Chapter 2
*
Phil and Clint are pressed against a corner in the underground parking garage, deliberately not making face to face contact with their shadowy mystery informant.
“All I know,” a gruff, vaguely familiar voice whispers, “is that a few days before the party a letter goes out, telling someone that they’ve been chosen. Sometimes there’s a bottle of alcohol, too, if Mastermind has a special request.”
“Dude, we knew that already. Give us something new!”
“Who’s doing it?” Phil demands, flapping a silencing hand at Clint. “Who’s the person behind it all?”
“Look, I’ve told you all I know.” The voice pauses, fraught. “And even that’s probably too much.”
Clint crows with unbridled delight, and Phil barely resists the impulse to demand How can I contact you again? or some other shitty spy movie line. There’s a scuffling noise around the corner and the echo of rapidly retreating footsteps. Phil gives in and laughs, happy because Clint is, happy that they still have this, the goofy quest that brought the three of them together, that the game is every bit as thrilling as it was when it began two years ago.
He hopes it never ends.
*
For every bloody, high octane assignment there are ten like this one—dressing as someone else, living as someone else, and then dramatically dismantling the entire façade.
Phil and Clint do most of the heavy lifting, posing as American investors in Colombia, interested in setting up an English speaking resort with a hearty sideline of drugs. Natasha is on hand to make the occasional cameo as Phil’s desirable mistress, but spends most of her time being bored out of her mind in a luxurious penthouse.
She’s the one who discovers the telenovela and forces her partners to watch, and Strike Team Delta spends five months interfacing with bankers and drug lords during the day and all night parked in front of the television.
El Corazon es una Rosa Solitaria has been on for decades and seems to have an episode playing at all hours of the day and Natasha records them all dutifully, scours the internet for relevant details. Sometimes Phil rallies and forces a talk about strategy, but they know the plan, they know how to carry it out, they know what to do if everything falls apart, know the inevitable way this will all end. What they don’t know is if Juan Carlos Martinez Esperanza, owner of the most glorious mustache on earth, will ever keep his family’s vineyard out of the clutches of the scheming Ines de la Torre Gomez Rodriguez. Or if Sergio Diego Maradona Carbonell will ever win the affections of the doe-eyed Luz Eugenia, who keeps getting kidnapped (usually by the still scheming Ines de la Torre Gomez Rodriguez).
Natasha, with too much time on her hands and bored of the kept-woman lifestyle, joins online discussion forums and takes people to task all day, everyday, about Rosa Solitaria minutiae while Clint takes to mimicking Juan Carlos’ dramatic facial expressions in response to the most innocuous daily conversations. Phil picks up the overly flowery language and calls Natasha and Clint his preciosos, his cariños, his tesoros, and the three of them laugh, happy enough to pretend that it’s just a game, that it doesn’t mean anything.
The op ends with an uneventful mass arrest coordinated with Colombian police, the most danger being a few colorful threats tossed Phil’s direction. Clint calls Natasha and she has the penthouse packed up and a quinjet en route before Phil and Clint have even left the scene. They’re halfway through the flight home before Clint nudges Natasha’s foot with his own.
“How did it end?”
The show, of course he’s talking about the show, and Clint sounds regretful and a little sad, as if the internet doesn’t exist for him look up a synopsis or perhaps even watch the episodes themselves. As if the show is ending along with the op, as if it will cease to exist because they aren’t there to see it.
“Ines was shot.” Natasha dusts her hands together neatly, delighted at the convenience of it, a thing all wrapped up and resolved, and just in time for their departure. “Juan Carlos won’t have to worry about her anymore. And now Luz can marry Sergio.”
Clint hums thoughtfully and rubs at the short beard he’s worn for months—ready to shave it off and be done with it, ready to be Clint Barton instead of Elliot McAllister, ready to put it aside along with the show and the penthouse and all this time together. Natasha’s back in her tac uniform, a jarring change after high heels and sundresses and expensive jewelry, and even her voice is different, the detached way she relayed the information so unlike her previously breathless reports. Clint and Natasha are ready to go home again, ready for it to be over.
