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Skye emerged from her bunk to see him huddled over the bar with a bottle of water in one hand and a ratty old book in the other, as though the words on the page had recaptured his eye before he’d made it back to the couch, and he’d just sort of forgotten everything else. The view gave her pause, for a minute, as it sometimes did—Skye knew she shouldn’t let herself get attached, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t look, right?—and she stood, watching his forehead crease with concentration and his grey tee stretch across his shoulders, for a few seconds too long.
Agent Ward’s situational awareness returned, and he startled upright. Skye floundered, casting about for an excuse before she noticed him recomposing himself and realized that was the wrong strategy.
“I’ve figured it out,” she said brightly. Ward’s face did that micro-frown thing. “You are secretly a cat.” She said it like she’d won some great victory, overselling it by a long shot and going right back around to supremely uncomfortable. What were the odds he’d let her get away with retreating now?
“That makes even less sense than you usually do,” said Ward, after a beat.
Really, she should just leave. “No, it makes all the sense,” she said instead. “The whole aloof, understated… well-groomed thing. And you totally hate that I just snuck up on you.”
The micro-frown thing deepened into an almost regular frown and Ward tilted his head and stared at her like he was deciding whether she could possibly be serious.
“So, you were standing over there staring at me strictly for science,” he said.
“Duh,” she said. “The opportunity for science presented itself. And who am I to resist the call of science.” Shut up.
“Uh-huh. And is that what you came out here for?” he said. The frown had faded by now, and Skye broke eye contact, sauntering over to the bar. She didn’t look at his face again until she’d plucked the water bottle out of his hands, cracked the seal and taken a long gulp.
“Hacking is thirsty work,” said Skye. If she’d thought it would be safe to look at him now, she was wrong. He hadn’t budged when she’d invaded his space to take his stuff, and all the superspy training in the world would never get her used to how big he was up close. He didn’t always seem big from a distance. Skye thought he turned it off sometimes, his whole be-suited agent imposing presence deal, and wondered if it was an old habit, born of…
“A cat would never stand for thievery,” said Ward.
“My God, is he participating in the banter?” she said, holding the bottle up to her chest in shock. “You’re just trying to prove me wrong for the sake of contrariness now, Mr. Contrary. As with the sneaking and the startling, you totally hate said thievery.” To punctuate her point, Skye took another gulp from the bottle, keeping eye contact this time.
Mistake. His eyes dropped to her mouth. For like, four milliseconds but time stretches out when a guy as smoking hot as Grant Ward is looking at your mouth.
“You know, bizarrely, I really don’t,” he said, and then the micro-frown was back, like he’d surprised himself with the words, and it took Skye an extra second to process them. She gulped, slowly putting the bottle down on the bar.
Ward broke eye contact first, shuffling and clearing his throat and it was so textbook and Skye was so relieved not to be alone in the desert wasteland of awkward that she was glad to give them both an out. She circled the bar, putting something solid between them and (aw, hell) mourning the loss of his proximity.
“Still reading unbelievably depressing war stories?” she asked, and had to point at the book still lying open in his (large, large) hand before he clued in.
“Uh,” he said. “Actually, no.”
He didn’t say anything else, and Skye stood and waited for him to take the hint. Ward rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand, and suddenly she was really curious and… was he blushing? No, that was the light. It was dark outside the bus and the artificial light was kind of blush-coloured. Gave everybody’s skin a kind of healthy glow. Yes.
“Le Petit prince,” Ward finally said. “The Little Prince, in the French. The original.”
Skye’s instinct was to make a joke about it. “Too good for the English?” she said. It was a pretty dumb instinct, to be honest, as evidenced when Ward actually ducked his head…?
“No, I mean, that’s cool,” Skye backpedaled, trying to think of why such a lame joke might have hit a nerve. “Six languages, Coulson said, right?”
