Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Who attacks New York on Halloween? Idiots. Idiots attack New York on Halloween. Phil is stoically jogging in and out of the crowds of young adults out to party this evening. He tucks his gun in close to his body where it blends in a bit against his dark suit, and keeps the safety on.

There is a terrified sound from around the corner and then the shouts of young men. Phil presses his back against the wall before swinging his gun up and around, fully expecting the reported Doombots to have got a hold of some drunk college boys.

Phil almost shoots one by accident. It's not his fault – one of the drunk college boys is actually dressed as Doctor Doom. The others are a sexy Ninja Turtle, a sexy doctor, and Batman. They're trying to stuff a cat into a pair of green, scaly Robin pants and a cape, but look up when Phil slides into view. They look at his field suit, the badge clipped to his pocket and his gun. They laugh. "Good costume, man!" One of them says.

There are actual Doombots in the city right now, disguised as costumed New Yorkers dressed as robots and that just makes his head hurt. Phil does not have time for this shit. That is his only real excuse for firing a warning shot down the alley instead of doing the mature, adult thing like talking them into letting go of the cat.

"Oh, fuck!" The college boys all swear. Phil would have thought that was the end of it, except then Batman throws the cat at him and they all leg it down the street. Phil catches the cat, of course, because he is a great catch and would have done college baseball if he hadn’t been set on the Army and wanted to leave that spot open for someone who wanted to go pro. He ends up with an armful of traumatised cat tangled in Robin's underwear, and Doombots to catch.

A slight buzz in his ear warns him before Maria bursts onto the comm. "Easter and Principal, where are you? We've found the main deploy position and have them surrounded, but there are still twenty-four out and among the civilians." ‘Principal’ means him. Phil tries to put the Robin cat on the ground but it digs its claws into his sleeves and hisses at him for trying. Phil sighs, thankful for the protective field gear and breaks into a jog.

"On the periphery. If any of the eyes up above spot any, direction would be nice."

It is difficult to persuade actual Halloween partygoers that he is really a government agent. Phil already knew that would be a problem though. It is even more difficult to persuade them that he is really a government agent when he tasers a Robot-costume-disguise-Doombot in the neck. His SHIELD-modified tech fries its circuits. Phil still has twenty-three of these fuckers to go though, so he just pulls back in his taser lines, relays his coordinates to Hill and lets her dispatch a couple of junior agents to deal with the mess as he moves on.

Robin cat pokes its head out from where it's now cradled in the crook of Phil's arm to hiss menacingly at the dead Doombot. Phil wishes he could do the same.

The Doombots are surprisingly easy to deal with. The crowds get a bit hysterical every time he zaps another one, true, but that's not his division – at least not right now. It's testament to how simple this op is that Robin cat stays where he is, suspiciously snarling at anyone and everyone, including Phil, and yet refusing to be dislodged from his arm. It’s small, still a kitten, and has bobbled brown fur that makes it look perpetually wet.

"Shit, is that a civilian?" Those are Jasper's first words to him as Phil gets back to the surveillance van. Phil supposes that in their line of work, it's not that odd of a question. Even Maria looks around.

"No, no. It's a cat. A real cat. It won't let go of me and I didn't have time to deal with it," sighs Phil, slumping into a seat as Jasper turns the ignition on and heads back to HQ. He finally looks down at it. It's a scrap of fur, brown and wide-eyed. There's a collar around its neck that says 'Clint'. Its ears flick back and it hisses at Phil when he reaches down. "Stop that. I've been carrying you for almost two hours," he says, tugging the Robin cape off and then delicately lifting its legs so that he can unwind the pants too. "There, that's better, isn't it?"

'Clint' hops off down to the floor, makes a quick rotation around the van, hissing both at Maria and Jasper and then circles back around Phil. "He's walking a bit oddly." Maria frowns. She's right. Clint is kind of waddling awkwardly.

"Hope I didn't do that," Phil says, watching as Clint observes him for a moment, ears still flicking, and then determinedly squirms his way into the non-existent space between Phil's butt and the back of the seat. He yowls when Phil tries to fish him back out so Phil gets out his paperwork instead, and ignores the warm, trembling lump between the small of his back and the seat.

When they get to SHIELD HQ, Clint claws his way up Phil's back and Phil bemusedly bends his arm as Clint nudges his head around Phil's waist and tucks himself up there. Phil takes it the only place he thinks will help: Medical. "I need to know if he's chipped," says Phil. He tries to put Clint down on one of the medical beds and Clint cries at him. Phil internally wibbles. He sits down on the bed himself instead, adjusting the pillows against his back and letting himself feel amused as the doctors stare at him. “Well?”

A junior doctor steps up, a little scanner in her hand. “I can do it.”

“Doctor Chiu. Aren’t you meant to be in ward four at the moment?” One of the other doctors shoots her an annoyed look. She waves him off.

“Ward four finished up already,” she says, and efficiently waves the scanner over Clint. Phil likes her already. “No chip, I’m afraid. Any address on the tag?”

Phil shakes his head. “Is there anyone here who can give it a once over? It’s walking funny.”

“He,” corrects Chiu. “Come here and let me see you, baby.” She makes a move for Clint; Clint reacts the same way he has to everyone so far, swatting at her with a snarl. Amazingly, she dodges all the gleaming claws, tucks her fingers around his paws so that he can’t move them and scoops him up fearlessly. Clint howls, and tries to flail with all four limbs and his tail. “It’s okay, baby,” she coos. The senior doctor - Graves, Coulson vaguely remembers - snorts at her. Chiu ignores him and runs a hand over Clint’s fur, a frown forming as she does so.

“What is it?” Phil asks.

“It feels like he has some broken bones, but he’s not acting like he’s in pain.” Chiu goes for the portable x-ray machine, letting Clint escape back onto Phil.

Graves protests at this point. “Agent Coulson! You’re not injured and this is Medical, not a vet’s. Doctor Chiu, you can’t just use the equipment for anything you like.” They both ignore him. Phil’s far enough up the ladder that Graves doesn’t quite dare to directly interfere, but disapproval radiates off him. Clint sniffs him, sneezes and then rumbles in disgust.

As soon as his legs are free, Clint clambers all over Phil’s lap in distress until Phil pets him. Clint simultaneously hisses at him and arches into the touch. He lets Phil tuck him onto the small rolling table so that Chiu can x-ray him. Her frown deepens as the x-ray develops in front of them.

“What is it?” Phil finds himself scritching at the back of Clint’s ears.

Chiu hands the x-ray over, her mouth pursed into a line. “He doesn’t have any injuries right now, but he has had quite a few previously. Broken bones that don’t look like they’ve been set. I can break the bones and reset them, but you should probably ask the owners first.”

Phil nods absently. “I’ll head back to the area and ask around.” Clint delicately picks his way across Phil’s thigh and attempts to burrow in behind his back again. He looks inordinately disgruntled when Phil gets off the bed, exposing him. “Come on.”

The ride back to into central New York is fine, Clint being the model of cat decorum, tail swishing as he looks at everything with deep interest but doesn’t touch. It lasts all the way until Phil opens the door for Clint. The cat gets one look at the surrounding area, screeches and flees back into the car. Phil bends down to pry him out from under the front seat, and Clint is just huddled under it. His ears are flattened all the way down, but not in the menacing stance of before, and his eyes are huge with betrayal. Phil reaches out slowly and Clint mewls pathetically, his entire body shaking.

“O...kay,” says Phil. “You don’t like it here, huh.”

They drive back to SHIELD as Phil thinks over options. It takes almost ten minutes before Clint inches his head out from under the seat, his ears flicking suspiciously as if Phil might throw open the door at any moment and they’re suddenly back at the nasty place again.

When Phil opens the door, Clint shuffles backwards under the seat again. “We’re back at SHIELD,” Phil informs him, well aware that he looks like he’s talking to an empty seat. Clint clearly doesn’t trust him, because he pokes his nose out to get a good smell before wriggling out. Phil scoops him up before he can try to sharpen his claws on Phil’s back again, and takes him up to his office. Several junior agents do a double take as they walk past him; Phil makes mental notes of their names, because they could at least make it less obvious when they’re startled.

When they get to his office, which is a horrible dark thing with a window the size of a postage stamp, Phil sets Clint down and heads for the desk. The files are starting to loom in his inbox tray and he sorts about two thirds of them into categories urgent, can wait and shaft off onto junior agent, although that one’s officially supposed to be delegate. The other third goes straight into the shredder. He has his own shredder. It’s industrial-sized and sits by the wall within arm’s reach, decorated with three lacy doilies his mother crocheted, and a bonsai. It confuses everyone who walks in, and he quite likes that.

Clint is meandering around the office, sniffing at everything. He’s still walking awkwardly, but seems to have no trouble jumping up on Phil’s desk, keysmashing across the keyboard, hopping back down into Phil’s lap and cramming himself behind Phil’s butt again. He’s going to have to do something about that. Phil brings information and contact details up for three local pet rescues and shelters and deletes Clint’s ‘adsrffffkyhjn,l;’.

By nine pm, Phil has written a description of Clint and taken a picture of his backside and tail for the rescue shelters to put up as a notice, finished the thankfully sparse paperwork for this op and contemplated going home at least twice. Jasper stops by on his dinner break to pick up his paperwork with a sandwich for him - because in their line of work, nine pm is a perfectly reasonable time for a dinner break - and Clint meows mournfully from behind Phil.

“Fuck!” Jasper glares. “Is that cat in here?!” He looks around, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound.

“What cat?” Phil looks blandly at him.

Jasper scowls, and waves his sandwich at him. “Don’t fuck with me, I’m saving you a whole ten minutes of legwork,” he says, picking up a stack of Phil’s paperwork to file it for him because he is the best.

When Jasper’s gone, Phil shuffles forward and cranes around to peer at the squashed lump of fur that is Clint right now. “Food, huh. Probably a good idea. You look underfed.” Clint just looks grumpy that his source of heat has disappeared, and Phil is left wondering why he’s talking to a cat. He sighs. “Come on.”

Phil has no idea what cats eat. Thank god for smartphones, seriously. He orders take-out in advance from his favourite Chinese place, gets there just in time to pick it up and only tells Clint off for climbing all over the containers once. Clint is practically clawing at his thighs to get at the food when Phil walks them into his apartment, taking no notice of the fact that he falls to the ground in each failed attempt, only climbing back up Phil’s legs again. Phil’s just glad he kept the protective field gear on.

Crab rangoons go over particularly well with Clint because he snarfles them all, quick as a thief, Phil letting him out of amusement more than any inability to wrestle food from a kitten. Clint actually climbs into the little take-out box after he’s done and circles around, smearing oil and crumbs all over himself, and then drops off to sleep.

Phil eats the rest of his Chinese, wishing he’d ordered more rangoons, and then belatedly realises that his apartment is totally not equipped with dealing with a kitten. He’s not even sure where he can get pet supplies at this hour. He sighs, and goes to dig up one of his potted plants. The plant gets temporarily repotted into a smaller pot, the remaining dirt goes into a casserole dish along with some torn newspaper and the dish goes in the kitchen, which he hopes will be easier to clean than his carpet.

By now, it’s late enough that Phil just wants to unwind before he has to think about preparing for the next day - he’s going to have to follow up on this Doombot situation and see what the point of the incognito route was - so he goes to relocate Clint, who twitches awake when Phil’s hand gets near. He seems to be litter-trained, and perfectly well behaved when people aren’t involved, so Phil heads for a quick shower. The hot water is just what he needs to strip the confining feeling of his field gear out of his skin and it proves how out of it a bit of hot water and scented shower gel can make Phil that he doesn’t notice the cat over the sound of the shower until Clint walks over his foot.

“ARGH,” Phil yells, grabbing the nearest weapon available. And because not even he is ridiculous enough to take a gun into his shower, it means that he’s squirted half a bottle of shower gel over his foot. (On second thought, it was probably a good idea that it wasn’t a gun in this case.) Clint has dodged the sticky mess and is looking at him, swishing his tail back and forth through the bubbles. Phil can just tell that it’s his version of laughter.

He is incredibly thankful that he regularly sweeps for SHIELD bugs in his apartment, because that moment would probably have made Jasper’s week. Picking the sodden Clint up, Phil tells him firmly, “You’re not allowed to sneak up on people. I’m the SHIELD agent, it’s my job.” Clint ignores him, and happily bats at the falling shower water. Phil takes the chance to rub the essence of crab rangoon off him.

It should have been obvious to Phil at that point. He prides himself on being exceptionally foresighted; it’s part of his jobto be foresighted after all. But he didn’t predict that no one would answer the notices he’d put out and he certainly didn’t predict keeping Clint. He asks the shelters if they have room to take Clint, because his kind of life is hardly suitable for pets, and they’re all full up. One of them offers to put Clint down though. Phil looks at where Clint is grooming himself on top of the office shredder and politely tells them that it was all right. Then he makes sure to tell Clint that he’s not being put down, because it seems like the right thing to do even if the cat can’t understand him. Clint just wants ear scritches.

Phil goes to Chiu, because she had actually sent him an email asking about Clint, and he finds out that Clint hasn’t had any of his shots or indeed any medical attention at all. His face darkens and Clint cowers, so Phil goes to stomp around the corridor in a thunderous mood a few times so as to not scare him. Except then he hears Clint crying through the door for him and goes back in. He is so screwed.

Chiu sets Clint up with shots and a chip and recasts his hind legs, leaving him clunking around desolately in casts. Phil reckons that he’s only sad because now people can hear him coming though. It means that Clint’s taken to sitting next to Phil’s door to get a better chance of managing to claw up anyone’s ankles when they come by.

When Phil goes on ops, he leaves Clint at home. It’s less frequent these days given his expertise, but it still happens. This is when he discovers that Clint is very, very good at stealing food. No leftovers are ever safe. He can actually open the fridge. Not only this, but he is very good at not getting caught doing it. In fact, he will slink off and avoid Phil for hours after he comes home until he is sure that Phil has discovered his crime and isn’t angry at him. Phil only discovers this because he has finally resorted to bugging his own apartment to find out how on earth his leftovers were disappearing. There’s a small feed that stays up on the corner of Phil’s computer. Maria cackles, and hacks into his computer to label ‘Catcam’ underneath it in Comic Sans.

“Your cat,” says Jasper very, very calmly, which means that he’s either very, very pissed or very, very amused. Phil raises an eyebrow as acknowledgement. “Your cat just terrorised an entire office of junior agents today.”

Phil finally looks up, and lets out an ungainly snort. Clint is perched on the top of Jasper’s bald head, happily flicking his tail back and forth. Jasper is somehow ignoring him, which gives him many points in Phil’s book. “An entire office?” He prompts.

“There they are, chipping away at their paperwork, or at least pretending to, when there is a hollow thunk that resonates around the room,” says Jasper, deadpan. He’s very good at storytelling. “Followed by a loud hiss, then there’s this horrible crunch and lastly a very smug ‘miaow’ that roils across the room. Guns were drawn.”

Phil considers the story for a moment and hazards a guess. “The ventilation shafts?”

“The ventilation shafts,” confirms Jasper as Clint leaps off his head, limps around the computer monitor in his casts and proudly deposits a mostly intact mouse on Phil’s mousepad.

The overriding thought running through Phil’s mind right now is that Jasper’s just had a dead mouse on his head for at least five minutes. He’s taking it very well. “Good boy,” he tells Clint quite seriously, and tries to remember which form he needs to requisition a bottle of disinfectant.

After two weeks, Clint gains a codename: Hawkeye. He can see anything from a mile away, two if it’s something he doesn’t like. He also has unnaturally good aim, and is especially great at judging how far he needs to jump to sink his claws into that nice tender bit of inner thigh. Jasper and Phil like to talk about Clint using his codename where other people can hear them and see how long it takes them to realise that they are talking about a cat and not a super-sniper-assassin. It usually takes surprisingly long. Maria freaks out because she thought that she had a higher level clearance than Phil and if there was a new asset then there was no way that Phil knew and she didn’t and then she takes her revenge by streaming Phil’s Catcam to Fury’s office.

Fury spends a whole day smiling and almost everyone is unnerved. Phil spends the day after that sending Fury videos of Maru.

Chapter Text

Hawkeye makes a friend. MODOK’s trying to take over the world again -- and really, Phil would have thought it’d be easier to start with a small village somewhere and work his way up rather than go straight for New York -- and so Phil is on surveillance near his last known whereabouts, trying to figure out where he is. For a giant head in a jar, he’s surprisingly hard to find.

