A/N: This chapter takes place preseries, from Bahrain until the right before the Pilot.

Disclaimer: Agents of SHIELD and all affiliated characters belong to Marvel, those brilliant bastards.

Chapter 2: Never Gave Up

Phil Coulson had never given up on her.

x x x

After Bahrain, her life had fallen apart. In a way, she had needed it to, needed to punish herself for being the kind of monster who was willing to murder a child. She had shut down completely, avoiding everyone and pushing those she couldn't avoid away.

Andrew had done his level best. Honestly, he had. But in the end, even he had had to give up on her. She had forced him to do so.

She had done him the courtesy of telling him the whole truth about what had happened. He deserved to know why she had broken and why he could never fix her. For the longest time he had tried to convince her that he could, that they could move past this together.

But she knew he was wrong and had done him the favour of filing for divorce. He had begged her to give herself more time, but she ignored him.

He didn't understand.

There was no going back.

x x x

She had pushed Coulson away, too. Or at least, she had tried.

Somehow, she hadn't actually told him what she had done. It hadn't been intentional at first. She just hadn't been able to form the words in the immediate aftermath, sobbing helplessly into his chest. In the time that followed, she realised she couldn't face telling him. She didn't know how he might react, but she couldn't bear the thought of him knowing something so horrifying about her. She had had to tell Andrew, but with Coulson ... maybe, somehow, she didn't need to destroy all his beliefs about her.

He had been upset, of course, on hearing that she was transferring to administration. He had come to the house to try and talk to her. No one had told her at the time, but she knew Andrew had called him. She had overheard them in the hallway when Coulson had arrived.

"She won't talk to me," Andrew had said in an undertone. "You're the only other person she listens to. Please just talk to her."

It hadn't gone as she had expected at all. He had come into the kitchen, greeted her for all the world as though nothing was out of the ordinary, and made them both some green tea. Even though he hated it about as much as she hated coffee.

"I hear you've decided to work in administration for a while," he said matter-of-factly after he had sat opposite her at the table.

She said nothing.

"Well, I think that sucks."

She couldn't help looking up at him. She was so used to people walking on eggshells around her lately that this upfront approach was completely unfamiliar.

"What am I supposed to do without you?" he continued crossly. "Anyway, you belong in the field, not behind a desk."

"I don't know where I belong anymore."

Even she was surprised to hear these words come out of her mouth. They were spoken in a deadened monotone, but they were sincere.

"Well, I do," he retorted. "Out there, kicking ass and saving the world, with me."

She looked away again.

She couldn't bear the look on his face. It was almost ... heartbroken. Sure, he was covering it with defiance, but she knew him well enough to see past that.

"But." It was said reluctantly and very quietly, and then followed with a drawn out pause that forced her to look back up at him. "If this is what you have to do, Melinda, then I'll work with it."

She didn't know what it was about him that seemed to calm her down, but he had always had this uncanny knack for it. Somehow the miserable twisting in her stomach seemed to ease a little.

"I mean, I'm not going to pretend I agree," he added sternly, "and I'm certainly not going to pretend to be remotely okay with losing my partner to some crappy desk job that's just so beneath her, but I will concede that it's not really up to me."

She swallowed down a desire to cry, although she couldn't articulate at what. She watched him take a sip of his tea, pull a face and clunk the mug back down in disgust.

It very nearly made her want to smile, even if only for half an instant.

An impulse she had almost forgotten.

"I'm not going to let you disappear, though," he warned her firmly. "One day, I'll bring you back."

Those words echoed in her head often over the years. As usual, he had made good on his promise. Not only was Phil Coulson a man of his word, but he was a stubborn bastard.

x x x

As such, that hadn't been the end of it.

He stopped by her cubicle quite regularly, perching on the side every couple of weeks and updating her on the joys of working with Sitwell or Barton or whoever it was. He didn't find another permanent partner. She knew he was waiting for her to come back, although to his credit, he did not bring up their situation again for several months, seeming to have decided to take her lead.

For the moment, anyway.

