Fic: "Three for Playing" 2/3
title: three for playing
author: perletwo
rating: PG (this part)
fandom: Marvel movieverse
warnings (this part): language
prompt: tl;dr: Coulson gets kittenfied and witnesses Clint's many facets.
The cat has nine lives: three for playing, three for straying, three for staying. - English Proverb
God made the cat in order to give man the pleasure of petting the tiger. - Anonymous
The front room of Agent Coulson’s bungalow was a disaster.
Clint and the cat took a few steps into the house and stopped to survey the damage. Furniture was overturned, pictures were knocked off the walls, and glass was broken into unrecognizable fragments.
The cat showed no signs of finding anything at all amiss.
Home!
“Signs of a struggle,” Nick Fury said, standing in the middle of the room while forensic techs worked around him. “Pretty impressive really, given how Spartan Agent Coulson keeps his quarters.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Clint’s eyes locked on to his boss’s boss. “Sir? What can I do?”
One of the forensic techs overheard and shouted, “You can get that damn cat out of here - it’s contaminating the scene!”
Clint blushed and bent down to grab the kitten, who was sniffing at a puddle of coffee by an overturned armchair. “Sorry.”
“Wait,” the tech said, and hurried over with a pair of tweezers in hand. She tweezed a bit of loose fluff from Phil’s coat and dropped it into an evidence container. “For elimination purposes. Now get the damn cat out of here.”
No! Home! Mine!
He carried the struggling ball of fur back to the jeep, dropped Phil onto the passenger seat and slammed the door shut before he could escape. He could hear the kitten’s infuriated wails even through the glass.
“Can it, cat, you’re not gettin’ back out. You’re already getting me in trouble with the boss.”
Clint rejoined Fury inside the bungalow. “Sir?”
“What you can do,” Fury said as if they hadn’t been interrupted, “is use those hawk eyes of yours. Anything that looks wrong, anything out of place, anything odd, let me know.”
He shook his head. “Sir, I’ve never been in Coulson’s house before. For all I know it’s always like this.” Fury turned his head and gave Clint the one-eyed stare every SHIELD agent dreaded. “Okay, yeah, I know, he’s a clean freak and like an anti-hoarder, if his office is anything to go by. But my point is, I don’t know what in here’s his stuff and what might not be.”
“Oh, it’s all his stuff, Barton,” Fury replied, and released him from the Stare to look around the room again. “But every instinct I have says something in here is wrong, something’s off here, and I can’t. Place. It.” He shook his head. “So, you’re going to look around here, and you’re going to look at what the forensics people come up with. You’re going to find the pattern, and you’re going to find where the pattern breaks. And then you’re going to call me, personally.”
Clint’s stomach clenched. “Yes sir.”
*********
A quarter of an hour later, Clint got back into the jeep and found the kitten looking smug.
Phil had knocked Clint’s coffee mug out of the cup holder to spill all over the plastic cover of the emergency brake, and while he’d licked up much of the bitter black liquid, there was still a sticky residue everywhere. Clint growled in frustration.
“That’s it, cat. We’re skippin’ the pound. I’m throwin’ you to the base’s Rottweilers.”
He reached for the kitten, and Phil gave an angry screech and swatted Clint’s hand with claws out. Blood welled in the scratches, and the cat backed down onto its belly, eyes wide with sudden fear.
Clint stared at the scratches on his hand in shock, and then the anger and frustration on his face broke apart and he began to hyperventilate. His hands took up their places on the steering wheel and clenched as though hanging on for dear life.
“ohgodohGODohgodohgod,” he chanted under his breath, fighting not to sob. Phil crossed the emergency brake hutch and climbed into his lap, stood on his hind legs between Clint’s torso and the steering wheel, front paws on his chest, and mewed.
“What’m’I gonna do, cat? I don’t know what to do.” He fought to catch his breath. “My friend is missing. I don’t know how to find him. And there’s blood in there, cat. Not much, okay, but still. Blood. If he’ hurt - if he’s -”
A sob did break through his reserves, strangled and humiliating. Phil trilled sympathetically and rubbed his cheeks over Clint’s, nudged his nose against his friend’s, butted the top of his head under Clint’s chin. One of his hands released its death grip on the steering wheel and dropped to pet the cat’s soft fur.
“Thanks. I needed that,” he said, a little more in control of his breathing.
“Tell you a secret, cat? I’ll deny this if you ever tell anyone else…But I don’t really have very many friends. I mean, I know a lotta people and I get along okay with most of ‘em, but not real friends. You know? It’s pretty much just Fury, ‘cause he brought me in here, and Natasha, ‘cause she was my partner and you gotta love your partner way down in the deep. And Coulson, ‘cause - I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his hair. “He talks to me like I’m as smart as he is, and he expects I’ll understand him. He lets me get away with saying stuff he wouldn’t take from most people, and it’s like he thinks I’m funny, the good kind of funny. He treats me like I’m worth something.”
