trip together and hey, you weren't dead. You had been, for days, but now you weren't. There was..." He swallowed. Once. Twice. "There was a program called TAHITI, another dumbass acronym, you were agent in charge for a while. If you don't remember, well, I can't help much because it was, and I'm quoting Fury here, classified up the ass. All I know is that you wanted it shut down with extreme prejudice."
Phil thought about a mountain collapsing and wondered if that was extreme enough.
"Fury took me to – I guess the best description is a cross between an operating theatre and a torture chamber and you were... you were..." Clint swallowed again and when he blinked tears ran down both cheeks. "They had a machine, a spider thing, and fuck I hope you don't remember this, but it was messing around in your brain and you were begging... begging to die." After a long moment, he wiped his face dry and squared his shoulders. "Fury said it was up to me. For his fucking procedure to work, they had to wipe your memory or you'd go crazy, but if they wiped too much of your memory you wouldn't be you. So he gave me a choice, he'd have me wiped out of your head, everything about us gone, or I had to give the order to pull the plug. Some choice. You forget me, or I kill you again. Finish what I helped Loki start."
The coffee mug smashed against the wall. Phil stared at the dark splash, lines of coffee dripping down to the floor, and had no memory of throwing it. Breathing heavily through clenched teeth, he pressed pause, Clint's face filling the screen. For all the long years Phil had worked with Nick Fury, he'd known – or he'd thought he'd known – how far the other man would go to do what he felt had to be done. When, over those same long years, Phil had personally felt the end wouldn't justify the means, he'd told himself that, as director, Fury had access to details he did not. He'd looked the other way. He'd made excuses.
No more. Fury had needed him. Had needed a high level agent he knew he could trust. An agent he knew without question wasn't Hydra. He'd needed Phil, rebuilt without all the messy complications of his marriage and he'd made Clint chose, life or death.
Because if Clint hadn't known what was actually going on, he wouldn't have stayed away. He'd have known Phil was back the moment Phil set foot in the Hub. Fury couldn't keep Natasha busy enough to miss that and nothing he could say to her would keep her quiet. She'd know and the first thing she'd do, well, maybe the second after going Red Room on Fury's ass, was tell Clint. And Clint would have found him.
But Clint hadn't. And Natasha hadn't. And her willingness to keep Fury's dirty little secret could only be because Clint had asked it of her.
When Phil pressed play again, Clint's laugh skirted the edges of hysteria. "Thought about changing my name to Sophie, but when it came right down to it, it wasn't a choice at all was it? You alive without me or you dead. Because the son-of-a-bitch had already brought you back to life. I could have pulled the plug if you were on life support, we talked about that, right – fucking job – but I couldn't kill you. I'm sorry."
"For what?" Phil whispered.
"You were begging to die, but I couldn't... I couldn't live in a world without you in it. Oh and Captain America's a real bastard too, just so you know. I was just standing on the roof, back before I found out, and he was all up in my face and saying it's not very nice to leave another mess for someone else to clean up. And okay, I fucking puked shwarma all over when Nat told me and there may have been that whole kind of catatonic thing I mentioned so I wasn't coming across as particularly stable, but I wasn't going to jump."
He didn't sound like he believed it. Fury might have saved Clint's life by reading him in on TAHITI. Might have just saved his own life too – Clint's life was an end Phil would take any way he could get it and Clint's life weighed in the balance against what Fury had done...
"Anyway, Fury had Dr. Frankenstein wipe me out of your head and you came back all bright and shiny and new even though you had to go through a shitload of physio I couldn't help you with and then you got a bright and shiny and new team and right before you deployed, I climbed into May's apartment and fell apart all over her. It wasn't pretty. Tears and snot and yelling and vomit because I was... uh..." He ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck. "...pretty liquored up."
Clint didn't get drunk. He knew his limits and he didn't go over them. He'd always said, no one needed a sniper with the shakes, and they'd both agreed to pretend his memory of his father's drinking had nothing to do with it.
"After May kicked my ass and cleaned me up, she agreed to give this to you if you remembered. So that's you. Alive. I could keep going if you were alive but I couldn't stay at SHIELD. Not after..." His eyes focused past the camera and Phil wondered what he was seeing. "There was no point," he sighed after a long moment. "Not without you. Nat stayed. She could access info on you and feed it to me and she didn't trust Fury with Steve. Yeah, Steve joined. I'm guessing Fury's been keeping them well away from you and your new team."
