Author's Note:
This all grew out of my belief that straight-laced paperwork-loving rule-following suit-wearing Coulson was a bad boy and a rebel in his youth and a strange certainty that Coulson did, in fact, love one song and whistle it off key all the time. It was intended to just be a funny fic about bad-boy Coulson and Maria getting in trouble for blowing things up and then it ended up being angsty and I dunno how but ANGST HURTS.
The whistled strains of Sweet Caroline were barely recognizable as such, but what they lacked in tune they made up for in volume and enthusiasm. The shrill sound filled the relatively small office, bounced off the walls, and seemed only to gain in energy as time passed. It had been going for an hour and a half straight.
Probationary Agent Maria Hill gave up trying to rub away the headache with a hand to her temple. Clearly a more proactive solution was necessary. She dropped her pen on top of the half-written incident report in front of her and glanced around for something more useful than pens or files. The stapler looked most convenient. Peering over the mountains of folders, binders, and forms, she took brief, careful aim and then flung the stapler without a moment's hesitation toward the source of the noise.
The off-key whistling cut off abruptly and Phil's indignant, "What the hell?!" only preceded the thunk and clang of the stapler hitting the wall by a split second.
"Shut up," Maria called across the small office before she turned back to her paperwork, enjoying the momentary silence. She rubbed the sore spot on her middle finger where the pen had been rubbing all afternoon and read her last line again, trying to regain her train of thought.
"You could've killed me!" Phil shouted. He retrieved the stapler and held it up, studying it incredulously. "This thing weighs like five pounds! It's solid cast-iron or something!"
"Probably light-weight steel or something," she corrected, dropping her pen to the page and picking up the report where she'd left off.
"You missed my head by an inch - you could've killed me!" he went on.
"I missed. That's the main point," Maria muttered. "Shut up and work."
"I was working."
"You weren't shutting up. Don't you know any other songs?"
Phil matched her narrowed eyes. "I like that song."
"What, you have a girlfriend named Caroline or something? You don't even whistle it in tune."
Phil tossed the stapler back onto her desk , dislodging an intimidating stack of case files. "No. It's just a good song. My tune is perfectly fine."
"Your tune doesn't even deserve to be called a tune." And then, jumping to catch the cascading folders, Maria added, "Damn you, these were in order."
"My head was in order."
Maria looked up long enough to glare at him and point her pen menacingly. "One of us is trying to work here."
"Yeah - I'm trying. You're throwing office supplies." He picked up his pen again and straightened the stack of reports in front of him.
"I should get hazard pay for working with you," Maria muttered. She finished restacking the folders and turned another dangerous look on Phil.
"I think that's covered," he said. "This is SHIELD. Everything's hazardous. Anyway, I'm not the dangerous one."
"Oh yeah?" She gave up on the report and leaned back, arms folded across her chest. "Remind me whose idea it was to steal plastic explosives from the supply room and test them as energy sources inside the damn base?"
Phil couldn't quite keep a smirk off his face. "Come on; it was a great idea. Until you dropped that casing. And the Director got back early."
"You're just lucky I'm even helping you with all this," Maria said darkly, giving the stapler another meaningful look.
Phil tossed a bottle of white-out at her, and she didn't dodge quite quickly enough to avoid its hitting her shoulder. "You're in trouble too," he reminded mildly. "It's not all my fault." He bent over the desk again, carefully creasing the partially-finished report into a complicated paper airplane.
Maria flung the whiteout back in his direction without really looking, trying hard to get back into the groove of reports. She heard the sound of the whiteout crash-landing into his paper airplane and looked over with one eyebrow raised. "I distinctly remember hearing, 'Agent Coulson, clean this shit up now,'" she said, voice lowering to mimic Director Stanton's disapproving tone.
"And I remember hearing, 'Hill, what the hell were you thinking? You're lucky I don't fire your ass right now.'" Phil wiped a black singe smudge off his forearm and aimed the paper airplane at Maria's nose.
"Don't you dare," she said.
His expression shifted to something along the lines of You can't stop me, and he tossed it anyway, and then offered a mischievous grin as it did three loops and landed in a nosedive on her desk. "But we were close," he said, and then shrugged. "Next time we'll test them somewhere else."
"Next time?" Maria stared. "There's gonna be a next time?! Dammit, Phil, I am not getting fired for your stupid, reckless ideas! Believe it or not, I actually like working for SHIELD." Phil looked too amused by that, so she threw the stapler at him again. "Beats the Army, anyway," she muttered.
Phil caught the projectile before it could do any damage and smirked. "He won't fire us. We're his best rookies and he knows it. Just give us a few years' worth of paperwork and send us out on crap jobs for a while. Maybe delay promotions."
Maria rolled her eyes. "Promotions. That's what you're worried about." She shook her head. "A few more of these catastrophes of yours, and I think he'd just fire us. I think he reads the protocols handbooks instead of the newspaper when he has his coffee every morning."
"You think?" Phil glanced up at the security camera in the corner, straightened his files again, and then walked around to Maria's desk and shoved a page in front of her. "We could find out."
