Excused Absences

“Don’t you have parents, or something?” The usher asked, running his frazzled hand through his shaggy hair. “Someone to supervise all of you.”

Clint signed with his whole body, looking like a balloon deflating before he drew himself back up to stare down the usher with his bird-like eyes. May had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep the smile off her face.

“No,” He said in one long exhale of air. “Car crash took ‘em. How ‘bout you, Nat? What took yours?”

“Dem Russians,” She said in her thickest accent.

“Mom’s dead,” Bruce said with a ‘what do you do?’ shrug.

“Mine too,” Tony added. “And a father that might as well be.”

“Just me and my mum,” Fitz added as well, mouth full of popcorn.

“Orphan,” Daisy threw out after Ward’s comments on shitty parents and an aunt.

The poor usher, who was clearly just some college kid that wanted some extra cash for doing an easy job, was looking more and more like he’d rather be taking a final for a class he’d never been too. He turned his wide eyes wearily to where May and Coulson were standing off from the rest as if to ask, and you?

“Terrorism,” May said.

“I actually have both of mine,” Coulson admitted.  The usher seemed relieved by that.

“And his mom is enough for all of us,” Clint chirped. “Seriously.”

“We really weren’t doing anything, mister,” Natasha said in a sickly sweet voice. She even batted her eye at him.

The usher, for his part, gestured around wildly at the mess of popcorn and skittles that covered the theater floor, and then to the Carmel Apple stuck to the movie screen, “You did nothing? This is nothing?!”

Coulson gripped May’s hand in the shadowed casted on them in the dim theater. She could feel the surprised laughter shudder through him as she whispered through the side of her mouth to hold it together.

“Well…” Clint and Natasha began at the same time, but stopped when the door to the theater was ripped almost completely off its hinges. A soft ‘oh’ followed.

Coulson almost completely lost it then. He only kept quiet because he squeezed May’s hand and bit his tongue.

The usher, with his wide comical eyes, turned to the door to see Thor walk in with a guilty look upon his face because he still was actually had the door knob in his hand.

“It’s those dreams arms,” Daisy mused.

“Mhmm,” May hummed in agreement.

“They aren’t that dreamy,” Coulson muttered.

“No, they are,” May replied, as Simmons’ followed in behind Thor. Her arms were full of candy boxes and popcorn bags, speaking quickly about something or other that involved the circumference of Thor’s bicep and outer space.

“Guys,” She sighed when she looked around the theater. Her shoulders dropped forward and she rolled her eyes, looking all the more like an annoyed substitute teacher of a rowdy third grade class. “What happened?”

“Yes!” The usher jumped, his flashlight waved wildly at each of them. “Yes! What happened?”

“Well,” Natasha shrugged. “We wanted to make May feel like one of the gang.”

“Actually,” Clint drawled. “It all started with the day I accidently dumped my cereal on Nick Fury.”

“And lived to tell the tale,” Ward added.

“Nah, I think it started,” Tony cut in, stroking his chin in thought. “It started when Agent May – can I call you Agent May, Agent?”

“No.”

“Anyways, it started when Agent May went all ninja warrior on a bunch of crazy psycho terror- Ooph. If you hit me one more time Romanoff, I’m going to sue you for everything you’ve got!”

“Tight jeans and a hair straightener,” Clint mused. “I can see why you’d want that.”

“In the theater,” The usher signed, the question ‘why me?’ present in his voice. “What happened in the theater?”

“They didn’t follow the book,” Tony said simply, and Coulson lost it.

Coulson should have known that something was going to go wrong when Tony Stark swaggered up to his lunch table and peered down over his designer sunglasses at him with that look. He should have prepared for something to go wrong when Tony then said, “We’re going to the movies, bitches.”

If he followed that up with ‘if you don’t blow off that stupid safe sex seminar to hang out with your besties then they totally won’t judge you. I will but Bruce and the sass-sassins won’t,’ then Coulson, as president of Student Council, should have considered getting a speaker on peer pressure. He should have especially done that considering that he caved like the Golden Gate Bridge in literally ever lame ‘end-of-the-world’ movie the moment that May said that she’d go.

He accepted that he had to go because, of course, May would say ‘sure’ in that very May way that suggested that the option was only slightly better than gnawing her own arm off. May didn’t like crowd or being near the majority of the student body She probably didn’t like seminar either.

It wasn’t like she wouldn’t have noticed that the majority of the student body also didn’t like being around her. Of course, she wouldn’t want to go.  