Phil mewed and licked at Clint’s chin with a rough tongue. Clint lowered his head to touch his forehead to the cat’s. “Okay, yeah. Got you too, now, I guess. But my point is, I haven’t got so many real friends I can afford to just go losin’ one of ‘em, you know? I gotta - I gotta - I don’t know what I gotta do. But I gotta get him back home. Safe. Somehow.”
He glanced down at his hand, where the scratches were scabbing over. Phil’s eyes followed, and he mewed apologetically.
“Ahhh, forget it, cat. I’m not throwin’ you to the Rotties.” He scratched Phil’s ears. “Those dogs wouldn’t stand a chance.”
*********
Clint drove them more sedately to the base’s archery range. He told the cat to stay on the locker room bench while he changed into workout gear, and for a wonder it did as it was told.
“I gotta do this anyway, every day, and besides it’ll help clear some of the worry out of my head,” he told Phil. “It’ll take the science geeks some time to finish up what they’re doing. Best to take my mind off it.”
He led the cat to a yellow line at the perimeter of the range and knelt, pushed the cat’s head down to the line. “See that? That’s your wall, there. You don’t go beyond that line. Hell, you don’t even go near that line. Sharp pointy things are gonna be flying around beyond that line. You got me?”
Phil meowed, head-butted Clint’s knee, and with nose and tail in the air trotted to a table against the wall which held sign-in and scoring sheets, spare targets, broken shafts and extra fletchings, flints to sharpen arrowheads and other bits of detritus. Clint’s coffee cup rested there, and the cat leapt up onto the corner of the table beside the travel mug and settled down, tail swishing.
“Good cat. Smart cat.”
Clint entered some commands into a touchscreen panel, took up his bow and found the starting mark for a training exercise. A buzzer sounded and Clint ran, aiming and firing at the first target to drop from the ceiling. Two more sprang up from panels in the floor several yards down, and he fired one arrow after another for bulls-eyes. A moving target slid down the far wall in time with him, quickly nailed, and the next yawed in a zigzag pattern along the wall. Once that one was dispatched, he shot out five small targets that popped up like weeds in his path from the floor and a floating target much like a weather balloon. He crossed a line at the end of the range and another buzzer signaled the end of the exercise.
He walked back toward the table where Phil sat watching, and his brow furrowed. He picked up his coffee and sipped, and considered the cat.
“I got a friend who likes to watch me shoot,” he mused. “Not every day, but when he can get clear. He’ll always lean against this table, with one hand just about where you’re sitting, and a cup of coffee in the other.”
Phil mewed and twitched his whiskers. Clint shrugged. “I dunno. Just felt…familiar, you watching me right there like that.” He gave the cat a quick pet, then set up the next exercise.
*********
Once his training session was done, Clint and the kitten drove to another building, checked in with security - who gave Phil the hairy eye, but let him in on Clint’s recognizance - and went to Clint’s desk, set in a half-cubicle in a bullpen, with the sterile look of a workspace seldom used.
Several reports from the forensic techs awaited him atop the desk. Clint pulled up his desk chair, and the kitten leapt onto the desk top to sit upon them. Clint sighed.
“C’mon. Official government documents, there,” he said, and gave Phil’s chest a poke. The cat lifted its nose in the air haughtily and moved back a few steps, as if it was all his own idea, then licked a paw and began washing his face.
Clint studied the incident scene reports, reading and re-reading, and finally set them down and rested his head in his hands as though it ached. Very little of it had made sense to him, though one thing did come through loud and clear: The small amount of blood found in the bungalow matched Agent Coulson’s records. Clint’s hands began trembling when he reached that point.
“These damn things might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the good they’re doin’ me,” he muttered. Phil stepped forward and butted the top of his head against the top of Clint’s.
“Okay, yeah, thanks,” he muttered, sitting back up. Then he picked up a stack of forms from his inbox. “Tell you what. I’ll make Coulson happy and catch up on my sitreps and in-trips. Maybe while I’m doing the drone work something’ll percolate in my subconscious.”
The cat favored him with a cheerful meow and settled down to watch. Clint chuckled, scratched under its chin, and waded in to the stack of paperwork.
Two hours later he was down to the last three forms, and Phil was dozing atop the forensics reports.
“All right, cat, my eyes are about to fall out of my head. Whattaya say to some lunch?” The cat’s head lifted with comic speed at the sound of the last word, and Clint laughed. “Oh yeah. You know at least a few words of English, all right…” He rubbed Phil’s neck affectionately, and started to brush a bit of cat dander from his hand.
Then he stopped, looked at the few strands of fur clinging to his hand, and then stared into middle distance. Shooed the cat off the forensics reports, and pulled out the diagram of the scene and some close-up photographs. Stared into middle distance some more, and then turned to his computer and called up a few Google searches.
Ten minutes later, he picked up his phone and dialed an interoffice extension.
“Agent Barton, calling for the Colonel…Well, how long’s…Okay. If you’ll please ask him to meet me at this morning’s incident site as soon as possible,” he told Fury’s aide. “Tell him I think I’ve found him his pattern.”
