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bungakertasRating: PG
Summary: "Go to Peru and take possession of O-8-4." Oh, if only the mission were as simple as the orders.
Characters/Pairings: established Phil Coulson/Tony Stark/Pepper Potts/Darcy Lewis (off-screen); otherwise mostly gen with some tiny little pre-sedoretu for another group
Warnings/Tags: weird relationships, sedoretu, AU-canon, rarepairs
Spoilers: Captain Americas 1 and 2; Thor I & II; The Avengers; Iron Mans 1, 2, and 3; Agents Of SHIELD — Basically everything. The Agents Of SHIELD spoilers are the biggies, though.
Disclaimer: The characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all that comes with them are the property of Marvel Studios, ABC, or both. No money has changed hands, and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Author’s Notes: This is the next in my MCU sedoretu series that begins in “Compatible Weirdness.” It follows after “The UnTeam.” I highly recommend you read those two first or else you will be confuzzled.
*~*~*
Sometimes Phil felt like he outsmarted himself.
Adding Skye as a member of the team was a good idea in theory, and she would certainly be helpful in his mission to figure out what SHIELD was keeping from him about his death. In practice, it meant a lot of paperwork.
Transferring FitzSimmons out of the SciTech division and into Ops had taken more than a little scribbling. Authorizing Skye to actually join a SHIELD team, on the other hand, resulted in a gargantuan flood of paperwork (all of it digital, and sorted into a three dimensional holographic stack by the holoGUI) that he had been afraid he would never see the end of. But he had to finish it all, or they'd never get to find out what this O-8-4 was about. So he grabbed a stylus and got to work.
First it was the Index Asset Evaluation and Intake on Skye, then an assessment filled out by the team leader and full background check, then a psych eval, then payroll authorization forms, then… Phil started to get dizzy.
However, he was finally reaching the last few lines of Skye's official Assignment Orders when something on his desk beeped. He hunted through a stack of papers, marveling faintly that technology had advanced from actual papers cluttering his desk, to multiple windows cluttering his computer, and back to virtual papers…cluttering his desk. Somehow, Tony always managed to keep everything orderly on his holoGUI at home. Finally, he flicked his wrist and “pushed” the entire stack off of the desk to find that he had just received official notification of Skye's arrival. He tapped the “Acknowledge” button on his desk, reached out and “grabbed” his paperwork stack to bring it back to him, and polished off the last few lines of Skye's forms before filing them and descending to go to the conference room and prep to brief his team on their next assignment.
He was ambushed by Ward before he got off the steps. “Is it true?”
Phil raised an eyebrow at Ward.
“Is it true, sir?” Ward repeated, practically rolling his eyes. “Are you really inviting Skye on to the team?”
Phil nodded, moving towards the conference room and giving May an acknowledging glance as she joined them.
“Skye?” Ward demanded, in a voice dripping with disdain. “The girl's not qualified to be a SHIELD agent.”
“Agreed. That's why I've invited her on as a consultant,” Phil replied.
May made a sound that might actually qualify as hurt.
Phil looked back and forth between Ward and May with a mixture of amusement and annoyance.
One of their security monitors showed a clear feed of the newest team member's movements. Skye's van had just been driven away by a team of SHIELD intake techs, and Skye herself was now officially on board the plane, being welcomed by Fitz and Simmons. So, naturally, he was having to deal with Ward and May both giving him dark glowers and dire warnings about the dangers of having Skye on the team, instead of welcoming her himself.
Though he hadn't expected Ward to be more opposed to her than May was. May was concerned about keeping her safe. Ward was more worried about the trouble she might cause.
It didn't seem to matter how many times he told them she wasn't actually on the team, in a technical sense, either. They just kept on glowering.
He couldn't decide if this was funny or not. And after their new orders were so interesting, too. Apparently the O-8-4 was in Peru and SHIELD had given them clearance to do whatever they needed to contain it. It was always nice to not worry about red tape.
If Ward said “hacker” one more time, though, Phil was going to blow a gasket. “I’m looking for an objection I haven’t already anticipated,” he finally snapped. “I’m calling this, but your frown will be on record.”
“We’ve been called in to investigate an O-8-4,” Ward said. “We all know what that means.”
Phil barely managed it, but he did not laugh. “Yes, we do. It means we don’t know what that means.” Which was literally true. SHIELD’s resource classification system was generally pretty useful in telling people what they were dealing with. “O-8-4,” however, was the system’s equivalent of question marks across the board. The thing might be a paperweight or it might blow up the universe, and SHIELD had no idea whether it was from Earth or another planet or another universe or what. Phil remembered that the real Coulson and May had to stifle their laughter at the academy when they’d learned about the system. A glance at her revealed she was in no mood for reminiscing, however, so he pretended not to remember.
Ward huffed and made for his bunk.
After take-off, the team amused themselves in whatever manner suited their fancy. Fitz and Simmons tuned up machines in their lab, and fiddled with their calibration settings in ways that most human beings probably wouldn't care about. May mostly scowled at the autopilot, daring it to misbehave.
Ward cleaned his guns. With his door open. In the bunk directly across the cabin from Skye's.
To her credit, Skye ignored him magnificently. She was thoroughly engrossed in a SHIELD handbook and either wasn't aware of Ward's dark looks, or was really good at pretending not to be aware of them.
But eventually everyone grabbed something for dinner and then curled up in their bunks. Ward tried burning holes in the door of Skye's bunk when she slid it closed, but she didn't emerge after that, so eventually he gave up and went to sleep, too.
The next morning, Phil made do with a slightly rumpled suit, happy that he was at least able to wash up from the in-suite sink/toilet he had in his cabin. When they made appearances at breakfast, May's hair was in a ponytail, as was Simmons'. And both Fitz and Ward were still scrubbing hands through their hair, as if dissatisfied with it.
They were all a bit surprised when Skye sauntered in wearing clean clothes, smelling like she'd taken a shower, and with her hair down, sleek, and shampoo-commercial perfect. She surveyed the assembled team with a look of surprise and then said, “What happened to you guys?”
“We spent the night on a plane,” May snarled at her. She'd only had one sip of her coffee, so her temper was reflexive instead of serious.
Skye frowned and then she blinked with a smile. “That's right. You aren't used to living on the move. 'S okay. I'll show you some tricks I learned from living in my van.”
Ward looked even more upset about this, but FitzSimmons instantly started pelting her with questions. And although May didn't ask any, she listened with what Phil easily recognized as great interest. Score one for Skye.
Landing in Peru was a bone-jarring affair on a dirt airstrip that no amount of May’s expert piloting could salvage. It was impossible to land a plane this size in a place like this and not rattle the entire thing almost to pieces. But after correctly reorienting his spleen, as Darcy would have put it, Phil grabbed his shoulder holster, slid his jacket on, and joined Fitz, Simmons, and Skye as they waited in the cargo bay to get off the Bus.
They were all excited right up until the moment when the cargo ramp opened. Even before it was halfway down, a blast of damp, hot air hit them all so strongly it was a bit like having a a towel soaked in hot water thrown over your face.
FitzSimmons and Skye dashed for the SUV and the air conditioning therein.
Phil managed not to join them—though he dearly wanted to—and descended the ramp to see if he could hire a second vehicle to get to the site of the O-8-4. It exhausted his meager supply of Spanish, but he was fairly certain he’d managed it without making any lifelong enemies. Phil had never had the same gift with languages as Tony or Pepper. But finally they were able to lock up the plane and get under way.
The drive out was actually fairly pleasant, once he got over the heat and the bumps in the road. They took a winding dirt road up a mountain and through the jungle. Since they were so close to the equator, it didn’t matter that Phil’s brain thought of this as “early Fall,” the flowering plants were in full bloom and everything was a gorgeous, vibrant green as far as the eye could see. Strange animals hid in the trees and called back and forth as they passed. As they climbed, he occasionally caught glimpses through the trees of a river winding through the valley on the other side of the mountain.
Phil officially liked Peru.
They finally pulled to a stop and disembarked at a camp that had been cobbled together by a mix of expatriated archaeologists and local vendors, situated right outside a pre-Columbian pyramid that Phil’s brain—programmed by too many American movies—instantly labeled “temple.”
Phil thanked the driver he’d hired and watched with amused eyes as May, ever the paranoid one, waited until everyone had gotten out of the SUV and then drove it away from the camp. He started on the short distance towards the pyramid, when Skye caught up to him.
“We should warn the people who live around here if the O-8-4 is dangerous,” she said, trailing him through a little copse of trees. “They’re already dealing with anti-mining rebels and the Shining Path guerrillas. I could post something?”
Phil smiled. Her impulse was good. “Remember the panic when that anti-matter meteor splashed down, just off the coast of Miami and nearly devoured the city?” He came to a stop when he reached a wide grassy space just in front of the pyramid.
“…No?” Skye came to a halt beside him, with a confused look.
“Precisely. Because we kept it quiet and contained.” He turned to her.
“So…what am I doing?” Skye asked.
“Well, if it gets out, I might need you to create some kind of diversion. Put the public on the wrong scent.”
She nodded in understanding. “So, everything that I’m against.”
“Yup.” But Phil said this with a smile, because he knew as well as any SHIELD agent that you could not push an asset too far against their grain or you would lose that asset. And he had no intentions of losing Skye.
The man who’d been running the study of the pyramid—which turned out to actually be a temple, score one for crappy American sci-fi—told them that it was full of pre-Incan artifacts, which made the potential O-8-4 that much more interesting. And when Phil entered the temple and actually saw it…
He hated doing this. “Sir, I need you and your team to evacuate the site until we determine the risk associated with this object.”
The man’s face fell. This was always going to be the worst part of his job. Fitz and Simmons had their little flying scanner whatsits out and zooming around already, which the professor seemed to find even more disheartening.
Phil sighed and escorted him towards the opening his team had broken in the wall to get in to this room. “Now. For your own safety.”
The archeology team reluctantly allowed themselves to be escorted out.
Phil couldn’t help but remember meeting Darcy like this. She’d been absolutely silent the whole time. He hadn’t realized it then, but Darcy was never that quiet. The way she'd clammed up that day, though, was something she only did when she was asleep, very relaxed, or felt particularly upset. If he’d known her then like he did now (or at least, like he remembered knowing her)… Well, he wouldn’t have taken her iPod, for one thing. It was a year after they were married when Darcy figured out that he never even touched her iPod without her express permission because he still felt a little guilty.
And…this was not helping him focus at all. He tried watching FitzSimmons and Skye study the O-8-4, but seeing Fitz shyly coach Skye into being more helpful, with little suggestions and explanations here and there just made him remember teaching Darcy, Tony, and Pepper how to shoot. All the hesitant little touches and eye contact…
And that was it. He had to get outside. If he stayed and watched these three flirting, he’d just get more depressed.
Phil strode through the hole in the wall, and up the stairs into the brilliant sunlight.
May was standing on the open landing where the stairs leading to the doorway met the stairs leading out of the temple. The archeology team was vanishing, with grumbles, away from the temple, and Ward was coming up from where they’d gotten out of their vehicles.
“Tracks match the tires on the professor’s truck,” he reported.
“Good,” Phil said.
“Something wrong inside?” May asked.
Phil shook his head. “I was in the way more than helping.”
“I'm surprised you're not armed,” Ward said, gesturing towards May.
“If I need a gun, I'll take one,” she answered casually.
“Right,” he smirked. “Forgot I was working with the Cavalry.”
Phil turned a ferocious glare on Ward. May just said quietly, “Don't ever call me that.”
Ward held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry.” He moved slowly towards the trees, acting casual. “I just heard about you. Bahrain, you in action.” Then he stopped, and shifted oddly. And it was there that Phil caught what he had seen. Movement in the trees. There were three…eight…a lot of armed men, hiding in the trees just out of sight. And they had been about to move in a moment ago, but now they were in a holding pattern.
Phil glanced at May curiously. She elected to reply to Ward, a little too loudly, and a little too casually. “I'm not proud of what happened in Bahrain. I'm not ashamed of it either. I did what needed to be done.”
Ward inclined his head, moving to the bottom of the steps. May moved to near the center, and sat down where she could easily move if she needed, while Phil remained up top. Any half-baked operator would instantly spot this as a defensive formation, but maybe that would help defuse the situation.
