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Taking the serum is almost a conscious decision. Almost.
In the days leading up to it, Phil Coulson swears he can remember the idea, thin grey line of maybe in his mind – at least, as long as he can swear, which doesn't last. In the days after, he's convinced he made the choice himself, but then again, in the days after, his mind is no longer quite his own. And in the days during, he screams hellfire and ashes, tear my brain from my body i never wanted this, but no one hears him, because he is alone and silent and his screams burn acid through his ruined throat and never see the light.
It starts with a mistake. Not Phil's; he is not the kind of man to make so grave an error in judgment. No, someone else's error, someone else's authority that stamps the paperwork to retrieve the remainder of the Extremis solution from the rubble of a destroyed laboratory in Texas and store it at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. After all, someone reasons somewhere at the root of the decay, where safer to keep it than under the watchful eyes of Phil Coulson and Nick Fury?
Phil can't say it wouldn't have happened elsewhere. Almost certainly, it would have. The difference, though, is that anywhere else, it would not have been Phil Coulson whose body blazed with a billion tiny, hungry fires that consumed him alive and vomited him back up little more than slag; it would not have been Phil Coulson whose blood sang him to sleep with foreign promises and lies.
There was a time when they all talked about it, jokingly, before the suggestion that there might still be some serum left. A time when Bruce Banner would say, can you imagine what the Hulk would be like controlled by Extremis? and Clint would say, hey, if anyone gets Extremis enhancements, it's me, you guys already all have superpowers, and Tony would say nothing and sit hunched in a corner, Steve's hand on his back and a blank look of denial on his face.
It was always meant to be impossible.
It is impossible, until a defeat that should never have happened. Failure of Iron Man's attention in the field; failure of Captain America's skills with his shield; failure of Norse gods and inhuman monstrosities to follow orders, fight the enemy, protect their own.
It is impossible, until Clint Barton is taken by a man with a sneer on his lips, glint of gold in his twisted smile. It's impossible until Phil sees the knife at Clint's throat before he vanishes from view, the fingers that press in on his wrists and the back of his neck, the resigned look in his eyes, affordable loss, and S.H.I.E.L.D. agrees.
It is impossible, until then. After that, it is the only possibility.
Phil takes a week's leave, which should be the first red flag.
It should be, but they don't question it, other than a fractionally-raised eyebrow from Director Fury as he stamps the papers. Noticing atypical behaviour on the part of Phil Coulson would first mean noticing Phil Coulson, and that is a stretch at the best of times. When he chooses to be invisible, their eyes slide over him like so much paperwork.
He's doing this at home. He's thought about the implications of that, considered renting a storage unit or putting himself in lockdown in a S.H.I.E.L.D. safehouse. But those things leave records, a paper trail that perhaps even someone other than Phil Coulson could follow, and he can't risk detection before he's done what he means to do.
Risk in general is a concern, but Phil is not a man who takes these things lightly. He's barricaded the windows, metal bars locked from the inside with a key no longer in his possession. He's reinforced the door, nailing heavy boards to it even though he knows it's probably futile. Phil Coulson, the man, could not escape this makeshift prison; Phil Coulson, enhanced with Extremis, is an unknown quantity.
Checking the doors, windows, emergency exits, he knows he's only delaying the inevitable. There's no question that he plans to do this, dull metallic briefcase on the floor of his living room, brand-new Stark injection gun inside (for the good of humanity, said Tony at the press conference, and Extremis will corrupt it like so many other things). There's a vial of solution in a cryo-storage container, and for some reason, Phil's mind sticks on the thought that it will be cold, looping and looping and refusing to acknowledge that the cold will be less than a fragment of the least of his worries shortly.
He's ready.
There is no such thing as ready, a fact he is conveniently choosing to forget.
