Once they left SHIELD medical, the corridors became increasingly crowded, full of agents who apparently did not believe that "personal space" was a real thing, or that humans came in heights lower than five feet. Three times he was nearly separated from Coulson by an oblivious agent, and twice a junior almost bulldozed over child-Coulson (seriously, did these guys never scan ahead?). Without breaking stride, Clint slipped his fingers between Coulson's arm and ribs, sliding down his arm until he could pop Coulson's tiny hand into his.

This proved less than satisfactory, though, when Coulson couldn't hold his hand in return. There was a moment of almost subconscious rearranging, and then their hands slotted into place like puzzle pieces. Clint had a moment of deja vu, almost as distinct as surfacing for a breath, as his hand transmitted to his hindbrain that this was the way to hold a child's hand; he had simply forgotten. Vague recollections of walking with other children at the orphanage or in the foster care system teased his memory. He looked down his arm to where their hands joined, Coulson's arm at his shoulder level to compensate for the height difference. Clint's forefinger was being grasped by all four of Phil's fingers (which didn't even cover the length of his finger) and Clint's other fingers and thumb were wrapped around a very soft wrist.

Holding Coulson's hand near his thigh made them into more of a unit, forcing Clint to keep his stride shorter and preventing any more agents from practically running over Coulson. The warm grip on his forefinger pulsed, and he squeezed back without thinking of it before he realized that this had happened several times already. Apparently they had been exchanging hand-squeezes without ever making a conscious decision to do it. Maybe this, like the hand-holding position, was a built-in child-proximity feature.

When they reached the gym, Clint threw the bag aside and dropped Coulson's hand. "Race you to the end of the mats, sir?" he teased, but Coulson took him at his word and dashed across the gym, laughing. Clint was caught flat-footed by Coulson taking him up on his offer and even more so by the unrestrained joy in Phil's giggle. After a beat, Clint took off after him, chasing him down before he caught him in a flying tackle, rolling several times with the boy caged in his arms to protect him from any impact. They landed on their sides, nearly nose to nose.

Phil laughed out loud, a full belly laugh that Clint would've paid good money to hear from his adult version. "You think that was fun?" Clint asked. Hazy memories rose in the back of Clint's mind of the acrobats tumbling with their children between shows, everyone from toddlers to teens laughing delightedly. "How about another classic kid thing?"

Before Phil could answer, Clint pulled his knees up to his chest and pressed his feet against Phil's torso, surprised all over again when his feet covered Phil's abdomen from hips to ribs. He grabbed Phil's hands and rolled to his back, pressing Phil up into the air as he straightened his legs. "You ready to fly, sir?" he asked, stretching his arms up and sideways.

Phil laughed again, and Clint felt the chuckle through his toes down to his knees. "C'mon sir," he encouraged, and Phil stretched his legs out behind him and his arms out to the side in an airplane pose. Clint straightened his legs and began to fly him forward and back, forward and back, flexing his knees and waggling side to side a bit for "turbulence." Phil just continued to laugh, and Clint kept it up for minutes that felt like no time at all and like years stretching forward from his childhood, until he suddenly called "Mayday! Mayday! We're going down!" and crashed Phil sideways down onto the mats.

Phil popped up a moment later, laughing. "I have the almost unton— uncontrollable urge to shout 'again! again!' for the foreseeable future." He straightened his sweatshirt much as he would have done for his suit and tie, smoothing his adulthood into place along with it.

Clint rolled to a cross-legged sitting position and rested his elbows on his knees. "Hey, it's a classic for a reason, sir. Everybody loves to fly."

"Still." Coulson glanced around the gym, seemingly relieved by the thin after-lunch crowd, and Clint realized that his handler hadn't scanned for other occupants before he sprinted across the floor. He felt a curling hit of something like nausea in his gut. Failing to reflexively sweep the room was distinctly un-Coulson-like.

