A/N: First of all, no one will be shocked to hear that I still owe review responses, because I am the worst. I'm sorry! I'm working on them!
Second, all of the stories contained within are responses to prompts I received for a meme I did on my tumblr, in which I invited people to send me the title of one of my fics, and I would write a snippet of it from another character's POV. I still have several unanswered prompts, so this collection might get expanded, but these are the ones I've done so far.
Third, title comes from "Gonna Change the World" by S Club 7, a song which has absolutely nothing to do with these fics. I just got the two lines stuck in my head, and they particularly fit the point of the collection, so-*shrugs*.
I think that's it! Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review!
Prompt for this chapter: anonymous said: "Ward in i'm not falling in love (i'm just falling to pieces), please? (Going with the assumption he's real, that is.)"
Grant is well aware that he's not a good man.
No good man could make a decent specialist, and Grant is so much more than decent. He's one of the best, with all that it implies, and the mix of pride and shame he carries for the work he's done is something only another specialist could understand.
He's felt his fair share of guilt. He's suffered the flashbacks and the nightmares that are part and parcel of specialist work. There have been days when he's thought he would never get the smell of death out of his nose, where he's felt like everything he's ever done has stained his hands for all the world to see.
For the blood he's spilled, the lives he's taken, the horrible deeds he's committed in the name of maintaining his various covers…he carries that guilt constantly, and it only builds with each mission he completes. After eight years? It's a lot of guilt.
And all of it combined can't compare to what he feels looking at Jemma right now.
She's dwarfed by the shirt she's wearing, which is definitely one of his. Usually the sight of her in his clothes is a turn-on (he is nothing if not a possessive man) but it's hard to find any satisfaction in it right now. It makes her look that much smaller, and she really doesn't need the help.
Jemma has always been small—petite, as she's often insisted—but only deceptively so. She's brilliance and sunshine wrapped around a core of pure steel, and has been since the moment he met her. She's stubborn and strong and unbending, tough enough to bear not only her own burdens but his as well. He learned long ago to see past her small (tiny, he used to tease her) stature and see the strength beneath.
But not anymore. Between the weight she's lost (far too much—has she eaten at all in the last month?) and the look on her face, it's hard to think of her as anything but delicate. Fragile. Like a harsh word or a stiff breeze might shatter her.
He did this to her.
She backs away from him and cries and insists that he isn't real, and even as he calmly tries to convince her otherwise—even as he tries to prove, through touch and sight and sound, that he really is standing in front of her—he's slowly drowning in guilt. She flinches when he touches her, and shame claws at him with burning fingers.
He never should have agreed to the deception.
He finds himself trying to explain, in between attempts to convince her that she isn't hallucinating. It isn't the time for it—not when Jemma so clearly thinks she's in the midst of a mental break—but he can't help himself. He needs her to know, to understand, that he didn't do this on purpose.
The lie wasn't meant to last anywhere near this long. It was only supposed to be for a few days—not even long enough for them to hold a funeral. He knew that she would mourn—that she would suffer—but it wasn't supposed to be this bad. He figured she would spend a day or two crying on Fitz's shoulder, and then the truth would come out and he would spend the next decade or so making it up to her.
Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that it would stretch out to more than a month. If he'd known—if he'd had any idea—he never would have agreed.
Letting the target think Grant was dead was the best way to bring him out of hiding, he knows. They spent weeks debating it, drawing up and discarding strategy after strategy after strategy, and the one where he faked his death was the only one (out of literal dozens) that wasn't likely to cause collateral damage. All of their other plans would have resulted in heavy civilian casualties.
But he would rather watch a hundred innocent people die than see this look on Jemma's face.
By the time they realized that the mission would take more than a few days—that the target (a man who doesn't deserve the courtesy of a name; it's not often that Grant uses words like evil in earnest, but it's the only one that really applies) was paranoid enough to continue his precautions past the point of the death of the only person he knew was after him—it was too late to back out. Revealing that his death had been faked would only have justified the target's paranoia and driven him further into hiding.
He told himself that Jemma would be all right. He told himself with Fitz there to take care of her, and Barton and Romanoff—pulled off the mission to lend credence to the lie—to protect her, she would make it through okay.
