The first time Skye thinks about Ward, she does not identify him by name or face. In fact, she doesn't identify him as Grant Ward at all. There is a fleeting image of a fallen body and a shaking compound that flickers in front of her eyes, threatening to develop further, and she does everything in her power not to delve on it.

Her new life (she doesn't know it then, but only because she doesn't stop to think for hours after the fact) starts as she shakes the dust off her clothes and re-orientates herself. There are no people by her side. There are no bodies, either. No bloodstains and no bleeding wounds, nobody who needs her to check their pulse or be dragged to safely. Just rocks and dust still floating in the air, and deep down she thinks (knows) that she's been spared a gruesome spectacle. She starts to run before her soul can shrink with the sickening knowledge that the chunks of rock she crunches with her military boots are made of her friend's flesh.

She finds her own (Coulson, Mack, May) easily enough and they continue to run together, the ground shaking all around them, and Skye can feel each quake coming in perfect synchrony with her own heart clenching. She is helpless to control either - heart or earthquakes, not now, not ever.

"Trip's dead," she says. "Crushed," she adds out of breath, looking at May because May is the one who won't offer her any emotion. It's the complete truth, too. The other truth (that he didn't prove to be satisfactorily special to a goddamned stone) will stay forever buried in his underground grave.

The temple crumbles, and so does the entire Hydra base on top of it, and the Bus takes off leaving behind a city in shambles and more questions than they were prepared to seek answers to. Everyone talks and only Coulson listens, and among the chaos he still takes a little time to pat her on her back and ask whether she's alright. She feels so grateful for the small gesture, she feels like crying and hugging him and never letting go. She doesn't, though, and she continues to be the little perfect soldier he needs by lying automatically, explaining that the Obelisk is finally destroyed and that her specialness was all about being able to touch it. She doesn't mention Trip again. She also doesn't mention the overwhelming feeling of her heart (her blood, her breath, her soul, her nails, her eyelashes, everything) being in synch with the destructive shakes. It doesn't sound quite SHIELD worthy, anyway. And definitely not to be discussed on a small plane packed with people.

If something does come out of it, she'll talk to Coulson later.

Back to the base, everyone disappears to lick their metaphorical wounds. Fitz and Simmons run back to the lab together to check Mack's readings, Hunter and Bobbi are nowhere to be found. Mack is installed down in the vault until his checkups clear him. May pairs up with her yoga exercises. Skye is left alone, and she hangs around the entrance to Coulson's office like an overgrown needy child until it becomes clear that the Director doesn't have any time to spare for her right now. There is dust under her skin and in her hair, and she can't bring herself to wash it off - it feels a part of her, a part that will always be there from now one. The more time passes, the more she feels like she should have spoken up already, but the idea of opening her mouth becomes harder and harder. The next day, she feels like that proverbial driver who wasn't even at fault but who run away from the accident in a moment of panic without offering first aid, and ended up looking guilty to everyone around. She feels stupid and weak and as far from the team as she was when she first came on board with a secret and an agenda and found out that she was an 084. Except she's a full agent now. She doesn't fool around and she doesn't look out for herself alone. She follows protocols and works for the improvement of SHIELD. She follows protocols... and she dreads finding out what they dictate in her case.

So she occupies herself with gathering news from local news sites and NSA satellites and compiling them in a neat little presentation that looks very useful (agents who are useful don't get pulled out of their useful activities to do stupid debriefs, right?). The destruction on her screen is heart wrenching, no wall left standing and no structure recognizable, for all she knows most of the debris belongs to the camouflaged Hydra base. Some of the footage allows her to see an enemy jet taking off, but all in all she can't track any real evacuation. People (nay, not people, hidden Hydra agents) who were inside the base are probably all dead, and she reports this objective conclusion to Coulson when she finally makes it to his office the next day. The day after the... How are they naming yesterday? It feels like it should have a name.

Coulson looks down at her images and nods, and they speak about the extent of the destroyed Hydra firepower and she's already told him that the Obelisk itself had ceased to exist, so that's the end of it. The SHIELD Director calls the operation a big win "despite the loss of a friend and an excellent agent", which surprises her even if she can see the tactical advantage gained by shooting Hydra's leader in the head and putting down about fifty enemy agents.

