AN: This is set some time after, and consistently canon with, the season 2 finale. As such, you can expect it to become wildly AU as soon as Season 3 begins. It's been some time since I wrote any Fanfiction and I am new to this show so please bear with me if this isn't good or if I am a little off on the tone of the characters. Any feedback is welcome
Largely unnecessary disclaimer: I make no claim toward the intellectual property of anything within the Marvel Universe or the Agents of Shield Television Show nor do I have any intent or design to profit from this piece of fiction in any way.
It is to be posted on the purely for the enjoyment of its members and not anywhere else without my consent or the consent of an official of the owners of said property should they be so inclined (They won't.)
Now that that's out of the way, let's begin.
Wellington, Iowa.
"Get off my land!" Beatrice Hall shouted from the entrance of the large gray barn that had stood proudly on her small farm for generations.
A second later there was a crashing sound and one of the unhinged doors sailed through the air toward Skye who was forced to dive, once again, out of the way to avoid being crushed when that massive door smashed into the earth where she'd been standing only a second before. She rolled nimbly to her feet behind the relative safety of what had once been a pleasantly blue old pickup truck and braved a quick peek. There stood Beatrice, a middle-aged part time teacher at the local high school, proud mother and energetic member of Wellington's small community, angrily ripping the second half of the barn door off as it were made of paper mache instead of weighing hundreds of pounds.
"We're Agents of Shield!" Skye shouted, staying safely under cover. The woman was amazingly accurate with those projectiles and she didn't want to end up like her team. Not thirty feet away Deathlok was still struggling to escape from under the refrigerator that had smashed into him and pinned against the side of the farmhouse. "Don't make this any harder than it has to be! We know what you did at that bake sale, Mrs. Hall!"
"Third place!" the woman screamed and the remains of the pickup truck Skye was hiding behind shuddered against the impact of the second barn door slamming against it. "My Apple Crumble Surprise wins every year and suddenly I come in third! I know what you did! You know what the surprise is? Cinnamon!"
"I could use some help here!" Skye said urgently. Her ear-bud kept her in constant communication with the team, even when they were scattered like that moment. Risking another glance she saw Beatrice turning her attention back to Deathlok, who was only just managing to shove the heavy, and full, refrigerator, away. "Mrs. Hall, stay with me! How can Cinnamon be a surprise? Everyone puts that in their apple deserts!"
"Ooof! I… ugh! A Little Busy with her son!" May's voice was its usual flatly professional tone. Aside from the grunting, of course.
"I'm coming," Elena Santos' languid tone followed immediately. While May sounded like she was wrestling a bear, which wasn't far off given what Skye knew about Beatrice enormous son, Elena sounded like she was taking a quiet stroll along the beach with her feet in the water to the ankles.
"I'm up," Deathlok grumbled. "I'll engage and you circle around, try and get…. Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
Skye risked another look, her Night-Night gun at the ready despite the fact that she'd already plugged Beatrice twice and it had barely slowed the woman. "Are you freaking kidding me?" she asked in exasperation then raised her voice to shout. "Mrs. Hall, put down the cow!"
"You heard her, get off our land!" a shotgun blast ripped into the earth near Skye's feet. Skye rolled away desperately to get clear of the path of the blast, an action that unfortunately sent her back into Beatrice's line of sight. She cringed, waiting for the inevitable blow of something huge smashing her into a puddle but it never happened. Instead she heard the woman shout in alarm and the telling mechanical chiming of one of Deathlok's cybernetic weapons discharging.
Nigel Hall was already reloading from his perch at the front door of the farm house. Whatever had caused the drastic change in Beatrice and her son hadn't effected Mr. Hall but the man wasn't about to stand by and allow his family to be carted off by the government and that shotgun was a real enough danger for anyone. Skye lifted her gun and put a round of dendrotoxin into the man's chest and he tumbled back into the house, only his feet remaining in sight as he slumped to the hardwood floor of the pleasant little home.
Deathlok was struggling with Beatrice and was taking a beating in the process. The half-human cyborg that Skye knew as her friend Mike was the strongest individual Skye knew but he was barely managing to keep the thrashing, screaming woman within his bear-hug. Seeing her husband shot had the woman in a frenzy; she wasn't hearing any of his assurances that Mr. Hall wasn't dead.
