Chapter Text
The next morning, Hope Lutheran School was the site of the most recent Coulson-run field operation. Clint just tried to keep up. As child-Phil wrestled his colored contacts into his eyes again, Clint cooked breakfast and called the school secretary to make an appointment for a morning school tour. They loaded into the car as soon as Phil brushed the syrup off his teeth.
Yesterday’s shopping trip had netted them sufficient supplies to blend in with the locals, so Phil arrived at the school entrance in bright red tennis shoes, a Ninjago t-shirt, and pre-faded jeans. Jeans that Clint had carefully modified the afternoon before to conceal Coulson’s tiny push-dagger. They might be spending the morning surrounded by children, but Clint wasn’t letting them go unarmed. He wasn’t crazy.
They were greeted not by their guide, but by the secretary, Mrs. Jones, at her desk outside the principal’s office, and she asked them to wait in the couch opposite the reception counter. “Mrs. Khouri is the parent volunteer in charge of your tour,” she informed them. “She’ll be here as soon as she gets Pascale’s backpack to her room. She forgot it this morning and Mrs. Khouri had to make a special trip back to the house.” She shook her head. “At least it’s not far.”
“We’ll be fine here,” Clint assured her. They sat down side by side on the couch and just before Clint could cross his legs, Phil migrated into his lap. Clint dug his iPod out of his pocket and handed it to Phil. “Turn down the sound this time,” he said as Phil loaded Angry Birds.
Phil had barely demolished two pig structures when a woman in her late thirties emerged from the upper grades’ hall.
“Mr. Martin?” Her thick black braid swept forward over her shoulder as she leaned down to shake Clint’s hand. “I’m Nadia Khouri,” she said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Clint shifted to wrap his left arm around Phil’s waist as he unwound his right to return her handshake. Her fingers were slim and delicate in his callused grip. “No problem,” he said. “Gave the boss here time to work on his budding ballistics skills. Close it now,” he said to Phil.
“Ba!” Coulson complained. “One more level? Please?” He twisted around to aim beseeching eyes directly at Clint.
“Nope,” Clint said, plucking the iPod from Phil’s grip and standing slowly to ease Phil from Clint’s lap to his own two feet. “Time for the tour. Say ‘hi’ to Mrs. Khouri.”
At his cue, Agent Phil Coulson swung into action to establish his cover as James Martin, Jr. “Hi, Mrs. Khouri! I’m James, just like Ba. That’s my dad,” he confided seriously. “Not everyone calls their dad Ba but I do. Have you ever heard anyone call their dad that? Are we going to see the whole school today? Are we going to see the other kids? Do you have any kids here?”
Mrs. Khouri, to her credit, rolled with the interrogation, answering the last question first. “I have four children here, and Layla will be in your class if you decide to come here. She was disappointed when she heard you had the ‘flu and couldn’t start last week.”
Then her gaze shifted slightly from Phil to Clint. “Layla’s my youngest. She’s five.” She crouched down to look at Phil at eye level. “And she calls her father ‘Baba.’ That’s pretty close to ‘Ba,’ wouldn’t you say?”
Phil peered at her intently, scrutinizing her black-lined eyes and elegantly arched brows. “Does she have pretty eyes like you? Ba’s and mine are boring,” he said in an aggrieved tone, turning to meet Clint’s workaday-brown eyes with his own.
“Layla’s eyes are dark like mine,” Mrs. Khouri said. “But yours and your father’s are a nice brown, too. Not boring at all.”
Having established his eye color to the entire office area, Phil honest-to-God scuffed the toe of his shoe against the floor and proceeded to underline his recent bereavement. “Not like Mama’s,” he said, looking down at the vinyl tiles. “Hers were super pretty, right, Ba?” he asked, lifting his face up to Clint’s for confirmation.
Before he could progress to a wobbly lower lip or teary eyes, Clint hugged him around the shoulders. “Yeah, they were. But that’s probably enough, boss,” he said gently. “We should let Mrs. Khouri show us around, OK?”
Coulson was still the best field backup ever. When Clint needed to plant a bug, Phil’s childish enthusiasm was enough to distract their guide from Clint’s actions. He waved arms, coughed, ran to the other side of the room, and most importantly had their guide’s complete attention. Admittedly, after the second time it was because Mrs. Khouri was probably afraid that Phil would fall off of a chair. Again.
Where he really shone was the playground, however. While Clint “interviewed” Mrs. Khouri on her satisfaction with the school, Phil covered almost the entire play structure and reached every corner of the fence and the adjacent building wall. Clint had to “rescue” Phil from several of these locations, giving him an opportunity to place the surveillance equipment without raising anyone’s suspicions.
