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It is almost anti-climactic when Phil Coulson returns to Earth. Thor finds out first, when he visits his mother and finds her tending to his old friend. As Thor is incapable of keeping anything quiet, he breaks the news to everyone when he returns to Earth. There is, of course, much jubilation at first, particularly from Maria Hill, who is one Iron Man/Monaco incident from a nervous breakdown.
Then comes the oh shit moment, when Coulson's lover, boss and friends realize that he is now without a home and about ninety percent of his pre-death belongings.
Fury begins the Bring Coulson Back movement by approaching Steve. "Cap, I don't suppose you have the cards I once gave you, do you?"
There is, Steve notes, a note of something approaching diffidence in his tone, and the man out of time wonders if there is actually someone that Fury fears. "Yes, of course," Steve assures the SHIELD director. "I'll give them back to you immediately."
"Thank you," Fury calls, and Steve shakes a hand dismissively as he returns to the quarters he calls home. He finds the cards immediately; there are few personal items in his room. He has not quite adjusted to the time he is in, and has not yet become accustomed to the modern trend of having so many things. At heart he is still the boy who grew up in clothes that had been handed down several times, where full stomachs were a luxury that few of his classmates knew with any regularity. He has been an orphan without a home for longer than the four months he has been in the twenty-first century.
It is, surprisingly, a little wrenching to give the cards back to Fury, but Steve swallows the odd feeling of resentment and pretends he is only too glad to hand them over. They are in better condition than when he received them, with every trace of blood removed. Steve learned how to remove bloodstains from paper when he would take letters from the coat pockets of dead soldiers; you did not want the young girls or mothers waiting at home to see the blood of the man they loved; the telegram and the loss were bad enough. Removing bloodstains from the most personal of belongings is not a skill that one loses, he muses.
His act must be good enough to fool even a master of intelligence because Fury merely raises an eyebrow at the pristine cards and leaves after a quick thanks.
He does not wonder why some people get their happy endings and others don't. He can't let himself think that way.
*
Natasha and Maria are both present when Fury debriefs Thor and finds out that he's getting his best eye back. Maria takes off quickly afterwards, and Natasha has a feeling that she's indulging in a quick victory dance in her quarters. Not that she can state that for a fact; no one has ever seen Maria Hill do a victory dance.
Natasha knows where she has to go, and the difficulty of a job has never caused her to hesitate where it really matters. She catches a quick helicopter ride with a pilot she knows has a thing for pretty much anything Stark drives, and makes her way to Stark Tower, which she's almost certain is now being called Avengers tower even though Tony Stark keeps talking about redoing the sign.
Thor comes with her. She knows that he has a village woman's penchant for gossip and giving good news, but she warns him that telling Clint needs to be done with some sensitivity, so he can't do it. He is more self-aware than most give him credit for, a lesson that has been hard won and therefore all the harder to forget, so he agrees. Besides, he is already anticipating the victory drinks Stark will bust out once he finds out.
It goes down about as easily as she'd imagine. Clint doesn't believe her, but he's also afraid she is wrong. He won't even hear her say it at first. He sees her expression, oddly similar to the one she wore when she told him his lover was dead while he pulled against the straps holding him down and called for Phil. He thinks that Phil's death gave him as much cognitive recalibration as hitting his head, but he doesn't tell her that. Instead he braces himself and starts talking quickly about anything and everything to get her to stop.
"Clint," she breaks in after a few minutes of his rambling, "Clint, stop!"
He obeys her, and turns to look her in the eye for the first time. "Tasha," he begs in a wrecked voice. "Whatever it is-"
"He's alive."
His face twists and he turns away. "No, he's dead. You told me he was. You told me. You said he died on a raid I led against my own people."
"I know what I said, but Thor's people..."
"Oh my God," he cries out, sarcasm ringing in every note. "Don't tell me the people of Asgard are finally taking responsibility for the shit they keep pulling on our planet?"
She sighs and sits down on the ground of the target practice game that looks like every budding Robin Hood's dream. She waits for him to sit down at her side, and then she explains. "Apparently Frigga, Loki and Thor's mother, was 'watching' everything that happened, and she transported Coulson to Asgard in the moment he died. Thor doesn't know what she did with the body but apparently she could teach Loki a few things about magic, so we'll probably never know. She put him in something that Thor says is sort of like an Odinsleep. I don't know what that means, but apparently he's asleep, and he heals that way. Well, he was asleep, and now he's not, and as soon as she thinks he's well enough to travel between worlds he's coming back."
"'He's coming back...'" It is as if repeating the words will help Clint believe them, because he does it several times. She sits next to him in silence for the half-hour or so it takes for reality to sink in, and then grabs him by the arm and tugs him into Stark's over-the-top living room just in time to hear Tony loudly ask Thor if this news meant that Coulson had beat him into space.
