Best Intentions
The Framework, Seven Weeks Ago
“Wha—what do you mean there’s no place for her mind to return to?” Coulson sputtered.
At some point in the last minute, he had grabbed May’s hand without meaning to. It was a reflex, muscle-memory from their imagined decade of wedded bliss. But he did not let go. Her fingers felt warm in his grip.
Alive.
Her mind was alive. Her body here was alive. But in the world they called “home,” there was nothing but a corpse left as a repository for her thoughts.
“I’ve been monitoring everyone’s vitals remotely through the ‘backdoor’ code I inserted in the Framework,” Simmons explained. “That’s how I found out about the Framework breaking away from our reality. May’s heart flat-lined over two hours ago.”
Coulson turned back to May.
Her face was blanched and devoid of expression.
“So, what?” He asked, looking at FitzSimmons. “We just leave her here? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“No, of course not,” Fitz answered.
“That’s the good news,” Simmons replied brightly. “We’ve found a way to bring her back.”
“How?” May asked.
The word sounded more like a croak than actual speech.
FitzSimmons exchanged a smile.
“Gravitonium,” they answered together.
“‘Gravitonium?’” Daisy echoed. “You mean that blob of silver goo that almost swallowed Malta?”
“What?” Mack asked. “What did you guys get up to before I came on board?”
“Nothing fun,” Daisy assured him.
“Yes,” Fitz said. “I’ve managed to synthesize my own sample of Gravitonium in the labs here. FitzCorp has been experimenting with it for year—well, weeks, I guess. Days? The point is, I’ve been studying it long enough that I know what is does.
“The Gravitonium that Dr. Hall created almost sucked in Malta because—
“It’s an inter-dimensional portal!” Simmons interrupted.
“Like the one AIDA made?” May asked.
“Sort of,” Fitz answered. “This is a little more… rudimentary.”
“You’re qualifying, Fitz,” Coulson said. “What does that mean?”
“We think it works more like a wormhole, inside a black hole,” Simmons said.
“You mean the thing that tears you apart atom-by-atom and theoretically reassembles you on the other side?” Mack asked dryly.
“What?” He said, at FitzSimmons aghast stares. “Didn’t anyone else see Event Horizon?”
“So the only way for May to get back to our world is to shove her through some inter-dimensional portal that will ‘theoretically’ work like a black hole, and hope she gets reassembled on the other side in one piece?” Coulson summarized.
Fitz looked at the ceiling, apparently searching for any part of the question that seemed erroneous.
“Yeah, that just about sums it up,” he agreed.
“Or, we could always try Plan B,” Simmons said.
“What’s that?” May asked.
“We could build a LMD of you in our world and transfer your memories into that,” she suggested.
“No!” May and Coulson shouted in unison.
Simmons winced.
“Well, I did say it was ‘Plan B.’”
Coulson took May by the hand and pulled her away from the others until they were out of earshot.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
He had no idea what she was feeling right now, but if she was half as scared as he was, he did not know how she was still standing. He felt like one false move and the floor would cave in under him.
“What’s the alternative, Phil?” She asked.
There was an underlying current of desperation in her voice. Even though they both knew he would not have an answer, she still hoped he could give her one.
“I can’t… live here,” she said. “Not alone.”
“What if I stayed too?” He asked.
It wasn’t until he said it that he realized meant it. He could stay behind if it meant she was alive. What he could not do was return to a world she was not a part of.
May smiled sadly and the tears that filled her eyes threatened to spill over.
“You can’t,” she said. “I can’t. Not knowing what we know. This world might be ‘real,’ but it’s not ours. Being part of Hydra, fighting against the Inhumans…”
“Our marriage?” He finished for her.
“It’s not who we are,” she concluded.
Coulson nodded. She was right.
As soon as the memories from his real life came back, the house with the white-picket fence, the nine-to-five job, even his wife, felt like a dream. It was a beautiful dream. But it was not him. It was not them.
But there was one part that was not a fiction.
“I love you,” he said.
May might be about to be torn to pieces and disappear from his life forever, and he would be damned if she was going to die thinking that all of this had been a sham.
“In this life and the other one, you are everything to me,” Coulson said. “I need you to know that.”
