Chapter Text
2006
The kid doesn’t want to look at him.
Phil’s barely been able to get two words out of him all day, and even that’s just his first name and his age. A word to one of the computer geeks on the op turns up his full name and his status as a foster kid—mother deceased, father unknown—who was reported missing in April.
It's not the first time he's wound up looking after a child during a mission. Kidnappings, hostage situations, or in this case, an 084 in a minor's possession—plenty of missions involve children, and it's usually a matter of handing them over to an agent who has kids of their own for a few hours until a parent or a relative is found.
But there's no parent who can come pick this kid up. There's no relative who wants him. His last set of foster parents lost their license for waiting so long to report his disappearance. And the way he huddles next to the plane window—only responding to doe-eyed, soft-spoken Agent Alvarez, who's showing him how to make a helicopter out of pipe cleaners, flinching every time a male agent gets too close to him—Phil will be damned if he dumps the kid back into foster care.
I wasn’t late, he thinks, as if it could reach across two decades and five hundred miles, to that boy in Indiana who had seemingly seen this day coming. Now what?
But then Leo refuses to go with Agent Alvarez when they land, instead clinging to Phil's hand and quietly asking to stay with him, and Phil thinks, Oh.
So that's what he was talking about.
The other agents shoo the pair of them off to Medical, saying they’ll cover for Phil at the debriefing. Medical’s waiting room is as crowded as it usually is; there are always agents who are just back from their latest missions or who’ve been injured on-site. The injuries range from small cuts to bullet holes, but the nurse running intake zeroes in on the small boy at Phil’s side and ushers them off to the side, where Dr. Abidemi—the closest person SHIELD has to a pediatrician—takes charge of them and leads them into a private examination room. She asks Phil to step out while she examines Leo; it’s another fifteen minutes before she comes out to talk to him.
“So you can see here,” she says, tilting Leo’s brand-new chart towards Phil, “that he’s only one hundred twenty-five centimeters tall, or about forty-nine inches. That’s right on the edge of the bottom fifth percentile for Hispanic boys his age. More concerning, he only weighs twenty kilograms, or about forty-four pounds, which is dangerously underweight. He needs to weigh at least fifty pounds to be healthy; most boys his age weigh fifty-six pounds or so.”
Phil ignores the clenching in his gut as he studies the chart. “What else?” he asks quietly.
“He has almost no fat on his body. He’s been fed decently for a few months, but before that he was most likely starving. And beyond that, well…” Dr. Abidemi purses her lips. “There’s a golf-ball-sized dent in the back of his skull. From the size and shape of the indentation, it was caused by impact with something round and hard. And it most likely wasn’t an accident.”
Phil’s heart almost stops.
“It’s at least a year old,” the doctor tells him. “Leo isn’t saying what caused it, but Legal is working on getting his medical records from his social worker.”
Phil nods at this, and soon after, Leo is released into his care, hugging himself tightly in the too-big army jacket he’d been wearing when they found him. It takes some coaxing to get the boy to climb into his car, but eventually Phil accomplishes it.
The drive back to his apartment is silent; Leo stares out of the backseat window, watching the raindrops drip off the roof of the car. Phil keeps the wipers quiet, not wanting to startle him. By the time they pull up to the apartment building, the sun has long since gone down; his headlights reflect off the front of the building in the late-twilight haze.
“We’re here,” he says quietly, meeting Leo’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
Leo nods and undoes his seatbelt, practically scrambling to get out of the car. Phil does the same at a more sedate pace. At the front door, Leo hangs back nervously and waits for Phil to push open the door before following him in; the pattern repeats itself at the elevator and at Phil’s apartment door.
“So this is my place,” he tells Leo, suddenly nervous. “You can stay in the guest bedroom; I’m not sure how comfortable it’ll be.” More comfortable that what you’re used to, Phil thinks. Even his cheap little apartment in one of the shittier parts of the city had to be better than the streets.
Leo nods stiffly, still rooted in the entryway, looking around the main room.
“I have to get up early tomorrow morning. You can sleep in if you want, but I'd like you to be up by nine—nah, let's make it nine-thirty. Is that all right?"
“That’s okay,” Leo says, and Phil does his best not to startle—it’s the first thing he’s heard Leo say since they got to Medical.