*********
Phil perched atop the overturned armchair, tail swishing, and watched Clint pace off the length of the room with the occasional detour. He was muttering under his breath, and only stopped when the door opened.
“Agent Barton. I understand you’ve got something for me.” Nick Fury strode in like a man fully expecting his demands for answers to be met.
“Yes sir.” Clint walked up to meet him. “Hold this -” he shoved an enlarged copy of the crime scene diagram into one of Fury’s hands, “- and this.” He scooped up the kitten and dropped him in Fury’s other hand, earning himself a scolding yowl.
Fury glared down at the kitten dubiously; Phil lifted his nose haughtily, then deigned to sniff at Fury’s wrist, finally rubbing his cheek against it in acceptance. “Barton, is this - creature -”
“- necessary? Yes sir. In fact I believe he’s essential.”
Fury’s eyebrows lifted. “Does it have a name?”
“Yes sir. It’s Cat.You’ll remember that the cat came in with me this morning and a tech bitched us out about it, the cat and me. That’s why the cat’s fur had to be entered into evidence and eliminated. But.”
Clint circled behind Fury to stand in the open doorway. “Cat and I walked in and we both stopped right here.” He walked to the overturned armchair and the coffee spill. “That’s maybe five, six steps in from the doorway. The only fiber transfer from the cat that can definitely be attributed to this morning is marked on that diagram as 12A.”
Fury studied the diagram. “There are more incidences of fur here,” he said. “There,” he pointed to the bookcase on the far wall, “and there.” He pointed to a spot below the window.
“Yes sir, and that’s where I believe the pattern breaks. This morning the cat did not go anywhere near those fiber transfer sites before I took him out and locked him in the car.” Clint looked at Fury, then at Phil. “I believe the cat had been in this room before this morning.”
Fury held up one finger of the hand holding the diagram. “Devil’s advocate, Agent. Cats shed, and fur flies.”
“Yes sir, it does. But this cat’s coat is short and glossy, and it doesn’t shed much unless it comes into direct contact with something. I realized that this afternoon when I petted him and got a few - a very few - strands of fur on my hand. There are a lot more on my shirt sleeve, where I’ve been carrying him. You’ll probably see a bit of loose fur on the cuff of your sleeve there, sir. But his coat’s not very fluffy, and his fur doesn’t just spontaneously fly.”
He crossed the room to the bookcase. “If that cat’s fur was found here, and there,” he pointed to the spot beneath the window, “and it has been confirmed that the fur found here is from that cat, then the cat had to have been in physical contact with these spots.”
“And that can’t be accounted for by this morning’s intrusion, by your reasoning,” Fury said.
“Right.” Clint walked back to join Fury near the doorway. “Here’s how I reconstruct what happened. Coulson comes home on his lunch break to get that file. He stops about here where we’re standing, judging by the position of his briefcase, and surprises an intruder - already in the middle of the room, I think. If he followed protocol, Coulson would have identified himself, drawn down, and ordered the intruder to stop whatever he was doing.”
“Only one, you think?” Fury said in an undertone, to avoid disrupting the flow of Clint’s thoughts.
“I think we’d see a lot more destruction here if there were more than one,” he said. “A physical struggle ensued, starting here,” he walked to the overturned chair, end table and coffee cup, “progressing to here,” he took a few more steps to the broken coffee table, “and here, where I think Coulson took cover behind the sofa, which was destroyed by - I don’t know what, some kind of energy blast.
“My guess is that Coulson was then picked up bodily and thrown with considerable force into the bookcase.” He walked over to the damaged shelves. “The impact broke this picture frame, and the jagged metal and glass are what I think caused the bleeding.” He stared hard at the broken frame and added, “Yes. There are at least two shards of glass missing.” He took a deep breath and shook that mental image away.
“Coulson would have then fallen to the floor, probably on hands and knees, if not naturally then in an attempt to rise. Quick and dirty measurements from the height of impact tell me he most likely landed here.” A few steps took Clint to another marker. “This is also the first site at which a small amount of cat fur makes an appearance. There is no blood trail, only these few drops by the shelves. In fact, all signs of Agent Coulson’s physical presence just stop at this point. Maybe he went out the window, but there are no footprints or any other evidence outside to support that. Maybe the intruder carried him out of here bodily; but then we should have some clear shoe imprints in the carpet from the weight of both bodies, and we don’t.”
Clint walked to the window. “In fact, the only other forensic oddity between here and the doorway is this patch of fur beneath the window. It’s got a lot more fur transfer than the site by the bookcase, which suggests to me that the cat spent some time in this spot; I don’t know why.”
As if in answer, Phil meowed, stood and stretched on its perch in Fury’s large hand, leapt to the floor and trotted over to Clint. He nudged aside the plastic cone marking the spot, turned in a tight circle twice, and lay down. He stretched out to full length, extending all twenty toes, then drew back into a ball and settled down to nap in the afternoon sun.
Clint stared down at the kitten and smiled. “And there you go.”
“You think the cat is Agent Coulson,” Fury concluded.
