I don't own Agents Of SHIELD.

Delayed. Again. I know. Sorry. I'll put the final chapter up later today to make up for it! :)

Set during 3.09 Closure.

Nature abhors a vacuum; idiom; empty spaces are unnatural as they go against the laws of nature; any empty space must be filled with something.


9. Interrogation V


May crosses her legs, straightening once more into her interrogator pose. "Would you care to explain that, Agent Coulson? You mentioned pendulums earlier tonight, and again just now. What do you mean? And what does Agent Barton have to do with former Agent Grant Ward?"

"Most systems," says Phil, blinking eyelids that feel heavier than they should, "assume a state of entropy. Meaning chaos. Everything starts neat and slowly spirals into disorder."

"With you so far. Go on."

"We're the opposite. Not SHIELD in general, I don't think. But my teams, yeah. I'm not saying it's an instantaneous process. I mean, it's taken years to get to this point."

"What process?"

"Loss of momentum. Homeostasis. Elasticity, resilience. Call it what you will. At its most basic, a loss of momentum and a general increasing tendency toward…" He can't think of the word. He waves a hand toward Clint.

"Homogeneity?" Clint suggests.

"That's the one, thank you. We're like a pendulum. We start out with all these differences, swinging wildly from side to side, every which way, all over the place. But over time we lose momentum. We become more and more like each other. We gravitate toward the intersection of ourselves and other people. Our arcs get smaller and smaller. And one day we will have lost all modicum of difference, of impetus, and we'll be sitting right at the bottom of the arc and we'll be just like everyone else."

Skye shivers. "That sounds cheerful. Not."

"It's only a theory."

"A convincing one," Natasha murmurs. "Unless, chemically speaking, we all combust first."

"Because that's super likely," mutters Clint, rolling his eyes.

Natasha digs him in the ribs.

"As for what Clint has to do with Ward — it's more what Clint has to do with me, and I have to do with Ward. Because the intersection of Clint's arc and Ward's arc? Is one Agent Coulson. Me."

"Explain," May orders.

He blows out a breath. "Do you ever wonder if we're just perpetuating the cycle?"

"No."

"Have you ever imprinted on a recruit?" It isn't talked about, but they all know it happens. Imprinting runs both ways.

He notices how her eyes very carefully don't slide towards Skye. "No."

Liar, Phil thinks. But he doesn't blame her. She's always been careful about what she says on the record.

"Ever had a recruit imprint on you?" he asks.

"Of course."

"And when they graduated, they probably had a recruit imprint on them, right? It's practically tradition."

"Probably," she says. "Why?"

"Perpetuating the cycle. We become more and more like each other. And we repeat each other's actions over and over. Like recruiting. And imprinting. And breaking rules for the sake of the people we've imprinted on."

"You imprinted on Barton?"

"I thought that was obvious."

"And?"

"I recruited Clint, who imprinted on me and vice versa. He recruited Natasha — with my blessing, admittedly — and, again, they imprinted. Even our method of recruitment was eerily similar: a bullet to the calf, followed by swift first aid and a long lecture. It's a blasted Master-Padawan chain, no matter who's involved. He's gone on become Recruitment Manager for the Avengers, you know. Just like I've been recruiting for SHIELD overall."

"I learned from the best," Clint says. "Meaning you, Master Kenobi."

Phil blinks. It doesn't surprise him that Clint's thought about this; it does surprise him that he's decided Phil is — "Kenobi? Really?"

"Diplomat, warrior, knows the rules inside out and breaks them on very rare occasions? Yes."

"That would make Fury… yeah, okay, maverick, I see your point."

"Unfortunately, it also makes me Anakin."

"Maverick again," Phil says with grin. "Just don't go dark side on us and we'll be fine."

A thought occurs, and the grin widens. The analogy fits better than most of the team knows. Both Clint and Anakin had rocky childhoods; they're both natural loners with very close bonds to a very few people; they both had spectacular anger issues when they were younger; and they both have hidden families.

May clears her throat. "And Ward? Leaving Star Wars out of it, if you don't mind."

She's always been more of Trekkie.

Phil grimaces. "John Garrett recruited Ward. And he was Ward's S.O., which usually isn't allowed but I suspect he pulled some strings. Maybe got Fury involved — Nick was Garrett's S.O. And my S.O, too. Ironic, huh?"

"Is it?" The question is clearly rhetorical.

