Clint stepped out of the car and took in his surroundings: a large, white-painted farmhouse with a broad porch, no longer part of a farm and set back from a main road, in the middle of a large somewhat wild yard. In addition to his and Phil's borrowed black sedan, there were five vehicles parked on the gravel out front of the house: an old pickup, an unassuming Buick, a nice VW, a bedraggled minivan, and a powder blue hybrid.

He came around to Phil's side of the car and opened his door. "C'mon, let's do this thing."

"My sisters are going to kill me. Unless my mother kills me first. She might beat them to it."

Clint grimaced. "Your dad isn't on the list of potential executioners?"

"No. Just the women. They'll kill me."

Clint shook his head. "Babe, I'm an assassin and I refrained from homicide. Come on."

Phil sighed, stood, closed and locked the car, then walked with Clint up onto the porch. The door was unlocked, as Phil seemed to expect it to be. He was barely inside, Clint half a step behind him, when a small, heavy, cross-stitched pillow came flying through the air and smacked Phil in the face. He could have dodged it, Clint was sure, but he didn't even try.

"Philip Josiah Coulson, you asshole!" A woman—six years older than Phil, with dark hair that gleamed with a few strands of gray—stood at the end of the short entry hall. She swept forward and pulled him into a rough hug. Clint gathered she must be Maddie, Phil's oldest sister.

Two other women—one younger, closer to Clint's age, with a barely tamed pile of light brown curls, and another in a stripped down pantsuit who looked a little older than Phil—came forward. They glanced at Clint and then at each other before latching onto their brother. These two had to be baby sister Shannon and middle sister Kit.

In a mass of hugs and tears, they dragged him through a wide interior entryway. Ignored and fighting a grin, Clint trailed after the siblings.

In the living room, Maddie pushed Phil forward. Pink-faced and anxious looking, Phil stepped forward and embraced a thin but not frail woman who had to be his mother. She looked a bit like Katharine Hepburn had in her seventies—tough, no-nonsense, a ramrod straight apparently steel-reinforced spine, and not yet completely gray. She put her hands to either side of his face and kissed his forehead before passing him to her wet-eyed husband. He pulled Phil into a firm hug. "My son."

"I'm here, Dad."

"Why didn't you tell us you were alive?" Kit demanded, arms crossed under her chest.

"Uh." Phil stepped back from his father.

"Partly because classified B.S., partly because he had amnesia," Clint provided.

"You." Shannon pointed at Clint without looking around at him. "We'll get to you. For now you don't exist."

"Okay then." Clint deposited himself in the corner La-Z-Boy to watch the show until he was existent again.

"Philip." Mrs. Coulson took her son's hands. "What happened?"

Phil looked over his shoulder at Clint, who shrugged. "Hey, I don't exist right now. You got this."

"Right..." Phil took a breath. "I died then I got brought back."

"How?" Maddie said.

"I can't tell you that." Phil shook his head. "It's classified for good reason."

"Phil—" Kit began.

"If he can't say"—Mr. Coulson cut his middle daughter off—"he can't say. If we needed to know, I damn well expect he'd tell us."

"I would," Phil affirmed. "It's for the best that as few people as possible know those details."

"All right, Mr. Agent Man, we'll buy that," Shannon said, "but how long have you been not-dead? Why didn't you contact any of us until last week?"

"I was in rehab for quite a while." Phil glanced at Clint. "After that, I had amnesia. It took me a long time to come back from that. I should have contacted quite a few people but didn't."

"People like him?" Shannon jerked a thumb toward Clint.

"Yes." Phil nodded. "Like him."

"You." Shannon turned to Clint.

"Me?" Clint straightened up in the recliner.

"Who are you?"

"Clint Barton."

"Relationship to my brother?"

"Common-law widower, except he's not dead anymore, so partner I guess?"

"I knew it." Shannon rounded on Kit and held out a hand, palm up. Kit sighed and fished her wallet out of the pocket in her slacks. She slapped fifty dollars into Shannon's hand.

