No Matter How I Try
Hunter wasn't the best fighter. Sure, he was ex-SAS, but when it came to S.H.I.E.L.D he was basic; Bobbi could kick his ass from Monday to Sunday, May was the bloody Cavalry, Skye had been trained by May, Mack was... Mack was just big, even if he didn't have the skill, he had the brute strength to take down anyone, and Coulson was crafty, he'd heard a rumor once that Coulson could kill someone with a bag of flour and a kitten.
Compared to all that Hunter was the least skilled, but he liked to think he was more like Coulson - creative thinking could win the day too.
Still, when he was up against a Nazi monster who had specialist S.H.I.E.L.D training and no morals, he wasn't looking so good in a fight. Skye was on another mission, the lab had been overrun so Bobbi was sidelined to help there. He was leading a small team to follow up a lead on HYDRA.
It wasn't just HYDRA, they'd finally managed to get Ward and like Hell was he letting him out alive.
His Icers were empty, he only had two bullets left, his team were either unconscious - the lucky ones - or dead - the unlucky ones whose names and faces he would never forget - he had at least one broken rib, possibly a concussion.
At least he'd managed to shoot Ward in the shoulder, but it didn't slow him down nearly as much as he'd hoped.
"Give it up, Teacup." It was down to Ward and him. Ward with his grudge against S.H.I.E.L.D, Skye and Bobbi. And him getting revenge; revenge for Skye, revenge for torturing and almost killing Bobbi, revenge for hurting Fitz. Revenge for the whole team. "You know you don't stand a chance."
"Hate can do wonderful things to a mans stamina." Hunter called back from where he was leaning against a wall. It was getting hard to breathe. "Just give up, Mate, and I might kill you quickly."
"Sure." Ward scoffed, his voice was getting closer. "You can kill me."
"Glad you admit it." Hunter called back, he checks his gun and sucks in a slow breath. Two bullets left; one for Bobbi, one for Skye. He'd call the one currently lodged in arseholes shoulder one for Fitz too.
"Why don't you stop hiding then if you're so confident?" Ward was mocking him! Well, he'd see who got the last bloody laugh when he was dead and Hunter got to go back to base and get in bed with Bobbi and Skye.
Trap! Trap! Trap! Every instinct was screaming at him to run, but this was his chance. Possibly his only chance. Hopefully the last chance he would ever need.
Two bullets.
He grips his gun tightly, counts to three to prepare himself, and steps around the side of the wall.
Grant Ward, the bane of his existence. If he had an arch nemesis it would be him.
Two bullets.
One for Bobbi that hits his shoulder. Lance's stomach explodes in pain and his second shot goes wayward. He drops to his knees and his fingers twitch at his chest. Well, fuck! Ward won.
Skye is pacing across the viewing room of the operating room.
Bobbi is pacing too, in the opposite direction so they pass each other in the middle of their tracks.
Lance is surgery.
It was meant to be a regular mission, just another HYDRA base, they hadn't had a lead on Ward in months. But, Ward had been there and Hunter had gone head to head with the psychopath. And had come out with three bullet wounds, a broken rib piercing a lung, and a head wound.
Skye and Bobbi passed each other in their pacing again. Bobbi had called Skye the second she heard about Hunter, she'd left her mission that second, leaving Lincoln in charge. Coulson didn't even argue this time, having learnt his lesson after Skye was injured, at least the mission hadn't been completely abandoned.
The steady beeping of Hunters heart monitor picked up in speed, making both women turn to the window with wide eyes.
The beeping reached a frantic pace until it descended into one long beep of not having a heartbeat. No heartbeat.
Skye reached blindly for Bobbi. No, no, no, no. They couldn't lose Hunter. Her mother had turned out to be a psychopath, her father had no idea who she was, she'd already lost Trip, did she have to lose Hunter too? Wasn't she allowed to be happy?
"SKYE!" A voice invaded her clouded mind. Bobbi. Bobbi's voice. "You need to stop, Skye." Stop? Stop what? "You have to stop. For Hunter. Come on, Rockstar." She's dimly aware that Bobbi was dragging her out of the viewing room and holding her tightly. "Stop shaking. Stop shaking. Stop shaking." The blonde is murmuring in her ear, her voice close to breaking. That's when Skye realises that it isn't just her shaking, she's making the whole building shake.
Bobbi is holding Skye, pressing their marks together. She doesn't know if it's a comfort to her or the brunette. Skye was leaning against her and staring blankly at the wall. Hunter was still in surgery.
Still in surgery. It had been hours. It could have only been a couple of minutes, but it felt like hours. Hours waiting. Hours not knowing if Hunter was okay. Hours. Hours. Hours.
The only thing keeping Skye from shaking the building to the ground was Bobbi's arms and the feel of their marks. Is this how Bobbi and Hunter felt when she'd been injured? The feeling of loss and hollowness and fear?
The door to their bedroom opened; Simmons was standing in front of them, still in scrubs covered in blood - even though she wasn't a medical doctor they'd needed someone on the inside and Bobbi couldn't stomach going in there. "He's out of surgery." The two let out a slow breath. "He'll be in recovery for a while, but you should be able to see him soon."
Bobbi couldn't deal with this. She really couldn't; first Hunter nearly got himself shot in the head because of Ward, then Skye nearly died, now Hunter had nearly died because of Ward again. She couldn't handle it if the people she loved kept almost dieing.