“And the O-8-4, sir?” Ward asked, because now that they'd started this pretend chat, they couldn't just let it drift off into nothing without being obvious they were just doing it for show.
“Secure. We still don't know anything about it, but FitzSimmons will work it out,” he shrugged.
Movement in the trees again. And now someone was walking out of them.
Was that…Camilla Reyes?
Phil had to blink a few times at the beautiful evening woman to be sure he was really seeing her. He hadn't seen Camilla since his first days as a level five agent, over a year before he'd met Pepper. “Camilla?” he said out loud, because he just couldn't quite believe it was her.
“Hello, Philip,” she replied in her softly accented English, coming towards the pyramid. Phil schooled his expression into blankness, when what he really wanted to do was frown. Why did she have so many armed men with her? Something about that did not sit right, so rather than letting her walk past Ward—breaking their defensive line, so to speak—he came down the steps and met her at the bottom. He could practically feel May's approval. She wasn't behind any of them this way.
“The welcoming committee's a little overwhelming,” he said out loud.
She shrugged. “We received word of a dangerous object on Peruvian soil.”
He nodded, forcing a slight smile. But his heart sank. He hadn't said word one about the O-8-4 being dangerous. For all they knew, it was decorative. The fact that she'd sped straight to mentioning it, even before the introductions was…troubling. “Agent Melinda May, Agent Grant Ward, this is…Commandante Camilla Reyes of the Policía Militar del Perú,” he said after noting her new rank pin.
She offered him a bright smile. “What do you know about the object in the temple?”
“Nearly nothing,” Phil answered, “but my team will let me know.”
She nodded, and there was an odd silence, as if she felt flat-footed or caught-off-guard. Phil shifted his weight, prepared to move. He had a feeling this was about to get unpleasant.
“What would I need to offer to get you to let me know?”
Phil exchanged a glance with May, trying to decide how to word his reply. Maybe they could still get out of this without trouble.
He took too long. With a snap of her fingers, Camilla's men had their guns up.
May and Ward moved faster than he could track. So he did the only logical thing. He grabbed Camilla, drew his weapon, and pointed it at her head, hoping that May and Ward had a handle on their people.
Sure enough, when he glanced over, May had managed to seize a rifle and a sidearm from two men who were now unconscious (how did that woman manage these things?) and had the rifle pointed at Camilla. Ward had one man lying at his feet, moaning in pain, and his gun was aimed for Camilla as well.
“Can't we just be civilized about this, Philip?” she sighed.
“You drew first,” he answered, slowly going backwards up the steps for the pyramid. May and Ward flanked him, now aiming down into the crowd of armed men, who tracked them with the barrels of their weapons.
They reached the top of the steps and Phil said, “I'm sorry it came to this.”
He threw Camilla down the steps, trying not to feel guilty as she hit hard on the stone. She had just threatened to kill his whole team, after all. Her men hadn't been expecting this, and that bought Ward, May, and himself just enough time to get into the door of the temple without a hail of bullets chasing them.
“Pack up the O-8-4!” Phil shouted down the stairs.
A round of gunfire came flying towards them, and the three of them each began trying to pick off whatever head they could see peek over the tops of the steps.
“What's going on?” Skye yelled.
“We're being attacked! Pack it up!” Ward replied harshly.
“Not possible!” Fitz shouted up, his Scot's accent thicker than usual under pressure. “This device has a power core fluctuating in frequencies far greater than ten exo-hertz! Without a containment case, it can't be moved!”
Phil glanced at Ward. “Did you understand any of that?”
“Not a word,” Ward answered.
Phil squeezed off a shot that winged one of the men who'd put his head up. “Go get them packed,” he ordered, scowling. That should've been a kill shot.
As Ward disappeared down the steps, he said something that sounded suspiciously like a sarcastic “Nice shot, sir.”
Phil and May stayed, taking careful shots at any heads they saw. But Phil noticed two men sneaking off away from the temple and the camp.
“How well did you hide the SUV?” he asked May.
“Fifteen minutes unless they get lucky,” she answered.
“Right.”
Behind them Fitz suddenly started yelling again, backed up by an extremely agitated Simmons. Then Skye's voice came up the steps. “We're packed. Can we come up?”
A bullet whizzed by Phil's head, and pinged off the roof behind him. “No! Do not come up here!”
He fired his next shot and the slide on his gun did not slide forward. He was out. He ejected the magazine and slid a new one out of his jacket and into his weapon. His last one.
“I've got one extra for the sidearm,” May said, anticipating his question. “And whatever's left in the rifle.”
Three more shots came flying in the door, coming uncomfortably close to both of them, and he and May fell back to the opening to the chamber with the O-8-4. Ward was looking confident and alert, holding a bag that presumably contained the O-8-4. Fitz, Simmons, and Skye all looked less confident and very uncomfortable.
“Are we trapped in here?” Skye asked, as the two of them came in.
“They've got to come down the stairs. It's a bottleneck,” Phil answered. “We've got a good shot at beating them.” Which was a technical way of saying “yes” and everyone knew it.
“Give me the bag!” Fitz said.
“We are not repacking the O-8-4 now!” Ward snapped.
“I don't want the O-8-4, now give me the bag!” Fitz was well beyond a lost temper now.
With quick glances, Phil watched as Ward held out the bag and Fitz retrieved…something that looked vaguely like a sonic screwdriver from one of the pockets. He went to the back wall, turned the device on, and held it against the stone.
And, unbelievably, began cutting through the stone wall.
Fitz cut a door into the next chamber in less than thirty seconds, and then said, “Let's go.”
Phil exchanged a glance with May. “Cut through to the outside. When you get through to the back of the temple, send Skye back to tell us. Do not give away your position when you reach the outside wall.” If the three of them retreated, their friends with the automatic rifles would get into this chamber and realize they were going through the temple. Then they'd send people around to the back, and the team would be trapped again. Their only hope of this working was to do it secretly.
Fitz nodded, and he, Simmons, and Skye dashed into the next room.
Then came an agonizing two minutes where Phil kept up the cover fire with May and Ward and didn't hear anything from the other three. But finally, finally, Skye's voice sounded behind them. “Got it!”
They all turned and broke into flat-out runs.
The path Fitz had cut was easy to follow, and when he and Simmons saw the speed they were coming, they started running as well. The six of them raced outside. They fell, more than ran, down the back side of the temple and made for the tree cover as fast as their legs could carry them.
“May, take point! Make for the the SUV,” Phil ordered. He and Ward—who still had the O-8-4—would hang back and cover their six.
Neither Skye nor FitzSimmons were trained for a long run, and—he didn't want to admit it, but it was true—he was not in the shape he remembered the real Coulson being in. They made good time away from the temple, but their pace slowed considerably in the first minute alone.
The terrain that had been so beautiful on their way to the temple now worked hard against them. The jungle was full of thick undergrowth that threatened to trip everyone with every step, the heat sapped their energy, the humidity got sweat dripping in their eyes almost immediately, and their path took them over a grueling uphill-downhill-by-turns that had even May and Ward breathing hard. When May slowed to a stop, Phil had to clamp hands on Fitz's and Skye's shoulders and say, “Breathe quietly.” Simmons had held up surprisingly well.
“Wait here with them,” he told Ward, indicating FitzSimmons and Skye. He nodded to May, who sank into a crouch and began moving through the undergrowth. He followed her.
They were well outside of May's fifteen minute time-frame. But Phil had hoped that she had been estimating conservatively. Or that she was assuming everyone was as good an operator as she was.
These hopes were dashed, however, when he reached a vantage point where he could see the SUV. It was still locked, so everything inside was safe. But all four tires were resting on the rims. They'd been slashed.
He and May rejoined the group. He shook his head.
“There's some ammunition in the back—” Ward started to say, in a near whisper. He was interrupted when a bullet caught him in the back of his shoulder, knocking him to the ground.
“Go!” Phil said, pointing downhill.
Fitz, Simmons, and Skye immediately broke into a run again. Phil seized the bag with the O-8-4 (which drew an unhappy noise from Ward as it was yanked off of his now-injured shoulder), and May hauled Ward up by his good arm (which drew a flat-out agonized noise from Ward), and the three of them started off downhill.
They had no direction this time, other than “down” and “together.” Phil knew that with Ward injured and Fitz and Skye as exhausted as they were, anything more complex than that was currently out of the question. But Simmons and Fitz were trained SHIELD scientists, and had therefore taken some basic courses on emergency procedures. These were rudimentary, sit-down-only classes, but it was not nothing.
Simmons took the lead, and she quickly picked out a game trail for them to follow. It wasn't a marked path, so their pursuers would first have to find the same game trail before they could track the team. But there was less undergrowth, so the team was working a little less hard. She avoided any visible rock formations or anything that looked like a waterway, since those could lead to cliffs. And she took the fastest pace they could all steadily maintain.
They didn't so much as hear another shot the whole way down the mountain. Apparently Camilla didn't feel like chasing them.
When they finally came to a stop, breathing hard and red-faced, it was beside that river that Phil had spotted on the drive up.
“Hold up,” he called, when Simmons looked totally ready to keep going. “Time to regroup.”
May sat Ward down on a nearby rock and had him take off his jacket and shirt. Phil sat Fitz and Skye down a few feet away.
“How are we on supplies?” he asked.
“Supplies?” Skye said incredulously.
“Whatever you're carrying. Let's see it,” he said.
Their supplies were too techy to be helpful. Six cell phones, none of which were getting service for some reason, probably some kind of jamming courtesy of the Peruvian police; FitzSimmons' little analysis droids; and the O-8-4 comprised the majority of what they had. The useful supplies were four energy bars; a 20oz bottle of water, about three-quarters of the way full; three sidearms with limited ammunition; and Fitz's cutting tool.
“What is that thing anyway?” Phil asked, pointing at the device.
“I called it a Mouse Hole. I invented it a few months ago, and put it in for testing last week. But I always make two prototypes, since you never see the one in testing again,” Fitz said.
Technically against SHIELD protocols, but Phil had never much cared about that particular rule, and he was more than a little happy Fitz broken it in this particular case.
May came over and gave them all a glance. Then she said, “Skye, give me that plaid shirt you're wearing.”
“What? Why?” Skye answered.
May jerked her head towards Ward. Skye nodded and shucked off the shirt at once, which May proceeded to tear into pieces to make a bandage.
“So, how long before we starve to death?” Skye asked, forcing an upbeat note into her voice.
“We won't,” Phil replied. “The airport where we parked the Bus is several hours' hike from here, but we can easily make that even without food. If we can't retake the Bus, Camilla will have us all shot. Starvation takes longer than either of those scenarios.”
“Oh.” Skye had lost the upbeat.
“'Retake' the Bus?” Simmons asked.
“Reyes has working SUVs,” Ward said, bearing May's bandaging of his shoulder without any indication of pain in his voice. “And she has the national military on her side. If she doesn't know where the Bus is already, she definitely will soon. And she'll get to it a lot faster than we will.”
“Can she get inside?” Phil asked May.
“With the right equipment,” May answered, tying off her bandage on Ward's shoulder. “But she probably won't try. This is enough of an international incident as it is.”
Phil winced. While SHIELD had given them permission to do “whatever” was necessary to secure the O-8-4, engaging in hostilities with the Peruvian military on Peruvian soil was probably a slightly more extreme version of “whatever” than they had had in mind. The Senate homeland security committee was going to be talking about him. Again.
But May was right that it would probably give Camilla pause before she tried to break into the Bus. Thus far, nobody had died. And slashing the tires of an SUV, while it technically counted as damaging the property of a United States intelligence agency, was a far cry from breaking into, sabotaging, or even stealing a multi-million dollar United States tactical aircraft. She knew the politics at play here as well as he did. Hopefully, she wouldn't want to make things any worse.
Ward was flexing his arm, testing out the bandage. He looked to Fitz. “What was it you were saying about the O-8-4?”
Fitz glared at Ward from his seat, opened his mouth, and then said something so impossibly technical that Phil felt like even Tony would've had a hard time following it.
“Fitz!” Skye said from her place on the ground beside his feet.
“The O-8-4 is a derivative of the Tesseract!” Fitz snapped. “Probably developed by HYDRA during World War II. It contains lethal amounts of gamma radiation and it has a fluctuating power source!”
