Who: Grant Ward and OTA What: Having weird weak irrational fathers day thoughts! Where: A park in Lawrence When: Late evening yesterday Rating: Um...low, but mentions of traumatic childhoods
It was stupid. Irrational and weak. He'd run the entire distance to a park on the outskirts of the city. A park with a created lake, or whatever you called it, not big enough to be a lake bigger than a pond. He'd gone and sat by it for over an hour. He was obsessing, and he knew he was, couldn't get his head in the game to go and sit with tea and tell Simmons it would all be okay. Couldn't be the Grant Ward she knew. It was so dammed ridiculous, just a simple comment on the boards from a woman he didn't even know saying she missed her father and couldn't put flowers on his grave, her own father, a man Ward would never meet and never care about and he felt himself empathise. It was enough to get through what he'd throught was an inpenetrable veneer of 'don't care'. Oh he didn't miss his biological father, or in fact any of his 'family'. Why would he care about them? They hated him, the boy that could only grow up to be a deluded psycho serial killer or a US Senator. Ward was unashamed of his actions and his brother wanted him tried as an adult. His parents agreed and eventually they'd washed their hands of him. Even his younger brother hadn't spoken up
Maybe it would have been better if Christian had died in that dammed fire, he thought bitterly.
Flicking on and off a lighter for a moment Ward blinked. That man had never been his father, that family had never been his.
The only father figure he'd really ever had in his life was John Garrett and he couldn't even talk about it. Couldn't grieve for him. Because he was still, in his own way, following orders. In this strange world, the only one he knew being a Simmons before he was revealed as Hydra, a Simmons who still trusted and believed in him, it was easiest to revert. Even if she didn't know about the drug that saved John. And it had been nice, even if it was pretend, to have people that treated him like they had for those few months.
He knew. He KNEW it was a weakness. Hell, even missing John now was a weakness. But maybe that's why he'd failed. Maybe he did have the weeknesses Garrett told him he had.
"Dammit John, I couldn't stop it. Couldn't stop them. I didn't expect that." he said. And looked down at the lighter. It had been a gift. A joke more than anything to the little pyro when he got accepted to SHIELD. Garrett had told him never to forget his beginnings, never forget where he'd come from. And always, always remember the mission.
But the mission was over. And John Garrett had to become just another weakness to eliminate in himself. He'd have wanted that. He held up the lighter ready to send it flying into the water. He had to do it.
He had no other way to grieve. And he wasn't supposed to grieve. But god help him he couldn't do it. Instead he took some time to scout the area, make sure he wasn't being watched or followed, force of habit perhaps but this wasn't for anyone else to see, wrapped the lighter in paper, newspaper from a bin, classy move, but it was all he had to hand. This done, he moved to the grass nearest the lake, found a patch near a fencepost and dug a little bit down, dirtying his hands but he didn't care, he dug and dug, using his hands, a knife, eventually a little bit of wood he found nearby. And gently, almost reverently, he placed the lighter in, before filling the soil back in.
"Thank you." he said simply. What more could he say to the man who had saved him from a life wasted, from being branded just one more kid gone wrong. Prisons and institutes. To a man who had helped Ward become better. Sentimentality though it had no place here. No fathers day crap. If he'd ever heard those words leave Ward's mouth he'd dump him back in the woods for another run and he'd be right to do it.