"The 084 was apparently an Inhuman," said May. "Her powers had something to do with pressure. When they emerged, she and her house imploded."
"And the woman is dead?" verified Coulson.
"Yes."
"And we have no idea what caused her powers to emerge?"
"No recent travel."
Coulson hung up the phone. This was the third Inhuman "accident" to show up on their radar. Just because dealing with Ward was top priority didn't mean they could ignore all their other responsibilities entirely. One survived to be indexed (a Haitian man who could see ultraviolet and x-ray frequencies), the second essentially committed suicide by police, and this third one apparently unintentionally killed herself. Skye was lucky, then, that she made it through her transformation without serious harm.
According to Skye, there was some kind of registry of pre-Inhumans (unawakened Inhumans? baseline descendants? Coulson wasn't sure of the proper term) in Afterlife that Jia Ying had guarded jealously. He also suspected that, given Hydra's obsession with gifted, they had some ideas about how to locate these people.
Coulson had no idea, however, how these people were transforming. Maybe some of the Inhumans who fled Afterlife took diviner crystals with them? This could very easily become a serious problem. He lifted his hands to rub his temples, but of course, the left hand wasn't there.
Miles tapped Joseph on the shoulder and beckoned him to follow. They were in an abandoned tenement and they knew better than to stray too far from the group into territory occupied by various homeless and junkies. Still, they were able to go down a filthy corridor into what had probably been a janitor's closet.
"What is it?" asked Joseph. "Are you sick?"
Miles shook his head. "Look," he said, "I just have to know what you think about all this."
"This building?" asked Joseph, for he was a rather literal man.
"No, I mean the things we've been doing. And we had a kid with us and now we don't. And we think SHIELD is evil but apparently we're giving the kid to them. And Ward is, man, he's scary. He will kill us when he gets what he wants out of us. You know that, right? There's no happy ending."
"I didn't start a journey of revenge looking for a happy ending," said Joseph, for he was also an astute man.
"I don't want to die," whispered Miles, dropping his voice as if this were his most closely kept secret. "And I don't want to…keep killing people." Miles felt his face grow hot, turn away from Joseph. He recognized these as the signs of shame and he wondered how he had grown into someone who was ashamed to value human life.
"Revenge doesn't make you feel good," said Joseph. "It's just something that has to be done."
"His HIV test is negative," said Simmons. "Although I want to add that virology is not my area of expertise." She had been taking an increasingly medical role on the team, as per necessity, and she occasionally wondered if her fellow agents had forgotten that she was not, in fact, a medical doctor, but rather an exemplary biochemist with some credentials in emergency medicine.
"Why would Ward want him on drugs for a disease he doesn't have?" asked Coulson.
"Mack," whispered Hunter in a voice no quieter than anyone else's normal speaking tone, "you know this stuff. You explain it."
Mack turned only his head to glare at Hunter. "Stereotype much?"
"I'm not stereotyping," said Hunter. "Wasn't Tim positive?"
Mack ground his teeth together hard enough this his lip shook, but he turned away from Hunter and toward Coulson. In an overcontrolled voice, he said, "The test detects antibodies but they take a while to build up. If you test too early, you can get a false negative. The only way to be sure you don't have it is to take two tests, six months apart. But after you're exposed, even if you don't know if you have it, you can take the drugs to reduce the chances the infection will stick." He paused. "A negative test is a good sign, but he should keep taking the meds."
Mack's eyes shifted from side to side and a thick puff of air escaped his lips. "May I be dismissed, sir?"
Skye carried the tray into Vault D. It had chili, rice, tortilla chips, a carton of milk, a few cookies, napkins, and plastic utensils. It was the same food the SHIELD agents had eaten for dinner. It also had a plastic water cup and a pill. She reminded herself that she was going to see a kid who probably didn't even know what Ward was all about, who had been more Ward's prisoner than his collaborator.
The barrier was transparent. The boy was sitting on the floor, balancing checkers on their sides, obviously bored. He looked up, gaped at her, but said nothing.
Skye tapped the control panel and slid the tray into the cell. "I have to see you take the pill," she said. He looked the capsule over and complied.
"I know who you are," said the boy through a mouthful of chili.
"I'll bet you do," said Skye. She wanted nothing to do with Ward and his weird obsession with her. She could already feel her heart rate rising.
"He didn't say anything bad about you. He just said you have powers and you're stronger than you look, but you're nice."
"Nice," echoed Skye, saying the word as if it were fingernails on a chalkboard. "Nice." The second time she spoke more softly, with less of an edge, trying to force her mind to make separate categories for Grant-Ward-psychokiller and Curtis. "When you're done eating," she said, "I can set up your PlayStation in there so we can play Katamari Damacy."
The boy ate steadily and all but licked the plate. He obediently slid it through the slot that opened in the force field. Once Skye performed some miscellaneous computer magic, the theme song came on and they were busy controlling abstract balls of sundry objects.
"Se habla Español?" asked Skye.
