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Coulson made his way through the narrow hallway at the front of the Bus and knocked on the door to the cockpit. Normally he wouldn’t bother knocking, but after what he had found out was happening between Melinda and the team’s other specialist, he was a bit awkward around his friend. “May?” he called out hesitantly.
A stifled cough was his only answer.
Phil frowned in worry. Now that was weird; May barely ever coughed - really only ever as a result of getting strangled or drowned, both of which Phil had had the displeasure of witnessing in the past. Opening the door and stepping inside the cockpit, he slid into the copilot seat, looking worriedly at the woman. “You okay?” he asked her, sympathetic.
“Yeah,” May answered, voice deep and raspy.
“Oh yeah?” he scoffed slightly, though still making sure his voice bore no sign of actual irritation. “Because you sound like an eighty-year-old smoker.”
She gave him such a vile death glare that Phil was genuinely surprised he didn’t spontaneously combust. He took in the sweat at her hairline, the flush on her cheeks, and the glassy look in her eyes and came to the inevitable conclusion that she was sick. Melinda May, who never even got a case of the sniffles as far as he knew, was sick.
Coulson had long ago created this idea that bugs were afraid to go near the Chinese specialist, probably fearing they’d go extinct. Now, though, one courageous virus appeared to have braved her impeccable immune system.
He gave her a pleading look. “Please, May, get some rest. You’re sick.”
“No shit,” she mumbled.
Rolling his eyes at her unusual attitude, he suggested, “Well then, put on the autopilot and go take a nap. Our ETA is what - two hours?”
“Yeah,” she rasped, “but if you want to get to the base before we run out of fuel, we need to fly straight through that storm.” She pointed at a radar screen that showed a large storm brewing near the American coast.
Phil sighed. “So you have to be on the stick.”
“If you want to stay in the sky, yeah,” she answered, voice like gravel.
Biting his lip, Phil watched as Melinda suppressed another cough, managing to turn the sound into a clearing of her throat. “You want me to make you a cup of tea?” he offered.
She hmmed in the negative. “I told Ward to brew me a cup,” she explained.
“Oh.” Coulson rubbed at his chest unconsciously, as if his scar were bothering him. “I can bring you a blanket,” he tried, before adding, “or is Ward taking care of that as well?”
May glared. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you are,” he muttered bitterly.
She pressed a few buttons, before turning to face him. “You have something to tell me, Phil?” she questioned.
Ok, so maybe he was being a little snarky. He had promised himself when he first found out about May and Ward that he was going to be professional about it, but it just wasn’t happening. “Sorry,” he apologised quietly. “I guess I still find it a little weird.”
She considered him. “I told you I could end it if it bothers you.”
“I know, but I don’t want to make you break up with him just because I’m a little uncomfortable,” he explained. “I’ll get over it, I promise.”
Melinda rolled her eyes. “It’s not like that between us, Phil. It’s just sex.”
“Yeah, I know you said that,” he quickly replied. “But still, you chose him for a reason, to - you know - have sex with.”
May seemed amused. “Yeah,” she said with a barely there shrug, “he’s hot and he was there.”
Before Coulson could say anything else - and dig himself an even deeper hole - the door to the cockpit opened and Ward appeared in the doorway, a cup of sencha green in his hand. “Melinda, I brought- oh, hello, sir.”
Phil nodded at him. “Ward.”
The male specialist cleared his throat and in an unusually nervous gesture rubbed the back of his neck. “Um, I have your tea, May.”
To Phil’s amusement, Melinda just looked at the tall man blankly.
“Right,” Ward said, passing the cup to her. “Here it is.”
May waited for the man to leave the cockpit before taking a sip and sighing quietly in relief. Coulson noticed her eyes were beginning to water a lot more and the colour in her cheeks had reached a pretty telling deep red.
“You ok?” he asked, slowly reaching out a hand, signalling his intention to check her temperature.
She was burning up and yet, the thing that made Phil worry the most was that Melinda had let him put a hand to her forehead without complaint. “Wow, you’re pretty out of it,” he whispered. “You take anything for the fever?”
She shook her head weakly. “I’m not allowed to pilot on any medication,” she explained, rasping.
Phil snorted skeptically. “Yeah, because that’s so much worse than being feverish,” he snarked. “I’ll go and grab you something off Simmons, okay?”
May nodded, hacking a painful-sounding cough. “Tā māde niǎo,” she swore under her breath.
While having no idea what she had just said, he guessed it was probably something rude, so he scowled at her jokingly. “Language,” he chided.
“Fuck off,” she returned in English, though there wasn’t any real heat in it.
Phil chuckled, shaking his head. “I’ll go get you something, okay?” he promised. “You just drink your tea and hold on.”
He thought she might’ve rolled her eyes at him again, though he couldn’t be sure as he was already leaving the cockpit. He rushed downstairs to the lab, managing to convince Simmons to give him some medication for Melinda without her having to see the specialist first - which was no mean feat - and went back upstairs. He was gone no more than five minutes, but when he returned to May, she looked like she’d gotten a lot worse - sweat was literally pouring from her, while her whole body was overridden with shivers.
“Jesus, you really look bad,” he commented, handing her the large green pill Simmons had given him. “Here, take this and I’ll go get you that blanket.”
May dry swallowed the massive thing without a flinch, lifting her watery eyes to meet his gaze. “I’m fine.”
“So you’ve said,” Phil acknowledged with a nod. “Several times actually, but it’s not getting any more believable.” And with that he left his best friend again, taking the necessary couple of steps to reach her bunk, so he could retrieve her favourite blanket - a deep red, fluffy thing her grandmother had gotten her for her twentieth birthday.
