After I'd learned firsthand what a hydrochloric acid burn felt like, I found Victoria waiting for me back at my cell, sitting in a corner with her knees drawn up to her chest. She looked like hell. She'd lost a lot of weight; her cheeks were sunken in, and her eyes were dull and bloodshot. She was still wearing the remains of her clothing, but parts of it had been cut away to expose the skin for Bodho. There were long stripes of angry, burned flesh running across her torso, and her left eye was swollen almost shut. Her lips were pale and cracked, and her maroon-streaked hair hung limply in her grimy face. I wondered if I looked that bad. I probably did.

"Hey," she said, her voice dry and raspy.

"Hey yourself," I replied, mine equally hoarse. I coughed a few times and sat up, clearing my throat. And then I did something very uncharacteristic. I crawled on my hands and knees over to where she was sitting and propped myself next to her, closer than the new Melinda was usually comfortable with. But after the long days in the cell by myself, I longed for human companionship, even hers.

"Saved you some water." She offered me a half-empty plastic bottle. I drank it hungrily. It wasn't enough, not nearly enough.

Silence passed between us, interrupted only by an occasional coughing fit from me. I began tracing the cracks in the wall, watching them form cats, dogs, sailboats, the prison version of cloud watching. I had used it to amuse myself during my time in solitary confinement, both here and in that hellhole outside Sarajevo. Eventually, I knew, the cracks would cease to form new patterns, and I would be left with the same cats, dogs, and sailboats I'd seen the day before. In Sarajevo, I had hit the wall repeatedly, trying to make new cracks, but had succeeding only in scraping my knuckles down to the bone. It had been a welcome diversion nonetheless.

"Victoria?" I asked, after a while.

"Yeah?"

"Thanks."

"What for?"

"Throwing that knife the day of the stakeout. You said I could thank you later, so …"

"My pleasure," she assured me.

But I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. We'd been different people back then, whole, or at least only slightly cracked. It felt like a lifetime ago, and the mere notion that a time before this even existed, a time when Victoria had held something as empowering as a knife, seemed absurd.

"I'm sorry we couldn't escape," I said. "I should have seen him."

"It's okay. I didn't see him either. I think he was waiting behind the truck or something." She rubbed her shoulder and moved it experimentally, wincing in pain as she did so.

"Shoulder okay?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Think they wrenched it or something last time they took me."

"Oh."

I started coughing again, razors tearing through the inside of my lungs, the spasms making me painfully aware of every injury. My head was pounding and my muscles ached from the electrocution. Thanks to malnutrition, none of my cuts or burns were healing properly, and they ached and stung with various degrees of intensity. The bruises I had accumulated over the past few days throbbed, especially the one on my face from where Bodho had punched me. I paused to suck in air, then doubled over coughing again.

"I don't like the sound of that," said Victoria, rubbing my back in one of the few places that wasn't covered in burns. I was too sick to mind the touch.

I nodded. "I think I have pneu—" Another coughing fit cut me off, and she kept rubbing my back as I spat up mucus and blood. Yep. Definitely pneumonia.

"It's okay," she whispered, her hand still between my shoulder blades. We both knew it was a lie, but I still felt a little better. I shivered and gingerly hugged myself. I was sick and cold and I hurt and I just wanted to go home.

"I'm sorry," I said, after another long silence.

"You've got nothing to be sorry for," she assured me.

"I do. Back there on the stakeout, and this whole mission, the way I treated you, that was unfair."

"It's fine," she said, giving a one-shouldered shrug. "I know I'm kind of out of my depth here. I don't think I'm cut out for life in the trenches."

I scoffed. "Don't be stupid. You obviously know your way around hand-to-hand combat and knife-throwing. Not to mention that you held out under torture with almost no resistance training. You're a natural."

"Yeah, and compared to the Cav—compared to you, I'm nothing."

"I was nothing once," I admitted. "You want to hear about my first field mission?"

She smirked. "Wouldn't miss it."

I took a deep breath, feeling my chest rattle. This incident used to be in the unmitigated disasters file, until Zurich, Sarajevo, and a few missions in the Middle East gave me some perspective. "Well," I began, "it was supposed to be an in-and-out undercover mission. There was a restaurant we thought might be a front for an arms smuggling operation, so we sent some agents in disguised as waiters, kitchen staff, a few customers. I was a waitress. I looked stupid.

"I spent the morning listening to people complaining about the undercover kitchen staff messing up their orders—Duvall might be a crack shot, but he can barely boil water—and trying to avoid wandering hands."

She gave me a sympathetic look; most women who went through ops training had been around the block a few times when it came to sexual harassment.

I continued, "One of the people we suspected of being involved with the arms smugglers came in the front door and started talking to the head waiter. It sounded like he was giving some kind of passphrase, so our handler told us to be ready. Except I had my earpiece turned way up so I could hear over the restaurant noise. When I heard the handler's voice, it was so loud that I yelled, grabbed the earpiece, yanked it out, and spilled a guy's coffee all over the floor."