He starts to loosen his tie, before he remembers another issue. “Do you want to shower now, or in the morning?” he asks. It’s not that he minds rearranging his schedule, but it’s better to know that to use up all the hot water.
“I can shower now,” Leo says softly.
Phil leans down and starts untying his shoes. “Then in that case, I’ll change into night clothes now, and then you can have the shower. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Leo finally starts to move, slipping his shoes off and carefully positioning them by the front door before slinking off in the direction of the guest bedroom. Phil waits until the bathroom light flicks on before turning towards his own room, where his pajamas and his bed are waiting for him.
There’s going to be hell to pay in the morning, Phil knows, but that’s the morning’s problem. For now, Leo is safe, and that’s enough.
Phil wakes up to the blare of his phone ringing.
“Coulson,” he greets whoever’s on the other end as he swings his legs out of bed. Hopefully he doesn’t sound as tired as he feels.
“If you want to ask me how my morning is going,” Director Fury gripes, “you transported a minor across state lines yesterday, without the permission of his legal guardian, while on official SHIELD business. How do you think my morning is going?”
“In all fairness, Sir, he doesn’t have a legal guardian,” Phil points out, unclipping a clean pair of slacks from the hanger.
“Then without the permission of his social worker, one Mr. Jacob Wheeler, who has spent the last hour playing an increasingly-impolite game of phone tag with Legal.”
Phil checks the time—just shy of eight—and does some quick time-zone math. “He’s been doing this since six a.m.?”
”Yes,” Fury sighs. “You see what I’m dealing with?”
Now that he has socks and a shirt on, Phil starts heading into the kitchen, making noncommittal noises as Fury gripes into his ear.
“Look, I know you just got back from a mission,” Fury says. “But I need you to come in to work today and help sort this out.”
Phil stops and thinks about it. “I may be able to come in for a few hours,” he says cautiously. “But I’d rather not leave Leo home alone.”
Fury sighs. “You’re keeping him, aren’t you.”
Phil pauses. “Only for a month or two,” he says softly. “Only until we can find someone to adopt him. He seems like a good kid, who’s had a long run of bad breaks, and I think all he needs is a chance to turn his luck around.”
Fury chuckles at that. “And you think being taken in by a SHIELD agent will work for that?”
“Can’t be worse than what he’s already been through.”
Once again, Fury sighs. “Are you sure you’ve got room for a kid in your life? He has some extended family in Houston; you could look into—”
“There is no way I’m making him go back,” Phil interrupts firmly, pulling the cupboard door open harder than he means to; thankfully, he catches it before it slams. “I don’t want to know what his ‘family’ will do if they’re forced to take him in.” He hears movement in the other room, as if a certain someone is trying to listen in while being as quiet as possible.
“Where’s the kid now?” Fury asks.
“At my apartment, where else?”
“You have an apartment?”
”Yes, I have an apartment. Where did you think I lived?”
“I was thinking you went down to the nearest Internet cafe and plugged yourself in to charge overnight,” Fury quips.
Phil’s brain nearly stops at the fact that Nick Fury just made a joke. “I’m not a robot!” he splutters out, barely hearing the stifled giggle in the hallway. Recovering slightly, he says, “Look, sir, no matter what the baby—junior agents say, I’m not actually a robot.”
He can just hear Fury rolling his eyes before he speaks again. “Look. Taking care of a kid is time-consuming. Taking care of a traumatized kid is even more time-consuming. Are you sure that this is the best arrangement for both of you?”
Phil isn’t quite sure what he says to that; he may have threatened to resign before forcefully hanging up. For all of his care earlier, slamming the phone down onto the counter scares Leo into racing back into the guest room. Silently cursing himself, he calls out, asking if Leo is up, as if he hasn’t been hearing him move around for the last few minutes.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no answer. He repeats himself at Leo’s bedroom door, before letting himself in and sitting down at the end of Leo’s bed, carefully keeping his distance. God, Phil wants to hug the boy, but he knows Leo’s not ready yet. “Hey, I have to head into work for a few hours today, so I need you to get up, okay?" he says.
Leo gets up, thankfully. He follows Phil into the kitchen, quietly asks for oatmeal, and sits as close to the door and as far away from Phil as he can manage.