For her part, she was hugely torn by his approach. On the one hand, she wished he would just leave her alone so that she could move on and forget their past life together. Forget that he was out there without her, forget about who she had once been, forget about what she had lost. What she had destroyed.

On the other hand, his visits brought the only flickers of warmth to her otherwise icey life. It was difficult for her to understand why it was that he and he alone managed to revive her deadened heart just a little, although she guessed it was because they had been through so much together. In their worst moments, they had always had each other's backs, and it seemed that hadn't really changed.

One day, Coulson brought another chair to squeeze into her cubicle, stared hard at her with concern and said, "Look, I don't want to upset you, but I'm also not going to lie to you. Andrew called me. He said you filed for divorce?"

Of course Andrew had called him. Andrew knew, probably more than Coulson himself did, what he meant to her.

She couldn't find words with which to respond.

Phil was looking uncharacteristically distressed, more upset than she had seen him since Bahrain, during those long hours that he had sat with her while she had refused to allow anyone else near her, refused to move, refused to leave the girl.

She shook her head now, a firm warning that she didn't want to talk about it.

He ignored her.

"Why?" he asked instead, once more taking her by surprise with his tone. He didn't seem exasperated, like he was here to change her mind, but sincerely saddened. And she supposed this did affect him as well. Things had been personal in their little world, and Andrew had been a big part of it. Andrew and Coulson had gotten along from the moment they had met and it had been Coulson, not her, who had recommended he consult for SHIELD.

She half opened her mouth, trying to be honest, but no words would come. She couldn't tell him.

"You need him now," said Phil unexpectedly, but he still spoke sadly, mourning her marriage for her.

"No," she said. "He needs me to let him go."

"He doesn't agree," came his quiet reply. "And nor do I."

She felt a flash of frustration, again an unfamiliar experience in her otherwise emotionless world.

"Well, you have no idea what you're talking about," she snapped coldly. "You know nothing about me anymore."

Phil studied her calmly until she broke eye contact. Then he asked, "What should I know?"

She didn't want to answer him. She didn't want to talk anymore. She wished he would just leave her alone. But he wasn't going to, she knew that much.

"I'm not the same," she said eventually, growing tired of his relentless staring. "I'm not who Andrew needs anymore. And I'll never be that person again."

She expected him to disagree, but instead he seemed to be thinking about this. Finally he sighed.

"Well, if that's true, I guess we need to figure out who this new version of you is."

She frowned slightly.

"We don't. You should move on from this. I'm not the same for you either."

But she recognised the steely look in his eye which meant nothing could ever convince him to change his mind.

"Maybe not, in some ways," he said. "But you are something to me in many ways, and I know that some of them are still there. Maybe you're a different May, but you're still May."

There was a wrenching in her chest now as she tried to resist feeling.

This was so typical of him. How he managed to be both demanding and accepting at once. He wasn't trying to make her who she was again, and yet he was refusing to let her go.

"You might not like this version very much," she mumbled, her words tripping awkwardly from her lips, her attempt at a warning falling flat.

"I'll get used to it," he said, that characteristic mild look of his back in place, a flicker of a twinkle in his eye.

She was staring at him, feeling at a loss. But she was less annoyed than she might have thought. Because for the first time, she came to realise that maybe there was one thing from her old life that didn't need to be wiped away completely.

Maybe her friendship with Phil Coulson could adapt to their new circumstances and, somehow ... Persist.

x x x

It did.

Seemingly impossibly, despite everything, Coulson remained the one constant to her new life.

She hadn't exactly been flush with friends before, but she had successfully driven even her few respected colleagues away. Nobody came by her cubicle anymore for any reason other than admin needs. They were polite, friendly even. But as distant as she forced them to be.

Her new notoriety didn't encourage social ease either. She heard the rumours about her, noticed the awed whispers and stares, learned of her hateful new title. The Cavalry. She had smashed a good few breakables the night after hearing that for the first time.

She stopped talking to her parents, too, for the most part. She made dutiful monthly calls so they knew she was still alive, but her interaction stopped there. They had found out about the divorce through Andrew and about Bahrain through some contact of her mother's, but she refused to talk about any of it with them.