"Garrett and Ward, Ward and Skye, Skye and… Joey? I guess. Although the circumstances are different there. Maybe there's hope for us yet. And with any luck you broke the cycle yourself, May. When you took Skye on after Ward betrayed us, murdered Eric Koenig, Victoria Hand, Tim Jones, and Daniel Danielson, and freed John Garrett from custody."

Skye shifts uncomfortably in her seat. Simmons presses in beside her, offering wordless comfort. That's one thing Phil's found to be grateful for: in all the double-crossing that went on, friends backstabbing friends, adopted family turning out to be lying bastards, at least he hadn't had the grief of finding out his S.O. was a Hydra sleeper agent.

Garrett was bad enough. He and Phil had been friends for a long time.

Ward was worse. Knowing that they'd had a Hydra agent in their team, under their noses, eating and sleeping and laughing with them for the best part of a year… it gave Phil the shivers.

But Fury? Even if he hadn't been Director, Nick Fury turning out to be Hydra would have broken them.

Not just Phil.

All of them.

Nick hadn't only been Garrett and Coulson's S.O. The man had taken on a lot of new agents over the years. Tens. Dozens. More than that, maybe.

"Ward hadn't been doing his job properly anyway," May says. "I don't know if you've compared the records of her progress under him and her progress under me…"

"Of course I have," Phil says. "She's halved her milestone times since you took over. But she was Ward's first recruit. She'll be your… what, fifth?"

"Sixth."

"You'd had experience as a Supervising Officer. He hadn't. Plus, he was young; Skye's not. Uh." He fumbles momentarily. "He probably got distracted. Is what I mean."

"Smooth, A.C." Skye smirks.

"And Fitz?" May asks.

"What?"

"You said Barton and Coulson and Fitz and Ward. Where does Fitz fit into it?"

Phil rubs his temple. Darts a glance at Fitz. He has to be careful what he says here. "Perpetuating the cycle," he says again. "We take kids in. Try to give them a home, you know. It's how the system is designed, it's why we imprint on our R.O.'s and S.O.'s and ducklings. I guess I always thought it might be enough. But Ward…" He shakes his head. Seeks out May's gaze. "Where did we go wrong?"

"We didn't," she says. "He did."

"But if we'd caught it early enough — "

"What, you mean if you'd been his Recruiting Officer instead of Garrett? If we'd found him even before that, before he was in juvie? No. Some kids are just born bad."

"Careful, Agent May," Phil says, stifling a grin. "Dangerous ground. It's not a good night to be debating original sin."

Mack looks between them, confusion clear. Phil contains an eye roll with an effort. Mack's a good guy, but he's far from having a monopoly on critical thought and religious reasoning.

"What Ward did," May says. "That's not normal behaviour. You know he tried to burn his family's house to ground."

"I also know his father neglected him and his brother flat-out abused him both physically and emotionally." There are parallels in any family — even adopted ones. He doesn't look at Clint. "It's not an uncommon story in SHIELD. Or in the military. Or in any other organisation like ours. Hell, it's practically why we recruit those kids."

"Why, because they're already broken?"

"No. Because they've got less to lose. They know how to survive, they know what it's like to create a family of choice. They're the lucky ones, in a way." And now he knows he's tired, far too tired for this, because he has to fight to keep the bitterness out of his voice. "They've never had to walk away from their own flesh and blood in the name of keeping them safe. Never had to find out about the funeral from a memo passed from department to department for the last six months."

He meets Simmons' eyes, sees the flash of pain there. It's been hard on her, he knows. Of them all, she's the one most attached to the life she's left behind. The normal life.

Clint straightens. "Your mother died?"

"Yeah," Phil says. "When I was in Tahiti. I died, she died, and then, surprise, I wasn't dead after all."

"I'm sorry, man. I would've been there. If I'd known."

"I know."

"Even if you had been dead."

"I know," he says again. Clint and Nat going to his mother's funeral without him is not something he wants to think about. "Thanks."

"You'd rather we used different recruiting methods?" May asks.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because in the end, it doesn't matter. It's why any biological family we've got left is dead, or they think we're dead, or they're estranged or hidden away somewhere or they haven't heard from us in years. All the paths come out to the same end. However SHIELD finds us — a college student trying to support a sick mother, an Intelligence Agency brat shifting from base to base, a foster kid from St Agnes' living in a van on the street — " he motions to himself, May, and Skye in turn, "— it doesn't matter. We make our family where we find it."

"We are all of us lost," Clint recites softly. "The best we can do is make whatever we're lost in as much like home as we can."

"Clearly Ward didn't get that memo," Skye mutters. But Phil catches the quick, curious dart of her eyes to May. She hadn't known about May's background? Interesting. Not unpredictable — May's always been private, even rivalling Phil in that respect — but interesting.

