TW for death of a child (context: it's this story's version of Bahrain), illness/death of a spouse, mentions of Daisy's past GSW

It was almost an hour later when Quake finally emerged from her room, tape recorder in hand. Melinda had been waiting for her out in the living room, watching the city pass by through the window for most of the time. The overcast sky had given way to a heavy drizzle, and raindrops raced each other down the glass, mesmerizing Melinda as she wrestled with whether or not she had done the right thing by laying all her cards on the table with the kid.

Quake's expression didn't give much away as she walked over to where Melinda sat on the couch, and Melinda purposefully didn't reach out with her powers to get a sense of Quake's feelings. If she was trying to get Quake to trust her, invading her privacy with empath powers was probably not a good place to start.

Quake sank onto the couch, leaving a space between her and Melinda, and set the recorder on the coffee table in front of them.

"Tell me about Katya Belyakov."

Melinda nodded, swallowing hard. Outside of the recording, she hadn't so much as spoken Katya's name aloud since her death, but she knew that this was the right thing to do. She owed it to Quake and to Katya's memory to tell her story. She clicked the recorder on.

"Katya was one of the young people we had recruited into the EnReD program. She was one of the youngest we'd ever recruited – her powers hadn't even fully emerged at that point – but her genetic signature indicated that she was enhanced, and her mother was adamant that we take her. I was unsure, but our list of willing participants was getting shorter by the day, and Dr. Whitehall was happy to snap up an eager subject. And I freely admit that I didn't push back the way I should have. I kept my feelings to myself and followed orders, because that's what a good agent was supposed to do. I don't want you to think that I'm trying to separate myself from the horrible things I did, just because I wasn't as enthusiastic as my superiors. I still did them of my own free will. I'm still responsible for them."

"I understand," Quake said softly. "But I also know how hard it is to disobey orders in SHIELD."

"Katya received G.H.325, and it worked. Unfortunately for everyone, it worked. It unlocked her enhancements, amplified them far beyond what she was equipped to handle at that point. She was an empath like me, apparently, but the way that her body reacted to the G.H.325, it wasn't just that she could sense other people's emotions. She craved them. She needed them. It was like… like she fed on them, and the stronger the emotion, the more she wanted it. Anger, pain… those are more potent than most feelings. It… it made her unstable."

"So what happened?" Quake asked. "Did she get treatment, or that memory rewriting that you talked about?"

Melinda shook her head sadly. "No. Our usual course of acclimation and training didn't help, so we had planned on dismissing her, maybe sending her through TAHITI for a memory rewrite, but her mother and Dr. Whitehall decided that it was worth taking one more shot with her, increasing her dosage of G.H.325 and seeing if her body and mind could course-correct on their own, if she had more power over herself and her abilities."

"Are you serious?"

"G.H.325 did have regenerative properties, in addition to its enhancement ability," Melinda said. "It wasn't entirely unfounded to think the way Eva and Dr. Whitehall were thinking. But it was unethical, and it was desperate, and it was wrong. The second dose only made things worse. Katya became more unstable, and her powers grew stronger. She could do more than sense emotions now, she could absorb them, and people's lifeforce along with them. And she wanted more."

Melinda paused. They were getting to the hardest part of the story now, but it was too late to turn back now. She took a deep breath and continued.

"She broke containment at the lab, absorbed her mother and some of the doctors, killing them all. She fled. There were a few civilian casualties as she made her way through the city. A team of agents tracked her down to a warehouse across town, but she absorbed them, too. That's when I got called in. They needed a specialist to… to take her out."

"SHIELD decided to kill her?" Quake asked, barely above a whisper. "How old was she?"

"Ten," Melinda said, the words raking raw across her thick throat. "Between my dual role with EnReD and in the field, and my experience as an empath, they tapped me. I went in, saw the agents she had already killed. I had my orders. She was in so much pain, and she was begging me… I… took the shot. I held her while she died. Gave her everything I was feeling to try and make her last moments peaceful, but I… I killed her. A child."

