Author's Note – Once again, I do not own Agents of SHIELD or any of the characters featured within, although I really, really wish I did because I'd have a bigger house and no car loan repayments.
Neither do I own the song 'Breathe (2 am)' by Anna Nalick. If you don't already know the song, then go listen to get a better grasp of this fic.
Thank you to everyone for the wonderful reviews for my first AOS fic, 'Begin Again'. You all spurred me on to make plot bunny stew from this idea, so if you hate it… it's kind of on you.
Another massive thank you to WelshWitch1011, who I roped in to betaing this for me by telling her that I was 'writing a short AOS drabble'. Don't I suck?!
Breathe (2 am)
'Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable,
And life's like an hourglass, glued to the table.
No one can find the rewind button, boys,
So cradle your head in your hands...'
x-x-x
It was half way through a red eye flight from Tokyo to LA that Melinda May heard the cockpit door slide open, followed by the tell-tale shuffling of feet across the carpet that heralded the arrival of one of her team.
Without saying a word, May shot a glance at the clock, surprised to discover that it was almost 2 am. She watched the hour hand tick forward and land squarely in the centre of the number '12', all the while waiting for her visitor to announce their presence, or else leave her the hell alone. It had been a long and gruelling day, and May was in no mood to… well, May was in no mood for much of anything that didn't involve slamming John Garret's face repeatedly into a block of concrete. Rotating her shoulders to relax her tensely coiled body, May flicked a switch with the tip of her finger, turning on the autopilot feature. Then, she leaned back in her leather upholstered seat and simply waited.
Melinda had assumed that her team were all safely ensconced in their bunks, sleeping off their latest encounter with Hydra, which had ended in a missing rear landing wheel for the bus, and a bullet in the thigh for Agent Tripplet. Luckily for the latter, the bullet had passed straight through his leg, leaving a clean hole and no irreparable damage. However, the fact that the bullet had been fired from the gun of one Grant Ward, Hydra sleeper extraordinaire, was another matter entirely; one that the team had pointedly refused to discuss, much to Agent May's intense irritation.
For the last six weeks, Ward had been the giant elephant in the room, and May was sick and tired of skirting around the mere mention of his name to protect the delicate sensibilities of certain team members. It was not that Melinda was heartless, but rather that she prided herself on being a pragmatist. Grant was evil, it was sad, but she had dealt with the resulting feelings of betrayal in a timely manner, and was now ready to hand the boy his own testicles on a silver platter. She rather wished the rest of the team were on the same page.
With an exhausted groan, May finally whirled around to face the intruder. Since Ward had defected, the cockpit had remained largely her domain, save for the odd visit from Coulson when the chips were really down. It was the only place left on the whole godforsaken bus where May could scavenge a moment of solitude, and thus she did not take kindly to being disturbed.
However, the acerbic barb that had been poised on her tongue melted away into nothingness as she took in the sight before her; Skye, ensconced in a dark blue bathrobe that was not her own, her wide eyes serving as a window to her obvious inner turmoil, and her teeth gnawing a bloody trench in her bottom lip.
When she spoke, her expression was dazed, and her voice was small.
"I… I need… can…" the hacker stuttered, not even blinking as she stared at May, although undoubtedly not really seeing the other woman.
"What is it, Skye?" May demanded, although her tone was far gentler than she had first intended.
"Can you help me?" Skye whispered finally, her eyes misting over and tears beginning to spill from beneath her lashes, "I made a mistake."
Before May had fully realised what was happening, Skye was clinging to her, silent sobs wracking her entire body.
It was going to be a long night. Again.
x-x-x
May had listened quietly and intently for fifteen minutes, before finally falling eerily still. Not a single muscle in her entire body so much as twitched, and Skye found herself fidgeting all the more in a bid to compensate. However, just when Skye was certain she could not take it anymore, May spoke, her voice slicing through the silence like a machete.
"When?" was all she demanded, her jaw clenched and her hands curled into fists at her sides.
"Right before he left for the Fridge with Hand and Garret," Skye mumbled, her gaze falling to a spot on the carpet and focusing on a loose thread in the pile. She was determined not to meet May's eyes again, uncertain as to whether she felt mentally stable enough to handle the disappointment and anger she would find there.