"It's not a job," says May. "It's a lifestyle."

"Exactly," Phil agrees.

"And Rosalind?"

Of course she knew his thoughts had swung back around to Ros. "I don't know," Phil says simply. He's got nothing. No energy. No conviction. It'll come back. But for now… he's drained. "You always said dating civilians never turns out well."

"And then I married Andrew," she says. "Which was fine. Until Bahrain."

"Yeah. I'm sorry." He's not talking about Bahrain, and she knows it. "That I didn't tell you I was seeing him."

Beside him, Clint wolf-whistles.

Phil ignores it.

"Phil." May looks pained. "You didn't have to tell me."

"Maybe not, but I should have. He's your ex-husband."

"He was your therapist," she returns. "I was married to him for five years, I know all about client confidentiality."

"You know why we don't get involved with civilians, too, huh."

"He understood."

"But he didn't approve."

"No."

Andrew had always seen the problems in the system. Had always had trouble looking past them.

"I thought… with Audrey… But that didn't work. Postmortem relationships aren't the best. It wouldn't have been fair on her. And Rosalind…" Phil frowns. "I thought we had a chance. She wasn't a civilian. Not any more than I am. But she wasn't a SHIELD agent either."

"Does that matter?"

"Yes."

"Relationships down the hierarchy are against SHIELD protocol."

"Within the same team," he says. "Like you and Ward. Which I turned a blind eye to. You're welcome."

"You're the Director." The words would be gentle coming from anyone else. "It's all the same team. Why do you think Fury was perpetually single?"

"Because he's Fury."

She concedes that with a nod.

"I'm not Fury." He shifts his weight and settles again. Draws the conversation back onto firm ground. They need to wrap this debrief up before he crashes fully. "No, I made a mistake. Tonight. For the record."

May leans forward. "What do you mean?"

"I forgot." He stops. Starts again. "No, that's not true. I ignored the fact that Rosalind Price wasn't a SHIELD agent. She'd done years of undercover work, yeah, but she'd never been a field agent. She's not like us; she doesn't see a threat in every open doorway and exposed pane of glass, a weapon in every knife and pen and candle. I never saw her make sure the room was clear before she relaxed. She didn't check the delivery guy's ID, she hardly even locked her doors when she drove."

"Some would say that's a good thing. That she wasn't paranoid."

"In our line of work?" He shakes his head, too exhausted even to laugh. "You're either paranoid or you're dead. I'll give you two guesses as to which one she is — and you won't need the second."

"Okay. So?"

"So it was my job. To clear the room, to lock the doors, to do all the thousand and one things that we do every second by instinct. But tonight — " he draws a sharp breath through his nose, "— tonight I failed. If I'd just closed the damn curtains — "

"If you'd closed the curtains," May says steadily, "it wouldn't have made a difference. Ward would have marked your position beforehand. Or used thermal imaging. Or tracked the GPS on her phone, or done a dozen other things. She'd still be dead, Phil." She stares him down, unblinking. "You need to understand that. You can't bring her back. Nobody can."

He snorts. "Yeah, only Nick can resurrect people. And I'm not him, I know. I wouldn't wish that on anyone."

"Not even Ward?"

"Well, I suppose it might save us some trouble if he begs us to let him die." The echo of his own words come back to him, please let me die let me die let me die please, and he shudders. "No. Not that. Not even on him."

"You know, they say mercy is the mark of a great man."

"Mercy?" This time he does laugh. "This isn't mercy. Mercy would be letting him die, giving him a quick and clean death."

"What's your plan, then?"

"I don't have one." He cocks his head to the side, stares blindly past May. The movement feels familiar in a strange way. Like someone else borrowing his skin. "Not yet. But I will."

He anticipates the movement more than sees it, and catches Clint's hand an inch from making contact with his arm. Blinks. "I'm here. And I'm exhausted. Can we wrap this up?"

Simmons and Skye are nodding off, heads drooping together on the couch. Fitz is making a valiant effort at staying awake, but his eyes are half-closed. Mack and Hunter and even Bobbi are looking weary.

It's been a long night.

Natasha and Clint are quiet but alert. Nat's curled into Clint's chest, her head in the crook of his shoulder, his arm around her back. They watch him watch them without saying a word.

"Last question," says May. She glances at the transcript. "Ward said, I just wanted to hear the panic in your voice before you died. That was the last thing he said?"

"Yes."

"What happened then?"

"I died," Phil says, deadpan.

