"Slept well last night?"

"I didn't even get close to drunk yesterday, May."

It wasn't what she meant, but then again it wasn't really surprising that Ward would get defensive at a perceived admonishment. May wasn't usually one for small talk, but she'd made an exception to find out more about the progress he had made with Skye. Ward was on the track to once again become a decent operative, but his mind was still a scary place. The more he opened up to May about it, the more she wished he'd find someone else for it. And while she'd never push Skye into it unwillingly, the girl was willing. In the last days she had all but stalked Ward. And she would certainly do a better job of it than May.

Another part of her was ready to admit that she was simply curious. May had expected Ward to be happy after having finally broken the ice and coming out of it not only alive, but as Skye's sparring instructor. Hell, she had expected him to be in the kitchen at the time Skye usually ate her breakfast, to capitalize on the understanding that had transpired the previous day. What May got was a bleary eyed Skye who looked like she had slept in after her most intensive workout yet, and was now as baffled as May at the Ward-less kitchen.

Breakfast came and went, and when May went down to the hanger she found him exactly where she had found him every other day: punching the bag with his headphones on and looking very much like he needed it.

"Wheels up in five."

"Got it."

He did throw May an affronted look – showering and changing in five minutes beat every strict SHIELD requirement, and it wasn't like the mission was time sensitive anyway –, but was off in a hurry.

They took the mini-jet to fly to the Bay Area to check out a rather far fetched sighting of a Fridge escapee. A girl had been admitted to the hospital with claw wounds, and her first report had claimed that a gigantic "thing with claws" had mauled her near a nature resort where she was camping with her friends. Skye had picked up the report from the police station records as soon as it came in, and since apparently one of the ex-arrestees did infamously have claws, off they went to check the story. There was no need to send a two specialist team, but activity was low after the last raid and Coulson didn't mind in the slightest.

The mission proved to be a bust right way. By the time May and Ward got to the hospital the personnel there had already established that the girl was high as a kite, and the mauling marks probably corresponded to a common feline. Ward had still produced a fake ID card featuring some green leaves on it and proceeded to very patiently and very straight facedly interrogate the girl until she became ashamed of the inconsistencies of her own story. She still tried to make him leave the card behind, and only relented after he wrote her his private number on the bandage wrapped around her arm.

The straight faced routine lasted only until they were back inside the jet, by which time they both groaned. The traffic in the area had been atrocious, and they still had a three hours flight back to look forward to.

"I can take the wheel, if you want," offered Ward.

This made May think back to something she had found suspicious about him, but had promptly forgotten.

"You aren't certified. It wasn't in your file. But you have helped me land the Bus, and you have flown it up and down the States all by yourself. How come?"

"John didn't want me to get certified. Said it'd attract too much attention if I went up the levels way too fast."

"It'd have taken you away from him. You'd normally get your own small team as a Level 7."

May expected him to protest the implication, but Ward just nodded.

"Yeah, something like that."

"He taught you?"

"Learned by watching him. Lots of double missions, lots of faraway places. Simply sitting there got boring in a while."

"Well, knock yourself out," she said.

In the next hour, May came to discover the one thing about Grant Ward she didn't realize she wanted to know until she learned it. Namely, something the man genuinely enjoyed. Had she had to answer the question before, she'd have said he loved boxing, weapon maintenance and push-ups. Which was as true as the fact that she loved filing. But the way he took the jet off the ground, a bit too brisk and eager, and just enough extra thrust in the engines to feel all their power, made it clear that he was enjoying it. Even once they had reached the cruising altitude, he flew the aircraft like it was meant to fly: no autopilot in sight, slight course corrections as a way to test the bird's reaction time. It was powerful and exhilarating, and not at all like a transport that didn't have any enemies on its tail was supposed to fly, but May was willing to overlook that.

"So what did you and Skye talked about yesterday," she asked after a while, when the sun had set down and Ward allowed the autopilot to come on in absence of any light.