Phil wanted to bury his head in his hands. This day just kept getting better and better.
“It's nuclear?” Ward demanded. “And you didn't tell me?”
“It's worse than nuclear,” Fitz snapped back, “and I did tell you—repeatedly—exactly what we knew about this device!”
“The device is stable,” Simmons said. “It might go off if hit by gunfire—”
“We've had people shooting at us all morning and you never once thought to mention this!” Ward yelled.
“As if I could've gotten a word in edgewise with you barking orders all about the place!” Simmons shouted back, now loosing her own temper.
“Stop shouting! The bad guys will hear you!” Skye said.
“And what kind of help would you be if they did?” Ward demanded, turning to her.
And then all four of them were shouting at once.
“Quiet!” Phil yelled, cutting across their argument. “First off, Ward, just because Skye is a consultant doesn't mean she's wrong. Stop giving away our position. Fitz, we're not all you. You're gonna need to speak so everybody can understand. Is there anything else you can tell us about the O-8-4?”
Fitz shook his head. “Not right now. We're still going over our readings from the drones. It'll take a little time for us to work out what we've got.”
“Can you do it while we walk?” Phil asked.
“We can,” Simmons nodded.
“Good,” Phil said, picking up the bag with the O-8-4 in it (and trying to reassure himself that if it were going to kill him, it would have done so on the way down the mountain), “because we've got a really long hike ahead of us.”
They walked and walked and walked and walked. The sun was hanging low in the sky by the time they came in sight of the village and Phil called a halt. They edged closer, keeping to the trees, and Ward eventually scaled the tallest tree they could find.
When he came down a few moments later, he said, “Sir, it's strange. Everything looks normal. I don't see any soldiers.”
“They should outnumber us ten to one by now,” Phil said in surprise. “This town isn't big enough for that many people to hide.”
“I don't see anyone but locals,” Fitz said.
Phil glanced at May.
“Let's circle around to the airfield. See what we can there,” she suggested.
Phil nodded.
This trek was shorter than their last, but it felt more agonizing. Knowing they were so close to the Bus and safety, but they couldn't actually get to it was much more frustrating than being separated from it in the first place.
At the airfield, they saw several men waiting by rear of the plane, right about where the end of the ramp would be if the cargo hold were open. One man was up to the front. After a few moments of watching, Camilla exited the airfield manager's office and walked across the field. It seemed to take her hours to reach a little group of military trucks.
Phil turned to May with a confused look. “Where are their reinforcements?”
“Sir?” Ward called from his other side, “I don't think they have any.”
He nodded at the men by the trucks. Phil refocused his attention on them and noted that there was a man inside one of the truck cabs, speaking into a radio, looking furious. Whatever he was being told, he didn't like it. And when he turned to report it to Camilla, she didn't look like she liked it any better.
Skye frowned. “There's no way we can get to the plane from here, is there?”
“Nope,” Ward answered. “Not without better weapons.”
“Without reinforcements, they won't spare more than three men to guard the SUV,” Phil frowned.
There was a quiet moment. Finally, May said, “Ward and I could easily disable three men.”
Phil thought it over. He looked to Ward. “Your shoulder?”
Ward flexed his arm, wincing, but getting a pretty good range of movement out of it. “I'm not going to be comfortable, but I'm all right to work. They're crappy shots. They only winged me.”
Phil looked at the makeshift bandage on his arm, and noted that there was no visible blood. It would be a long, frustrating hike for his specialists, but they could do it before morning. He nodded. “Go.”
The two headed off at once.
“What do we do, sir?” Fitz asked.
“We're going to find a place to camp. And the the three of you are going to learn everything you can about that O-8-4.”
It took some hunting around, and Phil eventually had to pick the lock on on a back door, but the four of them claimed a space in the stockroom of one of the local stores. It was cramped, and hot, and they were surrounded by boxes of unfamiliar foods, but they were off the streets. Skye did something with her phone (and Phil was beginning to think he would need to keep a closer eye on whatever unholy magic it is that she was working with it) and managed to enable Fitz and Simmons to network all of their phones together (aside from Phil's which she said had a weird firewall), if they had had the right programming.
After a few moments of tinkering with Fitz's and Simmons' phones, Skye added the right programming, so that they could crunch through the data on the O-8-4. It wasn't a full-blown lab by any stretch, but FitzSimmons actually said some pretty impressive thank yous before being seduced by the O-8-4.
Skye tried to keep up, but eventually she had to admit she was outclassed. She scooted away from FitzSimmons to sit, cross-legged by Phil, who was sitting against the wall.
“Where did you find those two?” Skye asked.
“They were assigned to last O-8-4 I was sent to investigate,” Phil answered.
“Thor's hammer,” Skye surmised. “What's he like? Really?”
Phil thought for a moment. “Big,” he finally said.
Skye's lips twitched at that description. “He's morning, isn't he?”
“So are Fitz and Simmons,” Phil replied.
Skye turned away, blushing.
Phil decided he was just going to pretend not to notice anything these three were doing. Intrateam relationships were technically against SHIELD protocol, but they were hardly unusual all the same. Ignoring it unless it became a problem was the route most team leaders took.
“I hate this,” Skye finally said quietly.
“Most of our missions are not this dangerous,” Phil assured her.
“I hate that too,” Skye answered. “But I meant this, right now. I'm absolutely useless. Maybe Ward was being unfair earlier, but he wasn't wrong. I'm in the way.”
“Not every mission calls for every skill. I'm sitting here with you, aren't I?”
“In case someone attacks us, so that you can defend everybody. You didn't go with Ward and May because someone had to stay here and babysit us. I'm not even doing that.” Skye hugged her knees close. “I just thought…that I could be useful here. Maybe do some good.”
Phil raised his eyebrows. He hadn't been too sure about Skye before, but that clinched it. If they could just get her to commit, she had the potential to be an excellent agent.
He was about to suggest a training course when Fitz spoke up. “Agent Coulson. We know what the O-8-4 does.”
Phil and Skye moved over to the two scientists. It took three separate comments from Phil to get them to explain comprehensibly what they were talking about, but eventually they managed to get an explanation that was coherent enough to make sense. The O-8-4 was a weapon. An extremely powerful one. In fact, the words “death ray” were not entirely inappropriate to describe it, though Phil did not say that out loud.
On the plus side, though, it wasn't leaking radiation as they'd feared. Fitz and Ward could still look forward to fathering children some day.
Phil told the three of them to get some sleep. Fitz and Simmons talked Skye into curling up near them and although it took too long, eventually their breathing evened out.
Once they were well and truly unconscious, Phil picked up his phone. “TED? Are we still being jammed?”
“Yes. I can not access any satellites,” TED replied quietly. “I am, however, able to listen in on Reyes' radio communications.”
Phil blinked. “Well, that's something. Why haven't they called for backup?”
“They have. The commandante was informed that her mission remained deeply classified, no assistance would be forthcoming, and—if unsuccessful—the government would disavow all knowledge of it. I recorded the conversations if you would like to hear them?”
“No. That's all right. Thank you.”
That explained a lot of things. Reyes had felt free to claim the backing of her government because she did have approval to act. But approval was not support, and that she did not have.
It was about 0545 when May and Ward made it back. They were tired, but triumphant. They were carrying a good seventy pounds, each, of weapons and ammunition, including three rifles and six handguns. Phil woke Skye, Fitz, and Simmons, and they made their plans. It didn't take long.
In fact, the sun was just creeping over the horizon when they put their plan into action. After minimal coaching Skye, Fitz, and Simmons took their handguns and fired at the guards around the Bus. Phil couldn't quite tamp down his pride at the fact that though none of them would be winning any marksmanship awards (not one of them actually hit any of their targets), they weren't terrible for beginners. Certainly they all showed more promise than Tony had.
Still, scattered and off-target as they were, this had the desired effect of getting a good half of the guards to leave the Bus. Fitz, Simmons, and Skye bolted immediately, and ran as fast as they could straight for the draw where Coulson, May, Ward, and the O-8-4 were waiting. As soon as they were out of the line of fire, the three of them found cover and ducked down.
When Reyes' men entered his sights, Phil opened fire.
He missed. Badly.
May and Ward were thankfully able to cover with deadly accuracy, and the first of Reyes' men went down. The next set looked around for cover and found none, so they dropped to their knees.
“Surrender now and we'll take you in alive!” Phil called out.
“Give us the device!” one of men replied.
“Surrender! Now! Last chance,” Phil said.
For an answer, they fired towards his position.
May shot back. Using the O-8-4.
Two of the soldiers were enveloped in a beam of blue plasma. One moment they were there, and the next they were gone. Atomized, apparently. The remaining three members of the team that had been chasing them were blasted away from their teammates. When they peeled themselves off the ground to find scowling SHIELD agents looking down at them from behind rifles, they were all happy to surrender.
With their team so undermined, the remaining soldiers by the Bus were easy to capture. Even Camilla came fairly quietly. Phil could almost find it in himself to be sorry for her. It was clear she’d been assigned this mission with the expectation of receiving no official support. That was tough to swallow under any circumstances, even if the reasons were good ones. But to get an assignment like that and fail to carry it out was worse. Her career was going to suffer for this. Badly.
Then he remembered that she’d nearly killed his entire team and that killed any potential sympathy.
Phil was happy seeing the ramp to the Bus slowly lowering for them, right up until he laid eyes on that big blank spot on the floor where the SUV ought to be. Instead, Lola was sitting there by herself, practically mocking him. Because he was going to have to go all the way back up that mountain, and put new tires back on the SUV.
How exciting. He glanced around at Ward, who was getting some proper medical attention from Simmons, May who was climbing the steps towards the flight deck already, and Skye, who didn't know anything about cars.
“Fitz, you up for a field trip?” he said.
Fitz looked up, saw the missing SUV, and his face twisted. But what he said was, “Yes, sir.”
So Phil left May to secure their prisoners and he and Fitz went off to try and buy some tires.
Fitz turned out to be a pleasant travel companion. Despite his Scottish brogue giving him a horrendous accent, he was actually reasonably fluent in Spanish. So finding the correct tires and making the purchase was fairly easy. Of course, they still had to get up the mountain and put them on themselves. Which Phil was 100% capable of doing on his own, of course (Tony had spent a solid day and night of groveling before Coulson had even let him touch it—and he knew Tony knew how a car worked), but replacing tires was one of his least favorite jobs. But with Fitz's friendly help, the job actually went very smoothly.
By the time they got back to the Bus, Ward was treated, May had the engines warmed up, and Simmons and Skye were in the lab, laughing and smiling to one another about something.
Of course, having prisoners to bring to SHIELD, who were members of a foreign military, meant more of Phil's new hobby: filling out forms. He only took a fifteen minute break for supper, during which time he learned that Skye had let FitzSimmons borrow her dry-hair shampoo, and they'd happily whipped up a knock-off in the lab in about ten minutes. Even May looked a tiny bit excited about that.
He had retreated back to his office quickly, though, and kept pushing through the homework. It took him another hour-and-a-half but he finally finished with his After-Action Report and put the whole mess in to SHIELD for processing. Then he just rested his arms on the desk and laid his head on them. At this point, he was thinking about not bothering to go to bed. He could just sleep right where he was. That wouldn't be so bad?
A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts.
“Come in,” Phil called tiredly, sitting up.
The door opened and Skye's head poked around it. “You okay up here? You disappeared pretty fast after supper?”
“Paperwork,” Phil told her. “There's a lot of it. We'll be starting you in on some of it tomorrow.”
“Great,” Skye said with a rueful smile.
“You did good, you know?” Phil told her. “Not that the goal is to put a gun in your hands, but even so.”
Skye nodded. “I know. And we never would've known what the O-8-4 was if I hadn't helped network our phones, so that FitzSimmons could get more work done. Then we couldn't have used it to shoot those guys.”
“Does that bother you?” Phil asked.
“A little. But Simmons told me that's something SHIELD can help with. If it bothers you a lot,” Skye answered.
Phil nodded. “An unfortunate reality of our work is that we sometimes do have to kill people. We try to avoid it, but it does happen. Everyone on board is willing to help you if you need it.”
Skye nodded. She was quiet for a long moment. Finally, she said, “Your phone doesn't have a firewall, does it?”
Phil looked at Skye, long and measuring, and finally said, “What makes you say that?”
