*******
They rarely went out to clubs--at least not the three of them together.
Natasha and Clint regularly went out after missions, dancing frenetically until the bars closed down for the night. Then they would stumble back to whatever bolthole that had been established, covered in sweat and wired with exhilaration and seeming so alive that sometimes Phil ached to touch them both, to drink in that vitality, to share it.
Phil seldom joined them out, but felt as though he went with them more often than he actually did, their descriptions of the danceathons so detailed that he had somehow managed to share the memory and insert himself into it, between their gyrating bodies. It probably wasn't far from the truth. Phil knew he was always with Natasha and Clint, maybe not physically present, but always a voice in their ear, a thought in their heads--as they were for him.
But now he is actually going to go out with them, and that means things had gone south in the worst of ways, because that is the only time he goes. After they complete the initial debrief and he tells them to clean up and meet at his car in thirty minutes. "We're going out. We need it."
Natasha frowns. "Sometimes, after a difficult mission, the Red Room would give us a sweet. Is that what you are doing, Coulson? Giving us a candy so that we'll be happy again?"
Phil has no answer for that, but Barton sighs "Quit it, Tasha," and she doesn't say anything else.
*******
The mission should have been easy. But like every disaster, they walked right into it blissfully unaware.
"Hoooo, boy! Well, everybody can relax, because the Big Bad Bravo Team is here to save the world," Clint announced.
"Shut up, Barton," Harker grumbled, twisting up a silver gum wrapper and flicking it toward him, Clint snatching it from the air and shooting it back. "We could have handled this ourselves. Delta and Lima didn't need to tag along."
Natasha shrugged. "I've never been opposed to a good old fashioned milk run. And I'm guessing you aren't either, and that's why you decided to use this opportunity to participate in 'Take Your Kid to Work Day'."
Everyone laughs, even Team Bravo, all eyes focused on their newest agent, young and excited and practically swimming in his tac outfit.
"You Delta guys are a pretty small team," the kid observed, not noticing Phil's warning glare. "I thought there had to be a minimum of three members on the ground."
"Yeah, well...it's not the size of the Strike Team, it's how you use it," Clint offered with a wink, laughing along with the kid like it was a joke, a big joke that their team was so small. As if he and Natasha had not actively resisted the addition of any new members. "You have to be old enough to drink legally to get on Team Delta--it helps to keeps the riffraff out."
*******
Phil buys the first round of drinks and when Clint orders shots of rum he knows it is going to be bad. Barton rarely drinks, and when he does it is always too much, too fast. The second bad sign comes when Natasha does not narrow her eyes at his choice of beverage, but instead cheers loudly as they knock them back simultaneously, then demands that they have another. And another. And another.
When they go out to dance to what Natasha insists is her "favorite song of all time"--Phil is pretty sure they've never heard it before--Phil takes the chance to munch on some peanuts and drink water, trying to temper the buzz that threatens to come crashing. He watches his teammates dance, pressed against one another--her hands clasped behind his neck, his low around her waist--moving as they always do, perfectly in sync, fluid and and lithe and graceful, as if they were one beautiful body instead of two.
*******
There had never been a permanent third member of Strike Team Delta, but Karl Strehley had come pretty close.
Karl's codename had been "Mother" and no one admitted to knowing how that came to be; everyone only knew that it was what his name had always been. Clint insisted it was short for Mother Hen, while Fury affectionately suggested that it was actually short for Motherfucker. Phil had simply appreciated Karl's even temperament--he was older and had been in Shield as long as Phil and Nick Fury, and provided a good balance to the impulsive Hawkeye and the angry Black Widow. Strike Team Delta had been the best of the best for years with the two, and sometimes three, of them in the field, Phil watching over them all.
But like everything, it didn't last. As Clint and Natasha came more into their own Karl had seemed to diminish, growing more careless as they grew more measured. He started taking risks to the point that even Clint was taken aback and Natasha had expressed her concern.
"What's going on?" Phil asked finally. "Talk to me, Mother."