May’s eyes spilled over and she covered his lips with her own.
It did not matter that the team was probably watching. This would hardly be the oddest thing that they experienced today.
“I do,” she whispered, touching her forehead to his. “And I feel the same way. So if this is the only way we both get back, I’ll do it.”
Coulson wiped a tear from her cheek and frowned thoughtfully.
“What?” She asked.
“Nothing,” he demurred. “It’s just… we’ll never know if…”
May nodded, understanding.
If Daisy had never shown up, they could have been parents.
They had only been trying a week. Now, they would never know if anything had come of it. Coulson hoped they had not been successful. He did not know much about babies, but he was relatively sure traveling through a wormhole would be on the list of things to avoid in early pregnancy.
“It would have been nice,” May concluded.
“Yeah,” Coulson whispered. “When we get back, we might need to have another conversation about that.”
May smiled and kissed him one last time before they returned to the team.
They never had that conversation.
When he woke up in the submarine hours later, the only trace of his Framework life was a nagging feeling that there was something he had forgotten to do.
Our World, Present
The mood in the Director’s office was tense as the team stood in a semi-circle around the desk, eyeing the veiled box perched on top with varying degrees of suspicion and fear.
“Well, if no one else is going to say it, I am,” Mack pipped up. “Why is this thing still here? Why haven’t we destroyed it?”
“In case it’s escaped your attention, Agent MacKenzie, things have been a little chaotic around here over the last couple of months,” Mace answered. “Between repairing the base and chasing down the Watchdogs—
“Plus the mandatory post-Framework psychotherapy,” Fitz murmured.
“We hadn’t implemented a policy on what to do if the… object in question was ever retrieved,” Mace continued. “And quite frankly, we didn’t think it would happen this quickly.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Daisy snarked.
May stared down the box, ignoring the bickering around her, as if she looked at it hard enough, she could incinerate the damn thing by sheer force of will and spare all of them the trouble of deciding what to do with it. As much as she wanted this thing out of their lives for good, she knew they could not actually destroy it though. It was not the smart play.
“Well, I second Mack’s concern,” Fitz said.
“Me too,” Simmons agreed. “Why draw this out any longer?”
“Wait, you guys don’t want to poke around with it and see how it works?” Daisy asked.
“No,” Simmons answered, shuddering in unison with Fitz.
“I’m officially out of the Cartesian dualism experimentation business,” Fitz announced.
“I don’t know what that means,” Daisy said.
“No more messing with brains and fake bodies, or fake brains and real bodies,” Fitz said. “Or any combination of the above.”
“While your input is appreciated, this is not up for a vote,” Mace broke in. “Has anyone seen Coulson?”
Everyone looked over at May, who stared back defiantly.
“I’m not Coulson,” she snapped. “And I don’t know where he is.”
“Sorry I’m late,” came a voice from the door.
Coulson entered the room with pink cheeks and tousled hair. May felt his eyes linger on her for a fraction longer than anyone else, but if he was trying to communicate something, she did not acknowledge it. She knew where she stood with him. There was no point in pretending otherwise.
“Phil,” Mace greeted. “We were just discussing what to do with our new friend here.”
Coulson sized up the mood in the room with deliberate consideration. May could feel herself reflexively standing at attention. Whatever else he was to her, Coulson would always be the team leader. There were few people she had met who had the ability to command the focus of a group with his level of skill.
“I take it the majority want to destroy it, then?” He asked. He was met with nods and murmurs of agreement. May stayed still and silent, watching to see how the scene played out.
“So do I,” Coulson said. “But we can’t.”
In spite the situation, May felt a smile tug at her lips. Coulson knew better than to bow to the knee-jerk reaction of revulsion and fear. There was a longer game in play here and this box was their ace-in-the-hole.
“There’s more at stake here than just one man,” Coulson said. “If we destroy the head in this box, the Superior, Anton Ivanov, dies. But there are hundreds of Watchdogs that follow his command. This is the mistake we made over and over when we faced Hydra.
“So this time, we’re not going to just cut off one head. We’re going to bring an end to the entire operation.”
May heard nothing but the beat of her own heart as the team held their breaths, processing the implications.
“Alright, Coulson,” Mack broke the silence. “What’s your plan?”