“Transformed somehow.” He nodded. “You think it sounds crazy. I think it sounds crazy. Find me another theory that fits the physical evidence and I’ll drop it like a rock.”
“Any other support for your theory?” The corner of Fury’s mouth twitched.
Clint nodded. “I spent a little time reading up on feline behavior. When I let this little guy into my place last night, the first thing he did was get on the arm of the sofa and knead his paws on it. When I sat down, he rubbed his face and the top of his head on me. When he went exploring the next room, he rubbed his sides against the legs of all the furniture and at intervals along the baseboards and walls. This is called scent marking; cats do it to mark their territory, warn other cats off with their personal scent. When the cat came in here this morning, he made no effort to mark anything. That little table there, and the coat rack, those are within even the small range of movement he had before I locked him out, but he didn’t go near anything but the coffee spill.” Clint took a deep breath. “I think it’s because his scent is already marking this room - that it’s all over everything in here, in fact. I don’t know of any human with a sense of smell that could confirm that, but…”
“But it fits.” Fury took out his cell phone and scrolled through the numbers saved in it, engaged one. “Mr. Wong? Is the doctor in residence at the moment? Ah. Good. …Yes, I understand. He’s a busy man. But if you’d please let him know that SHIELD is in need of a house call…”
*********
Fury uprighted the overturned armchair and settled down in it. Clint sat on the floor next to the kitten, and gave it an occasional pet, more to reassure himself than Phil.
They waited there an hour before a visitor entered. Clint looked up at the man and suppressed a snicker. Even the ersatz Gypsy fortune tellers he’d known in the circus hadn’t dared go for this level of wardrobe schmaltz. The man wore black boots and tights, a billowy blue silk tunic belted with an orange sash that matched his long orange gloves, and a red cloak with a high collar and a gaudy gold amulet holding it closed at the throat. His black hair was slicked back, the better to show off the white streaks at his temples, and his mouth and chin sported a split goatee and a really bitchin’ fu Manchu ‘stache.
“Dr. Strange.” Fury stood to greet the new arrival, a hand outstretched. “Thank you for coming so quickly.”
“Always a pleasure to serve my country, Colonel,” Strange said silkily. “I’m sure you will return the favor by continuing to allow me a certain latitude in my…business.”
“We’re here anytime you need us, as long as you’re here anytime we need you,” Fury replied. “Such as now. Meet Agent Barton,” he gestured to Clint, who rose and stood at attention, “and Cat.”
Strange raised an eyebrow at the kitten and turned back to Fury.
“We have reason to suspect that the cat may not be exactly what it appears to be,” Fury said. “We have no way of confirming that suspicion. We were hoping you might.”
“I might indeed.” Strange crossed the room and knelt by the cat. He put out a hand and let Phil sniff it, then petted its head and shoulders and crooned softly, lulling Phil into a half-sleeping state.
Then the gold brooch at the neck of Strange’s cloak split in the middle and a layer of gold slid back to reveal a glowing human eye. Startled, Clint fell back a step and reached for his Glock; a gesture from Fury stilled him. The glow from the eye brightened and fell in a narrow beam on the kitten, which dozed peacefully through the inspection.
“That cat is definitely not in its natural form, though the Eye of Agamotto could tell me no more than that it is a man, transmogrified by magic,” Dr. Strange said.
Clint and Fury looked at each other. “If you can change it back to its proper form, we can take it from there, whoever it really is,” Fury said.
The doctor nodded. He lifted his hands and uttered what sounded to Clint like nonsense rhymes. No visible energy appeared, but Clint felt the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end.
Phil yowled and began to struggle, and again Clint started to make a move only to be checked by Fury. The kitten’s limbs and form began to ripple and take on greater substance, and he wailed pitifully.
“You didn’t tell us it was gonna hurt him!” Clint blurted.
“Anytime a transfiguration such as this adds mass, there is bound to be pain,” Strange said without breaking his concentration. “This is not so with the loss of mass. I should think the initial transformation was quite painless.”
The cat’s form was flowing into the familiar shape of a human male, and Clint knelt to watch as familiar black boots and dark suit trousers formed over its lower torso. A white dress shirt and tie formed on the upper torso, and shards of glass were ground into a bloody patch over one shoulder.
The head and face took their true forms last.
“Coulson,” Clint breathed.
Strange looked over to Fury, who nodded. “That’s who we were expecting, yes.”
On the floor, Coulson’s breathing stuttered, and he began to cough and convulse.
“Shock,” Strange said, and rushed to Coulson’s side. He shifted Phil’s head gently over one shoulder, opened his mouth and put two fingers in to clear the airway. A moment later, Coulson vomited over his shoulder.
“Not unexpected,” Strange told Clint, not without gentleness, and Clint wondered what his face must look like to prompt that small kindness.
Fury snapped his cell phone shut. “Medical’s on the way. Barton, you’re to go with him in transport, stand guard.” He crossed the room, knelt down. “Phil? Can you tell us what happened?”