Victoria winced. "Ouch."

"Oh, you think that was bad. The head waiter saw the earpiece and made us. Pulled a gun, grabbed me, and held it to my head. I don't think I've ever been more scared in my life."

Something about this whole conversation suddenly struck me as odd. I never talked about that op; I didn't like remembering how badly I'd screwed up. And why was I admitting I'd been scared? The new Melinda would have her teeth pulled without anesthesia before admitting to being scared.

"So what happened then?"

"Huh?" I asked, looking up.

"You had a gun to your head. What happened after that?"

The injuries and malnutrition must have really done a number on my head, because I kept talking. "There was a gunshot from behind us and the guy's head exploded. I got brain matter all over my face."

Victoria's eyes widened.

"Like I said, Duvall's a crack shot," I said with a dry, brittle laugh.

"Ick," she grimaced. "Double ick."

I shrugged, then winced as a cut on my collar opened up and started suppurating. Speaking of ick.

"That op was when I first met Phil Coulson," I mused, speaking more to myself than to her. "After we'd cleared everything up, done our debriefing, I went back to the motel we were staying at and showered for about an hour. Even after I was done, I still felt dirty, like that man's brain matter was still all over me. It didn't seem real. One minute, he was alive, and then the next, everything that made him who he was was splattered all over the room. And I thought that maybe if I'd just kept the volume on my earpiece down, he'd still be alive."

"Why'd you care?" Victoria asked. "He would've killed you."

"I know. But that doesn't mean I felt good about it. I went outside to get some air and ended up sitting on the steps of the motel with my head in my hands. And then suddenly there was this guy in a suit sitting next to me. I'd seen him before, but we'd never worked together."

"And that was Coulson?"

"Yeah. We talked for a while, and he told me some really bad jokes. I guess he was trying to cheer me up. But we just sort of clicked, if that makes sense, and we stuck together after that. He had a couple of friends in Personnel, and he asked them to assign us together as much as they could." I felt a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth as I remembered him, his smiling face, his quiet voice, his love of antiques and collectables.

"Did you ever ..?"

I shook my head, still smiling. "No. It was almost … more than that."

My smile disappeared when I realized I'd just used the past tense.

"I've never had anyone like that," she said, oblivious to my Freudian slip. "As an adult, I mean. I had a cousin growing up, though. We were pretty close. My dad was in the USAF, and I'd stay with her family while he was away. We were like sisters, Miracle and me."

"Unusual name," I observed.

"It was true, though. She had some kind of really bad brain bleed when she was born, and the doctors said that even if she made it out of the NICU, she was going to be severely disabled. Like, can't walk or talk or see or think kind of disabled."

"They were wrong, I take it."

"She got honors in middle and high school, played the lead in The Glass Menagerie, and rode horses on the weekends. We both did, actually."

"Horses?" I asked. I could barely picture Victoria as a teenager, much less on horseback.

"Yeah. Her family owned a ranch. Almost a hundred acres of Kentucky bluegrass country. We used to pack a lunch and ride out to this little stream and have a picnic under a tree. And after we were done, we'd sometimes take off our shoes and socks, roll up our pants, and go wading. She was always trying to catch fish with her bare hands. I kept telling her it wasn't possible, but she always said that miracles happen all the time."

"She ever catch one?" I asked.

"Never a fish. Bunch of turtles and a few frogs, though. Once she caught a snake and we brought it home. Aunt Kerry almost had a heart attack." She gave a short laugh as she recalled the memory.

"Do you still see her?" I asked.

Victoria looked down at her lap and shook her head. "She, uh, she died. Fell off a horse on a jumps course. Killed instantly."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. She had a nice life. Nineteen good years when she wasn't supposed to have any at all. Besides, that was a long time ago."

But that didn't make it any easier to bear, and we both knew it.

"What do you think happens after we die?" she asked.

I looked up. "I don't know. I've never given it much thought."

"But you're a specialist. You've probably had more near-death experiences than you can count."

I shrugged. "I have. But I don't dwell on it. I just get the mission done."

"But when you go in, don't you ever think, This mission could be my last?"

"It's ... complicated," I said slowly, searching for the right words. "It's true; you never know when your number's going to come up. But if you spend the whole mission trying not to get killed, you'll hesitate, make mistakes. And then you'll definitely screw something up."

"So you're not scared of dying?"

"I didn't say that," I whispered.

"I watched a guy die once," she said, sitting upright. "Back when I was stationed at the Fridge. Dixon, his name was Michael Dixon."

"How'd he die?" I asked.

"Well, we keep a lot of people on the Index there, the really dangerous ones, you know?"

I nodded. I knew where this was going.

