Title: Believing in Heroes
Author: StargazerNataku
Rating: G
Genre: Drama
Characters: Steve Rodgers, OFC, Clint Barton, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Thor, Natasha Romanov
Summary: His own smiling, saluting face covered in blood mocked him in his mind's eye, his hand clenched around the drink which would never make him drunk and he listened to the others talk, slowly at first but more quickly and animatedly as the bourbon settled in and loosened their tongues.
Warnings: None
Author's Note: Based on the Avengers movie, although most of this is shamelessly my own headcanon. I don't know where these ideas came from, but I wanted something really solid to explain why Coulson was such a Captain America fanboy and this is what hit me so this is what came out.
Believing in Heroes
By
Stargazer Nataku
Steve was the last to enter the living space at the top of Stark Tower, walking carefully around the Loki-shaped hole remaining in the floor to where the rest of the team was waiting. The outer wall of glass had been replaced with a speed that rather surprised him, but Stark was efficient when he wanted to be. In fact, Steve strongly suspected that the damaged floor would be the last piece of the tower put to rights; he had overheard Stark tell Banner that it was a tempting permanent decoration, if a dangerous one considering the possibility of tripping down it. He skirted it, accepting the drink that Stark pushed into his hand and seating himself on the first couch, taking a moment to study the rest of the team. Beside him, Bruce was worrying his drink between his hands, spinning it back and forth so the ice cubes clinked against the side of the glass in a repetitive manner, avoiding eye contact with the rest. Hawkeye sat in the corner of the other couch, Natasha perched on the arm, balancing herself so she was aligned with the archer's well-muscled right arm; the contact was light but ever-present and Natasha's eyes occasionally flicked to Hawkeye's face when she thought no one was watching. Barton did look tired and Steve made a mental note to speak to the man when he had the opportunity; he could recognize the memories and guilt lurking behind the archer's carefully schooled blank expression, feelings he understood well.
For once, Thor sat quietly, subdued, taking up the other half of the large couch where Barton and Natasha sat. They were all dressed comfortably, out of their uniforms, but Mjolnir sat on the floor in between Thor's slightly spread legs and Steve was reminded of a stuffed bear that had been the last gift from a father he had never known, a gift that he clung to throughout the bouts of asthma and illness that had plagued his childhood. It was an odd association to make with a man who was essentially a god, and he smiled a little internally at the mental image it produced. Stark himself was coming back from the bar with his glass in one hand and the bottle in another, seating himself on the couch on the opposite side of Banner and across from Thor, setting the bottle on the table in between the couches. No one spoke for a long moment, just stared into their glasses and cast glances at each other, the physical weariness from the battle against the Chitauri mostly gone but the emotional scars still fresh and aching. At length Barton smirked.
"He would absolutely kick our asses into next Thursday if he saw us now," he commented, the darkness in his eyes shifting a moment to allow a brief moment of humor. "Sitting around like it's the end of the world." Steve watched the man's jaw clench slightly. "Hell, we saved the world. It's what he believed we would do, and we damn well did it. He was never wrong when it mattered." Steve watched Natasha's hand make an almost invisible brush against Barton's, a concrete reminder of her presence.
"You and Natasha knew him better than the rest of us," Banner said quietly. "Maybe you could…"
"Yeah," Barton said. He raised his glass. "To Phil Coulson, bad-ass secret agent man." The others echoed the sentiment, even Stark who, Steve noticed, actually used Coulson's real first name instead of a muttered "agent" as he usually did. Again, Steve felt like an intruder; he had not known the man, not as well as most of those circled around him, not as well as he could have. The only connection he had managed was an unfulfilled promise, exemplified in the bloodstained cards Fury had tossed in his direction on the deck of the helicarrier after the man's death. The cards were now in his quarters, tucked away safely as a reminder of a man who, against all odds, had believed in him more than Steve had believed in himself. His own smiling, saluting face covered in blood mocked him in his mind's eye, his hand clenched around the drink which would never make him drunk and he listened to the others talk, slowly at first but more quickly and animatedly as the bourbon settled in and loosened their tongues.
"He trusted me," Hawkeye said. "To make the shot, to make some calls, but when I was in over my head he was always that voice in my ear telling me what to do. Calm as hell. I don't think anything ever broke that calm. Well, except for you, Stark." He smirked over at the billionaire.
"I know, I know," Stark responded with an answering smirk. "Volatile, self-obsessed, don't play well with others..."
"But you're still here," Banner said, eyes flickering to Stark and then away. "He's the one that came to get you to join us. Where'd we be now if he didn't?" There was silence after Banner's quiet commentary and Steve knew they were all thinking about Iron Man and his death grip on a nuclear missile, flying himself with it through a portal to Lord knows where, not sure if he'd ever come back out into their world. Steve had misjudged Stark, he could acknowledge that to himself even if he would never openly admit it to Stark himself for obvious reasons. Banner continued. "He never saw the Other Guy," he said quietly, for himself. "It wasn't like he pretended he didn't, he just…didn't. I appreciated that."
