A/N: Like I said last chapter, this is to make up for the longish wait. If you haven't read the previous chapter, make sure you do to avoid spoilers.
Losing Their Best
May and Ward arrived one minute too late. They had arrived at the warehouse district, but when they neither heard nor saw any sign of Coulson, they decided to head back to the docks. Actually, it was May who decided. Ward argued that he would want them to search the warehouses, but she wasn't hearing it.
But, by the time they arrived, they saw the mysterious hooded man standing over the docks railing, as if watching something in the water. He had what looked like a grenade launcher pointed at whatever he was looking at. When he saw them, he left quickly.
May saw the grenade launcher in his hand, and a sinking feeling set in the pit of her stomach. She knew that something had happened to Coulson. Skye confirmed through GPS tracking that Coulson's SUV had somehow ended up in the water, and he hadn't emerged after almost two minutes.
She dove in after him, and found him unconscious and still buckled in. The SUV had almost completely filled with water, but the driver's seat was completely submerged. Hurriedly, she drew the knife from her boot and cut him free, then carefully but quickly pulled him out through the shot out passenger side window. "Ward!" she shouted as soon as she emerged.
He found a flotation device attached to a long piece of rope tied to one of the cement pillars that line the wooden railing. It took him and two bystanders to pull up both Coulson and May. "Inbound Simmons," he barked into the comm as he helped her get him into the back. "Coulson's down and injured. Prep medbay. Tell Skye to alert the nearest SHIELD base of our arrival."
=Roger that.=
The only injuries he sustained, that she could immediately determine, were a few shallow gunshot wounds to the arm and shoulder, a broken nose and a fractured wrist. The real danger was that he was unconscious underwater. The threat of drowning wasn't his only problem. Brain damage from a lack of oxygen for almost two minutes was a real possibility if he survived. If.
She wasn't so attached to him that she refused to see it as a possibility.
As Ward weaved in and out of traffic en route to the Bus, May performed CPR to get Coulson to cough the water up and allow him to breathe more easily. He sputtered and hacked, coughing up gobs of water that splashed against the back of the seat and trickled down the side of his mouth.
May frowned and smoothed his hair back when the coughing finally subsided and he seemed to be breathing on his own, albeit labored.
"How is he?"
May didn't answer for a long moment, prompting Ward to glance back into the rearview. It was then that he saw her saddened grimace, eyes blinking furiously to fight back tears that were threatening to fall. "May?"
"He's… he's breathing on his own for now."
Ward didn't say another word until they reached the Bus five minutes later. Skye and Fitz were waiting on them with a gurney, on which Ward carefully placed Coulson and wheeled into the lab.
It… went as well as it could have with the limited supplies and equipment in the Bus. Simmons was able to stabilize Coulson enough for the trip to the SHIELD base in Singapore, where he was handed off to SHIELD doctors for surgery to set the broken bones and stitch up his wounds. More importantly, they were going to give him a CAT scan to determine if any damage had been done to his brain and how much oxygen his brain lost.
According to the doctors, the damage wasn't extensive, but it was bad enough that he was going to have to remain a few days for further observation.
But, he didn't make it the night. Complications occurred too quickly for May to cope with. As she was ushered out, she noticed an agent standing beside Coulson's bed as doctors rushed in. She screamed his name in uncharacteristic panic, but it was too late.
Phil Coulson passed away at 1:49 AM.
Triskelion
February 25, 2014 – 3:56 AM
It was the second time in less than two years that she had lost him. The first time to that fucking bastard Loki, and this time to some guy in a hood.
May replayed the scene in her mind every minute, and had been for the last two days. While externally, she appeared calm, almost apathetic, everyone who knew her best knew that out of any of them, she was the worst off.
Out of all of them, her and Coulson were the closest. They had been through it all together; Bahrain, Genosha, Cuba, Latveria, more missions in Madripoor than either of them wanted to think about. He had seen her at her worst, and had been there for her during her most difficult times. He was there when she was shaken, bloodied and broken after Bahrain, and he had pulled her back from falling off the deep end when she had nearly lost Ward to an attack by AIM leader Monica Rappaccini.
He was her rock and her tether, and now, he was gone. How was she supposed to continue?
Did she even want to continue? The kids needed her, but Ward was more than capable of handling them. Plus, there were plenty of SHIELD agents capable of flying the Bus.
What would she even do if she left? Go into something mundane like the CIA or FBI? That would have been a letdown.
