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Her hands, bloodied and ice cold, shook as she wrapped the ragged cloth around Agent Ward’s upper arm and applied as much pressure as she could to the gunshot wound. She’d ripped apart his plaid button down to make the emergency bandage and the thin white t-shirt he was wearing underneath wasn’t nearly enough to provide any warmth in the face of the brisk midnight air. His flesh was puckered as much from the cold as from blood loss and Jemma knew that if they didn’t make it to the rendezvous point before Ward succumbed to his injury they wouldn’t make it all. Realistically there was no way she’d be able to carry his weight and fend off their attackers. She was struggling with the gun he’d provided her as it was; multitasking was out of the question.
Ward pressed the heel of his good hand to his eyes, gritting his teeth as she pulled the bandage tighter. A shudder ran up his spine, rattling his teeth and Jemma began murmurings apologies under her breath. Her eyes stung with tears she refused to shed as she tied the bandage as tightly as she dared and dropped her hands to his to grip it tightly, forcing his attention to her.
“Agent Ward?” She didn’t dare raise her voice above a whisper. They were hidden pretty well, but she didn’t want to take any chances. The knot in her stomach tightened when Ward’s eyes shifted to meet hers. Glazed over with pain and unfocused, he was blinking furiously in an attempt to clear his swimming vision, but it wasn’t enough.
Jemma apologised again and squeezed his arm as close to his wound as she dared. “Grant? I need you to focus.”
Ward hissed and tried to tug his arm out of her grasp. He bit back a groan as pain flared up and down his arm, burned throughout his shoulder and chest, and left him gasping. But it cleared his head and the glazed look out of his eyes until he could lift them and focus squarely on Jemma’s dark ones in front of his face.
“I’m here,” Ward declared sharply, his voice ragged and hoarse with pain. He settled back down, his head thudding against the brick wall at his back. Jemma’s hands dropped back to his and he squeezed them despite the sharp needles of pain it sent from the tips of his fingers all the way up to his shoulder. He used the pain to stay awake.
“I’m here,” he repeated more steadily. “What’s the plan?”
“The plan?” Jemma’s voice trembled, her stomach a mess of knots and her chest tight with worry for him, for them, for their team. Panic and fear were climbing into her throat and strangling her. She had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from screaming at him that there was no plan.
“Jemma.” Her name was a foreign word coming from his lips and it jarred her enough to stem the rising tide of sickening panic. His fingers dug into the backs and palms of her hands, grounding her further. “I can’t do this alone. You saved my life, but it won’t mean anything if we don’t get out of here.”
Jemma nodded and with a shuddering breath and her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she forced herself to calm, to reengage – to think. She thought back to their mission briefing, her mind racing like a video tape set to rewind. Images raced through her mind, words looped themselves over and over again, as she played the events of the past couple of days over in her mind as she madly searched for anything that could help them.
Skye.
Jemma’s eyes flew open, wide and bright and certain. “Blow up the facility.”
The Skye in her mind had her arms crossed against her chest as she’d leaned with the utmost casualness against the briefing room’s large table. Coulson had frowned at her suggestion and Ward had raised his arms in a gesture of exasperation.
“Why is that your first solution for everything?” Ward had demanded.
“It’s not,” Skye had retorted. Her eyes had narrowed as she’d readied for the inevitable fight with her SO. “But considering that S.H.I.E.L.D’s ultimate goal is to do away with the place altogether anyway, why are we wasting our time and energy infiltrating a highly guarded facility with top level security systems when we could just blow it up and walk away?”
Before Ward had been able to reply, Coulson had cut in. “That’s our Plan Z. If we can’t capture the facility, we erase it, but only as a last resort.”
Ward’s eyes had narrowed then in much the same way they were doing at the present moment.
“I’ve been shot, I’ve lost some blood, my head is a little fuzzy, but unless you’ve developed super powers you’ve neglected to tell us about I’m pretty sure we’re still inside the facility you’re suggesting we blow up.”
Jemma nodded. “We are, yes, but-”
“But? There is no but when you’re talking about enough explosives to turn this place into one giant crater.”
Jemma rolled her eyes and tugged sharply on his hand as she spoke over him. “You need to let me explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain.” Ward pushed himself into a straighter sitting position. The possibility of an imminent death was giving him a resurgence of energy. “If this place blows, so do we because I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m not exactly in the best shape of my life at the moment. I don’t think I have it in me to outrun a bomb.”
Jemma placed one hand over his mouth. “Stop talking.” She was surprised at the steadiness of her hand against Ward’s face. She left it in place as she continued speaking rapidly in hushed tones. “We won’t have to outrun anything. We’re currently in the southwest corner of the facility. Fitz ran some calculations when we received the mission specifications and discovered that the failsafe explosives aren’t actually enough to take this place down – not completely. It was never meant to be destroyed and we’re in the part of the building that’s going to be affected the least by any explosion.”
Ward raised his eyebrows in question and Jemma shook her head. “According to Fitz it’s something complicated about yield and the construction of the walls and floors in this part of the facility. I would try and explain it to you but you’d simply tell me to ‘speak English’,” her attempt to mimic Ward’s accent made his eyebrows rise even further, “and I think we can skip that particular game at the moment, wouldn’t you say?”
His lips moved against her hand and Jemma realised he was trying to speak. She quickly removed her hand, noting for a moment at the bloody handprint she’d left on his face and fought back a shudder.
“Are you sure?” Ward asked simply. “Because if you’re not and Fitz was wrong then neither of us are making it back to rub his face in it.”
“I’m sure.”
“How sure?”
“I trust Fitz with my life.”
Ward let out a long slow breath that ruffled the ends of the hair. It had long ago fallen out of the bun at the back of her head.
Jemma hadn’t realised until she felt his breath fan across her cheek just how close they’d gotten as she’d patched him up and then forced him to listen to her admittedly reckless plan of escape. She was close enough to him now that despite the darkness, she could make out the varying shades of brown in his eyes, the creases at the corners of his eyes brought on by the pain of his gunshot wound, and the growing stubble on his cheeks. There were flecks of blood on his chin from her hand and she was wiping them away with her thumb before she’d even realised her hand had moved.
His eyes flickered from her hand to her mouth and Jemma sucked in a breath when they made it back up to her eyes.
“Are we really doing this?” Ward’s voice was hoarse and low when he finally spoke - if she hadn’t been sitting so close to him she might have never heard him. Her thumb stilled near the corner of his mouth and she held her breath.
Jemma nodded.
Ward raised his free hand to hers, grasping her wrist lightly, but not pulling it away.
They breathed.
Ward sucked in a deep breath and pushed himself up to a standing position, holding on to her hands tightly as he used the wall for leverage. He swayed on his feet and grunted in pain when shooting pains and fire burned through his arm. Jemma was forced to hold him up when his legs buckled, tearing her hands away from his to grip his waist tightly instead.
He steadied himself one deep breath at a time and reached behind her back for the gun she’d tucked into the waistband of her jeans. It brought them closer together and Jemma held her breath when he let his hand rest for a moment at the small of her back. She tilted her head back to look at him, their height difference making for an awkward angle.
“You said you trust Fitz with your life.” Ward spoke steadily and quietly, the usual confidence she associated with him slowly creeping back into his voice.
Jemma nodded in response. She heard the faintest whisper of voices somewhere in the distance and tightened her grip on his waist, her fingers digging into hard muscle.
His hand at her back pressed her closer as the voices grew louder until she couldn’t crane her head up to look at him anymore. He lowered his mouth to whisper in her ear.
“But do you trust me with your life, Jemma?”