The Flu

"There." Skye said as she looked up from Agent Hand's computer, that she had somehow managed to unlock.

"What did you do?" Jemma asked, as bit distracted as she checked Agent Hand's vital signs. Stable. She let out a little sigh. Nice and stable. Exactly what she wanted right now.

"Set up something to grab any footage of whatever's going on with Director Fury. I figured that Agent Hand might like to see it when she gets better." Skye clicked on one of the videos and set it to playing. "I can't believe this. Now they're saying that he ran over and kidnapped some other poor woman. How can you kidnap someone after you've ran over them with a car, because wouldn't that be kind of messy?"

"Oh, my heavens!" Jemma came around the desk and looked over Skye's shoulder at what was playing on the screen, footage from a street camera of an unconscious, dark haired woman being loaded into a car by Director Fury, Director Carter, and who in the world was that older Asian woman who was with them? "I do hope it occurs to someone at some point to drop that poor woman off at a hospital some place. I really don't like the way she seems to have hit her head." And she was definitely glad that she wouldn't be the one who was expected to deal with that situation. The situation with Agent Hand and the flu was more than complicated enough.

"Hospital's probably a good idea for her and then wherever Director Carter's taking Fury, he should probably tell her to keep going." Skye said. "Maybe he should take a trip to Tahiti for awhile? AC seemed to like it, and it might be a good place for him to lie low until this mess dies down." Then her eyes fell on Agent Hand, drifting in a drugged sleep. and worry hit her. "Do you think that she really thinks that we hate her? I mean, I know that our team can kind of give her a hard time and everything, but do you think she really thinks we hate her?"

"She was rather heavily medicated. Between that and the shock of seeing what she did, the way she did, she might have been just been confused." Jemma offered. The thought that Agent Hand, someone who she had always admired, believed that she, that their entire team, hated her, disturbed the young scientist as well, and she desperately hoped that it had been the medication, illness and shock that had put the thought into the senior agent's head instead of it letting a thought that was already there slip out.

"I know, but she didn't really sound confused to me. She knew enough to remember the entire mess with Coulson's death getting faked and everything, and what she was saying thinking that's what was about to happen to her made a whole lot of sense." Skye told her. "Is there anything you can think of that we could do to maybe help convince her that we don't hate her? That can't be very good for her health, can it, for her to think that she's trapped here while she feels so bad with a bunch of people that she thinks hate her running the place?"

"I know. I'm just not entirely sure what we can do about it beyond making her as comfortable as possible and making sure she isn't upset again." Jemma told her. "You were going to look for a book, weren't you? That might make her feel a bit better, if we tried to read to her."

"What would a rule loving superior officer like to read?" Skye asked.

"Maybe we should try to call Agent Coulson or Agent Garrett and see if they have any suggestions?" Jemma said. A book, that seemed like a safe and hopefully relaxing thing to do, but she wasn't entirely sure of what to suggest. The first things that popped into her head were science books, which was probably a fairly good sign that she had been spending too much time in the lab lately.

"Or what about a fairy tale thing? She seemed to like that version of the Three Bears I came up with. Or at least she didn't seem to hate it. There were these fairy tale books that I used to see in the library when I was a kid. They had colors in the titles and there were a whole bunch of them. One of those might be good." Skye opened up a browser window to google and started to type in a search for fairy tale books and colors. "Or The Wizard of Oz, maybe, or is that kind of stereotypical? Oh, Project Gutenberg has that for free, though, and those fairy tale books with the colors too. I guess we could download them all and see which one sounds best when we start reading."

"That might be best, to have a few choices." Jemma agreed.

"Okay." Skye clicked to download what looked like the entire collection of the colored fairy tale books, the Oz books, and a few more titles she thought were likely candidates for reading to Agent Hand. While she was waiting to make sure everything had downloaded, so she could move it to her phone, she flipped back over to the site where she had been watching footage of the Director Fury disaster. A moment later, her eyes went wide. "Jemma, what is Agent Hand's family doing on the news, obviously not knowing that she's okay? Wasn't someone supposed to tell them that she was okay?"

"It might have been Director Fury who was going to tell them." Jemma said. "And it does seem that he's a bit distracted right now."

"He definitely better tell Peggy Carter to keep going if Agent Hand every finds out about this." Her grandmother was crying. Skye didn't want to think about how upset she would be if she knew about that. Grandmother. Her eyes fell on Agent Hand's phone as something occurred to her. She reached out, grabbed it and started scrolling through the contacts. "Grandma. That's got to be her." She hit the connect button and sighed in satisfaction as it started to ring.

"Skye, I'm not sure if you should do that without consulting Agent Coulson first." Jemma said.