“I didn't just cosplay outside of Stark Tower, you know?” Skye answered.
Phil rolled his eyes. “You tried to hack Stark Tower. Of course you did.”
“Stark has a weird firewall, too. Only it's not a firewall. It's an AI. It booted me off the servers. It was actually kind of snarky about it, too. I tried a couple more times over the web, but that AI had me beat, easy. I doubt anyone actually using the system even noticed my attempts to hack it,” she sighed.
“Stark may not know. But JARVIS—the AI you ran into—does keep a record of any attempt to hack the Stark Industries systems, or Stark's personal ones. Too many attempts, or if JARVIS thinks you're malicious, and he'll tell Tony right then and there,” Phil answered.
Skye nodded. “I didn't know why last night, but the firewall on your phone felt familiar. You have an AI, too. Don't you?”
Phil was silent for a long time. He wasn't sure he was ready for Skye to know this much, this soon. On the other hand, trust builds trust. By telling Skye the truth here, now, he could lay the foundation to tell her harder truths later on. He hated to be this calculating about it, but if they were going to outmaneuver SHIELD at intelligence gathering, every single step had to be carefully thought through. Even the interpersonal ones.
“I do.”
“Did he build it?” she pressed. “Stark, I mean?”
“Yes. Tony created the base programming of the AI for my phone. He only laid the foundations, though. TED's development was shaped mostly by his interaction with me.”
Skye's eyes went big. “That's…a hell of a Christmas present.”
Phil thought it over. There was no way that Skye wouldn't be making a beeline for Google the instant she left his office. However, they were reaching the extent of what Phil felt he could safely tell her today. “We're married.”
Skye gasped.
Phil rolled his eyes. “It's on his wikipedia page, though I am listed as deceased. Pepper Potts and Darcy Lewis are my evening sister and morning wife. For reasons that are deeply classified, I have not contacted them.”
“That sucks,” Skye said.
“Yes, it does,” Phil answered, brushing his feelings to the side. “Skye, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that you do not discuss any of this with the rest of the team. Or anyone else. Ever. Aside from being classified, this is also personal.”
She nodded. And Phil could tell that she meant it. She would keep his secrets for now. Which was a pretty big success, he felt.
“Can I meet him?” Skye asked.
“Tony?”
“Your AI.”
Phil smiled. He reached out, and moved his phone to sit in front of Skye. “TED? This is Skye. She wanted to meet you.”
“Good evening, Miss Skye,” TED answered in his bland way. “I apologize for blocking your attempts to access this unit earlier, however I also guard some classified information that I cannot allow you to access.”
Skye blinked in surprise before finally saying, “You are so cool.”
Phil smiled in approval. A lot of people would have looked at him and said “This is so cool.” Skye treated TED like a person right off the bat. A very good sign.
“Agent Coulson has already made this request, but I must ask you again: do not speak of my existence to anyone. I understand it may go against the grain, but it is important to the safety of a number of people, including Agent Coulson himself, that no one be aware of me.”
Skye nodded. She stood up. “Thank you, sir. For trusting me.”
Phil smiled. “There may come a time when I need you to trust me. I want you to know that you can.”
There was another nod. And then she left.
Phil sighed and rested his head on his arms again. That had gone remarkably well.
Thanks to Skye's coaching, the next morning saw the team gathered in the mess looking much neater and put-together. The coffee was a touch less bitter (though still strong enough to be the kind of sludge appropriate for a team of government-employed super-spies, thank you very much), and the conversation was a lot less stilted.
Their landing at the Slingshot was unremarkable, and Phil was happy to hand over the O-8-4 to a SHIELD scientist who received it with excitement and a twinge of sadness.
He made his way—with no excitement and a lot of sadness—to an office in the main administration building of the complex.
He had been summoned.
A summons like this meant only one thing. And, much to his disappointment, his supposition was spot on. When he entered the office, it was to see Nick Fury seated in an imposing chair behind an even more imposing desk, with his elbows propped up on the desk and his fingers laced together.
On most people, that kind of comic-book-supervillain pose would look ridiculous. On Fury, Phil thought it still looked a touch ridiculous, but it also looked like he could get shredded for saying so out loud.
“Your first mission, Coulson,” Fury said quietly.
“The O-8-4 is now in SHIELD custody,” Phil answered, equally quietly.
Fury's eyebrows went up. Or, at least, his right one did. His left eyebrow could be turning somersaults behind the eye-patch for all Phil knew. “Have you ever met Senator Stern?”
“I have not had that pleasure, sir,” Phil replied.
Fury glared at him. “The Armed Services Committee held a closed door hearing two days ago and extended a pointed invitation to me to attend. Yesterday, Fox News ran a piece about the number of closed Congressional meetings, and included a mention of that one. Today, there are over 2.6 million hits on Google for articles talking about SHIELD and discussing our 'shadowy policies and existence,' which is a phrase that Claire McCaskill used word-for-word in the hearing. Apparently, somebody in Congress has a leak, and global attention is being focused on SHIELD. I don't like people even being aware of our existence.” Fury spread his hands. “But you tell me we have the O-8-4, so apparently I can relax.”
Phil restrained himself from glaring. “It appears to be a HYDRA weapon.”
Fury rolled his eyes. “If you are talking about the Captain America cards, Phil, I swear—”
“We believe it was developed in Germany and brought here by Nazis who escaped after the war,” Phil continued.
That actually got Fury's attention. “You think you're on to something here?”
“For all that I'm aware, sir, it's just an artifact that turned up,” Phil replied, shrugging his shoulders. “However, I am certain that the Peruvian government was very resistant to our acquisition of it. Possibly their reasons were political, possibly there is a deeper motive somewhere along the line.”
Fury was quiet for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Keep your next mission off the radar, Coulson. That's an order.”
“Yes, sir,” Phil nodded.
“Are you sure about bringing this girl on board?” Fury asked.
Considering the things she already knew about him, Phil thought, it was too late for him to back out. “Skye could be a remarkable asset,” was all that Phil said out loud.
“Or a remarkable mistake. Keep your eyes on her, Coulson.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a pause. “Dismissed.”
Phil left.
THE END
Phil woke up at 0200.
This was actually on purpose. He’d had something worrying at his mind and but he needed to check it a little more thoroughly before bringing it to anyone else. He took in a deep breath, letting the hum of the Bus' engines soothe his mind while he organized his thoughts.
“TED?” he finally called quietly, without moving from his bed.
TED’s voice spoke quietly from his phone on the bedside table. “Yes?”
“Since I’ve come back from Tahiti, have you run any scans on me?” Phil asked.
There was an odd-sounding beep from the phone that Phil suspected was the electronic equivalent of a derisive sniff. “I have scanned you physically every morning and evening, and maintain continuous analysis of your vocal patterns and micro-expressions. I also perform psychological analyses of all your internet browsing, and word-by-word analysis of everything you write.”
Phil’s eyebrows went up.
“You informed me that you might be a danger to Sir and your family,” TED said, managing to sound both monotone and withering at the same time. “And then I learned that the original Agent Phil Coulson had died and that you believe yourself to be some form of copy. It is only prudent that I test whether you are a threat of any kind.”
“And what have you discovered?”
“You are identical in every way to the original Coulson. So much so that my day-to-day operations do not ordinarily require the information that he has died.”
This was the closest TED had ever come to saying anything about missing Coulson. And of course any AI that Tony Stark created would be capable of some level of emotion, but expressing grief—even indirectly—was so deeply emotive that Phil was stunned for a moment.
Finally he asked, “But...I’m...human? I’m not...something else?”
“As far as my scans can determine, you are neither alien nor robot nor clone,” TED answered.
Phil nodded, staring up into the darkness of the little alcove in which he slept. He should take this to someone else. He should take it to anyone else. He should face his problem and not run from it. If he did that, though, he ran the risk of Tony finding out about it, and that could very well hurt Coulson's family even more.
“I wish we could tell Tony,” was all he said aloud.
“Sir is capable of defending himself, should the need arise,” TED answered lightly.
Phil thought that over. Tony could take care of himself, in his own inimitable way. SHIELD hadn't taken him on as a consultant for nothing.
And then he blinked. Tony was a SHIELD consultant. And Darcy, as Thor's friend and Dr. Foster's employee, was a SHIELD asset. Either one of them might come face-to-face with him at some point. And unless they were prepared for that, they would think he'd just run away from them for no reason.
“We can't tell him right now,” Phil said, “but we should begin working on a way to do so safely.”
“Oh?”
“Tony and Darcy are both on SHIELD's roster. They can't find out by reading my name in a report. I need to tell them about Coulson. And me. In person. Soon.”
TED was silent for a long time after that. But finally he said, “How can we prepare to do so safely without knowing what kind of threat you may pose?”
“I suppose we'll have to start with that. We need to figure out just how human I really am.”
*~*~*
Author's Notes: I actually worked up a complete version of the SHIELD Object Classification System, but I'm not going to introduce it into the story until I'm sure it won't run into a conflict with a canon version further on down the line. It's not the most important thing in the universe, anyway. But, if you're curious, right now SHIELD-in-this-universe would refer to Loki's scepter as an O-5-3, Thor (the guy) is an A-5-1, and most of the Iron Man suits as O-4-1s. (The Mk. 42 Iron Man Suit would probably get an O-2-1.)
I grew up as a TCK, and have actually been in planes that have landed on unpaved airstrips before. If you have ever been in a plane that landed on a paved runway, you definitely notice the landing (especially if the pilot bounces—that's always fun), but it's not really that bumpy, per se. Landing on an unpaved strip is another story. It's not just bumpy, it's really bumpy. The planes I was in were Cessnas and Helios, which hold six to ten-or-so passengers. The Bus is a much heavier plane. I can't imagine landing a plane that size on an unpaved airstrip would be anything like comfortable.
I have also been on hikes through actual jungle in mountainous terrain. This was in Asia, so it wasn't exactly the same as hiking through the jungle in South America (the island I lived on didn't have any large predators other than crocodiles, for one thing), but there is some carry-over. Like jungle being seriously exhausting to hike through. Stuff just grows. Freaking everywhere. And so you're hacking through the branches and stomping down the little stuff, and it's humid, and there's mosquitoes… Running through the jungle without being on a path? This is very hard work, folks.
I am assuming a slightly less schizophrenic political universe here, where SHIELD operates like the other government agencies do. They're an executive branch function, operating out of…probably the Department of Homeland Security, but possibly the Department of Defense or Department of Justice. Within that, though, they are relatively autonomous.
Director Fury reports to Secretary Pierce (who, I think, was Secretary of Defense, so that would make SHIELD DoD, I guess…) and to the Director of National Intelligence (which is an actual office that the United States actually has and it has a Wikipedia article and everything). Pierce reports to both the President and to Congress. The international oversight committee is not generally a thing for US government agencies, so I'm assuming that's the result of some kinda treaty that allows SHIELD to function as it does without pissing the rest of the world off/trampling on everybody's sovereignty/starting wars.
Even with all that, though, SHIELD agents trading bullets with foreign military personnel from a country with which the United States is not at war (on that country's soil, against that country's wishes, no less!) is going to give a lot of the SHIELD political people very big headaches. Like, that's just…really bad. You can't do that. (No, SHIELD cannot operate the way it does if it is not an agency of a specific government. This is true for the same reasons that INTERPOL has no teeth. Because every country that can will ignore you and the ones that couldn’t ignore you, you won’t get any support to go after.)
Phil worrying about having a Senate committee talking about him isn't entirely a pointless worry, either. SHIELD has to report to a lot of people, including Congress. Or, at least, they should.
The United States Senate handles certain tasks by assigning them to committees of senators. We have committees for armed forces, agriculture, foreign affairs, energy, and…a lot of other things. These committees do various things, including vetting legislation before it is presented to the full Senate. (The House actually does this stuff too, but we're talking about the Senate at the moment…) The fact that SHIELD is an Executive Branch agency does not mean it is immune to Congressional oversight and intervention. (Which is something several IRL Executive agencies could stand to remember…).
As far as I can track down, Claire McCaskill (who is an IRL United States senator, for those readers who aren't American politics junkies, like me) actually was on the Armed Services committee in the Senate in Fall 2013. I think. I haven't listened to her make a lot of speeches, though, so I have no idea if the quote from her is anything like what she'd actually say. *le shrug*
Summary: "Go to Peru and take possession of O-8-4." Oh, if only the mission were as simple as the orders.
