Chapter 1
“You know where my heart is,
The same place where yours has been
And we know that we fear to win
So we end before we begin.”
He turned over again on the narrow cot for the third time in as many minutes. Phil Coulson had four hours of rack time before the Zephyr hit the tarmac in Los Angeles and he needed every second of sleep. As it turned out, fighting to keep a foothold on one dimensional plane while being forcibly dragged into another was exhausting work. But as soon as he switched off the light, she had commandeered all of his thoughts.
All he could see was that crumpled, defeated look of despair on her face when she thought he was dead followed by a pathological desperation to get him back. He had not seen her so broken since Bahrain. If he was honest with himself, he did not really believe there was enough left inside of her to be broken.
He caught a glimpse behind the mask and what he saw both frightened and excited him at once. How much had she kept to herself all of these years? Or was this new?
Coulson rolled over and rubbed his hand over his eyes.
No, it wasn’t new.
It had always been there, just beneath the surface. If he had allowed himself to believe it was possible, he would have seen it as clearly as he had in the cargo hold of the quinjet. Sometimes, he thought he caught glimpses: a stolen smile when she thought he wasn’t looking, the constant concern over his safety, always putting his needs before her own.
But that was what May did.
May was a protector. As much as she might have given a long, hard stare at anyone for saying so, she was caring and nurturing. She was the teacher, the parent, the one who strengthened her team by preparing them for danger and defending them when they failed.
He was no exception.
Was he?
Coulson groaned as the monologue played again in his head for the countless time:
“You can’t be gone, not yet… What are we waiting for?”
But it wasn’t just the words that had broken his heart.
It was her.
She was lost without him. She needed him in a way that no one had ever needed him before. The idea of his death had unravelled her composure and driven her to extreme measures.
“Why didn’t you tell me, May?” He asked aloud.
“I did,” she answered, in his head. “I told you every day since you came back from TAHITI.”
“No, you didn’t,” he argued.
His imaginary Melinda shot him a scathing glance, lips pursed, eyebrow raised in a perfect arch.
“Yes, I did, Phil,” she said. “You just didn’t hear me.”
Coulson sat up on the cot and placed his feet on the cold, metallic floor. He rested his elbows on his knees and pressed the heels of his hands onto closed eyes. A sick, fluttery feeling had taken hold of his gut.
She hadn’t told him, had she?
Not in words. Never with words.
Even before Bahrain, May preferred action to conversation. He learned her silent language slowly, over the years spent together in ops. He discovered how she could communicate more with one look than anyone else could have done with a soliloquy. But somewhere along the way, he must have forgotten how to read into the negative spaces she left between them.
No.
Not forgotten.
That was too easy.
He did not want to read into her actions. He was afraid of what he would see. He was afraid that he would see hope. Phil Coulson had abandoned the hope of Melinda’s affections a long time ago.
They had grown close after May graduated the academy and was assigned as the lead specialist on his team. Two years into their service, they were nearly inseparable. He had not been afraid of what he would see when he looked at her then. He saw admiration and dedication. He even saw love. He had not hesitated to reciprocate those feelings.
They could have been something. In the part of his brain that he had not suffocated with denial, he still knew that there had been something between them then. Something real.
Then Glasgow happened.
One of the agents on their team, Leah Pendrell, was compromised on a surveillance mission. She was garroted with piano wire in the driver’s seat of her parked Fiat. She never had a chance to call for backup. It was John Garrett who found her body the next morning. He phoned in the news to May and Coulson, who were waiting in a nearby safehouse for the call for Pendrell’s extraction.
Coulson could still hear Garrett’s flat, lifeless voice inform them that they had an agent down and he was personally escorting her body back to the Triskelion. Neither Coulson nor May had a chance to interject before Garrett cut the line.
Pendrell had been Garrett’s fiancé. Their wedding was scheduled for the following weekend.
After discovering that Garrett had turned to Hydra, Coulson had wondered how much her death had factored into his decision to turn turncoat.
May was quiet that night, more so than usual.
Trying to lift their spirits (or drown their sorrows), Coulson had pulled out the bottle of Haig they had lifted weeks earlier from Fury’s stash.
“Come on, Melinda,” he said. “We can’t perfectly good pilfered liquor go to waste. Now seems as good as time as any.”
She turned to him with a sad smile.
“Save it,” she protested. “We might need it more further down the line.”
He shrugged and dropped the bottle into his overnight bag.
“Fine,” he agreed. “Next mission that goes worse than this one, we’ll break it out.”
“Hard to imagine it getting much worse than this,” she had whispered.
God, how young they were! If only they had known how much worse it was going to get. It was better that they did not. They would have never survived if they had known what was in store for them in the years to come.
“I couldn’t do that, Phil,” May had said at last.
“Do what?”
“I couldn’t do what Garrett is doing now,” she explained. “Burying someone you love, someone you’ve worked with and trusted with your life. One mistake, that’s all it takes. One slip-up and any one of us could end up like Pendrell.”
“Melinda, I know it’s hard, but—
“It’s impossible,” she corrected. “I couldn’t live with that kind of fear. Being terrified of losing someone I loved because of the job. Could you?”
He heard everything she said and everything she wasn’t saying. He knew what she was asking. Part of him wanted to say that he could. He could live with the uncertainty of not knowing that she would come home at the end of the day, just as long as he got to spend every day that they were alive together. He wanted to argue that he wasn’t so terrified of losing her and what they could be that he wasn’t going to try.
But he could not. It was impossible.
It was impossible to imagine his world without Melinda May in it. He would rather have her in his life in any capacity than not at all.
“No,” he said softly. “I couldn’t.”
And that was that.
Nothing changed between them after that night. Not really. They still watched each other’s backs, fighting side-by-side. He still read between the lines of all of her silences. But he stopped looking for the hints of affection, until one day, he stopped seeing love at all. That one conversation threw up a barrier between them that could not be broached. He had accepted it as part of who they were.
A year after Glasgow, she married Andrew, and any secret hope he had harbored for a happy ending between the two of them was snuffed out.
Now, almost twenty-five years later, that dying ember was being fanned into a flame.
Sitting there in the darkened bunk, with his head in his hands, he searched his memory for all of the times he had been deaf to the silent declarations she had given him since he returned.
Finally, he heard her.
When she agreed to go back into the field, when she took up combat ops to protect him, her search for all of the unanswered questions about TAHITI, standing silent vigil over his bed after he collapsed after hours of carving, comforting him after Maveth: all of the concern and the loyalty and persistence broached the surface of his conscious, now cast in a new light.
She had been saying it for years. But he had been afraid to believe it.
Coulson stood up from the cot and blindly fumbled for his shirt and tie. He had shut her out for too long.
He was ready to listen.