Archive of Our Own

 "Hey, I recognize this place."

 Phil Coulson stopped on the ridge and bent down, face highlighted in red and gold by the setting sun. His eyes were dark, narrowed to a squint as he stared over the ridgeline to the little valley between the hills and the small green-painted cabin that was nestled on the far side, surrounded by birch, fir trees, and thickets of wild rose.

 Smoke rose from the chimney, light shone in the windows, and a mess of wildflowers in shades of cream and gold clotted the sides of the path to the front door. It looked like something out of a North Country Kinkade painting, only it didn't make Skye want to puke with an excess of twee.

 "You do?" Antoine Triplett asked, sitting up. Skye reached out idly and picked a couple crushed wild blueberries from his back. "They friendlies?"

 "They're good neighbors," Coulson said, idly.

 "Not much around for them to be neighbor to," Trip said,turning in a wide circle over the vast emptiness, and it was quite true; they'd seen nothing, not even a cell tower, as they'd come down. "I don't think there's anything around for miles."

 "Not at the moment," Coulson said. He reached down and picked up a little round pellet, like a marble only larger, holding it up and squinting at it it. "But there used to be."

 "So you know them?" Skye asked as she watched Coulson watch the little cabin, rolling the pellet between his fingers. The cabin looked like it was beaming up at them, enticing them down.

 "I met them once before, years ago. In winter. Agent Barton and I had missed our original extraction point. Spent a couple nights huddled in a... well, I guess you could call it a safehouse, while a storm blew through. Had to snowshoe out to get to the next extraction point, and then our heli went down anyway. We were lucky, if that’s the right word, to happen on these guys. Very hospitable. It was hard to leave."

 "Finding some kind of shelter in the middle of all this… nothing? Yeah, I’d say you got lucky,” Skye responded. “Twice, it sounds like.”

 Coulson smiled a little, in a far-off sort of way.

 “Well when you put it that way,” he said, “it’s hard to argue. At the time, things seemed… a little more complicated.”

 “Complicated how?” Skye asked, and got a head shake for her trouble, and one of Coulson’s little half-smiles.

 “That’s classified.”

 “What, seriously?” Trip asked, standing up and coming to loom over Skye.

 “Oh yes,” Coulson said, squinting up at him. “So classified, in fact, that even the redactions have redactions.”

 “We don’t have need-to-know right now?” Skye asked.

 Coulson chewed on his lip thoughtfully, watching her, and she tried to keep her face as open and you can trust me, bossman as possible.

 “Nah,” he said finally. “Not yet. If it becomes relevant, I’ll read you both in-- you wouldn’t believe me if I told you right now, anyway.”

 “Okay, I feel like we’ve seen enough shit to get a pass on that,” Skye told him.

 “You think you have,” Coulson agreed, so amiably she had a brief urge to bop him. “But you’re going to have to trust me on this one.”

 “Well, when you put it that way, I guess we trust you.” Skye said, because when Coulson was in that mood you couldn’t get information with a crowbar and a can of WD-40. It was one of his less endearing traits. “But it’s a good thing you’re cute, boss, that’s all I’m saying. You’re a hard man to argue with."

 “I’ve been told that before,” Coulson said, looking down the hill and sighing. Skye got the distinct impression he didn’t expect their luck to last. “And at least the distress call got through to Agent May. Did she have our coordinates, Trip?”

 “I think so,” Trip told him. “It got a bit hectic at the end.”

 “That’s the understatement of the century,” Skye said, leaning backwards and poking at Trip’s knee where he still hovered. “I thought we were gonna wind up in pieces in the treetops for a while there.”

 "C’mon girl, you know I wouldn’t let you down," Trip said, lazily. "Would’ve had us in one piece if I’d had just a little more room to maneuver. I never got to pilot a float plane before. Too bad this one won't be going anywhere soon." He looked back down at the hill behind him, where a float plane sat half submerged and still smoking, dark as a wounded blackbird, in a wide, round lake that glinted and darkened with the setting sun. "Seriously though, Coulson, there's nothin' but nothin' around here."

 "There was the mine," Coulson told him, and gestured at the lake. "Or there used to be."

 "That was a mine?" Trip said slowly. "How long ago?"

 "Long enough it shouldn’t matter," Coulson sighed, looking around. "But people have long memories up here."

 "And short cell towers. I can't get a signal at all from anything, even this piece of junk," Skye said, glaring at her satellite phone. For all the good it was doing her, she might as well have skipped it across the lake like a stone.

 "You won't," Coulson stood. "Hmph." He contemplated the cabin a little longer.

 "Any reason we're not already down there?" Trip asked. "May can't manage an extraction 'till tomorrow, and it'd be nice not to sleep on bedrock, sir. So unless some of those redactions involve them cooking guests for dinner, I hope their long memory extends to you."

 "Oh it does," Coulson said, "I'd bet our lives on it."

 "Then what's the hold up? They not going to be so friendly now?"

 "I... don't see why not," Coulson allowed. “We parted on good terms-- fair ones, anyway. But you never know, with them."

 As he stood the sun slipped lower, tangling in the branches of the trees that surrounded them and turning their still-pale berries bright orange. The shadows were already thick in the little valley. Coulson reached behind him and pulled, then idly slid the twig he'd torn from the tree into his pocket, patting it gently.

 "Yes," he said, musing, "on the whole, being in there is safer than being out here tonight. Come on, you two."

 Why he was so reluctant to ask for a warm, dry place to stay for the night? Skye put away the question in favor of not falling as they picked their way down the hill. They slipped between the burnt husks of trees, the stands of aspen and birch, the tall spruce and the occasional pine that loomed like a giant above them all. Wild raspberries tore at their clothes, already in bad shape from their crash and subsequent hike.

 Midway down the hill, Trip yanked Skye backwards. She windmilled wildly, struggling to stay upright on the steep, crumbling ground, before grabbing onto a nearby trunk and clinging.

 “What the hell, Trip?” she asked, feeling herself blush as both he and Coulson looked at her with lips compressed against smiles. She was not going to play the comic relief.

 “Poison ivy,” he said, pointing at a patch of glossy green undergrowth in front of her. “Figured you wouldn’t want to step in it.”

 “I know what poison ivy looks like,” Skye told him. “‘Leaves of three, let it be,’ right? I can count.”

 The stuff in front of her was indeed three-lobed and potentially itchy-- and she was not about to admit that she had been a half-step away from Calamine City without noticing it. She’d been concentrating too hard on her balance.

 “C’mon, girl!” Trip said, raising his hands in surrender. “Don’t be like that. I wasn’t sure a big-time computer nerd like you’d know your plant life, is all.”

 Skye sniffed, detangling herself from her arboreal savior and removing an errant caterpillar that had found its way onto her pants with all the dignity she could muster.

 “Shows what you know. I read Call of the Wild at school like every other kid ever. I can tell my aspens from my oaks and poison ivy from gooseberry.” She waved at each plant in question, just to prove her point.

 “Fine,” Trip said, as he got going down the hill, “but that’s a birch.”

 Skye did a double-take at the tree. It looked awfully smooth-barked; didn’t birch peel? That was what they made canoes out of, right? She glanced back down at Trip and decided that if he was making fun of her, it was probably best to maintain a discreet silence.

 Way back when Skye was living at the orphanage and spent a fair amount of her time hiding from the nuns, she’d used to crawl between the shelves in the library and read for hours and hours. Because stealth had mattered more to her than genre, she’d ended up with a pretty eclectic reading list. For a while, she remembered being obsessed with My Side of the Mountain, with the idea of just heading off the grid, away from all the disappointment that people seemed to bring her, and living in a tree for a while.

 Then she’d discovered computers, and everything had changed. She never had run off to the wilderness, except in her imagination. Maybe readers had the same problems with plants as big words; it was hard to recognize them the first time you saw them somewhere other than the page.

 As they went down the hill, Skye found herself cataloguing the trees she knew, just to make sure. Birch (definitely birch this time, with curlicues of bark half-peeled off), some kind of scruffy pine, a fir that was oddly soft to the touch (balsam, check,) and a couple drab oaks.

 "Before we get down there," Coulson said, breaking into her thoughts, “we need to go over something.” He snaked himself between two huge boulders, rusted in long streaks where their iron content had been exposed, as he talked. “These guys are eccentric.Tread carefully, and just because they seem hospitable, don’t assume they are."

 Skye’d already been going to do that, thanks-- even if Coulson hadn’t been acting so shifty about them, she’d never seen anything good come of assuming new people were automatically going to be nice to you. Not even if they swore up and down they had nothing but your best interests at heart.

 "Eccentric?" Trip asked Coulson when he didn’t elaborate, "More eccentric than you'd expect from people who live in the middle of nowhere?"

 "Yes. More than that." A branch caught Coulson as he spoke, slapping him in the midsection, and he glared back at the bush it had come from. He smiled a little and repeated eccentric to himself with a slight laugh.

 "Okay," Skye said. "Thanks for the warning."

 The smile dropped off Coulson's face.

 "That's another thing," he told them, deadly serious. "Just let me take care of the protocol. We don’t have time to go over this properly so you two follow my lead. If I do something, you do it too. If I don’t, you don’t. I mean it:no deviations. "

 He stopped at the open gate and knelt down to open a little wooden chest, half-buried in the flowerbeds before them. Standing again, Coulson removed his handgun from his shoulder holster and placed it inside the chest. Then he removed the icer from his side holster. Then his handcuffs. Then the knife strapped to his ankle.

 By that point, Skye had gotten the message and was following suit. She glanced back upon hearing Trip sigh. He had an awkward armful of weapons-- gun, icer, two knives, and the cigarette laser-- and he dropped them into the box, looking down at them as if he wasn’t sure they were old enough to be left alone.

 “They’ll be safe enough there,” Coulson said, looking sympathetic. “And it’d be seriously bad manners to bring them in. Come on. And just… just cross your fingers.”

 Without waiting to see whether Trip and Skye were following, he set off for the door. Coulson took a minute while they caught up to smooth his jacket and hair and then knocked, a polite little rat-a-tat.

 After a long moment it opened, spilling light, and the little old man on the other side said:

 "Well, now, would you look at that! Hey honey,” he turned back into the house momentarily, “it's that nice agent from SHIELD-- you remember, with the snowshoes and all, the winter we had the blizzard in April?” When he turned back, his face was cracking into a slow, almost wondering smile. “Gosh darn it, we heard you got killed."

 The man wore a dingy maroon feed cap on his egg-bald head, a plaid jacket so faded the original tartan couldn’t be discerned, and a set of the twinklingest eyes Skye’d ever seen. His smile had turned into a little chuckle, as he looked Coulson up and down.

 "I got better," Coulson said in response to his comment. Skye didn't think it ever got easier to stifle the hysterical laughter that rose in her each time he said it. "May we come in and rest-- just for the night? We'll leave by daybreak, but right now we're in need of a sanctuary."

 While he’d been talking, a woman even littler and more wrinkled than the man had joined him at the door, crossing her arms over the decorative wildflowers painted on her robin’s egg blue sweatshirt. She’d been looking them over critically, but upon appeal gave a considered nod.

 “Of course you can, dear,” she said. “we’re always happy to see our Agent again. And your friends. Come on out of that cold, get warmed up, and tell us what you’ve been doing all this time. We’d thought you’d forgotten us, it’s been so long!”

 “I could never,” Coulson said, stepping over the threshold, “ever forget you.” He reached back and drew Skye in with him, then Trip, keeping one hand on each of their arms. Skye caught Trip trying to hide his double-take of surprise-- and what looked like a kind of abashed smile-- at the move. “May I present my friends? This is Mary Sue, and this is Trip.”

 <i>This is Mary Sue.</i>

 Skye pasted her happiest smile on her face, reached out, and shook the hands of first Ma, and then Pa, Pikkuinen as they introduced themselves. At her back, she could almost feel the shadows coming down the valley, the wind picking up the chill of late evening. She tried to convince herself that was the only thing causing her to draw into herself, not Coulson using that name. “Mary Sue” had always meant pretending, always meant big people who did things she hated for, as they said, her own good.

 It seemed weird to hear it again in such a welcoming place. The cabin was roomier than she’d expected;  with the red toadstool-printed curtains closing out the last of the lingering shadows, it felt snug as being tucked up in the heart of a piece of amber. Darkness lurked in the doorways, true, but the fire was blazing, the two ratty recliners pulled up to it were covered in grandma afghans, and a card table set beneath the windows held a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of a reed-filled pond. Surely, nothing really bad was gonna happen around 5,000 pieces of wood ducks and water.

 “Come on in, sit down and warm up. You must be starving. Pa and I were just about to get supper; I’ll dish up some hotdish for you.”

 Ma bustled briskly in behind them, opening a door behind which lurked avocado and wheat-colored tile.Trip’s stomach growled and Skye felt herself begin to salivate as well, as the mingled scents of hamburger and onion wafted outwards.

 “Hey, that sounds good,” Trip started, only to be cut off by Coulson, who yelled genially into the kitchen:

 “No need, we wouldn’t want to be any trouble.” He met Trip’s puppy dog eyes with the kind of glare that, in the field, would have meant somebody’d just tripped the silent alarms.

 “Oh, it’s no trouble,” Pa Pikkuinen said, brushing up behind her, his belly passing so close to her back that Skye jumped. “We made enough for leftovers. Isn’t that right, Ma?” he raised his voice.

 “Yeppers! Plenty to spare. I’ll just get out the extra plates. We’ve got some nice jello salad too, don’tcha know. Way too much for Pa and me to eat. We’d hate to see it go to waste.”

 <i>Jello salad?</i> Trip mouthed at Skye and she shrugged. She’d lived in California long enough that nothing sounded weird to her. It must have sounded weird to Coulson, however, because he declined again.

 “No, we’ve already eaten. Absolutely stuffed. Couldn’t eat a thing. I appreciate the offer.”

 Since their last meal had consisted of several power bars and generous handfuls of the blueberries that had stained Trip’s back, Skye felt that Ma Pikkuinen’s cooking had to be spectacularly bad to merit that level of reluctance from her boss.

 She nearly opened her mouth to say that <i>she’d</i> have a little, if they were making it anyway, when Coulson’s earlier words floated into her head. <i>Follow my lead. No deviations.</i>

 When in doubt, her younger self told her, wait and watch.

 “You sure? It’s got those little crunchy onions on the top. Or if you’re too full for that there’s potica. I’ll get you some of that with coffee.”

 “Oh, I’d never get to sleep if I had coffee,” Coulson said, as if he didn’t live off the stuff most days. That clinched it, whatever she was serving had to be tantamount to poison, and Skye just hoped Trip’s stomach would stay quiet. “No, you go on and eat without us. We’re just going to collapse and get off our feet. Maybe wash up, if there’s space.”

 “Well suit yourself, and let us know if you change your mind,” Ma said, with real regret. The smell of hamburger and butter surged momentarily, then cut off--she must've closed the oven door. Something seemed to settle in the air around them, a chill just at the edges.

 The bedroom, at least, seemed cozy enough-- if dim. Rain was beginning to dash against the windows, pattering almost on rodent feet, unseen behind thick brocaded curtains. Coulson crossed directly to the full bed with its white enamelled headboard and a chenille bedspread that was flocked in dim floral patterns like a formal garden. He sloughed off his suit coat, dropping it on the bed.

 "So," Skye said as he rifled his jacket pockets and began to transfer his effects to his pants, "do they eat arsenic for dinner or something?"

 Coulson's response was a sad laugh and head shake, as he began to remove his cufflinks.

 "Trust me, that'd be a mercy," he said eventually, half to himself. "I mean, you'll live, but you'll have a real hard time... going." He spiralled his hand on the last word, clearly trying to convey some special emphasis.

 Skye blinked. Going? What was...

 Oh.

 "Ew," she said at last.

