Title – A Picture Paints A Thousand Words (Or One Particular Impression And A Lot Of Speculation)
Author – Moonbeam
Rating – Teen
Warnings – Nothing
Summary – Phil Coulson was not an Avenger – he was the guy in the background that no one was supposed to notice. Then there was a picture and it all changed.
Disclaimer – Don't own either universe or the characters – just Netflix, DVDs, and a highly suggestive brain.
Author's Notes – I was reading Selenay's Damage Limitation series (if you haven't read it, do it now - everything by Selenay is amazing!) and there was a few comments about pictures and I just couldn't get this idea out of my head so instead of working on one of the many, many things I should be writing when I finally eck out some time I'm doing this instead. I hope you enjoy.
This is set in some alternate timeline where Phil did died but only for 8 actual seconds, because he was there S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't fall apart entirely, Cap saved Bucky earlier, Civil War didn't have to happen and they are all just running around being amazing and Avenging things. There is still a lot of wonderfully broody Bucky running around.

A Picture Paints A Thousand Words (Or One Particular Impression And A Lot Of Speculation)

by Moonbeam

/ The Picture \\\

Phil Coulson, S.H.I.E.L.D. liaison to the Avengers, the man who came back from the dead, and the most terrifying person currently standing in the middle of the park wanted nothing more than a time machine to go back before he had developed a crush on Captain America and decided that if a skinny kid from Brooklyn could save the world then so could a not-so-skinny kid from Maine. Then he might be somewhere else, not dealing with his childhood crush climbing out of a massive crater in the middle of Hyde Park completely naked. Steve blushed a surprisingly bright shade of pink and then ducked back down into the crater. Phil watched The Winter Soldier appear from somewhere, like he was also the invisible man, and take up a defensive position in front of Steve's hiding place. Phil knew it was too late; there would already be pictures of Steve Rogers' penis all over the internet.

Phil turned to the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents next to him and demanded they find a shop and get something for Captain America to wear. They scurried off – he liked it when he made them scurry. Then he pressed his finger to the earbud, not because he needed to but because it was the only way he could show how annoyed he was by the whole situation.

"Hawkeye, status?"

"Can't see any remaining bugs, Boss," Clint responded. "How's the old ticker now that you've seen Rogers' junk?"

"Thank you for volunteering for the next week of Avengers On Call."

"Coulson," Clint said pleadingly. "Not fair."

"And yet you volunteered, Barton. Get down here."

"Seventeen," Stark called out as he landed on the ground between Phil and the crater. "Twenty-nine…oh the BBC got a really good shot."

"Stark," Bucky ground out, turning to look at Ironman. "Shut up."

Stark held his hands up while the suit opened and he stepped out. "I'm just the messenger – can't shoot the messenger."

Bucky's eyes flicked over Stark and Phil knew he was thinking that he could actually shoot the messenger. That he might even enjoy it if Stark was the messenger in question. Phil did not need a picture of The Winter Soldier beating up Tony Stark to be vying for a headline with naked Steve Rogers. Not to mention that Steve would forget he was naked and climb out of the pit to help Bucky because neither of the two could walk away from a fight the other was having. And that was not a photo that ever needed to exist. Phil made it to the two of them before either man could say something else and stepped between them.

"Stark," Phil said, turning a bland expression on the other man. "Perhaps you could get JARVIS to contact Fury – he will need to contact the Queen to apologise for the damage made to her land."

Stark nodded.

"And then you can go home, Pepper said something about a board meeting."

Stark groaned but stepped back into the Ironman suit and flew away.

"He would deserve it," Bucky muttered.

"Yes," Phil agreed. "But Steve would have helped."

Bucky glared harder, half hidden by the mask and hair but noticeable nonetheless. He gripped his gun a little tighter and looked around him with an air of paranoia.

"Can someone get me some clothes?" Steve called out to them.

"I've got agents getting you clothes currently, Captain Rogers," Phil told him.

"Please call me Steve," Steve called up. "And thank you."

"Not during a mission, Captain Rogers, and you're welcome. They should be back soon."

"There will be photos, won't there?" Steve asked.

Bucky growled and Phil looked at the sky.

"Yes, there will, Captain Rogers," Phil admitted – he had always thought it better to be honest when in the field. Secrets were a necessary part of the job but never a benefit to any mission.

"There are certain things about this century that I do not enjoy."

Bucky's lips twitched. "But at least there wasn't any swooning."

Phil turned around as Clint jogged towards him laughing and Phil needed to keep him away from Bucky when there was any discussion of swooning. "Take the other side of the crater."

Clint nodded and redirected his jog. "Yes, Sir."

