Everyone in the room froze.

Banner was the first to speak. "I knew we couldn't trust SHIELD."

Natasha didn't move a muscle as she answered, "Barton is manipulating you. I'm not sure why. Perhaps to turn you against SHIELD. Perhaps to goad you into attacking SHIELD so they have an excuse to imprison you."

"How the fuck am I manipulating them?" hissed Clint from the ceiling. "You're the one who's had Phil Coulson alive and decided not to tell anyone."

Natasha didn't answer Clint at all. Instead, she said, "Barton's accusation is based on SHIELD data which he claims to have viewed, conveniently far away from any witnesses. I'm sure now he'll offer to show his findings, but – again, conveniently – the access codes will no longer work."

Bruce shook his head. "He didn't leave last night to be secretive, he left because-"

Natasha interrupted him, "Because he had a fight with Captain Rogers? Hm, no. He quite obviously intentionally picked a fight with the Captain to give himself an excuse to leave and plan. Think about it. Dr. Banner has told us his parents were hippies. The child of such parents will either be quite liberal, like them, or rebel and become extremely conservative, but Banner's told us that he listens to Glen Beck to anger himself, so it's obviously option A. Mr. Stark is fiscally conservative insofar as he doesn't like to pay his taxes, but his libertine philosophy of sex is well known. And then there is Steve Rogers, who comes from an era in which Marilyn Monroe's thigh was considered risqué. If he were really looking for support or sympathy, his choice was exceedingly poor."

"That's your argument?" shouted Clint indignantly. "That's the kind of crazy plan that you come up with, not me! I don't plan that far ahead. Just because everyone's political leanings are obvious to you doesn't mean that somebody like me can-"

"Hang on," said Tony, looking up at Clint, "you're saying we should trust you because you're too stupid to deceive us?"

"Yes! That's exactly what I'm saying! She's trying to distract you!"

"But why did you bring that up with me?" asked Steve, straightforward, a genuine question that had frankly been on his mind. Barton's statement the previous night had seemed to come out of nowhere and Natasha made a good, if vaguely insulting, point.

Clint exhaled through bare teeth, but otherwise remained perfectly still, arrow still cocked at the ready. "His funeral was today," he said low voice, "Phil's funeral. And I wanted to attend, but his family, they're not-. I figured if I could convince you to go with me, who would say no to Captain America, right? I didn't want to make a scene, I just wanted to be there, okay? Now you know and knowing is half the battle or whatever." He huffed, embarrassed and angry.

"You couldn't go to-" Steve began, but Bruce cut him off with a gesture and a look that promised to explain later.

"If he's alive," said Bruce, "then what was buried at the funeral?"

"Easy," answered Clint, "SHIELD agents are always cremated so no one can steal our biomarkers. Ashes all look the same."

"It's not that I don't love a good game of he-said/she-said/Blade-wannabe-airship-commando-said," Tony paused to give everyone in the room a moment to realize that the last clause referred to Nick Fury, "but I want Thai food for dinner and it's going to be really awkward for the delivery guy if he walks into the middle of a standoff."

"Stark is right," said Steve, eyes briefly widening in surprise at his agreement before they narrowed and he looked serious again. "This isn't how we're going to argue. Agent Romanov, Agent Barton, disarm yourselves."

Clint laxed his bow as Natasha placed both of her guns on the floor, but he held back from returning his arrow to the quiver. "All of it, Nat," he said.

Romanov sighed, then produced another gun, three knives, and what appeared to be a miniaturized taser.

"Where did you keep all that?" asked Tony. "Did you have a knife in your hair? How would that even work? I'm terrified but oddly aroused."

Steve glared. "Stark, could you focus on the problem at hand and stop thinking with your dick for one minute?"

"I happen to have an extraordinarily intelligent dick," answered Tony smugly.

Clint hooked his bow over his shoulder and dropped down from the lighting fixture. He sounded miserable and exhausted. "Why are you trying to play both sides? Are you really going to try to string me out here?"

When a strategy stopped working, Natasha abandoned it. It would have been best if she could have isolated Clint from the others; it would be hard enough convincing him to behave rationally without throwing Banner's paranoia, Stark's rebellion at all authority, and Rogers' deep-set misunderstanding of modern medicine into the mix. But she clearly wasn't succeeding in convincing the others to shy away from Clint, so she switched to friendship and honesty – not often the best policy, but she wasn't so hardened as to rule it out as a matter of course. "It's been almost a year," she answered Clint with a blasé smile, "we were due for some light betrayal." Then she let her eyes fall just a fraction of an inch. "And I was trying to protect you."

"From what?" Clint spat.

"He's not alive, Clint," she whispered. "It's just his body. He's stuck under. He's not Phil. And yes," she breathed sadly, "we've discussed destroying the body, but not until every feasible solution has been tried."

"Under," said Bruce. "What exactly do you mean, 'under'?"

"Under Loki's spell," answered Clint. His face was blank and his eyes were unfocused. "He was stabbed through the heart with the staff, it must have…Nat, I've got to see him."

"He's being kept on the detention level, which you can't access now that they've kicked down your security clearance. What if there's still some influence over you that could get information from him?"

"Doesn't anybody trust anybody around here?" Steve ran his fingers through his hair.

"It's a practical question." Natasha furrowed her brow at Clint. "How are you going to get into there without security clearance?"

"I'll…" He rolled his eyes from side to side as he tried to think of an idea. "I'll slap handcuffs on you and say I've taken you prisoner. People would believe it," he added just a bit meanly.

