Day 45

"Get up." The lights went on in the basement.

Grant awoke more or less immediately. A lifetime of constant threats had trained him to skip the drowsy phase that some people lingered in.

"Get dressed," said Hand, dropping sweatpants and socks on the bed. She herself was already clad in yet another black pantsuit. "We leave in four minutes."

Grant had never undressed in front of Hand, but she showed no sign of leaving the room – she was typing rapidly into some kind of communication device. "What's going on?" he asked, as he took off the undershirt he slept in and put on a rugby shirt. It really wasn't strange, changing clothes in front of her. Grant had never really valued privacy, and besides, it was hard to feel embarrassed in front of someone who already knew all of your secrets.

"There was an incident at the college downtown." Hand put the communication device into a pocket, though Grant couldn't figure out physically how something that size could fit into her clothes without altering her outline at all. "I'm the nearest agent. I need to go assess."

"And you want me to…?"

"It's a college. You look like you belong there. I don't. You're a prop."

They loaded into the SUV. Hand didn't stop to arm herself, which meant that either she felt weapons were unnecessary, she had them on her at all times, or there were extras in the trunk. Grant personally hoped for the latter. It was only a short drive to the college. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of people standing around outside behind makeshift barricades, blankets draped over their shoulders more for effect than for warmth. Police and security were guarding the entrances, more concerned with keeping the frustrated crowd from attempting to re-enter the building than with actually tackling the threat.

Hand scanned the situation as she got out of the SUV. She immediately turned back into the car and rummaged through the compartment between the driver's and passenger's seat. This somehow yielded three pistols, a packet of blood capsules, and a Ziploc baggie of instant coffee grounds. She tucked one gun into her waistband, a second at her ankle, and handed the third to Grant. "You don't fire without my command," she said. "I don't care if you see the Zodiac killer. Don't make me regret this."

Grant held took the gun gingerly. Was it real? He wasn't supposed to be eligible for a gun license anywhere, ever – not with a felony on his record. This was…utterly bizarre. "What's the coffee for?"

"That's how you're going to help," said Hand. She popped a few fake blood capsules into the grounds and mixed it by squishing the baggie. Then, she opened the seal and held it out to him. "Hold this in your mouth and wait for my signal."

It took Grant a moment to realize that she meant the disgusting red-brown mixture within and not the entire plastic bag itself. He tipped back his head and poured the coffee grounds into his mouth, trying not to simultaneously swallow and retch – the taste wasn't that bad, but the texture was entirely unfamiliar.

"Come on." Hand was already making her way through the crowd much faster than a woman on crutches ought to be able to. As she got toward the front she slowed, turned to Grant and put on an uncharacteristically maternal expression. "Come here, sweetie," she said, reaching out a hand for him to take. They had ended up outside of the south stairwell, near an alert young-looking man in a paramedic uniform. Grant reoriented himself to the situation just in time to hear Hand say, "My nephew isn't doing well. I think he was exposed. And he's really-"

Grant felt Hand dig her fingernails into his palm and he knew what to do. With a horrible gulp, he dribbled, then spat and gagged, then dribbled some more the coffee grounds-and-blood mixture onto the guard. It was lubricated by a healthy amount of saliva at this point and looked, if anything, more disgusting than when he had taken it in.

The paramedic's eyes widened. "Black, crumbly emesis," he said in a tone that clearly meant 'emergency'. "He needs to get to the hospital. They're going to need to scope him."

Grant did not know much about the field of medicine, but he knew that scopes generally entered the body one of two ways, neither of which he was wild about. While he protested that he was feeling much better, Hand slipped past the guard and into the building. She was going in alone to face whatever it was. He spat on the ground. His mouth still tasted funny.

He was just a distraction. He didn't much like that. But she had armed him. That had to mean something.

Grant had spent the first fourteen years of his life lying to doctors, so he was very, very prepared for this moment. Just as the EMT began to signal a colleague, Grant sheepishly raised his hand like a schoolkid. He knew it made him look young and endearing. "That…uh…it wasn't blood. Please don't tell my aunt. It was this stupid fraternity thing." Grant glanced at the Greek letters adorning the dorm windows. "Alpha Phi Omega. They can't make us drink anymore after what happened – I dunno, I think it was last year – so they just make us carry around this stuff in our mouths. It's just Jell-o and coffee."

The EMT rolled his eyes. "APO is nothing but trouble, kid. We get called there every weekend, seriously. Pledge something else."

Grant nodded. "Yeah, starting to get that idea." He looked around. "Shit! Where'd my aunt go?" He backed away. "I gotta go find her."

The EMT nodded, giving permission for Grant to bleed back into the crowd, not into the dormitory, of course. Grant still had to find a way in. Here again, a lifetime under threat helped him. He knew how to step lightly, how to casually monitor someone else's gaze and slip past while they were distracted, and yes, he knew how to play the game of "Let's you and him fight." He found a cluster buff-looking preppy kids who were clearly still tipsy from the evening's partying. Rushing past, he pushed one into the other. "What the fuck, bro?" muttered Grant indistinctly.

