Spy vs Spy

*

Winter

Phil Coulson ladles himself a cup of punch and—yep. Spiked already. He sighs. The Director is going to have an absolute shitfit.

Agent Carson is assigned to guard duty and, to her credit, doesn't flinch at Phil's narrowed eyes. "I didn't see a thing."

"Of course not."

He wanders away to lean against one streamer-festooned wall before having a second sip—the drink is already poured; he might as well enjoy it. It is the End of the World, after all.

There are too many countries and religions and cultures represented in SHIELD to honor them all, so somewhere along the line the agency had created its own traditions. There are four officially sanctioned holidays—each with a corresponding party—because they need a united reason to celebrate, an excuse to cut loose every three months. The End of the World Party is SHIELD’s answer to Christmas and New Year’s; an acknowledgement of their own successes and an unsubtle dig at all the hysterics who inevitably claim that this will be the year the world finally falls apart.

Director Carter had forbidden all alcohol after what Nick Fury—one of the few people left from those days—still claims was a very memorable and emotionally devastating agency-wide limbo contest. Of course, an agency full of hyper-creative and intelligent individuals has no trouble skirting any rule they choose, and the spiking of the punchbowl has become as much a tradition as the parties themselves.

The music is lively enough to tempt people out on the dance floor, and several pairs of senior agents show off the fancier steps they’ve learned for undercover work, a crowd gathering and whooping appreciatively. There are a lot of flushed faces and bright eyes, but no one is too drunk yet. Phil allows himself the hope that the night will end without a brawl; the drinking may go unmentioned if nothing terrible comes of it.

The next guard shows up to relieve Carson—they’re assigned to only fifteen minute shifts; even Nick isn’t cruel enough to pull people out of the party altogether—and Phil finishes his drink hurriedly, intent on putting the fear of God into the new man.

He’s only halfway to the table when he stumbles over a pair of legs sticking out from under the partially retracted conference room curtain.

“Hello,” comes a rather nasal voice, presumably from the owner of the legs.

“Who is that?" Phil pushes the heavy curtain aside to reveal a youngish man laying on the floor, holding a red, dripping cocktail napkin to his face. "What are you doing under there?"

“My partner zigged when I zagged; I’m waiting for this sonofabitch to stop spurting.” The man pulls the napkins away to reveal a gushing nosebleed, wide grin, and a face Phil recognizes from countless forms floating across his desk. He’s never met Clint Barton personally.

Phil extends a handkerchief fished from his pocket. “That’s a lot of blood. Maybe you should go to Medical.”

“Nah, that’s okay,” Barton says cheerfully and Phil’s stomach does a slow roll as red steadily seeps down the white of the handkerchief. “My friend was going to get some more napkins, but she never—oh, there she is.”

Phil straightens up as Natasha Romanov brushes by, a glance of simultaneous assessment and dismissal her only acknowledgement of his presence. She’s carrying a wad of wet, brown paper towels, undoubtedly liberated from the nearest bathroom, and drops them unceremoniously on the floor by Barton’s head with a sodden plop.

“Well, I can see you’re in good hands, so—” Phil gestures vaguely back toward the party. “Feel free to keep that,” he adds, nodding toward the handkerchief before briefly returning Barton’s grin.

When Phil makes it to the refreshment table there’s a brand new bowl of punch, lime flavored this time.

And it’s already spiked.

*

 “I want to know who’s responsible.” Nick Fury pounds the table for emphasis, sending everyone’s coffee cups rattling and half a dozen eyes closing in brief agony.

Phil resists the impulse to rub his forehead, wishing he’d accepted the Tylenol that Sitwell offered on their way into the meeting. “As far as we can tell it’s a coordinated effort.”

A long-term coordinated effort, he does not add—the spiking of the punch appears to have started the same day as the alcohol prohibition, and has not been hindered in the slightest by the best efforts of a line of angry SHIELD directors.