And for some reason, to Phil, that suddenly doesn’t seem okay.
“Did you see it?” Natasha raises an eyebrow and Phil clarifies, “Ines’ death. Did you see her actual body go into a coffin?”
She blinks at him, somewhere between amused and offended, while Clint pauses scrubbing at his face, his eyes moving between her and Phil, interested.
“She was shot in the heart, Coulson. She’s dead.”
“Maybe.” Phil shrugs.
“Ines fell off the pier and her body was swept out to sea.” Natasha glares meaningfully at Clint, who widens his eyes and raises his hands in the universal signal for This isnot my fight. “So if she wasn’t killed outright, then she drowned anyway.”
“…Possibly.” Phil probably shouldn’t enjoy carefully provoking the Black Widow as much as he does.
“The waters were shark infested.” Natasha points for emphasis, really getting heated now, or as heated as she ever gets. “There was a sign posted right where she fell in. The camera really lingered on the shot!”
“I remain unconvinced,” Phil says apologetically, and Clint hastily resumes scrubbing at his jaw to hide a smile.
“And,” she goes on, her voice raised against the roar of the quinjet, “you may recall that Ines was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor just two days ago! So even if the sharks and the bullet don’t get her—”
“Hey, I don’t make the rules here.” Phil spreads his hands helplessly as Clint gives in and laughs aloud. The corner of Natasha’s mouth twitches up unwillingly. “It’s the number one rule in Soapland—they’re only dead if you see a body go into the ground…and maybe not even then.”
*
“Not everyone is meant to be in the field,” Phil says as kindly as possible. He nudges the box of tissues nearer to the weeping woman, who ignores it in favor of wiping at her eyes with her fingertips. She peeks at them just long enough to see if her mascara is running, then resumes her theatrical sobs. “Some people’s talents are better used elsewhere.”
Phil Coulson will not attempt to rub away the headache growing directly between his eyebrows. He will not tap his foot or bounce his knee, he will not gnaw on a pen, and he certainly will not sigh with frustration at Marianne, who won’t stop crying. Phil absolutely will not do any of those things, though he very very very much wants to do them all. Instead he’ll finish the task that Fury fobbed off onto him and cut Marianne Sanderson from the covert ops training program.
“And there are still many fine departments that could utilize your wit and intelligence and obvious devotion to SHIELD. Logistics, perhaps.”
The desk phone illuminates into silent life and Phil glances at the display. There’s a callback number—Phil recognizes it immediately as Natasha’s cell phone—and suddenly it’s all he can do not to hurry this meeting along, not to throw the box of tissues at Marianne’s head and tell her to pull herself together, to get the hell out of his office. Clint and Natasha have been gone for weeks on one of their rare missions without Phil, and he wants his team inside this office as much as he wants this weepy recruit out of it.
But she’s still sobbing loudly, now wiping the back of her hand across her nose and as he fights his features from twisting into a moue of disgust Phil realizes that she’s doing all this deliberately. Maybe she’s a better actress than they’d thought.
The phone flashes again, this time with the numerical message 07734. Too short to be a phone number, not long enough to be anyone’s SHIELD ID number. Phil blinks at the numbers, trying to will them into making sense, something about them nagging and familiar.
“I feel like I wasn’t given enough of a chance,” Marianne manages between shuddery breaths. “If Director Fury could just—”
Phil is looking at her sympathetically—but not too sympathetically, or she’ll never let this go—but he isn’t listening at all, still turning those numbers over in his mind. And that’s the answer, suddenly—turning them over. Decades ago Phil Coulson exchanged many funny messages to his classmates via calculators displayed furtively or passed from hand to hand. 07734. All they had to do was flip the calculator upside down and squint at the numbers for them to become HELLO.
Phil stares at Marianne and fights a smile. And he wins the fight, but barely.
“—Sitwell said he could find a place for me but I want to be in ops, not—”
The phone flashes again with another message, this time 5508 07734.
HELLO BOSS.
