Content: Robin tells May of a future she tried desperately to change and explains why SHIELD has traveled into the future.
*Spoilers through 5x07 and contains suppositions drawn from promotional photos for the next two episodes.*
"I have waited such a long time to see you again."
-Robin to Melinda May, "Together or Not at All"
Robin was not prone to exaggeration. Her visions of the future were bizarre and incomprehensible enough on their own. To embellish on them would have been redundant.
She had waited seventy-three years to see the face of the woman who died trying to save her, futile gesture though they both knew it to be. In the decades that followed, she expected her memory would have distorted the image of Melinda May she held onto. But those final moments had burned every eyelash, dimple, and scar into her brain.
She was exactly as Robin remembered. Younger, but unmistakably May.
Now, as she returned Robin's greeting with a suspicious frown, Robin felt something that she had not experienced in years: relief.
It was all about to be over.
At the end of this, she would be able repay a debt backlogged for the better part of a century. She could finally save Melinda May from a past future that she did not remember.
"Sorry," May said, glancing at the wooden bird in Robin's hands. "Have we met?"
She replied with a kind smile.
"No," she said. "And yes."
May grimaced.
"Look, I appreciate the timely rescue," she said. "But between almost being hacked to death by a telepath, eaten by insects, and talking with… whatever the hell this guy is—
She gestured to Enoch, who was standing with customary stoic composure in the shadows.
"As I explained, I am a sentient Chronicom sent from—
A glare from May broke him off mid-sentence.
May turned back to Robin with deliberate slowness.
"I have reached my limit with crap I don't understand," she stated. "I need answers. Not riddles. Who are you? Why do you think you know me?"
Robin regarded the battered agent thoughtfully.
In her memory, she was gentler, sadder, more patient.
But then, she would have been.
The May she knew had seen more destruction and death than the woman on the floor in front of her. At some point, she had become resigned to the cruelties of the world. Her existence was a constant exercise in triaging tragedy. She saved those she could, knowing that it would never be enough. Her fight was long-since over and she knew she had lost.
"My name is Robin," she started. "When I was a girl, your team encountered an Inhuman who could see another's future with a touch. Your—Daisy, she tried to save him, but she could not change his fate. None of you could."
May's lips parted and she looked at the woman in front of her with new eyes.
"He was your father," she realized.
Robin nodded.
"He died asking Daisy to protect me."
"Your mother," May muttered, half to herself. "Daisy gave all of that money she took from the Watchdogs to you and your mother."
"She did…she would have done more," Robin said.
May pulled her damaged leg in front of her with a wince.
"You're an Inhuman too," she stated. "Can you see what will happen, like your father did?"
Robin smiled sadly.
"Not like my father, Agent May. I can see so much more…"
I don't know how old I was when the visions started. It's hard to remember a life without them. They started as images and sounds that came to me, interrupting my childhood and robbing me of any semblance of reality. By the time I was six, I was seeing them all of the time. I stopped living in the present. I hardly ate or slept. The only thing I did was draw. I was swept along on a current that I could not control. All I could do it watch and listen as the events played out in my head.
A world falling to ruins.
People scrambling to find a life among the wreckage.
Eventually, I even saw my own death.
But not before I met you…
It was in 2018 that Thanos came to Earth and the War of the Infinity Stones began. The Avengers, a handful of Inhumans, and a few brave humans, stood up and fought in a battle that could have torn the fabric of the universe.
But it was not the War that shook the world apart.
That was SHIELD's doing.
Gods knew, they did not mean to. But the wheels for Earth's destruction had been set in motion millennia before their organization was conceived of. They merely accelerated the clock.
For thousands of years, the Inhumans had remained a small group, hidden from the rest of the world. Then SHIELD unleashed Terrigenesis on an unsuspecting population and hundreds of humans with the dormant Kree gene turned. The arrival of a powerful Inhuman named 'Alveus' summoned an outpost of Kree Reapers to Earth. He destroyed them before they could put an end to the Inhuman outbreak.
The Reapers were dead, but the signal went out through the Kree Empire. The Inhuman experiments, long-since thought to be a failure, were an unprecedented success. Suddenly, the planet Earth became an imminent threat for the Kree. Their experiments had gotten out-of-hand. If other species in the universe became aware of the powerful weapons that lived on our planet, they could be taken and used for their own purposes.
