They spoke no more about it that day, thankfully. Even if Phil had wanted to do something different about Ward (and again, what would that be?), the man was gone by the time he could have gotten to it. The screaming match died before she needed to make use such banal pearls of wisdom as "this is not the foundation you want to build SHIELD upon" and her favourite, automatically all-conquering: "What Skye would think if she knew?"

Skye herself was gaping openly by the time May left the office and made her way to the living quarters, leaving Coulson alone to think. The decision to just let Ward walk was not without all kinds of setbacks. Even if getting him out of their hair was quickly becoming the easy option for the peace of mind of everyone involved, there was the little detail of a Hydra operative who had just walked out of SHIELD headquarters. Their secret playground was not so secret anymore.

"Did Ward just…" Skye made an abstract gesture intended to portray the path Ward had taken. It was difficult to know what she was thinking, apart from being rightly flabbergasted at the development. "Did Ward just walk out of here with a gun in his hand?"

She was hovering in the aisle across the office area, not quite as out of earshot as ordered, but close enough to not risk being called out on it. Pretending to just pass through, clearly, but her diversion skills were truly pathetic. Even Simmons would have done a better job. It was a good thing that Coulson's office did not have video cameras, or Skye would be hijacking them judging by her poorly contained curiosity.

"Did he?" May asked. He had acted so matter-of-factly upon hearing the assignment, she could almost picture him stopping at the control centre and indeed waiting for the full list of mission parameters to appear on screen. Or, at the very least, she could certainly picture him stopping by the weapons racks and helping himself to something better than a pistol. The one May had given him was more a declaration of intent than a weapon which could be used for hostile takeover of a heavily defended compound.
"Yep."

"I sent him on a mission."

She did not care what the girl would think about her, but that didn't mean May did not want to know. Curiously, Skye's eyes lit in a mischievous grin.

"Wait, does SHIELD actually have a brainwashing machine?" May didn't honour that with an answer. "Coulson wouldn't just let him walk."

"He was of no use to us here."

"You can't trust him!" The girl was about to burst with indignation.

"It depends entirely on what you plan to trust him with."

"Us. SHIELD."

"Those are two completely different things," May pointed out and was on her way, having little intention to discuss this with the child. She had little doubt that Skye would go to Coulson after that; Phil was welcome to lose as much of his time as he wanted on schooling her. He'd probably talk about second chances again. It wouldn't be the first time he waxed poetic about a decision that was initially made entirely against his will. The incident with Ward and Fitz's little foray into extraction-less missions came to mind, along with Phil's monologue about trusting the system. It was just as well that he had become the only pillar of said system overnight. Now he had no choice but to play by the rules and colour by the numbers. The question of how long and how well he could live with himself while doing so remained.

Simmons wasn't on the premises, having gone to visit Fitz. Hypoxia was a done deal, so the real question was how well had his brain answered to it. After spending about a week at a hospital he had been proclaimed stable and fit enough to leave the acute care. The tests came up free of any big, pressing problems. His broken arm was set, his extremities all moved perfectly, his eyes saw and his language skills were roughly the same as before. The images of his brain that Simmons had shown at Coulson's request during the briefing had no gaping holes in them. Still, nobody was eager to let him just walk away from the hospital, and rehabilitation was to be his next step. That was where the problems started. The tests became more complicated. Suddenly, it wasn't about holding his arms up for ten seconds or following the pen tip with his gaze. There were extensive concentration check-ups where Fitz had to perform while listening to loud conversations or music, and memory testing that required holding long strings of numbers in his head. The testing for fine motor skills was almost more complicated that managing the holotable, Simmons had said. It wasn't a catastrophe, all in all, but there were problems. Fitz scored fine in the memory checks, for example – but had flown off the handle when Simmons pointed it out to him, saying he should have scored excellent. He was a genius after all. Had been a genius, he had than amended. And when the tests weren't able to measure, he himself claimed to feel that his performance was off. The psychologist Coulson had insisted on assigning to him and Simmons both had tried to point out that with all the stress and Fitz's performance anxiety, it was no wonder he could not concentrate, but it fell flat.

