lemonclementine (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lemonclementine) wrote2014-05-20 11:48 am
lemonclementine) wrote2014-05-20 11:48 am
Entry tags:
Hydra Hatchling (3/?)
Title: HYDRA Hatchling- Birthday Party
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 Chapter Two
There were a lot of things Hydra was good at.
Organizing a six-year-old's birthday party was not one of those things.
“Oh for the love of- Uhlenbrauch, what the hell is he gonna do with an assault rifle?! He's turning six! The damn thing is taller than he is!” Raina had suggested that Ward pre-screen the gifts that the various visiting agents brought, and he was glad he'd taken her up on that suggestion. So far he'd already confiscated a high-powered freeze ray prototype, some strange Aesir weaponry, plastic explosives, and especially confusingly, a whole pound of marijuana. Granted, in that last case, Agent Holloway had been high as a kite and probably hadn't actually intended the weed as a present for Julian...
“Aw, come on,” Agent Ulehnbrauch complained. “He'll grow into it! And wasn't Garrett talking about starting the munchkin up on firearms training this year anyway?”
“Yes, with a handgun,” Ward replied, a vein twitching in his temple. “And not with live ammunition.”
“But this thing was expensive!”
“Then keep it for yourself! Or save it for someone else's birthday! Qi Sorokova's birthday is in two weeks, give it to her or something!”
Agent Uhlenbrauch shuffled off, still grumbling about how expensive the gun had been and how nobody ever appreciated anything he ever did around here. Almost as soon as he had left, Agent Sorokova herself wandered over.
“Did Bill try to give you that damn rifle of his?” she asked. Ward groaned aloud.
“You knew about that?”
“Everyone knew about that,” the Eurasian woman replied, rolling her eyes. “The idiot wouldn't stop talking about what a good deal he got for it on the Internet. I just didn't think he was going to give it to Julian. Oh yeah, before I forget, here's the present from me. I actually got it without blowing anything up this time!” She handed over a big Lego set, but Ward didn't take it.
“He bought that thing on the Internet?”
“Relax, Ward,” Sorokova said. “Bill might be an idiot, but he's not that much of an idiot. There's no way any agency could have traced it. Apparently he got it off some old retired mafia guy.”
“It's not any agencies I'm worried about!” Ward replied heatedly. Again, Sorokova rolled her eyes.
“You're not still concerned about that woman finding us, are you? Koujirou and Ethan haven't detected any intrusions, or even suspicious access attempts into the computer systems for months,” she said, referencing Agents Kurosawa and Zuckerman. “If Skye is even still alive she has no idea where we are. There's no reason for you to worry.”
“And of course you're an expert on what Koujirou Kurosawa does and does not know. Does he give you a network security report at night when you're cuddling?” Ward asked sarcastically. Sorokova flushed.
“Well... I...”
“Don't worry about it. You two are old news around here by now,” Ward said lightly, trying to cover up the sense of disquiet he felt. “Did you two really think you could keep your relationship a secret from Raina? Or, for that matter, from Garrett?”
“Garrett knows?” Sorokova asked, going white as a sheet.
“Of course he knows,” Ward said. “And if you two are smart you'd be less obvious about it. He'll think you're getting too attached to one another, and you know how much he hates that.”
“I... yes, of course,” the woman replied, eyes darting around the room like a frightened rabbit. “If the Legos are okay I should go wrap them...”
It was a bit cruel to scare her like that, Ward thought, watching Agent Sorokova maneuver her way through the crowd of agents trying to get up a child's party, or at least something approximate to one. But Sorokova grated on him- her demeanor, her personality... even her physical appearance were uncomfortably reminiscent of Skye. Or at least would be, if Skye was a Hydra agent. Truthfully, Garrett didn't care at all about the relationship between Qi Sorokova and Koujirou Kurosawa. In fact, upon learning about it, he'd just laughed and said, “So Kurosawa finally stopped being a pussy and bagged Sorokova, huh? Good for him. I thought I was gonna have to order him to ask her out.”
