Chapter Text
Skye is naked. She’s cold, and she’s kneeling in the tub, and there’s a hand firmly wound into her hair at the back of her head.
“Are you ready yet?” Garrett asks her.
Skye doesn’t say ‘Ready for what?’ like she had done the first few times. She doesn’t sneer at him, or try to explain that she can’t have powers, that she doesn’t know anything. She just sits, and then he plunges her face back into the water of the tub.
It’s freezing. Skye’s mouth opens as she’s forced in, a gasp reflex against the cold, and air spirals out of her. She closes her mouth again, spits the water out, opens her eyes. They burn underwater, but it makes her feel calmer. She can see her hair, floating around her like dark seaweed. She doesn’t struggle, or panic, because she’s learnt by now that fighting makes it worse.
Garrett hauls her up, out of the water. Skye’s hair falls like a curtain in front of her face, plastered to her mouth, and for a few seconds she’s breathing water.
“Are you ready yet?” Garrett asks again. “Show me what you can do.”
Skye breathes deep, trying to filter as much air back into her blood as possible before…
He forces her under again.
It’s calm, under here, beneath the water. Skye watches her hair. She watches the bubbles. She blinks and she tries to make her mind blank, make her face blank.
Garrett lifts her. Skye’s hair is plastered to her face, to her neck, except for the handful that he is gripping.
“I think that’s enough for today,” he says, and he releases Skye’s hair and wipes his hand off and laughs. “We’ll play again soon.”
It’s Raina who helps Skye to her feet, pushes her hair out of her face and drapes a towel around her shoulders. Skye is shivering and freezing. Water streams down her face and hair. For a few seconds, she’s too shocked and cold to move. Her nose burns from inhaling water. Her eyes sting. She doesn’t move, she just lets the towel and Raina’s arms wrap around her.
After a little while, Skye regains herself. She grips the towel firmly and she steps back, away from Raina. She forces her face to go slack, her eyes to go blank and dead instead of wide and stunned.
“Come on,” Raina murmurs. “It’s okay.” She puts an arm around Skye’s waist and leads Skye out of the room, down the corridor and into a bathroom, warm and cosy with mats on the floor. Skye watches as Raina turns the taps on the shower, and then she drops the towel and steps inside.
The water of the shower is luke-warm and there’s a weird smell, but it isn’t freezing and there is shampoo and conditioner and bodywash in the corner, so Skye welcomes it. She uncaps the shampoo and squeezes it into her hand, massages it through her hair.
They’re trying to destroy her mind. Skye knows it. She’s seen Hanna so many times over the past – days? Weeks? Months, even? They’ve shown her the body of her baby girl, contorted and bleeding and broken. She never knows when it’s real; never knows if this time she won’t wake up. It’s hell, not knowing; not about Hanna, not about the rest of her team, not about the world outside.
Skye is determined to hold on to her mind. She forces herself to ignore it all, everything they do to her – she reminds herself that Raina is evil, even when she’s nice, that Garrett is a skilled manipulator and a compulsive liar. It’s times like now, in the shower, that she has time to focus. She stares at the white tiles and keeps a picture of Hanna in her mind – perfect, beautiful Hanna. Hanna in Jemma’s arms, Hanna in Natasha’s arms. They will take care of her baby. She’s sure of it.
Conditioner pours through Skye’s fingers and she rinses her hair out as it hangs heavy down her back. She remembers showering with Hanna, and it feels so long ago now. Water drips from Skye’s eyelids onto the tiled floor.
She could stay in this shower forever; she could try. But Garrett would come, and his methods of manipulation aren’t the same as Raina’s. He’s not gentle. He’s not sane.
Skye twists off the taps. She pushes open the door of the shower and steps out and lets Raina wrap a towel around her again. She clutches it to her shoulders and stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She’s pale, she’s bleeding, her eyes are huge and dark and her eyelashes clump together with water. She looks young, and vulnerable. Her lips are red in her white face.
“You’ll be okay,” Raina smiles. “You’re all cleaned up, so let’s get you back to your room.”
Skye wonders why they speak to her like she’s a child. She lets herself be led through the twists and turns of the rabbit warren that is Hydra’s new base, and then Raina opens a door and pushes Skye through and she’s back in her room. It’s grey, small and grey, with a concrete floor that is cold against her bare feet.
“Get dressed quickly,” Raina tells her, and then she backs out and closes the door behind her.
Skye dresses on autopilot. She wonders, about the clothes. Why are they here? Every day, new clothes in her size appear, and she doesn’t know where they come from, or why. Why do they give her these clothes when they will only be destroyed later – have blood stain them, soak in water, be cut away from Skye.
She wishes she could remember how long she’s been here.
***
Some time in the middle of the night, they drag Skye from her bed. She’s frogmarched down the hallway with vicelike grips on both of her arms and she doesn’t even care anymore. She drops her head and lets her hair fall down to cover her eyes.
Her chest is aching again. Skye’s body doesn’t know that she’s been separated from her baby. In the first few days her breasts were swollen and heavy, but now it’s settled into an occasional dull ache. She hates the pain, because it makes her think about Hanna. How are they feeding her? Skye wanted to breastfeed her daughter for at least the first year of the little girl’s life, and now she’s worrying that Hanna might starve to death because no one on the plane remembers to buy formula.
Well, no. That’s kind of an idiotic thought. Surely Jemma knows how to feed babies.
