Archive of Our Own ^beta

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TABLE OF CONTENTS: (please note that I am not writing these chronologically at the moment... So, I will be listing them in this table of Contents in rough Chronological order of events, so you knew when-ish things happen. It's going to be a mess, but a good hurt/comfort mess)

Prequel: "Last Words" (it's old, please forgive my writing level) - Posted in 2018

1. "Tangled Souls" (spooky shit) - Posted June 2025

2. "Panic Attack" (Ward, FitzSimmons, Daisy moments) - Posted June 2025

3. "Pancakes at Midnight" (Coulson and teen Grant get to know each other) - Posted Dec 2025

4. "Thoracentesis" (Ward and Simmons in the medical bay) - Posted Dec 2025

5. "Don't Go Anywhere" (Ward and May process terrible things) - Posted July 2025

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How did Ward die?? (refresher) 

1.) The “up and coming Romanoff” beaten by a 50-year-old guy, at least 30 pounds lighter, six inches shorter, and emotionally compromised? Ward went toe-to-toe with MAY several times... Coulson just isn't that level, sorry, I don't buy it. Besides the point, Ward conveniently just lies there and doesn’t get up or roll to the side or hit Coulson upside the head. Was he just too weak after taking that beating? **(one of my eyebrows is hitting my hairline in disbelief right now🤨)* 

2). Fun Fact #1: To crush an average adult male sternum requires 4" deflection (penetration) - 960 lbs of force, quite a bit more force required at point blank range.🏋

3). Fun Fact #2: To cave ribs requires 400 lbs of force (1-3 ribs are the hardest --the first ribs Coulson would have been pressing on-- 4-9 (lower ribs) are the most common to fracture) 🩻

4.) These "Fun Facts" tell me that I need a better reason for why his chest caved in. I know, bionic hand and all, but if you push on something as hard as you can, are you using force from your hand or your arm ? I mean, think about it. Yeah, he could probably crush an arm if he grabbed it, but pushing down and grabbing use two different centers of force in the body. Long story short: Captain America or the Winter Soldier could totally cave a chest in, but Coulson could not. 🚫

5). Due to points 1-4, I gave Ward lung cancer that had gone metastatic (into the bones), making this crush-scene much more plausible. Read the prequel "Last Words" for an exploration of that. But yeah, to sum up, Ward was pretty fucked up so he started fighting worse and was MUCH easier to kill than normal. 

Chapter Text

Ward woke up in Vault D again and he couldn’t breathe. A cough cracked through his chest and his lungs that split him in two. Rolling off the cot and hitting the ground on all fours, he kept coughing until blood and spit splattered the cement floor. He moaned and gagged on bloody phlegm. His chest ached like it had shortly after his diagnosis. Kara had been urging him to see a doctor but he didn’t trust anyone. And it wasn’t like he could just roll into an urgent care without having to drop a few bodies once his identity was discovered. 

“Baby?” he heard Kara call out from the bedroom. Before he could answer he vomited into the toilet bowl again. She padded into the hotel bathroom to find him sitting on the floor by the toilet, shirtless and drenched in a cold sweat. He flushed the toilet with a shaking hand and swiped across his mouth with the back of the other. 

“Sorry, I woke you up,” he rasped, wincing at the taste of vomit on his tongue. 

Kara disappeared back into the bedroom for a moment before returning with his water bottle from the nightstand. She handed it to him as she knelt in front of him, feeling his forehead. 

“This is the third time this week,” she murmured softly as he swished around a month full of water and spat it into the toilet. He sighed and let her pull his dead down onto her shoulder as she knelt in front of him. “You need to see a doctor.”

“No,” he muttered, eyes slipping closed as she ran her fingers through his hair. “Hospitals mean–”

“Bodies and potential capture,” she finished for him, used to this game by now. “I know, but Coulson reached out. He wants us on a job, right? So would they really come for you just for getting medical help?”

He chuckled dryly. “You underestimate them.”

She sighed again. 

“I can’t have them knowing anything about where we are,” he pulled back. “Or the condition we’re in–”

“The condition you’re in,” she poked him in the chest. He winced and she frowned in concern, spreading her palm over his chest. “How much pain are you in? Should we even take this job?”

“It’s more than just the job,” he reminded her. “We need Morse. I’ll be fine.”

“Why don’t we just try to prove she’s dirty from afar?”

“Shield already has her close to the vest,” he shook his head. “And they aren’t going to be taking my word for anything. Yours either, for that matter. And don’t you want closure?”

