A/N: Okay, so this is, obviously, neither the promised side-story nor the next chapter of sometimes, but I've had Jemma's section sitting in my snips folder for ages and I suddenly got inspired for May's, and then the rest of them showed up. So you get this. I hope you enjoy!

Title comes from The Cab's "Vegas Skies." Thanks for reading, and, as always, please be gentle if you review.


Melinda May is twenty-seven when she meets her soulmate.

She's on a mission in Krakow, running back-up for Victoria Hand, who's undercover with a group of child smugglers. It's been a horrible few weeks, watching the way the children suffer, but they can't move on the group yet. They haven't yet identified all of the group's buyers, and if a single one gets away the group will just reform somewhere else, and that can't be allowed. So Melinda and Victoria and the rest of their team have had to just stand back and watch as children suffer unspeakable torment.

Melinda has made a silent promise to each one of them; those who torment them will suffer a thousand times worse at the hands of SHIELD. She'll make sure of it. They all will.

So she's in a terrible mood as she makes her way back to the safe house after a twelve-hour shift on watch. Today she was tracking one of the higher-ups in the group, hoping he'd lead her to his employers, but it was a dead end, and she spent all day following him around downtown Krakow in the pouring rain.

The safe house is not in the kind of neighborhood where people own cars, so she's being forced to walk, and the rain hasn't really let up. The constant downpour, on top of her terrible day and the horrible mission, is her only excuse for not seeing him until the last minute.

Well, it's not that she doesn't see him, so much as she absently notes his presence, dismisses him as 'not a threat', and ignores him. Which is a bad idea, because he trips on the uneven pavement, loses his balance, and knocks her down.

She has enough time to avoid him, but pulling out those kinds of reflexes would blow her cover as a factory worker, so down she goes. She does manage to adjust her fall so she doesn't hurt herself, but it's still annoying—the perfect ending to an awful day on a torturous assignment.

The man immediately scrambles to his feet and offers his hand, apologizing profusely, and she looks up at him as she accepts it, intending to tell him that it's fine. (It's not like it's his fault that this is a shitty neighborhood with poorly paved sidewalks.)

Time stops.

They both freeze, holding hands, he bending down to reach her and she still on the ground.

She feels oddly giddy, all of her concerns melted away, and it's a bit like the rush she gets when she plays a successful prank, except a thousand times better. It's…amazing. She can hear his timer going off, and it's the most beautiful sound she's ever heard. She has a brief moment of longing for her own timer, removed when she graduated the Academy.

Realizing she's still on the ground, she tugs on her soulmate's hand a little to get his attention, not wanting to pull him down, too. It's not that she couldn't get up on her own—she's a trained SHIELD specialist, of course she could—it's just. She doesn't want to let go of his hand.

He snaps out of his shock and helps her stand, back to apologizing.

"It's fine," she tells him, then curses herself. She's technically undercover, and her cover identity doesn't speak English, just Mandarin and basic Polish. She's never in her life made that kind of rookie mistake, not even when she actually was a rookie.

"You speak English," her soulmate realizes. "Listen, I am so, so sorry, this sidewalk is just too—"

There are protocols for this kind of situation. She should call in to HQ immediately so that a background check can be run on her soulmate to determine if he's a threat to their mission. She's already compromised her cover with him, and she needs to get him off of the street and into the safe house. If he is a threat to the mission, he can be subdued. If he's not…well, she can hardly introduce herself as a SHIELD agent in the middle of the street, even if it does look abandoned.

"It's fine," she repeats. "I'm not hurt."

"Good," he says, relieved. "That's good."

"The weather's horrible," she says. It's a statement of such blindingly obvious fact that she gives her soulmate a few points for not rolling his eyes at her, but it works as a segue. "What do you say we continue this conversation indoors? My house is just down the street."

"Good idea," he agrees. "Lead the way."

As they walk, he introduces himself as Marek Symanski. She avoids the question of her own name by asking about his fluency in English, and he tells her he teaches it at the nearby lower secondary school. He's obviously happy in his career, enthusing about the opportunity to work with children and teach them such a useful skill. She can't help smiling at his zeal.

"So, you didn't give me your name," he reminds her as they reach the safe house.

The door opens as they reach it, and Agent Sarah Jackson frowns at her.

"Meet my soulmate," Melinda says dryly, motioning to Marek.

"Oh," Jackson says, and steps back to allow them into the house.

