Chapter Three

The helicarrier has finally been totally evacuated and stripped and scheduled for demolition - it was too damaged to be worth repairing and Stark's building a new one anyway, so if Phil's anywhere, it should be in SHIELD's ground Headquarters.

The first place Clint checks is the morgue, because he's not stupid and he knows what's behind the concerned glances the others sometimes send his way. They think he's crazy - he's in denial - and on the off-chance that they're right he needs to know now.

There aren't any bodies in the morgue, not anymore - they've all been sent home to their relatives or buried in the plot behind HQ - but there are records. Clint reads them all, taking particular notice of the ones killed by arrow wound, memorising the names because Bruce is right, he can't change it, but he can sure as hell remember. There's no record for a Phillip Coulson.

If Fury were telling the truth - if Phil had been killed and his body cremated, the file would be in here. The fact that it isn't means Fury has something to hide, and that's more than enough evidence for Clint. Now all he needs is to actually find Phil.

Clint still helps out with rebuilding New York. He still hangs out with the other Avengers and he even gets his reports to Hill in a timely manner and attends the mandatory psych sessions without complaint. If Natasha had been there she would have immediately known he was up to something, but the others don't know Clint well enough to see his complacence as the warning sign it is.

The shrinks spend a lot of time talking at him about the after-effects of loss of control and guilt and violation. Words like 'rape' are thrown around. It's nothing he hasn't heard before. They try to explain the Five Stages of Grief as if loss was a new concept for Clint and he has to bite his lip to keep from laughing inappropriately in their faces because Clint has had more experience with loss than any of them will ever know and he has read Kübler-Ross, and if they think they have anything left to teach him on the subject of death and dying then they are deluding themselves. Still, Clint's been managing shrinks since he was three years old and he gives just the right answers - well within parameters but not so perfect as to be obvious - and he's soon cleared for duty. Not that Fury's been sending any of them out on missions yet - which is good, because otherwise it would interfere with Clint's self-assigned mission: find and retrieve Phil Coulson.

Once, two years ago, Clint had been captured when a mission went south. It had been one of the few missions he'd been assigned without Phil as AIC, and Phil had made sure it was also the last. He'd been held for six weeks before Coulson had found him and it was the longest time he'd spent away from Phil since the day he'd been recruited. Forty-six days of cramped solitude interspersed with amateur interrogation techniques. Forty-six days of not knowing when or even if he'd be rescued. At least then he'd had every reason to believe that Phil was out there, safe.

Natasha had left for Europe thirteen days after Loki's army had tried to destroy the city and on day fourteen Clint had broken into the SHIELD morgue. On day fifteen Clint begins his nightly excursions to SHIELD HQ to search for Phil.

Clint starts with the obvious: Medical. Phil's not there - Clint didn't expect him to be, so he's not disappointed - and while Phil does have a record on the Medical servers (Clint's no Stark, but he knows his way around SHIELD's systems), it hasn't been updated since before Loki stole the tesseract. Clint takes his time in Medical, searching every doctor's office and treatment room for any evidence that Phil was ever here. By day eighteen Clint has searched all of SHIELD Medical, including the isolation and quarantine wards.

On day nineteen he searches Phil's office for clues, ruthlessly suppressing the memories each item evokes, and by day twenty-one he has searched all the other senior agents' offices for good measure. He finds nothing - no files, no reports. The last document of any kind with Phil's name on it is the requisition form for the jet that extracted Tasha from Saint Petersburg after Loki's initial attack and Clint notices a lump that feels a lot like doubt start to form in the pit of his stomach.

Clint wants to be able to say that he keeps his faith, but by day thirty he's searched close to two-thirds of the 476 rooms in SHIELD HQ and the lump is a boulder. He sleeps less and less and he's beginning to resent the pitying, helpless looks the others give him. He'd go back to sleeping in his nest in HQ if he didn't know it would make the others come after him 'for his own good.' But he swore he would search every single room if necessary and that's what he's going to do. He treats it like any other mission because he has to and Clint can come apart when the mission is over, not before. Only this time when Clint comes apart, Phil won't be there to put him back together again.

So when on day thirty-eight Clint drops from the ceiling of just one more storage room nestled between office supplies and spare uniforms it takes him a few moments to register that this room has a bed in it, and in that bed is Phil Coulson.