Work Text:
By the spring of 1985, Phil Coulson was riding high on the wings of a multitude of successes. In five years he had released three novels that had become NYT Bestsellers. Having originally started out as a comic illustrator, his books often included scattered drawings throughout the pages. He had also been commissioned to paint a handful of movie posters over the last year or so. With his literary agent’s help, they were currently in the beginning stages of possibly selling the movie rights of his first novel (though, Phil felt overly protective of the work and so he didn’t want to just sign it away for someone to butcher with their own interpretation). His work life was steadily climbing. His personal life wasn’t far behind. He had a gorgeous wife, whose career as a cellist (especially so now that she had more time to devote to her art after graduating from a performing arts school in the city) was burgeoning to its own heights. They were both in peak health. Their families were safe and happy. They lived in a wonderful, small, suburban neighborhood not far outside of a large metropolitan city area, should the urge to go wandering strike them. Their neighbors were lovely.
The only cloud that seemed to be hanging over them, however, was the heavy cloud of conception or, rather, their lack thereof. Both Phil and Audrey had discussed many times over the course of their relationship that they wanted a family. Each came from a small family, Phil an only child and Audrey with one older sister, and both of them had some very rose-tinted, starry-eyed visions of what their life, as a family, should look like. Since their Honeymoon, just over three years ago, they had been (rather actively) trying to conceive with little luck. For a long time, Phil had kept fairly relaxed about it. He figured it would happen when it happened. Audrey took it much harder each month she failed to turn up pregnant or, worse, when she turned up no longer pregnant, as had happened twice in the last year.
They had been to the doctor’s office yesterday to talk about results from a number of tests that were much more complicated than Phil usually pretended to understand. The doctor, in no uncertain terms, had told them that it was not only unlikely that they were conceive their own child, but it was even more unlikely that Audrey would carry any baby that they did conceive to full term safely for either herself or the baby. It had been a crushing blow to take in for the couple. Their ride home from the visit had been silent as Phil had held onto Audrey’s hand and pretended he didn’t see her out of the corner of his eye as she tried to turn away every so often to discreetly wipe stray tears away. The rest of their day had been spent in varying forms of despondency as Phil did what he could to push away his sadness over the news so that he could try and pull Audrey from her own sadness.
The timing could have been better but, unfortunately, it wasn’t, as they had agreed to watch Audrey’s niece, Maria, for a week while Audrey’s sister and brother-in-law were away on two separate work-related trips. Phil had picked her up in the morning alone and even though Phil had already talked with his in-laws about what they had found out ahead of time so they would know it was him coming to get Maria instead of Audrey so he wouldn’t have to explain in front of the seven year-old, Maria knew something was wrong right away. She had asked him about it repeatedly on the ride back to Phil and Audrey’s house and he had only managed to distract her by a pit stop for ice cream before they had finally made it to the Coulson household.
Maria rushed inside, shouting for her aunt as soon as she was over the threshold with the intention of rushing her for a bear hug Phil knew that, even in her depressed state, Audrey would scarcely be able to deny. He grabbed Maria’s small backpack and suitcase from the trunk after parking Lola in the garage next to Audrey’s Pontiac (a much more family-friendly car, what with their attempts to expand their family, of course). He shook his head and chuckled a bit as he closed the wide garage door and then headed into the house from the door in the corner.
“We’re home!” Phil said as he crossed through the laundry/mud room inside the door, wiping his feet on the mat, and walked into the kitchen where Maria was wrapped around Audrey’s waist already delivering her bear hug greeting.
A faint smile crossed Audrey’s lips as she returned her niece’s fierce grip. “I see that,” she said. “I think you’ve grown a whole inch since the last time I saw you!” She mustered up her enthusiasm for her young niece as the girl pulled back and Audrey placed her hands on either side of Maria’s face.
Maria giggled. “That was only two days ago!” She protested.
“No, yeah,” Phil nodded as he walked closer toward them. “I think your aunt’s right,” He grinned. “Clearly we’ll need to make sure we’ve got enough stocked in the fridge and pantry to feed her through this growth spurt while her parents are away,” He teased.
--
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things’ll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things’ll get brighter
--
“Did your niece get into something she shouldn’t have while messing around in the garage, or is this stress-related car work?”
