The show dropped Skye's hacker/Rising Tide background pretty early on, which I thought was a pity as it juxtaposes in interesting ways with events in later episodes. So here we are. Some things needed to be said.

Thanks, as always, to dogsbody32 for shepherding this one through the entire production cycle.

He's a murderer, she says, and Mike only asks, Are you?

Skye has always tried to do the right thing, even when she wasn't on the right side of the law. She truly believed in the Rising Tide and what they did; she investigated SHIELD partly because she wanted to know about her family, but that was only one part of her general belief that information should be free for everyone, because that was what you did with information. (Implicit in this was, of course, the assumption that people were inherently good and could be trusted with that information.)

She finds the Hooded Hero because of her political convictions, but she helps Mike Peterson because she wants to. If it furthers the Rising Tide, then all the better, but it's almost incidental. The man gained his super-strength and then used it to help people instead of using it against them. She first caught him literally rescuing people from a burning building, never mind that they were Centipede and likely the same people who had taken advantage of him by giving that serum in the first place. You'd have to rescue kittens from trees to get any more morality points.

SHIELD helps Mike when she can't, and that more than anything is what persuades her to accept Coulson's consulting gig and implied offer of recruitment. She would probably have accepted anyway — what hacker would turn down that kind of proximity to SHIELD's databases? — but she would have had no compunctions whatsoever about hacking them for data. As it is, she joins SHIELD with some misgivings about her self-appointed task. Fitz and Simmons, and Coulson and May, and even Ward are hardly the ominous, soulless Men In Black the Rising Tide had characterized them as. She had told Mike to go public, to defy SHIELD and its involvement in these matters, but instead Coulson had helped him, Fitz and Simmons developed their serum to counter the Centipede serum, and Ward had held his fire until Fitz and Simmons could complete it.

In a way, Ward is why she joins SHIELD. Anyone else, any other commander, would have had Mike shot — Skye would have shot him, under the circumstances, and she'd wanted to help him. But Coulson had been determined to save Mike, and Ward had obeyed that order even against his own opinions. She could get behind that type of people. This had been a comfort when she was on the Bus, a closeness to her SO and friend (and something more, she'd thought) she held to her heart.

But of course it turns out Ward is HYDRA, that he was lying to them (to everyone) the whole time. It only goes to show, she thinks; just as well she never told him about his role in her decision-making.

Ward lies on the ground and gasps, his hand reaching out to her, and Skye imagines she can hear the fading, irregular beat of his heart.

When May leaves Providence base, Skye is angry and worried about her, but there's also a frisson of excitement that runs down her spine when she realizes she and Ward are alone. She's looking forward to picking up where they left off in the Hub. Ward had been acting differently ever since the mission going after the Clairvoyant, when he had shot Thomas Nash —

(His motivations had seemed clear enough, in the heat of the moment, though given recent revelations about his real loyalties, Skye has to wonder.)

— Ward has been acting differently ever since she was shot, opening up about himself, and she has to admit, she likes what she's seeing of him. (And not least, he looks good with that stubble.) During that conversation over drinks, she thinks she's finally seeing the real Ward emerge from his prickly defensive layers. Wounded by his brother, driven to do better and overcome his horrific family life, and just as uncertain about their relationship as she is. Skye tells him he's a good man, and she kisses him, and for a few glorious moments, she believes.

Then she finds the blood on his neck, and the penny drops, and-

Skye doesn't have the luxury of disbelief, faced with the very real evidence of Ward's treachery. Koenig's body lies there, still bleeding, and Ward's tracker is quickly approaching, no doubt to check the scene of the crime. She has the presence of mind to replace the penny, and then, in the bathroom, she scrubs off Koenig's blood more cleanly than Ward did. Out, damned spot, and so on; she can reconstruct the sequence of events well enough. She talked Koenig into letting her hack the NSA satellite feeds, which she projected into the situation room for the men to see, upon which Ward killed him. Koenig was lying dead in a closet the whole time she and Ward — the whole time Ward was lying to her.

She can't stay in there forever — she has the tablet showing Ward coming closer and closer (Koenig's gift from beyond the grave, charging her to avenge him), and more than that, she can hear Ward coming closer, calling for her.

