It's like a heart attack nobody can see.
Her pulse trips, stumbles, then starts to pound. Her toes go cold. Her fingers curl into fists. Blood rushes clumsily to her head, her heart, knocking about as if her veins are five sizes too small. Her gut twists.
And the hole – the hole that's always there – gets a little bit bigger.
It happens every time she walks into a room with a known Inhuman.
No one can tell. Her face betrays no emotion – her smile was the first thing to go, after Cambridge – but the gnawing, relentless fear is real.
She's trained herself to walk with it. To work with it. To fight through it.
But she doesn't tell anyone about it.
There's no one to tell.
And even if there were – they would tell her she deserves it.
The folder is placed meekly, reverently, on her desk – standard Hydra logo, with bands of not-very-subtle red across the top and bottom. Top Priority. Urgent.
She flips it open, scans the first page, and frowns.
"Pinsky, what is this?" she snaps, ice in every word. "This is a basic interview for processing purposes."
"Sp-special request, Agent May, ma-ma'am," Pinsky stammers, trying manfully and failing spectacularly to make eye contact. "From the Doctor himself."
Her right fist clenches, in irritation or fear or something else.
She wants to say no. She wants to walk away.
But, she reminds herself, as she does every day every minute every second, that she can't. She broke the world – ripped a gaping hole in it, filled with loss and death, just like the one inside her – and this is what she has sworn to do.
"Get the subject ready."
She studies the booking card again, although she's already learnt what little there is on it by heart.
Basic biodata of an Inhuman teenager – Gao Yongming, 15 years old, picked up living on the streets of D.C. Nothing on his abilities. Nothing to suggest why he might be special enough for the Doctor to take a personal interest.
But it does at least make clear why she was assigned the case.
Someone saw the boy's name and jumped to one conclusion - that, after losing a day or two in custody, he would be glad to see a face that looked like his.
She rolls her eyes.
Racism is alive and well in Hydra.
The boy doesn't flinch or open his eyes when she enters the room. He's slight for his age, with messy shades of blue and green threaded through his hair. He's taking deep, even breaths - perfectly calm in a situation that has reduced grown men to fits of tears and panic.
"Mr. Gao," she begins, taking the chair across from him. "I'm Agent May."
"你好," he says, a tiny smirk in his voice. "Hello," he repeats in English.
He looks at her, at last, and she's floored, for a moment, by the colours dancing through his eyes - each iris a starburst of sunset gold and midnight blue.
It's remarkably disconcerting, and no doubt an aspect of his abilities.
"Do you understand what we're doing here?" she asks, making sure to bleed all emotion and colour from her words.
"Do you?" he responds - not cheekily, just in a completely matter-of-fact way.
She grits her teeth. This is not how interviews are supposed to go.
"It's standard protocol," she explains. "You tell us what you can do, and we add you to our registry." She pauses, just long enough for the ghosts of choices past to catch up with her. "That's how we keep people safe."
"If you say so," he shrugs, though the look on his face is less defiant than bemused. As if he can't believe that she believes what she's saying.
Cut to the chase, she tells herself, Get this over with, the sooner the better.
"What, exactly, do you do?" She studies him as he ponders the question. In truth, her operative's mind has already processed him: small, almost scrawny; kind face; doesn't look like he could harm a fly.
But she had thought that in Bahrain too.
"I… read the truth in things," he says simply.
"I'll need more than that, Mr. Gao."
"My family calls it 看穿." He rakes his hand through his hair, and she could swear that - for a split second - the gold in his eyes bleeds into the white, until there are no other colours left.
"'Seeing Through'?" she translates, making a note on his card. "So... you can tell when people are lying?"
"That's me," he laughs. "The human lie detector."
"That must come in handy," she observes. On the card, she checks 'Cognitive' under ABILITIES. She circles 'Minimal' under REAL-WORLD EFFECT, then adds question marks around her choice.
"Not really," he says, a trace of despair slipping into the way he holds himself. "When I woke up, it felt like..."
His voice trails off, the colours in his eyes fade for a moment, and he somehow looks five years younger and a thousand years old, all at once.
"There's something wrong with this world." He holds up a hand to the light and studies it, with a cool, clinical detachment.
Of course there is, she thinks. It's a world where you have to take the children who are different and make sure they don't kill other children. It's a world without heroes - just Inhumans, just ticking time bombs, just death wrapped in human form.
"It's not what you think," he says gently, and she can tell that he's weighing his words now, trying to decide how much more he should tell her.
"Can you demonstrate?" she asks, business-like and stern as always.
"Sure," he shrugs. "Say something. Anything. I'll tell you whether it's the truth. Maybe start with something easy. Your name?"
"梅秋莲," she offers. Not many people know or care to ask about her Chinese name.
"Mei - Qiu - Lian," he sounds each syllable out after her. "Melinda May. True."
She only notices her pulse because it's started pounding, quietly, in her ear. Did she mention her first name?
"I love coffee," she lies.
"You don't," he says immediately. "You can't stand the taste of it."
"Lucky guess," she shoots back. "I don't think a couple of those will prove you can do what you say you can."
A sad little smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. "You want proof?"