May eyeballs him.

"Oh, no, sorry, that was 2012. Wrong year. Correction for the record: I didn't die."

She waits. It's a very deliberate wait.

"Ward's ground assault team stormed the place." They all know debriefs can cause certain reactions to resurface. Associative memories, and all that. Phil can't stop the dart of his eyes to the stairs, the doors, the kitchen at the far end of the room, now shrouded in darkness. "One point guard with a tail, two-man reinforcement team, another two at the elevator, and at least two more on the street. Probably four on the street, but I can't be sure. Agent — sorry, Acting Commander Mackenzie? You extracted me. How many did you see?"

"Two on the street engaging you," Mack says. "One guarding the back door. One at the corner of the street. Probably a few more around the front of the building, but that's conjecture."

"Conjecture wins battles," murmurs Clint.

"Or gets people killed."

He tips his head, acknowledging the point.

"You fought your way out?" asks May.

"I may have gone to ," says Phil mildly, "but I'm still a field agent." It's an old joke. "Yes. I fought my way out."

"Academy of Communications has nothing to do with it." Is that fear in May's eyes? Surely not. He can handle himself, and she knows it. "There were a lot of them, Phil. And they didn't sound like new recruits."

"Sure. They were good. But I was… better."

"Want to give us the play-by-play?"

He's always hated that phrase. "I'll summarise. I knocked the gun out of the point guard's hand and engaged in a close-quarters brawl. It was messy. Inelegant. I really am Kenobi, aren't I? Damn."

Natasha chokes on a laugh.

"Used Number One as a shield when the next guy burst in. He took four bullets to the back. Another two went in the ceiling when I forced Two's arm up. His pistol went flying, I don't know where. I knocked him out." He brushes a light finger over the bruised knuckles of his flesh hand.

"You didn't have a gun on you?"

"I did, but it was over the far side of the room. Didn't have time. Plus…" Phil holds up his prosthetic hand. "It's fine when the gun's already primed. But loading and setting the magazine still takes too long."

She nods.

"I knew Ward wouldn't have stopped at two. Heard noises outside. Set up a distraction — candles and an aerosol can — grabbed One's gun and waited for the next guys to show up. Shot Three and Four dead while they were watching the fireworks, went down the hall and nearly copped a bullet to the face from the two at the elevator. I shot Number Five, winged Six, and decided a strategic retreat was in order. Took a shortcut to the street."

"And by shortcut you mean — "

"I went out the window, yeah. Hence all the glass you had to dig out of me. Two storey drop, landed hard on a pile of rubbish bags. I'll be feeling it tomorrow."

"Better than being dead," she says dryly.

"Being dead didn't hurt. Speaking from experience."

"Didn't hurt you, maybe."

"Point. Sorry. Anyway. I went out the window. Took cover behind a dumpster, held off the guys on the street while I waited for extraction. Shot Number Seven. Mack turned up a minute later in the SUV and laid down covering fire. Extraction was a success, and here we are." He yawns. "Sorry."

"Stop damn well apologising, Overwatch," Clint says.

Phil slides him a look that is both unimpressed and quietly amused, and turns back to May. "Anything else you want to know?" He should know if there is, he's done enough debriefs, but right now his brain is fried.

The corner of May's mouth tucks downward in a gentle negative. "That's everything for the initial report. Might need a follow-up in the next couple of days; we'll see. But for now? No. We're done here. Acting Director May declaring this debrief closed at thirteen minutes past midnight on January 23rd, 2016." She shuts off the audio recorder on her phone, stops the video camera, and says, soft but firm, "Get some rest, Phil."

Rest. That's funny. Every muscle aches with exhaustion, his limbs are weighed down with tiredness, but his mind churns, skittering from one thought to the next while his eyes seek out the shadows and exits of the room. It's like a bad case of jet lag from the years before he learnt to hit seven time zones in two days without missing a blink. His body craves sleep while his mind burns with energy.

"He will," Clint says.

Phil looks around the circle. Meets the eyes looking back, his team openly worried or shocked or angry, sympathetic, fatigued by turns. "Thank you," he says. The words aren't much. But they're all he has to offer. And he means every morae and chroneme of them.

May tilts her chin at him, just a fraction, and he nods. "We'll start individual talks at 0700. Mack — "

"Yeah," says Mack. "I'm on it."

Phil had already told him to get the interrogation room ready.

"Dismissed," May orders. "Go to bed."

Slowly, reluctantly, the room empties. May slips out last of all, taking the stairs up to the office.

And Phil is left alone with Clint and Natasha.