May tuned out the rest of the conversation between Skye and Simmons. Strangely, when she considered her options, there were two completely opposite directions she was itching to go. One was to check up on Ward, see if he was truly alright after that damn demonstration. The other one was to check up on Phil for exactly the same reason. The activation of the failsafe did not appear painful to Ward in that he just went completely unconscious from one moment to the next. As a means of execution it seemed a rather merciful option, but that kind of power over a breathing, moving, thinking being was overwhelming and deeply uncomfortable. May doubted Coulson had planned as far as to try out the functionality of the device on the day of its installation. She also doubted he expected to have to act on the threats he had delivered earlier. If he had truly thought Ward untrustworthy or dangerous to anyone at the Playground he would have never let him stay there. The little talk had been for the benefit of the team - and it had overshot its target by several kilometres at least. It would not have surprised May to see a look of utter revulsion in Skye's eyes after the demonstration drew to its end. The reading she got from her was not quite that, though. Revulsion would not have fazed May; uncertainty and worry the young agent directed at Phil and herself did.

It was the unwelcome memory of herself kneeling over the prisoner, pushing him down and holding him still under the falling water, that made May choose to go after Ward after all. Both men had made their own bed in this, but Phil had the advantages of much better mental health and a support system he actually knew he could call on once in a while, though he typically loathed to go to May with his troubles. She fully expected to find Ward in his room, tending to his wounds both figuratively and literally. She found him in the kitchen instead, quickly throwing together a ham sandwich. He froze when she came into view, visibly checking to confirm she had no objections. May suppressed the urge to nod to speed him on his way. It took him longer than it would have probably taken otherwise, but he did go back to his interrupted activity after a couple of seconds. He then went on to pack the sandwich into a napkin and make his way towards his room.

"You can eat here, you know," pointed out May.

"Simmons usually comes by to eat something around this time."

"You know all the team member's routines." It wasn't a question, and she did not try to make it one.

"Complying with the restrictions won't be an issue."

May could hardly tell him to relax about it less than half an hour after he received his full set of instructions, so she let it go.

"Make me another one," she offered instead. The rare moments when she and Ward had had anything resembling 'bonding time' before his reveal had been over hard liquor, but she doubted it was the ideal setup now. "It's past time you told me about the Fridge."

The thing about him that was both irritating and frightening was that he had apparently managed to hide in plain sight for over ten years, playing the part of a functioning and healthy person while being anything but. His truckload of issues had been completely invisible to any and all SHIELD agents and handlers before, and the more May thought about it, the less she could understand why. Because once seen, it was something impossible to un-see, impossible not to notice in every step he took, in every thing he said, in every damn reaction or non-reaction that he had. Skye had called him a robot, but it was worse than that. He was the wooden puppet of the fairy tale, but carved by a psychopath instead of a benign old man, knowing perfectly well that he wasn't a real boy but never ever dreaming of becoming one. The most Ward seemed to be able to do was to look on from the outside with the kind of entranced, abstract fascination and longing born not from the desire to belong but from the knowledge that he didn't.

And so, even if it was completely irritating and more that a little difficult to speak to him while being mindful of the clusterfuck her words could evolve into in his head, May was ready to offer Ward a distraction this once. She had never been the one to measure her words. Heart to heart talks bored and irritated her. Above all, she did not want him to think that they would become a fixture in his life. In the exceptional circumstances where he had just been rigged to die at Phil's whim, though…

It seemed like a good opportunity to make an effort and an exception.

May did not want to crowd the tiny room Ward was now assigned, knowing full well the importance of having a place to call his own. She walked him to the library instead, sat in the plush chair and took a bite from the sandwich he had made her in imitation of his own. It was just the bare basics - plain bread, no cheese, no lettuce or tomatoes. She swallowed it all the same, watching Ward imitate her ten times more hungrily.

"So, the Fridge..."

