Disclaimer: If I owned the MCU – The Winter Soldier would have been a very different movie. That's really what it comes down to.
Note: Normally I'd be waiting a few more days to put this up, but I just got let go yesterday from my job (shitty and minimum wage as it may have been, it was still my source of you know, rent money and food money) and I'm in an increasingly bad mood about it. So I'm posting this today because reviews/comments/etc make me feel better.
Thanks to Riley Holden/Colormeblue for beta-reading this chapter
Ledger Dripping Red
By Alkeni
Chapter 3: I Don't Want To Know
Skye's Room, The Playground
October 2nd, 2014
For the first time in her life, Skye wished she wasn't as good with computers as she was.
It was a thought she'd never thought she'd have, but staring at the screen of her laptop, it was a thought she was having.
Because if she hadn't been so damn thorough in wiping Ward from the internet, she could have filled this request for AC in a few hours and be done with it. She wouldn't have to think about him – she could have spent some of that time pretending Ward didn't exist. That he had never existed. That he hadn't made her fall in love with him and then turned out to be a lying murdering traitorous Nazi bastard. That he hadn't torn her heart out and made it feel like it was impossible to trust anyone with it again.
It wasn't easy to pretend, but those few hours when she was able to pretend, to not think about him – they were precious. Because the other option was a hell of a lot worse.
And now she couldn't help but think about him. Because for the last four days, that had been her entire job.
But what I do need is for you to find every piece of information you can about him. Every tiny scrap about Grant Ward that exists anywhere in any computer system you can access.
Coulson's words echoed in her mind, and it drove her crazy that she didn't know what the hell he wanted. That he wouldn't tell her. And that 'private' conversation he'd had. If Ward was suddenly talking to Coulson, would she ever need to go back down into Vault D to get intel from him? If the universe was even remotely kind, she wouldn't have to.
Then again, has anything happened in the last year that gives me any reason to think that the universe is 'kind'?
The answer to that question, of course, was a resounding no.
Skye had found out a few things about Ward, but not much. A few old newspaper and magazine articles, old TV interview transcripts that mentioned the middle Ward child when they discussed Congressman Johnathon Ward, but never in any detail.
Everything she'd found out about the no-longer-in-office daddy Johnathon and older brother Christian, now a Senator, only made her get the impression that the pair of them were exactly the kind of soulless, unprincipled jackasses that made people not trust politicians in the first place.
I guess Ward had to get it from somewhere.
She checked each of those articles, skimming them, putting them into the file for Coulson, but then she found something strange: right around the time Ward would have been 16... he's no longer mentioned at all. Johnathon Ward never talks about a son named Grant. Christian never speaks of a 'Grant'. A 'Thomas', yes, that youngest brother, but never a Grant. It was as if he didn't exist to his family. Or to the rest of the world.
She finally found something that might be an answer when she came across a newspaper article in a local Massachusetts paper, buried in the back pages.
Ward Family Home Burned To The Ground
The headline was what caught her eye. Rather than just adding it to the file, she read it. It mentioned that Christian Ward was in the house, but was unharmed. But no mention of who started it. But the date:
Right before Grant Ward fell off the map for his family.
So he was always a killer, then. Even as a kid.
She searched more around that date, and found a petition, filed by Christian Ward to have his brother tried as an adult for arson and attempted murder. Which meant that the legal system knew that Ward had done it. Had him in custody. Was going to try him.
And yet five years later he was at the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy, without a criminal conviction – Skye had read his file well before she'd wiped it and never seen any mention of it. Not even a hint or a vague reference.
And of course, there was no court case.
So what happened?
The answer came to her when she saw another bit of news from a few weeks later. It didn't mention Ward at all but it did mention the Juvenile Detention Center in Plymouth Massachusetts where Ward would have ended up.
It was attacked. Attacked by unknown men with a half-dozen prisoners, all unnamed, now on the loose. Well, 'now' as of when the article was written.
That answered why his attempted murder, his incarceration wasn't in his S.H.I.E.L.D. file.
Hydra wiped it from his file. Kept it hidden. She wondered why that hadn't been the first thought to come to her mind.
Ward was always Hydra. They must've realized what a sick bastard he was and plucked him out of Juvie. Inducted him into their little Nazi Death-Cult and sent him into S.H.I.E.L.D.
Always a liar. Always a monster. And she'd trusted him.
She'd fallen for the emotionless, by the book act. She'd fallen for his 'Grant Ward, stalwart Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.' act She'd fallen for the act as he 'slowly opened up', as he 'let her in'. As he became more and more 'personable'. The way he'd saved Simmons life, put himself on the line to save the team time and again. Acted like he cared. Cared about her, about FitzSimmons, about the team.
She'd fallen for his act, she'd fallen for his looks, and she'd fallen for him.