Phil pulls out the brown sugar for him before he puts his shoes on, checking his watch. He has about two minutes before he’s definitely going to be late for work. With that in mind, he straightens his tie and triple-checks that Leo will be fine on his own for a few hours. As he closes and locks the door behind him, Phil can practically hear Leo relax.
Unfortunately, it seems that he’s left his Metro card and normal cell phone behind, a fact he discovers halfway down the hall. So now, he has to go back to his apartment, a fact he regrets as soon as he opens the front door and sees how badly Leo flinches at his return.
Way to build his sense of safety, Phil, he thinks sarcastically. “Having fun?” he asks out loud, noticing that Leo’s trying to hide whatever he was fidgeting with out of Phil’s line of sight.
"I just forgot a few things," Phil reassures him, collecting his phone and Metro card from the counter he left them on. "If you need something to fidget with, I have a few bouncy balls in the junk drawer. What's your diagnosis?"
Leo hesitates. "ADHD."
"Got it. Do you take meds for it?" His only answer is a head shake. "Okay, so I don't need to worry about that. Oh, and by the way—can I see what you made?" Leo shakes his head again. "That's fine. Is there anything you'll need for the next few hours that you haven't already mentioned?"
Another head shake.
"In that case, I will be home in—" he checks his watch "—about three hours."
"Okay," Leo says softly.
As predicted, Phil is a full five minutes late to work, counting up to the moment he sits down at his own desk, coffee in hand. He’s two sips in when he’s summoned to Legal, where he’s immediately put on a Skype call with Jacob Wheeler, who looks like he’s about to burst a vein in his forehead.
“First things first,” Wheeler says immediately. “Is Leo safe?”
Phil relaxes at the man’s concern. “He’s at my apartment,” he confirms. “I asked a neighbor to keep an eye out.”
“And he’s safe there?”
“It’s one of the safest apartments in D.C. My security system is top-notch.”
Wheeler slumps in relief at that and opens up the file in front of him, rattling off everything Leo’s been through. Phil holds back a flinch at every injury mentioned.
No wonder he’s so terrified.
By the time the call is done, Phil is well on his way to having temporary guardianship, and Wheeler is considerably less wary of him. There still needs to be a background check and forms to sign and everything else, of course, but by the time the ball drops in Times Square on Sunday and the new year is officially rung in, he now has a housemate for the foreseeable future.
2007
Leo Valdez, age nine, was never supposed to be a permanent fixture in Phil’s life, but here they are two months later, and there’s no sign of a more permanent placement for Phil’s—ward? Charge? Extremely young roommate?
(Clint says he’s Phil’s minion; Romanoff goes with "asset." Sitwell describes him as Phil’s "annoyance," until Phil finally gets sick of it and tells him that Leo’s not annoying, he’s in fact much quieter than any kid his age should be; Sitwell stops after that.)
It’s not until a school-day morning in late February when Phil figures out what he wants Leo to be to him. Watching Leo stumble around the kitchen, still half-asleep, and muttering something about Cap'n Crunch, he realizes that he wants mornings like this to be the rest of his life.
He wants Leo to be his son.
A month and several bribes (mostly in the form of cookies) to SHIELD's legal department later, Phil has the initial paperwork done and the next several meetings with Leo’s social worker scheduled, and he’s feeling a lot more confident about the whole process. Just in time for Leo’s tenth birthday, he’s approved as a prospective parent; now all that’s left is coordinating with Texas CPS, and ensuring that no members of Leo’s biological family want to adopt him, and filing the rest of the paperwork, and the adoption hearing itself, and, and, and...
It’s a ridiculously complicated process, especially since it’s an interstate adoption, but the look on Leo’s face as he opens his birthday present steals his breath away and makes it all worth it.
When SHIELD sends him back to Houston in June, it’s an opportunity to meet Leo’s biological family, so they can formally relinquish whatever claim to Leo they still have.
The first time he meets Rosa Valdez, he has to stop himself from punching her. She’s nice enough at first. Cordial, even. But Leo has told how she’d threatened him and kicked him out, and Phil knows that this is not a good woman. The less said about that meeting, the better; there had been plenty of raised voices. Phil is very, very glad he sent Leo to hang out with his cousins for the afternoon.
After a tense afternoon, Phil takes Leo out for ice cream so they can both recover after dealing with her. By the time they find a place, both of them are sweating and someone’s stolen Phil’s dummy wallet. The blast of freezing cold air is a welcome relief; the way Leo beelines for the cases, all shyness temporarily vanished, is even more welcome.
