So after many, MANY a long months, it's finally done. I'm going to be honest - I wrote this in maybe 6 hours after I had stared blankly at the same page for almost a year and a half. I haven't watched SHIELD recently because of how badly the writing on the show had gone, and it's really hard to recover a 'voice' when I no longer hear it on a weekly basis, if that makes sense. DarknessandDeath, who legit went reviewed every chapter as they read it, is a BIG reason why this actually got finished after so long. The writer's block is no joke, dudes. Also,The Cocky Undead let me pick her brain at all hours of how I had totally written myself into a corner and couldn't think of a way out of it. So. Huzzah! Over two hundred pages written, roughly 120k words, and BAM! It's finally done!

Fitz yelped in pain as he dropped to the floor, clutching at his leg. Blood bubbled up from between his fingers, just above and to the right of his knee at the meaty part of his thigh where the bullet tore through the muscle.

Ward's hands immediately ignited, a snarl of rage escaping his lips before Gonzalez redirected the muzzle.

"You're fast enough to save yourself, I'm sure, Mr. Ward. But I assure you – you are not fast enough to save both of you," he warned. This time the gun was aimed at Fitz's head, unwavering and with his finger still on the trigger.

Ward may be fast, but the Director was right. With it aimed as it was, with his finger just shy of exerting enough pressure to fire, Ward couldn't risk it.

Not yet, anyway.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Coulson demanded angrily, starting for Gonzalez as if he meant to beat the older man to death with his bare hands.

A round of clicks from the surrounding agents as half turned from Ward to Coulson's small group. He stopped, inwardly cursing not for the first time about not paying enough attention to personnel changes when Gonzalez had started them.

They were outnumbered, and even in that small group they had one injured, one Inhuman and two HYDRA genetic specials – all three of whom hated each other – and three specialists, who while good at their jobs were not magic, nor were they bulletproof.

Poor odds did not even begin to describe their situation.

"The world is changing, Coulson," Gonzalez snarled. "HYDRA was only a piece of the shit show the world has become. People who aren't people any more are making more and they're allying against us, and we have nothing to defend against them. People who can teleport, immortals…how you can you even argue that they're people anymore? I am done with watching good SHIELD agents die because of our past mistakes. I want it known that not even HYDRA's last line of defense was enough to stop SHIELD this time. These two? Willing or unwilling, they're stronger than anything the Inhumans can throw at us. Trained by HYDRA and SHIELD's top operatives, and their abilities aren't new. Adaline wanted them as HYDRA's weapons? They can just as easily be ours. Attack dogs belong in cages or on leashes, not allowed to wander free as if we don't know what they've done. Adaline Ward's chimeras are now our monsters, and so help me God, if all I have to do to make sure the rest of our agents, our people, come home alive is eliminate one more obstacle?"

He kept his gun trained on Fitz, but his frighteningly manic gaze slid towards Coulson.

"It's one last sacrifice I'm willing to make."

"So your plan to save SHIELD agents is to kill more of them?" Coulson demanded. "How does that make sense?"

"I'm prepared to die for what I believe in, Agent Coulson. Can you say the same for you and yours?" The older man gave a meaningful nod towards Jemma and Skye.

Coulson felt his heart skip a beat. Was he willing to sacrifice any more of his people, limited as they were, for the moral greater good? There was no option where they walked away from this unscathed. Gonzalez already proved the lengths he was willing to go to show he didn't need the same controls Zola did to make Grant Ward do his bidding, and Coulson harbored no illusion that Ward could be kept at bay without the threat of violence to Fitz. Which meant if he caved, not only was he agreeing to let Ward be used as little more than an attack dog towards anyone that Gonzalez viewed as a threat, but it also meant agreeing to let him use any means necessary against Fitz.

His two agents he'd failed the most, and it looked like his only option to make sure the others got out of this alive at all was to let them down again. Gonzalez had made no indication that if Coulson decided to make a stand the rest of them weren't expendable. Even if they were allowed to walk out of this room, there was no guarantee it wasn't just to holding cells.

Or a firing range.

He glanced back at his team – Jemma. Skye. May and Hunter and Bobbi. Was he willing to let them die, right here and now, where their deaths would amount to nothing? As soon as they were dead, Gonzalez would keep on his current path, and there would be no one to stop him. With Adaline Ward's chimera formula, courtesy of Angela and Grant's DNA mapping, it would only be a matter of time before he applied it to others. Before he started making his own army of enhanced people, and started a war.