"Anytime, Quell," Skye grumbled, firing another round into the woman when their thrashing gave her the opportunity. It didn't seem to slow the woman down and Skye once again promised to talk to fix about upgrading the Night-Night gun. A disturbing number of the disturbing number of powered individuals that had been appearing over the last year showed a disturbing resistance to their dendrotoxin. That was too much disturbing for Skye.
"I'm here!" Elena, or Quell as she'd been named when she joined the team, said brightly as she appeared from the other side of the barn.
A handsome woman in her thirties, Elena Santos looked like anything but a member of an elite group of powered agents of a clandestine organization. The sleek jumpsuit that looked so natural on Skye was bulky and awkward on Elena and the gun at her belt looked more like a Halloween prop then a weapon. Indeed, she looked more like she'd just woken up than like an agent in a life and death struggle with a family of crazed Inhumans. That was Elena though and her ability to look and sound like an agent wasn't why she was on the team.
"Hurry," Deathlok grunted, taking an elbow in the face.
"Sorry," Elena winced, patting him awkwardly on the shoulder and nearly catching an elbow herself in the process. "Are you okay? That looked painful."
"Hurry please!"
"Your ears," Quell reminded and Skye touched her ear-bud. Fitz had designed their ear pieces to emit a sound too high for the human ear to pick up but somehow able to negate the effects of Quell's power so when Elena began to hum soothingly in Beatrice's ear, all Skye heard was what sounded like a Spanish lullaby.
Beatrice heard something else entirely. What she heard Skye had no idea and wasn't curious enough to find out but Beatrice stilled immediately. The woman's red face went slack and passive and her shrieking recriminations faltered into silence. She began to rock and sway in Deathlok's embrace, almost like a child nestling into her father's shoulder. If that child's father had a shoulder attached to a rocket propelled missile launcher and was encased in steel and the child was a grown woman able to tear a barn apart with her bare hands.
That might not have been Skye's best simile.
"She'll sleep now," Quell smiled, reaching out to brush the woman's hair gently. "Poor thing."
"Poor thing?" Deathlok grunted. "She threw a cow at me!"
"Oh no!" Quell blinked, her eyes widening in worry. "Is the cow okay?"
"Guys!" Skye cut in before they could begin to bicker. "We have to go help May."
"I'm fine," May grumbled, emerging from the nearby cornfields. Behind her a mountain of a young man, complete in overalls, was walking sullenly. His hands were secured behind his back and he had the beginnings of what would be soon be one heck of a black eye.
May, for her part, was sporting a bloody nose. That was nothing new, though; May always had a bloody nose. Skye privately suspected that if May went a week without being punched in the nose she found a door to walk into to attain the properly ominous and impressive trickle of blood to maintain her battle hardened image. Not that she'd ever offer that opinion anywhere May might hear it, of course.
"Great," Skye said. "We got them all. Let's get them packaged for pickup and get out of here. Our next target is in Los Angeles."
"Not anymore," May said, shaking her captive when he tried to move closer to check on his unconscious parents. "Coulson just called. He wants us back at Gamma station right away."
That was news. For nearly a year Skye had been leading her team with little contact with the outside. They had their little base, if Gamma could be called that, and got a list of targets but they rarely dealt with Shield and rarely saw Coulson. She tried not let it bother her and had even gotten used it it after a rough few months. It made sense, after all. Coulson was needed to help rebuild the wreckage of Shield and she had an alarmingly large list of dangerous people to evaluate and either subdue as had just happened or investigate.
Skye hadn't even known Coulson was at the Station, the man had been increasingly absent over the past months as rumors had begun circulating about tensions among the avengers and the talk of the registration act had intensified.
Not that Skye wanted to think about that. That act would change her life, one way or another, and she'd been stonewalled at every turn when she tried to discover more. Maybe if Coulson was around he'd have some answers she could weasel out of him. Besides, it would be good to see him again.
"Good," she finally said. "I've been wanting to talk to him. Let's get back."
It was hours before they were back at Gamma, getting the prisoners sorted on the Bus and flying the massive mobile base of operations to Gamma's secure location in the hills of Kentucky. More than enough time for Skye's adrenaline to fade and for the ache and fatigue of the fight to set in, leaving her muscle wearing and limping from having wrenched her knee at some point. She was wincing as the group walked down the ramp into Gamma's spacious hangar and half-heartedly acknowledged the salute of a young technician.