Phil had Lola in the driveway pull up onto heavy duty blocks. He had been on a rolling mechanic’s creeper while working with his tools. A battery operated radio that had been tuned to an oldies station that played mostly music from the forties and fifties was playing at a decent level near the front right tire. His legs were stuck out from the front of the car which was facing the street. When he heard the voice, Phil paused. He rolled out from under the car and moved to sit up, grease splatters covering his dark Gray T-shirt and, in some cases, his jeans where he had unceremoniously wiped his hands. There was a reason these were his car work jeans, though and it was so that he wouldn’t have to worry about getting grease, oil or any other manner of car fluid on them. The same went for his shirt.
“Officer May,” He smiled when he saw her standing near the bottom of the driveway in her uniform, looking meticulously put together even at the end of the day. Her hat was tucked under her arm and her hands rested together at the middle of her belt. Phil pulled a dirty rag from his back pocket and began cleaning off the tool in his hand. “I trust the civilians gave you an easy Tuesday at work?” He asked with a small smirk.
Twice in their lives, Phil Coulson and Melinda May had lived on the same block. The first time had been when Melinda’s family moved four houses down from Phil’s parents’ house when Phil was five and Melinda was four. He remembered hearing some of the adult conversations, somehow scandalized by the new neighbors, who spoke broken English, but they ‘seemed nice enough for now,’ they had supposed. Phil’s parents were often at odds with some of the other neighbors’ views on the May family. They often invited them over for dinner. Julie Coulson and Lian May frequently traded recipes and home tips and did their own level of gossiping between each other. Robert Coulson and William May frequently borrowed (and returned!) each other’s tools, talked about and helped each other fix their cars and played golf together. It didn’t take much for Phil to become friends with Melinda, though there were times they did suffer the wrath of the rest of the kids in the neighborhood. Melinda, he had quickly learned, could handle her own rather well, but it never hurt to have a friendly in your corner.
They had been friends all the way through middle school and junior high before the Mays had moved to a neighborhood on the other end of town, closer to the city, which meant Melinda and Phil wound up in different high schools. They were still friends though and their families frequently got together for barbecues and dinners.
The second time, well, was now. When Audrey and Phil had moved in a few months before their wedding, they hadn’t known anyone on their long winding street, which ended in an oblong cul-de-sac, though it had an island in the middle separating it that cars would generally circle around rather than having that space on large open oval of blacktop. Melinda and her fiancé Andrew had moved in almost a year ago now, Phil had been more than pleasantly surprised. He had been downright excited! He and Melinda had fallen in and out of touch in the years since high school. She had dropped in for their housewarming party when they first moved in, had been part of their wedding party, each of them, with Audrey or Andrew accompanying them, had been to various barbecues or parties celebrating birthdays or other events (like Melinda graduating from the police academy, etc) but generally they only saw each other around town now and then and saw each other every few months.
So when he had been coming home from a business trip to New York and had turned into his and Audrey’s driveway and had seen the moving truck at the end of the cul-de-sac, he had been curious about the new neighbors. After stopping inside to see that Audrey had already left that morning to go into the city for rehearsal, he had dutifully taken the carefully wrapped pie dish with the cherry pie she had made for the new neighbors (at the behest of the note Audrey had left him), with him to go greet the new neighbors. He almost dropped it when he had made it to the sidewalk in front of the house and was halfway saying hello when Melinda appeared, hefting a box that looked much too heavy and large for a woman of her size (though Phil knew better). Melinda had almost dropped the box she was carrying down the ramp when she heard his voice, though it wasn’t because she didn’t know he lived on the block so much as she hadn’t heard him approach.
She had put the box down, he had put the pie on top of it and a round of laugh filled hugs commenced as they joked about surprises. Just like when they were young, though, Phil began to hear those same whispers from the same kinds of neighbors around the block, about the new neighbors who had just moved in. This time it wasn’t because they were foreigners who spoke broken English, though. This time it was the apparently distasteful combination of an Asian woman and a Black man, currently unwed, moving into their neighborhood. The sentiment fell, as far as Phil could tell, mostly among the middle and elder aged residents of the cul-de-sac, so far as Phil could tell. He, and Audrey for that matter, made no bones about standing up for their friends whenever neighbors’ gossip hit their ears. They were always civil and diplomatic about it, but they made it clear that Phil had known Melinda for a long time and he wasn’t going to sit around and let people falsely disrespect her. It helped that Melinda was a police officer, though there were a number of the men who felt overly emasculated by the authoritative air Melinda May had about her.