Grant grinned in satisfaction as a scuffle broke out. As a security guard went to deal with it, she left a hole in the perimeter for Grant to sneak through. He ran down a brick pathway to the door Hand had entered by. When he opened it, he could immediately see that something was horribly wrong. There was a body in the stairwell, a girl not much older than Grant in skimpy pajamas. Her lips were bright, cherry red and her skin was a dull cyanotic blue. She was dusted with flakes of sickly green wax. When she collapsed, the pajama shirt had obviously shifted so as not to cover one breast. Grant surprised himself by not thinking any particular sexual thoughts. Instead, he readjusted the shirt to give her body some dignity. The cloth was gritty and oily – something had obviously settled on it, the same substance that was on the stairs and handrails. Grant made a note to keep his hands to himself.

He ran up the first flight of stairs and then the second. He had to be catching up to Hand. The stairs must have slowed her down. He could hear a faint whining noise from above, getting louder as he climbed.

Grant found Hand on the fourth floor, doggedly continuing up the last flight of stairs. "How the hell did you get in?" she asked. "No, never mind, later. It's a science project gone wrong. We get a lot of those," she explained as they ascended to the top floor. "Get your gun out and hold it up. Can't do any good if you're not holding it." She breathed heavily for a moment – climbing stairs on crutches was a challenge. "It obviously emitted some kind of poison, but it seems to have-"

There was a blue haze in the air that smelled like almonds and made Grant's eyes burn.

Hand assessed the situation and came to a conclusion in a matter of seconds. "You're going to turn around and drive back to the house. It's less than three miles and I know you were watching the street signs on the way here. When you get there, you're going to need to disarm the security. You need to memorize this list of words: Carolina, bluebell, wristwatch-"

"Wait, wait, I'm not going anywhere. You brought me with you to help, right? I can help."

"You already helped. I don't have time to argue with you."

"You keep reaching for your gun. Whatever's in there, you're getting ready to shoot it, but you need to keep your hands on your crutches. I learned aim in military school. I'm a good shot." Grant looked Hand in the eye. "I can help," he repeated.

Hand rubbed the bridge of her nose and sighed. "When you were a kid, did you memorize a list of something? States? Presidents?"

It was a sign of the trust they had developed that Grant took the question at face value. "I know the presidents."

"This is how we're going to do this. We're going to walk back to back. I'm going to go first, which means you're going to walk backwards. You're going to stay calm. I'm going to say one president, then you're going to say the next one. Back and forth. Focus on that. You're not going to touch anything, especially not your mouth or your eyes. You're going to breathe in through your nose. You're going to keep your gun up. And if I tell you to drop, you're going to do it right away. No arguing. Do you understand?"

Grant nodded. His lips were dry. He wanted to lick them, but he suspected that was a violation of the no-touching rule.

Hand tossed one crutch aside. With her newly free hand, she raised her weapon and faced forward down the hall. "Washington," she said.

"Adams." Grant got into position behind her.

"Jefferson." Hand started to walk forward slowly.

"Madison." A light flickered, but Grant didn't startle. He panned the gun from side to side, scanning the hallway behind. They had just come from that direction, so any assailants were much more likely to attack Hand first, a fact which Grant did not find particularly comforting.

They made their way down the hallway at an agonizingly slow pace. The greenish wax was caked on the walls, the floorboards, the machinery in the halls. The floor itself was relatively spared, which allowed Grant to focus on keeping his gun level instead of struggling to keep his footing. He had no idea how Hand was managing in high heels, though in fairness at least she was walking face-forward.

"Monroe," said Grant. There was a body on the ground, covered in a thin sheen of wax, with tendrils of the stuff bursting out of it like fungal spores. Maybe they were spores. Suddenly breathing through the nose did not seem like sufficient precaution. He was going to come down with a bad case of xenomorphs and-

"Adams Junior," answered Hand. She sounded steady, unafraid. That was comforting. She also wasn't offering Grant the chance to run away again, either because running at this point was more dangerous than walking through hell with a trained SHEILD agent as a guide, or because she genuinely wanted his help.

"Jackson," said Grant. The whining sound was getting louder as they made their way down the corridor. "We should switch places," he said, more because he thought he ought to than because he genuinely wanted to do so.

"Van Buren." Hand didn't dignify his suggestion with a response.

