Author's Note: This is attempt number two to write some AOS whump that is not 11,000 words. Attempt number one, which is 11,000 words, is called When the Fireflies Came, if you want to read that. Most of this whump takes place at the top of a tree. Enjoy.
It was the night of the new moon. The sky above the evergreen forest was inky dark, a thick blanket of nothing and stars spread over the trees. The air was crisp and cool and smelled of fresh growth and old decomposition. The only sound was the hush of the wind through the evergreen needles, and the cooing of nocturnal creatures.
Two sleek, black-clad figures ran through the night, feet barely striking the ground as they entered the forest and let the darkness take them in its protective embrace. No words passed between them, of encouragement or caution, for none were needed. They were perfectly silent except for the slight huffing of their breath. They ran with surety, never missing a step, never hitting a tree, never losing their footing, farther and farther into the sanctuary of the forest.
"Ward," Melinda May, the smaller one, hissed to her companion. "Giant fir, a hundred yards ahead."
"I see it," Grant Ward, her companion, replied. "Wait, are we going to—?"
"Yup." May put on a final burst of speed, reached the base of the tree, and jumped. Her hands caught on a low-hanging branch, bark cutting into her palms. She pulled herself up, got her foot onto the branch, then reached up to grab a higher one, and began her ascent.
Climbing in the dark was difficult, with no way of knowing whether a branch was solid or would break away in her hand. More than once, she almost lost her grip. She could hear Ward behind her, trying to make as little noise as possible as he searched for limbs thick enough to hold his larger frame. While his hand-eye coordination was excellent, he was over six feet and pushing two hundred pounds, not exactly built for climbing. But after the first ten or twenty feet, they fell into a rhythm, hands and feet instinctively knowing what would give firm purchase and what would give beneath their weight. Fifty feet high, May decided they were sufficiently concealed and let Ward catch up to her.
"We're far enough up," she stated, holding on to the trunk for balance as she scanned the ground below them.
He nodded and settled himself in the fork of a branch near her. Neither one of them dared breathe, ears alert, straining to hear any sounds of pursuit. There were none. Ward leaned forward and looked through the fir needles at the land surrounding them. Nothing but silence and evergreen trees. No soldiers. No guns. No tracking dogs.
They waited another ten or fifteen minutes, just to be certain, before Ward broke the silence.
"So we'll stay here?" he asked. "Until Coulson and the team come for us in the morning?"
May nodded, taking off her backpack and hanging it on a stump of a branch above her head. "I'll take first watch. You sleep."
"Don't know if you've noticed, but it's a long way down," said Ward, gesturing to the ground.
Wordlessly, May tossed him a coil of rope.
He caught it expertly in his left hand. "Right. Gotcha."
Slightly amused, May watched him settle down into the fork, tying himself to the branch once he was comfortable. Like any specialist, he could make himself fall asleep whenever he chose, a necessary skill on long missions, and soon his breathing was slow and even, muscles relaxed. He looked almost innocent like that, his smooth, pale skin catching the starlight that filtered through the trees. Like a sleeping child.
But May knew better. Ward was a combat-hardened specialist, same as herself, and both of them were far from innocent. They'd seen and done things that were the stuff of nightmares for the rest of the world.
And yet the night had a way of bringing whatever scraps of purity were still left in them to the surface, stripping away their outer armor and making their true faces visible, if only for a few moments when the angle was right.
Making them vulnerable. Exposed.
He was murmuring in his sleep now, something about goats and frogs, or possibly coats and logs. Ghosts in fog? Who knew. SHIELD agents tended to get stranger dreams than members of the normal population, a natural consequence of having stranger jobs than members of the normal population.
May shook her head and leaned back against another branch, needles tickling her scalp. The scent of evergreen filled her nose, and the hum of the cicadas rang through the air. Between the new moon and their rural location, the night was the color of printers' ink, and she could see the glint of a million stars through the fir needles. Her eyes found constellations, Orion, Cassiopeia, Taurus … as a child she'd called them Brian, Cleopatra, and the Tourist. She smiled at the thought, something she wouldn't normally let herself do, but who would see her now? Ward was sleeping, though she could see him growing restless, and there was no one else around. The night was silent and still, and she was all alone, the good kind of alone, the kind that gave you plenty of space to breathe and clear your head and smile a bit if you wanted.