There was no way in hell that she was going into the public sector and start a family. The average housewife deal wasn't her thing, nor was having and raising any crying, snot nosed little brats.
So, then, what?
Stay?
That seemed like the best option, but without her tether …
An arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her onto a smooth, hard chest. She sighed softly, hoping that it had a least some irritability laced somewhere. It didn't. She sighed again and nestled her head into the space between his shoulder and head. "I miss him," she breathes into his neck.
"I do, too," Ward said in reply.
She knew he did, even if he didn't show it around the others. He and Coulson weren't necessarily the closest, but there was a mutual respect between the two that was hard to dismiss or ignore. Both men knew how close she was, and how fond she was, of the other and didn't let that come between them. She was thankful for that. Especially now.
She didn't blame him for Coulson dying. It was Ward that tried to get her to stay at the warehouse in Madripoor. That 'discussion' delayed them by a full minute. Had it not happened, they would have arrived in time to try and stop whoever that was. She didn't blame him because he was concentrating on the task at hand, the 084, and had trust that Coulson was savvy enough to get out of whatever problem he had found himself in.
That trust normally was well-placed; this time, it wasn't.
"I keep expecting him to walk through that door any minute." Her voice was shaky, making her sound timid and weak. She hated it, but knew that Ward wasn't judging her. He knew as well as she did that she was still a human with emotions, a heart that could be broken. She made everyone believe that she was an Ice Queen, like Hill and Hand. She made everyone believe that she didn't care, because it was easier to deal with people that way. Once emotions were revealed, an agent was compromised, and that agent might as well have turned their badge into Trent right then and there.
Ward had also seen her at her most bare. No pun intended.
"I know." His hand moved in a slow, deliberate circular motion along the small of her back. Across the scars she had earned when jobs went bad.
It was soothing.
His short answers meant that he was going to let her drive the conversation. When she was ready to talk, he was ready to listen.
The thing was, she didn't know when, or if, she would be up for talking. She knew that she needed to eventually, but this was the exact kind of thing that she talked to Coulson about. Ward was a good listener, but he was more than twenty years younger than Coulson and lacked the wisdom that almost fifty years of living provided.
Fury, Hill and Coulson were gone, either in hiding or dead. Hand was far too busy with her position to listen to her vent and rant. Trent, well, she didn't trust him as far as she could throw him. Neither did she trust Sanders. There was something dangerously charming about her. Like a cobra. There was a hidden danger behind her beauty.
Guess she was stuck with leaving it all bottled up until she could find a punching bag, either living or inanimate.
"May?" Ward asked suddenly.
He had been so quiet that it startled her to hear him speaking with first being spoken to. "Yes?"
"Have you –" he started before stopping suddenly. "Have you given any thought recently to maybe calling it quits?"
It was such a sudden question that she almost didn't understand what he said. "What do you mean?" she asked, with only a small trace of suspicion in her words.
"I mean… Hill and Coulson are gone. Fury's gone. Barton. Romanoff. Drew. Rogers. They're all gone. These were some of the best agents at SHIELD. I just think that… I was just wondering if you were considering getting out while you can."
"Until as recently as ten minutes ago, no." She paused to sit up, not bothering to cover over her chest with the sheet that was only covering their lower halves. "And what would I even do? Start a family?" She snorted halfheartedly, and pretended to miss the grimace he flashed briefly. "People like me, people like us don't just retire and settle down into mundanity. I'd go insane, and I know you would too."
"What do you mean I would?"
"You'd want to come with me, wouldn't you." It was a statement of fact, not a question. She knew that he was just attached enough to her to quit SHIELD and go with her to wherever she decided she wanted to go.
When he didn't answer, she smirked. "I know how much this means to you. It means much more to me. SHIELD is my life. And, it will be my death."
It was the morbid promise her and Coulson made to one another when they first became partners. That they weren't going to retire, they were going to die as agents of SHIELD. Preferably by old age. Even if Coulson was gone, she planned on holding up her end of the promise.
It was what he would have wanted.
Ward nodded and pulled her closer to him. "I respect that. And I'm glad, because I don't want you to go." He kissed her softly for a moment before breaking the kiss to add, "And I don't want anything to happen. When I see all the agents that have been killed these last several months, I just… I just fear that you'd be next, and I… I don't know if I can…"
She shushed him softly. "I'm not going anywhere. Trust me."
That one statement seemed to put him at ease. His arms tightened slightly around her waist. And she melted into his warmth. "I do."
A/N: Hope everyone is enjoying the story. Leave a review and let me know!