Shout out to my ex, you're really quite the man

You made my heart break and you made me who I am

"Who broke your heart so badly?" Natasha turned, stripping off her headphones to see who the voice was. Much to her surprise, May was there, strapping on her own boxing gloves in preparation for what she guessed was a cathartic round with the punching bag. "I pity them, really."

"May," Natasha frowned, striding towards the petite Asian woman with gallons of confusion flooding through her. "I haven't seen you in weeks!" It was more like she hadn't seen her in months - May had changed, she noticed. There was something in her expression, she noted, that somehow had aged her years in a few measly weeks. "Where've you been?"

She held off on the 'how've you been' part, not wanting to start an incident based on the conversation she and Maria had heard a few weeks ago. "Out and about," May said curtly, stepping up to the bag and beginning to jab at it. Natasha watched, wincing as May seemed to hit the bag with all of her strength. "I apologize for not having had time to train you. I thought you would have been informed."

"Of what?" Natasha grabbed the bag May was punching at, studying her mentor with sturdy eyes. The air was tense, both of them breathing harshly to soften the sharp silence. "What's going on, May?"

"I'm transferring to Administration."

"WHAT?" Natasha was so shocked she dropped the bag, letting it swing and nearly whack May in the face. "Administration?" It wasn't possible. She looked around, searching for the hidden camera. "Am I being punked?"

"Do I look like the type of person who would punk you?"

Natasha thought back to the first time she'd met May, all sharp commands and unrelenting stares, but still with the interior of a baby bunny inside. "...yes?"

"No." May's eyes had lost that sparkle that Natasha had somehow taken for granted, and her voice was flat as she began to wail at the punching bag again. "You'll be getting a new superior officer until your rank rises high enough to handle your own missions. Then you'll be calling your own shots." She stopped punching at the bag to direct some of that flat stare towards her protegee. "Morse and I took a chance on you. Don't fuck it up."

"Well, Morse has been fucking a lot of things lately," Natasha snapped as she plugged her mp3 into the speaker. May offered no response, just a cock of the ear as the music started up once more.

I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs

I crashed my car into a bridge, I don't care!

"Spar?" May grunted over the pulsing beat of the song, and Natasha nodded silently, the two of them making their way over to the sparring ring in the middle of the room. They stared each other down while the bass thudded in the background, somehow mirroring the anger thudding in their veins.

Natasha was the one to swing first, launching herself at May with a battle cry that attempted to put all of her frustrations into one vocalization. May blocked it easily, her grunt nothing compared to the redhead's, but her swing just as fierce. The two of them battled it out - an attempted sweepout here, a half-nelson there - yet neither of them reaching the goal of victory or emotional exhaustion.

The music continued to change as they fought, but the ferocity in which they attempted to defeat each other didn't change.

In an odd moment of synchronicity, both May and Natasha tried to sweep each other off of their feet with a low kick, succeeding and sending each other to the ground. "Who pissed you off?" Natasha panted, though she had some inkling as to what had made her so angry.

"Wouldn't you like to know," May answered through gritted teeth, standing and holding a hand out to the young redhead. She tossed her a water bottle. "You go first, and maybe I'll consider letting you know."

"Barton and Morse are fucking again," Natasha's tone was bitter as soon as she pictured the two in domestic scenes, perhaps making dinner or settling down to watch a movie. (They had better not have been watching Nicholas Sparks movies - those were the ones she watched with Barton, not her.) "And obviously, it's the worst fucking idea in the world, why would you ever get back together with anyone you didn't trust enough to keep secrets?" The spar over, she headed to the bag again, jabbing at it in anger. "They never stop," she complained. "All day. All night. They're either fucking or giving each other lovey-dovey looks from across the hall. It's disgusting."

May said nothing, only started up a slow rhythm against the speed bag. "A mission went FUBAR. Andrew couldn't handle it." The expression on her face suggested she wasn't about to give her student any more. "I...I couldn't handle it." The sounds of the speed bag increased until she was pummelling the bag at lightning speed, Natasha's cue to back away.

From the sounds of it, the mission had gone more than just FUBAR if it'd caused May to have an explosive argument with Andrew and disappear for days on end. But not once under her tutelage had Natasha known to get more out of her superior officer than she was ready to give, not even under torture - something she was pretty good at herself.

So she headed out, leaving May to jab at the punching bag with renewed strength and frustration at the fact that she'd even lost the ability to communicate with people in short interactions. How could she? They'd never understand what had happened in that compound. None of them. And if even if they did, she doubted that they would care. All that mattered was that one, the world was safer, and two, they'd gotten the job done. There was no need to concern themselves with the details.

"Bahrain fucked May up."

Maria looked up from her sandwich, surprised that for once the topic wasn't Clint and Bobbi. "What?" she asked through a mouth full of ham and cheese, and Natasha frowned mockingly at her until she swallowed. "You saw May?" She knew her friend had been trying in vain to find her mentor, spurred by some parts concern and some parts boredom now that she was shunning her two (former) best friends. "When?"

"Last night." Natasha decided not to mention she'd been beating the shit out of the punching bag at three in the morning when they'd met. "She came down, had a round with the speeding bag, and we sparred. She's transferring to Admin." The last part was said a little too late, for Maria spit out her current bite, a partially-digested chunk of cheese whizzing over Natasha's head. "Hill, that was fucking disgusting."

