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It had started off so innocently, coming down from the high of preventing their first true catastrophe. An entire floor of an office building had been destroyed, but compared to the potential of the weapon to level a small town, it had been a victory. And yet Phil had been standing hunched over a desk, looking out over the floor, his normally chatty manner quiet. Melinda had walked up to him and rested a hand carefully on his back, letting him process whatever he had to to get through the night.
When she'd gotten shot for the first time, and extraction was two hours out, it had been Phil with his hand clamped over the wound on her leg, keeping her conscious out of pure will. They learnt together, taping up wounds, interrogating suspects, taking guards down. She'd picked shrapnel out of him, he'd borne her weight when she'd sprained her ankle. They worked well together, and the higher ups saw that, letting their partnership develop, making sure they were challenged.
One of those "challenges" had come dangerously close to being a suicide mission, and she remembers still what it felt like to have gunfire raining down around her for the first time. He'd asked her to dinner, when all seemed lost, and she'd said yes, because what were the odds of them surviving this mission? If he got her out of this alive, he could buy her all the dinner he wanted. They did get out of it alive, and dinner wound up spiraling into an all-night adventure wandering around Beijing's old hutongs, old alleyways Phil swore felt magical.
What had they known, anyway? They were twenty-something, newly minted agents of a secret agency, with access to fighter jets and really big guns. They'd been young, and reckless, caught up in the delirium of saving the world -- or telling themselves they did, anyway.
And it was easy to confuse whatever intimacy they had with the idea of love. It was no wonder SHIELD's fraternization policies were so loose; something about how well literally feeling someone's blood pulse through their veins as you tried to keep them alive translated to physical intimacy, then something oddly emotional. Against all odds, he'd kept her... warm, both literally and figuratively.
Maria Hill had stumbled upon them, once, in the aftermath of a particularly trying mission in Minneapolis. Melinda had kicked Phil out immediately, and she and Maria had gone to a bar, to deal with the aftermath. Melinda wishes her words had been anywhere near as eloquent as "Agent Ward and I have been having sex." No, she'd sat in silence, knocking back shots with Maria, resenting her for caring. Weighing the words "sex" and "making love" on her tongue. And yet there was some relief in knowing that whatever this thing she and Phil had, there was someone else in the world who knew about it.
In the end, "we have... a thing" was all she'd managed to say, and Maria had understood. Romance was perilous at best in their field of work. Comfort, perhaps, was all they could ask for.
When she'd heard word that the two of them were going to be promoted to Level 5, she'd bought a ring. She doesn't know why, really, but she'd been on her way home from a mission in Munich, and a ring had caught her eye in an antique shop. She supposes that some part of her sub-conscious knew that being on the brink of Level 5 was the last chance for them to choose the other life over this one, the last time they had an out.
She'd never said anything, though, and Level 5 was thrilling to them both, having larger stakes in larger missions. Their missions diverged more as their respective talents shined through: extraction for her, handling for him. They took down HYDRA cells, disarmed bombs, took down terrorist plots. She saved entire SHIELD squadrons, he began mentoring some of the best agents SHIELD had ever seen. Somehow in the space between, they'd moved in together, finding comfort in the few hours they could steal together. Fantasizing about running their own ops. As partners. Maybe something more.
Lives ruined. Blood shed.
Careers made, love - if you could call it that - found.
By any account, epic.
Had it been another time, another place, they might have had a romance for the ages, perhaps, but this was SHIELD and a world constantly on the brink of catastrophe. She found the ambiguity of what they had oddly tantalizing, anyway. Being each other's person, sharing an apartment, holding each other together after missions. Having someone to share the thrill of rising in the ranks with, that hint of excitement and worry wrapped up in a strange trust for the system. It wasn't romantic love, perhaps, but Phil Coulson had always made her believe in something.
The disillusion had hit, though, and hit hard. There were only so many times one could watch the world go to hell, only so many times one could make "still not dead" sound like a joke and not an embodiment of the screwed up system that existed. What they had was extraordinary, perhaps, but only because ordinary had stopped being an option. They both knew well that they'd become top SHIELD assets, that the organization would never let them have the other life anymore, that their lives had become ensuring that other people still got a chance at holiday dinners and vacations on the beach.
Their past adventures began to catch up with them. The nightmares began to come, the threats began rolling in. They'd become visible enough - and established enough - in SHIELD that former nemeses began to point fingers specifically at them, and they were each other's weak points. The thrill of SHIELD and their relationship began to fade when they woke up shaking in each other's arms, when they were called to the other's bedside one time too many, when missions took them away from each other for weeks, months.
Being tied inextricably to each other - professionally, and personally - had meant that they'd never leave SHIELD without the other, and they never would have asked the other to give up their careers. They existed in that odd space between wanting ordinary and wanting to live up to the SHIELD legends, the heroes that had inspired them to join SHIELD in the first place -- Captain America, for him, Peggy Carter, for her. Whatever it was that they had had locked them into that space, and it strained the relationship. Melinda hadn't wanted to talk about it, and Phil hadn't pushed.
And then Bahrain had happened, and she'd become a legend in the worst way possible. Bahrain was more catalyst than anything else. It was the near miss that had come far too close for either of their comfort, the one mission that left Melinda fearful for the day that Phil's own Bahrain would come. He'd stuck by her, of course he had, but when he told her to let go, that clinging on was hell, she inadvertently let go of him, too. They'd both been emotionally compromised on that mission, and they knew it. Being around each other became more pain than pleasure, a reminder of what they'd lost by not getting out when they could.