"Agent Johnson," the boy said. She realized distantly that the young tech was probably only a year younger than she was but somehow he still seemed very much like a boy. Her experience with the team over the previous years had aged her in more ways than the simple physical, searing away most of the childish innocence she'd never realized she had until she felt it fade. "Agent Coulson asked to see Agent May. He asked me to tell you that he'd come find you soon."
"Skye," she corrected the boy. Daisy Johnson may the name she'd been born into but the truth was the name didn't resonate with her. When she heard it, she felt like she was hearing someone call out to a stranger. Mostly the name just brought up painful memories she'd worked hard to push away. Almost a year after the drama with her family and that pain was still raw enough that sometimes she just wanted to find a quiet corner and cry. "Just call me Skye."
"Yes, ma'am," the boy saluted again and she sighed, walking past. May was already gone, having taken Skye's momentary distraction as an opportunity to avoid the younger agent trying to tag along. Mike was walking off as well, muttering about cows and trying to ignore Elena who was tagging along chattering happily and completely unperturbed by his stoic quiet.
Abandoned, she tossed her bag in her tiny room and rejected the urge to crash face first into her comfortable cot. Instead wandered down two flights of stairs to the busy little hub that was Gamma's lab. Almost a dozen white coat clad scientists, none of whom ever bothered to speak to anyone not in white coat, bustled past her as they worked on whatever supposedly important research that had them so focused. They were background noise, as far as Skye was concerned, important in their own way but most just extensions of the person in the office on the other side of the lab.
"That's not what I'm saying," Mack's deep voice emerged from the back office.
"Then what?" Fitz asked in that rich accented tone, somehow caught between his customary polite cool and annoyance. "You want me to just abandon her? So I can work on your containment… containment…"
Skye knocked on the door mostly to give Fitz a moment. His condition had improved a lot but when he was upset or agitated he still sometimes lost track of his train of thought or found himself fishing for words or terms and she knew how much it frustrated him having people watch him fish like, even his friends. Besides that, she knew what they were arguing about and didn't think she could take listening to yet another argument about Jemma.
Her parents' fates weren't the only wound that still hurt.
"Hey," she said brightly. "Guess who's back?"
"Skye!" Fitz flashed a smile, his agitation with Mack disappearing. She grinned back at him and held up a hand, chuckling when he awkwardly slapped her palm. Her efforts to "cool him up" had met with very mixed results. "How did the mission go?"
"We got them," she hopped up on the spot of his work bench that was somehow always free when the rest of the bench was a debris field she couldn't make sense of. She suspected that he kept that spot open so she'd have a place to sit and talk. "Hey Mack."
"Skye," the big man nodded, turning to leave. "Good to see you. We'll work on these schematics later, turbo."
The air was chilly between Skye and Mack, a condition so common that she barely noticed it. Mack was a good man and she trusted him to have her back but the man had his issues with anything more than human and that included Skye. To his credit he tried hard to pretend otherwise but things would never be comfortable between them, not like they'd once been. She wasn't supposed to know it but she was a source of tension between Mack and Fitz.
"So, tell me about the mission," Fitz prodded her to scoot over a little so he could put away what looked to her like a metal basketball but was actually either something for her team or the world's most complicated taffy maker. Sometimes it was hard to tell until he turned the contraption on.
She reached across the table, not caring that she jostled him in doing so, and stole part of the half eaten sandwich that she knew had sitting there for longer than it should. As expected his eyes narrowed and he hastily ate the rest of the sandwich, knowing full well she'd eat the entire thing if he didn't. He didn't eat nearly enough, hadn't in too long. He didn't sleep either but she had no way of bullying him into that.
"Tell me," he prompted again around a mouthful and so she did.
It had, somewhere along the way, become something of a ritual. She's come back from a mission and drop by his office, fill him on where she'd been and what she'd done. Things had changed so fast and so drastically that for a time after she'd been made team leader she'd felt utterly lost. Everything was so different, even the people she'd worked with, that she'd had a hard time finding her footing in her new position of authority.