So Skye lies to him. She scratches a message into the image panel and jams it, and then she leaves her hideaway. She kisses him again, and tells him she wants it, that she had been scared by his admissions but had come back to him all the stronger. It's what Ward wants to hear, and he buys it, and that confidence pushes him into tipping his hand. If she hadn't already known, she would be suspicious now.

She doesn't let herself consider the real magnitude of Ward's betrayal, because if she does, she knows she'll never forgive herself.

Mike says, Garrett doesn't think you'll let him die, and Skye wants to ask, what do you think I'll do?

Skye joins SHIELD armed with her convictions. Coulson's team is unexpectedly sympathetic, sure, but the organization as a whole is still engaged in more cover-ups, conspiracies, and flat-out lying than even the Rising Tide can expose. The people are owed the truth: the whole truth, not the false security that SHIELD offers.

She still believes that, after everything, though she'll admit now (now, as SHIELD has collapsed) that not all information is meant to be shared. The world is a dangerous place, and people not as kind as she'd imagined. It starts in Colombia — Reyes's people died for that weapon, not to mention that Reyes' people were apparently those who had commissioned it in the first place — and it only goes on from there. She sees firsthand that what Coulson's team keep secret, they keep secret for a reason. The Chitauri helmet, gravitonium, the Berserker staff — all beyond most people's range of comprehension, and so too unsafe to be let out in the wild.

And she does like them, Coulson's team. May intimidated her when she first joined, but Skye's since come to appreciate and admire her. Fitz and Simmons are happy to include her in their banter, like the siblings Skye had always wanted. Coulson invited her onto this team, and she's grateful for it. Ward… well.

Eventually their paths cross with Miles'. She goes behind the team's back to help him — of course she helps him, how could she not, for everything they've shared — but she's surprised by how much she regrets it. The Skye Miles knew would have been happy to break ties with SHIELD, to cross them, but then Miles never quite realized that Skye really believed in the mission statement of the Rising Tide. For him, hacking was only a means to an end (his own self-interest, apparently), and she should have celebrated what he did. And she would, but not now; not any more, not ever again, when she knows that some things are secret for a reason.

She'd do it again, even knowing what she knows now. Her reasoning is solid; it's not her fault if Miles doesn't respect (if he never respected) her choices. But she does regret the impact helping Miles has on her relationship with the team. She had finally been making some progress with them: Coulson and Fitz and Simmons had been friendly from the start, of course, and May was always a lost cause at that point, but she'd thought there was a connection between her and Ward. After Quinn and Malta, she'd told him I want this, and it had even been true. SHIELD offered her answers about her parents, but it also offered her friends and an almost-family and somewhere to belong. Of course she wanted it; of course she'd do what it took to get in.

As Coulson and Fitz and Simmons had been the first to welcome her when she first joins the team, they're the first to forgive. Coulson lets it go (mostly) as soon as she tells him the story about her parents (just another example of truth, disclosure, honesty being the best policy, her hacker's credo in miniature), and Fitz and Simmons buy her apology at face value. May is still hostile and unwelcoming, as she had been before. And Ward…

It wasn't personal, he tells her later, about his own betrayal. He's one to talk, she thinks hysterically; yes, there are some things that transcend mere friendship, obligations more binding than what they owe SHIELD and each other. Ward of all people should understand what she did for Miles and why she did it, which makes his silent-treatment act after Miles all the more ridiculous.

God, she can't believe she actually fell for it back then.

You think I don't want to see him suffer, Skye says, and Mike responds, Not suffer. Die, and then, It's your choice. And she has to think—

Ward is guilty; there's no doubt about that. For what he's done to all of them — the lies, the manipulation, choosing Garrett over Coulson — he slept with May. She's wondered how that worked, before; now she thinks it over and feels nauseous. He'd been trying the same thing with her, and it had been working, too. There's nothing he can do that will ever make up for his betrayals.

