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Phil doesn’t think about it for a long time. He can’t. If he thinks about it he will collapse right here, dead of a broken heart. His poor boy. His poor, sweet, wounded boy. Of all the people for this to happen to, he would have taken anyone over Clint. Not for a moment does Phil think that Clint is actually a traitor. Compromised, yes, but not treacherous. Not Agent Barton, and not Phil’s Clint. The only thing that makes sense is that he’s somehow enthralled. The idea of Clint’s fierce will subsumed in an enemy’s makes Phil feel sick, and the idea of him being forced to trust someone who’s just using him makes Phil so angry that it feels like he’ll burst with it, like he could scream for a year and not express it. Clint is his. His to love and protect and train, and he can’t stop picturing all that hard-won trust shattering like glass, crumbling down to be ground into snow. Whatever method Loki is using to control Clint, it will damage that deepest part of him that has already been so neglected and abused, and the awareness of that is an agony in every moment.
Phil does his best to be no one but Agent Coulson, and sometimes it’s harder than others. In more flippant moments, he supposes that it’s just his luck to actually meet Captain America, and for it to happen when his sub is in far too much danger for him to care. At least his six-year-old self is happy. Steve Rogers is a good, kind man, and even disoriented and alarmed is polite and gracious when Phil has a little fanboy moment to distract himself from his unspeakable misery.
He stays in constant touch with Natasha, and the relief to hear that Clint is back, that they have him, even if he needs deprogramming or goddamn brain surgery, they have him, and he’s as close to safe as anyone can really be right now. Everything in him wants to go to his sub, but there’s work to be done.
Phil feels like some stupid kid on his first day of training when the spear goes through his chest. He supposes it says something about him as a human being that his first thought is, Yeah, I fucked that up. It’s immediately followed by Clint! And then Loki is gloating, and that gives him all the time he needs to find out just what the new gun does. He keeps firing for as long as he can manage, because he has never wanted to hurt anyone quite as badly as Loki. And then he goes away for a little while and when he comes back Nick is there. Phil just tells him to take care of Clint for as long as he can speak, and then he goes away again.
He comes back to pain. It begins in his head and it travels all the way down to his toes, sharp and cold and unrelenting. Phil is tough. He has dished out and taken a lot of pain. Professional torturers have failed to break him, but this just goes on and on and no one even asks him any questions. There’s nothing but pain whenever he’s awake and he can’t think and Clint isn’t here. They keep telling him he’s in a medical treatment facility, but if that’s true then Clint should be here. Somewhere, even just up behind glass in the observation deck. But he’s not here and they must be lying and it just won’t end. Phil starts to miss being dead, because it didn’t hurt, and he didn’t miss Clint. After hours or days or weeks, he begs to die again, because there is no end to the pain, no reason, so way around, over or through it. No way to let it through him. Phil has always heard that the brain can’t feel, but this is like feeling every synapse injected with something so cold it burns.
One day or night or century he surfaces to see Nick. “Nick! Make them let me die!” He knows there are tears in his eyes, but he’s shocked to see tears in Nick’s good eye as well.
“I can’t do that, Phil.” He reaches out and strokes Phil’s cheek, the feeling familiar and strange and the first comfort in an eternity. “But I can give you something else.”
The next time Phil surfaces, he’s in a little building with palm frond walls. He sits up, and there’s just a pulling ache in his chest, nothing like the constant pain. He’s not strapped down either, and he sits up and then stands, having to crouch a little to keep his head from knocking against the roof. He wanders out into a cool morning on the beach, and sees Clint silhouetted against the sunrise. Of course he runs to him and holds him tight, but he knows there’s a reason he’s here and not there, and Clint smiles sadly when he pulls away.
“Yeah, I am just your memories of me, but I’m safe in the outside world. And wouldn’t you rather hang around with me?” This last is coquettish, and Phil can’t help but smile as Clint loops his arms around his neck.
“I suppose you have a point. This feels like Tahiti. Is it Tahiti?”
“If you want it to be, boss.”
It’s good to have even the memory of Clint around, and the memory of the taste of a perfectly mixed Mai Tai, and the memory of warm sun and the scratchy-slidy texture of sand. But he still longs for the real thing, and sits up as soon as he awakes in the real world again.
“How long has it been?” He rasps, throat dry from having all his fluids delivered intravenously.
“Too long,” Nick says. “Can you stand?”
Phil can stand. He’s a little shaky, but that doesn’t concern him as much as glancing down at his left hand and seeing his ring missing. “Nick?”
“Clint has it. He’s in the next room.”
Phil can’t move very fast and has to lean on Nick’s arm, but he closes the distance between himself and his sub as fast as he can.