S02E10, I.

It was her fault. It was her fault that Mack was dead.

Intellectually, Bobbi knew she had no other choice, that she did the right thing. That she had tried everything in her power not to hurt Mack, taking his blows and not retaliating as much as she could have. That she had only meant to stun him, to render him unconscious, not… Not... Not kill him. But it was funny, how the mind could know one thing, but the heart believe another. She inhaled a shaky breath as she entered the garage- the place Mack had claimed as his workplace.

The place was a mess, from the complicated manoeuvres that May had done to trick Hydra into thinking they had blown up the Bus. Some part of her, a part that wasn't numb with grief for Mack, appreciated and admired the technical expertise and intelligence of the operation. Bobbi exhaled as she knelt among the items, and began sorting them out. Mack would have wanted that. He had been as neat as she was, a stickler for order and tidiness. Something, she realised with a pang, that she had rubbed off onto him.

Something flashed for a moment in the light and caught her eye. A thumbdrive. She lifted it from under a pile of boxes and tools. She recognised this thumbdrive—

"Looking for something?"

Bobbi started as Lance entered the garage. She pretended to fumble with the boxes, hiding the thumbdrive in her palm and keeping that hand hidden behind them.

Lance rolled his eyes mentally. He might not know what secrets she was keeping, but he always knew when she was keeping secrets. And she was keeping one from him, right now, and not very well at that—he had caught her off-guard when he walked into the garage, and that split second deer-in-the-headlights look was as tell-tale a sign as any. But it wasn't the right time to bring it up. Not when she was hurting. He could see it in her eyes, in the downward slant of her lips, the defeated slope of her usually-defiant shoulders.

"Mack would hate to see his garage like this," Bobbi replied, gesturing at the overturned metal containers around her.

She recognised this particular thumbdrive—she had given it to Mack, after much beseeching on his part—she knew what it contained.

"I heard what happened, with Mack." Lance came to a stop in front of her. He sometimes beat about the bush when trying to say something, but when it came to certain things, important things, he always cut straight to the chase.

"Then you know it's my fault." Bobbi's voice trembled and broke. She swallowed hard, and again. She didn't want to cry; she didn't want to be vulnerable, didn't want to let her emotions overtake her. Not when there were things to be done, not when they were still on a mission. Not… Not in front of Lance.

"That's not the story going around."

He picked up a box and turned to place it on a shelf. Bobbi knew she wouldn't have time to slip it into her pocket; Lance would catch her mid-act. She would have to stall, find an opportunity. She couldn't let him find out about the thumbdrive—especially about what it contained.

"I heard it wasn't Mack that came out of that hole."

Lance wasn't sure what he could say to comfort her. There weren't enough words—and he would know, because he knew firsthand the pain and guilt of causing a friend's death. "You did what had to be done."

Bobbi cleared her throat and grabbed another box. Lance followed her movement. She was trying to find a moment to secrete the thumbdrive into her pocket, he knew, and she was hoping he hadn't noticed. What, did she think he was that blind? For a moment, all the past hurts and times she had tried to hide (and sometimes successfully hidden) things from him surfaced in his mind.

"Do you think he's dead?" he asked casually, crossing his arms. He knew it was a provoking question and that it would hit her squarely, and he hated himself for doing that to her the moment the words left his mouth. He and his damned mouth! Why couldn't he learn to control his emotions and his damned tongue better?!

Bobbi stilled for a moment, and turned to face him, drawing a shaky breath.

"Between what infected him, and the hundred foot drop—" She paused for a moment, replaying the odds mentally. Anguish rolled over her like a wave. She shook her head, blinking back tears. Lance's gut twisted.

"When this is all over, imma cry for like a week," she said, trying to mask her pain with poor humour.

She tried—and failed—to smile, turned to walk away, hoping to get away from Lance before the pain overwhelmed her.

"Hey, come here."

Lance instinctively reached out and pulled her into his arms as she walked past, his palm hot against her waist through the thin cotton of her shirt. A voice in his head reproached that he shouldn't do that, that this was too intimate a gesture for "just friends", that this would only complicate things further. He ignored it and tightened his arms around her.

Bobbi hesitated, momentarily startled by his embrace. They had never been the hugging type particularly much when they were still married; as time went on and the secrets accumulated, they had put up walls and kept each other out, and hardly let each other see the other person vulnerable, much less offer comfort.

His arms tightened around her, and she tentatively wrapped hers around his neck. She had missed this, this intimacy. Sure, they had had sex. Angry sex, make-up sex, let's-not-quarrel-about-this-anymore sex, and most recently, undefined sex (although she knew it wasn't so much undefined as it was the realisation that he still loved her and she still craved his trust—she just didn't want to admit it to herself)—but hugging, hugging was more intimate in some ways than sex. They hadn't hugged in a long, long time.

