[Hill/Coulson, one shot, 1600 words, General audience.]

He had the best gallows humor.

He knew a hundred ways to kill a man, he joked, but he couldn’t be bothered to remember them all.

He could manage to make her snort with only a few words, a feat few could manage with paragraphs worth. He could make her laugh.

They sat together at lunch.

She had to talk him into eating real food, but only once. It was always the same thing, a turkey and avocado sandwich. On rye. The really dark sort of rye that no one ever seemed to eat.

He talked about Steve a lot. She didn’t mind. She liked hearing him talk about the people he was fond of. He loved the Avengers. As friends, he said specifically once, they were very dear to him.

He always left her a donut. Didn’t matter if she couldn’t eat it, he always left one. There were three in a bag in her room, waiting to be eaten, and she knew he’d leave another. Always tucked into a brown paper bag with her name scrawled neatly across it.

One day, he told her a secret. He didn’t tell her not to tell anyone, but she wouldn’t say a word. She could tell it was something he trusted her with, she’d never seen him look around so carefully before telling her something, and never so quietly she could barely hear him.

She told him things too. Things she’d never told anyone else. It was easy to talk to him. Almost too easy. But there was one thing she didn’t tell him.

It was just one thing, but now, now she wished she’d said something.

“Agent Coulson’s down…” “A medical team is on it’s way.” “They’re already here, they’re the ones who called it.”

There couldn’t have been a worse moment in her life, and her mind replayed that again and again when she’d try to sleep.

She sat alone at lunch now.

She went to put the bread someone had left out away, and there, tucked in it’s usual spot, was a bag with her name on it. She felt her eyes burning as she took it out of the cupboard. There was a donut in it, she saw when she opened it. Just like always. It was stale.

She ate it anyway.

It was the first time she’d cried since he’d died two weeks ago. She didn’t throw this bag away like she had the others. It was the only thing she had of him now. Her hand trembled as she clenched the folded top of the empty bag. Her name. His writing.

Why didn’t I tell you?

Would it have mattered? He was going to die anyway. Would he have cared? It was so hard to tell with him. She preferred to think he would have cared. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her uniform pulled over the back of her hand, and took the bag upstairs. She put it in her desk drawer, neatly folded.

Some days, she would open that drawer, and she would stare at his writing. She would hear him in her head, sometimes it was something about Steve. Sometimes it was something about work. Sometimes it was part of a story he’d told her, something that had happened during a mission, or on the way to one. It was always sort of muddled, the way memories so often were.

One day she opened the drawer, and very clearly in her head, she heard him say it.

I left you a donut.

She could see him in her mind’s eye, she could see that little smile, the one the others called The Coulson Smile. He lingered in the doorway of the cafeteria a moment longer, before saying something else.

If you want, there’ll always be one.

She closed the drawer on the desk quietly, and laid her head on her folded arms. There wouldn’t always be a donut there. There’d never be a donut there again.

I should have told you. I should have told you the day you showed me those stupid cards.

She didn’t hate the cards. Steve had cleaned them up, and with no idea what to do with them, had given them to her. He hadn’t signed them, but he’d offered to. She could only mutely shake her head for now.

They hadn’t given him a funeral, he didn’t want one. She couldn’t bring herself to go down to the deck the morgue was on. They rarely kept bodies on the helicarrier, but there hadn’t been anywhere to take him.

She didn’t want to see him like that. She wanted to remember him how he was before.

Before.

She wiped her eyes again. Sometimes, she could go days without shedding a tear. Some days, she couldn’t go ten minutes, it seemed.

It’d been a month, by now. It still hurt as much as the day she’d heard the news. She went down to the cafeteria at lunch time, and sat alone at the table again. Someone left the bread out again, and she went to put it away.

There was a brown paper bag tucked in one corner.

Her heart lurched and her stomach twisted in on itself. She reached in and pulled it out. There was nothing on it, but it was heavy, the same familiar weight those bags always had. She opened it.

Inside was a donut.

She dropped it, the whole thing smacking down on the counter and bouncing slightly. She backed away from it. It had to be some kind of sick joke. It was even the same kind of donut, the chocolate filled powdered ones he favored.

She couldn’t help it. She threw it away, shoving it down in the bottom of the trash, her heart pounding as she did it. She resolved to put it out of her head.

The next day, there was another one.

What the hell is going on?

She wanted to report it to Fury. Especially when the donuts kept showing up. But what was she going to tell him? Someone was giving her donuts like he had, and she didn’t want them, because it was too much like a bad joke? He’d throw her out of his office for wasting his time, tell her to handle it herself.

Fine. She’d just stake out the cafeteria and catch whomever it was in the act.

It took three days. Three days of sitting in the exactly perfect spot that no one would see her. She specifically took the time off so she wouldn’t end up missing anything.

And then she looked up from her fifth cup of coffee of the day, and someone was shoving a brown paper bag into that cupboard. She got up quietly. Walked over so she stood on the other side of the cabinet door where they couldn’t see her easily.

“Ha! Got you. Stop leaving me those donuts. I don’t want them.”

Whomever it was didn’t even jump. The door calmly swung shut. “I thought you liked them.”

She stared.

She couldn’t stop staring.

No, it can’t be. They said you died.

No words could come from her. Her vision blurred. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. The room spun.

“Maria? Are you all right?” She felt a hand on her arm, supporting her easily. Her heart pounded in her ears, so hard she could barely hear that voice.

“You died.”

Her voice was hoarse, barely recognizable as her own.

“I know I did.” He didn’t make any effort to argue or explain.

“You died.” Her voice, still hoarse, was accusing now.

“I didn’t want to.” He had to use both hands to hold her up now.

“I ate lunch alone. I still eat lunch alone.” She felt like everything was collapsing under her.

“I’m here now. You’re not alone now.”

Tell him. Tell him now. He’s here now tell him. She was afraid it was a dream, though, or a hallucination brought on by not sleeping for three days straight.

Tell. Him.

No use arguing now, not when it was that stubborn. She opened her mouth.

“Phil.”

He nodded, encouraging her to speak. “I’m here.”

“Phil.” She reached out and clutched the lapels of his suit coat, the clip for his badge jamming into the base of her thumb. It hurt.

It gave her the strength to try to speak what she’d meant to tell him for so long.

He looked at her, calmly, patiently, just waiting.

She clung more tightly to his lapels, the clip stabbing her now, hurting. It wasn’t deep enough to cut the skin, but it gave her clarity of thought. She spoke then, in a clear and recognizable voice.

“I love you.”

He just stared at her, and her heart sank. It was like those words were alien to him, like he’d never heard them before, even though she knew he had. Then he gently unwound her hands from his coat.

“I know.”

Her brows furrowed. “How—?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. But I knew. It’s how I could do what I did.”

She let out a choked noise, half sob- half laugh, and found herself folded against the scratchy wool of his suit, his body solid underneath. “This is real right?”

“Yes, it is.”

It was real. It took her a while to really, really grasp that. But it was real. She couldn’t ask how. But she could give him the cards Steve finally signed, and watching The Coulson Smile evolve into a real smile was nothing short of amazing.

As was the kiss he pressed to her cheek suddenly before leaving the room for his day-long meeting with Director Fury.

She just stood there staring after him.

alpestris:

Ok my dash is being super super slow, I need to follow more people.

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