"It was just one time," she added in a whisper, shaking her head to punctuate her own disbelief.
"Oh Skye," Agent May groaned, suddenly dropping her head forwards into her upturned palms. She managed to resist the urge to deliver the age old cliché of one time 'being all it takes'.
"I'm sorry… I'm so, so sorry," Skye said in a tearful rush, sniffing back a further round of sobs with determination. "But I… I have to fix this, and I didn't know where else to go."
May dragged her palms down her face, pausing to rub away the tiredness from her eyes, before she focussed her attention back on the youngest member of her team.
"Does anyone else know?" she asked, darting forwards and gripping Skye's elbow almost painfully. Pressing her lips together in a line, Skye shook her head, sending a mass of knotted curls flying in all directions.
"Simmons?" demanded May, her fingers pinching Skye's skin harder. The hacker let out a low yelp, before extracting her arm from May's grasp and rubbing at the reddened skin with her fingertips.
"No, I… I didn't want her to…" Skye began, trailing off as May nodded in understanding. Of all people, the Cavalry knew what the weight of judgement felt like, and as sweet as Simmons was, May was not certain that she would be capable of regarding Skye without it considering her current predicament.
"You did the right thing coming to me," May promised, one side of her mouth curving upwards in an attempt at a soothing smile, "I can help."
"You can help?" Skye repeated earnestly, leaning forwards and grasping May's hand with the ferocity of a woman on death row clinging onto the priest come to deliver her last rights.
"I can help," May echoed. Without thinking, she reached forwards and smoothed her palm against Skye's cheek. Skye leaned into the woman's touch, craving the comfort that only human contact could bring, and a shudder wracked her body as the realism of the situation bore down upon her.
Minutes later, May tucked the young hacker up into her bunk, whispering promises to soothe her into slumber, before she returned to the cockpit. May didn't sleep the rest of the night. As it turned out, family drama was better than caffeine at helping to keep her eyes open.
x-x-x
Arm in arm, Skye and May walked through the door of the white washed stone building, both as afraid as each other, yet neither one willing to admit as much. Even from the outside, the building looked sterile, and Skye had simply stood on the sidewalk outside staring up at the second floor windows for ten minutes before May had managed to dislodge her.
Escaping Coulson and the rest of the team had proven easier than May could ever have anticipated, since upon landing in LA, they had been far too preoccupied by news of wacky Hydra hi-jinx in Europe to pay much attention to where Skye and May were skulking off to.
As the door swung shut behind them, May felt Skye instinctively shrink against her side, and she tightened the arm locked around the woman's waist in a bid to reassure her. Several pairs of eyes drifted their way, filled with such surprising accusation that May immediately bristled.
Skye swallowed down the lump in her throat, and crossed the room to the reception desk with May practically holding her upright. The stares were beginning to get to her, although she knew that any shred of disapproval cast her way from the occupants of the waiting room was laughably hypocritical. However, the guilt was all but chewing a hole in her belly, and Skye could not seem to find her voice to offer her name to the receptionist who glared back at her.
Instead, May retrieved the necessary forms for her with a growl so audible that the receptionist actually gulped. Then, she steered her towards a plastic chair in the corner of the room, and produced a pen from her breast pocket. Skye stared at the offered item for several seconds before her brain engaged and coordinated her limbs enough to pluck the pen from May's grasp.
The clock affixed to the wall ticked noisily, and the water cooler bubbled impossibly loudly, and as the woman seated across the room puffed out a sigh, Skye almost lost her cool entirely. However, she gripped the pen harder, until her knuckles whitened around it, and forced herself to write her name in the relevant box. After a moment, the pen clattered from her grip, and Skye let out a gasp.
May was crouched down in front of her in record time, peering up into her face with an expression that straddled both sympathy and concern.
"My last name…" Skye blurted out, her features drawn into a mask of utter panic, "they need my last name and I don't know what to write…"
"It's okay, Skye, it's not a big deal," Melinda soothed, laying a hand over Skye's and feeling the girl tremble uncontrollably. "Just make one up."
"No, I… there's been enough lies, May. I should be the one to face this," Skye hissed, her bottom lip quivering as she eyeballed the single box that might prove to be her undoing.
