i had so much fun writing this. HASHTAG SKYEWARD.
x
(so see, that explains everything. we're not together anymore because of the multiverse.
well, isn't that comforting?
because you could have loved me forever. and maybe in another universe, I let you.)
x
one.
she sits behind him in English class. she has the neatest, most perfect handwriting he has ever seen.
the way she curls the wisps and swoops of his name makes him wonder how her lips would wisp and swoop around his mouth.
she switches schools midway through second semester and he realizes he never learns her name.
two.
she's just another girl in another club on another friday. he asks her to dance, hand scraping the back of his neck as he does, head ducked down not meeting her eyes.
her face lights up, flush rising in her cheeks. she's wearing a magenta dress that is bright against her olive skin.
she spins sloppily in his hands, fingers outstretched to catch her wrist. it's hot under his palm.
he never asks for her number and she never offers it.
three.
when his mom married her dad, he didn't know he was getting a sister in the deal. especially one with opinions and barbed comments and the most ridiculous set of tits he'd ever seen.
four.
he puts four bullets in her chest, turns his head as the life drains out of her whiskey eyes. her hair feels like silk and the cut highway of her figure limply strains against the weight of the wall behind her.
her fingers are crimson with onyx polish on the nails and she smiles as she breathes her last.
"hail hydra."
five.
she slashes the tires on his sportster during second block. he fills her locker with silly string and shaving cream and condoms during the lunch period.
the guidance counselor, mr. coulson, and the PE coach, ms. may, lock them in the detention room for three hours to, and he quotes, "reconcile their differences".
hour one is spent in silence. hour two is spent screaming and shouting obscenities. hour three is spent fucking on the teacher's desk.
six.
his roommate has been eyeing the british lilted girl at the bar for like, the grand total, of forty minutes. grant decides to help and "accidentally" shoves fitz, but his aim sucks cause he slams into the girl with the british lilted chick, and her reaction is less than friendly.
the girl is all but five foot but that glare is scary as hell. her nostrils flare and ward intercepts her with a hand on the wrist.
"whoa, whoa cool it. that was my bad."
"listen, you kennedy knock off," is how she begins before fitz grabs the back of his jacket and pulls him out of the crowd before his fuse blows. he doesn't hear the rest, but she's rose tinted until here on out.
seven.
they get locked in the closet for seven minutes in heaven during a particularly drunken night on the bus. fitz and simmons are juveniles.
she talks nervously for two of the seven minutes. he sighs loudly and speaks to fitz outside the door for another two of the seven minutes. coulson begs them to stop for two of the seven minutes while his words slur together. ward can only imagine may's face.
and for one minute, he considers closing the little space between them, counting the freckles on the bridge of her nose is like getting lost. her arms are crossed her over chest and she has a challenging look in her eye.
he opens his mouth, and the door opens.
eight.
her dog tangles the leash around his legs on a hot day in the city. she's drinking iced coffee that she promptly drops on the sidewalk and is wearing smudged red lipstick.
he grins that wicked smile that makes every girl beam and buys her another coffee. across the back of the cup he scrawls his number and his name.
she never texts him, but he waits for her to.
nine.
he sleeps with the girl with whiskey eyes and the skintight black lace dress and wakes up alone and missing his wallet and his watch.
she does leave a note.
sorry, but if it makes it any better. best. orgasm. ever.
he chuckles. it was worth it.
ten.
in order to ascend the throne, he must marry a princess. but they're all stuck up, little bitches. still king is in his blood, and this is hard to avoid, so he at least decides that he doesn't want to marry someone boring.
pick a good one is what he tells his friend, fitz, who is unlucky enough to be head of security and the asshole prince's best friend. fitz nods solemnly like this shit is going to take him all day. in reality, he already had chosen.
daisy of portugal who storms in three days later with her hair in loose ringlets down her back and chuck taylors on her feet cursing like a sailor and flouncing into the king's good armchair like she owns the damn place. grant smirks. this could work.
eleven.
he hits on her in a bookstore of all places. she snorts and puts the book back on the shelf, looking over her shoulder as she exits through the front door, chin lifted in recognition, loose tendrils falling out of her chignon. she walks to a café and orders an espresso.
he follows and offers a pain au chocolat as a peace offering. he sits and they verbally spar into the afternoon until the sun goes down on paris, lights of the city bouncing off the seine. it's so cliché, but then again, it's paris.
he never sees her again, but he doesn't forget her either.
twelve.
she falls asleep on his shoulder on the train to the lian-yu province. there's a translation book on her lap and she's got bangs that easily drift across her face.
he looks up the word for beautiful in mandarin and commits her to memory after she apologizes in chinese and he pretends not to understand what she is saying.
thirteen.
she marries another man in another church in another city after leaving him over a decade ago in a ruined hotel in puerto rico. the man smiles toothily and his eyes are not the color of freshly roasted coffee and his jawline can't cut glass and even more importantly when he kisses her, he's still not grant ward.
fourteen.