"Harri-" The whine suddenly picked up and a painfully bright red light seemed to come from every direction at once. Grant didn't have to be told to drop to the ground as the source of the noise began spitting thick ropes of some sort of plasma. He looked up just far enough to see that Hand had taken cover behind a study carrel. Her right sleeve was smoking and torn, obviously damaged by the blast. She was right-handed, Grant realized. Could she shoot with her left? Grant looked up again. Everything – the light, the plasma, the green wax, the blue gas – was all streaming from a cube about the size of a softball. He looked back to the ground, shielding his eyes. It hurt to look at that thing for too long. He knew how to shoot from prone. He'd done it plenty at military school. But he'd given his word. "Give the order!" he shouted.

"Yes! Shoot it!"

Grant propped himself on his elbows, mindful that every extra inch of height brought him closer to the deadly chaos circling in the air. He aimed. He exhaled. He pulled the trigger.

Hand's arm was only grazed so she insisted on driving them home. She had no idea what the terror box was, or who had made it, or how many casualties there were. Those things were the job of a cleanup crew. She and Grant had served as the tourniquet, had stopped the bleeding. That was what mattered.

She parked the SUV in her driveway, made a mental note to change the plates tomorrow and stumbled out, only to find Grant by her door, wordlessly offering her a shoulder. She accepted gratefully.

"What was the blue gas?" asked Grant. "Why did you change your mind?"

"First rule of being an agent," said Hand, "always assume the worst. It smelled like almonds, which could mean cyanide."

When they got inside, Hand opened an otherwise invisible panel in the wall to retrieve first aid supplies. Gauze for her arm – it was just a graze, but there was no excuse for letting it get infected. And inhalers for both of them. She handed one to Grant. "Shower first, and then go to bed," she said. "I know you're wired. Adrenalin. But you should try to sleep. If you feel like you can't catch your breath, use this. If that doesn't work, get me right away."

Grant nodded numbly. He was only now starting to realize that he was covered in sweat. He did as he was told.

"Grant," said Hand, urgency in her voice, "are you all right? Is your breathing okay?"

"What? No, it's fine. I woke up and used the inhaler once and it worked. I'm fine. I just got up to use the bathroom." He did so, and walked back to the living room. "Why are you sleeping on the couch?"

"I'm not sleeping. I was keeping an ear out for you, making sure you didn't stop breathing."

"I'm fine. I only caught a little of the gas. You got a lot more of it."

"You're my responsibility," murmured Hand through a yawn.

There was a moment before Grant's face shifted, briefly looking stricken before returning to its prior state. He had never before been someone else's responsibility, not really, and he wasn't sure how to feel about it. He sat down on the other end of the sofa, pulling his feet up underneath him. "I'll sleep up here," he said. "You can go to sleep, and you'll be able to hear it if I start gagging or something."

Hand looked at him as though she were going to object or say thank you, but she just smiled tiredly instead. "You did good tonight."

"Well," corrected Grant pedantically.

"No," said Hand, "good."

Day 52

Grant lay on the sofa, on his side, arms hanging limply over the edge. His left arm stretched over his right so his wrists were crossed in an X.

"I don't think I can do this SHIELD thing." Grant's breathing was strident, as though there was a line of saliva splitting his airstream. Perhaps there was. "We had this dog. Her real name was Delta but Thomas called her Deedee and it stuck. She was a nice dog. Lazy. But you could just pet her when things were bad. And I don't know what made it start, but I got mean to her. I would kick her, pinch her. Once, I heated up a fork on the stove and poked her with the hot end. There were these four little red spots, four little circles where the fur burned and stank. Must've hurt a lot. And it wasn't like she was bad and I was punishing her. I just did it. And because of all that, she got mean. Really mean. One day, she bit Thomas out of the blue. They had to put her down."

Hand looked down at Grant's face. It was twitching. First, he seemed blank. Then, there was a flash of guilt or grief or perhaps just simple embarrassment. After a moment, the expression was gone and replaced by clenched teeth. The cycle repeated.

"Did your older brother make you do that?" asked Hand.

The twitching stopped. Grant seemed to be holding his breath. Finally, "No," he said. "I don't know why I did it. I know it was wrong. I knew then it was wrong. I did it anyway." There was a pause, and Hand could hear a gulp. "She was a good dog and I-" Another gulp. "I hurt her. I got her killed." That strident breathing again. Grant spoke in a watery voice: "I don't know why I did it."

Hand looked down at Grant, her expression somehow conveying that she knew he had never had a dog, and also that he was in fact telling a very important truth.

"You should get some rest," said Hand.

Day 71

Grant wasn't sure if he had been expecting SHIELD academy to have barracks, but semiprivate dormitory rooms were a pleasant surprise. He put his duffel on one of the bunks, unsure whether to start unpacking or wait for his roommate to negotiate sides. Then he noticed masking tape with GW on one bed and JS on the other. Problem solved. The beds had thin drawers underneath – they certainly weren't going to need an expansive wardrobe. Grant opened the drawers to empty out his duffel and he began to laugh. Not just a quiet little giggle, but a full throated laugh.

In the drawer was a pack of M&Ms.