Marek is starting to look a little suspicious, so Melinda leads him down the hall to the living room. The room is specially shielded to interfere with long-range listening devices, so it's safe to talk here.

"My name is Melinda May," she says. "I'm a SHIELD agent, and I'm technically undercover at the moment."

Marek stares at her for a long moment.

"So…I should hold off on mentioning you to my parents?" he asks finally.

Melinda smiles. "It might be a good idea. But there's no reason we can't get to know each other in here."

"Of course," he agrees at once. "Anything you like."

Melinda exchanges a look with Jackson, who nods in understanding. She'll alert HQ while Melinda keeps Marek busy. It's really just a formality, though. Melinda already knows, as she and Marek sit down on one of the couches, that the background check will come up clean.

She knows, with the same complete certainty she always feels during field work, that Marek is a good man, and the two of them will be just fine.

She thinks she'll keep her own name, though. Melinda Symanski just doesn't have the same ring to it.

xy

Leo Fitz gets his timer on his tenth birthday. The nearest Timer Office is thirty kilometers away, and his mother wakes him early so they can get there before traffic hits. He's nervous and excited, a little jittery, so Mum lets him bring the toaster along. He's been begging for weeks to be allowed to fix it, and just that would be an excellent birthday present. Getting his timer on top of that?

Best birthday ever.

The Timer Office is still closed when they reach it, so they sit in the car park and wait. Leo's almost positive the toaster is fixed, not that he'll be able to test it until they get home, and he explains to Mum everything he's done with it. She smiles and nods, the way she always does, and he considers starting again, trying to explain it with more basic words, but gives it up as a bad job. His Mum's not stupid, not by a long shot, but she's not a genius, not like him.

He hopes his soulmate will be. That would be nice, wouldn't it? If he and his soulmate shared a fascination with science and engineering. Perhaps they could invent things together. He'd like that.

When the office opens, they're the first ones in. The nurse doesn't make them wait at all, just takes them back and, after a quick test for compatibility, administers the sedative that will keep Leo unconscious during the procedure. He's grateful for it; there's no way he'd be able to sit still during the procedure if he were at all conscious.

When he wakes up, he excitedly checks his timer, and is disappointed to find it blank. Still, all that means is that his soulmate is younger than him, which, statistically speaking—

"You just have to be patient, love," Mum says as they leave the office. "It won't be long, I'm sure."

But it is long. The years pass, and he keeps waiting, but his timer never clicks on.

So he buries himself in his work, and he's not lonely, not really. He's got Simmons, after all, and she's his sister in all the ways that matter, and they work together so wonderfully that they actually end up creating a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Yes, We're Sure We're Not Soulmates" and carrying around flash drives with the file wherever they go. They call themselves FitzSimmons and they invent dozens of useful tools and plan out a hundred more, and she's everything he ever hoped for in a soulmate, except platonic, and he's perfectly content with that.

He's not miserable. He's not desperate. He is, in fact, fairly happy, especially once he and Simmons finish at the Academy and get started on actual work.

But he can't help hoping. And the first thing he does every morning when he wakes up is check his timer.

It stays blank.

xy

Mary Sue Poots is probably eleven when Sister Mary Katherine takes her to the Timer Office. No one at St. Agnes actually knows when her birthday is, so they made her wait a few extra months after her assigned birthday, just to be safe. Everyone knows it's dangerous for kids under ten to get timers—although no one has actually explained to Mary Sue exactly why that is—so she's been forced to wait, asking every other day if it's time yet, has it been long enough yet, please can we go today?

But the day is finally here. Today, she's going to get a timer. A timer that will connect her to her soulmate, whoever he is. She hopes he's tall, and nice, and that he'll get her jokes. She hopes he'll be impressed by how good she is with computers. She hopes he'll help her pick a new first name, one that will sound good with his last name.

But if he's short and grumpy and a stick in the mud, that'll be okay, too. What's important is that he's her soulmate, and he'll want to keep her. Whoever he is, he won't be sending her back, the way the Brodys and the McKinnons and the Carters did. He'll be happy to meet her, she knows he will, and he won't send her away.

She won't send him away, either. She won't let things happen the way they do in all of those romance movies, where someone misunderstands someone else and soulmates spend months hating each other. No way. She's gonna be totally honest and open and show him exactly who she is, and he'll love her because he's her soulmate and that's how things work.

If he's got a big family, she'll become a part of it, and if he's an orphan, too, they'll make their own family. Neither one of them will ever be alone again.