"I can't see it anymore," Karl answered. "We work and we work and never seem to get any farther. The world only gets more broken. The people that we save...most of them don't even know they've been saved. I can't see an end to it and I can't see how what we're doing is making anything better."
Phil had heard him, had been sympathetic and comforting, but hadn't listened. Not in the right way; he knows that now. Hadn't read the signs, hadn't listened to the message behind the words. Phil likes to think now that Karl had just figured he was oblivious, because it is unbearable to think that Karl did think Phil understood, that he cared, but just didn't care enough.
It was never clear if he had done it on purpose, if he had heard Widow's warning or not, if he truly thought he had time to disarm the weapon before it detonated. It didn't matter, either--after years of good decisions and sound judgements, it was the last in a string of poor, hasty ones. It was the last decision Karl ever made, and whatever his motivation behind it, it was the wrong one.
The doctors labored, Fury raged, Natasha watched, Clint paced, and Phil prayed, but none of it made any difference. In the end he died in spite of all them, in spite of their hopes.
Clint and Natasha had bundled themselves away to mourn, and for once Phil had left them to their own devices, had neglected them to go instead to Nick.
"Christ, how many times have I seen it?" Fury was drunk and Phil nearly so, sitting together in the director's office, surrounded by pictures and reports detailing how wrong everything had gone. "They get more and more reckless until they finally get themselves dead. There he was with his SHIELD weaponry, his Kevlar vest, dressed in the best even down his goddamned SHIELD issued underwear. None of it was enough to protect him. And we get left to wonder if it's really an accident or just the inevitable outcome of this life--another SHIELD Standard Issue Suicide."
"Shut up, Nick," Phil snapped, because this wasn't some anonymous agent he was talking about. It was Mother.
"I never saw it coming. Not from him. Not from Karl."
"Shut up, Nick," Phil said again, but this time gently, because he remembered what so few did anymore; not many of them were left from the old days. No one seemed to remember that Nick had been an agent himself before his meteoric rise through the bureaucracy, while his partners had stayed in the field, nurturing and mentoring all the Hawkeyes and Black Widows that followed.
Phil had missed the signs with Mother, but is determined to never make such a mistake again. And lately he is afraid he sees it in their eyes sometimes--that weariness, that hopelessness. He's afraid he reads it between the lines of the reports that pass his desk, in the way Clint scales higher and higher buildings only to leap dramatically off. The way Natasha toys with her marks, cutting it close before finally cutting throats. The way they barely make it to extraction points, the way they are hurt more and more often.
He always took care of them, before. It's what he was good at doing. Planning, preparing the op down to the last detail, that was Phil Coulson's superpower. He was not, despite many half serious jokes to the contrary, omniscient, but like his team he had laser like focus and a vision for the overarching plan. Phil Coulson was the dreamer, but Clint and Natasha were the creators--they took his ideas and made them real, saw his plans through even when they should have been impossible. It took a toll on them, being the tools that made and unmade the world, and Coulson had always prided himself on taking care of them afterward, patching up the damage above and beneath the surface.
He ensured that Natasha took time to decompress, that she didn't remain in mission mode all the time, that she remembered a full life included the little moments between the big ones. He reminded her that eating a pizza and watching a movie together built friendships just as exercise built bodies. "Live," he told her. "Natasha, remember to get out there and live."
Whereas Natasha needed to be prodded toward freedom, Clint needed direction. Drink more water, Phil told him. Take some vitamins. Try a college class. Go on more than one date with the same person. Make a goal and see it through. It was as if Clint used every bit of focus he had on missions and then had none left. He bounced around a little aimlessly in his own life, the rogue meteorite in an otherwise orderly Delta orbit.
But lately Phil hasn't been around. The world is changing around them--aliens, Iron Men, reanimated super soldiers--nothing is as it was, and there are new horrors that accompany the new miracles. Phil has been dealing with these things and they've been on their own, had to work with other handlers, had to take care of one another. He hopes they've been doing a good job of it, is afraid of what will happen to them if he isn't watching.
