#wssummer

Jemma smiles tightly and duck her head, bringing the champagne flute to her lips and pretending to sip to cover a pang of loneliness that hits her, even amongst the crowd counting down the new year that surrounds her.  God, she never should have let Grant and Daisy convince her to come out with them. It had been fun for a while, but now she’s standing amongst couples who are buzzed and giddy, ready to kiss to the turn of the year, and she’s alone, her longest friendship in ruins behind her because, for all the genius she’s said to be, she was stupid enough to think that because Fitz was in love with her, she’d be able to love him back.

“Six! Five! Four!”

Jemma’s puts the glass back to her lips to hide their trembling, trying to push the self-loathing aside, to leave it in the old year. She doesn’t want to mar Grant and Daisy’s evening, either. She pastes on a smile and downs her champagne, grabs another off a nearby tray.  She’ll toast with her friends once they’ve done kissing, she tells herself, then beg off back to the building to go to bed.

“Three! Two! One!”

The ball drops, fireworks erupt in the sky, and Grant pulls Daisy in for a kiss, his hand dipping low on her bare back, their champagne flutes on a table beside them so as not to get in the way. Jemma can’t help but watch, the beauty of them pressed together. Daisy in her bold pink dress, hands cupping Grant’s face. The way he leans into her, one hand tangled in her dark hair as his mouth moves over hers.

With a herculean effort, Jemma manages to tear her gaze from them before they break the kiss, her cheeks colour a little from the visual.

“Jemma!” Daisy reaches to grab her arm and she lets herself be pulled in, then more quickly than she’s able to track finds her drink plucked from her hand as she’s shoved bodily into Grant.

“Jemma needs a New Year’s kiss, too,” Daisy announces. Any protest she might have made (and who is she really fooling) dies on her lips as Grant’s cover her own. It’s not the perfunctory peck she might have expected, given his girlfriend is standing a foot away. It’s not tentative, either; his hands on her waist pull her flush against him, his mouth demanding. Her hands find his biceps as she opens her mouth for him, yields to the desire that has been burgeoning in her for

months. He kisses the very breath from her lungs, and it takes only a short second before guilt and shame wash over her. She’s kissed her friend’s boyfriend – her friend! – like he was a lover, like she had any right to do so. She doesn’t have time to dwell on it, though, because Daisy is spinning her around, only there isn’t anger in her dark eyes. Instead, there is only amusement and something else Jemma can’t quite name.

“Daisy,” she begins, unsure of what she’s about to say. There’s a question in it, she thinks, but she can’t quite make sense of herself through the heady feeling coursing through her.

“My turn,” Daisy says, stepping into Jemma’s space. Then she’s being kissed again, this one different but no less intoxicating an experience as Daisy playfully nips at her lips, a careful tease of mouth and hands that leave her spinning. Her eyes flutter closed and she feels Grant step in behind her. His hand slides down her silk dress, hot through the thin material until it is rubbing circles over her hip bone. She feels his stubble against her neck then he’s sucking a mark into her skin. Her hand comes to cover his own as she arches into it, a low whine escaping her throat of its own volition.

Daisy moves against Jemma, one hand anchored in Grant’s hair, the other fluttering in feather-light touches along her collar bone. It’s then she realises that her other hand is not free, that sometime along the line she’d flattened her palm where Grant’s had been, just above the cut of Daisy’s dress, smoothing along the soft, bare skin.

“What… I don’t…” she starts feebly, breaking off when Daisy leans to lick the swell of her breast.  

“We’re seducing you,” Daisy says, a flirtatious note beneath the matter-of-fact statement.

“Is it working?” Grant asks from behind her, not giving her a change to respond properly when he finds that spot near the hinge of her jaw and bites. She makes a noise so wanton she’d be embarrassed if she had enough wits left about her to care.

“We’ve talked about this,” Grant continues, almost conversationally.  “What it would be like to have you in our bed, to share you.  About the things we want to do with you. To do to you.”

His voice is a low murmur but she feels it everywhere, like a spell burning under her skin. She feels pliant beneath their hands, drunk on champagne and their ministrations.

“Will you let us?” Daisy nearly purrs before catching Jemma’s earlobe in her teeth.

“Hmm?” Jemma responds, not able to make heads or tail of the question through the haze of desire settled over them.

“Will you let us have you?” Daisy asks.  “Will you let us share you?”

“It’s important that we have the words, baby,” Grant says, his hand sliding down to pull the hem of her skirt higher, his hand on her bare thigh. “We’ll stop if you want to stop.  But if you want this, want us like we want you… say yes.”

It could destroy everything, she knows this too intimately, could leave nothing but ash and debris in the wake of this fire burning inside her. None of that matters at the moment, though. It feels far, far away. Because she does want this.  Maybe more than anything she’s ever wanted in her life. And she can’t bring herself to deny this.

Jemma nearly missed the phone call.

