Chapter 2

Disclaimer: see previous chapter.

The next time Natasha saw Coulson – or rather, the first time in a long while, he was in his new office, looking rather worse for wear, emotionally and mentally at least.

"What?" he glared at the redhead, before realizing who she was. "What," he repeated in a different tone. "What gives?"

"I just want to talk," Natasha said quietly, realizing that the normally mild-mannered and even-tempered man was neither at the moment.

"About Ward?"

"...No. About May, actually. Why would I want to talk about this ex-agent?"

"My bad," Coulson grimaced. "I just had several bad weeks, lately-"

"Because of May?" Natasha asked, but got a very peculiar glare instead.

"How much did she tell you?" Coulson asked, sounding bristly – and briskly too.

"Everything," Natasha confessed.

"Ah," Coulson leaned back, defeated. "And she's right, at least to a point, you know? I do not live her – not the way I loved Audrey. We were friends, until recently, and I thought that it would be enough, but apparently it was not. Melinda wanted more – more than I could honestly give her, and now we're all paying the price."

"All?"

"We miss her – me, Skye, Fitz and Simmons, even Hunter and the others. She was an important part of the team, Natasha-"

"Yes, Fury explained it to me. She was something of a den mother-"

"Yes, she was becoming something of a den mother – and I'm not sure anymore that she liked it," Coulson nodded. "There's a passage in Hamlet about how we tend to change, that we may not always stay the same person that we were at first – and we may not always like it, if we're to go by the subtext in the passage."

"...Are you using Shakespeare as an explanation?!" Natasha stared at her former co-worker as if he had hulked-out instead.

"Between Fitz and Simmons, Hunter and Morse, I became quite familiar with the Bard – and I like him, at least to an extent," Coulson nodded wryly. "But we are getting off track – my bad. I was trying to explain that May was changing, and as far as I thought, that she was changing for the better. It seems that she disagreed."

"Because of Palamas?"

"Palamas is just an agent who had some very bad time lately, and that left her personality very short-fused – but she is working well enough with the other agents, including Skye and the FitzSimmons, though she is avoid Morse and Hunter, BTW. Frankly, this does not make her too unusual by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s standards – but that was not Melinda's problem with her. Melinda actually tried to intimidate her into submissiveness – and for all the wrong reasons. Just like me, Melinda was become older, more, well, human – and apparently she didn't like it as much it as I have thought."

"She wanted to please you-"

"I know," Coulson said miserably, "and I thought that the two of us had an understanding, especially before Puerto Rico – but I was wrong. May was wrong too – but in a different fashion, and when we both figured that out, things fell apart. In private, but very spectacularly, too."

Natasha, realizing the need for a sounding board, just nodded in an encouraging sort of way and Coulson took the bait, as expected – sort of.

"Melinda is the nothing or all sort of person," he continued. "Between that and the fact that Skye did get the best of her back when the whole mess with the InHumans began, she sort of collapsed. Belay that – she just collapsed. She tried to do what she had done before, after Bahrain, but it did not work – in part because of me, but in part because she did not want to. She and I were growing apart, as I expected us to, but it went worse than I have expected."

"You expected to grow apart?" Natasha stared at the man.

"Yes. I do not love her – Andrew does. Melinda needs love in her life; Andrew can give it to her, while I cannot. I loved Audrey – still do, I suppose. I just, just expected that Melinda would bring Andrew into the fold instead – but it backfired. So be it. I cannot really do anything about it – not while Melinda is angry at me, you know?"

There was a pause as both he and Natasha thought this over.

"So how are you handling this?" Natasha finally decided to ask the obvious.

"Not so good – but not bad enough to beg her to come back," Coulson shook his head. "We have been abandoned by one of ours before, and under much worse circumstances too. Compared to Ward's betrayal, May's rejection is not so bad, just rather immature – but it is still her call. She did imply that she may be back, to work in the administration, as she did once, after Bahrain, but given how she sounded when she said it, I would not bet on it. Ward chose, purposefully, Hydra over us. Melinda...just decided that she does not care anymore. There's some difference."

"Here you go about that man again. Is he really that important?"

"When we first captured him after the Centipede situation I thought that there might still be some inherent goodness left in him, and that he would try to cooperate for the sake of redemption, at least. I was wrong. Whatever goodness there is, whatever anything there is, it is all buried under insanity – if we ever capture him alive, and I would not bet on it, I will try to help him – with T.A.H.I.T.I., but I would not bet on it. He is too far gone for now, and neither Hunter nor Morse is inclined to be gentle with him, for obvious reasons."

Natasha held her tongue in regards to the last bit. She did know Morse back in the old days, before the Hydra uprising, she knew that the blonde woman was good... but not as good as tended to think... and that her life partner was probably the same way: almost as good as he thought that he was. Between that partially misplaced confidence, and Grant Ward's current tactics of misdirection, Natasha wasn't certain as to who would win – but she wasn't in the right place to tell Coulson this anymore; maybe Fury was, but Fury wasn't here right now.

Bastard.

"But this has nothing to do with May," Coulson continued. "She is sane; she just took a look around, realized that she was not the person she once was, or thought that she was, and didn't handle it very well. Personally, I thought that it was good for her-"

"That she was becoming more, uh, maternal?"

"Yes – but perhaps I was wrong; that's what Melinda implied. She told me that she did it only because she thought that I wanted her to do so, and if I didn't – she wouldn't."

"That's not how she told it."

"I know. She was not in a very good emotional place, not since the whole Li Shi incident, and at that moment it showed. I told her that if she did not want to, she did not have to – among other things, and she took it all to the max and just left. She was, or is, an important part of the team, and my friend, but it does not seem that she wants to be either, not anymore, not at the moment. You talked to her – does it sound as if she is coming back?"

"No," Natasha shakes her head and gets back up. "Sorry about that, BTW."

"Don't," Coulson also gets up and shakes the ex-agent's hand. "You and Barton aren't coming back either, now would you?"

"Sorry, but Bruce still isn't a big fan of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Barton too has retired – to his farm," Natasha says with a chuckle. "Maybe it's the zeitgeist, director – it's against S.H.I.E.L.D. and all..."

"Maybe," is all that Coulson replies, and Natasha leaves his office – the same way that she came.