Clint comes with him on these sorts of things, mostly because Phil has tried to stop him by locking him in his office and it didn’t work. Clint went on a rampage in the air ducts despite Phil double checking that the covers in his office were firmly screwed in, and passively aggressively left a whole slew of dead mice outside Phil’s office. Phil was one of the last to get back after that mission and by that time everyone had seen the pile of rodents against his door. No one had dared to ask.

So, now, Clint comes on surveillance missions. Phil spends his time glued to binoculars and Clint flattens himself down on the rooftop with him, tucked under Phil’s chin. Except today, Phil spots MODOK and is reporting in to SHIELD when he feels a smidgen of movement, looks down absently and discovers that there are now two cats under his chin. He has a very silent, very calm freak out.

The new cat follows them back, neatly jumping into Phil’s car after Clint despite its short legs. Phil does not have the time to deal with this, because he is relaying orders to three different teams of agents at the same time, co-ordinating the scientists with Maria and trying to convince the police to evacuate. New Yorkers are nothing but unimpressed at people trying to take over their city, he swears.

By the time Phil gets back to his office, he is dirty and tired and one of his ears feels bigger than the other. Given that MODOK just tried to stuff his head into a glass jar, that’s not too unreasonable. He’s actually completely forgotten about the new cat until he gets back to his office and it’s casually curled up with Clint on the sofa. It yowls in alarm as he walks in and Phil tuts. "Hey” he says. “My office, I’m allowed in. You, however, don’t have the security clearance.” He phones Chiu anyway.

The new cat is a girl and Phil doesn’t even know where to begin to start looking for her previous owners or if she even had any. She has no trouble relocating to new places unlike most cats, who get nervous at new settings. She really likes Phil’s windowsill though. Phil asks about spaying and neutering, just in case Clint decided to become a daddy whilst Phil was applying a can opener to his head. Chiu’s face darkens, and she mutters something about home spaying. Phil politely asks her to repeat herself even though he already knows what she said.

“There’s some infection, some scarring, pulled stitches, possible chance of more pus and hormonal problems, and she’s probably in a great deal of pain,” says Chiu. “There’s no chip and no collar, and you don’t even know where she’s from, Agent Coulson.” They look over at her, where she’s anaesthetised because she wouldn’t let Phil move her around any other way. Clint is draped half over her and nuzzling the orange tufts on her ears.

“You get to tell Hawkeye she can’t stay,” Phil mutters and Chiu outright laughs at him.

Clint can’t be persuaded to leave her when Chiu operates to fix the damage, so Phil brings up his paperwork on a tablet and waits with Clint. “Agent Coulson, you’re going to want to see this.” Chiu’s voice doesn’t sound happy. Phil looks away from his junior agents’ forms to where she’s shaved away some of the glossy black fur.

There’s cigarette burns on the new cat, ugly and puckered and scabbed which means that they’re not that old, and suddenly Phil understands why she doesn’t care that she left her part of New York. Phil tries to sound detached. “What is that, a Z or an N?”

“Probably an N,” says Chiu, her voice steady as she gently trims around it, checking for inflammation. He watches her as she finishes the rest of the check-up, redoing the stitches and setting aside some pills for Phil to give to her later. “Do you want me to chip her while I’m at it?”

Phil looks down at Clint, who has his head propped on his paws on the edge of the operating table. “Why not,” he says finally. “Even if she ends up with someone else, it’s nice to be able to keep track.”

“What name do you want to put on the information?” Chiu asks distractedly.

Looking down at the scarred tissue on her hip, Phil goes with a hunch and reaches out to uncertainly stroke the back of her head. “How about Natasha?” He asks. “That sounds good. Natasha. You like that, Hawkeye?” Clint flicks an ear at him.

When Natasha wakes up, she blinks blearily around. Clint gives her a nuzzle and Phil lets them play in the corner. He can feel the disapproval coming off her whenever she pauses to look at him, but she’s too nice to actually claw him up for it. He returns the respect by giving her some space. He’s fairly sure that if someone drugged him, shaved his chest hair and cut him open, he wouldn’t like them very much either. He bribes her with really expensive cat food instead; she likes the salmon ones, and takes to winding around his ankles on her tiny paws whenever she wants more food. It pretty much always works.

“Your cat,” says Jasper very, very calmly. Phil looks up, because he is sure he’s had this conversation before. Jasper merely holds the door open, and Phil can hear the screaming from Agent Bradwell drifting in.

‘Oh fuck it was the FREAKING HUGEST SPIDER EVER, where is it, OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.’

“Spider?” Phil asks in disbelief as Jasper lets the door swing closed. “I have two cats, and neither of them exhibit particularly spider-like behaviour.” Clint still doesn’t tolerate people and spends his time sharpening his claws on people’s legs. Natasha is sweet and elegant and warming to Phil now that her fur’s grown back and her stomach stitches are out and he feeds her lots of salmon. There’s been a peaceful lull recently and Phil has taken to letting them out so that they have more freedom than his office. Partially it’s because Clint will find a way out anyway and Natasha will follow him curiously, but also because if SHIELD agents cannot deal with two cats then frankly they need better agents.

Jasper flops over on his sofa, first checking that Clint hasn’t squashed himself in between the cushions as he was wont to. “Your new one. You realise I only have your word that she actually exists, right?” Phil realises that Jasper’s been trying to figure out for a while whether Phil’s just fucking with him when he says that Clint has a friend. A couple of their conversations over the last week suddenly make more sense.

“No, she’s a real cat,” Phil insists, reaching for his phone to show some pictures.

Natasha is infinitely cute in them all, padding around on her stubby paws, and Jasper flicks through the pictures in disbelief. “But she looks so sweet and adorable,” he says in bafflement. “And not a ninja cat that streaks unseen through the offices, only appearing in the corner of your vision when you least expect it.”

“She is sweet and adorable,” says Phil, concern wrinkling his forehead.

Jasper looks pointedly at the door. “Your evil ninja cat has the entire floor on edge, has clawed up six different people’s ankles and none of them have even seen her yet. She nearly got Johnson’s family jewels the other day.”

There is a strong urge rising in Phil to tell Jasper not to talk about his baby like that, and he very quickly quells it. The door swings open - Phil and Jasper both swing their legs down to try to look like consummate professionals - and reveals Clint and Natasha, Clint just landing and looking inordinately proud of himself for working the doorhandle. Clint hops up to give Phil his daily (hourly) mouse and Natasha freezes inside the door to snarl at Jasper, going from sweet and unruffled one second to claws out and tail bristled. She takes a flying leap across the room at Jasper, who rolls over the back of the sofa to defend himself because he can’t really justify shooting Phil’s cat.

Surprised at the sudden behaviour that he's never seen from her, Phil nevertheless reaches out and snags her out of midair, hand looped around her stomach, and tugs her into his lap as she yowls at him. “No,” he tells her, and gives her a cuddle. Natasha really likes cuddles so she settles into a pout instead, sticking her head over Phil’s shoulder to hiss at Jasper. “Well, she likes me,” Phil says mildly.

By the end of the week, there is rumour of a giant mutant lethal spider infiltrating SHIELD and Bradwell hysterically puts in an order for evacuation of the building and comeplete lockdown to find the intruder before Fury appears himself, looming in the doorway, and tells them that they have all failed his surprise test. Phil lets him take the credit. Natasha gives him a present of an actual dead spider and earns herself a codename too. Jasper laughs at his apparent inclination for naming cats after other animals.

(The week after that, the rumour is that the giant lethal mutant spider on floor fourteen has been recruited as a SHIELD asset under the codename Black Widow.)

Chapter Text

It’s not actually aliens this time. Phil is fairly sure that he’s doing the FBI’s work right now, because this counts as home-grown terrorism. Technically. Obadiah Stane, the prominent head of Stane Industries, provides weapons for the good ole US of A... and also several militant groups that said US of A are at war with. Oh, and himself. They only find that one out when Stane takes one of his armed suits out for a ride, and Phil only wishes that meant that he was banging his security guards. New York does a lot of screaming because New York is somehow not fazed by alien takeovers, but is very indignant when it comes to one of their own trying to take over the world and disrupts traffic on the highway.

Phil has minus six hours to catch up on everything to do with Stane since, as previously noted, this is the FBI’s job and not his. He also thinks that maybe one of the junior agents ought to have noted in his background brief that Stane has been working on a sustainable source of energy for the last few years, and Stane Industries does not exactly support humanitarian projects. It’s a moment of weakness though because Phil knows, really, that he blames himself and not the junior agents; he just feels like shifting the blame somewhere else because someone is shooting at him with a giant flashlight mounted on their chest.

Luckily, as Phil is barking orders into his comm for everything that Stane has ever published and said about this thing, it overloads and breaks down. Ha, Phil thinks uncharitably, not such a super-battery now. He slinks around the back of the suit and takes the time to slide his penknife in at the neck joint and slice up a few wires. He thinks vaguely that maybe Stane ought to have done a few more lab tests before trying to take over the world in this thing; sustainable sources of power are presumably supposed to actually sustain themselves.

Phil secures Stane’s hands and registers something else moving in his peripheral vision. He swings his gun up and out before he realises that it’s just a cat. A really, really big cat that is hissing at him. He considers shooting it anyway, but Clint and Natasha are watching on the cams and they would probably disapprove. The cat takes a leap and Phil very nearly ends up shooting it anyway, but the cat lands heavily on Stane’s chest, takes a sniff at his attempt at a gundam suit now in pieces around him and growls.

After Stane’s been bundled up and hauled away, Phil dusts his hands off and gives the cat A Look. “I don’t know where you came from, but you should go back there now,” he tells it as it watches him, head cocked. He definitely does not want to scoop it and all its long, gangly limbs up and take it to meet Clint and Natasha. Reaching forward, Phil peers at the expensive collar around its neck. Tony, it reads. He looks on the flip side. If lost, return to: Obadiah Stane, Stane Industries. Oh, fuck. He looks at the SHIELD van that Stane is being very securely strapped into. Well, he’s fairly sure that prison doesn’t allow pets.

Tony sneezes from the dust, and follows Phil when he walks back to his surveillance van. “Shoo,” he tells him. “I already have more than enough cat than I can deal with. Besides, I’m sure Stane has actual legalities that dictate where his cat goes after he’s been arrested for treason and terrorism.” He shuts the door firmly in Tony’s face after a last shooing motion.

It turns out that after treason and terrorism, the legalities that dictate where Stane’s belongings go involve confiscating everything and taking it down to SHIELD storage, including the damn goldfish and cat. Phil is there to oversee it because his job now includes removals, and Tony pads up to him, curls around his leg and cries when they take his bed away. “No,” Phil says, reaching down to give him head scratches anyway.

Obadiah Stane is a paranoid bastard, and his personal belongings are booby trapped. They’d thought to check things like the computers and anything at work, but the actual house is booby trapped and they only find out when the rooms start blowing up, one by one. Phil throws himself out of a window, starts to tuck himself into a roll and ends up diving into the pool instead. He seriously hopes that there aren’t lasers in the pool or something ridiculous because he is on the verge of losing his temper.

Phil drags himself out of the pool to see the house in a pile of rubble. He gets his phone out -- because they hadn’t exactly anticipated needing comms to move furniture -- and the waterproof guarantee is holding up well. He calls Maria. “Status?” His voice is as bland as normal, but Maria gets it. There were a lot of agents in that house when it went, most of them wearing suits rather than the field gear.

“Running the bioscans now. Thermals indicate as many bodies in there as should be expected. No accounting for injuries though. Also one mammal  life sign that’s non-human. Dispatching medical teams.” She hangs up on him, but that’s a sign she has more important things to do.

Phil’s suit is ruined. He shrugs off the waterlogged jacket and tosses it to one side before heading back in to the wreckage. Maria has thoughtfully sent him a feed of the thermal imaging, and Phil picks his way across the less hazardous parts of the house to his colleagues. Some of them are fine, just staying put because they know better than to disturb piles of stonemasonry liable to crumble in on them at any moment. A couple of others have gashes or burns and Phil sends detailed but quick reports of their locations and surrounding areas to the medical teams. No one seems to be in critical condition and Phil can add ‘bad at blowing people up’ to Stane’s resume, and then decides that’s too much of a lie given he was dealing with several prominent terrorist cells.

There’s a soft whining cry coming from somewhere though, and Phil startles. What -- of course. One non-human life form, Maria had said. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied with his other agents, Phil wouldn’t have forgotten about Tony. He glances down at his phone screen again. Close. Phil surveys the damage around him; a door in splinters there, the remains of a wall, a pillar cracked and toppled. There are a lot of places that a cat, even a large one such as Tony, could be hidden. Phil zones out the blares of sirens, the curt voices of efficient people and listens for the soft, wheezing cries on an injured animal. There - he can see the jut of a paw under the pillar now.

Chiu is on Phil’s speed dial by now. “Get down to the Stane house,” he tells her when she picks up.

“There’s already four med teams down there,” she says in confusion, subtly reminding him that she is still a junior doctor.

Phil mentally maps the best way to get through to the pillar. “There’s a cat,” he tells her, and hangs up. He wonders briefly when he’d become so fond of cats. He wonders for slightly longer why he’s more fond of cats than of people. He sits next to Tony and gently pats the edge of paw he can reach as he waits.

When they lift the pillar off Tony, he’s far too weak to move himself. Chiu injects him full of sedatives before moving him. “I’m going to lose my job because of you,” she tells Phil casually. “I’m not even allowed to requisition a med van on my own, let alone steal one and load it with operating facilities.”

Phil doesn’t answer that, because she’s not going to lose her job if he has anything to do with it. (He doesn’t, but that’s only technically. He knows people.) “How does a SHIELD doctor know so much about operating on animals?” He asks as she starts hooking Tony up to machines.

“I was a vet before SHIELD recruited me.” Chiu looks up in time to see Phil raise an eyebrow. “My speciality lies in giving treatment to patients trying to run away from me,” she says, and her deadpan is almost as dead as Phil’s.

Phil might not be a vet, but he can tell when there are multiple broken bones. Tony’s chest looks like it’s caved in on itself and his breath is coming out in thin, wet whistles of air. Chiu is already immersing herself into medical equipment. “It’s going to be a while. I’ll call you when I have any news. Go finish up.”

The other agents are all being taken care of. When Phil steps out of the med van and the cold winter air hits him, he remembers that he’s in wet trousers and sodden underwear. Jasper has a hot mug of coffee waiting for him when he gets back to his car, and Phil inhales it all before fishing a spare suit from the trunk. It’s a bit wrinkled, but it’s better than loudly dripping over the the cold SHIELD corridors.

At some point in Phil’s life in SHIELD, he’s learnt how to change clothes in a car without flashing his underwear to outside cars and he and Jasper have done this for each other more than a few times now. Jasper drives them back to HQ and fills him in on the injuries sustained. Nothing more serious than a broken bone here or there, thankfully, but the case is now depleting their resources. The original agents are tied up in medical, one team is already dealing with Stane to see if there are any more surprises, another two teams had been dispatched to see what they can salvage of the bomb site and oversee clean-up and of course four med teams are tied up.

Phil waits patiently in line for his turn with medical, or rather carries on with his job as he waits for medical to clear out. Clint and Natasha meet him up at the office and they climb all over him, poking their noses into every pocket to see whether the new cat smell lingering on him means an actual new cat. He maybe gives them both a hug, unwinding long enough to realise that he’s very grateful for not dying today, especially from something as mundane as confiscating furniture. They squirm their way out of his touch when they realise that he also reeks of chlorine and stone dust. Natasha sneezes delicately and gently bites his forearm.

A shower is what Phil needs. He takes Clint with him because otherwise Clint will sulk at not being able to get into the shower, and lathers him up too when he gets bored, Clint revelling in the attention. Then he gets back in a suit, because it contains him and helps to fortify his inner armour, with his field gear underneath because actual armour can’t hurt either. He checks in on each of the agents present at the explosion and does not go down to Stane’s cell to strangle him.

When Chiu finally calls him after five hours (not that Phil’s been counting), it’s with good news. He waves at Clint and Natasha where they are either bathing in the tiny amount of sunlight that comes in through Phil’s window, plotting evil schemes or both. “Come on, I’ve got someone I want you to meet.”