The Inhumans had to be eliminated.
The Kree descended on Earth by the dozens.
SHIELD was all that stood between the Inhumans and complete annihilation.
Once disbanded, and its top officials imprisoned, SHIELD was officially reinstated by the US Government during the Infinity War. Former director Phil Coulson was mentally and physically broken from his time in captivity, unable to reconcile being abandoned and tortured by the same government he had given his life to protect. He handed leadership over to Daisy Johnson, who led the defense against the Kree.
Most Kree came with the intent of eliminating the Terrigen from the ecosystem and killing the Inhumans who had turned. Others abandoned their mandate, enslaving Inhumans and taking them off-world to work or to sell. No matter the endgame, the Inhumans were no longer safe.
I was twelve the year my mother died, caught by the blade of a Kree Reaper who had come to kill me. SHIELD arrived minutes too late to save her, but Daisy remembered her promise to my father and took me into her care.
I don't remember much of my life in the SHIELD bunker. It was dark and chaotic. There were always people rushing around, doing things I did not understand.
I remember Daisy though. How she would see me and smile through the sadness and pain that normally clouded her face. How she could always manage to make time to talk with me, even when the world seemed to be falling apart around her. I remember her friends: Jemma, Fitz, Mack, and Elena. They were so kind to me, so desperate to make me believe that everything was going to be alright, even though they did not believe it themselves.
And I remember the day I left.
The base was attacked by a team of Kree Reapers.
Daisy was in a quinjet with me in the hanger at the time. We were sitting in the cockpit and she was showing me what all of the dials and buttons did. She told me that one day, she would teach me to fly.
The bomb went off as she powered up the quinjet. The shields were up and the jet survived the explosion. No one else made it out alive.
Just us.
That was the day I met you.
Daisy told me that she was going to "finish this." That was the phrase she kept repeating over and over.
"Don't worry, Robin," she said. "This is over. All of it. I'm going to finish this."
She told me that I could not go with her, that she had to keep me safe.
"Where will I be safe?" I asked. "With who?"
"With my family," she told me.
We landed at a cabin that was surrounded by wilderness in every direction. There were a handful of people milling around the porch. They looked up in fear as we arrived, running inside. I would soon discover that they were Inhumans.
With everyone else running away from the quinjet, one person stood out.
You.
You opened the locked door and came forward to greet us.
When Daisy told you about the base and the agents inside who had perished, you closed your eyes for so long, I thought you were going to pass out. But instead, you opened your eyes, took one of our hands in each of your own, and led us inside.
The cabin was a refuge, a haven for Inhumans who had nowhere else to turn. Families and individuals were tucked into every available space. People were cooking, cleaning, or just staring into space, their eyes vacant from too many horrors witnessed in one lifetime. You squeezed my hand as I stared around in wonder.
We made our way to the kitchen.
There, at a surprisingly empty table, was a man in a buttoned-down flannel shirt, reading a tattered comic book.
"Phil?" You said. "Daisy's here."
The man looked up, his eyes as bright as anything I have ever seen. He stood and pulled Daisy into a hug.
To me, she had always been a hero and a leader. I looked at Daisy Johnson and saw everything I wanted to be one day when I was grown. But seeing her in Phil Coulson's arms made her seem like a child, hungry for affection and terrified of letting him down.
"They're gone," I heard her tell him. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I couldn't save them."
He only pulled her closer in reply and kissed her forehead when she released him.
"I'm going to finish this," she said. "I promise."
"What are you going to do?" You asked her.
Daisy wiped her eyes and turned to the two of us.
"Can you watch Robin for me?"
"Daisy—
"Please, May," she begged you. "You're the only one I trust to protect her."
"Alright," you agreed, pulling me closer to your side. "Until you come back."
When she smiled at you, I knew I would never see her again once she left. I think you knew it too. She was surprised when you dropped my hand and wrapped your arms around her.
"None of this is your fault," I heard you whisper. "You've been so brave for so long, Daisy. I'm so proud of you."
Daisy had made it to the cabin door when a voice stopped her.
"I'm coming with you."
We turned around and saw Phil standing in the kitchen doorway.
I only met the Phil Coulson from Daisy's stories once in person. In her recollections, he was witty, determined, and gentle. The agent she described was unwaveringly loyal to his team, a natural leader, and someone who you did not want to make angry. The man I saw when I came into the kitchen that day was the shell of the person he used to be. He was hollowed out and hopeless, clinging onto this life for the sake of what remained of his family.
