Disclaimer: Coulson and his team belong to Marvel, even though I would prefer they were real actual people having real actual adventures. Or are they?

The Patient

"How are you feeling today?"

Phil Coulson regarded the speaker through a mental haze that slightly suppressed his anger. "I'm feeling kind of drugged up." He was at least sitting up on his small bed, though he had to keep his back pressed to the wall to keep from slumping over.

The man in the white coat nodded apologetically. He was young and earnest-looking, though a full beard added a few years to his appearance, and his dark brown eyes vividly expressed the owner's sympathy. "The sedatives are unfortunately necessary at this point, but I'd love to work you off of them if you show improvement." He rubbed his still-sore neck. Yesterday, Coulson had pinned him by the throat against the wall while accusing him of being a HYDRA agent. It had taken three other men to subdue Coulson, despite the fact that he'd just woken up from a previous drug-induced stupor and only had one hand.

"Improvement?" Coulson scoffed. "When I start to believe that this isn't a cell – that it's really a mental hospital, and I've been a patient here for the past two years?" He gestured around at the simple room with its pale blue walls and complete lack of decoration.

The other man, who was calling himself Dr. Thompson, flipped open a thick file folder and started skimming through it. "Improvement's not impossible, you know. You had been making great progress with Dr. Garner. You just had a little relapse when he took that new job out of state." He pulled out the photograph that he was looking for. "At least you didn't go back to doing this."

He held up the image, which was a section of a wall marred with a network of neat lines and circles. They'd been scratched deep into the surface in a seemingly random pattern, looking very much like they'd been carved by a madman. Coulson stiffened. "I know what you're doing. Dr. Garner? Please. You plan to talk about different people and places and things in my life and put them into some sort of alternate history that you've constructed for me. You're going to try to convince me that this is the 'real world.' There's an episode like this on every scifi tv show ever."

"Watch a lot of scifi?" When Coulson didn't answer, Thompson smiled in a placating way. "I shouldn't have to convince you, Agent Coulson. Let me tell you what I know about your life and then what you've told us about your life. We'll see which feels more real to you." He glanced for reference at his file folder. "Your name is Phil Coulson, which you don't seem to have disputed yet, so that's something, anyway."

Coulson glared. Thompson cleared his throat and continued,

"You spent your entire adult life working for the CIA. You've had an exemplary career, full of commendations from your superiors and respect from your peers. The only real blots on your life were when your parents died, and when your wife left you, taking your newborn daughter with her."

"Wife and daughter?" Phil interrupted. "I don't see where you're going with... Oh, wait. Now I do. It took me a minute on account of the drugs. Please continue."

Thompson did, looking embarrassed, as though he'd rather not bring up such painful memories. "Everything changed when you were captured by a criminal named Edison Po. He tortured you for information, cutting off your hand in the process. Your people rescued you, but the mental trauma was a little too much. Even an extended vacation didn't seem to help..."

Phil snapped his fingers together. "Let me guess: Tahiti, right?"

"Do you remember when you were a boy and your father died?" That question wiped the sarcastic smile from Coulson's face. "You took refuge in reading comic books and stories about superheroes like Captain America? You couldn't save your father, and so you started to read stories about people who did save others. That was a perfectly normal and healthy response. But this time, you took it a step too far. You saw the stories of SHIELD and the Avengers on the news, and you started to fantasize about them. You started to imagine what it would be like to be a part of it all, writing yourself a central role, tying everything together. And none of that would have been a problem if you hadn't started to believe it was true. But you did believe it, and as your fantasies became more violent, you became a danger to yourself and to others. You shot your ex-wife, Phil."

That admittedly threw his brain for a loop. "Wait, wait. I'm guessing you're going to put May in the role of my wife and Skye in the role of my daughter, but I never shot... Oh, right."

The doctor set the folder aside and crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back in his chair. "So you do remember? Melinda had reached out to you because Skye wanted to meet you, her father, but then you saw the news reports about HYDRA destroying SHIELD, the organization that you had imagined yourself into. That was really the breaking point for you. You accused Melinda of spying for HYDRA, and then you shot her, and by the way, it was a real gun, with real bullets, not some stun gun like you later claimed. Skye was there, and she called for help, which is how you ended up here."

Truth be told, Skye had been there, but she'd been on his side, not May's. "May is fine." He didn't know why he sounded so defensive. He knew that he'd shot her with an ICER, that she wasn't his ex, and that he didn't care what this HYDRA guy said or thought.

