THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY

A/N: I love Ward so very much. And once I thought of the angst possibilities, they couldn't be squashed. It helps that the show is so awful to him, the poor guy. Also, it pisses me off that they just left him there after suicide attempts, not to mention now keep telling him he should die. Anyways, I wrote this all at once quite early in the morning; I forgot how much I love writing angst.

WARNING: This is extremely dark. There are mentions of death, self-harm, and suicide. There is also a lot of swearing.

VAULT A

The first time he woke up he thought he was dreaming.

It wouldn't have been the first time. He had a lot of nightmares and all of them were weird as hell—like his life on acid or something. Garrett would be there, and so would Christian and their parents, and they'd all laugh while Thomas drowned him or choked him or smothered him or did something else that kept him from breathing.

So when he woke up, gasping for air, he was certain it was a nightmare. But as Agent Grant Ward sat up and turned to look around he saw that it wasn't a nightmare: this was life. He slowly rotated to put his feet on the ground and looked down, checking his condition. His foot was burning and he was sore all over and he could've sworn those were broken ribs—plus when he felt his face, there was some swelling, and he could feel stitches—but what concerned him the most was his throat. It just—it felt wrong for some reason and he didn't know why—

Ward thrust himself to his feet and limped toward the wall opposite him. He was in a gray cell. When he stopped and tapped the wall, he discovered it was made of some kind of metal. Iron, probably. But when he turned to tap another wall, that sounded an awful lot more like glass. Ward scoffed softly to himself as he realized it was probably one of those damn two-way mirrors. Maybe the rest of the team would want to watch him dry up and wither away in here, like a science experiment.

He turned, leaning back against an iron wall, and slid down to the floor. Once there he pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his head between them. Ward's head was throbbing and he still really just didn't know about his throat—

"Hey, he's up."

Ward lifted his head and squinted toward the glass wall. It was light out there now; he didn't know how long he'd been sitting there. There were a couple of guys he vaguely recognized from SHIELD standing around outside. Both of them, he noted, looked absolutely disgusted. "Hey, asshole," said one of them. Ward just looked at him.

The guy glanced over at his buddy. His friend looked amused and Ward couldn't tell why. "You know, we're gonna be watching you," said the friend, taking a step toward the glass screen. "There's security cameras installed in there. You won't be going anywhere anytime soon, you fuckin' Nazi."

"I'm not—" Ward tried to say. Then he stopped, because as far as he could tell, nothing came out but some kind of rusty, hoarse noise, and it hurt his throat a lot. Both of the agents outside laughed. Ward reached up to feel his throat—right, of course! May, goddamn May, fractured his larynx. Was that even a thing that healed? It could, right?

Ward wasn't sure if he'd need surgery for it to heal. If he did, he knew for certain it was never going to. None of these people would give him surgery. They'd all rather let him die instead—even Skye. Especially Skye.

He reached up to push his hand over his face, and then through his hair. Though it seemed they'd taken the liberty of cropping his hair close while they'd been doing whatever they'd been doing to him. "Poor baby," said one of the two guys. "Can't even talk back."

"Yeah, you're not such a big shot now, are you?" said the other one. "Now Garrett's dead and so are all your nasty little friends."

They're not my friends, Ward wanted to tell them. I'm not a Nazi. I was just following orders.

But then they'd say that was what a Nazi would say, and Ward almost believed it. Almost. It wasn't like he'd known what else to do—Garrett had showed up in that prison and offered him a way out, a way out that didn't include Christian or his parents or even remembering Tommy, so of course he'd decided to take it. He'd been introduced to SHIELD through HYDRA. It wasn't a betrayal—it was just business, it was who he worked for. Couldn't all of these people understand that?

It occurred to him that both of them had kept speaking. They were still laughing with each other and cajoling, but he didn't care. He just watched them, the venomous looks on their faces, the way they spit their words at him. Ward didn't even know who they were and they hated his guts.