"Melinda…"

"I was never really the same after that, but I tried to be. I tried to be a good agent, compartmentalize. But I couldn't. I quit the EnReD program, transferred to an artifact recovery field team, scrub work with little to no human interaction. My husband, Andrew, he tried to help me. He was a therapist by training," Melinda explained with a tearful chuckle. "He was always trying to get me to talk about things, and I would always tease him about it, but after that, I… I just shut down. There was a lot of distance between us."

"You divorced?"

"Worse," Melinda shook her head. "It was probably about six months after Katya's death, there was an epidemic – an alien contagion that infected a lot of people in the city. Chitauri virus. Scientists were eventually able to create a treatment for it. Vaccine or antiserum or something, I don't know. All I know is they didn't make it fast enough to save Andrew. He died, before I had really been able to fully mend things between us. He knew I loved him, at least, and he was able to tell me he loved me, too, before the virus took his ability to speak. The last thing he told me was 'do good, Melinda.' And I feel like I've failed him every damn day since."

Quake chewed on her lip, her eyes shining with shared sadness. Melinda cleared her throat and forced herself to finish the story without emotion.

"Things were crashing and burning around me, but the final straw happened on a mission. My team was sent to retrieve the Berserker Staff – it had been discovered in a tree up in Norway. I don't know if your SO has ever told you this, but the staff does more than give you strength. It gives you rage, amplifies your most powerful emotions.

"When I touched it, it was like everything I had been swallowing down the past year all came to the surface, and I just snapped. I destroyed an entire field office, threatened to expose everything SHIELD had done with the EnReD program. They'd been keeping it quiet, see. SHIELD never even claimed responsibility for Katya, just fed the press a story about an unhinged Enhanced who killed civilians and SHIELD agents alike, and framed my killing her as a necessary action taken by a hero to stop a new threat.

"SHIELD shut me down, kept me in containment until the Berserker effects wore off. They told me that if I went public with EnReD, they'd spin the whole thing, pin it on me. My name was all over the EnReD program; it wouldn't be hard to tie all the failures to me and absolve their own researchers of any wrongdoing. They'd have me prosecuted for Katya's death and all the other deaths EnReD caused, and they'd get off scot-free.

"So instead, we agreed that I would walk away. They'd create a record that The Cavalry, and Melinda May, died in action, and I would disappear. It seemed like the only option I had at that point."

"But how does Maelstromeda factor in?" Quake asked quietly. "I mean, you didn't totally disappear if you went on to become a villain, right?"

"I took a few years away from the whole rotten business," Melinda nodded. "Tried to rebuild, make a new life for myself. But after a while, it got too hard to ignore everything that was going on. SHIELD had made some substantial changes following the failure of EnReD, but I suspected it wasn't as sweeping as their PR team made it seem. And there were still threats out there, still work to be done. I was done with SHIELD, obviously, so my options were limited. And villainy offered me more freedom than any other avenue. It's not like there are a lot of paths for Enhanced people, much less Enhanced people with a skill set like mine."

"Have you been keeping tabs on SHIELD this whole time?" Quake wanted to know.

"Somewhat, although I branched out a lot over the years. Found some employers I'm comfortable working with who allow me to operate in shades of grey. In all honesty, I've tried to distance myself from SHIELD as much as I can. It's only been recently that I've started digging back into them, trying to get the story straight, so the truth can be out there eventually. And then when I started getting to know you… started seeing firsthand what SHIELD was still doing with its heroes…"

Melinda shook her head. She made sure to hold Quake's eye contact for this next part.

"I looked into your files. I know that's a violation of your trust, and I apologize for that. I wanted to see what programs you'd been put through, and when I saw you'd been given G.H.325 for your gunshot wound, and that your reaction to it put you on a list for a new experimental program… It just felt like I was watching the same tragedy start to unfold right in front of me. I felt like I had to do something."

"So you took me in," Quake supplied. "I was your pity project and your in with SHIELD."

