"Look, letting him die is easy enough, if that's what you decide."
"Let's take this somewhere private, shall we?" Emma hissed, ushering them into the nurses lounge.
"It's not murder if he just succumbs to his injuries, Sheriff," Whale continued.
"Pretty sure it is," glared Emma, folding her arms.
"I don't think he's going to die," said Ruby matter-of-factly. "If whatever made that glowy scar didn't kill him...nothing will."
"Even so, of course we'll save him" Mary Margaret interjected.
"Obviously," added David.
"Well..."
"Leroy!" Ruby snapped.
"I'm just saying, it's either him or us!"
The phone started buzzing in Emma's hand, the iPhone screen simply reading 'Her.'
"Someone's looking for him..." Emma whispered nervously.
"Do we answer it?!" Ruby panicked.
Mary Margaret looked wide-eyed at the name glowing on the screen.
"'Her' might be a wife, or a girlfriend?!" She gulped "We should let her know he's alright..."
"And say what? We can't have more outsiders coming here."
"That's enough, Leroy!" Emma snapped. As they fought, the call went to voicemail.
"Well, that solves that problem" exhaled Emma, cracking her neck. "What do we do now?"
"We'll save him." Mary Margaret declared, "and then deal with the situation."
"I'll prep him for surgery" Whale resigned, grabbing his white coat and slipping the phone in his pocket. A cheery bell sounded, marking the arrival of a voicemail from 'Her.'
...
The next thing Coulson remembered was a blur of lights and the beeping of heart monitors. The anesthetics kept him from acting upon his paranoia. What if they caught onto him for seeing something? They no doubtedly saw his scar from The Tesseract Incident while prepping him for surgery. He prayed it didn't spark any red flags. How could have he been so careless behind the wheel? The painkillers in his system made him a little drowsy, but nothing to the degree of almost killing pedestrians.
'I'm safe' Coulson tried to convince himself. 'They think I'm named Greg, it's basic field work.'
"You awake, Mr. Mendell?" sounded a worried male voice from his bedside. Coulson looked at the disheveled, blonde doctor who seemed too emotionally invested in his case for a basic hit-and-run.
"I'm Dr. Whale, your cardiac surgeon. You're going to have to stay a few weeks, but you'll make a full recovery."
"That's it?" Coulson breathed a sigh of relief.
"Well, I just need to take a better medical history now that you're lucid."
Shit.
"What do you want to know?" Coulson asked, successfully masking his uncertainty with a deadpan expression. Dr. Whale coughed and gestured his pen towards Coulson's mildly open hospital gown.
"Oh, that."
"In all my years as a doctor, I've never seen anything like it." It was true, even though Whale's PhD technically came from a curse.
"New radiation trial," Coulson lied. "Vibranium isotope. I had minor lung cancer."
"And it's glowing because..."
"Side effects." Coulson shrugged nonchalantly. Whale shivered, the patient's emotionless attitude towards his own life was highly unsettling.
"Well," Whale acquiesced. Being frozen for nearly thirty years put a hindrance on his medical knowledge from 1984 onwards. "The Sheriff will have some questions about the accident. I'll let you rest and send her in later, Mr. Mendell."
"Call me Greg," Coulson sighed. "Um, Dr. Whale?"
"Everything okay?"
"My things, where are they?"
"Oh." Whale marched to the bedside table. "Right in this drawer, Mr. Mend-I mean Greg." While pulling his clothes, Whale discreetly slipped the phone from his hand into the jacket pocket.
"Pass me my phone?" Coulson groaned, his IVs limiting his movement.
"Of course."
As the door clicked shut, Coulson immedietaly flipped through his contacts until he stopped at 'Her.' His hands were clumsy from the IVs and heart monitors, but he managed to bang out a text message:
(702:) inhosp crashcar magic alrt
Back in Manhattan, Jane Foster felt a sharp vibration from her lab coat pocket. She dragged her lock screen and saw Coulson had replied to her voicemail.
"Everything alright, Boss?" sounded Jane's bushy-haired assistant.
"Fine, Darcy." Jane winced at her phone, knitting her brows tightly. "Coulson finally wrote me back...but I can't understand it. Do you speak text message?"
"Fluently" Darcy chirped, plucking the iPhone from Jane's calculating hands. Her sunny smile crumbled to pieces as she read.
"Well? What does it mean?"
"Coulson's in the hospital, his car crashed."
"What?!" sounded an urgent voice from behind the scientists. "What do you mean, 'hospital?!'"
"Agent Hill," Jane beckoned her superior over to her phone as Darcy displayed the message.
"What's a-l-r-t? He's asking for backup already? Dammit, I knew he wasn't up for returning to work yet!" Maria spat, dialing Director Fury to give him a piece of her mind. Darcy quickly grabbed her superior's wrist.
"Chill!" she exclaimed. "A-L-R-T is shorthand for 'alright.' He's fine!"
"How do you know that? You can't be so sure-"
"I taught it to him" Darcy sighed. "While I was working the medical bay after the invasion. I taught it to the patients so they could easily contact me during rounds. ALRT means 'alright,' 'NH' means 'need help,' etc."
Maria breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
"What was his mission, anyway?" Darcy asked Hill quizzically. "The guy could barely stand last month, why the field work?"
"He was desperate to get back out, we got a blip on our satellite similar to the energy signature of the Bifrost. Coulson went to investigate."
"And he said he'd send me everything!" Jane exclaimed.
"Now, don't get too excited," Hill sighed. "Director Fury's easing him back into work, he think's it's just bored kids who rigged some explosions. Nothing too strenuous."
"Still, I hope he's okay..." Jane sighed. "Should we go visit him? He's in Maine, right?"
"Affirmative," Hill replied, "but stand down, Dr. Foster. Coulson survived Loki, I'm pretty sure he can handle a fender bender. He has his phone, he'll keep us posted."
...
"Well?" The crowd cried in unison upon Whale's return to the nurses lounge.
"He's going to make it. He's got a few weeks of recuperation, but he's going to live."
"And the glowy scar?" inquired Ruby.
"He insists it's from cancer treatment, but I'm not buying it. Said his doctor used Vibranium-"
"Are you kidding? That stuff is lethal!" Emma gaped. "That stuff is military grade. A chunk the size of a Rubix cube nearly destroyed Manhattan last year. Where were you?!"
"Cursed."
"Right."
"So he's with the government?" Leroy asked nervously, his hands sweating. "Are we going to be experimented on? I'm telling you, this will come to no good."
"Quiet, Leroy" David snapped.
"I want to talk to him," interrupted Emma. "When will he be awake?"
"He's up now," said Whale.
"Already?"
"Yeah, I decided to wait a few hours just in case he...well, keeled over."
"Alright then!" Mary Margaret beamed, taking her husband's arm. "Let's go talk to him!"
"Um, guys?" Emma winced. "We're not talking to him as a group. We're not a group Sheriff."
"But we've been doing this together..."
"Mary Margaret, we're trying to convince him that this place is normal," Emma began, smiling weakly. "In a normal town, the Sheriff goes in and asks a few questions. She doesn't bring her parents with her."
"That's probably true," David laughed.
"We'll be right here, then."
...
Wow, I didn't expect this story to gain any followers. Hope you liked the chapter!