He accepted the fact that any trip that involved skipping the last two periods of class, the phrase ‘we’re going to the mall bitches,’ and nine of his strong-willed and stubborn friends miraculously and suspiciously agreeing to do something with no fuss was not going to end well.

It was pretty much the equivalent of the stars aligning on the eve of the apocalypse during a full moon on Friday the thirteenth while standing under a ladder with a broken mirror and a black cat shouting Macbeth at the top of his lungs. It was going to end badly and likely with them being on the wrong side of prison bars.

He was right.

Granted, it was mall security’s holding cells that they were all crammed into.

They were only here because Tony and Clint thought it’d be funny to piss off security by talking about how laughably easy it would be to escape mall security.

 Also, because Thor accidentally broken the handle off their office door and Natasha’s stared at them with unwavering glare until it freaked the officers out.

Not to mention that in a rare moment of lulled silence, Fitz said a little too loud that mall security was just a bunch of police academy flunkies.

But really, none of this would be happening, none, if they’d just apologized to that poor usher and offered to clean up the theater instead of laughing until the usher got fed-up and called security. None of this would have happened at all if they would have just gone to that damn sex-ed seminar.

In conclusion, Coulson needed new friends.

Tony was threatening to sue them for unlawful imprisonment and for generally acting like a bunch of entitled dickbags.

He really needed new friends.

None of them even seemed the slightest bit concerned that they had been arrested. Not even Fitzsimmons, who had a tendency to overreact.

Even Simmons didn’t seem the slightest bit frazzled by their current situation despite the fact that she freaked out about almost being late for class this morning. She was as calm as could be where she stood whispering with Daisy in the far corner of the crowded cell.

Only Coulson seemed the slightest bit concerned that this was going to fuck up his life, majorly.

The military would never accept him if he was a felon. Skipping class and stealing keys was one thing because they had no consequences outside of detention (and he stayed after school often enough anyways, so his mom didn’t even have to know) but this was a cell.

A cell.

He was in a jail cell that had bars, and a lock, and disapproving looks on the guards’ faces. He was inside of a life ruining cell that he never would have been in if he would have just stayed at school.

What university would accept him now that he was a heathen to society?

His mother was going to be so disappointed. How as he going to look his father in the eye now, with this on his permeant record?

“You okay?” May ask after she slid down the wall to sit next to him on the cold concrete. She didn’t seem to mind the dust or the shattered remains of his future.

“I’m–”

“So,” Clint cut off throwing himself to the ground next to Coulson. “They aren’t, like, pressing charges or anything. We just gotta have someone pick us up.”

“Oh,” Phil sighed. “That’s, uh, that’s less bad, right?”

“And we’re banned from the mall for a month.”

“I’ve never been banned from anything,” Phil replied disheartened.

Clint and May shared incredulous looks before rolling their eyes. Phil would have been thrilled that they were developing a kind of nonverbal communication, but it was overshadowed his own incredulous thought, “Oh, and you two have been – Nevermind, of course you’ve been banned.”  

 “Man, I was banned from the entire state of Missouri once.”

“How–”

“Who are we going to call?” Natasha asked the crowd, holding up her phone.

“I’ll just call my dad,” Tony shrugged.

“No!” Everyone shouted.

“What? Why not?” Tony asked. “He’d clear all of this up, get the ban lifted and everything.”

“Yeah, and every newspaper in New York will headline with ‘Howard Stark rescued delinquent kids from mall security,” Daisy snorted.

“And I so do not feel like being grounded,” Clint added. “Let’s call Mrs. C.”

 “No, we’re not calling my mom,” Coulson told them, “Under no uncertain terms are we doing that.”

“Yeah,” Tony agreed. “No way. She’d make us run laps, or eat a pack of cigarettes, or something.”

“Fury?” Clint suggested.

“NO!” Everyone shouted.

“Geez, it was just a suggest–”

“Where’s May?” Phil asked because she was no longer pressed against his side. There was a break in conversation as everybody stopped what they were doing and acknowledged that she truly wasn’t standing next to Coulson.

They almost got whiplash at the sound of the cell door unlocking and May stepping out of it. The door was closed, and the lock snapped back in place before anybody could fully comprehend what happened.

“What the hell?” Ward exclaimed as the officer led her away from the noise and she pulled her phone from her pocket. “We never agree to that.”

“Aye, the lady knows what she’s doing,” Thor defended, smiling brightly at May’s initiative Thor was just as enthralled by May’s awesomeness as May was by his, it was kind of adorable.

