Chapter 10: Skye
Summary: Obviously not canon compliant with the most recent episode.
Contains Spoilers for E01X05 "Girl in the Flower Dress" She was desperate to regain his trust, his approval, and he knew it.
She was desperate to regain his trust, his approval, and he knew it. "I need you to find this man."
The photo Coulson had given her wasn't one of SHIELD's crisp 8x12s, it looked like he'd pulled it out of his wallet. "Okay." The ring of metal around her wrist clattered against the table when she set the photo down. "Can I ask who he is?"
"Agent Clint Barton. Codename: Hawkeye."
A week ago, she would have fan-girled at him about the Avengers but after Austin… "How long ago did he miss check in?"
"Agent Barton hasn't been seen since the Battle for New York." Coulson's face was a mask and she hated it. "I'll get you access to anything you'll need."
The attack on New York had been over a year ago. The man was a Level Seven agent and the trail had to be stone cold. The chances of finding him were terrible. "Yes, sir."
Coulson had pointed her to SHIELD's security footage as a starting point and Skye wished it had been anything else. There was no audio but what she could see was enough.
She had known Coulson had been injured on the helicarrier but it was one thing to know it and another to see Loki drive a staff through his chest. She had seen Nick Fury in passing that time they had destroyed the plane and he'd seemed like a stone-cold bad ass but he looked afraid as hecrouched in a pool of Coulson's blood.
She closed the video and stared at the screen. Agent Barton wasn't tagged in many of the security videos from that day, which was odd. She could follow the other Avengers as they went through their day but there was no video attributed to Barton until he suited up and stole a plane. "Sir, where was Agent Barton during the attack on the helicarrier?"
She had been expecting to hear that he'd been wounded and gone to fight despite it. Instead, Coulson looked up from his computer and in that same bland tone he'd been using all day said, "He was leading it."
She wanted desperately to ask Coulson why they were looking for Hawkeye but he hadn't been in a question answering mood. Why had he fought for Loki then gone and battled the Chitauri in the streets? Were they planning on arresting him, killing him?
She opened the next video attributed to Barton. It was in SHIELD medical, hours after Iron Man had nuked the aliens and the Black Widow had closed the portal. He was arguing with a doctor and whatever the guy told him just destroyed him. He'd slammed his fist against the man's desk and she watched his shoulders hitch, his body shudder. He was crying. The Widow wrapped her arms around him and she quickly closed the video.
Coulson was watching her watch the video, and when she closed the file he said, "They were informed that my body had been destroyed for national security reasons. It's the last time any of the Avengers were on the helicarrier." Then he went back to his paperwork like faking his own death was something that happened all the time.
There was a death certificate on file for Philip Coulson, signed by Doctor Andrew Vitale. It was obviously faked but there was no video tagged with Coulson's name after it was signed. She found it the hard way, by following Coulson from camera to camera as medics and then surgeons fought to save his life.
There were no official medical records about what had been done to save Coulson's life but she found a file on Doctor Vitale's private share the next morning with nothing but a serial number in the patient name information. The injuries matched the ones in Coulson's file, it couldn't be anyone but him.
Doctor Vitale had thrown a kitchen-sink's worth of experimental medical technology into Coulson. Something had obviously worked but the doctor writing the record had been under a lot of stress. There were notes about the Director and secret orders and HR, of all things. Once they'd gotten involved, Coulson had been transferred off the helicarrier. To Tahiti, maybe? Coulson was always talking about doing his rehab in Tahiti.
Coulson had obviously been looking for Agent Barton for a while. He'd provided her with a list of searches he'd already performed, security footage from airports, train stations and bus stations. Barton hadn't turned up in any of it. Someone else at SHIELD had been looking as well, logging their efforts in Barton's file. That person had been searching carnivals and fairs, looking for a sharpshooter, an archer, a carney who couldn't stay out of trouble.
Coulson had been all about second chances lately. Maybe he was trying to find Barton first, give him a chance to come in?
The way Skye saw it, they were both going about it wrong. New York was a big city, big enough to lose yourself in. SHIELD had access to a lot of the security footage feeds and she started a facial recognition search using Agent Barton's official SHIELD picture. Coulson had taken the snapshot back.
Coulson didn't seem to need much sleep. He stayed up late watching her work, until he finally went to his bunk around 2 am. It wasn't trust that made him let her keep working unsupervised, it was the keylogger but she'd take what she could get.
She'd called it because the facial recognition returned a result. There was a restaurant near Stark Tower that used a video security system SHIELD had remote access to.
Agent Barton had eaten there, and recently. He had shared a booth with a man with salt and pepper hair last Wednesday. A little research turned up the guy's name. Doctor Bruce Banner was a Stark Industries consultant and he was apparently shacked up with an Avenger because when she backtracked them Barton and Banner had walked from Stark Tower to the dinner, together.
She watched them walk together to the dinner every Wednesday for weeks, as far back as the video archive went. Skye had always had an active imagination. She was suddenly sure they were living together. There was something protective about the way Barton treated Banner, about how he ran interference against the crowds as they walked, the way they touched.
She could picture SHIELD bursting into their apartment, dragging Barton out of bed and black-bagging him. It would be her fault.
A little more digging in local cameras turned up the rest of the Avengers. Thor, wearing a hoodie and drinking a giant coffee. The Black Widow, sitting in a bakery. Captain America, sketching in a notebook. There was no sign of the Hulk, but she couldn't really imagine him living in a Manhattan Stark was everywhere, but he always had been. The real question was, how had SHIELD missed this?