Which isn't even touching on the question of what he's done to everyone else. What really happened at the Fridge? She never did see the NSA satellite footage that she'd talked Koenig into letting her get (that he'd died for, she knows now), but she can imagine what happened well enough. Agent Hand had believed Ward, relied on him to help escort Garrett and the rest of the HYDRA prisoners to the Fridge. Easy enough for him to turn on her and kill her, and to kill everyone else at the Fridge too. How many other agents like Hand and Koenig thought Ward was one of the good guys and trusted him, and sealed their own fates in doing so? When she gets out of all this, she'll pull up that footage again, she thinks. She has to know what the real me Ward talked about is really like, for the sakes of his victims if nothing else.

She knows enough now to know that Ward deserves to suffer. It's less the physical pain — though sure, he can deal with that too — as much as the emotional impact of knowing that someone you trusted has betrayed you, thrown your trust and everything between you back in your face. He did all this for Garrett's sake; what's it like to know that Garrett cares more about the secrets on that damned hard drive than for Ward himself? This is what it was like for Skye, herself, when she sat in that bathroom and the pieces about what Ward was doing fell together.

Skye wishes he had never come back to Providence base. He could have died or faked his death at the Fridge, it doesn't matter which; either would have been fine, a clean break instead of this drawn-out mess. Better a clean break on everyone's parts than this mess going on now. She'll give him that much.

The first time she meets Ward, she asks him, have you ever killed anyone? Months later, Mike finally gives her a true answer to that question.

Skye calls him a serial killer, and fine, that's not quite true, but he's a murderer by any definition. If she lets him die here now, not only is it justified in defense of that hard drive, but it would be justice for those he's killed. Thomas Nash, Victoria Hand, Eric Koenig, and how many others that she doesn't know about? It would go a little way towards balancing out everything he's done.

But who is she to make that choice? Mike is still standing there, waiting for her decision, and Ward looks at her blankly with fading eyes. Ward himself would no problem deciding, she thinks — she can imagine how it would go if their positions were switched, if her life depended on his choice. No doubt she would be dead already, asphyxiated after Mike zapped him, or he might even have shot her himself. She's not Ward, though, no matter what he might say. She hesitates, and that in itself is a decision as he slips a little further away.

As a hacker, Skye believed (still believes) in letting people make their own choices. The point isn't to make those choices for them, as SHIELD and HYDRA and their ilk try to do; by distributing and spreading information, people can inform themselves and then make their own choices. Well, Ward's made his choices that led him here, and he knows about Garrett now, but the choice lies in her hands.

They were terrible people trying to murder nice people, said Ward when she asked him, and he tells her later, I lied to you… I am not a good man. That was truer than he knows. What would he say to her now? What category would he place himself in? Would he defend himself, justify his choices, or ask for his life? Would he do it for himself, or for Garrett's sake? She knows what Garrett wants (the hard drive), she knows what Mike wants (his son safe), but what does Ward want?

For that matter, what does she want?

Skye was always an idealist; the list of things she wants stretches on and on. She started hacking to do something, to give voice to her half-formed ideas of how the world should be. The Rising Tide would be the people banding together and standing up for themselves to wash away the institutions of the old world, as inexorable as the waves coming in. Many waters cannot quench love, but they can drown out lies. The truth is in the air, she says; it remains only for the tide to set it free.

But the tide washes out, too, and the waves can be tamed. SHIELD finds her and invites her to join them, setting her to their purposes, and slowly, she begins to want what they want. Security, peace, defense… they offer her a purpose, a family, the ability to ensure a specific result without catching up everyone else. (If she had worked with SHIELD earlier, Mike might be better off now.) They offer, and she wants: Coulson's acceptance, Fitz and Simmons's friendship, May's eventual respect, and Ward's mentorship —

She had liked that Ward, prickliness and cheekbones and all. He was a SHIELD agent, she was a hacker (hell-bent on taking them down, indeed) — of course they weren't going to get along well (she was a SHIELD agent, he was part of HYDRA — of course not). But despite their rough start, he cared about her enough to spend all that time drilling basic skills into her. He learns to joke and loosen up around her; he tells her about his love of cooking, his taste in literature, his sports teams. His family. He says, I am not a good man, and she tells him Yes you are, and she believes it. He's not an easy man, not outwardly charming or demonstrative, but he is a good man, or so she thinks then.

