A Family Matter
Disclaimer: I do not own the Avengers or MIB or any of their characters. That right belongs to Marvel. Lucky bastards.
A/N: This is a fill for this prompt on the avengerkink meme: "Agent Kay is Coulson's dad. Run with it." It will contain some slash between Coulson/Hawkeye, meaning men in a relationship with other men. So if that's not your thing, turn back now. Other than that? Enjoy.
Chapter 1
In retrospect, it shouldn't have surprised anyone that if Phil Coulson was alive that the first person to break into layers upon layers of S.H.E.I.L.D. security to find him would be his father. The man that had once been known as Kevin Coulson walked down the stark white hallways with a brisk but languid pace. The man exuded self-assurance and purpose. As he walked, he even nodded politely to anyone that looked up and made eye contact with him. The more alert ones paused to look at him longer than a passing glance, recognizing something unusual about his being there or maybe the way he looked but were unable to figure out why.
He continued on his way, the heels of his shoes clacking quietly against the hospital's clean floor. Like every other hospital, every inch of the building seemed to have a faint odor of antiseptic. The fluorescent lights emitted a low buzz and flickered every so often. It was late so it was quiet and still, save a few on-call doctors and nurses that flitted from room to room.
It was past visiting hours, but the sight of a sharply dressed agent walking down those halls was not unusual. So no one questioned it when the agent, clad in a sharply pressed black suit, tie, and expensive-looking shoes, deftly entered the Intensive Care Unit and made for the room of Agent Coulson. He froze in the doorway for a long moment, taking in the bed where the pale figure lay. The ventilator's rhythmic compressions of oxygen moved in conjunction with the steady beeping that came from the heart monitor.
He spotted a clipboard hanging at the end of the bed and flicked idly through the pages, scanning words like 'perforated lung' and 'medically-induced coma' and 'severe internal hemorrhage.' Then he glanced back at the face whose story could be told in the lines that he couldn't remember seeing there before, nor the purplish bags under the closed eyes.
Sighing, he made his way to the side of the bed as flashes of another time, another life, flickered across his eyes. He remembered a small cottage with flowers and a smiling woman who dutifully tended to them. He also remembered a happy, rambunctious little boy with big gray-green eyes and a gap-toothed smile that had liked to run around with one of the pot lids he'd painted red, white, and blue and bore a big star in the center.
With these images swimming in his mind's eye, the man who'd once been called Kevin Coulson in that life reached down to touch the still hand of Phil Coulson. He ignored the disappointment that sharply lanced through his chest when there was no reaction, no change, at his touch. He smoothed back the dry, awry brown hair and rested his hand there for a moment; the action had always comforted Phil when he'd been ill as a child, after all.
Don't worry, son. Dad will make this all better.
Straightening up, he removed his hand from the prone body and glanced directly towards the spot just above the television. A tiny, inconspicuous camera was imbedded cleverly into the pattern of the wall. He cocked his head at it, wondering just how baffled the hospital security staff must have been at that moment when all of their cameras had simultaneously malfunctioned. He could only imagine what they'd think when they discovered that all of the recordings taken by multiple cameras along one very specific path that led from the hospital's entrance to one particular room in the ICU had been erased.
He casually reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and produced a handful of small discs. They were no larger than the size of quarters, but within them was embedded some of the most sophisticated technology that existed in the universe, technology that Earth was so far away from achieving on its own that it was almost laughable.
He pressed one of the discs to the side of the bulky hospital bed, one on the IV drip, one on the ventilator, and one on the heart monitor. The last he carefully placed on Phil's chest, just below the wound on the starchy white bandage that covered his entire upper torso. Then he fished out a small portable device and typed in their destination coordinates. The discs began to emit a soft white glow, pulsing in perfect sync as they awaited the final command from him.
His eyes roved around the room one last time, checking to see if he'd missed anything. When they fell upon what appeared to be Phil's personal effects, he took a moment to scoop up only one thing: Phil's dog tags from his stint in the Marines. There was also a silver wedding band dangling amidst them on the chain that Phil had added years ago.
Reaching into his inner pocket again, he produced his sunglasses and placed them down on the table in the place of Phil's tags. Then he turned and walked back to the bed, pressing a single button on the handheld device. The pulsing light became a bright glow that flashed, flaring outward to fill the room and empty hallway with a blinding white light. By the time the first security guard and nurse stumbled into the room, the man now known as Agent Kay, his son Phil, and every gadget that had been used to keep his son alive was gone.
Nick Fury liked to think that he was a patient man. Being the Director of an agency of super spies and entrusted with the security of the entire world demanded discipline, patience, and the will to do whatever it took to get the job done. He'd given everything of himself and more to make S.H.E.I.L.D. the formidable force that it had become. Today, however, patience was something he was short on.