And even if she has to wait forever, like Kelly whose timer has twelve whole years on it, she'll at least know that he's out there, waiting for her like she's waiting for him.

She can't sit still in the waiting room. She keeps bouncing out of her chair and running to look at something on the other side of the room, then running back and sitting back down. Then she realizes she doesn't even remember what she just looked at, so she goes back over. Rinse and repeat, again and again. Honestly, she doesn't even care what's in the room; she's just too excited to sit there patiently.

Well, she's never good at patience, but at least this time she has a reason!

Sister Mary Katherine is unusually tolerant about it, just smiling after her instead of snapping at her to sit back down. Even nuns have soulmates, Mary Sue guesses, and maybe Sister Mary Katherine was excited, too, when she was Mary Sue's age. (Not Mary Sue's age, Mary Sue had to wait six extra months, which is totally unfair.)

When the nurse finally calls them back, Mary Sue runs over so fast she nearly knocks the woman over. Instead of frowning at her, the way grown-ups always do, the nurse (Sally, says her nametag) just pats her on the head.

"Excited, are we?" Sally asks.

Well, duh. Mary Sue doesn't want to be rude (because what if they refuse to give her a timer as punishment?), so she just nods.

"Well come on then, sweetheart," Sally tells her. "Get on back to room twelve and have a seat. Let's get you a timer!"

Mary Sue skips to room twelve. She's not usually a skipping kind of girl, but come on! She's about to get her timer!

When she gets there, she scrambles up on to the exam table and sits on the very edge, kicking her feet. Sister Mary Katherine doesn't say anything about that, either, just takes a seat in a chair off to the side.

"Okay," Sally says. "First things first, we've gotta test you for compatibility. It won't take but a second, and then we'll get you a little shot that will help you sleep while we…"

She's been holding up a little scanner to Mary Sue's wrist as she speaks, and she trails off when it beeps. Her bright, friendly smile fades away.

"What?" Mary Sue asks. "What is it?"

Sally doesn't answer. She turns to Sister Mary Katherine instead. "Ma'am, can I have a word with you in the hall?"

"Of course," Sister Mary Katherine agrees. She looks very serious as she stands.

"What? What's wrong? Tell me!" Mary Sue demands.

"Just a second, sweetheart," Sally tells her, and she walks out of the room, followed by Sister Mary Katherine.

Mary Sue doesn't even breathe while the grown-ups are in the hall. She thinks she knows what's going on, but—no. No, it can't be. God is love, right? He wouldn't do this to her. After everything, after taking away her parents and not letting her stay with any of her foster parents, He wouldn't take this away, too.

Sister Mary Katherine comes back into the room alone, and she has bad-news face. Mary Sue's very familiar with that face. That's the this-isn't-working face, the you're-not-a-good-fit face, the sorry-maybe-next-time face.

"No," Mary Sue says. Her eyes burn and she knows she's going to cry. She hasn't cried since the Brodys sent her back, but she's gonna do it here, if Sister Mary Katherine says what she's so clearly about to say. "No, please, Sister—"

"I'm so sorry, Mary Sue," Sister Mary Katherine says. "They can't give you a timer. You're not compatible."

She thinks she might be screaming, but she's not sure. She knows she's crying because she can't see, her eyes can't focus, but all she would see anyway is Sister Mary Katherine's shoulder, as she hugs her close. Sister Mary Katherine's never hugged her before. She doesn't know if Sister Mary Katherine's ever hugged any of the kids at the orphanage before.

She tries to fight Sister Mary Katherine, tries to shove her away, because Sister Mary Katherine is a liar. She's a liar, she has to be, her and Sally the nurse, because there's no way Mary Sue doesn't get a timer. It's not fair. Sister Mary Katherine holds on, though, just stands there and holds her, and eventually Mary Sue just collapses against her, sobbing. She's not screaming anymore, if she ever was, but she still can't really talk. All she can say is 'no', over and over again.

She doesn't have parents, or a birthday, or even a name that's really hers. And it's never bothered her all that much, because she knew that her soulmate was waiting for her somewhere, and she'd get everything she ever needed from him.

But she won't. She'll never find him, and she'll never have anything.

xy

Phil Coulson is a romantic at heart. He always has been. The entire reason that he decides to remain a field agent instead of becoming a specialist is because he's not willing to give up his timer. His instructors promise him, again and again, that his soulmate's timer will still work, that he'll find her even if he doesn't have his timer, but honestly, why risk it?

