A/N: safelycapricious asked: ""You need to sleep sometime." Biospecialist."

Grant has a lot to do and not much time to do it in, so as soon as he's stashed Koenig's body (in the store room; not the most secure of hiding spots, unfortunately, but the best he could do on short notice and with so little knowledge of the base), he goes looking for Jemma.

He finds her exactly where he expects to—in the kitchen, sitting at one of the tables and holding an ice pack to her head. Her eyes are closed, so he makes sure to scuff one foot along the floor as he crosses the room and comes to stand behind her. He doesn't want to scare her.

"Hey," he says, careful to keep his voice soft. Three days after the disaster at the Hub, her concussion is mostly gone, but the headache's sticking around. "How you feeling?"

"Like a great bloody chunk of ceiling fell on me," she grumbles, slumping back against him as he rests his hands on her shoulders. The ice pack is cold and wet against his stomach when she tips her head back to look at him. "What about you? How are your ribs?"

"Fine," he says—lies. They hurt like a bitch, actually, between the cheap shot Koenig got in and the stress that lifting his corpse into that vent put on them, but he can't tell her that. Grant Ward, agent of SHIELD, doesn't admit to feeling pain, not ever. Not even to his girlfriend.

Actually, especially not to his girlfriend.

But this isn't why he's here. He's running out of time; he needs to get straight to the point.

"Why don't you get some sleep?" he suggests, rubbing her shoulders lightly. He keeps it as gentle as possible, but she still winces a little when his hand reaches her neck, and he lets go of her regretfully. "You look like you could use it."

She shakes her head, then winces again. "The others—"

"Are fine," he interrupts. "They'll call if anything changes, and if they do, I promise to wake you up."

"I don't know…"

"Jem, please," he says. He smooths her hair away from her forehead, careful to avoid the bruises, and she scrunches her nose at him. "You look exhausted. Did you sleep at all while I was gone?"

"Not much," she admits. "I was too worried."

"I'm sorry to have worried you," he says. "But you need to sleep sometime." He raises his voice slightly over her imminent objection, adding, "If the others do end up needing us, you won't be much help to them if you pass out from exhaustion halfway through the flight."

"You may have a point," she says, and sighs, twisting in her seat to face him. "You promise to wake me if anything happens?"

"Cross my heart," he says, doing so.

"Very well, then," she says. She drops the ice pack on the table and allows him to tug her to her feet. "Have you seen the quarters here, yet? They're very nice."

"I'm sure they are," he agrees, because for an underground bunker in the middle of nowhere, this place is pretty clearly designed for comfort. "But if you don't mind…"

"Yes?"

"I'd feel better if you slept on the Bus," he says.

Jemma frowns. "Why?"

"I don't know anything about this base," he says. "If something happens—"

"Oh, Grant—"

"If something happens," he repeats, louder. "I'd prefer for you to be in an environment I can control and predict." He pauses. "And I don't trust that Koenig guy. He's so…"

"Cheerful?" Jemma offers dryly. "Friendly?"

"Weird," he decides.

She rolls her eyes, but there's a fond smile tugging at her lips. He leans in and kisses her quickly, because he really can't help himself.

"So," he says. "Bus?"

"Oh, fine," she sighs. "If it will make you feel better—"

"It will," he confirms.

"Then yes, I'll sleep on the Bus," she says. "Even though there's a perfectly nice and perfectly large bed in the quarters I was assigned when we arrived last night."

"I'll take your word for it," he says, and turns her towards the door. "Maybe we can check it out when the others get back."

"That would be nice," she says, a bit wistfully, then gives him a stern look. "Only for sleeping, mind. We're neither of us in any condition for sex, at the moment."

"No kidding," he agrees, frowning at the splint on her left wrist. Every time he looks at it he gets hit with the overwhelming urge to kill Hand. Again.

"Oh, don't make that face," she says, nudging him gently. "I'm fine." She pauses. "A bit turned around, perhaps. Do you remember which way the hangar is?"

"I do," he confirms, and takes her (uninjured) hand. "Come on."

He's a little concerned by her confusion—she's got a pretty good sense of direction, and she's been at this base long enough that she shouldn't be getting turned around anymore—but he'll chalk it up to a combination of exhaustion and the lingering effects of her head injury. Still, he makes a mental note to have her checked out by a real doctor as soon as possible; nothing against Trip, but field-med training is not the same thing as med school.

