7) Lessons in Death-Cheating

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"There's-- there's a medication that can bring someone back from the death? Like... days after?" Nica summed up Coulson's narrative incredulously, her gaze flickering between him and the infamous Fitz-Simmons science duo.

Simmons, standing above an open file – a very thick file – sighed, running her fingers through her hair.

"It's not just one medication, one miraculous vitrae," she explained, frowning on whatever she was seeing in the documents. "It was a never-ending series of procedures as it seems, we'll have to look into it further. It looks so... unnatural."

Unnatural.

The word appeared to be losing its meaning the longer Nica was on the team.

When Veronika Macháčková first set foot in New York City, she hadn't even had a clue an alien invasion had occurred there, only having heard about a terrorist attack.

And suddenly, the world had become a much stranger place, the weird surrounding her as if she was a damn magnet; blind superpowered vigilante, not to mention a band of superheroes, ninja cults fighting an ancient war along with a guy with a glowing fist he had earned by punching a dragon (no, Vera was still not over it), archers, speedsters, breachers from another Earth-- loss, death, murder.

Secret government organizations. Fake suicide.

And now actually cheating death.

Her boss had been brought back from the dead. When they had first met – when he ambushed her in the prison – he had told her he had flatlined.

This sounded like a whole lot more than flatlining.

This was playing fucking God and winning, choosing an undoubtedly good man to live despite his heart stopping not for seconds, nor minutes—but for days.

But didn't Vera know at least one man who would have deserved the same?

Who had given the operatives of SHIELD of all people in the world the right to choose who should get another chance and who shouldn't?

Jesus fucking Christ.

Unnatural, Simmons said.

Vera could think of many, many other words to describe what it was, staring with 'mess', continuing with 'miracle' and ending with 'unfair'. Instead of saying any of these out loud, she squeezed her eyes shut, swallowed her anger and grief fighting to get an outlet, air stuck in her lungs, guts twisted to the brim of torture. When she opened her eyes again, no one could see anything in them but something odd, indescribable. Emotions locked out in her heart, barely held together perhaps, but hidden securely for later to blow up.

Unnatural, Jemma said. What else should Nica respond with than what she was expected to?

"Yeah. I guess," she murmured, her own voice sounding like someone else's, strange, distant, dull.

Funnily enough, that was the last straw, hearing the three seemingly careless words leave her lips, when she cared with all her heart.

"Excuse me."

-.-.-

Coulson found her half an hour later – most definitely not a result of too vast ground to cover in his search –, sitting on her bed, her back leaned onto a wall as she had half-curled into herself; pathetic.

But be as it was, she had no energy left in her body, not one damn molecule of it. The emotional roller-coaster of the previous mission, the brutal encounter with the past caused by her own teammate momentarily fighting for her life on this very jet, the heart-to-heart with May, the alcohol, the work-out, the lack of sleep.

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