Because one day what if it wasn't almost?
After he'd had the tubes removed, and he was lucid, and Bobbi and Skye were sitting on either side of him in the med-room; "did I get him?" His voice sounded like he felt - bloody awful. "Did I kill the arsehole?"
Skye let out a tearful laugh. "Yeah, you idiot, you did it."
"Is that how you talk to someone who almost died? Call them an idiot?" Lance smirked at her.
"When you're an idiot; yes." His hand still felt cold to her touch, "don't scare us like that again."
"Gotta agree there, Cowboy." Bobbi shook her head.
A broken rib that pierced his lung, a bullet through his large intestine, another bullet that had fragmented through his chest, another shot that Ward had managed to get off that grazed the side of his head.
Lance's recovery wouldn't be quite as strenuous as Bobbi's knee or Skye's muscles, but neither of them seemed to care as they hovered over him like a pair of mother hens.
He'd like it a lot more if one of them was in the nurses outfit Skye had ordered, and the other was in a similar outfit - maybe if Bobbi was wearing her lab coat and nothing else? Then he'd actually quite like the mother henning. When he'd mentioned that Bobbi had decided that apparently he was healed enough to be hit upside the head.
Besides, he was meant to be the coddler in the relationship, and with him out of commission it felt like they were both fighting for mantle of who could coddle him more.
Hunter was enjoying be injured far too much, Skye thought. It was more than just ice cream in bed and the sponge baths he insisted were necessary for his recovery. He whined and complained about the pain and the humanity the second any form of work was brought up. For any of them!
Skye hadn't done anything more than training since she ditched her mission to come see him. And even her training had been interrupted by Hunter's insistence that he was in deadly pain that would only be fixed by her presence. If it wasn't so endearing it'd be annoying.
"I have to go." Bobbi mumbled, they might believe her more if she hadn't been saying that for the last half hour. "May is-" her reasoning was cut off by a moan. However injured Hunter was, his lips were still very much in use. "Fuck! Lance."
"You can go, Love." Hunter smirked against her skin. "Not stopping you from leaving, just enjoying you while you're here." For someone who was supposed to be injured he had an amazing amount of stamina.
He couldn't move as much as he liked - his ribs and lung were still healing, and his wounds and surgery scars were closed, but still tender - but he more than made up for it in enthusiasm. His dick more than made up for it too.
"What happened? Last I remember the sunnuva bitch was walking around like he owned the bloody place?" Lance was surveying his new scars when he asked the question. One scar on his stomach from the bullet wound that had been expanded for surgery. A large, rather nasty scar near the middle of his chest. A scar on the side of his head from where a bullet had come close enough that the scar might never fade.
It had been a month and a half and he finally got the guts to ask the question. All he knew so far was that Skye said he'd got him.
"You were an idiot, that's what happened." Bobbi shook her head. "Stop playing with them." It still made her queasy to see the scars. To see how close they'd come to losing him. "You should have called for back up."
"And let him get away? Not bloody likely." He scoffed, letting his shirt drop. They sat in silence for a moment, Bobbi reached over to hold his hand and Hunter looked up with haunted brown eyes. "It's a bit fuzzy, but I remember I only had two bullets left; one for you, one for Skye. And I'd already hit him in the shoulder with one for Fitz..."
"He had splinter bullets, looks normal, but when it impacts it splinters to cause more damage." The surgeons had taken nearly two dozen fragments out of his gut alone. "Two shots in his shoulders, one on each side. Damaging, but only fatal for blood loss." She unconsciously rotated her own shoulder. Her shot had been a lot worse; a shotgun at close range, it was a miracle she was alive, let alone had full use of the shoulder again. "There's no cameras or witnesses so we don't know what happened, but one of our guys woke up and called it in; Ward was dead, gunshot wound to the neck, hit his spinal chord... You were bleeding out, you flatlined twice on the quinjet on the way here, you-"
"I'm here now, Love." Lance squeezed her hand. He was here. He was alive. "I'm okay."
"What if next time you're not?" Bobbi burst, "what if next time you don't come back?" Their fears, the ones she and Skye had dreaded when he'd spent those hours in surgery, finally spilled out. "What if next time it's someone worse than Ward and you don't come home?"
"Then at least I'll have died trying to make the world a little better for you and Skye and the little rugrats we're going to have in a few years."
Silence.
"We love you, Lance." Bobbi murmured, "and we need you. We need you to come home to us. Alive."
"And that's always going to be my first priority, Love, but if there's someone out there threatening you, I'm not going to sit by and let them walk free until they hurt my family. I'm going to kill the sorry sunnuva bitch and then come home and have amazing sex with two gorgeous women." He grinned and she couldn't help but smile too.
It had been a while since Coulson had his best small strike team together - mainly because of the fighting between them at the drop of a hat - but when Hunter was eventually cleared for field work again he sent the three of them out to be the welcome wagon to a new gifted that showed up on their radar.
Bobbi was checking her escrima sticks. Skye was warming up her powers. Hunter was making sure he had enough ammunition to arm a small nation.
"Don't die out there, yeah?" Fitz was the one who said when they were getting ready to board the quinjet. "Seems like all three of you need the reminder."
2 or 3 installments left (could be 3, depends if I decide to condense two of them into 1).
I'm trying to decide what I should do next; let me know if anyone has any requests.