"Luckily for you, she is recovering, but you hurt her, Phil, and I think you know that. I was here when the police first brought you in, you know. You were still violent, still angry. We had to restrain you so that you wouldn't hurt anyone else, though to be honest, it was more likely that you were going to hurt yourself. You just kept screaming, 'please, let me die – please, let me die' over and over. I've heard a lot in my time here, but that... that'll stay with me."

Hearing his own plea for death, even out of context, sent a cold chill through Coulson's heart, but he brushed it off as best he could by muttering, "You've got your timeline all wrong."

Thompson didn't seem to care about the timeline. "You still say it in your sleep sometimes. Meanwhile, when you're awake, you've been telling us all about your adventures in SHIELD. Apparently, Hawkeye and the Black Widow were under your command every so often. You were there when Tony Stark became Iron Man, when Thor came to Earth, and when your hero, Captain Rogers, was thawed from the ice. I don't know why you left out the Hulk, but never mind. In the end, you died to bring them all together as a team, which was a fanfiction with one gaping plot hole: you were still alive. You explained it away by saying that because Fury and SHIELD and everyone just loved you so much, they brought you back to life with a convenient alien drug. Later, after SHIELD fell, Fury even entrusted you with the task of rebuilding it, which is an odd thing for a dead man to do. Did he get resurrected, too?"

So, that was it. They were trying to find out about Fury. Coulson figured there had to be a point to this little charade. Rather than letting on that he knew, Coulson played along. "I live in hope. After all, I never saw the body. But I got my instructions in a message that he left me."

"A last will and testament kind of thing? In case SHIELD was ever destroyed from the inside."

"Something like that."

Thompson shrugged. "Well, you haven't been rebuilding SHIELD. You've been in here, carving on the walls, insisting that the cafeteria is an alien city, and pretending that the earthquakes we've been experiencing are due to Skye's new superpowers."

By this point, Phil was shaking. His urge to punch the fake doctor in the face was now barely tempered by the sedatives. (Well, that, and the fact that he'd attempted just such an ill-conceived attack yesterday, and it hadn't ended very well for him. At the moment, he could barely even feel his extremities, so he didn't think he'd fare much better at a second attempt.) "Enough. You don't think I'd actually fall for this, do you?"

"I don't know if you'll ever believe me, though I hope so. You were listening to me, at least. The next step is getting you to talk about your problems."

"Oh, I've got plenty of problems, but insanity's not one of them."

"Anymore. Even in your own fantasy construct, you knew it wasn't rational to carve those designs like you did. Do you remember talking about that with Dr. Garner?"

Yes, he had talked about this crisis with Andrew, but how did HYDRA know about that? There was something there... If only he could think clearly.

"I'll take that as a yes. He said you were also starting to talk with him about Po and about the aftermath of your captivity, though you had a long way to go. You were having trouble accepting two sets of memories – the real ones and the ones you invented – and you were insisting that SHIELD replaced your memories."

It did sound crazy said out loud, so to be fair, Coulson decided to put it to the test. "How did I lose my hand? I don't mean Po and Raina and the torture like you were saying. How did I tell you that I lost my hand?"

Thompson squinted in thought. "Raina? That was...Po's assistant, right? Sorry, there was a lot of information in your file, and it's hard to keep it all straight... So, incidentally, I can understand why you're confused. But you just remembered a detail about your time with them. That's good."

With a little snort of impatience, Phil bit back what he was about to say – namely, that Po and Raina had been asking him about his time in Tahiti, so his time there, real or fake, had to come before the torture, not after. "Don't sidetrack," he snapped. "What about my hand?"

"I'm sorry, but you refused to even mention it until now."

"Or it's the one thing that HYDRA didn't know about me." At least, he assumed they didn't. Recently, when he was talking to Rosalind Price of the ATCU, she'd known pretty much everything there was to know about him – all things that had happened while HYDRA spy Grant Ward was around. The one thing she hadn't realized was that he had a prosthetic hand, which he'd gotten after Ward left. That lead him to believe that A) the ATCU was getting intel from HYDRA in some way, and B) HYDRA still didn't know about events on the Iliad, which meant there were no leaks from his own people. After all, there couldn't be a single SHIELD agent who didn't know within a day or two that Director Coulson lost his hand in the battle.

Throwing up his hands in exasperation, Thompson sighed, "I honestly can't tell if you are listening to the things you're saying or if you can hear how they might sound to other people. I mean, it sounds like a great life where you have your flying dream car and your invisible planes and everything kind of revolves around you..."

"No, last year mostly revolved around Skye, and I think things will continue to do so for the foreseeable future."

