She pressed the trigger three times in a row, and felt the aftershocks echo on her bleeding palm. The first nail went right through flesh and bone, she knew it even before she saw Ward take one imbalanced step back. The second felt like it might have not done too much damage, and she pressed the trigger of the nail gun one more time, leaning her full weight on it in search of the minuscule jump that assured her that she had shattered a another bone. She never noticed if he screamed at that. It was beyond the point. After a whirlwind of kicks and punches, falls and contortions and a damned fucking saw she was well aware that she had just achieved her full victory. Ward had been aware of it, too. He was good, had always been. The impartial, professional sort of respect for his skill never entirely left May despite all of what had transpired the last few days, and the trail of increasingly deeds to which he had applied said skill to. She had thoroughly assessed him on the first day on the Bus, and had deemed him to be both fit to fill his position as the team specialist and relatively uncomplicated to deal with in case the necessity arised. Even though, May had never been fan of those incensed Saturday night bets in the Academy on who could take whom in how many rounds. It was a question of skill, and luck and above all mindset. Ward could have just as easily overpowered her just right now. Pushed a little harder, pressed her head a centimetre further into the path of the saw instead of opening his mouth and talk.
He did it once again, just before she delivered the kick that finally sent him to the ground. Got a hand up – such a defensive gesture, all but telegraphing defeat, she was almost, but not quite, taken aback by it - and mouthed "May". She never stopped to think of what she did after that. She went directly for his throat in a move delivered to kill. Ward floundered for a second, first pain and then fear ghosting over his eyes, and then he was finally down on his back, what little air left to him leaving his lungs in one excruciating gasp. He grimaced in pain, tried to take a lungful of air and shuddered when the agony made the larynx constrict the already damaged airway. The second breath was a beautiful exercise in meekness and caution. By his third gulp of air his arms had fallen out of their protective stance, and his hands had relaxed slowly. May watched from a certain distance. She had taken many prisoners before, and she was well aware of that last spike of fight or flight instinct that tended to overcome a person upon understanding that all is lost and they truly have no hope for escape anymore. She had seen prisoners lash blindly at their armed guards to the point of having to be shot at, and she had seen them struggle against handcuffs until they made themselves bleed. Ward's was probably the calmest reaction she had ever witnessed. He just lay there staring at the ceiling, his breathing swallow but already controlled, his left foot twisted as to keep pressure from the wound. May could have sworn she could see all his muscles go lax at once, and could not deny that the display of utter submission to his very unpleasant fate gave her a nice fuzzy feeling. He had never been on top, she thought to herself. She would never have stood for it, had he attempted to, but then he never seemed to want to, never even remotely looked like he wanted to try.
May picked the pistol he had carried, found own weapon and cuffed his arms viciously behind his back before venturing away in search of pliers. They had made such a mess of the area, it was almost impossible to believe that a small army of Deathloks had not been partaking in the fight. By the time she came back there were other agents roaming about the place, and Ward was standing in a somewhat upright position between two guards. May passed the pliers to the closest of them. Extracting the spikes would take a while, and she was not in the mood to get on her knees for this.
She found Coulson in the main hangar, talking to Fury over several dead and deformed bodies of Cybertech soldiers. Garrett's corpse, skin boiled off and face caved in, was the most prominently displayed of them all. From what she could hear of the conversation, his foray into full psychosis has been deemed to be funny by Coulson and Fury both. May was not sure it was the most sensible approach, but she would take a somewhat oblivious, joking and happy Coulson over a stressed and freaked out Coulson of late. They all had scored a big victory today. They were allowed to take a few kicks out of it before all cost and consequences started to set in.
She came nearer, automatically surveying the scene to make sure it was secure. Someone had to bag Garrett; the body would need to be analysed and taken care of no matter how unpleasant the thought. Phil noticed her approach and gestured to come nearer, not at all preoccupied with the further Fury reveal. May made her way toward the group, peripherally aware of the three pairs of steps trailing at her back, two strong and assured and one with a barely noticeable drag in it. She had expected Coulson to be pleased, but she should really have known better by now. As soon as he saw Ward his face fell into a mask of calculated calmness that spoke of dark depths hidden within.
"He has some trouble speaking. I might have crushed his larynx", she announced pre-emptively in case Phil decided he wanted to extract all the answers from him then and there. Retrospectively it has been a huge tactical mistake, for all it had felt amazing for a while afterwards.