“…Loki,” Coulson managed, then dropped into unconsciousness.
author: perletwo
rating: PG (this part)
fandom: Marvel movieverse
warnings (this part): language
prompt: tl;dr: Coulson gets kittenfied and witnesses Clint's many facets.
The cat has nine lives: three for playing, three for straying, three for staying. - English Proverb
God made the cat in order to give man the pleasure of petting the tiger. - Anonymous
The front room of Agent Coulson’s bungalow was a disaster.
Clint and the cat took a few steps into the house and stopped to survey the damage. Furniture was overturned, pictures were knocked off the walls, and glass was broken into unrecognizable fragments.
The cat showed no signs of finding anything at all amiss.
Home!
“Signs of a struggle,” Nick Fury said, standing in the middle of the room while forensic techs worked around him. “Pretty impressive really, given how Spartan Agent Coulson keeps his quarters.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Clint’s eyes locked on to his boss’s boss. “Sir? What can I do?”
One of the forensic techs overheard and shouted, “You can get that damn cat out of here - it’s contaminating the scene!”
Clint blushed and bent down to grab the kitten, who was sniffing at a puddle of coffee by an overturned armchair. “Sorry.”
“Wait,” the tech said, and hurried over with a pair of tweezers in hand. She tweezed a bit of loose fluff from Phil’s coat and dropped it into an evidence container. “For elimination purposes. Now get the damn cat out of here.”
No! Home! Mine!
He carried the struggling ball of fur back to the jeep, dropped Phil onto the passenger seat and slammed the door shut before he could escape. He could hear the kitten’s infuriated wails even through the glass.
“Can it, cat, you’re not gettin’ back out. You’re already getting me in trouble with the boss.”
Clint rejoined Fury inside the bungalow. “Sir?”
“What you can do,” Fury said as if they hadn’t been interrupted, “is use those hawk eyes of yours. Anything that looks wrong, anything out of place, anything odd, let me know.”
He shook his head. “Sir, I’ve never been in Coulson’s house before. For all I know it’s always like this.” Fury turned his head and gave Clint the one-eyed stare every SHIELD agent dreaded. “Okay, yeah, I know, he’s a clean freak and like an anti-hoarder, if his office is anything to go by. But my point is, I don’t know what in here’s his stuff and what might not be.”
“Oh, it’s all his stuff, Barton,” Fury replied, and released him from the Stare to look around the room again. “But every instinct I have says something in here is wrong, something’s off here, and I can’t. Place. It.” He shook his head. “So, you’re going to look around here, and you’re going to look at what the forensics people come up with. You’re going to find the pattern, and you’re going to find where the pattern breaks. And then you’re going to call me, personally.”
Clint’s stomach clenched. “Yes sir.”
*********
A quarter of an hour later, Clint got back into the jeep and found the kitten looking smug.
Phil had knocked Clint’s coffee mug out of the cup holder to spill all over the plastic cover of the emergency brake, and while he’d licked up much of the bitter black liquid, there was still a sticky residue everywhere. Clint growled in frustration.
“That’s it, cat. We’re skippin’ the pound. I’m throwin’ you to the base’s Rottweilers.”
He reached for the kitten, and Phil gave an angry screech and swatted Clint’s hand with claws out. Blood welled in the scratches, and the cat backed down onto its belly, eyes wide with sudden fear.
Clint stared at the scratches on his hand in shock, and then the anger and frustration on his face broke apart and he began to hyperventilate. His hands took up their places on the steering wheel and clenched as though hanging on for dear life.
“ohgodohGODohgodohgod,” he chanted under his breath, fighting not to sob. Phil crossed the emergency brake hutch and climbed into his lap, stood on his hind legs between Clint’s torso and the steering wheel, front paws on his chest, and mewed.
“What’m’I gonna do, cat? I don’t know what to do.” He fought to catch his breath. “My friend is missing. I don’t know how to find him. And there’s blood in there, cat. Not much, okay, but still. Blood. If he’ hurt - if he’s -”
A sob did break through his reserves, strangled and humiliating. Phil trilled sympathetically and rubbed his cheeks over Clint’s, nudged his nose against his friend’s, butted the top of his head under Clint’s chin. One of his hands released its death grip on the steering wheel and dropped to pet the cat’s soft fur.
“Thanks. I needed that,” he said, a little more in control of his breathing.
“Tell you a secret, cat? I’ll deny this if you ever tell anyone else…But I don’t really have very many friends. I mean, I know a lotta people and I get along okay with most of ‘em, but not real friends. You know? It’s pretty much just Fury, ‘cause he brought me in here, and Natasha, ‘cause she was my partner and you gotta love your partner way down in the deep. And Coulson, ‘cause - I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his hair. “He talks to me like I’m as smart as he is, and he expects I’ll understand him. He lets me get away with saying stuff he wouldn’t take from most people, and it’s like he thinks I’m funny, the good kind of funny. He treats me like I’m worth something.”
