The Life You Don't Remember

Our World, Present

After Zephyr One had returned home and the box that they had stolen from the Watchdogs was safely stowed, Coulson left the base. If anyone had asked him what had brought him here, he would not have been able to answer. He knew he would not find any comfort or solutions in this place. Maybe he just wanted to be near her again.

“Which is stupid,” he told himself. “She’s not here. She’s back home.”

He knew this to be true on a conscious-level, but for some reason his heart was slow to catch on.

He reached his destination and stood without moving a muscle, hands closed into fists.

Fresh grass had only just begun to sprout on the new grave.

It was not her buried six feet under his feet.

It was just the body that had carried her for all of those years.

Somehow, it did not matter how many times he reminded himself of that, the grim reality of being pulled out of the Framework and seeing her lifeless form beside him was more powerful than logic.

Coulson had no memory of his life in the Framework.

May, Simmons and Daisy were the only ones who really knew everything that had happened there. The others remembered snatches and glimpses. Only Coulson was a blank slate.

Simmons reasoned that it had something to do with what happened when he came back. She said the others could recall bits of their time in the Framework because they had come out of it slowly. His case was more like being awoken from a dream by a fire alarm.

The last thing he remembered before waking up was being dragged into a room aboard a submarine by AIDA, groggy and semi-conscious. He opened his eyes and saw May, the real May, not the LMD that had been masquerading as his partner for those past few weeks. She was drugged and plugged in to Radcliffe’s Darkhold-Matrix, but she was alive.

Coulson did not even have a chance to call out to her before he was injected with a syringe. No amount of struggling or will-power could repel the darkness that followed.

Two weeks later, he woke up stiff and groggy.

His neck spasmed when he turned to look at his partner.

May’s lips were blue and her complexion was pale.

He did not know how long he performed CPR before Simmons and Daisy burst into the room and pulled him off of her, while Yo-Yo took AIDA apart piece-by-piece, faster than the eye could process. When they explained what had happened, he did not believe them. Even when May entered the room, looking every bit as real as the person he remembered, he could not get his brain to wrap around the reality that he had been thrust into.

As the living May stood next to her deceased counterpart, the colour of her complexion seemed like a mockery of the sallow corpse that was sprawled on the table beside her.

Earlier on the Zephyr, he had told his partner that he truly believed she was Melinda May, but it was no wonder he could not convince her of a truth he did not feel.

If he could just remember, maybe he could really understand.

Coulson sighed.

“I know you’re not here, May,” he said aloud. “I keep telling myself that, but I don’t believe it. Why can’t I believe it?”

A soft breeze blew through his hair, but offered no guidance, no solace.

“I know she’s not made of metal and code like that LMD. I know she has all of your memories. She has your warmth and wit. Maybe she even has your spirit. I don’t know. Was is it Mack says? ‘Memory is the author of the soul?’

“I know she cares about the team, about me. Why isn’t that enough?”

The laser-cut letters that formed her name in the headstone seemed to taunt him with their silence.

“What would you do in my situation?” He asked. “I know I should probably just ask her. But I’m asking you. If the circumstances were reversed, if I wasn’t the one who made it through, what would you have done?”

Nothing.

His only answer was the distant sound of wind whipping through the trees on the edge of the graveyard.

May was not here. She could not give him the peace he sought.

But, maybe there was something else.

Coulson pivoted on his heel and started at a brisk jog to the north side of the cemetery. He had never been to this spot before, but he knew where it should have been.

Lot B, Row… 17? Underneath an oak tree. Perhaps it was morbid of him to remember this information, but once he had read the file, it was permanently locked in his memory.

His breath left him when he saw it.

Fury had not wasted any money on an epitaph. Coulson supposed there was no point providing an elegy for a man who was not dead.

He sank to his knees.

So this is what it was like.

This is how it felt to stand beside a visible reminder of your own death.

He had friends and co-workers who had said goodbye to him forever that day five years ago. There were others that came to know of his resurrection and did not accept it. People who believed he was different, as if the part of him that made him who he was had perished for good before the Battle of New York. People who had wished he had stayed dead rather than come back in whatever form he was now: Agent Blake, Robert Gonzales, several agents who had chosen the “Real SHIELD” over the leadership of Phil Coulson—the corpse reanimated with alien DNA.