“It was my favourite book as a kid,” he said, almost talking on top of her. “The English one. I had this torn-up yellow paperback…” He stopped abruptly, killing the tangent before it could be born. “But my stuff was never really mine. French was my second language.”
Another pause.
“My brother couldn’t read this one, so he had no use for it.”
Skye’s eyes dropped to the book, actually seeing it for the first time: dog-eared and worn, tattered at the edges, with a few illegible words in a child’s scrawl down the margins. For a blinding moment, Skye nearly buckled with anger, recoiling because she wasn’t supposed to feel sympathy for these people, damn it, and for Agent Ward least of all. She was meant to endear herself to them, not the other way around, and it felt like failure that she should feel such a wave of emotion upon being shown a piece of Grant, the person, rather than Ward, the faceless agent in a dark suit.
But that wasn’t fair and Skye couldn’t sustain it. She absolutely did not lift her hands to wipe tears from the corners of her eyes. She didn’t look up at Ward, for fear that he would see them. Instead, she did a far more foolish thing.
Skye traced her fingers over the ink that a much younger Grant Ward must have left there. “What’s this say?”
It took him a few long seconds to answer. “I was practicing,” he said. “I copied phrases, memorized them.”
“But what’s it say?”
Again, Ward hesitated. “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur; l’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” he said, finally. Skye would never tell him the words sounded gorgeous coming out of him, or that his voice did something low and husky with the switch in language.
Nope. Instead: “Some of us don’t speak six languages, hot shot.” She leaned over the bar, intending to tease, and regretted it (but not as much as she should have) when the movement caused his eyes to wander down her throat. Just for a second. Long enough.
“That’s what it says,” said Ward. “I’m not translating it.”
“You gonna make me learn French?”
“If you’re going to be a field agent, yes.”
Right. Training. The training which she was doing, and which he was supervising. As her supervising officer, because that was a thing which had happened when they’d decided to trust her.
Or at least keep her close.
This sucked. It was never supposed to go like this. A thought struck: what if they knew she was a sleeper? What if Ward was just playing her game better than she was? What if he was endearing himself to her on purpose, pushing all the right buttons, playing the long-suffering middle sibling to gain her trust? No, that was just paranoid projection. It had to be. They would never have sent her into Quinn’s compound if they’d suspected. Right?
“I’m not so good with languages,” Skye hedged. “Computer code, sure, but that’s different. I don’t know if I’ve got space up here for more than English.”
Ward shrugged. “That’s kind of too bad. Multilingualism is part of the package deal.”
Skye made a face. “Unfair.”
“I don’t make the rules. We’ll start with French.”
“What if I want to start with… Telugu?”
Ward closed Le Petit prince and gave her a look. “I do not speak Telugu.”
“Oh, darn!” said Skye. “What a shame. I guess I’ll have to get somebody else to teach me fancy words. So, what are your other four? Euro-centric, or do they have you branch out a bit, so you can look vaguely international?”
It was obvious bait, and Ward didn’t bite. “Italian and German, yeah, but I’ve got Mandarin and Arabic,” he said mildly. “I’m working on Japanese and Russian. Always been curious about Afrikaans.”
A beat.
“Though maybe now I’ll shelve that for Telugu.”
Skye shook her head. She reached for the water bottle, if only to have something to do with her hands, but Ward snatched it first, lifting it to his lips and Skye swore his eyes were smiling even if the rest of his face was just as pinched and Blue Steel as it ever seemed to be.
“You are a lame flirt,” she blurted. “That was a lame… flirtation.”
To his credit, Ward didn’t hesitate. “I don’t see how planning to expand my repertoire of fancy words could be construed as flirtation. And we’re still starting with French.”
“Fine. Can you teach me with that?” Skye pointed at Le Petit prince.