"Hang on," Clint said. "Was I the subject of a bet?"

"You were at the funeral, you know, with a redheaded woman," Maddie said. "Knew you both had to be coworkers of Phil's—both sort of screamed C.I.A. Kit figured the redhead was with Phil, Shannon figured you were. I declined to take the bet. Course it seemed unlikely to ever get settled."

"They bet about everything." Phil sighed.

"Phil, honey, why didn't you tell us?" Mrs. Coulson asked. "We'd have accepted it."

"He went into the military," Mr. Coulson said. "All that was a lot harder decades ago."

"As far as dealing with other people." Mrs. Coulson straightened up further. "But not as far as dealing with his mother."

Phil put his hand on his mother's shoulder. "It took me a long time to accept it, Mom."

Kit considered him. "Is this why you and Shelly didn't work out?"

"Yes," Phil said.

"Did she know before you?"

"Yes." Phil turned and eyed Kit.

"How—how did she know before you?" Maddie asked. "Better question—how did you not know? I've known since you were eleven."

Phil's mouth dropped open. "How on Earth could you have known that?"

"I just knew, little brother." She shrugged. "That's why I didn't take the bet."

"I think I like your sisters, Phil." Clint chuckled. Kit grinned at him.

"Why don't we sit?" Mrs. Coulson said.

Phil sat on the end of the sofa that was closest to the recliner where Clint lounged, having just gotten the footrest up. Shannon sat next to Phil, Maddie sat next to her, Kit sat on the floor, and Mr. and Mrs. Coulson sat in a pair of coordinating wing chairs that were also recliners.

"This thing about you dying," Shannon said. "I'm guessing it was more than just your heart stopping for a minute or two."

Phil grimaced. "You might say that."

"Were you dead for a few hours or something?" Kit asked. "I'm pretty sure the record is something like an hour and a half of being clinically dead before being brought back and that was a case of hypothermia."

Phil shook his head. "Let's just say it was horrific and talk about something else."

"So you were gone for a while," Shannon mused. "You suffered brain death."

Phil laughed. "I'm sure Maddie would say I've suffered many bouts of brain death."

Maddie smirked. "Mostly when you were a teenager."

"It's just"—Shannon took a breath—"did that cause the amnesia?"

"Partly." Phil became pale. "The treatment itself was...traumatic."

"Alright, fine, let's not talk about that, what can you tell us?" Kit asked. "How's the C.I.A? Any good restaurants in Langley?"

"I'm not C.I.A."

"S.H.I.E.L.D," Clint said. "We're both S.H.I.E.L.D. I do know a good Thai place in Langley, though." He gestured. "Can I get names confirmed here? Shannon, right?"

"Kathleen," the sister in the slacks said. "People call me Kit." She leaned her elbows on the coffee table. "You're S.H.I.E.L.D?"

"Not Hydra." Phil held his hands up. "Clint, my sisters, Shannon, Kathleen, and Madelyn. We call her Maddie."

"I'm Julie," Mrs. Coulson said. "My husband Robert." She gestured. "So sorry, we've mostly been ignoring you."

"No problem." Clint shook his head. "The zombie is more important."

"Zombie?" Maddie laughed. "You sound like my kids."

"To—uh, one of our coworkers is even worse with the names." Phil shrugged. "Walking dead man, Dr. Zomboss, undead, and widow's son from Nain."

"This is all pretty unsettling," Maddie said. "As you saw, I threw something at him. What'd you do when you saw him again?"

"Sort of the same?" It came out a question. Clint felt his cheeks burn. "I hit him and then I kissed him."

Kit dissolved in a fit of giggles.

"He didn't mean the hit," Phil said. "If he had, it would've been a punch and my jaw'd have been broken."

Mr. Coulson visually assessed Clint's upper body strength. "I'd say that's true."

"I was upset," Clint breathed.

"Of course you were, dear," Mrs. Coulson said. "We all are."

"Mom." Phil leaned forward. "I'm so sorry."

