Darcy came back from her meeting with Fury wearing a side arm and a new job as "Cat herder. I'm supposed to keep you all from killing each other until Fury can assign a permanent liaison. Then I'll be that person's assistant. Any comments?"
Tony opened his mouth to say something and Bruce put a hand over it. "No comments, Miss Lewis. Welcome to the asylum."
Steve shook her hand and called her ma'am. She threatened to shoot him if he did it again. This made him blush, which Natasha made note of if she ever needed to seduce him.
Clint was gone again.
When Clint came back, he looked like he hadn't slept since he left. He didn't talk to anyone, just went to his room and slept for eighteen hours.
"Should we... do something?" Steve had a worried look on his face and he got to his feet. "He looks awful. Fury shouldn't be pushing him so hard."
"Sit back down." Tony dropped another pancake on Steve's plate. "Leave him alone. Have you ever been tortured, Steve?"
Steve got that look that meant he was thinking of Bucky, but he said "No."
"Well, you're the only one in this room. He's coping, even if you don't like it." Tony passed the plate to Bruce. "You need to eat more, Big Guy. Natasha?"
"No, thank you." He doesn't talk about Afghanistan anymore, not to anyone, but he must have told Bruce because the man didn't as much as raise an eyebrow but Steve looked like someone had punched him in the gut. Natasha could sympathize, she'd felt that way a lot lately.
When Clint woke up, Natasha was looming over him. "Do you remember, when you promised never to lie to me?"
"Yes." To his credit he didn't scramble back or flinch.
"You also said as an Agent, my body would be my own. That SHEILD would never order me to fuck anyone."
"It never has." He looked confused. "Natasha-"
"But it was asked of you. You never loved him, did you? You can pretend all you want, but I know you. You're happy he's dead." She wanted to ring his neck, to scream. Phil had been her friend and he had no idea what Fury had done. "He wouldn't have forced you. If Fury was holding something over your head, he would have helped you. Do you even enjoy fucking men, or did you sleep with Coulson all those years for your country?"
"You don't know anything. Get out of my room." His face was cold and blank again, and she rolled off him and left the room without another word.
Her sense of self was coming apart. She had rebuilt her humanity on trust in Clint. He had never lied to her or manipulated her. Except, apparently, the lie of omission, the assumption that he had loved his husband. As she punched the heavy bag, Natasha wondered if Clint would have gone on with it forever, if Coulson hadn't died, if he would have someday gone to his own death with one of Coulson's dog tags in his wallet.
When the bag split, after a particularly viscous punch, a voice came from behind her. "I've never seen anyone else do that." Steve had slipped in, probably looking for a chance to demolish the heavy bag himself.
"The Red Room does good work." It was either the bag, or Clint's face. For the sake of the team, she'd beaten the bag.
Steve watched her unwrap her hands, making sure that she hadn't hurt herself too badly, before he spoke again. "You're really angry. Is there anything I can do?"
"I lost someone, a long time ago. Tonight, I miss him very much." James had taught her how to bend and not break, but after all these years at SHIELD, she seemed to have lost the knack.
He sat down on the floor and patted the space next to him. "I understand loss. You're on your own turning on the TV. I need JARVIS to do it for me."
"I don't think I can trust SHIELD anymore." She almost choked on the words. If she was not Natasha Romanoff, Agent of SHIELD, then who was she?
"I agree. We don't know who's pulling his strings, but I won't work for a group that would use nuclear weapons on civilians. Tony and I have been talking, he's willing to have us all here permanently. Miss Potts has offered us financial backing and..." Steve trailed off. "They gave everything to Peggy, when I died. She and Howard invested it. He was so sure I was coming back he left a provision in his will holding it in trust until I came back. It's a lot. I don't want any of it. We can use it to get started."
The pressure on her chest receded a little. She could be an Avenger, she could follow Steve's lead. Phil would have approved. "Thank you, Steve. That helps." If she had lost Clint, at least she hadn't lost everything.
