lemonclementine | Fic: Hydra Hatchling (2/?)

Title: HYDRA Hatchling- Six Years
Fandom: Agents of SHIELD
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Past Skye/Ward

Summary: A woman, desperately trying to find the child stolen from her shortly after his birth, with the help of the people who'd become her family.

A man, raising his son and hoping to do right by the child.

And a little boy, raised within the shadowy ranks of a notorious terrorist group.

Sometimes the line between the bad guys and the good guys gets a little blurry... especially when you're six years old and your family says the "good guys" are out to get you.

Chapter One

If someone had told him how much more efficient and motivated his agents would be after a child came to live with them, Garrett would have laughed in their face. Hydra was supposed to be an elite force, not a babysitting service, and at first after Fischer and Smith brought back Ward's son, he was concerned. Everyone in the base came out to gawk at the baby, many making “gitchy-gitchy-goo” sounds and silly faces, or talking in ridiculously high-pitched voices. And then, when he'd sent Agent Sorokova out to pick up formula (considering that Ward couldn't exactly breastfeed the baby), the idiot ended up getting spotted by an off-duty FBI agent who recognized her in the Wal-Mart. Sorokova ended up blowing the place sky-high to get away, causing a public panic that was more trouble than it was worth.

But as time went by, Garrett had to admit that little Julian was a brightening influence on the base. Sure, it took some getting used to, seeing hardened, long-term Hydra agents playing patty-cakes or the science team watching Teletubbies, but it was, overall, a good thing. And with the boy being raised within the organization, they had a chance to raise him in the ideology from birth, to teach him what they wanted him to know and nothing more.

When Ward had learned of Skye's pregnancy, the man had become single-minded in his determination to get to her. Nothing Garrett said seemed to make a dent in the man's thick head. It was ultimately Raina who got through to him: “You realize that Skye will not want to have anything to do with you, father of her child or not. She made that very clear to you when she tried to get you arrested by the FBI. But the baby... the baby won't know what you'd done if she doesn't tell it.”

“Because she's just going to tell my child that its father was a good man. Right,” Ward had said sarcastically, rolling his eyes. Raina just smiled enigmatically and shrugged.

“That's only if she is the one to raise it.”

“Are you suggesting that she'll give the baby up for adoption? I doubt that, she hated that orphanage she grew up in.”

“I didn't say that, but if she did it might make it easier... no, I'm suggesting that you step up and raise your own child. Be a father.”

The color drained from Ward's face at the woman's words. He'd known Skye was pregnant, and he knew it was his, because unless Skye had been getting it on with Coulson (and wasn't that a horrifying mental image), there wasn't anyone else who would have been in a position to impregnate the hacker. But he hadn't allowed himself to think of himself as a father. His own hadn't been much use. Would he just repeat the same the same mistakes? He was pretty sure that was how it worked, and said so. Didn't parents just repeat the same mistakes they'd been subjected to on their own children?

Raina just raised an eyebrow and said nothing other than, “well, it's your choice whether you want to know your child. Or not.”

So Ward had started tracking the movements of the bus obsessively. He bribed Agents Zuckerman and Kurosawa into keeping it under surveillance, and spent several weeks convincing Garrett to allow him to raise the child here, in the heart of Hydra. “After all, when the child grows up, it will be ready to be an agent.”

And so, the fateful day arrived. Agent Zuckerman ran into the training room where Ward and Garrett were sparring as fast as his stubby little legs would carry him. “The SHIELD plane... they landed it... near a hospital,” he panted, out of breath from running. “I got a call... from one of the field agents. They brought a pregnant woman in.”

Garrett had to stop Ward from dashing off himself to retrieve the child. “Will you think for once? They know who you are! You won't have a chance of getting close. Let someone else go. You'll have plenty of time to be with your kid once we bring it back here, okay?”

It was a tense several hours waiting for Fischer and Smith to come back, but when they did, they had a bundle of blankets that they handed over to him- he had a son! Skye had apparently named him Julian Phillip, and Ward ultimately decided to keep the first name, but change the second. Julian Grant Ward. His son.

