After the fighting is over, then come the hot baths, ice packs, resurrection from the dead, political maneuvering, and happy endings (not like that, Tony).

Phil Coulson wakes up in a hospital bed. Well, damn.

They were reunited a few days later in a hallway in SHIELD headquarters, outside an otherwise nondescript door that said Philip J. Coulson.

It was Captain America. Captain. Freaking. America.

Even when Phil Coulson was doing something ridiculously, embarrassingly, crushingly human, he was still a flawless, seamless black box of a spook.

In which Cap makes new friends, becomes an accidental Internet troll, swaps a lot of stories, and gives Bucky Barnes a hug.

Steve pauses when he sees the bizarre changes to Times Square. Well, what if he didn't? What if he got away and SHIELD didn't get him? He escapes. He learns. And in true Captain America fashion, he refuses to hide away and decides to take the fight to Hydra (because who else would capture him?) in the streets of New York, hiding among the Finest. Along the way, he picks up a rural hometown, a best friend who knows a little too much about the silver men, an old friend with new metal accessories in his fists, and a partner who doesn't freak out when Steve tells him Nazis are trying to kill him, please don't tell the Desk Sergeant? Oh, and at some point, he may just figure out that the weird guy at the coffee shop isn't gay, but is a SHIELD agent that's torn between turning THE CAPTAIN in and giving up the vacation this manhunt turned into.