Just a few short minutes later, as Phil is mulling over his options, the bell over the front door jingles, letting in a preteen girl, who, conspicuously, doesn’t have an adult with her. She starts asking for samples of just about every flavor, working from left to right, before settling on Rocky Road and paying with a fiver. On a hunch, Phil checks his pocket; sure enough, his dummy wallet is back in place, with five dollars missing.
He and Leo see the girl—Piper—safely back to where her father is working (after she and Leo exchange hotel names and room numbers), but the next day she’s at their hotel, asking to hang out with Leo. Phil hems and haws against their expectant faces and finally decides he can leave them alone for a few hours, reasoning that they’re probably too young to get into any major trouble.
(He comes back to a wet carpet, popcorn all over the floor, and two sugar-hyped children, and immediately regrets his decision.)
(At least their blossoming long-distance friendship is running fairly smoothly. Family Court almost doesn’t. At least until Leo’s Tia Rosa is removed from the proceedings. After that, it’s pretty smooth sailing, something Phil can appreciate. That, and the nice, big IT’S A BOY! balloon Samuel Valdez, Jr. gives him on the last day of the proceedings.)
2008
Even with most of the government dedicated to finding Tony Stark, Fury still needs agents available for other cases, or at least that's what he tells Phil when he protests being stuck on cases closer to home instead of out in the action. Then a case strikes really close to home, and he's glad (even if it opens him up to Leo's teasing).
Audrey Nathan is a cellist, turned thirty-nine last December, being stalked by a man who apparently absorbs energy. The first few incidents can be dismissed (she is a very good cellist) but the call she makes to the D. C. police department—the one that SHIELD intercepts—pings their radar.
(She's also very pretty. Phil tells himself to shut up whenever that thought crosses his mind. He's too old for the schoolboy crushes that Leo's classmates always fall prey to, the ones that never seem to last more than a week.)
(That doesn’t stop him from asking her out once her stalker has been arrested. She declines, but she does give him her number. Who knows? Maybe it will lead somewhere.)
Phil checks in with Audrey a few days later, just to make sure she’s okay. Somehow one exchange becomes another, until they’re texting each other every day and Leo is teasing him about his attempts at romance.
When he sees a stuffed giraffe on Sitwell's windowsill, he takes a picture and sends it to her.
(The next day, he finds a rubber duck in his pocket while he's talking to Sitwell. As he leaves, he pauses, smiles at Jasper, and sets it down right next to the door.)
(Three weeks later—shortly after Audrey asks him out for the first time—Sitwell finally loses it. There's screaming involved, and crying, and at least two stuffed animals have their heads ripped off. It's a miracle he keeps his job. Or a tragedy.)
Bahrain is a shitshow.
On the flight back, Phil knows that when they land, he's going to skip the debriefing and go straight home and hug Leo to pieces. Piper's in California, or he'd hug her too.
(He wishes, not for the first time, that he could keep pictures of them in his wallet. But Phil Coulson, father of two, has to stay separate from Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD. He's never regretted it more.)
Next to him, May stares vacantly out the window, curled in the fetal position. She hasn't moved in fifteen minutes. The other agents pretend they're not staring, but they are.
Phil just keeps smoothing his hand over her hair, humming wordlessly to her. She drinks a little bit of water and eats a couple of airplanes peanuts, and manages fitful bursts of sleep for a few minutes at a time.
“Do you want to stay at my place tonight?” he asks her softly, during one of her more awake moments.
She nods, silently, curling her head into his neck, and Phil glares all the other agents into silence.
Pepper Potts is, put simply, a goddess.
Not to slight his girlfriend, but Phil finds himself tongue-tied whenever he’s around Miss Potts. At least Audrey seems to find it amusing, teasing him over text about whether or not Miss Potts has a six-pack.
Miss Potts is also badass enough to figure out Obadiah Stane’s double-dealing before anyone at SHIELD can, but before Phil and some other agents can arrest him, Stane takes off in his own version of Stark’s armor. As Stane and Stark battle it out over Los Angeles, Phil goes to work creating a cover story for Stark. He lays it out for Stark the next morning before the press conference; Stark says he’ll take it into consideration.
