"Garrett's dead, Ward. Nothing you do now can betray him."

Ward's eyes were barely open.

"When Fitz wakes up each day in the hospital, he's disoriented and confused, which makes him frightened. He has retrograde amnesia for the weeks before his injury, no memory of your betrayal, so he asks for you. Are you hearing me, Ward? He thinks he's been captured and he hopes that you'll come to rescue him."

Ward's breathing was slow and steady.

"Grant, listen to me. You've done wrong, but you can start to make this right. We need names. Other Hydra agents within SHIELD."

At first, Ward was perfectly still, showing no reaction at all. Then, slowly, he lifted his right hand in front of his chest. He formed a fist with his pinky sticking up then turned his wrist so he traced a 'J' in the air. Then he made an 'O' by touching his thumb to his four fingertips.

It took Coulson a moment to realize that Ward was fingerspelling. Even though Ward's voice had yet to recover, he still had the option of simply mouthing his response and allowing the SHIELD lip-reading software to interpret for him, or to write his answers with the crayon Coulson had provided (crayon being the least dangerous writing implement). Still, Ward was actually communicating something. That was progress.

"J…O…H…N." Coulson echoed each letter after Ward signed it. It had been a long time since Coulson used fingerspelling, and he had to consciously work to recall each letter. "G…A…R…R...E…T…T."

Ward dropped his hand back into his lap, wearing a self-satisfied smile.

Coulson stood up and left the room.

"You wanted to see me?" Skye edged into Coulson's makeshift office. He was sitting at a desk, laptop open, May standing behind him.

"Yes, come in."

Skye eyed the file that was open on the desk. "Is this about Ward?"

"His interrogations have yielded nothing," said May. "He claims that Garrett kept him compartmentalized from other cells. We have no way of telling whether that's true."

"Don't you have, like," Skye made air quotes, "ways of making him talk?" To her own surprise, she didn't feel particularly uncomfortable at suggesting they should torture Ward. It wasn't like Coulson just tortured people for the hell of it.

"We do," said Coulson in a measured tone. "But Ward is trained in resisting interrogation. And he's better at it than most SHIELD agents. It's a skill called autohypnosis. It's a sort of intense, intentional relaxation, becoming detached from your surroundings. Specialists are trained in it – according to Ward's file, he was a natural, almost a prodigy. We think it's how he beat Koenig's lie detector."

"It means," said May, "that he's only going to talk if he wants to talk."

Skye had a feeling she knew why they were telling her all of this, but she couldn't quite figure out how to articulate it. "You think that…"

"When he was trying to force you to decrypt the hard drive, he was trying to explain himself to you," said Coulson. "You can build on that."

"You want me to interrogate him?"

"I want you to visit him." Coulson gave one of those little 'its somehow out of my hands' shrugs. "Tell him the truth: that you want to understand, not because you plan on forgiving him but because you need to know how we could've been so wrong about someone."

"I never want to see him again."

"Understandable," said Coulson. "The difficulty is that we don't know what we don't know. He could be hiding an enormous trove of information, a few key details, or nothing at all. We need to know if that intel exists. And the only way we can know for sure…"

"Is if I convince him that he wants to tell me the truth," said Skye. This was a mission, a serious task for her as an agent. She wasn't wild about it, but she could do it.

Guards led Skye into a small, white room with oppressive steel walls and a plexiglass barrier, speckled with air vents, down the middle. There was a solid metal table bolted on both sides of the barrier. A thin opening, maybe one inch high, rose above the surface of the table. The guards had informed Skye that she would have to get their permission before passing anything to the prisoner. There was a regular folding chair on her side. On the other side, there was a heavy steel chair welded to the ground.

She sat down and waited, wishing she had brought her laptop with her. The whole prison was spotless, chemically clean. It was quiet, too. Somehow, she had expected noise, though she wasn't sure why.

The door on the other side opened, and Ward shuffled in. His hands and feet were cuffed, but they were letting him walk around. Well, what did Skye expect? It's not like he was Hannibal Lecter. He was just a guy.

Ward didn't visibly react when he saw her. Maybe they told him she was coming? Maybe he didn't really give a shit one way or the other.

"I wondered when Coulson was going to send you," he whispered. He could talk audibly now, though his voice was quiet and raspy.

"How are you clean-shaven? They can't possibly give you a razor, can they?"

"Really focused on the important questions, aren't you?"

"What else am I supposed to say? Hi, how's prison, I hope you rot in hell for everything you've done."

Ward looked impassive, but he sat down.

"If you're sorry at all, you would just tell us what you know."

"I told them everything I knew about Hydra. It wasn't much. Organizations like that compartmentalize for a reason."

"There's something else you know."

"I know a lot of things."

"We visited Fitz last week. Gemma still can't go in there. She just starts crying."

Ward didn't answer, nor did he show any signs of tensing or gulping or any freaking human reaction. Skye had to remind herself that she was here for precisely that reason. Because he didn't have normal feelings or something (Skye still wasn't entirely clear on the nature of autohypnosis.) and something might hit home without having any visible effect.

"He can talk, now, a little. Mostly he just tells everyone to leave him alone. He can't concentrate. He can't remember things."

"They do give me a razor to shave with. Once a week. I'm in solitary, so they put it through the meal slot. I get it for exactly 7 minutes, before I have to return it intact. If I try to keep it or alter it in any way, they'll knock me out and retrieve it."

"You look like shit," answered Skye because it was true and she didn't know what else to say. He had changed the topic away from Fitz. Did that mean it bothered him?

"That's probably true."

"And you smell bad."

"If Coulson sends you here again, ask for a Friday. I get to shower on Thursdays."

Today was Wednesday. Skye hadn't been lying when she said Ward stank. He smelled like BO and urine. Skye hadn't really thought about the logistics of Ward's imprisonment, but of course he didn't get daily showers.

"What do you do all day?"

"Calisthenics. Sleep. Nothing."

"Do you think about what you did?"

"Some."

"What do you think about?"

Ward said nothing.

"Do you think about the team at all? Me? The others? How we trusted you?"

"No."