 Unwilling to follow that line of thought further, she turned to the little bunk bed against the other wall. It was made of what looked like whole tree branches, stripped and varnished, and the bottom bunk was made up in a fairly inoffensive woodsy moose and fir quilt. The top bunk…. Skye turned away from it quickly and dropped her backpack on the bottom bunk, sitting to pull off her boots. Just in time, as Trip came in to claim his own bunk. His good humor had come back, once he’d reconciled himself to remaining unfed (or perhaps he’d stealthily eaten another power bar-- it was hard to be sure).

 She watched the smile drip off his face as he went to claim his bunk.

 “Aw, c’mon, girl,” he said, holding out the pillow in protest. Skye giggled, loud enough that Coulson looked over.

 “Suits you,” Coulson said, seriously, and went back to rolling up his sleeves.

 Trip gave it a forlorn look, nearly matched by the cross-stitched, straw hat-wearing puppy that faced him from the slightly misshapen lump of a pillow. It was being hugged by a youthful clown.

 “Are we sure that we don’t want to just camp out tonight?” Trip asked, his voice gone a little plaintive.

 A roll of thunder answered him, followed by a gust of wind strong enough to shake the little cabin. Trip dropped his shoulders and carefully squared the pillow on his bunk, clown-side down.

----

The fire had burned low in the little brick hearth, casting Skye’s corner of the room into dimness so complete that even the half-timbered walls barely registered. She’d curled up in one of the recliners, snuggled under the scratchy medallions of the afghan, and closed her eyes against the howling wind from the storm outside. The thunder had been joined by a bone-rattling wind that shook the sides of the little cabin like paper.

Trip looked up from his seat at the dining table after one particularly heavy shake and put down his playing cards. He’d been in the middle of a fairly intricate two-deck solitaire game, methodically moving cards from each of the dozens of little piles he’d built into eight precisely-squared new ones. He pressed the two of spades down on top of its brethren and left his fingers on it.

“Nasty night out there,” he said quietly.

“Glad you’re in here, huh?” Ma Pikkuinen said, and Skye slewed to find her watching Trip from the doorway to the kitchen, the reflected glow from the hearth edging her glasses. “Bad night to be out; maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll keep the guys down by the pit at home.”

“Are they still there?” Coulson asked idly, from his position by the far window, clearly only half listening. He and Pa Pikkuinen had retired to a set of worn armchairs. They had a little table between them, holding a cribbage board shaped like a walleye, and were an unknown number of hands into the game. “Thought they’d have gone by now-- there's nothing left for them.”

“Twelve,” Pa Pikkuinen replied, laying out his cards and reaching for the green peg. “Yeah, they’re still there, you’ll hear ‘em knocking down there if the storm dies. We’ve all got long memories up here; we’ve all seen cycles. Prices go down, mines close, everyone leaves. Prices go up, mines open, everyone comes back."

"Mine's a lake now, Pa," Coulson said mildly, and got a snort in reply.

"Don't I know it. We're all set in our ways, Agent.”

“They’re nice enough, anyway,” Ma said, “if loud. Keep themselves to themselves, unlike some other neighbors I could mention.”

For a deserted stretch of backcountry, Skye decided there were entirely too many neighbors-- although she supposed that “neighbor” to the Pikkuinens could mean anything.

“Well,” Pa said slowly, “They’d straighten up if people came back. Got no-one to steal from right now, so they’re getting antsy. You know how it goes.”

Skye didn’t know how it went, and considered saying so, but she didn’t think either Pa or Coulson would appreciate it if she broke their concentration. It was an itchy feeling, like when she’d been a child trying to unlock the mysteries of the adults that came and went around her, doing adult-y things that passed a five-year old understanding. If she wasn’t careful, she thought, she’d get stepped on.

“‘Antsy?’” Coulson asked, frowning. “These are the neighbors on the other side of the hill? I thought they mostly stayed, well, home?”

“‘Home,’ now. That’s kind of a tough topic up here right now,” Pa sighed, his accent thickening and his cadence turning slow and ruminative as he went on. “That’s the problem, huh? Not a lot of home left for them. They smelled the iron, smelled the jobs and the picks in the dirt and got hooked real good. We came here same as they did, when the first miners came. Followed the ore to a new home. When they blackballed the miners, kicked us out, tried to destroy our towns, did we go? No, we were hooked good. We stayed, took to the woods. Ate beaver, muskrat, whatever we could trap. The companies bought in scabs, but the scabs were stubborn too, and they set down roots.

“Then the mine went and the miners went with ‘em. But we stayed right here, and the neighbors stayed in their hill. And the boys stayed in the pit, for that matter. Nothing left here for them? Too early to say, that's what they tell me. Mines might open again, if they’re they’re waiting. It’s their home much as it is ours, I suppose, they’ve got the right to stay. Even if they’re stubborn as all get out and dangerous idiots about it.” He set his peg in the tail of the fish.

“Muggins,” Coulson told him, his voice smug around the edges. “Nobs on your jack. You’re not dangerous?”

Pa Pikkuinen stared down at the jack in his hand, then back at the three of hearts he’d cut, and sighed.

“Fair enough,” he said. “Stubborn, too. But that’s the last one you’ll get from me so easy. What about you, anyway, Agent?"

"Am I what? Stubborn, or a dangerous idiot?" Coulson asked, amused. Pa snorted.

"Well?" he asked after a moment. "Are you?"

"Definitely one, maybe the other," Coulson told him, then frowned down at his cards. "And maybe I think it's too early to say."

Skye thought about the Playground, their own hidden sanctuary housing the last desperate remnants of SHIELD, and sighed. Maybe Coulson was right and they were stubborn idiots too, rattling around pretending they could make it all come back if they just didn’t give up. She still felt a brief pang of desperate longing for the drafty old corridors they’d barely settled in to.

Well, the Playground was half a continent off-- and at least this particular little hiding hole was cozy. She let herself drift again, trying to find a really comfortable way to sit in the lumpy old chair, tucking her toes further under the blanket to combat the draft. She really wanted hot chocolate-- or coffee, or a whisky, or anything really-- but Coulson’d refused on their behalfs again when they’d come out of the bedroom, and she didn’t have the heart to glare at him.

She looked over to find Ma Pikkuinen looking at her now, face unreadable, and tried not to gulp.

“Look at you,” Ma said, her voice full of satisfaction. “Snug as a bug in a rug. Good to be out of the rain and cold. Stay as long as you like, dear.”

For a moment, snuggled into warm scratchy wool, Skye felt like maybe the Playground could wait after all. Just a little while.

“No, we’ll be on our way in the morning,” Coulson called, breaking the spell.

“That’s what the other one said too,” Pa told him, and Coulson looked up.

“Other one?” he asked carefully, and Skye thought he’d gone still as a statue.

At that moment, and with impeccable timing, a door banged open. The sound was distant; somewhere in the warren of little rooms in the back of the cabin, but even so the light in the cabin seemed to thin and shift.

Skye startled upright, finding herself reaching for the nearest weapon-- and the best thing she could find was a bottle-green fluted vase that was holding wilted yellow and orange flowers. It didn’t seem likely to help. Trip had leapt up at the sound; his hand was hovering almost forlornly at the small of his back, where he usually carried a gun.

The banging was replaced by silence, thick and black as the darkness in the open door that led back to the bedrooms. Skye shivered. Ma and Pa seemed unfazed by the breach of their cabin walls, though Ma did get up and start ambling towards the kitchen.

“He’ll be wanting cocoa, I bet. I’ll just heat the kettle. Agent, sure I can’t get you some while I’m up? No trouble.”

“We’re fine,” Coulson said, vaguely. He’d started to get up, one hand braced against the table.

A scraping was coming from the hall, heavy and shambling, like someone was either hauling a body before them or dragging up the floorboards themselves as they came, grumbling in a peculiarly ursine sort of way. The shadows grew long in the doorway, thickening, quivering, and the air smelled like mold and snow. If Skye’d been on her own, she’d probably have been gone already, run out the door into the storm to take her chances with <i>whatever</i> the Pikkuinen’s neighbors were, out there beyond the safety of the little cabin on the hill.

But Coulson stood behind her by the window, Trip before her near the kitchen, and they anchored her.

“Oh come on out, it’s only friends, don’t be so darned shy,” Pa Pikkuinen grumbled from behind her.

Slowly, the shadow bent beneath the doorframe, raising a shaggy head as it came through.

“You want cocoa?” Ma called from the kitchen, and the shag began to nod, then stopped. Skye managed to get her eyes to focus right, and blinked at what she saw.

“You’re not a bear,” she said to it.

The figure turned towards her and shrugged off a huge brown coat, resolving itself fully into a man with an overgrown mane of dirty golden hair and a full beard. Beneath the coat he was dressed in drab flannel.

“Not at the moment,” he replied, then he looked up beyond her and his lips dropped open. He mouthed the word <i>Phil.</i>

Coulson was staring at him, pale as chalk. After a little while, something like the beginnings of wonder crept over his face.

"Found you," he breathed.

He was so focused, so intense, that Skye didn’t fully process his meaning at first. When she did, it was like someone had dropped ice down the back of her shirt.

What the hell did Coulson mean by that? They weren’t supposed to be anywhere near here; they'd fucking crashed on their way back from Winnipeg.  Anyway, supposing Coulson had been looking-- somehow-- why the hell would he want to find this near-bear half-lumberjack wild man? Was he another Fridge escapee? Someone Coulson thought had a connection to Hydra? Or just someone SHIELD had traumatized horribly in the past-- which it certainly had a bad habit of doing. The guy had looked stricken at Coulson's words, and Skye didn't think there was a good way to take that.

Whatever, or whoever, he was, the guy didn’t seem capable of either moving or speaking at the moment. Just the sight of Coulson seemed to have rooted him to the spot. Obviously realizing that his quarry wasn't going to say anything for the foreseeable future, Coulson turned back to Pa, his eyes narrowed like he was testing a hypothesis.

"You said you’d heard I'd been killed," he said. Pa shrugged.

"I did; now you know why. Seems it wore off," he offered.

"You could say that," Coulson said, and went back to staring at the shaggy guy, whose eyes had been flickering back and forth as the conversation hopped. “I’m alive enough now, anyway.”

 The man glanced back over at Pa, waiting for his response, like he needed Pa to give him a second opinion on Coulson’s level of extantness.

 "You bet," was all Pa said, and then he flicked a hand between the man and Coulson impatiently, clearly done being his proxy in the conversation.

 Coulson stared at the man for a long moment, and the man stared back with his woodland eyes.

 "So I'm not dreaming this time?" the man croaked, in a voice that did nothing to convince Skye that he wasn’t lying about not currently being a bear. "You’re real? This… this was really you?"

 Something rustled at his waist, and Skye looked down to see him drawing one hand back out of his pocket. He was holding was a small brass-colored keychain made of two miniature snowshoes harnessed together.

 “I’d… I hoped, but I didn’t dare believe it,” he whispered.

 “Oh, thank god, I really did send that,” Coulson said, in a voice like an oak tree, rough on the outside and wide. “I wasn’t sure. I was still mixed up from the… from my recovery… at the time. I remember being desperate to find a way to let you know, but everything from that time is so muddled in my mind, between reality and… dream. I didn’t have any trustworthy way to check which that was. I’ve been having... memory problems,” he confessed, then stuttered to a stop.

 This did not seem to reassure the trinket-toting bearman. He was looking at Coulson with a great deal more consternation now. At last, he seemed to shake it off, and flicked his head at Trip, then at Skye.

 "Friends?" He asked.

 It startled Coulson into action.

 "Yes, he said, gesturing at them both in turn. "Mary Sue and Trip, my agents. Trip, you remember Hawk. He was with me when I was here last."

 Trip shifted at Skye’s back, and she felt as much as heard the breath leave him all at once.

 “Y… yeah,” he said, “yeah I remember. Good to see you again, man. Got worried when we didn’t see you around, you know?”

 The shaggy man-- Hawk-- gave him a tentative sort of smile, and something slid into place in Skye’s brain. He was a SHIELD agent, then-- or had been. “Agent Barton,” Coulson had called him, when he’d told her and Trip about their last visit here. Well if Coulson wasn’t going to use his name, Skye was going to forget she’d heard it-- it seemed safer. Anyway, he seemed miles and ages away from Agent Anything, in his current state. Had he been this shaggy then? Had… oh was he part of the Index? A were-bear or something? Well that explained-- kinda-- why Coulson'd been looking for him here. (Except that Skye still didn't think Coulson had been looking intentionally-- then again, this being Coulson, he was quite capable of planning about a picosecond before acting, so maybe it'd been intentional by the time they entered the cabin door.)

 “Sorry,” Hawk rasped at Trip. “Didn’t mean to cause a fuss.” He shuffled forward to take the hand being held out to him, looking a little startled when Trip held it longer than necessary and beamed a little bit. After a moment his smile began to broaden, because no man (or woman) ever born was immune to one of Trip’s eye-blinding grins.

 “Hey,” Skye said, finally finding her feet loosening, and reached out for a handshake of her own.

Hawk’s grip was firm and certain, his palms calloused and warm, and she kind of never wanted to let go. Then, while he was still gripping her hand, Hawk’s gaze shifted back to Coulson, and Skye felt the moment he forgot all about her, just before he dropped her hand. All the strength went out of him.

He mouthed Coulson’s name again, shaking his head in disbelief. Coulson mouthed something back, his lips lingering over the single syllable.

"No tricks now," Hawk said out loud. "It's really truly you?"

"Really truly me," Coulson told him.

After an uncertain moment Hawk reached up, ignoring Coulson’s offered hand, and touched his face, once, with a trembling thumb.

“They told me you were dead,” he managed, looking lost.

“I was,” Coulson said, voice gentle and all his humor gone, “but now I’m not. They told me I couldn’t contact the Aven-- um, any of you. Can you… are you….” he paused, looking alarmed, and darted forward, as Hawk shuddered. “Cl-- Hawk-- you need to sit down.”

Hawk nodded, already collapsing into one of the ratty armchairs. Coulson helped him sit, hands under his elbows. Once he had Hawk settled, he folded down himself to perch on the ottoman at his feet. He’d completely forgotten everyone else in the room, Skye was sure.

“That’s right, you get him comfortable, Agent,” Ma chirped, and Skye whipped around to find her holding a blanket and a mug of something that wafted curls of steam. Either she moved disturbingly stealthily for a woman her age, or Skye’d been more distracted than she’d thought.

“Hawk, here’s that cocoa you wanted,” Ma continued. “We’ll just get you tucked right in, hmm?”

Hawk started to reach for the mug, looking grateful-- and then stopped and looked down. Coulson’d set a hand down on his knee, and was watching him, worried.

“That’s… not tonight, Ma,” Hawk said, still staring at Coulson’s hand. “I...  I’m not thirsty.”

"You, ah, have you been here long?" Coulson asked. Hawk looked bewildered momentarily-- which Skye sympathized with. It was a pretty sudden shift in conversation and he didn’t seem up to sharp turns.

"Not long at all," Ma chirped, bustling around behind the chair and tucking the flannel blanket tightly around Hawk's shoulders. She patted one as she went. "Seems like yesterday, really. I wouldn’t want you to think we’re not glad to have him here-- keeps us from getting too lonely. He helps out when the neighbors get uppity, too."

A lone howl, long and keening, filtered in from the outside, sending prickles up Skye’s spine. Ma Pikkuinen frowned vaguely at the window, apparently impatient at the interruption.

Hawk, meanwhile, answered Coulson's raised eyebrow with a kind of sheepish grin.

"I mighta lost track of time a bit,” he said. “You know how it goes, right? You say it's just for the night, you end up staying for... for..." he wrinkled his forehead. "Shit. Couldn't be that long, could it?”

Coulson gave him a kind of why ask me face, mixed a little bit with that’s a little worrisome eyebrows. Apparently, Hawk was fluent in the language of Coulson’s facial twitches, because he gave a tiny little laugh, a bare puff of air, that was nothing if not an admission, before he continued on.

“Fury sent me off on a," he paused and looked over at Skye and Trip, then back at Coulson, suddenly far sharper than he'd seemed so far, more feather and beak than fur and claw, "on a thing. I got ambushed on the way back, had to bail out. Realized I’d been betrayed."

