Pieces
Daisy’s weary glare toward the knock at her hospital room door transformed into relief when Coulson peered around the corner and let himself in.
“Finally!” She exclaimed.
She turned off the television bolted to the opposite wall and threw the remote control in the closest chair.
“You here to bust me out of here?” Daisy asked. “There’s nothing on television except for reruns of The View.”
Coulson replied with a wan smile.
“Not yet,” he answered. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. I think they want to keep you overnight for observation.”
He removed the discarded remote from the chair, pulled it up to the bed, and sat down.
“So why am I not ‘being observed’ at the base?” Daisy pressed. “Why bring me to a hospital?”
It was a good question. One that he did not really know the answer to.
“May was injured in the fight with the Superior,” he began.
“Is she okay? Was she shot?” Daisy asked.
“No. I don’t know,” Coulson equivocated. “I think she’s fine. She just thought that she needed to see a doctor at a hospital instead of the base. And since we were already heading in that direction, it made sense for them to patch you up here as well.”
“That doesn’t sound like May,” Daisy observed.
No. It did not.
But they would get to that.
“Ivanov’s dead, Daisy,” he confessed. “Body and mind. The box with his brain was destroyed in the fight.”
Daisy exhaled audibly and collapsed into the pillows behind her.
“Well,” she said, looking at the ceiling. “I can’t say I’m sorry about that. Still, that is going to mean more work for us.”
“All of his followers that we didn’t apprehend today will scatter back to the shadows,” Coulson agreed.
“They’ll have to get funding,” Daisy pointed out, picking up her head to look at him. “And maybe we’ll be able to wring some intel out of the ones we caught.”
“I wanted to end this,” Coulson said. “I wanted the Watchdogs to be stopped. Now they’ll reorganize and be even harder to catch.”
“Coulson,” Daisy said.
She put a hand on his arm.
“You guys must have had a good reason for destroying that box.”
Coulson closed his eyes, shutting out her consolations.
He was back in the alley. He heard May scream. He had never heard anything like that before. Certainly not from her. He saw the fear and pain in her eyes when Ivanov held that knife at her throat.
He would do it again.
He would have shot that box again and again, given the chance.
“Coulson. Hey, Coulson!” Daisy tried to catch his attention. “You okay?”
He looked down at his hands and saw that he had twisted and balled up the bedsheets in his fists.
“Sorry,” he said, releasing his grip.
“What happened with you guys?” Daisy muttered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Daisy, have you noticed anything different about May since she came back from the Framework?”
“She’s not an LMD, Phil,” she replied sardonically.
“That’s not what I mean,” Coulson said. “Things were rough between us for a while, you know that. I couldn’t understand what had happened when we returned. I pushed her away. But now… she’s holding something back.”
He tried not to notice the Daisy’s pitying frown as he ploughed ahead.
“I know that she experienced a whole life in the Framework,” he conceded. “That had to change her in some way. But you and Simmons remember everything that happened too and you’re both fine.”
Daisy sighed.
“Well yeah, but we knew who we really were,” she explained. “We knew that the Framework wasn’t real and we spent most of our time trying to get everyone else out. I didn’t even meet up with you and May until the last day we were there. And trust me, you two were a piece of cake to convince after Mack. Not to mention having to deal with Ward—
“Ward?” Coulson exclaimed.
“I know, right?”
“Okay, putting a pin in that for a minute,” he said. “When you met up with us, was May okay? Was she happy?”
Daisy shrugged.
“It’s May, Coulson. She’s not exactly an open book, no matter what universe she is in,” Daisy said. “The only time I saw her, I had to tell her that her life an illusion created by a demonic book, and that a power-crazy scientist that had replaced her body with a robot. So no, she wasn’t sunshine and rainbows when we met.”
Coulson nodded, staring blindly at the wrinkled bedsheets in front of him.
“But,” Daisy continued hesitantly. “I think you were both happy in general. With each other.”
He blinked.
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I know it’s none of my business,” Daisy said. “But I also know what I saw in there. Your marriage might have been something concocted by the Framework, but you two loved each other. You can’t fake that. I get that it might be a little awkward being back in ‘the real world’ having experienced all of that, but what’s stopping you guys from being happy together again?”
Coulson could not be certain, but he was pretty sure his jaw actually hit the floor. After the words, “your marriage,” he had more or less tuned Daisy out.
“M-may and I were married?” He croaked.
Daisy’s eyes grew round and spots of pink appeared on her cheeks.
“She didn’t tell you?” She asked. “She didn’t tell you… Coulson, I’m so sorry. I thought you knew.”
***
The pieces of a puzzle he did not even realize needed solving were starting to fall into place. All of the events of the last few weeks were cast in a new light and were now making too much sense. May’s distance, her anger, her inability to look him in the eye, he chalked it all up to his own inability to reconcile himself with her “death” and resurrection. But it was only part of a whole story. One he could not remember.
Daisy said they were happy.
How long had they believed they were married?
Simmons told him that time passed differently in the Framework. What had actually been two weeks in their world could have been months or even years in the Darkhold dimension.
Coulson considered himself lucky that he could not remember the Framework. He had caught snatches of conversation from the others and none of it sounded like a world he wanted any part of. Hydra had taken over SHIELD, Inhumans were hunted down and put into stasis without a trial.
What kind of person would he have been in that world? Would he have fought against the tide of injustice, or would he have floated with it, a product of his own paranoid environment?
In all honesty, he did not want to know.
Whatever his flaws were in that place, there had been something good in him. Something good enough to make Melinda May want to marry him.
Their history in the Framework might have explained her behaviour towards him, but there was still a piece missing. Coulson still did not understand what had happened in the alleyway with Ivanov and why she had insisted on coming to the hospital for a relatively minor injury.
He leaned back in the hard plastic chair of the waiting room and bit the inside of his cheek. The first inklings of a hunch had begun to take root in his mind and he hoped to the gods he was wrong. Because if he was correct, then that would mean—
“It’s impossible,” he chastised himself.
But he had witnessed the impossible on a regular enough basis not to dismiss it out-of-hand.
“Mr. Phil Coulson?”
He tripped to his feet and met the nurse at the door of the waiting room. His mouth was dry and he could not formulate an appropriate response.
“You’re listed as Ms. May’s emergency contact,” she observed, looking at her clipboard. “You’re her partner?”
He answered without thinking.
“Yes.”
The woman took him by the arm and led him into the hallway.
“Melinda is fine,” she assured him. “And so is the baby.”
Coulson grabbed the wall behind him with a sweat-slicked palm as the ground fell out from under him.
“…bruising and knows to contact us if there is any cramping or bleeding,” the nurse continued. “But from what we can tell, both mother and child are healthy. Mr. Coulson? Are you okay?”
He managed a noise that must have sounded like something affirmative.
The nurse smiled patronizingly and patted his arm.
“They must have given you quite a scare,” she soothed. “You can see her now. She’s in the fourth exam room on the right.”
The hallway spun around him as the nurse walked away. It took every ounce of his concentration to place one foot in front of the other to make it to the door of May’s examination room.
A full three minutes later, he finally raised his hand to the door to knock.
He hoped May would feel like talking to him, because for the first time in his life, he had no idea where to start.