*Background: Xinjiang is the northwestern-most province in China and borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, India, Russia, Mongolia, and the Chinese province of Tibet. The language, Uyghur, is Turkic in nature and often uses the Arabbic script for writing. It is spoken by 8-11 million people. Most Uyghurs are Sunni Muslim.
For political reasons, this place is probably never going to be mentioned in pop culture, but there's no reason to think SHIELD would not be involved in such a strategic location.
2003-Xinjiang province, China
"Device is in position, team standing by. All units check in."
"Assault team one is go."
"Assault team two is go."
"Beta-strike team is go."
"Decoy one good to go."
"Decoy two go."
"Extraction one is go."
"Extraction two is go."
From inside a parked car, May does a 360 sweep for the thousandth time and presses the button on her handheld. "Extraction three is go."
The walkie crackles again. "T-minus one minute."
Sweat drips down the back of May's neck towards the collar of her long-sleeved shirt as she stares across the street at the house that is about to become a crime scene. She counts the seconds and watches the front door, watches the windows, the street around her, the roof…
She doesn't have room to think of the seven other teams moving throughout the city in their various locations, each of them pulling off their individual operations, pulling their individual threads so that this whole web can unravel. She can only think of her marks inside, the plane a mile outside of town, and the stretch of road that stands between here and there.
Five…four…three…two…
BOOM!
May turns the key in the ignition and the engine roars to life, covered by the sound of the explosion in the back of the house. She hears the gunfire break out as she throws the car into gear and reverses it into the small space in front of the house, unlocking the doors as she sees the front door burst open and a woman race out, a small girl clutched in her arms. Smoke and shouts and another woman dragging a young boy by the hand come after, and then the second woman is herding the hysterical first woman to the car, throwing open the door and pushing her and the child into it, throwing herself and the boy in behind them, and suddenly there are four smoky passengers in May's backseat.
"Drive!" The agent shrieks in Mandarin as she slams the door behind them, and May's foot lands on the gas.
Their car tears down the street, following the cleared path out of town towards their landing strip in the desert surrounding it. May keeps her eyes on the road as she steers them at breakneck speed through the pale, deserted streets (thank you, extraction team 2). She doesn't speak Uyghur, so she doesn't understand any of what is being said (shouted) in the backseat. Both children are crying, the mother is screaming. The other woman is busy trying to calm them all and keep their heads below the windows. May can guess, however, at exactly which moment the wife's attention turns to her in the driver's seat and she realizes that the person driving the car is definitely not this family's paid driver (he's sleeping off a chokehold in the garage).
Just who is this? Stop the car!
Don't tell me to be calm! Who is this?
How do you know her?
Why does she have a gun?
What have you done?!
And then there's gunfire directly behind May's head and two new holes in the roof of the car, and she curses but keeps the wheel steady.
"Morse!" she yells without turning around.
The girl's voice cuts back in English, "I'm handling it!"
In her mirror, she sees a revolver go flying out the window, landing harmlessly in the middle of the road.
They are already to the outskirts of town and almost to the plane. May cuts the wheel and takes them off map.
She grabs her walkie off the dash. "Extraction 3 is inbound!"
Then there is a motorcycle in her rearview mirror and the man on it has a gun-
"Hold on!" she shouts, and starts her defensive weaving as they streak through sand towards the place she knows the plane is-
"Hostile in pursuit-requesting backup!" May shouts into her walkie.
In the shimmery heat ahead of her, a portal to another world seems to appear, the cargo ramp of a cloaked plane opening for them. From the mouth of the ramp, two agents fan out. It only takes a shot from each one, and then the motorcycle falls away in her rearview mirror.
May slams on the brakes at the last possible second as they streak up the cargo ramp. The two agents fall in after them, the ramp closes, and she hears the jets turn vertical, bearing them upward.
May kills the engine and lets herself let go of the steering wheel. Slowly, she exhales, and a shudder starts in her heart and goes all the way to her fingertips. She feels like a runner that just made it back to home plate just under the ball flying into the catcher's mitt.
Safe.
Behind her, Agent Morse is still trying to get the wife to calm down enough to listen. After the brightness of the desert, the dimness of the cargo bay is disorienting, and May can barely make out the outlines of her four passengers as she turns over the side of her seat to face them.
