NOTES: Warning for discussion of arranged suicide.
It's been two days since he rejected May's offer for the Australian outback retirement when she knocks on his office door. "Clear your desk," she orders when she walks in.
He looks at her confused. "I had an episode four days ago, I'm not due—"
"You have a guest," she interrupts.
Phil looks over her shoulder. Even though the window in his office door is opaque, he can immediately identify the silhouette on the other side, and it earns May a glare. "Why is she here?"
"She demanded I bring her, and since she has incredibly valid reasons to be pissed at you, I flew her in."
"Get out," he sighs.
May shrugs her slim shoulders, probably more than happy to earn another point for her side of the disagreement they've been having. As she leaves, Anna slips hesitantly through the door, and Phil's breath catches at the sight of her. She's joined into the hair-cutting movement most of the women around him have started, her loose brown curls now stopping at her shoulders. She looks a little thinner than the last time he saw her, and that gives him some concern, but the part that makes his guts twist is how her eyes are already wet. "What are you doing here?" he asks.
"May called your redhead to give her a heads-up that you might reach out to her for…" Anna pauses to grind her jaw and take a deep breath. "To do what May refused to do. Clint was warned you might call him, too."
"It's not what you probably think it sounds like," he tries to argue.
"It sounds like you're begging your friends to kill you," she fires back. "Do you know how much of a mess Clint is right now? You know he still carries a metric ton worth of guilt around for you dying in the first place. Are you seriously going to ask him to be the reason you die a second time?"
Exhaustion hits Phil like a freight train as he decides how best to phrase his response. "It's not what you think it is."
"I think you told me you were suicidal before, and now—"
"I don't want to die," he nearly shouts. He takes a deep breath and swallows, trying to reign in his feelings. "But I don't want to end up like Garrett."
Anna looks at him skeptically. "You think you're going to defect to HYDRA and start bashing hands of your friends' girlfriends?"
"I think I'm going to go insane," he admits quietly. "When I killed Garrett, he was a nutcase. And it's only a matter of time before I become that, too."
"You don't know that," Anna argues softly. "Maybe it's like your beloved Captain America serum—bad people get worse, but good—"
"It's not like that," he counters with a shake of his head. "My… 'art projects' are becoming more of a habit. If I don't have an episode, I feel like I'm going to crawl out of my skin. My hand wouldn't stop shaking the other day. I'm losing control." Anna hangs her head, and Phil is torn. He can try and comfort her, or— "I knew this was going to happen. This was why I was going to leave S.H.I.E.L.D., because I saw agent after agent lose their mind because of this and I was done. I mean, sure, wanting you to stick around was part of it, but I resigned—"
"Stop it," Anna whispers without looking up.
"Thank goodness it was just a pregnancy scare and not an actual baby, right? You'd be, what, seven months along now?"
"Stop it," she hisses as her head snaps up. Tears have started to run down her cheeks, and Phil hates himself a little. "You have every right to be angry at me, but you do not get to say whatever vile things pop into your head in order to scare me off. You don't get to do that to me."
They stare at each other for a minute or two before Phil sighs and sinks into the nearest chair. Anna rocks on her toes for a second like she might walk over to him, but remains rooted in her spot. "How's your hand?" he asks.
She stretches her right arm out before her and flexes her fingers. "As good as it's going to get. If it weren't my bow hand I'd be screwed, but I think I can get away with stiff fingers for now."
"Jemma said—"
"I knew it," she mutters with a shake of her head.
"Knew what?"
"You've got her working undercover."
"I didn't say—"
"She's working in a lab," Anna cuts in. "The only lab that would keep her interested would be one that has plenty of funding and therefore isn't government-related. I doubt S.H.I.E.L.D. has a lab out in the open, so you've got her undercover. You've got an exit strategy for her, right?"
"Of course," Phil answers.
"And what's the exit strategy for you and all of this? Because asking your friends to put two in your head isn't going to work."
He scrubs his hands over his face. The one he wants to happen apparently never will, unless he shoots himself, and he can't bring himself to do that. Not yet anyway. "May wants to ship the two of us off to the outback. Have me lose my mind. She's got fake passports and money."
"Tell her to get a third passport," Anna instructs him. "I mean, Felix will probably be eaten by a dingo, but whatever."
Phil shakes his head. "I'm not going to let you watch me go mad."
She looks at his fingers before speaking. "Did you know you had an open-casket funeral?" His chest squeezes at the question, but he doesn't answer. "I stood there for, I don't even know how long, just holding your hands. Hoping that maybe if I stood there long enough they'd stop being so cold, but it didn't work." Slowly, she inches toward him and kneels beside his chair. "We know exactly what it's like to not have you in our lives. And no one is going to voluntarily go back to that. You mean too much to us."
They sit there quietly for a moment before Phil opens his hand to her. She clutches it in both of hers for dear life.