In retrospect, Phil realized he'd clearly been interacting only with hand-picked agents. He and Clint weren't common knowledge, their jobs were too dangerous for that, but they weren't a secret. And then SHIELD fell and those who knew were too busy surviving betrayal to worry about his marital status.
Agent Morse had known. Although Agent Morse wasn't likely to talk to him about that particular ex-husband, not with the way her marriage to Clint had ended. SHIELD shattered most relationships.
"I wish I knew how long it's been for you." Clint laid both hands flat on the table and seemed to brace himself. "It's been fifteen months at my end, I mean, right now while I'm recording this... whatever you can call this, it's been fifteen months since I made my choice. Feels like forever. I guess when you're watching this it's been as long for me as it has for you – or it will be, however long that is." He frowned, his lips moved and Phil knew he was going back over what he'd said, trying to work out if it made sense. After a moment, he shook it off and continued. "With any luck, you'll remember tomorrow and May'll give you this and I'll stop feeling like someone ripped out my heart. Of course, my luck's always been shit since I've been wanting that for the last fifteen months. Not the May part, because I'm just recording this now. You remembering. Right." He bit his lip, splitting the chapped skin. "Last month, I sold the apartment. I hadn't been. I couldn't... And you didn't remember it when I did it so it's not like you'd miss it. I gave the money to orphans of the invasion. A lot of kids got fucked over. "
Phil thought of Clint going back to the apartment they'd chosen together, and having it remind him of everything he'd lost and was only surprised he'd held it together long enough to sell it and hadn't just walked away.
"I found a place in Bed Stu, there's some weird shit going on so I've been keeping busy. Oh, I got a dog. Or he got me. I think he got me. I've cobbled together something like a life but it's not much of a life without you." He shifted and suddenly it seemed as though he was looking right at Phil, not into a camera, but into his eyes. "If it's been years for you, I guess you have a life I'm not part of. And yeah, I'm selfish enough that I want you to walk away from it and come back to me, but I know real life doesn't work like that. I hope it's good life, and that you were happy, that you are happy in it, and if you chose to stay in it instead of chasing an ancient memory, I understand. I only ever wanted you to be happy. I don't want you to..." He closed his eyes for a moment, lashes brushing his cheeks. "I don't want you to have spent all those years alone."
The like me was silent. And loud. Phil fought to breathe.
"If I'm still alive, I'll know all that though, about your life. I can't just let you go. I know the life you'll have... have had without me." Clint shook his head, his mouth twisting into something vaguely resembling a smile. "Talking to the future is hard."
He sat silently, staring into the camera for a long moment, then finally scrubbed a hand across his cheeks. "All right, enough. Can't sit here all day, I have to get this to May before she changes her mind. To sum up, Fury is a bastard. His mad scientists say if you see me, you'll die insane so I'll stay away. I'd rather you were alive without me than dead. But never doubt that you're it for me Phil. When you remember, if you still want me, come find me. You can have your ring back." He touched his chest. "I love you."
"I..."
But the screen was blank before Phil could get the words out.
They'd been apart for two and half years. Fifteen months before Clint made the recording. Sixteen months after. Sixteen months while Phil built a new life with a new team. The world had changed. SHIELD had fallen, betrayed from within. Humans were evolving. There was a girl, a girl he was responsible for, who'd had her DNA ripped apart and reassembled.
He'd changed. Fallen. Been betrayed from within. Evolved in his own way.
What did he want?
To not have to tell Trip's parents their son was dead.
To wipe the terrified look from Skye's face.
World peace.
To take Nick Fury apart for the pain caused by his belief that the ends justified the means.
He didn't remember walking down to the containment area, but the glass was cold under his hand.
"Hey, AC. You look... different."
He remembered tripping over boots left in the middle of the floor and the apologies that followed every damned time. He remembered an arm wrapped around his waist and a muscular body tucked against his back. He remembered soft kisses, hard kisses, hurried kisses, leisurely kisses, and kisses so wet and filthy they lead to the kind of sex no one would believe men their ages were capable of of.
"I need your help."
"Thank god. I'm going cra..." She flushed and wrapped her arms around herself. "I'm so bored. What do you need?"
"I need you to find a male, Caucasian, early forties. He lives in Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. He has a dog."
Her laugh lifted a little of the weight off Phil's shoulders. "Yeah, the dog'll really narrow it down." She sat cross-legged on the cot and flipped open her laptop. "Does he have a name?"
"Clint Barton."
He remembered where he'd left his heart.