*******
The sound of gunfire over the comms, as always, sent Phil's blood pressure skyrocketing. He exchanged a look with Jasper Sitwell who was handling Team Bravo. "Report, assets," he said as calmly as possible. There was no answer, only more gunfire.
Snatches of conversation, the yelled shorthand between Clint and Natasha. "Your two!" she shouted. "Get down!" he answered. "...piece of shit...seven...seven...damnit!" More gunfire. Muffled shouts. Then, clear as a bell, "Oh God, is that Bravo?"
Sitwell called out over the comms "Both teams out, now!" while tapping furiously into his computer, a stricken expression on his face. "Strike Team Bravo, report in. Report. Ramirez? Harker?" His eyes met Coulson's again.
He waited as long as he could, but when he heard Natasha's voice screaming "What the fuck, Hawkeye, just move!" Phil abandoned his better sense and ran out with the extraction team. They should not have needed a third team to go in; Team Lima had fully expected to be bored and benched in the jet the whole time but now was fully on point, going in to scrape out whatever was left of Bravo and Delta.
Lima advanced with Phil in their midst, and he gasped in relief at the sight of two familiar profiles. Natasha was firing behind her, and Clint was dragging out the young agent from earlier, stumbling and tripping awkwardly because his fingers were buried in the kid's neck, trying to pinch closed the severed artery that sprayed blood in high, streaming red arcs.
"Leave him, he's gone, leave him!" Natasha shouted at Clint, holstering her empty pistol and pulling at him as Clint yelled something angry and indecipherable back at her. Natasha's eyes met Phil's and they each grabbed one of Barton's arms and forced him away from the dying agent, up and into a run with them, because she was right, the kid was too far gone, couldn't be saved. Sitwell would be furious later when he learned he had been deliberately left behind, but at the time Phil hadn't cared about that, because the kid was lost and Barton was still alive, and he had no intention of leaving one of his men behind any more than Sitwell did.
Once back on the jet Phil grabbed towels and Barton threw up his hands defensively, then checked himself and allowed Phil to swipe at the red that covered his face and neck. "Is this blood yours?" Barton blinked in confusion and Phil repeated loudly and with exaggerated slowness, "Clint. Is any of this blood yours?"
"No," he said, surprised. Gestured toward outside of the jet. "It's his. And...I guess some is Nasserine's. She was with him, but already dead. I couldn't get them both, and I thought maybe he could still be okay." Clint took the towel and scrubbed at his face. He missed a spot in front of his left ear, and Phil's eyes were drawn to it again and again during the many hours that followed. "He was still bleeding," he added unhappily, giving Phil a dark look. "He was still alive when we left him there."
He was dead, Phil wanted to argue. He just didn't know it yet, and neither did you. But instead he shook his head and answered "I'm sorry."
"What kind of clusterfuck was that?" Natasha interrupted, incensed. "Bravo is gone. And that boy was twenty years old if he was a day--he wasn't old enough to have seen jack shit, and now he'll never see anything, because he's dead. Why was he here? Who the hell sends children to a place like this?" she demanded. "Who, Coulson?"
SHIELD, he wanted to tell her. SHIELD does. I do. He looked at his team and remembered a nineteen year old Clint Barton, skinny and scarred with a baby face and an old man's eyes. And later Natasha, only alive seventeen years and already a killer for most of them, remote and angry and cruelly beautiful.
They had been children, and he had sent them out. Again and again. For years. Last week. Yesterday. Today.
It's not the worst thing they've seen, by far, and that's horrible in itself; that a field of dead enemies and colleagues isn't the worst thing they've ever seen. It's not so bad, Phil wants to say, having the smell of gunpowder in your hair, blood under your fingernails--it's not so bad.
How can it be so bad when they are still alive?
*******
Clint leans his head against Coulson's shoulder. "I've missed this," he says thickly, and Phil automatically reassesses his sobriety level and hopes Clint will cut himself off before he has to say anything about it. "Feels like we never get to see you anymore."
