The second time he doesn't see her, but he thinks of her, and it's the first time he does it with anger. It's a pretty uncomfortable reaction as he's sure that he doesn't have any right to that, not after everything he did to her, and thankfully he has more pressing matters to attend to and must not dwell on it. There are plenty of hideouts he can choose from, but he needs one that is far from civilization, soundproof and can safely contain a very violent and highly skilled occupant. He's been working as a double agent for ten years, though, so even such a specific place isn't a problem in itself. Getting 33 to collaborate with his plan is harder to archive. She is docile and withdrawn as she lands the cloaked jet, but he knows it won't last and he knows he will never be able to overpower her once the calmness passes. He no longer throws up blood, which is good, but as 33 noted after finding the mess on the floor, it doesn't have to mean anything yet.

"You might still be bleeding inside, just not throwing it up anymore. If you start again and it's black as coal, I will put you out of your misery."

Blood that ends up swallowed and digested is black as coal, he knows this too. The offer is a logical one, and she still has the weapon, so he simply shrugs.

"Just not in the back."

"Not in the back," she repeats, and he trusts her words instantly. Back shooting is for silent infiltration or (extremely rarely) an angry afterthought, and he can't imagine a seasoned agent needing to do this under any typical circumstances.

The hut is located on the outskirts of a small town. It has a tiny kitchen, an all purpose living space and an ample cellar that is reachable through a trap door in the kitchen floor. It's perfectly quiet and safe, except that now he has to convince 33 to follow his plan. He has given it some thought back on the jet, and he has figured the first all important first steps. She isn't going to like it and he's as good as dead if he spooks her and they end hashing it out, so sincerity is it.

"You are running on survival instinct. You lost your battle and had to retreat or die. Now that you're safe, you'll start thinking about what happened. You'll run through your options and find that while you have some, none appeal to you. You'll replay Whitehall's death in your head and wonder where it went wrong, and how you could have prevented it. You'll hate yourself for being useless to him at the time he needed you most. That hole that you have already felt inside yourself will start growing exponentially. One, maximum two days from now, you won't be able to think of anything else. You won't be able to sleep, eat, you'll wonder what you'll do without Whitehall, and you will realize that you have no answer to that question. Your survival will start to seem increasingly unnecessary as you will have no proper goals to look forward to, and around the third day you will very calmly take that gun and put a bullet in your head. This is how it ends. Unless we do something to prevent it."

Thankfully, she's not at that stage yet. She is quiet enough to give him hope that she is listening to him. That she still wants to survive this. Then again, right now she is as expressionless as May, so she might be readying herself for kill him in anger.

Ward finds that he doesn't care.

"You've seen it before?" She asks finally.

"Lived it before."

It took him much longer to come to that stage, but he's certain he isn't wrong in his assessment of the time they have left for 33. In his case, it simply took him a long time to feel safe enough to start thinking about Garrett's death. First there was all the shipping from place to place with a bag over his head and his injured throat threatening to close up and cut off his air. Then came the threat of interrogation, with Coulson himself coming down to see him. Ward reacted the only way he knew: he shut the hell down. The Academy instructor always wondered at how easily he picked up that particular skill. Truth was, he's been able to go away in his head for as long as he could remember.

How long did Coulson say it went on? Three weeks? He couldn't have said, thankfully. Because as soon as the director got fed up and left for good, as soon as Ward dared to come out of it and look around a little, it all crashed down. John's death, and naively trying to play for both sides, and Fitzsimmons, and Skye... He was lucky enough to have been such a dangerous threat with such high containment measures in place, because he had consistently given his death wish the best of tries and had been nearly successful with no tools at all.

Agent 33, in control of a gun, would come to the same result much more easily.

"I am not going to kill myself" she says. "I am going to look for Dr. Whitehall. It's a trick. He could very well have survived."

And yes, the delusional phase, he'd forgotten. It'll be quick, though. Successful specialists don't indulge in phantasies for long.

"He's dead," he says. "You know it, or you'd not have run away. It will get real bad, real fast, trust me. It'll get better after a while, though. You just have to hold on."