"Betrayed? Hydra?" Trip asked, clearly fascinated. He turned a dining chair around and sat down on it backwards, draping himself over the seatback to listen. From beyond them, Pa drifted closer.

"We found him on our porch,” he said, “more'n half dead of exhaustion. Brought him in. Just like old times, ya know?"

"Sure, I remember," said Coulson, but his eyes never left the Hawk's. "So, you were caught out in the field when Hydra fell and you had nowhere to go. But you would have tried to get to the Widow," he said, like he was as sure of it as he was of his own name.

"Of course," Hawk said. "Figured I should rest up a bit before I tried though. Too tired to go on that night-- well, tired and maybe injured a bit.”

From Coulson’s snort, Skye figured that Hawk was yet another habitual downplayer of injuries. Coulson did seem to collect them.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hawk told him, “Spare me the lecture. Anyway, I tried to leave, got... halfway through a goodbye, is that right, Ma?" he looked up at her and she nodded back, "halfway through, right. But I’d just gotten back on the trail when the traitors showed back up. Guess I hadn’t lost ‘em as well as I thought. I got hurt-- again-- when we took ‘em down. Did SHIELD manage to kick the bastards out, or did you... did Hydra...?"

When who’d taken them down, Skye wanted to ask, since the only “we” she’d seen so far was this sad-sack ex-SHIELD agent and an elderly couple. But Coulson wasn’t waiting for clarification, or even paying attention to her and Trip, and she understood why. His answer was bound to hurt Hawk, and he didn’t want to draw it out.

"Hawk," his voice was gentle, "The Triskelion fell. Widow and Cap and the others, they exposed Hydra, but SHIELD is..." he trailed off.

"SHIELD is what? SHIELD is gone?"

Skye had to look away before the disbelief in his eyes brimmed over, like she knew it would.

"Not gone," Coulson told him, in a sure voice. "Gone underground, but not gone. We're here, you see? We're here, and we found you, and we want to bring you in from the cold. We want to bring you home."

"’We?’" Hawk asked, eyes intent and searching.

"SHIELD," Coulson told him. "We're still SHIELD. And we want you back."

Hawk shook his head.

"And you?"

Skye thought she'd never seen Coulson look quite so uncomfortable in his life. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. She wandered over to the jigsaw and began to put pieces together, idly trying to match shades of marshy water and shadowed reeds, and turned her back to the room.

"I," Coulson said after a long moment, and she didn't need to be looking over to know his face would've gone white and stiff, the way it did when he was shocked by his own heart, "I don't deserve to be the one asking. But I am."

"Don't deserve?" Hawk asked, echoing Skye’s own confusion.

Trip's long finger came into view, darting out to grab a puzzle piece and snap it into place decisively. Ah, another refugee from the sudden awkward.

"Because of before," Coulson clarified. "When I didn't come. When I didn't let you know--" he broke off, and Skye glanced back over. She could only see his back, and it was bowed.

"But you did let me know," Hawk said, his face shining like pale gold in the low light as he stared up at Coulson. “Remember? It was real, you told me it was real. You sent a ticket stub. The ticket stub led me to our old dead drop at the train station. You left me the key. I just didn't believe... everyone else said you were dead. N... the Widow… told me you were dead, and I should have looked. I should have looked."

Coulson ducked his head and reached up to tug Hawk's blanket tight around him.

“And I could have been a hell of a lot less cryptic. I just didn't... I didn't have the lay of the land. I knew what I wanted to do but I couldn't trust, well, a lot of people, as it turned out. But myself, most of all. I didn't know if I was just remembering the you I wanted to remember, or... or...." Coulson rattled to a stop, groaning in frustration.

"Did they... you said you had memory problems, from coming back?" Hawk prompted him, and Skye felt a rush of gratitude.

“Yes. Or rather, I had problems with my memories from just after I died-- and somewhat before." Coulson glanced back at her once, and Skye tried to give him an encouraging, fortifying sort of smile. (She thought it probably came off more anemic than invigorating, but any time she was forced to remember how Coulson had come by those problems, how bloodily they’d dragged him back from death, she felt nauseous.) "I’m not… I’m not sure which are mine, and which someone made for me. Or I made up myself.”

“Ah,” Hawk said, inhaling deeply and closing his eyes for a long, slow blink. The topic must be making him nauseous, too.

“I… I get that, actually,” he whispered once he’d locked eyes with Coulson again. “After, after what happened at Pegasus-- well, I guess I don’t need to tell you. But it was hard to trust my own memories after. And, well, I kept wishing I was remembering it wrong. The footage. Of you. Dying. I kept waking up hoping I’d dreamed it.”

They both fell silent.

“Well gosh,” Ma drawled, “you two nutsos do make life hard on yourselves, don’tcha?”

She had been shuffling around in the background during the conversation. Skye turned to find her creaking back and forth slowly in the corner rocking chair looking like an applehead doll, only with a blue-tinted permanent instead of a calico bonnet.

“How so?” Coulson asked her. She grinned, wide as a mine pit.

“Way I figure,” she said, “don’t much matter whether you dreamed it or not. You were both dreaming about each other, doncha know.”

“And don’t much matter where we were, as long as we’re here now?” Hawk asked her.

“You bet,” she said.

"Not for long though," Coulson told her, sounding far firmer than Skye thought he really needed to, since she didn’t know how anyone could hear the tattered hope in Hawk’s voice and not go all gooey. "We leave at dawn."

"So soon?” Pa asked, and Skye jumped to realize he’d moved close to them during the conversation; his voice came from just behind her. Seriously, did she just have a horrible radar for tiny little elderly people? “You were just in a plane crash--”

“Landing,” muttered Trip, and Pa waved him off and continued.

“And you’re all beat up and exhausted. Stay a day or two and talk.”

“Can’t,” Coulson told him, turning briefly. “We have responsibilities. And people looking for us.” His hand, where it had fallen on Hawk’s knee, tightened, dirty canvas wrinkling under his fingers. “We can’t linger.”

“Can’t we?” Hawk asked him, almost wistfully. Coulson blinked at him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Hawk glanced over at Ma, then at Pa, his eyes dark and brow furrowed. Skye wished she could read the look better, but he was still more ursine than human to her, and she didn’t manage it.

“I’m gonna slow you down, sir,” he said quietly. “You know that. Better if I follow later, maybe?”

“Fine with us, Hawk,” Ma said, before Coulson could respond. “Don’t feel like you have to rush out of here on our account. Plenty of time yet for goodbyes, right, Pa?”

“You’re like family now, Hawk,” Pa said, coming forward to loom over Coulson’s back. “You’re no trouble at all. But you do what you gotta do, I suppose. Can’t say it’s not nice having you here, of course. Not so young these days; been good having a strong back like yours around the place there. Someone to help with the neighbors, ya know. Ma’s liked it too. Need someone to eat up all that hotdish she makes. We’d miss you, but we wouldn’t want to keep you here if you want to go.”

Ma nodded, setting up creaking in her chair.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” she said. “Not that you need to worry about us-- we’ll manage, I’m sure. Pa’ll just have to be careful out there choppin’ wood, with no one to help. And I guess it’s okay if he only takes one deer; less mouths to feed. No, it’s your life, you do what you need to. We’ll handle the neighbors somehow. Pa’s not so old as he looks, I guess he can take care of them if he has to. But it’s no trouble at all if you want to stay. We like you.”

Coulson frowned at the both of them and Skye wondered if he was going to apologize for trying to drag Hawk away. She knew she was holding herself back from babbling out sorries mostly because she wasn’t sure where to start. When Coulson turned to look up at Pa, though, the idea that he’d apologize evaporated. Skye saw his face clearly for the first time since he’d crouched down, and she took a startled step back. He was struggling to look anything like polite, but she couldn’t tell what he was struggling with underneath.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’ve got a prior claim.”

“You mean SHIELD has a prior claim,” Hawk said slowly. Coulson turned back to him.

“If that’s how you want it to be,” he said, measuring each word carefully, “then yes.”

Skye found herself bristling a little, and wasn’t sure quite whether it was on his behalf or Hawk’s.

“You know, you guys could just stay here instead,” Ma said into the silence, nodding her head to indicate Coulson, Trip, and Skye herself.

For a minute Skye thought how nice that would be, to curl up in the amber light of the cabin and just rest, safe from the storm outside and the howls and the fall of SHIELD and all the stupid high-tech double agent-y drama they’d had since. She was so tired, they all were-- too damn much chasing Hydra trail and their own tails. It was all bound to end in tears-- if they were lucky. If they weren’t, and they hadn’t been so far, someone was going to end up dead.

“Just a few days while you get some rest, Agent,” Ma wheedled. “Shame you had to go so soon, last time. Felt like we were just getting to know you. SHIELD can spare you, I bet.”

“No, they can’t,” Skye snapped, surprising herself and Trip both. She shook her head, trying to clear the cobwebs. It was one thing to daydream about sleeping it off, about her and Trip staying behind. It was quite another thing to think about Coulson leaving SHIELD-- that was just unnatural. “Can’t spare the Director, even for a day.”

“Director?” Pa asked, straightening a little, eyes snapping-- and for a half moment Coulson’s crack about him being dangerous almost made sense. Maybe years ago, decades ago, like World War II era, he might have been a very dangerous man. “Well that’s different. If we’d known we wouldn’t have kept calling you ‘Agent.’”

“It’s fine,” Coulson said, darting a quelling glance at Skye. “No harm, no foul.”

“Ya, but it changes things a bit,” Pa said. “I suppose if you want to take Hawk with when you go, you’ve got the right, don’tcha?”

Coulson shrugged this off, and turned back to Hawk, rocking forward till he was curved over the man’s lap, trying to stare into his eyes.

“Director, huh?” Hawk asked him. “Fancy.”

"Frantic," Coulson corrected him, and wrapped one of the man's big hands in his own. "We leave in the morning; what do you say?"

The entire cabin seemed to bow inwards towards Hawk as everyone waited for his answer. He and Coulson were locked together, both their hands clasped around each other’s now, and he was trembling just a little.

Skye wondered how traumatic Hawk’s escape from Hydra had been, if he'd spent this long recovering, looked this little like a human being. It was quiet here, out of the way-- the opposite of SHIELD’s head-over-heels pace. Would it really be a good thing to bring him back to that? She glanced over at Ma, who was frowning at the entwined men.

Did she know something about Hawk they didn't?

Finally, Hawk's hands tightened on Coulson's, sinews gleaming from the firelight.

"Well," he said. "I guess I better make sure I’m packed."

----

Skye woke up in the middle of the night to pitch blackness-- and someone whispering somewhere in the room with them.

“Boss,” Hawk hissed. “Hey, c’mon. Boss. Wake up, c’mon.” There was muted rustling from the general direction of the double bed, and she decided he must be shaking Coulson where he lay. Why hadn’t she woken up when he came in? Why, for that matter, hadn’t Coulson?

Skye felt her eyes strain to adjust, but the room remained obstinately lightless, too dark to see her hand on the pillow right next to her nose let alone anything across the room. The storm had gentled sometime during the night, producing only occasional, fitful patters against the windowpane. She forced herself to relax and stay down. Better to know what Hawk was doing before she tried to interrupt; the balance of moods in the cabin had been so fragile since Hawk had announced he was leaving with them that Skye’d turned in early to avoid accidentally shattering it. She didn’t want to break anything now.

“Boss, c’mon, they’ll be back soon,” Hawk continued, growing more agitated but keeping his voice nearly soundless, “Now is really not the time to catch up on your beauty sleep. C’mon, Didn’t used to be able to get you to stay asleep. Wake up for me, babe.”

More rustling, and a creak.

This time, after a moment, she heard a moist little sound and a soft sigh, and then:

“Oh, I missed you so much,” from Coulson, very very small, next to newborn. Skye felt more than heard the pause, the lack of breath, before he continued. “Damnit-- I’m sorry. I didn’t… for a moment I didn’t… I’m so sorry.”

Movement over sheets, like someone pushing back or up or away.

“No,” Hawk said into the silence, “don’t be.”

Another long pause, then a rush and rustle and a creak and another firm little smack, skin against skin-- unmistakably a kiss, swift and light. And then Hawk repeated, quietly:

“Don’t ever be.”

Skye thought her heart was going to burn a hole through her chest, plop onto the floor, and roll away in the dark. If there was a last thing to expect, she figured this had to be it.

“My dear,” Coulson breathed after a moment.

He was answered by a fast scuttle, a sound of someone moving that trended vaguely upwards, best as she could tell. Hawk pulling himself upright?

“You have to go now,” he hissed. “Now before dawn-- or it’ll be too late.”

That must’ve woken Coulson from whatever reverie he’d been in, because his reply was sharp and Director Coulson-y, even in the drowsiness of the small hours.

“Before dawn? C-- Hawk, that’s too damn dangerous, and you know it. We could walk off a cliff while we think we’re stepping into the outhouse. Even if the land’s not against us, the storm’s stopped. Next door might be up. We can’t handle them in our condition. It’ll be safer closer to daybreak.”

Another creak, this one heavier. Maybe the world outside was growing a tad lighter or Skye’s eyes were finally reconciling themselves to the dark, but she thought she saw some form in the blackness, slumping to sit next to another lump. Or maybe she was just making it up.

“Oh next door is definitely up, the ghouls. Doesn’t mean you can wait. Or didja think our hosts’d let you sneak out without saying goodbye, boss?” Hawk asked, sounding strained.

“Shit,” Coulson replied, and it sounded like maybe he was scrubbing his face with his hands. “You’re sure they’re planning on it? The Pikkui-- our hosts?”

“Lying in wait for you just before dawn? Yeah, I’m sure. It’s how they got me the first time. I wasn’t a complete idiot, boss, back when I tried to leave. Knew if I got stuck being, uh, polite I might never get out, not in any kind of good time, anyway. Tried to sneak out myself, and… well. There they were, just beside the gate, waiting with a thermos of coffee and a fried doughnut.”

 Coulson swore, though Skye didn’t think a fried doughnut was anything to blaspheme about.

 “And then Hydra agents attacked?” he asked. “Or not? Was that explanation just for the general company?”

 What did “general company” mean? The Pikkuinens? Or her and Trip? And in what world was a doughnut a worse threat than the skull-faced squid menace? It gave Skye the same sense of frustration she got when she was dealing with a particularly sticky piece of code to crack; there was a pattern there, hovering just out of reach.

 “Oh yeah, Hydra was really there. They found me and set up an ambush right by the main road. Must’ve been waiting the entire time I was here-- flattering they’d go that far to take me out. Or to try to take me out, anyway.” Hawk snorted. “Fat lot of good that did ‘em. Pa dumped what was left of ‘em in the old pit, I think. I was out of it at the time.”

 “Speaking of our hosts-- you sure they’re gone right now?”

 “I’m surprised you didn’t wake up when they went, Sleeping Beauty. They were loud as a moose in rut; it shook the house. Pa heard the neighbors out the window and he didn’t want them to get hands on you. So he went to... take care of things. Ma’s out front waiting for him. If you slip out another way, she won’t see. C’mon, boss. You know what it means, if they see you.”

 Tiny rustle, probably one of the two of them shrugging. Yes, Skye was definitely beginning to pick out movement.

 “Yeah, it means we miss our ride, to say the least.” There might have been a little smile in Coulson’s voice. “And I don’t suppose they’ll help us find another, either.”

 “They like you, boss-- and I think they like your agents. They keep people they like, you know that. Certainly kept me. Fuck, they’ve been cleaning out the hunting cabin further up in the woods to, in their words, ‘give me a place to settle in for good.’ You nearly didn’t find me at all.”

 “They can’t keep you,” Coulson’s voice was urgent, and he shifted into what Skye thought might be sitting position next to the other man-- at least, if she was reading the vague shadows right. “Hawk--”

 “Don’t worry about me, boss,” Hawk told him. “I’ll help you guys get out, but we gotta go this minute. I know the safe paths-- ought to, by now. Stick with me and I’ll get you home.”