"We don't want Agent Hand to think we hate her. How is letting her grandmother cry on national television because she thinks her granddaughter's dead going to help with convincing Agent Hand we don't hate her? It will be fine."

When her phone started to vibrate, she had looked down at it automatically with no intention of answering. Right now Victoria's grandmother Maisie didn't feel like talking to anyone, not even family members or friends who hadn't been able to be there for Victoria's service. But then she saw the name on her screen, and her eyes went wide with shock. "Hello?" She said as she clicked answer. "Who is this?"

"Hi." Okay, now what did she say? "Is this Agent Hand's grandmother, the one who was on tv just now, or I guess a little while ago because it looks like footage they're rerunning."

"Yes. Who is this? Are you with Shield?" She asked. Was Shield finally contacting them? Even though she understood the situation, the lack of contact from the people her granddaughter had cared so much for and the organization she had devoted her life to was painful.

"Sort of. My name's Skye. I think they've got me down as some sort of consultant, which apparently isn't really a paying position, which is probably okay since who knows when anyone else is going to get paid anyway with our past director kidnapping our current director and everything. At least I know I to survive on soup made from ketchup packets picked up at McDonalds. Sorry. That's off topic. I was just calling to let you know that someone somewhere made a mistake again, and please don't get upset or shocked, but Agent Hand's okay and we just wanted to let you know, which probably should have happened way, way earlier."

"She's…. Is this a joke?" They had attended a funeral hours before, had seen the coffin buried. The rational part of her told Maisie that this had to be some sort of joke, but her heart desperately prayed that somehow it wasn't.

"I'm really sorry." Skye told her. At least she wasn't dropped dead from shock or something, which was good, but she sounded unhappy which would lead to an unhappy Agent Hand if she found out. How did she fix this? "I'm really not sure how in the world this mess happened. She has the flu and she did get a bit sicker than expected because she was trying to do her job and keep some scientist who was also ill and possibly delirious from wondering into a lab and setting the building on fire, but I'm really not sure how you go from an awful case of the flu to people being told your dead and your funeral being on tv. Unless someone at Shield really has a thing about having funerals for people before they're dead, which is very alarming if so, because what if they decide to bury you before you're dead, too? I'm really sorry. She's okay, I swear. I mean, she's sick with the flu and everything, but she's going to be okay."

She sounded like she was sincere. Maisie felt hope growing. "I want to talk to her."

Talk to Agent Hand? Oh, boy. "Jemma gave her something to help her sleep with how bad this flu is." Skye said. "I can put the phone by her, though. I'm not sure if she's actually going to be able to talk or anything, but she'll be able to hear you, anyway. Just a second." She moved around the desk and dropped to the ground by Agent Hand. "Hey, your grandma's on the phone and she wants to talk to you. I'll hold it so you can hear, okay?"

"Victoria?" Maisie whispered, the sound of her saying her granddaughter's name drawing the attention of her husband, daughter and the other family members who had clustered together in their hotel room. "Sweetheart?"

Her brain was foggy, and her eyelids were too heavy to force open, but Victoria heard a voice calling for her, and she struggled, trying to respond. "Grandma?" She somehow got the name out, her speech slurred from the drugs.

"Victoria." Maisie let out a sigh of relief as she hit the button to turn the phone to speaker and frantically waved for the others to come over. Even though she was obviously heavily drugged, she could recognize her granddaughter's voice right away. "Sweetie, are you alright? We've been worried."

"Sick." Victoria murmured. "Flu." and there was something else, but with the drugs racing through her body she couldn't think well enough to recall what it was.

"You're definitely sick." her grandmother agreed, smiling as happy tears shimmered in her eyes. Alive. She didn't know how the mix-up had happened, but somehow the granddaughter she thought she had lost was alive. Her husband hugged her and she hugged him back hard. She was alive and was going to be okay! "You just go back to sleep now, sweetheart, and focus on getting well, alright? I'm looking forward to your being at my birthday party, and I want you better to enjoy it, alright? Can you do that for me, rest and get better?"

Victoria nodded. "Sleep now." She whispered.

"That's right. You go to sleep and get better. It's going to be alright, I promise, sweetie."

"She looks a lot happier." Skye said as soon as she got on the phone again. And Agent Hand definitely did, a slight smile on her lips, and it seemed like her body had relaxed slightly.

"Can we call again?" Maisie asked. "Would it be alright if we called and talked to her, or at least checked to see how she is?"

"Sure. Call as often as you want. And if you can't get through on her phone, here's my number." Skye agreed before rattling off her phone number for them. "I'm just really sorry this mess happened."