“I want additional guards stationed around the punchbowl at the next party. They can keep each other accountable.  Offer an incentive for turning one another in.” Fury waves vaguely, too irate for details. “An extra day of personal leave or something. I don’t fucking know.” He slams his hand down on the table one last time, hard enough that Phil’s coffee finally sloshes over the rim of his cup to soak a stack of meeting agendas. “But the drinking stops now. Coulson, send out a memo.”

Spring

*

The party has already started and Phil just…doesn’t go. Five more minutes, he thinks, sorting through stacks of papers, then looks up at the clock only to find that twenty have passed.

The phone rings. He lets it ring. It’s undoubtedly Jasper, wondering when Phil is going to show up.

There’s a knock on his door, polite and quiet enough to be easily ignored.

Another phone call. Probably Fury this time, ready to threaten bodily harm if Phil doesn’t appear.

Phil tells himself that he doesn’t want to go because pounding music is unlikely to help his gnawing headache. That he doesn’t want to hear the tittering laughter that inevitably turns into guffaws and whoops as everyone gets more intoxicated and progressively carefree. He tells himself that Hayfever’s Eve is his least favorite faux-holiday due to all the Kleenex that gets tossed around—it covers the floor and creates an agency-wide slipping hazard as well as leaves lint all over everyone’s clothing.

Phil tells himself all of those things are the reasons why he’s avoiding the party, avoiding people.

He tells himself that it isn’t because of the notice on his desk, because of grouping of teeny tiny pixels that merge together to form the boring blandness of an employee identification photo. It isn't because no matter how long he looks he can’t recognize Caroline McPhail at all.

Phil was technically her superior officer—though removed through various layers of management and handlers—but had never actually met her. Maybe, if he stares long enough, he’ll realize that he’d seen her around and just not known it, will recognize her from the cafeteria or hallways or gym. Then again, maybe she never looked anything like her ID photo—who does, after all?—and Phil would recognize her immediately if he could see her in real life, chatting and smiling or laughing. Maybe he’d recognize her more easily if the large black DECEASED printed beside the photo wasn’t so distracting.

He used to be able to pair faces to all the names of the paper people that travel across his desk, but there’s too many of them now. What had been a lean and tightknit community of agents ten years ago is now a shaky pyramid of footsoldiers and administrators, the numbers of both approaching unwieldy proportions. When Phil gets up to speak at all staff meetings he can't identify most of the people looking back at him.

The door suddenly explodes inward, kicked by the large black boot of a scowling SHIELD director. “Where the hell were you?” Nick’s shoulders are still glittery from the confetti shower that signals the end of the party, and Phil grits his teeth at the thought of it raining down all over the office carpet.

“Catching up on paperwork.” He rearranges the stacks smoothly, covering Caroline McPhail’s picture. “I thought it’d be a better use of my time than drinking and dancing.”

Nick scowls at Phil’s desk, at his face, at the world in general. “Four times a year the agency gets to have fun and you just don’t go. What the hell, Coulson? It’s almost like you’re—”

“Did anyone spike the punch?” Phil interrupts, indulging the one and only interest in the party in the first place.

“Yes.” The switch from brooding to rapturous anger is abrupt and over the top in the way that is completely unique to Nick Fury. “There was even a Conga line!” The Director is practically apoplectic at the thought, but when he glares at Phil there’s almost something mischievous in his eyes. “We need to put out another memo. This shit has to stop.”

Summer

*

The memo goes out, but the shit does not stop.

This time the punch isn’t just spiked—it seems that the enterprising prankster has gone so far as to exchange the entire bowl of punch for one of wine. Phil finds himself jostled until he collides with an elbow that’s hastily relocated, the owner not spilling so much as a drop of her wine in the process.

“Pardon me, Agent Romanov." Her unfriendliness is legendary at SHIELD, but she smiles politely enough before gathering the skirt of her dress in her other hand and tugging gently. Phil feels his own foot rock and realizes with horror that he’s standing on her hem. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry!”

“Think nothing of it.” She smiles again before moving her gaze back out to the dance floor, finished with the conversation, finished with him. 

“Where’s your other half?” he asks, and she glances back at him briefly, eyes narrowed uncertainly.  “Your partner. Is he on the dance floor? Or hiding under another curtain?”

