"A gnat just flew into my nose. An actual gnat is actually inside my actual nose. This is the grossest thing ever."

Ward made some sort of half-growling / half-coughing noise in reply. He upped their pace, hoping Skye would stop complaining once she was out of breath. Her field op in Malta had been cushy, the way some ops were, but lots of them were like this: a little action, a lot of discomfort, and a lot of waiting.

"Oh my god," moaned Skye, "this is torture."

Ward stopped short and turned to face her. "Never," he said, clipped and severe, "use that word unless you really mean it."

Skye looked like she was going to argue for a moment, then the gears turned and her mouth dropped open. "Wait, you've been tortured? When? By who? What did they do to you?"

Ward didn't answer about his own experiences specifically. "Enough people at SHIELD have had that experience that you should learn to be careful what you say and who you say it to."

"Sorry," she said, and she actually looked apologetic. "It's one of those things that doesn't sound like real life to me. Like knowing someone who's walked on the moon or something. I didn't think about it as, like, an actual thing."

"SHIELD has that effect on people. My old SO loved to tell stories about all the crazy things he did and I have no idea which ones are true and which ones aren't." He kicked aside some dead leaves and settled down cross-legged in the dirt. "We can take a break."

"Ohthankgod," said Skye, words rushing together as she took off her pack. She knew it was lighter than Ward's but it was still way more than she could readily manage. She pulled out her water bottle and tipped it back and forth. "I'm getting low. Is there someplace we can refill, or am I supposed to ration it, or what? Please don't tell me I have to drink my own pee."

Ward blinked several times. They had crossed half a dozen streams in the past two hours. Why on earth would they resort to desert hydration protocols? "We'll get water from the land. Finish off what you have and we'll fill up at the next creek."

"Won't we get crazy parasite germs?"

"Your pack has water purification tablets. If you're ever caught without them, you have to distill the water. It's actually pretty simple. I'll teach you how."

"Do you like all this Bear Grylls stuff?"

"Not particularly."

"But you're good at it."

"Being an agent means doing my job whether I like it or not."

They walked on in slightly more companionable silence than before.

By nightfall, they had covered six more miles. Skye was fully aware that Ward would have moved much faster without her tagging along, and she wasn't particularly fond of camping, but still, it was nice to be part of an actual mission. They had refilled some dropbox with a weapon and some documents, added a tracker to some guy's car, and picked up a tiny case that was much heavier than it ought to be. That was the easy part. Now they had to leave Russia without anyone noticing, which meant they had to hike to the extraction point and wait three days for pickup.

"Can I listen to the radio?" asked Skye. She had now gone a full 36 hours without internet and she was craving a media fix.

Ward scanned the thinning woods around them. He nodded and pulled the tiny apparatus out of his pack. "Headphones," he said.

Skye put the tinny headphones in – seriously, SHIELD couldn't have come up with some better tech? – and scanned through the local frequencies. Maybe a pop station or even NPR or – Skye remembered she was in Russia. She could pick up three stations, none of which were in English. Two were talk radio, one sounding like the same message over and over, while the other seemed to be some kind of call-in show. The music station was opera. In Russian.

Ward was smirking at her, obviously having predicted this outcome. "Nothing on the radio, rookie?"

"You speak Russian, right?"

"Da."

"Can you translate?"

"I'm not a very good translator. It's sort of an art."

"You just don't want to."

"There's also that."

"Come on," pleaded Skye. "I walked really far today and I didn't complain at all." A beat. "Much," she amended.

"All right," said Ward. He sounded amenable when he gave him, not resentful. "Fine." He sat down on the ground next to her and put one earbud in his ear, leaving the other for Skye. "Okay, this station is just saying, 'There is a right place for emergencies. There is no emergency now. If there's an emergency later, you should come to this place.'"

"Weird."

"I told you, I'm not good at translating."

Skye twisted the dial until she found the talk radio show again. "They're talking about boxing. Who won the match, who should have won the match." He paused. "The commentator thinks that the younger guy should have won." Another long pause. "And the caller is saying that the younger guy has too much…I'm going to guess that's a euphemism for tattoos?"

"You don't know all the modern lingo?"

Ward shrugged mildly.

Skye changed the station again to the opera.

"This isn't in Russian, Skye. It's German."

"It all sounds like angry shouty people to me," said Skye. "Do you speak German?"

"Not nearly as well as Russian."

"Give it a shot."

Ward listened to the singing for a while. His German was never great to begin with and he hadn't practiced in ages. Also, it was just harder to tell what people were saying when they sung, no matter what the language. Still, he could get a general idea of what was going on, especially since – in his limited experience with the art form – all operas were basically the same.

