Work Text:
Mem'ries,
Light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
Of the way we were
Phil’s office door was ajar. He didn’t leave it that way, not ever, but there had been people traipsing through the Bus for two days. Probably some errand boy was back for a file or comm link, something lost in the shuffle of Agent Hand vacating Phil’s office and migrating back to a stationary command center. Phil supposed it was a necessary evil if he wanted his office back, but he was exhausted in every way humanly possible and then some; the last thing he needed was to have some junior agent invading his sanctuary. He didn’t want to have to maintain a moment longer.
He pushed the door open the rest of the way and blinked at the pair of very familiar boots crossed over his desk. “Natasha. I was wondering when one of you would show.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You don’t call. You don’t write.”
“It was classified.” It was a poor excuse to give a friend, and he knew it, but it was all he had.
“Nothing is classified for Stark, given enough time.” Natasha looked him over, and frowned, kicking her feet off the desk so that she could lean closer to scrutinize the way his skin split over his eye. “You look terrible. I heard you had a rough couple of days.”
“You could say that."
She nodded, assessing the rest of him for injuries. Under her intense regard, he forced his back a little straighter. “Was it worth it?” she asked when she was satisfied.
“In a way. I know the truth now.”
“You know part of it,” she agreed slowly.
“Enough to know there are things missing, yes.”
She nodded again. “How much do you remember? From before Loki?”
From before? “Everything,” he answered, his brows drawing down. “It’s after the mythological Norse deity turned my chest into Swiss cheese that it all gets a little... fuzzy.”
“You’re sure you remember everything?”
Phil crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes. Before isn’t the issue.”
“Not that you realize.”
The feeling of unease stewing in the pit of Phil’s stomach blossomed into fully grown dread. “I don’t understand.”
Rising from his chair, Natasha reached for him, and laid a calming hand on his arm. “They did a good job, Coulson. You’re still you. But there were some things they didn’t know to rebuild.”
Phil took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It did little to steady the ground beneath his feet. He had suspected they had played fast and loose with his mind, and regaining the memory of Johnny 5 sticking his spindly fingers into Phil’s grey matter didn’t exactly inspire confidence that he had recovered with all his faculties intact. “Tell me.”
Natasha shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t. You have to remember things on your own.”
“Why?”
“The memories are still there. It’s the connections allowing you to access them that are gone. If I tell you what you don’t know, you’ll remember my telling you but you won’t have access to your original memories. If you rebuild the neural pathways, you’ll be able to access those pieces of your life again.”
“Okay. So you can’t tell me what I’m missing. Can you at least tell me if they added anything more than white sandy beaches and Mai Tais while they were playing Pictionary with my brain?” He was hoping she would say nothing. He needed her to say nothing, but one look at the tight press of her lips told him it wasn’t going to be that simple.
“I think maybe you ought to sit down.”
That wasn’t a good sign. Phil walked to his desk and sat, his eyes never leaving Natasha’s. “Can you give me some idea at least? Or do I have to sift through fifty years of memories and try to figure out which parts might not be real? Forgive me, Natasha, but that might take a while.”
“Tell me what you remember about Helena Michelson.”
The pit in Phil’s stomach intensified, and he took a deep breath to try to calm it. “David Michelson was on my team when I was in the army. He died in my arms on a black op in Kosovo. Had no living relatives except a baby sister in New York. He asked me to look after her.” When Natasha showed no outward sign of disagreeing with him, he continued. “I kept an eye on her. She was getting her Masters at Juilliard. We met a few times. I made sure she had everything she needed. When I joined SHIELD, I was based in New York. Helena and I started to see each other more frequently, and then more seriously. We-” Natasha’s head shook softly, and Phil’s chest squeezed tighter than a vice. “We didn’t date, did we?”
“No,” Natasha said softly.
“But I remember,” Phil protested. “I remember kissing her cheek on the stairs of her apartment building and sharing cabs home. I remember how it felt to listen to her play, how proud I was. I remember-”
“Do you remember the sex?” Natasha cut in.
