Hey

Lance had to move quickly as Bobbi finished packing away the rest of their clean-up kit. He felt vaguely guilty, for Bob’s sake, that her meticulous work would be for nothing. He found the console in Melinda’s desk easily enough and wasted no time in slotting the blank thumb drive into its side, copying the command instructions he had received to his burner phone earlier that afternoon. As he waited for the download to complete, he swept his gaze around the room. Even if he didn’t know what had transpired down the hall hours earlier, the place would still give him the creeps. The house as a whole was a jarring contradiction of absence and livelihood. A thick layer of dust settled across almost everything; but the bed was still unmade, an open book laid facedown on the nightstand, never to be picked up again.

Pocketing the thumb drive, Hunter quickly checked the timer was counting down before hastily shoving the console back into the dresser, hearing Bobbi’s familiar footsteps approaching.

‘Let’s get out of here’, the revulsion of what she had witnesses seemed to have dulled any curiosity Bobbi might have had in what Hunter was up to in his absence.

They drove in silence to the nearby airfield, and were above the clouds before Bobbi finally spoke.

‘Is it wrong that I keep thinking about Jemma?’, the tortured look she turned to face him with told Lance her question was not rhetorical.

Sighing heavily, he reached for her hand, ‘No, love, there’s a lot wrong with all of this – but not that.’ Hunter inwardly cursed Coulson, with no real conviction, for spreading this trauma to his wife but couldn’t help being painfully aware that it was the best choice the man could have made. Melinda had helped secure them a comfortable life outside of S.H.I.E.L.D after their abrupt departure – even though her choice of minivan, already equipped with a booster seat, had provoked an uncomfortably frank (albeit beneficial) conversation between himself and Bobbi. They owed her this much at least, if not as a professional courtesy, then very much as a friend.

Bobbi snorted a small laugh in spite of herself as she alerted the base to their approach, ‘I can’t believe I let you register my Commander ID….’

‘Love is a powerful thing’, Hunter quipped with a wry smile, they had had this argument before.

‘Tequila is a powerful thing’, she muttered reproachfully as they began their decent towards base.

The house was too quiet.

With one foot inside the door, Melinda’s mind flashed encouragingly back to the image of Phil, snoring softly in bed, awaiting her return. This was a bad idea. But she shook the image regretfully from her head as the door clicked shut behind her; her gut instinct had never been quite right when it came to Andrew anyway.

Melinda had to steel herself as she moved quickly down the hall, careful not to soak up too much of what she had left behind in these walls. Her feet carried her up the stairs instinctively, a now perverted repetition of her usual homecoming. When she reached the landing, and saw the only door that stood ajar, her twisting gut paused long enough to sink somewhere through the floor.

Her and Andrew had always found their own way to balance the asymmetry in their communication. And so, when she had left her signed consent form stating she had declined her Operations recommended contraception issued to all Specialists on their kitchen counter when she left for a mission – he had responded in kind, by nonchalantly walking her through the renovations he had undertaken in their spare room during her absence, which now held a crib instead of a bed.

Her heart was hammering now as she approached the nursery, in a distinctly different way than it had that first night she stepped through it’s door. This could only be wrong. There was no purpose, no space, for anything but pain in that room now.

But still, she let her legs carry her numbly forward.

Her brain seemed to have conveniently disengaged from her body; reeling in a way it did not have the capacity to contain. She had seen Andrew earlier that week, directly before his abrupt departure. He had been uncharacteristically cool with her then, abrupt and unkind with his words as he all but absconded from the base. She hadn’t allowed herself to think too much into it then, but as her mind searched for any sort of explanation, things began sinking coldly into place. They had been working closely together in order to help Daisy, and after living closely together not all that long ago, still found themselves very much in tune; uncomfortably so. He hadn’t yet spent a full day on base before commenting pointedly that he was glad she was sleeping better these days, in the Director’s quarters. He hadn’t brought it up again – or seemed to take issue with it at all really. But had he assumed what she had suspected at the time – that her uncharacteristic illness was a by-product of the uncertain road  she was venturing down with Phil – a road her and Andrew has started down long before but never reached the end of.

It was agonizing to rationalize, nauseating even, but did nothing to prepare her for the rage, for the disgust she met from Andrew’s eyes as she entered the small room.

For a moment, she was bitterly wishful that his anger was justified, just before a wall of pain hit her squarely in the chest.

‘Melinda, Melinda…..please, come on now…..’

Jemma frantically pleaded, paralyzed by panic, momentarily unable to do anything put place useless glancing touches against her. The woman was slumped over the side of the bed, having lost consciousness before her feet had even managed to hit the floor. The disconnected IV was now dripping steadily on the floor, a not quite silent drip somewhere between the erratic beeping of the heart monitor.

The familiar cacophony of sound triggered Jemma into a clearer minded Dr Simmons. As gently as she could, she lifted the woman onto her back, hands immediately reaching to stem the flow of fresh blood seeping through the bandages on her abdomen. To her horror, she seized beneath her touch, weak hands reaching for her blindly, eyes screwed shut as a torrent of desperate pleas torn themselves from her bruised throat..

‘…..ple – please, nuh, hmmm, no, please, no…please STOP -.’

Dr Simmons choked back sobs as she restained her friend, struggling weakly against an enemy she wasn't lucid enough to realize wasn't there.

'Please, Drew - no, please - listen...'

Melinda could do nothing but beg; bound before an unrecognisable monster she would not believe was once her husband if it was not for the same luck of disgust in his eyes.