There were facial recognition searches running on all the Avengers, and when she ran them in the front-end interface nothing came back. It was only when she hit the back end directly that she got results. She did a quick comparison of video counts in the frontend and the backend. Everything she could spot the Avengers in was missing. The hack was so neat she could barely see it.
There was something else missing from the front end. A whole folder of videos on a Doctor Streiten's private share. She opened the first one to find Agent Coulson laid out on a metal table.
"It looks right." The Director came into frame. "Very Phil-like."
"We based it off his last scan from PEGASUS." A man in a lab coat came over to Phil's body. He pushed up the scrub shirt Phil was wearing, exposing a huge scar on his chest. "We thought this would add to the effect."
"Don't." The Director's voice was sharp and he grabbed the Doctor's hand. "He's not a science experiment."
"I'm sorry, sir." The man extricated his hand from Fury's grip. "We're ready to proceed."
"Give me a minute." The video ended and Skye gave her screen a puzzled look. Something about that little scene felt wrong. She pulled up the next one in the sequence.
"Let's begin." Doctor Streiten was holding a screwdriver. "Roll it onto it's stomach."
Two assistants rolled Coulson's body over and Doctor Streiten jammed the screwdriver into his neck. Skye bit back a scream but there was no blood. Instead, a panel popped open. There was a port visible under the panel that looked like it would be right at home in the Matrix.
They plugged a cable into a port and Streiten opened up a laptop. "Beginning transfer."
She went on to the next video, her stomach churning. They had moved him from the metal slab to a regular doctor's bench. They had dressed Coulson in a suit and they'd propped him up so he was sitting. The doctor closed the hatch and quickly shone a light into Coulson's eyes. "Alright, Agent Coulson, you're all set."
"There was never anything wrong with my eyes." Coulson pushed Vitale's hands away. "Now that you're done prodding me, I'd like to see Clint."
"I don't know where Agent Barton is." The doctor stepped back. "You'll have to talk to the Director."
The video ended and Skye realized she was shivering. "I'm working for Cerberus."
She couldn't sleep, she didn't even try. She just sat at the computer until Coulson came back into his office around 6 am. "Did you sleep?"
"No." The screen was blank but she was still staring at it. "I found Agent Barton."
"Good, good." He sat down behind his desk, a cup of coffee in his hands. "Where is he?"
"Shacked up with some guy in New York." Everyone said he was different now. How much of that was the experience of dying and how much of it was the fact that he had a new body? Skye made her hand move the mouse and the screen blinked back into life. "That's them."
He'd twitched a little at 'shacked up' but when he saw Doctor Banner he smiled a little. "Stark must have locked him up in a lab after New York. I can't believe he didn't run. Play the video."
They sat in silence as the video played. She couldn't believe Coulson wanted to watch Barton eat eggs but apparently he did. "Is he going to get a trial?"
"What?" Coulson seemed reluctant to look away from the screen.
"I know he almost got you killed and you want justice, but I would feel better if he was getting a trial. He fought for you, in the end." Whenever she'd accidentally fallen asleep, she'd seen Agent Barton being dragged out of bed by SHIELD agents. "You can lie to me, if you have to."
"I'm not arresting him, Skye. He's not responsible for his actions during the attack." Coulson finally looked away when the clip ended. " I want to bring him home. When I couldn't find him, I was sure the WSC has arrested him or… He wouldn't have killed himself, but he can be reckless. It's good, that you found him."
"They're all there. The Avengers, I mean. Someone's been interfering with SHIELD's monitoring of them." She'd taken notes for whoever's job tracking the hack would be. They wouldn't be trusting her unless they had to for a long while.
"JARVIS." Coulson was smiling over the lip of his coffee. "I'll take care of it."
She pushed away from the computer terminal, ready to try and get some sleep, but she couldn't stop herself. "You'll see it in the logger anway, but no more secrets. I watched the videos of you in Doctor Streiten's folder."
The smile slipped away. "What videos?"
She set up the backscatter glasses for him, then passed the frames over. Coulson slipped them on then stared into the mirror over his sink. Long moments of silence passed before he asked, "How did I die?"
"I don't know." Doctor Vitale had quit, suddenly, a few weeks ago. Probably because a dead man had shown up and said hello. "You were recovering, when they transferred you. Something must have gone wrong."
He slipped the glasses off and let them drop into the sink. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the mirror. Coulson was always so put together, it was strange to see him like this. "What am I?"
"A SHIELD agent. Who happens to be a android." She shrugged and thought about touching his shoulder, decided against it. "Does it matter? You're still Phil Coulson. Our bodies are just meat."
"Meat." Phil straightened up and he was looking in the mirror again.
"Meat." Skye hoped her nodding looked encouraging. "I can lend you some books about transhumanism. Well, PDFs."
"You're not understanding the issue at hand, Skye. Why am I looking for Agent Barton?"
"Because…" He had looked fond, even though the man had almost gotten him killed. "Because he was one of yours. You were his SO and you don't leave people behind."
"Almost right. I was his SO, ten years ago. He was the best shot anyone at SHIELD had ever seen, but he had a mouth on him and a problem with what he called 'stupid' orders. It got easier when I realized we were giving him stupid orders and started trusting his judgement. He always made the right call, in the field at least, even when you thought he was crazy. That's how we got Natasha."
"Coulson-"
"I didn't have you looking for an Avenger. I had you looking for my husband." Phil rubbed his thumb over his bare left ring finger. "What do I say to him? Sorry I was dead for a year, how do you feel about robots?"
"I wouldn't start there. Maybe hello?"
Phil fished the glasses out of the sink and passed them back to her. "I could try hello."