"I waited by the south wall of this complex for the military to come and pick the guys you had iced and took prisoner. Got onto their helicopter unseen, flew with them to their base. Got hold of a Longbow chopper there. Lost a bit of time there, but I didn't want to take the first chopper. It was a transport and not a good fit for a direct assault, not to mention that SHIELD would have been implicated in the theft. Flew the Longbow into the Fridge, pretended to make a full frontal attack, waited to be hit, crashed the thing into the wall. That was how I got in. Had to lie low for four days, until they had convinced themselves it had been an isolated attack, patched the wall and stopped coming to that level. I spent another eight days setting up the explosion. The elevator shafts run right through the middle of the structure, so vertical spread was not a problem. The trick was to make it explode horizontally into each level. I had to disable the fireproof doors on almost every floor. After that, it was simply a matter of cleaning up. Started from the top to make sure everyone was trapped inside and cut off the communications… Made a short work of it."

It sounded easy: a trademark of a well thought out plan. It never meant that it had actually been easy, though.

"Good job."

The smile showed in his eyes only, small but genuine. He looked like he wanted to add something but thought better about it.

"Was it hard?"

"No," was the immediate answer. "Took a lot of crawling and waiting, and time. Thought I would be ready in a week, but it took me more than two in the end."

"I meant, killing your people."

"No." The new answer was still immediate, and May would have cringed if she had not trained for a long while to expel such primitive reactions from her body. It had seemed like a legitimate, profound question for a moment, a way to let Ward open up about how he felt about changing sides and working against Hydra. A minimal consideration made it abundantly clear that it was more of insensitive meddling into an open wound than anything else.

Ward hadn't cringed at all, but he went back to not looking at her, and he left the food back onto the plate.

"They weren't… I didn't know them. And killing in itself stopped being hard a long time ago." He paused, then added, "Director Coulson has ordered I undergo psych evaluations."

And why was he acting like it was something to be held against him, when it had been his official SHIELD job description? Hell, before Coulson, it had been May's job description, too.

"And how is he planning to do that?"

"Personally. Twice a week."
It did sound like Phil. It was sweet of him, to want to try. May smiled at the idea, though she could not very well imagine Ward and Coulson having heart to heart talks. She hoped it wasn't any kind of "tough love" setup that Phil had in mind. Ward had a kill switch now; it didn't get tougher than that.

"Well…" She could not intervene, Phil had been adamant about it. "Gather your footing, do your missions, keep you head down. We'll see how it goes in a couple of weeks from now. If everything is fine, you will get a long term goal. How does that sound?"

That, she could do. Think back on the hopelessness of him, when he was left with no plan to follow and no way out, and explain it to Phil. Make sure there was a light somewhere ahead of him. Even a small one would suffice. All the rules Coulson had set for Ward, no matter how draconian, were already having a calming effect on him.

"Thank you."

Sure enough, the next days bore witness to the emergence of calm, grounded patterns of behaviour that were light years away from Ward's initial apprehensive, hyper-alert state. May had expected the adaptation to be hard on everyone, but the truth was it proved to be surprisingly easy. Phil had the good sense not to send Ward out until he healed, and had explicitly informed him of the fact. Ward appeared to interpret this to mean that he needed to get back to the peak of his physical strength ASAP. He had visibly lost weight between his incarceration and the Fridge mission, but now that he knew exactly what was expected of him he was quick to take the steps needed to prepare for his assignment. He started to eat what he wanted from the kitchen without checking for permission anymore, just as he did not ask for permission to use the training room of the Playground. The very first day after the tagging May went down to work through her usual workout only to find him going at the punching bag with his headphones on, T-shirt already dripping wet at seven in the morning. He noticed her right away, but paused only long enough to check that she was not there to use the same equipment, and was back to his routine right away. As May moved through her own exercises she observed him take a short break, drink some water, stretch briefly and move on to the running mill. Fifteen minutes at full speed and he stopped, drank again and moved back to the punching bag.

