Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
...
...
Tahiti?
It's a magical place.
How long had Phil been there? He really wasn't sure. It all seemed something of a blur.
Normally, that would bother him a great deal, as he prided himself on an excellent memory, but these weren't exactly normal circumstances. He had, after all, been skewered through the chest by Loki.
His jaw twitched as he felt the memory of that agonizing pain, followed by a sensation of creeping cold, followed by numbness, followed by… what?
Waking up somewhere.
Tahiti.
It's a magical place.
A physical therapist with very little English, seemingly interminable rehab, tropical days and nights of boredom and frustration, all blurred together into a jumbled mess in his mind.
There was some reason that Director Fury and Maria Hill wanted to keep his survival a secret from the rest of SHIELD - essentially, they'd declared his continued existence a Level 7 classification.
He wasn't sure why they'd bothered; most agents below Level 5 didn't even know he existed, anyway, and once the Avengers had united to defeat Loki and the Chitauri invasion in New York, there was no obvious reason to keep the truth from them.
Team building aside, there had to be something-
...
...
...
Phil lost his train of thought, and found it again in a lovely tropical hut, being badgered by a physical therapist with an irrelevant command of English.
Tahiti.
It's a magical place...
He wasn't there anymore - not in body, at least. Director Fury wanted- no, needed him back in the field as soon as possible. It was a whole new world out there, after all, and Fury was offering him the chance to hand-pick a team all for himself. Anyone but Romanoff and Barton, he said. So, here he was at a brand new desk, trying to find just the right people for what he needed. Phil shook his head and stared at the files in front of him, trying to focus on them instead of his hazy memories.
Tahiti really had been a magical place, Phil mused. Something was bugging him at the back of his mind, but he just couldn't put his finger on it.
He was sure whatever it was would come to him eventually.
It always did.
A/N: The stanza from the beginning comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."