Nothing had ever seemed to escape him, at least in terms of a mark, and that hadn't changed. He picked up on the little things, habits, tells. Of course, it made sense. To excel in his line of work, he had to be observant, and to be that observant required at least a bit of obsession, she imagined.
But she'd done her share of watching. Stealing peeks at him when he was training or working out; when she thought he wasn't looking in the lab. Then after, less innocently, in the vault, relentlessly, every day, five-thirty, when it kept her from sleep, when she forgot to eat.
Of course, it had already been as though he was dead and invaded by some other force, she told herself. The Ward that she had known, that had saved her, had been utterly subsumed by the Ward who'd broken Fitz. Who'd tortured Bobbi. Who'd wrought murder and destruction and pain on so many people she loved.
And of course, on her.
But that wasn't really at all an accurate comparison, as the monster Ward had become was really the monster he'd always been. This – this Maveth – he'd moved into the cold hollow that had been Ward
whatever he'd been, he'd been warm; the heat of him against her in the ocean, in the lab, under her fingertips
and taken what he'd known, what he'd remembered, and he moved like him, smiled like him, twisted his lips in a smirk or something warm but even more sinister in just that way.
But it wasn't Ward.
That in itself was quite unsettling enough, putting aside the fact that it was animating Ward's corpse – moving with the same smooth confidence Grant – Ward – always had. The way he spoke, the prolonged eye contact –
She couldn't help but watch him.
They couldn't contain him forever. Though the data showed otherwise, Simmons couldn't shake the uncomfortable sense that the stones they'd found were already weakening.
Maybe because of how whenever she was watching, he was always just shy of looking directly into the camera – and usually, at least once, whether being interrogated or alone, just shy of a smile.