Lie, lie, lie. It won't get better. It's still on his mind frequently enough, but then maybe 33 is different. There is nothing inherently wrong with her, like there is with him. She didn't do anything wrong. She didn't ask for this. She might be able to recover and make right choices before all this is over, for all he knows.

He manages to talk her into giving him the bullets to her gun and go down into the cellar. It's a relief and a surprise. He makes sure there is enough light in there (the bulb is high enough so that she won't be able to reach it). He opens enough rations to last her a week and leaves them on the floor. Since it's a hiding place thought for lying low, there is a direct supply of water. He places a radio near the trapdoor so that she can hear it playing. He doesn't dare with books, even though what he did with that piece of paper was kind of extreme. He'd get her newspapers if he could walk to the nearby town, but he can't, which is a pity. The hideout also doesn't have any sedatives (normally any agent would know better than to indulge in them, no matter the problem at hand), just some painkillers and antibiotics, but he doesn't allow himself to dwell on it.

She helps obediently, which is a measure of how lost she is without her orders. By the time they are finished, he is exhausted enough to just want to drop onto the bed and pretty much pass out. He knows his body well enough to realize he's bled badly enough for him to take weeks to feel stronger again. The fact that he cannot move his right arm doesn't help at all.

He bolts the cellar door, and lingers on his knees for a long moment. He lied to her, but he doesn't want to have been lying. He doesn't have much hope. She is way too quiet, which means that she's thinking, hard. She's also as well trained as he is, and it took the entirety of SHIELD to prevent him from taking his life.

"Just remember that it will get better in a while. It may not feel like it, but that's the truth. You'll figure it out. You were a great agent, and you'll be one again soon enough," he tells her through the door.

The night and the next day are still relatively quiet. He gets up feeling worse than when he went to bed (cannot walk on his own at all without getting short of breath, so he mostly moves around holding the furniture). Coming up with something to eat seems too much of a chore. He sits down on the kitchen floor up and tries to talk to her instead. She's mostly quiet, but she moves around a little. He has questions to ask (he knows nothing of brainwashing, not even if she remembers her old self), but he worries that reminding her of her previous life might trigger her. So he settles for some platitudes, like the fact that Whitehall is dead but she isn't and she will find herself another mission soon enough, and that if she needs anything he'll get it for her. It sounds unnecessary and plain and stupid, but at least he isn't listing her failures and promising to ruin the rest of her life.

The radio is mostly music, and he changes the stations until he succeeds in getting her to tell him the one she prefers. Her voice is dry as desert and just as lifeless. It scares him more than he can afford to admit.

He wakes up in the middle of the second night to rhythmical thumping coming from the cellar. It's a soft, dull sound, and all the more ominous for it. The walls down there are wood and earth, and it's hard enough to actually inflict self damage using concrete, so he knows not to immediately worry. But time passes, and the dull sounds don't go away, and as he staggers to the trapdoor he starts to hear low, painful, horror-inducing noises. It's not a cry and not a wail but something way more primitive, a sound of unbearable pain made by a mindless creature without voice, a hollow moan of wordless suffering.

Another thud comes, and then another, and he cowers on the floor with half a mind set on opening the door and face her and half a mind on taking the jet and get as far away as possible. It hits way too close to home, and he cannot... He knows exactly what's going on downstairs. He knows exactly what she's feeling and doing and thinking in glorious detail, and he cannot stand witness to any of it and just do nothing. He cannot. It makes him sick on the inside, to sit there and listen, and soon enough he realizes that he's actually wispering useless strings of pleas that help nothing, and probably aren't even audible from the inside.

Thud.

"Please don't."

Thud.

He doesn't even know her name. He can't do anything right by himself, how the hell did he expect to help her?

Thud.

He can't just open the damn door and go down there. She'll kill him (not a great loss, all in all), but than she will kill herself as soon as she is free. He's in no shape to hope to stop her.

Thud.

He heaves a couple of times, which only brings more pain, but no blood - fresh or otherwise - come out. All he can do is sit there on the floor, huddling himself, and listen. He tries to talk more loudly and about something eventful for a change, but he knows that she is not able to listen in the state she's in. He talks anyway, about that time he doesn't really remember all that well. He promises her that she also won't remember. He tries to come up with things he might have wished for, himself, that might have calmed him and made him feel a lbit more hopeful when he was like that, but he realizes that he mostly wished for the world to fade away and that's not helpful at all.

