And, chapter four. Thank you for your kind reviews! They keep me posting - there are two chapters left after this one, I think, so thanks for reading this far!


COULSON

He feels nothing for her. And yet he stands with only a low table and a few chairs between them with the barrel of a gun pointed at her head and his finger on the trigger and waits. What he is waiting for he cannot say—for her to make the first move, perhaps, so that shooting her will be justifiable in his own head.

A very secret, dark part of himself hopes that she'll throw up her hands and shoot him one of her almost-smiles and admit that she's been on his side the whole time. The rest of him can think only of Lorelei and how disappointed she'll be if he lets Agent May walk away.

"You said you'd have my back," he hears himself say. "Is that still true?"

It's a one in a million chance, but that deep, hidden traitorous part of himself wants to make sure it's not an option.

"I'll always have your back," May says, and the words send tentative relief up and down his spine and warm his chest just a little.

"You sure about that?" He presses further, but she's lowered her fists and his watching him with her head cocked to one side, and there's the not-smile he was looking for. He lets the gun drop a little, loosens his grip, and his lips have begun a smile when she says,

"Don't ever doubt it."

And then she's leaping up and twisting around, bracing her hands on the table and slamming her heel into the gun, jarring it painfully out of his hands and sending him staggering backward to avoid her other heel. He's been had, and he knows it, and he's angry.

"May!"

"Fight it, Coulson," she says. They're on the same side of the table now, just feet apart, and the gun has skittered away into a corner. He glances at it and she sees and moves to the right to stand between it and him. "This is not who you are."

"Yeah? And how do you know who I am?" he asks coolly. He might be angry, but he's in complete possession of his faculties, that much he knows. He's got Lorelei now, but he still remembers May, knows everything about her. In some ways, she's more familiar to him than he is to himself. "While you were down in the basement pushing paper for all those years I was out in the field, in situations just like Bahrain, running missions for Fury alone over and over again. Who I am has changed a lot since you went into hiding, May. You don't even know who you are anymore…how could you possibly know me?" He laughs shortly, humorlessly. "You've got my back? Sure didn't have my back when I was skewered by alien technology before the Battle of New York. You should have been on that helicarrier right alongside me, May. And you weren't. You were sitting in a bunker stapling memos and filling reports. I don't think you have the right to know me. Not anymore."

He's struck all of the sore spots, and feels vindictively pleased about it as he watches the hurt in her eyes blossom, the color drain from her face, her lips tighten.

"Don't you think I don't know that?" she whispers, and her voice breaks despite her best efforts to keep it steady. "Don't you think I didn't think about that every single day while you were dead? That I don't still think about it?"

"I wouldn't know. You're not exactly the sharing type anymore."

"Phil…"
"That's enough. I've had enough." He glances behind her and lets his gaze soften, lifts a hand in welcome, and she turns her head to look, dropping automatically into a solid stance.

There is, of course, no one there…but then, he's always had to play dirty to beat her and they both know it. His roundhouse connects squarely with her collarbone and glances off her chin, and she crashes into the wall and slides to the floor with a groan. He makes a run for the gun, but as he passes her, she throws her legs out and he goes sprawling, lifting his arms to protect his face from impact with the floor.

Then she's on him, but she's still off-kilter and he uses her momentum to fling her off his back and launch her across the floor.

He rises into a crouch, his adrenaline spiking. He looks at her face, staring back at him with dark, haunted eyes across the room, and he does not know her anymore.

He only knows that she is in his way, Lorelei's way. He licks his bottom lip and imagines that he can still taste Lorelei's kiss, and that is all he needs to count Bahrain and Sausalito and Rome and Chicago and all the others as nothing. Lorelei is everything. Lorelei is all.


MAY

He has completely broken her heart, and the worst part is that he very obviously doesn't care, and more, he is taking extreme pleasure in her pain. Always, in the past, when he has said something unintentionally hurtful or just plain stupid, he has apologized as soon as he's realized that he's inserted his foot into his mouth. That look of dawning comprehension followed by puppy-dog guilt and shame-faced embarrassment is one of her favorites on him, because it cracks the tough, impassive, unshakeable, unemotional Agent Coulson façade and lets her know that Phil is still and will always be there whenever she needs him.

But both Agent Coulson and Phil are gone now, and the man standing a few yards away has just deliberately and violently torn open her heart to reveal her deepest, darkest regrets and then physically sent her flying rather painfully across the room. There is no puppy-dog guilt in his eyes now; he has no qualms about destroying her, and he very clearly intends to kill her.

