Author's Note: Original Marvel Characters and locations belong to Marvel Entertainments and Affiliates. Everything else is mine. I've always thought there had to be an interesting relationship between these two. I love writing their interactions. Thanks to smileyanne for leaving a lovely comment on "zephyr one" inspiring me to post this. Reviews and feedback are appreciated. Let me know what you think.
TW for referenced suicidal attempt.
Nick Fury was sitting in the back of a crowded bar. He had chosen a spot in the back corner with seats that would allow of them both to see all the exits and possible venues of attack. She was just as suspicious as he was; he had trained her well.
She came in one of the side door dressed in dark jeans and her soft leather jacket and slid into the booth next to him without a word. The eyes of some of the male tracked her as she cut across the room and he knew it didn't have anything to do with her being one of the most powerful spies in the world. Honestly, he couldn't take her or Romanova anywhere.
Fury took a sip of scotch before addressing her.
"Where's the fire, May?"
He knew she could handle just about anything, so for her to be here said it was bad. He had called, just for a moment, after leaving Hill and Rogers and going underground to let her know that he was leaving the continent for a while. Melinda's had enough betrayals for one lifetime.
He just never expected the next sentence to come from her mouth.
"Andrew is an inhuman."
He felt his heart shutter within his chest. Immediately, his eye scanned the perimeter for anyone that seemed to be a tail before pulling her out of the booth. He was surprised when she allowed his hand to wrap around her wrist; gently enough to not be perceived as a threat, but hard enough to let him lead.
The parking lot was dark and empty when they reach it. The air was cold and crisp. The keys materialized from her pocket and for once, the notorious control freak let someone else drive. It was a clear sign of just how bad things had gotten.
"Start from the beginning," he ordered once they had both slid into the dark SUV.
She didn't ask where they were going. There was a trust between that he had to work hard to earn the first time when she was right out of the Academy and he wanted her for his Strike team and even harder to gain back after Tahiti and the lies.
May took a single breath and for a second he feared she was going to say nothing and then everything came tumbling out—Theta Protocol, the inhumans, Phil calling Andrew behind her back, Afterlife, Skye's betrayal, Hawaii—
"And he was going to kill all of them…so I shot him."
Fury tore his gaze off the road and found her profile in the dark. Exhaustion and defeat leaked from her body, flooding the space between them like a suffocating fog.
"Jesus," he murmured under his breath, could she ever get a break?, "And where the hell is Coulson?"
The pause in response was all he really needed to know.
"With Rosalind Price."
"The ATCU head?"
May hummed quietly. Her attention had moved to the city they had just entered. "I knew Coulson was drivin' a little too fast, but the ATCU? Is this about that damn Inhuman task force he thinks he can develop?"
Melinda didn't answer right away. It was several moments of silence and he was about speak again when she answered.
"He doesn't listen to me anymore."
There was something else in that sentence. He could tell just by that level of exhaustion in her voice. Just what had she and Coulson fought about?
He was about to ask her just that when he noticed how still she had gone next to him.
"May?"
The light from one of the hotels caught the inside of the car. A puddle of blood had seeped through her left side and onto the leather of the car. He swore loudly and his foot slammed down on the accelerator.
"Melinda?" There wasn't an answer. "Melinda, I need you to focus on my voice. Keep talking."
He reached his hotel within minutes.
If this were any other circumstance, he would be teasing her that he was just as old as he looked and he shouldn't be carryin' her around like some bride to be, but her body was deathly still in his arms and her blood was warm on his hands.
She was fading in and out by the time he laid her on the bed.
"Melinda?"
"Nick?" He could hear a little more of her lilting accent, telling him that this was just as bad as he thought. The blood spills onto the ugly floral bedspread as he cuts off the bottom of her shirt. The gritty lighting in the made it look even more gory.
"It's not as bad as it looks I'm sure," he said drily.
May moved to sit up so she could see the wound. The muscles in her abdomen flexed making more blood gush from the opening, but Nick's hand caught her shoulder with a harsh, but even, "don't even think about it."
"It's jus- a scratch…" Her voice is airy.
He growled in frustration. She's going into shock.
"No, Melinda, that's a gunshot."
The room's first aid kit was crap, supplied barely enough stuff for a usable bullet extraction. In this kind of situation he hated to cut her open more, but she was little and he couldn't feel the bullet with only one finger in the wound, let alone get a pair of tweezers in there.
It seemed that the bullet had lodged near her hip and had gotten stuck, stemming most of the bleeding until it was knocking loose, causing more internal damage. It was a smaller bullet, not something SHIELD would carry—
His gut contradicted painfully.
Andrew.
"It was an accident."
At one point early on in their working relationship, he thought May could be a mind reader. If he believed in that kind of thing, which he didn't. It was damn useful in the interrogation room, but vapidly annoying the rest of the time. And this was one of those annoying times where, even while bleeding to death in some seedy motel, she could tell exactly what he was thinking.