Progressive training, the same technique he had been teaching Skye. May rather disliked it for all the stress it put the body through in a very short time, and for the implication that someone had been lazy enough to allow his muscles to turn slack in the first place. She would rather avoid slacking off on the maintenance than go through the intensive build up.

She observed Ward some more. It was a pleasing sight, aesthetically speaking. There was a ton of dedication and not an ounce on vanity in what he did; he applied himself to his training with the same single-minded concentration he used while oiling and checking his weapons. It had been that deadly efficiency with which he took care of his body what had made May conceive their initial sexual arrangement in the first place. Seeing him doing something so familiar again, and knowing what she knew now, she could think back on the nights she spent with him without the poison of the betrayal weighting on her mind. She had wanted it, and she had thought that the twenty years she had on him and Phil's friendship would protect her if things got weird on his end. She wondered now what had Ward thought about it, going in. May had never been forced, by situation or by her superiors, to use sex as a weapon, but she knew enough people who had been. The Black Widow's casualness on the topic was legendary. She wondered if people like Romanoff and Ward even knew that the other side of the coin existed. Not even in sense of love – May did not much believe in it herself – but as the ultimate release, the joy of simply letting go, have no obligations and no tasks to fulfil and simply cease to exist for a little while.

Probably not.

She shook herself of her thoughts and went to continue her exercises. Ward did not seem bothered by her staring. He had noticed, of course, but the only reaction was a little proud grin that came and went, and never destroyed his concentration.

Three days in, and it was becoming clear that the constancy provided by the deal had worked wonders on Ward. Watching him do better day after day truly put the depths of his initial brokenness into new perspective. A Ward who knew exactly what was expected of him was someone who actually had little problem looking May in the eye. A Ward with a definitive goal was someone who took good care of his physical needs without any prompting or need for permission. A Ward with a mission would speak up and discuss the parameters of said mission until he was completely satisfied.

He still avoided everyone in the base with the exception of May, whose company he actively sought out, and Coulson, whose debriefs and talks he tolerated. He religiously avoided crossing paths with Skye or Simmons, going as far as not eating if doing so required a stroll through an otherwise occupied kitchen. He'd get some provisions stored in his room for that: dry food, standard mission packages. The first time May noticed it she could not decide what to do about it. It felt logical, and she supposed it was what Coulson had wanted. She felt better realizing that any inhibitions disappeared on the days a mission was on. Ward was too responsible to let anything personal prevent him from being anything less than 100% in shape. He would go wherever he needed to, and face whoever was there before a mission. He would do so with a blank stare and try for minimum contact, but he would do it.

Simmons was more than happy with that. Skye was silently seething. The root of it didn't even lay in the betrayal, or whatever personal experiences they had shared before the event. Skye was, easily, the most compassionate person to ever grace the team. Strangely enough, the caring was becoming a problem in a very roundabout way. The more aware she became of everything that was wrong with him, the more upset she got. She was angry at him for not standing up to Garrett, and for not standing up to Phil and May. For not looking at her, or for doing it with his vacant expression. Several days into the arrangement, May had heard her screaming at him in the hangar area, though they were too far to understand actual words. By the time she arrived there, Skye was nowhere to be seen and Ward was making his weapon check up with an intensity and concentration he had probably not graced such a task with since his first year in the Academy.

"Everything all right here?" Ward's hand stilled, then tightened. He did not look up at her. "What did she want?"

"To talk," May was not a fan of talking herself, but even she never succeeded in making it sound like a dirty word. "I was doing my part. I didn't engage her."

"Never said you did."

"Well, I'm the one with the restriction order."

And this answer, in a nutshell, explained everything that was wrong with Phil´s original order to keep away from the team. Because Skye was itching for an opportunity to talk, while Ward was the one who did not want any contact and Phil´s order gave him a foolproof excuse not to do it.