"Let's see what you've got, sir," Clint said, springing lightly to his feet.

"What Coulson had" turned out to be a lot of memory of exercise, and no corresponding muscle memory to go along with it. He was strong for a child his age, Clint guessed, and he understood the mechanics behind tumbling or climbing, but it was like someone with a great ear for music trying to sit down and play a Beethoven sonata. The brain was willing, but the body just didn't have the coordination or experience.

The tipping point came when someone missed racking their free weights. At the resulting clang, Coulson jumped in a full-on wide-eyed child startle, flinging his arms out to the sides and leaving himself completely vulnerable. It was a far cry from the combat-ready stances his handler had taught him, Clint mused.

"Let's call it, sir," he suggested, heading for the abandoned shopping bag. "See what they've got set up for your quarters, and what results they have. Sound good?"

"OK, but we're coming back tomorrow," Coulson piped. "I think this spine could do rolls and breakfalls forever," he said, twisting his torso from side to side.

Clint laughed, and as Coulson came to his side for the return journey, their hands came together as if by magnetic pull.

Clint looked around in dismay. The quarters SHIELD had arranged were... practical, Clint forced himself to think. Sterile, his mind whispered back stubbornly. Functional, he told himself firmly, although an on-the-ball social worker would never have let a child in the system stay in such a featureless environment. SHIELD hadn't bothered with a child bed, but instead had taken out the bed frame and set the mattress on the floor. Anything with the potential to tip – bookshelf, chair, TV, dresser – had also been removed. These had been replaced with a few plastic storage cubes just one notch classier than milk crates, but Barton had a moment to be thankful that nothing in the room was actually above Coulson's eye level. Of course, there wasn't much of it. He sighed.

Coulson scanned the cell-like accommodations. "Adequate," he declared.

Clint twitched mentally. "Sir, I am currently reviewing every time you used that word in regard to assets, intel, or mission results." He froze. "You never called me 'adequate', did you?" he asked forlornly.

"Don't be ridic'lous, Barton," he replied. "You have always exceeded 'adequate' by a wide margin."

Clint grinned at the combination of childlike pronunciation and Coulson's standard phraseology. He squeezed Coulson's hand once, then dropped it and walked through the tiny room to the bathroom. His combat boots made scrinch sounds on the bare, utilitarian flooring. The sink was regulation height, which meant Coulson would barely be able to touch his forearms to it, much less put his hands under the water. That was OK; one of the first things Joanne had mentioned was step-stools, and it looked like the Facilities staff had taken that to heart, tucking one beside the toilet. The shower was another matter entirely, and he surveyed the chest-height water controls sourly.

"Sir?" he called back. Coulson took two steps into his quarters and was nearly to the bathroom, waiting with an inquiring look, wispy eyebrows drawn up. "Uh, I'm going to requisition a shower chair." The eyebrows drew down minutely. "Unless you want to shower in the locker room's accessible stall?" Clint gestured to the tiny cubicle and out-of-reach fixtures.

Mouth thinning, Coulson nodded. "Chair it is," he confirmed.

They folded the results of JARVIS' initial shopping trip into the glorified milk crates. The small pile of t-shirts, pants, and underwear made the only splash of color in the grey room. Coulson's dress shirt (white) and tie (a sober blue stripe) didn't help, but were hung in the closet anyway.

"Not like you're going to need them while you're this size, sir," Clint explained while Coulson's tiny hands struggled to fold the paper bag neatly. "And when you do want 'em again, you'll be tall enough to reach."

There was another pause while each of them mentally re-iterated "when" very forcefully and did not say "if" or its corresponding "and what if...?"

Clint noticed Coulson's hands smoothing down the front of the sweatshirt again, and wondered if he'd ever seen him perform that motion more than once in a day. "How about dinner, boss? It's getting around that time. We can drop by medical on our way and see if they've got anything?"