"Dr Banner," Phil said, wishing he could press an unneeded finger to his ear again.

"Here."

"The problem has been neutralised, you can stand down."

"Thanks," Banner said.

"I'm sending Natasha to you for extraction. Debrief in eighteen hours."

"Noted, Coulson," Natasha said and Phil turned back around to focus on the three Avengers left.

They got Steve clothes, the Stark Foundation started working on clean up, and they headed back to New York for the debrief.

The first sign that something was different was the fact that Nick Fury was sitting at the table in the S.H.I.E.L.D. conference room – not at the head of the table, he never sat at the head of the table. Coulson had a feeling sleep would be even further away than previously thought.

"Director," Steve said, immediately stepping forward and stopping to stand at attention in front of the rest of the team. "I apologise for-"

Fury held up a hand. "You saved London, Rogers."

"I also cast a shadow over our good work with my indecency."

"It's the 21st Century, Cap," Stark said, striding in and sitting at the head of the table. "No one cares about your junk…well, actually a lot of people care about your junk but there is no scandal attached. If you had been snapped sl-"

"Stark," Coulson said, voice snapping Stark's attention to him.

"Agent?"

"Stop."

Stark opened his mouth to keep going and Phil let his expression slip just a little, just a touch, just for a second, and then Stark leaned back in his chair.

"If you aren't here to reprimand me, Director," Steve said, his stance not calming in the slightest. "What's wrong?"

Fury smirked, Phil's sense of dread kicked up to eleven, and threw a paper across the table. Steve reached out for it, the muscles across his back so tight that Phil wondered if the t-shirt would survive but then they relaxed and he turned to look at Phil.

"Captain?" Phil asked.

Steve silently handed the paper to Phil. He looked down at the front page to find himself there, one large photo of his face and a smaller photoset of him standing between Stark and Bucky, ordering Clint to do something, and then him leading the whole team, and a few S.H.I.E.L.D. agents away from the clean-up and towards the quinjet. It was the headline that was really worrying though – Is This Man In Charge Of The Avengers? Phil was supposed to be the silent liaison between S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers. He needed to be invisible and now he'd been exposed.

"How far has this gone?" Phil asked.

"What?" Natasha asked, sliding next to him, plucking the paper out of his hand and then sitting down in a chair. Clint slid in next to her and they both stared at the newspaper. Phil could see the smirks on their faces.

"It has gone viral," Maria offered as she walked in, a group of S.H.I.E.L.D. hospitality staff behind her carrying food and drinks. Phil knew that medical were very firm about the energy replacement needs of the Avengers but it always looked like a strange party while they debriefed the most recent mission. Maria didn't continue until the rest of the S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel had left and it was just the Avengers and the three of them. "That is the set of images being used by the major news outlets, or some variation, but social media has been trawling through everything and there are whole tumblrs and twitter feeds dedicated to images of Coulson from the background of photos and videos since the beginning of the Avengers."

"How long until someone finds something from before the Avengers?" Phil asked.

"That is classified," Fury said, glaring at Phil.

"Yes, and given how tenacious people on tumblr can be I suggest we worry about it now and now after they find something from before."

"Before what?" Stark asked. "You were a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent before you were our liaison."

"Before that," Fury said and Phil went cold – that had not been what he was talking about – he had only meant the missions he'd run as a normal S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. It wasn't like Nick to make that mistake.

Phil looked around the room and then looked at Fury again. "It truly is classified; there is no one in this room, apart from Fury, with clearance to know anything about it."

Maria looked at him sharply but even she didn't have the clearance for his past.

"Would there have been photos?" Fury asked him seriously.

Phil shrugged. "Given what we've been able to find on the Winter Soldier from conspiracy theorists there is every chance that something exists."

"JARVIS," Tony said, clicking on his phone. "Monitor every photo that shows up with Agent Coulson in it, if anything appears prior to…"

"1994," Coulson supplied, that was easily accessible from his S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel file – if anyone but Maria and Nick had clearance to see his H.R. file.

"Scanning," JARVIS's voice came out of the phone. "Should I advise Agent with any photos found matching this description?"

"Yes, please," Phil said, not letting Stark answer. He'd given up trying to get the AI to stop calling him Agent but this was something he needed to be informed about.

"Affirmative."

"The question we really need to answer," Maria said, turning back to business. "Is what we will call Phil?"

"An Avenger," Steve answered, no pause and no question in his voice.

Phil could be honest with himself how much that meant, even if it wasn't true. "No."

