A/N: Thanks for your reviews and your patience. I was moving and as a result, got a little waylaid by life. But I'm settled in to my new home and back on my stories. I hope you enjoy this chapter!

Disclaimer: Marvel. Not me. They're the best.

Chapter 3

The next morning, May woke early and went in search of a gym equivalent. She found one and spent an hour beating the crap out of the punching bag and enjoying the way the exertion helped clear her head. Not only was her previous evening with Coulson still weighing on her, along with a distinct fear that she might be losing her mind, but she was finding herself reliving every terrible thing she had done for Hydra. Seeing her actions from this new perspective made her feel sick with guilt.

Even supposing this world wasn't real, her decisions had been.

"Hey," came a voice from the door, and May completed a final round kick to the bag before turning to find Skye watching her and smiling slightly.

"Hey," she said cautiously.

Skye walked over.

"Want to go a couple of rounds?" she suggested.

May raised her eyebrows, surprised. She and Skye had never sparred before.

"You're my SO, you know," Skye clarified in response to May's silence, and May detected something like pride in her voice. "In that alternate reality you don't believe in? So, we do this a lot. By which I mean, you kick my butt a lot, but whatever."

"So, you're willing to talk to me about that now?" said May quietly, remembering how unimpressed Skye had been on discovering Coulson had told her.

Skye shrugged.

"Coulson already spilled the beans, so why pretend?" she said, and added with a smirk, "So typical of him; guess old habits and all that."

"Meaning?"

"Well, I mean … he tells you everything, so …" There was a pause as Skye looked at her, slightly puzzled. "What's wrong? You think I'm crazy, don't you?"

May realised she had been staring at Skye with too much intensity, once again hungry for answers.

"No, I …" she frowned and shook her head, looking away. "I suppose I'm having trouble accepting it."

"So, you believe us?" said Skye, sounding surprised.

May sighed and looked back at her.

"I don't know what to believe," she said. "It sounds insane, but …" She hesitated, and then added, "I do feel like I know him somehow. Coulson."

"Well, that makes sense," said Skye vaguely. "You're closer to him than anyone else."

This was her opening, a place to get answers of some kind.

"How is it that you remember this "other life"?" she asked. "Coulson said you and the other girl, Simmons, that you weren't part of this … whatever this is?"

"Right," said Skye. "You guys were all kidnapped, you see, and your memories reprogrammed to believe you had always been in the Framework. Simmons and I accessed it ourselves to try and get you out, so we still remember our real life."

"And you don't remember this one at all?"

"Well, no. It was never programmed into us, you see."

May sighed heavily again and massaged her temples. "This is ridiculous," she mumbled.

Skye gave her a sympathetic smile, but said nothing.

"How long have I been in here?" May asked, fumbling as she tried to grasp what Skye was saying.

"A few weeks," said Skye. "He took you first and replaced you with a Life Model Decoy of yourself, so we didn't immediately know you were gone. Coulson and the others got taken when we went to look for you -"

"You know what, just stop," May interrupted. "I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't think I want to. You're just making me question my sanity even more."

"I guess that was a lot to take in," Skye conceded.

"How is it that I remember years of my life if I've only been in here for a few weeks?"

"I told you, your memories were reprogrammed," said Skye patiently. "And from what I can tell, they were reprogrammed from Bahrain onwards, although I guess you wouldn't remember having Coulson as your partner before that either, since he was off being a propaganda-spreading History teacher."

May's stomach had chilled considerably.

"Bahrain?" she asked quietly.

Skye looked as though she had been unexpectedly caught out.

"Right," she muttered reluctantly, now fiddling awkwardly with the punching bag beside them and avoiding eye contact. "That's … well, I think that's kind of the crux of this whole world, really. That you saved that girl."

She now turned to look May directly in the eye.

"You see, in the real world, you killed her."

May stared at her in open astonishment.

"I – I did?"

Skye nodded grimly.

"But it … well, you weren't the same after that. Coulson told me you lost a part of yourself when that happened. You left the field for years and everything. I think … they changed your biggest regret when you came to the Framework, you see. I think that was yours."

May felt decidedly wrong-footed and a bit spaced out, as she felt odd waves of emotion wash over her.

"But … saving her is my biggest regret," she murmured.

Skye seemed entirely at a loss for words at this, so the silence stretched on as May tried to regain some kind of grasp on reality. How could it be that she had once killed that girl and let it destroy her life? Was her life destined to fall apart from the moment she set foot in Bahrain?

"And Andrew?" she asked, struggling to speak his name. Things had not ended well between them.

Skye looked away.

"I … I don't know how much you want to know," she mumbled. "It won't matter when we go back. You'll remember it all then."