"I told her she wasn't putting her feet right. We went through basic exercises and I corrected her stance a couple of times."

"And did it physically hurt?"

It was meant as a joke, a little pat on the head for a job well done. Sometimes, the level headedness of a specialist wasn't measured by how many bullets he could put in other people's heads, but by how well he could keep pretence under less than ideal circumstances. Watching Ward very patiently interrogate the slightly antagonistic, mightily stoned and very horny witness under the guise of a prudish forest ranger required more commitment to SHIELD than one would think in the first place.

He didn't rise to the bait and pretended to ignore the comment, but May wasn't deterred.

"You do this thing where you interact with me and Coulson. The two people who can and will end you in a blink if you as much as step out of line. But you won't even talk to Skye or Simmons, who are oblivious and merciful and who would fall for a lone "I am sorry" and probably forgive your ass. Why is that?"

"You and Coulson, I've made angry. Them, I hurt."

They flew in silence for a time after that. May hadn't seen it that way before, but as with too many other things about Ward, once she saw it, the logic made the perfect kind of sense. Because it stood to reason that Ward would think of people in terms of these who he fought with or against, and these who had to be fought for or around. She and Coulson were his equals, people he'd successfully lie to and consider himself clever, people he'd fight against and consider himself lucky to survive. Fitzsimmons and Skye, they were different, weren't they? Doing these things to them would have felt like harming a child.

There were certain pitfalls to that worldview, but May guessed that they'd be lost on Ward right now and she certainly didn't want to explain them to him. Like the fact that he didn't only make her angry - yes, he had, and it would forever be her primary emotion when remembering his shot stint in her bed. But he had also hurt her, even though she had took every precaution possible to never allow that to happen, and even now had a hard time admitting it did happen even to herself. As for Skye – it was completely obvious that anger was very much a constant in her life right now. At whom exactly, May doubted even Skye could tell.

"You still have to make nice with them. It's not your choice, it's damn well your sacred obligation. You do missions to make it up to Coulson and the Agency, you pull yourself together and stay that way for me, and you do whatever needs to be done for Fitzsimmons and Skye."

It was a little harsh, maybe. And it didn't escape her that she was giving him orders once again after she had made a point to avoid giving Ward any kind of instruction. It was for a good cause, she told herself. The people he had hurt had to come first. Ward shouldn't be allowed to hold back an apology because he was feeling too guilty to offer one.

"I will. Just need a little time to figure it all out."

"You see them every day, and you won't even look at them most of the time. You think that's fair? That it's about you having a hard time?"

"I know that, May! Complete the mission – it's no problem. That's what I do, that's what you have me here for. You didn't let me out of that basement cage to go around making nice with people. You don't even follow that advice yourself…"

"What advice? I didn't kidnap Skye and I didn't put Fitz in the hospital."

He rubbed his face with his both hands and went on tiredly: "I'll come to it, OK? It's not that simple. It has never freaking been, not even before. At least I didn't pretend the plane couldn't fly itself and didn't hide in the Bus cockpit every damn time we had a team evening."

May's reaction was immediate and furious, and it took Ward only half a second to realize that he had overstepped. By the time she had turned to him he had already frozen mid sentence, eyes and mouth wide. She didn't have to say anything, for him to do the thing with his hands where he started to move them up in a placating gesture, made himself stop upon realising he was doing it, then slowly completed the gesture anyway. His chin came down and his body turned a little away from May.

He was waiting for her to hit him, she realised dimly. She hadn't seen him do it in weeks, hated that he would still react like that and hated knowing that he'd probably never shake it completely. But all the same, she was too angry at the moment to do anything about it. In the end she just glared at Ward in furious silence until he stood up – the jet was on autopilot anyway -, and wordlessly made his way to the back of the plane.