At the distinct ringtone, her body had stilled—the butter knife in hand clattering into the kitchen sink, her eyes staring in a petrified daze at the spot where she had tucked the cellphone away for safekeeping, the shrills of the incoming call the only sounds in the room.

Instruction might prepare her for a lot of things, but nothing made her ready for this exact moment where training became reality. And by the sixth ring, all the magazines stacked in the drawer had been ripped out and thrown over her shoulder to reveal the singular device. Panic seized her chest.

Seventh ring. “Hello?” she said, scrambling to answer the call before its eighth and final ring. Before her life was over.

“Joey’s Pizza.”

Jemma held her breath.

No words could express the icy terror in her veins, the numbness of her brilliant mind.

“You have the wrong number.”

She snapped the phone shut and sprang into action.

The back cover of the cellphone ripped off; the battery stomped on; the SIM card broken and flushed down the toilet. Her go-bag dug out of the trenches of her closet; random clothes pulled off hangers and stuffed inside alongside her laptop; most of her makeup products knocked off the dresser in her wild rush. The safe flung open; fake, old passports shoved in her bag; the simple wedding band slipped into her jacket pocket.

Jemma didn’t take her keys, lock the door, or look back. When she left, she was gone.

The streets appeared like a maze in front of her, but her feet never stopped moving—propelling her in a constant forward motion until her head finally caught up to her instincts. She knew where she was supposed to go, what she was supposed to do.

Her loose hair swung behind her shoulders, and her hands curled into fists to reduce their shaking. There was a well-devised plan, a detailed and foolproof exit that even someone like her could handle. And she would follow that plan, just as she had been taught to do.

Out of nowhere, a hard hand grabbed her wrist and jerked her in the opposite direction. Jemma gasped.

She had no sooner been pushed into the passenger seat of a black car than driven down streets off course. She struggled with her seat belt.

“This way will take us longer.”

The dark man looked at her like he was preparing a right turn. “No, honey, this is a shortcut. It’ll get us there faster.” He swerved left.

Her hand brushed the ring in her pocket; she looked back at the driver.

Everything was all wrong.

They sped down the highway far too slowly, and Jemma couldn’t help but glance at the side view mirror every few minutes looking for what she didn’t even know. She lost sense of direction after the second car change, but one thing was for sure: had she stuck to the plan, the plan he had promised to be infallible, she would’ve probably been captured or dead.

Jemma had put her life in his hands, had trusted him with it, and yet he was the one that constantly put it in danger.

Her head throbbed when they pulled to an easy halt. The smell of the sea made her nauseous. The setting sun illuminated the sky brighter than the way she had left it. Jemma looked down the road and wondered if they would take her pocketbook of euros.

She unbuckled her seat belt and turned to the driver. “Do you like my hair?”

He gave her an encouraging smile. “It looks good like this,” he said. The plain way he handed her a new set of keys was symbolic if anything. Jemma accepted them with a suppressed sigh.

“Thank you, General Jones.” He nodded in return and only peeled off from the row of parked cars when the front door locked shut behind her.

Inside, Jemma didn’t bother to unpack what little she had brought. She kept her bag on one of the stools by the breakfast bar, checked all the windows, and fell back-first onto the bed. For hours, she chewed her lip and the inside of her cheek and the other half of a granola bar from the third car change—stewing in the silence. It would be a while until she received new instructions.

It had once taken six days.

And Jemma fell asleep like that—wearing the outfit from before that clearly didn’t belong here, clutching the cuffs of her jacket with her arms folded across her chest, feeling annoyed and scared and sore, and waiting as long as she could before succumbing to slumber.

In the morning, she shucked off all her clothes right on the bed before staggering into the bathroom. The shower rejuvenated her parched skin, starving for relief, and it made her miss some of the things she had left behind as she watched them go down the drain.

These were the last moments of her old identity, one that had been bittersweet to live.

When she emerged from the steaming room, Jemma saw a back—stiff, yet slightly folded, but ever familiar atop the list of images she would never forget. She said nothing about his unobtrusive arrival; he said nothing about her silence.

She rounded the corners of the bed to face him, to kneel by his feet in nothing but a wet towel. She rested her arms on his legs and dared to look up until his eyes met hers. Hers were red and weary from the rubbing. His were dark and fatigued surely from whatever it took to get here.

“The bad news?” she asked.

“They got too close.” That was an understatement.

“The good news?”

He released his grip on her to reach over to the nightstand where the recognizable manila envelope lied. Breaking the seal, he unceremoniously spilled out items of her new persona. Jemma stood to examine her new passport only for him to snatch her back in place. She stumbled into his lap and saw what he held in his palm.

There was no hesitation when he pushed the sparkling rings onto her finger.

“You’re my wife again.”

Jemma had been Mrs. Grant Ward for all of twenty-three hours before their identities had been erased. That part of pretending—being a newlywed—wouldn’t have to be faked.

And some time after all her old clothes had been swept to the floor, after he had pinned her down and ravished her, after she had finally allowed herself to shed a tear in his arms, somewhere in the dark, she found that simple band in her jacket pocket and put it back where it belonged.