But the root of it all was that Fitz exhibited no desires to return to work. He talked about it often enough, but always as though it was far in the future, and it took Simmons two weeks to realise that he was actually offering excuses to ignore the diagrams and the hard drives she was bringing to him.

"He's terrified that he won't be the same, won't be able to keep up," she had said at dinner that night, eyes puffy and voice yet more high-pitched than her usual. "Neuropsychological tests are basically useless tasks he will never perform in real life. I mean, when was the last time one of us had to make calculations by hand? But failing to solve an engineering problem would be a tragedy for him."

"Give him time," Coulson had said quietly. The face Simmons had pulled was a mixture of knowing how useless the advice was and realising how much it was still needed.

"Just tell him that we miss him, and we will come to visit as soon as he wants us to," offered Skye.

"Oh, he will just tell me that he is very concentrated on his exercises. Of course, they are a little pointless, I keep telling him that designing a better night-night gun would be a much better exercise than randomly playing with numbers, but…"

The smile Simmons had offered was just as bright as any other, but the real measure of how she felt was given when she hurried from the table not five minutes later to seek refuge in the laboratory once more. May seethed. Ward may have lied to Coulson and manipulated her in order to find a way out of their clutches, but if he did not come back of his own volition then the thing that would gall May most would be that he'd robbed Fitzsimmons of their retaliation.

Not that these two would know what to do with it, anyway.

After a couple of days passed, May herself started to have a hard time differentiating between what she believed, knew, and wanted. She had been so sure of her decision the day she let Ward walk free. There had been no shadow of doubt in her mind that he'd obey her, carry out the mission or die trying. It all had made the perfect kind of sense. He had been following her in exactly the same unhealthy, devoted and mindless way he had followed Garrett, and it had felt good to set him on a productive path for a change. The next day started just the same, in the full knowledge that she'd done the right thing.

The second day, she woke up thinking she was the stupidest specialist on the entire planet. There had been no forewarning to it; nothing had really happened, no new intel had arrived. The Fridge was a long way away from the Playground (there were less and less virgin beaches left in the world, not thanks to whoever had decided to set a freaking tower on one of them and make roughly 3000 square kilometre inaccessible in order to hide the contraption). Without any kind of support structure, Ward would need a couple of days just to get there. May knew that… and still the fact that there has been no development on the second day had sent her for a spin.

She went through her exercises, checked with Coulson to make sure no missions were expected of her that day. He had made her the courtesy of not commenting and not setting any deadlines. Most of the time, he carefully avoided any mention of their little wager. It was truly easy, seeing as he had a lot of other worries on his plate.

"I have spoken to Talbot. The three men in the basement are indeed his, gone AWOL after the Centipede raid. The military was looking for them as well, they are completely aware of everything they've stolen."

"We can't…"

"I'm considering giving them back." May frowned. These guys definitely knew where the Playground was located, and of course they'd tell Talbot in their first breath. SHIELD has always been about secrecy…

"Yes. And maybe that's why we failed this bad…"

She had not spoken aloud – she newer slipped this way – but Coulson could apparently read her thoughts now. Not that the train of thought was that difficult to infer.

"He'll want the staff, at the least, now that he knows what it is able to do", she warned.

"He can have it. What use does it have for us? The military will do the same thing with it as we would. First try to study it, and then lock it away. Trust is more important now than funny objects."

The soldiers were transferred to a military prison within the day; Talbot had been gleefully happy to have them back, and also eager to check out the new SHIELD headquarters. Phil had worked out the transfer protocol and denied him access inside the base, but both he and May knew that the entire perimeter of the Playground was being surveyed from the waiting helicopter.

"It's OK, May," Phil had said after the heavy transport chopper took flight. "They had known where the old Headquarters was, too."

