Chapter Text
Phil met Sara ten years ago when she was in town to play in a symphony. He’s always been attracted to both men and women, no particular preference either way, but he had liked the slim dip of her waist, the lean muscle of her arm. Their dates were sparse but good, conversation flowing well between them. They were periods when they were rarely in the same country, but there were emails and texts to get them through, and Phil liked that he had someone to listen to him talk. He’d always been somewhat of a loner, making friends but never making connections, and something inside him told him the same was true with Sara - she was comfortable, pleasant enough, but she didn’t make him feel anything extreme.
Phil thought maybe it was just him - he’d never had those kind of feelings about anyone, after all. He’d never felt his heart race or his stomach flutter. He is sensible, pragmatic Phil Coulson, and he tells himself he is not settling.
Two years in , Sara tells him he is afraid of commitment. He has only ever worked for two companies doing two jobs; he has never changed the brands of foods he eats. He is the personification of commitment, but he doesn’t tell her that. Instead he invites her to move into his apartment, wondering why the words taste so sour. He lets her replace all his furniture and take down his Captain America prints. His spare bedroom stops being a memorabilia museum. Sara makes him buy a different brand of cereal.
These changes happen little by little, bit by bit, and then one day he comes home and realizes it feels like he’s in a stranger’s apartment. Still, he knows that relationships require compromise, so he goes along with it.
When Sara becomes withdrawn, he blames it on her new job as a classical music teacher. He knows she would rather be traveling still, but she tells him they cannot have a proper relationship that way, so he accepts her barbed comments about him never being home and makes more of an effort to do so.
It happens in stages, really: he loses pieces of himself, small chunks that he doesn’t notice disappearing, until one day he looks in the mirror and wonders who the tired, haggard old man staring back is.
The first time Sara hits him, it is during an argument about him having to leave the country for a month.
He tells her to be gone when he gets back.
Loneliness is a seed planted in him long ago, though, and it has already taken root. When she messages him telling him that she is sorry and that she loves him, he makes himself believe her. And then it happens again and again, and he doesn’t think he believes her, but he thinks maybe he doesn’t even care.
Not anymore.
**
There is a running joke around SHIELD that watches could be set according to Phil Coulson’s timekeeping. He is never late, never flustered or rushing. He lives his life through a set of practiced, perfected routines, and only exceptional circumstances can change that. The junior agents call him an android. The agents around Phil call it kissing Fury’s ass.
Phil doesn’t call it anything, but he knows full well it is his way of trying to find a semblance of control over a life that feels like it has spun away from him. He is nothing more than a distant visitor to his own life, as though he’s fallen into the slipstream of being someone else and never quite left again. It’s the only explanation, really, for the way he is living now. Because Agent Phil Coulson, he is always pristine, always level-headed and sardonic and so professional it cuts, so professional that no one thinks to look beyond it to see Phil. He is a suit, not a man. He is an agent, not a person. Somewhere down the line, he has lost himself, and it feels like he only ever finds pieces of that old person. He only ever finds cracked shards, too jagged to fit together again. If there had ever been a fire within him, it had burned out years back.
So he does what he can: he falls back on patterns and lets their regularity comfort him. He wakes at 5:28am so he could be conscious when Sara gets up at 5:30, so he can feign sleep without having to be vulnerable and helpless. He is an expert in faking shallow breaths, of ignoring the way the scent of her perfume makes everything inside him roil and shake, like a house set on crumbling earth. Phil times his departure from bed right as she heads to make a quick breakfast at 6:00. There are days when he’s sure he won’t be able to get up - when all his limbs have turned to water and he’s convinced that this is it, that he’s finally just wasted away into vapor, but he forces himself. He is Phil Coulson, after all, and he does not take days off.
He shaves without meeting his eyes in the mirror (you don’t have the right jawline for a beard, it’s too soft). He washes himself in the shower, feeling the divots and raised skin covering his body (you’re lucky I’m willing to settle for you, Phillip). He shampoos his hair and adds some conditioner (see how thin it is, old man, who’d want you anyway?)
When he hears the slam of the front door over the spray of the shower, he allows himself five minutes. In these five minutes, he isn’t an agent of SHIELD or an ex-army-ranger. He is just Phil, tired and hurting and alone.
He presses his back into the tiles of the wall, the scars there dragging and catching on ceramic as he slides to a sitting position. He moves his head underneath the fall of the shower, and it is like being waterboarded in Kosovo, it is like drowning in Krakow. He does not move.
It clogs his nose, floods his eyes, plugs his throat and makes his choke, and he does not move. In the safety of his bathroom, with a locked door and enough rushing water to mask it, Phil cries. They are not delicate, small tears, they are heaving, ugly sobs, tortured and wracking his all of his broken body.
On the worst days, when he feels each nasty word slicing into his softest parts, when he feels a hundred years older than his age, when his insides are ribbons, he thinks about not moving. He is hollow, he is a husk, and the water will fill him up. He will finally float after a life of sinking, finally breathe after a life of drowning.
Sometimes, he wonders if this is his penance. Years of taking the lives of others; maybe this is life’s way of taking his own. Every piece of almost-happiness he finds is nothing more than gauzy overlay, darkness slipping in all around the edges. He wonders sometimes if he is a person who was never built for happiness, if he is the misshapen, malformed mistake at the end of the production line.
But Agent Phil Coulson, he doesn’t have room for thoughts like that. There is no space in his life for sadness or depression or any feeling at all, so when his five minutes are over, he moves his face from the water. He hauls himself back to a standing position, he rinses the conditioner from his hair, and he steps out of the stall and towels himself dry.
He does not look in the mirror. He does not acknowledge the soreness of his eyes or the thickness of his throat. He walks into his bedroom and gets dressed. He shrugs on Agent Coulson just like he shrugs on his shirt, and he buries Phil at the bottom of the laundry basket with his towel, along with everything else sullied and stained.