Phil presses his cheek into Clint's hair, soft from a shower and smelling somehow citrusy. He must have run out of shampoo again and went begging from Natasha. "I know," Phil sighs. "I finally get to coordinate a mission for my team and the whole thing turns into a total cock-up."
"Running out with Lima...that was dumb, Coulson."
"What was I supposed to do?" Phil asks. "Leave you out there with your hands in that kid's throat, leave you out there to be killed also?"
"Yes," Clint says sadly, running his finger through a wet spot on the table where condensation has dripped from his glass. He draws a vague shape, maybe a bullseye, maybe a Captain America shield. "It was a warzone and you ran right out there, didn't even have a vest on. I know why you did, but...that's not your job, it's ours. It was stupid, and it was careless of you, and I thought--"
But Phil never gets to know what Clint thinks about it, because he stops talking the instant Natasha appears, carrying two tall glasses of slushy red liquid with umbrellas stuck in them. "Ahh, there you are," he says, pulling away from Phil, the moment gone, changing gears effortlessly from thoughtful back to sanguine. "I know you only get drinks like this in an effort to embarrass me," he says conspiratorially, "but what you don't seem to understand is that I was born without the part of my brain that allows me to even be embarrassed."
She scoffs, handing his drink over and taking a long sip of hers. "Oh, please. No one on earth knows that better than I do."
*******
He almost came to blows with Sitwell during the initial debrief, emotions running high and raw. "Where was the intel?" Phil demanded, aware he was being unreasonable and not caring, that he was punishing a man who had already lost too much, his entire team dead. But Phil's team had also been in danger, and that he couldn't abide. "What the hell was that? How could this have happened? Your intel sent two teams right into a fucking buzzsaw!"
"Goddamn you, Coulson," Sitwell swore and lunged forward, clumsy with anger and grief.
Clint was up in an instant, wrapping his arms around Sitwell from behind, pinning his arms down and pulling him away as Natasha stepped in front of Phil and laid a hand on his chest. "Take it easy," she said calmly as Fury yelled "What the hell is going on here? Stop this shit now!"
Phil sat down and straightened his tie, pulling on his cool demeanor like a mask, pretending his heart wasn't pounding. Pretending that he wasn't feeling a little guilty at all the angry, tense faces in the room, hating himself for making things worse instead of better. Clint's arms were still around Sitwell as he said something low and comforting, but his eyes were trained on Coulson. Phil could still see the blood in front of Clint's ear, now dried to a maroon color, and had the almost irresistible urge to lick his thumb and scrub it from the man's face, as a mother would do to a dirty child.
Nick Fury frowned at him. "Tell me what happened."
"Every member of Strike Team Bravo was killed in action," Phil began.
For nothing, he wanted to add. They died for nothing. The target was neutralized and we still lost.
*******
"This dance is all yours, Boss Man," Natasha says, appearing suddenly and bumping into him deliberately, her face in his. Her Russian accent creeps out a bit in the words, revealing that she is far drunker than he had originally guessed. He wonders if she'd had something to drink in her Shield quarters before they came out.
"Alright," Phil says, though he hates to dance, feels foolish and clumsy next to her feline movements as she pulls him onto the dance floor by one wrist. "Where did Clint go?"
"Bathroom?" she guesses and puts her arms around his shoulders, leaning into him. They sway and spin awkwardly, Natasha leading; Phil can't even hear the lyrics of the song playing, but the beat is so loud that he can feel it in his teeth. Natasha's eyes are half closed but his are wide open, scanning the club with every turn.
Finally he spots him. Barton has found a dartboard on a far wall and is showily making shot after shot to the great approval of a group of ladies that cheer him on with obvious interest. One of them runs her hand up his arm, openly admiring the muscles there, and Clint grins back at her, flushed and pleased.
Natasha's eyes follow Phil's and she scowls, then laughs. "He makes friends so easily," she observes, "and he's just tanked enough that he'll go home with her if she asks. All he wants is looooove, the poor little thing." Her voice takes on a cruel, mocking edge that Phil knows is directed at him and not her best friend. "Poor Clint. Poor little broken birdie. You should go over, Phil, and steal him away from her. Then maybe you can be the one that gets to save him tonight."