Kara chewed on her lip. After discovering that the exchange of safehouses Bobbi Morse claimed in her official report had been a bust –that the 24 Shield lives she supposedly saved had come up empty, their safehouse already evacuated before she sold Kara to the wolves to prove her loyalty to Hydra– Kara had become convinced that Morse was still playing the long game and infiltrating Shield by playing a triple. 

Ward hadn’t shared his own triple status with her, as far as she knew he was still a lone wolf who worked for both teams, but he bought her theory. Morse’s name hadn’t been one on the very short list of people Fury named as other Triples, to avoid friendly fire among the few resources he had after the Hydra takeover. And Coulson had always been too quick to trust his people, especially his female agents. So Kara and he had hatched a plan to get Bobbi to break her own cover. 

He told Kara it was for closure: take out the dirty Shield agent who betrayed her.

But really it was so that they had one less leak sharing information from Shield to Hydra. Really it was because he was still doing his job in payment for Rainey’s safety. 

Really he was lying to Kara too.

“Listen,” Kara cradled his face in her tiny hands. “If getting closure means I lose you: al diablo con eso.” Her dark eyes flashed in the cool glow from the bathroom window.

He gave her an exhausted smile. 

“Okay, how about this,” he wrapped his clammy hands around her warm wrists. “I promise to get checked out after we take care of Morse.”

“Promise?” she asked him dubiously. 

“Prometo,” he murmured and pressed a kiss to her forehead. 

“Ay!” she winced at the smell of vomit. “You need to rinse again. And brush your teeth.”

“I’m waiting to see if I’m done,” he chuckled, and leaned back against the shower wall. 

“Okay,” she settled down on his other side, content to wait it out with him. 

He gagged and gasped for breath between coughing fits but no matter how hard he tried to catch his breath he couldn’t pull enough air into his wrecked lungs. 

He was in a material body right now and that body needed O2. 

Desperately. 

The barrier in Vault D was down so he hauled himself to his feet and stumbled for the stairs, leaning heavily against the wall whenever he could. His breath was tight and painful, every gasp making that horrible sound that months with cancer had taught him meant they were filled with fluid. 

He settled Kara’s body into the back of the car, sobs still forcing those disgusting coughs from his aching chest. Somehow he’d broken at least four ribs in the fight with Bobby. A fight that normally would have left him bruised and maybe with a cracked rib or two, but nothing more. Definitely not four cleanly broken ribs. 

“You’re going to shoot anyone that comes after you, right?” Kara muttered as they prepped for the incoming attack from the team. “No hand-to-hand. Just bullets. You’re sick and those ribs could shift and hit something important.”

“I’m not sick,” he muttered in denial. He couldn’t afford to be sick. Fury had no use for him if he was sick. And something told him medical extraction was not going to happen. 

“Bullshit,” she snapped, eyes flashing. “Me lo prometes.”

He muttered something irritably under his breath and she smacked his broken ribs lightly. 

He barely swallowed a shout and hissed at her between clenched teeth. 

“Me lo prometes, Grant,” she insisted, not looking the least bit sorry. 

“Prometo,” he snapped back irritably. “I’ll use lethal force first.”

His vision was blurring as he finally found his way to the medical bay. Thankfully no one was there at this time in the early hours of the morning. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t pull enough oxygen into his lungs and the deeper his breaths the worse the coughing got. 

He had finally found a way to see a doctor after Kara was dead. Lo prometido es deuda. 

He’d pushed a doctor into an Urgent Care after hours at gunpoint and demanded treatment. The doctor had run multiple tests on him under duress; taken blood samples, an X-Ray, multiple MRI’s… 

He’d put the gun down after the first hour. The doctor he was holding hostage seemed more interested in finding answers than escaping. She was a woman in her late-fifties who seemed more irritated with him than afraid of him after the initial fear had worn off. 

“Ye know this is probably the worst way ye could have sought help, right?” she scolded him in a heavy Scottish accent that reminded him of Fitz for some reason. “I know ye bloody Americans have their healthcare problems, but honestly. Gunpoint? Just to run some tests?”

“I’m sorry,” he muttered again. “Just run the tests and I’ll let you go.”

“Ye better let me go, son,” she warned him. “Or ye’ll be facing a medical crisis and a murder charge.” 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he reiterated. “I just need answers.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have any good ones, lad,” she waved at him to sit as she waddled over to him with a stack of printouts. He obeyed, despite being the one with the gun in his belt. 