A smirk road up the right side of May’s lips now as Phil teased her. “If by ‘easy’ you mean ‘somewhat boring,’ why yes, I had a somewhat boring Tuesday,” She granted.
Phil chuckled. He pulled himself up from the mechanic’s creeper after tossing his tool momentarily into the box next to the radio. After wiping his hands off on his rag, he stuffed it in his back pocket. “Want a beer?” He asked with a nod toward the garage as he headed that way.
“I’m good,” Melinda shook her head but followed him inside to the refrigerator in the corner of the garage, used for extra freezer storage space and for extra beverage packing for barbecues and what not. “You’re dodging my original question,” she added as Phil pulled a beer bottle from the fridge for him and a can of coke for Melinda since she declined the beer, likely because she was still in her uniform.
“A little routine maintenance,” Phil answered as he used the bottle opener on the fridge to pop the top off of his bottle and tossed the cap into a nearby trashcan. He leaned back against his work bench and took a drink from his beer. “Thought I’d get it out of the way while Audrey and Maria are at the park.” He shrugged.
May set her had down on a spot on the workbench a few feet down from Phil. She leaned her weight back against the bench and popped the top of her soda can, though when she drank from it, it was to take small sips rather than gulps of it the way Phil did with his beer when he would lift it. She knew his work on the car was more than simple maintenance, despite how Phil was always sure to keep Lola beyond tip top shape. His dad had worked on that car with him while he was a kid and he had learned to use his work on it as a form of catharsis for what was troubling him – be it writer’s block, a squabble of some kind with Audrey or, as of late, the frustration of their attempts to start a family. “I haven’t seen you two since your appointment with Doctor Schultz. How did things go?” She asked.
She knew from the shadow that briefly crossed over Phil’s face before he could push it away that she had hit the nail on the head with her question. Phil lifted his beer for another deep pull on it. He cleared his throat when he swallowed and looked down at the bottle in his hand. “In the unlikely events that she manages to conceive, it’s extremely unlikely that she’ll be able to carry the baby to term without complications that would harm or kill one or both of them,” He told her.
“Oh, Phil,” Melinda’s expression turned into a sympathetic frown for her childhood friend. She reached out to his arm and gave his shoulder a small squeeze.
Phil shook his head. “It’s – I’m alright. It’s Audrey I’m worried about, y’know?” He said. “We’ve been talking off and on about maybe fostering and eventually adopting, but, I don’t think she’s convinced. She’s pretty set on the idea of having our own baby,” Phil, generally, wasn’t the type of guy who lacked the willpower or motivation to push for the things he wanted out of life. The fear that doing so in this particular case might give way to the possibility that he could lose Audrey, however, was so strong in this case, it was palpable.
Beside him, Melinda was quiet for a long moment. She took a small sip from her soda can to give them both a moment to digest what Phil had said. This topic was one she wasn’t quite acquainted with just yet. It wasn’t that she and Andrew didn’t want to have their own family, but Melinda was still working her way up the ranks for her department and Andrew was finishing his degree while working three days a during the week at the local library and three nights a week as a bartender. So it likely would be a couple of years yet before they started on their family journey.
She could see that feeding Phil some kind of line about he and Audrey getting through the situation wouldn’t help, so instead, as had often happened to them throughout the course of their friendship, she settled into comfortable, if saddened, silent support for her oldest friend. The silence between them only broke when Audrey and Maria came strolling up the block from the park. Maria broke free from Audrey’s side when she saw them from the sidewalk and raced inside to show them the frog she had caught while at the park. Audrey scrunched her nose in distaste from behind her niece but couldn’t help but smile a bit at the girl’s enthusiasm as she jammed the frog up at the end of her extended arms so it was practically under Melinda’s nose, its back leg hanging down and plunking into her soda can, diffusing the lingering sadness that had fallen over the adults.
--
Some day, yeah
We’ll get it together and we’ll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We’ll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some say
When the work is much brighter
--
It wasn’t until the beginning of summer the following year, 1986, that Phil finally managed to talk Audrey into actively looking into both what they would need to do to become foster parents and also what it would entail to look into their adoption options. Audrey had lost a third baby within the first three-four months of conception since they had started trying to conceive. It had been a particularly harsh blow for them as it happened within days of Audrey’s mother passing away rather suddenly.