Honestly, Skye can’t believe how much she misses her team right now. She’d spent most of her life singing that she was a solo performer, not a team player, and yet here she is, moping because she’s spent a couple of days on her own.
She shouldn’t be thinking about the team. Not now. Not before this.
They drag Skye into the room and force her down onto the table, strap her arms and legs. Raina is the one who gently plugs the electrodes onto Skye’s temples. “It’s just a simulation,” she explains. “We want to see how you react.”
Skye knows this is a lie. It isn’t a simulation – it’s a torture chamber, designed to stop her from knowing or understanding how much of her world is real. She can remember this now, but as soon as Raina flicks that switch-
***
“Come on,” Ward says. He grins and beckons and backs towards the window, and Skye laughs and follows him, almost against her will, because he’s got that flirty smile plastered across his face.
“We should stay down here and watch the baby,” she objects.
Ward steps closer to her, so that he towers over her, and slides his hands down to her waist. “Hanna’s asleep,” he promises. “Come with me.”
Skye lets him take her hand and lead her out of the window, so that they’re standing on the narrow ledge outside. It’s not exactly a ledge where people are supposed to be standing, but Ward’s eyes are bright with the knowledge that he’s doing something forbidden.
“Up we go,” he says, and he leans backwards at an angle that makes Skye lose her breath and points towards the fence that surrounds the rooftop garden above them. It’s not their garden, which is why they don’t have the key to the roof door, but that doesn’t seem to stop Ward.
“Don’t let me go,” Skye hisses, and she puts her bare foot on Ward’s thigh to hoist herself up. His hands grip firmly at her ribcage, slide down to hold her legs.
“I’m not going to let you go,” he says, and then he gasps and laughs. “Stop it! Stop moving your toes!”
“Really?”
“I can’t help it if I’m ticklish!”
Skye stretches her arms over her head and grabs hold of the bottom of the fence. She hauls herself up, Ward pushes, and then she steps on his head and leaps over the fence. “Okay,” she calls down softly.
“You stood on my head,” Ward complains. He’s following her path, shimmying up the side of the wall as if he does this every day. Who knows? Maybe he does.
“Your head was in a convenient location,” Skye says. “And it’s hard as rock, so it makes a good stepping stone.”
Half over the fence, Ward pauses to put his face close to hers. Skye smiles, leans in, lets their foreheads touch.
“I love you,” Ward says. His eyes are so close.
“You’re just like Hanna,” Skye tells him. “Forehead-touching is her way of expressing deep emotion too. I expect you to grab my ears at any minute.”
“Maybe I will,” Ward says, and he moves as if to lift his hands away from the fence, and Skye shrieks and laughs and pulls him over into the garden with her.
It’s cold, the kind of crisp cold that makes the sky bright and the stars and moon brighter than normal. The air is clear and it burns Skye’s lungs in a way that she likes. Ward tugs her over to the middle of the garden, and then he sprawls on someone’s deck chair and pats his lap, smirking up at her.
“This isn’t ours,” Skye says. “Hanna is going to grow up with parents in jail.”
“I never get caught,” Ward objects, and he looks so pleased with himself that Skye sprawls down on his lap and kisses him, long and slow and messy. He brings his hands up to tangle in her hair, like he always does, and she puts one hand on his chest to hold herself up.
“I miss you,” Skye murmurs into his mouth.
Ward pushes her back a little bit, says, “What?”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t know why she said it. “Kiss me.”
“You’re always so demanding.”
Skye swings her leg over so that she’s sitting right in Ward’s lap and says, “You love it.”
“I do,” Ward says, and then he groans and adds, “Can we work on a sibling now?”
***
Garrett is leaning over Skye when she wakes up and she curls her lip in an automatic revulsion, because she’s just come out of a really graphic vision and his face is gross.
“Your face is gross,” she tells him. That last one was nasty. She needs to ground herself back in reality – needs the sharp pain to bring herself out of her floaty fantasies.
Sure enough, Garrett slaps her sharply, without even hesitating. Skye’s lip splits open, starts bleeding, and she licks over the blood and relishes the taste. This is real. Her blood is real, Garrett is real, the straps tying her to the table and bruising her wrists are real. Ward isn’t.
“You’ve got a nasty tongue,” Garrett tells her. He leans close and smiles big and says, “I bet Ward likes it.”
“Do you perv on my little visions?” Skye asks. “Or is that just Raina?”
“I don’t need her machine to help me see into your head,” Garrett hisses. His tongue darts out, snakelike, to dab at the corners of his lips. His eyes are wild and rolling and she swears he is insane. She probably shouldn’t provoke him.
“So you like to watch, then, Garrett? Jealousy, is it? When was the last time you got some?”
His hand shoots out and circles her throat. “You know I won’t kill you,” he says. “I need you. But this – what we’ve been doing? This is just the tip of the iceberg. I can do much, much worse than this, Skye. Is that what you want?”
Numbly, she shakes her head, chastising herself; stupid, stupid! Don’t say anything else.
Garrett laughs. “Smart girl,” he says, and then he releases her throat and walks away and Raina is there, leaning over Skye, her fingers cool on Skye’s face, helping her to sit up and giving her water.
Raina’s manipulation is worse – so much worse. It’s hard to hate someone who consistently gives you nothing but kindness. Skye’s going to do her best, though. After all, she reasons, all she needs to do is give her team time. They’ll find her. They just need more time.