Six Years Later

“I cannot believe how big you're getting!” Raina cried, hugging the little boy with a big grin on her face. “Six years old! You're making me feel old!”

Julian giggled. “You're not old, Auntie Raina! And my birthday's tomorrow, so I'm not six yet.”

“Yes it is,” Raina agreed. “What do you think you'll get for your birthday? I heard Agent Kurosawa baked you a cake, and I overheard Agent Zuckerman and Agent Johnson were going to go to the toy store today.”

"I really want an X-box!”

“An X-box? Really?” Raina asked with a laugh. “Since when do you know how to play video games?”

“Since Agent Smith taught me how to play Angry Birds!”

“But that's not an X-box game...” Raina replied before she realized the futility of trying to argue with a child. “Well, we'll just have to see what you get, hmm?”

“Actually,” Julian dropped his voice to what he thought was a conspiratorial whisper- which was still actually still fairly loud. “I want something else, too.”

“Oh?” Raina asked curiously. Julian looked around, as though he was checking to see if he was going to get in trouble .

“Don't tell Daddy or Uncle Garrett,” he whispered, “but what I really want is to have a mommy.”

Raina's heart sank. Shortly after bringing him home, Garrett had ordered everyone to not divulge any information about Skye or SHIELD to the baby once he grew up. Ward had decided to tell Julian that his mother had died shortly after he was born. So far the boy had accepted it, but it didn't stop him from asking about his mother.

“Was she pretty?” he'd asked Agent Smith out of the blue one day. The agent absentmindedly responded,

“Was who pretty?”

“My mom. Was she pretty?”

The agent stopped in his tracks, beginning to sweat a bit. “I, ah, I don't believe I ever met her, Julian.”

“But she worked with you, right?”

“Er... I didn't start working here until after you were born,” the agent lied. Julian nodded, but sighed.

“I wonder what she was like.”

Another time he straight-up asked Ward about his mother. “What was mommy like?”

Ward had frozen, taking a few moments to craft his response. What was he supposed to say? How do you explain such a complicated situation to a child, especially one who believed his mother was dead?

“Your mother… she was beautiful, and very smart. She loved computers- she was our- my- the team’s hacker. She pulled us out of more than one difficult situation with her skills,” he finally said, hoping that would be the end of it.

Of course, it wasn’t.

“I wish I could have met her,” Julian mumbled. Again, Ward paused for some time before answering, trying to come up with an answer.

Finally, he simply said- “I wish you could have too.”

Every year in late spring, it was a good idea to leave Skye alone. The days leading up to the anniversary of That Day, Skye would tend to start to withdraw into herself, her normally ebullient personality becoming snappish and irritable. The first year, she almost pushed Fitz out of the cargo hold of the Bus for an ill-advised remark. Three years after the incident, May found Skye half-dead from alcohol poisoning in her room, empty bottles scattered everywhere. Four years after the incident, Coulson had to forcibly restrain the hacker from blindly charging into a suspected Hydra safe house.

The past year, Skye (as well as half of the team) had been laid up with a terribly case of food poisoning, likely from the sketchy restaurant Triplett had insisted that they all try, so the anniversary passed relatively calmly. Well, as calmly as any day could be when four former SHIELD agents were practically puking their internal organs out. At least no one threatening to push anyone else out of a plane, drinking themselves to death, or trying to charge head-first into a Hydra base that would likely have turned out to be a suicide mission.

Coulson sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. Losing Skye’s baby had been hard on everyone. Triplett had taken a bullet in the shoulder from one of the fleeing Hydra agents. Simmons blamed herself for not having the knowledge and equipment to deliver the baby safely on the Bus. May was still furious about her inability to catch the agents. Fitz regretted being so oblivious that he didn’t realize what had happened until he was mobilized to try to track down the agents. But it had been hardest for Skye, naturally.

First she had found out that Ward had never truly been the person he said he was. Then, a few days after that, she discovered she was pregnant with his child.

