Skye had always felt alone. Singular. Isolated. It was a fate she had accepted between foster homes and lines of code. She’d built up space around her, and that space had long ago become home. She needed no one else, nothing else besides herself and her laptop.
Occasionally, others would make their way into her world but would leave a gaping wound twice as big when they did. She would force herself to heal and patch and ignore -- She was alone but not lonely; lonely was not something she knew how to feel, simply because she didn’t know there was anything else.
But then there was them. The whirlwind of a force that dragged her down until she wasn’t sure which way was up or down or left or right.
She didn’t even know that this was what she wantedneeded until they turned to her post mission-turned-failure, tugging her into their embrace and dragging her down into the smell of grease and roses and dirt and sweat and the feel of Jemma’s hair in her mouth and Fitz’s elbow digging into her side and everything that could only be considered perfection.
It was a dagger, sliding into her ribs and stopping so, so close to her heart that she didn’t dare move, didn’t dare breathe, in fear of jostling it.
With them, she learned to be lonely.
Loneliness had never been something she knew how to feel. Rarely feeling anything else would do that to someone; but now, now between the feel of Fitz’s coarse fingertips against her hip, or Jemma’s lips pressed to her shoulder blade, now between Fitz’s smile or Jemma’s laugh, now between the moments that they spent together and the next ones that they would,
Skye learned the feeling attached to the word.
It was a bittersweet feeling, the loneliness. The quiet of the rooms when they weren’t there was nearly painful; their gentle bickering and half-sentences that blurred together took up so much space, and it was space she could not bare to have around her anymore. They did not feel like an intrusion but a conjoining, their flawed existences pressing together and finally giving Skye room to breathe.
The dagger pressed deeper with every breath she took.
She spent longer in corners of their lab to combat the stinging sweetness, simply basking in them, curled onto out-of-the-way countertops with her laptop balanced on her knees. They’d work around her, fitting her into their routines like water shaped around a stone tossed into its froth.
With them, Skye learned to love.
She learned how to give it just as much as she learned to feel it. It was abstract and solid and all-consuming, a mess that left her feeling dizzy and weightless. It was impossible to put a finger on but easy enough to place; she knew the heart-pounding feeling when she had it.
Love felt like waking up with blankets draped over her shoulders when she dozed off at her desk.
Love felt like fingers curling through her hair while she dozed on the couch, sprawled with her head against a warm chest, a late-night marathoning session gone a bit too far into the night.
Love felt like waking up in bed amongst tangled limbs, light seeping through the curtains to become metaphors about truth and hope when illuminating the expanse of snowy sheets.
Fitz’s eyes only seemed bluer when they were first opening. Jemma’s smile grew only sweeter when it first settled itself onto her lips, waiting to be kissed away by one of them before returning even brighter than before.
Love was perfection and she never wanted for it to end.
But this was not a forever sort of thing.
Skye had, distantly, know that from the beginning.
It was a while it lasted sort of thing; it was an in the moment sort of thing. She was not a part of them the way they were a part of each other, she could not finish their thoughts and they could not finish hers. This was not a forever sort of thing, and she had never been a forever sort of person.
When it stopped, there wouldn’t be any words. When they went to bed, hand in hand, she would follow after less, and when she gave in to need and love and loneliness, she would slip away in the mornings before they woke. She saw the way they looked at each other, sleep-dazed and lazy from the warmth that surrounded them and so very breathtakingly in love that poets would have fought each other to write sonnets about them, and how that look didn’t always extend to her.
It was not her fault they loved each other more; nor was it theirs. But she couldn’t stand to be there, in fear that the dagger would slip deeper and tear at her heart.
So she dragged herself back, one step at a time, until her space was her own again. They never left a wound, not the way the ones before had. Instead, they left something else, something that was manageable until she lay in her own bed, missing the way Fitz snored.
Missing the way Jemma stole the blankets despite the fact she was as hot as they sun, burning them up yet necessary for survival.
Missing the way she fit with them, skin against skin against skin, the tacked-on puzzle piece that managed to fit perfectly into an already completed puzzle.
Missing the ignorance she had, before this all, because now she could not go back to feeling alone but not lonely because she had learned the meaning all too well.
The knife in her ribs had cut too far.