“Look ‘ere, ye’ll need a proper oncologist, but this is what I can tell ye tonight…”

He fumbled with an oxygen tank and flipped it on, pressing the mask to his face and desperately gulping in deep breaths. The upset to his breathing was setting him on the edge of hyperventilating. The world swam around him. 

“Extraction was never part of the deal.”

“Neither was threatening to leverage my daughter against me!” Ward hissed, leaning over Maria Hill threateningly. The handler reached for her gun again but Ward was too fast and snapped her wrist behind her back. 

“I want extraction. And I want my daughter to remain unharmed. That’s it. That’s all I’m asking for.”

Was that really too much to ask for? After everything he’d done for Shield? After everybody he’d dropped for them, some of them friends, just to keep his cover as a triple in tact? 

Hill twisted out and slipped away, and he let her, but not before he’d confiscated her weapon.

“Not my call to make, Agent,” she snapped. “You can’t have both.” 

He aimed her own gun at her. 

“If you shoot me, you can guarantee you lose both,” she threatened.

“What guarantees you haven’t already killed her.” 

Without Fury, who was he even working for at this point? 

Fury, he trusted only in as much as he didn’t think the man would directly give a kill order on a kid. The rest of Shield? Many would gladly. 

“I’ll show you a video stream,” Hill promised, lowering her raised hands to pull out her cell phone. “How about you ask those questions, now, while I pull it up.”

“If you call for help or call a shot on me,” he growled. “I will turn on you. And you’d be surprised how much more damage I can cause when I’m actually fighting against S.H.I.E.L.D.” 

“That, I can believe.” Hill laughed mirthlessly, and began swiping on her phone. “Ask away, Agent.” 

She hesitated before adding quietly, “You’ve earned it.”

The irony was enough to choke on. He’d earned it because he’d been working as their triple for years now, for nothing but the promise of his daughter’s safety when all along they had been prepared to use her as leverage to control him. 

In the end, Shield had only been the lesser of two evils. There was a reason Hydra fit so seamlessly into their ranks. 

The oxygen wasn’t doing enough to ease the agonizing tightness in his chest. He was likely full of fluid that needed to be drained. 

He felt like screaming in frustration. He was fucking dead already! Only to come back as a ghost… with cancer again?? The Universe or whatever shit had him stuck here must have a particular hatred for him. 

Barely surviving the next splintering cough, he dragged himself over toward the counter and began ransacking drawers looking for an 18 gauge needle long enough. 

“Why don’t we just retire?” Kara murmured in the darkness, hand splayed out over his chest, retracing one of the exit wounds from when Skye shot him. “What if we just put this life away and move out to the country somewhere?”

“With a picket fence and 2.5 children?” he teased sleepily. 

“I was thinking more like a homestead in the mountains,” she snuggled up closer to him. “Maybe in México?”

He hummed in agreement. That sounded… nice. Like a dream or a fantasy that he’d never have. 

“And we’re both specialists,” she shrugged. “I signed the consent form and I’m guessing you did too… so neither of us can have kids anyway.”

He wanted to tell her about Rainey so badly. Wanted to recite her birthday and the few facts he knew about her. But even suggesting her existence would put her at risk. 

“Supposedly the procedures are reversible,” he reminded her instead. Shield encouraged all specialists to undergo vasectomies and tubal ligations before they entered the field. Access to contraceptives were not guaranteed in the field and anyone who refused to consent or underwent a reversal procedure was limited in the kinds of missions they were sent on. There were many assignments that required sexual components Shield wasn’t willing to risk it on too many specialists who weren’t willing to go the full distance or who might jeopardize a mission due to unintended pregnancies.  

When she didn’t respond he pressed a kiss to the top of her head and suggested. 

“What about a dog?”

“Mm,” she continued to trace the scar. “I prefer cats.”

“Cats?” he scoffed teasingly, as though there were no worse animal on earth. 

“Don’t tell me you don’t like cats,” she sat up in mock alarm. “Men who don’t like cats are red flags!”

He chuckled and rolled over to tackle her. 

She laughed as he looked down at her, dark hair splayed over the pillow, eyes shining with joy imagining a future he couldn’t give her. He leaned down to kiss her smiling lips anyway.

“Cats are fine,” he murmured against her mouth. “But I’m afraid I am in fact a red flag.”

“Mmm,” she kissed him back, hooking her legs around him and pulling him down against her. “Me too.”

He tore his shirt off and ripped open a sanitizing wipe briskly cleaning the area between his eighth and ninth rib as he slid down to the floor. 

