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It’s dark inside the building, and he’d like to say that’s an indication that the former Hydra base is uninhabited, but things rarely work out so neatly. The supersoldiers Hydra has been creating don’t need light, after all, with their infrared vision.
It was probably foolish to come alone, and he’s realizing his foolishness now that he’s standing just inside the door, where the afternoon sunlight outside doesn’t quite reach, except to create long, creepy shadows.
But his team is tired and needed a break after going nonstop through known bases. Green and Mendez both have families — Mendez is a new mother — and as the only single one, the only unattached one, it just makes sense that he’d take care of something low stakes and give them the time off.
This one is meant to be a low priority anyways, he thinks as he lets the door swing shut behind him.
The dirty windows — dirty enough that the only light in the room is a sickly brown color that illuminates the high ceiling — are set high in the walls, such that the floors are mostly dark. He shines his flashlight down the hall, grimacing as the light catches on a few shiny silk cobweb strands.
Slowly, picking his way around rubble and rat droppings, he makes his way towards where the blueprints suggest the lab will be.
When he hears the noises of someone who definitely shouldn’t be here, he curses to himself quietly and pulls out his ICER.
“Hello?”
And then his flashlight falls across the face of a young woman in jeans and a purple flannel vest, leaning casually against the exposed brick wall and smiling at him through the darkness.
“Hi, Phil.”
He points his ICER at her, aimed with the beam of his flashlight, and has his finger hovering at the trigger when she stands upright and raises her empty hand, palm towards him.
“I’d put that down if I were you,” she tells him conversationally, not the least bit afraid. He can see she’s unarmed, so he lifts his finger away from the trigger and lowers it slightly. “I wouldn’t want to disable it. You’re going to need it later.”
“You can disable my gun?”
“I can do lots of things,” she agrees, throws him a smile, and he’s almost offended that she’s clearly not afraid of him at all. He likes to think he cuts a fairly imposing figure.
But he’s also never been that interested in being feared.
“Are you going to demonstrate?”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” she responds, leaning back again, so she’s practically lounging upright, right knee bent so her foot rests flat on the wall behind her.
He supposes that whatever she might be capable of would look like an attack — like a threat — were she to demonstrate.
Slowly, he drops his gun all the way to its holster, figures there’s no point in a standoff.
The woman just smiles at him, like she had no doubt he’d do what she asked.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you that you shouldn’t be here.”
“You’re right. There’s no point,” she agrees.
He kind of likes the audacity of her, casual and lounging like she holds all the power here.
Even though he tries not to, a smile slips through.
She smiles back.
“Don’t worry, Phil. I’m a good guy, I promise. I’m on your side.”
It almost annoys him that he believes her when she says that, but there’s something in her eyes that makes him drop his guard.
“Have we met?”
“Yes and no,” she responds as she saunters closer to him, and he wonders if maybe he knew her before his near-death — a lot of things about before are still hazy.
When she’s closer to him, she looks younger than he’d thought at first — except for her eyes. Her eyes are old, full of the kind of haunted knowledge he sees in the mirror every morning, and he thinks he can’t have ever met her before.
He’d remember her eyes.
And then her fingers are hooked into the knot of his tie, and he finds his himself tugged down so his face is almost against hers.
She frowns.
“This is a lot harder than I thought it would be,” she confides in him, and he has no clue what she’s talking about. “If I knew it would be this hard, I’d have asked you how I did it.”
She tugs harder at the knot, draws him so close that their noses touch, and her eyes wander down his face.
He wonders for a moment if she’s going to kiss him, can’t quite identify whether he feels anticipation or fear about that.
He’s never exactly been opposed to being kissed by beautiful women, but he should probably have a rule about it when they’re trespassers at known Hydra bases. Probably.
But the woman licks her lips, leaving a trail of moisture across her bottom lip, and he can’t help the way his mouth falls open.
And then she slips his tie up over his head and down onto her own, a triumphant smile lighting up her face.
“Hey!”
