The Words Don't Reach
The day Phil Coulson officially returned to the land of the living, Clint was completely unprepared.
Phil had just reached the short hallway to the room when Clint exited the elevator. He was heading to the same place, having gotten JARVIS’s alert that the team was meeting, and didn’t look up for several seconds. His bow was in his hand, his shirt was on backwards and inside-out, and the usual band-aids patchworking his arms had been joined by one on his nose, and one on his cheek.
He froze, other hand halfway out of his pocket holding his hearing aids.
Coulson stilled along with him.
He could see the sudden expressions flashing through his eyes, and then… Then they all shut down at once. Like a wall of ice had been slid between Phil’s eyes and his view of Clint’s thoughts.
This look was completely unfamiliar. It gave him a horrible feeling that, in the time since he had been ‘dead’, things had changed. He knew thing were going to have changed, logically, but… Did he know this Clint at all?
“Spot-on timing as always, sir.” the other agent said in a monotone, before turning back into the elevator, shoving his aids back into his pocket. Coulson looked for his tells, the position of his hand on his bow, the angle of his arms, but… he was almost completely blank. Like I’m a stranger. Or a mission target. Untrusted. Unknown.
“Agent Agent!” Stark’s surprised call had him turning just as the doors closed behind Clint.
“Long time no see. I should’ve know not even death could keep you away from your celebrity crush. Cap, come see!”
Steve joined him in the doorway, looking surprised. “Agent Coulson. I’m… so glad you’re alive. We’d been told you died.”
Phil wiped the worrying exchange with Clint from his mind (for the moment, there was no way he wasn’t coming right back to that issue as soon as he was free...) and smiled pleasantly, accepting the firm handshake from the relieved icon. “I thought I had as well. And the information was classified, until now. I came as soon as I was cleared to do so..”
Stark made an undignified squawking sound. “Classified? Classified? I know everything on SHIELD’s sadly underprepared servers, how the hell is this more classified than where your oh-so-secret safehouses are?”
Phil smiled slightly (superiorly) “If you had checked the agent rosters, I’m sure you would have known sooner.”
Ignoring Stark’s splutter about grunt work and miles and miles of closely written text, he turned, and sensed slight wind, threat, potential injury-(safe, let it happen) and felt Natasha’s slap sting on his face. “Agent Romanov.”
“Good to have you back on the team, Phil.” She frowned (imperceptibly). He noticed her hand turn slightly in a gifting gesture, then close slightly as if around an arrow.
Information-Barton?
He adjusted his head as he made his greetings to Banner and Thor, and as his hand fell back from the handclasp, angled it in a negating gesture.
Yes. Not good.
He turned back towards her and Stark, who was still talking, and met her eyes. Her eyes that said, This is your responsibility. He nodded imperceptibly.
Yes. It is.
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“I thought vents weren’t your thing.”
“I’m SHIELD, Clint. Everything can be my thing if I want it to be.
A pause.
He knew Phil would never ask for it. But that he was hoping that Clint would say it.
A part of him wanted to latch on to Phil and never let go, and part of him wanted to never say it. To give Phil some of what he’d been forced to make it through, to try to survive in a Coulson-less world.
A world where agents who used to be friendly or neutral snarled at him, or broke his field gear, or just plain glared.
“Natasha told me you were...coping.”
He stayed staring ahead. Go away, go away, go away….. Never leave me again, stay right here- go away-
“Which I took to mean that you were avoiding Psych, internalizing your issues, and subtly using the agent’s actions to punish yourself.”
Damn, he thought over the conflicted background of pleas and refusals. Got it in one go. How very Coulson of you.
Another pause. Abruptly, he broke the silence.
“Get your own roof, jerk.”
The response was immediate. “I’ll have to, you keep breaking ours”
“You hate the beach.”
“Hate is for petty archers who don’t show up to meetings and make my job difficult.” A small smile was growing on Clint’s face, even through his turmoil. He started the next line.
“There is not such thing as silence,”
They finished in unison. “The world is just waiting for Phil Coulson to give it permission to speak.”
For a moment they stayed frozen, looking straight into each others eyes, and then Clint shifted slightly, and looked down at his skittles.
Phil didn’t expect much of a change in Clint’s attitude, and he was right. But the archer did slouch a bit more, and dangled a colorful bag over his shoulder towards Phil. “Candy?”
“Thanks, Clint.”
This didn’t change the rift of the past months.
But it meant there was a way forward. That this op wasn’t completely bad.
I’ve never had a bad op that he couldn’t turn around.