Still, things were quickly getting better. A week in, his scar was healed and his behaviour could be resumed as professional to the extreme and jealously devoid of any personal distractions. Which was exactly as it had been in the first weeks after he got on the Bus, down to the general avoidance of any human contact as far as permitted by the situation. The role of a stoic SHIELD Agent was a well oiled mask, and Ward was fully back to it as soon as he got a minimal breather from the physical stress. Skye was not the only one to find it extremely disturbing and unsavoury, though nobody seemed to want to speak up about it. Ward was doing exactly what was being officially demanded from him, after all. For her part, May did not have the heart to call him out on his behaviour. It was obvious to her that he knew no other patterns for this kind of interaction, and also that falling back to it was giving him a welcome sense of security and relief after a very rough time. Only a month and a half had passed since Garrett´s death, and he was harming no one with this. Pushing Ward into high end human interactions, or maybe even concepts like loyalty, earning of trust and carefulness when choosing a master, could wait.

The first Coulson-sanctioned mission was a couple of hours at most, no violence involved, just following a hot trail for a little while. May did not even notice Ward was gone until she heard about it through an offhand comment by Coulson.

"How did he do?"

"As well as expected from a level 7 agent sent on a level 2 mission."

"Did you tell him he did OK?"

"Of course I did not tell him. It was a level 2 mission, it would have been condescending and he is not a dog. He does not need a treat every time he performs a trick. He has to learn to find satisfaction in knowing that his own actions are serving a greater good, not through a pat from his owner. "

"He is doing what you are asking. You should…"

"Do what, May? Allow him to bask in his dependency on others? I'm telling him what to do, because I have come to accept that he can't do it on his own and because sending him to rot in prison and washing my hands of him won't snap him out of it. But you? You're rewarding him for it. And as long as you do, he will not learn to atone for wrong choices by making right ones. Any other master, and he would be gladly cutting our throats in our sleep. He has to learn how to not be a puppet, and he has to learn it the hard way, because that's the only way."

"He is not ready for that. I know you mean well, but… Look. I tortured him, and then I gave him a plate of pasta, and now he has a Stockholm syndrome centred around me. He was afraid and that was grateful, and it is easy for him to relate to that because it's virtually all he knows. You want to break that? Fine. Great. I'm all for it. Or do you think I enjoy being his second Garrett? But the thing is, he needs to stand on his own two feet before you can start preaching at him about good and evil from an impossibly high moral ground he knows he can never even hope to reach. He has to have a minimum of self worth to even think about trying for atonement."

"It is never too early to learn about good and evil, how can you even say that? If Ward wants to get a second chance, he'd better take a hard look at himself ASAP and start working. And by working, I don't mean going on missions."

"If, Phil? If he wants a second chance? Everybody here thinks he is already getting it. Everybody, including Ward himself. You might want to inform him that risking his life will earn him absolutely nothing in your eyes, before you send him on any more missions."

"I meant a second chance at a good life, May. At being his own person," he said with a slight smile. "It's nice to know how protective you are becoming of him, but you should remember that he's a grown man and avoid the coddling."

The second mission was much more demanding, an 'in and out' play into a building suspected of hiding a Chitauri worship ring. May heard Phil listing the parameters in the war room and being very matter of fact about it, but in the end he did offer some words on the topic of Ward being careful and coming back in one piece. It was all the encouragement anyone ever got from Coulson before a mission, so Ward could hardly complain about it. She did not intervene, even after she felt Ward's questioning gaze linger on the back on her neck. He was Coulson's problem now. Both men should learn to deal with it.

Phil's insinuation that May was coddling him stayed with her long after the actual conversation. Two weeks in, she deemed Ward to be stable and happy enough in his new routine to start running the experiment of completely ignoring him. Their "relationship" had remained unchanged during all this time, with Ward subtly looking for some kind of approval or sign from her almost every day. It was nothing overt; in fact it was masterfully camouflaged. He would cross paths with her in the corridor, making eye contact briefly before turning right to the communal showers. The timing of their individual training sessions became synchronised day in and day out, and not through May's doing. She was getting more frustrated and tired of it with each passing hour, but she did not take action until the one time she was out on a short mission herself, and came back only to find him in the hangar waiting for her to step off the plane. If he had at least been doing or pretending to do anything useful, and if she had not been sweaty, dead tired and bleeding from a head wound, she would not have snapped as she did. Even then, she still tried to avoid becoming confrontational – May knew just how poisonous she could be if she lost her patience – by sending her best unimpressed gaze in his direction. The message had to have been clear and still he lingered, not saying anything and even sending a little timid smile in her direction.