"Barton," she sighed, "you have got to stop basing your plans off something you saw in Star Wars."

"That ewok thing would have worked if you hadn't stopped me." Clint pouted, which was arguably an improvement over the unfocused expression of grief he had worn a few moments earlier.

"Mr. Stark," interrupted Jarvis, "there is a phone call for you from Dr. Jane Foster's line."

Tony glanced at everyone in the room and decided they could use the interruption. "Put her through."

"GREETINGS, MY METAL-ENCRUSTED BROTHER-IN-ARMS! I HAVE RETURNED TO THINE REALM ONCE MORE!"


Tony Stark could hardly recall ever having enjoyed Thai food less. Thor's phone call was okay, if only because Thor had apparently reached the conclusion that they were all miniaturized and residing in Jane's phone. He had also assumed that since they were many miles away, he would have to shout at the top of his lungs, but honestly, that wasn't much of a change from his usual volume.

Once they'd finished talking, though, and Thor had promised to visit them soon in the mighty city of York – "It's New York, buddy." – they were back where they'd been only moments ago, in an uncomfortable stalemate.

Barton was standing off to the side, standing perfectly still save for occasional blinking. He'd been silent ever since he'd been grudgingly convinced not to storm the battlements. Natasha was explaining what was known about the situation, what had already been tried and ruled out as a solution.

"He was examined yesterday by a telepath named Ruth Aldine – trained at Xavier's, but not by him. They finally got her security clearances through. She reported that there was certainly information in Coulson's mind, information that only Coulson was likely to know, but there was no organizing principle, no sense of self, no desires or beliefs."

"Like a hard drive with no operating system," mused Tony. "And you've already tried rebooting him, so you need to reinstall…" He stuffed a forkful of noodles into his mouth.

Bruce had deliberately chosen a seat as far from Natasha as possible, closer to the door than she was. Given this evening's events, he was nursing a worry that her attempts to draw his blood this morning hadn't just been for show.

"And now that Thor has returned," said Natasha, "we'll contact him. He may know something about the nature of the enchantment."

"And then you're out of ideas," said Clint. He was holding a plate of food, but he hadn't eaten any. This was magic; it didn't play by logic, but Clint knew that Phil couldn't be maintained in this state indefinitely. So once they were out of ideas… He stabbed at some sort of yellowish-green vegetable.

They lapsed into silence.

Steve suddenly looked at Clint and said, "Doesn't it bother you that she," he tipped his head back at Natasha, "just tried to convince us that you were some kind of double agent?"

Clint shrugged. "Not really. That's her thing."

"I thought the two of you have worked together before, though," said Steve.

"Yeah, so?"

"How can you fight alongside someone you don't trust?"

"It ain't like that," said Clint. "You're from the army. They train you to rely on each other, watch each other's backs, a band-of-brothers kind of thing. SHIELD's different, at least the black ops part is. We have our assignments and we work to accomplish them, but we might not have the same goals. We might even be working at cross-purposes." He shrugged again. "I trust that Tasha wouldn't kill me without a really good reason. Beyond that, it'd just be wishful thinking."

"We can't function like that," said Steve. "We're supposed to be a team. It has to be based on more than just agreeing to not kill each other."

"It'd be a step up for me," said Bruce. "If I could stick with a group of people and be sure they weren't trying to kill me, I'd be pretty happy with that."

"Here, here!" Tony hoisted his beer in a toast.

Steve thought back to Tony's file, how his close family friend had hired a group of terrorists to kill him, and to Bruce's file, how he'd been hunted across four continents. He rubbed his thumb in circles over the tip of his index finger, as he often did when he was thinking. "No," he said finally. "No, we can't operate that way."

"We barely know each other," pointed out Natasha. "What exactly are you hoping for?"

"It's not immediate," answered Steve. "It can't be and it shouldn't be. But we can't just settle for the bare minimum. We don't know each other; we should try to learn. This doesn't work unless we trust each other as people, not just as vaguely reliable combat machines."

Steve's jaw jutted forward and he looked so perfectly, disgustingly All-American that Tony suppressed a burp and said, "So, is it true that you piss amber waves of grain? Because that always sounded really uncomfortable, like patriotic gonorrhea."

Bruce munched on his bean sprouts thoughtfully. "What exactly are you suggesting, Rogers?"

"I don't know," said Steve, "but I think everyone in this room could use a few friends."

"Thank you, Captain After-School Special," said Tony. "I couldn't agree more. I think we should start with friendship bracelets and make t-shirts and then have sleepovers and braid each other's hair – hey, Thor got back from Asgard just in time; he's got some pretty elaborate coiffage up there."


"Okay, Thor," said Darcy, "now you give it a try." She was supposed to entertain the Asgardian while Jane ensured that data from his arrival portal was compiling correctly.

"Knock knock," said Thor, in a deep, stentorian timbre.

"Who's there?" asked Darcy patiently.

"THOR!"

"Thor who?"

"THOR! GOD OF THUNDER!"

"No, Thor, see, it's not supposed to be your name. It's supposed to be a joke." Darcy smiled. Jane really needed to stock up on tequila. "Try it again."

Thor's eyes narrowed in thought. "Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Volstagg!"

"Volstagg who?"

"Volstagg the Voluminous!"

"Okay, at least it wasn't your name, but it's supposed to be a joke."

"Volstagg tells many jokes!"

"Here," said Darcy, "have more liquor."