"What about you, Cap?" Stark asked suddenly after Hawkeye had finished a story about an incident somewhere in New Mexico that ended with Phil taking out two armed robbers with nothing but a bag of flour that left them all laughing.
"I…" he hesitated. "I didn't know him." He thought back to the few times he and Coulson had spoken. "I wish like hell I did, but all we managed were a few very…awkward conversations and then it was all business." Natasha, who had overheard the exchange on the bridge of the helicarrier when Coulson had asked Steve to sign his cards, spoke in a firm, quiet voice.
"You got behind his walls without even trying, Cap," she said. "Trust me on that one." After a moment's thought, Rodgers nodded and raised his own glass in silence. The others did the same, and for the next few minutes silence rang as they drank, lost in their own thoughts.
*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X
The motorcycle turned off the county road outside of Portland, Minnesota, onto one made solely of dirt and gravel, rocks and dust flying under the wheels as the bike bumped over potholes and slight rises on the uneven ground, sparking a dull ache in joints already stiff from the long ride from New York. It barely looked right, this turn-off in the middle of nowhere, but the directions had been good and Steve Rodgers knew he was in the right place. Cornfields blocked his gaze on either side of the drive for a good piece before giving way to pasture with a few horses and some sheep grazing lazily behind fences which had clearly once been white but had faded to gray over the course of the seasons. These pastures sloped off into a small grassy yard before a house that had seen better days. The cheerful yellow paint was dull and peeling away, one of the pillars which held up the porch's roof leaned slightly as though world-weary, and there were shingles missing from the roof.
Despite its haphazard appearance and the sense of age and weariness that seemed to pervade the place, there was also a familiar calmness, a strength in how the house's structure had stood up to the years despite the chipping paint and the dying oak tree whose shade was haphazard at best. Through the open doors of an old grey barn, a pickup truck he recognized as a '39 Ford was slowly decaying, much like the rest of the place. Outside the barn was a car, small and rusting, the muffler held up with string and the trunk wired shut. He parked his bike, looking up at the house for the briefest of moments before walking towards the few steps up onto the porch, his boots crunching in the gravel, his blue jeans covered in a fine layer of dust.
He stepped up to the door and knocked, sticking his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket as he waited, glancing over his shoulder to take in the place again, only to jerk around as the door was opened by a woman at least a head shorter than himself with brown hair and blue eyes that, for a moment, made his heart lurch in his chest. "Ms. Coulson," he said, nodding his head, one hand coming out of his jacket. "I'm Steve Rodgers, I had called…"
"I'm Phil Coulson's sister," she told him with a hint of a laugh. "Of course I recognize you, Captain. Come in." She stepped back into the home and allowed him to come in through the little entry into the main living room. He stopped briefly at the threshold in surprise; the room was filled with old-fashioned furniture and the few knick-knacks present made him feel as if he were back in the 1940s and that the seventy years he had slept had never happened. Tinny country music came from the ancient radio sitting in the corner; a grey and white cat yawned where it sprawled on the back of a sagging sofa, staring out the bay window at the front of the house. An ancient cello sat in a stand beside the large stone fireplace that dominated one end of the room, and he bit back a smile of understanding, remembering Clint laughing when Tony mentioned Phil's cellist at their private memorial but being unwilling to explain. "Have a seat. Would you like something to drink?"
"Please, ma'am," he said.
"Lemonade all right?"
"Sure," he said, seating himself in a chair much like one the elderly woman who'd lived across from them in Brooklyn when he was growing up had owned. Here there was no steady hum of electronics as there was at Stark Tower or at SHIELD headquarters, there was only the slow, measured ticking of a grandmother clock, the wind making the windows creak in their frames, and the shifting of the cat into a more comfortable position. He felt himself relaxing despite his earlier discomfort, the atmosphere in the house sparking good memories of his mother and their tiny Brooklyn apartment, the slight smell of fresh baked goods friendly and familiar. The clock had steadily ticked away a few minutes before his hostess reappeared with a tray holding a pitcher of lemonade, well iced, and two glasses. Beside this was a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies, the smell of which made his mouth water. She set it down on the coffee table in front of them, taking a seat on the couch before pouring the lemonade and handing him a glass as he picked up one of the cookies.
"My grandmother's recipe," she said as he took a bite, savoring the taste and the memories it sparked.
"Thank you, ma'am." She smiled.
"You're welcome to call me Bridget, Captain, if you're inclined. If not, I understand." He took a sip of the lemonade and cast another look around the room.
