He wakes up to the steady hum and slight shake of a quinjet, and promptly throws up about a gallon of blood. For a second, he forgets where he is, and then he remembers.
Skye.
Skye shooting him.
Agent 33/Not-May finding him.
Stumbling out of the building as it came crashing down around them. He's sure he was awake, there was no way for her to carry his dead weight at all, but he can't remember getting on to the quinjet.
"Morning," the voice from the front startles him for a second, because it sounds so much like May. But no, there's the gash running the length of her face, and although she's a trained flyer, there was a certain calmness that May had at the controls that this woman lacks.
He stumbles around the mess he's made, seeing bloody gauze and sewing supplies also littering the floor.
"I had to stitch you up in the air. I'll re-stitch you once we're at a safe house. If you keep throwing blood, or it gets darker, I'm leaving you outside a hospital."
"That's fair," he says, wincing as he runs his hand over the stitches and takes the co-pilots seat.
"How are you feeling?" he asks.
"I didn't just get shot four times by the love of my life," is her answer.
He looks down.
"Free," she says, after a second, "but lost."
"You have a gun?" he asks.
"Yes."
"Give it to me."
"Why?" she almost seems scared.
"Because that thing you're feeling, soon it's going to turn into despair and confusion, and depression. And I don't want you to put a bullet in your head."
She sighs, putting the jet on autopilot and taking off her gun. She passes it over to him.
"Might as well take these to then," she says, handing over two small knives.
He unloads the gun, and places the bullets in his coat pocket. He stashes the knives in his boot.
They stay silent for a long time, watching the sky fade into darkness.
"What's your name?" He remembers suddenly, he has no knowledge of who she actually is.
She seems to contemplate this question for a second, before answering.
"Kara. My name is Kara."
"Call me Grant." He surprises himself by saying this, but it's a fresh start for both of them, and he wants to shed the burden of his last name.
She only smiles.
"I know this may be a sticky subject, but… are you going to remove the mask?"
She looks down, running her fingers over the side of her face, carefully touching the edge of the gash.
"I think it's stuck," she says, looking sad. "I can't find a way to get it off."
"When we land, I'll look up some things."
It's strange, he thinks, to see the face of May smile.
"Can I ask you a question?" Her voice again seems worried.
"Sure."
"That girl- the one who shot you- do you really love her?"
"Yes," his reply is immediate, but then he backtracks. "I don't know. I do, I did. But," he sighs "I don't know how to explain it. Being locked up, was fine, if I got to see her. But then, I finally broke out on my own, was free, for the first time in my life and- she just wasn't enough. We-I-both of us deserve better."
Kara stays silent.
"I love her," he concludes, "But I need to find the right- the healthy- way to love her."
Kara only smiles in response.
…
They arrive at the safe house, one in the middle of back country Montana, late that night. It's well stocked and untouched. Kara makes quick work of taking out her hastily sewn stitches, and stitching his wounds back up; Three through and throughs, and one graze. He lies on the couch with his eyes closed, grinding his teeth together. The basic anesthetic they found barely works. Behind his eyelids, he watches Skye fire the gun on repeat.
"She wasn't trying to kill you," Kara muses as she finishes the stitches on the graze wound.
He doesn't respond. She may not have wanted to kill him, but he wanted a chance to save her. She didn't give him that chance. Kara finishes placing the bandage in silence. He slides back on the couch, hauling the blanket tossed there over his legs and closing his eyes. She gets the message and throws away the wrappings from the bandages and stitches in silence, before disappearing down the hall to sleep.
The next morning, he wakes up to a crash and her pacing the kitchen back and forth. She looks up at him with tears in her eyes.
"I don't who I am," she says, frustrated. "I don't know." She is clutching a spoon in a death grip, knuckles turned white, and a shattered cup of coffee lies on the ground next to her.
He approaches her slowly, placing his hands lightly on her shoulders.
"Your name is Kara." He realizes he doesn't know anything else about her, so he repeats this until she says it with him. Slowly, her grip loosens, and he takes the spoon from her. He leads her over to the couch, and manages to kick the broken cup into a makeshift pile before sweeping it into the trash.
He turns the kettle back on. An image of the other May making tea to soothe a shell shocked Simmons appears in his mind. He shakes the thought away. Then he pulls two teabags out of the cabinet.
"Tell me about your family," he says, once they're both sitting on the couch with tea.
'Younger sister," she says. "My parents died in a car accident after I left the academy. But my sister, she's smart. Got a scholarship to Yale. Last I heard she was saving lives in some far off country."
She doesn't ask about his family, and he's grateful. She probably heard about it on the news, and from Whitehall.
"Just repeat that, when you don't know," he says softly after a while, "It helps."
"I looked up some stuff about removing the mask last night," he says, "Unfortunately the only thing that came up was some mixture involving hydrogen peroxide, which would most likely burn off a layer of your skin"
"A scarred face is better than somebody else's," is her reply.
"I know," he says.
He stands up, going to the cabinet and pulling out the hydrogen peroxide. He pours it into a bowl wish soap and water. He brings her the mixture of soap and water and hydrogen peroxide.
"Just wipe it on the edges first, and then see if the mask peels off," he says, handing her a towel.