The room swam around him as he struggled to open the sterile needle and attach it to the syringe. He had to stop several times before he was able to get it positioned. His head was splitting now and his breathing still hadn’t returned to normal. Still, he tried locked his left arm over his head and reached around with a violently shaking right hand to insert the needle in place. 

He’d done this so many times in his last 6 months of life. But for some reason, inserting a four inch needle into the pleural space surrounding the lung on his own didn’t get any easier. The world pitched again and his labored breath caught, throwing him off. He paused to try to get a hold of himself before puncturing. 

“What the bloody hell?”

He looked up to see three Simmons’s walking through the lab door. 

Chapter Text

Simmons was unable to sleep for most of the night. She went to bed at midnight, climbing carefully over a snoring Fitz to her side of the bed, pushed up against the wall in their tiny bunk. Well, her tiny bunk. Fitz had his own but they basically shared hers, using his only for storing his clothes and things. Fitz muttered something indecipherable as she settled down softly next to him, careful not to wake him. She slept fitfully until around three am when she gave up and got back up to work. 

“Jemma?” Fitz looked up blearily, his curls smashed on one side of his head and a pillow crease pressed into his cheek. 

“Go back to sleep,” Simmons whispered as she slipped into her jeans. “I’m just going to check something in the lab.”

“M’kay,” Fitz dropped his head back down and was out again like a light. She envied how easily sleep came to him. It never was for her. 

After pulling a sweater over her head and sliding her feet into a pair of flats, she snuck out of the bunk and carefully closed the door behind her. 

She glanced at her phone to read the time as 3:11. 

At least it would be quiet in the lab. There were perks to getting in early before the constant interruptions and conversations. She had several charts running overnight she could check on and multiple data samples to examine. Now was as good a time as any. 

The only sound in the halls was the soft padding of her shoes on the concrete and the hum of the fluorescent lights. Fitz had been slowly organizing the plans to replace them all with LEDs, but it would take time since Shield did all their own maintenance and construction now to minimize the risk of exposure. 

As she rounded the corner to the lab the silence was interrupted by a sudden crash. 

Who was in her lab at this hour? 

She rushed in the sliding doors ready to face whatever emergency awaited her in her workspace. She was not, however, prepared for a shirtless Grant Ward, collapsed in the cabinet corner with an oxygen mask over his face and an 18 gauge needle in his hand. 

The lab was torn apart, equipment scattered across countertops, drawers hanging open and cabinets ransacked. 

“What the bloody hell?” she screeched, marching forward to rip the needle from his hand. As she did so his eyes lolled and he all but collapsed against the cabinet. 

“Ward?” her anger stilled as she took in his state. She could see his ribs where she should see smooth muscle wrapped around his exposed chest. His collarbones and shoulder tips stood out on his now-wiry frame. His breaths were coming in wheezes behind the oxygen mask and his face was pale and slick with sweat. She pulled the mask up to find blue lips parted in a failed attempt to get air in. He didn’t respond to her at all, eyes glassy and unseeing. 

“Right,” she slid the mask back over his mouth and nose and checked the gauge on the tank to make sure it was full and he knew how to actually open the valve correctly. After ascertaining that he did, she stood up and dug through one of the drawers for a pulse oximeter she slipped onto his left pointer finger. 

It read 84% O2 with a pulse of 128. 

“Shit,” she swore, shining a light into both his eyes. “Ward? Can you hear me?”

He didn’t even blink his unfocussed eyes. 

She felt his clammy forehead. His numbers were an emergency. For the moment she could almost forget that this was Grant Ward. For a moment he was just a patient in critical condition.

“What is happening? What were you trying to do?” She scanned his frame for injuries and didn’t find any beyond a number of greenish bruises along his chest, arms, and hands. He just looked… sick.

“But,” Ward had sputtered at the so-called medium when she claimed he was supposed to live longer; that he wasn’t supposed to die so young.“I was… I was already sick.”

“You would have recovered.”

“From Stage 4 metastatic lung cancer,” Ward deadpanned. “Right.”

“Lung cancer,” Simmons muttered to herself as she glanced over the items Ward had grabbed in the mess he’d made. An 18 gauge needle on a syringe. An open packet of alcohol wipes… 

“Were you trying to give yourself a thoracentesis?” she asked in disbelief, grabbing for her stethoscope. She had never heard of a patient giving themselves the procedure. Some things could be easily done to oneself, others… nearly impossible. Especially safely. 

“Are you bloody insane?” she muttered, pressing the stethoscope to his chest. As she listened to his lungs over the sound of his tachycardic heart all she heard was fluid swallowing his lungs in a pressure that would make breathing incredibly difficult. 