"And to an alien planet," Bruce Banner rubs it in, an unholy gleam in his eye.
"Son of a bitch," Tony mutters, his face split by a wide smile. He catches sight of Clint and the smile grows impossibly bigger. "Hey, Legolas! Ready to put on a diaper and, bow and arrow in hand, go greet your boy at... where and how will he land, Thor? I don't get how this bridge works."
"It is a Rainbow bridge," Thor answers, not very helpfully, but he manages to silence his audience for all of ten seconds.
Pepper, smiling through her tears, is the first one to recover enough to talk. "I think they showed it in a cartoon I watched as a kid. Do you travel on the bridge via a magical horse called Starbright?"
"Well, we do often use animals much like your horses to traverse- I do not understand. Why are you all laughing?"
*
In the days and weeks they wait for Phil Coulson to return to Earth, another chapter comes to an end for an Avenger. Betty comes to Stark Tower one day, unannounced. There is something resolute and broken in her face, and Tony lets her in and gives her and Bruce privacy, forgoing questions and teasing for once.
In a quiet room on a deserted floor of one of the most spectacular, albeit not to everyone's taste, buildings in the world, Betty Ross quietly and painfully breaks Bruce Banner's heart.
"Are you in love with him?" Bruce asks, his face carefully turned away.
She shakes her head. "But I could be, if I let myself."
"Will you let yourself?"
She buries her face in her hands, runs them through her hair, and then sits up, determined to have her say. "I don't know yet. It depends on your answer."
He prevaricates, though he knows full-well what she's asking. "My answer? You haven't asked a question, Betty."
"I've asked you the same question for almost ten years now, Bruce, and now I want an answer." She stands and then comes to his chair, kneeling in front of it and grasping his hands so that he cannot avoid her any longer. "I need to know, now, whether we have a chance. A future, Bruce. I can't keep on living like this."
He stands, then, pushing her away so gently she is reminded of the power he chooses not to wield more than he has to. He walks to the window and looks out, seeing nothing and everything. "I can't- I know I can't offer you much. No intimacy, the constant threat of the military, and a piss-poor relationship with your father."
"My father's and my relationship is ninety percent his fault and the rest mine. It's not you, Bruce, and if it is, it could just as easily be anything else. And yes, I like sex, but I could live without it, could settle for whatever you and I can do together. Hell, if it's just getting off, there's no reason you can't help me with that. But it's more than that. I need us to be together, and for you to take a break from the penitent self-flagellation you've made of your life, searching for a cure or, worse, a way to kill yourself. I need someone I can spend time with and build a life with, and I want you to be that person. But if you can't be, if you can't foresee a reasonably near future where we are together, I need to know that now so I can try to build it with someone else. I can't wait forever if you can't give me any hope for a good ending for the two of us. And for God's sake, please look at me!"
Surprised, he does, and he is caught off-guard by the sincerity in her eyes. He wants to give her the answer she wants to hear, but he can't. He loves Betty, and has loved her for almost twenty years, since he saw her across the auditorium, listening to the Dean's orientation speech at Harvard. And because he loves her, he has to let her go. "I can't give you that future, Betty. I wish I could, you can't know how much I wish that, but even if I was okay with tying you to a life of celibacy, I'm not tying you to a life of waiting for something that isn't happening. I'm never going to be at peace with the other guy; I'm never going to settle for a lifetime of having him lurking behind my brain or, even worse, him hijacking it." He closes his eyes and swallows. "I'm never going to stop being angry."
"So that's it," she realizes. "After all these years, this is where it ends. In Tony Stark's house, when you've finally graduated from sleeping on sidewalks or running around the world to settling somewhere. Now you're ending it." Maybe she came to him, to snap the chains holding her in limbo forever, but he's the one who ended it by ending her hope for something else.
He's never been good at knowing he caused someone else pain, which makes the Hulk all that harder to stomach, but this is worse. He thinks, incongruently, that it would be much easier to be dead than to be alive in that moment. Monster, he reminds himself, in case he falters. "Betty, Betty," he says uselessly. "I'm so-"
"God, don't tell me you're sorry," she groans. "Please don't."
He is silent, and after a few moments of her pretending she isn't crying, and his pretending he can't see her cry, she gets up. "I have to go."
He can't let her go this way. "Are you sure you can- someone can take you-"
She smiles sadly, loving him with all her heart. "I'll be fine," she says, and it's true. She's strong and she will be fine. So much stronger than him, and they both know it. That is what makes her pause, and tell him, "You know, whatever else we were, we were always friends. If you need anything, if you still need that out, you know you can just..."