“Providence?” he asks, naming the biggest place anywhere near here.

She shakes her head. “Just outside Sunrise.” She gives him an understanding smile; it’d be one thing if she was some country girl, but she’s clearly not from the area. “I like solitude for my work.”

“Ah.” That makes more sense. There’s more than a few homes out in the sticks - the big, nice ones with lots of land all around - that have been bought up by outsiders looking to get more for their money. He’s pretty sure there was a thriller writer living in one of those houses two counties over. 

“What about you?” she asks. “Are you heading anywhere in particular?”

He lets his ear lay against the seat and gives her a languid smile. “As far as you’ll take me.”

She smiles back in a way that lets him know she’ll take him pretty damn far.

“That was delicious,” he says two hours later. Far, as it turns out, is all the way to her house. This girl doesn’t have a cautious bone in her body; Grant’s got no idea how she’s survived this long. 

“Would you like more?” she asks as she bends to take the tray of tea things back into the kitchen. 

“Oh no.” He splays his hands over his belly. “That was plenty. And way more than I could’ve asked for. Thanks again.”

The pretty blush that started appearing after the first five miles is back. He’s almost certain it’s leading up to an offer of sharing her bed for the night and he’s sorely tempted to take her up on it.

He glances at the newspaper she barely looked at before dropping it on the coffee table on her way in. If she’d bothered to look below the fold, she’d have seen a police sketch that looks a hell of a lot like him. It’s his own damn fault, he thinks bitterly as he pulls out the thin, multipurpose chord he wears in place of shoelaces. He got cocky and let that Morse bitch get away and now half the state’s out hunting for him; he was lucky no one recognized him before Jemma picked him up.

And all that means, much as he’d like to, he doesn’t have time to dilly-dally. He’s just gonna have to finish with Jemma right here and now before she can get wind of how dangerous he is. 

Trusting she may be, but she’s not completely oblivious. She hears him coming into the kitchen and starts prattling about her work while she cleans. She’s a scientist, not an artist like he thought, and she’s so close to the big breakthrough she’s been hoping for. Just one more test and she’ll have it, she’s sure.

Or he thinks she’s sure. The word dies in her throat when he drops the chord around her neck and pulls it tight.

“It’s okay, baby,” he says while her heels slip on the tile and one of the teacups shatters on the floor. “I’ve got you. It’ll all be over soon.”

He can feel her heart pounding in frantic time with his own excited heartbeat. One of her hands reaches back for him, but there’s no scrape of nails like he’s come to expect from all the others before her, her fingers stroke almost gently over his cheek. She’s giving up, the fight draining out of her.

“That’s a good girl,” he purrs and kisses her temple.

His grip is feeling a little loose so he tightens it up, not wanting her to suffer unnecessarily - she has been unaccountably nice to him. Only when he shifts his shoulders back to pull her closer to him, it leaves his knees weak. A second later his vision’s starting to go grey at the edges and he thinks, isn’t this supposed to be what’s happening to her?

He slips to his knees and she’s still standing, a strong statue for him to hold onto as he falls.

“It’s okay,” she says while his lungs strain like a pair of landed fish. She kneels beside him and passes her fingers, just as gently as before, over his cheek. “It’ll all be over soon.” There’s no malice in the words and somehow that’s a comfort to him. That’s good. He always hoped it was.

He stares up at her with wide eyes, wondering how and who and why. She’s amazing and he’s on friendly enough terms with death to know he’s only ever gonna see this one glimpse of her; he wants to make it last.

“If all goes well,” she says brightly, “I’ll see you again soon.”

He has no idea what that means when his heart won’t stop pounding and his vision’s going black and there’s this sound like a torrent of rain crashing over him, but he feels her fingers on his face until the end.

“Oh, splendid!” she says the second he opens his eyes. He doesn’t agree, not at all. Everything’s bright and white and the sound of her clapping her hands echoes in his head. 

He can’t move. His hands and feet are bound to the bed he’s laid out on and Jemma’s over him, muttering to herself and writing down notes when she checks the machines he’s hooked up to.

“What?” he asks. The single word tears at his throat so he doesn’t bother with the the hell did you do to me he’d planned on coming after.

She gives him a sympathetic look around the edge of her clipboard before going right back to work. “It might please you to know that you are officially my first successful test subject. You, Grant,” she says like he should be honored by the distinction, “are going to change the world.”

He wants to ask how he’s gonna do that while she’s got him strapped to this stupid bed, but she moves to one side before he can, giving him a clear view of the bed next to his. Or the not-a-bed. It’s more like a tube, the kind of thing he’d expect from some lame sci-fi flick. And what’s inside isn’t much better.

If Jemma says more about what she’s done to him, Grant doesn’t hear it, he’s a little too preoccupied staring at the half-a-corpse floating in the tube. Whatever it was before it died, it definitely wasn’t anything human.