Coulson took one more glance around the small room. "Sure, Barton," he replied, heading for the door, arm hovering about eight inches from his side, at just the angle for Clint to catch his hand easily. "Let's go."

Dr. Josephs was still closeted with Stark and Banner, but the rest of medical had a few test results back.

"I'm glad to see you," Dr. Martinez told them. "I wanted to go over these results before I headed home for the night."

Coulson seemed to slip into "receiving debrief" mode, and it was weird as snake shoes to see his boss' focused look on that round face. "What do you have, Doctor?" Coulson asked, as calm as he had been hundreds of times before.

Martinez, to her credit, continued to address Coulson as a competent adult rather than directing her words to Clint. "Agent Coulson, the brain scans show a well-developed, perfectly healthy brain for a child." She paused a moment to let her words sink in. "There is a high level of activity – I would even go so far as to say an extreme amount – in the areas connected with long-term memory. Language processing is extremely active, too, though not to the same extent."

"The first part makes sense, because I know I have my memories." Coulson frowned. "But language processing?"

Dr. Martinez paused for a moment, looking up as if retrieving words, then shrugged and said, "Porque, por ejemplo, creo que hablas español?"

"Claro," Coulson replied unhesitatingly.

Clint clued in. "És a magyar is, természetesen. És sok más is," he said.

"Ó, látom," Coulson replied, nodding.

She smiled at them both. "I'm not sure what that was, but I'm pretty sure you just made my point. There are more languages than usual for a four-year-old in your brain, and it makes for some Christmas-tree-like activity in the fMRI."

Then she sighed. Here came the other shoe, then. "Unfortunately, while your brain looks great, it also looks like a child's brain. The executive areas, especially the frontal lobes and the prefrontal cortex, haven't really been wired yet. Those are the areas most related to inhibition or assessing consequences." She winced. "I expect that if you haven't been already, you will soon be confined as a security risk. A brain full of data, and very little internal editor to control what gets said."

Coulson's mouth firmed into a thin little line. "Yes, Director Fury has already restricted me to headquarters."

She shook her head grimly. "I know it's required, but I'm not pleased about this. A child's brain needs activity to wire itself. Even more than muscles need activity to work properly, these connections won't form unless they are made to form through experience. And there are certain windows of opportunity for that wiring to happen.

"You could be back to your normal age this evening, for all we know," Martinez said, looking Phil in the eye. "Goodness knows it's what we want to happen. But we need to plan for the 'what if?', and that means taking care of your brain as it is now, if you get my meaning."

He frowned at her in concentration. "Then what do you recommend?"

"You're going to need some occupational therapy, similar to what we might give an agent with an injured brain." She fixed him with a serious look. "Some of it will seem very trivial to you. All of it may seem frivolous to you. I assure you it's not. Medical has made it clear to his superiors that this ongoing, daily therapy is mandatory."

Then she turned that intent stare on Clint. "And I assume that I can count on you, Agent Barton, to assist?"

Before Clint could answer, Coulson interrupted. "I assure you, Doctor, that Agent Barton will be more than willing to participate in something trivial and frivolous," he deadpanned.

"Aw, sir, that's my line!" Clint protested with a grin, pleased that Coulson's teasing seemed to have survived his transformation intact.

"If you're finished with us, Doctor?" Coulson inquired.

She nodded. "We'll set up referrals for the therapy. That should begin tomorrow."

"I don't know why she gave me that look," Clint grumbled as they retreated from medical. "We were already going to get food. It's not like I was planning to starve you."

Coulson's hand squeezed Clint's forefinger, twice, like a heartbeat, and Clint responded with a reflexive squeeze of Coulson's wrist. "Professional requirement to give Hawkeye a hard time?" he suggested, smiling. "You hadn't done anything else today to earn triti— criticism, and I think they have a quota they have to meet whenever you've actually been on the premises."

Clint just shrugged, keeping Coulson's hand close to his thigh, and tried to remember to keep his strides short.

