It had been nearly three months since they lost Skye.
In her own way, May missed the young hacker; she had brought a lightness, a unity to the team they had sorely lacked without her. Ward still flinched every time he passed her empty bunk, refused to even look at the med bay.
He was as deadly as ever, but there was a hollowness to him now. The most animated May saw him was when he was pounding deep into her, palming her breasts hard enough to leave faint red hand prints for a minute afterwards. After that first time, when she hauled him back from the brink of insanity, it was a few weeks before they fucked again. Then, it became almost regular. It was Skye's name he grunted when he came, and Skye's name he screamed at night, every night. May didn't care; she had her own name to whisper into Ward's shoulder. It worked, each of them using the other to make love to the dead.
He used to kiss the back of her neck when he had finished plaiting her hair. Sometimes, she imagined she could still feel the press of his lips there. Once, Ward thumbed the top of her spine in the exact spot; she broke one of his ribs throwing him away. "Not there," she hissed, "never there."
He didn't argue, didn't even look surprised, and it was then that she remembered Ward painstakingly destroying every single peg from the battleship game, crushing the model ships beneath his boots.
May understood sacred memories, she really did.
It was a warm day in late June, somewhere in southern Germany, when she found Ward locked in the interrogation room, his hands balled into taught fists in front of his face, shoulders heaving with silent anguish. His eyes were raw with unshed tears and he had worried his lip into a bloody mess. He took better care of himself now than he had in those first weeks, but he slipped, often.
"What is it?" May asked him, perfunctory. He didn't need any more emotion in his already overloaded system.
His voice was low and fractured. "I-I can't remember the colour of her eyes."
His words hit May like a sledgehammer to the gut, and she was suddenly in Beijing, twenty years ago.
"Jian!" she called, running into the apartment.
She found him in the doorway of the kitchen. "Mel, what is it?"
She fumbled for the camera in her pocket. "I have an idea."
His smile was long suffering; he knew about her ideas. They usually came just after a mission briefing, when she knew they would be apart for a long time. "What is it?"
"Here," she showed him, holding the camera out. "Take a picture of me."
Puzzled, he took the picture. "What was that for?"
"For you to keep, when I'm on my mission."
He smiled at her. "I have an album of wedding photos, Mel, I didn't need one more."
Taking the camera from his hands, she turned it on him and snapped several pictures before he could stop her. "Maybe not, but I did."
May still had that picture, tucked safely in her bunk. She told herself that over and over when her breathing began to speed, because she did know what colour Jian's eyes were, she had that picture as proof, even now. For a second, she felt the ache of his death as strongly as she had on that day sixteen years ago.
She offered Ward a hand up that he took reluctantly, pulled him up off the floor. "I have a picture of the team in my bunk," she told him quietly. "The whole team. And I have a few of just her. One of the two of you."
His hand tightened around hers with bruising force. "Why?"
"Pictures are important," she said simply.