The trick for her will be to put him out of commission without damaging him too badly. She'd like him in one piece, after all, if and when Sif manages to incapacitate Lorelei.

She is slightly pissed at him for taking a cheap shot, so she attacks first this time. He is ready for her, and if she were aiming to destroy him she might have aimed for his teeth or nose. As angry as she is at Lorelei and as much as she'd like to tear her aching heart out of her chest, she can't help but have a hard time seeing this as anything more than a friendly sparring match…in which broken noses are out of the question.

"Going easy on me, May?" he asks, blocking one of her blows with a forearm and grabbing her other wrist in a solid, painful grip. "Unlike you."

"I always go easy on you."

He ducks another one of her swings with a malicious twinkle in his eyes, but she's there to meet his chest with a roundhouse, and he crashes to the floor with a grunt. She's on him in a second, and a for a few furious moments she's raining down blows around his neck and shoulders, reaching for pressure points that will debilitate him, but his ferocity takes her by surprise—he manages to reach up and grab her hair at the nape of her neck, yanking back savagely and sending her tumbling off him with a cry of pain.

His foot sweeps around and slams her in the ribs, and she feels something give way.

Then she's somehow on her feet again, but he's flying at her in a rugby tackle, arms locking around her waist with the force of a small steam engine, and now they're crashing to the floor again with him on top. Unlike her, he's not trying to go easy.

His fists are pounding at her nose, her cheeks, her eyes, and it's all she can do with the breath knocked out of her to fend off the worst of it with raised forearms.

"I wish I didn't have to do this, May," he pants, and she catches a glimpse of his face above her. He does look faintly upset, but his eyes are hard and cold and he's relentless, his body weight crushing her, pinning her to the floor.

Fortunately, she knows the way he fights as well as she knows herself, and she knows that he tends to favor his left side, that his weight is always unevenly distributed. When he reaches back with his right fist again she's ready, twisting her body to one side and heaving her hips and shoulders up; he's thrown off enough for her to land a solid hit to his diaphragm and then knee him in the hamstring. He tumbles away against the wall with another groan of pain.

"I'm not going to let you win," she says, pushing herself up and ignoring the pain in her cheek and nose and the taste of blood in her mouth. "I won't kill you, Phil, but I'm not going to let you win."

He looks up at her, and shakes his head slowly from side to side. "I really, really wish I could say the same thing."

And then his right hand whips up and around, and she barely has time to register the gun in his hand before he's firing, and she throws herself back, feeling the hot, sick burn of the bullet graze her thigh.

He's shot her. If she can find some comfort in the fact that she can feel blood trickling down her leg and her leg feels like it's on fire, it's that Phil Coulson is one of the cleanest shots she's ever known: he doesn't miss. The fact that it's her thigh and not her chest with a bullet hole means that somewhere, deep inside, he's still there.

But even if he is subconsciously trying not to kill her, she cannot guarantee that he won't seriously damage her. As she throws herself behind the interior wall, the second shot shatters the etched glass above her and sends a million shards of glass raining down on her head and back. She shields her face in her hands and lets her inhibitions go.

That's not Phil.

It's a puppet trying to maim, kill, or otherwise leave her and the Bus and the team utterly defenseless while the Puppet Master from Asgard takes over earth and all of its citizens.

And she won't let that happen.


JEMMA

Even from halfway down the corridor, they can hear a great clamor from inside the Cage. It sounds as if an entire army is trying desperately to destroy each other in full armor, which is probably a fairly accurate description of what is actually happening.

Jemma and Ward stop, look at each other, and come to the same conclusion at the same time. Leaving what can only be Lorelei and Sif duking it out from inside the security of four Asgardian-proof walls alone is undoubtedly the best solution to the Lorelei problem. They round the corner and peer down the corridor to their right (where the banging grows exponentially louder), and there is Fitz, frantically fiddling with a small black device he has attached to the wall. He is obviously trying to open the door and let Lorelei out, and Skye is obviously doing everything she can to keep the door closed remotely.

"Hold on, baby girl, come on, hold on," Fitz is muttering, and Jemma shares yet another significant glance with Ward before he dives down the corridor at a completely startled and unsuspecting Fitz, who has time to utter a strangled "Ward! You're not supposed to…" before he is tackled to the ground.