"There was this one guy who could kill you just by touching you. I don't know all the science behind it, but basically his skin was poisonous. So one day, I was sitting in my office catching up on paperwork when the alarms went off. Technically I was an administrator, so it wasn't any of my business, but I still wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Morbid curiosity, I guess. I ran down to the detention block, and I saw the door to this guy's cell hanging open, and these two guards lying on the floor. One of them was dead; I guess he'd gotten a larger dose of the poison, but the other was still alive. His skin was this ashy blue color, and he was gasping and wheezing like he couldn't breathe." She paused and shook her head. "He died right in front of me. I watched the light go out of his eyes. And then there was just a body. I think it was the first time I'd ever seen a dead person outside a funeral home."

"Did they catch the guy?" I asked, after a minute.

She nodded. "No one else died, thank God. But I just remember that guard looking up at me, like he was begging me to save his life. And I couldn't do anything; I didn't have any medical training; hell, I barely had any ops training. And I just thought that maybe, if I hadn't been sitting on my ass doing paperwork, I could've done something."

"It wasn't your fault," I said automatically. It isn't unusual for survivors of an accident to blame themselves, whether or not they could've done anything to help, and I've heard the if-only spiel a hundred times from colleagues.

"I know that," she told me. "But I just felt so useless. I mean, the whole point of SHIELD is to protect, and I wasn't protecting anyone by signing stuff in triplicate."

"Is that why you transferred to Operations?"

She nodded. "I wanted to make a difference. Maybe even save someone's life."

"Did you ever—" I started to say, but then I started coughing violently, my lungs staging a full-fledged rebellion against whatever horrible strain of jungle bacteria was growing inside them.

"Hey, hey, shh," Victoria said, rubbing my back again. "Deep breaths; it's okay."

"I doubt it," I replied, spitting out a mouthful of sputum.

We were dead women; I'd known that on some level since our escape attempt had failed. We both did, come to think of it. The past hour or so had been our last confession. I never would have told her about the undercover op, or meeting Coulson, or any of the rest, if I thought we had any hope of seeing daylight again. I suspected the same was true for her.

The prospect of death was almost welcome. I didn't particularly want to die, but I also didn't want to go back to that room and face Bodho again. At this point, an end to life meant nothing more than an end to pain. Maybe I'd see my dad, or my old partner, or any one of the numerous people I knew who had died. Victoria could see Miracle. And we'd never have to face Bodho again because he was going straight to Hell ...

"May? May, I need you to stay with me," I heard Victoria say. My eyes focused again, and I swam up out of a foggy headspace I hadn't even noticed I was in. "Come on; look at me." I looked, but she didn't seem real. I was dissociating; it had happened a few times before, but never this badly.

"I broke my wrist once, when I was at the Academy," Victoria began. "Third year. Fell off the ropes course. It hurt like hell, and I went to the infirmary to get it set. And while I was waiting for the cast to dry, there was some kind of accident, and like twenty first-year cadets came in with flash burns. It was all superficial, but they were really scared, so I got a big black Sharpie and had them all sign my cast. A couple of them drew some pretty, um, inappropriate stuff on there, and when my SO saw it, he just marched off to the administrative offices and came back with a big old thing of white-out. Once I'd covered up all the indecent stuff, he asked if he could sign the cast too. Drew a little smiley face."

There wasn't much point to the story, but her voice was keeping me here, keeping me solid.

She started another story. "I had this pet rabbit when I was a kid. I called him Peter, you know, after the children's book …"

Victoria kept talking, telling story after story, some about her childhood, some from the Academy, and some were just folk tales or fables she happened to know. She never took her hand off my back either; her touch and the sound of her voice were the only things that kept me holding on. I don't know how much time passed, but eventually she fell silent. The only sound in the room was the crackle of mucus as I inhaled and exhaled. I looked over and noticed Victoria's eyelids drooping.

"Hey," I said, poking her with my elbow.

"May?" Victoria asked sleepily.

"Right here."

"I'm tired." She moved forward and lay down on the floor.

I leaned in closer to her and, hesitant, touched her forehead. She was burning up. Despite the antiseptic Bodho had been soaking us in, one of her injuries must have gotten infected. I couldn't let her sleep.

"Uh-uh. Stay awake. Victoria, stay with me."

"I can't," she protested, her voice weak and slurred. "Wanna go to sleep."

"No sleeping," I said as firmly as I could, though I realized that I was as tired as she was.

"Just a few minutes?" she implored.

"No. You go to sleep, you'll never wake up."

"That such a bad thing?" she murmured.

She was right, and I knew it. I'd known it all along.

"No," I conceded. "No, it wouldn't be. In fact, I think I'll join you."

So I settled down next to her, careful of my various injuries, and we curled into each other for warmth. We lay there, shattered bodies and shattered souls on a cold concrete floor. This really isn't so bad, I thought, as I felt myself slipping away. Before the darkness claimed me, I reached out next to me. My hand found Victoria's, and she squeezed it reassuringly. Then the world faded to black.

Author's note: Thank you to all who have given feedback. You've kept me motivated, and seeing new reviews is the highlight of my dreary existence. It's been great writing for you guys. - JC