"Is everyone-"
"Agent May—go," the young woman says calmly but firmly, barely glancing at her. "I'm trying to talk her down."
May bristles slightly at being ordered by a junior agent. She hesitates, glancing at the two children with their faces buried in their mother's lap. "Should I take the kids with me?"
"You think she's letting them out of her sight?" the young woman snaps. "Get out of the car and tell the agents to give us a minute. I'll have her out and cooperating when she's ready and not a minute sooner. Go."
Two agents are laying wheel stops behind the tires as she climbs out of the car.
"Agent May," one says, straightening up and shaking her hand. "Well done."
"You weren't so bad yourself, Lin," May says, dragging a sleeve across her dusty cheek.
"Couple holes in the roof-they got a story to go with them?" the man asks, nodding at the roof of the sedan.
May rolls her eyes. "I'm pretty sure the wife had a small pistol. Her husband probably told her to wear it in the off chance that something like this happened. Agent Morse disarmed her pretty fast. It's a miracle she didn't shoot anyone."
"Indeed," Lin says, obviously amused. "So, kingpin 1's family is in custody-"
"Is safe," May reminds him.
"Right, and we already heard extractions two and three went off without a hitch," the other agent adds. "No word yet on the strike-hoping to hear that we got more than one big fish today."
"What's going on in there?" Lin nods towards the car as the volume inside it rises.
She shrugs. "Agent Morse said she's handling it, and to give her a minute."
It takes thirty minutes of Bobbi calmly talking down the woman and her kids before the kingpin's wife allows the woman to open the car door. It takes twenty more minutes of introductions, explanation, and patient convincing before she lets them walk her and her children to one of the bunks on the upper deck to wait out the flight. When they arrive at the door, the little boy refuses to let go of Morse's hand. The wife slaps his hand and yanks him off , pulling her children inside and slamming the door in Morse's face.
"Well, that went better than I expected," Agent Lin says, typing in the lock code on the door as Agent Morse turns from the door and finally pulls the purple hijab off her head. "It's not every day the family nanny turns out to be an Agent for the organization that's arresting your husband."
The girl's eyes flash, and she clenches her scarf in her hand.
May takes her cue.
"Agent Lin, could you go and ask the pilot how many hours to Istanbul and ask Control what information we can give the target's wife about her husband?" Her tone doesn't let him mistake it as a suggestion. The man smirks at her and moves down the staircase, leaving her and the girl alone in the hallway.
May turns back to the girl, who is pulling an elastic out of her hair. Long, brassy waves fall out as she untwists the bun behind her head, staring at the ground. "Don't let Lin get under your skin," May says apologetically. "He likes to pull hooks."
It seems to take the girl a minute to realize that May was talking to her. When her gaze finally lifts to May's, a look of recognition arrives with it.
"So you're the agent who's been gathering my dead drops and leaving me weapons? Nice to finally meet you, Agent May." She extends a hand, and May shakes it.
"You too, Agent Morse. Congratulations on a very successful field assignment. I can't believe it's only your first."
The girl shrugs, leaning tiredly against the wall. "No one was planning on it to last this long."
"I heard. I heard you were out with a handler and a small team of your classmates practicing cover-building and language acquisition. And then you-"
"And then it was blind luck that the woman I chatted up in a park was the wife of the trafficking boss SHIELD had been chasing for five years." Morse doesn't sound proud at all.
"Maybe that was blind luck, but then you got yourself hired as nanny and tutor for her kids and kept the cover for three more months. That's not luck—that's skill. You kept them blind and you kept them safe."
The girl's eyes flicker towards the closed door. "And then I ruined their lives."
"You saved their lives," she corrects gently. "A sting like this would usually neglect targets' families, leaving them to fend for themselves or to the wolves that would come after them in revenge. What you did today helped prevent that from happening to the woman and her kids."
"The kids..." Morse slides down the wall until she is sitting with her knees pulled to her chest. She sighs, resting her forehead on her hand. "The mom's anger sucks, sure, but it's perfectly understandable. The kids, though…I hate that they're going to remember this. That there's nothing I can do to make this better. That they probably won't trust anyone ever again."
Something in May's chest reaches towards the pain in the girl's voice. She sits down against the opposite wall. "I've heard from a lot of agents that it's usually children who undo the hard fastenings."