Romanov smiles again, more genuinely this time. “He isn’t feeling well. I’d be with him now, but I already had the dress. And I couldn’t very well pass up my chance to enjoy all this…” She waves vaguely toward the gaudily decorated room, the drunken dancers. “….splendor.”

“Of course not; no one could.”

They exchange another polite smile before falling into a companionable silence, watching everyone else laugh and mingle and twirl one another around. Phil catches sight of Nick frowning at them from across the room; Romanov must notice him as well, because she stiffens almost imperceptibly before inclining her head back toward the punch bowl and holding up her now empty cup.

“Excuse me.”

And like that, she’s gone.  Phil spots her a few more times during his halfhearted mingling—she's always hovering motionlessly around the edges of the action, leaning against walls and tables. Drinking cheap wine. Watching. The party is over and she’s disappeared before Phil figures out why the whole thing unsettles him so.

Natasha Romanov was the most beautiful person in the room and nobody asked her to dance.

*

 “Have you ever met Barton?” Nick’s voice booms suddenly.

“Clint Barton?” Phil’s lips twist wryly at Nick’s fleetingly pursed expression of displeasure at his non-reaction; the director’s unannounced bursting into offices has inspired more than one hysterical response around the agency. “Archer. Sniper. Pilot. Yeah, I’ve met him.” He pictures the agent’s legs sticking out from his half-heartedly selected hiding place beneath the divider curtain and his smirk turns into a more genuine smile. “Well, sort of, anyway.”

“He got fucked up on his last mission and Medical grounded him to base. That pulls Romanov out of rotation, too. I have a project I want you all to collaborate on.” 

*

Phil hasn’t been in the field in a long time, but he recognizes the aftermath of captivity and torture all too well—clusters of bruises, hooded eyes, taut cheekbones that point toward too much weight dropped too fast. When Barton takes a hand off one of his crutches and leans on the other to shake hands, Phil finds himself gripping too gingerly in response to the man's frail state, but Barton grins as easily as he had six months ago at the party. He straightens in surprise at the finger poked into his back before taking an awkward, shuffling, step further into the Phil’s office to make room for Romanov, who storms in and pulls Barton forward in the same fluid movement.

“Do you mind? He’s not supposed to put any weight on the leg.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer before stacking the file folders strewn over the couch with one hand while maintaining a deathgrip on Barton’s elbow with the other.  She also has fading bruises on her face, obviously hidden by skillful makeup application the week before. She gets Barton settled as Phil deposits the folders on his desk in an untidy pile and turns to face the two assassins he’s been assigned for an off-book, eyes-only project.

 “So…where do we start?” Romanov asks.

Phil takes in her weary suspicion and the way Barton’s eager, interested expression is as odds with his hollow eyes and unknowingly makes the decision that leads to the rest of it.

 “We start with a pizza.”

*

Three weeks later they’ve eaten many different takeout meals together. Now that they’ve stopped dancing around introductions and reciting highly edited autobiographies they’ve focused on their assignment, and it’s not going at all like Phil imagined. He figured it would be a wild goose chase, busywork assigned by Nick in petty retaliation for not properly enjoying his parties. What he didn’t imagine this time would be is…fun.

They treat it as an op, even though it’s after hours, and Natasha has her shoes off and Clint is wearing a pair of red pajama pants with one leg cut off to accommodate his cast. Phil stands in front of his whiteboard—his thirty-seven point To Do list having been erased without a second thought prior to the agents’ evening arrival—with an eggroll in one hand and a dry erase marker in the other. “Alright, what do we know?”

“The punch doesn’t start off spiked. Guards are assigned. No one has ever been caught.”

Phil nods in agreement as he writes, the marker squeaking. “And what have we heard?” He directs this toward Clint, well liked at SHIELD and therefore more likely to have his ear to the ground than the famously unfriendly Black Widow.