He was just closing the door to her sleeping quarters after himself when the whole plane shook violently. “Shit,” he cursed, stumbling.
“We hit turbulence,” came May’s voice over the plane’s intercom - a little raspy but remarkably composed. “We’re flying into a storm, so buckle up,” she finished.
Entering the cockpit again, Phil could see several lights flashing dangerously on May’s dashboard. “Everything all right?” he asked as he draped the warm blanket across the pilot’s legs.
Melinda grunted in answer, which only made her cough violently, before choosing to finally tell the truth, “Other than the fact that I’m seeing two horizons…”
Phil winced. “Did that beast of a pill help at all?”
The Chinese warrior gave him a half-hearted shrug. “My chest doesn’t hurt anymore,” she disclosed.
Coulson gaped at her. “You said you were fine, May! And now you’re telling me your chest was hurting?”
Another shrug and Phil was starting to get a little annoyed by her attitude. Who knew a sick May would resemble a mardy teenager? Before he could tell his friend what he thought about her behaviour, the plane shook again, sending Phil into a wall.
“Jesus,” he hissed, watching May grab onto the control wheel with her left, while pulling on one of the throttle levers with her right. The plane kept shaking.
“You have it under control?” he asked worriedly. This didn’t feel right at all.
Melinda nodded, though she didn’t seem as sure of herself as usual. “Can you check our altitude?” she asked a couple seconds later.
“What?”
She gritted her teeth, her sweaty hand slipping on the control wheel. “Can you read the number on this display?” she asked, pointing at a small screen in front of her.
He glanced where she was pointing, frowning. “The number? Why don’t you just-”
“Read it, Phil!” she snapped as she blinked, trying to focus.
Well, shit. She couldn’t even read the display, she was so feverish - that was even worse than he had thought. “It says twenty-six thousand,” he quickly read.
“Gàn!” she swore, pulling at the throttle lever again and adjusting the tilt of the front two engines with a well-practiced move of her hand.
“What? What’s happening?” he questioned insistently.
“We’re too low, the storm is slowing us down,” she explained through a clenched jaw, her voice gritty. Then, just as the plane shook even more violently, she burst into a coughing fit. “Gàn,” she repeated once she recovered.
Phil really shouldn’t find her speaking Chinese cute. Especially not in a situation like this, but he couldn’t help himself - it was kind of nice seeing May not in complete control of herself.
The door to the cockpit opened, Ward sticking his ruggedly handsome head back in. “Everything okay?”
May turned her head to glare at him. “Get out,” she snapped, following it by an acerbically said, “nǐ tā mā de kàn shénme!”
Ward winced, promptly leaving them alone again, and Phil remembered the male specialist actually knew some basic Chinese, so there was a chance he had understood what the angry woman had said to him.
A lightning bolt crackling right next to them startled Phil, causing him to jump in his seat. The plane’s right side dipped down suddenly, and an alarm started flashing on the dashboard in front of him.
“What now?” he demanded, trying to figure out what had happened, despite not really understanding anything the little screens were showing him.
“Engine number two is down,” May noted, managing to slowly bring the Bus into a level position again.
“Did the lightning do that?” he asked, surprised.
The Chinese pilot snorted. “Of course not, it was probably some sort of debris or a bird caught in the storm.”
As another coughing fit racked her body, the plane jolted again, prompting May to once again grip the throttle.
Phil held his breath as things got worse for a couple of seconds, before everything suddenly calmed down. The Bus was once again smoothly cutting through the air; the howl of the storm outside was gone; and the only sound in the cockpit was the soft rasp of May’s breathing.
Coulson watched as her white-knuckled hands slowly loosened their grip on the control wheel, before the specialist’s whole body listed to the right and went slack.
“Oh, shit,” he cursed, grabbing his friend so she didn’t slide completely down to the floor. He tapped her burning cheek lightly, trying to wake her up. “May?”
Nothing.
“Come on, May, snap out of it!” he urged but got no response.
Flicking on the autopilot - one of the few things he actually knew how to do - he turned on the intercom. “Ward, Simmons, report to the cockpit immediately!” he ordered.
He didn’t have to wait long for the duo to appear. “Quick, Simmons,” he motioned for the doctor. “May needs help.”
Ward stared at him as he clutched the small woman to his chest. “What happened?” he asked. “She was fine a couple of minutes ago.”
Coulson glared at the other man. “Well, she’s not fine now,” he snapped. “She passed out as soon as she got us out of that storm.”
The younger man looked worried as Simmons went to check on May, making Phil wonder if perhaps there actually were some feelings involved in the two specialists’ relationship. “Snap out of it, Ward,” he told the man, repeating what he’d just said to Melinda. “I need you to fly this plane. Can you land it?”
The tall brunet nodded, eyes not leaving his lover. “Yeah.”
“Engine two is down,” Coulson informed him. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” the specialist repeated. “I promise I can land it.”
Having finished a swift examination, Simmons stood up and instructed, “I need you to carry her to the lounge, so she can lie down comfortably - she has a really high temperature, and I don’t like the sound of her breathing.”
“You and me both,” Phil commented, lifting the tiny woman in his arms. Thank god she was unconscious, he thought ironically, otherwise she’d never let him carry her, even if it meant she had to crawl all the way to the lounge on her hands and knees.
“She’s gonna be all right, though, right?” asked Ward as he slid into the pilot seat.
Simmons gave the specialist a warm smile. “Of course, Agent May is very strong,” she reassured him. “She should be fine once we get some liquids into her and dose her with a strong antiviral.” Then, after a brief pause, she added hesitantly, “Some bed rest is also advisable.”
Phil chuckled, setting Melinda down on a couch. “Yeah, good luck with that.”