When he followed her off to fight in their final, I saw the Phil Coulson that Daisy remembered.
Daisy wanted to protest that he stay, but you beat her to it.
"Phil, please," you said softly.
He pulled you close and whispered something to you that I could not hear. There were tears on your cheeks when you stood back, but you nodded. I knew it was rude to watch, but I could not look away when he kissed you for the last time.
I don't know why, but that's how I realized it was almost over.
For all of us.
Everything.
As a child, you understand things that you can't articulate. Things that you forget how to comprehend when you are older and intuition is replaced by logic and experience.
But I was a child then.
And I knew that you both said goodbye to everything that day. All of your hope had been spent on others. You had none left for yourselves.
It was about three hours after the quinjet left that tremors began.
At first, it was a rumbling that we felt in our gut. Soon after that, the ground began to vibrate. The others in the house moaned and cried out as the crack of trees falling in the forest rang out around us. You stood still, watching the world cave in on itself. It took the earth rending open, tearing the cabin in half, to bring you to your knees.
You were the last thing that I saw.
You held me close, shielding my body from the falling debris with your own.
I heard your voice, even with all of the chaos in my ears.
"It's okay, sweetheart," you told me. "It's almost over."
Robin finished her story and waited. The May she remembered would have nodded and accepted the news with quiet resolution. But this was not her May. There was no telling what she would make of Robin's visions of a future that never happened.
She took a deep breath, started to say something, and then opted for silence, letting the air out of her lungs slowly.
"Okay," May tried again. "So you're saying that Daisy ended the world?"
Robin shook her head patiently.
"I was six when I saw those visions. I hardly understood what it all meant. I just knew that it was going to happen and that I had to stop it."
"Like your father?" May asked knowingly.
Robin smiled at the silent figure in the corner.
"My father did not have Enoch," she answered.
"When I met Robin, she was very troubled," Enoch stated, taking his queue to cut in. "It was clear her visions were of something catastrophic. An extinction-level event. Her communication skills were limited to drawing what she saw in sketches. Between the two of us, we divined that the chance to avert this catastrophe was to remove the people at the crux of it."
May's darted between the two of them.
"SHIELD," she said. "Daisy."
"Yes," Enoch answered.
"But you didn't 'avert' it!" May exploded. "The world's still in pieces! The only difference is that a few people survived."
Robin could only nod, expressionless.
"You were wrong," May realized. "You thought it was Daisy who did this, but it was something else! You sent us forward in time to get us out of the way based on what you saw, but you didn't have the whole picture."
She groaned and got to her feet.
"So that's it?" She demanded. "All of this? For what? So you could bring us out here to die?"
"She did not bring you here," Enoch said.
"No, you did!" May spat.
"I did not build the monolith or the Lighthouse," he replied. "I only carried out the prophesy. The future is inevitable. We just play our parts, as we would have always done."
May rolled her eyes.
"Then what about the future she saw where we all die?"
"That was one possible future, Agent May," Robin said, her voice suddenly very quiet. "This is another. You're right: I did think it was Daisy's fault. But it doesn't matter what I believed. Someone, or something, else sent you and your team here. I just saw it happen. And whoever it was thought you could save us."
May swallowed and sat down in front of Robin with a thump.
"Who?" She asked. "Why us?"
"I don't know who," Robin admitted. "But I believe they are right. I know you and your team, Agent May. I know what kind of people you are. You won't stop until you've saved us."
"Even if we die doing it?" May murmured. "Or lose… each other?"
Robin could not help but pity the woman who sat at her knees, rubbing a temple with the fingers of her right hand as she tried to assimilate everything she had been told. Robin reached forward and grasped her free hand with her own, smiling at the familiarity of it.
"I hope not, May," Robin whispered, her eyes filling with tears. "It's not what I wanted for any of you."
May managed a tense smile and gave her hand a quick squeeze before releasing it.
Robin's attention wavered from her and her gaze drifted up to something unseen above May's head.
"We'll find out soon enough though," she whispered. "We're running out of time. It's almost over."
I have no idea how all of this is going to shake out on-screen. I just had a few idea of how it could tie together and wanted to share. Hope you liked it!