"Regardless, you can't back up your story with any proof. Look at this." He held up a birth certificate for Skye Melinda Coulson, born July 2, 1988. That was Skye's real birthday. Probably, Ward had heard it from her dad while they were working together, which made sense. Coulson was sure that Cal would've been talking about Skye pretty much nonstop. "You probably think it's a forgery, don't you?"

"Of course."

Thompson tucked it back into the folder and frowned. "But at least it's something here in front of you, and we can both agree that this piece of paper exists, real or not. You won't tell me anything about SHIELD because it's 'Classified.' You won't call them, because you don't want us tracing that call to find them (as if we had the technology here). You won't call the Avengers, because for some reason, they can't know that you're alive. It was nice of you to lend them your helicarrier anyway. That was you, right? The helicarrier came from SHIELD, and you say that you're the Director."

This second attempt at information-gathering was about as subtle as the first. "Stop it," Coulson snapped with as much force as he could muster through the mind fog of the sedatives. "Just stop. You're fishing for information. I won't give you any."

Thompson stood sadly. "Maybe I was pushing a little too hard. I'm sorry if that's the case. Why don't we call it a day? You think about everything that's happened to you, and I'll try again tomorrow."

"Tomorrow will be the same as today, and so will the day after that. There is something that you need to understand right now: This won't work. I don't believe you." He shook his head, which still rested against the pale blue wall behind him. "I will never believe you. I understand why you're doing this... Someone decided torture wouldn't work, since it hasn't in the past, and kudos for trying something different, but this strategy is just as misguided. One thing about me that should be pretty obvious by now is my faith in SHIELD and in my people."

Holding up one as though in surrender (the other hand clutching his folder), Thompson backed toward the door. "Please, just sleep on it."

No sooner had he stepped outside, though, than a seismic blast knocked him backwards. The two orderlies/guards outside went with him. After that, Skye darted into the room with Mack on her heels. "We found him," she said into her radio before rushing to sit next to Coulson on the bed. She pressed two fingers against his carotid to check his pulse, not knowing what else to do. "Medical's already standing by," she told him. She slipped an arm under one of Coulson's armpits and Mack got the other side, the two of them hoisting him off the bed. "I don't suppose you can stand?"

"Not without falling."

"It's okay, sir, we've got you," Mack assured him. They helped him hobble out of the room, one on either side of him to support his weight.

Skye paused just after they made it through the door, glancing down at the scattered papers next to the unconscious Dr. Thompson. Clearly visible on top of the mess was a photo of the alien carvings. "What's this?" she asked. She knew perfectly well what it was, of course, but she didn't understand what it was doing in a HYDRA prison.

"They were trying to convince me that I was insane."

Mack snorted and when the other two glared at him, he added awkwardly, "Of course you're not."

Skye pushed Coulson fully onto Mack and bent down to retrieve the fallen papers.

"Just leave it," Coulson said. "Leave all of it. We don't need to read more HYDRA lies. This is HYDRA, right? Not the ATCU or some new enemy?"

"HYDRA," Skye confirmed, still idly gathering the loose pages.

"Skye, please. If you take them, I'll read them, and if I read them, I might start to wonder if I really am... you know. I over-think things. I brood over things. You know this. So, let it go."

Nodding gently, Skye let the papers fall from her hands and straightened up, pulling his half-arm around the back of her neck again as she prepared to help him finish the escape. "Right," she confirmed with a quick smile. "Like you said – just more lies."

"Right. I absolutely came back from the dead and own a flying sports car and run a vigilante spy organization and all that other stuff."

"Right," Skye echoed. "Though when you say it like that..."

"Yeah. Hey, Skye, you don't think everything's about me, do you?"

"Um, well, you do get captured an awful lot."

Coulson shrugged as best as he could given his present posture. "Besides that."

"Never mind what some twisted HYDRA interrogator said," Skye told him, not at all answering the question. "Just think how great it will be to get home. I know a certain flying sports car who will be happy to see you."

"What – did Lola gain sentience while I was away?"

Skye chuckled. "Come on, sir."

They shuffled away, and Coulson's eyes followed the rest of the scattered papers as the three SHIELD agents passed them. They lay unguarded and far too tempting. He had enough self-restraint not to stop and have Skye pick them up after all, but he did not have enough self restraint to keep from thinking, or from wondering. Because this was something he'd wondered about all along, very deep down.

"Did they hurt you?" he heard Skye asking even as his mind wandered these other, forbidden topics.

"Just sedatives and mind games. I'll be fine once everything's out of my system." The corner of his mouth hooked upwards in a lopsided smile. "You can just stick around to assure me that everything's real."

This seemed to satisfy her, and she didn't say another word about it. Neither did he.

He simply wondered.