May didn't see Ward during landing, and he was out of the plane by the time she had completed the post-flight checkups. As the higher ranking agent – as the only agent to be exact –, she was the only one required to go through debrief. Coulson was rather amused by the adventure, which May had frankly feared, but not enough to allow their partnership to continue for long. In fact, he wanted Ward for a solo sniper job the next day. By the time they were done with the meeting, evening had come. The common area was full of activity. Skye was preparing some frozen pizzas while Simmons dictated which ones they should choose. Ward was there too, much to May's surprise, rather apart from these two but still contributing to the cause by cutting the salad into army kitchen level of perfection sized bits. She had decided to check up on him after she was done with Coulson, and was relieved to see that everything was fine.

Just as May watched, he gathered the results of his cutting exercise, put them into a bowl that already contained tomatoes, bits of grilled chicken and cheese stripes and went to stare at the contents of the fridge.

"Is everyone OK with Caesar, or should I wait with the sauce?"

"Caesar is OK with me," announced Skye from inside the oven. Her head popped up after a second, and she looked around to check on Simmons, who had been chattering just a second ago but had suddenly gone silent. "Caesar is OK with everyone."

The rest of the evening went exactly like that. Ward brought the pizzas to the common room, cut them into painstakingly identical pieces and disappeared to bring napkins, and then plates, and then forks for the salad, and then a bin for the waste, until there weren't any excuses left not to sit down anymore. Skye had procured a game of Scrabble meanwhile. She was laying it a bit thick for May's taste, but who knew? The girl was taking charge and Ward was finally socializing, and it all looked so normal, and wasn't normalcy exactly what they all wanted anyway?

Skye ended up sprawled in the middle of the sofa, idly playing with her letters and chattering about latest news - the adventure of the bitten weed smoking camper had made the national TV somehow, and people were in all earnestness discussing the kind of new wild species that could have made the attack.

"Are they really arguing for a Bigfoot? Isn't it supposed to live, like, in Himalayas among the perpetual snows?"

"She went from a Bigfoot to a bear to a wildcat in about 5 minutes," said Ward. He had taken the chair, which was very sensible of him - the one that was positioned somewhat away from Simmons' direct line of sight and not too close to her. "There are some wildcats in Yosemite, but when I told her there weren't, she straight out admitted that it had probably been a big domestic cat. The big domestic cat of the couple camping near them, to be precise."

"Well, she's gone in the inverse order once again," pointed Skye.

"The size and the distance between scratches are clearly indicative of a lesser mammal," said Simmons. "Hoover. The domestic appliance, not the infamous FBI director. It's not much, but it does get double word points."

Skye groaned, but refrained from accessing her dictionary to check the point.

"She's doing it on purpose," she announced to May.

May had declined playing. It was enough that she was sitting there with them, and that – that had nothing whatsoever to do with Ward's earlier words. She was simply interested in the proceedings taking place in front of her. It was a "spot the 5 differences" game for her instead of Scrabble. Team game night, before and after one of them had tried to kill the rest. Simmons, arranging her letters and calculating strategy. Skye, munching on the pizza crusts, oblivious until someone reminded her of her turn. Ward, more concerned with not being out of line than with winning anything.

There were no 5 differences to find. There were no differences whatsoever, and that could either mean that they had lucked out and all was truly well, or that they had a giant red flag on their hands. Skye was the only one who seemed to genuinely enjoy herself but then again, it was really easy to make her smile. Simmons was doing everything to remain highly concentrated, but that was also nothing new. Simmons and Skye hardly had anything in common, and while they got along just fine, the biochemist missed Fitz fiercely, even with his discharge date coming closer every day.

Ward… Ward was behaving exactly like his pre-Hydra self would be. Which grated on her more than May would have imagined. Part of her wanted to smack his unassuming smile from his face and remind him he had no right to share anything with all these people. Except… what did she expect from him today? Another bout of broken down confessions? She had seen him at that stage. It hadn't felt like victory then, and had become a nightmare in hindsight. She had already made him pay in ways almost more terrible than the original crime. If he was now back to being himself, why was she resenting him for it? Ward was doing what she had told him, immediately after she had told him to do it, which was to play by Skye's rules. And it was making Skye obviously happy, so there was that. Playing pretend would have to be enough.