She had cut Andrew off completely, ignoring all calls and attempts at contact after the divorce was finalised. This was her greatest pledge to herself. Whatever happened, Andrew had to move on from her. She had to free him.

But Coulson still showed up.

Opening up to this version of their friendship was a slow process for her. At first, there had been his short visits to her cubicle. Shortly after their discussion about her divorce, he started to suggest they get drinks after work every now and then. It took a long time before she agreed.

She began to relax a little into their new friendship, but remained restrained for the most part. There was none of the teasing cheery ease of years past, but she was able to take a shadow of an interest in his new life, able to converse more naturally, able to smile sometimes.

She saw him less and less frequently as time passed. Freed from a partnership and ops, Coulson was being charged with increasingly more high profile missions, acting more and more as Fury's right hand man, particularly with certain initiatives she wasn't technically supposed to know about. As such, he was often away for long stretches of time, but on returning he would always manage to drag her out to drinks or possibly a burger to catch up.

Despite all of this, she remained distant, guarded. Because as much as he was willing to adapt to her, he remained unchanged, still Phil Coulson, a good man to his very core. And that side of him seemed unreachable to her new self, something worlds beyond her grasp. She could only watch it from afar.

He did begin trying to get her out in the field again, as promised, but never with any success. It was always the same conversation. He would materialise at her cubicle every couple of months and give her a one sentence summary of the assignment in question.

"Thought you might like to join me on this one."

"No."

A determined smile, eyes twinkling in the face of her eye roll.

"Next time."

As months turned into years, a wary companionship settled between them. She grew used to it, to having someone to talk to sometimes, someone to rely on to always show up, someone to still believe in her. He remained as light-hearted and friendly as ever in the face of her stoniness and she found herself softening just a little for him. She learned to smile just a little bit more. He was also the one who determinedly kept them connected in the real world. She simply followed his lead in that.

But in her soul, her attachment to him, already stronger than she could ever have explained, grew more and more solid, immutable, embedded within her like roots of a mountain. When everything else in her life was dark and empty, he was all she had.

x x x

Hill had been the one to tell her he was dead.

She hadn't thought she would be able to find a contender for the worst day of her life, but this one hurtled into the lead with no trouble, Bahrain fading into the distance.

Dead.

"We thought you should know first," Hill had said quietly. "You were closest to him."

Coulson. Dead.

"He died a hero."

"He was always -"

Her throat closed up and stopped working. It didn't work again, not for weeks.

She should have been there. She should have had his back. How could she ever forgive herself?

If the darkness before had been empty, it was solid now. Thick darkness closing in on her, suffocating her, clogging her throat. Nothing else existed. She couldn't cry, she couldn't feel, she couldn't do anything. She wasn't anything.

She was frozen in time, without a lifeline.

He had been her lifeline.

x x x

Fury had been the one to tell her that he was alive.

"I know it sounds impossible, but we brought him back."

Alive.

When he explained how, told her about the TAHITI project, told her awful things about what they had done to him to bring him back, she barely heard any of it.

Phil's alive.

After the initial wave of lightheaded surreal joy had hit, and she had found herself instantaneously, inexplicably freed from the darkness, something else settled in her chest, unyielding as iron. A determination, a vow.

Phil would get his wish. From this moment on, she would never leave his side again. She would be there, watching him and making sure he was safe. No matter the cost to her, she would protect him to her last breath.

So, when Fury asked her to do the unforgiveable, in order to protect him, she didn't hesitate.

"Anything," she said.

x x x

Sometimes she looked back on that time, when she had thought him gone, and was convinced she would have died. Convinced her despair would have sucked her straight down to the gates of hell.

She would never tell Coulson that, of course. He would hate that.

She hated it too.

Freed from her self-imposed exile, she had found new purpose now, a reason to keep going. And she knew she would never again give up on life, because he never had.

Phil Coulson had never given up.

x x x

A/N: Thanks so much for reading. I'd love to hear what you think 😊