Marianne eyes the phone balefully. “I guess you have to go. Someone keeps calling. I guess it’s important.” Her injured sniff comes at the same time as 80085.
It’s one of the rare calculator words that can be read upright, and Phil Coulson recognizes BOOBS as readily today as when he was a smirking twelve-year-old with a gray Casio calculator. And while the original callback number may have been Natasha’s, this particular message has Clint Barton’s fingerprints all over it.
“You’re still upset, I don’t mind talking some more.” Except he does. His ass aches from sitting at his desk and in meetings all day, and, due to the same meetings, he’s missed both dinner and lunch. Also his friends have just returned home after being gone for weeks. Phil does mind. A lot.
37047734 (HELLHOLE) comes next, followed immediately by 3704558 (ASSHOLE).
There’s a faint scuffling noise from the hall and Phil isn’t sure if he actually hears their laughter or his mind is just supplying it, along with the image of Clint and Natasha wrestling over her phone, eager to be the one to type in the next message.
“No, I guess we’re done.” Marianne’s tears end abruptly and miraculously, and while she still looks a little annoyed, she’s also resigned. Phil hastens to stand when she does, his desire to get out to the hallway masquerading as chivalry.
Clint and Natasha aren’t even pretending to do be doing anything other than waiting when the door opens. Natasha gives Marianne a brief dismissive glance before smiling at Phil. Her red hair has been colored black, making her look sallow, haunted. Clint has several splinted fingers on his left hand.
“I bet those hurt to type with,” Phil scolds, raising his eyebrows in disapproval.
That’s what he can offer. A joke. Mock annoyance. What he wants is to urge Natasha to wash that dye from her hair, to smooth the dark circles from beneath her eyes. Phil wants to examine Clint’s broken fingers and fume that they could have been set more cleanly had he been there to help. He wants to hug them. But Clint and Natasha are trained assassins, he is Phil Coulson, this is SHIELD. Banter is all he can offer.
Clint waves the observation away as unimportant. Of course typing had hurt, and of course it had been worth it.
“Food,” Natasha demands. “Now.”
*
“I think it’s Nick Fury.”
They’d missed the latest holiday party while off in whatever pocket of the world they’d been folded into (India, it was India—Phil hadn’t even lasted a week before he accessed classified info to find out), but Phil had updated them immediately on the latest End of the World celebration. There had been copious drinking that culminated in three hundred SHIELD employees singing, jumping, and drunkenly group-hugging along to “Sweet Caroline”. The whole thing had left the Director in a thunderous mood for days afterward.
“Christ.” Clint drops his fork to scrub at his face carefully with seven fingers. “I feel like crap. I might be sick. I might be dying.”
He looks worn out, but not particularly unwell. A sick Barton is usually a very subdued one, his frowns growing deeper and his words further and further apart before he’ll finally, very grudgingly, admit to illness. On the other hand, an openly complaining Barton has a purpose—usually to annoy Natasha or make Phil laugh, but every so often he does so to communicate something obliquely.
“You do look tired.” Phil passes over his dinner roll, which Clint accepts immediately despite having two of his own.
Natasha ignores them both. “Being the Mastermind would allow Director Fury to indulge in all his favorite pastimes simultaneously.” She holds up her fingers and enumerates, “Lying to people, sneaking around, and yelling at everyone afterward.”
“Maybe I have a wasting disease,” Clint offers. “Something really rare and exotic. Maybe I’m incubating something terrible.” He presses a shoulder into Natasha, who pushes him away reflexively. “Maybe I’m contagious and everyone in SHIELD will catch it and die.”
“No matter what Fury says, he loves those goddamned parties, even the dancing. Especially the dancing.”
Nick somehow feels Natasha’s gaze upon his back and turns away from the serving line to stare at them. He can’t know what they’re talking about but scowls at her as a matter of course. Natasha narrows her eyes and points in his direction with her butter knife, mouths I’m on to you. Nick glares back, oblivious to the food server still standing patiently with a spoonful of mashed potatoes, not caring if he holds up the chow line forever, if everyone starves. Phil sighs; neither Natasha or Nick will be willing to blink first.
