Tiny Useless Secrets
Secrets are stigmatized because they signify a presence of knowledge in one person's mind and the absence of that knowledge in another person's mind. So often, secrets are used to inflict pain or to exert control, and the ones who suffer in whatever way remember how they've suffered and they forever mistrust secrets, instead of the person who misused them. Blackmail, lies: these find a safe place in secrecy, sure, but there are also crushes, and surprises, and journal entries -- things treasured but sometimes never voiced. Ward didn't have anything like that, but he did have his routines, his regulations, and he had preferences as to how he followed them. He had a spot in his cell where he liked to work out, a position he liked to sleep in, a certain way he liked to pull his shirt on after finishing exercises. What gave distinction to these banalities were the memories he attached to each action, his stash of what he had experienced that he considered to be "good and pure". The spot in his cell where he liked to exercise had this memory: sitting alone in the woods after Garrett had left him alone, and the sounds of birds and other animals to which his mind gradually attuned, his own spot by a little brook, under the branches of enormous and elderly trees in all seasons. Alone, dependent on no one, responsible for nobody's pain save his own. That had felt pretty close to bliss, once Ward figured out how not to die, and what plants did or didn't make him sick. Letting his mind release its inner tension through the medium of work and survival had given him a place to be, a good place, even when he was stuck in places like this cell.
The place he went to when he fell asleep was again in a location where he'd stayed by himself, tracking and observing. It was a flat on a quiet street someplace in France, and the only people who went down the streets were old couples or nannies with the children they were in charge of, maybe a bicyclist or two, their baskets filled with groceries or books or sometimes their pets. Shop windows had tasteful displays, nostalgic in a way, and balconies of neighboring flats were either crowded with plants and solitary tenants or people who talked and laughed over food, wine, and softly-playing music. He walked by himself down many streets like these, and noisier ones, filthier ones, the kind of place he had thought Garrett would put him, but instead his mentor had given him the key to a quiet place. Garrett had never done anything unintentionally, so Ward knew he'd made sure that Ward would stay there. A gift? No way to know. But it was good to look back on -- "good and pure". He'd gotten a few jobs there, too, so he could flesh out his cover but also so he could absorb more of the quietness. In a bookshop, in a cafe, in many restaurants where he washed dishes and took out the garbage. He accumulated possessions and arranged them in his flat, a vase of flowers with flowers bought from one of those street vendors (he tried out a little French and got a nod of approval from the vendor, but that could have been an attempt to get more money, a successful strategy, as it had turned out), books he'd learned more French from, comics he'd gotten from one of the many comics stores. He bought a bed, a comfortable chair, blankets, dishes, silverware. He bought wine and fresh bread, fresh produce, more flowers, and he entertained some of his neighbors. He even went so far as to invite his landlady to dine with him, but she didn't like foreigners, and she didn't like American ones, especially. He thought of telling her how many people he knew like her in his homeland, that she was nothing special to him, either, but that would have wasted his time. That time was good, and slow-moving. He imagined that he was there when he fell asleep. It relaxed him more than he felt it should, but he didn't complain. No one to complain to, except himself, and the yellow line.
He thought of Scrabble when he pulled on his shirt. This memory wasn't all the way pure, but it wasn't toxic. Bittersweet; that was the right word. He thought it over, spelled it out with his hand behind his leg so the security cameras couldn't see. He didn't want Coulson to come back down here, because that would mean that he'd been seen again, that he'd once more entered the thoughts of those who were still trying to forget him. Could they? Not all the way. Ward did his best to be realistic about this. It struck him that the most optimistic thought he'd had recently was that maybe other people would be happy if they didn't think of him at all. 'How messed up is that?' he signed, again hiding his hand. He chewed some dead skin off of his lower lip and swallowed it.
But it was true, right? Everyone upstairs had many, MANY reasons to hate him. Well, not many reasons, but the reasons they had were big, they didn't just go away. Ward would never be able to say "I'm sorry" and fix what he'd done. 'So why be sorry?' he signed again, and chewed the end of his thumbnail. His pulse spiked. These thoughts weren't doing him any good. Back to Scrabble... How the heck did someone know what the little plastic casing on a shoelace was called? But sitting around. Close, on comfortable couches, flying in a home in the sky. That was good to think of, even if he would never get that back. How could he have known what that kind of memory was worth? 'I mean, I'm keeping it a secret, for what, so I don't try to smash my head on the walls again?'
He thought himself back to the woods, where he was alone. He stood at the edge of a lake, early morning, water probably cold enough to divide body from soul. Across the lake on the opposite shore there stood a fox, not blinking at him, not even focused on him; instead it was hunched over in the rushes around the lake, where a mother duck, father duck, and some ducklings were swimming in the water. Ward listened harder and heard the soft quacks of the mother to her young. He watched the little fuzzy babies twitch and change direction to get closer to their mother's side. The fox was too still to be noticed. The ducks made slight rippled on the lake's surface. Ward watched the fox's body move as it readied itself, as the mother duck got close to the shore.
He grabbed his rifle and shot the fox. The ducks quacked in alarm. Ward waited for the ducks to leave; then he shouldered his rifle, and made his way around the lake to collect his kill. That hadn't made any difference, he suspected; ducks were prey, and other predators would find them. He'd tried. That had to count, right? He decided yes, it did. He had no one to complain to, no one to talk to, and this was fine. This was as it had to be. This was how he'd made things. And he was adjusting to how he'd made things. So that was good too.
He let a smile bend his lips. 'Good job, I guess'.