If he was really honest with himself, Ward admitted that his discomfort around the woman was due to the fact that she reminded him of Skye, if Skye had been obsessed with blowing things up. In fact, due to the resemblance between the two women, Garrett had suggested that the woman pretend to be Julian's mother. Ultimately Ward had put his foot down and said no, however. Skye was the mother of his son, and if she wasn't willing to be a part of Hydra, then his son was going to have no mother. And that's where the lie came in.
Sometimes, though, he wondered if it really would have been so bad to try the ruse. Ward wasn't an idiot. He knew his son wondered about his mother. Sorokova clearly liked Julian. When they were together, they really did look like mother and child. Maybe it was one of those lies that would have turned out for the better, if he'd gone along with it.
“You're thinking too hard again,” a familiar voice said, and a familiar hand bonked him lightly on the head. “It's a party! Lighten up! You're too serious!”
“It's not a party yet,” Ward replied. Garrett smirked.
“No, but it will be soon. Raina's trying to get your son to wear pants before he comes to get his presents and eat his cake. Whoever thought it was a good idea to get him Captain America pajama pants is is going to get very familiar with my boot up their ass. What genius thought it was a brilliant plan to get our little hatchling Captain America pajamas?”
Ward snorted. “Zuckerman said they didn't have any other kind of boy's pajamas at the store. It was either those, or a Barbie nightgown from the girl's section.”
“What the hell happened to pajamas for young boys that had trucks or whatever on them?” Garrett wondered. “Now it's nothing but this superhero shit.”
“Little boys look up to superheros, I guess,” Ward replied. Garrett laughed derisively.
“We've got plenty of role models right here! Look at yourself! You actually made something of yourself! Everyone around here is a success story- more or less, anyway.”
“Mmm...” Ward hummed noncommittally.
“Oh look, here comes Kurosawa with something that looks like a cake! Man, say what you want about that guy but whoever taught him to bake a cake like that deserves a goddamn medal.”
Agent Kurosawa came over with what was, indeed, a delicious-looking cake. After confirming the ingredients with Ward, he went to go drop it off at the food table before slipping off to go help with decorations. Ward watched with mild concern as as the balloon group struggled to put the balloons up. Really, how hard was it to make a balloon bouquet? But with the way his coworkers were bumbling about, one would think that placing balloons in visually appealing arrangements was harder than trying to reverse-engineer Tony Stark's suit.
How was it that members of what was supposed to be one of the most feared terrorist groups in the world could be so... incompetent? Maybe they had just never had much of a chance to experience something like a birthday party for themselves. And wasn't that a depressing thought? HYDRA was so full of dysfunctional, stunted people. He’d known that. HYDRA liked to recruit those people who had nothing left to live for- Garrett had been dying from shrapnel embedded in him, he himself had been in lockup after trying to kill his brother and burn down his family home, Sorokova had been desperate, turning to prostitution after her parents were killed by their country’s regime, Zuckerman’s father had killed his mother and himself, leaving the teenaged boy behind with no money and no prospects, Kurosawa had been caught trying to sneak meth into his hometown to make some quick money and Fischer had been caught manufacturing meth… he could go on and on describe the situations his coworkers had found themselves in before they were recruited. In a way, HYDRA had saved them. But had they really been saved, or were they just in a different sort of bad situation now?
Eventually, Raina showed up with Julian in tow. The little boy was pouting and fidgeted every so often, looking unhappily down at the jeans he was wearing. Raina huffed with repressed laughter at the boy’s antics.
“He really wanted to wear his pajamas,” she explained. “I tried to tell him that he couldn’t, but he didn’t want to listen.”
“It’s my birthday!” Julian said defiantly. “I should be able to wear what I want!”
Ward laughed. “I don’t think it works like that, kid,” he said.
“Well, it should,” Julian said emphatically. Ward shrugged. He couldn’t really argue with that. He always had days where he wanted to lie around in pajamas too.