It's not that Phil has never thought he might find himself here one day, kneeling on his living room floor with the cool muzzle of a gun pressed to his neck. It's not even that he has never thought he might be the one holding the gun, on dark days when life seems insurmountable and he stays at the office overnight because he is afraid to go home and be alone with himself. But this is one step further than he thought he'd ever go, this suicide-not-suicide that might mean Agent Barton's safe retrieval and might also mean the loss of two of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s best agents or far worse.
His finger twitches on the trigger; there is no safety catch on an injection gun.
It starts with a mistake, and this time Phil Coulson is the one who makes it.
There is one man alive who has been touched by Extremis; that man is Tony Stark, and he never speaks about it. About the computer virus, yes, about the suit that supercompresses itself into his bones (and Phil has never asked him, does it hurt), about the data streams that twist and mangle in his head, one step beyond a direct neural interface. Never, though, about the lead-up to it; never about his thoughts and motivations, never about the reasoning and desperation that drove him to take it, and never, ever about those twenty-four hours in which his body was re-written like a poorly-done rough draft of a life augmented.
In classified S.H.I.E.L.D. reports that Phil has never been allowed to see, Tony claims he has no memory of it. No one exists who is qualified to contradict him.
He lies.
Phil knows that now.
It doesn't hurt for a split second, injector hissing as he depresses the trigger (cold, he was right, it's cold), and the gun falls from his fingers and there's nothing.
And then it shatters, and the shards of it slash through his skin, flaying ragged strips from his body, onionskin layers of him peeling back from fibrous muscle, nerves, bone, blood, collapsing discarded as he convulses, laid open, fingers scrabbling slick with blood to hold himself together and his vision
whites out
knife in his back, filleting the marrow from his spine, and soft whispers
phil, phil, and he could swear he knows the voice but needles through his ears rob him of sound
all the mistakes he's ever made, bodies burning on a field of glass he pours himself onto like gasoline to fuel the flames his fault his fault tear the heart out of his chest and throw it like a grenade everything the shrapnel touches falls to ash
he burns
he burns
In three days, a man can die without water.
In three days, a war can be fought and won.
In three days, a god can be unmade and rise again.
So can Phil Coulson.
On the third day, he tastes blood and remembers it for the rest of his life, because it is the first sensation that finds its way past the blinding pain. In his old life, Phil might have regretted that, but this new Phil Coulson has always known he would be born in blood.
He tries and fails to lick the iron from his teeth, but this is just the start, and he can wait.
Slowly, the scarred surface of his brain restores itself to being, like tearing open old wounds so that his mind flows from them into the ether – and every wound that bleeds from him touches a million tiny points of electricity, Greek fire sparking across his neurons, searing them to life.
He is born in fire and blood and brimstone; his mouth tastes of carrion and cinders.
This is the last time Phil Coulson ever sleeps, and when he wakes, his mind and body are no longer his alone. He shares them with Extremis. He shares them with everything.
He opens his left hand, and somewhere over northern Europe, a satellite goes dark.
He levers himself up on both his arms, and in his head, he watches the stock market values drop.
He stands, puts one foot and then the other in front of him, Hans Christian Andersen remembered as swords pierce through him with his every step, but as he walks, the impacts of his footsteps could bring down empires.
In three days, Phil Coulson has gone from drudge to demiurge, and the power sings sweet agony through his fingertips. He paces the house, mines pain for purpose and, eventually, remembers.
Life. S.H.I.E.L.D. Avengers. Clint. Clint. Clint is the reason he did this – Clint is the reason he holds the reins of the universe in his hands – Clint is lost and Phil and Extremis are going to find him.
From remembering to doing, there is no division anymore. Phil's eyes are in the skies, skimming from satellite to satellite; he knows the codes, and when he doesn't, Extremis can find them; Phil is privacy and secrecy and subtlety, he's bought it with his pound of flesh, his thirty silver pieces, and the world is laid before him like a map for his perusal.
It takes him two more days to come down from his god complex.
On Monday, he walks into work in immaculate tie and suit and sunglasses. Nobody notices.