 “Us,” Coulson said. “You’ll get us home. You’re coming with us. You have to.”

 A rustle, another creak, one shadow turning to another.

 “I’ll try, but,” Hawk took a deep breath, “if they have me they’ll let you go. If it comes to a choice, I mean. And you’ve got to get back to SHIELD, no matter what else happens. Anyway, it… changes you.”

 “What does? They do?” Coulson breathed.

 “A little.” Hawk hesitated, like he was searching for words that weren’t quite coming. “Honestly they’re good company. I’ve been content, if that’s the right word, here.”

 Coulson made a small sound of protest, but Skye thought she saw what Hawk meant. It had been so easy, during the course of the evening, to sink into the stillness and the firelight and the smell of fir and smoke. The peace must have been seductive, after all the trauma Hawk must’ve gone through. She’d certainly found it so.

 “And the land,” Hawk said dreamily, “I-- you grow into the land. I didn’t get it when we were here before, but I do now. It gives itself to you-- and you give yourself to it, too. It’s why they stayed, why everyone who stays here does. It gets under your skin, your bones kinda… grow down and mix with the ore.”

 Skye closed her eyes, trying to imagine how it must feel to be so deeply rooted to a place, imagining the rusty veins of iron seeping up out of the earth, vining around her and drawing her in.

 “That’s very poetic, but not the point, Hawk,” Coulson said, pulling her out of her reverie. “I won’t lose you, if it means literally tearing you up and slinging you over my shoulder.”

 “I said I’d try. But if I gotta, I can distract ‘em, make sure you guys get out. You’re the important ones.”

 “Hawk.” And that was a flat-out plea. “That’s not acceptable. You’re coming with us, you have to come.”

 “Ph--”

 “I need you.” Coulson’s words, nearly soundless as they were, stopped Hawk in his tracks. “Please,” Coulson continued, stronger, “you know I need you.”

 “SHIELD doesn’t--” Hawk started up again, after a pause so still Skye lost the ability to distinguish their forms.

 “I’m not talking about SHIELD,” Coulson rasped. “I need you. I came looking, didn’t I?”

 “You…” Hawk hesitated. “You said that just for the Pikkuinens. I know that. I mean it’s all right, I get it-- it’s fine. But you crashed a plane, boss. How could you have known where to do that? It was an accident. You crashed,” He finished, repeating it like a child who’d gotten stuck midway through the alphabet.

 Skye felt sympathetic; she was having a sudden vision of Coulson sabotaging the float plane just to have a plausible excuse to do an emergency landing in a flooded pit mine, and it was… unsettling, to say the very least. She wished she could see their faces.

 “Oh, not the crash,” Coulson said. “That was a happy accident. But why the hell did you think we were in Winnifuckingpeg in the first place?”

 “Yeah?” Hawk’s voice was harsh. “You tell your team about me?”

 A rustle; probably a shrug, possibly some other gesture that was Coulson for “that’s classified,” which usually meant yes but in this case clearly meant no.

 “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Hawk continued. Clearly could read obfustication in Coulson’s shoulders, even in the pitch black, just as well as Skye could. “So what, you just tell them it was a recruiting mission?”

 “It was the truth, we did recruit,” Coulson allowed, and Skye held in a snort only by strength of will and strong diaphragm control.

 “Ah, same ol’ Boss,” Hawk said, going from sour to bitter. “Always a SHIELD angle.”

 “Yes, same as I ever was, at least that way.” It was weird, Skye didn’t think she’d ever heard that mix of regret and determination in Coulson’s voice before. “Always a you angle.”

 “I--”

 All this stopping and starting was going to be the death of Skye; she kept holding her breath whenever it happened, sure she was going to be discovered if she so much as exhaled. This was a heretofore-unknown facet of Coulson. She knew he’d never have shared it with her on his own, probably would be mortified if he realized she’d heard any of it. Well, obviously, since he’d gone to such lengths not to reveal any hint of it to her or Trip.

 “I missed you too, a lot,” Hawk finally managed. “But there were reasons, you know there were, why we couldn’t… why I had to let you go.”

 “There were,” Coulson said, measuring the syllables like he had to be careful not to let too many go at once. “At the time, it would have been selfish of me to ask you to stay. But that was a different world, in so many ways. I guess I was hoping, now that you’re not at Pegasus and I’m not--”

 “How’s the cellist?” Hawk asked, all in a rush.

 Skye refrained from yelling “what he said!” only by actually physically biting her tongue. Because Trip had gone on, oh god how he had gone on, about Coulson’s desperate trip to Portland and about sweet Audrey Nathan. How lovely and vibrant and brave and sad she was, as gracious as someone out of an old movie.

 Not that Skye had cared at all what Trip thought of the woman. Or any woman. Anyway, Audrey Nathan had been Coulson’s girlfriend before he died, all right. And that did not sort with the revelation-- unless she was somehow reading things entirely wrong-- that he’d once been involved with this huge shaggy blonde bear-man. The two of them did not overlap on any romantic venn diagram Skye could draw.

 “She... she’s moving on, I think,” Coulson said. “She seemed to be when I saw her in Portland. Blackout had gotten out, Hawk, it wasn’t like I went there for--  he was going to kill her,I couldn’t not go. She didn’t see me, she doesn’t know I’m alive. And she’s not going to-- certainly not as long as it could put her in danger. Even if it wouldn’t, she’s out of the picture.”

 “You didn’t send her any little trinkets?”

 It was said mockingly, but Skye was sure it was more of a plea. Coulson sighed and the bed creaked again, then footsteps padded faintly across the floorboards.

 “The thing between Audrey and me was never more than a daydream, Hawk. A very nice dream, but not something I can indulge now. She’s a wonderful person, an exquisite artist, and so giving-- I needed that, I think. Nothing felt very real at that time-- or maybe that’s the holes in my memory, again. But even then I… damnit, it doesn’t matter. She's in the past. My dear, please, I need you now. Come with us.”

 Night and anticipation grew so thick around Skye, so hard to assess in the absence of any cues visual or auditory, that she didn’t know if it was minutes or hours before Hawk answered.

 “Yes,” he said, “I’ll come with you.”

 Metal rattled against metal and thin moonlight washed the bedroom out as one of them pulled the curtain back.

 They were standing together in front of the window, gazing half out into the night and half at each other. Something passed between them, so subtle that neither even seemed to blink, and then Coulson reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out one of the branches he’d stuffed in it earlier. He tucked it behind Hawk’s ear so solemnly, and Hawk smiled at him with so much gentleness, that it had to have some private meaning.

 Skye figured it’d end up just another in the long line of absurd details about tonight that Coulson would forever refuse to explain, just another redaction in a file in the back of a drawer somewhere. The man did like his mysteries.

 They stayed frozen, Coulson’s hand still up and ghosting over Hawk’s cheek, for a long minute before suddenly springing into motion. Coulson reached up to the top bunk to shake Trip. Hawk stooped over Skye and set one big, hot hand on her shoulder.

 “Wake up, girly-girl,” he said. “Or wake upper. Time to blow this joint.”

 He handed her something. It felt canvasy and-- oh. Her jacket. Skye was pulling it on before she’d had time to realize she was levering herself upright at all. Urgency translated itself into her through the tremble in Hawk’s palm, and she flung her stuff into her backpack all in a mass and scrambled over to Coulson.

 Hawk had crossed to the door and was peering out it, watching. When Trip had joined her and Coulson had shrugged his jacket on-- the measure of his own haste shockingly clear as she realized he’d managed to get it inside-out-- Hawk latched the door. He nodded back at them.

 With deft hands, Coulson pushed open the window and bundled Skye through.

 “Don’t we need to leave a note or something?” Trip asked, as he was shoved through behind her. Skye helped him down. “You know, just to be polite.”

 As if polite mattered when they were leaving through a window in the middle of the night. Skye wasn’t quite sure if Trip was being serious or not-- the thought that he might actually know circumstances where that would be polite was a bit disconcerting.

 “No.” Coulson snapped. “No polite. Just go.”

 As they slunk off through the blue streak of moon, crouched below the low sills of the cabin, Skye realized Coulson wasn’t the only one with sartorial issues-- she’d managed to get her own jacket on wrong, too.

 Oh well, clearly there was no stopping now.

 They passed beneath the last window and under the eaves of the forest, following the man who called himself Hawk-- and following Coulson, too, of course. Like they always did. Like, despite his redacted files and his classified smiles, she knew she always would.

----

Later, it would seem to Skye that they’d descended through the window into some other world entirely, dreamlike and far vaster in scope than the one they’d crashed into by the light of day. The storm still rumbled in the distance, like it didn’t want to be forgotten so soon. The clouds were thinning and leaving the night sky dusted with stars, but none of them would resolve into familiar patterns-- though, to be fair, all Skye really knew was Orion and the Big Dipper. Her time had been spent deciphering codes, not constellations.

Under the trees moonlight and starlight both failed and they trod on by the faint light of flashlights, clinging close to Hawk’s sure footsteps. He hunched under overhanging branches that rained down needles, skirted massive boulders, and stepped nimbly over roots the size of his forearm as he led them through the underbrush and over the thick carpets of red pine needles.

Once, Skye went on ahead, following a path of little pearl-like berries set in emerald leaves. It seemed to wind on cozily enough and in a reasonable direction, so she was more than shocked to hear Hawk’s curse, feel his huge forearm wrap around her waist and jerk her backwards into him. She cracked her skull against his chest so hard that her teeth snapped shut.

“What the hell?” she’d hissed, rounding on him.

Hawk glared, then picked up a pebble and tossed it down the path. It hit with a splash, and Skye realized that what she’d taken for a long shadow was actually the edge of a small cliff, and the little berries were stars reflected in the water at the bottom.

“Wasn’t kidding, girl, stay behind me,” he hissed.

It was far from their only close call-- Trip nearly got swept away by what he’d thought was a shallow stream, but turned out to be deep enough that he was up to his knees and floundering before Hawk and Coulson pulled him out. He lost his jacket in the excitement, but that was better than the alternatives. Coulson himself got bowled over by an unexpected owl.

All around them, the night air was split with howls and keens, sometimes near, sometimes far off, no rhyme or reason to them. That was slightly better though, than the cackles and the sudden burst of music, something loud and full of dark twang, that burst out of a hollow they’d nearly wandered into. Hawk backed them out quickly, and Coulson picked up a stout branch, passing it restlessly from hand to hand until they were out of hearing distance.

“What the hell was that?” Skye panted, as the howls chased them out.

“The neighbors,” Hawk replied, voice clipped and quiet. “On the hunt. Hopefully Pa has a bead on ‘em.” He looked up at the path in front of them, and stopped short. “Fuck,” he said.

Skye wasn’t sure what he’d seen at first; the path ran up out of the woods into a flat open space where bedrock had crumbled and left a wide clearing open to the night sky. Slabs of rock had piled against each other to either side of the path like overgrown cairns. It was intimidating sure, but hardly seemed as dangerous as the hollow they’d just left-- and just as she had that thought, one of the piles moved. A blink and a headshake later, Skye revised her opinion-- something on or under the piles was moving. A pair of yellow eyes winked out of the crevasses, followed by another.

“Fuck, fuck,” Hawk said, and shoved them all back down the path at a near-run. He didn’t let them rest until he’d gotten them up a trail so small it was probably just a deer track. “Nearly got us, there.” A high, mocking laugh drifted after them.

“Those are the neighbors?’ Skye felt the words catch in her throat. “How the hell did you know? I couldn’t see anybody-- and are they using dogs or something? Is that the howling?”

“No dogs,” Hawk said. “Those are wolf howls.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Skye snapped at him, and Trip snorted. “Or do we have to worry about wolves too?”

“Just assume everything out here is hostile tonight,” Coulson told her. “Wolves, neighbors-- trees,” he finished with a curse, as a particularly whippy birch branch he’d pushed out of his way whacked him on the back of the head.

“Right,” Hawk said. “The wolves, now, they’re mostly harmless, but…”

“Not the neighbors,” Coulson finished for him.

“No,” Hawk whispered. “Not the neighbors. It wasn’t a bluff, boss, they’ve gotten bad since the last time you were here. Not sure I wouldn’t rather face a cruller and travel mug.”

Skye figured that was a sign she wasn’t gonna get any more sense out of him, and she shut up and concentrated on moving fast. Survive first. Figure out what she’d survived later. That was how she’d managed to live long enough to even be in this absurd position.

The longer they traveled, the faster they went, even though Skye was so tired now her chest was throbbing and every breath burned.

“Not so far now,” Hawk panted, looking back at Coulson, who was trying hard to conceal his own exhaustion. “Trust me, we’re almost there. I’ll get us out.”

Coulson gave him a tight smile, and Hawk turned back around and ran straight into a moose.

It loomed in the darkness twice as tall as Skye, brown shadow against the pitch blackness between the tree trunks. Its eyes burned with reflected fire from the flashlight, its pendulous jowls swung as it shuddered-- and it began to lower a rack of antlers that could have scooped up two small men.

Hawk sprawled on the ground in front of it, just repeating holy shit in an undertone, over and over.

The moose leaned down to snuffle at his knees with a nose as massive as Hawk’s head, then began to work its way up his belly. Coulson stood just out of its immediate reach, staring up at it with wild eyes and slinking, so slow Skye hadn’t realized he was doing it at first, closer and closer to Hawk.

Finally the moose reached Hawk’s face, lapping all around his face and lipping at him, until it reached the branch of berries he’d tucked behind his ear. Then it lifted its head and moaned, a great bellowing aoogah like a train engine giving birth.

Coulson took the opportunity to yank Hawk backwards, clutching him under the armpits. They scrambled back towards Skye and Trip, without bothering to take time to get Hawk on his feet. He just kind of pushed with his heels while Coulson dragged. They were nearly within reaching distance when Coulson lost his balance on some hidden root or stone, and they both fell backwards off the trail and out of sight.

When, after a moment, Skye didn’t hear a cry or a thump, she decided it probably meant that they hadn’t fallen over another hidden cliff and off the edge of the world. ‘Probably’ being the key word, there.

“Sir!” Trip shouted-- which turned out to be not the best idea in the world.

The moose turned on him, thoughtfully mumbling the branch Hawk’d dropped, tasting the orange berries.

“Hi?” Trip tried.

The moose spat the sodden clump of berries at him, snorted, and began to lumber forward, swaying alarmingly with each step. Skye finally felt her feet unfreeze. She rushed at Trip, tackling him in the breadbasket, and they both flew over the little ridge where Coulson and Hawk had just disappeared-- and into darkness.

For one half moment, suspended in air, Skye thought she’d miscalculated and it’d been a cliff after all. But then she and Trip hit leaf and dirt, and they were rolling down a steep hillside, being whipped by the saplings and gathering a miniature whirlwind of leaves as they went. They skidded to a stop at the bottom not far from the similarly entwined pile of human that was Coulson and Hawk, who were just beginning to sort themselves out.

The moose was still caterwauling with determination, somewhere up above them. It shook Skye to her bones.

“Careful, girl,” Trip said in her ear while he helped her up. “Careful. Hopefully that hill’s too steep for it.”

“Depends on how determined it is,” Coulson replied. He and Hawk had gotten to their feet successfully as well and were in the process of brushing themselves off. “It’s not rutting season, anyway, that’s a mercy.”

“How d’you know?” Trip asked him, and Coulson shrugged.

“Comes later in the fall. Anyway, if it was in rut, we’d already be trampled. Hawk, can you find us the path back?”

Silence.

Coulson turned, confusion evident even in the dim light.

Hawk was standing behind him, looking as bereft as if he thought Coulson was about to be snatched away again. As Skye watched, he brushed his ear with a shaking hand, bringing it down empty, and he shook his head at Coulson.

“I’m lost,” he said-- a simple statement of fact, sounding like heartbreak.

“No--” Coulson breathed, watching him.

“I am, boss, I’m lost. I can hear them, they’ll be on me soon. I can’t hide from them.” He looked over his shoulder, as if they-- whether that was wolf, neighbor, or Pikkuinen, Skye wasn’t sure-- would already be there when he turned. “You have to go. Save yourselves. Run.”