She should stop the interview, right now. She knows what he can do - that was her only task, and that's all she'll need to assess whether to detain or release him.
But something stops her. A whisper. A hint. A ghost of something else - something more.
She nods.
"You'll have to give me your hand," he says, resting his own on the table between them.
She scoffs, half in disbelief, half surprise. "You're not serious. You're actually going to read my palm?"
Her words call up a childhood memory, washed grey with all the years gone by, of a dusty old shop in Chinatown. Qiulian will do great things, the wizened fortune teller told her credulous aunt. She will change the world.
At the time, she had dismissed the old man as a quack. Turns out he was right, after all - she had changed the world. Just not for the better.
"I couldn't believe it either, when I started doing it." He looks sheepish. "Make fun of ancient traditions, and they're gonna come back and bite you in the ass one day."
Something suspiciously like a laugh blooms across her chest, and she buries it by clearing her throat.
What is going on here? she wonders, recalling the way every element of her biochemistry betrays her around Inhumans. And yet, with this boy -
"Okay," she says quickly, before logic can take hold, "Show me what you've got."
Before she can change her mind, she offers him her right hand, palm side up.
"Chinese is a funny language, isn't it?" he asks thoughtfully, as he takes her hand in his. "Words made up of words, meanings built upon meanings. Like 掌心."
He's right, she realises: 掌 - palm. 心 - heart. She wouldn't think twice about it, ordinarily - the two characters joined together to create a new word. But break them up and...
"You're actually holding your heart in your hand," he says, completing her thought and sending a tiny shiver down her spine. "That's why I can read it."
He brushes his thumb across her palm, his eyes clouding over with a stormy gold.
"You have a family." His words are filled with a quiet wonder, like he's seeing things he never expected to find.
She rolls her eyes - of course I do - but he shakes his head before she can protest. "I don't mean your parents."
His fingers trace patterns into her palm.
"They're looking for you," he says slowly, brow furrowed in concentration. "Two girls - one the blue of the sky and the white of flowers - and one who's walked in the dust of another galaxy. There's a boy from the Highlands too. But he's lost as well. You know… I think I've met him."
He's crazy, she thinks, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, Riddles and rhymes and rubbish.
"Oh god," he gasps, without warning, snatching his hand away like she's burnt a hole through his skin.
There's pity written in his eyes, now, pity and heartache and grief.
"They've taken him away from you," he whispers, fear and loss threaded through every word. "He's all over your heartline."
The boy is spouting nonsense, she knows it, but she can't help herself. "Him? Who are you talking about?"
"They bled him out of your memories. But he - he's carved into your bones. Your heart. Your soul."
The boy's hands are trembling now. "You're trying to remember him."
"That… that makes no sense," she argues, "How can I be trying to remember someone I don't even know? Someone I've never met?"
"You met him thirty years ago." Gold swirls in his eyes. "You know that bottle of Haig you've set aside in your liquor cabinet? The one you haven't touched in years? You're saving it for him."
Her mouth goes dry. How could this boy know -
Suddenly, the door slams open. The Doctor, flanked by two agents.
"I think we've heard enough," snaps Fitz, disdain sketched across his face. "Escort Mr. Gao to the detention facility."
She wants to protest - she knows what this means for the boy - but her mind is a mess, tangled up with her heart, and -
Yongming just stands there, looking at her, as they click handcuffs into place around his wrists.
"Agent May," he says quietly. "I read your lifeline. 在这待久了, 你的心会碎的."
"You were watching this whole time?" she asks, wondering why she's even surprised at that.
"Of course." He's settled himself into the chair across from hers, his fingers drumming an impatient rhythm into the table. "I interviewed him myself, earlier today."
Her pulse is just starting to return to normal, though the confusion is still eating away at her ability to focus.
"Then why…"
"A second opinion, of sorts," he cuts her off. "I wanted to see him try his parlour tricks on someone else - someone who wouldn't fall for them so easily."
She forces her face to remain impassive - which, fortunately, comes naturally to her these days.
"So you think it's all just… a scam?" she asks, tentatively, her mind still stumbling over everything the boy told her.
"He's quite the showman - a poet, too," Fitz concedes. "He almost had me believing that I've travelled to the ocean floor, across dimensions, and to another planet - all to find the half of me that he claims is missing."
Her nerves are still on edge. "Some of the things he said, though," she points out. "They were true. And there's no way -"
"I suspect his real power is to convince you of his truth." Fitz pulls the folder to him and glances at the few words she'd scribbled on the page. "He picks up enough about you to spin a story - one you'd rather hear than your own."
Something very much like disappointment begins to creep through her veins. Of course.
"I'll recommend permanent detention," her boss continues, uncapping a pen and adding his own comments to the report. "With termination a possibility."
"Is that really necessary?" Her hands clench into fists. "He's just a boy, and he seems harmless e-"
"With your track record," Fitz interrupts. "Better safe than sorry - wouldn't you say, Agent May?"
It's a punch in the gut - Bahrain Cambridge your fault don't ever be so stupid again -
And she jerks her head to her chest in a nod - to agree with him, but also to avoid looking at him.
As he leaves the room, she thinks of the last thing the boy said to her.
Stay here too long, and your heart will break.