A few mentions of torture in this, though nothing exceedingly graphic; just skip to Athena and Aaron talking if it bothers you.
Very quietly, while they aimed at Athena, Aaron crept around the whole scene and rifled through her bag. He could hear them arguing, though he barely listened to what was being said. He took out two syringes, filling them quietly with enough tranquilizer to knock them out.
He crept up on the two of them knowing full well that in any other situation, they would have noticed and he would have been killed. There was no question to it. But now, while they were hurting and angry and lost, he might have a shot. They would die otherwise, and the last thing he wanted to bring to the Commander—to Coulson—was their bodies.
"He gotten any better?" Aaron asked, despite knowing the answer before Athena even opened her mouth. She just gave him a look.
"He thinks they're home, safe and sound," she said. Very slowly, she stepped away from their prone forms, looking out the window of the plane. Clouds drifted past her line of vision like wisps of smoke. Athena bit her lip.
"It's Christmas in a few days," she said. "He's got everything all ready, all nice and spruced up; he even got them a tree. He's baking cookies. And in his mind, they're right there next to him, helping him bake and decorate, and he's so happy I want to shoot myself. I've worked with Phil Coulson for ten years, and I've never seen him so happy."
Athena closed her eyes and shook her head.
"And here they are. Merry Christmas, Phil. We're dumping their half-dead bodies on your doorstep, so you can deal with having your mental state crushed and the realization that over the past six months, you've gone completely insane." She said.
"He's strong," Aaron said, though it didn't matter and they both knew it. "He'll get over this. And he'll have them. S.H.I.E.L.D. can't risk their best two agents like this again. They won't leave him."
Athena shook her head, undoing her hair from its ponytail and sighing.
"It won't matter," she said. "He'll never fix this. Not entirely. It'll always be a raw, broken place within him that no doctor or therapist can fix. He lost them. It doesn't matter if he never does again. He lost them." She sighed and took out a towel from her coat pocket, sterilizing it and wiping her hands clean before tossing it to Aaron.