The cats lazily flick their tails at him, just to show that they aren’t doing this because he told them to, but because they want to, and rally around his ankles before hopping on up. Natasha stretches out along his shoulders, and Phil has an inkling that maybe she grew up somewhere she couldn’t stretch out very often. Clint takes the corner of his arm, as usual, a little blob of fur with twitchy ears.

When they’re close enough for there to be new cat smell again, they both perk up, sniffing around and trying to figure out if it’s a good new cat smell or a bad new cat smell. “Be nice,” Phil tells them mildly. Chiu greets them with a smile, looking worn, and Phil’s glad he sent Fury a memo about her. Tony is still drugged six ways to Sunday but he looks a little less like a deflated soccer ball. There’s a dozen wires and tubes sticking out of him though.

“What do you think?” Phil asks the cats as they shuffle over to take a look. Clint and Natasha immediately don’t like him, of course, because they are judgemental, judgemental felines and never like anyone. Natasha goes for disdain, circling around and concentrating on washing her ears instead, and Clint flattens his ears and hisses at Phil’s elbow. “That’s practically acceptance coming from you two.” Phil rubs Clint’s back affectionately.

“He’s still in very real danger of dying,” says Chiu, “but given he had his entire chest crushed, he’s doing remarkably well.” She stretches, and a couple of vertebrae in her back pop. and Phil suddenly feels guilty. She’s probably stayed on far longer than her shift by now. “I’m going to risk going for a coffee and a shower. If anything beeps, call me.” She waves at him and heads off, now popping her shoulders.

Opening his mouth, Phil catches the small, amused look that Chiu gives him no matter how tired she is, and sits down instead. He should have anticipated that she needed a break, but it seems that she’s fine with asserting those needs herself. It’s a refreshing break from working with agents. It doesn’t matter how select or elite the forces get; they never grow out of trying to maintain a facade even in the face of life threatening injuries.

When Tony finally wakes, the cats flick to attention, which is how Phil goes from reading reports on his tablet to sitting up straight. Tony mewls softly, blearily, and then, as cats do, freaks out about being in a new place. Phil leans in, and warily reaches out to stroke his head before Tony rips all of the tubes out of his skin. Tony stops struggling, but his eyes remain frantic, darting around the room in unfocused, diluted terror.

Clint nips on down to meet him properly, and circles warily on Tony’s pillow. Phil stifles a laugh, because he is about the same size as Tony’s head. This leads to Natasha hopping off Phil’s shoulders because she is very protective of Clint, and Tony purrs in appreciation. He tries to roll around enough to nuzzle Natasha and that... that maybe ruffles her feathers. Or fur. In any case, she goes from placid to claws bared and swiping Tony across the nose.

Tony yelps, and sinks into chastised sulking. Clint bares his teeth and swipes his tail back and forth, which means that he is positively hysterical with laughter. Even though Natasha is smugly cleaning her paws, that doesn’t discourage Tony. He manages to sulk for all of a minute, and then Phil can see him gearing up for a second attempt. He quickly intervenes, picking Natasha up and giving her belly rubs and cuddles and she goes kind of limp, swishing her tail and chirruping. Phil wonders how and when his life turned into cockblocking cats.

“Be nice,” Phil murmurs again, rubbing her ears. She gives him a ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about’ look, and pretends she didn’t have plans to maul Tony. “At least let him heal before you break him again.”

And then Tony catches all of their attention again when he makes the same deep, rumbling purr from before but this time at Clint. He’s worked a paw free from all the tangled tubes and is batting at Clint’s tail and Phil snatches Clint up protectively, clutching his cats to his chest. “No,” he tells Tony, shocked. “He’s just a kitten, he is far too young for you.”

Chiu chooses this moment to walk back in.

Chapter Text

“Oh fuck,” Phil groans, leaning back in his very comfortable office chair. “I’m the office crazy cat lady!”

Jasper gives him an odd look. “Are you only just realising this? You’ve been the office crazy cat lady since Hawkeye took to the air ducts.”

The cats know when they’re being talked about, and they circle around the sofa legs. Or at least, Clint and Natasha do. Tony is in an enormous cat bed, his ribs wrapped up and a cone around his neck and is still on a cocktail of drugs meant to keep him out of pain and not moving too much, so he’s kind of just slumped on one side, watching everything with large amounts of curiosity and suppressing his dislike of change by only occasionally spitting. Anyway -- Clint and Natasha have finally got used to Jasper coming in to invade Phil’s office, and will tolerate him, barely.

The deal they seem to have is that Jasper is fine as long as he stays on the sofa. It doesn’t stop them from just waiting for when he forgets and dares to touch a foot to the ground. “Fucking lavasharks,” he had muttered once, and Phil had decided to just not ask.

Tony is a cat with absolutely no sense of self preservation. The moment Chiu declares him healthy enough to take off some of the drugs, he tries it on with Natasha again. Phil watches him as he tries to get his head far enough out of the cone to lick her; Natasha snickers at him, and bites his tail. Tony makes huge sad eyes and trots over to Clint instead, who apparently quite enjoys being hit on. Or maybe he just likes the fact that Tony is a huge cat and will let him climb up his cone and see the world from up high.

Sometimes, Clint will take Tony out into the office. Tony’s far too big to fit into the air ducts, not to mention that he’s still hurting too much to do that much maneuvering, so they take the front door approach instead. Tony can sense that he’s allowed to be curious over things as long as it’s not the stacks of neatness in Phil’s office, and so he maybe goes a little wild. He can (and does) jump halfway across the room in one bound, head high and alert. He’s curious about everything and anything and looks so disappointed when he is denied the chance to literally stick his nose in something. At least he’s still injured enough that he’s only good for brief rounds of exercise before needing to flop over in Phil’s room.

If the office had been on alert before, it is now on high alert. Clint gains previously unseen range, distance and speed since Tony is willing to cart him around, and they cause enough ruckus that no one notices Natasha slinking along behind them in the shadows.

“It’s getting out of hand, don’t you think?” Maria asks one day over lunch, as she has to do a somersault from Phil’s office door into his guest chair so that she doesn’t touch the floor and get attacked by Phil’s lavashark kitties. She sets down two portions of piping hot lasagna though, so she can’t be too angry at him.

In return, Phil pours her some coffee from his (beloved) personal coffee maker, which is almost as big as his shredder. Clint takes his momentary absence from his chair to squish himself into the back of it so that he is nicely sandwiched between the chair and Phil’s back when he sits back down. “Constant vigilance,” he merely says. The lasagna smells really good.

Maria squints at him. “Are you quoting Harry Potter at me?”

“I’m quoting Nick Fury at you,” Phil says. It takes her a moment to get it, and then they both crack up at the mental image of a badass one-eyed man quoting another badass one-eyed man.

Maria digs in, but not before curling an arm around her food. Natasha is even better than Clint at stealing food. “So you’ve talked with Nick about your cat problem?”

“My cats aren’t problems.” Phil frowns.

“No, not what I meant.” Maria pushes the tupperware at him, waiting for him to take a bite before explaining. “You have a problem. Your problem is cats. You collect them like cats collect fleas.”

Phil frowns again. “My cats don’t have fleas.”

Maria points her fork at him. “That is exactly what I mean. That’s what you took away from what I said?”

Taking the time to eat and think, Phil finally pushes the empty tupperware away. “Are my cats a problem?” He asks, aware that he may have a bit of a biased view on this matter.

“I -- Yes. Yes, they are a problem.” Maria raises a hand before he can say anything, so he wipes his mouth instead. He thinks that she might take a while. “They are dangerous and ridiculous and disrupt my agents from working. I’ve had two filed complaints, raging office gossip and fourteen agents who have handed in transfer notices.”

“Fourteen?” Phil asks, because there are only twelve cubicles in the open area outside his office.

“Philip,” Maria says, and Phil subsides even though he’s old enough to be her creepy uncle at least. Natasha has crept into his lap, and he pats her absently. “I think there only aren’t more official complaints because they are too scared that you’ll set the cats on them. But!”

Maria pauses for breath. “But Phil, the problem isn’t even the cats. Fury finds them hilarious, and I’ll admit that as ridiculous as they are, if you can’t deal with some misanthropic cats then you probably won’t last long in SHIELD. The big thing is that they are your cats and you are bringing them in to work. When you work for a very secret, very dangerous government agency. Your cats sit in on briefings and missions. I mean, they’re called Hawkeye, Black Widow and -- what’s Tony?”

“Iron Cat,” Phil supplied helpfully.

“Iron - what? Iron Cat? Okay, that’s exactly my point. Your cats have codenames.” Maria pauses. “Why is Tony ‘Iron Cat?”

Phil shrugs. “Given his ability to survive houses falling in on him and Natasha attacking him every other day, I figured that he might well be made of metal.” He doesn’t mention anything about his childhood reading superhero comics and how inordinately proud is he that he seems to be collecting his very own supercat collection. Phil may be a middle-aged government agent, but he still has dreams, okay.

“No one’s going to believe that Iron Cat is a real SHIELD agent codename,” she says flatly and this is when Phil knows that Maria’s not really bothered by the cats at all, because then she wouldn’t be arguing over the realism of Tony’s fake codename. He’s going to have to figure out what it is she’s really after.

It’s probably time to remind her: “My codename is Principal. I think Iron Cat will pass muster.”

“My point is,” Maria gets back on track, “that you are bringing your personal life into your professional life. Normal people do not bring their pets into the office. Look at yourself; you look like a Bond villain.”

“Normal people don’t save the world from aliens every other week,” Phil retaliates childishly behind the safety of his own office door where no junior agent will ever know he was anything but emotionless. He strokes Natasha again, then steeples his fingers. “Mwahahaha.”

Maria tilts her head and thinks at him. She’s good at hiding the emotions when she needs to be - they all have that mastered - but she likes to be able to think loudly. “So you don’t think we should try to act like a normal office?”

“I think we should do whatever it takes to keep us sane,” says Phil. “The psychs said that I seemed calmer after the cats, so I figure that they do some good.”

“Are you also under the impression that the more cats you collect, the calmer you’ll be?” Maria asks dryly. She seems to have got what she came for, though Phil hasn’t figured out what that is, because she’s collecting the tupperware and planning her escape. She has her work cut out for her; she has to get to the door, open it, get out and shut the door again before the lavashark cats can reach her, and there are three of them and they are waiting.

Phil takes mercy on her, mostly because she brought him very delicious food, and gets the door for her.

-

“This is Pepper,” Maria says the next day, standing on the threshold of Phil’s office. There’s a ginger cat elegantly perched on her shoulder, tail curling neatly over Maria’s collarbone.

Phil blinks, which actually means that he wants to stare, and holds out a hand solemnly. “Nice to meet you, Pepper.” She leans forward and bumps his hand with her head, and then goes back to licking her paw. Phil feels a light frisson of fear.

Ten minutes later, Phil feels his phone buzz. It’s a message from Jasper, which reads thus: WHAT DID YOU DO. There is no answer to give, because... this time, Phil’s actually not sure what he did.

Their pre-emptive panic turns out to be a bit... well, pre-emptive. Pepper is, in fact, sweet and adorable and sophisticated and everyone likes her. She’s very like Natasha actually, except that Natasha is only sweet and adorable and sophisticated towards Phil and Clint and a lethal, deadly killer to anyone else. Phil feels a pang of jealousy, because everyone coos over Pepper, but the entire floor flees with urgent missions or paperwork to file elsewhere whenever Phil’s cats are implied to even be nearby.

There’s a second message from Jasper after lunch. Does this mean I can bring Furbils in tomorrow?

Only if you want your gerbil to be eaten by Clint, Phil types back, a fresh horror forming in his mind. Thankfully, no one else seems to take this as a sign that they should all start bringing in their pets too. (Nick threatens to bring in a parrot.)

It’s pretty hard to actually dislike Pepper, because she’s just so likeable. There’s a meow sound outside Phil’s office early one morning and Phil opens the door. She drops a dead mouse onto his carpet, nudges it at him with her nose and then pads into his office as if she has appeased him with the necessary amount of customary greeting and is now making herself at home.

Pepper spends the next day getting to know all of Phil’s cats. Phil isn’t sure what they get up to because contrary to popular belief, he doesn’t actually spend all his time in his office watching his cats. There’s a lot of paperwork to get done, and Johnson needs to be prepped for her first long-term undercover. Whatever happens though, neither Clint nor Natasha are shredding her to pieces when he gets back and Tony is practically drooling over her. He keeps begging her for nose bumps; she occasionally lifts her head to give him one, and then go back to placidly curling up on the floor next to Natasha as they laze.

Chapter Text

On his first anniversary of cat herding (which means it’s also Halloween again), Phil buys presents for his kitties. He has no idea what took him so long, but since the idea of owning cats in the first place freaked him out, it’s a good step forward for him. He gets them all matching collars. Clint’s is purple, Natasha’s is black and Tony’s is red. They were picked out using the unscientific method of checking ‘what colour cushion do you like to lie on the most’ at home. They get their names on the tag with codenames in brackets underneath and the back has Jasper’s home address. Phil figures that the only way they’re going to get lost is if he’s not coming back, so his own address wouldn’t be much help.

Halloween is also, as previously iterated, when idiots attack New York. To be fair, this time they’re giant alien slugs that are a tiny bit confused, since they got sucked into a wormhole that was actually opened up by Reed Richards. They still trail monstrous amounts of ooze and slime across New York (thankfully, much of it is on the Baxter Building, and the Fantastic Four can deal with that on their own) in their quest to get back to their homeworld. At least Phil isn’t on cat herding duty, which doesn’t involve any herding of actual cats; it’s Jasper’s nickname for civilian duty. There’s always a few who decide to wander towarddanger and not away.

So, Jasper’s on cat herding, Maria’s gone personally to hold a very sharp knife to Richard’s neck to make him fix this and Phil... well, Phil has mostly rounded up all of the giant slugs and is attempting to keep them contained until they can be sent back. Five blocks have been cordoned off, and the slugs are mostly just lying around, oozing, and occasionally absorbing the odd car that’s in their way.

There’s slime congealing around Phil’s ankles but he grimly ignores it as he wades through, closing the perimeter in as best he can. He expects to have to fish out an intrepid reporter from under a slug, or have to order someone who thought it wasn’t worth their time to evacuate to get out alreadyor rescue a child who had been left behind. However, he doesn’t, he really doesn’t despite the way this is becoming almost a routine, expect to see a cat on top of a fire hydrant, hissing at a giant slug as it slowly rolls over. The cat is enormous, its long fur dirty and tangled and its tail is bristled as it snarls.

Phil can see where this is going. It’s like watching a car crash in incredibly slow motion. He would like to say that he dashes over to the cat and pulls it out of harm’s way, but he can’t. He kind of schloops over instead, each step making the sound of a sucking plunger, and reaches out his hand... only to get zapped by a catful of static electricity.

Swearing, Phil flinches. ‘Principal, what is it?’Maria’s voice is in his comm immediately, sounding ready for anything from ‘I’m being swallowed by a giant slug’ to ‘Reed’s a distraction, they’re invading’. So it’s her turn to swear at him when he says sheepishly, “It’s a cat.”

‘Another one?’The disbelief bleeds through her voice. Phil does not have time to deal with what she thinks of his cat collecting tendencies, because that slug is about to squash them both. He slips an arm around the cat, and schloops away, just in time before the slug reaches its rolling point and crashes down behind him, splattering his back with slime. A bit of it drops from his hair and trickles down his neck. Oh, that’s disgusting.

The great tangled ball of fur in his arms wriggles free to give him a friendly faceplant that Phil suspects is supposed to be a nose bump, and then rubs itself all over Phil, conveniently smearing all the slug slime over his chest. Phil blinks, slowly, and goes back to walking the perimeter. “How goes it with Reed?” Phil asks casually.

‘Still upset he has to abandon his pet project,’Maria says in her tones of voice reserved for exceptionally stupid clever people. ‘Almost done though.’

There is a pause. “Reed’s a distraction. They’re invading,” he says just to hear her reaction.

Phil squelches his way back to the surveillance van once all the giant slugs have been happily transported back to their own planet, and leaves the giant blond cat on a different fire hydrant. “You’re not coming in here covered in that,” says Jasper, doing an uncanny impression of Phil’s father. The worst part is that Jasper’s actually met Phil’s father, so it’s deliberate.

“Screw you,” Phil says and makes to climb in the van. Clint appears in the doorway and yowls at him, tail lashing, and refuses to let him come in either. “What,” Phil says crossly at Clint. Even Natasha is flicking her tail in mild irritation. (Tony, who gets himself in and out of all sorts of disgusting situations, clearly doesn’t mind his state of being.) “It’s just alien slug slime,” he protests.