The weeks afterward, through most of May, Audrey had walked around in various levels of dazed confusion, a shell of her usual upbeat, vibrant self. Because she was between performances at the moment, Phil had convinced her that they should take a trip – anywhere she wanted to go – just to get away and recharge, to get back into focus and grounded. After a week and a half exploring Italy, Audrey had been the one to bring the topic of adoption up the night they had returned home.
Most of June was spent in and out of offices filing paperwork, doing home inspections and talking with officials so that they could be officially certified and approved as foster parents and to begin the process on possibly being matched through the adoption agency in the city.
“How soon do you think it’ll be,” Audrey was asking him as they sat at the small kitchen table twirling spaghetti around their forks, sitting in their normal spots next to each other around the round table. “Before they place a kid with us?”
Phil smiled. He felt great relief to see Audrey smiling with genuine excitement again, the kind that reached her eyes when she laughed or that conjured those laughs up from her belly. He knew they both still had healing to do, but he could see the finish line for that race finally and felt like he could breathe a bit lighter because of it. “I don’t know,” He said. “Could be as early as the end of this week,” He repeated what the social worker from child services had told them once they were given their final stamps of approval. “Or it could be a month from now. I guess it depends on how soon they have a kid that needs our help,” He smiled. Honestly, it was a little odd to hope that a kid came along that needed their help if only because it meant that kid would have lived through some kind of trauma surrounding their family life up until that point in their life.
“Do you think we should do anything else to either of the bedrooms?” Audrey asked as Phil stuffed his mouth full of pasta and chewed. When she looked over at him, she giggled and reached out to wipe sauce away from the edge of his mouth and mustache before she leaned over enough to kiss his cheek.
Phil shook his head as he swallowed his food and outright grinned when she kissed his cheek. “I think they’re set to the basics that we’ll need right now. We should wait and see so that we don’t change something in there that might need to be redone depending on who comes to live with us,” He reasoned.
“I think,” Audrey leaned closer again, her own grin full of mirth as she gazed at him, “you should finish up your dinner so we can go to our own room…” She bounced her eyebrows up once and let them drop again.
“I’m done,” Phil set his fork down into his mostly finished plate of food, hastily wiped his mouth off and leaned over to close the distance between them to kiss Audrey just as she was letting out a laugh at his eagerness. She giggled against his mouth as she wrapped her arms around his neck and let him pull her up from her chair since he still tasted like pasta sauce and garlic.
--
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things’ll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things’ll get brighter
Some day, yeah
We’ll get it together and we’ll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We’ll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some say
When the work is much brighter
--
1989 was the year! Everything had been falling into place for them again. Phil had eight standalone bestsellers under his belt and two different series that he’d started in the last two years and were taking off nicely. Two of his books had been turned into (thankfully) successful hit movies and, when he had the time for it, he still took a commission for movie poster art here and there. Audrey had gone from small tours around the country to becoming an internationally famous cellist, classified both as Classical and New Classical for the works she performed and the works she created and performed respectively. Wanting to stay close to home she was currently working the orchestra and doing some production work with recording studios in the city.
Over the last few years they had had four different children temporarily placed with them under the foster care system. It was hard, every time they had to let one of the kids go to return to one or both of their parents after they had proven to the state that they once again were capable of taking care of their kids but, obviously that was part of the deal.
Then, finally, one day a call came from their representative at the adoption agency. They were working with child services after an infant had been abandoned outside a local fire house. They estimated that the baby was three to four weeks old at most. She had been treated for hypothermia and minor malnourishment but other than that was, thankfully, was alright. The doctor in charge of her care was expecting to sign off on her release in four days as a precautionary measure to keep her under observation just in case. While CPS and the police department attempted to try and identify the baby’s birth parents, the agency was working with them to place the baby.
Phil remembered seeing something about the baby being left at the firehouse while watching the news a few nights before after Audrey relayed the information to him. He and Audrey had readily agreed that they were up for the task. As soon as Audrey had hung up they had hopped into Audrey’s car so they could go on a shopping trip to gather the items they would need for an infant since they had dealt by this point mostly with kids ranging from two up through seven.