The dinner crowd had mostly thinned out by the time they reached the cafeteria, but SHIELD's employees worked enough irregular hours that there were still people in the serving line and seated at tables. As he dropped Coulson's hand to pull two trays from the stack, Clint realized that Coulson's eyes were almost level with the tray slide rail. He wrapped his arm under Coulson's arm, around his back to his waist, and hoisted him up onto his hip.

Then his forebrain realized what he had done.

Clint tensed, then forced himself to relax as he felt his arm pressing Coulson's chest and belly into his side, his fingers gripping too hard on his thigh. And Coulson was so much smaller and fragile and squishable. "Oh, shi— uh, shoot, sorry, sir," he stuttered, "shoulda asked before grabbing you. Just because you're smaller doesn't mean people suddenly get to move you wherever they want."

Coulson gave him a sidelong look that was about a nanometer from a full-on eyeroll. "Barton, how many times have you or I pushed each other one way or another in the field without asking permission?"

"Just wanted you to be able to see the food, sir," Clint answered sheepishly. "Not exactly life or death."

"How could I have lived without seeing that day-glo orange mac & cheese?" Coulson responded wryly.

"Want some, sir?" Clint asked, sliding his own dish of mac & cheese onto his tray.

"Yes, I think I do."

OK, so that was different. "What other things do your child-tastebuds want that older-you wouldn't?" Coulson continued to select foods that Clint had never seen him eat, including the canned fruit cocktail, complete with violently red maraschino cherries.

"Y'know, boss," Clint said as they walked to a table, "if you're like this for any length of time? We should invest in one of those kid backpacks. The kind where the kid rides around on the adult's back?" At Coulson's quirked eyebrow — and that had to be a built-in feature; no way was that muscle memory — Clint continued. "We could be like the MasterBlaster of SHIELD. You could be the brains, and I could be your brawn."

Coulson laughed lightly as they sat at the table, his feet swinging a foot off the floor. "With Fury as Mad Max? And who as Tina Turner?"

Clint gave a low whistle. "Tina Turner in a chainmail dress. Now that was fodder for a thousand adolescent fantasies. That woman has legs for days."

Instead of agreeing, Coulson looked thoughtfully down at his vanilla pudding. "Interesting," he said slowly. "I can remember thinking that, and I don't disagree, but it all seems," he paused, searching for the word, "distant, now."

The conversational pause was interrupted by Stark plunking himself down on the narrow slice of bench between Clint and the rest of the room. "Scoot over, Hawkguy," he demanded, pressing his sneakers into the floor so he could shove Clint with his hip. Clint went, and Stark ended facing Coulson directly. Natasha sank gracefully to a seat beside Coulson, opposite Clint.

"I was right! Tiny Coulson is adorable!" Stark crowed. He pulled out his StarkPhone. "I've got to get a picture of this."

"No!" the three SHIELD agents immediately snapped.

Tony pointed the phone at Coulson's face. "It'll be fine. It's me," he insisted. "OK, and maybe Pepper. Pepper is going to love this!"

"Tony, no!" Clint repeated.

In a blink, Natasha's hand covered the lens of the phone, holding Tony's fingers tightly against its frame. "It's not negotiable, Stark," she said in deceptively smooth tones. "You will not take unauthorized pictures of a minor, or of a SHIELD agent," she continued, her voice and grip both growing progressively harder, "or of a human being who has been altered against their will."

Tony's eyes rounded comically. "Right. Solid choice," he agreed, nodding. "Also, ow? And can I have my hand back?"

Natasha released his hand and he drew it back, flexing it absently. "You know what isn't cute?" he said as if the intervening conflict hadn't happened. "Agent's quarters." He gave the word a sardonic twist. "If you can even call them that." He shuddered. "It's like something out of Oliver Twist. When we heard you were in the cafeteria, I expected Coulson to be in the food line with his bowl saying, 'Please sir, I'd like some more square footage.'" He shook his head. "Or furniture. Or color. Or anything, really."

