"Barton!"

It's a familiar voice, and I stop in the middle of the hall. Phil Coulson. He must've come on base with those supply trucks this morning.

"Hey, Coulson," I reply. "How'd your trip go?" I don't actually remember where he's come from this time, but the question is generic enough to refer to either his trip to the base or all his travels since I saw him last.

"Great!" he beams; obviously something very important happened. I'm trying to remember if he's still dating that cellist, and if there could've possibly been an engagement; there hasn't been any such news through the grapevine, and for a bunch of secret agents and spies, it's scarily accurate as far as personal lives go. Still, it has been wrong before. Only one way to find out.

"Oh?" I ask. When Coulson's like this, you usually only need a vague leading question to find out what he's excited about. A routine "How's it going?" greeting from Natasha had once resulted in a twenty-minute detailed lecture about the new trading cards he'd just bought.

"I got to meet Captain America," he blurts out, and then tries to recover and take a step back. "I mean, not meet him meet him. He was still asleep. But I got to see him."

I stare back at him. There's no real need to be so excited about watching someone sleep. It's actually kind of creepy.

Coulson is the very epitome of professionalism and politeness when he's in the field or dealing with a crisis. But he relaxes when he's within the bowels of S.H.I.E.L.D., surrounded by people who know him and whom he cares about and has faced danger with. It's kind of hard to go back to small talk about the recent heat wave or that big game with someone who's been your back up when death is on the line. If your conversations with an agent always consisted of weather and sports, as if they were the only matters worth discussing, you begin to wonder about trusting them with your life.

I try to turn my stare into an interested look and apparently it works because Coulson starts giving me an embellished account of the retrieval.

So I'll be treated to more stories about the great Captain America. Of course I'd read the reports on Steve Rogers, the miracle of finding him frozen in ice after almost seventy years, and the even greater miracle of him somehow surviving that. He's a legend come back to life, the great Captain America. It's not that I mind him; far from it. We need more good men willing to serve in extraordinary ways, more heroes.

But heroes on paper and heroes in real life are quite different and my experience is that even the good guys are never so clear-cut; and death, or at least distance and time, tend to make good men great. I hope this Captain America is really all that he's supposed to be or we'll have a very disappointed Coulson. That said, Coulson is a bit of an exception to the rule, being on the straight and narrow about as much as a person can be.

I turn my thoughts back to what this conversation is actually about: the man in front of me, not a frozen hero I may never meet. Coulson is partway through a description of his encounter with the S.H.I.E.L.D. wardrobing team, and his insistence on the incorporation of certain key design elements in Rogers' new suit when there's the rumble behind me that quickly grows to a roar. We both step back against the wall as a parade of carts carrying boxes of equipment and supplies go past.

"I guess we are rather in the way," Coulson says when the clacking of twenty-eight plastic wheels on the hard floor has died back down to a dull murmur. "Do you want to grab a drink?"

"I was actually on my way to the lab," I tell him.

"Of course," he responds. "I should check in with agents at base HQ too; but maybe we can finish catching up afterwards?"

"Yeah, we'll talk later," I reply and begin to head off.

"See you around," he calls out and disappears from view. I think no more of it and enter the lab. But within moments it's alarms and confusion and precautions and evacuations. And I realize now that that was the last time I saw Phil Coulson alive.

Author's Note: Thanks so much for reading! :) If you feel like leaving a review, it would be much appreciated. Flames will be sent to the evacuated base.