So he follows the track to become a field agent, and he never regrets it. He likes still having his timer on his wrist, counting down the years—decades, actually—until he meets his soulmate. He regrets that he has to wait so long, but he's sure she'll be worth it, whoever she is. And in the meantime, it's nice to have the timer running, the comforting blue glow a wordless reassurance that wherever she is, she's alive and well.

x

He's thirty six when he's sent to Portland to investigate the potential of a candidate for the Index. One Marcus Daniels has been accused of stalking Audrey Nathan, a cellist, who claims that Daniels shorted out the power for her whole block.

Phil is well aware of how close his timer is to zero. Chances are he'll be meeting his soulmate on this particular assignment—perhaps someone staying at the same hotel, or someone who works in it—but he can't afford to focus on it. He pulls on a black wristband, capable of blocking out his timer's glow, so that he won't be able to look at it and count down with it. There's the possibility that Daniels may become violent, and he can't be distracted.

His first stop in Portland is Audrey Nathan's house. The police dismissed her claims, so SHIELD doesn't have the whole story of what happened. He'll need to interview her before he can get anywhere on Daniels.

He puts on his best harmless I'm-here-to-help-you expression and rings the doorbell. He's heard the tape of her hysterical call to 911, and he fully sympathizes with this woman. Regardless of whether Daniels actually has any powers, he's clearly frightened Miss Nathan, and the local police's outright refusal to believe her can only have made things worse.

"Miss Nathan?" he asks when the door opens. "I'm Agent—"

His voice catches in his throat as soon as he makes eye contact.

It hits him like a wave, like walking into the ocean and standing there and being knocked down, but by peace instead of force. He feels strangely weightless and a little dizzy. He vaguely hears their timers chiming in unison, but it barely registers.

"Oh," Audrey says softly.

He has no idea who moves first, but suddenly he's kissing her. Maybe it was him, because he's inside the house, and she backs down the hallway so he can kick the door shut, all without pulling away from each other.

Her hands are cold as they cup his face, but her mouth is warm and sweet and perfect. It doesn't last nearly long enough before she's pulling back, breathless.

"Agent who?" she asks.

"Right," he says, realizing he never finished his introduction. "Phil Coulson. I'm with SHIELD."

"Nice to meet you," she says happily. Then she kisses him again.

He knows there are protocols, that he should be calling this in to HQ, that he should alert the other agents here in Portland with him so that one of them can take the lead, that this is not the time for kissing, but.

Well.

A few more minutes can't hurt, right?

xy

Jemma Simmons doesn't spend much time thinking of her soulmate. She's never obsessed over the idea of him the way her classmates do—not that there's anything wrong with dreaming about one's soulmate, of course. In fact, Jemma has spent her fair share of time watching the numbers on her timer click down.

It's just that her timer says her soulmate is in the future, years and years away, and in the present there are things to learn, science to be done, and discoveries to be made. So it isn't so much that she doesn't think about her soulmate as it is she just thinks about science more.

Until one day she looks down and the timer is blank. It's not red, like it would be if her soulmate died, and it's not green, like she's met him and somehow failed to notice—it's just blank, the numbers wiped away as if they were never there. She's never heard of something like that happening before, and for the first time in her life, she panics.

She's sixteen years old, a student at the SHIELD Academy, far away from her parents and working on her SHIELD certification and her second PhD concurrently. The first person she goes to, naturally, is Fitz. She knows he's done his research into timers, born of his own timer's continued blank state, and she's sure he'll know.

Except he doesn't. He apologizes for the lack (ridiculous boy) and offers the suggestion of Dr. Weaver, who, in addition to running the Academy, was part of the team who designed the most recent iteration of timers. It's a sign of how much she's panicking that she didn't think of Dr. Weaver on her own, and Fitz walks her to Dr. Weaver's office, perhaps concerned that Jemma will faint or become even more hysterical on the way there.

Dr. Weaver, of course, has an instant answer.

"It's nothing to worry about, Jemma," Dr. Weaver says. "It just means that your soulmate's timer has been lost."

"Lost?" Jemma echoes. "Lost how? Like he—he's had his hand chopped off, or—?"

"That's certainly a possibility," Dr. Weaver acknowledges. "But it's probably nothing so drastic. It is possible to remove timers, you know. In fact, it's standard procedure for government agents who work in covert operations. It's entirely possible that your soulmate is one of our specialists—they all have their timers removed, to keep them from interfering in undercover operations."

