[Phil Coulson, Johann Schmidt]
Feb. 12th, 2013 04:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aa_coulsonPhil Coulson doesn't dream the way he used to. Surreal strobe flashes of activity crackling with magnesium heat in a sea of dead sleep.
He sits up sometimes and thinks about the slant of light through the blinds instead of what he did yesterday
or what he has to do tomorrow
which is different too.
On an off night he spends at home he pads from the bedroom and sinks into the couch, leather cool on his back. Captain America salutes from his poster over the television
Give 'em Hell
vintage cards smudged brown with blood slotted into the frame.
Johann Schmidt is dangerous in public. When they are out on business lately it is in pairs. Always a hand at his shoulder, when he starts to turn after a skirt or men holding hands or a look he does not like.
He is led along the sidewalk like a tiger, chain never longer than arm's length.
Gradually his behavior improves; he earns her trust. He learns not to care, or to care less. His handlers are dismissed and the next day he murders a man in Marseille, painting an alley with evidence.
Now there are posters of him there.
There is a serpent buried in the stone beneath Svalbard.
Lightning boils flush over ice and chews into the bare rock beneath it; Schmidt resolves into the wilderness in a blaze of light lost to the dawn. There is little to see, snow scorching white in waves over barren terrain. The wind howls shrill in his ears.
Nothing rumbles, or shifts.
Still he listens, and watches, and feels, crude senses probing after familiar sensation.
Or smell.
After an hour he picks himself up off of aching knees and vanishes in a furl of steam.
Five kilometers further, he appears again.
He sits up sometimes and thinks about the slant of light through the blinds instead of what he did yesterday
or what he has to do tomorrow
which is different too.
On an off night he spends at home he pads from the bedroom and sinks into the couch, leather cool on his back. Captain America salutes from his poster over the television
Give 'em Hell
vintage cards smudged brown with blood slotted into the frame.
Johann Schmidt is dangerous in public. When they are out on business lately it is in pairs. Always a hand at his shoulder, when he starts to turn after a skirt or men holding hands or a look he does not like.
He is led along the sidewalk like a tiger, chain never longer than arm's length.
Gradually his behavior improves; he earns her trust. He learns not to care, or to care less. His handlers are dismissed and the next day he murders a man in Marseille, painting an alley with evidence.
Now there are posters of him there.
There is a serpent buried in the stone beneath Svalbard.
Lightning boils flush over ice and chews into the bare rock beneath it; Schmidt resolves into the wilderness in a blaze of light lost to the dawn. There is little to see, snow scorching white in waves over barren terrain. The wind howls shrill in his ears.
Nothing rumbles, or shifts.
Still he listens, and watches, and feels, crude senses probing after familiar sensation.
Or smell.
After an hour he picks himself up off of aching knees and vanishes in a furl of steam.
Five kilometers further, he appears again.
