Spring:
She spends two weeks without thinking about it. Coulson promises there will be no more lies, and that is good enough for Skye. And angry as she is after finding out that he has spied on her, it does not make any sense to dwell on things already done. It isn’t like the new SHIELD doesn’t have more pressing matters to solve, day after day. They are all pulling their weight, doing the work of an entire agency with barely ten people, and Skye doesn’t want to be the one to mess with some important mission because of personal misguidings.
The Simmons Extraction and the cold shoulder Fitz has been giving her ever since her return is bad enough, and Skye doesn’t want to add to that. The Talbot Misunderstanding – that one is seemingly never going away, and Skye looks at the wrinkles around Coulson`s eyes and bites her tongue when he withholds information from her once again. It’s for her own sake, after all. She is a rookie… Well, a rather fresh agent, and he is the Director. Surely he knows more.
The Senator Ward Fiasco takes the cake, however, and Skye doesn’t feel like talking to her team members for weeks after it goes down. It shifts from a political game into her first major killing op, and she does beautifully – eyes on her objectives, hands steady, pulse strong and slow. She is scared beyond shitless all the time, though. They let Ward out of the vault in order to bait the slimy Senator, and just as everyone with half a brain could have predicted, he slips his manacles and disappears from the radar halfway through the op. He does pop back up quickly enough, right after he is done cleaning their perimeter of unannounced Hydra third parties by the looks of it. Then, he just stays quietly to the side of their group, a sniper rifle he had acquired somewhere placed at his feet as unthreateningly as possible.
It does seem rather counterproductive to drag him back down to the vault after all that. There is a secret meeting (yet another one) between Coulson and May, and Ward is issued some kind of behaviour controller that will neuter him if he as much as looks at the team the wrong way. He is assigned a bunk and some civilian clothes, and that is the extent of his integration back into the team.
Summer:
He runs silent long distance support and is put away for further use long before the rest of the team comes back to Providence. Even his briefings are done by May apart from everybody else’s. It suites Skye just fine. Way better than being the only soul able to get him to comply, at any rate. He looks her way sometimes the same way he did when she first came down to him - the same eager, open look that hopes for something, but will never ask for it. Skye recognises the look as the same one she has of late, on the exceedingly rare occasions she sees Coulson at the base. It’s hope for guidance. Hope for a person who knows best to wake up and save you from the slippery slope down to the hell.
She ignores Ward headfastedly, and after a while he stops looking up every damn time she walks through a door. After some months, he just keeps still as a statue in whatever position they tell him to wait in for further orders, until the next order comes.
She keeps ignoring him. Ignoring herself. Then, after some complicated, inexplicable, and probably rather unnecessary mission, she swiftly decides to take matter of her sanity into her own hands. She plans a relaxing girl alone time in her bunk, well away from any SHIELD related worry or any of her obnoxious team mates. She lives surrounded by a decent number of single, good looking and fit people, but it has been more than half a year since any guy has made her feel the slightest bit interested that way. She strongly suspects it is the stress taking its tall.
She takes a longish shower, pads barefoot back to her bunk and into the bed, gets under the covers and snuggles a little. Lets her imagination fly. She is all set and ready, thoughts pleasantly relaxed and body growing heavy, when the quality girl time is brought to an abrupt end by one single and unwelcome thought.
Coulson wouldn’t have put cameras in there, would he? He said he didn’t, but then he had stirred the conversation away from the topic deviously enough. Skye can’t quite remember what was said and promised, but thinking back she realises that she didn’t get to vent one millionth part of her anger at him that day. But he wouldn’t put cameras in her bunk. That was a big no-no. May wouldn’t have let him. Girl solidarity and all that. SO and her rookie bonding. Except that May has been her SO from the moment Ward left that position, and May had known about Coulson all along and lied to Skye about it – even when directly confronted. May had known about the monitoring, hell, she had been doing most of it, fancy heartbeat monitors included.
Skye sits up, all thought of relaxation gone. She trusts May – better said, she truly wants to. Needs to, after Ward… well, after everything. And she hates the fact that she cannot tell how much of May’s own brand of care is genuine, and how much is the older woman keeping an eye on her even now. She hates the crawling creepy feeling of a camera eye watching her in the sanctity of her little room.
She spends the next week in growing agitation. She is the informatics expert on the team, she can find any camera, hijack any camera, but for the longest time she doesnt’t even want to try. Then she mans up… and finds it. It’s posed over her tiny desk, not looking directly at her bed. There is no real consolation in that knowledge. She feels utterly feel unclean and violated, with nausea ready to come up.
Autumn:
Worst is the fact that she can’t truly take it down. Can’t look in its direction for fear of betraying that she knows. Has to come back from the shower already clothed in her pyjamas. Betraying her knowledge means having to confront Coulson about it, and she… Damn her, she knows she should, but every time she thinks about it, she simply can’t. It’s easy to know what she should do – rise hell, scream, rage and hit him like she hit Ward on the plane, not caring about his strength or his affection or the chain of command, just dishing what she knew that was deserved.
She can imagine it in her head so clearly. May wouldn’t tell her to step down this time. She would understand that Skye was in the right. Everyone on the team would understand, be on her side… They’d shame Coulson, maybe be disgusted, but that’s not what Skye wants, is it? Deep down she understands that Phil is only trying to help.
She cries in frustration at least once a week (during her nightly showers, obviously) and smiles at Coulson happily when the mornings come.
There is a new mission being discussed by Lance and Trip, and she is listening half heartedly, barely eating for the uproar in her head and secretly wishing she wouldn’t be sent out this time to do who knew what for some increasingly unexplainable set of reasons. Then, suddenly, there is a hand pressing down on her own hand, and Ward is sitting down for breakfast at her side for the first time since he had been branded as a Hydra traitor.
