TW for minor fighting/violence, presence of a gun, discussion of medical procedures/experiments

It was more than a little disorienting to leave the ATCU medical facility and realize that it was well into the afternoon, not still the middle of the night, like Melinda had thought. The daylight hurt her eyes after spending all night in the windowless rooms and artificial lighting of the medical facility, but the sharp, chilly breeze that clipped across her face was a welcome change from the stuffy air she'd been breathing for hours. She felt more awake than she had, now that the cold, fresh air was skinning her cheeks and clearing out her lungs.

Deciding that she could spare the time, Melinda headed first back to her apartment to get cleaned up and change into something less conspicuous than her Maelstromeda costume.

A golf ball of emotion clogged up her throat at the sight of Daisy's door, left open and giving Melinda a clear view of Daisy's things, mostly strewn about and waiting for her to return. The hula girl sat atop the dresser, perfectly still without anyone to nudge her, and the stuffed elephant was sitting on the unmade bed, propped up against a pillow like Daisy had set it there on purpose. Like she couldn't be bothered to take the time to make the bed, but the time to make sure her stuffed animal was in a comfortable spot was well worth it.

Melinda turned away brusquely, shoving the thought from her mind before tears could spring up or she felt like punching another dent into the wall.

She put her own things away in the office, electing to clean her suit and sword later, when she had the time to do it properly, then scanned her fingerprint to pop open the secret drawer and retrieve Coulson's commlink. She sent him a short message asking to meet, and by the time she had showered and dressed in comfortable civilian clothes – jeans and a leather jacket, same as she'd worn the day Daisy had called her from the hospital, she remembered with a painful lurch – he had responded with a time and place for them to rendezvous.

An hour later, she pulled up outside the familiar, formidable entrance to SHIELD HQ. The building itself looked unchanged, but the collection of ATCU agents swarming like ants around the perimeter was a jarring reminder that everything was different.

She flashed the badge Rosalind had lent her to the agent guarding the main door, and he nodded her through without a word. Inside, more ATCU agents were milling around, some boxing up materials from offices and labs, some escorting SHIELD agents out in handcuffs, and others still speaking to other SHIELD agents – ones who, presumably, weren't implicated in the Project Insight roundup. The big holographic display of Avengers legends that normally anchored the middle of the entrance hall was turned off, leaving the room feeling even more cavernous and empty than normal, and the display screens normally alive with mission updates and call times were dark, too. The whole place felt like a husk.

Nobody paid Melinda much mind as she crossed the big hall and headed up the cascading, double-wide glass staircase, then down the hall that led to the office where Coulson had asked her to meet. The hallway spiked away sharply from the main part of the building, winding back into the deep innards of SHIELD, away from the regular traffic of agents and heroes. Melinda had only been back this way twice before, and neither time had been particularly pleasant.

When she finally reached the imposing door that protected the office marked 'DIRECTOR,' she was surprised to see it ajar. Knocking on the open door, she poked her head in and saw Coulson standing behind a massive desk, shuffling through stacks of paperwork with a bemused expression on his face. He looked up at the sound of her knock.

"May, hi. Come on in. You can shut the door behind you."

She obliged, stepping into the room and pulling the door shut behind her. She looked around for a place to sit, but every available chair was piled up with papers, file boxes, or locked cases that looked like they had been dropped off by SciTech.

"Can I—?"

"What?" Coulson blinked, like he was finally processing the scene in front of him and what Melinda was asking. "Oh, yes, sorry. Just throw that stuff anywhere. I'm a little in over my head here."

"Nice digs," she nodded as she lifted a trio of silver SciTech cases out of a chair and set them delicately on top of a stack of folders on the desk. She sank into the chair, grateful for a chance to rest her knee. "So, director, huh?"

"Director by default, I suppose," Coulson said with a little shrug. He gave up trying to flip through the file in his hand and tossed it into a pile, then took a seat himself. "Working at the Avengers level for as long as I have got me up to a pretty high rank, but I guess I didn't realize how high until everyone above me got carted off by the ATCU and I was the only one left."

Melinda was quiet, more focused on stretching her powers out than chatting. She was curious how Coulson felt about his sudden promotion, and about the ATCU raids. Nothing was coming across particularly strongly – a little nervousness, a little guardedness, but a little confidence, too. A dash of pride and excitement.