"She's transferring?!"

Natasha picked at a piece of lettuce that hat somehow found its way into her hair. "Yeah. I guess something happened there that made her want to get out of the field." Maria's eyes were wide, her sandwich forgotten. "Although I can't imagine what it would be. It seems like it takes a lot to rattle May."

"Yeah," Maria said finally, beginning to shovel down the rest of her sandwich despite Natasha giving her a dirty look. "Which is why, after I'm done with this sandwich, we're going to go find out what the hell it is."

"You had to pick the most conspicuous place for us to hack the network," Natasha hissed later as they were in the lobby, Maria typing frantically into a laptop she'd liberated from one of the techies. ('It'll just be a second,' she'd purred to the hapless computer engineers, who'd handed over their latest model without hesitation. 'Thanks!') "We could get caught at any second!"

"We're not staying here for much longer," Maria said distractedly, shutting the laptop shut with a snap. "I haven't actually started the trace yet because we're not at the second stage of the plan." Natasha frowned. She hadn't heard about a second stage when Maria'd explained to her an hour ago. "Watch and learn, young Padawan."

For a second, Natasha stopped, thoroughly confused. "Wha..."

Maria stopped as well, just as confounded. "It's...that's...you...just ask Bobbi." It took her another second to process the idea that there was a living, human being who hadn't watched Star Wars. Only then did she remember Bobbi's supposedly treacherous act. "Right. Never mind. Star Wars. Don't ask Bobbi, but she's obsessed with it."

Natasha didn't answer, but sighed as they got into the elevator, the eagle-shaped contraption beginning to climb floor after floor. When the doors dinged open on an unfamiliar floor, Natasha frowned at how Maria seemed to waltz out, knowing exactly where her destination was. "Where the hell are we going?"

"Keep watch" was all Maria said as she sat squarely down on the floor in front of someone's office. "If anyone asks, I'm trying to find illegal ways to watch 24. This floor has the best wireless internet, God forbid they ever get around to updating my office. Damn techies." With that, she began to type so fast her fingers were blurry. Natasha sighed and complied, her eyes darting around the hallway. "Nat, you got a watch?"

Natasha nodded, automatically looking at her wrist. "Yeah, why?"

"Start your timer when I say...right...about...now." Natasha hit the button, still confused as Maria wrenched open the door, placed the laptop on the desk, and raced towards the elevator. "Come on!"

They piled in, Maria hitting the button for her office repeatedly. "What the hell is going on?" Natasha asked, checking her watch. Thirty seconds and counting. "Maria, did you set off a bomb or something? Am I going to get deported for this?" Maria just shook her head, pointing up at the camera in the corner of the elevator. Finally, they got to her office, and Natasha's grip on her friend's arm was harder than she cared it to be - after all, if her third best friend turned out to be a traitor, it would really say something to Natasha's taste in picking out friends.

"Sorry," Maria apologized once they were safely tucked behind closed doors. "Couldn't risk compromising the operation while we were still out in the open." Natasha still looked several shades of confused, so Maria chose to elaborate. "You really didn't look at whose office we were sitting outside of?" Natasha shrugged; she'd been too busy wondering how she'd managed to make so many flawed decisions in such short a time. Maria sighed. "Just look for the memo from HR tomorrow, yeah?"

Natasha nearly burst a lung when she read the short email the next morning.

"Mathers?" she wheezed, having to clutch the doorframe outside of Maria's office. "You managed to punt the whole thing on Mathers? Jesus, 'Ria, I knew you held grudges, but definitely not like this..." Maria, for her part, was smug, getting up and gingerly ushering Natasha into her office. "He'll be wondering for the rest of his life."

"Maybe not the rest of his life," Maria shrugged. "Hacking into a classified file is nearly considered treason. I'm sure they have people in jail who are willing to kill treasonists. Maybe I'll tell him on his deathbed. He'll love it." The two of them sat down in front of Maria's computer, ready to divulge the contents of their treasure. "Alright, May, what the hell did you do in Bahrain..."

A loud alarm blared from the computer screen, forcing the two of them to duck under Maria's desk out of habit. When they ascertained ten seconds later that nothing was immediately going to blow up, they stood, frowning at the single siren that wailed around and around the screen. Cautiously, Maria reached up and clicked her mouse, both of them flinching when they saw a video message.

"Shit," Natasha whispered. "How'd May find out?"

"She probably figured out that we were the only ones smart or stupid enough to hack into the system," Maria whispered. Both of them exchanged looks, expecting May, Coulson, Fury, or all three to burst in with piles of paperwork in their hands and a lecture at the ready. "Let's see what she's got in store for us."

"Hill, Romanoff," May's voice echoed strangely through the office, and both women stood to see the screen better. May was seated in what they could only assume was a swivel chair, surrounded by towers of administrative materials. ("Shit," Natasha murmured. "She really did go through with the transfer.") "If you're seeing this, congratulations and my condolences. One, you've managed to successfully infiltrate the toughest system in existence. Two, it was for nothing - because you'll only get access to this file after you do one thing. Romanoff, I assume you know. I can't have my best three agents fall apart just because I transferred." With that, the video clicked off, leaving Maria to stare at Natasha with wide eyes.

"You don't think she means -"

"She can't."

"Oh, she can," Coulson's voice was muffled through the door, but the threat was still the same. "Now if you two will come out, we have protocol to discuss."