But she was never one of them.

If May had questioned who he really was for even a second, he never knew about it.

She had probably attended his funeral, he realized. He did not know for sure. He had never asked.

How long had she believed he was dead before Fury told her the truth?

She had buried him, grieved for him, and then the moment he had come back, she was there by his side. May had believed he was his old self, even when he had doubted.

“I know you, Phil. And I knew you before. You know I’d be the first to go down that road if I thought it led somewhere.”

He remembered those words as clearly as if she had spoken them yesterday.

“Do you believe me at least? Do you?”

“Yes,” he answered finally. “I believe you, May.”

The Framework, Seven Weeks Ago

Jemma Simmons and Leo Fitz engulfed Daisy in a claustrophobic embrace when she, Coulson, and May entered the lab on the top level of Fitz’s private company, FitzCorp. Jeffrey Mace and Mack stood back from the group with folded arms, wearing matching expressions of men waiting for the axe to fall.

When FitzSimmons released Daisy, the scientists greeted Coulson and May with tight smiles and nervous glances.

“Everybody alright?” Coulson asked.

Mack rubbed his neck his hand and shook his head.

“‘Alright’ is relative at this point,” he answered.

“These two were just bringing us up to speed,” Mace said, indicating FitzSimmons. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“FitzSimmons,” Coulson nodded. “You wanna fill us in?”

May held back a smile. Coulson was using his “director-voice.” It was comfortingly familiar.

“Better start with the good news first,” Fitz said, sharing a sideways glance with Simmons.

“Well, it’s not all good news,” Simmons demurred.

“Well, it’s better than the other thing—

“Someone start talking,” Coulson interrupted.

“Right, well, to begin with, it turns out the Framework isn’t just a shared illusion,” Fitz said.

“What does that mean?” May asked.

Daisy, Fitz, and Simmons all looked at one another.

“It’s another dimension,” Simmons deadpanned.

“What?” Coulson demanded.

“It started out as a virtual reality,” Daisy explained. “A world that had certain boundaries created by Radcliffe and AIDA. Then, when May was inserted into the Framework, her brain started working with the program and built a larger world. But it was still just like an interactive video game. Because of the data that was needed to construct a world of this size, the Framework was borrowing memory from electronic devices all over the planet.”

“Then it stopped,” Fitz said.

“What do you mean it stopped?” Coulson asked.

“He means that the Framework has stopped using cell phones and computers in our world, because it doesn’t need it anymore. It has become its own self-sustaining alternate dimension,” Simmons concluded.

“How is that even possible?” Coulson asked at the same time May said, “What does that mean for us?”

“It’s that damn book,” Mack interjected.

“The Darkhold,” Simmons agreed. “We’ve already seen its ability to transport the Ghost Rider from whatever dimension it came from into Robbie Reyes and Mack. It showed AIDA how to construct a portal between worlds. Once Radcliffe used it to expand upon the existing Framework, it must have somehow created an entirely new dimension.”

“It means that this is all real,” Daisy continued. “This world, the people, our bodies… It’s the difference between playing a video game, and turning the game off and all of the characters continuing to fight dragons or whatever with no one at the controls.”

“So the game has been turned off from our dimension,” Coulson realized. “If that’s the case, then how do we get back? Simmons’s backdoor only works if there is an electronic connection between our world and the Framework.”

“Luckily, the Framework isn’t entirely self-sufficient yet,” Simmons said. “It’s only using about 1/100th of the power that it used when we entered, but it’s using less by the minute. The window of opportunity to come back is closing.”

“Then why are we standing here talking about it?” May asked. “We should be at the backdoor now.”

“Because, when we come back, only our consciousness will return to our world,” Fitz said. “Not our bodies.”

“We know,” Coulson replied impatiently. “We return to our bodies that were plugged into the Framework.”

“Not all of us,” Daisy whispered.

“The body can’t exist without a conscious mind for an extended period of time,” Simmons explained. “Not without extensive medical intervention. One of us was gone too long. Their body gave up. There’s no place for the mind to return to in our world.”

May could feel all of the eyes in the room turn to her, but their attention barely registered. She knew who it was before Simmons had stopped talking.

She had been in the Framework twice as long as the rest of them.

She was dead.