"Thanks for the H, Simmons," he grinned a little before reaching for the board. "Hybrid coming right up your way."

"I had plans for that H!" Protested Skye.

"Which is why you shouldn't leave your letters on the table for everybody to see."

"This is not Stratego!"

"It is what you make of it."

The only difference between this occasion and a real team night was that it ended much more quickly. Ward avoided getting roped into a second round of Scrabble with the pretext of doing the dishes and left the common room wishing them good night and smiling, and Skye got Simmons roped into a modified Scrabble game consisting only of swear words. From the self assured way she had explained the rules it seemed it wasn't the first game of this kind she'd proposed.

May also excused herself. She was ready to call it a night, but she knocked on Ward's door before going to her bunk. He didn't answer and she opened it – it was the only one to have no locks, and it had been made clear since day one that he should expect zero privacy. She had only meant to tell him that their team-up was over, because Coulson would probably only brief him on his new mission in the morning. The tiny room looked as neat as her own, but Ward wasn't there yet, which was surprising given the small amount of dirty dishes a pizza night tended to generate.

When she opened the door to her own bunk, there was a small gun lying on top of her nearly made sheets. Ward's contraband gun. The one she'd threatened to take away from him, before making him promise to let her know if he'd ever…

Damn him.

She thought about tracking him by his lanyard, assuming that he was wearing his (he was required to, but who the hell knew these days), but that would have meant to needlessly alert Koenig and Coulson, and May didn't expressly tell Ward to warn her of his funny moods so that she could drag him in front of a SHIELD commission.

Damn her. Why was it that she always made the same mistake with him? He had flat out asked her to respect the fact that there were things he wasn't yet able to do, and she still had pushed him.

She found him in the library, and easily enough. He was tucked in a chair with a book in his hands, looking for the entire world like he was perfectly all right and miles away, engrossed in some adventure. Thing with Ward was, he was too good a deceiver for his own sake. People would usually betray themselves if they were hurting, but he never betrayed anything at all. The sheer normalcy of the team dinner had been a glaring red flag from him. May should have known.

"What are you reading?" She asked coming up.

He showed her the cover, then passed a couple of pages back and forth without looking up or saying anything. Did he imagine that she could read his mind? Or maybe just the fact that she had understood and dropped by was enough? Deny oneself the access to the weapon, remain in public space. Enough to make by during one bad night. Should she confront him about it, make more small talk, what?

"Well, that was quick," the book was opened almost on the last pages, and May hadn't seen Ward in the library before.

"Rereading. I did this one a long time ago."

"Required reading?"

"Yes."

George Orwell, 1984. That hardly made sense. Why would John Garrett of all people want Ward to read up on indoctrination? Coercion, fear, fact manipulation, these were weapons of Hydra. Exposing Ward to them would only make him question them, wouldn't it?

"It was supposed to be an allegory of SHIELD."

"What?!"

"Fighting a self important war against some frequently not even existing enemies while there are real people dying on the streets of every major city, and real kids getting the shit beaten out of them every damn day. A register of gifted people who get schooled in what they can say and what they cannot. The slogans. Ignorance Is Strength was our favorite. For when another scandal got completely silenced for public good or some crap like that. We used to laugh about how they should just write it at the entry to the Hub. Yeah, and rewriting history half a dozen times. There was a report I had to change 4 times, last one two years after the actual mission, because there was an official inquiry by the government of South Africa into what I've been doing on their soil. Correct answer, infiltrating an embassy because some superpowered psychopath may have or may have not taken refuge inside. Redacted answer... I don't think I ever came to know."

"Hydra is guilty of the same thing."