She'd heeded his advice, shaking off any pretense of being the fearless, warm person she had been. Phil had enabled those qualities in her, and leaving them behind meant leaving him, too. He'd stood and watched as she packed up her things, left without a second glance.
It was better for him, anyway. After all, he'd gone through hell and back with her - for her - and she'd just... gone.
She'd been so thrilled when he began dating the Cellist, she'd left her own self-imposed exile in administration to congratulate him. Not that it mattered - even now, twenty years later, she doesn't know how to make sense of the intimacy they'd had - but it had felt right. The small grin on his face confirmed that it was the right thing to do. He seemed happy, and that, she could live with. Better he escape her ghosts than be dragged down with them.
She'd hoped, even, that it would be the kind of love that inspired him to take a stand and leave, take the Cellist to Lima and settle down in a house, have kids. Live out the rest of his life with someone who genuinely loved him with all certainty, not having to worry about when the next global disaster was going to hit. She'd have offered up her never used vacation days, used her own money to buy him flights to Portland, if it meant his relationship continued and he was happy.
She thinks about this a lot, his potential alternate life, the day the Battle of New York happens. She hears of his death over the comms like everyone else, glued to her desk in HQ. In a daze, she'd told Maria she'd handle the arrangements, hanging up before she could hear the pity in her voice. She doesn't quite believe it yet, but she books herself a flight to Portland in the morning, to tell the Cellist in person. Phil would have wanted that.
She believes that he's gone when she returns to her apartment that night and Barton and Romanoff are sitting on her couch, clinging to each other. They'd worked together when Romanoff first arrived, become tentative friends, even, but SHIELD rarely wasted resources. Barton and Romanoff together were more than enough to get the hardest jobs done, May alone enough to pull off the toughest of extractions. The three of them being in the same place usually meant the sky was coming down around them and all hell had broken loose.
The sky had almost come down on them that day. Phil was gone, and for all three of them, a bit of the world had crumbled.
They'd stayed just long enough to watch her pack for Portland. Barton had winced. "Jesus, Melinda, no. Don't do this to yourself." She'd steadily packed on, knowing that they would understand that this was something she had to do. She still remembers the look on Natasha's face when she'd handed her a small velvet box, explaining that they'd stopped by Phil's apartment before SHIELD came to clear it out. Melinda deliberately keeps a blank face as she assures Natasha she'd make sure it got to the Cellist.
The two of them exchanged a glance, throwing their arms around her and sitting her on the couch. Natasha speaks first. "Melinda, he's had that since Budapest. When he was still with you. It's yours." Budapest, the biggest mission of his career before the Avengers. Budapest, where the world literally stood at the brink of catastrophe, and he'd thought of her.
She finds the strength to tell the Cellist, holding back her own tears while wiping away hers, assuring her of the hero that Phil was. Romanoff had gotten Pepper Potts to send a private jet to bring her home, and she'd cried the whole way, thinking of how he'd been on her first flight, of the time they'd finished a mission early and flown to Paris, of the time she'd come so close to telling him about the ring, on a flight much like this one. She wept for all they'd had and all they'd lost.
Maria had been waiting on the tarmac for her when she got back, wisely not commenting on her red-rimmed eyes. She'd handed her a tablet, watched as her eyes flashed with anger, with hurt, then hope; then held her as the tears started anew.
A few weeks later, she'd had a choice to make. She'd planned on saying no, not wanting to entangle herself in the messiness of fieldwork again, not get wrapped up in Phil again. But then he'd shown up at her desk, alive and cracking jokes about red tape, and she feels that long-suppressed thrill of the dream they'd once had, running their own ops, being SHIELD legends. Together. She'd said yes. Whatever it was that they'd had, they'd been partners first and foremost, and she would have his back no matter what.
Things are different this time around. "Same thing," she'd told him, at the question of whether she was committed to the cause or just watching his back. She marvels sometimes that this many years later it is still true. Somehow over the years Phil had become her cause, and somehow, this time around the thought doesn't terrify her.
She still doesn't have words for what they share. It's more platonic in their second try, tempered by time and distance and trust. They needed that break, perhaps, to realize the depth of what they'd shared, how they could use it to be better together. With him back from the dead and her clawing her way back from whatever hell she'd been trapped in, ordinariness became a moot point. Maybe flying around in a Bus, waving away the unexplainable with two codependent geniuses, a specialist with the people skills of a porcupine, and a hacker who might possibly have powers was as close to ordinary as they would ever get. Melinda could deal with that, and she knew that Phil could, too.
Some days she wonders how they got here, how those reckless twenty-somethings had turned into the people that they were now. She knows that there's no going back. Too many years and too many ghosts between them; too much water under the bridge.
Melinda May had believed in yuanfen once, that concept her parents had spoken of, of the lot or luck by which people were brought together, of the strings that held them together. Then SHIELD happened and she'd been left wondering if the only larger force operating in the world was evil. Today, though, sitting in her cockpit with Phil next to her, rambling about god knows what to fill the silence, she's thankful for whatever forces tangled her strings with his.
She still doesn't know what they have, doesn't know what the rings she still has stand for, but she knows that they have something. That she knows him, and he knows her, that they have each other's backs.
With him beside her, somehow, that is enough.