It had not been a terribly easy pregnancy, either. Coulson did not know much about pregnancy, but he knew enough about it to know that some of Skye’s symptoms were not normal. Simmons had diagnosed the severely nauseous and faint Skye with hyperemesis gravidarium and had the hacker hooked up to an IV for several weeks so that she and the baby were able to get the nutrients they needed. Once she’d finally gotten over the hyperemesis, she contracted a UTI. That had been a miserable two weeks for her while she waited for it to clear up…

When Skye finally safely delivered her son, everyone had breathed a sigh of relief. That relief was short-lived. Hydra showed up and whisked the baby away.

Skye was convinced, and Coulson agreed with her to a point, that the reason her son had been taken was because of who his father was. She would have wondered how Ward had discovered the pregnancy, but stopped herself. Hydra had ears everywhere- like Coulson had said, you never truly eradicated the organization. And now they had her son.

Not that it was much comfort, but Coulson was fairly certain that Julian was alive, or at least had been for a while after he was taken. Those Hydra agents wouldn’t have gone to all of the trouble to kidnap the baby if they planned to kill him, and he remembered the female agent shrieking at the male agent to be careful with the baby, which gave further credence to the hypothesis that Hydra wanted the baby alive.

Of course, that was small comfort, especially given the fact that they had no idea what the organization planned to do with the child. Maybe they wanted to test another half-assed version of the super-soldier serum, this time on a child, to see what would happen if the super-soldier was raised from birth. Or maybe they planned to bring the baby up to become an assassin, like the Black Widow. Whatever the plan, it was not something that left a lot of room for error on any side, and they needed to retrieve Julian as soon as possible.

Six years later, however, they had still not made any progress on that goal, and even Coulson was beginning to despair that they would ever find the child. At this point, he was beginning to wonder if there would even be anything left to find.

A knock at the door startled him out of his gloomy thoughts. “Come in,” he called. The door clicked open, and Skye stepped inside. “Skye. What can I do for you?”

“Coulson. Tell me there is still hope,” she said flatly. “And don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about. Will I ever find my son?”

Coulson waited a moment before answering, as gently as he could. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. It’s been six years, and we don’t know what their plans were. Even if he is still alive, we don’t know if he can even be saved.

“HE IS SIX YEARS OLD!” Skye screamed. Coulson jumped. “It has been six years! Tomorrow, it will have been exactly six years! And we are still no closer to getting my son back! When will we find him? You told me… you told me would find him!” Skye’s voice broke on the last word, and as though she lost the ability to stand, she flopped almost bonelessly into one of Coulson’s chairs.

“I meant what I told you,” Coulson said heavily, “and we will continue to search for him. But there is something you need to keep in mind- I had hoped to not bring this up, but it seems that will no longer be an option. How much do you know about Hydra?”

“Enough,” Skye replied.

“Then you know about their attempts to replicate the super-soldier serum, starting during the second world war, and continuing on into the present day- including the Centipede serum.”

“Yes,” Skye said slowly. “That’s how the Red Skull- what are you saying?”

“As you said, it has been six years,” Coulson replied cautiously, “and we never did establish a motive for the kidnapping. And Ward never seemed to be the paternal type.”

“You don’t think-?!” Skye’s eyes widened with horror. Coulson made an abortive movement, as though he wanted to clasp her shoulder, but then thought the better of it.

“I don’t know what I think,” he said. “All I’m saying is that it might be a possibility we should prepare ourselves for. I don’t think that’s what happened, necessarily,” he hastened to add, “just that it might have.”

Abruptly, Skye stood. “Thank you for your time,” she said stiffly, before turning and walking out without another word.

Coulson watched the door close behind her, and listened to her steps fade as she walked away. Again, he sighed heavily, wishing they could back to the days before SHIELD fell. Before Ward was revealed as a traitor. Before Skye realized she was pregnant. Back when they had all been a team, and Skye had been the bubbly, talented hacker he’d recruited, and not the bitter, closed-off, temperamental shell she was now.

In those six years, a lot had changed. And none of it was for the better.