A/N: To malintzin, whohas been my dear friend through many fandoms, and wouldn't leave me alone till I started writing for the MCU. My beta reader, co-author, and overall partner in crime, I hope you have a wonderful holiday and that this is what you had in mind when you put it on your wish list. And thanks to katla for filling in as beta so you could enjoy your fic without having to work for it. ;)

Set after episode 3x10, Maveth.

Christmas Ghosts

Robert Coulson wasn't actually buried in New Orleans, but his name neverthelesswas emblazoned on a headstone in Greenwood Cemetery, memorializing him as Loving Father and Faithful Husband to Julie Coulson, who was. Not her real name, of course-she'd given that up when she gave up her old life-though the date etched in the marble, nineteen years to the day after her husband's, was true and factual, and matched the official one in her SHIELD file. Part of her, a big part, had died the day her husband had, so it was only fitting that when she passed, it was on September 22.

The headstone was Fury's doing; Coulson never could have afforded it on a field agent's salary. Fury even offered to have Julie's body transported to Manitowoc to be laid to rest beside her husband, in the Coulson family plot, but Phil said the headstone was enough. His mother hadn't been able to get out of Manitowoc quickly enough after the attack, not only for the necessity of hiding her son from the people who'd killed his father, and Coulson, for all his fondness of things nostalgic, had never been able to bring himself to go back.

Anyway, Wisconsin was so cold.

So was New Orleans, today, unusually so. Coulson shifted the two bouquets he held to his prosthetic hand, which already clutched his umbrella, so he could shove the one that did feel into his coat pocket. It wasn't that the temperature was so low, but the damp that made it seem like it, the stones slick and shiny from the steadily falling drizzle that kept most of the mourners away.

Most-but not all.

Coulson wasn't the first to visit his parents' graves today. When he arrived, he was greeted by the tang of evergreen boughs piercing the soggy earth smell of the cemetery, and found two wreaths had already been laid there, deep red carnations, holly and ivy. The same arrangement Audrey helped him choose that first Christmas he'd spent with her family in New Orleans. He'd brought her to the cemetery and told the story of his parents; she was the first civilian he ever told.

"I wondered if I might find you here, one of these days."

Audrey's voice, behind him. He wasn't surprised to hear it, but he'd been hearing a lot of voices these days. More of them from beyond the grave than on this side of it, though.

"What made you wonder that?" he asked.

Not the words he imagined being the first ones he spoke to her when he saw her again, which he'd all but promised Fitz he would. Turning, his breath caught at the sight of her, pale face framed by dark hair and a black raincoat. She wore all black, in fact, right down to the glove curled around the handle of her umbrella. He was accustomed to seeing her in black, but this wasn't concert dress. The corners of her lips twitched into a humorless smile, lines forming at the edges of her lips.

"Well. You weren't really in Arlington, and I know how you feel about Wisconsin."

She'd known, then. He'd been a fool to think after he'd talked to her, touched her, even when she was unconscious, that she wouldn't. It made things easier, not to have to deal with the shock of such a revelation, but harder, too. Audrey held herself back from him, fingers curling tighter around the umbrella, the other buried deep in her coat pocket. Even from this distance, Coulson could make out the creases around her eyes as they narrowed slightly, questioning: Why didn't you come to me?

Coulson stepped toward her, wet grass brushing his shoes. "I heard you lost your mother last year," he said, as if to attribute her presence here to something other than him. His gaze drifted over her shoulder, to the backdrop of the graveyard, vivid green closed in by a wrought iron fence and dotted with rain-streaked grey stonework-mausoleums, statues, and headstones. "I'm sorry."

"Thank you."

The pinched sound of her voice, the slow blink, made him go closer.

"I wish I could've…been here for you." He withdrew his hand from his pocket and reached out to her.

Audrey stepped back. "You could have. If you'd wanted to."

Coulson's hand fell to his side. His one good hand, as useless as the prosthetic he still hadn't mastered the use of. "You think I stayed away because I don't want to be with you?"

Her mouth twisted again in that joyless smile, but her eyes softened, brow relaxing. "Give me a little credit, Phil. I know it's more complicated than wanting. Or loving."

She'd moved toward him as she spoke, meeting him, and he discovered that without his brain having given it the command, his hand had come up again to close around hers as she gripped her umbrella.

"I love you," he said, and he watched the bob of her throat as she swallowed. "That won't ever change."

"Never," Audrey murmured, leaning in. Their lips had scarcely brushed, the ghost of a kiss, when she drew back, fingers flexing beneath his hand. "But it doesn't change anything, either."

Coulson released her, reeling inwardly as the brief feeling of being settled, finding his place at last, bottomed out again.

"Why today?" she asked. "After all this time…why now? Why here?"

The rain picked up, drumming down on his umbrella as he looked around at the graveyard. "You know…Christmastime…cemetery. Has kind of a Dickensian quality to it, don't you think?"

"You hate Dickens."

He had to smile a little at the way she always cut straight through his crap, but it vanished at once.

"I got close to someone," he said. "They killed her to get to me. And I could only think of Mom, and how for nineteen years after Dad was killed it ate away at her."

For a moment he didn't go on, waiting for Audrey to counter that his father had known from the beginning what a life with her might mean, that Robert's life had already been endangered by his own discoveries, that neither one of them had any regrets about the love that brought their only son into the world, whom they both loved more than life itself.

She didn't say it, though, not any of it. Audrey never had liked to have the same arguments over and over again.

"It could have been you," Coulson shuddered out. "One second joking over burgers and fries, the next a bullet in your throat and bleeding out in my arms."

He wasn't usually so blunt with her, but Audrey didn't flinch.

"There are worse last meals," she quipped. "I'm not going to try to convince you to be together, because we shouldn't. Not because I could be killed. I'm not afraid of death. But you're afraid of life."

Coulson didn't deny it. He was afraid of life-as this part-machine, part-alien, not entirely a man that he once had been. Why couldn't Fury have given him a headstone here? Phillip J. Coulson, July 8,1964-May 4, 2012, Faithful SHIELD Agent, Victim of a Norse God. It would be so much easier if he could just lie down beneath that blanket of soft green earth, beside his mother and his father, and rest. Let me die…

"I love you," Audrey whispered, her mouth against his cheek. "Who you were, who you are, and who you will be."

He shook his head even as he leaned in to her kiss.

"Merry Christmas, Phil. I hope whatever your ghosts have to say…you'll listen."

And then, like one, she was gone.