Then he falls quiet, and realizes that she's quiet too. The low wailing animal sounds are gone, and hard as he'd wished for them to stop, the alternative is worse. He waits and waits, until dawn comes and he has no choice but to open the door and check, because it occurs to him that she might be badly hurt and he might still be able to help somehow.

He can't see very well from above, and when he tries to go down the ladder he ends up nearly falling after discovering he can't pull himself down one armed.

She is huddling in the far corner, hair and hands matted with blood. She looks up when she hears him, and her scarred face is devoid of all expression. She then looks at the stairs quite longingly, and Ward doesn't have it in himself to even pretend that he's up to stopping her.

"Please don't," he tells her quietly. She blinks.

"You had gone quiet," is her answer. She looks him over, like he's the one knocking on the death's door.

"You had, too."

"You cold?"

He nods, because he actually is. Had been for a long while now, the place has no heating. She stands up, looking relatively unharmed for what his imagination had conjured, and makes her way towards him. He does not bulge, and she also doesn't push him aside. She just looks at him for a while and checks his forehead and pokes him in his side matter of factly.

"Let's go upstairs." He still won't bulge, but she just pushes him away. "You're burning up. I can wait until you aren't dying."

Her medical training goes as far as to get him to drink a lot of water (he had avoided it, as he hadn't wanted to become nauseous again, but it was a mistake if he's truly running a fever) and feed him some instant noodle soup along with some antibiotics and Tylenol. She looks extremely unsure of herself, rummaging around the kitchen, and ends up piling all the knives and a couple of guns on the bed near him. He's now trusted enough to guard them against her, apparently. It feels nice, allowing himself to relax, and Ward floats in and out of consciousness, and only startles as she settles for the night on the floor near the bed (it's very cold in there, and she makes him take the bed again). He turns onto his side and puts his functioning hand on her shoulder.

"Stay there," he says, and she does.

It's damn uncomfortable, and he cannot get his mind to shut down, so he stays awake for a long time despite the fever and exhaustion. He can't help his mind drifting to his own experiences. He thinks back to his own scars while cursing himself for failing to properly check hers, and that uncomfortable time he'd had to explain them to Skye. She told him that he should have run faster. It never occurred him to wonder about that line before, but he thinks about it now and it makes him sick again, remembering the noises 33 made. She didn't even sound like a person, just something barely alive and so very deeply hurt, the only way to stop the pain was to keep inflicting it until you came through on the other side. He tries to imagine just what kind of hatred would make him tell 33 something like what Skye told him, and he can't. Even if she had been a fully competent and merciless enemy to him before, she hadn't been anything like that down there. She'd just been a very very sick person.

And the thing is, he himself couldn't have looked and behaved too differently, but he still distinctly recalls Coulson standing by his side after he woke up in full body restraints and coldly telling him he wouldn't get out of his hands so easily. He thinks about everything he's done to deserve that one, and it's not like there aren't heaps of dirt to choose from, but for all he tries he still can't really see it. If he wanted 33 to pay for something she'd done, he's pretty sure he'd wait until she was herself again and not half out of her mind with... whatever.

He wonders if he should feel angry at Coulson for treating him like that (the unsavory thing with Christian also comes to mind), but he actually doesn't. From the beginning, he didn't really expect mercy from the man, should Garrett's mission fail. Skye, though... He'd always thought she was so different. And it could yet be that her bullets end up killing him, but somehow that one sentence from months ago feels so much worse. It had rolled off him like everything else she had done recently, but in hindsight...

In hindsight, it hurts. A lot. And he does feel kind of angry. He hasn't ever felt truly angry at anyone, except very recently at his parents and Christian, which is why it terrifies him to even open that door with Skye. He tells himself firmly that he has no right to think that way, and that is the end of it. Agent 33 breathes evenly under his hand, which is more that he'd excepted to achieve by now, and he concentrates on that feeling.