Finally Phil sprinted from the swingset and barrelled almost into Clint’s knees. “I like it here, Ba!” he exclaimed as Clint swept him up into a shallow toss and then caught him against his chest. “The swings go super high! An’ there’s lots of places to climb!”
“Yeah?” Clint confirmed, laughing. “You could have fun here?”
Phil nodded earnestly. “When can I start? I want to meet the other kids soon!”
Clint looked a question to Mrs. Khouri, who smiled.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “We’ve been holding your space since your father called us a few weeks ago.” Clint had to give the lady props -- she addressed her comment directly to Phil.
Then she turned her attention to Clint. “Mr. Martin, there are a few more forms we need you to sign and fill out, and then James will be ready to start on whichever day you decide.” She indicated the entrance back into the school.
Clint dropped Phil down to his own feet and Phil grasped his hand -- what he could reach of it, which was pretty much just Clint’s forefinger -- firmly. “Let’s head in, then,” Clint said.
* *
Mrs. Khouri deposited them back at the front desk where Mrs. Jones (call me Elizabeth, please!) handed Clint a stack of forms to fill out, a Parents’ Guide, a school calendar, a tuition schedule, and a school supply list.
Clint tucked most of the papers away to deal with that night and instead looked over the list he’d taken from the school secretary. Scissors, glue sticks, Ticonderoga pencils, Crayola crayons, Crayola markers...
“I’m so sorry,” she said, probably responding to the contemplative frown on his face, “but because James is starting in the middle of the year, you’ll have missed all the school supply sales. You’ll have to pay full-bore prices for the supplies, I’m afraid.” She really did look apologetic, and Clint could understand why. The name-brand versions of everything Coulson would require for kindergarten would easily be triple to four times the generic sort.
Clint didn’t remember starting kindergarten, but he would imagine that all his supplies had been the bargain brands. They certainly had been in the orphanage, and in foster care. He remembered getting his new pencils for the school year -- not many, but new, and that was awesome -- and excitedly grinding them to pointy newness in the hand-crank sharpener. Until the point broke. Or the wood splintered. Or the lead broke in the barrel and the lead fell out.
He remembered sharpening his pencils in class, taking forever, because the cheap wood split and fragmented if you weren’t careful and then the lead would break while you were writing and then you had to sharpen your pencil again and all of a sudden you were spending all your time standing at the pencil sharpener and you had missed what the teacher was saying and you were further behind than you’d been and foster homes didn’t want dumb kids, didn’t want kids who couldn’t keep up, who were failing in school.
Sharpen the pencil carefully, so gently, so precisely; one turn too far and the wood splits, the lead falls out; start again. Fit yourself into the family so carefully, so gently, so quietly. One noise, one request too many and the family splits, the foster kid falls out. Start again.
Soft fingers squeezed around his, drawing him back to the present of echoey commercial tile and humming fluorescent lights and adulthood and quasi-parenthood. “Ba?” Coulson’s soft voice, almost as much as the tugging of his warm hand, pulled Clint out of his thoughts. He could hear the echo of “Barton?” underneath the childish voice. “Is it OK, Ba?” Coulson asked. Because if anyone knew him, it was Coulson, who had seen him shake off a thousand lousy memories of his childhood.
Clint dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around Coulson’s tiny frame, brushing a kiss on the soft brown hair at his temple. “Yeah, boss, it’s OK. Just thinking.”
He squeezed Coulson again, thankful, and then pulled back to grin at him. “Ready to hit the office supply store?” he teased.
“Whoo-hoo!” Phil hooted, all four-year-old enthusiasm and absolutely zero “inside voice”. “ALL the Post-It notes!”
* *
Driving back and forth to Liberty to shop at the big box stores there took up a big chunk of their day, and Coulson had an abbreviated nap before Clint fixed them dinner. Once their bellies were full of broccoli and stroganoff, Coulson settled cross-legged on the floor in the living room to organize his supplies.
He threw Clint a look over his angular shoulder. “Do we have any movies?”
Before Clint could answer “no”, JARVIS interjected, “Indeed we do, Agent Coulson. We have access to most online content and libraries and the entire Disney/Pixar oeuvre.”
Coulson’s fluffy eyebrows rose into his hair. “All the Disney movies?” he asked in a disbelieving tone, looking to Clint for confirmation.