Without a miracle, he could think of no way out of this without making a sacrifice play. If he did nothing now, he could only hope that there would be a chance to do something later – and that by surrendering now didn't mean summary execution.

He met Ward's gaze, because he couldn't bring himself to make eye contact with Fitz.

Ward met his gaze evenly, and Coulson could see the moment his former agent realized that Coulson had made his decision. There was a brief flash of betrayal, but there was something else there, too. Acceptance? Understanding?

No. Neither of those were quite right.

It was vindication.

Ward knew what Coulson's choice would be before he even made it.

He laughed softly, as if at a private joke, his head dropping momentarily and hiding his face. When he looked back up, those dark eyes were unreadable – as flat and dangerous as a shark, and Coulson half expected to be screaming class alpha fire in the next few seconds.

"So this is how it ends, huh?" he said, a strange little smile playing across his lips. "With a bang and a whimper."

And just like that, the room exploded.

Ward wasn't an idiot. He knew what the options would be in whatever standoff Gonzalez was going to create before he'd even fired the gun, and knew what Coulson would conclude. At least Coulson was nothing if not predictable. He would always protect those that he thought no one else would, or ones that couldn't do it themselves.

He wasn't sure if he was pissed that once again, Coulson was leaving him to save himself, and oddly flattered that he trusted him enough to know that Ward would protect Fitz, even when Coulson couldn't.

If he was going to do something, it had to be fast, and it had to be accurate, or none of them were getting out of this alive.

When Angela had unlocked whatever mental block she'd installed decades ago – it wasn't like recovering memories, like something long forgotten suddenly remembered. There were no more missing pieces. No more abstract sensations or disjointed nightmares indistinguishable from reality. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, he knew what he could do, how to do it, and why.

He wasn't a mistake.

He was a prodigy.

He'd outstripped Angela's abilities when they were children. But unlike his older siblings, he couldn't be made to do what he didn't want to do. And he didn't want to attack people he didn't know. Didn't want to be a part of their 'family' of HYDRA operatives and heads and subterfuge. He was good. And Adaline couldn't abide an ungrateful child who couldn't be bothered to do as he was told. Especially not after the first fire that wasn't an accident.

The failure didn't lie with him – it lay with Angela. A thirteen year old that didn't care about fine tuning or details or repercussions. Mom says jump – you ask how high. If she told you to be a safety lock on your thermonuclear brother so he wouldn't be able to use the gift she gave that thankless little shit, then you crammed all of the memories and knowledge of it into a piecemealed box, and tried to tweak the fundamentals of a personality you didn't understand yourself.

He'd forgotten all of it. Including how much it hurt with her untrained and uncaring fingers in his brain, severing bits and pieces of him to make him a little more her and a little less him. But people could not be unmade, and the patch was sloppy at best. Given enough time, and he would dig out the box of memories all on his own, whether he realized it or not.

And as much as he hated her for it – for all of it, he couldn't find fault in her logic. Cold and cruel as it was, she was simply the product of Adaline Ward. And unlike Christian, she played the game just long enough to make her own way out. She never came after him. She simply let it be survival of the fittest, and stayed as far away from him as possible.

But.

But.

She wasn't on the sidelines anymore. She wasn't some faceless player on a board he wasn't invested in.

As Coulson and Gonzalez sniped back and forth to one another over moral right and lawful evil, Ward made his own decision.

And really hoped Fitz wouldn't be mad.

The first explosion was simply a distraction. Enough of a bang to knock everyone nearby off their feet, because honestly, he couldn't be sure hitting them with anything hot enough to kill them wouldn't also make every piece of munition they had on themselves explode. And explode in unpredictable directions.

He focused mostly on Gonzalez and his itchy trigger finger, concentrating the level of oxygen up his arm so the fire race upwards along his sleeve. Instinct with fire wasn't to clench your muscles, it was to splay them out or let go of whatever you thought was hot, and the Director didn't let him down.

With a yelp, he dropped the gun almost in Fitz's lap as he used his other hand to try and bat out the flames.

"Stop them!" he shouted, yanking off his burning jacket and hurling it on the ground. "Take them alive!"

Oh good, Ward thought. At least he hadn't overestimated his own importance. There had been a brief moment he considered what would happen if Gonzalez gave the order to shoot them instead of capture, but he hadn't dwelled on it. Dead was better than back to being a puppet.

Most of the hanger was already in flames thanks to his and Angela's showdown earlier, and the air thick with smoke, the heat radiating in waves that made things almost impossible to see through the haze.