"I'm still kind of in shock about it all," he continued, apparently not noticing Melinda's lack of conversation. "The ATCU hasn't told me much, just that they've taken in a lot of SHIELD agents and officers for… a lot of things. A lot of financial stuff from the high levels, allegedly, and practically the whole SciTech division. There's going to be a massive investigation, they said. Pretty much all our assets are frozen, our entire hero operation has been put on hold. And you… don't seem all that surprised by any of this."

Melinda held his gaze for a long time, her face expressionless, the silence speaking volumes until she finally broke it. "No."

"I wondered," Coulson murmured. "When you reached out this afternoon, I wondered… I guess it all makes sense…"

"Coulson, SHIELD was broken," Melinda said quietly. "It was rotting from the inside out. Had been for a long time. Somebody had to do something before things got out of hand."

"Couldn't have given me a heads' up, could you?" he asked with a sad smile. He shook his head and turned his attention to the silver cases Melinda had moved onto the desk a few minutes ago. He popped the top one open and studied whatever was inside. "Last couple of things SciTech sent up before everything got shut down. I'll probably have to hand this all over at some point."

He lifted something out of the case – a sleek, hi-tech looking handgun. Melinda didn't recognize it, but she could tell by the design that it probably wasn't a normal gun.

"Dendrotoxin-powered tranquilizer," Coulson explained, waving the gun a little carelessly. "ICER. Supposed to neutralize a target almost instantaneously without the noise, mess, or blunt force trauma of a bullet. They're still getting the dosage right. Right now it just stops the target's heart rather than knocking them out, which isn't quite what they were going for…"

"I'm not here to look at SHIELD's latest toy or check out your fancy new office," Melinda said, a little more impatiently than she probably should have. "I'm here to ask for your help with something."

"You, or the ATCU?"

"Both, I suppose, if you want to get technical," Melinda frowned. "We're not the bad guys here, Coulson. We want to give you an opportunity to work with us, help us cut the cancer out of SHIELD so that what's left can remain in operation."

"An opportunity or an order?" he asked. "Because I've already had my fill of orders from the ATCU, the UN, the DOJ…"

"It's an opportunity," Melinda said firmly. "Your choice. We'll get what we need eventually either way, but this gives you a chance to get out ahead of it. For SHIELD to try and save face with the public once all this gets out."

"And what is it, exactly, that you're asking for?"

"Access." Melinda leaned forward in her chair. "We'd like your help in getting into SHIELD's database, their files. We're looking for someone, someone who we think might be at the center of this whole mess. Someone we haven't been able to find a trace of so far."

"Can I ask who?"

"He calls himself the Clairvoyant," Melinda told him. "That's the only ID anyone's given us on him. We know he's got high-level clearance and a lot of influence here at SHIELD. He was pulling a lot of strings, putting a lot of pieces into motion. He gave orders to Pierce about how to handle the business side of SHIELD, puppeted Cybertek through Ian Quinn to develop weapons and tech and profit from the whole thing. Whitehall operated under his direction, recreating EnReD under the new banner of Terrigenesis. He even planted the entirety of Project Insight within SHIELD to recruit its agents into the program, getting them ready to morph into monsters on a moment's notice."

"Busy guy." Coulson looked pale, almost sick. "And you have no idea who he is? No one you've taken in fits the bill?"

"No, not yet. We're worried he might still be out there, planning his next move now that we've taken most of his pieces off the board. We want to comb through SHIELD's files to see if there's anything we might have missed, anything that can give us a lead on him."

"There's a lot of classified information stored at SHIELD," Coulson said hesitantly. "Not that I don't want to help – I do – but we're all still reeling from this huge internal shockwave. Opening up our entire database to an outside agency at this point… you're asking me for a lot, May."

"I know, and I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important," she said. "The Clairvoyant has done a lot of damage. A good hero put her life on the line to stop the Clairvoyant from doing any more. I'm just trying to make sure her sacrifice was worthwhile."

A muscle jumped in Coulson's jaw. "A hero?"