Mike was a valued and invested part of the team, someone she could count on and trust to do his job. He was her responsibility, though, and as much as she liked him he'd never been one to relax with. May was supportive in her own way, a constant source of strength to be counted on. She was only around p[art of the time, however, and when she was she made certain that Skye made every decision as if she didn't want to usurp the newly minted leader. Hunter and Bobbi were simply gone, they'd disappeared almost immediately after the reformation of Shield and all she'd been able to discover was that they were together on a mission for Nick Fury himself. Coulson was gone more than there doing the hard work of rebuilding Shield.
And Fitz had been… well, he'd been obsessed.
They'd discovered Jemma missing almost as soon as it had happened, even had video to show exactly what had happened. The trouble was that stone Jiaying (It was easier to think of her as Jiaying and not Mom) proved completely unresponsive and unchanging regardless of anything they'd done to try and get Jemma back. For months they'd worked, taken in the best minds that Shield had to offer and even brought in outsiders to consult. Fitz had gone weeks without sleep, even going so far as to invent a gadget that ran an electrical current through his body to keep him awake until he'd tiredly bumped into Mike and nearly killed the both of them.
They'd worked diligently, not resting or pausing and they hunted down any Inhuman that might have an answer. First for weeks, then for months, until every lead had run dry and they'd been left staring at a piece of rock that had somehow swallowed their friend. And slowly people had turned their attention to other things. No one said it aloud but more than one thought it.
Maybe Jemma wasn't going to be found. Maybe there was no more Jemma.
Not Fitz though. He worked to the exclusion of his other duties, to the exclusion of everything else. He studied fields he wasn't familiar with, fields that had always been Jemma's domain just to try new theories and approaches that might offer results. When that hadn't worked he'd tried wilder more dangerous things. He'd never lost faith that somehow, someway, he'd get Jemma back.
Then the call had been made to have the stone moved to a secure location and that had seemed to break something inside the thin young man. He was told he'd still be able to work the problem but that until he could offer substantive prove that he'd made progress he wouldn't be able to access the stone again. He'd been disconsolate, refusing to leave his lab and his work, convinced that everyone had given up on Simmons.
It had been Coulson that suggested Skye talk to him. He seemed to get that they were both lost, they both needed some kind of anchor. He'd sent Skye to talk to Fitz and while she'd been trying to talk him into dialing back a little to take care of himself, he'd shot back at her that she was more than just her job. It had become an argument but ultimately it had allowed them both to voice some deeply personal and ugly things they'd been keeping bottled up.
It was nice, being able to say those things to someone she knew wasn't going to judge her. Every vile thought about her lost mother and the father she'd only really gotten a glimpse of. How angry she was that the only memories she really had of either, that she'd ever have of either, were memories of them as monsters. She'd gotten glimpses of the people they might have been, the people they should have been, but nothing more than fleeting, broken glimpses.
What Fitz had told her about Simmons had broken her heart but she listened. On some level she got that he just needed to talk, the same as she did. So they talked and somewhere along the way she got her friend back. She got to have a person that looked at her and just saw his friend Skye. Not an agent. Not a leader. Not a monster.
She hadn't realized how much she needed that until she found it again. Being seen as nothing more than a person.
She saw the way some people looked at her when she put her gloves on. It was hard to miss. She may be an agent but she was always something else and they never forgot it.
She'd finally dragged him away from his obsession by convincing him that she needed his help. That had turned out to be a stroke of luck because he seemed to need a task he could accomplish after months of butting his head against failure after failure. A few days later he'd fixed their ear-buds to protect them from Quell's power, making her a much more useful and usable asset. The week after that he'd fixed a problem Deathlok had been having, providing a nonlethal alternative to the cyborgs deadly arsenal.
Friends. It was a good word, one she found she quite liked. She didn't have many.
So when she returned from a mission she went to visit him and perched on her spot on his desk and gave him all the details, even the painful and/or embarrassing ones. He'd sigh wistfully and tug at his damaged hand as if wishing he could join her. Then that look would pass and he'd tell her about his work, mostly about his latest theory on how to get into the stone, or how to discover what the stone was. His theories would grow wilder each visit and she'd know he was grasping, struggling to keep his faith alive.
Eventually he became an unofficial member of her team, so much so that he was sent a staff to deal with the projects he was asked to oversee for Mack or some other part of Shield. The work on the stone had become a strange hobby instead of an obsession. She never told him to stop, never called him silly for his search. The truth was she desperately wanted him to succeed. Thinking about Jemma being gone was enough to make her break down; it had on more than one occasion.