She startles, looks up wrinkling her nose… Something in his expression stops her dead. He never looks at anyone directly anymore. Even with her, he doesn’t look or talk. For all his semi reformed status, his behaviour now is much more upsetting than it had been down in the vault. Down there, he had clearly still wanted to achieve something. Had a goal that was personal for him. Now, all he does is to quietly follow whatever instruction he is given.
Until today.
Ward’s eyes are locked on hers at first. Then his gaze flickers down onto the table, and when Skye follows it, her heart freezes. There are thin lines carved into the surface, the pattern unmistakable. Ward lets her stare at it for a while, and then casually shifts his breakfast tray to cover it completely.
They doesn’t speak of it right then. Skye swallows a couple more bites before standing up clumsily. A look in Ward’s direction confirms that he is staying back and covering for her. The lines aren’t too deep – she has been using her bare nails to carve them, and some old fashioned polishing under the guise of cleaning the table will hopefully get rid of them.
She leaves the communal kitchen, walks down the corridor, and runs.
Finding an occasion and a place to talk proves to be as difficult as is expected. Going off the base isn’t a possibility with Ward. Their sleeping places and the common areas are out of question. The Bus seems like a good idea, but it turns out Ward is prohibited from going there by whatever dog leash from hell Coulson has bestowed on him. Skye finally settles by the small recess behind the shooting range, pretending to practise. Ward comes in a quarter of hour later, takes a sideways, unsure look at her and goes on to performing what looks like complex calibrating of all their long range rifles.
“You OK?”
Hearing him talk, she realises that she has been keeping silent for a while, not knowing where to start. What to do, to ask, to propose, to offer. All she knows is that she has made her first carving, and that she is terrified that Coulson and May will know. Before? Yes, sure. She would have gone to them in a second. But now? Without knowing what they plan to do with her? Coulson never told her that little detail, did he? He has been carving these symbols too, and cure was not in sight, but he is the Director of this place, and she… she…
“No,” she says.
“You have to tell him,” he says very quietly. “Or you have to walk.”
The expression in his eyes is painful and sad, and she knows he’ll do anything she needs, anything she asks of him. Against Coulson, against May, against his leash – anything she wants. Except to tell her what to do. She is the one who has to order him, to take initiative, when all she wants is to be ordered and told. She wants to be his rookie once more, held and protected and told that everything will be all right. She needs for Ward to tell her the one thing that she already knows to be true, but cannot seem to act upon: that she is making the same mistake he has done. Delegating her own will, her opinions, believes and her wellbeing. Bending under the needs and interests of people whom she trusts implicitly - but Ward had trusted Garrett just as much, hadn’t he? She needs Ward to scream at her, to explain that she is ruining her life, that with every exercise, every new weapon she learns to use, and every order, every kill, she is cutting away a part of herself, and the road back is quickly fading.
Except he won’t. The way he looks at her tells her that he understands, and that he knows, but something has been broken inside him. Maybe in the vault (his wrists looked terrible, but they had to feel worse). Maybe before that, on the Bus, when he had let her hit him and after she was done, he had still tried to make her understand. She didn’t want to understand, then or later, and then she’d delegated him to May, and somewhere down the road he had completely stopped trying. Skye needs him, but he won’t speak up anymore.
She doesn’t need to ask if he’d walk with her. She knows that answer, and she also knows what he really wants her to do. She knows perfectly well which is the healthier option. Not only for her. For both of them.
She promises herself she’ll take a week to make a final decision. One turns two, and after three she carves the symbols into their holotable, and there is no keeping it a secret after that. She talks to Coulson, who is very sympathetic. May takes her away after all that and tells her that additional precautions will be made. There will be a camera in her bunk from now on, watching her moves for her own safety. Skye nods and smiles in understanding, and the worst part is that by the end of their conversation she almost feels relieved – the secret is out, and she is spared making that decision.
She destroys the gym two hours later. The force involved may or may not be impossible for a woman her age to generate. Ward sits with her on her bed that evening while she cries and tells him she is sorry, and apparently their interactions are allowed from then on.
Winter:
They have to bomb a governmental building because there might be some files on Hydra in there that just couldn’t be accessed any other way. Ward sets the explosives while she activates the fire drill that should signal the evacuation. Something goes wrong. All law enforcement agencies of the world are hot on their trail.
Coulson is visibly ill, so May mostly does her babysitting duties. Ward is the one who gets sent on all straight forward missions, because Hunter is expensive and Trip left some months ago. He comes back a little more bloodied every time, and she patches him up the best she can. She grows to be quite good at that – he’s the only person whose blood she can smell without blacking into one of her mindless rages, and she treasures the feeling of being human at his side. She gets out on occasion, too, mostly on missions that require some of her more exotic, deadly powers.
They share a bunk some nights (nobody cares anymore). They never speak and don’t truly cuddle, and Skye knows she should tell him that she understands it now – she understands too well. But then, he realises that knows all that already. His electronic leash is broken and Fitz is overseas, working at Oxford, no mention of SHIELD on any of his application forms. He stays for Skye, and she feels guilty every night for ruining him further. She feels worse for ruining herself, though.
Some nights, she dreams about running into Simmons on a mission. Or Trip, or Bobbi. Maybe even Miles. She dreams that she has orders to kill them and she doesn’t. That Simmons’ trust and Fitz´ smile break the spell and make her turn around. Walk away. Dare to seek new family, new life.
Then the morning comes, and she goes up to Coulson’s office to get her orders. Ward trails behind.
They have another full day to survive.