“Right,” she said. “I need…”

She quickly got up and pulled one of the office chairs over in front of the patient. 

“Come on,” she grunted as she grabbed him under the armpits and struggled to maneuver him forward. Sheer determination and a skillful use of leverage was the only way she managed to pull his front half forward so that his head and shoulders rested on the chair, arms hanging over the back of it. The position gave her the best access to his back and side. 

After double checking his airway was open, he was fully unconscious now, she sanitized her hands, snapped on a pair of purple latex gloves and grabbed another alcohol swab. It looked like he had been attempting to go in from the side, which was reasonable since he couldn’t reach his back, sometimes going in from the side was better, depending on the situation, but she preferred to go in from the back. She prepared a fresh sterile needle and a catheter, assuming that by the sound of it he had more fluid build up than a 30mL syringe would be able to handle. Sanitizing the space between ribs, she carefully made a small incision and punctured it with the 18 gauge set in the catheter. 

After the initial resistance it slid in smoothly as she steadily sought the perfect depth. 

“You know this is most safely done with an ultrasound,” she scolded as though her patient could hear her. “And with a localized anesthetic.”

As she slowly pulled the fluid from the pleural space his eyes flickered open. He winced and twitched as though to pull away. 

“Don’t you dare move,” she snapped despite wondering silently how painful the procedure must be without any anesthetic at all. 

Ward stilled and remained so as she finished taping the catheter on his left side. 

“Right,” she said, placing the syringe on the counter top and changing her gloves. “The other side sounds bad too.” 

A new needle and catheter were set. Ward barely blinked as she made the second incision and slid the needle in, despite being awake. Blood from the incisions had trickled down his back and she carefully cleaned him up. 

“Absolutely barbaric,” she muttered as she started cleaning up her invaded workspace and let the fluid drain. “We might as well have just performed a field procedure. Do you know the complications that come with this kind of procedure? Infections? Effusions? You could have punctured your own lung!”

She shook her head as she swept garbage into the can and snapped off the gloves. 

“Absolute idiocy.”

Desperation was more like it, but she found irritability more comfortable than concern. And the idea of anyone doing that to themselves was deeply concerning. 

Ward said, nothing, staring blankly at a point across the lab, breath fogging the mask rhythmically. 

“Your breathing is already a bit better though,” she noted checking the pulse oximeter again. His numbers were better than they had been, but still pretty terrible over all. 

“Stage Four, you said?” she scoffed. “Yeah, you were dead anyway.”

A pair of dark eyes finally slid over to her, but her patient remained still and silent. 

How had he managed to continue functioning so well at that stage? He should have been bed ridden or close to it; on oxygen constantly; hospitalized frequently. Not running Hydra, adventuring to alien planets and fighting Shield agents. 

He had looked sick, she realized looking back to when he and Giyera were holding them, torturing them. But she had attributed it to mania, he seemed to be off the deep end, completely mad. 

Still, the fact that he kept functioning for so long was preposterous. 

Checking his fluid levels after 10 minutes she decided to give it more time since the fluid was still pulling steadily and his lungs still sounded like they were drowning in it when she listened to them. 

His heart rate had improved dramatically. 

“Doing alright?” she asked, biting back a ‘as if I care’ professionally. 

“Yes,” Ward’s voice was muffled through the mask, and he didn’t move with the needles placed in his back. His face remained emotionless. 

 Stuck with him in the lab, Simmons was forced into confrontation with a reality she wasn’t ready to face still. The reality of Grant Ward as a triple agent. A friend who had dropped her from a plane, had killed countless people. A friend who had kidnapped her, held her hostage, raved about how terribly he was hurting Fitz to get one of them to speak. A friend who had still betrayed her, for the good of Shield or not. A friend who she recently learned had been abused and brainwashed as a vulnerable adolescent. A fact she was still struggling to interpret. 

A friend she had tried to kill. 

A friend who was dead. 

“I can’t believe I’m giving a ghost medical treatment,” she murmured mostly to herself, rolling her eyes. 

A ghost who was cold. She noticed the purple splotches and goosebumps across his exposed skin before he started to shiver. 

“Cold?” she asked. He didn’t respond, just glanced back at her expressionlessly, and she sighed. She felt as inclined to give him a saucy ‘how terrible for you’ as she was to get him a blanket. It would be nice if he’d at least emote a little. 

She decided on a blanket for his neck and shoulders, above the catheters. 

She was still a professional after all.