Mouth full of food and eyes wide, Clint tries for an innocent expression that dies quickly at Natasha’s stony glare and Phil’s more bemused one. He swallows his food and scrubs hastily at his mouth with a napkin. “Look, all I know—and this is second and third hand, okay? Don’t, like, take any of this as gospel here—is that the person that does the spiking is different each holiday. A few weeks before the party a bottle of alcohol and postcard mysteriously appears, saying they’ve been chosen by the Mastermind to take care of the punch. They have to figure out how to do it and to try to get it done at the beginning of the party. Otherwise they could just get assigned to guard duty and wait for their shift, right?”

“Is that all?” Natasha asks, and swipes Phil’s stapler off his desk to loom threateningly over her partner. “Is that all you’ve heard?”

“Okay, it was Bobbi Morse that spiked it at the last End of the World.” He makes a darting grab for the stapler as Natasha holds it just out of reach, snapping at his fingertips. “She confirmed the postcard thing but didn’t know anything else.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Phil writes anonymous note and Morse in the KNOWN column, keeping one eye on the agents’ escalating battle for stapler dominance. “That’s what we know and have heard, but what do we think? Who's the one pulling the strings?"

“I think Mastermind is Jasper Sitwell,” Clint says immediately, confidently. “He fits the profile. It’s him. It’s Sitwell, he’s the guy.” He dusts his hands together triumphantly and picks up his takeout just as Natasha leans over to rapidly fire a staple into the container.

“I don't think Mastermind is an Agent at all,” Phil counters. “It’s someone in clerical or maintenance or finance…someone that can fly under the radar.  Agents are expected to be sneaky.  The lady serving casserole every Tuesday night is not.”

Clint hums appreciatively, picking the staple out of his food and tucking it under the splint on his hand, sure to be produced for some terrible retribution at some inappropriate time. “Okay, then I’m changing my vote to Mike Porter, the air conditioning guy.”

“How about you?” Phil asks Natasha. “Who do you think Mastermind is?”

Her smile is all the more dazzling for being so rare. “If I didn’t know any better, I would think that he was you.”

*

Fall

*

They’ve gone full-tilt with it now, the nearest thing to “play” that Phil Coulson has allowed himself in thirty years.

Natasha presses the color coded post-it notes to the wall Phil has cleared for this specific purpose, removing years’ worth of layered policy posters and OSHA reminders. Phil connects the post-its laboriously with taut pieces of string while Clint bosses them both from his spot on the couch, so obviously desperate to participate directly that they forgive his constant critiques. The end result is colorful and expansive and ridiculous, like something out of a bad movie, and they all sit together to take it in for a long moment, admiring.

“It’s fucking beautiful.” Clint Barton’s face is a study in unbridled delight.

“It’s certainly a first for me,” Phil admits, winking at Natasha. “Frankly, up to this moment, SHIELD has been a disappointment as far as conspiracy walls go. ‘Spy vs Spy’ and James Bond led me to believe there’d be a lot more string art in my day to day duties.”

Natasha nods, taking in their work with amusement and something like pride, a smile tugging at her lips. “Tomorrow’s the big day,” she says out of nowhere, and Phil’s confused until he realizes she’s talking about the cast on Clint’s leg.

The archer drags his fingernails up and down the wrapped plaster dramatically. “Once they take this sonofabitch off I’m going to do nothing but scratch and scratch and scratch as hard as I want, as long as I want. It’s gonna be heaven.”

Phil’s happy for Clint. He is. The spiral fracture took far longer to heal than the other bones, still immobilized long after stitches were removed and cuts healed into pink lines, long after teeth were sculpted and placed by patient SHIELD dentists. The removal of the cast means the beginning of return to normality for Clint, sidelined and forced into unwilling inactivity for so long. But it also means that a sundown has been called on the not-a-mission and easy comradery they’ve enjoyed for months now.

Natasha and Clint will return to the field, and Phil will be reduced to paperwork for evening company.

He’s quiet too long and Natasha follows his eyeline to the stacks on his desk, neatly ordered but neverending.

“Where does it go?” she asks. “You’re the last person to deal with it, so where does it end up?"

He's never really thought about what happens to it after. "To Records. They have a warehouse somewhere."