"We have some stuff coming," Clint said. "Some more clothes and things."

"SHIELD does not decorate its holding rooms for children, Stark," Coulson put in, "though I can certainly understand your interest." Clint mentally added "snarking at Stark" to the list of behaviors that seemed to have carried over into Coulson's de-aged state.

"Why, Agent," Stark responded melodramatically, "are you calling me a child? I'm hurt. Or touched." He tried to grab a roll off Barton's plate. Clint fended him off with a growl and a menacingly angled fork. "Or–"

"Or touched in the head," Clint muttered, forking up another bite of mac & cheese.

"And can I just say," Tony continued, changing tacks. "That voice? Adorable!" Clint narrowed his eyes at Stark, and then returned to his meal. It was probably too much to ask Tony to take this seriously. From what Clint knew, Tony had never had much of a childhood himself. From the time he was four, if SHIELD's records were to be believed, he had been treated either as a tiny adult inventor or as an afterthought, with no allowance made for a child's needs. It had resulted in a strange combination of self-sufficient independence and needing both Pepper and JARVIS to remind him to eat and sleep.

Coulson sighed deeply, a far too long-suffering sound for such a small frame, and set his fork down. Clint was beginning to recognize the signs of child-Coulson accessing adult-Coulson's memories and behavior patterns. "Do you have anything to report, Stark? Agent Romanov?"

Natasha shook her head, bright red hair brushing her shoulders. "Nothing as yet, sir. He's keeping his cards pretty close to the vest."

"And his notes are..." Stark rolled his eyes. "Shall we say 'lacking'? I don't know why they call these guys mad scientists anyway. Where's the testing? Where are the control samples? Where's the peer review? Is this what they mean when they say science education is lacking in this country? Because I could've sworn that fourth graders learned the scientific method. But these bozos—" He threw his hands in the air.

"Dr. Banner remained behind in the lab to see if he could make any sense of things," Natasha said. "Thor and Captain Rogers are on-call responders for Avengers business. I'll take over from Barton for night watch." Clint gave her a sidelong look, because Natasha had never been what he might've called "good with children." He thought for a moment. Or "in the same room with children", really.

"Agent Romanov, that really isn't nece–"

"Sir, Agent Barton will need the rest," she interrupted, effectively derailing the conversation. She turned to look Clint in the eye. "We'll see you for breakfast?"

Well, if she was determined, he would agree. At Clint's nod, she turned back to Coulson. "I have something for you, sir," she said, placing a small black item on the table.

Coulson looked from it to her serene expression, and then picked it up. He opened the black leather wrap and pulled out a small push knife. His small fingers fit into the loop, the central bar running between his third and fourth fingers, and the base of the loop fit snugly into his palm. In his fist, the blade extended only slightly further than his fingers would have. He punched experimentally with it, eyes rounding. "It's lovely, Natasha," he said with a delighted grin. "Thank you."

She acknowledged his thanks with a single nod. Clint grinned. He would've hugged her, if he was certain he wouldn't lose a finger or two in the process. Clint had gotten child-sized Coulson food and clothes, but Natasha had armed him. Because of course she had. Clint shook his head.

Stark goggled. "Please. Please, please, please can I take a picture of that? It's sharp, isn't it?" Natasha raised a single eyebrow. "Right, it's from you, of course it's sharp. That is so, so..." He spread his hands in front of his chest. "That's like a Black Widow version of a teddy bear, right there. Or a SHIELD security blanket."

"I don't know about you, Stark," Clint put in, grinning, "but having Coulson armed again makes me feel all kinds of secure."

Natasha ignored them both. "You can't handle the recoil of a firearm right now, and I knew that none of your other weapons would fit your hands." She stood. "Ready, sir?"

Coulson sheathed the knife and joined her, walking close to her side but not touching, and they left the cafeteria discussing draw and carrying options.