Melinda opened her mouth to respond, but found that her voice had gotten lost somewhere along the way, trapped deep in her chest and tangled up around her heart. She closed her mouth and just nodded instead, swallowing hard and blinking away the burning in her eyes.

"Quake," Coulson said, realization dawning. "You're working with Quake, aren't you? Those files you asked me for, the flag on her searches yesterday… Well, I'll be honest, that is definitely not something I saw coming."

"You and me both," Melinda said, a weak little laugh escaping her. "Neither one of us expected to work so well together, but once we started uncovering what was going on inside SHIELD…"

"She's been digging around in the system," Coulson nodded. "She got flagged by the security measures yesterday. But she hasn't… I mean, she hasn't found anything? She didn't tell you anything about the Clairvoyant?"

Something tugged at the edges of Melinda's consciousness. Coulson's discomfort with their conversation seemed to be turning to something almost like agitation. She wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

"She's the one who discovered Project Insight and the embedded signal, and she helped me connect the Clairvoyant to Ian Quinn. We went to go pick him up last night when everything went south."

"There was an incident at Cybertek last night, I saw…"

"Quinn called for help, and Hive showed up. One of your former agents, by the way. We took care of Quinn, and I killed Hive, but Quake… she's in bad shape. Hive attacked her with that mist he's got. She's hanging on, but barely."

"Talk about some twisted irony," Coulson said, shaking his head sympathetically. "Quake survives getting shot by Ian Quinn at Cybertek only to be killed by Hive there a year later."

Melinda froze. Her breath caught in her throat, and something dropped precipitously in the pit of her stomach, a cannonball of a horrible thought. No. It couldn't be. Surely…surely not…

"How did you know Quinn was the one who shot Quake?" she asked slowly, carefully, as delicately as one might approach a coiled cobra. "There was no record in her file of who pulled the trigger. She didn't even know for sure herself until last night when Quinn confirmed it was him that the Clairvoyant ordered to cross her off."

"Oh, well," Coulson waved a hand nonchalantly, but his face flushed slightly and Melinda immediately felt a rush of panic and frustration flood out of him. "I mean, it only makes sense, doesn't it? She was looking into Cybertek when she got shot and… and…"

Coulson trailed off, worked the muscles in his jaw for a moment. Then he let out a resigned little sigh from his nose and, to Melinda's disbelief, a smile slowly spread across his face.

"Well, shit," he said with a slight chuckle. "I guess there's no putting that cat back in the bag, now, is there?"

Before Melinda had a chance to so much as blink, Coulson hit a button on the desk and the unmistakable sound of the office door locking behind her filled her ears. She jumped to her feet, but was immediately met by the barrel of the ICER pointed directly at her chest.

"You really have quite a knack for throwing a wrench into my plans, don't you?" Coulson asked, his tone deadly. Coulson had always spoken in a voice with a meandering little patter – it had always worked to make him seem friendly and nonthreatening. But now that soft, friendly tenor had been replaced by hard, surgical steel – cold and cutting and about as dangerous as Melinda had ever heard a man sound. "First by teaming up with Quake and spoiling the surprise of Project Insight, and now by getting me to slip up and blow my cover before I can put my backup plan in motion."

"You're the Clairvoyant." Melinda felt numb. It was like her brain was moving in slow motion. This didn't make sense. Coulson was Coulson. Necktie-wearing, bad-joke-cracking, nice-guy Coulson. There was no way he could be the ruthless, calculating Clairvoyant. And yet the gun pointed at her chest and the venom in his eyes suggested otherwise.

"It has a nice ring to it, don't you think?" he asked. He gestured with the gun, indicating that Melinda should return to her seat. Not interested in being shot with something that would cause her heart to stop, Melinda obeyed.

"But… how? Why?" She shook her head like she was clearing water from her ears, still struggling to believe the new reality that faced her. "What happened to the man who believed in the greater good? The agent who was defined by his loyalty to SHIELD's mission to protect people?"

"Don't you see? That's exactly what I'm doing," Coulson said, spreading his arms wide. "Everything I've done as the Clairvoyant has been for the greater good. I'm just the only one who's got what it takes to push the company line as far as it should be pushed, the only one willing to actually make the tough calls that need to be made so we can make the world a better place."