“I am Iron Man,” Stark says on live television, and Phil fights the urge to facepalm.
2009
After almost a year of knowing her, he decides it’s time to introduce Audrey to Leo. It’s a weekend when Piper is visiting, and when Phil comes back home after picking Audrey up, the two of them are in Leo’s room, building something with one of Leo’s sets of Tinker Toys. Audrey comments that the apartment is too big for a bachelor living alone; Phil just smiles and calls for Leo to come in.
He’s not sure how well the kids hit it off with her, but she gets along with them well enough, to Phil’s relief. Leo, in particular, warms up fairly slowly, until the science fair at his middle school at the end of the school year, when a handful of older students try to sabotage Leo’s creation and receive the tongue-lashing of a lifetime from Audrey; Leo warms up to her much more quickly after that.
Through most of June, there are inexplicable, unseasonable storms centering on New York City. Phil ends up assigned to helping the Hammond Foundation branch in the area with the clean-up efforts.
In late August, the kids start their first year at SHIELD’s General Academy, with notes placed in their files—not by Phil—not to separate them unless truly necessary; as a result, the two of them get to share a dorm room, regardless of normal SHIELD policies.
For Phil, work and life go on as they always have: strange, entertaining, occasionally rewarding, occasionally terrifying, but never, ever boring.
2010
Piper and Leo start acting squirrelly around mid-January, but Phil isn’t worried, even as it continues for months; they’ll come to him when they’re ready.
In the meantime, with Stark Industries gearing up for the Expo, he’s assigned to babysitting Stark again. It’s a terrible mission, except for two things: One, he gets to handle a genuine, World War II-era Captain America shield. Two, he gets to threaten to tase Stark into unconsciousness and watch Supernanny as Stark drools into the carpet.
Phil ends up introducing his family to Stark, after the disaster that the Expo becomes. He immediately regrets it. The thought of Leo and Stark working together would be enough to keep him up at night; Piper and Miss Potts, working together, could easily take over the world. Add to that the kids demanding a way to talk to Stark’s AI at all times, and Phil can see nothing but headaches coming from this.
At least Miss Potts gives good advice when it comes to jewelry.
One sunny morning in early June, Phil goes out to buy a ring.
He has it all planned out—the dinner, the dancing, the flowers—but of course it doesn’t go as planned.
Instead, it happens like this:
He asks Leo for permission first, because Leo is the most important person in his life, and he deserves to have a say in this.
Then, on impulse, Phil asks if he wants to go do it right now. Then Leo grabs the camcorder, and they go find Audrey in the living room, and Phil gets a few nice kisses in before he’s on one knee and Audrey starts crying and all but tackles him in joy.
He’s pretty sure that’s a yes.
Just two weeks later, Leo and Piper are invited to spend a week with some of Leo’s more distant relatives in southern Mexico, coming home on the Friday before the Fourth of July.
On Wednesday morning, there’s an earthquake in the same state the kids are in. Just three hours after Phil hears about it, they call to say they’re coming home.
Over twelve hours later, just before midnight, their flight lands in D.C.
The question of why they’re coming home early dies on Phil’s lips when Leo and Piper walk into the waiting area, battered and bruised and flinging themselves into Phil and Audrey’s arms like they thought they’d never see them again.
But now they're home, thank God. His children are home and safe.
His first night as a married man is spent curled up on the couch with his wife, where they’d fallen asleep watching Leverage.
His second night as a married man is spent in the Caribbean, courtesy of SHIELD and over a month of unused leave. They leave Piper and Leo with Natasha, with the promise that she won’t give them any new and interesting weapons and that Piper will visit her father at least once. With the kids secured, Phil and Audrey are able to spend four weeks in the sun: no missions, no rehearsals, no kids. Utter perfection.
During their first week back in D.C., Audrey meets a homeless eight-year-old named Helena. Helena’s social worker meets them at home, and is perfectly happy to start working up the preliminary paperwork now, if you’re sure you want to adopt her.
Oh, we are absolutely sure, Phil thinks but doesn’t say out loud, sharing a smile with Audrey.