And the entire time – the entire time he was lying to everyone around him. From the moment he joined S.H.I.E.L.D. all the way to now. He lied.
And from the start, Grant Ward was a sick, murderous little bastard. Always a psychopath.
Skye shoved the information into the file and set her laptop on the bed, stepping away from it. She needed some air – as much as she could get on this base, anyway – and she needed to get away from anything to do with Ward. Just, just for a little while. An hour, at least. She couldn't think about him. Couldn't think about him, about Garrett, about Hydra.
She didn't want to wonder what happened to Ward in those five years between Juvie and the Ops Academy. She didn't want to wonder about Ward or about anything to do with him.
So she didn't. She refused to let herself think on it, think on him. On any questions. Ward was a monster. A murderer. A traitor. A psychopath. He was evil. That's all there was. All there could be.
You fell in love with a guy who seemed almost too good to be true because he fucking was.
Skye couldn't think about that. So she didn't.
Coulson's Office, The Playground
October 3rd, 2014
This time, Skye didn't knock.
She just barged into his office and dropped a thick file onto his desk. Coulson looked up at her. She was angry, eyes narrow, mouth clenched tightly, lips thin. Whether she was angry at him, angry at Ward or angry at...everything that was happening, he couldn't tell. Probably all of the above.
"Everything on Ward. School yearbook photos, his family, every little scrap. All there. Happy?" She turned around without another word and left before he had a chance to say anything back.
I suppose I may have deserved that. He'd known what having her dig into Ward's history would do to her, but there just hadn't been anyone else to give the assignment to. If there was anyone who could find information on Ward after Skye had wiped him so thoroughly, it was Skye herself.
Coulson looked at the still closed file. It was thicker than he'd thought it would be. But then, Skye was always through and she'd been at it for nearly five days. He picked it up in his hands.
Somewhere in this file is the information that has Romanoff convinced Ward deserves a second chance. And the information she thinks that will do the same for me, that I would have already known if I'd dug deeper sooner.
Well, one could only imagine the information was in here. Somehow, somewhere, Romanoff had found something that had convinced her to come here and demand to see Ward.
And something in that meeting had convinced her that Ward deserved a second chance. Unless he missed his guess, anyway, and he was really hoping he had. He was really hoping Romanoff didn't believe that anymore. But he doubted it.
And that was what was bothering him. What had been bothering him for days, ever since Romanoff's visit. Because Natasha "The Black Widow" Romanoff was a damn good agent. Arguably the best, and she wasn't given to sentimentality. Yes, Ward had saved her life three times, which had to influence her opinion – she was always loyal to people who had saved her life, paying loyalty back with loyalty. That loyalty would have been enough for her to start digging, to come here and demand that meeting. Demand a chance to evaluate him for herself, firsthand.
But it wouldn't have been enough for her to believe he deserved a second chance after a meeting with him just on that loyalty. She knew something – something big – and something had happened in that meeting. She was too good to let sentimentality get in the way.
And frankly, he had trouble believing that Ward had successfully lied to her, fooled her into believing in him. Very, very few had ever successfully lied to Romonoff when she was actually questioning them, when she was actually looking for lies.
Of course, one of the few people who could probably lie to her successfully was Grant Ward.
Which brought the whole damn train of thought back around to the fact that Grant Ward was a traitor. A liar. A murderer. He didn't deserve a second chance. He didn't deserve anything resembling the general neighborhood of anything that vaguely looked like a second chance! Not after what he'd done.
If he'd wanted even the slightest chance at redemption, he'd have spilled his guts the first chance he was given. Instead, he'd stayed silent as question after question was asked of him.
And while you repeatedly told him that even if he talked he wasn't getting out of that cell.
He'd realized some time ago that that had been a mistake. And a rookie one at that.
Even if you have no intention of freeing a prisoner, regardless of their co-operation or lackthereof – which was the case with Ward – you still didn't tell them that. You didn't lie to them, because that would end up just as bad in the long run. It was a basic rule of interrogation, in was in the same vein as telling someone that you were going to kill them as soon as they told you all the information that you were trying to get. It was a surefire way to get them to shut down. It removed all incentive.
But if he really wanted redemption, he'd have told us everything. Without needing any sort of incentive, any sort of chance to get out of the cell, and without seeing Skye as his price. Ward was unrepentant. A repentant man didn't make demands and certainly not demands like that.
Unlike May, Coulson was willing to entertain the possibility that Ward really had had genuine feelings – maybe even love – for Skye, in some sick and twisted way. May and probably Skye believed that he just thought Skye would be the weak link, the easiest to manipulate. That he could play on the feelings she'd had for him, get her sympathy. Coulson was also willing to consider that possibility – and he was more than happy to let Skye think that, to foster that perception in her. After everything that had happened, with everything that was still happening, the last thing she needed to think was that the psychopath in their basement really might love her.