"I'll come to you," he vows, smiling, because he has never doubted the intensity of her loyalty.
"Promise me that."
"I promise," and, hesitatingly, "Can you do something for me?" She waits as he searches for words. "Can you talk to your father?"
She shakes her head. "I love my father, I always will. It's not something that goes away, love for a parent. But it is possible to twist and turn it into something ugly and unbearable." When he turns away, she runs towards him and clasps his hands. "Not you, never you, Bruce. Even now, I hold on to what we had, and yes, you've broken my heart, but not through cruelty, ambition or selfishness, and that makes it easier for me to say there's nothing to forgive between us. But he broke my heart for all three of those poisonous, ugly reasons, and to make matters worse he used me and my friends to do it. I won't forgive him, Bruce, because of what he did to me."
He nods jerkily, so she leans up and kisses him. It is meant to be short and chaste, but it turns into something long and unexpectedly passionate. Just as he feels his heart speed up, she pulls away and wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. They look at each other for a loaded moment, and he knows she's waiting for a final reprieve. He wishes he had the strength or the cowardice, he's not quite sure, to give it to her. But he's mastered hurting himself over the past decade, so while it's no small task, he's able to meet her eyes and stay quiet.
She's almost out of the door when she stops. Not looking back at him, she tells him, "Just so you know, Bruce- I have always loved you. Every part of you."
"Even the Hulk?" he quips, but she's not joking.
She shakes her head. "Stop using that ridiculous name." She turns and gives him one final look. "It's you, green or not. I've never seen anything but you in him, plus a whole lot of control issues. But it's still you." She spins again and this time she walks out, heels tapping in a determined stride, and he knows he just lost the one person in the world who will never call him "the Hulk." Who will never see the Hulk in him.
*
They put him on their version of a suicide watch where Tony hangs around his lab and talks a lot about anything and everything, Natasha gets him to the gym for a limited workout that doesn't raise his heart-rate, Pepper has a lot of Indian food cooked by a chef no one actually catches a glimpse of, Thor gives inspiring speeches with references no one else understands, and Clint stands around looking awkward. Steve is quiet, but finds a little time every day to sit with Bruce, quietly sketching. Every morning and night, he makes sure to grasp Bruce's shoulder in a quick but sincere gesture of empathy.
Bruce does quite well for a man who has had every dream of a future taken away from him. He was always quiet, and the lack of interest in the world around him is less worrying a reaction, for an Avenger, than an obsession with saving it would be. He smiles a little at Clint, listens and responds to Tony with his own brilliant ideas, lets Thor talk and Natasha beat him up, and doesn't flinch away from Steve.
So it isn't until a few weeks later when the Avengers, minus the one teammate no one recognizes in his human form, come back from a public relations event and see a mid-size duffel bag by the door to Tony's living room that they find out he's leaving.
"Oh, Bruce," moans Pepper, who is contractually obligated to accompany Tony to all public relations events in New York where children will be present.
Tony is less diplomatic. "Really, you were just going to creep out in the middle of the night like a teenage girl?"
Bruce sighed. "If I was going to do that, don't you think I would have done that? You've been gone for four hours- it doesn't take that long to pack a duffle bag. I've been waiting to talk to you."
"Have you seen Stark pack?" Natasha asks, remembering her Stark Industries days.
"Hey!"
"Let's leave Tony out of this," Steve mediates. "Bruce, what are you doing?"
Bruce looks straight at him. "I'm not like you, I don't need a mission to deal with things. I can't feel useful when it's not me out there doing... whatever it is the Hulk does while he destroys buildings and endangers as many people as the villains of the week, so I don't get anything out of it except exhaustion. To get through this, to get..." He can't finish that sentence because he can't fathom a future where he's over her. "I need time and I need to be alone, and I need all of you to give me that."
Steve looks away, then nods.
"Hey!" Tony cries again. "You're letting him go?"
"I must have missed the part where he was our prisoner," Steve says dryly. Tony has the grace to blush.
"He's right here," Bruce points out.
Clint moves forward until he looms over Bruce; he makes it look impressive even though he's not a tall man. But he has an inch on Bruce, and he uses every millimeter of it to his advantage. "Okay," Clint says, "okay. But you know SHIELD will keep eyes on you?"
Bruce shrugs. "I'd like it to be at a distance, and I'd like to be left alone until I come back. And yes, I'm taking a phone, and yes, I'll be there if needed. But just because you need the other guy for a mission, doesn't mean I'm back, and I need you to give me the space I need to have. Which means that SHIELD may keep its eyes on me, but I would like you to promise you won't."