It had been explained to them that they would be fostering the baby once they met at the hospital and signed off on the paperwork for the foreseeable. The outcome of the investigation into the baby’s birth parents would determine their ability to pursue adoption, if that was a step they wanted to take. Any number of scenarios were possible – they might not find the birth parents at all, they might find the mother and she might sign over her rights and give them they birth father’s information, or not give his information, or not know his information, or she might not sign her rights over or they could find the birth parents and the father might not know what happened if he hasn’t been in contact with the mother and he might want to raise his child, or might want to sign his rights over, or members of either birth parents’ families might wish to become their guardian – it was all up in the air at that point, really. Phil and Audrey knew the stakes. It didn’t stop them from being excited by the prospect.
Once they had everything they needed to set up one of their bedrooms as a nursery and had assembled the proper furniture, they called to meet the adoption agent and the CPS worker at the hospital so they could sign paper work and visit with the as of yet unnamed baby.
Phil remembered the moment they walked into the hospital room and met the bay for the first time. She had been infinitely smaller than he had ever imagined, peach and pink all over when her skin flushed whenever she cried with a need of some kind, bundled up in the typical hospital white pink and blue striped blanket, a little pink knit cap hugging her tiny head after the nurses had folded the back of it and taped it so it would fit. He remembered the bubble of laughter that escaped him when Audrey had passed her into his arms after having held and rocked her for a while only to have her catch the hiccups in his arms. He remembered the exact moment her eyes opened once the hiccups stopped and the brightest blue eyes he had ever seen stared up at him while he spoke to her softly.
He thought about that moment - and the selfish way he hoped her birth parents were foolish enough to really want to be rid of her from their lives because he wanted to be the man she would called her ‘ daddy,’ – often. He wanted to be the one who helped rock her to sleep, who filled her head with fantastic stories and thoughtful philosophies on life and happiness, who chased monsters out of the closet and away from under the bed before it was time to go to sleep, who taught her (along with Audrey) all the things she’d claim to know one day, who shaped her into all the things as a person she could be and who got to play the proud papa whenever she became who and what she wanted to be one day.
It had been just about seven months since that mid-May day. The baby, they had named her Barbara, they had learned, had been born on April 27 th to a nineteen year-old unwed mother. She had been living in a motel after her boyfriend, the baby’s father, had kicked her out after deciding he didn’t want to be a father. Unable to keep up with caring for the baby, being able to work and paying for the motel, food and diapers, the woman had left her at the fire house since she knew they would take her to the hospital or the police. She had no parents to turn to but she had an older brother in college a few states away. Before Phil and Audrey had gone to meet with her at the police station (where she had been under Officer May’s watchful eye while May sat with her to take down information for the report filing), the woman had already repeatedly told the child services worker and the police that she wanted to sign whatever they needed her to sign so that they could give her daughter to a home that could take care of her.
Phil and Audrey offered to help her get on her feet multiple times, but the woman claimed to just want to put everything behind her so in the end, once she got into contact with her older brother, they helped arrange for a bus ticket to take her to the city he was currently in. In them on the months following that, Phil hired a private investigator and gave them the information the mother had given them in order to track down the baby’s father since they would need his signature in order to be able to pursue adoption.
On the last weekday before Christmas (December 22 nd ), 1989, Phil and Audrey, with all paperwork in order and multiple affidavits from friends and family as witnesses, they had gone this morning to the courthouse to officially finalize the adoption.
Phil stood in the doorway of the nursery watching Audrey as she gently swayed in the rocking chair while she sung the baby, who they had months ago named Barbara (after Audrey’s mother, though they had already taken to calling her Bobbi, the nickname Audrey’s mother had gone by since she was a girl), and thought again about the memory of that moment when he had first held Bobbi in his arms and she had opened those bright blue eyes to look up at him. Now she had long wisps of blonde hair to go with those blue eyes and she loved to murmur singsong babbles to attempt to imitate Audrey’s voice as she sung.
1989 was the year; there was a final, official start to the Coulson family. By some stroke of amazing luck mixed with late night feedings, diaper changes, learning the different sounds of different cries, losing sleep, worrying over a minor fever here or there, reliving The Exorcist through the impressive amounts of bodily fluids a baby could produce, of trying to coax her into trying new baby foods or just to eat in general instead of play, of crawling around on the floor with her, driving her around for hours to put her to sleep in the car - Everything had fallen into place perfectly for them and nothing but happiness remained.
--
Some day, yeah
We’ll get it together and we’ll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We’ll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some say
When the work is much brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things’ll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things’ll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things’ll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things’ll get brighter
Right now, right now
You just wait and see how things are gonna be