“Of course I do!” And he did. He remembered the smell of her skin and the touch of her hand, making love agonizingly slowly in the satin sheets of the penthouse suite he’d booked for their anniversary. He remembered the way she trembled, the way he touched her. He remembered taking her home, kissing her in his hallway, pressing her down into the sheets, and- Phil’s mind came to a sudden halt. It was the same scene. A different setting, yes, but his memory supplied him with the same words, the same touches, in exactly the same order. If he hadn’t tried to recall them one after the other he might never have realized but- Jesus, how was he supposed to know if anything was real? He remembered falling in love with this woman. How could it not be true?
Normally, Phil prided himself on being utterly inscrutable, but he must have been showing something on his face because the next thing he knew Natasha had both hands on his shoulders and had moved to catch his eyes. “Some of it was true,” she said gently. “Everything but the falling in love. You took care of her. You hated losing her to Portland but you were happy for her because you were as proud of her as if she were your own sister.”
“Raina said she cried for days when SHIELD told her I was- When they told her.”
“She probably did. You two were very close. But you weren’t dating, though your refusal to talk about your personal life led some people to believe that you were.”
“If I didn’t talk about it, how do you know we weren’t together?” Phil asked, but he knew he was grasping at straws. His feelings for Helena had never resonated exactly right and now he was beginning to understand why.
For a moment, Natasha was quiet, watching his face carefully, searching for something, for what Phil didn’t know. “You found the ring, didn’t you?” she finally asked.
For a second, all the air fled the room, because Phil knew exactly what ring Natasha was talking about. In the small chest that had once belonged to Phil’s mother, alongside his parents’ wedding bands, his gold cufflinks, and the Rolex Nick had given him for his tenth anniversary at SHIELD, the ring was still in the packaging from the jeweler, practically untouched. He had no explanation for the way his fingers felt drawn to the small box, the inexplicable way he was loathe to put it down once he’d picked it up. “I thought I must have given her a matching one,” Phil murmured.
Natasha nodded, her look intent. “But it’s a little big for you, isn’t it?” She watched as the implications sank in. Phil had known he preferred to date based on personality rather than private parts since sophomore year of high school. But an hour ago he would have sworn on his own grave - which was very nice, thank you, Tony Stark - that Helena was the love of his life. A throbbing started behind his eyes and he blinked it back. Right now was for figuring out what he’d lost. He'd have time later to come to terms with not knowing things he should and finding out that things he knew with absolute certainty were turning out to be something out of a telenovela instead. “Do you want to remember?” Natasha asked, and her straightforward sincerity was one of the things Phil loved most about her. If he told her he didn’t want to move forward, she’d stop there, no questions asked.
“I need to know, ‘Tasha.”
“Then tell me about the ring. Can you describe it to me?”
Thinking back to the last time he’d seen it, Phil leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “It’s titanium, with a row of diamonds in the center and thin black bands on either side of the stones, framing them.”
“Keep going,” she prompted. “Details.”
Phil tried to imagine standing at a jewelry counter, examining the ring in the box on his bureau, but there was nothing. No spark of recollection. No hint of familiarity. He bit back a sigh of disappointment and let his mind drift back to the ring, itself, focusing on the details as Natasha had suggested. “The diamonds are the clearest I’ve ever seen. Not huge, but really beautiful. The edges are smooth, rounded, and there’s an inscription on the inside. Cupid’s arrow piercing a heart.” It really was a spectacular piece, every detail carefully chosen. Phil wasn’t prone to lavish gifts. If the ring was meant for someone Phil was dating, he must have loved this man very much. It might have even been meant as an engagement ring.
He had thought being forced to keep his survival from Helena had felt like a piece of his soul had been ripped away, but this? There was a whole life he had lived, a first kiss, a first lovemaking, dinners and conversations and movies and the stupid things lovers do when they are completely at ease in one another’s presence, and it all had been stolen from him, ripped away and tossed aside like yesterday’s refuse. Phil wanted to be furious, but in truth, he had never felt so bereft.
He shook his head, and ran a hand over his hair. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got. There’s no jeweler logo on the box or anything. It’s just a very nice ring with a matching chain.”
Natasha’s eyebrows raised a little. “A chain?”
“Of course,” Phil responded automatically. “He certainly couldn’t wear it on his finger out in the field. It would interfere with his grip.”