"The guy who's singing right now, he's going to yonder prison in the morning. He's been arrested, or maybe he's going to be arrested? I'm not good with German tenses. He needs a…a…" Ward trailed off and listed for another line. "I think he's talking about an alibi. Okay, I get it now. He needs an alibi, or else he's going to yonder prison."

"Does it really say 'yonder'?"

"No," said Ward, "it's in German."

"I mean, that's such a weird word."

"Well, it's like he's saying 'that prison', but there's a German word for 'that' that also means it's far away. I don't know how the translators usually handle it."

Skye stared at him as though the existence of Germany was his fault.

Ward listened to several more lines of singing. "He's…oh, that's actually funny. He's got an alibi, but he can't use it, because he was sleeping with his best friend's wife when the crime was committed."

"Ew, serves him right."

Ward just shrugged indifferently. He couldn't bring himself to have an opinion on the moral status of people who didn't even exist.

"Have you ever done that?" asked Skye, as she picked dirt out from under her fingernails.

"Sung an aria in German on Russian radio?"

"No, committed adultery." Skye felt funny about the wording as soon as she said it, but having been raised in part by nuns, she couldn't help it.

Ward didn't seem to notice. "Once," he said, "but it part of an op, so I don't know if that counts."

"Wait, wait, you had sex as part of an op? That's like some crazy James Bond crap."

Ward was blushing a little. He said nothing for a moment, then said, "Being an agent means doing my job whether I like it or not."

Skye had already raised her hand to point out the blush when his words sunk in. "You didn't like it?" she asked.

"It was acting. It was a job. I didn't do it for fun."

Skye had a judgmental sort of look on her face.

"What?"

"Nothing. I'm just seriously lowering my opinion of SHIELD."

Ward sighed. "It's not something you ever have to worry about. If you don't want those kind of ops, they don't force you."

"I thought you said you didn't want to."

"When you graduate Operations Academy, they give you a list. There are about a thousand things on it, things that could be objectionable in one way or another. It ranges from desecrating a grave, to eating horsemeat, to killing a civilian. And you rate every item on that list. You decide whether you absolutely can't do it, or whether you can, if the mission calls for it. Now to be honest, you're not going to get many ops if you have a list full of no's. They'd probably reassign you to something administrative. But everybody has a few refusals." He tipped his head to the side. "Actually, given what's on that list, I don't know what they'd do if you said yes to everything."

"What did you say no to?"

"The usual," said Ward vaguely. "Kids, etcetera"

"Ugh! Why would they even have that on the list?"

"Like I said, I don't know what happens to you if you say yes to everything. Maybe they just throw it in to make sure you're paying attention."

Skye considered this for a moment. "Why would they give you a free pass to do all kind of terrible stuff?"

"It's not a free pass. You're expected to avoid it if you can. But the mission takes precedence."

Skye looked unconvinced.

"Okay, imagine that you're infiltrating a group of very bad men. They traffic…mostly guns, some drugs, some people. You want to take them down, but not just them, their suppliers and their buyers too. You need to be patient. You need to get on the inside and get information. And these very bad men, they know what undercover means, so they try to test you by asking you to do things that they think a good guy wouldn't do – use drugs, beat up a cop, help them carry out a sale. So you do those things and they like you. Now they want to give you a present, but the present is also a test. You can't turn down a gift." Ward was blushing again.

"A gift…" said Skye. Then it clicked. "A woman? That's it, wasn't it? These guys were traffickers and they gave you a woman?" She rocked back onto her feet and shuffled backward. "Oh my god, that's the worst thing I have ever-"

"She was freed three days later, along with twenty-eight other women and six girls."

"She was a slave and you raped her!" Skye gulped as if she were honestly on the verge of vomiting. Maybe she was.

"It wasn't like that," spat Ward. He gritted his teeth. His whole face was red and he looked as though he wanted to walk backwards into the woods. "It wasn't like that," he repeated in a low growl. He looked…scary. Skye was suddenly very aware that he could kill her. Easily. Bare-handed.

"Maybe we should just go to sleep," said Skye. "Or you can. I'll take first watch." She didn't exactly feel like sleeping. She was getting whiplash from all the shifts in her worldview. First SHIELD were the bad guys, then they might just be the good guys, and now…she was sitting across the campfire from a rapist who had committed the act on the company dime.

"Set the perimeter," said Ward, without making eye contact. He stood and walked out of the clearing. Skye could hear him unzip and piss. When he returned, she got a glance at his face – his eyes looked like they were set back further than usual, sunken into his skull. "Wake me at midnight," he said. Then he lay down and slept.

They packed up in the morning. Ward picked up the perimeter alarms and stuffed them into his bag. "You set them up right," he muttered.

