Seeing as we have two weeks until we find out what happens next, I decided to use the time to speculate wildly. This is the result:

Phil Coulson sat with elbows on knees on the edge of the black leather couch that he had shared with May not twelve hours earlier.

A lot could change in half a day.

In twelve hours, Zephyr One could travel from Hawaii to Paris, with a stop-over in Miami for lunch. Twelve hours was enough time to break a terrorist suspect through persuasive interrogation. It was long enough to tag and index a new Inhuman asset and have them back at home in time for dinner. And now, Coulson knew, twelve hours all the time it took for a sane, battle-hardened agent to descend into madness and to vanish without a trace.

"This room, does it seem…?"

"Like it was decorated by someone who needs to unclench?"

It was just twelve hours ago.

She had seemed… normal. Better than normal.

May had found her niche training the new Strike Team. They feared and respected her. She moulded them into a cohesive, effective unit. It gave her purpose.

The rug may have been pulled out from all of them when Daisy left and Coulson stepped down as Director, but in spite of everything, May had landed on her feet. Out of every one on his old team, she was the one person he knew he did not have to worry about.

Until he did.

"I won't let them take you."

She meant it. He knew that she meant it. She would do anything it took to stop them from hurting him or anyone else. But there was no "them." No infiltration. No unseen enemy. Just a pestilent fear that had run roughshod over the conduits in her brain, frying synapses as it went.

Two minutes after that, she had punched him in the gut.

Everything after that was a surreal montage. He watched, feeling like a stranger in someone else's body, as the new director lifted The Calvary herself by the shirt collar and slammed her skull against a brick pillar. He felt himself wince as she fell. In unconsciousness, her face relaxed into a smile.

Melinda May was insane.

He had repeated the phrase over and over in his mind, willing it to sink in, to mean something. When the reality of the situation finally sunk in, he felt shaky. Someone had replaced his solid foundation with sand without him even realizing it was happening.

"What treatment are you implementing? How long will—

Coulson was desperate and he knew it. Just as he knew what the Director would say before the words left his mouth.

Classified.

It wasn't until that moment that he realized how much he had given up by handing SHIELD over to someone else.

He had his reasons. After last year, he did not have the faith in himself that he once did. The evidence against his aptitude for leadership was fairly damning.

May still objected to his decision to step down, even after President Ellis had "strongly advised" him that it was the best course of action.

"You're not handing the keys to the kingdom back to Fury, Phil," she had reminded him. "We have no idea who the United States government will appoint or what their agenda might be."

It was the question of what that agenda was that had Coulson perched on the couch outside of the lab at one in the morning, waiting for Simmons to meet him. Because the Director's excuses for keeping him in the dark did not add up.

"When it comes to May and Daisy, you can't be objective."

Jeffery was a politician. A master manipulator.

Coulson had watched with bemused fascination as he had wowed the representatives from Capitol Hill, diverting their attention from the crisis in the containment facility and spinning it into a photo-op with the quinjet in the background. He had even allowed himself to be finessed by the Director's flattery and over-zealous comradery into playing tour-guide.

But Jeff had over-played his hand this time.

"You can't be objective."

Objectivity was more than an asset to an agent, it was the bedrock of their character, the infrastructure that supported their moral compass. Jeffrey was questioning his ability to see the situation objectively because it would have stopped a normal agent in their tracks.

But Coulson never was objective. Not with May. Not with Daisy. And the Director knew it.

And he assigned him to Daisy's case anyway.

Jeffrey didn't give a goddamn about objectivity. He wanted Coulson to stop asking questions.

Why?

What had he done with May?

"Sorry it took so long."

Coulson jumped off the couch like his ass was spring-loaded.

"I looped the camera feeds for this part of the hallway," Jemma Simmons continued, speaking in a rushed whisper. "We have a bit of time before anyone realizes something's amiss."

"What have you found out?" He asked. "Is she on-base?"

Jemma shook her head.

"No. She's not in any of the containment modules and she was never brought to the lab."

"Where the hell would he take her?" Coulson wondered aloud. "The best solve for this is the memory machine. Fitz has talked about reverse-engineering it to—

"Dir—Agent Coulson," Simmons interrupted. "I'm not sure that would work in this case. As much as I hate to admit it, whatever caused this transformation is quite outside of the realm of anything either I or Fitz have an explanation for."

Coulson ran a hand over his face.

"Simmons, you and I both know that you are the person that is most qualified to help her," he said. "You have experience with things no one else on the planet has seen before. The Director knows that. Why wouldn't you be the first person he would bring her to?"

"I'm afraid the situation might be more complicated than either of us have realized, Coulson."

Simmons swallowed and presented him with her smartpad. The screen displayed the log of the aircraft that had entered and left the base over the last day. There was only one entry of a flight leaving after May's disappearance. It was the quinjet that departed six hours ago carrying the representatives from Congress.

"You think he put her in the jet with the tour group?" Coulson asked doubtfully. "Jemma, you didn't see her. She was not in her right mind. The Director is obsessed with 'optics.' It's not exactly good PR for SHIELD to put a mentally compromised agent in an enclosed space with the people who are responsible for re-instating our agency."

She did not reply. Her eyes darted away from his when he tried to look at her.

"What?" He asked.

With a quick finger-swipe, Simmons opened a new window on the pad that displayed a video recording of the hanger-bay. The shot was grainy and moved in jerks, frame-by-frame.

"Someone tried to delete this off of the monitoring system," Simmons explained. "It took Fitz a couple of hours to restore it. It was taken right before the representatives arrived in the hanger."

Coulson blinked, trying to make out the images he was watching. Two figures dressed in black tactical gear darted in stop-motion across the hangar deck, carrying a white board between them. As they moved up the ramp to the quinjet, the image resolved enough so that he could see that the board was a gurney supporting a woman strapped down in a straight-jacket.

The last frame before they disappeared into the belly of the jet showed a clear shot of the woman. Simmons stopped the feed and they stared at May's face. Her lips were parted in a scream and her eyes were blown wide-open in terror.

Coulson felt the blood leave his face.

"Those weren't senators," he stated unnecessarily.

"I think that would be a safe assumption, Sir," Simmons whispered.

"Who the hell is the Director working for?" Coulson asked.

"I don't know," Simmons replied. "But it's not for SHIELD."

AN: I don't really want to believe that Director Jeffrey is a bad guy. But if he's not, he needs to have a really good explanation for putting May in a straight-jacket on the floor of a jet with a bunch of politicians that he is supposedly trying to convince that SHIELD is a legit agency.

I'm not the only one who thought that was weird, right?