"I took you in when I found out I was the only adult you knew to pick you up from the hospital," Melinda said, allowing herself to smile. "I didn't look at your files until later. That's when I really started feeling protective, but your connection to SHIELD had nothing to do with me wanting to give you a safe place to land or a friendly face to come home to."

"Oh," Quake said. "Well, that's good, I guess."

"I don't know if SHIELD has changed for good or not at this point," Melinda told her. "That's really only something you can say, as someone who works for them and has been put through their current Enhanced programs. But I will say that, from an outside perspective, and from the perspective of someone who's seen this shit before, SHIELD doesn't look all that great. And I want you to know that it is possible to have a life outside of SHIELD."

"I don't know about that."

"I'm just saying, I wouldn't want to keep working for an organization that keeps putting my life in danger and then not doing anything to help me recover from the traumatic situations they keep sending me into," Melinda said simply. "SHIELD should have supported you yesterday, and they failed on every level. They failed to support your mission with proper leadership or backup when you faced off against the alien. They failed to support your mental and emotional wellbeing when they sent you back out into the field immediately after a trauma – back to a site that also carried trauma for you – and they failed to support your physical wellbeing when they didn't give you time to recover between missions."

"It sounds bad when you say it like that," Quake frowned. "But SHIELD is all I have. I was broke and homeless when I got into SHIELD. They put a roof over my head, gave me a purpose, gave me a team. The agent who on-boarded me, Coulson, he was the first person who ever made me feel like he believed in me."

"And that's fine," Melinda nodded. "That can all be true. I just want you to have the full picture. Don't let misplaced loyalty blind you, especially when it might not be reciprocated in the same way."

Quake was quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet. "Can I… can I think about all this?"

"Of course," Melinda nodded. "I know it's a lot to process."

"And it's… okay if I stay here while I think?"

"I was hoping you would," Melinda smiled. "This might be hard to believe, but I've come to like having you around. It's been a while since I've had friendly company."

"It's definitely not hard to believe you haven't had company in forever," Quake cracked, returning Melinda's smile for the first time all day. "You're, like, way antisocial."

Quake tucked herself away in her room with laptop in hand for the rest of the day, no doubt trying to process everything – the alien, Melinda's story, all the new information she had received about SHIELD – and probably also to try and do some damage control with SHIELD after all that had happened in the last 24 hours. Melinda took the opportunity to retreat to her office and finally start sifting through the data that the Fishing Net had scooped up for her from Cybertek.

It was slow going – there were countless pages of financial records to read through, many of which didn't make much sense to Melinda. She began to see that Cybertek wasn't picky about who they sold their weapons and tech to; plenty of low-level thugs and goons, petty thieves, and small-time villains populated the sales logs, but so too did larger outfits like AIM and Hydra. Alarmingly, Melinda also found records indicating that a group labeled only as 'SSR' was also a customer of Cybertek. SSR was an old organization name used in the early days of SHIELD. It wasn't used anymore, except by shadow teams who operated out of SHIELD and didn't want to be easily connected back to the organization.

She made a note of it on the list of buyers she'd be supplying to Ros in her final report and tried to push the bad feeling out of the back of her mind. It wasn't unheard of for SHIELD to use outside companies to help supplement their weapons and tech. Everyone knew Stark had been collaborating with SHIELD for years, sponsoring their heroes and providing them with cutting edge gear. Obviously, they wouldn't want it to be public knowledge that they shopped at the same store as their enemies. Still, it didn't quite sit right with her that SHIELD had apparently been dealing with Cybertek under the table.

She moved into the documents that detailed Cybertek's money next. Notes and memos about its shareholders held a number of familiar names – mostly rich, old bigwigs whose fingers and money were poked and prodded into nearly every influential company across the country. Ian Quinn still held the majority of shares, and he was followed by someone named Franklin Hall, the same name that had been written into the textbook next to Quinn's.

That familiar itch at the back of her head scratched away as she read Hall's name, the same way it had back in Quinn's office. She ran Hall's name through a quick internet search, on the off chance that it might produce something useful, but nothing popped up.