Phil mewed and licked at Clint’s chin with a rough tongue. Clint lowered his head to touch his forehead to the cat’s. “Okay, yeah. Got you too, now, I guess. But my point is, I haven’t got so many real friends I can afford to just go losin’ one of ‘em, you know? I gotta - I gotta - I don’t know what I gotta do. But I gotta get him back home. Safe. Somehow.”
He glanced down at his hand, where the scratches were scabbing over. Phil’s eyes followed, and he mewed apologetically.
“Ahhh, forget it, cat. I’m not throwin’ you to the Rotties.” He scratched Phil’s ears. “Those dogs wouldn’t stand a chance.”
*********
Clint drove them more sedately to the base’s archery range. He told the cat to stay on the locker room bench while he changed into workout gear, and for a wonder it did as it was told.
“I gotta do this anyway, every day, and besides it’ll help clear some of the worry out of my head,” he told Phil. “It’ll take the science geeks some time to finish up what they’re doing. Best to take my mind off it.”
He led the cat to a yellow line at the perimeter of the range and knelt, pushed the cat’s head down to the line. “See that? That’s your wall, there. You don’t go beyond that line. Hell, you don’t even go near that line. Sharp pointy things are gonna be flying around beyond that line. You got me?”
Phil meowed, head-butted Clint’s knee, and with nose and tail in the air trotted to a table against the wall which held sign-in and scoring sheets, spare targets, broken shafts and extra fletchings, flints to sharpen arrowheads and other bits of detritus. Clint’s coffee cup rested there, and the cat leapt up onto the corner of the table beside the travel mug and settled down, tail swishing.
“Good cat. Smart cat.”
Clint entered some commands into a touchscreen panel, took up his bow and found the starting mark for a training exercise. A buzzer sounded and Clint ran, aiming and firing at the first target to drop from the ceiling. Two more sprang up from panels in the floor several yards down, and he fired one arrow after another for bulls-eyes. A moving target slid down the far wall in time with him, quickly nailed, and the next yawed in a zigzag pattern along the wall. Once that one was dispatched, he shot out five small targets that popped up like weeds in his path from the floor and a floating target much like a weather balloon. He crossed a line at the end of the range and another buzzer signaled the end of the exercise.
He walked back toward the table where Phil sat watching, and his brow furrowed. He picked up his coffee and sipped, and considered the cat.
“I got a friend who likes to watch me shoot,” he mused. “Not every day, but when he can get clear. He’ll always lean against this table, with one hand just about where you’re sitting, and a cup of coffee in the other.”
Phil mewed and twitched his whiskers. Clint shrugged. “I dunno. Just felt…familiar, you watching me right there like that.” He gave the cat a quick pet, then set up the next exercise.
*********
Once his training session was done, Clint and the kitten drove to another building, checked in with security - who gave Phil the hairy eye, but let him in on Clint’s recognizance - and went to Clint’s desk, set in a half-cubicle in a bullpen, with the sterile look of a workspace seldom used.
Several reports from the forensic techs awaited him atop the desk. Clint pulled up his desk chair, and the kitten leapt onto the desk top to sit upon them. Clint sighed.
“C’mon. Official government documents, there,” he said, and gave Phil’s chest a poke. The cat lifted its nose in the air haughtily and moved back a few steps, as if it was all his own idea, then licked a paw and began washing his face.
Clint studied the incident scene reports, reading and re-reading, and finally set them down and rested his head in his hands as though it ached. Very little of it had made sense to him, though one thing did come through loud and clear: The small amount of blood found in the bungalow matched Agent Coulson’s records. Clint’s hands began trembling when he reached that point.
“These damn things might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the good they’re doin’ me,” he muttered. Phil stepped forward and butted the top of his head against the top of Clint’s.
“Okay, yeah, thanks,” he muttered, sitting back up. Then he picked up a stack of forms from his inbox. “Tell you what. I’ll make Coulson happy and catch up on my sitreps and in-trips. Maybe while I’m doing the drone work something’ll percolate in my subconscious.”
The cat favored him with a cheerful meow and settled down to watch. Clint chuckled, scratched under its chin, and waded in to the stack of paperwork.
Two hours later he was down to the last three forms, and Phil was dozing atop the forensics reports.
“All right, cat, my eyes are about to fall out of my head. Whattaya say to some lunch?” The cat’s head lifted with comic speed at the sound of the last word, and Clint laughed. “Oh yeah. You know at least a few words of English, all right…” He rubbed Phil’s neck affectionately, and started to brush a bit of cat dander from his hand.
Then he stopped, looked at the few strands of fur clinging to his hand, and then stared into middle distance. Shooed the cat off the forensics reports, and pulled out the diagram of the scene and some close-up photographs. Stared into middle distance some more, and then turned to his computer and called up a few Google searches.
Ten minutes later, he picked up his phone and dialed an interoffice extension.
“Agent Barton, calling for the Colonel…Well, how long’s…Okay. If you’ll please ask him to meet me at this morning’s incident site as soon as possible,” he told Fury’s aide. “Tell him I think I’ve found him his pattern.”