Skye wants that Ward back now; she wants Koenig and his lanyards to be safe at Providence, and Victoria Hand alive to complain about her security clearances; she wants for this whole Centipede and HYDRA mess to have been just a dream. She wants the team she joined to still be alive and well and together to take on the world instead of split and scattered across three continents. She wants Miles to be who she thought he was, and Mike to be safe with his son.

As a hacker with the Rising Tide, she had the luxury of being naïve, of sweeping generalities and a disregard for consequences. She threw stones without caring what they hit. Now SHIELD has fallen, and she does the same thing for the members of Coulson's team that she did for Mike Peterson, but this time, the deletion of their identities is a desperate action taken to survive very immediate threats, instead of an unfocused rage against the system. She can no longer indulge herself in the blind self-righteousness of her former career. Some things no amount of hacking can fix. She does what she must to ensure her survival and that of Coulson's team, and through that team, SHIELD. There is no place for Ward there.

He doesn't belong with them any more, but does that justify his death, here and now, in the plane he betrayed them on, betrayed in turn by someone he trusted?

High-risk targets, Ward had said, and I felt bad afterward.

Anyone but Ward, she thinks once. This was in the diner in Los Angeles, sitting in a booth across from him, her laptop between them (her shield, her defense and weapon and her lifeline out) as he waited for the hard drive to decrypt, and she waited for the cops she'd called. She hadn't had a chance to let the revelation of Ward's true loyalties sink in (it still hasn't sunk in), and she was still in denial despite the evidence of her eyes. Anger comes later, but until then —

She feels ashamed of herself immediately afterward. The betrayal would be just as serious coming from anyone else — everyone on the team was especially close to someone else. She thought she had something special with Ward, sure, but if Fitz or Simmons had turned out to be a traitor, the other would have been heartbroken. They all thought May was a traitor, during those last hours at the Hub, and it had almost broken Coulson. Her relationship with Ward aside, she would have reacted just as vehemently if it had been anyone else the traitor, and everyone else finds out — Ward had been their friend (mentor, trainer, sparring partner, mentee) too. She isn't — she won't be — alone to stew. She almost envies May, who flew the coop and left this mess behind her. The wisest decision, really.

Skye never had a chance to apologize to her for the way she (the whole team) treated her, on that last flight to the Hub. She'd spent enough time with Coulson's team to forget who he worked for, and what type of organization SHIELD really was. She used to be a Rising Tide hacker; she of all people should know. She can only guess at the full history between Coulson and May — she's heard bits and scraps of it, Bahrain and administration and the Academy — but she's come to know May, as much as May lets herself be known (more, ultimately, than Ward had). She's caught up in the panic of the moment, in Coulson's distress at learning that his friend had other agendas, but when the dust settles and she has a moment to herself… they work (worked) for the Suits In Black. SHIELD's entire job is to keep secrets, justified or not. Coulson himself was brought back to life with some stuff out of the corpse of an alien. Who is he to get angry now?

Secrets within secrets, lies and deceptions and misdirections, all coming to light, all at once. Skye watches the accusations fly and the guns pointed and remembers, in a spare moment, her time with the Rising Tide. Her philosophy of truth above all, half-abandoned as she worked with Coulson, is looking better and better all the while. This is why she had been a hacker: if the pen is mightier than the sword, a few lines of well-placed computer code are even stronger. Let SHIELD have their guns, their weapons, their secrets; she has her computer and her keyboard. She'd take those odds any day.

That moral superiority is false comfort now as she's handcuffed to the staircase, helpless to do anything else. Those metal links bind her and keep her back. What use are a hacker's skills now? She can hack a computer, a database, anything with a keyboard and a network connection, but she can't hack reality. There's no way out of those handcuffs, or this situation, unless Garrett chooses to let her out.

Skye once imitated May as the archetype of a SHIELD agent when dealing with Rathman, and that choice served her well then. If May were here in her place now, chained to the staircase, no doubt she would have broken out already. She wouldn't be able to decrypt the drive herself, but she would have snapped the handcuff as if it were a paper clip, and taken down Deathlok in a whirl of black leather and well-placed punches and really tall boots, and — then what? What would she do with Ward?