Ward is trying his best to shake some sense into Fitz, who is struggling fruitlessly against the bigger man.

"I'm not going to hurt you unless you make me, Fitz," Ward says, and the headlock he's got Fitz pinned to the floor with does look fairly gentle. "But I'm not going to let you go, either. I want you to unlock the plane and let Agent Hand's soldiers on."

"Not …going…to happen…" Fitz chokes doggedly. Jemma crouches down next to both of them a safe distance away and lays her hand on Fitz's calf, which is the only part of him that she can reach.

"Fitz, try to snap out of it," she says encouragingly. "You can do it. You're the smartest person I know!"

"Being smart has nothing to do with it," Ward grunts. "He's not going to snap out of it until Sif gets that collar on Lorelei."

"Oh, you do think he managed to repair it before Lorelei got him, don't you?" Jemma asks anxiously. Ward shrugs.

"We won't know until things calm down in there." He jerks his head at the Cage. "And that might take a while."

"Ward…if Lorelei is in there with Sif, and Fitz is out here…" Ward looks at her sharply over Fitz's head—the engineer's fingers still scrabbling determinedly but rather sluggishly at Ward's thick forearms. "Oh, he's turning blue," she says. "Poor thing."

Ward loosens his arms a little and re-positions his arms around Fitz's neck and under one arm. Fitz makes a sound like a strangled cat, but they ignore him.

"May must be with Coulson," Ward says evenly. "She'll be okay."

"Well, I would think so," Jemma says confidently, but she's feeling more worried than she feels she ought. "Only, wouldn't it be best if we go and take a look anyway?"

Ward frowns. "She should be able to…ouch, Fitz, would you stop it…handle herself," he says. "But if it makes you feel better, I'll go up and take a look. Think you can handle this one if I put him out?"

"Put him out? Well, don't hurt him! I'll go get a sedative from the lab," Jemma says. "Be back in a tick."

She leaves Ward wrestling with Fitz (who is apparently trying to bite him, and seems to be doing fairly well considering he's up against one of the best specialists SHIELD can offer) and takes off for the lab.

By the time she gets back with a hypodermic full of sedative, Ward is starting to look worried. Fitz is subdued and furious, pinned face-down on the floor with Ward's knee digging into his back and his arms twisted behind him. "Don't worry, I'm being gentle," he says defensively as Jemma sends him a glare. "But I'd expect May back by now. Or Coulson down here looking for Lorelei. He must be holding his own up there."

"Can he do that?"

"Well, he went through the same training May did," he says, watching as Jemma pokes the needle into Fitz's arm (who yelps loudly and starts admonishing her in a rather fierce, adorable way until his voice trails off into a dejected sort of mumble as the sedative kicks in). "And he was a good field agent until they promoted him to officer. I've read his files. I've read all of your files, actually."

"I'll choose not to be creeped out by what you just said and focus on the fact that it sounds like Coulson might actually have a chance at beating May in hand-to-hand combat."

"Well, I didn't say I thought she could beat him…"

But he is cut off by what sounds terrifyingly like a gunshot, closely followed by a second. Even over the noise in the Cage, the sound is unmistakable.

"Was that…?" Jemma asks, and Ward flings himself off Fitz and grabs Jemma's arm on his way past her.

"Stay with Fitz!"

And then he barrels away up the corridor, leaving Jemma crouched beside the faintly-twitching body of her best friend, the blood pounding in her ears, her heart thudding painfully against her chest.

She knows that both Coulson and May are crack shots, and that its very likely that Ward is going to find one or both of them either seriously injured or (though she doesn't let herself think about it for too long, because it makes her want to throw up) dead.

But before she can start reciting the periodic table or the list of chemicals involved in creating the sedative she has just injected Fitz with to distract herself, Ward is back looking furious and shaken.

"Fitz has the front of the Bus locked up tight," he says grimly. "He's sure good at what he does, isn't he?" he shoots the inert Fitz a grudgingly respectful look. "Too good, this time. Skye's got to get it open before I can get up there, but coms are still down. You okay here?"

Jemma nods, and Ward is gone again, back down to the belly of the plane and Skye, where Jemma sends up a prayer to any god that might be listening that computer hacker vs. genius engineer will end with a quick (or as quick as can be expected, since this is Fitz's work she's up against) victory for Skye.

She pats Fitz on the ankle and settles back against the wall, eyeing the Cage door apprehensively. "Great job, Fitz," she says. "Great."


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