"No it wasn't."
Her eyes fluttered rapidly and Nick's spare hand came to brace her cheek.
"Stay with me, Mel."
He managed to extract the bleeding and sew up the wound. She lost consciousness a full ten minutes before he finished, but Nick wasn't surprised with the amount of blood she had lost. He had washed his hands and dressed the wound before looking for her jacket.
Her SAT phone was in the left pocket where he had suspected it would be and guessed the pass-code on the second try, the anniversary of Bahrain, before clicking on Coulson's mobile number.
It was answered on the third ring.
He could hear music in the background, too quiet to be a bar, but loud enough for him to hear some of the more romantic words. A woman's voice was muffled on the other end sounded suspiciously like a secret sniffing, red tape breaking, no good Fed.
Rosalind Price.
"May?"
Fury could feel rage building in his chest like wildfire at the sound of SHIELD's new Director's voice. His eyes wound up back on Melinda's unconscious form and the fire settled into a ball of metal in his stomach.
"Care to tell me why I have your partner on the bed in my hotel room bleedin' out, Coulson?"
He could almost hear Phil sitting up to attention on the line.
"Sir? What? Is she okay?"
"What do you think?" Fury couldn't help the ugly sarcasm dripping from his lips.
"Where are you? I'll come to you."
"It's not gonna happen, Coulson."
"Wha—why the hell not?"
Fury raised his eyebrow at the tone of Coulson's voice. "Because it's clear she's no longer a priority of yours. So I'm gonna minimize the damage you can do to her now before you get her killed."
"That's not fair—you didn't even hear my side of the story—"
"Your side of the—this isn't kindergarten, Coulson," he said harshly, "I heard all about your side of the story. All about the carving, Theta Protocal, the Inhuman taskforce, Andrew, Skye."
"Daisy."
An ugly smirk found Fury's lips. Phil seemed to recognize just what his correction signified to the older man because his next words were far softer.
"I just want to see her."
"I'll send her back when she's out of the woods…if she wants to go. I'm done makin' her do stuff she doesn't want to do."
Without signifying an end to the conversation, Fury hung up the line. He could feel the weight of the past few hours hanging on his shoulder as he turned back to Melinda's form on the bed. In the light from the morning, he could see better see the dark circles under her eyes, a clear sign of just how much she had been working and how little she had been sleeping.
If Melinda had still been a part of his Strike team, and this was seven years ago, he would have pulled her from the work. She would have argued (because that's what she always did, but in the end) it would be better than May working herself into a ditch.
It wasn't like Natasha who assumed she merely didn't have a limit, Melinda knew her limits, knew how far she could stretch them, and simply broke them because she didn't care about the damage.
Not anymore.
Her eyelids fluttered and her whole body spasmed. He moved to her side, perching on the edge of the bed. It was clear she was dreaming. Her stint in the unconscious had shifted into a nightmare.
"Melinda?"
Her name didn't seem to get a reaction. His hands came brace her wrists. He was gentle enough to not hurt her, but hard enough to stop the attack he knew would be coming the second he ripped her from the nightmare. He hated to shake her, especially so soon after stitching her up, but leaving her in that kind of hell wasn't an option.
"Melinda?"
Her breathing was ragged.
"Easy get your bearings."
She jerked toward, eyes darting open, wide and very alert. She fought against his grip for a moment until the fog in her eyes cleared and her entire body gave up under touch. He held onto her arms long enough to make she she wouldn't rip the stitches he had painstakingly just put in before he released her wrists, gently, moving back to give her the space she needed.
"I thought we agreed never to do this again."
Her body relaxed back into the mattress and her hand came to brush her hair out of her face. He let her heart slow down for a moment before she made a move to try and sit up. He eased her back up against the wall, allowing her body to fold in on itself, making her smaller.
"Think he clipped the edge of your kidney. That's why there was all the blood."
He waited for her to defend Andrew again, but she was silent.
They had been in a situation like this once before. In another dingy hotel room with her bleeding out all over the bed.
It had been ten months after the mission in Manama. She said she wanted out of the field. And he said no. So she took seven successive suicide missions, each one more difficult than the last. When he found out, he had been furious, but when she went dark on the mission, even he couldn't call it off.
After the seventh one, he found her in a safe house in Prague, intending to knock some sense into her, whether metaphorically or physically, he wasn't sure by that point.
But by the time he had gotten there, she had slit her wrists.
It took five days to patch her back together. Five days to stitch back together the pieces. Five days he told no one about. Not Coulson. Not Barton. Not even Andrew.
He signed her transfer paperwork the second their plane had landed and they never spoke of Prague again.
Maria had been furious, almost as furious as Phil who claimed he was giving up on Melinda by letting her leave the field. So he ordered them to leave her alone. And for the most part they did…until the Battle of New York.
"Do you think she's trustworthy?"