Characters/Pairings: established Phil Coulson/Tony Stark/Pepper Potts/Darcy Lewis (off-screen); otherwise mostly gen with some tiny little pre-sedoretu for another group
Warnings/Tags: weird relationships, sedoretu, AU-canon, rarepairs
Spoilers: Captain Americas 1 and 2; Thor I & II; The Avengers; Iron Mans 1, 2, and 3; Agents Of SHIELD — Basically everything. The Agents Of SHIELD spoilers are the biggies, though.
Disclaimer: The characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all that comes with them are the property of Marvel Studios, ABC, or both. No money has changed hands, and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Author’s Notes: This is the next in my MCU sedoretu series that begins in “Compatible Weirdness.” It follows after “The UnTeam.” I highly recommend you read those two first or else you will be confuzzled.
Sometimes Phil felt like he outsmarted himself.
Adding Skye as a member of the team was a good idea in theory, and she would certainly be helpful in his mission to figure out what SHIELD was keeping from him about his death. In practice, it meant a lot of paperwork.
Transferring FitzSimmons out of the SciTech division and into Ops had taken more than a little scribbling. Authorizing Skye to actually join a SHIELD team, on the other hand, resulted in a gargantuan flood of paperwork (all of it digital, and sorted into a three dimensional holographic stack by the holoGUI) that he had been afraid he would never see the end of. But he had to finish it all, or they'd never get to find out what this O-8-4 was about. So he grabbed a stylus and got to work.
First it was the Index Asset Evaluation and Intake on Skye, then an assessment filled out by the team leader and full background check, then a psych eval, then payroll authorization forms, then… Phil started to get dizzy.
However, he was finally reaching the last few lines of Skye's official Assignment Orders when something on his desk beeped. He hunted through a stack of papers, marveling faintly that technology had advanced from actual papers cluttering his desk, to multiple windows cluttering his computer, and back to virtual papers…cluttering his desk. Somehow, Tony always managed to keep everything orderly on his holoGUI at home. Finally, he flicked his wrist and “pushed” the entire stack off of the desk to find that he had just received official notification of Skye's arrival. He tapped the “Acknowledge” button on his desk, reached out and “grabbed” his paperwork stack to bring it back to him, and polished off the last few lines of Skye's forms before filing them and descending to go to the conference room and prep to brief his team on their next assignment.
He was ambushed by Ward before he got off the steps. “Is it true?”
Phil raised an eyebrow at Ward.
“Is it true, sir?” Ward repeated, practically rolling his eyes. “Are you really inviting Skye on to the team?”
Phil nodded, moving towards the conference room and giving May an acknowledging glance as she joined them.
“Skye?” Ward demanded, in a voice dripping with disdain. “The girl's not qualified to be a SHIELD agent.”
“Agreed. That's why I've invited her on as a consultant,” Phil replied.
May made a sound that might actually qualify as hurt.
Phil looked back and forth between Ward and May with a mixture of amusement and annoyance.
One of their security monitors showed a clear feed of the newest team member's movements. Skye's van had just been driven away by a team of SHIELD intake techs, and Skye herself was now officially on board the plane, being welcomed by Fitz and Simmons. So, naturally, he was having to deal with Ward and May both giving him dark glowers and dire warnings about the dangers of having Skye on the team, instead of welcoming her himself.
Though he hadn't expected Ward to be more opposed to her than May was. May was concerned about keeping her safe. Ward was more worried about the trouble she might cause.
It didn't seem to matter how many times he told them she wasn't actually on the team, in a technical sense, either. They just kept on glowering.
He couldn't decide if this was funny or not. And after their new orders were so interesting, too. Apparently the O-8-4 was in Peru and SHIELD had given them clearance to do whatever they needed to contain it. It was always nice to not worry about red tape.
If Ward said “hacker” one more time, though, Phil was going to blow a gasket. “I’m looking for an objection I haven’t already anticipated,” he finally snapped. “I’m calling this, but your frown will be on record.”
“We’ve been called in to investigate an O-8-4,” Ward said. “We all know what that means.”
Phil barely managed it, but he did not laugh. “Yes, we do. It means we don’t know what that means.” Which was literally true. SHIELD’s resource classification system was generally pretty useful in telling people what they were dealing with. “O-8-4,” however, was the system’s equivalent of question marks across the board. The thing might be a paperweight or it might blow up the universe, and SHIELD had no idea whether it was from Earth or another planet or another universe or what. Phil remembered that the real Coulson and May had to stifle their laughter at the academy when they’d learned about the system. A glance at her revealed she was in no mood for reminiscing, however, so he pretended not to remember.
Ward huffed and made for his bunk.
After take-off, the team amused themselves in whatever manner suited their fancy. Fitz and Simmons tuned up machines in their lab, and fiddled with their calibration settings in ways that most human beings probably wouldn't care about. May mostly scowled at the autopilot, daring it to misbehave.
Ward cleaned his guns. With his door open. In the bunk directly across the cabin from Skye's.
To her credit, Skye ignored him magnificently. She was thoroughly engrossed in a SHIELD handbook and either wasn't aware of Ward's dark looks, or was really good at pretending not to be aware of them.
But eventually everyone grabbed something for dinner and then curled up in their bunks. Ward tried burning holes in the door of Skye's bunk when she slid it closed, but she didn't emerge after that, so eventually he gave up and went to sleep, too.
The next morning, Phil made do with a slightly rumpled suit, happy that he was at least able to wash up from the in-suite sink/toilet he had in his cabin. When they made appearances at breakfast, May's hair was in a ponytail, as was Simmons'. And both Fitz and Ward were still scrubbing hands through their hair, as if dissatisfied with it.
They were all a bit surprised when Skye sauntered in wearing clean clothes, smelling like she'd taken a shower, and with her hair down, sleek, and shampoo-commercial perfect. She surveyed the assembled team with a look of surprise and then said, “What happened to you guys?”
“We spent the night on a plane,” May snarled at her. She'd only had one sip of her coffee, so her temper was reflexive instead of serious.
Skye frowned and then she blinked with a smile. “That's right. You aren't used to living on the move. 'S okay. I'll show you some tricks I learned from living in my van.”
Ward looked even more upset about this, but FitzSimmons instantly started pelting her with questions. And although May didn't ask any, she listened with what Phil easily recognized as great interest. Score one for Skye.
Landing in Peru was a bone-jarring affair on a dirt airstrip that no amount of May’s expert piloting could salvage. It was impossible to land a plane this size in a place like this and not rattle the entire thing almost to pieces. But after correctly reorienting his spleen, as Darcy would have put it, Phil grabbed his shoulder holster, slid his jacket on, and joined Fitz, Simmons, and Skye as they waited in the cargo bay to get off the Bus.
They were all excited right up until the moment when the cargo ramp opened. Even before it was halfway down, a blast of damp, hot air hit them all so strongly it was a bit like having a a towel soaked in hot water thrown over your face.
FitzSimmons and Skye dashed for the SUV and the air conditioning therein.
Phil managed not to join them—though he dearly wanted to—and descended the ramp to see if he could hire a second vehicle to get to the site of the O-8-4. It exhausted his meager supply of Spanish, but he was fairly certain he’d managed it without making any lifelong enemies. Phil had never had the same gift with languages as Tony or Pepper. But finally they were able to lock up the plane and get under way.
The drive out was actually fairly pleasant, once he got over the heat and the bumps in the road. They took a winding dirt road up a mountain and through the jungle. Since they were so close to the equator, it didn’t matter that Phil’s brain thought of this as “early Fall,” the flowering plants were in full bloom and everything was a gorgeous, vibrant green as far as the eye could see. Strange animals hid in the trees and called back and forth as they passed. As they climbed, he occasionally caught glimpses through the trees of a river winding through the valley on the other side of the mountain.
Phil officially liked Peru.
They finally pulled to a stop and disembarked at a camp that had been cobbled together by a mix of expatriated archaeologists and local vendors, situated right outside a pre-Columbian pyramid that Phil’s brain—programmed by too many American movies—instantly labeled “temple.”
Phil thanked the driver he’d hired and watched with amused eyes as May, ever the paranoid one, waited until everyone had gotten out of the SUV and then drove it away from the camp. He started on the short distance towards the pyramid, when Skye caught up to him.
“We should warn the people who live around here if the O-8-4 is dangerous,” she said, trailing him through a little copse of trees. “They’re already dealing with anti-mining rebels and the Shining Path guerrillas. I could post something?”
Phil smiled. Her impulse was good. “Remember the panic when that anti-matter meteor splashed down, just off the coast of Miami and nearly devoured the city?” He came to a stop when he reached a wide grassy space just in front of the pyramid.
“…No?” Skye came to a halt beside him, with a confused look.
“Precisely. Because we kept it quiet and contained.” He turned to her.
“So…what am I doing?” Skye asked.
“Well, if it gets out, I might need you to create some kind of diversion. Put the public on the wrong scent.”
She nodded in understanding. “So, everything that I’m against.”
“Yup.” But Phil said this with a smile, because he knew as well as any SHIELD agent that you could not push an asset too far against their grain or you would lose that asset. And he had no intentions of losing Skye.
The man who’d been running the study of the pyramid—which turned out to actually be a temple, score one for crappy American sci-fi—told them that it was full of pre-Incan artifacts, which made the potential O-8-4 that much more interesting. And when Phil entered the temple and actually saw it…
He hated doing this. “Sir, I need you and your team to evacuate the site until we determine the risk associated with this object.”
The man’s face fell. This was always going to be the worst part of his job. Fitz and Simmons had their little flying scanner whatsits out and zooming around already, which the professor seemed to find even more disheartening.
Phil sighed and escorted him towards the opening his team had broken in the wall to get in to this room. “Now. For your own safety.”
The archeology team reluctantly allowed themselves to be escorted out.
Phil couldn’t help but remember meeting Darcy like this. She’d been absolutely silent the whole time. He hadn’t realized it then, but Darcy was never that quiet. The way she'd clammed up that day, though, was something she only did when she was asleep, very relaxed, or felt particularly upset. If he’d known her then like he did now (or at least, like he remembered knowing her)… Well, he wouldn’t have taken her iPod, for one thing. It was a year after they were married when Darcy figured out that he never even touched her iPod without her express permission because he still felt a little guilty.
And…this was not helping him focus at all. He tried watching FitzSimmons and Skye study the O-8-4, but seeing Fitz shyly coach Skye into being more helpful, with little suggestions and explanations here and there just made him remember teaching Darcy, Tony, and Pepper how to shoot. All the hesitant little touches and eye contact…
And that was it. He had to get outside. If he stayed and watched these three flirting, he’d just get more depressed.
Phil strode through the hole in the wall, and up the stairs into the brilliant sunlight.
May was standing on the open landing where the stairs leading to the doorway met the stairs leading out of the temple. The archeology team was vanishing, with grumbles, away from the temple, and Ward was coming up from where they’d gotten out of their vehicles.
“Tracks match the tires on the professor’s truck,” he reported.
“Good,” Phil said.
“Something wrong inside?” May asked.
Phil shook his head. “I was in the way more than helping.”
“I'm surprised you're not armed,” Ward said, gesturing towards May.
“If I need a gun, I'll take one,” she answered casually.
“Right,” he smirked. “Forgot I was working with the Cavalry.”
Phil turned a ferocious glare on Ward. May just said quietly, “Don't ever call me that.”
Ward held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry.” He moved slowly towards the trees, acting casual. “I just heard about you. Bahrain, you in action.” Then he stopped, and shifted oddly. And it was there that Phil caught what he had seen. Movement in the trees. There were three…eight…a lot of armed men, hiding in the trees just out of sight. And they had been about to move in a moment ago, but now they were in a holding pattern.
Phil glanced at May curiously. She elected to reply to Ward, a little too loudly, and a little too casually. “I'm not proud of what happened in Bahrain. I'm not ashamed of it either. I did what needed to be done.”
Ward inclined his head, moving to the bottom of the steps. May moved to near the center, and sat down where she could easily move if she needed, while Phil remained up top. Any half-baked operator would instantly spot this as a defensive formation, but maybe that would help defuse the situation.
