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These are the agents that Agent Phil Coulson has lost, over fifteen years of active duty with SHIELD. Agents Lee, Alexander and Smith. Agents Mendoza, Cuxil, Brown, Nguyen. Agent Ranesh, and she was only a junior agent. Agents Cross and Markowitz. Agents Benson, Garcia, Nelson and Ratner. There are thirteen more, all interred at Arlington, and he remembers all of their names, but reciting them is no comfort.
There are twenty seven of them, and he remembers every one of their names, and serial numbers, and the words he spoke at their funerals - respectful, honorable, but guarded words. He remembers the grieving faces of their sisters, the wailing of their mothers, the stoic upper lips of their fathers. He remembers the missions he lost them on. Beirut. Lebanon, where he was the only one left. Egypt. Moscow. North Carolina. Phoenix, just stupid Phoenix, where Agent Li never reported a concussion and never woke up the next morning.
Agent Phil Coulson is the best field handler on SHIELD’s payroll, with the highest mission success rate, and he has lost twenty seven agents.
Now, he is sitting in a desperately bleak safehouse in Budapest, surrounded by a million dollars of worthless tracking and surveillance equipment, which is tracking and surveilling nothing.
It has been twenty three hours and forty five minutes since Agent Romanov and Specialist Barton’s last verbal check in. It has been twenty two hours and thirty three minutes since their trackers flickered off in the middle of a busy market, and he doesn’t know whether they’ve been intentionally disabled, or whether the trackers have been etched out of their skin.
It has been forty hours since he woke up next to Clint Barton, the younger man wrapped around him like a tired squid. It has been thirty nine hours and forty five minutes since he’d hauled Agent Barton from bed, forced him into a shower, and made him a cup of the strongest coffee possible from the weak coffee maker in the safe house. It has been thirty nine hours and thirty minutes since their last kiss, a brief and chaste peck, because Specialist Barton and Agent Romanov had a mark to meet.
It has been thirty nine hours and twenty eight minutes, since he has last seen Clint, and Agent Phil Coulson has not yet slept. This is not the first time Agent Romanov has gone off the radar, he knows, and she has always come back. It is also not the first time Specialist Barton has gone off the radar, but it’s the first time he’s done it under Phil’s watch. Agent Coulson makes another cup of coffee and his thoughts fold in on themselves. He is exhausted, but he cannot rest.
Footsteps ring out in the corridor, and pause before the safehouse’s door. Phil is alert, but this safehouse is a dingy apartment complex and the noises are constant. He hears the hidden keypad slide open and a code is entered - the wrong one, he’d changed it two days ago - and he draws his gun. It’s not Clint. He knows that. There is a sharp knocking on the door then - shave-and-a-haircut - and Phil relaxes.
“Goddammit, it’s me,” the person on the other side curses in Hungarian, and he goes to open the door, slowly to see Agent Maria Hill scowling at him. Maria looks tired, but she is clean and looks somewhat freshly showered. “You changed the code.” she mutters, but not angrily.
“What are you doing here?” Phil asks, because obviously, she’s not supposed to be. She’s supposed to be in Austria.
“I brought you food.” she says, lifting up a plastic bag filled with takeout containers, as if it were just another day on the helicarrier and it was her turn to bring lunch.
Phil raises a careful eyebrow. “The assistant director of SHIELD is not here to bring me food.”
“I just finished up some work in Vienna. And I thought, hey, I should have dinner with my best buddy, who’s only a couple hours away moping in a shitty safe house. And I knew that near that safehouse, there a great place with this one spicy chicken dish...”
“Chicken paprikash.”
“Yes. That. I had it a couple years ago when I was here. We should find Barton a recipe for it when he gets back.” she says, and the casualness of the word when, not if, eases the weight off his shoulders a bit.
“I’m not moping.”
“Of course you are. Barton hasn’t checked in over a day, and you’re worried sick.”
“Barton and Romanov, Maria. You aren’t worried?”
“I am. Of course, I am. I’m always worried about Nat. But I’m eating, and I’ve slept at least eight hours since.” Maria shrugs, pulling out a small styrofoam container and handing it to him with a fork.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Open it.” Maria says, and he does. The container holds a slice of cake, layered and chocolatey and rich.
“This isn’t chicken.”
“No, but are you hungry now?”
“Dammit, Maria.” Phil eats the cake. It is delicious. She knows his weak spot. Of course, she does. Phil isn’t entirely sure that this much sugar on an empty stomach is a good idea, but his stomach is suddenly growling, and he eyes the chicken filled container hungrily.
“This is the life we’ve chosen, Phil. We’re SHIELD agents dating SHIELD agents. That means that they’ll disappear for weeks on end and we only get to have sex about once a month, at best. Hold it together, Phil, they’ll be back.” she assures him.
Phil sighs. The room is cold, but Maria - well, having her here makes is a little warmer.
“Are you going back to the helicarrier tonight?” he asks - no, pleads - trying not to sound needy at all.
Maria looks at him, and her eyes soften. “No. I’ll stay the night. I have to be in Sarajevo tomorrow, and this is a good midway point.” Seeing his skepticism, she adds “I was going to stop here anyway, don’t flatter yourself, dumbass.” It’s not entirely true, of course. Phil knows his East European geography just fine, and Budapest is not on the way to Sarajevo from Vienna. But he gets her intention, and it soothes his worry. They eat their dinners together, and they don't talk about Phil's mission, because there's no way that either one of them would sound any less than a fretting grandmother.
When Phil emerges from the shower - demanded by Maria, because he apparently still smelled like the enthusiastically garlicky dinner Clint made yesterday - Maria is already curled up in his bed, fully clothed and snoring gently. He starts towards the couch, but Maria opens an eye and points at the expanse of bed next to her. When he lies down, she throws an arm around him and rests her head on his arm, and he shifts to wrap an arm under her back.
"I lied," she says, her voice a bit trembling.
"About what?"
"I am insanely worried about Natasha, and I haven't slept since they went off grid, and I came over because - because I thought, at least we could worry together."
"And so you could sleep?"
"Yeah." Maria admits.
"Go to sleep. I've got you, dumbass." Phil says, and his best friend nods and curls into his side.
They sleep for five hours, and when they wake, it’s to the familiar sounds of an approaching gunfight.
“An explosive arrow has never sounded so sweet.” Maria says, swiftly rolling out of bed to grab her sidearm and peer cautiously out the window at the blur of red hair below.
Phil grins in response, already having packed up their most important gear for a quick retreat. They’ll have to abandon this safehouse. They're about to launch themselves into a fight. They will all probably spend some time in Medical after extraction. And, Phil's day has just gotten better.