“Who is she calling?” Tony questioned. “Everyone she knows is right here! Unless she’s calling her parents from beyond the grave.”

Natasha punched him really hard in the arm and then glared at him in a way that suggested he shut up before she used his intestine for double-dutch.

“Maybe it’s an old contact?” Clint guessed.

“Does she have any?” Natasha asked. Coulson was reminded yet again that every time that every time he learned something about May, there was another hundred things that he didn’t know.

Clint shrugged.

“It could be ninjas,” Tony said.

“Could she be calling Principal Fury?” Simmons asked.

“God, I hope not,” someone muttered as May started talking softly into the receiver, too softly for any of them to make out.

Someone mumbled ‘typical’ but Coulson was too distracted to figure out who because May looked…relaxed, calmer.

Her shoulders lost some of the tension that was always there. He even thought that he heard her laugh once. He has rarely heard her laugh; hell, it took effort to get her to smile. Even more so since the whole S.H.I.E.L.D. file fiasco.

This person, this mysterious person on the phone, got her to laugh and they weren’t even here.

It was not jealousy, it wasn’t.

It was concern, how was he supposed to help her if he didn’t know anything about her?

May hung up the phone and walked back over to the cell. As soon as the guard let her back in, she was bombarded with questions.

“Who’d you call?”

“Was it Fury?”

“Was it a spy?”

“Ninjas?”

“Tony, shut up or I will punch you.”

“Are they coming?”

“How long will it be?”

“Who was it?”

 “Everyone,” Phil shouted. “Shut up!”

A hush fell over the crowd.

“It’s taken care of,” She replied, sliding back down to the floor. She wasn’t going to say anything else on the topic. They all knew it.

“Okay,” Phil replied because that someone should. “Okay.”

“Um, no, it’s not,” Tony piped up. “You’re new and all, but it’s a democracy around here. I don’t know how you did it in the ‘field’ or whatever, but it got your parents killed so many think – Jesus Christ!”

“You really should have been expecting that,” Clint said, lacking any sympathy as he observed the fresh hand-print on Tony’s face. “Nat did say she was going to punch you if you didn’t shut up.”

“Tony, apologize,” Bruce said, gesturing to where Coulson was currently glaring daggers from May’s side. “Now.”

She looked uninterested and untouched by his words to everyone but Natasha. She saw the way May’s jaw clenched and the flicker of guilt in her eyes before she slid on her ice mask.

And Natasha had anger in her eyes like the anger in Coulson’s; they had enough of Tony being Tony.

Natasha had snuck around enough corners and listened in on enough conversations to hear May talk about the guilt she felt over her parents’ deaths. She had watched as May crawl her way out of bad memories, and she had watched her never make it out of other.

She had watched as May hollowed herself out and created a no-feeling mask that never slipped or faltered in the same way that Natasha had. She watched and she knew that there was nothing she could do to stop her.

Natasha’s hand reacted before her mind caught up to it. She hadn’t realized she’d slapped Tony until the tingling, stinging sensation was already working its way up her arm.

She was not sorry.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony waved off Bruce. “I was being a dick. Sorry. I do that sometimes, that’s why I got Romanoff, to quite literally knock some sense into me. Don’t do that again.”

“No promises,” Natasha responded, keeping her anger off her face and out of her voice. No need to draw anything out when May seemed content with just ignoring Tony.

“But seriously, who’d you call?” Tony asked. “Will there be ninjas? Please say its ninjas.”

“Tony, go sit over there,” Bruce snapped. “Before I hit you.”

“Fine, whatever,” He muttered before sulking over to the bars to bug the officer.

“Thanks, Bruce,” Coulson said, nodding his head to him and then Natasha.

“He’s such a dick sometimes,” Clint muttered, dropping down next to Coulson much like he had earlier. “Why don’t you go kick his ass, May? Go one on one, Fight Club style.”

“Tony would have his ass handed to him,” Natasha commented.

“And you know how he doesn’t like being handed things,” Phil added before the three shared a laugh.

Clint and Natasha eventually migrated back over to the rest of the group where they were all huddled together in the far corner whispering to each other.

“You okay?” Phil asked her. May hadn’t said a word since Tony’s outburst.

“Are you?” She asked back, observing the group.

“Think so.”

“Me too.”

They fell back into their comfortable silence as the group’s hush voices rose and then shushed, and then rose again like a wave of gossip.

“You’re on Barton!” Tony exclaimed. “I bet you twenty dollars that the world ends before–”

“SHHH,” The rest of the group shushed him.

