Author's Note: This is just a small chapter while I think of what else to write. This story is going to be a mainly Ward story but I just wanted to have a brief catch up with the team because they become major players again later on.
I don't own Agents of SHIELD, I just wish I did
Chapter 3 – Broken Spirits
If anyone is the Playground wanted to find Skye the answer was always the same; the cargo hold of the bus, taking her anger out on a punching bag. Only this made things worse, because Skye would remember who had taught her the proper way to punch. Sometime she would be so angry that she would forget to wrap her hand, it wasn't uncommon for the hacker to join the team for meal with bloody hands, earning her worried looks from Coulson and May.
Simmons probably would have been more worried about Sky's behaviour if she wasn't constantly worried about another member of the team. The biochemist rarely joined the team for meals, she was constantly at the side of the unconscious technician that had saved her life. At one point she was skipping meals all together and if Trip hadn't threatened to throw her over his shoulder and carry her to the kitchen where he would force food into her mouth, Simmons probably would have starved herself to death.
Trip had become Simmons unofficial babysitter. He made sure that she slept and ate. One day he even had to push her into the shower, fully clothed, because she had refused to leave Fitz's side long enough to take one on her own.
As far as the team could see Coulson was handling their current situation the best. Only May knew any different. Only May knew that Coulson didn't sleep, that he spent his nights drawing on the walls in the basement of the Playground. During the day, however, Coulson was the picture of sanity.
Fitz remained in a coma, he was yet to wake up since Simmons and Fury pulled him from the ocean. Despite being unconscious, the engineer was the cause of many of the team's problems; Skye's anger, Simmons' self-destruction and even Coulson insomnia. The team wanted nothing more than to save the young man, Coulson had even put the resurrection of SHIELD on hold until Fitz could be a part of it. Despite Simmons protests Coulson refused to even consider looking for another source of GH-325, Coulson couldn't bring himself to tell Simmons why he wasn't exploring every available option to save Fitz's life. Fury's doctors had all agreed on Fitz's condition, IF the engineer woke up, he would never be the same. There was swelling of the brain, not to the brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, unfortunately the full extent of the damage couldn't be measured until he woke up. If he woke up.
Everyone on the team avoided Koenig. It was creepy being around a man they had seen with his throat cut in half. What was even creepier was how much like his brother Koenig actually was. Once or twice someone called him Eric by mistake and the operative went and sulk in office for almost a full day. May wondered if it was a coincidence that the two secret bases were both run by Koenigs or were there more out there. In one of her rare anger free moments Skye suggested that they weren't brothers but clones and that all of Fury's bases had a Koenig clone. Recently May began to wonder if the hacker had been right.
After being cramped on the bus for almost a year the team wasn't used to having so much space to themselves. The last time they had been at a SHIELD base this big it was The Hub and it had been full of agents, many of whom were now dead or in prison. It was thoughts like this that had broken the team. They remembered that the only family some of them had ever had was gone.
Today was one of the days Coulson spent alone in his office. He watched the team through the Playgrounds internal security system. Grant Ward's betrayal had broken this team, it was Phil Coulson's job to put it back together.