"Thank you for letting me stop by," he said, as if he had not come halfway across the country just to make this visit.
"My pleasure," she told him. "I hope you make yourself at home." He felt himself smiling.
"Ma'am, of all the places I've been since they pulled me out of the ice, this is the most at home I've felt anywhere. This place…"
"It was my grandparents'. I've never had much money to make any changes and never really had the desire either. I love this house and everything in it, even if most people who come tease me for living in the past. I don't, not really, there's just something comfortable about what you've always been used to. I know Phil felt the same way. He didn't get home much, his work didn't allow that, but I was always happy he could have one place in the world that would never change on him, someplace simple where he could escape when he really needed it." The silence between them fell heavily for a long moment, and Steve felt himself rushing towards a conversation that had been the reason he'd traveled so far across the country, coming faster than he had anticipated when he'd started the bike and left New York.
"If I could have saved him…" he said quietly.
"You would have. You don't need to explain anything to me, Captain. I've known for a very long time that this day would probably come. He and I talked about it sometimes. To be honest, Phil was rather matter-of-fact about it. I was always the one who railed against the possibility."
"It can't be easy."
"No, it isn't easy. But I have my sons and I know that he died happy because he died doing a job he loved." She gave a wry smile. "He never talked to me much about the details of it all. He couldn't, but from what little he could say I knew that he was happy. That makes it easier. I know that he needed to be out there, making a difference. He…idolized you, you know, Captain."
"Yeah," he said, remembering the awkward conversations on the jet and later the helicarrier. "He asked me to sign his trading cards. Vintage, apparently." Bridget Coulson responded to that statement with a low laugh.
"That's Phil all over," she commented, and Steve tried not to remember the sight of them on the conference room table, stained with Coulson's blood. "He spent years getting that set together. He was as giddy as a child Christmas morning when he finally found someone willing to part with the last one. He bought it from some man in Fresno for a steal; apparently the seller was impressed by Phil's respect for you."
"Fresno? Did you know his name?"
"It was a few years ago now, but it was something Japanese. I'm sure Phil had a record of it somewhere. He took provenance very seriously. I can look if you want, but I haven't gone through his things yet."
"Was it Morita?"
"That might have been it. Said the money didn't matter, that it was more important that it went to someone who respected the Captain as much as he did." Steve thought that over for a moment, and then sighed, feeling once again adrift in a world that had gone by too quickly while he slept.
"Why?" he asked before he can have a second thought about the appropriateness of the question, succeeding in fighting back a flinch of embarrassment. He had been getting better at that; it was a necessary skill for living in the vicinity of Tony Stark. It was a question that has been frustrating him more and more since the battle, and he hoped for some sort of illumination. It had been with him at the SHIELD funeral and in the days after, burning into him, questioning why any man would idolize a man dead and gone twenty-five years before he had been born. Bridget Coulson studied his face seriously for a long moment and then got to her feet.
"Come upstairs with me, Captain," she suggested and crossed the small living room to go up a narrow staircase hung with photographs, some black and white and old, some grainy color shots, a few of the newest standing out against those taken from earlier years. An entire family history, lining the walls in simple wooden frames. He recognized Coulson in several of them, one from when he was a short, too-skinny boy with an elderly man and woman and a little girl in pigtails; one in a crisp army uniform, his face the unbreakable calm that had been his standby; the most recent resembling the man Steve had known, smiling like Steve never saw him smile on the job, one arm around his sister's shoulder, the other around a teenage boy with the same brilliant blue eyes as both Phil and his sister. He paused at the last picture, frowning as he studied the face of the man in the black and white snapshot, arm around a woman where they stood on the porch to the house in which he stood.
"Captain?" Bridget Coulson said from her spot down the short hallway, outside a closed door.
"Sorry," he apologized, stepping down the hallway to meet her. She opened the door and then stepped aside, allowing him to step in. It was a small bedroom, a twin bed tucked up against the far wall, a desk and bookshelf adorning the other side, a dresser to the left of the door. On the wall above the bed hung a faded poster, a World War II style print with Steve's shield as a background, his helmeted and masked face in the foreground, and the words 'Fighting for our Freedom, Support our Soldiers at Home and Abroad' across the bottom. The comforter on the bed was blue, contrasting to the red and white of the poster, the walls white and bare except for the single poster. On the top of the dresser was a small replica of his shield and two photographs, one of Phil as a teenager, his sister laughing as he held her up on his back. The other was an even younger Phil of maybe eight, his sister a toddler, a military man, and a very pretty young woman, holding the girl in her arms as she smiled beautifully for the camera. His parents? Steve wondered, seeing Phil's unshakeable calm in the set of the man's face and the eyes of the woman in the boy whose shoulder she was gently touching. "On the desk," he heard Bridget Coulson say from the doorway, and he turned and took the two steps to reach it, noting a framed picture standing on top of several books waiting on the desk for an owner who, Steve Rodgers knew, would never come back for them. He was about to ask her what it was about the desk when he took a closer look at the picture and his face wrinkled in confusion. "What…" he started to ask, and she stepped around him to pick up the framed picture, turning to hand it to him.