"What?"

"You set the perimeter correctly."

Great. A compliment. Skye wasn't sure she wanted compliments from Ward anymore. Maybe his approval wasn't exactly something to strive for. He still had that shrunken look, though it had faded a bit. She packed up her gear and buried the remains of their campfire. She looked back at Ward who was eating one of those flavorless SHIELD nutrition bars. Skye didn't really like to eat breakfast as a matter of principle – she'd choke one down later in the morning.

"How far do we have to get today?"

"Only eight miles," said Ward. "They can't get to the rendezvous until Thursday. There's no point in us getting there way ahead of them."

Eight miles was completely trivial for Ward, less so for Skye. Still, it was definitely doable. She just had to wait two more days and then Coulson would pick her up and then wherever she touched down next, she could get the hell away from this creepy organization and its evil missions and its-

"I know you don't want to hear an explanation. I don't want to give one. I don't have to justify myself to you." Ward was sitting cross-legged, his forearms resting on his thighs, hands reaching up to prop up his face. His fingers were covering his mouth, muffling the sound somewhat. "But if you want to be an agent, you have to learn to think about consequences, about tradeoffs. Things aren't simple."

Skye was less and less certain she wanted to be an agent, but she was at least fifteen miles from the border, spoke no Russian, and was still having trouble with the use of a compass. She sat down on a rock, her body angled so that she could easily see Ward out of the corner of her eye, but there was no chance of accidentally looking directly at him.

"What would have happened," asked Ward, "if I told them 'No, this is wrong.'?"

"The…op would have failed. They would have kicked you out or attacked you or something."

Ward nodded very slightly. "Let's suppose I tried to refuse some other way – told them I didn't like women, for example. What would happen then?"

Skye had never personally met a trafficker, but she suspected she knew the type. "They would have lost respect for you?" she guessed.

"That's certainly possible. It's also possible they might have found a…male to give to me. Now I'm back in the original bind, but even worse because they're going to be very suspicious if I don't…" Ward made an inexpressive gesture. "You know," he concluded.

"Why not just say that you don't feel like it? You have a headache or something?"

Ward tapped his thumb to his index finger, then his middle finger, and so on down the row. It was a skittish sort of gesture. "Skye, you don't know what these people are like." He shook his head. "If a man isn't pleased by a woman, who do you think they blame?" he asked softly. He sounded tired.

It took Skye a moment to work out what he said. Who do they blame? Not their ally, but the slave, the one they could easily punish and control. She felt a hot, crawling sensation on her skin. The whole idea was so sickening. Finally, she said, "What did you do?"

Ward looked at her for the briefest of moments before returning to staring straight ahead. "You want to get it over with quickly. You don't enjoy…it's humiliating, and she's probably got HIV, and even if they've taught her to act like she's into it, you know she's not. So you want to go fast, but you know that's not how the op works. You have to tell them it's great, that you sampled the merchandise and you were satisfied, and that means taking your time. You want to tell the woman that you're sorry or that help is coming soon, but you have no idea who she is and if she can keep a secret. So you've got to do this thing and you have to make it last as long as possible when, god, you don't even want to touch her. You try to spend a lot of time on…you know. You keep it as, as…low contact as possible."

"Like a hand job?" blurted out Skye.

"Yeah," said Ward. He sounded almost grateful that she got the words out so he didn't have to. He was frowning, chin pressed to his chest. "Anyway," he said, "that's how you balance the various demands of the mission," as if he had just been giving her a regular SHIELD trainee lesson.

"She was married?" asked Skye, thinking back to the dumb question about adultery that started this whole thing.

"She was reunited with her husband at the end of the op. I wasn't around for that. They usually assign female agents to deal with trafficking survivors."

"What happened to you? When the op was over, I mean."

"To me? Are you asking if I was reprimanded?"

Skye wasn't entirely sure what she was asking.

"My SO retrieved me, brought me back to the Triskelion for debriefing. I gave a full accounting of events, listened to a tribunal second guess my every decision, and was given my next assignment." Ward sounded more confident now that he was back on familiar turf.

"They didn't, I don't know, make you talk to a shrink or something?"

"My SO checked me out, deemed me okay."

Skye wasn't sure that Ward sounded okay three minutes ago, let alone right after the event, but she didn't argue.

Ward was standing up to start their day's trek when Skye got up from her rock and hugged him. He didn't exactly resist, but he didn't lean in either. He mostly seemed confused and mildly alarmed. "What are you-?"

"I'm sorry," she said, "about what I said yesterday." She dropped her hands to her sides. "I mean, I still think the whole thing is awful, but it's not like you…" She exhaled audibly. "I'm sorry I used the word 'torture' to just talk about bugs."