"You have nothing to do but follow me? You realize that's not why we're keeping you around, right? You have to get your shit together before someone starts wondering why we even bother."

She guessed she should feel somewhat guilty at the full blown wince that followed, but she was way too tired. The upside was that Ward seemed to get the message quickly enough after that. From then on, there were no more causal crosses in the hangar, no lingering looks and no hidden plays to debrief in May's presence rather than in Coulson. Even Ward's training schedule had moved in order to keep them separated.

All in all, May felt pleased with herself. She had thought she was protecting Ward, giving him a familiar setting to step on, but in doing it, hadn't she done exactly the same to him as Garrett had been doing? If nobody challenged him, how was he supposed to learn?

She still made a point to check up on him once in a while, which was a big feat considering how good at avoidance he was when he tried – and he certainly was trying now with her, too. She saw no overt signs of anything going wrong. Ward trained, went out on missions, wrote his reports, read in his down time and had once even sought Simmons out of his own volition after coming back from a fight with a nasty gash on his right hand. The girl had patched him up gently enough, chatting about tetanus shots, sensible nerves and range of movement. She then had patted him on the shoulder awkwardly, a gesture you would offer an unknown but visibly starved dog that you were equal parts sorry for and afraid of, and basically just wished he'd limped away. She got thanks and a lifeless, fake smile in return. Uncomfortable as the entire experience had been, it did have the benefit of breaking the ice a little. At the very least May was now assured that Ward would know to seek medical help and not skip it altogether for fear of interacting with Simmons.

Skye, on the other hand, he still avoided religiously, but that was just as well. These two seemed destined to never understand each other. Skye was a free spirit, wild and outspoken and optimistic and her own person since the teenage years. Try as she might, she simply could not conceive the submissiveness that was now impregnating everything Ward did. And he had been her SO to boot, this confident, experienced and strong person who had nagged her month after month and showed her ways to improve and protect herself. May supposed that deep down, all Skye wanted was to have that person back, for her sake but mostly for his own. She all but hissed at him when they crossed paths, demanding he look at her, talk to her, talk back at Coulson and May, think for himself. She was nasty about it too, mostly on the assumption that she could snap him out of his headspace by humiliating him but also because she was starting to become truly angry at him. She recognised his weaknesses, and she seemed to despise them more than May ever did. May had the luxury of not having cared before, but Skye's involvement with Ward had been deep and personal. She also wasn't good enough an agent to pick up any of his minimal body language clues, so his subtly tensed shoulders, slightly bowed head and rather quicker and jerkier than usually movements went over her head. She simply took his non reactions as him ignoring her, which was in turn working her into a true rage.

The day when Skye appeared in the kitchen while he was making himself another sandwich, stood at his back and icily asked him what he would do if May sent him away or died was the day May finally snapped at her. It was a mission day too, which explained the fact that Ward was even in the common area with other people to begin with. He was already in his mission gear, minus the weapons, tense in what have come to be an automatic dread reaction to Skye's presence.

"I mean, will you just find yourself another master to follow?" May could not see his face, but she saw him freezing completely at the question, tense from neck to hands to feet, and slowly doubling over the counter slightly as if to steady himself. Even someone as clueless as Skye could not misinterpret it as anything else but a harassed and stressed out, but still subservient response, but she went on gleefully. "Is it that easy for you? Or that convenient? Not thinking for yourself, not having any responsibility? It's not loyalty, you know, just cowardice."