It was a small old black and white photograph of two men, one lying in a makeshift hospital bed, bandages around his chest and forehead, the area around his eyes showing hints of pain that were being mostly hidden by the broad smile on his face; a smile of excitement, despite being wounded in a hospital bed, because Captain America sat by his side. "Who…" he asked, confused, staring at his own hesitantly smiling face from the frame.
"My grandfather," she told him. "When you raided that HYDRA base trying to save your friend, he was among the other men you rescued. He was hurt pretty badly but it earned him his discharge, which allowed him to come home to Minnesota and marry his sweetheart. The rest is history." He looked away from the photo to meet her eyes. "After our parents died, Grandma and Grandpa Coulson took us in. Phil and I were raised on grandpa's stories."
"But he…"
"Phil was a little over the top sometimes, I'll give you that, but at the heart of his dedication was the knowledge that without your selfless actions, he would never have been here, would never have the chance to listen to Grandpa teach us what real heroism was…" She paused and took a breath to steady herself. When she spoke again he could sense that she was quoting the lesson learned at their grandfather's knee word for word. " 'The willingness to put aside any thoughts of personal safety to do the right thing, to help people, to carry the burdens that will, in the end, make the world safe so everyone else can live life in peace.' You can say a lot of things about my brother, but he never lacked conviction. He understood that every action has ripples that most of us can only guess at and he always did what was necessary to do the right thing."
Steve Rodgers looked down at the photograph in his hands for several moments in silence before he finally put it aside, ensuring he put it back where it had been, and moved back to the dresser and picked up the photograph of Coulson and his parents, taking in again the too-short, too-skinny child whose eyes were as large as his friendly smile.
For the first time in a long time, Steve Rodgers was silently glad for what he had gone through, remembering the brief moment in the aftermath of the lab experiment that had changed him forever when his surprise at his new body overwhelmed him, those first breaths not tainted by asthma, the first flex of newfound strength, the wonder of finally, finally having a body capable of all the things he had dreamed for so long of doing, as if Erskine's formula really had allowed everything hidden within the skinny boy from Brooklyn to finally emerge into the light of day.
Looking at the photograph of the child Phil Coulson had been, Rodgers couldn't help but be quietly impressed. Everything Coulson had done, he had done without the benefit of superhuman strength, agility, or the ability to heal from wounds that would drop lesser men. His armor had been a nearly unbreakable veneer of calm, years of hard work and training, and the quiet conviction that meant he would do what he had to in order to ensure the safety of everyone else in the world.
From behind him, Bridget Coulson spoke quietly, almost as if she could read his thoughts. "My brother believed in heroes," she said quietly. "He always did." She studied him for a moment, seeking something in his face which, after a moment, she apparently found because she spoke again. "I'll be downstairs, getting some lunch together. Come down when you're ready. Take your time and feel free to look around." She took a step back and reached for the door handle.
"Ma'am," he said to stop her, turning to meet her eyes, the photograph still in his hand. "He didn't just believe in heroes. He was a hero in his own right."
Her answering smile was slow and sad, the beginnings of tears wetting her eyes. "Thank you, Captain. That means a lot coming from you."
"I'm sorry I couldn't save him."
"You already had saved him, Captain. You made his life possible. Think of all the good that did when you remember him. Even if he was the biggest geek in the history of geekdom," she said with a little laugh. "I like to think he had good reasons for it, at any rate." She gave another gentle chuckle, a slight smile playing around her mouth and in her eyes, mingling with the sheen of unshed tears. Steve took a breath and nodded, turning back to the smiling child in the photograph in his hands as the door clicked closed and her footsteps receded down the hall, remembering in his mind's eye the parents and children in the photographs lining the walls of the stairway, the skinny boy smiling out of the photograph he held in his hand. The reticent man who had spoken to him with open admiration, who had been so proud to do something, anything for Captain America, who made it sound like design input into his uniform was the embodiment of all his dreams come true, who believed in old fashioned in ways that most people in this new world had forgotten was no longer an enigma in his mind. Not where he was, standing in a house with the trappings and memories of a bygone era, filled with photographs of family that would never have been possible if Steve had not picked up his shield and jumped from a plane behind enemy lines, rescuing four hundred men when he had gone after one.
Steve had just been a kid from Brooklyn who did not want to kill but hated bullies.
Phil had just been a kid from Minnesota who dreamed of heroes and a better world.
And that, in the end, was all that really mattered.