she knocks him out with her one trick right hook when he comes pounding on the van's door in an alleyway in LA. she briefly wonders if he'd wear a navy suit and take her to dinner and dancing.
the thought disappears when the first thing he does is laugh as she swings her fist. jackass.
fifteen.
hydra drops skye and ward in the atlantic in a tiny metal box, shining like fish's scales on the water's surface. he puts his elbows into the windows and watches as they fissure, hands skye the scuba gear. her brain already feels too full of oxygen as she hyperventilates into her hands.
she breaks the mask in half and he looks like he's about to rage all hell until she throws herself into his arms and together they collapse to the floor.
he squeezes her fingers as the sea slowly fills the compartment.
sixteen.
he buys her a drink during happy hour at a work function cause he likes how she wears five inch stilettos and a baseball jersey. she accepts and they argue about the sox versus the yankees and by the end of the evening, he is absolutely certain he's in love with her.
she writes her number on his hand in a black felt tip pen and leaves a plum lipped outline on the scruff of his cheek.
he calls her twenty minutes later and she laughs when she answers. his growing grin is almost indecent.
seventeen.
he is so goddamn late to his torts and contracts class. his oxford is untucked and his tie is askew and his hair looks like he spent the entire night fucking the grad student from next door. which he might have done.
grant bursts into the lecture hall, satchel undone on his broad shoulders, and I shit you not, the grad student from next door happens to be the TA for professor coulson's class. she smirks when he stumbles over the arms of the chairs and settles next to his best friend, leo fitz.
coulson resumes class. grant's phone buzzes in his pocket.
fitz: isn't that the grad student from next door? WELL FUCKING DONE MATE.
she glances in their direction and grant raises an eyebrow, appreciating how she turns fuchsia when coulson snaps her back in focus.
eighteen.
they kiss at a new year's eve masquerade ball at midnight in corsica.
he feels it all the way into his toes and the tingling in his hands. heart beating like a damn hummingbird.
she runs out almost immediately cursing in spanish, and leaves a single pearl earring in her wake.
he grimaces ruefully thinking he already knows how this story ends.
nineteen.
skye's a big time computer analyst stranded at bumfuck, usa, which she knows is really somewhere in goddamn new mexico of all places. there is a bar, so she supposes that is something to be grateful for since she has a flat tire and nothing else to do until trip arrives to help.
the bartender is clearly the best part of the whole sticky establishment with his gruff beard and honey eyes, a jaw that could make a twig into a canoe, and those arms, jesus. she's almost sweating as she orders her whiskey on the rocks hoping she doesn't ask him to bang her against every wall in the place.
he sets her drink down in front of her and almost senses this because he leans forward, fingers dancing on the column of her neck and says "I got a room upstairs and my break's in ten." and then he's across the bar quick as hell. she slams that drink, nearly falls off the stool, and saunters up the staircase, tapping out a quick text to trip.
skye: don't worry about me, I'm about to be fully facilitated.
trip: get it girl.
she covers her mouth as she kicks open the door and finds him leaning on the frame already waiting.
twenty.
she kisses his forehead as she stands before him, pistol trained in her left hand, cocked and ready. he's breathing into her neck heavily. her lips vibrate on his warm skin, dusting the freckles, and her free hand wrung in the dregs of the hair shagging on the nape of his neck. he smells like salt, leather, tangerine, and something that is distinctly ward.
she cries out as the gunshot rings around them and they both tremble to the floor. he's got disbelief in his eyes and she's got his slick, slippery abdomen in her hands. she's crying like a mess and he has the audacity to laugh. he opens his mouth to speak and strings of words placate skye's mind, imagining his loyalty to the demon to the very end, hail fucking hydra right ward, or perhaps something better, something pure will pervade.
ward chokes on a bit of blood, crimson in his teeth. "almost had ya."
she breaks.
twenty one.
skye swears to all holy hell that she doesn't check grant ward's social media after he up and left her, their empty apartment, and their goddamn dog.
but when she finds his cherry red, perfectly primed 67 mustang in the parking lot of the piano bar that he knows she and jemma frequent every other thursday since they moved to san francisco, she screeches her (their) goddamn apartment key down the flank and goes to the dive in the mission for cheap pbrs.
grant sees it later in the dim lights of the parking lot in glaring letters: FUCK YOU.
it doesn't say what he had wanted it to. (STAY)
twenty two.
you know this story too well, you love her. she leaves you but you don't leave her.
she puts four in you in a doorway in the caribbean sea and you still love her.
you burn the family mansion to the ground. you fuck some girl with may's face. you double cross hydra with coulson. you still love her.
you see her in a doorway (how goddamn ironic, you think) with the look of wild etched into her cheeks and a nasty scar on her lip. the ones in your abdomen throb at their creator. you see her first and then she sees you. you still love her.
i'm no clairvoyant but somethings are meant to be rattles in your brain like some ill addled cocktail.
she disappears and comes back to you twice as fierce and twice as lovely and you still love her and this time you leave her.
it doesn't matter anyways.
you still love her. the story never ends.