“It could be radioactive alien slug slime,” says Jasper. “And you don’t want to inflict that on us, do you?” Phil is too tired to care.

Standing on the street, Phil mutters something unsavoury about protocols as the van pulls out and heads back to HQ without him. The nearest facilities SHIELD has set up with decontamination showers are thankfully only six blocks away. “I hate them all,” Phil tells the giant fuzzy cat, who meows at him and then leans his head in under Phil’s hand, a shameless ploy for head rubs.

(‘I heard that,’says Jasper over the comm.)

Staunchly ignoring the slime, which is starting to dry and flake off his back like cheap lube, Phil makes his way to be decontaminated. Jasper’s right - it is the best thing to do until some of the SHIELD scientists have analysed what is in the alien slime. Giant fuzzy cat decides to walk along with him. “I don’t need more cats,” Phil tells him. “And you look like you belong to someone.” The analytical part of his mind that never switches off informs him that he would have sounded more sane if he had switched the order of those statements around, and also that if he really wanted to sound sane then he wouldn’t be talking to cats in the first place.

Chiu is there when he reaches decontamination. “Maria said there was another cat,” she says without preamble.

“I hate them all,” Phil reiterates to giant fuzzy cat. He holds out a hand to stop Chiu. “Shower first,” he tells her very seriously as he cuts in line, peels off his field gear which is now stuck to him with dried slime, and turns the water as hot as it will go. Barket, who was next in line, starts to complain but Phil turns around and levels him a look; even naked, Phil is intimidating. He merely points at giant fuzzy cat and crooks a finger. Barket looks confused for a moment, but then gingerly picks giant fuzzy cat up and pushes it into the shower with Phil.

Giant fuzzy, like Clint, thankfully really loves showers. He splashes and rolls around like a kitten even though he is clearly far, far too big to be that young, and Phil is just glad that cats are self sufficient as he scrapes dried slime off himself.

When he and giant fuzzy are cleaned and dried again, Phil pulls his mental armour back together, and goes to see Chiu. She’s making herself useful, lending a hand with minor injuries sustained. There’s nothing serious though, so she makes her way over to Phil when she spots him. “You really do have a cat thing,” she tells him, as though he hasn’t noticed.

“I think this one already has an owner,” says Phil, trying to capture giant fuzzy from where he is weaving happily in and out of Phil’s legs for Chiu to look at. She looks down at the problem and then scuttles after him, chasing him right into Phil’s arms.

“Watch out,” says Phil. Chiu reaches out before he can finish, and gets zapped. “I think his long hair creates a lot of static,” finishes Phil with a rueful smile.

Chiu huffs out a laugh, and hefts giant fuzzy into her arms. “Aren’t you a big boy?” Getting the scanner requires a bit of work since it takes her two hands to hold on to him, but they get there in the end. “Oh, you’re chipped! Look at that. Name: Donald.” She looks down doubtfully at giant fuzzy, who definitely doesn’t look like a Donald. “Well, there’s no accounting for taste. Owner: Odin Allfather. Hmm, I think I saw that name on a report or something earlier.”

Chiu frowns, and Phil pulls out his phone, searching the SHIELD database. “Allfather with a one or two Ls? -- Oh, I found him.” Chiu stops petting ‘Donald’ and looks up at his tone. “One of the reported fatalities of today’s off-world visitors,” Phil says, his voice heavy. He checks today’s reports to see if anyone has been dispatched to his next of kin yet, or whether he would have to tell them himself that he has been squashed and absorbed by a giant space slug.

This is his life now. Phil notes down the contact details on Donald’s microchip and ends up with giant fuzzy outside an apartment complex. Having looked into it first, Phil knows that this is a commune; he wonders briefly what that actually means. A woman with thick blonde hair opens the door. “Yes?”

“Good afternoon,” says Phil. He’s undercover, which means pretending to be an innocent businessman who happened to find a stray cat. “Is Mr Allfather in? I found this cat out in the streets earlier today. I got the chip checked, and this was the address that came up.”

“Oh, it’s Dondon!” The woman reaches out a hand to pet giant fuzzy. He purrs, a loud rumble. “Odin is -- gone, I’m afraid. But don’t worry about Donald. He’s not really our cat. He’s more of a free spirit. He just comes in and out whenever he wants.” She turns to look directly at giant fuzzy, and Phil is finally so glad that he’s met someone else who talks to cats like he does because he was starting to think that he was going crazy.

“Dondon! Are you coming in? Or staying out with your nice new friend?” Phil is not sure that he looks like a nice new friend. ‘Dondon’ lets the woman scratch him thoroughly, and then picks his way back over to Phil’s legs, twining his tail across Phil’s knees.

“Looks like he wants to play with you for a bit longer,” she says. “Don’t feed him too much, he’s very capable of hunting for himself.”

“Er,” says Phil. His capacity for being surprised is high, but even some situations are beyond his imagination.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Frieda.” She shakes his hand, and then politely closes the door in his face.

Phil looks down at the cat, who remains giant fuzzyin his head because Dondon is just too much. “No,” he says. “Go play with someone else. I already have three cats who own my soul and I don’t have enough time for you.” Also, Phil starts to get a headache whenever he thinks about Clint, Natasha and Tony and the blasé way they treat alien threats already; he’s not sure he could deal with a cat that happily stands ready to attack space slugs approximately three thousand times its size.

Unfortunately, Frieda was right when she said that Donald is a free spirit, because he tries to get into the car with Phil. Phil bodily picks him up and sets him on the street. Donald yowls in protest, and jumps back in the car. They repeat this a few times (bystanders are starting to giggle as they walk past) until Phil finally manages to get the door shut fast enough that he probably doesn’t have a squished cat in the doorway.

Taking a moment to just breathe deeply turns out to be the wrong thing to do. Phil is about to rev the engine when there’s the horrendous, ear-splitting screeching sound of claws down a blackboard from the outside of the car and Phil gurgles in horror as he sticks his fingers in his ears. When it stops, he opens the door. There’s two sets of deep gouge marks across the entire length of the car that end in giant fuzzy with his claws firmly embedded in the rear door. His face lights up when he sees Phil and he takes a long leap, first landing on Phil’s shoulder and then wriggling into the car.

Phil’s still recovering from the way his eardrums are quivering in fear as he helplessly shuts the door. “At least it’s a company car,” he says faintly to himself. Giant fuzzy is in the passenger seat, front paws up on the dashboard in excitement as he waits for Phil to get going. “You are a bully,” he tells Dondon, entirely unseriously. “You’ll fit right in.”

Unfortunately, Phil’s right. Giant fuzzy approaches everyone with the same kind of enthusiasm and friendliness that got Phil landed with him in the first place. There are layers of long golden hairs everywherebut he’s such a darling that no one cares. He bounces around the office as though he owns it, shamelessly nudging everyone as they work for pets and scratches. Half the time anyone touches him, they get zapped from all the static he builds up rolling around the carpets and flitting from person to person. He’s only been here for half an hour.

That’s only the first impression. Phil tries to distract him from all the people in the office for long enough to herd him in to meet the other cats, not entirely sure how they’re going to respond. Tony jerks up instantly, head cocking to the side as he examines the newcomer. He pads up to giant fuzzy and gives him a wary sniff. Giant fuzzy responds by grabbing Tony around the neck, leaning his weight on him until Tony crumples to the ground, then lying on top of him and giving him nuzzles. He is the most obnoxiously friendly cat Phil has ever seen. Tony makes protesting whining noises but giant fuzzy is good - it turns into happy trilling noises after about five minutes.

Clint and Natasha are still in their corner of Phil’s office, not because they aren’t curious, but because they’re not like Tony, sticking their noses into every new thing regardless of whether it’s safe or not. Clint is all bristled, ears and tail flicking in suspicion. Natasha is placid but watching with an eagle eye. Now Phil knows about her general disposition toward anyone but herself and Clint, he would probably wager that she’s sharpening the claws she has neatly tucked underneath her right now.

Giant fuzzy finally gets off Tony and Tony just lies on the carpet, basking in the nuzzles. He goes for Natasha next, trying the same technique of lie-on-them-and-love-them-into-submission, but Natasha doesn’t go easily. Phil watches from the corner of his eyes as he pulls out the correct paperwork. She yowls and screams and her claws and teeth are out in full force; giant fuzzy gets the hint and backs off. Phil wonders if he’s going to have to return an upset and wounded Donald to Frieda, but giant fuzzy just lowers himself to the ground, flattens his ears and gives Natasha the most giant, liquid, wobbly sad eyes that Phil has ever seen - and he’s seen Tony trying to bribe him for more food.

It takes a while for Natasha to crack, but she does eventually, her claws retracting as she leans down and inches forward until her nose bumps giant fuzzy’s in forgiveness. Giant fuzzy apparently has even fewer notions of self-preservation than Tony, because he darts his head forward happily and licks her from nose to ear.

If he had to guess, Phil would say that Clint is likely to react much like Natasha. Unfortunately, he’s not given much of a chance, because giant fuzzy bounds over to him, circles him twice, and then just flops over on top of Clint. Clint is so small compared to the enormous cat that is Donald that Phil can barely hear his pitiful yowls of Help, I’m drowning in fluff!from underneath giant fuzzy’s belly.

It stops after a while, and Natasha inches forward to see whether Clint’s died of overenthusiastic cuddling yet. Clint’s trembling nose eventually struggles its way out to bump hers and Phil lets out a sigh of relief. Giant fuzzy rolls off Clint and Phil hides his smile as he goes to rescue Clint before giant fuzzy can get at him again. He has never seen such a disgruntled and ruffled ball of fur.

Clint hops up onto his desk, tugging at Phil’s gel wrist rest with his teeth until Phil gets the hint and moves it out of the way. Clint likes to curl up where the wrist rest is supposed to be, and Phil finds himself leaning his wrists on top of him as he types, feeling Clint’s small ribcage move up and down as he breathes. When his phone vibrates, Clint bats at it until Phil plucks it away from his paws. It’s a text from Maria, which simply reads: Codename: Thor.

Phil looks over to the corner of his office, where Donald is sprawled all over his floor and Tony is on his haunches next to him, examining him with a series of quick, fascinated prods with his paw and occasionally hearing the crackle of static. Phil laughs. “Thor, huh.”

Chapter Text

Phil has the weekend off. That means, as usual, that he actually spends the weekend working, and then takes Monday and Tuesday off instead. Evidently even supervillains get the Monday blues because no one ever attacks then. Phil shrugs into his suit jacket and looks over mournfully at the mess in his office. He doesn’t bother tidying up the pile of cushions and cat toys in the corner, because the cats are like children, yowling whenever their things have been moved.

As he locks up his empty office, the click of the key alert the cats of home time and they join him. Clint slinks down from the ceiling, landing lightly on Phil’s shoulders before hopping down into his customary position in his arms. Natasha slinks out from under a desk and joins him like a little shadow. Tony looks over at him from where he’s examining a potted plant with great interest and then reluctantly joins them, all legs and excitement as he spies a new way of sneaking up on Natasha in hopes of nuzzles. It’s never going to work.

Thor joins them, dashing into the elevator at the last second, which means that Phil marches through the lobby of SHIELD with a complete set of cats. The first time that he did this, anyone who considered laughing was instantly mauled by an unseen Natasha and then laughed at by an irreverent Tony. Now, it’s just routine.

They pile into the car. Clint likes to take front seat next to Phil, and will fight anyone who tries to claim it, which mostly just involves trying to bite Thor, resulting in mouthfuls of fur and the most enormous hairballs. Occasionally, he’ll let Natasha share, but no one else, and she’ll either lounge in the front or slink under the seats to practice her ninja skills. Tony displays all the signs of a pampered cat of a rich CEO and likes to sprawl across the entirety of the backseat. Thor doesn’t always come with them because, as Frieda rightly said, he’s a bit of a free spirit - but if he does, he clambers all over Tony and occasionally sits on top of him.

Today, Thor seems to want to come with them, but then stops in the street, hissing madly. Given that the only other time Phil has seen Thor be unfriendly in any way, it was toward an enormous space slug, he’s a bit alarmed. His fingers twitch for his gun. “What is it, Thor?” Phil flattens himself against the nearest building; he would rather look a bit ridiculous if it turns out to be a particularly large rat than dead if it turns out to be another invading army. The other cats pick up on the tension and go into what Phil likes to call ‘Mission mode’.

Tony is on alert, his large ears flicking around for information, and then starts to hiss. Phil turns his head, waiting until his human ears finally pick up the sound too. He moves steadily toward the next intersection and around the corner. There’s a man there that he almost bumps into, and he has the bushiest moustache that Phil has ever seen. That’s not the sound that caught Thor’s attention though; it’s what the man is facing.

The cat is enormous. Phil already has Tony who is long enough to reach halfway up him and Thor who can successfully suffocate both Natasha and Clint in one, well-meaning hug, but this cat is just plain big. It’s also making a noise that Phil has never heard come out of a cat before, a low, hacking noise of terror and fury. A cat that big has no business being scared of anyone. Phil’s own cats are flattened to the floor as one, ears back and hissing. They’re very territorial of each other and this close to SHIELD, they are definitely feeling invaded.

It speaks to how big and intimidating the cat is that Phil only really notices the man opposite it second. The man is tall, broad and nearly spitting with anger himself. In one hand is a catch pole and in the other is something akin to a cattle prod.

It's not really a fair fight. Phil doesn't like fights that are not fair, which is ironic given that his career involves men running around with guns trying to subdue aliens with technology beyond their very imaginations. "Excuse me," he says politely, because the urge to punch the man in the face is no excuse for not being polite. He leans down to scoop the cat up. It yowls at him and goes for the throat but Phil's been taking master classes from Chiu. He gets one hand behind the front legs and the other hand around the back legs and hefts the cat into his arms where it struggles and thrashes. Given it's the size of a small child, Phil actually struggles to maintain his calm facade. "I'm not going to hurt you," he tells the giant furball of rage.

"You give that thing back!" The man steps up, moustache quivering visibly. His salt and pepper hair is trimmed meticulously, his buttons are polished and he brandishes the electric deterrent around with no thought to anyone else. Phil knows immediately the kind of man he is dealing with.

“If you are having trouble with a stray cat, you can just call AC&C,” Phil says, mostly ignoring him. “I’m sure they would be happy to take this feline off your hands.”

"That thing is federal property!" The man points the cattle prod at Phil threateningly and Phil has no doubt at all that he would use it if he thought it would work. He shifts one of his hands so that he can reach his hip holster, which is currently hidden by the body of cat in front of him.

"This thing is a cat," Phil informs him politely, "and as a federal agent myself, I can say that we do not condone animal cruelty." That’s the official stance, though Phil knows in the back of his mind that there are plenty of government science facilities doing experiments on live ani - oh. He looks down at the giant furball of rage again, and can see red, unfocussed eyes that narrow at him.

"That thing is not a cat," hisses the man, inching toward Phil as though Phil won't notice. Phil mentally scoffs at the thought. "That thing is a monster!" Veins in his forehead bulge.

Phil looks down at giant furball of rage. "No, I'm fairly sure it's a cat," he says mildly. "Now, who are you?"

"I am General Ross of the Air Force. And who are you, laddie?" The general snarls at him and Phil can only blink in surprise. It seems unusual that someone from the Air Force to be involved with something like animal testing, so it means that whatever they were putting the cat through must have been directly related to weapons. He misses the days when the issue would have been mascara or cloning.

"I outrank you," Phil says mildly. "Your clearance doesn't even involve knowing what organisation I work for." That’s the advantage of working for a super secret agency, not to mention that SHIELD operates outside the ranking system of the general armed forces in any case. But rank is the sort of thing that General Ross will understand. The cat is still trying to claw at him, and it is impossibly strong. Phil keeps his elbows locked down. He's had training on how to take down Skrulls in hand to hand combat; a cat is not going to overwhelm him, honestly.

Suddenly, Phil can feel a slight change of tension in his very bones and he flicks a quick look down to see what triggered it. The cats are no longer in attack mode, which is interesting. They're still wary, ears flicking back and forth in suspicion, but Phil knows it's more than that, it's -- Tony. Phil nearly has a heart attack when Tony stretches up, placing his forepaws on Phil's hip and poking his nose at the giant furball of rage. "No survival instinct," he mutters to himself darkly, because he doesn't really care if General Ross can hear him.