She wipes it along her face, grimacing and steam rises up, leaving angry red burns along the side of her face, but slowly, the mask peels away. The side of her face is burned, and the gash along her eye is still there, but she's no longer wearing someone else's face, and they can both relax. He brings her soap and water, and pats at the burned edges of her face.
"Thank you," she whispers.
"No problem."
He cleans up the mess, tossing the mixture out the door and throwing the towel in the trash.
He goes back to sit on the couch. She is staring at the table, rubbing her hands together. She looks lost.
"What do we do now?" she asks.
"I don't know," is his only reply.
"Do you think they'll come looking?"
"I don't know."
She sighs, leaning back against the couch.
…
He finds her the next morning, washing the countertops of the kitchen.
"What are you doing?"
"Cleaning," she deadpans.
"Why?"
"Because this place is dusty. Because I don't know what to do. Because we have no orders, no allies, no information. This is all I can think of to take my mind off of everything else."
He spends the day vacuuming the entire house, fixing the kitchen tiles, and re-painting a spare room with paint he found in the cellar. Later that night, he uses the computer there to get a connection to S.H.I.E.L.D. Then he fixes the circuits of the television.
They spend a while like this, constantly fixing up every inch of the fortified safe house, while monitoring the progress S.H.I.E.L.D. has made. He still can barely fight because of his stitches, and she is in no mindset to plan attacks or even surrenders.
Slowly, though, they piece themselves back together. They act as each other's sounding boards and therapists, while she laments the lives she took for Hydra and the lingering connection to Whitehall, he shares his thoughts about his team and his feelings for Skye.
Eventually, they build a friendship.
…
Three months after San Juan, they begin to hear whispers. They don't stay in their house all the time. But it's hard to go out when you're a wounded man and a woman with a gash on her face. They do manage though, making up stories of horrific car accidents and plane crashes to satisfy the general public's concern.
They start to hear whispers, though. Earthquakes keep happening, all across America, with no reason. They'll start and they'll stop. Whispers of men in suits, of people who show up exactly at the time of the earthquake. Whispers of a girl in black who can rip apart the earth with her hands.
"I saw it, I did," says a customer at the café, "girl just put her hand out and bam! The earth just cracked, I swear it."
The man's companion laughs in astonishment, but Ward tightens his hand around the handle of his mug. Looking up, he finds Kara staring at him. He meets her eyes and nods.
Later that night, he is the one pacing back and forth in the safe house.
"What do you want to do," she asks from her seat on the counter top. "Do you want to go find them?"
He stops, staring at her. "I don't know."
She sighs, sliding off the counter. "I'm going to bed. We'll talk about this in the morning, okay?"
He nods in response, resting his hand on the back of the couch. He will get no sleep tonight.
…
He wakes up the next morning to the smell of coffee. He is slumped awkwardly on the couch, having finally fallen asleep at around four am. The laptop and sheets of paper litter the floor around him and the coffee table. Kara comes to sit next to him, handing him a mug of coffee. He takes it with a smile.
"What have you found?" she asks, sipping from her own cup.
"Most of the earthquakes come out of this area," he says pointing, "In northern Washington. I'm guessing that must be where there base is."
"Or where they brought her to teach her how to control her powers. I don't think they would risk the base like that, especially if Hydra has caught wind of who she is," she counters.
"Right. So, we have the earthquake in San Juan, then one in the Rockies, in Colorado. Then they bounce all over. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Chicago, Florida, all of them have reported major earthquakes."
"They're in Colorado," she says, sounding confident.
"How do you know?"
"Well, my guess is they went home, after San Juan, and then, she probably caused another earthquake, and they figured out she was the source." She leans forward, pointing to the list of earthquakes in northern Washington.
"See how every time, they go down in scale. She's getting better at controlling them. There hasn't been a major earthquake for weeks now."
"So, Colorado," he repeats, leaning back on the couch. Kara looks at him, placing a hand on his. He doesn't flinch away.
"What do you want to do?" She repeats.
He sighs, leaning forward and resting his head in his hands.
"I don't know," is the only answer he can come up with.
"Well, when you do know," she replies, "That's when we'll know you're ready."
…
When the weather starts to warm up, they practice throwing knives.
Neither of them is sure how this hobby really started, but one spring morning finds them silently tossing knives into the reinforced side of their safe house. The knives barely stay in, catching on by the tip in the house.
He is walking up to the side of the house to retrieve his knife, when a realization comes over him.
"I didn't dream about her last night," he says, turning back to Kara, who slips her knife back into its sheath at her hip while remaining silent.
"First time?" she asks, as he sighs and places his knife into its case, and nods.
"And how do you feel about that?" she asks, smirking slightly as she slips into her role as therapist.
"I don't know," he says, and she simply crosses her arms.
"Like, empty, but at the same time okay. I didn't think- I didn't think I'd be okay with it but I am."
"That's good," she says, leading them back into the house.
"Are you ready?" she questions, turning to him once she's perched on the countertop of the kitchen.
"I still love her," he says, leaning against the back of the couch.
Kara smiles.
"You're allowed to lover her Grant. That's good. But it's also good that you've learned that you can live without her."
"But I don't think I can," he counters, "If anything ever happened to her…" he trails off, looking down.
"I didn't mean like that. I just meant- that the voice in your head- it's your own. You can love as your own person."
He smiles, and she smiles back.
"Time to face the music?" she asks.
"Time to face the music."