"You're insane…"

"I came to a realization, you see, right after you got the EnReD program shut down," he continued, happily ignoring Melinda's cutting remark. "I realized what a huge mistake SHIELD was making. They were throwing the baby out with the bathwater. EnReD wasn't perfect, but we were turning our backs on true, world-changing possibility just because of a few setbacks and missteps."

"I took the life of a child because of EnReD," Melinda spat. "That's more than just a misstep, that's a catastrophic failure of judgement. SHIELD had every reason to be ashamed of itself after that."

"No, see, that's where you're wrong," Coulson shook his head. "SHIELD was right. They've always been right. EnReD was a worthwhile endeavor, they were just too cowardly to admit it because the optics were bad. But the greater potential, the greater good that could be done when SHIELD allowed itself to make the unpopular move… Look, there's an acceptable number of losses on every mission. A scale of sacrifice that we weigh against all of our decisions. A cost we decide we're willing to pay in exchange for the greater good."

"But that's not a decision SHIELD gets to make for other people," Melinda argued. "Maybe SHIELD is willing to pay for progress with people's lives, but those same people deserve to be treated as more than lab rats or pawns you can sacrifice for some nebulous greater good you've declared. You don't get to be the arbiter of goodness and what it's worth."

"I disagree," Coulson tutted. "People have exceptionally bad judgement when it comes to knowing what's good for them. It's our job to know that for them, when their judgement is clouded by sentimentality or emotion or fear. People think SHIELD is here to protect them from bad guys, but really, we're here to protect them from themselves. From their own reluctance to make the hard calls, from their willingness to settle for mediocrity because it's more comfortable than the growing pains you get from progress."

"So you took it upon yourself to force your twisted version of goodness and progress into the world?"

"I took an oath," Coulson said. "To be the SHIELD. To defend the mission of SHIELD with every fiber of my being. So when I saw SHIELD itself shrinking away from its own values, I did what any truly loyal SHIELD agent would do. I began working behind the scenes, began whispering in the ears of people who could get things done for me. Planting ideas in Pierce's head about the profitability of playing both sides to ensure we'd have the funding we'd need, stoking the coals of Whitehall's ego about the injustice of cutting off scientific progress because of a few bad results. I used my Avengers-level clearance to set up Project Insight, giving me access to everything I needed, recruiting willing agents who understood the same thing I did, about what needed to be done to truly advance the world toward the ultimate greater good. And it all worked. People only saw me as someone who was blinded by my loyalty to SHIELD, a company man. But I wasn't blind, I had vision, insight that no one else did. I was Clairvoyant."

"I kept myself out of it all, of course," he continued with a smile. "A little failsafe. If things went according to plan, Project Insight would be activated and we'd have a whole agency full of super soldiers and enough public goodwill for me to unmask and take necessary control of anything we wanted. If not, well, then those in Project Insight could take the fall and leave me a clear path to the director's chair, where I could still put my plans into action, once I'd reframed it as a necessary response to the internal threat we had almost not seen coming."

"But… you helped me. When I started looking into SHIELD, you gave me Quake's file. Why?"

"You were always a smart agent, I'm surprised you haven't figured that one out yourself," Coulson smirked. "It's an easy strategy. You were always a loose thread SHIELD had never quite tied up when it came to EnReD. You trusted me, reached out, told me you were looking into things. I knew you'd look whether I helped you or not, so the obvious play was to feed you just enough to satiate your curiosity and offer you assurances that things had changed, make you see me as a harmless friend. You were practically begging me to play you for a fool."

"Not such a fool," Melinda glowered. "I didn't stop with what you gave me. I kept digging. Daisy and I uncovered your entire twisted operation—"

"Yes, Quake's betrayal was an unforeseen complication, I'll admit," Coulson mused. "She's such a valuable asset, you know. Her DNA is remarkable, I was told. One of our most promising candidates. A bit of a handful, but nothing that some strong supervision from Insight operatives couldn't handle. And she responded so well to the G.H.325 – accelerated her healing so seamlessly that I don't think even she's realized she's different now. It really is a shame she had to die."

Melinda's vision went red, and before she had fully registered what she was doing, she was on her feet, hand wrapped around the nearest heavy object – a paperweight in the shape of Captain America's shield – ready to smash it into the side of Coulson's stupid head.

