Disclaimer: I don't own Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Marvel or anything related to it.
Author's Note: So I just finished AoS - late, I know but the first six episodes were so excruciatingly awful - and who didn't end up absolutely loving May and Coulson? Maybe even a hint of May/Coulson maybe? Either way, I loved the episode that had May pranking Fitz and this was born out of it. I hope you guys enjoy it. (The prompt was the word 'proprietary' and it's 500 words on the dot.)
A Bunch of Happy Pills
You watch her walk away and it brings as much succour as pain to have her here because you remember how she used to be – you remember her shy smile and the rarer laugh, you remember twinkling eyes partnering pranks and you remember how she looked when IT happened. 'IT' with capital letters because something that destroyed May deserves capital letters, exclamation marks and red underlining too.
You wish you could have saved her, stopped her, but would she have been May if she hadn't gone in? Is she still May now? Sometimes you know it is and other times, you miss her though she's next to you. Sometimes you wonder if she misses you, if she ever missed you and if you were ever as important to her as she is to you.
You know Fitz and Simmons well enough, by now, to know that they're undoubtedly worming their way into her hard-earned trust (which gets them a one-way ticket to her heard) and you've seen Ward talk to her. You think they might have something in common but it's hard to tell. They both take quiet to an extreme and they're both secretive. Ward's obviously much easier to read.
It's Skye you're worried about. Not for Skye but maybe of Skye on May's behalf. Because you see a little bit of how May used to be in how Skye is now, and you're as sure as you can be that she sees it too. But she never had that black-and-white mentality and you worry that if May pushes her away too much, one day Skye might crack and hack all the information about May and then things will get ugly, because as indestructible as May is, she's also frighteningly fragile.
It's why you sit down with Skye and explain clearly, explicitly, why she should cut May some slack. The clip-notes version, of course, because May would have no qualms about grievous bodily harm if you let too many of her secrets slip out. She's an intensely private person, then and now, and you've respected that then, no need to not respect that now.
You have this urge to check that she's okay, because when she was working that hideous desk job, she most definitely wasn't okay and when has she ever admitted to being okay? But in the calm after the storm, you want to let her enjoy the calm too, and that means no emotional talks, no probing, no questioning and, last time, you found out that no hugs were requisite too.
And when Fitz gets pranked? Oh you have a hard time not smiling too widely because maybe, just maybe, you've found a fragment of the old May, the fragment you thought you would never find because you let her down and let her get destroyed. For you, that prank is like May's own proprietary brand of happy pills; you're smiling on a high for the rest of the week, even when she's glowering at you.