The heat didn't bother him, though. He could even keep his clothes from burning if he concentrated enough on keeping the heat and the flames away, and he could keep the worst of it away from Fitz until he could get him standing.

Tactics, first, he reminded himself.

The nameless hired muscle for the Director weren't a primary concern for him. Well, other than the fact that if they got too hot, they were going to turn into human IED's, which he had no interest in sticking around for, but most of their clothing was at least flame retardant, if not fireproof.

The ground shook, and he risked a glance over his shoulder to Skye, hands splayed out and a look of grim determination across her face as she less than delicately kept the soldiers off their feet.

Maybe there was hope for his Rookie after all.

And he had to believe that Coulson would concentrate on getting the others out of the literal line of fire, and if he didn't – well, Bobbi and Hunter were pretty smart. They would prioritize Jemma and Skye's escape over helping him with Fitz. At least, that's what he was banking on.

He could barely make out his sister through the haze, but he could hear her coughing and choking on the super-heated air and smoke, but when she met his eyes through the haze, he saw her eyes narrow in anger.

He'd ruined a perfectly good thing she'd set up for herself.

"You should've seen it coming!" he shouted.

"Why do you think I gave you that hatchet job when we were thirteen?" she yelled back. "You're going to wish –"

Ward didn't let her finish. He wasn't stupid. He wasn't about to get his homicidal sister monologuing, and he wasn't about to give her a chance to use her powers.

Not ever again.

Because Grant Ward was nothing if no vindictive.

Angela's shriek of pain was cut abruptly short as the fire seared its way across her vocal cords. Once pale and beautiful skin blistered, cracked and blackened with surgical precision across her neck.

Killing her would've been merciful. Powerless, but with all the secrets of HYDRA and Adaline's lab in her head? The secrets she'd once so carefully collected and hoarded as she made her way through life like a human hurricane were no longer an asset. No longer a bargaining chip. They were, however, every reason for Gonzalez to keep her locked in the Vault with all of his other dirty little secrets.

Let's see how she liked having someone dig through her head for once, Ward thought grimly.

"Ward!"

He spun back around, barely managing to catch Fitz as the younger man stumbled to his feet, tenderly holding his weight off his injured leg.

"I gotcha," he assured, keeping one arm underneath Fitz's shoulders as he leaned heavily against him. His leg was bleeding, badly, but not immediately life threatening. If Fitz was up, it meant no femoral artery perforations, and he wouldn't be even half this stoic if the bullet had hit the bone. A quick check saw the exit wound. Gonzalez wasn't a half bad shot for a politician. "How bad does it hurt?"

"Like I've been shot in the leg," Fitz snapped, hopping slightly to steady himself.

The hangar was in shambles. The floor cracked and heaved underfoot from Skye, and it was only a matter of time before the munitions from the quinjets blew sky high.

They needed to get out, fast, but he also didn't want to leave without making sure Coulson and his team were out of danger. He may have his issues with them, but they were good people. Even Skye and May, given half a chance. And Coulson was the closest thing to someone giving a damn about what happened to him in his life in years.

"Go!" he shouted, pointing back towards the hangar entry, towards the reinforced bunker of SHIELD's headquarters.

"What about you?" Coulson protested, even as he backed towards the door. The heat was getting more intense, enough that it was beginning to singe their skin, making them look like they'd been in the sun too long. Gonzalez's goon squad came prepared for a firefight – they would outlast Coulson's agents, and none of them came armed to take on the small army they were facing off against.

"Don't worry about us!" Ward said. He pulled Fitz closer as he tried to focus on keeping the heat at bay. He couldn't do it for long, and he couldn't manage it for Coulson's team, but at least Fitz wasn't in danger of becoming a briquette. "I've got him!"

Coulson's face faltered, a strange sort of emotion Ward couldn't readily identify flitting across it. "Ward, don't –"

"Get out of here!" he interrupted, and used a blast of heat to make him stumble back. "Now!"

Because they had more than just the fire to worry about. They had to worry about Agent Weaver, wherever the hell she was. They had to worry about how many more of SHIELD's agents were actually Gonzalez's agents. They might have more of a fight ahead of them than they even realized, but at least right now, no one knew for sure what the hell was going on here.

"Ward –" this time it was Skye and Ward wanted to scream. Now she wanted to talk to him?