The moment the words left his lips, Natasha’s eyes widened, and a searing pain ricocheted through Phil’s mind. Like a dozen ice picks crashing down on him at once, agony lanced through his head and shot fiery agony down his bones. He grasped blindly at both temples, doubling over, his vision whiting out. Keeping one hand pressed over his eyes, he groped for the edge of the desk, barely catching himself, and gripped it until his knuckles ached.
The world tornadoed around him, whipping past his head in a whirlwind of color and sound, images slipping like sand through his fingers before he could grab hold. “You better call it, Coulson, ‘cause I’m starting to root for this guy.” A steady hand on Phil’s shoulder. Clear, blue eyes lingering longer than was strictly polite. “Barton, what are you doing?” “I’m kissing you. You can court martial me later.” The taste of autumn wind on Phil’s tongue. Callused fingertips against his cheek. “Clint, don’t call me ‘Coulson’ in bed.” “Sorry, sir.” “Clint!” Laughter chiming like music. A rough baritone whisper raising goosebumps over Phil’s skin. The heat of a muscled body at rest held tightly against his own.
Memories fell together like dominos, a chain reaction firing through Phil’s brain, one vision triggering the next. Synapses snapped together like lightning, too quick for him to decipher, raging like a summer storm. Phil’s office at Pegasus. His apartment. The helicarrier. Hotel rooms and hole in the wall restaurants cycled violently and with such speed they felt like they were scraping the inside of Phil’s skull raw. Phil clutched at his head and held on, clenching his teeth to keep from screaming, until the blitzkrieg slowed and the incomprehensible flow of images finally ebbed.
When the room stopped spinning, there was leather under his cheek, a strong, slender hand rubbing circles between his shoulder blades, and a soft voice calling his name.
“Phil? Phil, are you back with me?”
“Yeah,” he said, and gasped when the sound of his own voice reverberated like thunder through his aching head. “No,” he corrected. This time, he barely let the word drift out on a whisper. The taiko drums faded to bongos, and he lowered his head back to the cool leather of the desk mat. “I may vomit on you.”
“I can take it. I’m a big girl.”
“Still, I’d rather not.”
The hand on his back resumed its soothing circles, this time slower. “Trust me, once you’ve seen secondhand shawarma, there’s not much left that can get to you.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Never eat Lebanese food when you’re too tired to see the plate in front of you. It doesn’t work out well. And it smells worse.”
Phil cursed his vivid imagination and breathed in slowly through his nose. “Is this supposed to be helping?”
“Sorry,” she said, but Phil could hear the smile in her voice. He pushed himself up and leaned heavily back in his chair, but it was a terrible idea. He could feel the blood rushing from his head as his vision blurred and he swayed a little, grabbing again at the desk for support. “Take it easy,” Natasha murmured. “There’s no rush.” She gave him another minute to catch his breath.
Phil rested his elbows on the desk in front of him and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Clint,” he said finally, the name associated with a thousand scents and sounds and images in his mind, only half of which he understood.
“Clint,” Natasha agreed, leaning a hip against the cherrywood.
Phil sighed. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“When we found out what they’d done to you, Banner didn’t think forcing you to remember would be such a good idea.”
“Well, it was no picnic in Centipede’s machine, that’s for damned sure. What did you call it when you smashed Clint’s head into a railing?”
“Cognitive recalibration,” she smiled.
“It was like that, only about a thousand times worse.”
Natasha nodded. “From what Bruce said, I don’t doubt it. He wasn’t sure you’d recover. He thought that there was a chance your mind would short circuit if you were pushed into recovering the memories they took from you. Stark said you’d want to take the risk, and personally, I agreed with him, which is something I never thought I’d say, but Clint wouldn’t hear of it. He begged us not to make contact. He wouldn’t risk you.”
Of course he wouldn’t. Phil couldn’t pinpoint the moment their mutual trust and respect had grown into something more. He couldn’t recall where they were when they first kissed or when Natasha had found out about them - probably before they had realized their attraction themselves - and his head was still full of memories of Helena so vivid he could revisit them with every one of his senses, despite not having the slightest clue how many, if any, of them were real, but he knew without a shadow of a doubt that Clint was fiercely and profoundly in love with him. Clint would lay down his life for any of his teammates. Without a second’s hesitation, he would die to protect innocents. But he lived for Phil. No matter what agony Phil had been put through, how could he ever have forgotten how much they cared for one another?