She turned then to the pages that held information about Cybertek's investors – bank records for offshore accounts where the secretive people with deep pockets could pour their money into Cybertek's projects without it becoming public knowledge – and when she reached a particular trio of names on the list, her heart turned to ice in her chest.

First was Gideon Malick, a billionaire on the board of Roxxon Energy and Gothamite Industries who was also a representative on the World Security Council.

Bad.

Next was Alexander Pierce, once a famous diplomat, now secretary of the World Security Council, and one of the highest-ranking officers (and PR managers) in SHIELD.

Very bad.

Last was Dr. Daniel Whitehall, SHIELD's resident mad scientist and man responsible for the EnReD program and about 85% of all Melinda's personal trauma.

Very, very bad.

She banged into Quake's room, knocking as she flung the door open and not caring much about the kid's privacy in the moment.

"What the hell—?"

"When you went on that first mission to Cybertek, the one where you got shot," Melinda began, almost breathless, "what was the mission? Who ordered it?"

"What?"

"What were you doing in Cybertek, that first time?" she asked again.

Quake's brow furrowed. "Why? What's going on?"

"Does the name Franklin Hall mean anything to you?"

"Yeah, he's a scientist at SHIELD," Quake said slowly.

"Shit. Shit."

"Seriously, what's happening right now?" Quake asked.

"Come on." Melinda beckoned for Quake to join her in the office, where she could see the Cybertek files for herself. "I'm investigating Cybertek for a client – that's what I was doing last night – and I think I've found something bigger than anyone could have anticipated."

"What is it?" Quake's eyes flew across the screen, reading the same information Melinda was still reeling from. "Wait… these are bank records. Deposits. Are you… are you saying all these guys are funding Cybertek?"

"I think so."

"And Franklin Hall?"

"He's a friend of Ian Quinn, business partner. But there's no public record of their relationship, just on the internal Cybertek documents. I found these papers—" Melinda pulled the leaked SHIELD schematics from her desk and spread them out for Quake to look at. "I thought maybe it was a small leak, maybe parallel science or something SHIELD had bought or sold… but now it seems like…"

"Like SHIELD is giving Cybertek the money and the science it needs to make all kinds of dangerous shit," Quake finished numbly. "But why?"

"I don't know."

"When I went in there last time, I was looking for information about their funding," Quake said in a rush. "I had gone off-book a little. There were some things I noticed when I was working a different mission, some things that didn't add up, that seemed kind of suspicious about Cybertek. I brought it to my handler, got approved to do some recon on Cybertek – I wanted to know where they were getting the massive amounts of funding they would have needed for the kinds of tech they were developing. I was worried they were being paid by Hydra."

"And when you got too close, you got shot," Melinda grimaced.

"But that doesn't make sense," Quake shook her head. "SHIELD could have just let me die if they were trying to cover something up. They saved me." She bent over the computer and began typing and clicking around furiously.

"What are you looking for?"

"Memos. Directives. Any kind of communication that might show a connection between SHIELD and Cybertek beyond the financial. Maybe SHIELD is just doing some shady business and it's not as bad as it looks."

"I don't know if you'll be able to find anything like that. I set up the Fishing Net to just collect financial documents, mostly."

"The Fish—" Quake stopped herself and looked up at Melinda in disbelief. "Seriously?"

"What?"

"Do you know what this thing is?" she asked, gesturing to the Fishing Net.

Melinda crossed her arms, trying to mask her embarrassment. "Fishing Net. It searches for and collects data."

"It's a lot more than a net. This thing plants a keylogging virus, a kind of Trojan horse thing, and also sticks an access hook into whatever system it connects to." Quake said all that like it was so obvious, a toddler should have known it. Melinda prickled.

"So what?"

"So," Quake said, with a smile and a roll of her eyes, "we can see anything and everything Quinn has done on his computer since you hacked it, and we now have remote access to their entire system via the ghost this bad boy dropped onto his computer."

"It can do all that?"

"Oh my god," Quake laughed. "You've been carrying around one of the most advanced pieces of hacker tech on the market right now and all you've been using for is a fishing net?"