"Beat it!" He set off one if the fuel containers, the force of the blast forcing her to drop her hands and flinch away, long enough that Hunter grabbed her around her waist and forcibly dragged her back with him.

Thank god for Hunter.

"Do you actually have a plan for getting us out of here?" Fitz asked.

Ward glanced up at the ceiling, and back to the quinjets. "Yeah, but you're not gonna like it."

Fitz coughed. "No surprise there."

Ward turned the two of them towards the emergency hangar exit when something slammed into him, grabbing around his waist like a linebacker tackle and slamming him into the ground. Fitz was knocked back and away from them, yelping when his injured leg hit the ground.

Ward didn't even have a chance to process what the hell just happened when a fist slammed into his face, breaking his nose and tearing up his eyes and making him reel. Another blow and another and another rained down on him with vicious ferocity, but the weight pinning his arms to his sides wasn't heavy enough for Gonzalez.

Through tears and blood, he could make out burnt, once radiant raven hair and sunburnt skin. Angela may not have her power anymore, but that didn't make her weak. Another blow rocked his head against the concrete with a crack and everything…stopped.

He felt disembodied. Like nothing worked. Like his body wasn't his own. It didn't hurt, per say, it just felt weird. Dimly, he was aware that was not a good sign, but it didn't really connect, either.

Angela's skin was bright pink and starting to blister, her face twisted into a hideous, silent snarl and Ward thought he smiled – now her outside was as beautiful as the rest of her.

And was probably the last thing he was going to see.

She pulled her fist back again, prepared to finish the job their parents started years ago when there was another crack. Angela toppled backwards without a sound.

He felt little more than if he'd watched a character die on a movie screen.

"For the record, that makes twice I've shot people for you," Fitz grumbled. He tucked the pistol down the back of his waistband as he leaned carefully over Ward. He must've picked up either Gonzalez's dropped weapon, or one from the drones. The details were still a bit blurry, and he was having trouble trying to convince his hands to move to wipe the blood and tears from them but he could tell Fitz was worried.

"Uh…wow…" Fitz gulped convulsively. "That's a lot of blood. How many fingers?"

The shape was obviously the younger man's hand less than a foot away from his face, but Ward had to squint anyway.

"Three," he slurred triumphantly.

Fitz shrugged. "Close enough. On the count of three, I'm going to get you up, but Ward, you have to make some effort of your own, yeah?"

"Uh huh."

As Fitz lifted him it was entirely too clear the damage Angela had managed. His movements were disjointed at best, his balance non-existent. He leaned heavily on Fitz's already overburdened left side as the shorter man tried to keep as much weight as possible off his injured leg.

With his head propped up because he was leaning against Fitz, he could see Fitz, too, was beginning to show signs of the heat.

Which meant Ward wasn't focusing enough to keep the fire at bay.

There went that escape plan.

"This is the end, isn't it?" Fitz wheezed. Smoke stained his face, sweat darkening his shirt and making his skin tacky.

Yeah, Ward silently agreed. It probably is.

The fire was everywhere – even Gonzalez retreated back towards the bunker doors with the few of his goons that remained, and was now between them and any thought of escape.

He tried to focus on what he knew he could do, tried to will his brain into long forgotten practice keeping the heat away. Maybe he deserved to go up in smoke – hell, it would practically be poetic – but Fitz didn't. The only reason Coulson had left him behind was because he trusted Ward to take care of him.

He shook his head, regretting it almost instantly when it sent a spike of agony straight through his brain, but it seemed to work. A little bit, anyways. The world wrenched itself back into sharp focus, and he made himself force the heat back.

Fitz gave a short lived sigh of relief, before cursing.

Gonzalez hadn't gone far – and even Ward could tell he was yelling at the fire brigade to fix the obviously malfunctioning fire suppression system. In a matter of minutes, the Halon and AFFF extinguishers built into the ceiling would smother the flames, and they would be right back to square one.

Gonzalez's prisoners.

Human experiments.

Weapons.

"Did you mean it?" Fitz rasped.

"What?"

"You'd rather be dead than go back to that?"

No need to specify what that was. They both knew damn well.

Just like they both knew damn well what Ward's answer would be.

Would always be.

He gave one quick, decisive nod.

"Me too," Fitz agreed. And he pulled the pistol from the back of his waistband and fired at the nearest munition container.

Don't worry. There's an epilogue. Also, feel free to come find me on Tumblr as disappearinginq! It's a nice way to talk without having a whole conversation in a review line!

Also.

Ahem.

#wardlives and #istandwithward