A/N: anonymous said: "Can I request a biospecialist where he comes home from a mission and is having difficulty separating himself from his cover? Just something weird and disconnected please, with a side of hurt/comfort if it's possible."
Sometimes it's hard to untangle.
Untangle what? He doesn't know. Real from not-real, cover from person, agent from man, maybe. He gets back to base and goes through Medical and gets debriefed, and he can reel off facts and figures, report the exact angle of the shot he took or the precise words of the information he forced from the target, but the whole time he's wavering between what he is and what he isn't.
He knows his name because they use it: Agent Ward this, Agent Ward that, good work, Agent Ward. But there's nothing beyond that, no substance under the skin, and Agent Ward is just another mask until he can straighten things out.
He goes home when the debrief is over, because he knows he's supposed to. Because there's comfort and warmth, there, a woman whose name occasionally slips away but whose smile never does. He doesn't think of her when he's not him—because it's painful and wrong, to attach her to the things he does—but he misses her anyway, even when he doesn't think of her. Even when he's too tangled to remember who she is, her absence is a gaping hole in his chest, a distinct not-right sensation.
He goes home.
She's in the kitchen, and she's holding a knife but it doesn't spark any of his instincts. He puzzles over it, turns it over in his head—the surety that there's no danger here, not from her—but all she's doing is chopping vegetables, so maybe it's that.
She smiles when she sees him, puts her knife and her cutting board and the little pieces of carrot aside, brushes her hands off and calls him love. She welcomes him home and wraps her arms around him, seems not to notice the blood staining his right sleeve, and he buries his face in her hair and inhales.
This is real.
He's still tangled. He's not sure who he is, really—lost in a muddle of languages and names and histories, six or seven months wearing someone else's skin—but he knows her. He doesn't remember—her name slips away again, which is annoying—but he knows her. As surely as he knows the gun holstered under his jacket or the switchblade in his boot or the wire in his pocket—he knows her.
She draws away from him too soon, starts to say something about dinner, and he cups her face in his hands and kisses her. She makes a little noise, and there's something sad about it, but she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him back with equal fervor, so it must not be important.
She's much shorter than him, and the angle is inconvenient. He lifts her off her feet, sets her on the counter, and she presses her knees against his sides as he runs his hands up under her shirt. The skin under his hands is soft and warm, but there's not nearly enough of it—so he runs his hands back down her sides, out from under her shirt, to undo the buttons instead.
Her nails dig into his shoulders while he fumbles with the buttons, and she makes that noise—that sad little hum—again, but her knees are still squeezing his sides, keeping him in place, and he doesn't know what it means.
He gets the last button undone but hesitates to shove the shirt off her shoulders, because—because…
There's something not-real about this, something automatic, and he doesn't like it at all. She's real and here and he needs to be him, not whoever else he's been. This shouldn't be distant and hazy, not now. But he doesn't know how to be him when he doesn't know who he is, and he still can't remember her name.
(Mashunya Ingrid Rosa Yvette—there are a hundred names on the tip of his tongue, but none of them are right. None of them are her.)
She leans away from the kiss, flushed and breathless, and she's beautiful and he doesn't like to lose the contact, so he presses his lips to her jaw, then kisses his way down her neck. There are facts in the back of his mind, things he knows about her even though he doesn't—even though he can't—
There are things he knows about her, and he knows that if he bites down on her skin just here, she'll make the most amazing noise
And she does—
So he does it again—
And—
"Grant," she gasps, and it slams him into place.
He's Grant and she's Jemma and her nails are digging into his shoulders because she's trying not to touch him anywhere else—because she doesn't like to touch him when he's not in his right mind, because she doesn't want to take advantage of him, which is ridiculous but he weirdly appreciates it—and…
He presses his face to her shoulder, struggling to breathe.
"I'm here," he says. "Sorry, I—sorry."
"It's all right, love," she says, and her touch changes, hands smoothing over his shoulders gently. "I know. It's all right."
It's not all right. He was so lost in his own head—in his own confusion—that he didn't even remember her name. That's not all right.
"I could have hurt you," he says, and she shushes him.
"You didn't," she says, fingers toying with the hair at the back of his neck. He suppresses a shudder. "I'm fine. Everything's fine."
It's not fine. They have this argument every time this happens (not every time he comes home, thank Christ, but still way more often than he'd like), and he knows he'll lose it, but he can't just let it go.
"It's not fine," he says. "I wasn't—"
"Grant," she interrupts, and he doesn't even know where that sentence was going, so he falls silent. "You can either finish what you started or let me down so I can finish making dinner."
"I don't—"
"Those are your only options," she continues like he hasn't spoken. "Either way, I'm not going to let you stand here and berate yourself for something you can't control."
He smiles against her shoulder, helpless in the face of her no-nonsense tone to do anything else. It doesn't make what just happened okay—she was holding a knife when he walked in, for fuck's sake, what if he'd taken it as a threat, what if he'd—but her easy acceptance loosens something in his chest. It always does.
This is what he was chasing, when he came home without knowing who or what he was—or even who or what she was. This unthinking welcome, how she can recognize a stranger wearing her husband's face and not push him away—not hate him for it—he craved it, even when he didn't know which way was up.
"Thank you," he says finally, straightening.
He can read the strain in her face, and he knows that it hurts her when he comes home like this—when the cost of the work he does is shoved in her face so blatantly. But she doesn't want to talk about it right now, and honestly, neither does he.
They need to talk about it. Experience has taught them that, surprisingly enough, talking about it does help. But that can wait until later—until the whole thing isn't so raw.
"I love you," she says, because she's ridiculous and doesn't like to be thanked for the amazing things she does for him. He rolls his eyes and kisses her forehead, then steps back to help her off the counter.
"I love you, too," he says, once she's got both feet on the ground again, and tugs her into a hug.
She gives a relieved little sigh as she hugs him back, and he empathizes completely.