She wanted to object, to say that then they were not formally fugitives then, but she had already used her quota of protesting for that week (and probably the one to come) and therefore kept quiet. She flew Coulson to New York to speak with Hill the next day, and again kept her thoughts to herself. A closed congressional hearing would take place shortly, Phil announced when she flew him back three days later. Hill and Potts had arranged that one, which all but assured that SHIELD would get the (unofficial) support it needed to get going. Potts had now been sworn into secrecy surrounding Phil's survival, and the smile on his face as he came on board of the Bus told May how grateful and pleased he was at her help and encouragement. May still thought that Stark should know about his survival too. She had almost mentioned it to Coulson on the flight back, but then quickly figured that Phil's reason for it was simpler than it looked. He was terrified that the billionaire and his Skynet butler would figure something about him that even he still did not know.

The next week was spent chartering the Director up and down the States. May was becoming cranky after three uneventful flights (the Bus was a highly sophisticated, weaponized transport, not a private jet). She ended up announcing that she was not a private pilot by the end of the week. Day fifteen saw her liaising with the Cube. Day sixteen saw her leading a six people team (all specialists) into a recon mission near Philippines. For once, the raid paid off big time. They identified a base with significant number of residual Centipede equipment, which was promptly confiscated. There were no miracle drugs in sight, though, and no signs of coerced workers. Everyone working there was simply paid high, international level wages as opposed to the measly local minimum. May was almost sad for them. It was easy to say that selling your soul for money was never a good option, but it held a different meaning in a place where money literally meant food, and therefore a healthy body to keep said soul from escaping on its own.

They spent a long time going through the compound before blowing it up. None of the guys under May's command proved to be good enough with explosives to set everything off in a way that guaranteed no recovery of the equipment by local governments. May had asked Tripp if he could do it, and got a dismayed look in return.

"I was only with Garrett for nine months. Signed on right after Ward joined your team."

"Why'd he choose you?" May asked, preparing for the struggle and shame she knew her question would get. Tripp, though, surprised her by answering honestly.

"I do not know. And I have thought about it. If there was something he saw in me, if I was special… in a bad way. But I'm kinda the most ordinary guy of all, you know? I do not think he targeted me specifically. It was just a cover, I guess. Garrett had spent a long time pairing with Ward and did not get anyone on for a long time after that. They had this weird father-son relationship. People were about to start wondering."

The 5 years gap in Ward's story was still bothering her as much as it was bothering Phil. Whatever had happened there (and no, May did not think Ward was holding out on the location of a Hydra boot camp—he was too much of a loner to have gone through that at the beginning of his training) had made him follow Garrett to the ends of the Earth, even to very obvious detriment to himself. It was something that smelled more like a personal cult follower than a full-time member of an illegal organization. But whatever it was, May had decided that her time limit would end by the time she came home from this mission. All in all, more than two weeks had passed; enough time to plan, arrive, set up and achieve.

If there was no news of him still, she would swallow her pride and talk to Phil about a worldwide wanted order. Maybe Talbot would be kind enough to see to Ward's future confinement arrangements himself. That is, if anyone managed to capture him.

"I asked around a lot at the beginning, OK?

She had been drifting, paying little attention, and had needed a moment to remember.

"What?"

"I was completely jealous. I wanted that, that tightness with my CO, and Garrett would not shut up about him. It was an all or nothing measuring stick; what Ward could pull, whom Ward could cross off, what risks Ward was able to take… I once base jumped into a fairly suicidal mission that I had already decided to pass on – and I could easily pass on without loss of face, because I had near zero experience in base jumping - because he patted me on the back, said it was perfectly OK, not to worry and he was just going to request Grant instead. "

"He was manipulating you," May said. She thought it was a foregone conclusion, but for all Tripp claimed that he'd thought about it, she could see that the thought itself was a new and uncomfortable one.

"Son of a bitch. I mean, he had no freaking hope to turn me, no hope whatsoever. My entire family breathes war stories, and all I ever wanted was to enter SHIELD. He could have never used me as a Hydra…"

"And still, he most probably did. He was high enough to be running free missions in the time you were together, nobody stopped to ask what and why he was doing the things he did. You should probably stop by the Playground for some questioning."