"I never gave myself a last name…" she continued in a rush, her voice growing louder and more unsteady, occasionally hitching on her erratic breathing. A white coated doctor stepped out of an open doorway and called forth a teenage girl with slumped shoulders. The girl went quietly but willingly to the room where all her problems were to be absolved, bringing Skye one step closer to the same fate.
"Mary Sue Poots… but… she's not the girl who got herself into this mess, May… and I can't… I can't put… I don't want to…" Skye choked out, tears beginning to stream down her cheeks as she finally spluttered, "I can't put 'Ward'. It's just not… right."
May shook her head, locking her brown eyes with Skye's and grasping both the girl's hands in her own. Skye's palms were clammy, and her right knee bounced repeatedly up and down as though her leg was being jerked by an invisible string.
"Skye, it's okay," May murmured, "you can use mine. Skye May. It's fine. Just put your head between your knees and breathe before you pass out."
Nodding dumbly, Skye cradled her forehead in both hands and dipped her head between her knees, closing her eyes against the tears that she had yet to shed.
"Just breathe," repeated May, her eyelids momentarily fluttering closed until she heard Skye's breathing beginning to even out to a quiet sobbing.
May slid the clipboard and forms from Skye's knee and retrieved the pen that had clattered to the floor. She pressed the nib to the crisp, white paper, and began to write.
x-x-x
It was a week later, during mid-morning, that Skye sat around a table on the bus gripping a mug of strong coffee in both hands and pretending to listen attentively to Fitzsimmons' joint scientific ramblings. AC's intent gaze was upon her, as it had been so often over the prior week, and even Tripp, who was seated at her side, was shooting the occasional puzzled look her way. The whole team knew that Skye had been uncharacteristically quiet of late, and they all suspected it had something to do with whatever business she and May had disappeared off to attend to the week before.
As Skye continued to gaze into the depths of her mug, swirling the now tepid liquid around almost absently, May breezed out of the cockpit and through the seating area. There was a definite bounce in her step, and she did not pause to so much as offer a 'good morning' as she steam-rollered through the team's breakfast, swiping up a muffin as she walked.
"Skye's pregnant, it's Ward's, anyone got a problem with that, see me… I'll be downstairs with the punch bag."
The words escaped May's lips fluidly, causing Tripp to gag on a slurp of coffee, Simmons to spit out a large chunk of toast slathered in marmalade, and Coulson to upset the glass of orange juice that had rested on the table at his elbow.
All eyes were on Skye, but she simply raised her coffee mug to her lips to hide the small smile of gratitude that had blossomed there.
Melinda May never had liked to procrastinate.
x-x-x
Grant Ward recalled his twenty first birthday as though it had been only yesterday.
He had celebrated that May 18th on a military training base in Fort Bliss, where he had consumed his first whiskey and his first woman all in the same night, courtesy of Garret. His mentor had been astounded and near horrified when he had learned that Grant had still been a virgin, and in his own drunken stupor he had set about to resolve the issue immediately.
The girl had been a prostitute, not much older than Grant herself, but with that world-weary look in her eyes that he had fast come to recognise. Her name had begun with an 'L', or maybe a 'K', not that this fact was of great relevance to Grant anymore. Lately, he had thought about precisely one woman, and her name began with neither an 'L' or a 'K'.
Their evening together had been brief and unremarkable, but Grant could still recall the cupcake she set down on his nightstand afterwards, with one single, skewed candle pushed into the centre. Ever since that year, his birthdays had mostly been spent uncelebrated and unrecognised in the field, although Grant was pretty okay with that outcome. For most normal people, birthdays meant cards on the doormat, a pile of gifts, and people who cared about you to share it all with; for Grant, they usually meant another name to add to his subconscious kill list, and perhaps a busted rib or two, if the Universe was feeling particularly generous. That was just the way things were when you allowed yourself to become smothered by an organisation like Hydra.
Grant took another long pull from the silver hip flask he clutched in his hand, and shook his head to dispel his own depressing thoughts. A little downtime had landed in his lap, and it just so happened that today was his thirty-first birthday. However, rather than take Garret up on his offer of a steak dinner and a round or two of drinks with a bunch of rowdy Hydra douchebags, Ward had retreated to his quarter with his flask and his regrets. There, he had contemplated the previous ten years, and the choices that had led him to the dank, windowless room in an underground bunker.