“I was going to ask him to marry me, wasn’t I?”
“If I know you as well as I think I do,” she smiled, “you’re still going to.” She brandished a scrap of paper, and slid it across the desk with two fingers. “This number isn’t in his file,” she said. “You and I are the only ones who have it. Use it when you’re ready.”
Phil nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and knew she understood it was for much more than the phone number in front of him. He stared at the paper, peripherally aware of her heading towards the door. “And Natasha?” She stopped, turned. “How did you get on my plane?”
The corner of her mouth lifted into a smirk. “You didn’t really think we’d let you run around the world without someone watching your back, did you?” She raised her brows again. “Why do you think she said yes?” Oh god. That was a terrifyingly thought: an unholy alliance between Natasha Romanov and Melinda May, the two most lethal human beings Phil had ever known. “You died, Coulson. We had to call in the Cavalry.”
Phil raised his eyebrows. “Don’t let her hear you call her that,” he warned.
“Ask her who started it,” Natasha called back over her shoulder, and then in typical Black Widow fashion, she was gone, and Phil was alone with his thoughts. He leaned back in his chair, and steepled his fingers under his chin.
When he’d been a Ranger, he and Nick had had this buddy, a guy named Travis, who loved to do jigsaw puzzles. His wife would send him dozens of the things, and he got so good that he started building the puzzles upside down. Between missions Phil would watch him for hours, picking up the pieces and fitting them together with no picture to help him, no colors to match to give any hint to how one piece flowed into the next. That was how Phil’s brain felt now: jumbled, full of fragments he knew made a whole picture somehow, but without any clues as to how they connected. There was nothing to do but turn the pieces over, examine them one by one, and see if he could assemble the puzzle in his mind. Only then would he know for certain how the pieces fit together, and which ones didn’t fit at all.
Clint Barton. Phil shifted his weight and let the chair swivel slightly from side to side, his eyes fixed on the ten digits written in Natasha’s angular hand. He should call. He didn’t remember everything, and a good portion of what he remembered didn’t quite make sense, but some things were unmistakable. When Phil pictured Helena, his feelings were wistful, pleasant but unobtrusive. Pastel. When he thought of Clint, Phil was all over the place. Worry, undeniable passion, exasperation, absolute respect, lust, and tenderness in a way Phil hadn’t felt since his mother passed. And unlike Helena, even though these memories were fragmented, hard to put together, they were in bright, vibrant technicolor.
Clint Barton, who had been betrayed and abandoned by so many people in his life, had asked the only people he considered friends to protect Phil in a way he never would have asked for himself. Clint Barton: Phil’s self-sacrificing idiot of an asset who was willing to spend the rest of his life alone because he thought it would keep Phil safe.
Phil needed to do more than call. He reached over and hit the button on the comm. “Agent May, I have business in New York. Wheels up in ten.”
“It’s about time, sir.”
Torn between sighing and giving in to the first tentative urge to smile he'd had for days, Phil pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Thank you, Agent May. You know how I appreciate your tactical analysis.”
“Any time, sir.”
“And do me a favor. The next time you let Romanov on my plane? A little warning wouldn’t go amiss.”
“I make no promises.”
Phil clicked off the comm, and gave in to the smile that had been hovering at the corners of his mouth. Despite everything, he was alive. He had friends who were fiercely loyal. He had a lover who would do anything, everything for him - at least he hoped he still did. Though there was obviously a long, not so pleasant road ahead of him, Phil knew he was luckier than most. He waited until the Bus was airborne, the ground dropping away below them as they climbed into the sky. Then he picked up the secure cell from his desk drawer.
His hands did not shake as he dialed the number.
“’Lo?” someone answered after just two rings.
“Clint?”
The breath on the other end of the phone caught. Then the voice came, wavering, but so achingly, endearingly familiar. “Phil? Oh my god, are you okay?”
He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “No,” he admitted quietly. “I’m not okay. Not by a long shot. But I remember enough. Clint, I’m coming home.”
FIN