Coulson wasn't naive enough to believe that love was somehow a quality that was unique to good people, that only good people could love. That evil people couldn't love. That was wrong. Evil people were just as capable of love – he'd seen too many otherwise monstrous people interacting with their spouses or children to think otherwise.
But it didn't change a thing. Whether he wanted to see her because he really did have feelings for her or because he thought he could manipulate her, he wouldn't set her as the price or his intel if he'd been truly repentant. If he'd really wanted to make up for his crimes.
If Coulson hadn't made the amateur – if all too human – mistake of letting his anger, hatred and disgust get the better of him, he might have been able to crack Ward, to get intel from him without sending Skye down there. Without subjecting Skye to that.
But he had let his anger, hatred and disgust get the better of him. It was personal. Romanoff really had been right about that.
But that didn't change the fact that Ward was unrepentant! That even if he was, there was nothing he could do to make up for what he'd done.
If it had just been killing Hand, Koenig and the other agents, maybe, maybe he could have someday earned the chance to make up for what he did. Earned the chance to win a measure of redemption, maybe even a little actual redemption, Romanoff had killed Agents after all. She'd killed a lot of people.
But Ward had done more than that. He'd kidnapped Skye, dropped FitzSimmons into the ocean – he'd turned on the very people who had relied on him for protection. He'd been loyal to John Garrett to the end – so loyal that he'd stuck by the insane psychopath all the way to the end.
There was no forgiving that. No coming back from that.
Coulson let the file drop onto the desk with a light thud. A small part of him, the part of him that had insisted that Akela Amador, Skye and Mike Peterson deserved second chances wondered if Romanoff had a point. A small one anyway. Ward had done terrible things but maybe there was a more complicated explanation? He owed it to himself to understand it, if it existed. And if it did, perhaps there really was room for Ward to deserve a shot at redemption. A small shot at a small amount, but still...
Romanoff had a habit of being right. Could she be right about this. Could she at least be a little bit right?
No. No. Ward was a psychopath. She had to be wrong.
You know how often I'm right about things like this. A voice that sounded suspiciously like Romanoff pointed out in the back of his mind.
And it was that voice, the possibility that she was right and he was wrong that made him not want to open the file. After everything Ward had done, after the team had been completely shattered by his actions, his betrayal, he didn't want to think about the possibility that Ward did deserve a chance at redemption. A chance to 'wipe the red from his ledger' as Romanoff might put it. It was a proposition he did not want to contemplate. A possibility he did not want to subject Fitz, or Skye or Billy Koenig to.
I don't want to know if there's something in Ward's past that explains it. I don't want to know about the 'five years' Romanoff mentioned. I don't want to know what she's talking about when she said that Garrett had to brainwash Ward the old fashioned way. I don't want to understand him. I want to hate him. It's simpler. He's everything that happened to S.H.I.E.L.D. in one person. The lies, the betrayal, the evil.
Coulson had never articulated the thought like that.
And he looked down at his hands, as if suddenly not recognizing them as he realized what it was he had just thought. What it was he had just articulated.
Do I really hate Ward that much? That I'm willing to just – ignore truth if its inconvenient?
Coulson had always valued truth. Yes, secrets were necessary. Yes, lies had to be told to protect those secrets at times. But truth – truth was important.
And here he was, wanting to ignore what could be an inconvenient truth about Grant Ward. And that -
Coulson looked at his hands a moment longer, then lowered them to the desk. A split-second of...epiphany came to him as he realized what he'd been thinking. As he realized that he'd let Ward change him that much.
Ever since Hydra had come out of the shadows, had destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D. Coulson had held onto one singular thought. That Hydra could never win.
Hydra could never win as long as there was one solitary agent left who still held to the ideals of S.H.I.E.L.D. The ideals of protection. The ideals of doing the right thing, of sacrificing of oneself for the greater good. The ideals of doing what had to be done – but understanding that even necessary actions came with a cost, that they couldn't be done lightly.
But...
If he could let Ward change him this much. Make him hate so much - Hate so much that he abandoned his ideals. Then Hydra could win.
What if Ward had succeeded in killing FitzSimmons? Would I have let May torture him?
That was a chilling thought, and one he didn't want to have. He didn't want to contemplate the possibility that Hydra could push him, push S.H.I.E.L.D. so far that they became just as bad as Hydra in their methods.
The ends could, at times, justify given means. But only justify. Never excuse. And there was a limit to how much could be justified.
Coulson took a breath and opened the file.
Coulson's Office, The Playground
October 3rd, 2014
Coulson closed the file.