The answer to that, of course, is that Melinda May would never have gotten into this situation. This could only happen to Skye, soft-hearted idealist itinerant hacker that she is. She reached out to Mike Peterson with the best of intentions and led both of them into this world that neither of them were prepared for, and she'll have to get them out of it.

Ward made his own choices, before and after she met him: he got himself into this situation. Skye doesn't know all of what lies between him and Garrett, but she knows enough. He was safe with the team, back at the Hub; he didn't have to take the initiative to go with Agent Hand to the Fridge. He didn't have to break out Garrett, who had been safely arrested. He didn't have to kill everyone at the Fridge, and he didn't have to kill Koenig, and he didn't have to drag her out here to Los Angeles. He chose all that. It's not her responsibility to fix the consequences of what he got himself into.

And yet.

It wasn't personal, says Ward when they get back to the plane, and then, You know how I feel about you, Skye. Which one is the truth? (I can handle this.) Which one is the lie? (Can you? You haven't so far.)

Ward is not another Miles Lydon. Miles has his faults — he was superficial, greedy, self-centered maybe, but his crime was, ultimately, to be less invested in the Rising Tide's cause than Skye. He sold Centipede the information about Chan Ho Yin in Hong Kong, which led to the deaths of Chan and Agent Kwan, sure, but Skye believes him when he says that wasn't his intention. Miles was a hacker who wanted to keep his hands clean. It's a long way from hacking to killing people. There will be no corpses falling out of his closets.

The first time she met Ward, he chose not to kill Mike, despite the odds. This seems especially ironic after she's seen what he did to Thomas Nash and Eric Koenig and who knows how many others? And now there he is, at the mercy of the man he spared once. How the world turns. Does he have any compassion left in him, or was that decision merely the result of a cost-benefit analysis? Did he know even then who was really running Centipede, and that Mike would be useful to them? What choice would he make now if he were at that crossroads again?

Skye is (was) a hacker, not a spy. Ward can stand there and talk about how it was his job to compartmentalize his emotions — by her own lights, it's her job to improve the world by telling a few more truths, two mandates in conflict here. Or she releases everything in the Pandora's Box of that hard drive, or Ward dies, right here in front of her.

She's always been soft-hearted (a bleeding heart), sentimental (a pushover), idealistic (a sap). Ward is guilty, but despite everything, she can't see herself ordering him to die. She knows this is what Garrett assuming, that she'll follow the pattern she began when she decided to get involved with Mike Peterson. She'll walk right into his hands now if she unlocks that hard drive.

Skye was a hacker. Before she met Coulson (before she met Ward), her guiding philosophy was the democratization of knowledge, that the truth in more hands was always better. By that logic, she should leap at the chance now to share the information encrypted on that hard drive. How the world turns, indeed. She was the Rising Tide, now she's a SHIELD agent. Ward was a SHIELD agent, and now he's part of HYDRA. Mike wanted to be a hero, but was transformed into a monster.

She reached out to Mike Peterson a few months ago with the best of intentions, but only flimsy justifications. As with Miles, she would do it again, but she might think through her actions more this time. If she hadn't brought him in touch with SHIELD, he would have died; this is a fact. It is also equally true that her involvement with him led him to Garrett's hands and his current position. She did the right thing, for the wrong reasons: if she had wanted solely and exclusively to help him and Ace, and stuck to that goal, that would have been one thing, but her self-righteousness, not her compassion, drove her.

Miles would decrypt the hard drive without thought of the consequences, but she isn't Miles. A SHIELD agent would let Ward die to preserve the data. It's tempting to hide her anger behind the smoke and mirrors of the agency, but despite her lost badge, she's barely a SHIELD agent. She's still that hacker who set out to improve the world one person at a time, who's learned the failings of blind ideologies the hard way. On principle, information should be spread, but there are always exceptions.

Skye still believes, even if they don't. She helped Mike and Miles; she'll save Ward now, for the same reasons and nothing more. His death wouldn't be murder, necessarily, but if Garrett wants Ward dead, he can do the dirty work himself, instead of putting the decision on her and making Mike pull the trigger. She won't let him do this to them.

Bring him back, she says to Garrett, and she doesn't mean Ward.

He doesn't look at her as Mike leads her away.