"Too late," Natasha said, throwing the newspaper onto the table and reaching out for one of the plates of rice and eggplant. She pushed the one with beef over to Clint who was watching Phil just a little too closely. Clint didn't reach out for the food – something that made the hair on the back of Phil's neck stand up. Nothing kept Clint from food – a left over relic of days of hunger as a child and days of not enough from the circus that Phil would never mention.

Phil started to explain carefully. "I do not have a suit," Bucky laughed. "Not a suit like the rest of you and I'm not out there fighting."

"You're still part of the team," Bruce offered. "And I have the feeling that if you were fighting some of our fights would be over very quickly."

Phil shook his head. "Call me exactly what I am; a liaison to the Avengers."

"Too late," Stark said, holding up his phone.

"What did you do?" Maria asked him.

Stark smirked. "From the official twitter feed of Ironman – When CapAmerica was asked who the Agent of the front page of the New York Times was…Agent is an #Avenger and I've included a photo of Agent and Cap from that thing with the purple Doombots."

"Stark," Fury said. "Take it down. We haven't agreed on an official stance."

"Maybe you haven't," Tony offered. "But Cap is our leader and he's made his decision and it's now been retweeted a hundred and twelve times."

"It makes sense," Natasha said. "He's an Avenger but we paint him as the man watching over us – keeping an eye on all of us and making sure that we can see the whole picture and Steve can make the right call."

"He is an Avenger," Bruce threw in. "We couldn't have done what we've done without him."

Phil felt his ears heating but he ignored it, knowing it would go away. "I'm not supposed to be visible – I should just step back from the Avengers, another handler can be put on the job until things calm down and they realise I'm just a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent like all of the others."

"You're not like the others and people are too smart not to work that out," Bruce argued.

Phil liked the sentiment but it would irrevocably change things and that wasn't his decision. He looked at Fury but the other man was looking back at him. And Phil realised that much like the decision in '93 this was his choice as well. He looked around the table – and weighed his two options; he could walk away from the Avengers completely or he could become an official Avenger. He knew the smart choice but he could feel Clint's eye boring into him and he had a history of making the other decision when the smart choice was presented.

"I'll have to move into the Tower," Phil said.

"There is already a floor for you," Tony offered. "With the biggest office you have ever seen – even Pepper is jealous of the office. You can write reports to your heart's content in there."

"I have an office here," Phil argued. "And nothing will actually change apart from me being there."

"And the media," Maria reminded him.

"I will still be doing things exactly as they are currently being done," Phil said. "I'm in the quinjet and watching the missions but if they spot me then I'm already explained and it doesn't risk the identity of any other high-level agents."

"Food," Maria reminded them. "Medical insists that you replenish the calories burned during the mission."

Everyone reached out for a plate and Natasha pushed her empty one away.

Phil opened the folder in front of him. "From the beginning…the call came through from New Scotland Yard…"

They finished their debrief and Phil closed his folder.

"I'll have the Avengers report to you," Steve said, standing up. Bucky immediately mirrored him, like normal when they were in S.H.I.E.L.D. Phil always wondered if he was hoping to just slide out of people's view and hide in Steve's shadow. But if that was how Bucky felt safe then Phil wasn't going to say anything.

"Thank you, Captain."

The Avengers stood and started moving out of the room, Natasha and Clint staying right where they were. Fury and Maria didn't move either so Phil settled back into his chair. Banner closed the door behind him and then Maria turned to look at Phil. He smiled at her blandly.

"None of my business," she said, looking at him closely. "But…the question is – did Hydra know?"

"That's a question for Nick," Phil said, turning to look at Fury. "It was never part of any documentation. I was actually an Army Ranger."

"Just not for as long as your records show you were."

Phil smiled. "That is classified. I hadn't given any thought to the possibility of it coming out now until Nick did – I was thinking of the S.H.I.E.L.D. missions that might have been less than legal, internationally speaking."

Fury stared at him and Phil wondered just why the other man had even connected those dots.

Maria nodded, yanking Phil's attention back to her. "If even I'm not cleared then Barton and Romanoff shouldn't have heard this much."

Phil was going to say something but Clint stood up and nodded. "Completely right, ma'am, we shouldn't be here." He started towards the door, not looking at Phil decidedly now. Natasha looked at him and then followed Clint from the office.

"We're done here," Phil said, standing up.

"I never told Pierce anything so HYRDA should be as ignorant as the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D."

"Good," Phil turned and walked out of the conference room but he couldn't see Clint or Natasha anywhere and he knew if he couldn't find them now he wouldn't find them at all. He didn't swear, just patted his tie to make sure it was straight and walked to the elevators so he could go upstairs and complete his own mission report.

TBC