*********
Phil perched atop the overturned armchair, tail swishing, and watched Clint pace off the length of the room with the occasional detour. He was muttering under his breath, and only stopped when the door opened.
“Agent Barton. I understand you’ve got something for me.” Nick Fury strode in like a man fully expecting his demands for answers to be met.
“Yes sir.” Clint walked up to meet him. “Hold this -” he shoved an enlarged copy of the crime scene diagram into one of Fury’s hands, “- and this.” He scooped up the kitten and dropped him in Fury’s other hand, earning himself a scolding yowl.
Fury glared down at the kitten dubiously; Phil lifted his nose haughtily, then deigned to sniff at Fury’s wrist, finally rubbing his cheek against it in acceptance. “Barton, is this - creature -”
“- necessary? Yes sir. In fact I believe he’s essential.”
Fury’s eyebrows lifted. “Does it have a name?”
“Yes sir. It’s Cat.You’ll remember that the cat came in with me this morning and a tech bitched us out about it, the cat and me. That’s why the cat’s fur had to be entered into evidence and eliminated. But.”
Clint circled behind Fury to stand in the open doorway. “Cat and I walked in and we both stopped right here.” He walked to the overturned armchair and the coffee spill. “That’s maybe five, six steps in from the doorway. The only fiber transfer from the cat that can definitely be attributed to this morning is marked on that diagram as 12A.”
Fury studied the diagram. “There are more incidences of fur here,” he said. “There,” he pointed to the bookcase on the far wall, “and there.” He pointed to a spot below the window.
“Yes sir, and that’s where I believe the pattern breaks. This morning the cat did not go anywhere near those fiber transfer sites before I took him out and locked him in the car.” Clint looked at Fury, then at Phil. “I believe the cat had been in this room before this morning.”
Fury held up one finger of the hand holding the diagram. “Devil’s advocate, Agent. Cats shed, and fur flies.”
“Yes sir, it does. But this cat’s coat is short and glossy, and it doesn’t shed much unless it comes into direct contact with something. I realized that this afternoon when I petted him and got a few - a very few - strands of fur on my hand. There are a lot more on my shirt sleeve, where I’ve been carrying him. You’ll probably see a bit of loose fur on the cuff of your sleeve there, sir. But his coat’s not very fluffy, and his fur doesn’t just spontaneously fly.”
He crossed the room to the bookcase. “If that cat’s fur was found here, and there,” he pointed to the spot beneath the window, “and it has been confirmed that the fur found here is from that cat, then the cat had to have been in physical contact with these spots.”
“And that can’t be accounted for by this morning’s intrusion, by your reasoning,” Fury said.
“Right.” Clint walked back to join Fury near the doorway. “Here’s how I reconstruct what happened. Coulson comes home on his lunch break to get that file. He stops about here where we’re standing, judging by the position of his briefcase, and surprises an intruder - already in the middle of the room, I think. If he followed protocol, Coulson would have identified himself, drawn down, and ordered the intruder to stop whatever he was doing.”
“Only one, you think?” Fury said in an undertone, to avoid disrupting the flow of Clint’s thoughts.
“I think we’d see a lot more destruction here if there were more than one,” he said. “A physical struggle ensued, starting here,” he walked to the overturned chair, end table and coffee cup, “progressing to here,” he took a few more steps to the broken coffee table, “and here, where I think Coulson took cover behind the sofa, which was destroyed by - I don’t know what, some kind of energy blast.
“My guess is that Coulson was then picked up bodily and thrown with considerable force into the bookcase.” He walked over to the damaged shelves. “The impact broke this picture frame, and the jagged metal and glass are what I think caused the bleeding.” He stared hard at the broken frame and added, “Yes. There are at least two shards of glass missing.” He took a deep breath and shook that mental image away.
“Coulson would have then fallen to the floor, probably on hands and knees, if not naturally then in an attempt to rise. Quick and dirty measurements from the height of impact tell me he most likely landed here.” A few steps took Clint to another marker. “This is also the first site at which a small amount of cat fur makes an appearance. There is no blood trail, only these few drops by the shelves. In fact, all signs of Agent Coulson’s physical presence just stop at this point. Maybe he went out the window, but there are no footprints or any other evidence outside to support that. Maybe the intruder carried him out of here bodily; but then we should have some clear shoe imprints in the carpet from the weight of both bodies, and we don’t.”
Clint walked to the window. “In fact, the only other forensic oddity between here and the doorway is this patch of fur beneath the window. It’s got a lot more fur transfer than the site by the bookcase, which suggests to me that the cat spent some time in this spot; I don’t know why.”
As if in answer, Phil meowed, stood and stretched on its perch in Fury’s large hand, leapt to the floor and trotted over to Clint. He nudged aside the plastic cone marking the spot, turned in a tight circle twice, and lay down. He stretched out to full length, extending all twenty toes, then drew back into a ball and settled down to nap in the afternoon sun.
Clint stared down at the kitten and smiled. “And there you go.”
“You think the cat is Agent Coulson,” Fury concluded.