“No, my dear, no.” Coulson took a step towards him, palm upwards. “Never. It’ll be all right, there’s time.”

“Hello, down there! There’s no way out that way-- better come on in!”

“Oh, damnit, babe, why’d you have to say that?” Hawk muttered at Coulson.

“Is that--” Skye asked, whipping around to stare up into the darkness. Even in the middle of asking, she realized how stupid the question was. Of course it was Pa Pikkuinen-- who the hell else would be out on this horrible night? And why was a single, not unfriendly, shout from him enough to send goosebumps up her spine?

“Yeah,” Trip said, looking with her. “That’s Pa, I’m pretty sure. Is he yelling at us?”

“Yeah,” Hawk said shortly.

“Not the neighbors?” Skye asked, hoping against hope. It was weird, to think of two mild little old people who sounded like Fargo extras going up against the neighbors and their dogs or wolves or whatever-- but given the look on Hawk’s face, she thought she’d take the weird. He seemed seriously creeped out by the idea of meeting the Pikkuinens again.

“No, not the neighbors,” Hawk said, and turned to Coulson. “Babe, you gotta go. You’re still in the clear-- you gotta get these two out of here. We got lucky before, and we knew what we were getting into. They don’t--” he broke off with a kind of wild look at Skye and Trip.

Coulson winced as he followed Hawk’s look and saw them. And that was just kind of it-- the last unexplained thing on top of everything else that had happened since Trip’d skipped their rapidly-disintegrating plane across the bright blue lake and skidded to shore. After all, Skye wasn’t a child anymore; she didn’t need protection.

She was an Agent of SHIELD, and her Director could damn well read her in already.

“Okay, seriously?” Skye snapped, “are you actually pulling the noble sacrifice card over an elderly couple with suspect cooking? What the hell is actually going on here? Who are these people, who are the neighbors, and why are you more fucking scared of the old people than of them?”

“Not now, Skye,” Coulson said, pausing with his hand on Hawk’s elbow.

“No, but seriously, sir,” Trip started, coming to stand right behind her-- because Trip being Trip, apparently he was gonna have her back physically as well as metaphorically. Skye thumped her head against his chest in gratitude. “We jumped out a window just to avoid having to say goodbye and have a doughnut. It’s enough to make a guy think they wanted to kill us or somethin’.”

“No--  just keep you,” Hawk told him.

“Yeah, but if we don’t want to be kept, then what?” Trip asked, a little truculent.

For him, that was about the equivalent of a full-on tantrum. Under other circumstances, Skye would have been shocked. But they were both exhausted, starving, scratched to bits, and more than a little freaked out-- and all of it for no reason she could manage to pin down.

Trust the system, Coulson used to say, back when there was a system. It’d always seemed to her like SHIELD enjoyed its little trust games way too much. But this didn’t feel like a leftover of that-- it was something both weirder and more personal.

Near as she could tell, Coulson didn’t actually do personal all that well, and it didn’t take much to realize this Hawk guy didn’t either. If there was something really wrong, fine, she’d follow Coulson to the ends of the earth. But she really didn’t want was to find out she’d been stumbling through a forest at four am because they had problems telling a little old lady ‘no.’

“Then good luck,” Coulson snapped at Trip in response to his question. “Because those two are more patient and more devious than anyone I know, here or on Asgard. Don’t let the accent fool you. They’re--”

“Dangerous,” Skye cut in. “We know, boss. You said and you said and you said. Is this all a… a disguise? A game to them?”

That, at least, would make the night make a little tiny bit of sense. If they were retired assassins or on the Index or something, and they used cute old people disguises to get their enemies off their guard.

“Yes and no,” Coulson told her, dropping Hawk’s arm in order to step towards her, hands raised in a calming gesture. “I think it is a game, a little, but it’s not really a disguise. The accent and the sweatshirts and the hotdish are all real enough. They’re products of their culture, like anyone else. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the only dangers in this world are beautiful-- or terrifying, for that matter. Sometimes they do duck puzzles and make potica by hand. And now we need to get going.”

“But-- how are they dangerous?” Trip asked. “C’mon, we’re flying blind here sir.”

“Trip,” Coulson sighed, “later. Not here. It’s not fair, I know, but I’m not doing this here. I can’t.”

“Yeah but--”

“YaOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOwow” called the moose, cutting Skye off. It sounded awfully close.

A rustling started in the bushes upslope, followed by the sound of branches cracking, like maybe a huge animal was sliding down.

“Boss, go now,” Hawk snapped.

Coulson rounded on him, snapping back.

“Damnit, not without you.”

He looked ferocious, suddenly, all his hidden strength uncoiling, and if Hawk was still a little bearish about the edges, Coulson’s snarl was pure wolf. Hawk flinched and stumbled backwards into an oak tree, old and gnarled, full of enough hollows to nearly hide him. The tree trembled, shaking leaves on top of them both.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It’s better like this.” He sat down in the leaf litter and tried to tuck himself all away under his arms.

“Trip,” Coulson said in a measured tone, “please go up the ridge and watch out. Give us a call when they’re close-- and then run. Get the hell away from here and try to find May.”

“Sir--” Trip started, then paused.

Coulson wasn’t paying attention to him at all. He’d sunk down to sit on his haunches, forearms braced on his knees, and he was watching the little ball of Hawk. Skye glanced back and found Trip looking at them both.

“Fuck it,” he sighed to himself, then turned his face down to her. “Keep ‘em safe, huh?”

“Yeah,” Skye whispered.

She turned back as Trip began to shuffle up the ridge, stopping to test the direction of the wind-- Skye had no idea if staying downwind of the moose was going to help anything, but figured it couldn’t hurt him to try. Coulson was still squatting down, his face hidden in shadows, even though a flashlight sat at his feet, sending a thin beam of light across the grass, and the moon was riding high in the sky now. Skye’d never managed to figure out moonrise and moonset-- it seemed like she was always surprised when the moon appeared. Right now, she just wished it were bright enough to show her Coulson’s face.

“Hawkeye,” he said, putting a hand gently on Hawk’s head, “talk to me.”

“I don’t know why you came at all, boss,” Hawk-- Hawkeye-- whined.

Skye forgot all about Trip. And the moose. And Coulson. Because she knew the name Hawkeye just as well as every other person older than about five, okay? And even a measly SHIELD asset heard whispers-- Fitz and Simmons had nattered on about him and the Black Widow and Strike Team Delta from time to time. Even Ward had mentioned him once, although May’d given him a side-eye that Skye hadn’t understood at the time.

She understood it now.

How was this overgrown lumberjack in front of her, the one rapidly shrinking into himself and starting to shiver, more jackrabbit than raptor, the Avenger who’d fought an alien army on the rooftops of New York? There were action figures in store windows with plastic facsimiles of his face, he’d caused the number of kids taking archery classes to skyrocket, and here he was, huddled in a pile of leaves and trembling. What had happened to him, in New York or since, to cause this?

(Oh no-- could it have been Coulson’s death? Please, let it not have been Coulson’s death. Not more collateral damage from his resurrection-- Coulson would never survive it.)

“I came for you, you know that,” Coulson answered Hawk’s question-- and Skye tried to think of him as Hawkeye, she really did, but it just didn’t stick. Not with him looking so forlorn.

“You came for my bow, maybe,” Hawk muttered into his knees. “If you’d wanted me, you could’ve had me back any time. Go away and take your kids. Shouldn’t have got them into this at all. I wasn’t worth it.”

“Oh my dear,” Coulson breathed, looking like he’d been shot, “yes you are, you always were.”

“Funny way of showing it,” Hawk grumbled, which Skye thought was unfair. If there was one rock solid in her world, it was that Coulson would never, ever think anyone he’d cared about wasn’t worth saving-- short of complete and total betrayal. She’d seen him in action. And if Hawk had ever really known Coulson at all, he knew that too.

“I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner,” Coulson said, pleading now. “I… I’m sorry I didn’t find you before, that was never on you, I never would have…. Dammit, look up. Please. Please look at me.”

Hawk buried his head further between his knees. Skye thought seriously about bopping him on the back of his skull, so he’d look up and see just how he’d cracked Coulson open. She didn’t-- mostly because Coulson gave a frustrated sort of growl and dropped down before his… his ex-boyfriend, Skye supposed. That wasn’t quite the right word for what Hawk seemed to mean to him, but it was the best she could find.

“Look at me,” Coulson repeated, reaching in and cupping Hawk’s chin in his hand, lifting it up. Hawk kept his eyes squeezed shut, like he’d be looking directly into the sun if he opened them. “Damnit, Hawkeye. I mean it. All of it. You have always been worth every sacrifice I can make for you-- and I did sacrifice. I gave you up. Don’t you understand? I only agreed to leave in the first place because I was lost. I was too wrapped up in the TAHITI project to be able to share myself with you. I let you go because I couldn’t give you as much of myself as you deserved. I stayed away when I was scared and alone because I was afraid I would hurt you again.”

His hand tightened on Hawk’s jaw until it must have hurt-- Hawk tried to jerk away. That only seemed to make Coulson more determined; he let go of Hawk’s chin only to grab his face with both hands, cradling it between his big palms and waiting until Hawk finally, finally opened his eyes.

They were lost, dark as a wild animal’s, and that seemed to shake Coulson to his bones.

“Oh I see,” he breathed. “I see now, it’s going to be that.”

“Yeah, sorry.” Hawk seemed to be struggling to get the words out clearly, fighting some contrary desire to swallow them down. “Always make things harder, don’t I?”

“No, I should have expected it,” Coulson soothed him.

“Don’t leave me?” The words were tiny, almost lost in the night. Coulson stroked Hawk’s cheeks with his thumbs in response.

“Of course not. It’s all right, my dear. It’s all right. We’ll ride it out together. I’m not letting you go.”

Distantly, Skye realized she’d pressed her fingers to her lips. Hawk froze for a moment under Coulson’s caresses, closing his eyes again.

A shudder ran through him.

What happened next was so unexpected that, even afterwards when she understood everything, or thought she did, Skye still felt startled at the memory.

Hawk growled and pulled back, struggling against Coulson’s grip. Coulson seemed unsurprised, despite how sudden the reversal was. He shifted, dropping one knee to stabilize himself and bracing as Hawk grabbed his wrists and tried to yank them off himself. Coulson held on, tight, against the pull, and kept on holding. That was their only point of connection-- Coulson clamping onto Hawk’s jaw to keep him in place while Hawk snarled at him, arching back and struggling, like a wolf trying to claw its way out of a trap.

“Let me go,” Hawk yelped, trying to pull Coulson’s hands down. “Damnit, don’t you get it? It’s too late.  If you hadn’t died on me, you’d have seen. It was too late when you got yourself stabbed. It would’ve been too late if you’d come to me when you came back to life. I’m a monster now. You’d know what Loki made me do-- who he made me kill.”

“I do know,” Coulson told him. “I do know, I saw it all. I don’t care.”

Skye had to look away from his face; even the half-light of moon and LED were enough to show clearly how raw his expression was. Earlier in the night, when she’d felt like she was a child again wandering around in a world of inscrutable grown-ups, she wouldn’t have thought she’d miss the feeling. She was just as bewildered now as she had been then, but the tables had turned. Both Coulson and Hawk were so vulnerable, she felt desperate to protect them-- and she had absolutely no idea how to do it. She felt as much as heard the rustle of leaves behind her, twigs creaking together on the wind, and spun around to seek out the source.

Up on the hill, a dark space seemed to bulge between the trees. As Skye watched, it slumped forwards and detached itself from the mass of shadow, then began to move. The moose came down the hill stepping carefully, sapling-tall, visible mostly as negative space against the trees. Its antlers blotted out the sky.

“Well I care,” Hawk snarled at Coulson.

He was pushing against Coulson’s shoulders now, bringing one foot up to try and press back against the knee Coulson still had raised. Coulson just held on, so tightly that his sinews began to show through the skin of his hands.

“He made me kill my friends, boss. Our friends. People I fought next to, people whose kids’ birthday parties I’d gone to. I took away mothers and fathers, I made orphans of kids who trusted me, of people who’d invited me into their homes. Of people who’d protected me on missions. For god’s sake, I killed agents you’d trained-- agents I’d trained! That I’d promised to protect with my life. I am not safe. Sooner or later, I will bring blood to your door.”

“That wasn’t you,” Coulson told him, voice shaking in his sincerity. “That was Loki.”

“Because he was controlling me? Yeah, well, maybe he still is.” There was a whine to Hawk’s voice, a little slump to his haunches, like his strength was failing. “You don’t know. For months afterwards I couldn’t sleep more than an hour without dreaming he was in my head again. I guess I walked a lot in my sleep; I’d wake up in another part of my rooms or in the hall and I’d think… what if Loki’s still there? What if I’m getting ready to go kill someone?”

His eyes were big and pleading, and Coulson slumped forward, until they were forehead to forehead, whispering something Skye couldn’t catch but that she devoutly hoped was you won’t, you aren’t. Hawk shuddered once, gentling to the new point of contact.

Then, just when Skye thought it was all over, he came alive, leaping up and trying to tear himself away in one motion. He broke Coulson’s hold on his head, and Coulson scrambled to get his arms back around him. He managed to catch Hawk around the waist, and tried to drag him back.

“I’m not safe!” Hawk protested. It was a howl more than a cry, eerier than anything Skye’d heard from the next-door neighbors. “I’m not who I was, I won’t ever be. You need to leave me here, where I can’t hurt anyone.” Hawk clawed at the arms around him.

This was how Hawkeye the Avenger had ended up the haunted, lost Hawk, then. It was the part of the story of the Battle of New York that Skye’d never fully known, that no one had-- because of course SHIELD wasn’t gonna let that get out.

Her heart caught in her throat. She’d known none of those SHIELD agents by name, none of their kids, of course not. But other faces were running through her mind now; all the agents from the Hub, all the dead, SHIELD and Hydra. Farther back; to the agents and the villagers that were killed when she was taken as a tiny baby.  So much killing; so many people dead because of her-- because of them. Maybe Hawk was right. Maybe he wasn’t safe-- Maybe none of them were.

The moose was down the hill now, standing so close behind Skye she felt its swampy breath on the back of her neck. She stepped away from it, even though it was a useless gesture. Not like it couldn’t squash her flat with one stomp, anyway.

“No,” Coulson said, and his voice was sure.

He had got his arm firmly around Hawk’s haunches now, and yanked him back down until Coulson was kneeling and Hawk was caught between his outspread thighs. He clamped those tight, wrapped both his arms around Hawk’s arms and torso, and spoke into his ear.

“You’re not a monster, Hawkeye. You’re not. The nightmares and the guilt, they’re normal, they’re valid reactions to trauma. It hurts, oh my dear, I know it hurts, but it means you’re human. It means you survived and you’re healing. You’re getting better.”

Coulson had started rocking Hawk now, one hand moving from his back to rub reflexively against his chest like he was smoothing down fur or trying to massage a twisted heart.

“You’re no more monster than I am,” he continued, nearly too hushed to hear. “Do you know why I left you?” Hawk shook his head, though Skye wasn’t sure if that was in reaction to Coulson, or to being restrained. “The TAHITI project-- the one that was taking me away from you-- what did you know?”

Skye swallowed, hard, the moose behind her forgotten.

"Just the name,” Hawk rasped, still now and somewhat bewildered. Coulson nodded against his shoulder and held him closer, easing them both down, petting now for his comfort as much as Hawk’s, probably. Skye, who knew what was coming, hoped it helped them both.

“I even forgot that,” Coulson said. “Or really, SHIELD took those memories-- ripped them right out of my head. I told you they did, back at the cabin. But I didn’t tell you how extensive it was. They must have taken little bits of years from me-- every memory of every moment I worked on that project.”

“Why?” Hawk asked, sounding at last a little more human.