"You know, if you had a monkey," he began when she complained about the lack of surveillance on the Hall farm. She smirked, throwing a piece of bread at him, an act which was seemingly tantamount to dousing his work area with gasoline by the way he flew into a fussy fit and began cleaning.
"You should come out with us sometime," she said as he wiped down the counter. Another part of their little ritual. Fitz still wasn't well, he was too pale and his hair was too long, giving him a mildly mad scientist look. The look was so complete that she'd have teased him about it if it were so dangerously close to being true. "We need to get you some sun. You get any paler and you're going to start sparkling and making girls called Bella go all gooey."
"Maybe," he nodded, glancing at other desk in the room, the one that had his other work. "I just have a lot to do."
"Are you really going to make me beg?" she adopted a big eyed look, not above playing dirty. If she knew anything she knew that Fitz was powerless when it came to his friends asking for help. It was, in her opinion, one of his best features. That kind of loyalty was rare, especially in a world like theirs.
"Well, I suppose I could," he hedged. "I've been wanting to see the new jumpsuits in action. The new alloy is remarkable and I really should have a look at Mike's…." He trailed off, searching for the word.
It was hard not to try and help him when he struggled. At first she'd avoided being around him too much because it had hurt seeing her brilliant friend fumbling with his thoughts. When they'd started talking again, she'd tried to fill in the blanks and found that only made it worse. So when he trailed off, she reached over and picked up a helmet that she thought was supposed to attach to the basketball thing he'd put away.
"What's this?" she deliberately fumbled awkwardly with it.
"Hey!" he snatched it away. "Careful now, you'll ruin the modulation. I won't have you fumbling around that with your clumsy paws."
"Paws," she protested, holding up her gloved hands and wiggling her fingers. "These are hacker hands, buster. Clumsy hands don't get past the NSA firewalls, do they? Not that I ever did that, if anyone asks."
He looked around guiltily, as if one of the white coats was going to overhear and turn them both in. "Well," he finally sighed, holding the helmet out for her to take again. "I suppose there's no reason you shouldn't know. It's a neural mapper. Well, mostly. To start, I suppose. Really it's more of a neural remapper and-"
"Neural," she peered at it dubiously. "It maps your mind? Like a CAT scan?"
"Yes and no," he looked around again to make sure no one was listening then edged closer, picking up a roll of white paper, which he unrolled and placed over the helmet so she was clumsily holding both. "The mind, it's really nothing more than an extremely complicated mass of electrical signals. Our thoughts, our personality, everything that makes us what we are, it's all stored in those currents traveling along specific pathways in specific orders and at specific times. The way each current interacts with every one of the millions of others. You understand?"
"Let's pretend I do."
"Right, well, we store information. Not just some but every single bit of data we've ever received. It's all stored somewhere in your mind waiting to be accessed. Short term memory here, long term there, cognitive function here, communication there. Whether our conscious mind can call on that information is determined by this process so if a part of not receiving or sending, you might work around it. So if I learn how to remap those, I could-"
"Fitz, this sounds dangerous," she began, frowning at the image of a brain he'd unrolled for her. The brain was covered in colors, mostly blue and green but some much darker and others almost white. It didn't make any sense to her but she didn't need to be a scientist to figure it was his own head she was looking at.
"Somethings happening!" someone called form the other room. "On the news!"
Skye turned to the big monitor on Fitz's wall, using the keyboard beside her to turn it on and then pull up the news. The screen came to life and it turned out she didn't have to change the channel at all; every channel was the same. There was trouble in Washington D.C., some kind of violent conflict. Again.
"Is that Iron Man?" Fitz asked slowly, taking the roll of paper and the helmet from her. "And Captain America? What are they-? Are they fighting?"
"Oh my god," Skye breathed. "This is bad, Fitz. This is really bad."
They were fighting. Like actually fighting. Right there in front of the Washington monument. The reporter was talking over the live image, talking about the registration act; there'd been a surprise vote in congress and the senate both and it had passed.
The Registration Act passed and Captain America was fighting with Iron Man. The world had gone insane. It didn't make any sense at all.
"There are more arriving," Fitz put a hand on her shoulder. "They're all… Look, it's the Hulk!"