"Phil," she said, "you were always a good son. You had a tendency to turn inward, even isolate yourself. What's hard about this is the length of time. A few months would have gotten a shrug, I think."

"I don't know where to start." Phil put one hand partway over his face. "Physical therapy went on for a while. The amnesia was complicated and went on for two years. After that I was still a mess and—wow, I'm bad at this."

"I can actually understand that." Mr. Coulson leaned forward. "It can take a long time to recover – months and years—people underestimate how much time. I just wish we'd been allowed to be there."

"I—" Phil took a breath. "My cover file says no family."

Clint lowered the footrest and sat up straight. He pointed at Phil. "Your boss"—he refused to say Fury's name—"knew that file was a cover. He didn't know about me but he knew you had a family. Not only did he let everyone believe you were dead, he made sure we did. He was playing ugly games. Used you to guilt the rest of the team into shutting up and doing as told, even."

Phil was starting to look gray. "He didn't know whether I'd make it."

"I don't care," Clint snapped. "You could have been a puddle on the floor, been in a coma, looked at us day after day and not known who we were, and we'd have been there until the end. All of us."

Phil flinched.

"Oh." Clint blew out a breath and looked around the room. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Mrs. Coulson's gaze was steady as she studied Clint. "I feel just the same."

"Deep cover," Mr. Coulson mused. "An agent no one knows about who is ultimately expendable because he's already dead. That is an ugly game."

Phil tapped his fingers against the couch in a nervous gesture. Clint caught his eyes for an instant. Breathe he signed and Phil relaxed slightly.

Kit leaned her head into her hand. "So why'd you break cover?" Her eyes were razor sharp as she watched her brother.

"I thought Clint might've been killed, so I called, then I didn't hear anything for a month—"

"Hey, I was stuck in Argentina," Clint said, palms raised defensively, "with bricked up electronics. Even my hearing aids didn't work."

"Wait." Shannon twisted to face Phil head on. "This is the hard of hearing agent you had the crush on years ago? You liar! I asked about that back then and you said no."

Phil held his hands up. "He worked for me!"

"I didn't ask about it." Maddie smiled. "I was pretty sure he was in love with the mystery agent." She looked at Clint. "He couldn't talk about you without getting this look in his eyes."

Phil's face went red.

"Huh." Kit narrowed her eyes at her brother. "You still haven't crossed that bridge have you?"

"Um." Phil looked at Clint.

"We're working on it." Clint quickly signed reassurance to Phil.

"What was that?" Shannon asked.

One side of Clint's mouth ticked up. "I told him just change the subject."

Maddie grinned. "And then you signed 'I love you.' My triplets are in Montessori school and they use ASL."

"Busted," Shannon said.

"Apparently my sisters have accepted you," Phil said dryly. "They're treating you about as badly as they do me."

"Not even close," Maddie said. "We won't break out embarrassing pictures of him."

Phil rolled his eyes.

Clint tapped the tips of his fingers together like a Bond villain. "Pictures?"

Maddie grinned. "Pictures."

"Please, no," Phil said as his mother got up to fetch an album from a shelf.

"Let me see these pictures." Clint bounded up from his chair.

"Clint." Phil grabbed for the back of the archer's shirt too late; he was already resettling himself on the floor by the coffee table where Mrs. Coulson had lain the scrapbook

"I've been waiting for years to be able to do this." Mrs. Coulson's grin had an evil gleam to it. "I never did get to show these to Celeste. I eventually gave up on him getting remarried. But now he's brought you home." She glanced at Clint. "He didn't tell us he was bringing you home. If he had, I might already have all the albums and a few loose photos stacked up and ready to be shown."

Hiding behind one hand, Phil muttered. "And this is partially exactly why I didn't say anything..."

"Consider it a return on getting to read my background check," Clint quipped happily.

Phil sighed, resigned to spending the next hour or more wallowing in varying degrees of humiliation. A smirking Clint rapidly signed to him Play along. Your Mom and sisters are trying to do something normal in an abnormal situation. Clint suspected they were also trying to pace how much shock they had to process in a short time. He had a lot of sympathy for that.

