It's really better if you read my first fic in this series, "Second Fiddles" before this one, but as long as you accept that Phil Coulson has a wife who is as big a Captain America Nerd as he is, it should be legible. Unbeta'd, so all mistakes are MINE MINE MINE.
If someone asked Phil Coulson to name the strangest thing to happen to him for six months on either side of the battle of New York, he would have talked about alien invasions and a near-death experience, but it wouldn't have quite been the truth. His job by nature dealt in the weird, the bizarre and the inexplicable; the levels had simply gotten turned up to eleven lately. No, in his heart of hearts, in the hour of the wolf and at the bottom of a bottle, the honest answer to the question was this:
He'd managed to acquire a wife.
Obviously, "strange" didn't necessarily mean "bad." And it certainly didn't mean "unwanted." He'd never intended to still be single in his late forties, and he certainly hadn't been a monk during all that time, but it had just never quite worked out with anyone. And now here he was, unpacking his possessions in the first shared living space he'd called home since he'd left the military. It wasn't like before, where he'd just go over to her place and not leave for days at a time: in the hurly-burly of her own move, and the chaos that followed the Battle of New York, Alys had barely unpacked any of her own boxes and so the whole process really felt like they were setting up a household together.
It felt ridiculous to even comment on that. Of course they were setting up a household together, they were married. That had rather been the point of the exercise. He was quite aware of the illogic of his reaction (on what planet was getting stabbed in the back by an alien demigod more normal than learning how to live with a wife?) but really couldn't escape the bemusement that had tagged along when they had made their de facto situation de jure.
He tried to lift one of the (many) boxes of books, and was abruptly reminded of why he shouldn't do that. He couldn't suppress a grunt at the twinge of pain that went through his still-healing muscles.
"Phil!" Alys darted in from the next room. "Are you all right?" She snatched the box out of his hands, shoved it roughly on the table and turned back to him, putting her hand on his shoulder solicitiously. "The doctor said nothing more than fifteen pounds! You'll make it worse if you try to push too hard!"
And Alys, who was not very familiar with the overly cautious ways of the physical therapists, took all of their recommendations to heart and fully expected him to comply with each and every one of them. Clint Barton would be laughing his ass off at this turning of the tables.
"I'm fine. I just... forgot." It was a weak lie, and he knew it.
She rolled her eyes. "I'll get the boxes, Phil. I really don't mind. Just be careful." She went back into the bedroom.
He sighed. It felt wrong, that she was literally doing the heavy lifting by herself. (He was also well aware of the torrents of sarcasm that would be unleashed should he voice this concern to a woman who made her living by holding her arms up and out for hours at a time.) She was extremely strong for her size – he knew that better than anyone – but it really went against the grain to see her working so hard while he was taking it comparatively easy.
Dammit, he hated being an invalid.
Frustrated, he picked up the boxcutter, sliced through the tape on the next box, and opened it. More books. So many books. Combining their respective libraries was turning out to be no small task; if they didn't come up with a good organizational system, they'd never be able to find anything. About half-way through the box, he found an old black-and-white marbled notebook of the kind generally issued to grade schoolers with no name on it, just a date on the front - October 10th, 1981. He opened to a random page – honestly intending nothing more than to figure out which bookcase to sort it to – and started reading.
Lady Anastasia St. Clare smoothed her auburn tresses back into place as she descended the steps to the Top Secret Headquarters of the Strategic Scientific Reserve in London. Most girls her age joined the WACS or volunteered at the USO clubs, but she wanted to do something real and serious so after her graduation from Girton, she'd signed up to work for the SSR...
He grinned. Oh my God, it's fanfiction.
This was not his first encounter with the genre. One of his favorite Howling Commando fanzines in the '80s had occasionally published some serial stories of varying quality, but he hadn't really made any effort to seek it out over the years. From the differences in the handwriting, it had obviously been written by two different authors, but one set of girlish script was very clearly Alys'.