Tony meows at the giant furball of rage, and then plunges his nose into the thick fur. Phil momentarily thinks Tony might be trying to kill himself, but then he feels a deep vibration in his arms and realises that the giant furball of rage is... purring. Another look down tells Phil that Tony has rubbed his face all over the giant furball of rage's, and they are nuzzling each other. Phil cautiously lets go of its legs so that it can squirm around and examine Tony curiously.

General Ross leaps forward with a shout. "It's dangerous! Don't let go!" He makes a grab for the cat, and the giant furball gets rage-filled again, turning his attention from Tony to Ross. Phil can feel the muscles under his hand bunching up again, claws digging in to the protective armour down his arm. He quickly steps back and away from Ross.

“I believe your presence is what’s bothering him.”

Ross narrows his eyes and sneers at Phil. “You think you’re being such a humanitarian, sheltering that thing, huh? Let me tell you, I’m no liar. That thing is a menace to society with the things it’s capable of.” There’s an air of superiority to him, and Phil knows exactly what that is. That’s the look the junior agents carry around with them in public for the first fortnight or so, that look that says ‘I know something you don’t know, and that makes me better than you.’

Phil is going to call his bluff. "Tony, Thor, look after him, will you?" Phil puts the giant furball of rage down - behind him - and Tony steps up in front of him, teeth bared. Phil rolls his sleeves up casually and ignores that Ross is squinting as he tries to figure out what Phil is up to. When Phil reaches into his pocket to reach for his phone, Ross’ fingers actually twitch in alarm, automatically extending his cattle prod before he even realises it.

"General Ross, you said? Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross of the US Air Force," he reads, scrolling through the information at his thumbtips. He gives the general a look of disdain at his nickname, sparing a glance at the cattle prod. “Well, I suppose if you insist on doing Pikachu impersonations...”

Phil ploughs on. "Assigned to the development of superhuman for the armed forces. Desired results include super strength, super speed, enhanced memory and super healing." He keeps an eye on Ross in his peripheral vision, and he’s getting steadily whiter as he realises how much of his file Phil can read, which is all of it. "Methods have involved research into the mutant gene, blood taken from superheros, gamma radiation and various other methods of inducing a change in humanity." He levels a flat look at Ross.

"Let me guess. You are at the animal trials stage. You have dosed this cat with some potentially poisonous and lethal and there are unanticipated side-effects. Then it escaped, and now you want to throw it back into your lab again." Phil sounds almost bored by the end. He almost wishes that he was more interesting. At least he has had the satisfaction of seeing Ross get as red as a traffic cone as his guesses hit home.

"If you know so much about it, then you'd know that the side effects could be anything," barks Ross. "That thing started out a mild mannered kitten called Bruce, and you saw it just a moment ago. Anger issues, agent. It’s a danger to people just by being out of its cell. You were holding it with your bare hands. Are you so sure you'll be safe?" He shows off his gloved hands in demonstration.

Phil’s hands tingle, which is exactly the effect that Ross was going for: intimidation and mind tricks. Phil does know exactly how dangerous touching experimental equipment can be, but he’s not going to stop now. In the end, it’s just a cat. If he’d been locked up from when he was a child and had been poked and fed unusual substances, he’d probably have a few anger issues too.

"The only monster here is you, Ross," Phil says. He turns around and points back at SHIELD. The cats fill into their usual formation (Tony and Thor up front, Clint behind them and Natasha slinking at the end) except this time they’ve sandwiched the giant furball of rage in the centre. Phil isn't sure who they're protecting, but he likes that the cats know when it's an urgent matter and when they can afford to ignore his commands. Ross tries to go after them, but Phil steps in between them and him. "You can talk to your superior and see if even he has clearance to come talk to us, and then your can petition for your cat to come back. Until then, the cat is being confiscated."

With any luck, the amount of time it takes to do that sort of paperwork will give Phil enough time to ensure that not only does Ross not get his hands back on this cat, but his entire experimentation on animals operation is shut down. Phil finds it easily to believe that someone, somewhere, thought it would be a good idea to have a line of super soldiers working for the armed forces, because there are a great many stupid people out there, but he can scarcely believe that they are seriously trying to make it work. His hands are full looking after four cats; he can’t even try to wrap his head around keeping a squadron of super powered people in line.

Also, his brain provides snidely, it doesn’t make sense to test enhancing natural abilities on cats. As far as Phil can tell, cats already think that they're super powered. It's a whole different mentality. Phil is also not stupid. He knows that this will be a difficult fight: it is a government sanctioned operation. He hands Ross one of his public business cards. It only states Agent Coulson and a phone number. It’s not even his number - it goes to the SHIELD lobby, where a receptionist by the name of Maura rules with an iron-fist and the sweetest sugary telephone voice. Getting through her will be an ordeal in itself.

Then Phil marches back to SHIELD, good mood entirely gone. He walks in through the door and mentally laughs when Ross tries to stalk in after him and finds himself kept out via the opticals activated force field. Then he takes his phone out again and dials the Chinese place. He asks if they can deliver to a different address today, and asks for it to be sent up to SHIELD's medical quarters. He also asks for an extra two potions of food, because the giant furball of rage looks like it could well eat both Clint and Natasha and still be hungry. Then, he leans down and picks up the giant furball, who is actually not very rage-filled right now and is letting Tony repeatedly headbutt him with amused patience. The name Bruce seems quite apt now. Bruce is enormous in his arms, and there's fur obscuring his vision. Thank goodness Phil has great muscle memory. He sends Chiu a text saying that he's on his way, navigates his way to the medical centre and lets himself in. There, he waits until several doctors and nurses have looked up in alarm and gestures at the lot of them. "I need decontamination for one human and five cats," he says calmly. "And then I need a full check-up and blood work on this one."

Phil gives himself the time inside the decontamination shower time to think. Clint is rubbing around his ankles as usual, happy to be in the shower with him. "No," Phil says firmly when Clint gets around to trying to tickle his toes with his tail, and pours shampoo on him. "So, what do you think?" He's been doubting his decision since before he even made it because there are so many things that could go terribly, terribly badly with a cat that has been injected or exposed to God knows what. All he knew was that he wasn't going to send it back for another round of it.

Clint doesn't much care either way. Clint still hates everyone anyway and is only social through peer pressure, because it's impossible not to get along with the rest of his cats. Clint meows plaintively, and Phil holds him under the spray, letting him bat the bubbles off himself. "I suppose it was the right thing to do." He tries not to think about how right it would still be if he had infected himself with some sort of half-baked enhancement chemical.

When everyone is finally washed and dried and attentive around the hospital bed in the corner that Chiu has settled the giant furball of rage on, Phil settles himself in for the long run. The Chinese arrived as they were showering, and Phil has distributed food among all the cats. Chiu has her own animal corner now, a small bit of ward four. It was decided that the sacrifice of the space and also some veterinarian equipment was a small price to pay for two of their highest ranking agents to be happy.

Giant furball of rage has been sedated, because he more or less went crazy the moment Phil tried to put him on the bed. Phil supposes that was an unsurprisingly reaction given this room’s similarity to a research lab. Chiu took the advantage of the sedation to take all sorts of sample which was good forethought on her part because one of the side effects seems to be an increased metabolism, which means that Bruce has almost shaken the sedative off now, and is woozily looking around him with very wide eyes.

Tony happily chirrups, and plops a shrimp right in his mouth. Bruce licks it hesitantly, and then carefully chews it up. Thor, not to be outdone, pads up and drops an entire mouthful of shrimps all over his face, and they slide down to cover the hospital bed pillow. Chiu has a hand pressed to her mouth in laughter as Thor sits back, looking very pleased with himself, and the giant furball rolls over to scrabble for all the food he’s been given. Chiu then sobers up, and hands a piece of paper to Phil. “It’s very... complicated. It’s amazing that he’s still alive.”

“I seem to specialise in that,” says Phil dryly, looking over at Tony. “Why don’t you start with the least complicated problems and work up from there?”

Chiu gives him a wry smile. “Well, exhaustion and dehydration. He has a lot of muscle mass and a very fast metabolism so he needs a lot of food. He’s also been doing a lot of physical exertion recently - escaping, I’d bet - so his muscles are a little burned out.” Chiu runs her finger down as she reads off from her list. Her finger’s still at the top of the page. “There were some common infections brewing that I strained out. His immune system’s shot, probably a by-product of breeding for experimentation, but the fast metabolism should also mean that he gets better from minor things quicker.”

It seems hardly believable that these are the less problematic results. Chiu continues, “There looks to be some neurological experimentation on his OFC, which would explain the apparent anger issues, and there are remnants of a half dozen unapproved chemical cocktails floating around his bloodstream. I’m having the computer analyse them and also cross-reference for likely effects. Oh and there’s also traces of gamma radiation in his blood.” She says that last bit really quickly, as if it’s inconsequential, and Phil just stares at her.

“...What does that even mean?” He asks, trying to remember what he knows about gamma radiation. It is unfortunately little.

“It means that it is a wonder that he’s still alive,” Chiu shrugs apologetically. “I’m a vet and a doctor, not a physicist. I’d take a stab to guess that the gamma radiation is slowly breaking his body’s cells down, which contributes toward the lack of immune system, but some of the other chemicals they used was to accelerate healing, which keeps it a bit in check. I think. One thing I did establish is that this is all bloodwork. He’s not actually emitting radiation.”

“He’s just a cat,” says Phil in amazement, watching Bruce shyly wait for Tony to offer him a bit of food before taking it and eating it.

Once the rest of the results come back and it’s been established that Bruce isn’t contagious or dangerous to anyone else (only himself, which is a thought that just breaks Phil’s heart), they finally, finally go home. Phil’s DVR is blinking madly, and Phil breaks his Mr Agent persona once he’s finally on his own ground. The cats herd Bruce into the living room and he curls himself up in a corner of the couch, impossibly unobtrusive for such an enormous cat as if he’s apologising for taking up space. Phil reaches out slowly, letting Bruce see him, and rubs his head, stroking him carefully. It takes a while, but Bruce eventually starts purring, contentedly and quietly as if it’s a rare treat.

Phil relaxes, propping his legs up and turning on the nature channel. Something with a nice, calm narrating voice sounds like the perfect thing to relax to right now.

Chapter Text

It’s disturbing, the sort of thing that passes beneath SHIELD’s notice just because it’s not an alien threat. Phil takes a blissful moment of downtime to pull the rest of the files on what Ross has been working on. Fury’s not happy with him, because interfering with any of the other branches of government creates an enormous bureaucratic nightmare for him, but Phil’s technically already interfered by ‘confiscating’ the giant furball and Fury’s not leaving him out to dry.

Phil is currently reading up on animal cruelty laws and drafting a proposal to shut down several centres of animal experimentation, notably the ones that seem intent on creating more aggressive and uncontrollable animals when the shiny new catflap in his door opens. (Maria has spent the same downtime manually installing a catflap in Phil’s office door. She finds it hilarious, Phil can actually lock his door again, and Pepper can come and visit. The cats watch her putting in the screws with avid interest, poking the flap open with their noses and staring at it as it swings shut.)

Clint comes in first, giving Phil his usual dead mouse, twining around Phil’s right hand until he gets pets, and then worming his way behind Phil’s back. Natasha and Pepper slip through next and go hog the patch of sunlight on the floor. Next is Bruce, and he’s big enough that he gets stuck every so often and mewls mournfully as he twitches his front paws. There’s a thud, which means that Tony has headbutted him from behind and Bruce plops through, rumpled and hapless, followed by Tony who affectionately pets Bruce’s fur back into place. Thor likes to take a running leap and come flying through the catflap, landing in a bemused pile on the other side.

Bruce is generally content to just curl up on the floor and watch everyone else, ears twitching with interest, rather than join in, and Phil is glad that at least there is one calming influence now. He makes a point to give everyone some petting every day, which involves actively giving Bruce cuddles because he’s the only one who won’t demand them from him.

The investigation turns up a list of laboratory buildings near the SHIELD buildings - which explains why Ross was herding Bruce out near here - and Phil immediately starts setting up the paperwork for a raid on the place. It looks like there haven’t been any inspections on these places for years. He taps the highlighter against his desk thoughtfully; deliberate oversights perhaps.

*

Phil keeps his sunglasses on as scientists are escorted out of the building, most of them looking annoyed or confused. “There are time-sensitive experiments going on in there!” One of them shouts at Phil as an agent drags him away.

“There are atrocities going on in there,” replies Phil flatly, although he does make a point to have someone ask one of the scientists if there are any dangerous, active experiments going on right now. He waits until they’re all clear of scientists and then walks in, not entirely sure what he’s going to find. The lab opens out into a long corridor with a multitude of doors. Phil tries a few of them, and mostly finds cupboard-sized rooms, each with different equipment. One sports an obstacle course; another a plethora of wires hanging from the ceiling. Down at the end, there’s an area for changing - there’s a wall of labcoats, boxes full of little plastic booties and gloves and enough antiseptic hand sanitiser to clean up after an alien invasion. There’s three doors labelled off the changing area.

Phil hesitates. He quickly squirts out some of the hand sanitiser before slipping into the door at the end, labelled ‘cats’. It’s filled floor to ceiling with cages. The cages are maybe a square yard each with a drip water bottle fastened to the bars and a neat little label. Each cage has one to three occupants, depending on the size of the cats, and they all look reasonably well fed and only marginally grumpy (which is basically miraculous when it comes to cats).

Phil unlocks the first cage, the only occupant a tiny ginger tabby with STEVE labelled on the front. Steve hisses at Phil, the smallest ball of outrage that Phil has ever seen. He’s even smaller than Clint when he’d first got him and that is no mean feat. He won’t come out of the cage whilst Phil’s still hanging around, so Phil pretends to ignore him, and moves onto the next cage. He gets a bit depressed when he very quickly realises that the name are done in boring alphabetical order -- the cage after Steve holds two kittens named Tiger and Uno -- especially when he thinks about Bruce and how he looks to be significantly older than many of the kittens here. It is in his momentary distraction that Steve darts out from his cage, across the tabletop and in front of Phil’s hand.

Phil manages to pull back just as Steve tries to swipe his paws (his tiny, tiny, cute paws! Phil’s mind insists) across where his hand had been. He looks down at Steve bemusedly, his cat-intercepting ninja skills safely intact. “I’m not going to hurt them. You stop that.” Steve is very disinclined to move though, and growls up at Phil. He moves his hand slowly, so that Steve can watch him. Steve starts a low hiss as Phil’s hand gets ever closer to the cage door and it’s frankly such a pathetic hiss that Phil wants to laugh. He flicks open the lock on the cage and withdraws his hand.

“See? That’s all I’m going to do.” Phil tells Steve, and then moves onto the next cage (Victor and William). Steve scowls at him, and follows him dutifully around as Phil opens all of the cages. By the time he’s done, the cats have started padding their way out, cautiously and suspiciously exploring as though this might all be another test.

Two of SHIELD’s scientists come in with a small factory’s worth of machinery ready to scan any small to medium-sized mammal. They have to take records, of course. There was far more than the usual behavioural experiments going on here, and they have to know if the cats are going to react badly to a change in circumstances or even if they’re contagious.

Steve has his work cut out at this point, running around and yowling at everyone indignantly and trying to claw up the x-ray machine. Phil eventually puts a finger to his comm and asks if his cats can be brought in. “You want to add more cats to the mess?” asks Jasper dryly from where he’s sitting in the van babysitting the little terrors and, okay, running surveillance on the place in case Ross or anyone like him gets wind of what they’ve done and tries to step in.

“There are never enough cats, Jasper,” Phil says seriously, just to fuck with him. “...Actually, you might just want to send Clint, Natasha and Thor. It’s probably not good for Bruce to be back so soon, and Tony can keep him company.”

Clint and Natasha are, in retrospect, not the best at comforting other cats, given that Natasha only likes Phil, and Clint doesn’t like anyone. Thor makes up for it though, delighted with this new abundance of friends and showing it by pouncing on any cat he can get close to. Phil scoops Clint up when he reaches him and sets him next to Steve, still amused that there is a cat smaller than Clint, and Clint sulks. Phil prods him with a finger. “Go on, make friends. Or at least tell him I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

It’s a good thing that Steve is apparently every cat’s friend. He immediately gets up to investigate the newcomer and Clint only grumbles a little bit as Steve weaves around him curiously. It seems to work though, because although Steve’s tail does not stop swishing with disgruntlement, he at least stops trying to single-pawedly take down the machines.