Clint Barton has been missing for a week. It takes seven years to declare death in absentia in the United States; for S.H.I.E.L.D., seven days is a stretch. Clint's file is covered with notations, incompleteness stamped into permanence by people in starched shirts and sunlit offices.
They're wrong. Phil knows that already, has known it since the day he re-awoke, knows where Clint is and who has him and how he has been used, but he is not a man to make decisions unconsidered (just one, and he's paid for it in full). He doesn't know his own strength yet; this is not Tony's Extremis, nor the original, and its only venture into the world will be Phil Coulson.
What Phil does know is proper procedure, and with a twitch of his eyes, he sends an anonymous tip to Director Fury. That should be enough to re-open the file, at least, buy them some days for him to build up evidence in a believable fashion. It should, until Tony Stark walks into his office and closes the door behind him.
It's never good news when Tony enters his office voluntarily.
"I blocked your notification."
Phil blinks at him. Just a blink this time, though it could be so much more.
"What do you think you're doing? Clint's file is closed."
"It's been a week."
"If he was still out there, we'd know, Coulson. We've looked. I've looked."
"What makes you so sure that you're qualified to judge?" His equanimity hasn't broken yet. He's doing well. One tiny motion and he could do things to Tony.
"I see everything, Coulson, in my head." He doesn't say the word Extremis. They don't talk about it anymore, not now that the remaining doses have been discovered.
Yours is not Tony's Extremis, a voice in his head – not literal – warns him. He hasn't thought about the possibility that Tony is completely unaware of Clint's survival. He's just thought Tony wasn't looking hard enough.
That he sees more than Tony now is novel, and a little frightening.
"You don't see everything," he says calmly, "and I don't have to watch you fumble this one anymore. This one is mine."
As he walks out of the office, leaving Tony to stare dumbly at his back, he waves a hand to shut down his computer and turn off the lights. Let the genius figure it out on his own.
Phil has somewhere else to be right now.
It doesn't take him long; Phil has to give him credit for that much.
What the fuck were you thinking, Coulson?
That's a neat trick, somewhere between voicemail and instant messaging for minds. He doesn't answer.
Do you have any idea what you've done?
He knows exactly what he's done, can read it burnt into his bones like runes on ancient sacrificial altars. The symbolism is appropriate; the old Phil Coulson gave his life for this, for one rescue. The new one owes it to him to save Clint.
Look, you don't have to do this, we can talk, come on, come back.
They are talking. Phil doesn't say it.
Coulson, you don't know what you're doing. Extremis isn't meant to work this way.
Phil takes pity on him. "My Extremis is nothing like yours," he says aloud and in his head, and it's a lie; his Extremis is built on the framework of Tony's, but superior. Where Tony chose to sacrifice its true organic powers in favour of control over the suit, Phil has had to make no such choice. For him, there is no suit, only direct computer access and the powers.
The records from Futurepharm are sealed in ways that even Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D. was unable to penetrate. Extremis can, though, and Phil knows the full extent of what he can do now.
He starts to run. The original – Mallen – managed three hundred miles an hour. Phil, loosening his tie, thinks he can get to California in eight. Tony is faster, but he has to wear hundreds of pounds of metal.
You're insane, Coulson. This has to stop now.
Maybe he is. Maybe he is and this is a mistake; maybe they'll lock him down or kill him when he gets back with Clint. But he doesn't think they can kill him anymore, and it's not likely they can even hold him long. It doesn't matter. Even if they could, he's better than they are in at least one way: he isn't leaving Clint to die alone.
Extremis, it would seem, is good with numbers. So is Phil.
Seven hours, forty-eight minutes, nine seconds is the travelling time from New York to Santa Clara. Phil is barely out of breath and, for whatever reason, Tony has not sounded an alert.
Perhaps, he thinks, it's plausible deniability. Perhaps it's simply a desire not to be alone.