"Give me some credit, I know perfectly well that Hydra is guilty of much worse."

"Then why are you rereading it?"

Ward looked down at the book in his hands, and May noticed that he wasn't rereading any random segment but rather a passage he had specifically searched for.

"Have you read it?"

"No." She knew the story, the Big Brother references. Knew it was a good book, but reading hasn't a part of her daily activities since long ago. Specialists had more useful ways to spend their time off the clock.

"This guy, Winston. He gets arrested in the end. And he gets tortured in the worst ways, and he confesses to everything, accepts everything they want him to accept, but he still never... Never betrays the person that he loves. And there is this one thing he is truly terrified of, and they threaten him with it... With starving rats eating through his face and he... he... he..."

May wasn't a newcomer to gruesome stories, and quite frankly, she could imagine how that particular one was going to end without hearing the words he seemed completely unable to squeeze out of his throat.

"He told them about the girl," she took mercy on him. "It happens. Everybody breaks. You know this, Ward."

He shook his head silently, a completely blank look to him now.

"No, no... They already had her. The only… He had to do... The only thing that'd… He... He told them to do it to her. Didn't only say it. He really meant it at that time." It came out in a whisper, and May never wondered if she had heard right because that made sense. A terrible, twisted kind of sense and Ward was still talking in a voice that was thin and unsure, like that of a child who couldn't begin to process the nightmare he'd just woken up to. "I wanted her to become a monster, only because I was too scared of being one myself. It was just for a second. I never ever thought about it after, or before. Just that one time. And... Every time I see her now, that's the only thing I think about. That I wished for that to happen to her... I can't… can't think about pizza… or Scrabble or… or nothing. Just… just about that."

He was still staring at the pages of the book with shell shocked, not seeing eyes. May took it from him, and there it was, the paragraph he had been reading.

"And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person."

She tried to think back to his actions in the Centipede main hall. Truth be told, she hadn't quite listened to Ward's and Skye's conversation, apart from a passing impression that whatever Ward's side of things was, he wasn't making any kind of sense. Except it did make sense now, with the new insight May had gathered about him. Garrett, the all encompassing figure in his life, had been unraveling. Skye had already read Ward the serial killer, betrayer of anything good that might have saved him act. And so he… what? Had that been his breaking moment? So quiet, unassuming, so… invisible to all? Before May took her fists to him, before the throat blow and the nail gun? Had he already broken down by then, and no-one even noticed?

She had forever wondered how he could have withstood all the "external" torture. The horrifying answer was, there had been nothing left for May to break. Damn her and Coulson for ever making jokes about it.

"Everyone reacts, when faced with things terrible enough. No moral is strong enough. No loyalty." He had faced his darkest, deepest fear in that white and well lit Centipede hall, and it had been so unbearable that for a second he had tried to save himself by turning against Skye. "That is the entire point of that book. That no matter how loyal, or noble, or good, any person can be entirely obliterated. It's terrible, and it's completely true. You know this, Grant. It's the description of your life. You'll figure it out, just as you do with everything else. Give yourself some credit."

She also told him to go to his room and sleep, and when she left she took the book with her. It was beyond May's capacity to make him heed her advice, and the only thing left was to leave him to his own devices. Back to her room, May swiped Ward's weapon off her bed and put it under her night table for safekeeping. The 3 bullets were still in it, and if Ward really wanted to do something stupid, he would have done it already.

She woke up in the middle of the night, arisen by a shuffle near her door and a soft knock on a wooden surface. It had come from the right, which was in fact Skye's door, and for a moment she was tempted to go back to sleep. The girl is a night owl, and the number of times she got up to raid the fridge was unprecedented. But then she heard Skye's sleep muddled "yeah?" directed at someone on the outside.

There were a couple of words exchanged that amounted to Ward – why wasn't May surprised – excusing himself for the timing of his visit. He was very quiet about it, and with reason. The clock on May's desk read almost 2 o'clock.