The room suddenly shook so violently that Fitz would have fallen if she hadn't caught him. A second later there was a second explosion somewhere deeper in the facility. The white coats outside were shouting and the alarm began to blare loudly.
"Attention!" Coulson's voice cut through the alarm. He sounded calm, as he always did when the world was going to hell. For a brief second Skye felt a fierce surge of affection for the man. Any storm, no matter what was happening, and Phil Coulson could be counted on to be thinking clearly and thinking about his people. "Flashfire. I repeat, Flashfire!"
"What's that? Where are those blasts coming from?" Fitz asked, looking around in confusion. He looked like he didn't know what he was supposed to do so he settled for gathering up some of his most precious items. "I don't know that protocol."
There was a lot of shouting in the distance and the sound of gunfire. "Fitz," Skye said, a sinking feeling in her stomach. "We have to go. We have to go right now."
"What's wrong?" he asked worriedly, pressing a weapon into her hands. Actually, he was handing her a number of items, an assortment of gadgets he was stuffing into a bag.
"Flashfire," she said weakly. "It's an order to go to ground. A last resort in case-" she cut off when a uniformed small group of men in dark combat suits charged into the lab outside and opened fire. Several of the scientists went down and the rest scattered amidst a whirlwind of screams and shouts from both groups. "We have to go!"
"There's one!" a voice shouted! "Take her down!"
Instinctively she lifted a hand and fired her weapon at the approaching commandos. Who they were, she couldn't say, but she had a sinking feeling in her stomach. She unloaded her clip and forced them to take cover but found herself shoved hard from behind by Fitz when she was stepping out to try and clear an escape route. A good thing he shoved her, too; a hail of bullets riddled his lab in an explosion of glass and metal an instant later.
"Who are they? They're trying to kill us!" he was on top of her and she shoved him off so she could get back to her feet, firing again.
"Not now! Are you okay?" she looked him over quickly to make sure he wasn't hit. "Are you hit?"
He grabbed something from the bag of goodies he'd just packed and threw it through the open door toward the enemy agents. "Cover your eyes!" he shouted, throwing an arm over both of them to shield them both a second before a blinding flash erupted and caught her unprepared. Her vision went white and she found herself on her knees rubbing furiously at her eyes.
"What did you do?" she mumbled dumbly, feeling him take her hand and drag her after him. She had no idea where they were going and stumbled several times over what she hoped weren't bodies. Dimly she heard voices groaning, the commandos had gotten the worst of whatever Fitz had thrown.
Fitz was shouting at the lab techs, extolling them to either flee or follow but Skye couldn't tell if they obeyed. Whatever his device had done her vision only started to fade after several terrifying moments of stop and go movement and the sounds of violent battle following them.
"Deathlok! Mike!" Fitz suddenly shouted, pulling her forward. By that point she was able to make out a few things through the ringing in her ears and the blur in her vision. They were in the hanger somehow. In the distance she saw a huge figure that she thought was Mike Peterson walking into a firestorm of bullets and agents. That's where Fitz was trying to take her.
"We have to go," Fitz was saying beneath the sound and fury of the battle. "I think I see-"
"Fitz!" Skye screamed, shoving him aside.
One of the dark fatigue wearing figures had turned to Fitz when he revealed himself and was lifting an automatic weapon, firing. Her hand lifted and power flooded through her, a quivering force In the pit of her stomach stretching forth and extending through her. It surged to her arm and out her fingertips in a wave of vibration that sent the gun wielding man flying. Not only him but the men behind him and a huge part of the hanger wall as well, which caused an entire section of the roof to collapse down in an explosion of dust and debris that left them both on the ground.
"Skye," Fitz said weakly a moment later when she was getting back to her feet. He was laying a few feet away clutching his arm, which was bleeding badly from a bullet wound. "Are they okay? I can't see anyone."
"Go," May's voice shouted from a great distance. "Flashfire!"
There were a lot of figures getting to their feet, most of them still holding automatic weapons. Skye knew if they were going to escape it had to be that second, once the enemy forces gathered themselves there would be no eluding them. So she did the only thing she could and gathered Fitz up, forcing him to lean on her.
"The others," he said weakly, most of his weight on her. Luckily he was very light and she was able to run with him leaning so hard against her.
"We can't," she said. "We have to go. We can't help them if we're dead. Stay with me, Fitz. Stay with me."
(No cows were injured in the writing of this story.)