She smiled to herself and curled her arms around him, settling into his embrace and into the familiarity. Lance pulled her in more closely, his body pressed tightly against hers. She could feel his heart thudding against her, steadily, just like she knew he had always been towards her. His heat warmed her from the inside out. Oh, she had missed this. It felt like nothing had changed between them, as if they were the people they were at the start of their ill-fated relationship, before the existence of secrets, before the hurts, before the fights. She ignored the voice telling her that she was slipping further into this spiral that was Lance and that it would inevitably end as it had countless times before-in disaster—and focused on the moment. She inhaled the familiar scent of detergent and shampoo and the something that was uniquely him, her grief abating momentarily. She focused on his arms around her and the warmth that spread from his palm across her back. Lance always did give the best hugs—he never held anything back. If moments could be captured…

"Mack's one of the best." Lance's breath was hot against her neck. "If he's really gone then the number of people I trust on this planet just plummeted."

Bobbi's heart gave a wrench, guilty at keeping a secret, this secret, from him—and Mack had known about it. She fingered the thumbdrive that was still in her hand and kept her voice steady.

"I didn't think you trusted anyone," she said wryly.

"Moment of weakness," Lance smiled, pulling away with a smile, his hands still on her waist.

"Let's just say I mistrust some less than others." He tightened his hold on her waist by a tiny fraction, and she knew, as she gazed into his honest brown eyes, that despite everything, despite claiming that he didn't trust her, that he did.

Bobbi's phone sounded in that moment, breaking the spell.

She made a split second calculation and decided it would be too risky to slip the thumbdrive into her other pocket at the same time as she answered her phone—he was right in front of her, after all—if he noticed the movement, she wanted to be as far away from him as possible to minimise the chances of him grabbing it from her.

"It's Diego," she said, moving away from him. "Coulson wanted me to set a meeting."

She slipped her hand casually into her pants pocket, sliding the thumbdrive in as she did.

"You know… I could use some backup." She tilted her chin down, half coy and half shy.

"I might know a guy. Want me to see if he's available?" Lance answered, smirking slightly.

"Is he good?" Bobbi countered, resisting the urge to smile. This semi-flirtatious back-and-forth, this she was familiar with. She had missed it. She ignored the voice that told her to stop, stop it before you fall back in.

"Ah," Lance gave a half-shrug, "Good enough to know you're keeping a thumbdrive from him," he said, searching her face.

Her heart skipped a beat and she dropped her gaze. Of course he would have noticed! How could she have thought he wouldn't? She searched her mind, trying to think of an excuse to give him. Another lie, she thought bitterly.

"I want to trust you Bob, I really do." Lance gazed steadily at her. "So I'm going to assume that whatever's on that drive has got nothing to do with you and me."

Bobbi met his gaze. His eyes were bright and clear, without a trace of doubt or suspicion—he was being honest.

He held her gaze for another moment. "I'll go get my weapons and we can go." He headed up the stairs, stealing one last glance at her back.

Bobbi swallowed as he left, feeling torn. She was relieved and grateful that he had let it go and didn't press her, because she didn't know what to say and didn't think she would have been able to come up with a decent cover. And yet, she felt guilty: not too long ago she had told him that she had always been honest with him. It wasn't a lie— he had never asked about this particular secret—but it wasn't the truth either. That's how it had been with them, half-truths and not-quite-lies, and it had destroyed their marriage. He had known about her tendency to give only half-truths ("half-lies", he used to call them) when she said she had always been honest with him, but now, here was actual proof that she was keeping something from him. Somehow, being called out on her half-lie, having it laid out bare, made the guilt that much harder to bear.

She marvelled though, at how much he had matured since the divorce—in the past he would have demanded to know what she was hiding from him and assumed that it was something personal, something that affected their relationship. (Of course, it never was; all her secrets had to do with classified mission intel that would have put him in danger, not that she could have shared them with him anyway.) She knew about his deep-seated insecurities and issues with trust, and the fact that he was choosing to trust her instead of giving into his insecurities made her heart wrench. Here he was, trying, trying to make it—them—work, and she was essentially throwing it back in his face. How ironic that when he finally chose to trust her, when he finally chose to believe that this secret did not involve them personally, that it actually did.

But she couldn't let him know what was really on the thumbdrive: pictures of a chubby toddler with familiar brown eyes and a charming smile that he had inherited from his father—pictures that she had given Mack because he had insisted they were part of his rights as a godfather.

A/N: Huntingbird is my favourite ship!

I've always felt that there's just so much tension and so much left unspoken in Bobbi's and Hunter's interactions, and these stay with me long after I've finished watching the episodes, so I've tried (and will try) to put them into words.

These drabbles are based on the assumption that 'the other thing' that Bobbi is hiding from Hunter is their child. But I were to be really honest... I don't think that's likely to be the case :( still, it's pretty fun to write. So I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I do writing them. :)