She wondered if Ward understood that it was not meant as a killer punch. They had no use for him dead, and the intelligence inside his head was way too good to pass it up. Since Ward had been revealed as a traitor, May had been slowly filling herself with the most pure and distilled anger, bottled and treasured until the right time to let it out. The fight had felt glorious and raw, spurred on by the recent close call with the Berserker staff. Ward calling her by her name while going down had been the last drop. He had so rarely, if ever, done that before. Them working together and needing to communicate usually meant tons of shit were hitting the fan, and in combat situations Ward never had the need to call out to get her attention; May was professional enough to always have a part of her mind trained on him. And out of the field… They were into sex, not into conversations and feelings. May was not sure if they had ever said anything at all. So when Ward had called to her, falling, she had seen red. She had wanted to shut him up, and she went for the right move.
Coulson wanted to know if she had gotten it all off her chest. She had not thought the boss capable of such a wistful thinking. She would never have it off her chest. She had slept with the bastard, one bed, no clothes, and wasn't it the most vulnerable position in the world?
"He's still breathing, isn't he?"
The fact that he was still breathing had nothing to do with going easy. Watching the beginnings of a vicious bruise form over Ward's throat May realised how close she had come to killing him. Caved the larynx a little deeper inside, cut off the airflow completely. But then they would be without intel, and she would have executed an already subjugated prisoner. Exactly like Ward had done to Thomas Nash.
Coulson was speaking again, briefly underlining what May already knew. Ward would first be made to give up all and every ounce of Hydra intel he consciously possessed, and then be worked further on to extract the peripheral info he probably wasn't even aware of. They were all standing in a circle, Coulson talking, everybody listening. It was almost like all of them were part of the same team again. May turned around and went to stay by Coulson side. It was a somewhat knee jerk reaction, but also offered a vintage point of view of Ward's badly bruised face. For all he was powerless to speak up, he did stood quietly on his own accord, listening to Coulson´s speech with a slightly distant expression, but all in all doing a reasonable effort of looking directly into his eyes with out flinching. May would have mopped the floor with him if he had dared to do any different. However, what finally succeeded in winning a full blown flinch from Ward was the description of his former mentor as a deranged narcissist. He looked away and to the floor, where Garrett's mangled body was being taken away.
"But most of your torture will be internal…", was going on Coulson.
"And a little bit external", peeped in May. The bastard was now only having eyes for his ex mentor, a vacant and slightly glassy expression on his face.
The remaining surviving mercenaries were collected, with a solid claim of illegal detention, torture and extortion by the victims of the incentives program. Coulson went away for a couple of minutes and came back after a grandiose explosion grinning at the new toy in his hands. May recognised the object with vague distaste. Throwing the Berserker staff into the ruins of the building was a dangerous and childish move in retrospect, because sooner or later someone would find it. They would need to collect and guard it, because judging by Director Coulson´s smile, this time around the items of unknown origin weren't going to be sent to the sun. Which was a mistake, they were already committing the same mistakes and they haven't even started. But she could not bear to talk to him about it now.
They took a couple of vans loaded with tech to the Bus, May riding with Tripplett in the second van while Coulson and Skye drove the first. They were already packed and ready to leave when Coulson came up to them, several nameless agents that had been shadowing Fury earlier now dragging Ward behind.
"You'll have to take him. Skye does not need to come anywhere near him right now".
May shrugged her shoulders. She was driving, and the order was issued in direction of Tripplett anyway. Of course they were taking him with them. Ward was a ghost right now; they all were. Law enforcement would not know a first thing about what to do with him, and any jail that tried to hold him would probably loose a couple of officers on one cloudy night. They would have to take him to the Playground, and deal accordingly. The intel would be worth it. Hydra secrets, at the very minimum names of other shady corporations, their leaders, their hidey holes. Judging by Ward's vacant look as Tripplett made him kneel on the floor of the van and used a second pair of cuffs to shackle the first pair to a metallic security ring, he was figuring out as much himself.
"All set, sir?"
"You can go now, boys. The bastard is safe here in our care." A safety release clicked pointedly.
May drove off, looking pointedly into the rear mirror as Tripp took his position at the side of his prisoner. He was loyal and eager, but he had never slept on a cot beside Ward's on the Bus, had never eaten sandwiches together, never played board games (she hasn't either, but she had listened to the team on the comms, serene in the knowledge that they were all safe with him there). He had no point of reference to call Ward a bastard.