He was really wishing he hadn't read it. He was really wishing that Romanoff hadn't arrived, hadn't raised doubts, hadn't forced him to try and step outside of everything, hadn't more or less made him have Skye create this file. Hadn't raised enough doubts that he'd more or less shamed himself into reading a file with more questions than answers.
Coulson knew the details of Ward's family. His older brother, his parents. S.H.I.E.L.D. had never had either the proof or the interest to make anything of it, but that was often the case. S.H.I.E.L.D. knew a background and a psychological profile that bespoke abuse when it saw one.
So when he'd seen the report on the burning of the Ward home, and Skye's note that all mention of Grant Ward stopped at this point, he didn't think it was just some random act, unprovoked. Christian had done something and it had prompted Ward, who really had been at Military School at that point, to burn down the house, with Christian in it.
What Ward did – that wasn't okay. But the petition to have him tried as an adult? The description Christian gave of his brother, why he was so dangerous as to need to be tried as an adult and needed to be in prison for as long as possible. Coulson didn't believe a word of it. But arson and attempted murder weren't okay.
Which was why Ward should have served his Juvenile Hall sentence, then been let out, like the law was supposed to do. But if he'd been tried as an adult – a sixteen year old kid subjected to a lifetime of abuse, he'd be facing at least a decade, probably more. For something that didn't merit that much.
Coulson thought back to that first conversation he'd had with Ward, discussing his file.
Under "people skills," she drew a... I think it's a little poop, with knives sticking out of it. That's bad, right? And given your family history, I'm surprised it's not worse.
He'd always thought Ward really had shown a remarkable recovery from his past. But...maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe he hadn't recovered at all.
He also saw the report on the attack on the juvenile detention center – and something else he'd seen in the file suddenly hit him.
One of the instructors at Ward's Military School, the Quartermaster... Coulson recognized the name. It was one the Marines that Garrett had worked with in the first half of the 90s, when he'd liaised with the U.S. military quite a lot, in the same general way Coulson liaised with the Peruvian National Police. A guy Garrett had referred to as a buddy more than once.
A picture Coulson didn't want to imagine was starting to emerge. He could just see the conversation, the offer: Stay in prison, serve a decade or more, let your family win, come out a felon with no future. Or come with me.
Coulson knew Garrett. He knew the way he worked, the way he persuaded people – he was slow about it. He'd start with one thing, then the next, then suddenly he almost has you believing that throwing Ian Quinn out of the plane was your idea.
I should have taken that as a red flag, if nothing else.
Garrett wouldn't have presented a young Ward with a choice of 'prison or my evil organization bent on mass murder and world domination'.
He'd have been slow. He'd taken a broken kid who had been beaten down his whole life.
And as Romanoff had said, Garrett had had five years with Ward.
Five years to bend him to his will.
Coulson had no idea if this was right. This was supposition. Theory. He didn't want to believe it. Didn't want feel the fragments of sympathy he was feeling for Ward. He didn't want to be reminded that Grant Ward was a human being, and that humans were never one-dimensional, that humans had motives, that humans did things for reasons. Usually, complex ones.
It was much simpler to just stamp Ward as a 'Hydra Psychopath' and file him into a box labeled 'Evil'. It was much easier to do that for everyone who had joined Hydra.
It didn't excuse what Ward had done. It didn't even mean that Ward really deserved a second chance. But...
Coulson wasn't the person who should be making that call. There was a reason the victim of a crime, or the friends and family and loved ones of the victim of a crime weren't allowed to decide the sentence. Why they weren't on juries. Because that wasn't justice.
It was revenge.
Even after reading this – it didn't change anything. He hated Ward. He wanted Ward to suffer.
And even if those weren't true, there was no way he could verify the theory, the theory Romanoff had obviously formed. The only options were to hold a séance and talk to Garrett, which would hardly work, or go down and ask Ward. But Coulson couldn't trust a damn word that came out of that man's mouth. Not after he'd lied. And lied. And lied.
There was no way that he could know if Ward... Romanoff was convinced. He couldn't be. Either because it was too personal, and it was blinding him. Or maybe because he knew Ward – the real Ward – now and Romanoff was the one who was wrong.
But the only way to find out... There would have to be conditions. Constraints. They needed the intel in Ward's head. If he was released into Romanoff's custody, she'd have to agree to get all that info.
Of course, the threat of Ward escaping her custody was a possibility. He'd never be able to actually 'get past' her but even the best couldn't be everywhere. But they could take precautions against that. Even their laser-grid cell wasn't perfect. Nothing was.
If Romanoff wanted Ward, she could have him.
Entrance, the Playground
October 4th, 1999
Romanoff got into the base the same way she'd gotten in before. This time, though, she didn't especially care if someone saw her. She wasn't going to bother with stealth. If Koenig raised a fuss because she didn't have a lanyard... well, she wasn't going to be here for long.
But she was leaving here with Grant.