"Whitehall could have been the highest ranking Hydra officer this side of the Atlantic, but another head will rise as soon as news reach the highest command," continues to say Coulson in his official tone. "The buildings collapsed almost instantly once the quake came, but I'm sure some rats still managed to run away quickly enough."

"I'm sure that some did."

She smiles grimly while her mind conjures images of gray nameless uniformed men hurrying to run away from falling debris in an almost comic fashion. Next thing she knows, one of them is hit by a big falling boulder and there is a pool of broken flesh and blood where he stood. She blinks, and is all set to get righteously angry at her stupid subconsciousness (these guys tied her up and would have killed her on command, they shoot the Bus, they never had even a beginning of a conscience and only just followed commands), but once her brain gets stuck in that particular direction all she sees are more images of men being squashed to death by falling boulders. It's not bloodless at all, like Trip's death has been. If anything, she must be overdoing the goriness of it. Or so she hopes. God, she certainly hopes she does. She hears the faint scrunching sounds, smell the saltiness of spilled blood, sees the whiteness of mangled bones sticking from under the rubble. The boulders fall in perfect synchrony with her accelerated breaths, and she can feel the bile rising up at the realization.

"Skye?" Coulson asks, because it must be obvious by now that something is wrong with her.

"I killed them," she says, and cannot tell if her voice is just as level as before or harsh or maybe pitched. "I called the earthquake during my transformation."

And just like that, yesterday now has a name. It's not a Victory over Hydra Day, not Destroy the Obelisk Day. It is the Day of Skye's Transformation. It will become official in hours, but she doesn't know that yet.

All she knows is that she feels the bones of people that she never knew crunching under her fingertips, come undone under her breaths, be smashed by her steps. The images of unknown men running away from her doesn't feel comic anymore. They feels hopeful, like they are doing the exact thing they should. She closes her eyes and forces herself to imagine them reaching fresh air and safety, she forces herself to think about that lone jet she saw taking flight. She takes deep breaths, stands up and leaves Coulson's office without paying any heed to words, commands and formal protocols.

She wants to run, but she remembers how her running steps amplified the trembles of the earth, and doesn't. She walks very measuredly to her bunk and checks her pulse, and does her mental exercises. She keeps taking measured breaths until she's almost in control. And then her eyes fall to the guns she'd been using on her latest missions and to her storming gear, and tears start falling freely.

It's not the fact that she (probably) has dangerous powers now that's smothering her. It's not even the fact that she (probably) has killed dozens of people less than 24 hours ago. It's the realization that she's been doing it all before, and until reaching double digits on her victims she didn't even notice it. She sees herself running toward a Quinjet - the secondary object of their first ever real mission - while soldiers behind her fall to the ground and clutch at their chests, and it's her finger on the trigger that has done it. A young man, almost a boy, stumbles under the impact of her bullet and falls backwards from a frozen ship into a freezing sea. A lone figure slumps against the wall and slides toward the floor, shock and pain written in every line of his body. There is no face and she fights tooth and nail to not whisper a name, but still the outline of him is the one that lingers. The blood is spreading quickly, and she knows he could not have stood up right then, much less run quickly enough. Him, she realizes, she killed twice.

May would be proud, she thinks hysterically. May said pulling the trigger never became easy. May lied (again). It's very easy, has been from the beginning. It's easy when you primary objective is to keep your heartbeat steady, when there's a sniper rifle to look through, when it's from behind (element of surprise, they called but they never mentioned that people will still try to look back at their executioner with their dying breath).

There was a time she couldn't pull the trigger to save her life (disarming someone is one thing, pulling the trigger quite another, the faceless man had warned her once). Less than a year after she's doing nothing but pulling the trigger on disarmed men, it seems. She looks back and can't even decide how she managed to be so stupid for so long. Becoming a field agent was never about earning a badge, or exchanging her skirts for a jumpsuit, or losing her sense of humor while putting on a pair of sunglasses that screamed "governmental toolbag". It wasn't about target practice. It was, and always has been, about one thing and one thing only - whether she'd be able to systematically take human lives, or not.

She guesses that she now has her answer.