"It did what I needed it to do," Melinda grumbled. "My employers never complained."

"I'm not criticizing you," Quake assured her, eyes sparkling with more life than Melinda had seen from her in quite some time. "I just think it's funny you had no idea what your gadget could do."

"I didn't ask Stark for a full product rundown when I stole it from him." Melinda threw her hands up into the air in good-natured surrender. "Sue me."

"Hey, check this out," Quake said suddenly, attention back on the computer. "I just checked the key logs to see what Quinn's been looking at today. Since we didn't clean up our mess last night, I'm sure he was in panic mode, trying to figure out what had been tampered with."

"So whatever he looked at is probably what he's most worried about," nodded Melinda, following along. "And probably what's most damning."

"Looks like the first thing he checked was a file called 'Project Insight.'"

"Doesn't ring a bell," Melinda frowned. "Can we see it?"

"Yeah, give me a sec." Quake tapped a few keys and navigated through a few levels of access screens that looked mostly like gibberish to Melinda. "Here."

"This looks mostly like decrypted communication logs," Melinda observed as the screen cleared its last access block and began displaying the contents of the Project Insight file.

"Another handy feature of your Swiss-army Fishing Net," Quake joked.

"Are these all between Quinn and the same person?" asked Melinda. "This 'Clairvoyant' person?"

"Looks like it."

They both read in silence for a while, skimming through months and months of back and forth between Quinn and his Clairvoyant contact. Payment schedules, coordination for data drops, plans for who Cybertek would and wouldn't sell to each month. It was almost unsettling how meticulous and complete the Clairvoyant's control over Quinn's business dealings seemed to be.

Quake sucked in a sharp breath. "Oh my god."

"What?"

Quake pointed to a memo that Melinda hadn't gotten to yet, another communication from the Clairvoyant dated just over a year ago. Around the time Quake had gone snooping into Cybertek and gotten two bullets for her trouble.

"SHIELD has flagged you for investigation. Expect interference from target Richter and enact Brink Protocol – avoid immediate fatality, if possible."

"Target Richter… you don't think that's you…"

"I'm the only one at SHIELD with earthquake powers," Quake said apprehensively. "I don't know who else would get a nickname like that, and I'm the one who got approved for the mission."

"So Cybertek knew you were coming."

"And already had a plan in place to deal with me. Whatever 'Brink Protocol' is, it sounds like that's what got me shot. I guess I should be glad they didn't want me dead right away."

Melinda pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes momentarily. "This doesn't make sense."

"Doesn't it?" Quake asked hotly. She pushed away from the desk and began to pace the length of Melinda's office. "Someone at SHIELD is communicating with Quinn, leaking him all kinds of classified material and giving him buckets of money. When I got too close with my investigation, they tipped Quinn off and gave the order for me to be killed."

"But why would anyone at SHIELD want to funnel so much to a company like Cybertek? And why try to take you out, but specify that you shouldn't die right away?"

"I don't know!" Quake huffed. The things on Melinda's shelves started to rattle slightly as the air tremored around them. "But I know what it means. It means you were right about SHIELD. They're full of shit, and they don't see me as anything but disposable. They don't care about me. They wanted me dead and had the gall to lie to my face and act like they were glad when I survived."

She stopped pacing and slumped against the wall, sliding down until she was huddled on the floor, back against the wall and face buried in her fists.

"It means I managed to find yet another place that doesn't want me," she said, her voice empty and fragile and angry. She thumped a fist against the wall behind her in frustration. "It's the fucking Brodys all over again, just with a gun this time. Just another place that's not a good fit. They're never a good fit. I'm never a good fit. Because I'm asking too many questions, or I'm Enhanced, or I kissed a girl once, or I'm too loud, too quiet, too disrespectful, too difficult, too much, not enough. I'm never enough. And I probably never will be, no matter how hard I try or many times I save the world."