"That girl is more valuable than any agent in your whole damn organization, and it's not because of her DNA," she snarled. "It's because she's more of a hero than any of you will ever be, and if she doesn't make it, because of what you've done—"

"My god," Coulson chuckled, "I didn't realize you'd grown so fond of her. Here I was thinking you'd sworn off attachments years ago. But you really do care about her, don't you?"

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't bash your head in."

"Gladly," Coulson replied coolly. He took a step around the desk, moved forward until there was hardly any space between them, and pressed the barrel of the ICER directly into Melinda's chest. "Because one twitch of my finger and your heart stops beating right here and you're dead on the floor."

"I'm not afraid to die, not if I get to take you down with me—"

"Which is why," he cut her off, using his free hand to extract the paperweight from her hand and letting it fall to the floor with a clunk, "I have an additional incentive you might find interesting. One that you'll need to be alive for."

"You have nothing I want."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," he smiled, his grin oily and oozing. He gave Melinda a little shove with the end of the gun, sending her back into her seat, before crossing back behind the desk and popping open the lid of another one of the silver SciTech cases. From inside, he extracted a small glass vial, filled with something blue. Melinda recognized it.

"That's G.H.325."

"Indeed," Coulson nodded. "One of the few vials that hasn't been seized by the ATCU yet. You promise to stay out of my way, to keep my name out of your mouth when you're talking to your ATCU buddies, and it's all yours. Then I don't have any more interference from you, and you get the wonder drug that will give you your little friend back, good as new. The deal's a no-brainer."

"Like I would ever make a deal with you—"

"Oh, come on," Coulson said, putting on a pretend pout, but failing to hide the delight that seeped out from him across the desk, "the other girl who crossed Hive, Quill, she made a miraculous recovery once we got some G.H.325 in her. And you know Quake can already handle the stuff. You wouldn't want to be responsible for another young hero losing her life, would you? Just because you're too stubborn and prideful to accept my help?"

Melinda hesitated, swallowed hard. Coulson's words rang in her ears. Here was something, something real and inches from her fingertips, something that she could finally do to help Daisy, to repay her for her sacrifice, to stop history from repeating itself once again. Something she could do to save a hero's life rather than end it.

"Once she's back on her feet, you have my word, SHIELD won't come after her for her betrayal," Coulson said. Melinda couldn't see his face – her eyes were locked onto the blue vial. "In fact, we'll probably give her commendation. Spin it: 'the hero within SHIELD who rooted out the inner evil.' She'll be honored, promoted. She's been dreaming of becoming an Avenger. Maybe we can give that to her, you and I."

"She gets the drug, and you walk free?" Melinda asked quietly. "I disappear, you take over the director's chair and continue SHIELD's mission with Quake as your new mascot? Am I getting that right?"

"That's right," nodded Coulson. "She lives, I fulfill my oath, and you can rest easy, knowing there's no more blood on your hands. Everybody wins."

"Everybody wins," she repeated numbly. "Everybody… except for all the Enhanced people you'll continue to prey on and experiment on. All the kids who won't realize that their idols are lab rats and war profiteers. All the innocent civilians and good agents and in-the-way villains who will lose their lives as long as you drag out your manufactured good-versus-evil conflicts for the sake of your bottom line."

She rose to her feet slowly, threateningly. Coulson swallowed hard, anxiety rippling away from him, and raised the ICER again, leveling it at her heart.

"Everybody wins except for all your acceptable losses," she said, her voice low and dangerous. "You know what that number should be, Coulson? The acceptable losses? That number should be zero."

In a flash, she pounced forward, diving across the desk and tackling Coulson to the ground. She made sure to get one hand on his wrist, twisting harshly so the gun flew from his grip as they both crashed onto the floor, papers and files flying everywhere. She pinned Coulson on his back, pressed her bad, aching knee into his collarbone and forced his hands out of the way.

Coulson spluttered, his face reddening as Melinda's knee began to cut off his oxygen. With her superstrength, one flex of her muscles and he'd be a goner.

"You're just going to kill me, then?" he wheezed, eyes bulging slightly as he struggled to breath. A fleck of spittle clung to the corner of his mouth. "Go on and get it over with. I'm sure everyone will love the story of the crazy villain who murdered the SHIELD director in cold blood."