“I’ll take good care of it,” she promises as she backs away, fiddling with the knot until it’s tight around her neck. “You’ll get it back soon.”
She darts around the corner towards the front door, and by the time he chases after her, she’s gone.
Slowly, he traces a path out of the building in the fading afternoon sun, squinting against the light as he walks the perimeter again, finding nothing out of the ordinary.
He’d almost believe it didn’t happen, except he’s missing his tie.
And he’s struggling to turn his head back to the issue at hand — to the Hydra base and the lab that needs to be secured — when he hears a scream coming from behind the building.
His brisk pace quickens to a jog, but he’s still at least fifty yards away when he hears a sickening crunch and then silence.
By the time he gets there, the only sign there was ever a person is a stray sneaker and a splatter of blood. Someone wandering onto the abandoned lot at the wrong time, most likely — not the first time he’s seen it. The MO here, though, is different — the super soldiers generally leave a body riddled with bullet holes, while it almost looks like some poor kid got eaten .
Coulson turns his back to the fence and points his ICER around a few crates, trying to spot his enemy, but totally misses the giant shadowy shape hovering over him until it’s too late.
When he looks up, he can make out eyes and a mouth, but no other defining characteristics, and he knows this is it. He’s done.
This death, he thinks, is even worse than the first one.
It’s more pointless, following a more pointless life, and he wonders what the purpose of bringing him back was. Fury should have just left him dead.
As he’s prepared to die, though, he feels someone run up next to him.
A hand is thrown in the air above his face, and the monstrous figure is pushed backwards until it hits the wall at least forty paces behind.
And then it vanishes.
“Is it dead?”
“No, it teleported,” comes the answer.
“To where?”
“No idea.”
He turns to see his companion, and is greeted by the face of the woman who had stolen his tie.
She smiles at him, like she’s trying to be comforting, and slides her hand inside of his.
“Run,” she tells him, tugging him behind her as she takes off in the opposite direction of the scene.
So he does.
He runs behind her around the building, gripping her fingers like she’s a lifeline.
They stop well beyond the fenced-off boundary, by a greyish blue van parked under a telephone pole.
“Was there someone back there?”
“Dead,” she agrees, frowning. “Eaten. I was too late to save him.”
He nods, swallows.
“What was that?”
“Alien,” the woman replies, and then she pulls a device from somewhere inside her flannel and scans him. It looks like a cell phone, but cell phones don’t light up like that.
“How do you know?”
She just raises an eyebrow at him and then examines whatever readings she’s getting from her device.
“You’re not exactly human, yourself, are you?”
His hand falls over his heart, almost reflexive.
“What?”
“You’re —”
Their eyes meet, and the woman’s whole face seems to soften.
“I’m sorry. Table that, okay?” She shakes her head and puts away her device. “Skye,” she offers as she sticks out her hand.
He takes it. Again.
“You already know my name.”
She looks at him skeptically.
“I really don’t.”
“You called me by it earlier, when you —”
For the first time, he notices that his tie is not around her neck.
He drops her hand.
“When I...?”
“You stole my tie. Where’s my tie?”
That gets him a smile, like she knows an amusing secret.
“Must have been someone who looked like me, then.”
He blinks.
“That’s not —”
“Do you want to talk about your tie, or do you want to tell me your name and get on with dealing with our alien friend?”
“Coulson,” he tells her after a moment, offering his hand again, letting her be the one to take it. “Phil Coulson.”
“Good to meet you, Coulson, Phil Coulson,” she teases. “Going for a secret agent thing there?”
“I am a secret agent,” he half-defends himself, and Skye laughs.
“You work for SHIELD, right?”
“What’s left of SHIELD,” he corrects her, and she nods.
“It’s a shame what happened. I was against Operation Paperclip, you know. Once a Nazi, always a Nazi — that’s my motto. Especially for the higher ups.”
“You were against Operation Paperclip.” She can’t be thirty, he thinks. She’s definitely not supposed to have past-tense opinions about US policies that took effect before he was born.