“And the O-8-4, sir?” Ward asked, because now that they'd started this pretend chat, they couldn't just let it drift off into nothing without being obvious they were just doing it for show.
“Secure. We still don't know anything about it, but FitzSimmons will work it out,” he shrugged.
Movement in the trees again. And now someone was walking out of them.
Was that…Camilla Reyes?
Phil had to blink a few times at the beautiful evening woman to be sure he was really seeing her. He hadn't seen Camilla since his first days as a level five agent, over a year before he'd met Pepper. “Camilla?” he said out loud, because he just couldn't quite believe it was her.
“Hello, Philip,” she replied in her softly accented English, coming towards the pyramid. Phil schooled his expression into blankness, when what he really wanted to do was frown. Why did she have so many armed men with her? Something about that did not sit right, so rather than letting her walk past Ward—breaking their defensive line, so to speak—he came down the steps and met her at the bottom. He could practically feel May's approval. She wasn't behind any of them this way.
“The welcoming committee's a little overwhelming,” he said out loud.
She shrugged. “We received word of a dangerous object on Peruvian soil.”
He nodded, forcing a slight smile. But his heart sank. He hadn't said word one about the O-8-4 being dangerous. For all they knew, it was decorative. The fact that she'd sped straight to mentioning it, even before the introductions was…troubling. “Agent Melinda May, Agent Grant Ward, this is…Commandante Camilla Reyes of the Policía Militar del Perú,” he said after noting her new rank pin.
She offered him a bright smile. “What do you know about the object in the temple?”
“Nearly nothing,” Phil answered, “but my team will let me know.”
She nodded, and there was an odd silence, as if she felt flat-footed or caught-off-guard. Phil shifted his weight, prepared to move. He had a feeling this was about to get unpleasant.
“What would I need to offer to get you to let me know?”
Phil exchanged a glance with May, trying to decide how to word his reply. Maybe they could still get out of this without trouble.
He took too long. With a snap of her fingers, Camilla's men had their guns up.
May and Ward moved faster than he could track. So he did the only logical thing. He grabbed Camilla, drew his weapon, and pointed it at her head, hoping that May and Ward had a handle on their people.
Sure enough, when he glanced over, May had managed to seize a rifle and a sidearm from two men who were now unconscious (how did that woman manage these things?) and had the rifle pointed at Camilla. Ward had one man lying at his feet, moaning in pain, and his gun was aimed for Camilla as well.
“Can't we just be civilized about this, Philip?” she sighed.
“You drew first,” he answered, slowly going backwards up the steps for the pyramid. May and Ward flanked him, now aiming down into the crowd of armed men, who tracked them with the barrels of their weapons.
They reached the top of the steps and Phil said, “I'm sorry it came to this.”
He threw Camilla down the steps, trying not to feel guilty as she hit hard on the stone. She had just threatened to kill his whole team, after all. Her men hadn't been expecting this, and that bought Ward, May, and himself just enough time to get into the door of the temple without a hail of bullets chasing them.
“Pack up the O-8-4!” Phil shouted down the stairs.
A round of gunfire came flying towards them, and the three of them each began trying to pick off whatever head they could see peek over the tops of the steps.
“What's going on?” Skye yelled.
“We're being attacked! Pack it up!” Ward replied harshly.
“Not possible!” Fitz shouted up, his Scot's accent thicker than usual under pressure. “This device has a power core fluctuating in frequencies far greater than ten exo-hertz! Without a containment case, it can't be moved!”
Phil glanced at Ward. “Did you understand any of that?”
“Not a word,” Ward answered.
Phil squeezed off a shot that winged one of the men who'd put his head up. “Go get them packed,” he ordered, scowling. That should've been a kill shot.
As Ward disappeared down the steps, he said something that sounded suspiciously like a sarcastic “Nice shot, sir.”
Phil and May stayed, taking careful shots at any heads they saw. But Phil noticed two men sneaking off away from the temple and the camp.
“How well did you hide the SUV?” he asked May.
“Fifteen minutes unless they get lucky,” she answered.
“Right.”
Behind them Fitz suddenly started yelling again, backed up by an extremely agitated Simmons. Then Skye's voice came up the steps. “We're packed. Can we come up?”
A bullet whizzed by Phil's head, and pinged off the roof behind him. “No! Do not come up here!”
He fired his next shot and the slide on his gun did not slide forward. He was out. He ejected the magazine and slid a new one out of his jacket and into his weapon. His last one.
“I've got one extra for the sidearm,” May said, anticipating his question. “And whatever's left in the rifle.”
Three more shots came flying in the door, coming uncomfortably close to both of them, and he and May fell back to the opening to the chamber with the O-8-4. Ward was looking confident and alert, holding a bag that presumably contained the O-8-4. Fitz, Simmons, and Skye all looked less confident and very uncomfortable.
“Are we trapped in here?” Skye asked, as the two of them came in.
“They've got to come down the stairs. It's a bottleneck,” Phil answered. “We've got a good shot at beating them.” Which was a technical way of saying “yes” and everyone knew it.
“Give me the bag!” Fitz said.
“We are not repacking the O-8-4 now!” Ward snapped.
“I don't want the O-8-4, now give me the bag!” Fitz was well beyond a lost temper now.
With quick glances, Phil watched as Ward held out the bag and Fitz retrieved…something that looked vaguely like a sonic screwdriver from one of the pockets. He went to the back wall, turned the device on, and held it against the stone.
And, unbelievably, began cutting through the stone wall.
Fitz cut a door into the next chamber in less than thirty seconds, and then said, “Let's go.”
Phil exchanged a glance with May. “Cut through to the outside. When you get through to the back of the temple, send Skye back to tell us. Do not give away your position when you reach the outside wall.” If the three of them retreated, their friends with the automatic rifles would get into this chamber and realize they were going through the temple. Then they'd send people around to the back, and the team would be trapped again. Their only hope of this working was to do it secretly.
Fitz nodded, and he, Simmons, and Skye dashed into the next room.
Then came an agonizing two minutes where Phil kept up the cover fire with May and Ward and didn't hear anything from the other three. But finally, finally, Skye's voice sounded behind them. “Got it!”
They all turned and broke into flat-out runs.
The path Fitz had cut was easy to follow, and when he and Simmons saw the speed they were coming, they started running as well. The six of them raced outside. They fell, more than ran, down the back side of the temple and made for the tree cover as fast as their legs could carry them.
“May, take point! Make for the the SUV,” Phil ordered. He and Ward—who still had the O-8-4—would hang back and cover their six.
Neither Skye nor FitzSimmons were trained for a long run, and—he didn't want to admit it, but it was true—he was not in the shape he remembered the real Coulson being in. They made good time away from the temple, but their pace slowed considerably in the first minute alone.
The terrain that had been so beautiful on their way to the temple now worked hard against them. The jungle was full of thick undergrowth that threatened to trip everyone with every step, the heat sapped their energy, the humidity got sweat dripping in their eyes almost immediately, and their path took them over a grueling uphill-downhill-by-turns that had even May and Ward breathing hard. When May slowed to a stop, Phil had to clamp hands on Fitz's and Skye's shoulders and say, “Breathe quietly.” Simmons had held up surprisingly well.
“Wait here with them,” he told Ward, indicating FitzSimmons and Skye. He nodded to May, who sank into a crouch and began moving through the undergrowth. He followed her.
They were well outside of May's fifteen minute time-frame. But Phil had hoped that she had been estimating conservatively. Or that she was assuming everyone was as good an operator as she was.
These hopes were dashed, however, when he reached a vantage point where he could see the SUV. It was still locked, so everything inside was safe. But all four tires were resting on the rims. They'd been slashed.
He and May rejoined the group. He shook his head.
“There's some ammunition in the back—” Ward started to say, in a near whisper. He was interrupted when a bullet caught him in the back of his shoulder, knocking him to the ground.
“Go!” Phil said, pointing downhill.
Fitz, Simmons, and Skye immediately broke into a run again. Phil seized the bag with the O-8-4 (which drew an unhappy noise from Ward as it was yanked off of his now-injured shoulder), and May hauled Ward up by his good arm (which drew a flat-out agonized noise from Ward), and the three of them started off downhill.
They had no direction this time, other than “down” and “together.” Phil knew that with Ward injured and Fitz and Skye as exhausted as they were, anything more complex than that was currently out of the question. But Simmons and Fitz were trained SHIELD scientists, and had therefore taken some basic courses on emergency procedures. These were rudimentary, sit-down-only classes, but it was not nothing.
Simmons took the lead, and she quickly picked out a game trail for them to follow. It wasn't a marked path, so their pursuers would first have to find the same game trail before they could track the team. But there was less undergrowth, so the team was working a little less hard. She avoided any visible rock formations or anything that looked like a waterway, since those could lead to cliffs. And she took the fastest pace they could all steadily maintain.
They didn't so much as hear another shot the whole way down the mountain. Apparently Camilla didn't feel like chasing them.
When they finally came to a stop, breathing hard and red-faced, it was beside that river that Phil had spotted on the drive up.
“Hold up,” he called, when Simmons looked totally ready to keep going. “Time to regroup.”
May sat Ward down on a nearby rock and had him take off his jacket and shirt. Phil sat Fitz and Skye down a few feet away.
“How are we on supplies?” he asked.
“Supplies?” Skye said incredulously.
“Whatever you're carrying. Let's see it,” he said.
Their supplies were too techy to be helpful. Six cell phones, none of which were getting service for some reason, probably some kind of jamming courtesy of the Peruvian police; FitzSimmons' little analysis droids; and the O-8-4 comprised the majority of what they had. The useful supplies were four energy bars; a 20oz bottle of water, about three-quarters of the way full; three sidearms with limited ammunition; and Fitz's cutting tool.
“What is that thing anyway?” Phil asked, pointing at the device.
“I called it a Mouse Hole. I invented it a few months ago, and put it in for testing last week. But I always make two prototypes, since you never see the one in testing again,” Fitz said.
Technically against SHIELD protocols, but Phil had never much cared about that particular rule, and he was more than a little happy Fitz broken it in this particular case.
May came over and gave them all a glance. Then she said, “Skye, give me that plaid shirt you're wearing.”
“What? Why?” Skye answered.
May jerked her head towards Ward. Skye nodded and shucked off the shirt at once, which May proceeded to tear into pieces to make a bandage.
“So, how long before we starve to death?” Skye asked, forcing an upbeat note into her voice.
“We won't,” Phil replied. “The airport where we parked the Bus is several hours' hike from here, but we can easily make that even without food. If we can't retake the Bus, Camilla will have us all shot. Starvation takes longer than either of those scenarios.”
“Oh.” Skye had lost the upbeat.
“'Retake' the Bus?” Simmons asked.
“Reyes has working SUVs,” Ward said, bearing May's bandaging of his shoulder without any indication of pain in his voice. “And she has the national military on her side. If she doesn't know where the Bus is already, she definitely will soon. And she'll get to it a lot faster than we will.”
“Can she get inside?” Phil asked May.
“With the right equipment,” May answered, tying off her bandage on Ward's shoulder. “But she probably won't try. This is enough of an international incident as it is.”
Phil winced. While SHIELD had given them permission to do “whatever” was necessary to secure the O-8-4, engaging in hostilities with the Peruvian military on Peruvian soil was probably a slightly more extreme version of “whatever” than they had had in mind. The Senate homeland security committee was going to be talking about him. Again.
But May was right that it would probably give Camilla pause before she tried to break into the Bus. Thus far, nobody had died. And slashing the tires of an SUV, while it technically counted as damaging the property of a United States intelligence agency, was a far cry from breaking into, sabotaging, or even stealing a multi-million dollar United States tactical aircraft. She knew the politics at play here as well as he did. Hopefully, she wouldn't want to make things any worse.
Ward was flexing his arm, testing out the bandage. He looked to Fitz. “What was it you were saying about the O-8-4?”
Fitz glared at Ward from his seat, opened his mouth, and then said something so impossibly technical that Phil felt like even Tony would've had a hard time following it.
“Fitz!” Skye said from her place on the ground beside his feet.
“The O-8-4 is a derivative of the Tesseract!” Fitz snapped. “Probably developed by HYDRA during World War II. It contains lethal amounts of gamma radiation and it has a fluctuating power source!”