“Project TAHITI was designed to bring the dead back to life.” The way Coulson said it, it was just another run of the mill pilot project, not something out of fiction-- or nightmares. “I don’t know what I did there, but I know that people went crazy, that the only way to save them was to wipe all their memories. It was bad enough I threatened to resign if they didn’t shut it down. I thought they had; Nick said they did. I know I couldn’t live with what I’d seen-- what I’d done to people. May found the report I’d sent to Fury. I may not be able to remember it, but I’ve seen the look on my own face when I realized what I had become.”

Hawk squirmed in his arms, turning until he could see Coulson’s face. They both looked so broken that Skye’s hands twitched with the need to go hold them together.

“I thought the nightmare was over when I resigned,” Coulson continued. “But it wasn’t. Because they hadn’t stopped the project after all. Nick had them use it on me when I died. I know… I understand now, why he did. But he brought me back and he took my memories, and I have alien blood in my veins. And he so afraid of what it might do to me that he exiled me with a team designed to bring me down if they needed to-- and I still don’t know if I’m safe.”

Hawk let out a tiny, wounded noise, half whimper and half protest, and Coulson tightened his grip.

“My heart,” he said, “you can’t be half the monster I am. We’ll be monsters together. But monster or not, you’re mine.”

How was it possible that Skye hadn’t keeled over yet, what with her sudden complete lack of lungs? For that matter, how was it possible that Hawk hadn’t pulled Coulson down and kissed the life out of him? He seemed to be contemplating it, the way he was searching Coulson’s face, eyes darting back and forth. If he was gaping a bit, at least he didn’t look feral anymore.

“I--” he started, twisting in Coulson’s arms, leaning towards him. Coulson loosened his grip to let Hawk change positions.

It was a mistake.

Quick as a dart, Hawk had leapt up, squirting through his arms, and was off and running. Coulson lunged after him and managed to snag the sleeve of his jacket. It didn’t stop Hawk, or even slow him down, so Coulson let himself be pulled along as Hawk ran. They’d nearly disappeared into the trees when Skye realized she was about to be left alone in the cold wet night.

With the moose.

“Guys!” she yelped, fear galvanizing her. She crashed through the underbrush after them, arms raised to shove off the branches they left creaking in their wake. Roots rose to trip her, and more than once she caught a mouthful of needles.

The trees thinned as they passed, until they burst out into a clearing. There was no grass here and very little undergrowth, just bare rock that looked like it’d been chopped by a giant’s axe. A stream ran down a shallow crevasse in the middle of it, giggling in the secret places of the rock and then tumbling gaily down a miniature waterfall.

Hawk was headed straight for it, all sleek and silver in the sudden burst of moonlight, and unless he turned, he was going to go right over the edge and down the little falls. He was already reaching with one hand as he approached the water.

“Absolutely not,” Coulson said.

He wrapped himself around a birch and grabbed onto Hawk with both hands. Hawk tried to pull forward, but all he did was smoosh Coulson into the tree. Skye saw his face crinkle in confusion, and he turned to find out what was holding him back. Coulson took the opportunity to yank, reeling Hawk back from the stream’s edge and smack into the tree. Hawk stumbled backwards, stunned. Coulson let go of the tree and grabbed Hawk around the waist, at which point they both lost their footing and tumbled over.

“Let me go,” Hawk protested as he found himself on the ground, wriggling in Coulson’s grasp and gasping like a fish out of water.

In spite of everything, Skye found herself fighting back a cackle. Even though it was probably hysterical laughter, just the impulse to do it felt good-- and given how surreal the night had been, it was a miracle she hadn’t just cracked up before. There wasn’t a person in SHIELD who’d have blamed her for snickering at the sight of the always tucked-away Director Coulson flailing around on the ground with his jacket half-on and inside-out, trying to pin down a wild man doing his best impression of a walleye pike.

Skye held it in, not out of respect for their pretty much mangled dignity, but because she’d only just managed to lose the moose tailing them, and she didn’t want to alert it to their presence. Which, also, when put like that-- a thump behind her had Skye jumping and scrambling off the path and whirling.

The moose! Goddamn that mangy, overgrown, weed-eating--

“What the hell is going on?”

Trip’s voice had never been so warm and welcome to her, even though he sounded like he was caught between outrage and bewilderment. He was standing behind her on the path, staring at Coulson and Hawk and their wrestling match. The look on his face, even shadowed under the eaves of the trees, was priceless.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Skye told him. “But it’s been quite a show.”

 “Huh. Well, given that they’re the two who kept on insisting we were in terrible danger from tater tot hotdish and tasty breakfasts, I assume they have their reasons.”

“It feels important, anyway,” Skye told him, unsure how else to describe it without sounding portentious and silly herself. “How’d you get here?”

“No idea,” Trip returned, shaking his head. “Thought I was going uphill, but somehow I kept ending up heading downward. I heard crashing, thought maybe it was the moose, and tried to get away but I kept on getting closer.”

“Was it the moose?” Skye asked, looking behind him.

“No, it was those two lunatics,” Trip sighed, gesturing helplessly at their Director and Hawkeye the Avenger, who had finally stopped struggling.

“You’re not like me, babe,” Hawk was saying in a voice wet with tears. “No matter what it was they asked you to do, it doesn’t matter-- you said no. You made them stop. When you died and they brought you back, they hurt you-- but they never broke you. They never broke you. Look at you. You’re healing, and you’re strong, and you’re back out in the world kicking ass, just like you used to.”

“Exactly,” Coulson told him. He managed to sit up without letting Hawk out of his arms, and heaved Hawk back against him in a kind of semi-cradle hold. “And you can be out there kicking ass next to me, just like you should.”

“No,” Hawk said, slithering around in his arms and looking him in the face. “I can’t. That’s what I meant. I’m not strong like you. I ran away. Loki didn’t even kill me-- he just made me wish he had. And I couldn’t face it, so I hid. After the battle I went away from SHIELD. I let them say it was for therapy, but it was to pull the covers up over my head and pray the nightmares wouldn’t find me. I only came back because that didn’t work, so I figured maybe if I made myself be busy the nightmares would go away-- and if I took solo missions no one would have to talk to me. I knew I couldn’t live with seeing fear in their eyes when they looked at me. You came back and you fought off Hydra and you’re trying to rebuild SHIELD, even though it took everything from you. And I’m here, too beat down to get myself out of this damned trap. I’m just a coward-- and I’m no good to you.”

The words bubbled out of his mouth despite the attempts Coulson was making to hold them back, shaking his head and pressing fingers to Hawk’s lips.

“Not true,” he said, his voice thick with what Skye figured were probably tears. (They’d be tears if it were her, anyway, or anyone else with a single ounce of decency in their body.)

“People will only hate me,” Hawk told him. “You know that. I’ll be a burden… I’ll hold you back. I’ll make them hate you too. And then you’ll hate me and--”

Coulson kissed him then, wet and sloppy, devouring his lips like a starving man. He kept it up until Hawk stopped trying to get a word in edgewise, then pulled back.

“That’s not a fair argument,” Hawk sniffled as Coulson’s lips left his.

“It’s not an argument at all, it’s me shutting you up so you’ll listen,” Coulson said, shaking him. “No one worth my time is going to hate you. You’re an Avenger.”

Hawk scoffed. Behind them, by the stream, Skye could see a shadow darken the silver water, moving upstream towards them. She watched it, even as she listened to Coulson try to reassure Hawk.

“You are,” Coulson said. “And a hero, and the bravest man I know. We both know that you’ve never once not been there when you were needed. That’s all anyone will care about, Hawk. And we need you even more than we needed you when SHIELD was still around, which god knows was bad enough I basically sold my soul for it.”

Skye wasn’t quite sure when they’d wandered from personal plea to recruiting speech, or if Coulson even knew where he ended and SHIELD began at this point. But whichever one it was, it was the damnedest one Skye’d ever seen. It was like something she’d read huddled up back in the stacks, in books where you never could quite tell where the line between actual lives and metaphor ran.

Trip rustled behind Skye, coming up close.

“There’s a moose behind me,” he said, “and its breath smells rank.”

Skye nodded, watching the shadow grow bigger on the water and start to creep up over the banks. She should have known the moose would come back, too. This was the hottest entertainment going for miles, probably. Well, as long as it didn’t decide to trample them or nibble them or… or drool on them… she was going to ignore it, in the hopes that it would get the hint and go away.

On the ground, Coulson and Hawk were clearly in their own world, and Hawk had gone back to staring at Coulson, shaking his head.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Hawk asked. Coulson winced.

“That’s what TAHITI was meant to do,” he told Hawk, “bring back an Avenger. From death. It was supposed to be a last ditch effort in case someone died that SHIELD couldn’t live without. That’s why I agreed. Why I agreed to try it, why I must have kept going even when the price climbed higher and higher-- and why I agreed to leave you.”

“‘Agreed’?” Hawk interrupted him, his eyes round as he searched Coulson’s face. “But… I didn’t-- When I asked, I thought-- you’d gotten so distant that…. Goddamnit, I thought it was what you wanted.”

“I…” Coulson paused, clearly searching for words, and absently gathering Hawk closer in when he shifted. “No. I never wanted it.”

“Babe--” Hawk gurgled, wriggling as Coulson’s embrace started to cut off his ability to inhale. Or maybe it was Coulson’s words making him breathless.

“I never wanted to let you go, but... but I couldn’t face you,” Coulson was muttering into Hawk’s shoulder. “When I first came back from Ta… from TAHITI, that part never made sense to me, in my memories. I remembered thinking you deserved better, I remembered you asking to end it… I didn’t… I didn’t know my own mind, but I remembered that. I didn’t want to end it, but I couldn’t ask you to stay when I couldn’t stand looking at you.”

Hawk went still in Coulson’s arms, and Skye sighed. Great, sure, what they needed right now, on top of being lost in the woods with moose and creepy water-walking shadows, was Coulson completely losing his ability to communicate at the worst possible moment.

“Now that was not smooth,” Trip sighed, and the moose snorted in agreement. Maybe Coulson heard them, maybe he didn’t, at any rate his eyes widened as he realized what he’d said, and he started to babble.

“It’s not-- damnit, that’s not what I meant. Look, there are very very few memories I’ve been able to scrape out of the wreckage, but I know what I must’ve thought, because as I was sitting there, watching the goddamn clip of me telling Fury to shut TAHITI down, I thought it again. And in nightmares ever since-- which is usually how I remember what I lost.”

Skye shoved her knuckle between her teeth and bit down hard, to shove down the sudden flood of nausea. She’d been the one to pull Coulson off the machine that had opened up his memories; she’d seen the ruin in his face. The idea that he woke up at nights with that look was abhorrent.

Coulson kept on going, the words tumbling out of him like a dam had broken, spilling out faster and faster and washing everything before them.

“TAHITI was bad, always bad, failure after failure till they had to-- we had to-- erase their memories. Must have been bad enough to do to strangers, but how could I… how could I have lived with you woken up with you in my bed every morning, and known I might see you in a b-body bag in TAHITI that night? I must’ve stayed up at night watching you sleeping and wondered if that was what you’d look like d… dead.”

Hawk made a sound then that Skye didn’t think she’d ever heard a person make before; a kind of wide, wet burble, like he was choking on a bubble. He’d been hanging limp and defeated in Coulson’s arms, but that galvanized him into one last wriggle, this one so that he could pull back and try to meet Coulson’s gaze. Coulson gave him the least happy smile Skye’d ever seen, and continued.

“I see it all the time w-when I sleep. Tonight was the first… it was the first good night in ages. The first night I didn’t see you on the t.. the table, screaming, with your head open… while they c-cut…. And you’re begging them… begging me to m-make them stop…. I know… I must’ve seen my nightmare when I looked at you. You didn’t deserve that, but I couldn’t... couldn’t let you go. Until you asked me if I wanted t-- to leave, and I just.… You were always the brave one-- and you were right. I had to choose. And I, well, I know why I chose TAHITI: we needed you in the world too badly. We still need do-- you’re the man who stood up again after Loki brought him down. You’re the man who got revenge on a god. If we’re going to make SHIELD stand we need you.”

Coulson paused there, and Skye thought he was done speaking, until he dropped his head and squeezed his eyes shut.

“No. Fuck SHIELD. Maybe SHIELD could live without you-- but I’m not sure it can live with me living without you. I was always lonely after I left. I’d known I would be. I must have thought I could give up having you in my life for the chance to keep you in the world; that I could make SHIELD be enough for me. I… I must have been an idiot, let’s be honest-- that was never going to work. But I never wanted to leave you, and I’ve made enough sacrifices for SHIELD. I know it’s selfish, my dear, but I love you. I need you.”

Hawk was trembling, and Skye didn’t blame him one bit. She thought she might be as well, between the oppressive darkness and the shadows in the moonlight and the way her heart broke with each fresh exchange between her Director and the man he-- well, the man he loved. She didn’t know how she was going to face either of them, ever again, after hearing all this.

Coulson raised his head, to speak directly into Hawk’s ear.

“I need you. And you’re mine.”

At some point, Skye must have broken skin from biting down on her finger so hard; she tasted salt and iron on her tongue.

“Oh,” she said, trying and failing to find something to follow it up with.

“Man,” Trip added, voice hushed.

“You got that right,” said the moose.

Skye spun around, nearly smacking into Trip as he backed up and attempted to drop into a defensive stance.

There was no moose, after all, just Pa Pikkuinen standing on the hill behind them, his broad shoulders draped in a corduroy coat shaggy as the bark on the trees around him, his red hat dimmed to the color of old blood by the darkness. Branches crossed behind his head, giving him the appearance of antlers for a moment. He seemed much bigger than she remembered somehow, and his smile was as chilling as it was broad.

Trip reached back and grabbed Skye’s arm, pulling her around the clump of trees they’d been standing near, bent on a tactical withdrawal. Yesterday, she’d have giggled at the thought of Trip running away from a little old man. Now, she just helped him go and tried to watch her footing.

He was headed for the stream, she thought, but he froze just short of it. The shadow Skye had been watching creep had reached the top of the little waterfall at last. Ma Pikkuinen was there, splashing up out of the stream. Night gathered in the round frames of her eyeglasses and water dripped down her raincoat, speckling it like the sides of a pike.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said to them.

Skye decided that it was nice enough right there, where she and Trip were standing. No need to move at all. Trip clearly had the same idea-- when Ma winked at him, he gulped and pulled Skye closer.

For better or worse, Skye didn’t think Coulson and Hawkeye were paying attention to any of them. Hawk had quieted a little, enough to raise a hand to Coulson’s chest, and he was tugging at Coulson’s jacket fitfully. Coulson didn’t turn, just kept staring into his eyes like he could continue their conversation telepathically. If it hadn’t been for the Pikkuinens, Skye would have preferred that-- let them have it out as quietly as possible. It wasn’t something either she or Trip should be witnessing.

But the Pikkuinens were there, and Skye wondered how she’d ever thought they were safe or homely. They might still be old and wizened, smiling all polite, but they were so excessively ordinary and cheery that they terrified her as much as the clown on Trip’s pillow. Why the hell couldn’t Coulson just grab Hawk and pull him along so they could all sort this out later at a safe distance? Somewhere private, somewhere that the Pikkuinens were not, and Skye wasn’t suddenly living in mortal terror of being offered a cruller.

“Now, Mary Sue,” Ma said, “no need to be in a hurry. Why don’t we just stay here and watch?” She grinned, thin lips slipping away from sharp teeth.

Coulson shifted at her words-- just a twitch of back muscles, but enough for Skye to realize he was aware of his surroundings after all.

“Hawk?” He asked gently, “Is it done yet? Ready to go?”

The look Hawk gave him was speculative, his head cocked.

“You thought it was for my sake,” he said, testing out what was clearly a new idea. Coulson nodded, patient with it.

“Hrmph,” Hawk said, gathering in on himself, “hrmph.”

And then he drew back and slapped Coulson so hard the smack echoed. Coulson raised a hand to his cheek reflexively.