There was another short silence, and then Ward was speaking again in a somewhat clearer and not quite steady voice.

"I've never told you I was sorry. I guess you noticed. I guess everyone did. It's not that I am not. Sorry. Or willing to offer an apology. I've… I've been lying to you and everyone else forever, and I am very good at it. I could say anything and nobody would have any reason to trust me, now. I don't trust myself most of the time. I've said things to you before, things that I truly meant but didn't uphold afterwards. So, ah… I am… am sorry. I'm just trying to make very sure that when I say it, it won't just be words. I need to make certain that it can be believable, for both of us."

There was a soft whispering of a paper being folded up.

"You wrote that down?" Asked Skye.

"Took me a while."

"Thanks for saying this. And you are right. I have been wondering. OK, then. Take your time."

"I also wanted to ask you for a favour. If… Just… Eh. The thing this evening and the training yesterday? Please don't do that to me anymore. I've been playing pretend the entire time that I've been on the team, and I can't keep doing it now. It messes me up in very unpleasant ways. So please, please don't…"

"Don't what?" She had sounded very agreeable before, but now Skye did sound angry, her rising voice not quite adequate for the time of night. "What makes you think I am doing something that isn't a hundred percent real?"

"Breakfasts? Boxing lessons? Scrabble?"

"You like Scrabble. I like Scrabble."

"With me? With real me. No, I don't think so. How long did you spend convincing Simmons to go along with it?"

"A couple of minutes. If she had been dead against it, I wouldn't have done it. I would have taken her side. I will always take her side in this, you idiot. Which doesn't mean that I can't stand being close to you, or that I am afraid of you or that I hate you."

"But I need you to."

"What?"

"I need you to hate me."

"Why?"

"Because there must be a distance between somebody like you and somebody like me. There must always be a line… A very clear one. I don't want to ever have to imagine that I've made you into something like myself, that I've successfully pulled you down to my level…"

"You think I have to become… what, an evil monster to ever want to talk to you? That doesn't even make sense. No monster would ever try to understand you, or offer you forgiveness."

"That's the whole point. You mustn't offer me anything, ever. You'd just make yourself vulnerable and weak."

"You truly believe that, don't you? All this crap is actually stored up there in your head, just like that not personal bit. What idiotic and absolutely toxic caregiver did you ever have the disgrace to meet in your formative years? Compassion is never a weakness. It's all right to offer it to others. And it's all right to hope for it yourself."

"It's not all right if I just know that I'd only drag you down! It's not all right if you have a hundred other things much worthy of you attention, and you know what? It's not your job. It's not your obligation to hold my hand just because I was stupid and weak and I asked you to once, and you said "yes" without knowing what you were getting yourself into. I won't allow it, do you understand me? I won't allow you to use one second of your time to pull me up from whatever hell I walked right into. I did it, Skye. I did it all by myself with no help from others, and I will get out exactly the same way. I don't care how long it takes, I don't care how hard it gets, I will crawl back from this goddamned hole and then we can talk about having breakfast."

There was a silence after Ward's little speech, and the quietness of it made it clear just how loud the conversation had gotten. May was holding her breath waiting for Skye to reply, and she was positive that the entire hallway was also doing it.

"All right," came the quiet answer. "I won't pull you up. Not once, not even a little, don't worry. I'll stand right here, making sure at all times that you know exactly in which direction you are going, and I'll wait for you to come. And I'll make pancakes when you are close enough, so that they will still be hot when you get here. Does that sound fair?"

There was no answer, but Ward must have nodded, because what followed were two quick steps and drag of hands on fabric. A pleading whisper repeating "no, no, no, stop, please don't", and another hushing soft voice telling that it was all right. And then there weren't any sounds to be heard except for two people breathing – one steady and one hitching, both muffled by the mutual embrace. One was speeding and one was slowing down, and in the end they sounded like, solid and grounding, and May could not tell which one belonged to whom anymore.