“They’re talking about us,” May spoke, seemingly disinterested.

“What?” Phil asked. “About – why – how do you know that?”

“I’ve heard my name three times.”

“That just means that they’re talking about you,” He joked. “Not me.”

“And your name twice.”

“Maybe they’re just telling a story from lunch or something.”

“And Fitz keeps looking over here,” She added. “And they’re whispering.”

“That’s…a good point,” He conceded. “Maybe they’re planning a surprise birthday party. Is your birthday coming up?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“They’re making a bet.”

“Maybe to see which one of us will punch Tony first.”

It was the distant clicking of high heels marching closer that caused every conversation to fade out. With a sense of dread, all eye turned towards the door.

“I wasn’t serious about calling Coulson’s mom,” Clint said in a whisper as the clicking stopped on the other side of the door.

Coulson wasn’t even given a chance to tell Clint that his mother didn’t wear high heels unless she was in court so that obviously wasn’t her (unless May somehow not only had his mother’s number but also managed to drag her out of court, and really, if that was the case they were better off with Fury) before the door opened and...

“You called Mrs. Hand!”

“God, we would have been better off with Fury,” Clint muttered, and Coulson agreed with the sentiment.

“You do know that she made a student spontaneously combust just by looking at them!”

“Tony, that’s not true!”

“Well, aren’t you just a sight for sore eyes,” Hand smirked before tipping her head in May’s direction. “Melinda.”

“Victoria,” She greeted back with a small smile before standing up. Her face dropped to something blank as she weaved her way to the front. Coulson followed.

“What’d you do?” Mrs. Hand asked her. The smile that played along her lips was negated by the serious note in her tone. Mrs. Hand was a rule follower, through and through.

“Did you tell Fury?” May asked in response.

“Not until you give me a reason to,” She answered. “What did you do?”

“Had fun,” May replied with a shrug and a small smile.

It was a good move. It was strategic because Mrs. Hand lost some of her edge. Coulson didn’t know if May was telling the truth or if she just knew how to pull Hand’s string to get them all out of trouble.

He didn’t really care because she said that she had fun. He couldn’t fight the smile that crept onto his face.

Mrs. Hand’s eyes softened, “Did you now?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you wind up in here?”

“Well–”

“Shut up, Tony,” Clint hissed.

“Had too much fun,” May replied cryptically then raised one eyebrow of Mrs. Hand’s unimpressed expression. “Kind of like in Bali with–”

“That’s enough.”

“But is it though?” May asked sardonically. If the situation wasn’t freaky weird already, the rest of them might have cracked a smile.

“It is,” Mrs. Hand said dryly. “Officer, let these children go.”

The security guard, who had been watching them with some degree of amusement, walked up to the cell and unlocked it. “They’re all yours, ma’am.”

“What happened to your face?” Hand asked stopping Tony with a hand on his shoulder as they filed out of the cell. She turned his head towards her to get a better look.

“Natasha happened.”

“You deserve it?”

“Yes.”

Victoria followed the gang out of the office before stopping the group, “I’m not your get-out-of-jail-free card. This was a one-time thing. Got it?”

“Got it,” They replied.

“Good, now Melinda,” She voiced. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” May replied, rolling her eyes like Phil had done so many times to his mother.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady.”

“Yes, ma’am,” She smirked, saluting her.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Vic?”

“Try again,” She said sternly, but the smile gave her away.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hand.”

“Now get out of here,” Victoria told them. All the softness in her eyes and the smile hidden back behind the strict mask of the Victoria Hand that they all knew and feared. “I’ll keep your secret, but make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“That was unexpected,” Ward commented when Hand walked away farther into the building.

“How do you know her?” Skye asked.

“I’ve literally have never seen her smile before,” Clint added.

“Guys, what are we doing now?” Coulson cut in. May wasn’t going to answer them; there was no point in asking.

“Did you know she knew Mrs. Hand?” Clint asked Natasha lowly.

“No,” She replied matching his tone. “But it makes sense. She spends a lot of time in Mrs. Hand’s office.”

“Glad she knows her.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Let’s get ice cream,” Fitz threw out.

“Let’s watch a movie,” Tony said at the same time.

“We just watched a movie,” Bruce pointed out as they passed through the empty food court.

“That movie was shit.”

“I want ice cream,” Fitz insisted.

“Yeah,” Tony waved him off. “Cool your jets, St. Patrick.”

“I’m from Scotland!”