He didn't know how time passed here. It all blended together. Sometimes those guys showed up to stare at him and mock, sometimes some other guys did too. He kept expecting to see one of his old teammates turn up but none of them ever did. Maybe it wasn't as long of a time spent in there as he thought—but it just…it felt like ages, and the longer it drew on, the more and more lost in his thoughts he became, and the more those guys and the other people visited the more he wondered…

Was he a Nazi?

No, no, no, he couldn't have been, he wasn't; Nazis slaughtered Jews, Nazis didn't carry out missions to take down corrupt organizations—but was SHIELD even corrupt? The concept almost made him laugh, of course SHIELD was corrupt, SHIELD was filled with HYDRA members trying to take it down and SHIELD had so many illegal bases it wasn't even funny, and he was probably in one—

Were they going to torture him or not? Fuck, he wished they'd got on with it already, all this waiting, he just—he couldn't handle it, he couldn't take it. Waiting for his dad to come home and hit him, waiting for Christian to come around the corner and find him and Tommy, waiting for Garrett to come back to the woods because nonono he couldn't have left him, he wouldn't have left him waiting there, all alone—

SHIELD let him wait. Oh, God, did SHIELD let him wait. He'd been in this fucking organization for ages and how far had he gotten? He hadn't even known Coulson was alive until Coulson wanted him. Why hadn't Garrett even told him? Why hadn't he been more in contact with the rest of HYDRA? Ward didn't even know what HYDRA was—what even was SHIELD? What did they protect, who did they truly serve?

Ward didn't even know that about himself. The more he thought about it the more upset it made him. He tried not to think about it whenever people visited because he was determined, stupidly, not to let it show through, that they were breaking him without even having to say anything, without even having to drown him. They were breaking him because he couldn't even respond, and he was starting to think that was for a reason, that maybe God or whoever the hell was up there having a good laugh was forcing him to think about his responses—

He took a button from his first pair of pants. As the days drew on longer and the nightmares grew stronger—he wasn't even sure what was real and what wasn't at this point, for all he knew Skye had come down here and screamed at him that he was a fucking murderer and that he deserved all this because God, he knew he did—he sat on his bed in the corner and calmly scratched the button against the wall. At first it was to count days because there was a skylight overhead, though there was no way he'd ever be able to reach it. Maybe it was because there were obvious tally marks on the wall they let him keep the thing.

But then as he wanted to say more, as he wanted to scream and just couldn't, he started filing down the button. He could've swallowed it but he didn't want to go that way, couldn't go that way, it would've been like rewarding May for what she'd already done, sort of. Instead he just whittled the button down a little more, a little tiny bit more, until—

One day Ward sat there, leaned up against the wall, and fiddled with the button in his hand. He studied it, at the one rounded side and the flattened side, the sharp edge that he'd created. The glass wall was dark. Nobody was out there, and even if those guys did see him on the security cameras, he doubted they'd come down to help him.

Who was Grant Ward? Was he a Nazi? Was he a SHIELD agent? Was he some loner wolf who could do missions on his own, a murderer, a psycho, a sociopath? Was he the worst damnedest older brother the world had ever seen, the biggest disappointment to his parents and to God, the stupidest arsonist on the planet? Was he the kid who hopefully sat around in the woods and waited for a corrupt man to come back and save him again, the kid who started fights in juvie, the kid who refused to shoot the dog?

Who was Grant Ward? Was he the man he was with Skye or the man he was with May? Was he the man he was with Fitz or the man he was with Coulson? What about Simmons, even? He rubbed his hand over his face as he thought about it because he knew, he knew he'd blown that mission, oh God he knew, he knew he'd let them in and that was the last fucking thing an agent was ever supposed to do, he'd let his cover story get to him—

Had he become his cover story? What even was the cover? Who the hell was Grant Ward!?

Nothing made sense anymore and he couldn't even scream. So Grant Ward, whoever the fuck he was, very carefully, very calculatedly, lowered the sharp edge of the button to his wrist, and sliced it open. Then he watched as he bled out.

Maybe in hell he'd at least be able to scream.