Jemma takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, imagines the panic going with it. Dr. Weaver's words make perfect sense, and are in fact quite encouraging. It would be nice if her soulmate were a SHIELD agent—she wouldn't have to lie to him about her work. However, when last she checked her timer it said ten years, so she's not likely to meet him anytime soon. There's no use thinking about it now, is there?

She thanks Dr. Weaver, apologizes for her panic, excuses herself from the room, and then resolves to put the whole thing from her mind. That is, as soon as she explains the situation to Fitz, who is waiting patiently in the hallway.

He can't quite hide the way he feels about the revelation as they head for the Boiler Room.

"A specialist?" he asks, clearly disgusted. "Really, Simmons?"

"There's no guarantee that he's a specialist," she reminds him. "But, even if he is, there's no shame in it. Specialists do important work, Fitz."

"Yes, yes, of course they do," he agrees impatiently. "I just would have thought your soulmate would be someone a little more…cerebral."

"Oh, Fitz," she says, shaking her head. "Why on Earth would I need a scientist for a soulmate? That's what I have you for, silly."

He looks pleased, and Jemma congratulates herself. What she said is the truth, of course, but it also serves to reassure Fitz of his importance. Jemma knows he's slightly insecure about his place in her life. His timer has been blank since he got it, and she knows he worries (though he would never admit it) that once she meets her soulmate she'll forget about him, and he'll be left alone.

It certainly doesn't help that everyone who learns that the two of them aren't soulmates immediately warns that Jemma's soulmate, whoever he might be, will never tolerate their close relationship. Perhaps that will stop, now that her timer is blank as well. She can only hope.

(It doesn't, as it happens. Jemma and Fitz hear it many, many times over the years.)

x

She's consciously aware, when she turns twenty six, that she'll be meeting her soulmate sometime in the next year. She acknowledges it, takes a moment to hope that things will work out, and then puts it aside. She has a lot to worry about—she and Fitz are finally getting a field assignment (despite not actually passing their field tests), and they'll soon be off to join a mobile response team. The final preparations are still underway—apparently they're still in need of a specialist—but they're expected to begin the assignment sometime in the next month. She can't wait, is honestly extremely excited, but there's a lot of work to do before they start.

x

As it happens, the assignment begins thirteen days after her birthday. She's thrilled to report to the plane that will be their base of operations, but Fitz is less enthusiastic, and they've been sniping at each other all week.

Still, it's nothing major. They'll be past it in a few days, they always are. In the meantime, he really should have consulted her before he built the prototype night-night gun. Honestly, she's a genius, not a witch; she can't create paralysis out of nothing.

Fitz is trying to instruct her on the subject of physics (the nerve!) when they're distracted from their argument by the thump of something falling to the ground. Concerned for their equipment, they look over, and find a man standing in the cargo bay staring at them.

This must be Agent Ward, the team specialist. Agent Coulson told her yesterday that Ward wasn't sold on the idea of being part of a team, which would certainly explain his clear annoyance as he asks for FitzSimmons (and who could have predicted that nickname would still be so widespread, a decade later?).

She leaves Fitz to deal with Ward's comm receiver and fetches one of the swabs for a DNA sample. She doesn't bother to ask permission first—which is terribly rude of her, she'll have to apologize later, she's just still a little irritated with Fitz—just swabs Ward's mouth.

She's in the middle of expressing her how impressed she is with the DNA-encoded comm system when she looks up and makes eye contact with him.

Oh. Oh.

She's filled with electricity. All of her nerves seem to be on end (which is a ridiculous and unscientific notion) and all of her attention is focused on the man in front of her. It feels like presenting her first doctoral dissertation, the way her heart stopped and her mind blanked the moment the committee ended the session so they could discuss her presentation—except in a good way.

There's not a single thought in her head, and she doesn't even mind it.

She's peripherally aware of Fitz swearing, and the chiming of her timer, and the fact that the DNA swab has dropped out of her suddenly nerveless fingers, but none of that matters. She was speaking, wasn't she? She should finish her sentence, except she has absolutely no recollection of what that was. Well, she needs to say something.

"Hi," she manages.

"Hi," he says. Slowly, deliberately, he takes her arm in his hand and turns it so that her timer is visible. The display is green, the exact date and time showing, and the evidence is conclusive. Agent Ward is her soulmate.

Well. That's unexpected, isn't it?


A/N: There might be another chapter of this, showing where May/Marek and Coulson/Audrey stand in the present time, as well as a little of Jemma's thoughts on Grant, but I promise I'll finish and post the side-story first. It's almost done, I swear!