Now that the guest of honor had arrived, the party could begin in earnest. Ward watched as his son goofed off with the variety of agents that had shown up. Someone had rigged up a poster-sized piece of paper with a passable sketch of a donkey drawn on it, and had tied some yarn to the ends of a bunch of knives. It was a very Hydra-ized version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Maybe another time, Ward would have yelled at the others for allowing his son to handle knives so recklessly, but he stopped himself. At least Kurosawa and Fischer seemed to have everything under control, making sure that Julian did not touch the blade part with his hands, only touching the handle.
And wasn’t that just a marker of how fucked up everything had become? Normal parents would be flipping the fuck out at the idea of their precious offspring being so close to a weapon of any kind, let alone playing with one. Ward sighed, wishing it didn’t have to be like this. If things were different, he could be raising Julian in a normal setting, away from the criminals and lunatics he was growing up with now. They could have a nice house in the suburbs and Julian could go to a normal school instead of the Academy of Whatever Random Agent Wasn’t On Assignment At The Moment. He could learn normal things, like spelling and addition, instead of gun maintenance and how to blow things up. Single fathers weren’t that strange nowadays, they wouldn’t draw too much attention to themselves. Or maybe, while he was dreaming, Julian could have been brought up by both his mother and his father. He could have known his true mother, not having to hide behind the lies.
Maybe he should have allowed Skye to raise the boy- maybe he shouldn’t have pushed Garrett to allow him to raise his son. Hiding in the shadows was no way for a child to grow up. But that’s what he got. He’d wanted his son to become part of Hydra anyway, hadn’t he?
No, no… he’d never wanted that. But that was the life he’d damned his child to. Julian would grow up here, amongst the agents, and would learn to become the perfect Hydra drone. Maybe if he was lucky he’d get to be in a relationship with another Hydra agent, and if they had children the cycle would begin all over again. That wasn’t what Ward had wanted at all. But that was what he had done.
Suddenly feeling ill, he excused himself from the party, coming up with an excuse about having a stomachache. As he beat a hasty retreat, he did not notice Raina’s eyes watching him, cold and calculating as always.
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 Chapter Two
There were a lot of things Hydra was good at.
Organizing a six-year-old's birthday party was not one of those things.
“Oh for the love of- Uhlenbrauch, what the hell is he gonna do with an assault rifle?! He's turning six! The damn thing is taller than he is!” Raina had suggested that Ward pre-screen the gifts that the various visiting agents brought, and he was glad he'd taken her up on that suggestion. So far he'd already confiscated a high-powered freeze ray prototype, some strange Aesir weaponry, plastic explosives, and especially confusingly, a whole pound of marijuana. Granted, in that last case, Agent Holloway had been high as a kite and probably hadn't actually intended the weed as a present for Julian...
“Aw, come on,” Agent Ulehnbrauch complained. “He'll grow into it! And wasn't Garrett talking about starting the munchkin up on firearms training this year anyway?”
“Yes, with a handgun,” Ward replied, a vein twitching in his temple. “And not with live ammunition.”
“But this thing was expensive!”
“Then keep it for yourself! Or save it for someone else's birthday! Qi Sorokova's birthday is in two weeks, give it to her or something!”
Agent Uhlenbrauch shuffled off, still grumbling about how expensive the gun had been and how nobody ever appreciated anything he ever did around here. Almost as soon as he had left, Agent Sorokova herself wandered over.
“Did Bill try to give you that damn rifle of his?” she asked. Ward groaned aloud.
“You knew about that?”
“Everyone knew about that,” the Eurasian woman replied, rolling her eyes. “The idiot wouldn't stop talking about what a good deal he got for it on the Internet. I just didn't think he was going to give it to Julian. Oh yeah, before I forget, here's the present from me. I actually got it without blowing anything up this time!” She handed over a big Lego set, but Ward didn't take it.
“He bought that thing on the Internet?”