"Just another day," he murmured aloud to himself, noting how the alcohol barely even slurred his words anymore. He was hardly surprised, since by his rough calculations, he hadn't been fully sober since the previous October. That was when he had realised that he had begun to develop an actual attachment to the SHIELD team he had infiltrated and, for perhaps the first time in his life, betrayal may prove to cause him a mite of discomfort.
Grant barely glanced up as a soft knock resounded on the doorframe of his room. He had left the door slightly ajar, certain that the majority of his Hydra comrades would be wise enough to know not to intrude on his brooding. Apparently, someone hadn't gotten the memo.
With a growl, Grant's gaze whipped around to the doorway, where he found Lauren Marks, one of Hydra's few female soldiers, standing examining him with a hand planted on her hip and her head cocked to one side.
"Heard a rumour it's your birthday," she said by way of greeting. Grant's grimace softened, but he made no move to invite the woman in. Lauren was okay, mostly, but he had no desire for company, especially of the kind she was likely contemplating.
"Guilty," Ward replied, draining the last dregs from his flask and then frowning as he realised that he may indeed be forced to begin the sobering up process earlier than intended.
Lauren pushed off from the doorway, entering the room uninvited, but in her extended hand she gripped a full bottle of Jack, and so Ward allowed the infringement to slide. The woman sauntered towards him and rested the bottle on the table top, before sliding into the chair opposite.
"Bought you a little present," she stated, her red lips forming a pouty smile that should have caused Ward's heart to race. Unaffected, however, he let out a grunt of thanks and set about untwisting the cap from the bottle. His fingers slid uselessly over the cold metal but he persisted time and again, grateful for the excuse not to look at the woman, whose brown curls could only serve to wound him more. He even found himself contemplating briefly what it might have been like to be spending the evening on the bus, and his mind obligingly conjured for him images of birthday cake, paper party hats, and stolen kisses with a woman whose name he refused to speak aloud anymore.
"Don't expect me to be grateful," he warned, although his tone was flat and devoid of emotion. Lauren only let out a chuckle.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
Without further comment, she reached across and stilled Grant's hands with her own, before removing the bottle from his grasp and making short work of the cap. Pausing only to offer Marks a tiny smile, Grant seized the neck of the glass bottle and raised it to his lips before sucking down a generous amount of the content.
Usually, when former agent Ward smiled, it was a sight to behold. The whole gesture brought new light to his often darkened features, and somehow erased years from his typically furrowed brow. The forced quirk of the lips that Lauren had instead witnessed him perform had seemed wrong somehow, and she was left wondering just what it was that could possibly have stolen the beauty from Grant Ward's smile.
Almost tentatively, Lauren reached out and captured Grant's hand in her own, preventing him from raising the bottle to his mouth again. He let out a grunt of irritation but made no further move.
"Rumour also has it that you need to loosen up a little," she purred, leaning across the table just so, and allowing a generous amount of heaving cleavage to address Ward. "I could help you with that, too."
A grin erupted on her face as she added, "And I definitely wouldn't expect you to be grateful."
After a moment's pause, Grant snatched his hand back and took a further swig from the bottle. Marks had her answer and it was a resounding one. Ward was still haunted by a pair of impossibly wide, impossibly brown eyes, and there was nothing Marks or any other woman could say to put those ghosts to rest.
With a sigh, Lauren climbed to her feet and set out for the door, her gait now lacking the purpose it had contained upon entry. She paused only when she had reached her destination, just long enough to turn and throw Grant an appraising look.
"You know, nobody should spend their birthday alone," she said almost gently, in a tone that verged on sympathetic.
Grant straightened in his chair, his grip on the bottle suddenly growing slack as he felt the familiar breathless sensation that accompanied impending nausea rising up inside him.
"Some people should," he managed to choke out, and then Marks was gone, leaving the door swinging in her wake and Grant cradling his head in his hands as he struggled to recall how to breathe.
x-x-x
By December, it was all over. Hydra lay defeated and John Garret, aka the Clairvoyant, lay in his grave.