"That's not—" Melinda stopped herself before she said the word 'true.' Maybe it wasn't, but from Quake's perspective, it absolutely was true. Nobody had stuck with her, had stuck up for her. "Daisy, you have to believe me. There's someone out there who won't feel that way. There's somebody who'll know you're enough – more than enough. Maybe you haven't found them yet, but you can't take SHIELD's opinion of you as fact. SHIELD doesn't know shit. They don't have any idea how much you matter."

"Y'know," Quake said sadly, not looking up from her knees, "nobody even cared that I vanished from my old life. My foster parents never filed a missing persons report, my social worker never tried to track me down. Just another runaway foster kid. Another statistic. Even after Quake started showing up on the news, nobody came looking for me. And obviously SHIELD only cared about having another obedient Enhanced person in their toybox. It really seems like the universe is trying to tell me I'm better off alone."

"Trust me, I wrote the book on believing I was better off alone," Melinda told her, joining her on the floor despite the twinge in her knee as she lowered herself down. "It protects you from a lot of heartache, but it keeps you from a lot of the good that life has to offer, too. It's taken me a long time to learn that, and I've missed out on a lot of life because of it. I don't want you to make my same mistake."

"Well, what am I supposed to do about it? Nobody wants me in their corner."

Melinda was quiet for a moment, weighing whether or not to voice the crazy idea that had been formulating in her brain the past few days. It had the distinct possibility of going horribly wrong if she didn't pitch it correctly, but there was a part of her that felt like it was the only thing that made sense anymore.

"I do. Come to my corner. Work with me. I know we've spent a lot of time fighting each other, but I think we'd make a good team. We'll take the fight to SHIELD, make them see what they've lost by casting you aside, bring their crimes to light and try to create some justice in this world. I have a contact… a friend, I guess… I think she'll back us up if we have the evidence to really make a move on SHIELD." Melinda paused and took a deep breath, trying to pump conviction into her voice. She hoped that the kid could tell how sincere her words were. "Help me hold SHIELD accountable for everything they've done to us, to all those Enhanced people like us. Help me take them down, brick by goddamn brick if we have to."

"I… I can't," Quake shook her head, a little stunned by Melinda's proposition. "I can't just turn on SHIELD, I'd be marked a traitor… my whole career as a hero…"

"I know it's a lot to ask," Melinda said. "But I also believe it's the right thing to do and that it's worth the risk. And I'm going to do it, no matter your answer. But I'd rather have you on my side than not. I… I like having you around. I think… I think it's a good fit."

"You really think so?" Quake asked, turning careful, hopeful eyes on her. "You're not just saying that so I'll betray SHIELD and join your villainous plot?"

"I really think so," Melinda said firmly, surprising even herself with how true and how right the words felt as she spoke them. "I think it so much that I want you to stick around, even if you decide not to help me take on SHIELD. I want this to be the place where you feel like you're enough, because… well, because I think that you are."

Quake looked conflicted, like part of her wanted nothing more than to fling herself into Melinda's arms for a hug, but the other part of her was too afraid to trust that Melinda was telling the truth.

Like a bolt of lightning, Melinda was struck with an idea. She had never tried to use her empath powers in reverse, except for when Katya had taken her feelings from her, but it seemed like there was no reason why it wouldn't work. Carefully, she reached out and placed a hand on Quake's knee. She focused every ounce of energy she had on her own feelings, concentrating them all into a single, focused point of emotional energy, all intent on communicating the sincerity and honesty of her words, of how she felt about the kid. She used her consciousness to push, rather than the usual pull she so often exercised, and felt the truthful feeling slip away from her.

It was an odd sensation, almost like something slippery was being pulled out of her from behind her navel, and her hand grew warm on Quake's knee. Slowly, Quake's expression shifted as she began to feel the emotions Melinda was pumping into her.

"You mean it," she said softly, like she could hardly believe it. "You're not making it up."

"I'm not."

This time, there wasn't anything holding Quake back, and as she wrapped her arms around Melinda, squeezing tight, the only thing Melinda could feel – too blurred and mixed up to quite tell whose emotion it really was – was something she hadn't felt in longer than she could remember. The only thing she felt was joy.