“Maybe I have chronic fatigue syndrome. Or mono. Or dengue fever.”
And there it is. All that to give Phil a clue to where they’ve been these last weeks, because in their minds he probably hadn’t worried at all, definitely hadn’t checked up on them. India, Phil. We were in India.
Clint can’t say it. He won’t say it. Natasha abruptly ends her staring match with Fury to glance fleetingly at Phil, because she also wants to be sure that he heard, sure that he understands.
“You get to Medical if you don’t feel better in the morning.” Phil pushes over his carton of milk, then immediately snatches it back and opens it in concession to those broken fingers. Pushes it back again. “And you.” He frowns at Natasha, all stern disappointment and reproach, because he won’t say it either. I missed you guys. I’m glad you’re back. “Stop tormenting our poor old Director.”
*
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” Phil says flatly when he sees Jasper.
Failed World Conqueror Day has the distinction of being the one agency holiday where costumes are sanctioned, Jasper Sitwell has dressed up as Red Skull for the last seven years. But tonight some wild impulse has merged with a death wish and he’s come outfitted as Nick Fury.
“You’re just upset you didn’t think of it.” Jasper snaps the eyepatch for emphasis.
“Better wipe that grin off your face; it ruins the effect.”
Phil has never dressed up, not even in his earliest years at SHIELD, but he’s done so today in concession to Clint’s enthusiasm and Natasha’s indulgent humor. Al Capone never had aspirations to conquer much more than Chicago, but Phil tells himself the spirit of the thing is close enough. Not to mention the fact that he already owned the pinstripe suit and has not nearly enough occasions to wear it.
The party’s just begun but the room is already full. Most people are in costume, and there’s everyone from famous despots to the human threats that SHIELD identified and dispatched before the rest of the world was ever the wiser. Maria Hill is dressed as Nick Fury’s former administrative assistant, who was later discovered to be a spy and failed assassin. There a few Napoleons, a spattering of Caesars and a half dozen Dr. Dooms. The room is sea of familiar faces dressed as other familiar faces—SHIELD’s unique version of Old Home Week.
Phil goes immediately to the punchbowl, where a grinning Clint Barton and a frowning Natasha Romanov are already waiting. After all his excitement Clint has come dressed only as himself, which may or may not bear thinking about later, while Natasha is some sort of popstar, if the blond wig and headset are any indication. Phil is loath to ask which one, sure that the answer is instantly obvious to everyone that isn’t him.
“Tonight’s the night,” Natasha announces in lieu of a greeting, eyeing Phil’s suit speculatively before giving it a curt nod of approval. “I’m catching the Mastermind’s minion in the act. Then the big guy goes down.” She scans the crowd for Nick Fury.
“Good luck.” Phil accepts the kool-aid Clint ladles up and then chokes in surprise, his throat burning from the overwhelming taste of Schnapps.
Natasha’s eyes widen and swing comically to Fury, who’s across the room, laughing and clapping Alexander Pierce on the back. “How?” she demands, half enraged, half exalted. “How?? He can’t have done it; I’ve been watching the whole time!” She snatches an empty cup from the table and dunks it directly into the punchbowl, takes a long swig. “Goddamnit!”
Several onlookers move immediately away, eager to be out of the radius of an angry Black Widow, but Phil knows better. There’s admiration in her anger, relief at the discovery, delight in the deception.
*
Everything is on the verge of falling apart.
Natasha and Phil are huddled in the back of a van and it’s not as terrible as it really should be. Clint’s out there dismantling human beings with his bow and his hands and somehow it feels like the weather should be freezing instead of just chilly, like it should be a moonless midnight instead of a sunny early afternoon. That Phil’s own hands should be shaking from the cold, that Natasha’s fingers should feel like ice as they wrap around his wrist. When she says Phil he half expects the word to come in a puff of breath.
“Hmm?”
“Say we can go back.” Natasha is quiet. They can speak normally in the safety of the surveillance van, but she’s almost whispering, the words breathy, like an admission of guilt or a dying declaration. “Say that when this is over things will be like they used to be—agency conspiracy theories and laughing and eating pizza on your couch. Say that it’ll be like it was; that we can have all of it back.”