"And tell me, Agent. How does one simply lose a patient out of a highly secured building with special agents and security officers crawling every floor? Not to mention that it has one of the world's most complex and advanced security systems," he demanded in a hard voice.
Agent Jasper Sitwell was a young and brilliant agent. He had passed every one of S.H.E.I.L.D.'s tests both in the classroom and on the field with flying colors. His sharp intellect was only matched by his deadpan wit and unflappable demeanor even in the face of the greatest diversity. But it took something special not to flee when facing down the full wrath of Nick Fury.
"We're still looking into it, Sir," Sitwell answered around a gulp, hoping Fury hadn't noticed the way his eyes had flickered towards the windows (that he judged he could make an escape through if he was fast enough). "From what we've gathered, at approximately 0132 hours the system suffered a severe malfunction and went off-line for a total of nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds. When it rebooted, there was no explanation for what caused it to malfunction."
Fury's brows furrowed. "Could it have been hacked?"
"The logs don't indicate any remote interference. There's nothing. It's as if the system just decided to go off-line and then reboot itself because it wanted to," Sitwell replied with a thoughtful frown of his own. Fury's irritation ebbed just a little; he knew the young agent would be pouring over the logs for the next few days, obsessing over them until he found what tiny detail that he had missed.
"What about the security cameras? Were they still rolling while the system was down?" Fury asked.
Sitwell nodded. "Yes, Sir. But it's the strangest thing."
He leaned over the keyboard, his fingers flying over the keys. Abruptly, the images on the grid of monitors flashed to the night before, during the time of the malfunction. "As you can see, the cameras continued to roll while the system stopped feeding the images to the server. All except these."
He gestured to the ones that had become nothing but snow. Fury looked over each one and quickly traced their locations as sequential: starting from the entrance of the hospital, down a series of hallways, an elevator, then to the ICU…and finally to Agent Coulson's room. This had not been some random flux. This had been done by someone good and with intent.
"Agent Coulson was targeted," Fury concluded grimly. Only a handful of agents knew that Coulson had survived the attack by Loki from three months ago. Most of them were currently crawling his room searching every inch of it for any clues as to who had expertly walked into their secured facility and abducted him without any bloodshed or even someone noticing until it was too late.
"It appears that way," Sitwell admitted unhappily. Coulson had been his first friend at S.H.E.I.L.D. The older man had been the only one who'd even given the young, arrogant genius more than a contemptuous look. He'd offered a real hand in friendship despite the person Sitwell had been when he'd first joined, and to this day, Sitwell couldn't recall if he'd ever told him how much he'd appreciated the gesture.
"I want you to go through every bit of that log. I want to know what could convince one of our most important security protocols to shut itself down precisely long enough for someone to walk in and kidnap one of our agents. I don't care what you have to do. Rip the damn thing apart if you have to, but get me some answers," Fury commanded, and Sitwell nodded quickly and hurried off.
Sighing heavily, Fury left the security station of the hospital and went to the scene of the 'crime.' Maria Hill was using a black light to flood the room with UV light, searching for traces of any elements that might be invisible to the naked eye. Aside from some leftover spots of blood (thankfully too dry and diluted to be Coulson's) and other unidentified fluids, there was nothing.
"It's like he just vanished," she huffed in frustration, ripping the goggles off of her lovely face. She handed the black light off to another agent, who continued the scan as she stood by with Fury. "Why would they take the equipment too, though? And how? There are no signs of a break-in, and no one saw someone roll an entire suite of life support machines out. Or a bed with a comatose patient in it for that matter."
"They took all of it because whoever wanted him, wanted him alive, Hill," Fury replied as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He looked around the room that offered no answers. The windows were perfectly intact. The blinds hadn't even been moved.
"But, Sir…who even knows that Coulson's alive but US?" Hill asked, and then her eyes grew wide in alarm. "You don't think the Avengers…?"
Fury mulled over it and then shook his head. "No. If they did, we'd know. This is the work of someone else. Someone more sophisticated and subtle…"
His eye absently roved around the room. Then they fell on the table where the scant personal effects that Coulson had had on his person had been placed. He'd seen them almost every day since Coulson had been admitted. So he'd memorized exactly what was there and where each item was placed long ago.
"Sir?" Hill asked as he quickly crossed the room.
Ignoring her, Fury plucked up the innocuous pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and inspected them for a long moment. They looked familiar, but they definitely didn't belong with Coulson's things. The moment that it hit him as to why they looked familiar was both a relief and dreadful all at once.
You motherfucker. Fury thought. Message received, Kay.