“Transformed somehow.” He nodded. “You think it sounds crazy. I think it sounds crazy. Find me another theory that fits the physical evidence and I’ll drop it like a rock.”
“Any other support for your theory?” The corner of Fury’s mouth twitched.
Clint nodded. “I spent a little time reading up on feline behavior. When I let this little guy into my place last night, the first thing he did was get on the arm of the sofa and knead his paws on it. When I sat down, he rubbed his face and the top of his head on me. When he went exploring the next room, he rubbed his sides against the legs of all the furniture and at intervals along the baseboards and walls. This is called scent marking; cats do it to mark their territory, warn other cats off with their personal scent. When the cat came in here this morning, he made no effort to mark anything. That little table there, and the coat rack, those are within even the small range of movement he had before I locked him out, but he didn’t go near anything but the coffee spill.” Clint took a deep breath. “I think it’s because his scent is already marking this room - that it’s all over everything in here, in fact. I don’t know of any human with a sense of smell that could confirm that, but…”
“But it fits.” Fury took out his cell phone and scrolled through the numbers saved in it, engaged one. “Mr. Wong? Is the doctor in residence at the moment? Ah. Good. …Yes, I understand. He’s a busy man. But if you’d please let him know that SHIELD is in need of a house call…”
*********
Fury uprighted the overturned armchair and settled down in it. Clint sat on the floor next to the kitten, and gave it an occasional pet, more to reassure himself than Phil.
They waited there an hour before a visitor entered. Clint looked up at the man and suppressed a snicker. Even the ersatz Gypsy fortune tellers he’d known in the circus hadn’t dared go for this level of wardrobe schmaltz. The man wore black boots and tights, a billowy blue silk tunic belted with an orange sash that matched his long orange gloves, and a red cloak with a high collar and a gaudy gold amulet holding it closed at the throat. His black hair was slicked back, the better to show off the white streaks at his temples, and his mouth and chin sported a split goatee and a really bitchin’ fu Manchu ‘stache.
“Dr. Strange.” Fury stood to greet the new arrival, a hand outstretched. “Thank you for coming so quickly.”
“Always a pleasure to serve my country, Colonel,” Strange said silkily. “I’m sure you will return the favor by continuing to allow me a certain latitude in my…business.”
“We’re here anytime you need us, as long as you’re here anytime we need you,” Fury replied. “Such as now. Meet Agent Barton,” he gestured to Clint, who rose and stood at attention, “and Cat.”
Strange raised an eyebrow at the kitten and turned back to Fury.
“We have reason to suspect that the cat may not be exactly what it appears to be,” Fury said. “We have no way of confirming that suspicion. We were hoping you might.”
“I might indeed.” Strange crossed the room and knelt by the cat. He put out a hand and let Phil sniff it, then petted its head and shoulders and crooned softly, lulling Phil into a half-sleeping state.
Then the gold brooch at the neck of Strange’s cloak split in the middle and a layer of gold slid back to reveal a glowing human eye. Startled, Clint fell back a step and reached for his Glock; a gesture from Fury stilled him. The glow from the eye brightened and fell in a narrow beam on the kitten, which dozed peacefully through the inspection.
“That cat is definitely not in its natural form, though the Eye of Agamotto could tell me no more than that it is a man, transmogrified by magic,” Dr. Strange said.
Clint and Fury looked at each other. “If you can change it back to its proper form, we can take it from there, whoever it really is,” Fury said.
The doctor nodded. He lifted his hands and uttered what sounded to Clint like nonsense rhymes. No visible energy appeared, but Clint felt the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end.
Phil yowled and began to struggle, and again Clint started to make a move only to be checked by Fury. The kitten’s limbs and form began to ripple and take on greater substance, and he wailed pitifully.
“You didn’t tell us it was gonna hurt him!” Clint blurted.
“Anytime a transfiguration such as this adds mass, there is bound to be pain,” Strange said without breaking his concentration. “This is not so with the loss of mass. I should think the initial transformation was quite painless.”
The cat’s form was flowing into the familiar shape of a human male, and Clint knelt to watch as familiar black boots and dark suit trousers formed over its lower torso. A white dress shirt and tie formed on the upper torso, and shards of glass were ground into a bloody patch over one shoulder.
The head and face took their true forms last.
“Coulson,” Clint breathed.
Strange looked over to Fury, who nodded. “That’s who we were expecting, yes.”
On the floor, Coulson’s breathing stuttered, and he began to cough and convulse.
“Shock,” Strange said, and rushed to Coulson’s side. He shifted Phil’s head gently over one shoulder, opened his mouth and put two fingers in to clear the airway. A moment later, Coulson vomited over his shoulder.
“Not unexpected,” Strange told Clint, not without gentleness, and Clint wondered what his face must look like to prompt that small kindness.
Fury snapped his cell phone shut. “Medical’s on the way. Barton, you’re to go with him in transport, stand guard.” He crossed the room, knelt down. “Phil? Can you tell us what happened?”
“…Loki,” Coulson managed, then dropped into unconsciousness.