"Rows of boxes, miles long and miles high." Clint grins up at Phil with a wry twist of his mouth that looks more like Natasha's gallows humor than his own usual exuberance. He drops his eyes just as suddenly back to the cast on his leg, picking at the edges, where the blue tint has long since been worried away. "What the hell is it all for?"

“Look,” Phil says finally, flustered and not quite sure why, “someone has to be the one to keep watch. And it can’t be Fury. Someone has to gather up all the pieces at the end and sort them back into the big picture so that it all means something. Someone has to be the person at the end that sees.”

“And you are SHIELD’s person,” Natasha surmises.

Phil sighs, his eyes joining the others' to focus on Clint's cast. “Yeah. That’s what I am.”

*

They stop by after leaving Medical and Phil is suitably admiring of Clint’s too-skinny, freshly freed leg. They’ve shared so many dinners at this point that he doesn’t think twice about suggesting “Lunch?”, but their expressions suddenly go cagey and they exchange a long, meaningful look. “It’s no big deal if you already have plans,” Phil adds hurriedly.

“We don’t,” Natasha says immediately, and Clint nods along readily enough before glancing at the clock above Phil’s head.

“But?” Phil prompts.

“We’re not usually free around lunchtime and…” Clint shrugs, a little embarrassed, “…we were thinking we could…” His face turns bright red but he still laughs when Phil suddenly understands.

Like the clandestine punch spiking there’s another open secret at SHIELD—an agency wide obsession with soap operas. Their lives are often too chaotic to enjoy television involving a plot to keep track off, but soaps are so repetitive and slow moving that an agent can miss a month of episodes and jump right back in when they return from an op. Phil may or may not have participated in his fair share of community viewings back when he was on a team, but he put all of those things away with his move to management.

“You should come, too,” Natasha offers, and the automatic refusal is already on Phil’s lips when it dies at the sight of the Clint’s hand, extended toward him.

“Come with us. SHIELD can spare you for one hour. You can be our person, too.”

And that’s how Philip J. Coulson, level seven agent and legendary tight ass of SHIELD ends up sitting in the midst of thirty coworkers, watching soap operas on a Wednesday afternoon. They congregate in the west lounge—the east lounge already being full of people watching the same program—Natasha and Phil commandeering the last open loveseat with Clint sitting on the floor in front of them, his still-weak leg stuck out in everyone’s way.

As the opening credits of “The Heart is a Lonely Rose” ring out the wave of nostalgia hits painfully, reminding Phil too much of his own rookie days, parked in a crowd just like this one, every face one he knew well. But just as suddenly as the melancholy descends it is washed away by his surprise at spotting a face he does know.

“Stone Rothschild!” Phil yelps, and a roomful of heads swivel toward him. “That guy was on the show the last time I watched—and that was seven years ago!” Clint tips his head backwards and sends Phil an upside down grin. “Is he still married to Bridget?” Phil asks him, half teasing.

“Bridget!” someone calls mock horror, and there is scattered, good-natured laughter. “They got divorced ages ago. Stone is married to Adrianna St. Clair now.”

“And Bridget is married to Roderigo Santa Cruz,” Jasper Sitwell adds, worming his way in between two maintenance workers while balancing a coffee cup and wrapped sandwich. “They started their own fashion house and it’s been war ever since.”

“That’s only because Adrianna used to be married to Christian, before he kidnapped—"

Phil’s head swims from rapid fire conversation and the cacophony of smells—most people are sitting with various microwaved meals balanced on their laps—but it’s fun all the same, everyone hooting and jeering and trashtalking characters. He’d almost forgotten this part of SHIELD, the part that unites in pursuit of something meaningless and harmless and fun.

The room falls almost comically silent during an actress’ beautiful, drawn-out death scene, everyone’s breath held. Then someone wails “Bianca, noooooo!", breaking the mood, and Phil Coulson laughs out loud.

“She’ll be back,” Clint says sagely, and a dozen heads bob in agreement. “That’s rule number one in Soapland—if you don’t see a body actually go in the ground, they’re still alive.”

*