The numbers keep rolling as Phil slips inside a hospital. Quiet, bland and unassuming, he's not scrolling through the patient records in his head, not searching for patterns of missing data he already knows are there, not assembling carefully-blanked records into a horrific picture of something S.H.I.E.L.D. should have found years ago.
Four is the number of levels below the basement, none of which officially exist. Two is the number of minutes it takes Phil to commandeer an elevator that also doesn't exist and go to the lowest floor.
Five is the number of men stationed around the elevator exit on guard duty, Hydra insignia on their shirts and tattooed on their shoulders; five is also the number of men Phil can now neutralize with his bare hands in thirty seconds.
It's two more than his previous record.
Thirteen are the doors he counts on either side before he finds the one he wants and lays a palm against the scanner. He could use one of the dead guards' hands, but that's not necessary anymore; his brain is a far more powerful computer than the one inside the building, and he reprograms it easily in his mind.
There are handcuffs on Clint's wrists and manacles around his ankles. The old Phil Coulson might pick the locks or use a tool to cut them. Now, he fits his hands around the iron shackles, runs a current through them; they melt easily and fall to pieces in his fingers.
"… Phil?" Clint manages, not entirely lucid, but attempting to bear his weight as Phil grabs him.
"I'm carrying you," Phil tells him, "and you're not arguing."
"Phil, you can't…" but Clint's protest, already weak, dies in his throat when Phil hefts his weight readily and makes for the door, one arm supporting the half-conscious man in a perfect fireman's carry, the other ready to disarm both locks and guardsmen if needed.
It's needed.
He has to drop Clint in the corridor and use both hands against the onslaught of Hydra lackeys apparently tasked with maintaining Clint's prisoner status. Lightning arcs from his fingers, crackling as skin melts and bodies fall in piles on the linoleum. Phil catches himself inhaling deeply, has to bite back on the instinct; he's saving that for a last resort.
It occurs vaguely to him that Clint will see all this, if he's conscious.
Clint was always convinced he had a superpower anyway.
In the end, it's the final thing he does before the elevator closes on them both. He stands between the doors, feeling them vibrate against the safety mechanism, draws a deep breath, and incinerates the sub-basement level.
It's not the first time he's smelled burning flesh. He never knew the scent was one you could get used to.
Clint wakes up in the middle of a heated conversation between Phil in California and Tony in New York. Neither man is using a cell phone, and neither speaks aloud.
You're a fucking idiot, Coulson.
I'm a fucking idiot who's standing next to Agent Barton. Alive.
What the hell is in your head, Coulson? What is that? That isn't Extremis. I should know.
You have your modifications; I have mine.
Does Clint know?
Phil doesn't answer, though by his silence he tells Tony everything. Instead, he kneels at Clint's side when he hears the rhythms of his breathing change, reaches out to lay a hand against his face, and stops.
He isn't sure anymore what his hands can do.
Clint blinks at him, eyes bloodshot in a face darkened with bruises, and says, "Phil."
I'm here.
He remembers too late that Clint can't hear him, remembers too late that Tony can. "I'm here." His voice sounds strange and unfamiliar, cracking in a way that belies his use of it only hours earlier.
"Phil…"
Waiting has never seemed as hard as it does now, when Extremis can tick off every second in his mind.
"… what did you do?"
There are so many answers for that. Rescued you. Came for you. Came to save you. Killed a man, killed many, many men. Made my body a battleground for you.
You're getting melodramatic.
Thank you, Stark, when I want your opinion I'll ask for it.
I'm just saying.
Have you sent someone to pick us up yet?
Not an answer, but a flight plan. There's a Quinjet on the way.
"What did you do?" Clint asks again from beside him, and he remembers that he still hasn't answered.
"I…" What can he say? "I got us out of there."
"You breathed fire."
"You're injured, Clint. Take it easy."
"Your hands…"
"Take it easy."
Clint doesn't try to speak again, but he's watching Phil now, and his eyes are alive with a kind of fear Phil has never seen.