Phil wanted to bury his head in his hands. This day just kept getting better and better.
“It's nuclear?” Ward demanded. “And you didn't tell me?”
“It's worse than nuclear,” Fitz snapped back, “and I did tell you—repeatedly—exactly what we knew about this device!”
“The device is stable,” Simmons said. “It might go off if hit by gunfire—”
“We've had people shooting at us all morning and you never once thought to mention this!” Ward yelled.
“As if I could've gotten a word in edgewise with you barking orders all about the place!” Simmons shouted back, now loosing her own temper.
“Stop shouting! The bad guys will hear you!” Skye said.
“And what kind of help would you be if they did?” Ward demanded, turning to her.
And then all four of them were shouting at once.
“Quiet!” Phil yelled, cutting across their argument. “First off, Ward, just because Skye is a consultant doesn't mean she's wrong. Stop giving away our position. Fitz, we're not all you. You're gonna need to speak so everybody can understand. Is there anything else you can tell us about the O-8-4?”
Fitz shook his head. “Not right now. We're still going over our readings from the drones. It'll take a little time for us to work out what we've got.”
“Can you do it while we walk?” Phil asked.
“We can,” Simmons nodded.
“Good,” Phil said, picking up the bag with the O-8-4 in it (and trying to reassure himself that if it were going to kill him, it would have done so on the way down the mountain), “because we've got a really long hike ahead of us.”
They walked and walked and walked and walked. The sun was hanging low in the sky by the time they came in sight of the village and Phil called a halt. They edged closer, keeping to the trees, and Ward eventually scaled the tallest tree they could find.
When he came down a few moments later, he said, “Sir, it's strange. Everything looks normal. I don't see any soldiers.”
“They should outnumber us ten to one by now,” Phil said in surprise. “This town isn't big enough for that many people to hide.”
“I don't see anyone but locals,” Fitz said.
Phil glanced at May.
“Let's circle around to the airfield. See what we can there,” she suggested.
Phil nodded.
This trek was shorter than their last, but it felt more agonizing. Knowing they were so close to the Bus and safety, but they couldn't actually get to it was much more frustrating than being separated from it in the first place.
At the airfield, they saw several men waiting by rear of the plane, right about where the end of the ramp would be if the cargo hold were open. One man was up to the front. After a few moments of watching, Camilla exited the airfield manager's office and walked across the field. It seemed to take her hours to reach a little group of military trucks.
Phil turned to May with a confused look. “Where are their reinforcements?”
“Sir?” Ward called from his other side, “I don't think they have any.”
He nodded at the men by the trucks. Phil refocused his attention on them and noted that there was a man inside one of the truck cabs, speaking into a radio, looking furious. Whatever he was being told, he didn't like it. And when he turned to report it to Camilla, she didn't look like she liked it any better.
Skye frowned. “There's no way we can get to the plane from here, is there?”
“Nope,” Ward answered. “Not without better weapons.”
“Without reinforcements, they won't spare more than three men to guard the SUV,” Phil frowned.
There was a quiet moment. Finally, May said, “Ward and I could easily disable three men.”
Phil thought it over. He looked to Ward. “Your shoulder?”
Ward flexed his arm, wincing, but getting a pretty good range of movement out of it. “I'm not going to be comfortable, but I'm all right to work. They're crappy shots. They only winged me.”
Phil looked at the makeshift bandage on his arm, and noted that there was no visible blood. It would be a long, frustrating hike for his specialists, but they could do it before morning. He nodded. “Go.”
The two headed off at once.
“What do we do, sir?” Fitz asked.
“We're going to find a place to camp. And the the three of you are going to learn everything you can about that O-8-4.”
It took some hunting around, and Phil eventually had to pick the lock on on a back door, but the four of them claimed a space in the stockroom of one of the local stores. It was cramped, and hot, and they were surrounded by boxes of unfamiliar foods, but they were off the streets. Skye did something with her phone (and Phil was beginning to think he would need to keep a closer eye on whatever unholy magic it is that she was working with it) and managed to enable Fitz and Simmons to network all of their phones together (aside from Phil's which she said had a weird firewall), if they had had the right programming.
After a few moments of tinkering with Fitz's and Simmons' phones, Skye added the right programming, so that they could crunch through the data on the O-8-4. It wasn't a full-blown lab by any stretch, but FitzSimmons actually said some pretty impressive thank yous before being seduced by the O-8-4.
Skye tried to keep up, but eventually she had to admit she was outclassed. She scooted away from FitzSimmons to sit, cross-legged by Phil, who was sitting against the wall.
“Where did you find those two?” Skye asked.
“They were assigned to last O-8-4 I was sent to investigate,” Phil answered.
“Thor's hammer,” Skye surmised. “What's he like? Really?”
Phil thought for a moment. “Big,” he finally said.
Skye's lips twitched at that description. “He's morning, isn't he?”
“So are Fitz and Simmons,” Phil replied.
Skye turned away, blushing.
Phil decided he was just going to pretend not to notice anything these three were doing. Intrateam relationships were technically against SHIELD protocol, but they were hardly unusual all the same. Ignoring it unless it became a problem was the route most team leaders took.
“I hate this,” Skye finally said quietly.
“Most of our missions are not this dangerous,” Phil assured her.
“I hate that too,” Skye answered. “But I meant this, right now. I'm absolutely useless. Maybe Ward was being unfair earlier, but he wasn't wrong. I'm in the way.”
“Not every mission calls for every skill. I'm sitting here with you, aren't I?”
“In case someone attacks us, so that you can defend everybody. You didn't go with Ward and May because someone had to stay here and babysit us. I'm not even doing that.” Skye hugged her knees close. “I just thought…that I could be useful here. Maybe do some good.”
Phil raised his eyebrows. He hadn't been too sure about Skye before, but that clinched it. If they could just get her to commit, she had the potential to be an excellent agent.
He was about to suggest a training course when Fitz spoke up. “Agent Coulson. We know what the O-8-4 does.”
Phil and Skye moved over to the two scientists. It took three separate comments from Phil to get them to explain comprehensibly what they were talking about, but eventually they managed to get an explanation that was coherent enough to make sense. The O-8-4 was a weapon. An extremely powerful one. In fact, the words “death ray” were not entirely inappropriate to describe it, though Phil did not say that out loud.
On the plus side, though, it wasn't leaking radiation as they'd feared. Fitz and Ward could still look forward to fathering children some day.
Phil told the three of them to get some sleep. Fitz and Simmons talked Skye into curling up near them and although it took too long, eventually their breathing evened out.
Once they were well and truly unconscious, Phil picked up his phone. “TED? Are we still being jammed?”
“Yes. I can not access any satellites,” TED replied quietly. “I am, however, able to listen in on Reyes' radio communications.”
Phil blinked. “Well, that's something. Why haven't they called for backup?”
“They have. The commandante was informed that her mission remained deeply classified, no assistance would be forthcoming, and—if unsuccessful—the government would disavow all knowledge of it. I recorded the conversations if you would like to hear them?”
“No. That's all right. Thank you.”
That explained a lot of things. Reyes had felt free to claim the backing of her government because she did have approval to act. But approval was not support, and that she did not have.
It was about 0545 when May and Ward made it back. They were tired, but triumphant. They were carrying a good seventy pounds, each, of weapons and ammunition, including three rifles and six handguns. Phil woke Skye, Fitz, and Simmons, and they made their plans. It didn't take long.
In fact, the sun was just creeping over the horizon when they put their plan into action. After minimal coaching Skye, Fitz, and Simmons took their handguns and fired at the guards around the Bus. Phil couldn't quite tamp down his pride at the fact that though none of them would be winning any marksmanship awards (not one of them actually hit any of their targets), they weren't terrible for beginners. Certainly they all showed more promise than Tony had.
Still, scattered and off-target as they were, this had the desired effect of getting a good half of the guards to leave the Bus. Fitz, Simmons, and Skye bolted immediately, and ran as fast as they could straight for the draw where Coulson, May, Ward, and the O-8-4 were waiting. As soon as they were out of the line of fire, the three of them found cover and ducked down.
When Reyes' men entered his sights, Phil opened fire.
He missed. Badly.
May and Ward were thankfully able to cover with deadly accuracy, and the first of Reyes' men went down. The next set looked around for cover and found none, so they dropped to their knees.
“Surrender now and we'll take you in alive!” Phil called out.
“Give us the device!” one of men replied.
“Surrender! Now! Last chance,” Phil said.
For an answer, they fired towards his position.
May shot back. Using the O-8-4.
Two of the soldiers were enveloped in a beam of blue plasma. One moment they were there, and the next they were gone. Atomized, apparently. The remaining three members of the team that had been chasing them were blasted away from their teammates. When they peeled themselves off the ground to find scowling SHIELD agents looking down at them from behind rifles, they were all happy to surrender.
With their team so undermined, the remaining soldiers by the Bus were easy to capture. Even Camilla came fairly quietly. Phil could almost find it in himself to be sorry for her. It was clear she’d been assigned this mission with the expectation of receiving no official support. That was tough to swallow under any circumstances, even if the reasons were good ones. But to get an assignment like that and fail to carry it out was worse. Her career was going to suffer for this. Badly.
Then he remembered that she’d nearly killed his entire team and that killed any potential sympathy.
Phil was happy seeing the ramp to the Bus slowly lowering for them, right up until he laid eyes on that big blank spot on the floor where the SUV ought to be. Instead, Lola was sitting there by herself, practically mocking him. Because he was going to have to go all the way back up that mountain, and put new tires back on the SUV.
How exciting. He glanced around at Ward, who was getting some proper medical attention from Simmons, May who was climbing the steps towards the flight deck already, and Skye, who didn't know anything about cars.
“Fitz, you up for a field trip?” he said.
Fitz looked up, saw the missing SUV, and his face twisted. But what he said was, “Yes, sir.”
So Phil left May to secure their prisoners and he and Fitz went off to try and buy some tires.
Fitz turned out to be a pleasant travel companion. Despite his Scottish brogue giving him a horrendous accent, he was actually reasonably fluent in Spanish. So finding the correct tires and making the purchase was fairly easy. Of course, they still had to get up the mountain and put them on themselves. Which Phil was 100% capable of doing on his own, of course (Tony had spent a solid day and night of groveling before Coulson had even let him touch it—and he knew Tony knew how a car worked), but replacing tires was one of his least favorite jobs. But with Fitz's friendly help, the job actually went very smoothly.
By the time they got back to the Bus, Ward was treated, May had the engines warmed up, and Simmons and Skye were in the lab, laughing and smiling to one another about something.
Of course, having prisoners to bring to SHIELD, who were members of a foreign military, meant more of Phil's new hobby: filling out forms. He only took a fifteen minute break for supper, during which time he learned that Skye had let FitzSimmons borrow her dry-hair shampoo, and they'd happily whipped up a knock-off in the lab in about ten minutes. Even May looked a tiny bit excited about that.
He had retreated back to his office quickly, though, and kept pushing through the homework. It took him another hour-and-a-half but he finally finished with his After-Action Report and put the whole mess in to SHIELD for processing. Then he just rested his arms on the desk and laid his head on them. At this point, he was thinking about not bothering to go to bed. He could just sleep right where he was. That wouldn't be so bad?
A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts.
“Come in,” Phil called tiredly, sitting up.
The door opened and Skye's head poked around it. “You okay up here? You disappeared pretty fast after supper?”
“Paperwork,” Phil told her. “There's a lot of it. We'll be starting you in on some of it tomorrow.”
“Great,” Skye said with a rueful smile.
“You did good, you know?” Phil told her. “Not that the goal is to put a gun in your hands, but even so.”
Skye nodded. “I know. And we never would've known what the O-8-4 was if I hadn't helped network our phones, so that FitzSimmons could get more work done. Then we couldn't have used it to shoot those guys.”
“Does that bother you?” Phil asked.
“A little. But Simmons told me that's something SHIELD can help with. If it bothers you a lot,” Skye answered.
Phil nodded. “An unfortunate reality of our work is that we sometimes do have to kill people. We try to avoid it, but it does happen. Everyone on board is willing to help you if you need it.”
Skye nodded. She was quiet for a long moment. Finally, she said, “Your phone doesn't have a firewall, does it?”
Phil looked at Skye, long and measuring, and finally said, “What makes you say that?”