“We can,” Phil promises. “It can be however we want it to be.”
“Yeah?” Only the Black Widow can sound so hopeful and cynical at the same time.
“Yeah.”
Phil doesn’t believe that and neither does she.
They’re back in Colombia for the first time in years and it’s an ugly op, none of them happy about the amount of wetwork involved, most of which falls to Clint as a matter of course. Phil does what he can to make things better, to smooth over the sharp edges. He delivers heartfelt diatribes about weighing guilt and eating sin while Natasha frowns and Clint says less and less. Phil hands him another name, and another, and another, and Clint never argues, he never says no, but there’s a growing mix of disappointment and accusation in his eyes.
Phil and Natasha wait while Clint goes out. Goes out again. And again. And again. The word is in his eyes and in the set of his shoulders—Clint never says no but it’s in their future, that refusal, and when it comes it’s going to tear their team and friendship apart.
Phil keeps saying Just one more and handing over files—each time hoping that it’s true, that this is the last name on the list, that Nick won’t call and add another. It won’t last forever; this op will end and they’ll go home. And that no will fade back into the background, the way it always has been before.
Natasha is skilled at so many things but has little talent for bridging the gap that’s growing between them. In between hits she finds the telenovela that they watched so long ago and the three of them try to recapture that old magic, but what was lighthearted and effortless before feels forced and artificial now.
Juan Carlos Martinez Esperanza, his mustache as glorious as ever, is still on the show, and the devious Ines de la Torre Gomez Rodriguez has indeed returned, exactly as Phil predicted. But when the lovely Luz Eugenia, an innocent teenager five years ago, appears on the screen as the current villain, Natasha sighs aloud and Clint announces that he’s tired, that he’s going to bed. Phil watches the formerly wide-eyed Luz all but cackle over some nefarious scheme, and something about the whole thing rings a muted bell of hurt, even though he doesn’t quite understand why.
*
They return to headquarters and deliver the most mechanical, dispassionate debrief in the history of SHIELD, Barton leaving the room immediately after signing his name. Natasha takes off after him and Phil goes back to his office. He sighs at the work that’s accumulated in his absence and knows he’ll have plenty of time to tackle it; he won’t be having any visitors for a while. Maybe a long while.
So it comes as a pretty big surprise when a note arrives the next morning.
You have been chosen.
*
Phil has never been to either of their living quarters; in all these years they’ve always come to him. He’s wondered about it sometimes, imagining what their homes would look like—he pictures Natasha living in a clean oasis of calm while Clint’s space would be a cacophony of knickknacks and arrows littering every flat surface. He’s so sure of that image that when Clint waves him inside Phil’s brain first stutters over and then wholly rejects the blank walls and spotless tiled floor, the standard SHIELD-issued anonymous furnishings. Phil turns a careful circle, taking in the spartan surroundings, unable to reconcile them with a man with such a big personality, as if Clint doesn’t really live here at all, as if he plans to evaporate at any moment.
He recovers just enough to bounce the crumpled up note off Clint’s forehead, the archer snagging it before it can fall to the ground, and while what Phil wants to say is I’m so sorry what comes out is a much safer “I got your message.”
Clint shrugs one shoulder, smile still a little hesitant, as unable as Phil to slide back into easy banter after so many weeks of tension. “I didn’t figure I should send alcohol in the interoffice mail, but don’t worry; I’ve got a bottle of Stoli stashed here for you. The Mastermind never cheaps out.”
“It can’t be you,” Phil says, but even as he says it he knows it’s true. That Clint is, somehow, against all logic, the Mastermind. None of it makes any sense. “I have three of those notes tacked up on our conspiracy board—Nat and I would know your handwriting anywhere!”
“That’s why Patty writes the notes. All but this one.” Clint smooths the wrinkled paper out against his thigh, and his grin is warmer, a little more genuine, as he waits for Phil to put it all together.
