Excused Absences

“You seem distracted, Fury.”

Nick did not spare a glance up to Maria from where he was shoving papers into his briefcase, “I’m busy.”

“Could it have anything to do with…?” She trailed off, forcing Nick to have to look at her just to follow the tilt of her head in the direction of May on the other side of the glass door.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Hill.”

“Oh, really?” She laughed incredulously. “You didn’t take your eye off her during the whole meeting. You know that you approved for Sitwell to let his class spend an entire week outside so they could study photosynthesis, right?”

“Yes,” He glared at her. “For you. You’re welcome.”

“For me?”

“I am going to be out of the office all day today,” Nick explained. “And Jasper has a habit of whining at me when I don’t approve his ‘teaching methods” – more like methods to case every asthmatic and hay-fever sufferer to be sent to the nurse, but whatever – “and you’re acting principal today. Do you want to listen to Sitwell bitch?”

“No.”

“So, there you go.”

“How’s it going, by the way?” Maria asked, jabbing her head back in the direction of May again. “You look tired.”

“It was a long night,” Nick stated but unlike Sam, who would back off or leave it be, Maria didn’t so much take the hint as she completely disregarded it.

“Why?”

“Because I had to read Hand’s report.”

“And that’s it?”

“It was a long report.”

“So, what was it again, Melinda?” She began. “Is she adjusting well to casa de Fury?”

“She hasn’t broken anything.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“That’s always a good thing.”

“She has a black eye,” Maria stated, asking how she got it without actually asking him anything. “She covers it with make-up but you can tell, if you’re looking for it, which I was. And what about her wrist? What happened there?”

“She came like that,” Nick replied, vague and unhelpful like he did when he didn’t really want to discuss it or if he just didn’t know.

“Is she… okay?”

“No.”

“Do you want me-“

“I don’t want you to do anything, Hill,” He said in a voice that barred no argument. “Just don’t destroy my school.”

“What are you going to do then?”

“Take her shopping.”

“And that’s going to fix what’s wrong with her?”

“No, but it’s going to fill her closet and that’s a start,” Nick replied as May finished up the last questions on her placement test. “She took that test in less than twenty minutes.”

“She did,” Maria nodded before picking up her own folders. “Maybe she’s a genius.”

“God, I hope not,” Fury groaned. Cleave and smart was one thing, the way that Barton and Romanoff were clever and smart but genius? He could probably handle a Banner-brand quiet genius that was happy to be shoved off into a soundproof lab and left alone but someone like Stark, or Fitz, or Richards, god no.

“I’ll have it graded and e-mail you her class schedule later. Have fun at the mall today. Maybe buy a new eyepatch, you deserve it.”

“Funny, Hill.”

“I’m thinking pick with unicorns and glitter.”

“Very funny.”

Nick watched as Maria walked out the door and picked up May’s test. She told her something, probably the same thing that she had just told him before leaving with an uneasy smile.

Nick took a deep breath.

Off to the mall.

Nick Fury like to think he’s a patient man.

He had to be to succeed in a career in the military, or the C.I.A., or S.H.I.E.L.D., or education. Patience was the key.

It was all a lot of waiting, a lot of hostility with people you preferred to not know.  

Nick Fury could keep his cool even when dealing with Tony Stark on most days. A gun held to his temple wouldn’t even cause the slightest of fluctuation in his blood pressure.

He should be able to handle the mall without his blood pressure sky-rocketing to kingdom come.

He couldn’t.

No one hated the mall quite like Nick Fury.

It was too loud and colorful. The music was too loud and the smells too strong, groups of teenage boys that should have been in school populated the place, and people moseyed around the premises with no real reason to actually need to be there. No one except Melinda May, who looked seconds away from skinning herself alive just so they didn’t have to step foot inside the place. 

“Where would you like to go?” Nick asked, eying the colorful displays in the colorful shops, advertising sales and deals and skinny jeans with distaste. He turned his gaze to Melinda and noted her dark clothes before he mentally marked out stores like Claire’s.

She shrugged her shoulders, eyes moving around the building as if she was calculating escape routes and finding exits. That was something Nick knew he shouldn’t take comfort in but found that he did.

Malls were tactical hell.

He let out a long breath and let his shoulders slump forward before standing a little taller. With a sigh and a ‘let’s go,’ they moved into the building. Melinda, thankfully, followed despite everything in her tense muscles suggesting that she was willing to stand just outside the mall’s entrance until the end of time.

Nick led her to a shop called Hollister; he figures that since he’d seen the kids at school wearing shirts with the company name written across them and since he was pretty sure that Clint had at least one of them that this was the place. That every kid under the age of eighteen shopped at Hollister. It was the cool place.

