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She stops breathing.
It takes Phil a moment to realise the blur of movement out the corner of his eye is Daisy and Jemma pulling May to the ground, that the muffled sounds he can barely hear beyond the pressure building in his ears are their frantic voices calling out to Elena and Piper for assistance.
He jerks his arm from the restraints holding him upright with a sharp groan – feels the crack as his bones and his body move with his brain for the first time in too many days, the ache down his spine as his legs try to push him forwards, stumbling from the rack and falling against the nearest wall.
Phil feels like he’s drowning, like he can’t blink past the burn of fluorescent lights at the top of his vision or breathe through the sickly sharp smell of sweat that lingers in the air. The rush of blood in his ears is deafening now that they’ve been flung back into their fragile, failing bodies.
“She’s not breathing,” Daisy shouts, and whatever fog he’s been caught in evaporates slightly. Fear floods his body and Phil pushes himself from the wall, stumbling towards the other end of the room where Daisy and Jemma are crouched over her body. She’s not breathing, his brain screams. She’s not alive.
“Melinda,” he murmurs.
Only moments ago he was kissing her goodbye.
Someone catches him by the shoulder as he stumbles across the room and his vision blinks, white spots dancing as he sags against them.
Everything goes black.
—
He kisses her right before Daisy rips them into reality.
He knows now that she’s not really Melinda May. That he’s not really Phil Coulson.
That they were never married. Never bought a house together and filled it with books and plants and photographs. Never visited Dublin or São Paulo or Lisbon or Sydney or Prague. Never spent a summer backpacking around Spain with only his vacation Spanish, or visited her father down in Sun City for Christmas and New Year.
He’s not a high school teacher. She’s not a Hydra agent working to destroy them from within.
Perhaps the only thing that’s remained the same is that they’re still trying to save the world together.
He takes her trembling hands as Daisy disappears and presses a soft kiss to her palm, his lips lingering over the underside of her wedding band like he has a thousand times since they were married.
Melinda curls into his arms and Phil wants to hold her this way forever, drag her from the room and away from this place. Keep them both running as far from reality as possible.
“It’s not real,” she tells him, and he wants to laugh even through the ache in his chest. Of course she knows what he’s thinking. Of course she’s the practical one tugging him back to shore.
“It’s real, Lin. We’re real.”
“Not like this.”
He can feel it, the ache of responsibility sitting in his chest, the phantom throbbing in his left arm and the echo of his real self at the back of his consciousness. Phillip J Coulson. Agent and former Director of SHIELD. Born in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Recruited at the age of 17. Died May 4, 2012.
He’s not her husband. Not her lover. Not her partner.
Not a teacher. Not a baseball coach.
Not this man.
God, he wants to be.
“I love you,” he whispers, and presses his lips to her forehead, her nose. He kisses her cheeks and her lips and the corner of her mouth. She smiles against him and if he closes his eyes he can almost pretend that they’re not about to lose each other.
“I love you. That’s real,” she murmurs. “Please don’t forget that, Phil. Please.”
He kisses her, like he has a million times and never before and just as he’s beginning to feel something – the weight of her in his arms and the soft taste of her on his lips – they’re gone.
—
It takes her a day to wake up.
Phil is half asleep, curled in the armchair by her bedside despite prolonged protest from Simmons that he’s still recovering and in need of proper rest.
Every part of his body aches like he’s growing back into his bones, but Melinda’s hand is warm in his and he can’t move through the panicked thought that if she wakes and he’s not there something delicate between them will have broken.
They’ve always had terrible timing, but he remembers her words from those last minutes in the Framework.
I love you. That’s real.
Even if it’s not, he needs her to wake up.
He’s dozing when he feels a tight squeeze of his hand; the warm, damp press of her fingers against his own. She’s turned on her side and facing him when Phil opens his eyes.
He feels something rise in his chest, a longing to move towards her and press his face to her neck until they’re breathing against each other. Something intense and intimate leftover from the coded memories of the Framework. He pushes it back down and instead moves the chair forwards, resting his arms along the side of the bed and his head pillowed on top of them.
“Hi,” she whispers, throat croaky with disuse.
He reaches up to brush her hair from her eyes, distracted by the way her pupils follow his fingers; the way her eyelashes flutter as he lets himself thumb gently at the smooth skin of her forehead.
“Welcome back,” he tells her.
She smiles wryly, “Hell of a trip.”
There are so many things he wants to tell her. How he’ll never forgive himself for not realising it wasn’t her. How he opened that bottle of Haig but there’s still enough left for them. How he’d known, when he realised she was missing, that no matter what boundaries they’d held themselves to before they meant nothing to him now, that nothing in the world could ever compare to her – that she was it for him. Everything to him.
That he remembers what she said in that other world that’s already starting to slip slowly from his memories, like a gossamer dream slips away when you wake.
That he loves her. Desperately. Achingly. Entirely.
“Phil,” she murmurs, and there’s something in her voice that tells him that she understands; the weight of his name on her tongue, like saying his name somehow brings them home.
They’ll have to talk about this later, but for now he lets himself slip closer to her until he can feel the warm weight of her breath against his cheek and the slide of her hair under his fingertips as he moves his palm to cup the back of her neck.
He kisses the corner of her mouth and lets her sink into him. Kisses her lips and lets the world fade away to her mouth and teeth and smile and the breathless noise she makes as his hand tightens gently in her hair. The way her heartbeat stutters at the dip of her clavicle as he sweeps his other hand down her neck; the soft skin under his fingertips.
The way their muscles move under their skin as he pulls himself closer to her, the ache in his joints and the curve of her body and the way she smiles into his mouth, her own fingers scratching at the stubble on his jaw.
And all he can think is that she’s alive. So brilliantly, wonderfully alive. Heart pounding, hands hot and sweaty, blood pulsing under her skin and tears catching on her eyelashes.
“This is real,” she murmurs, and Phil believes her.
“We’re real.”