There’s only one Patty in SHIELD, Patty Zavala, a rather humorless woman that works in Accounts Payable who rails against people stealing her pens and sends every email with a read receipt. It’s hard to picture her helping Clint out with anything work related, much less participating in anything as ridiculous as—
“There’s more than one Mastermind,” Phil declares, and Clint just shrugs, because of course there is. The punch spiking pre-dated his SHIELD career and continued in spite of all his mission-related absences. “Just how many of you are there??”
“Three, usually. Patty took over from Mike Porter a few years back. You remember Mike? He was in maintenance, did all the air conditioning. But these days it’s just me and Patty and—”
“Jasper Sitwell,” Phil realizes incredulously, and pinches the bridge of his nose, unable to hold back a grudging laugh. And then he can remember it all so clearly, a years-younger Clint Barton with his leg casted all the way to his thigh, fighting over a stapler with Natasha and chirping It’s him. It’s Sitwell, he’s the guy. Back when Phil hadn’t known Clint well enough to be instantly suspicious, hadn’t known how to ask the right questions. “Goddamnit, Barton. You even told me that—practically on the first day!”
“I wanted to tell you and Nat so badly. I’d decide it was time—past time, really—to come clean, but then I would always change my mind at the last minute.” Clint folds the note it into something small and neat and sticks it in his pocket. Maybe he’ll burn it later, in true spy fashion. Or maybe even eat it. “At first it was all about the thrill of getting away with something, but then later you and Nat and I had so much fun hunting the Mastermind. I didn’t want to ruin that. I couldn’t.”
Phil sees himself pressed against walls and questioning shadowy informants, pressing theories and names and wild conjecture against his office walls. Those post-it notes and bits of string are long since buried under maps and memos and OSHA posters, but they’re still there beneath it all, the foundation that made the rest of it possible.
“So I kept on with it. For myself, for you…but mostly for Natasha. We live in an ugly goddamned world, Phil—there aren’t many innocent things for a Black Widow to laugh about.”
“So why tell me now?”
“Because you always want to make things better for everyone. You want to fix everything and you can’t. But I’ve thought of a way that you can still help.” And Clint smiles, the sunny, scheming expression that Phil knows and loves so well—his gossiping smirk, his soaps-in-the-breakroom grin. “Phil Coulson, will you help me and Patty and Jasper engineer the means for the entirety of SHIELD to let down their guard, cut loose, and get absolutely shitfaced?”
Phil’s in, of course. He’s been in since the moment he tripped over Clint Barton’s outstretched legs or stood on the hem of Natasha Romanov’s ballgown.
“Is there a secret club handshake?” he asks hopefully, “How do you guys coordinate and plan—leave each other messages with invisible ink? Do you use decoder rings?”
Clint shrugs. “We email, usually.”
Phil Coulson rubs his hands together, already anticipating Natasha’s delight and Nick Fury’s anger. “Well. I think we come up with something a little more exciting than that.”
*
EPILOGUE
Loki takes everything away when he takes Clint. Natasha fights and brings him back, but can’t do the same for Phil, who is dead.
Except that he isn’t.
He lays in a hospital bed surrounded by people he doesn’t know, wondering at his broken body and abrupted life, until one night he wakes up to the weight of familiar bodies on either side of his, opens his eyes to Natasha’s red hair. She’s burrowed into his neck and shoulder, close enough that he can feel her breath on his skin, her eyelashes tickling against his jaw. He moves his head carefully, not wanting to dislodge her, not wanting to lose her, but needing to see if—his choked cry of relief breaks the silent spell as Phil catches the edge of Clint’s profile in his field of vision, looking tired and pinched but himself again.
“They said you were dead,” Natasha scoffs gently, nudging Phil’s knee with her own. “But we knew better, didn’t we, Hawkeye?”
“How?” Phil thought he was dead also. “How did you know?”
Clint lays an arm carefully across Phil’s stomach to grab Natasha’s hand, hooking his chin over Phil’s shoulder. “Don’t you remember the first rule of soap opera land? If you don’t see a body go in the ground, it means the person can still be alive. Their loved ones can go and get them back.”