Nick’s entire wardrobe consisted of a badass leather trench coat that had seen better days, t-shirts from school functions, two suit jackets, dress pants, and dress shirts in the basic colors – white, black, navy, and gray. Other than the random Christmas gift from Romanoff (Barton always bought ties, always) that was it.

He didn’t know clothes and he knew even less about the clothes that a teenage girl was supposed to find cool. Clint and Natasha did their own shopping and he had never been more thankful for that than he was at this exact moment.

He regretted taking her there almost immediately.

He should have taken May over to a fucking toy store or something. American Eagle would have been fine, probably, but not fucking Hollister.

There was music loud enough that it was almost im-fucking-possible to think and the perfume coming off the stupid tiki hunt entrance was enough to suffocate an asthmatic. Where was the logic in having the lights be that low?

That was a safety hazard at the very least and a lawsuit he hoped would one day shut down this stupid place at best.

Were the lights so low so that young kids with their parent’s credit cards shouldn’t see how unhappy everyone was or was it so they didn’t see the shitty quality of their stupid ass shirts.

The mannequin wasn’t even wearing a proper shirt. That was a sheet of fabric with a button on it.

Clothes were stupid.

Very, very stupid.

And Hollister was the stupidest of it all.

“Here,” Nick said placing the S.H.I.E.L.D. credit card in her hand because he refused, absolutely refused.

He rather be tortured, he was not going into that damn place. He’d rather invade Syria or Jupiter, fight space aliens or robots. He’d rather be lobotomized than spend a second longer inside of a fucking Hollister.

“You buy what you want. Get whatever you need and want, don’t feel the need to hold out because that’s you-know-whose. And screw them, right?”

She blinked up at him.

“Right,” He answered himself. “I’m going to be down there.”

He pointed down in the direction of the other end of the mall, “To see about getting you a phone because, quite frankly, a black man in an eyepatch following a short Asian girl, who looks like she could possibly be thirteen, around Victoria Secret is weird and likely to get the cops called.”

He almost got a smile at that, a little up-curl of the right corner of her lip for a split second. He’d take it as a win.

“It’s almost eleven o’clock, so I’ll see you in an hour and then I’ll meet you at the food court and we’ll get lunch. Make sure you try everything on – pants, shoes, whatever. I don’t think either of us want to come back to this dump.”

She nodded and then turned on her heels in the direction of a less stupid store, which Nick found relieving because honestly, fuck Hollister.

He waited for her to disappear from the shop before he left to go deal with his task. A task that he was much more suited for than helping a teenage girl find some clothes.

Nick took his time walking to the other side of the mall where he would undoubtedly have to deal with an overly-cheery sales person at the phone company, trying to get him to buy things that he didn’t need. It would still be better than Hollister though.

He just needed to buy the damn thing.

It took Nick less time than he thought it would.

The perks of being at the mall during school hours, he guessed. Nick had forty mintues before May was supposed to meet him, which was fine.

It was all fine, Nick decided as he added his number into the phone. He added in Barton and Romanoff’s, as well as a few other people’s into May’s new phone.

He couldn’t help the feeling of dread pooling in his gut because May was the daughter of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, spies probably, who watched her parents be killed but was not killed herself. She was a person of interest to S.H.I.E.L.D. and was probably having her every movement tracked. She had panic attacks about Bahrain and a million other oddities and suspicions that made her weird.

Nick didn’t have a goddamn clue on what any of that meant because it was classified. He didn’t know anything surrounding her, didn’t know if she was in danger of if she was danger.

He just knew that like Clint and like Natasha, he felt the fierce need to see her happy and fed, and safe, and he needed her to know that she was not alone in this world because Nick Fury had been alone. He was alone and if he could form an odd little family after losing everything than so could she.

She didn’t know that though, she didn’t know that he was not the enemy and because of that, the dread remained like a lead ball in his stomach. There was no reason – absolutely no reason for her not to have walked out the door the moment she disappeared from his sight.

The ring of his phone pulled him out of his thoughts. He pulled the thing from his pocket and answered the call, “Fury. Who is this?”

“It’s Hill,” The voice replied. “Don’t you check your caller ID, like ever?”

“What do you want, Hill?” Nick asked. “School still in one piece?”

“Nope, I personally mixed Fitzsimmons’ latest project with Banner’s gamma thing and everything went kaboom,” Maria, spoke, using all the technical terms, as always. “Everything is fine. Summers’ went home with a migraine, I think.”

“Hmm,” Nick hummed. “Any reason, you’re calling?”

“I graded Melinda’s test.”

“She goes by May.”