And there was the hesitation. It was almost a relief, that he was still sometimes so… stiff. It meant he wasn’t acting. If he were acting, he would be smoother, more willing to give. Unless he was really, really good actor, but there was that projection again, and another reminder why she really shouldn’t be fraternizing quite so hard. Well, technically it was good for her position because fraternizing meant gaining trust and that was the name of this whole game so far, but there was the problem of guilt later, and Skye was a person, damn it, and so was Grant. Ward. Shit.
“Sure,” said Ward, and Skye had been so deep in her rotten guilt spiral that it took her a moment to remember the question she’d asked. “If you want, we’ll use this.”
And that was it. Skye couldn’t fucking take it anymore. There was only so much earnestness a girl could take from a man this hot before it was too much, and it spoke to how close they’d already subconsciously leaned together that Skye could easily reach over the bar, clasp Ward by the back of the neck and pull him in.
He responded instantly, without wavering, as sure and immediate as if he’d been waiting for permission for days.
Skye opened her mouth and chased what she wanted, all thoughts of questionable fraternizing and future guilt conveniently shelved, frozen, paused, on hiatus pending notice, because nothing could distract her from how good Ward felt against her lips or the heat of his broad palms on her shoulder, her jaw. His long fingers tangled in her hair, tugging her head back just short of roughly so that he could kiss her more deeply across this stupid fucking bar—
“Oh, God,” she gasped, breaking away. Ward’s rich brown eyes opened groggily, the micro-frown reappearing but Skye didn’t give him enough time to form doubts, to wonder at her motivations or his own. She didn’t even take the time to go around the bar, nope, that was way too much distance, would have taken up too many precious seconds that could have been more productively occupied.
Instead, she slid the precious book to a safe distance, braced herself on the countertop and vaulted, scrambling into a seated position and fisting her hands in the stretched cotton of his shirt. At once, Ward grabbed her by the hips and pulled, scooting her to the edge of the bar and Skye groaned, diving back in for another kiss even as she instinctively locked her ankles behind his back because fuck. Oh. Shit.
She could feel him hardening against her, and the urge to pull him in flush was terrifying because they’d just started kissing, damn it, and she should have more self-control than this, but Ward was making this low grumbling sound and clutching her hip and the nape of her neck like lifelines and Skye forgot to care about pace and progression. She leveraged his hips right up between her thighs and ground forward, happily drowning in the wave of heat which followed, even as Ward’s gasp broke their kiss.
He buried his face in her throat, opening his mouth against her skin as his hips and hands grew restless, apparently despite himself. Skye tightened her legs and tilted her head back to encourage him, burying one hand in his stupid perfect hair to keep him doing what he was doing, because apparently every point of contact between them was hard-wired directly to her groin and it had just been so long since she’d had intimate contact with anyone and she sure as hell hadn’t felt anything in the same universe as this with her previous partners and boy was that an unsettling thought but who cares?
Not me, oh my god, whose moron idea was it to put it off this long?
“Sk-ngh,” he said against her throat, as his lips began to migrate up toward her ear, her jaw.
She sighed, aiming for mock-exasperated but only managing gratified. “That’s not my name,” Skye said, the words coming out in a reedy almost-whine that should have been embarrassing but didn’t seem to be doing anything to slow Ward down.
“Skye,” he growled, his teeth dragging on the skin below her ear, and Skye’s hips bucked without her permission.
“Fuck,” said Ward. He was trying to steady himself, Skye could tell, and she wasn’t going to have any of that. She held him firm against her throat, leaving his breath to ghost over her as he spoke. “Fuck, is this… is this too much?”
“Nooooooooope,” she said, talking over him, and rolling her hips to prove a point.
“Are you s—”
“If you stop, I will hurt you.”
So much tension ran out of his body all at once that he all but collapsed on her, shaking with laughter, and—laughter! That was a new one. Skye found herself giggling along, grinning uncontrollably as Ward’s hands ran up and down her spine, and still as one of them latched on to her hair to maneuver her into another kiss and that was kind of becoming a thing, wasn’t it? Grant Ward had a hair thing.
Appropriate.