Ward murmured again, only it sounded more like a whimper, weak and plaintive. May could see his eyes moving rapidly behind the lids, and despite the nighttime chill, small beads of sweat formed on his forehead. He turned his head to the side, breathing heavily, almost as though he were choking on something. Seconds later, he woke with a start, coughing and gasping for air. Seeing he wasn't completely awake, May quietly swung down to the branch next to him and firmly shook his shoulder. Panicked, he lashed out, and she ducked just in time to avoid his left fist.
"Ward!" she whispered harshly, firmly pinning his arm to keep him from hitting her again. "It's only me. Wake up. You hear me?"
Some of the haze in his eyes cleared, and he lay back, breath thick and heavy in his chest. He tried to sit up, but he was still tied to the branch. May undid the knot and helped him sit up, feeling him shivering beneath her hands. Shuddering, he brushed her off and sat up against the tree trunk, not meeting her eyes.
Nightmares were a tricky thing, particularly with specialists like herself and Ward. In some ways, the dreams were almost normal; the missions they ran left a mark, and feeling that mark was what made them human. But too many, too vivid, and you had post-traumatic stress of some sort. At this point, Ward was toeing the line. May had never been able to get a definitive read on him. He was plenty damaged, but then she was one to talk. Besides, 'damaged' didn't normally trip her radar unless it got in the way of the mission, and Ward accomplished his missions with swift, sometimes even brutal efficiency. Too much efficiency, almost. The kind of efficiency you got from putting all the things that caused you pain into a small, dark corner of your mind to keep from dealing with them.
"You good?" she asked after a minute, which was her way of inquiring if he wanted to talk about the dream.
"Fine," he said shortly. "Old mission."
It was more than he normally volunteered. "Bad one?"
"Yeah. Look, I'm not going to be getting any more sleep tonight, so if you want to catch some rest while we wait, I can keep watch." His voice carried an air of forced calm.
She shook her head. "I'm wide awake."
"Makes two of us," he said, trying to be lighthearted, but May didn't miss the catch in his voice. He was shaking, too, and not just from cold. Reaching up to the stump of a branch where she had hung her backpack, May pulled a heat-reflective blanket out of the side pocket and tore it out of its packaging. She offered it to him, and he took it gratefully. It wasn't very heavy, but she hoped it would give him some comfort, offer an illusory sense of protection. Besides, what else could she do?
"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked, keeping her tone carefully neutral.
"Not particularly." His voice still had a ragged edge to it, as though he were trying desperately to keep something back and failing. As though he wanted to tell her, but couldn't bring himself to. She understood. Sometimes a person could get so used to keeping things inside that it became almost physically painful to share them.
May pulled herself up to another branch so she was sitting at a right angle to him, close, but not touching. "I talk with Phil sometimes," she said. "Not often, but some things need to be said aloud before you can put them to rest."
Ward shrugged and cast his eyes downward, picking bark off his pants. Finally, he spoke. "It was a couple of years ago. I'd just started running solo missions. It was all pretty routine stuff, since I was only a level five. I was scheduled to parachute into a military compound and take back some stolen tech. At night, of course, so they wouldn't see me. Night of the new moon, kind of like now …"
May nodded encouragingly. "What happened?"
He looked away, and his voice fell flat. "The helicopter pilot who flew me in was a double agent. He dropped me over the ocean, and I was too dumb to see it coming. I should've sensed something was off."
"You were young, inexperienced," she reminded him. "And you're not a mind reader."
Ward shook his head, suddenly very interested in a corner of the blanket, and May noticed that he hadn't met her eyes since he'd woken up. "It was cold, and dark, and I could hear the water crashing against the rocks, close, really close. And I knew I was going to end up in the ocean. I was—" he broke off, but May could guess what the next word was, a word no specialist would ever even think, much less say aloud. It hung in the air, unspoken but acknowledged by both.
"I was in the water for, well, they told me almost an hour," he continued. His voice was pained, but there was an undercurrent of relief, as though he were finally exhaling after holding his breath for years. "I don't think I've ever been that cold in my life. My chute kept catching the water, yanking me around like a riptide until I finally got it off. I'm a great swimmer, but the surf was rough and all my gear was weighing me down. I kept going under, getting tossed against rocks … I think that was the worst part, the rocks. I couldn't see them; it was so dark and half of them were underwater anyway, so I never knew when I was going to get hit next. I started swimming, but I had no idea where I was or which way to go, so I just ended up wasting any energy I had left. Eventually everything just sort of went numb, and I remember thinking, This is how it ends. This is how I'm going to die. Cold, wet, scraped, bruised … alone …"
The kind of alone where you could scream until your throat was raw and no one would hear you.
May leaned forward, resting her arms on another branch. "They rescued you?" she asked.