She shoved the page aside without looking at it. "Not interested." She handed him the damaged paper airplane and slid her report back into place.
Phil shoved his page back. "No? Just look. I've got it all worked out. Don't you wanna be able to say you planted a bug on Director Stanton without him ever noticing?"
Her blue eyes narrowed. "No. I don't. I wanna get this damn paperwork done and get back to where Stanton doesn't look like he wants an excuse to fire me." She glared at Phil, who shrugged and walked back toward his desk. She turned back to her report, stared irritably at the seemingly endless ranks of fine print, and sighed. "Fine. Lemme see that."
Phil was back at her desk before she had time to move her report aside. "See? It's fool-proof. After we do this, we can prank Stanton and he'll never know who did it."
"I think he'd guess," Maria said dryly, but she was already studying Phil's detailed plan...
"You're kidding," Clint said dully without taking his eyes from the simple headstone.
The rain caught in the grooves of the engraving and made Coulson's name and date of death glisten in the washed-out light of the streetlights along the cemetery paths. Maria hadn't expected to find anyone here on a night like this. She didn't come by here all that often these days, but sometimes there didn't seem to be anywhere else to go. She was used to locking all her emotions away at work, and it usually ended up easiest just to keep them that way off the job, but it was hard to pretend she didn't still miss Phil all the time. She kept expecting him to poke his head in with some file or some problem, or to see him striding down a hallway in a suit, with a briefcase or a folder or something, one hand up, scolding one of his agents over the comms. Sometimes SHIELD just seemed wrong without him.
And, of course, she'd figured on a night this cold and rainy, she'd have a few minutes alone. Not like she had any real plans for her visit to his grave; mostly she just wanted to stand by the tombstone and tell him that dammit, he shouldn't have died, and especially not then, because Manhattan generated a hell of a lot of paperwork and now she had to deal with Tony Stark all the time.
But Clint had been crouched there when she'd come, apparently oblivious to the chill, his hair plastered to his head in the rain and his boots slowly soaking up the puddles in the grass. She had stopped behind him, tugged her coat a little closer around her, and stared in silence at Phil's grave.
After a few minutes, during which Clint never so much as twitched to acknowledge her presence, he'd managed a hoarse whisper. "Kinda thought he'd just... never die."
Maria had fought her lungs for a moment. "You and me both," she'd whispered at last.
For another few minutes there had been only the sound of rain dripping off the leaves and, in the distance, the soft hum of traffic on the highway.
"He was...really something," Clint had said after a bit.
That was when Maria had suddenly smiled in spite of the hard lump in her throat and the slowly-increasing pressure under her ribcage, and she had begun, slowly, half to herself, talking about the irresponsible maverick that had been Phil Coulson when she had first met him so many years before.
Now, still standing behind Clint, arms tight across her chest and hair deviating more drastically from its neat bun the longer she stood in the rain, she shook her head. "Not kidding at all. He loved that song. Never said why, but he drove everyone crazy with it. Never learned to carry a tune, either."
"No, I know that," Clint said, and then cleared his throat as his voice broke a little. He sucked in an audible breath. "He used to whistle it when he was looking over my shoulder when I had to do incident reports for breaking things." Which had been fairly often; she remembered that much of Clint's history with SHIELD. He paused and tipped his head back a little, squeezing his eyes shut for a long moment, seeming not to notice the raindrops spattering against his face. "The getting in trouble thing. Coulson practically lived for paperwork and protocols."
Maria managed a breathless chuckle that she cut off the moment she realized it bordered on a sob. "Nope. He was a rebel." She blinked and silently thanked the rain for making her tears indiscernible. "Damn near got us both fired every couple weeks for the first few years when we started with SHIELD. Stanton had us more or less straightened out by the time Fury took over."
Clint spun a bedraggled arrow absently between his hands and shifted his weight a little on the balls of his feet. His back heaved with a sigh. "Must be why he was so patient with me," he murmured, so softly that Maria wasn't sure he was even talking to her anymore.
"Maybe," she answered anyway. She shivered. It was cold. Damn rain. "It's probably why he was so good with the paperwork, too." Why they both were. She swallowed hard. "He was proud of you, Barton," she whispered. She stepped past Clint, brushed her fingers gently over the wet headstone, and then turned toward the cemetery gate. "Damn proud," she repeated, a little louder.
She kept her head up and shoulders square until she got to her car. She hadn't been a military brat for nothing. She knew how to look poised if it killed her. In her car, though, behind the safety of tinted windows, she let herself collapse against the steering wheel and shudder for a minute or two with the pain of pent-up emotion. The tears didn't matter; she was soaked anyway.
"Damn you, Phil," she whispered to the silence. "You would go out experimenting with the biggest classified weapon we've got. Damn troublemaker."
The initial roar of the engine drowned the end of her words as she turned the key. Mud sprayed against the car's undercarriage and splattered the back window as she pulled away from the cemetery. For a moment there was nothing but the engine, the swish of the windshield wipers, and the constant hum of tires against wet pavement.
Then, softly, in a half-broken voice, on a familiar semi-monotone, Maria's voice cut through the white noise. "Sweet Caroline…good times never seemed so good…"