“I still am,” she clarifies, as though that was the confusing part of her statement. “But let’s talk about the alien.”
Coulson nods because what else is he supposed to do?
“What was it? Where’s it from?”
“I don’t know all the aliens in the universe,” she tells him like he’s said something offensive. “We didn’t all go to alien school together or something.”
“Are we going to kill it?”
Skye frowns.
“That’s a last resort.”
“It just ate someone,” he tells her. “It’s a threat to human life.”
“And I’m here to protect human life, Phil, I am. I love human life. But imagine it this way. Someone transports you to a planet somewhere that you know nothing about. You’re scared and hungry, so you eat something that looks like a carrot but turns out to be someone’s best friend.”
“...okay.”
“Is it your fault that you can’t differentiate between sentient and non-sentient life in an ecosystem that’s totally unfamiliar?”
“I suppose not.”
“Of course it’s not. You’d want them to treat you humanely and understand that the real person at fault here is the one who dumped you somewhere you don’t understand, where you’d naturally wreak havoc. You deal with that person, you deal with the problem.”
“So we’re going to find out where the alien came from, who sent it.”
“Exactly.”
“And we do that...how?”
Skye turns and throws open the door to the van they’ve been standing beside, to reveal a large room — far, far too large to fit inside the small space.
There’s an ambient purple light that radiates from somewhere , illuminating at least twenty computer monitors hung around the perimeter of the room. A large central console, complete with too many buttons, knobs, and keyboards — including an electric piano keyboard and an old Remington typewriter keyboard — occupies the center of the room.
“What…”
“My ship.”
He stares into the depths of it, into something that can’t possibly exist, and takes a slow breath.
“You’re an alien,” he repeats as the concept sinks in.
She smiles at him, like she’s mildly impressed.
“For a human, you’re dealing with all of this very well.”
“I’ve met aliens before. One almost killed me.”
More than almost.
“We’re not all bad,” she promises, and he nods.
He knows that, too.
“What did you mean when you said I’m not exactly human?”
“Later, remember? We’ll get to that later.”
He nods, but he’s still uncomfortable with all of this. Generally, he’s supposed to be the one that knows what’s going on. He’s supposed to be the one that knows all the things and holds all the cards.
Or at least to know enough to fake it.
It’s weirdly disconcerting to be the one who knows nothing.
“Phil?”
She touches his arm and looks at him with her old, knowing eyes, and he smiles, shakes off his fears. He’s standing outside some sort of alien ship, basically fulfilling a lifelong fantasy or two.
“What do we do?”
At that, Skye takes his hand and pulls him on board. Standing in front of the central console, she controls the large screens around the room, showing him a series of maps with several glowing dots.
“I picked up on it because it leaves an energy signature wherever it goes, but I can’t seem to find the pattern.”
“Are you sure there’s a pattern?”
“There’s always a pattern.”
He nods and looks over her dots.
“That,” he points to one, “is right near Director Fury’s house. And there’s a SHIELD base there,” he points to another. “No one knows about that base.”
“Are they all…”
“I’d have to look them up, but...yes, I think so.”
“And did someone know you were coming here alone tonight?”
“...yes,” he answers. “I called it in.”
“Call Fury. Send up a warning,” she orders him, and he nods.
“What do I tell him about…” He looks around the enormous room.
“Tell him you’re with Skye.”
“Nick Fury knows you?”
She just raises her eyebrows at him.
Of course Fury knows about an pretty alien woman who cares about human life.
Coulson steps away from her, cell phone to his ear, and only manages to get Nick Fury’s machine and then voicemail before finally getting hold of Maria Hill.
“Fury got out, he’s in hiding,” he tells Skye when he’s off the phone. “And they’re calling back teams from missions.”
“So we assume we’re looking for a SHIELD Agent,” Skye suggests, and Coulson nods.
“I suppose we must be,” he agrees. “Someone who stayed in hiding after Hydra came out?”
She nods, but frowns, pointing at a giant spike on her computer monitor.
“What SHIELD Agent could get that much power?”