He nodded, still not meeting her eyes. "Yeah. Freaking miracle. They managed to get GPS coordinates off the helicopter that dropped me there, which gave them a place to start, but even so. I was lucky; that's all there is to it. I don't even remember them pulling me out; I just woke up in a medical facility in Saskatchewan. Still cold. Took me months to stop feeling cold." He shuddered, drawing the blanket tighter around his body. "Sometimes I still do. And just now, I was dreaming that I was back in the water. I couldn't see anything, but I knew that you and Skye and Fitzsimmons and Coulson were somewhere close by, and I had to reach you, but the waves kept knocking me under …" He broke off and put his head in his hands, muttering something indistinct. "I just want to sleep," he said, with the same forced calm from earlier, "without having all this garbage bouncing around in my head."
Not knowing what else to do, she stood up on her branch and, one hand on the trunk for balance, unzipped her backpack. They had used water laced with a tasteless sleeping drug to incapacitate some sentries earlier that day, and there was still a bottle of it left. She took it out of the pack and sat back down, offering it to him.
"Drugged?" he asked, voice bare of inflection.
May nodded. "You'll sleep."
He took the bottle from her, unscrewed the cap and drank the whole thing. When he was done, he wedged the empty bottle in a hollow knothole and leaned his head against the trunk, blinking a few times.
"Tastes funny," he remarked.
"It's the BPA in the plastic," May informed him drily. "Give you cancer in your old age."
He gave a humorless laugh. "Like I'll live that long. You sure you're okay to keep watch?"
"Fine. The team will be here soon to extract us. Though they are taking their sweet time," she muttered.
"Coulson doesn't like to fly at night," said Ward, already slurring from the drugs.
"Sissy," May smirked. "You're not a real pilot until you can fly your plane blindfolded."
"Which is exactly why we need you back on the stick," he agreed.
Knowing he would soon be unconscious, Ward lay down in the same fork he'd been sleeping in before, balling up his blanket to use as a pillow. He half-rolled onto his side so he was facing her, and loosely crossed his arms over his chest. And then May did something very uncharacteristic: she reached out and took his hands in hers, squeezing them reassuringly. He looked up at her, meeting her eyes for the first time that night. In the dim light she thought she saw tear tracks on his cheeks, though she was probably mistaken.
They sat like that for a long time, neither one of them saying anything, while they waited for Ward to fall asleep. Once he was under, May secured him to the branch with a quick slipknot and settled back to wait for dawn.
After a few hours, the sky began to lighten. The night of the new moon was over, and the daylight was transforming the mysterious, shadowy forest into something off the back of a postcard. Ward was still asleep when Coulson and the rest of the team arrived, and while May succeeded in getting him awake enough to climb out of the tree without incident, he still passed out again the moment he got back to his bunk.
After she'd showered and eaten a granola bar, she went to check on him. He was lying on his side, curled up, facing the door, and still wearing his mission gear. Shaking her head, May unlaced his mud-caked boots and placed them by the door, then eased him out of his tactical vest. She unfolded the blanket at the foot of the bed and spread it over his unconscious form. While she knew she should be writing her mission report while it was still fresh in her mind, something compelled her to stay with him. So she settled down next to his bed, elbows resting on her knees, and just watched him sleep.
And when he started growing fitful again, whimpering despite the drug, she gently rubbed his shoulder, just enough to remind him he wasn't alone, and he quieted, breath coming easier. Eventually, having been awake for almost twenty-four hours herself, she too fell asleep, head resting on the side of his bed.
And so that was how Phil Coulson found them when he went to look for May, both deeply asleep, her with her hand still resting on his shoulder. He smiled and nodded to himself; it was so rare for specialists who'd seen as much action as they had to be sleeping so peacefully. After a moment's consideration, he got a spare blanket from the supply closet and draped it over May. The pilot stirred slightly, but didn't awaken. It was no wonder; she had been camped out in the top of a tree all night; she had to be exhausted. Still smiling, Coulson brushed a lock of hair out of her face and left Ward's bunk, closing the door behind him.
Author's note: Three thousand words! Yay! Okay, most of you are probably disappointed that this wasn't very Skyward, but May and Ward have had similar experiences, so I figured he would be more likely to open up to her. Fireflies is somewhat Skyward, though, if you want to read that, though as mentioned before it is 11,000 words. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoyed this. Feedback is always appreciated, especially if you can tell me what some of my weaknesses as a writer are. Don't be shy; I won't be offended by criticism as long as it's constructive. Love JC.