Ad Interim
An Agents of SHIELD fanfic by Aisling Yinyr Ngaio
It was Christmas morning, and she was down in the cargo hold at 5 am doing strength drills.
Since Coulson's kidnap two weeks ago, it was as if the team had lost something fundamental. There was no more laughter or fun. Tension replaced the usual relaxed atmosphere between missions. The fortnight-long constant alert had taken the toll on their collective morale.
Even with her crappy history with the holiday, she had never felt less like celebrating Christmas than this year. If only things had gone down differently. If only… a million other things.
Behind her, Ward came up and, without any greetings, silently held the sandbag steady for her training, black rings surrounding his eyes as his lack of sleep and the weight of responsibility started to show. His cool facade had long since cracked, and she occasionally wondered how he had managed to stave off the anger effects of the Berserker Staff that she'd almost forgotten about it until now, when his controlled demeanor sometimes crossed the line for a split second before he brought himself back forcefully again.
Noisy steps heralded FitzSimmons into view, and they looked so cheerless that she was hard-pressed to remember the excited duo as they hung up their advent calendar almost a month ago, a long-standing tradition between the two. That fledgling attempt had long been abandoned since… that day, and the energy the two had been putting into planning out decorations and figuring out gift lists were replaced by a frightening, single-minded determination in experimentation, chief among them in trying to create superior, untraceable comm system equipment, as if stung and personally offended by the advancement of the technology used by Project Centipede, and driven by the failure of being forced by a hostile party to send in two of their own without any comm support.
Gone was the camaraderie, the playful teasing, the easy friendship of before. Instead, they were all withdrawn, focused, and coldly angry. They were working almost non-stop to recover their leader during all active hours, with her scouring the internet in between every non-training moment, hoping against hope that Centipede would make another wrong move in cyber space - the same mistake that led her to their first lab. They barely slept, unless forced by their bodies to admit defeat, and many a time she would descend into the cargo hold for morning drills to see one or both scientists slumped over their prototypes. They were lucky if they remembered to eat, even eternally peckish Fitz. One would almost call them disastrously tunnel-vision regimented.
This must be what the army feels like during a war.
She didn't want to feel like she'd been to a funeral every day for the past two weeks, even if that was precisely how it felt now, here on the Bus.
May would emerge from the cockpit during their twice daily video conferencing with SHIELD HQ in the briefing room, the only time of the day they saw her at all now. To others outside their team, perhaps she looked as stern and stoic as before, the Cavalry in all her perfectly calm glory, but not them; they could see the subtle signs of her temper, provoked especially when SHIELD HQ gave yet another non-update or tried to pass them off on another lower-priority mission, in the way she clenched her teeth and stared daggers at the screen before subtly slicing the unfortunate HQ agent verbally to pieces the way Ward would never dare, even as he resolutely put his foot down and refused to be distracted by HQ from their real goal.
It was Christmas morning, but despite her hopes of before, there was no reason to celebrate it this year. Her lips thinned with firm resolution as she gave the bag one last vicious punch. By the heavens, they would find him again, for there was no real Christmas if their family was not whole.
- Finis -