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She’s never asked him about his childhood and he’s never offered up the information. Grant Ward never offers up any information period, but Jemma Simmons figures it’s a special circumstance and an exception needs to be made when she has her hands pressed against the hole in his stomach and they’re sticky and wet with his blood.
She starts by asking him about his training, about his hobbies, about his friends, but those topics barely result in a sentence-long answer, so she asks him about family. Maybe it’s the blood loss or maybe it’s the pain, but as he’s telling her about the little brother who settled with a wife, two kids, and a house full of dogs in California she swears that it’s the least guarded she’s ever seen him.
To keep him talking, she asks about his sister-in-law (an English professor), about his nephews (they’re dedicated to trouble), and the dogs (he wishes he had time for one himself), until she’s run out of questions to ask him and his words are bleeding into each other in a slurred mess of speech.
Jemma nudges his shoulder lightly with her knee – she doesn’t dare remove her hands from his bleeding wound – to get him to open his fluttering eyes. When that doesn’t give her the response she wants, she applies more pressure against his side with her hands. The effect is instantaneous; Ward gasps in pain, eyes flying open, and Jemma’s biting back tears.
Her eyes are swimming with them. Ward is a bleary face marked with cuts, bruises, and more blood, but she knows that his eyes are finally open again because they’re the one thing she can focus on amidst the muffled shouts and gunfire around them. His fingers dig into the skin of her wrists where his hands are wrapped around her tightly and there are only two things that matter to her in that moment; keeping his eyes open and feeling his sure grip holding her hands pressed against him.
She thinks she cries out for help again – can’t be sure because there’s something big lodged deep in her throat and choking her. Ward’s eyes are fluttering closed again and this time she’s sure she’s screaming at him to stay awake because there’s nothing else that could be leaving her throat so hoarse and dry.
It feels like a horrific eternity passes with his blood soaking their clothes and her alternating between screaming for help and pleading with him to stay awake. There are hands reaching for her to pull her away, but she shakes them off, tries to convince them that her hands are all that are keeping Ward alive.
Suddenly, there’s Fitz’s voice in her ear and he’s the only reason she lets go. His is the voice she believes and in the end she watches as medics descend on Ward and Fitz wraps his arms around her to pull her up.
She lets him. She lets him because there’s nothing more she can do – she isn’t sure if she’s done anything at all, but no one is backing away from a lifeless corpse just yet and there’s a voice in her head still pleading with Ward to stay awake, to stay with her, to not leave.
They’re loading him up on a back board. He’s already hooked up to an IV and a bag of blood. It’s taken Jemma this long to realise that the ringing in her ears isn’t gunfire, but silence. Her legs shake with relief and Fitz tightens his arm around her as he helps her walk behind a grim-faced May.
The steady beat of helicopter blades is deafening when May pushes her and Fitz in behind Ward and the medics. The rest of the ride is tense and tight. Fitz is shaking beside her and somehow she winds up with Ward’s hand grasped tightly in her smaller one. He’s unconscious the whole way to base, but she’s wide awake the whole time with two fingers pressed desperately against the pulse point at his wrist, her breath catching with every painfully slow beat.
He’s ripped away from her a second time when they land. She watches from her seat as he’s rushed to the infirmary and she can’t quite get her legs to move from underneath her. Fitz is lightly tugging on one hand and she thinks he’s trying to convince her to move, to get checked out, but she doesn’t know what he’s talking about because all the blood on her body isn’t her own.
It’s Grant’s.
It’s that final thought – his name – that sends her jumping out of the helicopter and racing towards the infirmary after him. She needs to make sure. She needs to see him awake and alive and soon-to-be-whole again with her own eyes.
Fitz calls after her and later she’ll tell him she couldn’t hear him above the buzzing in her ears, but right now she ignores him and stumbles after the gurney until the door to the surgery room is closed in her face. She’s got one hand leaving a bloody handprint on the pristine window and the other pressed tightly against her side.
She doesn’t move.
Jemma doesn’t move when Ward flat lines on the table. She doesn’t jolt when the defibrillator paddles make him arch off the gurney. She stays put throughout the three-hour long surgery and doesn’t shift from her position – one hand pressed up against the glass, her breath fogging up the window in small circles – until the surgeons are tying the last of Ward stitches.
She doesn’t move until they’re wheeling him out of surgery and into post-op. She follows behind and stands at the foot of his bed, ignoring the worried looks the nurses send her way and the hands at her elbows trying to get her to move.
She doesn’t.
Skye joins her. When, she doesn’t know, but one moment she’s alone and listening to Ward’s breathing and the next there’s someone beside her.
Skye doesn’t touch her or try to get her to leave which is for the best because if only Fitz had been able to move her earlier, not even if he could have moved her now.
“It was supposed to have been me.” She doesn’t recognise her own voice, but Jemma supposes those had to have been her words because they feel torn out of throat. Her throat is dry and her voice sounds broken. There are tears welling up in her eyes for the first time since she’d had her hands ripped away from Ward’s battered body, but when she raises her hands to wipe them away all she sees is red.