“The Index,” he realizes, flash of realization.
“The Index?”
“A database of people with some sort of gift or power.”
“You keep a list?”
He nods.
“We take them in, run assessments, and keep track of them in case anything happens.”
“Like you need to take them down?”
“Like someone kidnaps them. Or like they need some sort of help.”
She narrows her eyes at him, clearly trying to decide whether he’s trustworthy.
“And what else could that be used for?”
“It’s for protection,” he promises. “It’s helped save a lot of lives, mostly of the people on the list. If I had my tablet —”
She cuts him off by pointing to one of the computer screens, and he watches as she hacks into SHIELD in all of fifteen seconds, displaying top secret data for him to see.
“Was that an alien thing?”
“No,” she replies with a smile.
“There’s a boy I took in two weeks ago — he had some kind of teleportation power, kept moving things around without meaning to.”
“And you think he could do this.”
“I think someone could find a way to force him.”
She nods, thoughtfully, and then presses a button that makes every entry on the Index run by in a flash, until she stops on the file of Terrence Banks.
“You’re right,” she agrees with him.
He is right.
When they break into the warehouse where she tracks the boy to, Coulson runs to Terrence, folds him up against his chest, and watches as Skye does something that sends their perp crumbling to the floor and makes the whole room shake for a moment.
It’s almost anticlimactic, except for the part where he gets to see some genuine superpowers in action.
A backup team shows up just after Skye has pressed some buttons, sent their alien back to wherever it came from.
She holds his eyes as he lets Terrence go, grins at them both, and then sort of fades into the background as he deals with the aftermath, with the paperwork and bureaucracy.
That’s anticlimactic.
Once the scene starts clearing, he searches for her and is disappointed not to see her. He’s wondering if he’ll ever see her again, if there’s any way he can contact her, when he spots her leaning up against the building, almost totally hidden in shadows.
She’s lounging against the wall, just like she was the first time he saw her, and she smiles at him — smiles at him like she finds him somehow impressive.
His cheeks heat up, like he’s a schoolboy called to the front of the class.
“You were right,” she tells him, head tilted to the side. “I still think your list is dangerous, but —”
“Not in the right hands?”
“Not in your hands. You’re pretty great, Phil.”
It makes the back of his neck tingle, to hear her say that, and he’s distracted when she slips her hand back into his and tugs him with her to her van.
Ship.
Whatever.
She’s still holding his hand when she turns to him, eyebrows raised in promise.
“So, do you want to?”
“Want to what?”
“Take a trip.”
“To where?”
“Anywhere,” she answers. “Anywhen, too.”
“Anywhen?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t figured out it’s a time machine.”
He blinks at that — time travel somehow seems beyond the pale, even after all this.
“Watch this, Phil.”
She releases his hand, grabs him by the ends of his collar, and pulls him down, so they’re face to face — like they were earlier tonight when he met her. Her breath washes over his chin, warm and inviting, and he examines her face again, the lovely lines of it.
He wonders if this time she’ll kiss him, but instead she fastens the top button of his collar and pops it up around his neck.
“Stay, just like that.”
He nods, though his eyebrows are drawn together and maybe he’s not sure whether she’s crazy or he is.
Still, he stays — just like she left him, bent down and ridiculous — as she jumps into the van and the whole thing disappears.
He only has about two seconds to feel silly, though, before the van is back — exactly where it had been before — and Skye steps out with his tie around her neck.
His mouth drops open.
Slowly, she draws his tie over her head and drops it back around his neck, and then smooths his collar down around it.
“Told you I’d take good care of it.”
He swallows, throat moving against her fingers as she straightens the knot.
“Oh.”
“Did I finally shock you?”
He nods his head and licks his lips.
“You have a time machine.”
“You wanna go for a ride, Phil? Let me show you a strange new world?”
He blinks at her, at this idea, at the preposterousness and the wonderfulness of it — at the promise of something bigger, better, stranger to fill the space in his life, the hole in his heart.
“Yeah.”