After he had snapped the neck of his mentor, friend, and father figure with his bare hands, former SHIELD agent Grant Ward had strode into a police station in downtown Seattle and handed himself in. Nobody had ever dreamed that Hydra would have been brought down by one of its best sleeper agents, from the inside.
The news was like music to the ears of those SHIELD operatives still remaining, and thus it had spread through the ranks like wildfire. Hydra had crumbled rapidly without John at the helm to guide it, and the immediate in-fighting had meant that SHIELD had had to do very little other than send in the occasional clean-up crew to mop up the handful of survivors.
When the news had dropped onto Coulson's desk, he had scrambled to be the first to deliver it to Skye. However, he had missed out on the window of opportunity by five or so minutes, and by the time he had arrived in her quarter, he had found the heavily pregnant hacker holding a terrified male agent against the wall with an elbow digging into his throat. Her water breaking had proved to be the distraction the agent had needed to escape with his life, and it was a further month before the team were finally back on the bus and headed towards D.C. on the president's orders, to begin rebuilding their ailing organisation from the foundations. There would be a space on the bus with Coulson for those of the team who still wanted it and a regular position at the new SHIELD headquarters for those who were unable to return. So far, the latter encompassed only Skye, but she assured her team, her family, that she was at peace with her decisions.
From the threshold of the doorway of Skye's old bunk, Agent May watched the hacker as she hunkered over a notepad, scrawling furiously. There came a brief, mewling cry from the travel bassinet pressed up against the bed, and Skye paused in her writing only long enough to reach out a hand and tenderly lay it upon the chest of the infant. The baby quieted immediately, and Skye went back to her note taking.
"You going to stalk me from the hallway all night or what?" Skye finally demanded, raising her gaze and affixing May with a good-natured smile. Surprisingly, the gesture was returned at once, and May stepped inside the bunk without further need for invitation.
"It's 2 am, Skye," May said softly, afraid of disturbing the baby who slept so peacefully despite the thunderstorm that raged by the wings of the plane, "you should be sleeping."
Skye only shrugged, laying her pen down and turning over the cover on her notepad to hide her scribblings from view. The act did not go unnoticed, but May only glanced at the pad, waiting for Skye to direct the conversation.
"Can't really sleep," Skye revealed, "not that that's surprising."
"It's been… an eventful year," May agreed, crossing her arms in front of her chest as she regarded the younger woman.
"You can say that again," mumbled Skye, her eyes widening momentarily. She peered at May suddenly, her tone low as she explained, "I just need somewhere to get it all out, y'know?"
May frowned, clearly not understanding, and Skye patted the bed space in front of her. Somewhat awkwardly, given the little room she had to manoeuvre in, May folded herself onto the mattress opposite the hacker. The journey to Washington was to be Skye's last jaunt on the bus for the foreseeable future, although there was a high ranking position waiting for her in the new CS department at SHIELD, with the promise of both Fury and Hill looking over her shoulder. They would still see each other weekly, but May knew that the woman's presence on the plane would come to be quickly missed, and so she had vowed to make this last flight count as best she could.
"The nuns used to have us do this thing, back at the orphanage," Skye began, a shy smile flirting with her lips as she became lost in nostalgia for a moment, "if there was something bothering us, they'd give us a piece of paper and a pencil, and they'd tell us to write it all down. Just… get it out, like a purge. Sister Mary Agatha used to say, that way, it couldn't eat us up anymore. It couldn't change who we were on the inside."
After a moment of silence, May finally nodded. She shot a glance at the A4 notepad and commented wryly, "You're going to need more paper."
Skye let out a quiet laugh and, as May gathered herself up off the bed to return to the cockpit, she reached again for her notepad.
x-x-x
Visiting hour had become almost painful for Grant to endure, considering he never received a single one, and yet the guards still insisted on trotting him out in his cuffs to sit alone on a bench like the kid at baseball that nobody wanted on their team. He assumed it was part of his punishment, given that he had, after all, willingly worked for an agency that had attempted to destroy the free will of humanity on numerous occasions. It still sucked royally, though.
However, Grant had opted to take his lumps like a reformed bad boy right around the time he had also opted to murder his SO, driven by the desperation he had felt when the life of a certain brown eyed girl had topped Garret's hit list. Now, his life was a mess, and Ward was certain that he had either managed to a) murder, or b) alienate everyone who had ever exhibited even a shred of love for him.