"Sí."
"Unfortunately, that's all the Spanish that I know. Oh, and I can ask where the bathroom is." Skye deliberately got her ball-of-stuff stuck in a corner to let Curtis catch up.
"Yeah, Grant says that arrogant American monolingualism is a relatively recent invention." This was the longest and most literate sentence Curtis had produced since arriving on the base.
"I'll bet he speaks Spanish. I've seen him speak a lot of languages."
"Yeah. And we were all learning to talk sign to Nevaeh but he was the best at it."
"It seems like it would take forever to learn sign language. Like, you can't make flashcards."
"We started in the woods. There wasn't anything else to do." Curtis's ball rolled across the finish line moments ahead of Skye's. He immediately queued up another round.
"In the woods?"
"Yeah, when he was finding us, he'd go get us one at a time and bring the person back to the woods. We had to learn to make shelters and hunt and fight and stuff. I got pretty good at fishing. Soames got bit by a snake but it wasn't poisonous."
"Snakes scare me," said Skye.
"If something scares you, either it's not important or you have to kill it."
"Is that what Ward told you?"
Curtis was silent for some time before he put down the controller and said, "I know you think I'm stupid." Before Skye could protest, he continued, "I know you think I just do whatever Grant says, like a robot. But that's not what it was like. He didn't tell me that I had to think that. He showed me why it was true. After Soames got bit, I started watching the ground for snakes and because I was watching the ground, I didn't see a coyote and that could've been much worse. So he showed me that either it's worth fighting all out or it's not. In between is a waste of time that makes you weak."
Bobbi Morse set two beers down on the ground next to the Jeep. She settled onto the concrete floor and tapped the space next to here. "Sit with me," she said. She waited a beat before adding, "I'm sorry about Hunter."
Mack sighed and sank to the ground next to her. "I thought when you two got divorced, you'd stop apologizing for him."
"It was a stupid thing to say," said Bobbi, "bringing up Tim like that."
"Yeah," said Mack. He took a sip of his beer. "Hey, should you be drinking that?" He eyed her bottle.
"A sip or two can't hurt," she said confidently. "Then you can have the rest." They sat in silence as Bobbi took one of her two allotted sips.
"A couple months ago," said Mack, "was the, uh, the anniversary of the Uprising. It wasn't like I expected us to celebrate that or anything, but I thought we might have a moment of silence or something. For the ones who…we lost a lot of good people that day." He gulped.
"How long had you and Tim been together?"
Mack exhaled, long and low. "It was…almost four years. We'd known each other a bit longer than that, but…"
"I can't imagine what it must have been like to lose him so suddenly." She hadn't seen it; she'd arrived moments too late, but even if she'd been there…
Mack swallowed and pressed his eyelids tightly shut. "We were so careful. He was positive and I'm not. We were so careful. He always said he couldn't bear it…if I died because of him." He was crying openly now, and making little effort to hide it.
That whole day was a terrible blur, but Bobbi knew that Mack and Tim had each tried to sacrifice themselves for the other and Tim had won the race to the bottom. It had been crass of Hunter to bring Tim up so casually. But still, it was odd the way they never talked about the dead. Mack was right - it was strange that they hadn't offered up some kind of memorial on the anniversary of the Uprising.
Bobbi took her second sip and rested her head on Mack's shoulder.
Ward knocked back another swig of scotch. Between genetics and life experience, he had astounding tolerance which had served him well on a variety of undercover operations. At the moment, it was a pain in the ass because he was going to need considerably more liquor than he had in his possession to get even the slightest bit drunk.
He felt…wrong, as if he were not a real person, but rather a picture of one.
The loss of Curtis was not the same as the death of Kara, but they both produced a trembling, plummeting agony. When Kara died, Grant could feel the insistent guilt prickling at the back of his mind, the knowledge that it was his finger on the trigger, the fact that he did it and therefore he could have not done it. This feeling was too much to bear. It threatened to crush him. There was no way to act it out or express it (that he knew of) and so there was no way to live with it. And thus, he took that thought, that feeling, and folded it up very neatly. He put it in a little cedar box so the moths wouldn't get it. He put chains around the box, locked it shut, and willed the key to never exist.
And now Curtis was gone because he had harmed the boy. Had he? Had he really? Was he like Garrett? Was this another thought that would need its own cedar box?
Grant was fairly certain Miles was conspiring against him. Or was he paranoid again?
Speaking of paranoia, Grant wondered where he could get his hands on some meth.
No, he wasn't going to do that. He was just going to drink his inadequate scotch and play checkers against himself.
Note: Mack's description of HIV testing and prophylaxis is generally correct, though a little out of date. There are different kinds of HIV tests, some of which can detect signs of infection within a few days. Post-exposure prophylaxis is effective but must be started very soon after exposure (1-72 hrs after exposure). Of course, it only reduces risk, not eliminates it. It's available in the emergency room, so remember that if you're ever potentially exposed.