“Relax, Ward,” Sorokova said. “Bill might be an idiot, but he's not that much of an idiot. There's no way any agency could have traced it. Apparently he got it off some old retired mafia guy.”
“It's not any agencies I'm worried about!” Ward replied heatedly. Again, Sorokova rolled her eyes.
“You're not still concerned about that woman finding us, are you? Koujirou and Ethan haven't detected any intrusions, or even suspicious access attempts into the computer systems for months,” she said, referencing Agents Kurosawa and Zuckerman. “If Skye is even still alive she has no idea where we are. There's no reason for you to worry.”
“And of course you're an expert on what Koujirou Kurosawa does and does not know. Does he give you a network security report at night when you're cuddling?” Ward asked sarcastically. Sorokova flushed.
“Well... I...”
“Don't worry about it. You two are old news around here by now,” Ward said lightly, trying to cover up the sense of disquiet he felt. “Did you two really think you could keep your relationship a secret from Raina? Or, for that matter, from Garrett?”
“Garrett knows?” Sorokova asked, going white as a sheet.
“Of course he knows,” Ward said. “And if you two are smart you'd be less obvious about it. He'll think you're getting too attached to one another, and you know how much he hates that.”
“I... yes, of course,” the woman replied, eyes darting around the room like a frightened rabbit. “If the Legos are okay I should go wrap them...”
It was a bit cruel to scare her like that, Ward thought, watching Agent Sorokova maneuver her way through the crowd of agents trying to get up a child's party, or at least something approximate to one. But Sorokova grated on him- her demeanor, her personality... even her physical appearance were uncomfortably reminiscent of Skye. Or at least would be, if Skye was a Hydra agent. Truthfully, Garrett didn't care at all about the relationship between Qi Sorokova and Koujirou Kurosawa. In fact, upon learning about it, he'd just laughed and said, “So Kurosawa finally stopped being a pussy and bagged Sorokova, huh? Good for him. I thought I was gonna have to order him to ask her out.”
If he was really honest with himself, Ward admitted that his discomfort around the woman was due to the fact that she reminded him of Skye, if Skye had been obsessed with blowing things up. In fact, due to the resemblance between the two women, Garrett had suggested that the woman pretend to be Julian's mother. Ultimately Ward had put his foot down and said no, however. Skye was the mother of his son, and if she wasn't willing to be a part of Hydra, then his son was going to have no mother. And that's where the lie came in.
Sometimes, though, he wondered if it really would have been so bad to try the ruse. Ward wasn't an idiot. He knew his son wondered about his mother. Sorokova clearly liked Julian. When they were together, they really did look like mother and child. Maybe it was one of those lies that would have turned out for the better, if he'd gone along with it.
“You're thinking too hard again,” a familiar voice said, and a familiar hand bonked him lightly on the head. “It's a party! Lighten up! You're too serious!”
“It's not a party yet,” Ward replied. Garrett smirked.
“No, but it will be soon. Raina's trying to get your son to wear pants before he comes to get his presents and eat his cake. Whoever thought it was a good idea to get him Captain America pajama pants is is going to get very familiar with my boot up their ass. What genius thought it was a brilliant plan to get our little hatchling Captain America pajamas?”
Ward snorted. “Zuckerman said they didn't have any other kind of boy's pajamas at the store. It was either those, or a Barbie nightgown from the girl's section.”
“What the hell happened to pajamas for young boys that had trucks or whatever on them?” Garrett wondered. “Now it's nothing but this superhero shit.”
“Little boys look up to superheros, I guess,” Ward replied. Garrett laughed derisively.
“We've got plenty of role models right here! Look at yourself! You actually made something of yourself! Everyone around here is a success story- more or less, anyway.”
“Mmm...” Ward hummed noncommittally.
“Oh look, here comes Kurosawa with something that looks like a cake! Man, say what you want about that guy but whoever taught him to bake a cake like that deserves a goddamn medal.”