Which left her to take care of what needed to be done. Coulson would want to play the good cop, or not participate at all. It was all right. May was more than prepared to be the bad one. She would not enjoy it, but it had to be done. They had all had counted on Ward, but May had taken him to bed, and did not that smart more than anything. She supposed it meant that she was partially compromised and not too suitable for the job, but she was not angry for the sex itself. At least not like a woman scorned, what was what Skye seemed to imply while distracting Ward at Cybertech. May had initiated it, had controlled every step of it, and had called the end. She had not been seduced, could never be seduced, and Ward had been clever enough to know that. May gave him the opening, and despite everything that had transpired now she was completely convinced that the first night he had taken her up on the offer not because of his orders, but because of his own experiences with the Berserker staff. For her part, she had wanted a little oblivion and had expected the hungry, animalistic sex of the post induced rage to do it for her. Ward has been anything but. He had been, and then kept on being, thorough and attentive, if a little by the numbers lover. His moves on her were like his sniper play: he set a target, then approached it with precision and skill, making countless little course corrections until he got it just right, time and again, painstakingly thorough and patient. She had started to suspect that he took the most pleasure in the cleanness and precision of a job well done. He never made any special claims as to what he himself actually liked or wanted, and that had made him seem safe in her eyes.
They drove away, then they flew. May sat with Skye on the Bus, hoping that her presence would instil the girl with the kind of quiet confidence a field agent needed after a hard job. She had performed admirably with the bomb, rescuing the prisoners, staying cool and collected while playing bait for Ward. He would not shoot her, she had assured repeatedly. He would want to talk. And talk he did, except nothing of what he said had really made any sense. "I had finally wanted something for myself", he had said. It had sounded creepy, but beyond that... Coulson had implied that he had only been a follower. Skye had called him weak. He was none of those things to May; a grown man with fighting skills that rivalled her own. He had had the patience and self control to become one of the best snipers of the agency. He was a damn good spy who spoke six languages and was able to transform into ten different personas. He could have done exactly how he wanted, at any moment he wanted. He could have killed Garrett a thousand times over and come clean about Hydra, but he had tried to kill Fitzsimmons instead.
She stood up and went down to the cargo bay, two bottles of water and a sandwich for Tripp in her hands. Tripplett was sitting on the ladder, checking some gadget they had confiscated from Cybertech. Ward was leaning against a wall, hands shackled to a pipe behind his back. His belt had been taken, May noticed with approval. His watch and his shoes were also gone. His head was bent down, but as May watched he straightened a little and started to make a swallowing motion, then froze. Wincing with pain, Ward finally bent over and spit a mouthful of bloody saliva on the floor. That last kick she gave him has made a number on his face. The left eye was swelling mightily, and looked almost completely closed
"Was it worth it?" It was good to see him startle, even if it only manifested in Ward blinking once and holding his breath a fraction of second too long. After that he pointedly looked directly at May, exactly the way he had done when she had chimed in with her promise of a more bodily type of torture back at Cybertech.
"I realise you cannot speak, but you are surely able to gesture yes or no." He did not react to that either, just stared back at her with that attentive, tense expression of his. He was waiting to be hit, downed on May. Well, she was through with punching for today. "Sit down", she said. When he gingerly did, she uncapped a bottle of water and poured it down on Ward's bleeding foot. She would have to go up and get hold of some disinfectant and a bandage, but that had to wait until Skye and Simmons weren´t near the medbay to figure out what was going on. They could cheer on or they could be horrified, and May sincerely did not care one or the other way. They just needed not to get in her way.
"Make no mistake, I will make it hurt", she promised. "But not where the others can hear you, and not before making sure you are strong enough to take it. Your psycho leader is dead, his operation is in shambles. The good men Hydra has used are all gone to their wives and children, and will sleep peacefully through the night. And here you are. Alone, with nothing to bargain with, with nobody who'd care if we threw you from the plane like you did with our friends. I could break your fingers, electrocute you, cut you up with these little bistouries from the chem lab. And make no mistake; everybody on this plane would cheer me on."
Tripplett was watching her with open curiosity. May supposed he had thought he'd be the one to take up the unpleasant job. She would have let him, if she could. She did not want this to happen. She was emotionally compromised. But she also was the one who knew Ward better. Who has read his file before deletion. Tripplett had not fought beside him with the Berserker staff. Had not watched him go at the punching bag, and succeeded in making him stand down with a couple of kind words. He has not been as close to Fitzsimmons as the rest of them were.
"Do you know what I want you to think on while you wait? That had you not been so weak, had you stood up just once, it would all have been different. You would be sitting upstairs with the team now. With your team. So tell me, was Garrett worth the price, Agent Ward?"
He wasn´t looking at her anymore, but rather through her; the textbook faraway stare of somebody trying to gain a measure of distance from a situation. May supposed it was answer enough. She would not get one word from him today, and probably not tomorrow, but she could work with that.