“I didn't just cosplay outside of Stark Tower, you know?” Skye answered.
Phil rolled his eyes. “You tried to hack Stark Tower. Of course you did.”
“Stark has a weird firewall, too. Only it's not a firewall. It's an AI. It booted me off the servers. It was actually kind of snarky about it, too. I tried a couple more times over the web, but that AI had me beat, easy. I doubt anyone actually using the system even noticed my attempts to hack it,” she sighed.
“Stark may not know. But JARVIS—the AI you ran into—does keep a record of any attempt to hack the Stark Industries systems, or Stark's personal ones. Too many attempts, or if JARVIS thinks you're malicious, and he'll tell Tony right then and there,” Phil answered.
Skye nodded. “I didn't know why last night, but the firewall on your phone felt familiar. You have an AI, too. Don't you?”
Phil was silent for a long time. He wasn't sure he was ready for Skye to know this much, this soon. On the other hand, trust builds trust. By telling Skye the truth here, now, he could lay the foundation to tell her harder truths later on. He hated to be this calculating about it, but if they were going to outmaneuver SHIELD at intelligence gathering, every single step had to be carefully thought through. Even the interpersonal ones.
“I do.”
“Did he build it?” she pressed. “Stark, I mean?”
“Yes. Tony created the base programming of the AI for my phone. He only laid the foundations, though. TED's development was shaped mostly by his interaction with me.”
Skye's eyes went big. “That's…a hell of a Christmas present.”
Phil thought it over. There was no way that Skye wouldn't be making a beeline for Google the instant she left his office. However, they were reaching the extent of what Phil felt he could safely tell her today. “We're married.”
Skye gasped.
Phil rolled his eyes. “It's on his wikipedia page, though I am listed as deceased. Pepper Potts and Darcy Lewis are my evening sister and morning wife. For reasons that are deeply classified, I have not contacted them.”
“That sucks,” Skye said.
“Yes, it does,” Phil answered, brushing his feelings to the side. “Skye, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that you do not discuss any of this with the rest of the team. Or anyone else. Ever. Aside from being classified, this is also personal.”
She nodded. And Phil could tell that she meant it. She would keep his secrets for now. Which was a pretty big success, he felt.
“Can I meet him?” Skye asked.
“Tony?”
“Your AI.”
Phil smiled. He reached out, and moved his phone to sit in front of Skye. “TED? This is Skye. She wanted to meet you.”
“Good evening, Miss Skye,” TED answered in his bland way. “I apologize for blocking your attempts to access this unit earlier, however I also guard some classified information that I cannot allow you to access.”
Skye blinked in surprise before finally saying, “You are so cool.”
Phil smiled in approval. A lot of people would have looked at him and said “This is so cool.” Skye treated TED like a person right off the bat. A very good sign.
“Agent Coulson has already made this request, but I must ask you again: do not speak of my existence to anyone. I understand it may go against the grain, but it is important to the safety of a number of people, including Agent Coulson himself, that no one be aware of me.”
Skye nodded. She stood up. “Thank you, sir. For trusting me.”
Phil smiled. “There may come a time when I need you to trust me. I want you to know that you can.”
There was another nod. And then she left.
Phil sighed and rested his head on his arms again. That had gone remarkably well.
Thanks to Skye's coaching, the next morning saw the team gathered in the mess looking much neater and put-together. The coffee was a touch less bitter (though still strong enough to be the kind of sludge appropriate for a team of government-employed super-spies, thank you very much), and the conversation was a lot less stilted.
Their landing at the Slingshot was unremarkable, and Phil was happy to hand over the O-8-4 to a SHIELD scientist who received it with excitement and a twinge of sadness.
He made his way—with no excitement and a lot of sadness—to an office in the main administration building of the complex.
He had been summoned.
A summons like this meant only one thing. And, much to his disappointment, his supposition was spot on. When he entered the office, it was to see Nick Fury seated in an imposing chair behind an even more imposing desk, with his elbows propped up on the desk and his fingers laced together.
On most people, that kind of comic-book-supervillain pose would look ridiculous. On Fury, Phil thought it still looked a touch ridiculous, but it also looked like he could get shredded for saying so out loud.
“Your first mission, Coulson,” Fury said quietly.
“The O-8-4 is now in SHIELD custody,” Phil answered, equally quietly.
Fury's eyebrows went up. Or, at least, his right one did. His left eyebrow could be turning somersaults behind the eye-patch for all Phil knew. “Have you ever met Senator Stern?”
“I have not had that pleasure, sir,” Phil replied.
Fury glared at him. “The Armed Services Committee held a closed door hearing two days ago and extended a pointed invitation to me to attend. Yesterday, Fox News ran a piece about the number of closed Congressional meetings, and included a mention of that one. Today, there are over 2.6 million hits on Google for articles talking about SHIELD and discussing our 'shadowy policies and existence,' which is a phrase that Claire McCaskill used word-for-word in the hearing. Apparently, somebody in Congress has a leak, and global attention is being focused on SHIELD. I don't like people even being aware of our existence.” Fury spread his hands. “But you tell me we have the O-8-4, so apparently I can relax.”
Phil restrained himself from glaring. “It appears to be a HYDRA weapon.”
Fury rolled his eyes. “If you are talking about the Captain America cards, Phil, I swear—”
“We believe it was developed in Germany and brought here by Nazis who escaped after the war,” Phil continued.
That actually got Fury's attention. “You think you're on to something here?”
“For all that I'm aware, sir, it's just an artifact that turned up,” Phil replied, shrugging his shoulders. “However, I am certain that the Peruvian government was very resistant to our acquisition of it. Possibly their reasons were political, possibly there is a deeper motive somewhere along the line.”
Fury was quiet for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Keep your next mission off the radar, Coulson. That's an order.”
“Yes, sir,” Phil nodded.
“Are you sure about bringing this girl on board?” Fury asked.
Considering the things she already knew about him, Phil thought, it was too late for him to back out. “Skye could be a remarkable asset,” was all that Phil said out loud.
“Or a remarkable mistake. Keep your eyes on her, Coulson.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a pause. “Dismissed.”
Phil left.
Phil woke up at 0200.
This was actually on purpose. He’d had something worrying at his mind and but he needed to check it a little more thoroughly before bringing it to anyone else. He took in a deep breath, letting the hum of the Bus' engines soothe his mind while he organized his thoughts.
“TED?” he finally called quietly, without moving from his bed.
TED’s voice spoke quietly from his phone on the bedside table. “Yes?”
“Since I’ve come back from Tahiti, have you run any scans on me?” Phil asked.
There was an odd-sounding beep from the phone that Phil suspected was the electronic equivalent of a derisive sniff. “I have scanned you physically every morning and evening, and maintain continuous analysis of your vocal patterns and micro-expressions. I also perform psychological analyses of all your internet browsing, and word-by-word analysis of everything you write.”
Phil’s eyebrows went up.
“You informed me that you might be a danger to Sir and your family,” TED said, managing to sound both monotone and withering at the same time. “And then I learned that the original Agent Phil Coulson had died and that you believe yourself to be some form of copy. It is only prudent that I test whether you are a threat of any kind.”
“And what have you discovered?”
“You are identical in every way to the original Coulson. So much so that my day-to-day operations do not ordinarily require the information that he has died.”
This was the closest TED had ever come to saying anything about missing Coulson. And of course any AI that Tony Stark created would be capable of some level of emotion, but expressing grief—even indirectly—was so deeply emotive that Phil was stunned for a moment.
Finally he asked, “But...I’m...human? I’m not...something else?”
“As far as my scans can determine, you are neither alien nor robot nor clone,” TED answered.
Phil nodded, staring up into the darkness of the little alcove in which he slept. He should take this to someone else. He should take it to anyone else. He should face his problem and not run from it. If he did that, though, he ran the risk of Tony finding out about it, and that could very well hurt Coulson's family even more.
“I wish we could tell Tony,” was all he said aloud.
“Sir is capable of defending himself, should the need arise,” TED answered lightly.
Phil thought that over. Tony could take care of himself, in his own inimitable way. SHIELD hadn't taken him on as a consultant for nothing.
And then he blinked. Tony was a SHIELD consultant. And Darcy, as Thor's friend and Dr. Foster's employee, was a SHIELD asset. Either one of them might come face-to-face with him at some point. And unless they were prepared for that, they would think he'd just run away from them for no reason.
“We can't tell him right now,” Phil said, “but we should begin working on a way to do so safely.”
“Oh?”
“Tony and Darcy are both on SHIELD's roster. They can't find out by reading my name in a report. I need to tell them about Coulson. And me. In person. Soon.”
TED was silent for a long time after that. But finally he said, “How can we prepare to do so safely without knowing what kind of threat you may pose?”
“I suppose we'll have to start with that. We need to figure out just how human I really am.”
Author's Notes: I actually worked up a complete version of the SHIELD Object Classification System, but I'm not going to introduce it into the story until I'm sure it won't run into a conflict with a canon version further on down the line. It's not the most important thing in the universe, anyway. But, if you're curious, right now SHIELD-in-this-universe would refer to Loki's scepter as an O-5-3, Thor (the guy) is an A-5-1, and most of the Iron Man suits as O-4-1s. (The Mk. 42 Iron Man Suit would probably get an O-2-1.)
I grew up as a TCK, and have actually been in planes that have landed on unpaved airstrips before. If you have ever been in a plane that landed on a paved runway, you definitely notice the landing (especially if the pilot bounces—that's always fun), but it's not really that bumpy, per se. Landing on an unpaved strip is another story. It's not just bumpy, it's really bumpy. The planes I was in were Cessnas and Helios, which hold six to ten-or-so passengers. The Bus is a much heavier plane. I can't imagine landing a plane that size on an unpaved airstrip would be anything like comfortable.
I have also been on hikes through actual jungle in mountainous terrain. This was in Asia, so it wasn't exactly the same as hiking through the jungle in South America (the island I lived on didn't have any large predators other than crocodiles, for one thing), but there is some carry-over. Like jungle being seriously exhausting to hike through. Stuff just grows. Freaking everywhere. And so you're hacking through the branches and stomping down the little stuff, and it's humid, and there's mosquitoes… Running through the jungle without being on a path? This is very hard work, folks.
I am assuming a slightly less schizophrenic political universe here, where SHIELD operates like the other government agencies do. They're an executive branch function, operating out of…probably the Department of Homeland Security, but possibly the Department of Defense or Department of Justice. Within that, though, they are relatively autonomous.
Director Fury reports to Secretary Pierce (who, I think, was Secretary of Defense, so that would make SHIELD DoD, I guess…) and to the Director of National Intelligence (which is an actual office that the United States actually has and it has a Wikipedia article and everything). Pierce reports to both the President and to Congress. The international oversight committee is not generally a thing for US government agencies, so I'm assuming that's the result of some kinda treaty that allows SHIELD to function as it does without pissing the rest of the world off/trampling on everybody's sovereignty/starting wars.
Even with all that, though, SHIELD agents trading bullets with foreign military personnel from a country with which the United States is not at war (on that country's soil, against that country's wishes, no less!) is going to give a lot of the SHIELD political people very big headaches. Like, that's just…really bad. You can't do that. (No, SHIELD cannot operate the way it does if it is not an agency of a specific government. This is true for the same reasons that INTERPOL has no teeth. Because every country that can will ignore you and the ones that couldn’t ignore you, you won’t get any support to go after.)
Phil worrying about having a Senate committee talking about him isn't entirely a pointless worry, either. SHIELD has to report to a lot of people, including Congress. Or, at least, they should.
The United States Senate handles certain tasks by assigning them to committees of senators. We have committees for armed forces, agriculture, foreign affairs, energy, and…a lot of other things. These committees do various things, including vetting legislation before it is presented to the full Senate. (The House actually does this stuff too, but we're talking about the Senate at the moment…) The fact that SHIELD is an Executive Branch agency does not mean it is immune to Congressional oversight and intervention. (Which is something several IRL Executive agencies could stand to remember…).
As far as I can track down, Claire McCaskill (who is an IRL United States senator, for those readers who aren't American politics junkies, like me) actually was on the Armed Services committee in the Senate in Fall 2013. I think. I haven't listened to her make a lot of speeches, though, so I have no idea if the quote from her is anything like what she'd actually say. *le shrug*