Agent Kurosawa came over with what was, indeed, a delicious-looking cake. After confirming the ingredients with Ward, he went to go drop it off at the food table before slipping off to go help with decorations. Ward watched with mild concern as as the balloon group struggled to put the balloons up. Really, how hard was it to make a balloon bouquet? But with the way his coworkers were bumbling about, one would think that placing balloons in visually appealing arrangements was harder than trying to reverse-engineer Tony Stark's suit.
How was it that members of what was supposed to be one of the most feared terrorist groups in the world could be so... incompetent? Maybe they had just never had much of a chance to experience something like a birthday party for themselves. And wasn't that a depressing thought? HYDRA was so full of dysfunctional, stunted people. He’d known that. HYDRA liked to recruit those people who had nothing left to live for- Garrett had been dying from shrapnel embedded in him, he himself had been in lockup after trying to kill his brother and burn down his family home, Sorokova had been desperate, turning to prostitution after her parents were killed by their country’s regime, Zuckerman’s father had killed his mother and himself, leaving the teenaged boy behind with no money and no prospects, Kurosawa had been caught trying to sneak meth into his hometown to make some quick money and Fischer had been caught manufacturing meth… he could go on and on describe the situations his coworkers had found themselves in before they were recruited. In a way, HYDRA had saved them. But had they really been saved, or were they just in a different sort of bad situation now?
Eventually, Raina showed up with Julian in tow. The little boy was pouting and fidgeted every so often, looking unhappily down at the jeans he was wearing. Raina huffed with repressed laughter at the boy’s antics.
“He really wanted to wear his pajamas,” she explained. “I tried to tell him that he couldn’t, but he didn’t want to listen.”
“It’s my birthday!” Julian said defiantly. “I should be able to wear what I want!”
Ward laughed. “I don’t think it works like that, kid,” he said.
“Well, it should,” Julian said emphatically. Ward shrugged. He couldn’t really argue with that. He always had days where he wanted to lie around in pajamas too.
Now that the guest of honor had arrived, the party could begin in earnest. Ward watched as his son goofed off with the variety of agents that had shown up. Someone had rigged up a poster-sized piece of paper with a passable sketch of a donkey drawn on it, and had tied some yarn to the ends of a bunch of knives. It was a very Hydra-ized version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Maybe another time, Ward would have yelled at the others for allowing his son to handle knives so recklessly, but he stopped himself. At least Kurosawa and Fischer seemed to have everything under control, making sure that Julian did not touch the blade part with his hands, only touching the handle.
And wasn’t that just a marker of how fucked up everything had become? Normal parents would be flipping the fuck out at the idea of their precious offspring being so close to a weapon of any kind, let alone playing with one. Ward sighed, wishing it didn’t have to be like this. If things were different, he could be raising Julian in a normal setting, away from the criminals and lunatics he was growing up with now. They could have a nice house in the suburbs and Julian could go to a normal school instead of the Academy of Whatever Random Agent Wasn’t On Assignment At The Moment. He could learn normal things, like spelling and addition, instead of gun maintenance and how to blow things up. Single fathers weren’t that strange nowadays, they wouldn’t draw too much attention to themselves. Or maybe, while he was dreaming, Julian could have been brought up by both his mother and his father. He could have known his true mother, not having to hide behind the lies.
Maybe he should have allowed Skye to raise the boy- maybe he shouldn’t have pushed Garrett to allow him to raise his son. Hiding in the shadows was no way for a child to grow up. But that’s what he got. He’d wanted his son to become part of Hydra anyway, hadn’t he?
No, no… he’d never wanted that. But that was the life he’d damned his child to. Julian would grow up here, amongst the agents, and would learn to become the perfect Hydra drone. Maybe if he was lucky he’d get to be in a relationship with another Hydra agent, and if they had children the cycle would begin all over again. That wasn’t what Ward had wanted at all. But that was what he had done.
Suddenly feeling ill, he excused himself from the party, coming up with an excuse about having a stomachache. As he beat a hasty retreat, he did not notice Raina’s eyes watching him, cold and calculating as always.