“May did well.”

“Well?” Nick asked.

“More than well.”

“Stop drawing this out, Hill,” Nick put a stop to her game.

“She did exceptional in foreign languages, knocked out Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, and Japanese,” Maria read off. “She tested out of taking a foreign language, Nick. Like Romanoff. Math score was high. Not Fitz high or anything but above average. English was decent. Science was okay. History was lacking.”

“I don’t think she spent a lot of time in America,” Nick supplied because why would international spies (or whatever) spend the time to teach their daughter American history, or anything that wasn’t relevant to the task at hand.

“You don’t think?” Maria asked. “Shouldn’t you know?”

“What else, Maria?”

“We’re going to put her in AP English, Koenig’s class since her score was good. No foreign language, I don’t see the point if she already knows the ones we offer, unless she wants to do a course with Xavier.”

Maria sighed, “Then it’s just Calculus, Biology – AP Bio if she wants it. Put her in Clint and Natasha’s gym class so she’ll know someone. Art?”

“Might as well.”

“She’ll have one free period then, without a foreign language.”

“Leave it,” Nick replied. “We’ll let her have her first day and then she can decide what she wants to take.”

“What are her hobbies?” Maria asked, trying to knock this out while she was already working on it.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Maria sounded shocked. “Do you know anything about this girl?”

“Yeah, her favorite color is blue.”

“Nick-“

“Look,” Nick snapped because this was getting really annoying, really fast. “She’s been at my place for a day and she didn’t exactly come with a filled questionnaire.”

“Yeah, okay,” Maria apologized. “Sorry.”

“I’ve got to go,” Nick responded in a voice that let Maria know that he’d already dropped it and forgot about it. “I can see May now.”

It was a lie, Nick just didn’t want to continue the discussion about the frustrating lack of information he had on Melinda May. He already had S.H.I.E.L.D. on his ass, he didn’t need Maria Hill there as well.

He only had to wait another ten minutes before he saw her during one of his scans of the inhabitants of the food court – consisting mostly of young mothers and a plethora of strollers and binkies. She was holding bags, a lot but not as much as Natasha would have if she was told to go wild with S.H.I.E.L.D. funding.

“What would you like to eat?” Nick asked after she sat down, dropping the bags under the small table.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Here,” Nick spoke as he pulled her phone from his pocket. “I’ve already put in my number, which you can call about anything, no questions asked. Clint and Nat are in there as well. I also gave you the number to Maria Hill, she’s the assistant principal so if you need to contact me and I’m not answering, call her.”

Melinda nodded, taking the phone from his hand gently so not to actually touch him. Nick noticed that she had two of her fingernails painted, one a dark shade of purple and the other black.

It was an oddly normal feeling to know that she had bought nail polish.

“Thank you,” She said softly, meeting his eyes with gratitude.

“I’m here to help,” Nick told her seriously. “So now, what do you want to eat?  I know you probably have no appetite but you’ll feel worse if you don’t eat something.”

She looked up at that and he stated plainly, “You’ve had an orange since coming to my place.”

“We have breakfast.”

“Which you didn’t eat,” Nick pointed out. “I noticed.”

“Chinese,” She responded, not seeing the point in arguing much to Nick’s absolute pleasure. He didn’t know if he’d hold up if she had decided to fight back. He got what she wanted and ordered the food.

“Where are you from?” Nick asked suddenly. May paused with her chopsticks halfway before her carton and her mouth. It would have been amusing if Nick didn’t really want to know the answer.

‘Hell, it was still amusing.’

“We spent a lot of time in Canada, off-mission, but my father is from Pennsylvania, second generation, my mother is from Hong Kong,” May answered after a moment deciding that the answer could not be used against her later. “I was born in Macau.”

“Macau, I’ve been there.”

She nodded and went back to eating.

“Miss Hill called,” Nick said from lack of something better to say. “Your results on the placement test were good. History was less great but we can improve on it. We’ve got you a schedule that could be tweaked if needed.”

Melinda nodded in understanding.

“I know that I’m piling a lot onto you,” Nick stated. “And starting high school in the middle of the year, especially having never been to high school, can be stressful. So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed at any point tomorrow, you can take to me or Maria. Miss Potts is a great guidance counselor and she’d be-“

“I don’t need a counselor.”

“Well, just in case. Her office is in the main office,” Nick finished. “And you don’t have to decide right away but I typically make my kids do an extracurricular activity after school because I typically stay late and it’s healthier than lying around Clint does archery.”

May didn’t say anything. If it was because she didn’t have anything to say or because she didn’t want to, Nick wasn’t sure.

“We’ll figure it out tomorrow.”