Shortly after they begin adopting Helena, Piper approaches him. “HYDRA still exists. It’s hidden inside SHIELD,” she says matter-of-factly. She places a binder on the table and starts flipping through it. “Here’s a partial list of children associated with SHIELD; here’s the current list of safehouses I’ve secured; here’s the outline of an evacuation protocol in the event that their safety is compromised.” While Phil is goggling over that, Piper puts a few sheets of paper down, written in a mix of the Cyrillic, Greek, and Arabic alphabets. “Here’s the list of loyal agents I’ve compiled so far. It’s not as coded as it could be, but we did our best.” On top of that, she dumps a bulging file folder onto the desk. “And this is all the evidence of HYDRA that Leo and I have managed to compile.”
Phil finally finds his voice, looking up at his daughter. “You realize we’ll have to go to Fury with this?”
Now Piper looks nervous.
2011
Piper and Leo start disappearing on weekends. When asked for their location, JARVIS refuses to say anything except that they’re safe. They come home on Sunday night—or early Monday morning, with barely enough time to shower, change clothes, and grab a snack and their backpacks before school—with new scabs and new bruises. On April 14th, the last day before Spring Break, they come home from school just long enough to hug Audrey, Phil, and Helena, pack for the next eleven days, and take off to God knows where. Phil resigns himself to not seeing his children until the Tuesday after next.
They come home the Saturday before they’re supposed to, because Leo has a bullet in his shoulder.
“Explain,” Audrey orders them, when the two of them arrive home, ragged and exhausted, with a bloody bandage on Leo’s left shoulder.
”Fuck,” Leo mutters; Phil decides to pretend he doesn’t hear it.
He gets them settled on the couch with hot chocolate and clean clothes. “So where were you this time?” he asks.
Leo mutters something under his breath. “Did you just say Alabama?” Audrey asks.
“No, I said ow. My shoulder hurts,” he tries to improvise.
“That was a terrible lie,” Piper tells him.
“Focus,” Phil reminds them.
The two of them look at each, seemingly talking it over without saying a word. Then, as always, Piper takes the lead. “What do you know about mythology?”
The story that spills out is fantastical, almost unbelievable, but Phil’s worked for SHIELD for twenty-five years, and he knows the truth when he sees it.
And it’s completely terrifying.
Helena charges out of the hallway where she’d been eavesdropping as Leo starts to describe the building collapsing in Oaxaca and climbs into his lap. Leo wraps his arms around her, holding back tears.
“When did all of this start?” Phil asks gently.
Piper looks up with red eyes. “The Wars, you mean?” She shrugs sadly. “June of 2004, I think?”
Seven years. This has been going on for almost seven years.
Phil reaches out to take Audrey’s hand in his own, searching for comfort. “How did you get involved?” Audrey asked.
“In Oaxaca,” Leo offers up. ”That’s when we found out about... everything. We already knew a little bit because of our powers, but that’s where we found out about the Wars and that there were more people like us. Then it turned out that An—one of our classmates is a werewolf and her great-grandpa had heard of us because of Oaxaca and then we really got involved.
“That’s how Exodus really got going,” Piper adds. “Most of the safe houses on the Exodus list are enclaves, places where preters—people with powers and supernatural beings—can live openly; our classmate’s family home was the first.”
”We’ve been helping where we can. We didn’t get old enough to fight until our last birthday. Usually I work as a medic.”
”And I’m usually with the bucket brigade.”
”Where did this start? Where is it happening now?” Phil asks urgently, itching to jot all of this down.
”It started in the Middle East, as far as anyone can tell. It’s the birthplace of civilization, it makes sense, you know?”
”These days,” Leo picks up, “The Wars are mostly just in North and South America. Everywhere else it’s over or almost over. We figure there’s a couple of years left of fighting, so if the world gets saved every time, then it should all be over then.”
”Why is all of this even happening—do you know?”
”That’s the thing—shit like this doesn’t normally happen. And I know the Isolation really fucked up the records but people have been digging up a ton of stuff from before the Isolation—”
”—and there’s no record of anything like this happening, even going back to ancient times. There’s records of individual battles for the fate of the world, but those battles were spread out over thousands of years, not just a decade or so,” Piper finishes.
”Could be because we’re all so connected now,” Leo suggests. Piper nods in agreement.
Questions pour out from there, asking for specifics, asking why you? Why does this have to be your fight?
“There aren’t enough grown-ups who can fight that are still alive,” Leo whispers.
It makes a horrible, horrible kind of sense.