May had just had enough of watching Ward. Skye, she did not need to watch much. She just backhanded her across the face. It was a soft enough blow, aimed to upset and to shut up, and it had worked beautifully. Skye´s eyes welled up in pain and surprise, and went even wider upon understanding that it had come from May of all people.

"Lay off of him."

"What?"

"I said, lay off, and don't presume to talk of cowardice to him. Not until you have gone on as many missions as he has, have watched Coulson die on you and have had a peacemaker installed into your chest set up to blow up your heart."

Skye was instantly ashamed, May could tell, but she was also willing to fight her on this, which was how May knew she wasn't doing it to be nasty and pitiless. She was trying to be cruel to be kind in the long run. It was the same approach Phil had, except where Phil was playing the part of SHIELD Director, Skye only had personal feelings to step on. The result was still the same: chances were very good it wouldn't work on Ward. For all the pressure and all the blows he had received in his life, he had fought back exactly once, and it had not been to defend himself but to defend John Garrett.

The girl held up her hand to touch her cheek, and came a little closer to Ward. She even bent a little to try to look him in the face.

"Sorry, Ward. May is right, I was out of line. I didn't mean to put you down. Just to make you think. You're not a robot. You're a person, and you can choose. You think Garrett had power over you, but it was only because you gave it to him. And then you let it happen with May. And you'll let it happen again, if somebody doesn't make you snap out of it. You have to realise you can't go on like this."

He still had not turned to face either of them, the food laying forgotten on the counter in front of him. There was a pause, during which even May waited to see if Skye's words would come through. For the first minute, nothing happened. Then Ward finally moved, but only to carefully take his sandwich and walk out of the kitchen without looking at either of them.

"Let it go," May offered not unkindly. "You want to break him out of it, but you will just as surely hammer him into the ground if you keep at this."

"Why?" was the strangled whisper at May's back as she came to the counter to put away the kitchen knife Ward had left behind. The voice was close to tears, but it was not the sting of the blow that coloured Skye's cheeks now. "What the hell is wrong with him?"

"Do you truly want to know? Simmons is the clever one, and she doesn't."

"I want to know so I can fight it."

"Maybe you can't. Maybe letting him be is the kinder choice."

"He tried to explain it to me, once. I answered that I would never give him what he wanted. I meant the decryption for the drive… But that wasn't what he was talking about. He said one day, I would understand. More than anything, he wanted me to understand, and now he acts like doesn't want even that. Well, tough luck. I don't believe that. I don't believe that letting him be is the kinder choice. I want to give him what he once wanted, even though he's forgotten how to want. And I want to know what has happened to damage him so badly. I want to understand," she smiled sadly. "And I'm going about it in all the wrong ways, aren't I? Thank you for pointing it out. I never meant to upset him. I'll think of something else. Talk to Simmons about it, maybe."

"You do that."

May walked by the hangar shortly after that. Ward was checking up his weapons, kneeling between the crate that contained the collection of icers and another one containing real guns, doing pre-mission check ups. His hair was longer now, especially compared to the short haircuts he had favoured while in his Agent mode. He probably did not have any means to deal with it, not having free time to go out of the base. Now it was hanging into his eyes, effectively hiding them from May. She strolled by casually, wondering if she should break her self imposed protocol of avoidance and talk a little to him. She decided not to, in the end. The damage made by Skye's amateur attempts at therapy was already done. And there was an offhand chance that Ward would actually learn something out of it. If somebody's anger could get to him, it had to be Skye's. He also seemed highly concentrated on his task, taking a gun out of the crate, taking it apart and putting it back after the check up, and she knew that he found handling weapons calming.

The scene in the kitchen had been bad enough, though, and she came by one more time a little before the official get-go to do her personal Ward pre-mission check up. She was pleased to find him still working with his weapons, still taking a gun out of the crate, taking it apart with jerky movements and putting it back. It was only afterwards, when the mission had been blown and disaster was all over the news, that she realised that on both occasions he had been handling the same gun.