"I'm not going to kill you," Melinda said darkly. "I'd trade your life for hers in a heartbeat, but you don't deserve the easy out or quiet dignity of death. No, you're going to rot. You're going to sit in a tiny cell for the rest of your life and spend every day thinking about the people whose lives you sacrificed, and thinking about how even the oh-so-impressive Clairvoyant couldn't see the likes of me coming."

And with that, she gave him a swift backhanded strike across the face, a move so practiced and polished that she knew from muscle memory alone she'd used just the right amount of force to knock him out cold, but not to kill him. As much as she wanted him dead, she wouldn't kill him. There would be no more blood on her hands.

She got up from the floor, grimacing against the fresh pain in her knee and glaring down at the pathetic, unconscious body of the Clairvoyant, of her old friend Coulson. She'd been such a fool, for so long, about so many things. But now it was finished, all the pieces finally tipped off the board for good. Checkmate.

Melinda wasted no time in unlocking the office and getting the attention of some of the loitering ATCU agents who still patrolled SHIELD's halls. They'd taken Coulson into custody and listened carefully as Melinda explained everything Coulson had confessed to her.

"Copy that, ma'am," one agent nodded. "We'll radio this in to Director Price immediately."

"Should we arrange transport for you back to the medical facility?" the other agent asked.

Melinda paused for a moment before shaking her head. "No, thank you. I need a few more minutes."

The agents left then, dragging Coulson along with them, handcuffed and just conscious enough to walk between them, leaving Melinda alone in the director's office.

She bent down to retrieve the Captain America paperweight and the ICER from the floor, replacing both on the desk and trying hard not to stare at the blue vial that still sat there, teasing her, taunting her, tempting her. She picked it up, rolled it back and forth between her fingers. It had been so long since she'd been this close to the stuff, and the vial felt oddly warm to the touch. She had forgotten it felt like that.

She didn't know what to do.

She knew what the stuff did. Knew what it could do. She also knew that Daisy had already been given it once before. She had tolerated it then, and didn't seem to have suffered any side effects once the drug had healed her from the gunshot. If anything, if Coulson was to be believed, it had given her minor healing abilities. So maybe this was her best chance at saving Daisy's life again.

Her fingers closed around the vial. Her hand shook slightly. She closed her eyes and began to slide the vial into her pocket, but something stopped her.

SHIELD had given Daisy an experimental treatment without her consent. They had all been lucky that it helped her and that she hadn't suffered any ill effects. Who was to say that they'd be lucky again? And did Melinda really want to make the same decision that SHIELD had? Did she want to rob Daisy of her agency like that?

She didn't want to lose Daisy, and she didn't want to be responsible for Daisy's death, if she didn't make it. But she didn't want to be responsible for a future Daisy never asked her for, either. If she was so determined to prove to herself that she was different – different from her past, different from SHIELD – then how could she make such a selfish choice?

How was she supposed to be better, to do good, when neither option seemed like a good one?

There was a noise at the door, and one of the agents returned.

"Ma'am? They said downstairs you might have… We were told there was a new course of treatment for Quake? Should I radio the medical facility?"

Melinda swallowed hard. She remembered the look on Daisy's face when she'd learned what SHIELD had done to her, to her Enhanced colleagues. The shock, the betrayal, the hurt. She remembered the way Daisy's pain from the CalciFi pills felt when she'd absorbed it into her body. She remembered Daisy's cheeky grin as she ate sour candy, the sparkle in her eye as they'd laughed about old TV shows and Halloween costumes. She remembered the way it had felt when Daisy had hugged her, when Melinda had told her she was a good fit, when they'd finally realized neither one of them had to be alone anymore.

She remembered how strong Daisy was. How much power she harnessed in her body, in her DNA. She remembered how determined and sure Daisy felt in a fight. How she never hesitated to do the right thing, even if it meant putting herself in danger.

She knew what Daisy would want her to do.

"No," Melinda said, shaking her head. "No, don't radio. Tell the doctors to stick to their original plan. We'll just have to wait and see if she can make it. She's a fighter. I trust her to pull through."

And with that, she dropped the vial to the floor and crushed it under her boot once and for all.