*

It’s a long day. Phil’s been there for fourteen hours by now and there’s still things to be done. Around four hours in, the phones had started ringing. (Around four hours and ten minutes in, Phil had ordered an agent to go through the entire building and take all of the phones off the hook.) Around five hours in, various Army teams had come to see what was going on. Thankfully, Phil hasn’t had to deal with any of that, though he’s heard bits and pieces through the comms. No one’s managed to get past them into the building though, so he just concentrates on helping all the cats get thoroughly scanned. He tries not to think about the teams of agents doing the same for the other animals in this building.

(The cats are all fine. Once they got over the initial ruckus, most of them have slept for at least eight of the fourteen hours.)

When Steve is the only cat left to give blood samples, he tries to flee when he sees the needles. SHIELD is just taking blood samples so that they can determine if the animals are safe to foster out to civilians, hopefully people who would love to have them even if they come with odd little quirks like super-slinking or tiny little holes in their skulls where the wires used to pass through.They can’t possibly keep them all at SHIELD. There’s almost two hundred assorted cats, rats and dogs. It’s not even possible to keep just the cats at SHIELD, because there are almost seventy of those. Phil finds himself thinking that he could probably have pulled it off if there had been just forty or fifty - and then comes to himself and realises that he’s trying to rationalise distributing forty or fifty cats throughout the SHIELD offices.

It all looks and feels the same to the cats though. Steve yowls thoroughly as they take two vials of blood - can a creature that small even hold that much blood? - but stays still, and then is mollified when Phil ‘borrows’ Pepper. Pepper is adorable and licks him all better, Steve obediently letting her thoroughly wash him and maybe hides behind her from Natasha. (Clint made a break for it several hours ago and has disappeared.)

“Looks like you’re clear to go,” says Phil as the scientists first process the bloodwork and then translates it into terms he understands. “There’s some strange stuff swimming around in here, I’m told, but it’s mostly unlikely that you’re going to explode.” Pepper gives him a long look, and the ducks her head. In one quick motion, she’s caught Steve by the scruff of his neck and picked him up. (His back paws barely sweep the ground when she’s got him in mid-air and he kicks one, twice, futilely, until Pepper gives him a little shake. There’s no arguing with Pepper.)

Before Phil can stop her - he’s allowed to not have cat ninja powers when it comes to other people’s cats, okay - Pepper has hopped off the counter and trotted out of the door with Steve still dangles from her jaws as he mewls pathetically.

Phil makes sure that things are still running smoothly, and then quickly follows them. He actually hasn’t the faintest idea where Pepper has catnapped Steve until Jasper’s voice sounds in his ear. “...Phil.” He heads for the surveillance van.

One look outside makes Phil almost give a double take. As opposed to the subtle scene he had left this morning with a few discreet plains-clothed agents hanging around and the surveillance van, the entire block now looks like it’s been roped off and agents are back in uniform. He straightens his jacket and marches into the van. “Looks like you’ve been busy,” he remarks.

Jasper scowls at him from behind the little wall of used paper coffee cups he’s built. Phil is suddenly more aware that he’s been in there all day. “Three attempts from the army and another two personally from Ross. He’s been detained for damaging a junior agent.”

“We need better junior agents.” Phil raises an eyebrow, and moves past Jasper to see where Pepper has proudly deposited her prize. Steve pads around in a circle, making little befuddled noises. Bruce notices and perks up, silently shuffling forward and waiting until Steve notices him. Steve clearly recognises him, because he cheeps and then licks Bruce on the nose. The two of them do a kind of recognition nuzzle which makes Tony sit up and pay attention because Tony is a jealous, jealous cat and pretty much hates it when anyonegets the attention more than him.

Tony prods him with a paw, and Steve squeaks, trying to claw Tony up. Tony, who is a weathered cat used to getting into the worst of scrapes, barely feels it, and bats Steve on the ass instead, sending him head over heels.

“He’s so cute,” Jasper says in amazement. “Have you finally found a cat that’s not completely ridiculous?”

Steve sneezes, rolls back over and promptly bites Tony’s ankle.

“Oh, we like you. You can stay,” says Jasper. Phil raises an eyebrow at him. “You have five cats. I don’t think one more is going to change anything. And he barely counts as a cat anyway, look at him. He’s a quarter of a cat, if that.”

Jasper scoops Steve up in one hand and raises him to Phil’s eye level. Phil can both feel himself getting a headache and simultaneously having the headache soothed away by how goddamn cute Steve is. Fuck. “Look, are you really going to say no to this little thing? You could get him little boots and he would be Puss.”

“I’m not getting boots for my cats,” Phil grinds out, going a bit woozy from the headache levels sloshing up and down and all over the place. Or maybe it’s because he hasn’t eaten in fifteen hours. Steve puzzledly nibbles on one of Jasper’s fingers.

“See? You’re calling him your cat already. You’re gone, I knew it.” Jasper pushes the tiny scruff of cat closer to Phil’s face. He sighs. Jasper’s right - he is gone.

(When Phil finally gets home, there is an email from Fury. It reads: 'SHIELD is not setting up an animal shelter.')

Chapter Text

Tony thinks Steve is hilarious. He is ever fascinated by the tiny wisp of fur and big ball of attitude that is Steve and has taken to nudging him over and seeing how he’ll react. Tony doesn’t stop even when Steve cottons on to the timing of Tony’s attacks and sinks his claws into Tony’s nose instead. Instead, he just moseys on back to Bruce and rubs himself all over Bruce’s luxurious fur until Bruce affectionately bites him.

And then Tony will go at it again. He picks Steve up by the scruff of the neck, and Steve never gets less indignant about it, and brings him over to show Bruce. Bruce will blink at Tony, bemused at what he’s supposed to do with his present, and lick Steve’s ear. (Steve likes Bruce very much and sometimes burrows into his tummy fur to sleep.)

Natasha tolerates Steve, and Phil suspects that’s because Tony’s stopped bothering her during naptime in favour of playing with Steve. When Thor is around, he likes to wrestle with Steve, which never fails to amuse Phil because Steve never gives up despite the fact that Thor can suffocate him with the fur off one paw. Clint suspiciously circles Steve a few times and then pats him on the head. Apparently satisfied that he’s the new baby of the family, he takes Steve spelunking in the air ducts and a whole slew of dead mice turn up everywhere.

“Steve’s fitting in well,” Jasper remarks, and Phil thinks about it for a bit.

“Mouse in your shoe?”

“In my In Tray. He has manners, at least.”

What’s really more worrying is that Phil’s office has been almost taken over by cats. The things that take the most room in this office are, in descending order: the shredder, the coffee maker and the cats. Somehow, his desk, which holds his actual work, only comes fourth on this list.

One day, Steve starts yowling and darts out of the catflap. Phil hears Maria swear loudly as the catflap swings closed and he opens the door to see Steve frantically clawing his way up her calf. He’s mostly failing because Maria knows better than to come past Phil’s office without wearing full field gear in case of cats, and he kind of slithers down her leg with a cry.

“Busy?” Maria asks, ignoring the ball of fluff hopping around her foot.

“No, I’m too busy dealing with cats to do any work,” Phil replies, which is a massive, massive lie because he deals with and signs off on at least half of the missions SHIELD is involved with right now.

“I adopted a new cat,” says Maria, and somehow magically produces a cat out of her coat. Phil’s not even going to ask. (She probably spent a lot of time deciding where to hide it and practising getting it back out, so he’s not going to ruin her hard work.) “I’m calling him Bucky.”

Bucky is sleek, as effortlessly graceful as Pepper was, and pays Phil absolutely no attention. Maria clearly has a type for cats whereas Phil has somehow ended up with all sorts. Steve yowls from the ground and Bucky flicks an ear, hopping down out of Maria's arms. Bucky lands with a bit of a clunk and Phil looks a bit closer. "I remember him. He's from the labs."

"His file says that they cut his paw off, expecting him to regrow it." Maria looks down at Bucky, who's now enthusiastically licking Steve to bits. (Tony is unimpressed from where he's lurking underneath the desk. He's the only one allowed to pester Steve so, and Steve never appreciates it when he does it.)

Phil looks at Bucky, who barely seems to notice his single prosthetic limb. "At a guess, I'd say it didn't work very well," he says calmly, even though there's a bit of ringing in his ears. He'd like to march down to Ross and shake him all over again, but Fury has forbidden him contact. "You realise that cats can function perfectly well with three limbs, right?"

"Why only have three limbs when you can have four limbs and a weapon?"

Phil thinks about that for a moment, and then agrees. "Why ‘Bucky’?"

"He bucked up after I had the prosthetic fitted." Maria says, pulling out her diary. "I have helicarrier duty next week, so you're cat sitting." She waggles her pen at him in a wave and then walks off, leaving Bucky to take up just that much more room in Phil’s office. Phil catches a glimpse of some gawping junior agents outside his door, and smiles placidly at them just as he closes the door.

Phil doesn't mind cat sitting for Maria, mostly because Pepper - and now Bucky - are nice, sociable cats that don't try to maim people, so he jots down the memo in his own diary. Steve is tucked on top of Bucky's head like the world's tiniest purring ginger wig and Phil can just sense Tony getting ready to pounce.

What really surprises Phil is when Tony does make his move, attempting to snatch Steve right off Bucky's head, Bucky reaches out with lightning speed and just clonks Tony over the head with his prosthetic paw. Tony slinks back under the desk and flops over on Phil's foot instead. "Never mind," Phil says, distracted by alien communications stolen from the SWORD databases. "Better luck next time."

It’s starting to fall back into being a pattern, right up until it... doesn’t. Phil keeps an eye out on Steve and Bruce, knowing that the strange chemical remnants in their bodies could produce any number of side-effects. It means that he notices the changes in Steve far sooner than the cats do. He feeds Steve the same amount of food as the rest of them, which is the first sign that something’s up because Tony, Thor and Bruce are all very large cats and Clint and Natasha gobble their food down like someone’s going to snatch it away from them. The fact that Steve can keep up is impressive.

In less than two months, Steve is a fully grown tabby cat larger than Bucky.

(Clint is the second one to notice, because he starts getting grumpy once Steve is bigger than him. Steve sometimes sits wistfully by the air duct entrance, knowing he’s not invited anymore.)

It hits Tony a bit by surprise when he tries to whisk Steve over to Bruce to play, as usual, and suddenly finds that Steve is too heavy for him to lift with his mouth anymore and strong enough to actually push him away. Tony spends several surprised moments just watching Steve shove him away, and then plops his ass down and meows mournfully.

Steve is thankfully too good natured to laugh at him.

Even though Phil’s had regular and frequent check-ups with Chiu and her very new, very shiny minions, he wasn't expecting anything to this extent. "Is he going to keep growing?" He had asked, to which the answer had been varying shades of 'maybe', 'probably not' and 'we haven't the faintest idea, Coulson, you make it sound like I've dealt with this before'. Steve remains as good natured as before though, so Phil doesn't sweat it too much.

It's actually a relief, because there is suddenly a whole string of alien invasions that take up his time, including this one where he gets kidnapped when he’s grocery shopping. Phil suddenly wakes up in a cell with an enormous headache and groans with sheer embarrassment.

Chapter Text

So, Phil wakes up in a cell and there’s no one there so he indulges in a moment of embarrassment. Then he follows all the procedures SHIELD has. He scopes out where he is, what he can see and what resources are available to him. Unfortunately, the answers are ‘I don’t know’, ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing’.

The door has a sliding window that opens from the outside and is locked - bolted, from the way it moves as he carefully pushes at it - and a small flap at the bottom of the door, presumably for food. There’s a hole in the corner that smells faintly of urine, but it’s far too small to consider using as an escape route. Phil can see by the yellow light coming in from the small, high window in the wall opposite the door, but the window appears to look out onto a bare corridor, which means that there are no clues as to where he is. For all he knows, he might not even be on Earth.

Fingers sweeping up behind his ear, Phil grimaces. There should be a slight bump there, the telltale sign of his SHIELD chip, but all he can feel is the tiniest of scars, which means that his chip is gone. Taking a moment to stand silently, Phil strains his ears to hear if there’s anything around him, but there’s nothing at all. It’s eerie.

With a huff, Phil strips off his jacket (not a suit jacket, because not even he feels the need to go grocery shopping in a suit) and starts stretching. He wants to be sure that he’s ready for whatever comes, when it does.

It doesn’t take long. There are footfalls in the corridor - the one outside his door, not the one outside the window - and Phil quickly slips his jacket on and lies down as if he were still knocked out. He curls his arm up to cast his face into shadow and opens his eyes just a slit. The small grate opens with easily and with no noise at all - a recently used cell, then - and Phil can just make out the shapes beyond it.

The person looking down at him is himself. No, Phil is not delusional. Beyond the door, that is undoubtedly himself. Apart from the bit where he has pointed ears and his skin is green, of course. Phil takes a long, deep breath, this time to keep his heartbeat steady, and frantically thinks it through. Skrulls. Mostly likely Skrulls, or it could be some other naturally green shapeshifter, he supposes, but there are unsurprisingly not that many in the SHIELD database.

There’s a low, rumbling discourse outside his door, which means that there is more than one of them, but they don’t come in. Phil isn’t exactly happy about it, but he supposes that as long as his impersonator is here, it means that they aren’t at SHIELD.

From what he can remember of the Skrulls, they can impersonate a person completely, stealing their memories and experiences. He must have been scanned whilst he was asleep, which just makes his eye twitch. The grate closes again and there are two echoing sets of footsteps away from his door.

The rest of the day is spectacularly boring. Phil expects someone to come along at some point to check on him again. He makes another three circuits of the cell to check that there isn’t any surveillance. He supposes that it’s not really necessary to keep much of an eye on him now that they’ve already scanned and impersonated him. It’s just so infuriating; he wishes someone could come along just so he can attempt to get some information or a chance at escaping.

Phil sleeps in the corner, positioning himself to face both the window and door at once, and settles into the uneasy half-doze that most agents manage when they’re technically off duty. He startles awake just past midnight to the sound of something being pushed under his door. A tray slides in; the slot flaps shut again. Phil darts to the door soundlessly, but all he can see when he lifts the flap are ankles in black boots marching away. He inspects the tray. There’s thick bread with a thin scraping of margarine, a cup of water and half a roll of toilet paper, minus the cardboard roll. They must really be going out of their way to avoid interacting with him because really, who feeds the prisoners in the middle of the night?

Phil has had training to deal with any sort of interrogation, any sort of torture tactics, but nothing ever prepared him for the sheer boredom that was just plain imprisonment. He pokes over his bread meticulously and doesn’t find anything that suggests it isn’t anything other than very boring bread and water, and then eats it. No point starving himself in case he needs his strength at any point.

The boredom is driving him insane. He thinks, dispassionately, that going from working fourteen hour days and living his job to having literally nothing to do all day could well be the worse torture they could have given him because Phil has no idea what to do with spare time alone, seeing how he hasn’t had any since he was twenty one. Phil keeps up as much of an exercise regime as he can manage in his cell.

At least he still has his watch, and a fantastically trained body clock. That’s how Phil knows when four whole days have passed and, to his knowledge, no one else has bothered to check up on him. All they know is that he’s alive, because he takes the tray they give him every day. (He hasn’t given the finished ones back. He never knows when a small collection of metal trays might come in handy. At the very least, they might get suspicious about why he’s hoarding the trays and actually send someone to talk to him.)

The morning of the fifth day, Phil is lying down, because there is only a limited amount of exercise even he can be bothered to do in a day, when there is a soft plop sound in the opposite corner of his cell. Immediately, Phil is up on his feet, holding his breath. He’s expecting a hundred things - bomb, tear gas, unknown alien chemicals - but what he isn’t expecting is Clint, shaking himself off the high drop from the window. Phil stares. (It’s been five days and he is utterly alone in an alien prison cell. He’s allowed to be slightly off his game.)

Clint bolts over to Phil and Phil scoops him up, silently tugging him against his chest. Clint gives him a rare lick of affection, right on his nose, twitches his nose at the way Phil smells and curls up in Phil’s arms. He leans his head out like he does when he has a mouse to offer. Phil opens his hand and Clint spits out a small pellet. Wiping away the cat saliva, Phil cracks a grin and scratches Clint’s ears, noticing that his collar has been changed to an unfamiliar one. Slipping the comm into his ear, Phil double taps the end to signal that he’s here.