“You fucking asshole,” Hawk hissed, his eyes blazing and anger beginning to flush his cheeks. “You complete jerk. D’you know what I thought? Do you know what you let me… what I-- arg! You thought you left me, like you were being so goddamn… goddamn noble and self-sacrificing? You idiot, I agreed to leave you.”

He took advantage of Coulson’s shock to pull out of the embrace, As he went, he yanked his hand free from Coulson’s grip, pointing an accusatory finger at him and punctuating his point with a sharp poke to Coulson’s chest.

“That is not how it went,” Coulson said, grabbing the offending hand and trying to tug Hawk back down. “You brought it up. My m-memory’s not so far gone I don’t remember that. You wanted me to leave, so I left.”

“I did not want,” Hawk interrupted him. “I knew fucking well how lucky I was to have you, would’ve held on forever. But you…. You were pulling away, trying to avoid me-- you were… I thought you were tired of me and didn’t know how to tell me. Of course I tried to give you an out!”

“I didn’t want an out!” Coulson cried. “I w-wanted in, f-for as long as I could have. Like… like you… like you wanted. Oh my god,” he groaned. “Like you wanted. My dear-- Hawkeye-- even at my worst I never wanted to leave you, even when I couldn’t look at you. I wasn’t… I couldn’t… it… I would never get tired of you. Why would you think that?”

He kept shifting his grip on Hawk, like he couldn’t stand to touch the man in any one place for too long. Near the end of his speech, Coulson put one hand up to Hawk’s cheek-- or tried to. After a brief touch, he hissed and pulled his hand back, shaking it reflexively as if he’d been burnt.

Hawk bit back something that might have been tears but equally might have been a string of four-letter words, working his jaw until finally a whimper escaped.

“Why wouldn’t I think that?” he asked finally, desperately. “I never had much to offer you. I mean” he cut Coulson off with a headshake as he opened his mouth to protest, “as your partner. Uh… partner-partner, not work partner. Obviously work was… well, work was work. Delta was… it was something pretty special. But that was never exactly… I mean, being very good at killing people isn’t much use in a relationship.”

Skye heard Trip grunt in something that sounded like sympathy or maybe even recognition, and it gave her pause. For as much shit as she’d been through since she’d first met Coulson, smiling creepily at her through the open door of her van, SHIELD was still in many ways a foreign country to her. She’d gotten by on luck and smarts and the fact that the organization was falling down around her ears. Was this another taste of her own future? Wilderness survival classes and nothing ever being what it seemed and having relationship talks in the dead of night with your subordinates and two supremely unsettling old people watching you?

 Hawk had been quiet for a moment, searching for words. Now, he started up again, staring down at Coulson’s clavicle, revealed by the buttons open on his shirt, as if he could read riddles in it.

“As your, uh, partner-partner,” he continued, “I’m… well I’m a fucking mess. Was. I was a fucking mess, and you seemed so fucking tired all the time. It was good when we started, but then Fury took you off Delta and Nat and I started doing more solo shit and I didn’t get to see you hardly ever. And when I did you looked so beat up. And the way you looked at me-- the way you didn’t look at me-- I couldn’t stand it. I thought… you let me…”

“What did I let you think?” Coulson whispered.

“You let me think you were disappointed in me,” Hawk told him, and Coulson flinched. “I didn’t blame you. You could’ve had anyone you wanted-- you deserved anyone you wanted. And I barely saw you because I was always off in other countries getting my hands bloody. I couldn’t give you enough of me; SHIELD had me first. But… you didn’t say anything. So I thought I better. Get it over with, ya know?”

“My dear--” Coulson breathed, still gripping Hawk’s hand tight as he stared upwards, his face devastatingly open. “You were always enough for me. More than enough.”

“Now you tell me,” Hawk spat, but then he shuddered all over as if he was trying to contain internal explosions. “Look, at least with Audrey you got a vacation once in a while. You got somewhere you could go to hide. Me? I was buried alive in SHIELD, just like you. Hell, that wasn’t even a fucking metaphor there at the end-- by the time I got down there with the Tesseract, buried under the desert with it whispering…. Fuck.”

“But none of that mattered,” Coulson told him. “Or at least it was as true of me as you-- my dear, I’m sorry. I never wanted… I should have known… Redactions and classifications and official secrets be damned, I should have made sure you knew it was never about you. Ever. You have always been the world to me.”

He shuffled forward on his knees, trying to get close enough to Hawk, Skye thought, to be able to grab him more tightly. He did it as gingerly as a man approaching a fire, uncertain whether he was going to get caught in a sudden backdraft, but he did it all the same.

“So maybe I was wrong about what you wanted,” Hawk said, his voice coming out heated and his body shaking, “but I’m not wrong about the rest. I was already a poor fucking choice for a partner before the Tesseract t-took me-- before Loki used me. Between that d-disaster and this,” his hand swung wide, to indicate both Ma and Pa, the entire wild night, “I’m all used up. Whatever you wanted me for, whoever you were willing to raise the dead for? I’m not that man anymore. Whatever you loved… I’m… I’m not… I’m not. I’m no good to you now, not as an agent and not as your, your lover.”

Hawk spat the last word out like it could burn Coulson to the bone-- and maybe it could. Coulson’s hand twitched on Hawk’s wrist, like he wanted to fling Hawk away from him, was trying to ignore the pain. No one, after all, could hold on to a burning match forever. Coulson was fighting reflex now, the desperate need not to get scorched. Hawk pressed his advantage.

“You have to leave me here,” he said. “Get these kids out of here while you still can, Director. That’s your duty now, not me-- I’m no use to you at all. Just. Let. Me. Go.”

As he snarled, Hawk stepped back sharply, twisting his wrist and yanking at the same time.

Coulson lost his grip at last, tumbling backwards as the tension between them snapped. He sprawled in the brush and stared up at Hawk, and he was panting like he’d been running hard.

Hawk didn’t run, though. He was waiting, staring down at Coulson with those burning eyes, panting himself in nearly the same rhythm. There was a chance yet, Skye thought. Coulson hadn’t lost him yet.

But Coulson just lay there, and didn’t say anything. She found she couldn’t stand to look at his face-- it wasn’t made to be so exposed, for her to be able to see longing and despair so naked in it.

Skye found Trip’s hand and squeezed hard.

“C’mon AC,” she whispered, and it was less a plea and more a manifesto.

He couldn’t just give up now, what the hell? He couldn’t agree to let Hawk go like that, could he? He couldn’t actually have bought any of Hawk’s bullshit arguments-- could he? Or possibly think, even for a minute, that she and Trip were going to agree to leave an agent of SHIELD behind, let alone a goddamn Avenger? After they’d jumped out a window, been chased across the night by a moose the size of a truck, nearly broken all their limbs just to take Hawk with them? What had Coulson even bothered to come here for, if he was going to quit now?

If he was going to let someone he’d loved-- who’d loved him-- go just like that?

There was no TAHITI to get between them anymore, no nightmares and false memories and madness. Nothing to stop Coulson from apologizing and grabbing his Hawk and never letting go-- and yet he was just sitting there, damn him. 

Pa Pikkuinen shuffled closer, practically radiating smugness, and Ma Pikkuinen stepped fully out of the water and began to advance on the group. Hawk shook his head and began to back away from Coulson, leaving scorched earth between them.

Hawk turned his head, looking back at the Pikkuinens.

“No.”

Coulson’s voice was high and lost, and so quiet Skye nearly missed it.

“No,” he said again, stronger, and lunged forward, catching Hawk’s hand just at the limits of his reach. He took advantage of Hawk’s moment of uncertainty to pull back hard-- and Hawk folded like a burning log, broken in half where the ash had grown hot.

When Hawk was safely back in his arms-- and lap, really, more than half collapsed against him-- Coulson pressed his forehead to Hawk’s, and brought one of Hawk’s hands up to his own cheek. A snail trail ran glimmering from the crease of Coulson’s eyelid and spilled over onto Hawk’s fingers.

He was… Coulson was… crying. Hawk gasped as the tear hit, and Skye didn’t blame him one bit. The last-- the only-- time she’d seen Coulson cry had been coming out of the theta wave machine, broken from the battering he’d taken from his lost memories.

“Listen,” Coulson said, “first off, first off, you are the only one who has ever believed you are a disaster, or used up, or… or worthless. I can never apologize enough for ever, even inadvertently, making you feel that way. But it isn’t true, and I will fight anyone who calls you that, including you yourself.”

It was a good start, judging by the effect it had on Hawk, which was kind of like pouring a bucket of water over a fire-- he let out a sharp hiss, then ended up soggy with tears.

Coulson watched him for a moment, waiting until Hawk’s breathing grew less ragged, his thumbs beginning to move in slow, soothing circles against Hawk’s skin.

“Secondly,” Coulson said once he had Hawk’s attention again, “I… I lied, a little.” Hawk’s eyes flew to his, “Earlier. When I told you I didn’t know if I…”  Coulson swallowed before continuing, his eyes darting to Skye and Trip quickly “... if I was… was okay.”

“You… what?” Hawk’s voice was as helpless now, as stripped bare, as Coulson’s had been just before he’d pulled Hawk back in. “I don’t… babe, I don’t understand.”

Coulson grimaced-- and again, that quick glance at Skye and Trip. After everything they’d just overheard, what the hell could he have to confess that was worth being shy over? Skye shifted uneasily-- and saw the Pikkuinens doing the same.

Coulson closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and kissed Hawk once-- a quick peck, but evidently enough to give him courage to continue. He drew Hawk closer still, until his lips were right next to Hawk’s ear. And then he set to whispering, low and vehement. 

Too low. Whatever he was saying was lost beneath the susurrus of the aspen leaves and the rush of water, the wind and the expanse of night. But Hawk heard it, Skye knew Hawk heard it because his face crumpled as he listened. He shook his head as if he could deny everything, but Coulson kept up his murmured argument, pressing Hawk close to him with a hand on his cheek, thumbing away tears with more circles, with little fitful strokes, sometimes pressing so hard into Hawk’s skin she thought he was probably leaving brief imprints behind.

Then he said something that made Hawk freeze, and that, Skye heard:

“I don’t know if I can stop it, Coulson said. “I don’t know what happens if I can’t. And I… I’m scared. I’m so scared.”

Trip had moved so close to Skye that he was pressed up against her back by now. She felt his adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed, hard. She didn’t disagree.

“But what does… what can I do… Phil… I would do anything to help, but I can’t.”

“You can,” Coulson said, “If anyone can. Hell, you’re the only one who can.”

“No, no, that’s not true, you’ve got Mel… May, you’ve got these guys--” Hawk indicated Skye and Trip with a jerk of his head, but didn’t turn away from Coulson’s gaze. “You have people who would do anything for you, if you asked.”

Coulson winced.

“Some things, I can’t ask. I won’t ask. Not of-- not of anyone but May. But if I asked her, do you really think that would end well? My dear, I’m not here asking you to come home to fix you, or to save you, I’m asking you to come home to save me.”

“How do you expect me to do that?” Hawk asked him-- no, Hawk begged him, Skye decided.

Coulson finally released Hawk’s cheeks, and kissed him gently where his fingers had pressed.

“You’ll know what to do,” he said, smiling a watery little smile. “You always do. You know how to ground me, how to distract me-- my god, like no one else could hope to.” His gaze roamed down Hawk’s chest, like he knew exactly what was under all that clothing, and Skye felt her own cheeks grow hot.  “How to make me feel human.”

“Oh, is that how I make you feel?” Clint asked, laughing a little shakily. Coulson grinned at him, entirely out of proportion with anything Hawk had said. He kissed Hawk’s lips, just a quick brush.

“It’s a kind of side-effect of the rest of it. I don’t know what’s going to happen-- to me, to SHIELD, to any of us. Can’t guarantee I won’t fail horribly, or get everyone killed. But I’ve been so lonely, since I came back, and it’s only going to get worse. I’ve been missing you so long-- years, I think. You have always seen me, not whatever damn role I happened to have to play. Even after we left each other you kept me honest. I never stopped loving you, not even when I died.”

Hawk sniffled, burying his head in Coulson’s shoulder.

“Neither did I,” he said, “and I never will-- you jerk.”

Coulson smiled, small and sure, the kind of smirk Skye’d seen just before he turned all the tables there were to turn on Agent Garrett, just before he salvaged SHIELD from the rubble Hydra’d left. The smile that always made her feel like she could hear the gears of the universe turning in his favor.

“I need you, Clint,” he said. “And if you’ll have me back, you’re mine.” He tugged his jacket off and wrapped it around Hawk’s shoulders.

Clint pulled back and looked straight at him. The tears had been replaced by a quiet certainty, so naked on his face it was nearly too intimate.

“I am yours,” he agreed.

It took a moment for Skye to place the high-pitched, mouselike whimper she was hearing-- which turned out to be coming from Trip. She looked over just in time to catch him furtively rubbing at one eye. One more thing about this entire surreal experience, she was sure, that they’d both pretend they didn’t remember once they were well away.

Speaking of which-- Pa Pikkuinen was glaring at Coulson and at Clint with his thick arms crossed over his barrel chest. The crinkles of his face had slipped from winsome into wild, like he’d absorbed the night. As Skye watched, a hint of something else lit his eye-- amusement maybe, or fondness- and he chased it away almost immediately.

“Well now,” he said, “that’s not too good.”

“Could be better,” Ma agreed, from her position by the stream. Skye was reminded of how she’d looked like a little applehead doll back in their cabin, wizened and genial. The thing with applehead dolls was that they withered from geniality into a nightmarish gauntness awfully fast. Ma was withering while Skye watched. “Too bad we didn’t know about all this before we invited you and your friends in, Director. If we’d known you wanted to take our Hawk back to all that mess-- well, we might’ve had a thing or two to say.”

She flashed those sharp teeth of hers, and Skye decided she absolutely did not want to know what that thing or two might have been.

“You knew exactly what you were risking, taking us in,” Coulson told them both, as he pulled back from Clint. He kept one arm looped around the back of Clint’s waist, gathering them together, as he turned to face Ma and Pa. “And you played matchmaker… re-matchmaker… anyway. Sometimes double or nothing gets you nothing.”

Just like that, he’d turned entirely back into the Director of SHIELD, despite his disheveled hair and clothing, and Skye wanted to hug him. That was who she’d needed, who she’d been missing, the man she’d thrown up her hands and given up her life in the Rising Tide to follow.

It didn’t seem to impress Pa the same way it did her.

“Whatever,” he said, lumbering down off his perch and swaying forward, his step heavy enough to shake the ground. “You’re SHIELD. You protect folks. All right, that’s fair. Told us that much last time, didn’t you? Not too bad at protecting yourself… maybe too darn good at protecting others. But I see you clear now, Phil.”

He used Coulson’s name like it was a knife and he was testing its edge.

A wind rustled the trees. Oak and ash, jackpine and birch, root and branch they creaked as he came on, and something small skittered out of the way of his feet. Coulson faced him, that little dangerous Director smile on his face like Skye’d seen it a thousand times before.

“Tapio,” he said, equally threatening, “I see you too.”

"Huh.” That clearly threw Pa for a loop. “Guess you do. How’d you come up with that?”

 “Google,” Coulson shrugged, as if that explained anything. He let that sink in a moment, then, calm and reasonable-- and with more than a hint of menace-- he continued. “The game is over.”

 "Over when I say it is and not before,” Pa growled.

 Ma huffed her agreement-- from right at Skye’s elbow.

 Skye leapt back, crashing into Trip, as she realized how close Ma was to her, grinning up with those blue eyes so pale they were nearly milk white. Something had shifted about the night, more fundamental than any change of moonlight or wind, and Skye couldn’t help thinking that it was the names that had done it. She remembered Coulson calling her Mary Sue at the start of the evening-- somehow, she thought whatever protection that had granted, it was gone now.

 They were finally going to really meet their hosts. It terrified Skye.

 “No.”

 Both Coulson and Pa froze, as Clint stepped forward out of the circle of Coulson’s arms. He straightened his shoulders and looked at Pa, then over at Ma. Skye could finally see Hawkeye in him. No-- not Hawkeye. Clint was stern and golden but somehow, finally, he only looked human to her. Nothing but his plain true self.