The look on Tripp's face was one of betrayal, worry and reluctant acceptance.

"I will. I swear though…"

"You are not in trouble. You could not have known. Garrett was Coulson's friend, they had both trained under Fury, and not one of them ever suspected."

Tripp nodded.

"Kind of makes you feel sorry for Ward, doesn't it? I mean, I was freshly level 5 when I started pairing with Garrett, and he was able to make me jump through fire after one month. If he started with Ward as he was just out of the Academy? Poor guy. I heard stories in training. He went through it much quicker than most, so we never actually met in person, but people do little more than compare scores in that place. His were perfect, which considering he never did anything but train? Actually fair. But then, when guys are done pummelling the shit out of one another, they usually go for drinks together. He didn't. He never socialised, couldn't tell a joke from somebody being serious most of the time. No wonder Garrett targeted him." He saw the look May was giving him and was quick to amend: "Not that it excuses his actions or anything".

"He knew Ward since he was fifteen. Set him up for recruitment, actually."

"That… actually makes even more sense."

That night she was still working out how to blow the compound (the local authorities were not helpful, the tech inside it was too cumbersome to take with them, and May had never been an explosives expert) as she went to sleep. She woke up in the middle of the night with a black certainty that Ward was dead. It came to her unbidden; having decided on a deadline, she had put all thoughts of him from her mind. And yet, there she was: bundled in her sleeping sack and wide awake in the middle of the night, just knowing that he had tried and could not pull it off.

She stayed awake for at least another two hours, not trying any technique to go back to sleep but planning how she would do it, if she had to. Wondering if it was even doable. Enough people had escaped Centipede (Quinn, that weird woman Raina) with the knowledge of Ward's arrest for May to know that he'd have no hope to talk his way in. Once compromised, forever tainted. The only access to the Fridge was through the roof. The walls were completely solid; any attempt to get close enough to blow them up would result in the guards and the automated cannons outside to mercilessly target you.

She finally slept, having come up with a couple of possibilities and knowing none of them were close to good, and kept dreaming of the Fridge. In her dream Ward was escorting her there, grinning at the guards inside while exhibiting her with her hands bound behind her back. They opened the doors for him, and as they stepped into the elevator May realised her binds were fake and would fall away. She walked ahead when the elevator stopped, aware of the fact that Ward was looking at her sideways, expectant, waiting. The moment she signalled she wanted to move in he eagerly passed her one of his own guns and turned his back to her to open fire on the guards. She shot him with no hesitation, execution style, a bullet direct to the head. He never had a chance to turn and look, just fell down in the middle of the corridor between May and all Hydra guards with automatic weapons. There was nowhere to hide anymore, and the guards proceeded to slaughter May in the matter of seconds. She woke up to a faint pain in the chest where the dream bullets had stricken her.

The next morning they blew the place up, having evacuated everyone within what was triple the safety radius, and went on their ways. May was home by sundown of the next day, having the disadvantage of flying west this time.

Simmons, Sky and Fitz (probably on a weekend break) were watching some movie in the common room, torn bags of salty snacks all around them. Fitz smiled self-consciously at her and busied himself with more saltines. Skye left out a squeak and jumped up in greeting, but May ignored her.

Coulson, just as always, was to be found in his office. May knocked on the closed door, and this time actually waited until given permission. The formalities ended there; she was very tired, and even the uncomfortable seat in front of the solid desk looked inviting enough under the circumstances.

"It proved to be a very good lead," she said as a preamble to debriefing. He nodded, but she could see his mind was miles away. "What is it? Anything happened?"

A short negation of the head and a set of pressed lips that spoke of a hard decision that was imminent were all the warning May got. She knew what it would be, though, and Coulson's next words left no doubt as to the nature of their predicament.

"The Fridge beacon has been activated."

-A very special thanks to the lovely Bibliophile109 for betaing this for me. The style of this story is now much improved for it!