Trigger Warnings: suicidal behavior, suicide attempt, mental health issues
Clint bites on his thumb as he stares through the glass of the observation window. He's fairly certain he's going to crack the nail if he bites any harder, but he'd been grinding his teeth so hard before that it's a wonder he didn't chip any of them, so he supposes this is a better alternative. He can't tell if he should go in or not, if he should continue to linger in the hall, watching from a distance like he always does.
In the end, he goes in. Because he needs to know why.
"They think I'm suicidal."
The words give him pause. Phil's face is turned away from him and though Clint had known he wasn't sleeping, he was sure that his handler wouldn't have known it was him entering. With a slow, deep breath he closes the door behind him and walks towards the bed.
"Can you blame them?" Clint asks.
His eyes are drawn to the thick, white gauze wrapped around the older man's wrists and he finds he can't look away until he feels Phil's gaze on him. Clint's eyes quickly dart up to meet Phil's. He's not sure what he sees there or what he expected to, but whatever it is puts a strange, squirming sense of guilt in his gut at having been caught looking.
"I'm not," Phil assures him.
Clint chooses not to say anything, but merely ducks his head in a nod of recognition.
"You don't believe me," Phil deduces.
"I don't know," Clint admits. The trust between them is something that has taken many years to achieve. Where in the beginning Clint wouldn't have trusted Phil to tell him the time of day, now he trusts the man with his life. Right this very second, however, he's not sure what to believe. He slowly sinks into the chair beside the bed, the exhaustion that follows adrenaline and fear and worry hitting him hard. "You said you were looking for something. What did you mean?"
Phil looks straight at him—straight through him, it feels like—but doesn't answer right away. He looks tired. As tired as Clint feels. More so, probably. He's still Phil Coulson, but he doesn't look like the same man Clint remembers. His gaze is hollow, haunted. Beneath the glazed look the heavy medication lends to them, there's something in his eyes that wasn't there before. Or maybe something's missing. Maybe both. Loki may not have taken his life as they'd originally been lead to believe, but he can't help but feel the God of Mischief managed to take something else.
Maybe it's the same thing he'd taken from Clint.
"It made more sense at the time," Phil says, blinking slowly.
Phil had been doing well. As well as could be expected after narrowly surviving his encounter with Loki. Clint had been doing better, watching his handler recover. It helped to plug up the parts of him which felt empty; busying himself by focusing on Phil's recovery allowed him to avoid his own issues. Not that Phil hadn't nagged him endlessly about his therapy sessions regardless.
So when JARVIS had woken the entire Tower several hours ago with "an emergency on Agent Coulson's level" they'd all gone running. Clint's not sure what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't seeing Phil sitting on his bathroom floor with his wrists sliced to hell and blood pooling beneath him. He's still not sure who had reacted or moved first, but he distinctly remembers Bruce ordering them to grab towels. He remembers crouching across from Steve as they pressed them to Phil's wrists and wondering if his face looked as horrified as Steve's did. He remembers hearing Pepper calling for an ambulance.
But what he remembers most was that Phil had looked at him. He wasn't wholly conscious, but he had looked at Clint as though he might have understood it all and had said, "I didn't find anything. I think I'm real." And over the next few hours, Clint had puzzled endlessly over what that meant and why Phil had looked at him that way. Him and only him.
"S.H.I.E.L.D. developed a series of Life Model Decoys. There's one of me. At least one," Phil tells him. He pauses, frowning at the space just above Clint's left shoulder. "I woke up and I thought… I wondered if…"
His frown deepens.
"I didn't know if I was me… or if I was an LMD. I've been told so frequently that it's nothing short of a miracle that I lived and I wondered if maybe I hadn't," Phil says slowly. "So I had to… check. I had to see for myself that I was real."
"Phil," Clint says gently, "you almost killed yourself."
"I know," Phil answers. His eyes are wide with something like shock, it seems. "It wasn't my intention. It hadn't even occurred to me that it was a possible outcome. Everything in that moment just made so much sense, but now…"
"Not so much," Clint finishes.
Phil closes his eyes with a heavy sigh and he looks so very, very tired. "I don't know what I was thinking."
That's what scares him. It's what scares both of them. Even now, doped up to his eyeballs on medication, Phil seems to have a clearer head than he did when he'd decided to dig into his wrists with a razor in search of wires or computer chips or whatever it was he'd been thinking he might find. It scares Clint because the man he remembers doesn't suffer from egregious lapses in judgment that result in emergency surgery and blood transfusions and a mandatory forty-eight hour hold for psychological evaluation.
"You looked at me like I understood," Clint says, breaking the silence.
"Do you?" Phil asks him.
"Maybe," Clint says. He shakes his head, drags his fingers across his scalp. "It's just… he took me out, stuffed something else inside. And then that got taken out and I got stuffed back inside. But it feels like… like…"
"Like something got left behind," Phil murmurs.
"Fuck," Clint says quietly, dropping his face into his hands.
"You know, they think I'm having a mental breakdown," Phil says, his tone almost conversational. "I don't know about that. Maybe it's true."
He stares at the ceiling. Clint lifts his head and stares at Phil.
"I'm not crazy," Phil insists softly. His fingers twitch against the bed sheets. "But I think… I don't think I'm okay. And I'm not sure what to do about it."
Clint swallows thickly, the admission causing his chest to constrict painfully. Phil is supposed to be the stable one. Even at his worst, Clint has never seen him like this. Phil is always solid, consistent. It's not supposed to be like this. He's not supposed to break this way. It's all wrong.
"We'll find a way to fix it," Clint says, clearing his throat.
Phil looks at him then like he wants to believe that.
Clint wants to believe it, too.