Wild horses couldn't have stopped him from reading more about the adventures of the "devastatingly beautiful" Lady Anastasia and her sparkling green eyes. It was exactly the sort of story he'd expect from a couple of – he glanced at the cover to check the date again – a couple of 14-year-old girls, but he found himself fascinated at this unexpected glimpse into the teenaged mind of his beloved wife.
There came a gasp from the hallway. Alys came into the room quickly, her eyes wide. She had her hand out. "Phil, give me that notebook."
He held it away. "No, I need to find out what happens next..." he teased.
"Give it to me. Right now, Phil, I mean it."
"But Lady Anastasia and Agent Carter have just pinky-sworn to be best friends!"
She crossed her arms. "Phil Coulson, you give me that notebook right now, or so help me God, I'm going to get your brother to send me that picture of you in the Underoos!"
A dire threat, indeed. They stared at each other in a brief moment of marital mutually assured destruction.
"Be a real shame if that showed up in Tony Stark's inbox," her eyes narrowed.
Discretion was the better part of valor. He handed over the notebook. "It's adorable. I don't see what you're so embarrassed about."
"Really?" she raised her eyebrow skeptically. "But it's awful."
"It's... untutored. Just tell me you didn't kill off Peggy Carter."
"She had to fly the plane into the ice instead of Steve," Alys muttered, playing with the edge of the frayed binding.
"At which point Captain Rogers needed to be comforted, of course."
"After a respectable period of mourning!" she said defensively.
He smiled. "Did you ever submit to any of the 'zines?"
"No, thank goodness. My shame remains a private one."
"Don't worry. Your secret is safe with me. But I think it's sweet."
"You're not exactly the Gold Standard for Normal either, darling." Nevertheless, she walked over and kissed him before heading off to the bedroom.
….
That went a lot better than I would have thought.
Alys had kept the contents of that notebook a deeply hidden secret for decades. Even the geekier men she'd dated tended to view fanfiction as beneath contempt and beyond the pale. That her husband viewed it as naively charming was quite a wonderful surprise.
My husband. I have a husband.
She shook her head. In the throes of the divorce, she'd sworn she'd never marry again; she'd also been furious that Mariasol had called bullshit on that at the time. Admittedly, no one could have predicted the circumstances accurately: "in the wake of an alien invasion" was a bit much to be believed, but, swept up in such high drama, it had all made some sort of sense. Now that they'd crashed down to Earth, the mundanites seemed a lot more daunting.
Daunting, but not impossible, certainly. Not even undesirable – she was really and truly happy when she was with Phil – but one couldn't live in alt, as the characters tended to say in the romance novels Alys swore she never read. His recovery (fast though it had been so far) had taken a toll – he'd be peevish and frustrated one minute, apologetic and sad the next. Plus, she was learning to live with a level of security that Phil seemed to accept as the natural order of things. And that wasn't even taking into account her own insecurities: even though Phil continued to prove himself the polar opposite of Cabot Van der Luyden, she still found herself occasionally prone to the 2:00 AM fear that any minute now he was going to realize his mistake and run far, far away.
She sighed, and peeked again into the next room. A small smile played about Phil's lips, and he was wearing those glasses that invariably gave her fantasies about naughty male librarians and what she'd like to do to one.
Blushing slightly, she looked down at the book in her hands and ran her hand over the worn black-and-white cardboard. She really ought to get rid of it (especially now that she'd actually met The Man Himself), but that wasn't so easily done. She had a lot of good memories wrapped up in these pages of pink ink and purple prose – happy hours spent with Mary Ellen Archer, the only other crypto-nerd at Miss Hewitt's, passing stories back and forth in their own little fannish samzidat. (Mary Ellen, with her penchant for bad boys, had been much more of a Bucky partisan, declaring Steve Rogers to be hopelessly white-bread and boring. Their impassioned argument had gone on for years, and Alys had more than once regretted that she couldn't tell her friend that by God, Steve Rogers wasn't even remotely bland and boring, and now she had the first-hand evidence to prove it.)
Well. There was no need to decide this instant – she merely had to find a better hiding place. And really, it could have been worse: Phil had only managed to find one of the more innocuous stories they'd written.
After all, she would have had a hell of a time explaining all that Steve/Bucky!