"Stop it, Natasha," Phil snaps, pulling from her embrace, her hands gripping him and not letting him go, only to suddenly push him away at the last moment.
"You stop it." Her face is unreadable as she spins away, disappearing into the throng of dancers.
*******
"You must work out," the woman says in a throaty smoker's voice, ghosting her hand up his arm again and then over his shoulders.
"Indeed he does," Phil says, interjecting himself smoothly between them, plucking the remaining darts out of Clint's hand. "In fact, we have to go work out bright and early tomorrow morning, so we're going to call it a night."
"Hey!" Clint says indignantly and makes a grab for the darts. Phil knows that this is the moment where it could all go to hell, because degrees of drunk there might be, but they all boil down to Barton having two states of being when intoxicated: cuddly as hell or angry as fuck. It can be a short, unpredictable trip between the two, and Phil would much rather deal with Clint disappearing into a one night stand than the emotional fallout of them having a drunken fistfight over a crooked pair of bar darts.
On some level Clint seems to know that, too, because he makes an obvious effort to push the moment away and shrugs apologetically at the woman. "I hope I see you here again sometime, beautiful," he says, laying on the charm a bit too thick, but she is tipsy also and doesn't mind. Clint offers no resistance as Phil drags him grimly back toward the dance floor. "Oooh, yeah, we gonna finally dance together?"
"No," Phil says archly and gives Clint a rough shove into the mass of bodies. "You're going in there and getting Natasha, and I'm going to settle up our tab. Then we are leaving. All of us together. So go get her, and no 'just one last dance' nonsense from either of you."
*******
As he pulls up to the curb he sees them standing there outside the club, waiting, not noticing him yet. Their arms are around each other in a casual ease earned from years of history. Clint's grin is playful as he says something into her ear. Natasha is laughing, her hand partially covering her mouth, as if she knows she shouldn't laugh at whatever he is saying, but can't help it. In that moment they could be anyone--any two friends sharing a joke after a night out, they could be two regular people who only sees horrible things on the news, happening to other people. Not happening in front of them. Not happening to them.
Phil wishes he could freeze them that way, looking happy and laughing over something foolish, wishes that they didn't have to drive back to SHIELD and wake up tomorrow to rehash the mission again and again. Dissect it, relive it, determine fault, lay blame, wipe out Team Bravo a hundred more times. He wishes that after the debrief he wouldn't have to take them back to his office and hand them new files. Their next mission. Their next target. Their next horror.
Barton's sharp eyes spot him, then, and he points the car out to Natasha, and they pile into the back seat. Natasha giggles as he overbalances and lands halfway in her lap while pulling the car door closed.
I'm sorry, Phil wants to say. I'm sorry for the things you've seen. For the things I've sent you to see. I'm sorry for what I have asked you to do. And for whatever thing I will ask of you next. I love you, and I'm sorry.
But there is no room for sentimentality in their lives, not in SHIELD, not outside of brief moments of affection--a shared joke, a wry grin, a weary head laid on another's shoulder.
So instead he tells them "If either of you throws up in my car I will end your life", and hopes that they can hear the sentiment layered behind the words.
They laugh in response, and he suspects that maybe they can.
*******
All he can say is "Good luck" and "Be careful" and "Come back" as he sends them away, Natasha to Russia, Clint to New Mexico. They should be going somewhere together, but her mission has been planned for months, and his should be easy enough. They'll be alright on their own. Nothing will happen.
"You too, Coulson," Clint says, and neither of them could know then that it will be the last time they speak, that these are the last words they will ever say to one another. Who could guess, in that calm moment, that Clint would come back alongside a conqueror, or that Phil's last decision would be to attempt to take down a demigod.
A final act that, while heroic, would later strike Natasha and Clint as heartbreakingly familiar.
Clint looks worried, and Phil is briefly incredulous that an agent would ever be worried about him. "Please be careful, Phil. Please...be here when I get back."
"I will," Phil Coulson promises. "I'll be here."