He was fooling himself, of course, but it wasn't until he successfully completed the op—until he returned to the Triskelion, only to be told that Jemma had taken her bereavement leave and disappeared—that he realized by how much.
He supposes he should consider himself lucky, that Jemma was too distraught to really hide. The thought leaves a bitter taste in his mouth—the idea that he should be grateful for his wife's suffering doesn't sit well. But it was easy to find her: once he ran a check on her passport and discovered that it had been used to enter France, he knew exactly where she was.
If she had made any attempt at hiding—if she had put that genius brain to work in covering her tracks—he might still be looking. And they've been apart for long enough already.
No. Not long enough. Too long.
She keeps repeating that he isn't real, and the guilt multiplies every time she says it. Between her tears and her obvious fear and the expression she's wearing—every single second of the last month is written in the lines of her face—he's being crushed under the weight of it.
He's angry at himself—furious, really—and it makes his voice sharper than he intends it to be when he asks her why it's so hard to believe that SHIELD would lie.
"Because you wouldn't do that to me," she says, and her words hit him like a punch to the throat. "You wouldn't leave me unless you had to."
Oh, look. More guilt.
She thinks so much better of him than he deserves. She always has, and he's always known it, but this…
He thinks maybe looking her in the eye would help—help her, that is; all it will do is bring him more pain, and fuck, does he deserve it—so he lifts her to sit on the counter.
(The first time he brought her here, for their anniversary four years ago, she sat in that exact spot while he made dinner and they talked about marriage. She was the one who brought it up, and the ring he had purchased months before was burning a hole in his pocket the whole time. Later that night, after he proposed—after she said yes, after they celebrated—she laughed and apologized for stepping on his moment. Great minds think alike, he said.
They spent part of their honeymoon here, and their anniversary the following year. They have so many good memories here, and the thought of her sleeping alone in the bed they've shared so often, crying and mourning him for no reason, causes him actual, physical pain.)
He apologizes some more, promises he's not dead, and then—because he honestly can't stop himself—because even when she's crying, even when she's pale and fragile and far, far too thin, she's still the most beautiful woman he's ever seen—because she spent the past month mourning him, but he spent it missing her—he kisses her.
He means to keep it light, because he has no right to kiss her right now and he knows it. But she takes it further, and he doesn't deserve it (deserve her) but he goes along with it anyway, because he doesn't have the strength not to.
He wonders if the kiss—if the way she slides her hands up under his shirt and squeezes his sides with her knees—is a good sign. If maybe she's starting to believe him. When they finally draw apart, he has to ask.
"Do you believe me?"
"I don't know," she says, and his heart sinks. Not because she doesn't know—although, yeah, that's bad—but because of the tone she uses when she says it. Usually, an I don't know from Jemma is a cheerful, excited thing. She loves it when she doesn't know things, because that leaves room for research—for discovery—and there are very few things she likes better than research.
She doesn't sound excited now, though. She sounds tired. She sounds defeated.
"But I'm willing to try," she finishes.
He can work with that, and tells her so. It will take time, he's sure. If she won't believe her own senses—if kissing him and being held by him isn't enough to convince her—he doesn't know that hearing confirmation from others will do the trick. Getting her to accept that he's really here is going to take time and patience, and he knows that every second of it is going to kill him, because she's not supposed to doubt herself. Not like this.
It's not just that he left her alone to mourn him for a month, although that was a fucking awful and cruel thing to do to her, for which he will definitely be apologizing on a regular basis. Her pointless, wasted tears are a mark against him and always will be, but they're not the worst of it.
He's shaken her faith in her own mind. He doesn't know that she'll ever be able to forgive him for it. He does know that she shouldn't.
She asks if they can pretend, for a while, that everything is okay—that she really does believe he's here—and of course he agrees. Whatever she wants, whatever she needs, is hers. He's going to spend the rest of his life making this up to her.
So he returns her hug, bears the weight of his guilt, and closes his eyes so he doesn't have to look at his reflection in the window behind her. He doesn't deserve her. He doesn't deserve this.
He never did.