“Principal, good to have you back.” Jasper’s voice comes in cleanly. “I currently have five very agitated felines on my back, and it is all your fault.”

“I hope they’re not physically on your back,” Phil shoots back, keeping his voice down. If it sounds a bit rusty because he hasn’t used it for four days, Jasper keeps that to himself.

“Well.”

Phil feels a surge of affection for Jasper, who puts up with an inordinate amount of crap from him. “So tell me. Where am I?” It’s a fair question. Phil hasn’t seen daylight for days; he’s actually surprised that he still seems to be on Earth.

“Funny you should ask. By our reckoning, you’re in your office, doing paperwork. But you also appear to be in an underground facility in Canada.”

“Canada.” Phil huffs. He also scowls a bit at the idea of anyone else sitting in his office and touching his things. It’s very irrational, he knows, especially given the much larger problems of Skrulls with access to all of SHIELD’s files. “How’d you figure it wasn’t really me?”

“Cats,” says Jasper sourly. “Maybe alien-you smells different.” Phil muffles a slightly hysterical laugh.

“You’ve known for five days it wasn’t me? What took you so long?” Phil isn’t really complaining; he knows that there is plenty of work that goes into setting up operations. He’s actually surprised that this took less than a week.

Jasper is grinning now - Phil can tell from his voice. “Catcam.” Somehow, Phil manages to grasp the entire outline of the operation from that one word, and pinches the bridge of his nose as Clint gnaws on the webbing between his thumb and finger.

“You mean you have been using my cats to infiltrate a dangerous alien hideout.”

“They practically volunteered. Do you know how hard it was for me to stop them all going in? Those cats really love you, and half of them are crap at intel missions.” Jasper pauses. “Besides, I’d hardly call it a dangerous alien hideout. You’re in Canada.”

Phil groans at him. There’s the makings of a plan to get him out of there, but it’s far too dependent on if we cans and maybe we’ll trys for Phil’s liking. Nevertheless, it’s all they’ve got because they have to run this operation so secretly that his other self doesn’t get suspicious and frankly there is very little that Phil doesn’t get suspicious about. The next cat to be deployed is Natasha, because she’s a tiny little shadow ninja, and she slinks into Phil’s cell and has climbed up his foot before he’s even noticed she’s there.

“Hello,” Phil whispers, giving her a cuddle. Natasha deposits her gift, wraps her body around his arm and refuses to let go.

Phil presses a quick kiss to her ear and opens the pouch she’s given him to find lockpicks (no good for his own door because it’s bolted but useful for later) and a set of miniature tranquilising blow darts. Phil scowls at them because if there’s any weapon he’s out of practice with, blow darts are probably it. But really, there is a limit as to how much weaponry they can wheedle a cat into carrying and still remain inconspicuous, so blow darts it is.

It is with great difficulty that Phil gets Clint and Natasha to stop nuzzling him for long enough to point out the tiny flap at the bottom of the door. “Bolt,” he tells the two of them. “Hawkeye, stop eating my fingers. I know you know how to undo bolts, you sneaky bastard.” Clint gently bites his pinky. Phil points at the flap and they finally get the hint.

Small as they are, Hawkeye and Widow have to wriggle to get through the food flap. Phil lies on the ground to watch them, fascinated. He never gets to see them doing this normally, since they only display such feats when he’s not around to open doors for them. Clint clambers on top of Natasha, who only lets him for as long as it takes for him to latch onto the bolt and slide it free. Phil takes a moment to appreciate the Skrulls and their apparent propensity for keeping bolts oiled.

Unfortunately, the cell’s lack of security doesn’t extend much beyond it - Phil takes his small collection of trays and sends one flying up into the security camera in the corner and then makes a run for it, Jasper piping up directions in his ear. “Left coming up. We haven’t managed to map the whole place, because, you know, cats, so keep an eye out.” Phil grunts his affirmative, because there are blow darts in his mouth.

True to Jasper’s warning, security catches up with him soon enough. Two go down with trays to the face, one with a tray slid underfoot, and three tripping over fallen comrades. Phil has never been gladder for narrow corridors, and miraculously does not stab himself in the tongue with a blow dart.

Once the alarm has been raised, it’s a lot more difficult to avoid groups of Skrulls appearing, and Phil soon feels the toll of unfilling meals. He’s run out of trays by the time the fourth group appears. He ducks to one side, landing a gut punch, and crunches the heel of his hand into the base of the skull. The Skrull crumples to the floor like soggy paper. Phil straightens, breathing hard, and retrieves a tranquilising blow dart from one of its comrades’ eyeballs. He momentarily debates the economy of reusing the dart versus the utter grossness of it having pierced someone’s eyeball, and tucks it into his pocket instead.

The cats move ahead of Phil, keeping an eye out for incoming aliens and Phil has to admit that they are surprisingly effective. Hawkeye has ducked into the rafter beams and pounces on his prey from above; Widow mewls quietly to warn Phil and then disappears into a shadow only to reappear ten seconds later, hanging off a Skrull’s inner thigh. It gives Phil time to catch his breath in between bouts. (Jasper only teases him about being out of shape once, a comforting voice in Phil’s ear as he huffs a laugh.)

They have to move up three flights of stairs before Phil starts seeing sunlight through some of the windows, and it gives him an unexpected shot of relief. The windows are, unfortunately, all very high up and too small to climb through. Someone clearly didn’t think sunlight was particularly necessary in this building. “I’m sending in the rest of the cats,” says Jasper with an annoyed note in his voice.

“...” Phil says. More accurately, he lets the comm fill with loaded silence.

“Oh, fine, yes, I lost my grip on them and they shot off.” Jasper amends himself grumpily. Happy yowls sound from somewhere outside the building because clearly they’ve given up on all pretence of subtlety now, and Phil lets himself smile minutely.

Directions from Jasper are supposed to lead him to a discreet side door, but there’s a very large group of Skrulls pouring out of that direction and so Phil takes a detour that leads him into the bathroom. The Skrulls have clearly been here for some time, because those are not human urinals and oh god Phil just did not ever need this much intel on the Skrulls. He slips the door shut and hopes that they don’t think to look in the bathroom.

There’s a hiss from the windowsill and Phil whips around so quickly he nearly blow darts a cat. He blinks. “Thor?” It looks like Thor.

“What colour is Thor?” Phil hesitantly asks into his comm.

Jasper’s clearly trying to decide whether it’s a casual question, or an important one. “Orange-ish? Bits of white and blond and brown depending on the angle and light and how much mud he’s recently rolled around in?”

“Not black, then,” says Phil calmly.

“...No.”

There’s a sudden movement and suddenly Thor is there too, pulling himself up through the small gap in the window, giving his shadow-self a nuzzle and then pouncing happily at Phil with a cry. Phil gurgles as he gets about six electric shocks at once, and decides that he has more urgent problems to deal with than the fact that Thor has brought along a friend. “I need a new route out,” Phil says, shaking his head.

The window, like the rest of them, are too small to get through, and there is only one door. It doesn’t sound as though anyone’s outside it, but Phil eases it open anyway, and the cats move through first.

“Right out of the bathroom. The second door down on your left leads into a long corridor out into the lobby. Lots of doors, no cover.” Phil can sense Jasper’s discomfort at sending him through such a high risk route. “Backup is on the way. Pick-up point at the window at the end of your passage.”

“Actual-trained-agents backup, or the furry kind?” Phil asks dryly.

“The furry kind,” Jasper admits. “You’ll like this one though.”

He’s right. Phil turns out of the bathroom and jogs to the window. Steve appears above his head, dropping down onto his shoulder and licking him from chin to temple. As glad as he is to see Steve, Phil is even more grateful for the thing strapped to Steve’s back. He’s wearing a tiny little harness like a backpack and there’s a laser gun and two remote detonating grenades attached to it.

“A laser gun?” Phil asks, incredulously, making his way toward the long corridor. “A bomb? You strapped a bomb to my cat?”

“Well, your normal gear is currently being worn around by your fake Skrull self, so this is what I could sign out without arousing suspicion, okay,” says Jasper. “It was this or a bow and arrow, and that didn’t fit on Cap.”

“Cap?” Phil should really be quiet because he’s moving down a corridor with no idea whether any of the doors are going to burst open at any time, but really, his cats are gaining codenames when he’s not around now?

“Captain. I’ll explain later. You’ve got company.”

Phil wants to ask how he knows, since they don’t have real surveillance on this place, when one of the doors on his left actually does open. Six Skrulls burst through, clearly trying to maintain a precise militarian run despite having Iron Cat and Bruce tangled up in their legs. Ah.

“Bruce needs a codename,” Phil says in that moment of calm before they spot him. (He does also fire four laser shots in the same moment, so it doesn’t completely count as wasting time.) Bruce looks even bigger than usual, his fur all over the place. His eyes are bloodshot like the first time Phil saw him, and he is indeed a giant furball of rage right now. He’s snarling and clawing up calves and - and is that a singe mark on his fur? No wonder Tony’s ballistic right now. He’s nipping at his Skrull’s side, under the ribs, and using his long legs to pounce from Skrull to Skrull.

Phil zaps a hole clean through a Skrull’s forearm as it tries to crush Tony’s skull as Hawkeye, Widow, Thor (plus his shadow self) and Ste--Cap join the fray. He’s going to have to get past all of them to get to the end. Phil takes a run-up, veers toward the wall, plants one foot on the wall and does a 720 degree twist spin over the mess of Skrulls and cats, shooting when he faces down.

He lands, bending his knees to absorb the shock, and swings to open the next door down, using it as a shield as a Skrull fires at him. He leans around, takes two well-timed shots at the foremost Skrulls and then moves for the next door down. From there, it’s rinse and repeat as Phil takes the fight down the corridor. There’s a close shave when one of the doors turn out to be locked, but Bruce sinks his teeth into a Skrull’s ear and pulls. It actually rips off, spraying the wall with blood, and Phil takes the time to move to the next door.

The lobby is, fortunately, both unoccupied and not very big. “One, two... four, um, six, seven!” Phil makes sure that all the cats are accounted for as they streak past him toward the door before tossing his grenade behind him. The doors don’t even have time to shut behind him before he’s detonated it.

Phil takes two seconds to wipe the sweat out of his eyes, and then he’s running again, following the cats. They’re in the countryside, somewhere with lots of trees. Jasper’s waiting with a vehicle in stealth mode somewhere and when he said that, Phil had not been expecting a whole Quinjet, just for him.

The moment Phil’s up the ramp, Jasper takes off. Phil just kind of lies on the floor for a few minutes with his eyes closed, feeling the adrenaline wane and leaving him just feeling tired and cranky. Once they’re far away enough that Jasper can set the auto-pilot on, he comes into the back to look for Phil. “Well. That was exciting. It’s not as though we might have wanted to get in and out as quietly as possible and maybe run another mission flushing them out.”

“Shut up,” Phil growls, gathering the cats around him like they are some kind of furry kevlar that can keep logic out.

“Are you injured? Do you need field medical?” Jasper and he have this habit of mixing in protocol with banter.

“Not a scratch,” says Phil, which is a lie because Tony did accidentally scratch his ankle when he was aiming for a Skrull -- but it is literally a scratch.

“What? No torture? No fights?”

“Not a thing.” Phil lets Bruce flop over on his stomach and winds his fingers through the thick fur.

Jasper scowls down at him. “You’re telling me that you got kidnapped by invading aliens and all you got was a five day vacation?”

“Crap catering though,” says Phil. He might just take a nap on the Quinjet floor.

Chapter Text

The next thing he knows, Phil is waking up as they hit a patch of turbulence. He checks his watch - he's only been napping for half an hour. "Did you seriously just let me sleep on the floor?" Phil says, levering himself up and dislodging furry bodies from himself. Half of the cats whine at him and settle straight back to sleep. He's not that young anymore; his back aches and his neck aches and actually so do half of his muscles. He probably should have stretched after all that fighting he did.

"You said you weren't hurt," Jasper calls back at him. Phil groans and flips him the bird. "Come on up and get yourself debriefed-slash-briefed."

Phil hobbles to the cockpit. (Thor's been using his foot as a pillow, and it's gone a bit dead) "Morning, sir," he says with a tired grin as he sees Nick Fury on one of the monitors. He slides into the co-pilot seat, lets Clint stretch across his thigh and settles his hand on Clint's stomach.

"I hope you're not another Skrull," Nick says with a glower. "We had to go through the whole damn building because of you."

"How many infiltrations?"

"Just you, you special snowflake. Probably the first one planned. We've got Skrull-you under surveillance. We just ousted their current base and we need to know where they're going to move to. I assume news of your escape has reached Skrull-you by now, since he's taken off. We're just waiting to see where he ends up."

"Great," says Phil. "Do you realise that we're going to have to check to see if there are infiltrations of other unknown government agencies now?"

"We're already on it. It's a bitch of a job. High priority and top secret from even the brass, but we're getting there. Easier once we realised that it can be scent sorted. Maria's lending a hand, and I'd like to borrow Bruce when you're back."

"Hulk," says Phil on an impulse. "Everyone else has a codename and ‘giant furball of rage' is just a bit long." He squints at Nick. "Wouldn't it go quicker if you used the rest of them too?"

Nick gives him a long-suffering look. "Half of your babies wouldn't know the meaning of 'top secret' if it bit them in the ass and the other half react as badly to real people as they do to fake people."

"Going to land soon," says Jasper, taking over control of the plane again. They don't get to do this very often anymore, the two of them; they're being phased over into supervising agents and handlers because of their security clearances, so Jasper likes to fly the planes whilst he still can. "Pussies! Hang on!" Phil hits him in the arm.

The landing is smooth (everyone's landings are smooth now they have to land on the damn helicarrier). On their way out, Jasper freezes for a moment. "Phil," He says plaintively. "The cats are multiplying again."

Phil glances around. For some reason, Thor's shadow-self has decided to follow them onto the Quinjet. "Oh, yeah. Him. I thought he was black Thor for a moment."

"That's racist," Jasper says, but there's a smile tugging at his lips as he looks the new cat over. "Eerie. They really could be brothers or something. What're the chances you'd find another -- whatever breed Thor is -- in the Canadian forests?"

"I think he's here for Thor more than me," Phil says dryly and they both know what he means. (Thor is irresistible. Mostly because he doesn't give up on anything until all resistance is gone.) "But Thor in the legends had a brother, right?"

As per routine, Phil takes all the cats (and himself) down to Medical and gets them all checked up. Since it takes substantially longer to check up seven (seven!) cats than it does himself (a bit of malnourishment, nothing else serious), Phil takes the time to look up some old Norse legends. "Loki," he says out loud. He looks at his new black fur lump. It works. "Loki it is," he yawns, making sure Chiu knows as they prep a file, ready to chip him. "Poor Natasha. I need more girls."

"Be careful what you wish for?" Chiu says with a grin, returning covered with cats. "All clear on everyone, it seems. Go home. I think you're allowed a few days off after being kidnapped."

"Fucking free time," Phil grouses and heads up to his office instead. He's trying not to think about all the things the Skrulls found out just via access to his brain - mission reports and failures, dubiously legal operations for the sake of the greater good, Fury's home address.

Home, sweet home should probably not be the first thing he thinks when he opens his office door. (It is though.) He twitches when he notices that a few things have been moved and soothes himself putting everything back where it should be. The cats spread out and growl, as if they can smell the remnants of fake Phil, and he thoroughly douses everything with fabric cleaner. Then he shuts and locks the door, and pulls up every single file that's been opened using his computer in the last five days.

Whoever the Skrull is has tried to clear his digital tracks, but it was a rush job so Phil manages to make a pretty comprehensive list. He forwards the list to Fury. Five seconds later, an email pings up on Phil's monitor with the subject ‘GO HOME, PHILIP' and the ongoing very secret file on ‘Operation Rescue Principal' attached anyway, because Fury knows him far too well.

Phil can see where someone (probably Maria) tried to downplay the whole angle of ‘we are very highly trained secret agents and we did this because cats'. It works reasonably well, he thinks admiringly. Once he's up to date, Phil dials Jasper's office extension. "Are you tracking Skrull-me?"

"Yep. It was me or Maria, and Maria lost."

Phil blinks. "What did Maria lose?"

"She gets to head the investigation on the other alphabet agencies." Jasper says smugly. Phil winces, because that's got to be a shitstorm of an investigation. She'll probably be in a bad mood for weeks; perhaps he should send her a cat or something.