It was, therefore, rather unexpected when, one Thursday afternoon in early February, none other than Agent Phil Coulson marched into Leavenworth maximum security military prison, to sit adjacent to Grant on the hideously orange plastic picnic bench he occupied.
Without a word, Coulson reached into his jacket pocket and produced a thick envelope, which he pushed across the table to Ward. As the former agent reached for the item, Coulson slammed his hand down upon it, drawing Grant's curious and somewhat remorseful gaze up to his face.
"We want intel. Give it to us, and you'll find that your co-operation doesn't go unrewarded," Phil stated, his tone almost robotic and his expression horribly unemotional. Grant swallowed hard, but simply shook his head before leaning back from the table, his hand now removed from the envelope.
"I don't know anything," he shot back, rubbing his palms on the legs of his pants. They felt uncharacteristically clammy, and Ward vaguely wondered if this was what the beginnings of guilt felt like. It was a new sensation entirely for the specialist, but one he was certain he would become accustomed to as he rotted in his prison cell.
"Think. Harder." Phil sat back, a smile that more resembled a smirk appearing on his lips. "Trust me, this is an opportunity you don't want to turn down. It's been an interesting six weeks."
For a whole minute of uncomfortable silence, the two men stared each other down, before Ward eventually looked away first. Seeming satisfied with this, Phil rose from the table and set off towards the door he had entered through. The envelope remained in the middle of the table, and Ward only stared at it as though it were somehow capable of leaping up off the surface and attacking him with the full fury of the team he had betrayed. He would have deserved nothing less.
His gaze whipped up as he heard Coulson call over his shoulder, "You're going to want to read that. When I'm gone. If you change your mind about my offer, you know what to do. Unless, of course, you're enjoying the food in this fine establishment."
With his interest piqued even further, Ward obediently counted to one thousand in his head, allowing Coulson enough time to exit the building and doubtlessly clamber back behind the wheel of his beloved Lola, if the car had even made it through the many skirmishes with Hydra that the past year had brought.
Finally, Grant pounced on the envelope, and within moments there were pages of A4 lined paper raining down on his knee, complete with a single colour photograph that he raised to his face immediately.
Ward let out an audible 'oof' as his breath left his body as though he had been sucker punched in the stomach. His eyes roved the picture of Skye hungrily, desperate to ensure her wellbeing, but they stumbled over the brown eyed, black haired, pudgy faced bundle she held in her arms. In the picture, Skye wore a smile and a standard issue hospital gown, an IV poking out from the back of one hand, and circles so dark under her eyes that she looked like she'd pulled several all-nighters in a row. And yet she was still the most breath taking thing he had ever laid eyes on.
Grant was embarrassed to admit that he couldn't tell if the wrinkled newborn she clutched was a boy or a girl from the photograph alone, but the cleft in it's chin and the Math he had rushed in his head both informed him that it was undeniably his.
With shaking hands, he raised the first page of Skye's letter and began to read. He devoured every word written in the familiar hurried scrawl, a lingering feeling of discomfort settling in his gut. As always, Skye had been beyond honest, and he was left with the distinct sense of having just read someone's diary without their consent. By the closing line of the letter, Ward thought he may vomit, but he choked down the rising bile with a new sense of determination, and instead stroked his finger over the image resting in his lap.
He had betrayed the woman he loved, and who had loved him in turn- that much was evident without the presence of a letter that more resembled an essay. There was no going back from that; no upsetting the hourglass and taking back the grains of sand. The only thing Ward could do was move forward, and hope that it would be enough for Skye, and ultimately for their child. He suspected that a nice, neat pile of intel. on Coulson's desk would be as good a place to start as any.
Carefully gathering the papers back up, Ward folded them and slipped them back inside the envelope they had been delivered to him inside.
Signalling the guard, he wasted no time in requesting a notepad, a pen, and a meeting with Director Fury. If they wanted him to spill Hydra's guts then spill he would, even down to the colour of the janitor's underpants, because he had a feeling that the bargaining chips he would earn in return would be more than worth the personal risk. There was little left for Ward to lose now, and apparently everything to gain.
There was so much to do and, for the first time in an impossibly long time, Grant Ward felt like he could finally breathe.