Clint was on the phone and he thought he was alone. He had been particularly distracted the past week, or she wouldn't have been able to get away with it. "I'm on my way, I promise. Do you want me to bring anything?" He laughed at whoever was on the other end of the line. "I always bring that. I was talking about dinner." He sounded happy and affectionate and she wanted to kill whoever it was he was talking to, just because they weren't Phil. "Okay, I'll order the pizza and then I'll head out. See you soon." He killed the call and placed an order for pizza and wings and asked for them to be delivered to a hotel nearby.
He was gone all night and in the morning he was so cheerful at breakfast Tony asked for ID before he'd give him coffee. Clint leaned against the counter and talked to Steve about baseball and Natasha couldn't take it anymore. She left her half eaten bagel on the plate and put on her shoes.
It wasn't a long walk to the hotel and it wasn't hard to get into the elevator. The card readers were never meant to keep out someone with her skill set. Room 1247 was as nondescript as every other room in the hall and there was a Do Not Disturb sign hung on the knob. She knocked, and stepped aside so whoever it was couldn't see her through the peep hole. She had no idea who could be in the room and she didn't want to get a shotgun to the face.
If Nick Fury himself had answered, she wouldn't have blinked. Maria or Jasper, she could see. But when Phil Coulson answered, holding Clint's sunglasses in one hand and saying, "Forget something?" all she could do was draw her gun.
"Good morning?" He took a step back and held open the door for her. "Did Clint tell you where I was, or has JARVIS gotten back into the servers?"
"Neither." He was shirtless and there wasn't even a scar. "I saw the video. Phil was stabbed through the chest. If you're him, if by some miracle you survived that, where's your scar?"
"An experimental procedure. I've been in a coma since the attack on the Carrier. I only woke up last week and I just got out of the hospital yesterday." He was calm enough to be Phil, staring at her, ignoring the gun pointed at him. "I suppose one day to myself was too much to ask. Are the rest of them outside?"
It could have been a legitimate question, or he could have been probing for weaknesses. She decided to ignore it. "I'm going to need proof."
"Call Fury." There was bad reality TV on mute, another point for it actually being Phil.
"No matter how you cut it, Fury lies. Either he lied about you being dead or you're some facsimile and he'd lie about that." They could be running some kind of game on Clint, with an LMD. "How long has Clint known?"
"Fury isn't a monster, Natasha. He never let Clint think I was dead." Phil glanced at her gun. "Are you going to shoot me, or would you like breakfast?"
"Proof, then breakfast." She wasn't sure what he could tell her that she would believe, but she'd let him try.
Phil sat down at a table where his own breakfast was half eaten. "I suppose I could tell you something only the two of us would know, but I don't think that would work. So I'm going to tell you something only Phil Coulson could know and you can decide if you still want to shoot me. I've got a grapefruit, I think we're evenly matched."
"Alright."
If she had been expecting something about Clint, she was wrong. There was a small box on the table and torn wrapping paper in the trash can. He opened the box and pulled out a stack of cards. He took one out of the pack and set it on the table where she could see it. "I can tell you the identity of the Winter Soldier."
It was James, rifle slung over one shoulder, looking off into the distance. It wasn't a photograph though, not exactly. She flipped it over to find a block of text on the back, identifying the photo as being of James 'Bucky' Barnes, a sharp shooter who had served with the Howling Commandos. "This is one of your trading cards."
"A replacement, actually, but yes, it's a Captain America trading card. When we brought you in and you described him, described the Infinity Serum, I knew. I didn't tell anyone, not even Fury. I didn't think it mattered, then." Phil very calmly put jam on his toast, like they were talking about the weather.
It was something that only Coulson could know, something only he could have put together. She holstered the gun. "You have five minutes to tell me why I shouldn't hurt Fury for doing this to us."
"Until last week, I wasn't expected to live. He thought he was letting Clint be with me when I died, but I hung on. I wasn't getting any better, but I wasn't going to die on my own either. Without the technology from Futurepharm, I would still be unconscious in a hospital bed."
He offered her a piece of the toast, and she took it. "I may have said some pretty terrible things to Clint. Accused him of never loving you, of being Fury's pawn."
