In Love with Defeat

“I wouldn’t dare. You might whip my ass.”

Melinda May made a minimal effort to fight the smile that followed. She did not try to look away. Completely betraying every instinct that kept her tough-as-nails exterior intact, she lingered for a few more seconds, watching him leave.

The flight from the base to Washington, DC and AIDA was just long enough for her mind to drift.

Something had changed between her and Phil Coulson in the past few weeks.

It wasn’t just one moment. It could not be chalked up to one seismic shift. But it was perceptible, almost tangible: heavy enough to be felt, but still too subtle to be given a name.

She always wanted him close, but now, when he wasn’t around, his absence put her on edge. She supposed some of that could be put down to almost losing him to the quantum energy surge that had ripped him from this dimensional plane and nearly cost him his life, but that was not the whole truth of it.

She was better with him than without him.

In the field, she was more focused and alert when she knew he had her six. During their off time, she was more relaxed and happy knowing that he was safe and that he was close to her.

Then there was the fact that he actually was getting closer to her. Literally.

Earlier, in Mace’s office, he stood so near that she could feel his warmth through her jacket. His touches, once so brief and infrequent, were slowly becoming more commonplace. He was still cautious with her space, still so unbearably gentle that the brushes of his hand on her shoulder or back bordered on reverence, but they were there all the same.

He was testing their boundaries. And she was letting him.

It was not completely new.

More than a few times in the past four years, she had to curb her instincts and restrain herself to maintain a professional distance between them. But now, it was more than just a few moments once in a while.

Why now?

What had changed?

Phil Coulson had saved her and she owed him her life.

Melinda May was not the kind of person that made grand, sweeping declarations. As a child, she learned from her mother that love was a verb. It was something that was shown, not talked about. So when he came back from the dead and hauled her out of that cubical, May had shown him just how much it meant that he never gave up on her with her unwavering loyalty.

The world had gone on without her in the five years since Bahrain. Everyone else left her behind and she let them. She deserved it.

She had never considered herself a particularly lucky person before Bahrain. All of her skills and her multiple successes in the field, she attributed to hard-work and natural prowess. It took one moment of bad judgment to completely obliterate her self-confidence. So much of that confidence was built on good luck, never having been at the wrong place in the wrong time. She just never realized it until that point.

It was Phil Coulson who gave her the ability to believe in herself back. She needed him because she needed to believe that what he saw in her was the truth: that she was a good person and a competent agent. It was his perception of her that made her love him. She could love herself again because he made her believe it was possible.

It wasn’t until he lied to her that she understood how much of herself she had tangled up in his opinion.

Outwardly, she had been furious. Inside, she was ashamed.

She had convinced herself that he thought she was perfect, but he had obviously not even felt that she was trustworthy enough to disclose his precious Theta Protocol project to. She hated him for that.

When she left, she told him, Hunter, her father, and anyone else who bothered to ask, that she needed to find out who she was outside of SHIELD. What she meant was, she needed to find out who she was without him.

In the end, she had ended up trading one surrogate ego-boost for another. When Andrew left, she was lost.

But then, something happened. Or rather, something did not happen.

She did not fall apart.

She didn’t retreat into a bottle or sequester herself away from the world, or hide behind a desk somewhere. Hunter reached out to her and she helped him. She helped him. For no other reason than the fact that he needed back-up and she knew she was good at what she did.

When that rapacious thug and his buddies cornered her in that underground fight club, she could not remember anything as delicious and exhilarating as nailing his ass to the wall and bragging about it. If Hunter hadn’t been too busy getting his own ass handed to him, she would have thrown her own hand into the ring. She could have taken them all down that day. That was how good she felt.

She did not need Andrew or Coulson or her parents or anyone else’s approval to know that she was worthy or necessary. It took nearly a decade, but Melinda May had finally crawled out of the ashes of Bahrain, a whole person.

It was that knowledge that gave her the strength to go back to SHIELD and to fight through all of the shit that was thrown at them in the months that followed. She was strong enough to pull Coulson through Rosalind’s murder and the hell on Maveth, to help take on Hive, and to shoot the man that she once loved in the chest. She was even strong enough to let Daisy go and not blame herself for her loss.

She did not need Phil Coulson to feel like herself again.

But she wanted him.

Now that the debilitating compulsion to use him as lens through which she could see the best version of herself was gone, all that was left was him. The friend that had stood by her through the hardest years of her life. The agent who would give his life for his team or her without a second thought. The man who made everyone around him better through simple acts of kindness or by always knowing what words were needed.

SHIELD molded all of its agents into harder versions of the people they once were. By the time they reached her and Coulson’s age, that tough exterior could permeate a once-compassionate person to their core. May had seen it with her mother, with Fury, even with herself. But not him.

Maveth had been as close to he’d come to slipping over the edge. She watched as he scuttled back from the precipice, terrified of the man he’d watched himself become.

May had always known he was the best person she was ever likely to meet. She had counted herself lucky that he had numbered her among his few close friends. He had helped her to become a better person.

Finally, she was ready to meet him on level ground.

But first, she needed to pick up this damned robot…

“If you go your way and I go mine
Are we so helpless against the tide?
Baby, every dog on the street
Knows that we’re in love with defeat.
Are we ready to be swept off of our feet,
And stop chasing every breaking wave?” –U2, Every Breaking Wave