"Price?" Melinda's head touched the back of the wall and for a moment she let her breathing even out. "He just wants someone who he think isn't going to hurt him."
"And he thinks his best bet is some blood sucking ATCU agent?"
May rolled her eyes with a smirk.
"I never said he was being rational."
Nick's lips twitched gently. He could see their shadows on the wall across from him. His large one, a single smooth one, and Melinda's tiny, willowy one.
"I should have been gentler."
"You did what you thought was best."
There was a tone in her voice he couldn't quite identify.
"I had to be sure."
Melinda didn't answer and he didn't expect her to. He thought of every way to handle the Tahiti situation; who to bring in, who to lie to. Lying to Melinda was never an option; not after he saw her face at Coulson's funeral.
So three months after he called her up to his office, briefed her through Level Ten, and told her that if she wanted to see the newly revived Coulson that she'd come back into the field.
It was cruel…but it was effective.
"Do you think it'll ever just be okay?"
"Maybe…but we'll all be dead."
There was something in the way he said it, that matter-of-fact, deadpanned, that made her laugh. Gorgeous and unexpectedly in the night air. He realized it had been a sound missing for the seven years.
"You don't have to go back, you know."
Her breathing went softer and made him feeler older than he was.
"I've got red in my ledger."
It was a ridiculous little phrase. He was pretty sure Natasha had been the one to come up with it. He never understood what ever happened to plain old loyalty. The idea of favors and lives saved was exhausting, especially to someone who care as damn much as Melinda did.
"I know you're with Melinda."
A wry smile twisted onto the ex-Director's face at the sound of Maria Hill's voice. "Coulson called you." There wasn't a question in his voice.
"He said you're hoarding her in some motel because you're pissed at him." He could hear the smile in his Deputy's voice.
"Damn right."
There was hesitation in Maria's next statement. She knew how Melinda was about injuries; Coulson once equated her to a big cat, sulking away to lick her wounds in solitude.
"Is she okay?"
"Yes."
Pause.
"Can I talk to her?"
Fury nursed the glass of scotch in his hand and watched May looking over the specs for the new Quinjet that he had brought from Stark. Feeling his eyes on her, the Chinese woman glanced up. "As long as you don't give Romanova our coordinates."
Hill chuckled on the other end. Fury wordlessly moved to hand the phone to Melinda. Her eyebrows contract in a silent question, but didn't hesitate to put the phone to her ear.
"Yes?"
Nick watched Melinda converse with her old Rookie affectionately.
Strike Team Delta had been his masterpiece.
It had been a conversation he had with Peggy Carter over Chinese food in her office one late night when they had lost too many causalities. They suggested a team of elites that had free reign over the top cases of world importance and he had chosen the best SHIELD had to offer.
Barton was the comic relief that held the team together. Between him and May, some of the funniest practical jokes he had even seen had gone down at the various SHIELD bases…though he'd never admit to finding them amusing.
Romanova had been a stray no one expected. But when Barton brought her home, he knew immediately where she was going to stay. And after he saw the way she and May clung to each other in the violence around them, he knew he was right to keep her.
Maria had joined when May picked her up as her first Rookie. There was something in the young Communications Academy graduate that Melinda saw potential in. And under her guidance, Maria flourished into a top notch specialist. A Master manipulator. And an even better leader.
It was no secret that Coulson was his favorite. Phil was an easygoing, "yes sir", no trouble causing, respectful field agent. He had good instincts and cared about the work. He wasn't a ladies man like Barton, or a flight risk like Romanova, or savant like Melinda, but he was a damn good field agent which balanced out all the extremes in group.
He had never met anyone quite like Melinda May. He suspected he never would again; someone who was perfectly ironed on the outside and diamond on the inside. He and Peggy recruited her when she was sixteen. Lian already had her listed for CIA blackops when they convinced her to jump ship to join SHIELD. She was the greatest martial arts master he had ever witnessed in combat; explosive like a hundred and twenty pounds of C-4 tripped with a hair wire.
Phil may have been his favorite, but Melinda…she had always been his star.
When Melinda woke up again when it was dark outside.
The hotel room was silent and she braced a hand against her bandaged side, wincing slightly as she sat up. There was no one else there. Without a sound, her hand flew to the SIG sitting on the end table.
"Nick?"
She cleared the rest of the hotel room with her mind fluttered around the task. Had something happened? There were twelve missed calls on her SAT phone. Two from Natasha. One from Skye. Eight from Phil. One from Mack. She didn't listen to any of the voice mail messages. She knew what they'd all say.
As she circled back into the tiny living room, a manilla envelope caught her eye from the coffee table. Nick's black scrawl was written on the front of it with the keys to her car next to it.
Emergency with TS. Sit rep in 72 hours.
Underneath it, she found a hasty P.S.
For Tahiti.
Inside she found a one way ticket to Hunan, China.