Summary: The Avengers and Nick Fury hold a wake for Coulson in which drinks are drunk and stories are told

Coulson's Wake

Fury slammed his hands down on the table, making the whole table shake. "Fuck you all, shut up, you damned mother fuckers. It damned well wasn't a god damned hero's death!"

The Avengers gaped at the director.

Captain America rose from his seat. He had been Steve before, but now he was definitely Captain America glaring and speaking in a frosty voice, "Excuse me?"

Director Fury glared right back. "Fuck. You. Coulson died. The least you could do is fucking see who he was. He died a fucking martyr, not a hero. Saint him if you want, I sure as hell would believe he could damn well tell God what to fucking do, but if you want to fucking honor him, then the least you can fucking do is see who he goddamn was."

Even Steve looked taken aback, completely losing his Captain America façade. The other Avengers looked uneasily at each other. "Er, what?"

"He was a fucking hero the whole god damn time he fucking worked for SHIELD with his god damned checklists and files and shit. He fucking saved more goddamned people than any of you fuckers and you never fucking noticed. And now you want to honor him for being a dumb motherfucker who martyred himself to buy a few extra seconds that didn't even fucking matter."

There was a resounding silence that was not helped at all by the awkward tinkling piano music playing quietly on the sound system.

It was Thor would finally broke the silence. "Aye, Nicholas Fury is right. It was a heroic death, but not a hero's death. His death did not save any lives or accomplish any great deeds. Instead, he died a martyr, standing for what he believed in. And his death accomplished what a martyr's death does: it shone a light on a desperate need. It is to my shame that I needed that death to show me the way. Though Philip, the Son of Coul, may have died a martyr, he did not die in vain. Tell us then, Nicholas Fury, of the heroic Philip Coulson I failed to see."

Fury seemed to relax a bit. "Phil wasn't the picture perfect hero because he was always more careful. He never threw himself into impossible situations and won against impossible odds through crazy acts of bravery. Instead, he would analyze situations, makes sure he knows what the odds were and went after his goals in ways that minimized the risk to himself and his team while optimizing the danger to his enemies."

Barton laughed, and added, "His lists! Oh my god, he made so many lists! He said they were helpful and they must have been because he was a stickler for details and he always knew exactly what was going on." He paused a moment. "I'm going to seriously miss his lists."

Banner blinked. "Huh. There's a whole manifesto on the importance of lists for doctors. It makes sense that it's important for secret agents too."

"Nat and I, we worked with Coulson a lot. But it was almost never for assassinations. We're good at those, the best at them, but Coulson didn't really care for the approach."

"He thought it lacked elegance."

"It was weird. He'd use us, push us to our limits and beyond, but for all the lists, we were never just single-purpose tools like we sometimes were with other handlers. I don't know why we had him so often, but I appreciated it."

"It was on purpose."

"What?"

"Coulson wanted to teach us ways to get rid of annoyances other than assassination."

"But he never taught us anything."

"Didn't he?"

"… Yeah, I guess he did."

"His missions almost always ran smoothly. For a while I thought he was babying me, but he wasn't. He was just always prepared and he made sure we were prepared too."

Fury nodded. "Before he joined SHEILD his missions went so smoothly that he got a reputation for being protected by someone on high and only being given the easy missions. No one seemed to notice that they wouldn't have been easy missions if they had been given to anyone else. His last commanding officer apparently thought he was so protected that his death in the field would make a good political point."

"What?" Barton said, his voice cold as death. Barton might have worked on a variety of missions, especially under Coulson, but he'd first made his reputation as an assassin.

Natasha only shifted her position, but she was clearly on point and waiting for action.

Fury grimaced. "I think what offended Phil the most was that it wouldn't have even worked at that point."

"Heh," Barton consciously relaxed and took another swig of beer.

Fury continued. "No one important was paying attention to him then. But that was how he joined SHIELD. He got a dishonorable discharge for disobeying a direct order and I recruited him immediately after."

"WHAT?" Tony said.

Fury gave him a pointed look. "You didn't research him?"

"No, I didn't." Tony wanted to claim it was a matter of respecting the man's privacy. But he'd honestly just never considered Agent Coulson as anyone other than Agent Coulson of SHIELD. What was there to research?

Then he reached over to smack Barton on the back, where he was still trying to cough up the beer he'd choked on.

"The commanding officer was an idiot who hadn't done his due diligence to figure out that Phil wasn't related anyone of any particular importance. I think that pissed him off just as much as the half-assed assassination attempt."

"Hmm," Natasha said again, like she was contemplating whether Phil's apparently tepid respond to it all changed her plan to track down and eviscerate the commanding officer, but was inclined to think not.

"I told him he'd better obey my orders or I wouldn't charge him with anything, I'd just kill him myself. He said, he'd obey all of my good orders, so I'd better make sure not to give him stupid ones. I figured that was fair. But he avoided wearing uniforms after that."

"I once asked him why he always wore suits," Natasha volunteered.

"What did he say?"

"He said it was part of his fake-it-till-he-makes-it plan to be a proper government agent."

Tony couldn't stop the snort of laughter at that. "But why was he still wearing suits? Had he become addicted? No longer owned any jeans?"

"No, he was still faking it. He spent his days asking people to tell him what was going on or waiting around to see what was happening and yet somehow he'd gotten this reputation for knowing everything. The more awesome his reputation got the more he wondered when someone was going to catch on that he wasn't that person. He was just a comic book nerd who'd signed up with the military to get out of his small rural town."

Tony stared. "What the…?" Tony had those thoughts, with everyone always calling himself a genius even when he knew he was so spectacularly dumb, but Agent? Agent had been the real deal. There was no way he should have doubted himself.

It took a lot of drinking to get through that night, and they were all mostly drunk by the end of it. At the end of the night, as Fury was preparing to depart and Thor was the only one still mostly sober, Thor bid him safe travels. "I think you are a man of wisdom, like my father, who knows much but also knows the power of words unspoken. It is a wisdom that still eludes me at times, but a valuable skill indeed. Safe travels, my friend, and good hunting."