Clint shook his head. “I don’t pretend to understand it. Something about fair use, archival backup, blah-blah, and JARVIS being the person who purchased the movies in the first place and registered them online?” He shrugged. “He tells me it’s legal and I figure between that and garden-variety plausible deniability, we’re good.”
“That, and them coppers’ll never take me alive. Sirs,” JARVIS added, his pronunciation exceptionally precise and crisp. As Clint and Phil chuckled, he continued, “May I suggest Finding Nemo for this evening’s entertainment?”
Clint thought he detected a hint of amusement in JARVIS’ tone, but he he didn’t catch on to the ulterior motive until several minutes into the film.
“First day of school! First day of school! Wake up, wake up! C'mon, first day of school!”
“I don't wanna go to school. Five more minutes.”
“Not you, dad. Me!”
Clint turned from watching Nemo try to wake Marlin and pinned Coulson with a threatening scowl. “I swear on my bow, Coulson, you do that tomorrow morning, they will never find the shredded remains of your Captain America memorabilia collection.”
Coulson had the nerve to grin at him -- he’d given up on winks after discovering that his current facial muscles didn’t have the coordination to do much more than a slow, rolling blink with an associated nose scrunch -- and continued writing ‘James’ in black Sharpie on his pencils. “Have you met four-year-old me?” he asked. “One of these mornings you’re going to need to surgically tetach -- De-tatch,” he repeated deliberately, “me from my pillow.”
Clint grinned. With work and focus, Coulson was enunciating clearly almost one hundred percent of the time. When he got truly agitated -- or snarky -- though, he tended to miss some consonants. He was still more comprehensible than most of the kids Clint had seen today. He’d do fine in school. If Clint could manage to get him signed up properly.
Clint reached over and fluffed Coulson’s hair, dropping his hand to rub across the nape of his neck. Without the daily input and reinforcement from Nancy, Coulson’s occupational therapist, he was going to need to be very deliberate about initiating skin-to-skin contact with Coulson. He squeezed Coulson’s neck gently, then went back to his paperwork.
Most of the forms were straightforward enough, and after years of training under an ever-so-slightly compulsive SO, these civilian forms were a breeze. But suddenly, one caught him up short, and he felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. How could he possibly have been so short-sighted to have never considered this?
“Shi-- uh, shoot. Uh, Coulson?” Clint laid the paperwork aside for a moment and rolled his neck to loosen the kinks. At Coulson’s inquisitive look, he continued. “The school wants to know when you had your immunizations.”
“And?”
Clint scanned over the lines. MMR, polio, DTaP, influenza, hepatitis, and on and on and on... “Well, we could make up some numbers and dates, here, but the real question is...” Clint winced at his oversight. “Have you had all your shots? Cuz, um,” he made a rolling gesture with his hand, “you don’t have any of your scars, freckles, tan lines... I don’t see why you would have your antibodies, either.”
Why hadn’t he thought to ask? He’d planned to enroll Coulson in school; how could he have forgotten shots? “All those tests they did on you at SHIELD? Did they happen to mention whether you still had your immunities to the things that you’d been vaccinated against?”
“No, they drew enough blood for it, they should’ve been able to see the inside of my bones, but I don’t remember them saying.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“I am not interested in going to a pediatrician and getting a dozen shots, Barton, especially if I don’t actually need them.”
“Sirs, if I may?” JARVIS interrupted. “I downloaded Agent Coulson’s entire medical file -- adult and de-aged -- before we departed the SHIELD facility. Judging by the tests run by SHIELD medical...” There was a brief pause that Clint was learning was simply to give the humans time to prepare to receive data. “Agent Coulson has antibodies for all the required childhood vaccinations.” Clint felt relief wash over him, distinctive and bright as oxygen-rich air after hypoxia.
“In addition,” JARVIS continued, “Agent Coulson’s blood work contained antibodies for anthrax; hepatitis A, B, C, and E; malaria; meningitis; pneumococcus; rabies; smallpox; tuberculosis; typhoid; varicella; yellow fever--”
Clint interrupted the report with a low whistle. “Rabies, sir? Seriously?”
“Angola,” Coulson replied tightly.
“Right.” Clint shuddered, then shook off the memory. “Just as glad we don’t have to get you re-stuck for all of those shots. Looks like we can just fill in some plausible dates, then, JARVIS?” He started to fill in the blank lines, wishing once more that he could hand some of the job over to Coulson himself.
As if reading his mind, Coulson gave him a small smile and a shake of his head before he returned to labeling his school supplies with a studied single-mindedness.