You see? says Tony in his head. This is the price you pay.
Phil doesn't answer, because he's right.
Clint goes to the medical bay. Phil goes to his office.
Tony Stark, of course, is waiting for him there.
"I hope you know what you're doing." I know you don't.
"Do you see any better alternatives?" Now that it's done?
"No." What were you expecting, the phone number for the Skrull mothership? This is what you are now. You don't have a choice anymore. Did you think you could just turn it on and off?
That wasn't at the top of my priority list.
The truth is that Phil doesn't have a priority list where Clint is concerned. Everything else just falls away into the distance.
You gave that up when you did this, too.
I know. It's true, though only just barely. He knows now, but he didn't when he made his choice; he never thought far enough ahead to think of Clint's reaction to it. Phil Coulson, master of scheduling and planning and clear thinking, brought to his knees by a single M.I.A.
He's safe now, Phil tells Tony, which is far, far too revealing, but they're communicating the next best thing to telepathically, and Phil finds it blurs the boundaries somewhat.
I hope it was worth it.
Yes. It was.
Phil doesn't go to see Clint in the infirmary. He remembers panic in the younger agent's eyes, frozen expression as they waited for the Quinjet. He remembers abject relief when Clint passed out again, because, unconscious, he was not afraid.
Clint doesn't need him there right now, Extremis singing many-voiced choruses of data and code inside his head. Clint doesn't need to see him, healed already and stronger than ever, hands shaking in a way they never have before, because Phil is afraid, too, of his own power.
He stays away.
On the third day, Clint wakes up. Phil considers the parallel briefly, then drops it because the sharp edges of truth are too painful.
On the fourth day, Clint asks for him. He hesitates, but goes.
There's a smile on his face when Phil walks into the room, but his eyes are wary and his gaze only sidelong. It's a while before he speaks, and all he says is, "Hi."
"Hi."
Phil sits by the bed. Clint's picking at his bandages; nineteen hours since he regained consciousness, most of which he's spent asleep anyway, and yet he's already impatient to get out of here. It's so typically Clint that Phil's heart aches. He wants to reach out and take the hand picking at the gauze, feel cool, dry skin against his own (he's hot; he's always hot since Extremis). He can't, though.
Things like that are not intended for him anymore.
"What did you do?" Clint asks him, and Phil realizes that he still hasn't truly answered that question.
"Extremis," he says carefully, knowing that this will be his official admission of guilt. Tony, miracle of miracles, has said nothing to anyone; Phil, for his part, has shown up for work each day and gone as unnoticed as ever.
"You breathe fire. And the thing, I saw lightning…"
Phil holds up his hands; electric fire sparks from one to the other.
"Did it hurt?"
He understands Tony's answer now. "I don't remember anything," he lies, crushing every tortured memory against his skull where he can't see them reflected on his eyes.
"Why?"
"Why don't I remember?"
"Why did you do it?"
"Because having a supercomputer in my head was the only way I was ever going to keep up with the ridiculous amounts of paperwork all of you generate," Phil tells him, but Clint shakes his head, and so he tries again, honestly. "No one was coming for you."
"So you came."
"I was a little delayed."
"Phil, goddammit," says Clint, and has to pause to catch his breath. "When the hell are you gonna learn that not everything is your responsibility?"
"Find me a competent minion," Phil says, "and I'll share."
Clint says, "I could be competent."
"You wouldn't make it ten seconds as a minion."
"Try me."
"Fine."
Clint reaches out and takes his hand and it's just as cool-dry-wonderful as Phil's imagined.
"You're hot," Clint says, frowning.
"Side effect," he says.
"Are there a lot of them?"
Phil can breathe now without blades slicing through his chest; he can move like a human being. He can also light up a small city with his mind and read the news from every country in the world without opening his eyes in the mornings.
"Maybe a few," he admits softly, and tries to let his hand slip from Clint's grasp.
"You'll have to teach me about all of them," Clint says.
He doesn't let go.