 “That’s not the rules and you know it. It’s time for us to go,” he said. “Freely.”

 Ma’s face screwed up, eyes darting, and Skye found she was holding her breath.

 “You bet, Clint,” Ma said at last, rolling his name off her tongue like she was savoring it. “Wouldn’t want to be unfair. You can go whenever you want-- wouldn’t be polite to keep guests longer than they want to stay.”

 She was gentle about it, was the scariest part, patient as if she was remonstrating him for starting to eat before they’d said grace. Skye found herself feeling as ashamed as when the nuns would tell her she knew what you’ve done, young lady. Skye never had known what she’d done wrong, any more than she knew now.

 “I guess we’re just disappointed,” Ma continued. “After all we did for you, I suppose we thought you’d really felt at home with us. What did we do that you wouldn’t even stay for goodbye?”

 Clint smiled at her, sad and wistful, and shook his head.

 “This was never my home,” he told her. “Home is with Phil.”

 Coulson gasped, quick and quiet, and Clint turned to him with a soft smile.

 “So maybe I got lost for a little,” he said, still looking at Coulson even though he was talking to Ma, “Maybe we both did. We found each other again. And while you’ve been good to me, I’m going home now.”

 “Well I guess we can’t stop you, if you’re that determined about it,” Ma sighed.

 Just like that, Skye felt the night unwind. Everything seemed a little lighter and less looming, and her eyes finally found the deer tracks that penetrated the thickets around them, leading outwards from the clearing.

 “We’re determined,” Phil said, grabbing Clint’s hand to gather him back in, and waving Skye and Trip over. Skye came quickly as she could, feeling warmer as she crowded next to him.

 “All right then,” Ma told them, “I guess you better get goin’ if you’re goin’.” She made shooing motions towards one of the deer tracks. “We’ll miss you, ya know? You should always feel free to come back and visit.”

 “You bet,” Pa agreed, unexpectedly close to Skye. He nudged her along like she’d gotten caught wool-gathering, and Skye leapt away from his touch. The thought flashed across her mind that they were being herded-- but where to? “Any time you want, you’re welcome to stay. Too bad you’re going at night, or I’d see you out. It gets kinda tricky, ya know. But we got to take care of the neighbors.”

 “That’s right,” Ma said, as she led Trip back into the group and held up a thick branch of sumac to open a path into the woods. “Awfully dark in there-- and the fog comes up pretty thick this time of morning. Easy to get lost if you don’t know your ground-- or delayed. Daybreak’s coming up fast, and you did say you’d be gone. Wouldn’t want you to break your word.” She paused in front of the path, just before Coulson stepped onto it. “Unless you want to wait for coffee and a doughnut after all?”

 “No,” Coulson said firmly, and he tugged Clint past her, “thank you.”

----

It wasn’t that easy, of course. Nothing ever was, in Skye’s experience.

Whether their warning had been a threat or mere prediction, the Pikkuinens were quickly proven right about the fog. They were barely out of the clearing, Clint leading them, with Coulson trailing close behind and Trip bringing up the rear, when the mist began to rise. Skye noticed it first as tattered patches that hung on the trail like drifting ghosts, then it grew thicker and thicker-- until they were walking through cloud as much as woods.

Skye had no idea how long they spent in the middle of that moist space, guided only by the dirt beneath their feet and the shift of branches against them. She wondered if that was what sensory deprivation tanks were meant to do; remove all sense of urgency along with the passage of time. Eventually, though, the air around them took on a lighter, grayer hue, and began to thin enough so Skye could see her teammates around her as more than vague shadows in the drift.

Clint was still leading them, talking them over hills and around boulders, but he was beginning to sound nervous as he called out each obstacle.

“We’re running out of time,” he muttered to Coulson as they paused to drop rocks down a hill, before beginning to scramble down. “If dawn catches us here, we’re fucked. You promised to be gone.”

“I know,” Coulson said. Skye could hear their voices well, but barely see their faces.

“Well I don’t know,” Trip grumped from next to her. They’d been holding hands the entire way, and anytime Clint and Coulson got too far ahead Trip would tug her along fast. Whatever’d happened to him when Coulson sent him away, he clearly didn’t want to repeat it. “What would happen, sir? The Pik-- they’d-- show up again with breakfast?”

“Something like that,” Phil said, “or the neighbors might get to us. They’re not half as nice as the Pikkuinens, and they don’t take trespassers well.”

“And me without my icer,” Trip sighed. “Or my cigarette laser. Now that would’ve come in handy about now, sir.”

"They wouldn’t have let you in with it,” Phil told him. “You don’t go armed into a house like that.”

“Anyway, we really can’t afford to meet them now,” Clint piped up. “What you saw last evening was them being nice and friendly. Phil kind of fucked all that up. Now, if we’re lucky, we’re just… stuck here. For good. If we’re not lucky, if they really were mad? Well, then they just kill us. Cigarette laser or no.”

“They-- what?” Skye asked, feeling a little stupid to have missed the moment that the Pikkuinens tipped over from creepy old people into homicidal ones. “They wouldn’t really, would they? What the hell did Co-- did the Director do?”

“What’d he do? He thanked them,” Clint said. “That was unnecessarily rude, Phil.”

Phil muttered something about extreme provocation, and tugged at Clint’s hand to get him moving, leaving Skye and Trip blinking behind them.

It was the off-hand way Clint had said they might get killed for minding their manners, as if it were just another day in the life, that truly convinced Skye he was Coulson’s love. Whether he’d come by the crazy honestly or through long exposure to Coulson, it was deep in the grain now. She muttered that to Trip as they got moving, and got a snort in return.

“Yeah,” he replied, “that’s the one thing that’s crystal fucking clear about this. I tell you, I’ve been on ops where the entire briefing was redacted that had clearer parameters than this.”

“Is it going to be all right?” she asked, if for no other reason than to get her mind off the fact that she was pretty sure she’d stumbled over the same root twice now.

“Aw girl,” Trip said, “how’d I know?”

He took the question seriously enough to pause, though, right as Clint and Coulson did. Skye watched them tighten their hands then disappear downwards, over what she assumed-- hoped-- was a low ridgeline. She tensed, waiting for the tell-tale thud and spate of cursing that would tell her they’d both made it down.

Nothing.

“C’mon,” Trip told her, tugging her forward. “One thing I do know, is that’s my Director down there, and I’ll follow him anywhere, even when I’m going in blind. I mean look-- he got us Hawkeye back.”

Skye opened her mouth to respond, and got a lungful of mist. She gave up-- what was she going to say, anyway? Trip was right; in the end, she’d follow Coulson anywhere, even into this place where the rules shifted like the mist and little old ladies had pike teeth. She’d already sat next to him in an open-topped convertible as they fell backwards out of a jet plane. What was one little walk in the woods compared to that?

She let Trip lead her off the ledge.

They came out on the edge of a bog, hummocked with tall grass and spotted with scraggly conifers, everything drained of color in the early light. The fog had cleared as if it’d never been, but Clint’s face had turned thunderous.

“Damnit, Coulson, we’re out of time,” he growled, “and I can’t see the way. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Coulson said, paying more attention to the treeline than to Clint.

“It is not. We took too long back in the clearing; they must have been hoping we would. And I lost what you gave me; I can’t see the true path anymore. Some goddamn Hawkeye I am.”

He kicked at a bush, sending small birds skittering into the air in all directions.

“Clint,” Coulson’s voice was fond. “We’re probably a lot closer than you think. When the hell have you ever known me not to have a back-up plan?”

It was a fair point. She’d never known Coulson not to have some kind of contingency plan. She’d also never known him to actually tell anyone about the back-up in advance, and if Clint’s exasperation was any indication that was not one of the things that had changed post-TAHITI.

“Nice time you picked to let us know,” he said. He sounded wounded, but a smile was flickering around the corners of his lips, threatening to spread.

“I didn’t want to tip our hand when the Pikkuinens might notice,” Coulson said. “Reach in your pocket. I slipped something in there when we left the cabin.”

Because of course he had, Skye thought, sorting through her memories. Had he palmed one of the weapons they’d left in the little chest by the gate? Or had he not fully disarmed? She didn’t think they’d left anything in that chest that would be helpful now-- not even Trip’s late lamented cigarette laser.

“Director, if you had a compass all this damn time,” Trip sighed, sounding less exasperated and more bewildered.

“Wouldn’t have helped,” Coulson told him. “Too much iron in the bedrock around here; all the magnets go out of whack. It’s… ironic, really.”

He at least had the grace to look sheepish at that, and Skye felt her heart lift a little in spite of herself. If Coulson was still in punning form, things probably weren’t hopeless.

“Yeah it is,” Clint breathed, and Skye refocused on him. He was holding up the little pellet Coulson’d been playing with at the crash site, rolling it over and over between his fingers. “Phil, you beautiful, beautiful son of a bitch.”

He kissed Coulson through a growing smile. And as he did, he flung the pellet backwards over his shoulder.

Skye was still watching them, even though really she should’ve been looking anywhere else, when they heard the little metallic ping from the direction he’d flung the pellet-- and then a loud “ouch!”

Clint’s smile, if anything, broadened.

“Sorry!” he called, as he pulled away from Coulson’s embrace. “My bad!”

There was a brief silence, and then Melinda May’s voice came spiraling high in the morning air.

“Damnit Barton, look where you’re throwing things next time!”

Clint was laughing-- okay they were all laughing-- as they raced towards her voice.

She was standing on the ridgeline as the sun came up behind her, pink and gold pouring down over the gravel road and past them into the hollows. Behind her, a rust-ridden extended cab pickup truck sat idling.

“Agent May,” Coulson said, his voice warm, “you’re late.”

----

Skye and Trip ended up pressed against May in the front seat of the cab, with Coulson and Clint chuckling just behind them in the rear seat. Skye was pretty sure May’d done it that way on purpose-- she’d taken one look at Barton, growled that it was about time he’d shown up, then shoved them both in first. It was unclear whether she wanted to make sure neither of them got away again, or was just worried they’d get handsy. Either way, Skye found she agreed.

“Where the hell is the plane?” May asked as she started the truck, “and where the hell were you?”

“The plane? Bottom of the lake,” Coulson said. “It was a bad plane anyway, Melinda. I’ll get you a better one.” As if he could just produce planes out of thin air.

“And us? Nowhere particular,” Clint added.

“Nowhere particular? What the hell, were you living in a hole in a tree, Barton?” May asked. “Or is this going to be like the last time you two got lost up here and I had to pull your asses out?”

Skye bit back her smile. May’s gruff act didn’t fool her at all after this time-- the worse it got, the more worried they’d made her. From the way she’d manhandled Clint, Skye thought there must have been friendship between them, too. Having May grumbling in the driver’s seat, piloting them out of danger like she always had, was convincing proof that they’d made it back to the sensible world at last.

They bounced over the gravel road and after about ten minutes turned out of the trees onto a path that skirted the side of the lake they’d been at yesterday. Skye frowned. How the hell had they not seen the road last night?

She looked back over her shoulder into the valley, searching out the smoke from the Pikkuinen’s cabin. Through a gap in the trees she thought she caught sight of their hill, far closer than she’d expected, and the little thicket at the bottom.

But there was no cabin.

“If by ‘like last time’ you mean we’re never going to give you an answer you’ll accept,” Coulson said, still talking to May, “than likely yes.” His voice was light, but Skye could sense the strain in it. “It’s the same story as last time, Melinda.”

May glared at them both briefly through the rear-view mirror then muttered something, low enough that Skye only caught bits of it. She recognized “just like them” and “stocking up on black sharpie again.”

“Okay,” Skye said, when it became evident that both May and Coulson were done talking, “but what about us, AC? Trip and me? Do we get to know what the hell went on back there?” She twisted around in her seat so she could rest her arms on the bench.

“Yes,” Coulson sighed, “later. If you still want to know. But the answers won’t do you much good, since I don’t think we’ll be welcome there anymore. And you’re probably not going to like them, anyway.”

“What I don’t like,” Trip grumbled, “is that I left my cigarette laser back there, for no damned reason. I hate leaving my stuff behind.”

“Hey, I left a really nice bow back there, thank you,” Clint told him. “Better your laser than yourself.”

“Speaking of leaving things,” May said, and she tossed something over her shoulder.

“Aw, yeah,” Clint said, catching it and holding it up to the light and eying it fondly. It was Coulson’s pellet. “I can’t believe you got that past them, Phil.”

“What is that?” Skye asked, leaning on her arms and trying to focus on Clint and Coulson, all curled up together and relaxed and happy, as the truck shuddered beneath them on the washboard road.

“Taconite pellet,” Coulson said, as if that explained everything.

“That explains nothing,” Trip told him, earning a thoroughly undignified little snicker from Clint. Coulson elbowed him, or tried to, and they lost a moment in shared glances before Coulson finally deigned to explain.

“I told you we were on an old mine site,” he said. “Taconite is what’s made when the ore grade is less pure; refines the iron enough that the steel mills can use it. Lets you keep going when the top quality ore is all used up. They’re all over on the ground up there.”

“But why-- why did you take it? Why did it--” She waved her hand vaguely in a do that thing it did kind of manner.

“Because iron unbinds,” Clint told her.

“That’s not what my doctors say,” Trip muttered.

He got another Clint twinkle for his trouble, and Skye thought she could get almost as used to those as she could to Coulson-twinkles. He was recovering so fast, now that the sun was shining fully on him. Or maybe it was now that he was back in Coulson’s arms. Oh god, they were going to be unbearable together. It was going to be epic. SHIELD was never going to be the same. Not that SHIELD was the same anyway, after Hydra. But Clint was gonna shake their hidden little remnants of SHIELD up real good-- and so was a happy Coulson, something she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen before for more than moments brief enough to have been a dream or an illusion.

And then Skye caught it-- the last puzzle piece. It clicked into place in her head with the same little snap as the last piece of Ma Pikkuinen’s puzzle: the dark shadow of a walleye beneath the ducks, with no distinguishing features to place it except the hole made by the other pieces.

It was the aspen and birch thing all over again; something from one of the stories she’d sneaked back in the stacks come off the page, warped and unrecognizable when she encountered it in real life. Maybe that was because she hadn’t thought she’d find it here-- or outside of tall tales at all, really. No wonder she’d felt like the little kid crashing an adult party, last night.

“Wait… but… why would they live near an iron mine?” She asked the two of them, desperate to confirm her suspicions. “If they’re really actually… why wouldn’t they live, like, as far away as they can get?”

Trip gave her a side-eye, and she wondered if Coulson was right, if he was going to be like May and prefer black pens to having to deal with the reality-- the unreality-- of their experience. An explanation the adults would accept. Skye hoped not.

“Skye,” Coulson said, leaning forward, “they already told you. They don’t live near the mine, they live near the miners. Or did, when there were more miners. And now they’re here, it’s home, even if that,” he pointed out the front windshield, “ever closes for good. Until the last person moves away.”

Skye turned. Out the windshield she saw another hill in the distance, and a town nestled into it -- much closer than she’d thought possible last night, when they’d searched in vain for civilization. It was little, spread between the old lake with its sparkling water, the deep woods, and a deep red gash on the earth that stretched on into the horizon. At the edge of the pit mine, squat stacks sent smoke billowing into the clear morning air.

“I do admire that,” Clint said quietly, “the stubbornness. The make-it-right.”

“Oh definitely,” Coulson sighed, the weight settling in his voice that Skye’d come to associate with the Directorship. “But it’s not enough. The key is to make it last, even if it means changing.”

He was not, Skye thought, talking about mines and mining and the Pikkuinens in their disappearing cabin anymore.

“Yeah well, there’s only one thing I care about at the moment, Director,” Trip growled.

Skye looked over to find him glaring at the back seat.

“That is?” Coulson asked, leaning forward.

“Is it finally safe to eat breakfast? You all kept talking about hotdish and bars and coffee and doughnuts and I am goddamn starving.”

END