"I know." He poured her a cup of coffee. "But it's Clint. He can't hold a grudge, no matter how awful people are to him. He'll forgive you."
She took the cup and took a sip. It was dark and strong, but not bitter. There was a French press on the breakfast tray, another mark for Phil being Phil. "You'll be coming back to the Tower with me, when we're done with breakfast. I'm sorry about your day off, but the others deserve to know."
"And you'll be able to subject me to invasive testing." He drained his cup and went to get a shirt. The scar on his back where he had caught a blade five years ago and she stitched him up herself is still there and finally, it feels like she can breathe again.
They made it all the way out of the lobby before Fury intercepted them in a black sedan. "Both of you get in. We're doing this my way."
She hadn't been gone long, just an hour or so, and the others were in the communal TV room watching 'The Day the Earth Stood Still.' They walked in just as Steve was saying, "-assumed everyone would have robots by now. Tony's the only person I've met who's actually living the future how I imagined it. It's actually…" He was facing the door and trailed off when he caught sight of Fury. "Director. We weren't expecting you."
Fury walked over to the TV and turned it off. "As of right now, the Avengers are an independent group, outside the purview of the World Security Council. I hope you people appreciate all the bullshit I had to go through to make this possible. The only condition is that SHIELD be allowed to place a liaison with your team, so we can provide you with the support you need the next time the world goes to hell. I believe you all know Agent Coulson."
The room exploded into noise, and Natasha grabbed the seat on the couch next to Clint as Tony, Steve and Bruce ganged up on Fury. "Bruce seems pretty upset."
Fury wasn't going down without a fight. "You needed a push. You were never going to work together without one. I did what was necessary."
"He's fine." Clint paused the movie. "I couldn't tell you. For weeks, they kept telling me he was going to die, that there was nothing they could do. Why risk everything to tell you, when he was going to die anyway?"
"I'm sorry for the things I said." Natasha didn't apologize very often but she had hurt Clint. "I should have trusted you. You never gave me a reason not to."
"Yeah, you should have. You said some shitty things to me, Nat." He held out his arm though, and she tucked herself under it as they watched the situation continue to devolve. "Bets on who's going to punch him in the face first?"
It turned out the smart money had been on Pepper, who had showed up right around the time Fury had finished slowly backing out of the TV room to the elevator. He'd almost made it out when the doors opened and Pepper hit him in the back of his head with her briefcase. He dropped like a stone and Pepper stepped over him with a sigh. "Tony, get this man out of my Tower. JARVIS, please revoke the Director's overrides and call him a cab."
Tony looked at Fury, then back at Pepper. He looked like a man very much in love. "Pepper has never needed a push."
They had schwarma delivered for lunch, at Tony's insistence, since Phil had missed it the first time.
Halfway through his pita, Tony started eyeing him suspiciously. "Are we sure he's not a robot? I'd always suspected he was a robot. They could have just booted up a new copy. How would we know the difference?"
"He's not a robot." Clint threw a piece of lettuce at Tony's head. "Robots don't spend weeks in a coma scaring the shit out of people."
"I said I was sorry." Phil said it like they'd had this conversation quite frequently the past week.
"You're not sorry, and we both know it." Clint sounded both annoyed and fond and he was reaching out to steal the container of sauce from Phil's plate when there was a loud crash on the balcony outside. "Company."
The balcony doors flew open and Thor walked in, looking very much like one would imagine a Norse god striding into a room would. "My friends. I apologize for my delay in returning, but I journeyed to Valhalla looking for the Son of Coul. He was not among the honored dead there, so I went to speak to my niece. She has…" Thor trailed off as he noticed Phil on the couch. "If you were going to go on an epic quest to retrieve our lost comrade, you could have summoned me." He sounded very affronted.
Clint held out a foil wrapped pita as a peace offering. "It's a long story, but there was no epic quest to the land of the dead. It involved a lot of sitting and worrying, mostly."
"Such tales are also worth telling."
"Not today." If anyone besides Natasha had been paying attention, they would have noticed Clint's fingers first tangle with Phil's then squeeze.
She hid her smile in her food. All was once again right in her world.