Phil watched him thoughtfully, then nodded.

Mrs. Coulson joined Kit on the floor. Maddie and Shannon leaned over the coffee table from their spots on the couch while their mother flipped through the pages that were dominated by pictures of a very young Phil, complete with the occasional bare-bottomed baby photo or streaking toddler picture. Maddie and Shannon were in a lot of the photos too, but this was one of Phil's albums. The label on the side said so.

Phil rolled his eyes and sometimes put his hand over his face but, on the whole, he rolled with it. Clint signed proud of you. Phil smiled.

Clint found it easy to gush things like, "He is just adorable," over most of the photos, because it was true. Toddler Phil was precious. The more Clint showed genuine interest and commented with enthusiasm, the more Julie Coulson laughed and patted him on the arm. Robert Coulson beamed.

"Oh wow." Clint looked at Phil. "Did your sisters drag you around like this all the time?"

"They were terrors," Phil said, deadpan.

Maddie grinned. "He was the youngest for seven years. Of course we dragged him around. Sometimes we put doll clothes on him."

"And sometimes we put the dog's sweater on him." Kit shrugged.

"You did that." Maddie pointed at Kit.

"Of course I did. Back then, I wanted to become a veterinarian."

Mrs. Coulson dragged down another album. This one had preschool and early elementary school photos of Phil in it.

"You were such a cute kindergartener." Clint turned a page in the album and burst out laughing at a picture of Phil dressed up as Captain America for Halloween. "Nice." He fished his phone out of his pocket and snapped a photo of the page. "Steve has got to see this."

Phil made to grab Clint's phone but was easily dodged.

"Steve?" Maddie asked.

"Uh, coworker," Clint said, still successfully playing keepaway with his phone while he texted.

"Another Cap fan, huh?"

"Something like that." Clint grinned triumphantly and tossed his phone to Phil. Message delivered glowed at the bottom of the screen. Phil shook his head and handed the phone back to Clint.

When the album page was flipped, Phil leaned forward. "I remember this." He fingered the page. "I was eight. You can't really see what I was working on but it was a school project, a Captain America diorama."

Julie Coulson nodded. "You made an A on it."

"I did?" Phil sounded shocked,

"Of course you did," his mother said. "You were always detail-oriented and, this being Captain America, you took special care."

Phil frowned. Clint watched him carefully.

"You don't remember that?" Maddie said. "You were so proud of it."

"No." Phil sighed. "I don't remember my presentation or my grade."

Kit's mouth dropped open. "You were so neurotic about your A's. Your memory really was fucked up."

Phil was taken aback. "Well, yeah."

Robert Coulson coaxed Phil to the floor. The whole family spent the next hour reminiscing with Phil and helping him remember the roughly thirty per cent of photographed moments that he simply had no recollection of.

Shannon's phone rang. She answered it. "Hey, honey." She paused. "Yeah, I figure you're allowed to come back now." She looked to her brother and eldest sister, received a shrug and a nod, respectively. "Yes, you can come back. Hold on a sec." She watched carefully as her mother mouthed something at her. Shannon nodded.

"Hey, hon?" Shannon said. "Mom asked if you and Hector can bring sandwiches back for lunch for everybody." She listened then said, "Yeah. The catering platters from the deli sound perfect. See you soon. Also, uh, brace yourselves. No, nothing bad. I promise. Just, brace. Love you too. Bye, hon." She hung up. "We sent the husbands and the kids—"

"And the dogs," Kit added.

"And the dogs down the road to the park," Shannon finished.

"You brought the dogs?" Phil asked Kit.

"I was told whole family meeting, hell yes I brought the dogs."

"I like dogs," Clint said.

"Good." Kit crossed her arms.

A/N: Phil's parents names are canon. I made up the rest of his family. As far as I can tell, he doesn't canonically have any siblings but I have read several pics where he's got three sisters and I like that.