There was a definite heaviness to the air and May, in spite of herself, decided not to ask more about him. She was barely able to cope with everything she was being told now.

"What about Coulson?" she asked instead, remembering the main thing she wanted to ask Skye. "You say … I mean, he was my partner? That we're close?"

Skye nodded, cheering up slightly.

"Yeah. Yeah, for most of your careers, apparently. And now, Coulson is the Director of SHIELD and you're his, well his right hand. His left one is cybernetic."

May blinked and chose to let that go.

"And …" she stopped, realising that she was unable to ask what she wanted to ask. But it seemed she and Coulson had guessed right the previous evening. Skye hadn't mentioned anything about a deeper relationship between them.

"You're like your own little team." Skye suddenly got a slightly mischievous twinkle to her eye. "Mom and Dad."

There was a complicated mixture of irritable exasperation and some other unidentifiable emotion in her stomach for just a moment in response to this, which May dealt with by implementing an instinctive glare.

"Yeah, that's about right," said Skye with a grin. "I feel like you totally remember how annoying you find me."

"And I'm your SO?"

Skye grinned.

"Yeah. You know, if you're willing to spar a little, you might be impressed with yourself."

May grunted.

"We'll see."

x x x

May was impressed, although she didn't tell Skye that.

This version of Skye was a far better fighter than the one she had known in Hydra. May, while never having directly sparred with her, had evaluated her skills several times over the years. That she did tell Skye, as they walked through the base to locate breakfast, and she looked extremely pleased to hear it.

"Don't get cocky," May warned her. "You may be good -"

"But no-one is infallible, I know," Skye finished and then, clearly amused by May's look of surprise, she added, "Would you like me to recite your control-in-the-field speech?"

After another taken aback pause, May said slowly, "No, thanks."

It was distinctly unnerving, not to mention irritating that Skye seemed to be enjoying herself so much.

"Hey!"

Coulson had appeared and he seemed happy to see her. She felt the now familiar sense of warm relief at the sight of him.

"Guess you did a better job than I thought of convincing May," Skye told him. "I honestly would have expected her to just crack your head against a nearby wall to try and knock some sense into you."

"Wasn't too far off," said May under her breath.

x x x

"Did you know I was the one responsible for the Cambridge incident?" May asked Coulson a bit later, feeling uncertain about bringing it up, but also feeling a very strong desire to justify herself to … well, to someone. She was having a difficult time justifying things to herself. They were in the Director's office again, having just finalised the logistics behind Skye's escape plan.

Judging from the look of surprise on his face, he didn't.

"No."

"I was the SHIELD agent who let that inhuman girl live," she said quietly. "I thought Skye might have told you."

There was a small silence as he apparently digested this revelation.

"Well … she told me that in the real world, that never happened," he said, his tone bracing. "That that girl died."

"Yeah, and I killed her," said May stiffly.

He said nothing in response to this and merely watched her.

"It's just … Skye says I saved her in here, because killing that girl was my greatest regret. And yet … look at all the pain and destruction I caused because of that regret."

"Well, it sounds like you didn't cause it," he said mildly. "You did the brave thing, the right thing. But I imagine it was a terrible burden to live with. Who can blame you for regretting it? It's whoever programmed this world … they caused all of this."

"But -"

"No, we've all done terrible things here," he interrupted, now very serious. "But this isn't who we are. Just remember that. You were manipulated here, but in reality, you are a good person."

"How can you know that?" she said, feeling strangely angry. "I don't feel as though I was manipulated. Everything I've done, I chose to do. How can I justify that? Even if there is another version of me that didn't do these things, this version did."

He sighed.

"I don't know," he said truthfully. "I think that's a question that we can only answer for ourselves when we get out of here."

She looked away from him.

"But hey," he said, his voice suddenly soft, almost intimate. "This version of you fought back. You're making things right."

"It doesn't undo what I've done. The people I've killed. The Patriot …"

Skye had told her that, too. That the Patriot had been one of them, someone who existed in the real world, and who was now dead. She had done that. There was no escaping the consequences of this life, even if they could really free themselves from it.

She felt a hand come to rest on her shoulder and she turned to look back at him, those familiarly warm blue eyes filled once again with inexplicable affection.

"We can't change what we've done," said Coulson gently. "Only what we do from here."

His words seemed to speak right down to the depths of her psyche, because she felt an almost immediate return of her resolve. She could hate herself for everything she had done – and she would - but from here on out, she would dedicate herself to doing what was right. And she knew, somehow, that by following the man in front of her, she would always be sure of what that was.

It was then that she finally felt as though she understood something of what it was that he was to her. Their connection came from this, a shared struggle, a shared fight, a shared ideal. A shared understanding. A shared dedication to each other.

x x x

tbc

A/N: Thanks for reading!