A/N: I really enjoyed "The Magical Place", but the lack of interaction between May and Coulson in this episode left me unsatisfied. So I came up with this little piece.
I don't own the show apparently (or I won't have to write this). Also, I'm not a native speaker, so apologize in advance if there's any mistake.
He doesn't know how long he has been sitting there. Hours maybe, in the dim light of his office, staring at some empty place.
Most of the days, he'd like to think himself as a lucky man. Phil Coulson, survived the death, continues to live, and now opening a new chapter of his life. He may have been changed, but for better, hopefully.
But.
("Let me die, let me die, let me die..." The Phil Coulson he saw on the surgeon table didn't look like him. Not the man who lives a full life and enjoys, but a man begs to be let go.)
He shakes his head, once again trying in vain to keep the images away. Should he be dead, instead of living? Is death his true will?
("We wanted to restore the man you'd once been, so we gave you a pleasant memory.")
He knows what S.H.I.E.L.D is capable of (and there must be more he doesn't know) and he is proud of it. But also fears, especially now. He fears of what they might have done to him. Is he truly him, or just someone S.H.I.E.L.D recreated? Is the memory he sees as part of him really from his past, or just something S.H.I.E.L.D thought he should have? Is...
"You look like you need a glass of this."
A familiar voice breaks into his reverie. He looks up, seeing May leaning against the door, a bottle of Scotch in her hand.
"No, I..." He blinks, noticing the paper on his desk so he gestures at them, "I have paper work."
She snorts, "let Fury deal with it himself."
"Do you remember, "he tries, tentatively, "the time Clint, you and I got drunk at Fury's home party and you two pulled a prank on him?"
He is so relieved when she nods. So that one is real.
"Of course," she says, a faint smile on her lips. "Fury was so furious."
"When I was...When you came in rescue me, I was seeing things. I remembered they...I..." He wants to tell her. He knows she heard him back there, knows, despite of her cold facade, she still cares. But he can't. Admitting makes it feel real, and real is not something he is sure of right now.
She watches him intensely. When he starts to growing uncomfortable under her gaze, she walks in and sits in front of him.
"Phil." There is a long minute before she says his name. Her expression still indecipherable, but her tone is soft, her voice gentle.
If this-the bus, the team, the caring of Skye, the awkward sweetness of Fitz-Simmons, the respect from Ward, is his new life, his afterlife, then the woman in front of him is the link between his past life and his afterlife.
"They altered my memory." He tries again, feeling the need to find someone who can understand. "I was dead for days. Not 40 seconds but for days, and S.H.I.E.L.D, they brought me back and gave me a fake memory of Tahiti. I..."
He looks up to her, seeing her face softens, seeing the reflection of a desperate man in her brown eyes.
She reaches for him, hesitantly at first, a thing she has been so out of practice. But when he holds on to her, it feels like home.
He tries to focus on her, on how his (new) heart beat faster at her proximity, on how his breathe catches when her warm fingers wrap his. But an alarm keeps screaming in his mind, this may not be real, this feeling may not be real.
"I don't know what is real, Melinda," his voice breaks. "I don't know how much me is the real me, how much is their creation..."
"You're real." She says firmly. Her grip on his hand tightens. "Trust me on this, Phil. I know you."
That is true. They have known each other for a good eighteen years (if his memory of that is real). He thinks of how they met for the first time in Academy, their first mission together; he thinks of Bahrain, where he was the one who held her hands and she was the one who looked at him with empty eyes. He wonders how they came to this, she is no longer her and he no longer him.
But if she says he is the real Phil Coulson, maybe he'd better believe her.
"Do you remember after...after Bahrain," she whispers, "you said to me, you said, I'll be here, let me help. Now it's me who should say the same words."
"But that didn't exactly work out, did it?" He asks, his smile still a little bitter.
After Bahrain, she shut people out, everyone, including him. When people realized there was nothing they could do to bring the old May back, they left her alone. But he stayed, days, weeks and months after the incident. She was the one who chose to walk away.
"No," she says, sadly, "but you're the one better at letting people in."