“Seriously, Stark,” Simmons cut in, rolling her eyes. “Do you know anything about the United Kingdom?”

“Doctor Who is cool.”

“Yeah,” Fitzsimmons reluctantly agreed.

“So,” Clint said, clapping his hands together to get everyone’s attention. “Ice cream and movies at Fury’s, right?”

“Right,” Natasha responded. “Got it?”

She eyed the crowd in that very, very Natasha way that meant they had better ‘get it’ and get it fast.

Everybody reluctantly did so.

“Then that’s settled.”

Coulson sighed first in relief when they exited the mall because seriously, thank the entire freaking universe for Mrs. Hand and her apparent soft spot for May. His dad was just back in town on leave, having his parents pissed off at him because he was arrested by malls security wouldn’t do…like ever.

His second sigh was one in exasperation – out of his parent’s frying pan and right into the fiery pits of Nick Fury’s rage – at the sight of Fury’s SUV. He should have questioned May more when she said she’d handle getting Fitzsimmons, Daisy, and Ward to the mall.

And he totally would have.

Really, he would have, if he hadn’t been too busy being disappointed that May didn’t want to ride in Lola and had purposely distanced herself from him in a rather obvious ‘let-me-shove-Barton-in-your-car-I’ll-even-put-his-seatbelt-on-safety-first!’ kind of way.

But no, there she was, parked right next to Lola and Tony’s Audi.

He shouldn’t have assumed that they were just going to take Daisy’s van.

“So, who’s getting the ice cream and who’s getting the movies?” Tony asked, seemingly unfazed by the fact that Nick Fury’s car was right there.

“Oh, we’ll get the ice cream,” Fitz exclaimed before going off on a tangent about how all the best ice cream flavors containing the word monkey in it. He was also unfazed by Nick’s car.

What was wrong with these people?

“Uh, May?”

“Yeah,” May answered, examining the large stone pillars outside of the mall.

“Is that Nick’s car?” He asked.

“Yes.” Her eyes slid from the pillar to out over the parking lot.

“Did you steal it?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“We’ll get the movie then,” Tony said to someone, probably Fitz.

“No way,” Barton protested. “We’ll end up watching Transformers again!”

“I’ll be there,” Natasha pointed out because, seriously, she hated those movies. Stark would sooner lose his hands than pick up one of those.

“You think The Green Lantern movie was not that bad, you can’t be trusted.”

“I, actually, don’t tell me,” Coulson answered finally answered May. “Plausible deniability.”

“Coulson, we’re going with Nat!” Clint shouted a bit too close to him. “May, you got the ice cream handled?”

“Yes.”

“Wait, what?” Coulson asked. “What’s going on?”

Why was Tony getting in his car?

What was happening?

Why did no one care that May apparently stole Nick Fury’s car?

What was wrong with these people?

May was talking; he wasn’t listening to the rest of them.

“Come on, Coulson,” Clint whined as Tony sped off with Bruce, Thor, and Natasha. “They’re going to go pick a movie before we get there.”

“But May–”

“She’s fine,” Clint said, pulling him towards Lola. “Nat likes strawberry so get that.”

“May, are you okay?”

She was certainly acting odd, the tension that left her when she spoke to Mrs. Hand now had her taunt like a bow string. She was distracted like she was spacing out, and that doesn’t often lead to anything good.

“Hmm,” She replied, preoccupied with staring over at her reflection in the movie posters. “Uh, yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

Would she tell him anyways?

“Yes, see you in ten minutes.”

“Bye, Coulson,” Daisy waved amused by his unwillingness to leave. She was still smiling when Clint convinced him to get in the car and drive. “I’m pretty sure you’re his favorite person, May.”

“Oh totally,” Ward agreed.

“Where are we getting ice cream?” Simmons asked.

There was talking, a debate on where to buy ice cream. But that became background noise, like static on a radio, because something was wrong, something felt off.

The hair on the back of her neck stood on end and she felt like there were eyes on her, like she was in the crosshairs of a sniper who’d never know her name.

She took a step back until her view would be blocked from the best position spots for a sniper. The mall parking lot was empty, dubiously so, it was an hour past the last bell and the mall was prime hangout zone for the kids at school.

“Let’s go,” She snapped.

“We haven’t picked–”

It wasn’t the gun that gave them away, not the quiet steps that she didn’t hear or the van pulling up behind her. It wasn’t the beginnings of terror dawning across the faces of her friends.

It was the sun reflecting off metal in her peripheral that alerted her to the gun.