It's not far from the kitchen to the hangar, but it's far enough that Jemma's starting to stumble by the time they reach the Bus.

"Careful," he says, steadying her as she trips at the bottom of the cargo ramp. "I'm in even less condition to carry you than I am for sex."

She laughs a little, pressing her forehead against his upper arm briefly. "I'm sorry. I'm just…very tired."

"I bet," he says. "It's been a long week."

"Has it only been a week?" she asks.

"Less, actually," he says, letting go of her hand so she can proceed him up the stairs. He wants to be in a position to catch her if she falls.

"It feels like so much longer," she muses, rubbing at her eyes with her good hand. "And with all we've got ahead of us…"

She trails off as they reach the top of the stairs, and he takes her hand again, giving it a gentle squeeze.

"None of that," he says. "Just get some sleep, okay? Leave the worrying to me."

"You know me better than that," she says, amused, but allows him to steer her through the lounge. He aims her towards his bunk, mostly because he can, and she doesn't protest (although she might not even notice; at this point, she looks to barely be keeping her eyes open). "I'm categorically incapable of not worrying."

She's slurring a little, and he shakes his head.

"Right now you're categorically incapable of standing," he says, sliding the door to his bunk open. "So, seriously. I'll take over on the worrying."

She mumbles something incomprehensible as she drops onto his bed, barely pausing to kick off her shoes before she crawls under the covers. She's asleep before he finishes pulling said covers over her shoulders, and he sighs, sinking down onto the edge of the mattress.

"I'm sorry," he tells her.

She doesn't hear him, of course; the sedative he injected her with is strong enough that she probably won't even twitch for at least twelve hours. He feels guilty about that, but not as guilty as he otherwise might—it's obvious, from how quickly it hit her, that she really does need the sleep.

He studies her, taking in the dark circles under her eyes, and thinks that maybe when she said she didn't sleep much while he was gone, she actually meant that she didn't sleep at all.

He needs to get moving and he knows it. He's short on time; if he wants to get Skye out of the base before she sees the results of her hack of the NSA satellites—before she sees footage of him leading the assault on the Fridge—he can't afford to linger.

Still, he can't quite bring himself to leave Jemma. Unless something, somewhere goes very, very right for him, this is the last time she'll willingly sleep in his bed—the last time she'll joke with him and hold his hand and smile at him so freely.

His plans for Skye are simple and straightforward: feed her a story about the team being in danger, take her to wherever the hard drive needs to be decrypted, and, once it's unlocked, dump her somewhere semi-isolated. By the time she manages to contact the team, he'll be long gone, with both the hard drive and Jemma safely in his possession.

He has contingency plans for every possible complication. He knows that he can play on Skye's guilt over Jemma's injuries (a direct result of the explosives they set in the Hub) to make sure she doesn't get close enough to realize that Jemma's been drugged. He knows he can easily insure that she remains unarmed (the better not to shoot him when she finally realizes the truth) and off-balance (so as not to spot any of the holes in his story, of which there are, admittedly, several).

He knows how to handle Skye. He knows how to get what he wants from her, and she'll give it to him with a smile.

He's got a plan for everything.

Except Jemma.

With her, he's not working with a plan. It's a new and uncomfortable feeling. He always has an exit strategy, a plan B (and C and D and so on)—some trick up his sleeve to guarantee that he comes out on top. He learned his lessons from Christian and Garrett and SHIELD itself, and he learned them well. He's made a living out of turning every situation to his advantage, no matter how bad things look at the start.

But what advantage is there to take, here? He's not delusional enough to believe that Jemma could ever be okay with him working for HYDRA; once she realizes who and what he is, she'll never want to see him again. She sure as hell won't want to date him.

HYDRA could program her into forgiving him—into forgetting that there's anything to forgive—but he doesn't want that. He's seen the aftermath of brainwashing firsthand, and just the thought of Jemma looking at him with blank eyes and the eerie, empty smile of the happily compliant turns his stomach.

He won't hurt her, and he won't allow anyone else to hurt her, either. And since there's not a chance in hell she'll stay with him willingly…He can't keep her. No matter what he does, he can't keep her.

But he can't leave her behind, either.

He leans in, ignoring the painful pull on his ribs, and presses a kiss to her forehead even as his watch beeps.

His time's up.