"I want in. At least when I encounter Skrull-me, I'll know which one of us is the real one." Phil hangs up on Jasper's bark of laughter and heads down to see the progress.

-

It takes six weeks, seven cats and eight cases of mistaken identity before they find where the Skrulls have (probably) relocated their base to. Phil mourns at how difficult it is to maintain a straight face when it feels like he's being pelted lightly with piss. He's in London, fitting right in with the businessmen around Monument in his suit. He maintains a firm grip on his umbrella, more to stop it being jostled away by the sea of other people's umbrellas than because of any real wind, and is pushed with the crowd across the street.

Jasper and the cats (which was a terrible name for a band if he had ever heard one) are already there and lying in wait, ensconced in a gleaming BMW, which is about par for the area. "Next left, Principal," says Jasper in his ear. Phil tries. He really does.

"Left, Principal," Jasper repeats, but it's pretty much impossible to defy the movements of the London businessmen during rush hour. Phil finds himself caught up in the crowd, pushed toward the opposite direction he is trying to go. He eases his way toward the edge of the throng instead, and finally finds himself next to nice, solid brick. He glances back, briefly contemplates trying to move against the flow, and then finds a side street to duck down and double back.

"Nearing target." Phil finally exhales, and straightens his suit.

Jasper wisely does not mention his near death brush with the London commuter. "Alright, be careful. It's all polished glass and open plan spaces from now so there's not much cover."

Phil taps an affirmative twice on his comm and peers around the corner. This area is much less populated, despite being a mere five minutes' walk away from the determined businessmen's destinations. Maria has been sending over files on Skrull interlopers whenever she finds a new one - two in the CIA, one member of Congress, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and a full quarter of SWORD so far - and Phil has all of their names and faces memorised. When he spots himself walking across the courtyard with the two CIA members, Phil presses back against the wall to avoid being seen and mutters, "Target confirmed."

The moment those words are uttered, Phil hears a horrendous menacing roar on the other end of his comm. He frantically blips the volume control down on his comm before his eardrums burst and growls, "REPORT."

"INCOMING," is all Jasper can yell at him before he hears gunshots go off. (They're not even allowed guns in this country; they'd had to get special permission first and now England's going to be pissed at them for shooting up one of the posher parts of London.) It takes Phil a moment to realise that he'd heard the gunshots twice - once over the comm and once out loud. He turns to face where the car would be, and he can hear the angry roaring just fine now.

There's also the sound of crunching, which Phil presumes to mean that they won't be returning the car MI6 had lent them in one piece, and then... and then Phil can see it. There is a giant blue creature looming over the buildings. England's going to fucking kill them. "Report. What is that?" Phil flicks his attention between the Skrulls and the … blue thing. The Skrulls have started drawing weapons out of unseen places. Phil almost hopes that the other four people he can see in that courtyard are also Skrulls and not civilians he's going to have to protect.

"THAT IS YOUR CAT," wheezes Jasper. He has a tendency to be melodramatic. It probably means that he's fine though, and not squished by bits of crumpled car.

"That's not very nice," says Phil, drawing his gun even though he's not entirely sure what that's going to do right now.

Jasper chuckles darkly, which eases a bit of the tension in Phil's chest. "No, really. That's Loki."

Phil squints up at the giant blue thing, which is stomping its way towards him. "It's not very cat-shaped." Phil ignores Jasper's mutterings about him and his fucking killer cats and fucking shapeshifters and feels rather disappointed that Loki wasn't a real cat. He'd been very furry, but not nearly as energetic as Thor, willing to let Phil pet him when he wanted and be left alone when Phil was busy. Phil had liked him.

"Do we know what he wants?" Phil asks, checking how many bullets he's got right now (eight, and a loaded spare clip).

The answer comes a moment later when Loki actually arrives in the courtyard. The Skrulls have given up on pretence for now - or perhaps it's harder for them to maintain a shapeshift when they're not concentrating, Phil's going to have to look into that one - and are all green. It makes things easier to tell apart. The Skrulls form a precise formation and start shooting things that are definitely more lethal than ordinary bullets. The blue giant lumbers towards them and shrieks when it sees the Skrulls, a high-pitched wailing that makes Phil feel as though the wind has just tried to shred his ears.

It ignores the civilians completely, and swings one enormous fist, and flattens a Skrull. "We may have gotten ourselves in the middle of an intergalactic grudge match," says Phil into the comm. "Big, blue and frosty is here for the Skrulls."

"Lucky us," says Jasper. "Cats incoming." Phil glances over in the direction the second alien had come from, and sure enough, there is Jasper with his gun out and the whole herd of cats - minus Loki, who was apparently not a cat and currently doing his best to destroy all the Skrulls.

"Do we have any intel on what that thing is?" Phil asks, even though he knows that there isn't.

"If it doesn't like the Skrulls, I vote we keep it," Jasper says sourly as they stand around, feeling a bit extraneous. "I reported us in. Fury says to keep an eye on what happens after big blue finishes with the Skrulls."

Given that one of the blue alien's legs is bigger than his entire body, Phil can deal with not joining in the fray. There are more Skrulls, and they're very well trained, so Phil gets the dubious pleasure of watching as more and more Skrulls pour out of the office buildings and pit themselves against the blue giant. It doesn't seem to feel pain though, as evidenced when it sticks one hand in through the fourth storey, raining the courtyard below with splinters of glass, and pulls a Skrull out, flinging it to the ground. Phil hears the crack of bone from where he's standing.

"Damn, we'd better intervene before he kills them all; we need to interrogate at least one of them," says Phil, moving forward, gun out. Jasper swears down the comm at him, but starts moving in too. Phil decides that the nearest Skrull is the most convenient, and if it just so happens to be fake-him, well, that's just coincidence.

Chapter Text

Skrulls are far too well trained for them to not notice his approach but they honestly don’t seem very bothered (to be fair, Phil wouldn’t prioritise himself over the enormous blue Skrull-smashing alien either) so Phil actually makes it all the way up to about ten feet away and fires a shot before a Skrull looks over at him.

It helps that Phil has excellent aim, and that shot went through its kneecap. (It doesn’t help that Skrulls have accelerated healing, and therefore it will be completely fine in about two minutes.) It works perfectly for the purpose Phil intended though, which was to distract a Skrull for long enough that the blue giant alien swings an enormous hand, and smashes him into unconsciousness.

Phil and Jasper swing into action, each pulling out nets and alien-tested cuffs. (Tailoring does wonders to hide odd bulges.) The Skrulls snarl, fighting their way over to their fallen comrade, but they forget about the cats. Someone should really have warned them about the cats by now, thinks Phil bemusedly, but he supposes that a race as intimidating as the Skrulls have a difficult time believing in the danger of the small fluffball.

Steve leaps in first with the others rallied behind him - how Jasper coined the codename ‘Captain’ for him, Phil is told - and retains the speed of a kitten as he slashes and then runs back to Phil. Phil takes the chance to reach into the pack strapped around Steve for a new clip, and reloads before shooing him off to Jasper for the same. Phil would marvel some more at how reliable Steve is and how well he takes to carrying supplies in a little reinforced kevlar outfit, but he really can’t spare the brainpower right now.

Natasha is like black lightening, zipping through legs with claws outstretched. Clint is the overhead equivalent, leaping from shoulder to head and going for ears, noses and eyes. Thor and Tony are both all over the place, not remotely worried about stealth, and seem to be having quite a lot of fun. Bruce placidly sits and waits for a Skrull to get close enough and then darts out and clamps his jaw around some stray fingers, or an ankle. Phil finishes up his cuffs and adds in a quick gag and blindfold too. He and Jasper exchange looks for a second.

“I’ll carry, you cover,” said Jasper with a huff, because they’re both trained to carry people and Phil is a better shot. He swings the Skrull over his shoulder and lifts from the knees. Phil angles his body sideways, keeping one eye on Jasper and one on the action, backing away with his gun raised. The Skrulls are scattering, unable to hurt the giant blue alien and presumably to find better weapons. It’s a good chance to get out of here now.

“Assemble!” He yells at the cats as they back toward the car. The cats stop chasing after the Skrulls (reluctantly though) and head back with the lone exception of Thor. “Thor!” Phil yells, exasperated, because he does not have the time for this. Jasper dumps the Skrull into the car, a feat made easier by the fact that one side of the car is now missing, thanks to Loki, and secures him down.

Thor is still in the square, and has padded up to the enormous alien-previously-Loki-and-a-cat, and.. and... whines. He rubs his head against what he can reach of the giant’s foot and cries. Phil groans, even as he straps fake-him’s shoulders down.

Instead of what Phil expects to happen, which is the alien shuffling his foot to the right and squashing Thor, there’s a bit of a shudder, and then the alien is falling, falling - no. Shrinking. Until all that’s left is a black cat that looks like Thor that comes running toward them, Thor in its wake.

The cats pile into the car and Jasper hits the road, already on the comm and asking their contact for location they can drive to that’s not so crowded with people. The shredded car and green-tinged person tied up in the back seat means they want to draw as little attention to themselves as possible.

Jasper heads for outer London, a GPS signal for an MI6 safehouse in place, as Phil pulls out the equipment stowed in the car looking for something suitable. “You, come here.” He leans into the backseat and points sternly at Thor. Thor’s ears droop as he slinks guiltily into Phil’s lap. He looks so very woebegone that Phil wants to cuddle him better. That’s not the point of this though; Phil just knew that Loki would follow him. And as soon as Loki is also in his lap, Phil flips him over and snaps a set of restraints around his legs.

“I don’t know what you are. And I don’t care how adorable you are. I don’t even care that you’re clearly just here for the Skrulls. It’s my job to take you in.” Phil says, feeling foolish for talking to a cat even though 1) he knows very well it’s not a cat and 2) he talks to his actual cats all the time.

“Alright, you lot. Anyone else secretly an alien, you can reveal yourself now.” He glares at the rest of them, thoroughly unimpressed. (Clint doesn’t like it when he’s grumpy, and claws his way across the car to hide in his usual place behind Phil’s back, a quivering lump behind his kidney.)

“Phil.” Jasper looks pained as he glances over from the driver’s seat. “Can you not at least contain the crazy to off-mission?”

“You’re the one who used cats instead of actual trained agents to rescue me,” says Phil. (Phil: 1, Jasper: 0, cats: perpetually 3,000,000) He strokes Loki’s long fur, even though he knows its actually an enormous hairless blue alien, and watches as Loki struggles, sometimes managing to turn a little blue. The restraints around him are the most advanced SHIELD tech there is right now though, and it changes shape to contain the alien. It was originally brought along in mind for the ferocious Skrulls, but it’s doing quite well with other shapeshifters too.

MI6 is suspiciously less bothered than Phil would have thought about the destruction of buildings possibly older than the entire history of the USA. “Not our problem for once,” says a grizzly looking agent with satisfaction. “Within the British borders is MI5’s problem, and off-planet is MI7’s. My only responsibility is you, and neither of you are dead, so we’re good.”

It makes sense, Phil supposes. They get on to a charter plane back home with no problems, at least. He and Jasper take turns guarding each of the aliens. They have to be kept at opposite ends of the plane, because Loki tries to eat the Skrull’s foot if he’s put within reach. Phil takes the first shift with Loki, and Jasper gets the Skrull, who is thankfully still unconscious and hopefully going to stay that way if they remember to inject a sedative into him every few hours. It’s disconcerting because even when green, he looks just like Phil.

The cats split, evidently knowing that work-time is over and nap-time is now okay. Thor accompanies Phil to Loki and mewls pitifully, rubbing his head against Phil’s thigh. After his third static shock, Phil forgives Thor just to make him stop. Then Thor goes to give Loki the same treatment, this time looking very disappointed.

He’s too close to this case to be able to interrogate their Skrull prisoner, apparently although Nick clearly didn’t think he was too close to it to hunt him across the atlantic ocean. In any case, after a very quick round in Medical, Phil is done as far as this case is concerned, which means that his mandatory leave of 48 hours has kicked in. It’s a policy that SHIELD sticks to after any case with personnel injury or harm. Being kidnapped counts, even if Phil tries to complain that giving him more free time is the last thing he needs.

After mandatory leave kicks in, their security securances automatically start locking them out of places, so Phil is refusing to leave his office because he knows he won’t be able to get back in for another two days afterwards.

“Phil, piss off,” Jasper yells from outside his door. (Now that their rightful Phil is returned, all states of truce between cats and Jasper are off.)

“Make me,” says Phil, copying files onto his laptop as quickly as possible. He has no delusions that he’s going to get thrown out at any moment now, but he’s going to do as much as he can before that happens.

The cat flap rattles open. “Are you FIVE?” snaps Jasper, sticking his face in quickly and then dropping it again as Tony presses his face close and sniffs. Phil dearly hopes that all the junior agents in the office pen outside his office have cleared out.

“Five and a half,” he yells. (His computer is 93% done with copying the files he’ll need to remotely access the details of the ongoing investigation. He just needs to stall a tiny bit longer.)

He hears Jasper snort, and starts packing everything. Suddenly, the door swings open to reveal Jasper sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Steve, who looks very amused, and Nick looming in his doorway .

“Phil. Take your cats and get the fuck out of my building,” says Nick. Phil can see past him - the floor is completely empty. He wonders vaguely where on earth all the agents who should be working are.

Phil opens his mouth, but Fury cuts in before he can make his smartass remark about magic words. “Please.” He glares at Phil with his one eye.

“Sir, yes sir,” says Phil, but only because his files are done. He slips the laptop into his briefcase. Nick eyes him because Nick knows exactly what he’s up to, but he doesn’t say anything which is good because then Phil would have had to fight the Director of SHIELD in the doorway of his own office and probably lost his job, even if he’s been friends with him for decades.

“I don’t want to see a single fucking whisker in the next two days, all right?” Nick stands in his doorway. Tony is especially obnoxious around Nick, and leaves a lovely furry layer over his leg as he cheerfully weaves his way out. Phil follows him out without saying a word.

Past the open office and into the corridor, Phil hears the thrum of conversation in the break room. He slips his head in. Aha, there all the missing agents are. It looks as though they were corralled out of the way, as they’re looking around curiously. “Alright, back to work,” says Phil quietly, and at least three mugs of coffee slosh as people start. He makes his way out, furry entourage included, as they stare after him.

Phil still doesn’t know what to do with free time now he has some, but at least home is more comfortable than the cell he’d been in. He collapses on the couch, Clint darting in to take his pride of place in the crook of Phil’s arm, and Natasha over his shoulders. Thor flops over his legs, ensuring that Phil will probably not get up again for the rest of the day. Steve is a comfortable weight on one foot, Bruce is tucked behind the other and Tony stretches out across them both.

For the first time in possibly years, Phil turns the tv on. He is greeted by the face of a screaming child. Phil leaves the channel on. (Children are very rarely a part of his job, and Phil honestly considers them to be a doddle compared to cats, agents and aliens.) “Wake me up when it’s time for food,” he murmurs, his hand sunk in Clint’s uneven fur, intending to fall asleep to the tune of... what is this he’s watching? Some show called Supernanny, apparently.

Three hours later, Phil has discovered that 1) there is a Supernanny rerun marathon on, 2) he hasn’t dozed at all because it is highly addictive, 3) there is apparently seven seasons of this show, so he’s probably got enough material to keep him occupied for at least the next two days and 4) his fingers haven’t twitched for his laptop once, and it’s not even anything to do with the fact that Clint sinks his claws into Phil’s hand if he tries to take it away.

He could do this some more, Phil thinks. Even if his left foot is dead under Steve, his arm is aching under Clint and he actually now really needs the bathroom but Thor shows no sign of budging. He can do this thing where his job doesn’t entirely eat his life and sometimes he comes home to his loved ones, even if they are a bit furry and a whole lot anti-social. It’s nice knowing that they care about him enough to come all the way to Canada to get him (Canada is really far away for beings the size of a pillow, okay) and he’d probably shoot an alien for one of them.

Phil leans back, and watches a child wail from its naughty corner. He tickles the bottom of Clint’s chin and he purrs, rubbing his face all over Phil, and Phil lets himself just relax for the first time in far too long, content to revel in doing nothing but watching addictive tv and enjoying the company of his family.

His SHIELD phone rings. Phil closes his eyes, and gives a very brief sigh. He reaches for the phone, ignoring Clint as he nibbles on the corner of it. “Yes?”

“We need you in.”

Such is the life of a SHIELD agent. "Come on, you lot. Suit up."