"Guess I've got plenty of years ahead to grow thicker skin, huh?" Agent Morse meets her eyes.
May shrugs. "Hope so."
"How did you feel after your first undercover?" the young woman asks.
May looks away and smiles, thinking of the infiltration mission that required her to go back to college for a semester. "It's still my least favorite thing."
"Because you can't be yourself?"
May thinks of the roommate, teachers, and friends that she lied to over those weeks on assignment. Falling asleep every night knowing she was sharing a wall with the daughter of a dangerous man. Getting herself invited to their home and being the inside intel for her organization to arrive and arrest her new friend's father. She sighs and answers, "And because it never really ends. It's like turning a crank until it's as tight as it goes. And then each day is another impossible click. Stress management can only help so much. This is one of the hardest things you'll ever do."
Morse scrubs a tired hand down her face, but May still sees the tracks the moisture leaves in her dusty skin.
"I'm not upset because it was hard. I'm upset because I was so good at it. She never saw it coming. I knew what I was doing the whole time, I knew what was going to her husband and family…and I never slipped. I was really good, May." She doesn't sound at all proud. "And that kind of scares me."
May doesn't know what to say to that, but she finds herself reaching for the girl. Her hand lands on her knee, and Morse seems glad for it, covering May's hand with her own.
"Look at me, Morse," May commands, and the girl's tired blue eyes meet her own. "I know you're only in your third year at the Academy, but I know they wouldn't have put you in the field without the proper training beforehand. Do you remember what they taught you in your Infiltration rotation?"
Morse nods, and May pushes their joined hands until Morse's own hand is pressed against her sternum.
"You're the only one who can truly know what's in there. You have to decide how you show it to others. And you have to know how to bring yourself back to it. What you've been doing—it's your job. It's not who you are. Find your touchstone, and bring yourself back to it."
Morse nods, pursing her lips and letting her gaze fall to the space between them. She maintains her grip on May's hand, and May lets her, not minding the contact after so many lonely weeks on the field.
It's nice to feel the presence of another person you don't have to be suspicious of.
"Does it get easier?" Morse finally asks, a little hoarsely, glancing back up at May.
May wishes the answer were different, but she tells the truth. "Yeah."
It gets easier to lie, ruin lives, and walk away.
Because you get better at letting it go.
They stay like that awhile longer, pressing against one another in silence, until there's a sound of footsteps on the stairs at the end of the hall. Both their heads turn and Morse drops her hand, but it seems that she waits until the last possible second before a head appears at the top of the spiral staircase.
"Agent May," Agent Lin says, wordlessly analyzing the two women's posture. "Agent Coulson is on the line—he wants to speak to you. And Agent Morse, Agent Hand needs to see you in the briefing room."
"Be right there," May responds, pressing her hands to the floor and standing. She offers a hand to Morse and pulls her to her feet.
Agent Lin ducks back down the stairs, and Morse glances back at the door that conceals the family.
"Do you want me to stay here until you come back?" May offers, and Morse looks at her, surprised. "I'll call you if they need you." She may as well do what she can to soften the ache…
And then Morse closes the space between them and wraps May in a hug, and all May can think is My god, this girl is tall, as she wraps her arms gently around the girl's middle and holds her back. It's not strange to be receiving a hug—she knows this touch-starved feeling. She feels the suppressed shudder and is happy that there's something she can do to help, even if it's not what she expected. Finally, May pats the girl's back gently and speaks against the girl's chest.
"You really shouldn't keep Hand waiting," she says, and Morse nods against the top of her head.
"What about Agent Coulson?" she reminds her. And May almost laughs.
"He's been waiting on me since we were Cadets. He can wait a little longer."
Morse finally releases her and steps back. "Thanks, May," she says with a tired smile.
"Go on, Morse," May says, nodding towards the stairwell.
"Bobbi," the girl corrects, flashing her a smile.
"Agent Morse!" Hand's unmistakable, impatient voice carries from the bottom of the stairs.
"Get going, Bobbi," May swats at her as the girl hurries towards the stairs. As the girl's blonde head disappears below the stairs, May pulls out her SHIELD sat phone and calls Coulson.
"Mission accomplished?" he says when he answers.
"Of course. But listen, I think I found the girl you need for that next big mission." And she lets him hear in her voice that she's smiling.