Tony argues, of course. Bruce hears him out in silence, and something about the quiet stubbornness defeats even Iron Man. In the end, he picks up his bag, accepts hugs from those who hug him, clasps shoulders with those who won't, and prepares to leave. At the door, he stops and turns to Clint. "Tell Phil Coulson he can't have my spot on the team."
Steve smiles. "We'll see you back when you're ready," and it's as much of a promise as Bruce's words were.
*
Phil Coulson lands back on Earth as he left it, with nobody noticing. He orients himself quickly, very deliberately does not even consider stopping at Stark Tower, and walks to the nearest SHIELD center. It's a toy store, because no one can accuse SHIELD of not having a sense of humor (though everyone does, and most of them are right). Phil walks unerringly between lego models and action figures until he reaches the young Asian girl dressed as a particularly ghoulish clown. "Agent Coulson, reporting for duty."
By now news of his miraculous survival and impromptu stint as an astronaut has spread, and the clown girl does not jump. She is all deference, but that's because she's seen Coulson in action and served under him, and to do both is to guarantee a lifelong respect for the man. "Sir," she says, "Sir."
"Reports of my death, and all that..." he deadpans, then asks for a ride home. "I imagine I need to be debriefed, Agent."
"Yes sir."
He is on a quinjet, and then on the helicarrier, in impressive time, but even before he lands he sees Iron Man, Thor, and a vessel pass in front of him, and he knows that the Avengers have beaten him there. He disembarks to the sight of all of them, except Bruce, in full uniform, and Nick Fury and Maria Hill waiting for him. There should be a battalion of SHIELD agents present, but the hangar is empty but for them. He's not surprised by Bruce's absence- the scientist never really knew him, and obviously hated the helicarrier and small planes- but the absence of regular traffic for this reunion both surprises and embarrasses him. He hides it well.
Phil continues walking forward, face impassive, until he approaches Fury. "Sir," he says, "I've been to Asgard."
"So I hear," Fury half-smiles. "Your report will be interesting. Conference room 4?"
"Five minutes?"
"Of course." Fury walks out, and if anyone notices his step is a fraction lighter, no one is stupid enough to remark on it, even to themselves. Hill follows him, but not before telling Coulson she's glad to see him. "And so ready to give Avenger-sitting duty over to you."
"Consider yourself relieved," Coulson assures, and then he's left with his team.
Steve is the first to realize he's in the way, and he smiles sweetly in welcome. "Glad to have you back, sir." He doesn't mention the cards because he knows Phil is a little embarrassed by that, but he'll make sure they're signed before Fury returns them to their resurrected agent. He leaves quickly to make certain that he catches Fury in time.
Natasha is next, but she's never been one for reunions. "Sir," is all she says, but he gets it.
To Thor, "I met your mother. You're a lucky man, and Loki is a fool."
Tony doesn't say much, just, "Pepper wants you over for dinner."
"I'll be there," he promises, and then he's alone with Clint.
Clint just looks at him. "I will never forgive you for this," he promises.
"I really had no control over any of it," Phil points out, but then adds, "Yes, sir."
Clint laughs wetly. "That has a nice ring, but I believe you outrank me, sir."
"And on that note, there's a debriefing we're late for," Coulson reminds him. They don't even touch each other, but that steadies Clint more than any grand romantic gesture would have. Coulson doesn't do public displays of affection, and he definitely never indulges in such behavior in a professional place. But by calling Clint sir, he's brought a bit of their bedroom into the helicarrier, and it's enough.
It's later, much later, when Clint finally gets Coulson to his suite at Stark Tower. He presses him against the door, and tears the normally stoic agent into pieces with his hands and lips. He means it to be rough and fast, but somehow he slows down, and when he takes him on the plush bed, it's gentle and almost worshipful.
They both fall asleep in each other's arms, and it's not until the next morning that Phil Coulson thinks to ask, "Do you live here now?"
That's when Clint tells him about the apartment lease he broke, the personal belongings that are probably in Goodwill, and the suits that Coulson will never see again. Luckily for him, Pepper has already replaced the suits with others that, individually, are worth at least ten times the value of everything Phil Coulson ever owned. Pepper also gifts Phil Coulson with a storage compartment key, where Tony had all of Coulson's personal belongings saved. "Not the suits, because calling those things suits is an affront to Italians everywhere."
"I thought, you know, he may one day wish he kept more than a couple of things," says the boy inside the man, the boy who buried both his parents and surrounded himself with stuff to forget the love he's never sure existed.
Coulson smiles. "I'm still going to taze you and watch television while you drool onto the carpet if you give me a hard time," he promises. "But for this, I might make it Top Gear instead of Supernanny."
"That's a good deal," Clint points out, in case Tony misses it.
"Wouldn't have it any other way," Tony smiles.
THE END