She's like the wind
Arrowsbane
"Just a fool to believe I have anything she needs. She's like the wind."
She's bored. Oh god, so bored. Hacking Shield was supposed to be fun, supposed to give her more to go on, but all she's found is a stupid, mostly-redacted file on something called an 0-8-4 which seems to be her… It really doesn't make sense.
Hacking the premier intelligence agency should have been cool, should have given her a high of endorphins, should have been a triumph because she just succeeded where pretty much everybody else (including all most alphabet agencies) failed. Instead she's just left scowling at the metal panels that make up the roof of her van.
Shield is just so… straight-laced. And she's never met a rule she didn't end up breaking.
Skye sighs wearily and taps away at the keyboard once more, not really paying a hundred percent to where in the mainframe she's going. Until an alert pings, and grabs her attention.
It's a request for immediate extraction – a solo operation gone wrong, and the agent involved is under heavy fire. So sue her, it sounds interesting – she opens up the audio on the com link.
"–'s not good boss. These guys really want me dead and stuffed like a hunting trophy." A man's voice with a canadian tinge to it and heavy gunshots echo from her laptop.
"Hold tight Agent," says another man's voice – low and steady, the guy must be tall. "We have a team on the way, but it's thirty minutes away at the very least."
"Don't think I have that long boss." the first voice says, and Skye takes one look at the GPS – it's not too far from her, she can get there faster – and makes a decision. She vaults the seat and starts the engine, buckles in and sets the laptop on the seat next to her. Later, she'll wonder where the moment of insanity came from.
He's pinned down behind a water cooler, with very few options that don't involve drawing fire into a civilian population. This wouldn't be happening if the guys in Intel hadn't screwed up and neglected to notice that one of the men on the building's security team had also been involved in the international relations event last year at the embassy. The one where his Strike team had been deployed.
Another ten minutes until his backup arrives. Ten minutes that he doesn't have.
"I'm sorry boss. Don't think I'm going to get out of this." He says into his com-link.
"Rumlow! Don't you do anything stupid!" Fury shouts down the line at him, and he suppresses a bitter laugh.
"It's okay boss, I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for this." He says. It's dreadfully dramatic and heroic and all, but he's about to die – cut him a little slack.
The line crackles and fizzes before a female voice joins the conversation.
"That's very nice and all Agent Rumlow, but could you do us all a favor and get your arse over to the east side of the building. The gunshots are making me twitchy, and if my van gets so much as a scratch on it, there will be hell to pay."
"Who the hell are you?" Is the only thing he can say as his brain switches to autopilot and his feet lead him left to the east exit.
"A very bored hacker who clearly has more than a few screws loose. Seriously, why the hell am I doing this?" The voice replies, although the second part seems to be directed at herself. He barrels down a hallway, narrowly avoiding getting shot and through a set of double doors. Down a flight of stairs – and he jumps over the banister on the last half-flight before heading out the fire-door. A nondescript blue van is idling on the curb, the side-door wide open.
"Get in!" He doesn't even blink twice, hurling himself inside and slamming the door shut behind him.
"Hold on tight," The very fact that he doesn't even have the time to grab a handhold is a testament to how quickly she floors the gas, and he's sent head over heels backwards into the main hold of her van, his fall cushioned by the thick rugs covering the floor.
"You're insane," he gasps out over the plunking of bullets scoring the sides of the van.
"Damn straight."
It's not until they are several miles away, and he's sure that nobody is following them, before he initiates conversation.
"Can I at least know the name of my knight in shining armor?" He asks, leaning over the seat to peer at the woman's face.
"That's funny," she quips with a wry smile, "You don't look much like a damsel in distress." He glowers at her and she just laughs at him.
"I'm Skye," she says. "Now where am I dropping you off?"
He gives her directions to the nearest Shield checkpoint and calls his superior to confirm that he most certainly isn't dead, which is excellent – although whether he still has all of his brain functioning is apparently very debatable right now – and fingers the set of cable ties in his pocket warily because for all that she's helped him today; the girl is an unknown, and she admitted to having hacked not only Shield's computers, but their encrypted communication frequencies.
They pull into the empty Shield hanger with a shared sigh of relief, and climb out of the blue van to inspect the damage. 'It could be worse,' he thinks to himself. The blue door is scored with bullet marks and there's actually a bullet wedged into the crease between the door and the main body panels.
"My van." The plaintive wail is so different from the tough girl slash flirty heroine act of just a moment ago, and it catches him off guard.
"My poor baby." His rescuer whimpers, and he backs the fuck up out of the way because she looks like she's about to cry and he really can't handle that. He doesn't do crying. It's part of why he's the commander of Shield's Strike Squad. One of his boots scuffs against the harsh concrete of the empty hanger where they're waiting on Shield to show up and he freezes, instinctively knowing he's made a mistake. Out of the pan, and into the fire.
She tenses up and slowly turns to face him, her eyes somehow managing to be both frozen, ice-cold-fire and pathetic puppy-dog at the same time as her gaze locks onto him and she freaking snarls. Absently, he wonders how that's even possible – although it must be, because right now she's reminding him of that time he came up against a mountain lion in the Rockies. How is it possible for such a tiny person to be so scary?
"I'll pay for that," He says quickly, mouth engaging before brain.
Seriously, he's never been so thankful to have been on a solo-op, because his team would never let him live this down. Special Agent Brock Rumlow, veteran, Navy Seal and commander of a premier (and very lethal) squad with a prestigious track record cowering before a tiny slip of a girl who probably wouldn't weigh more than a hundred pounds soaking wet and most definitely wouldn't know the difference between the trigger and the magazine release on a gun.
She opens her mouth to spit some very toxic words at him, but is interrupted by the screech of tires on tarmac as several heavy-duty, bulletproof SUV's pull up sharply just inside the wide open doors of the hanger. Next thing either of them knows, she has a black bag over her head and something much thicker and sturdier than cable ties around her wrists. Then he's being fussed over by the nearest medic and she's bundled into the back of an SUV.
The bag comes off her head in a single fluid movement, messing up her hair in the process. She's sat in a dull, metal-walled room at a table for two and facing off against strangers – a man with one eye and a woman with hair the most amazing color of red. (Seriously, just pulling off that shade should earn the woman a medal.) What's their game? Good cop, bad cop?
"Can I help you sir, madam?" She says politely, in the sweetest tone she has, wearing her gentlest smile.
"You can tell us how you managed to hack our database, and why." Says the dark-skinned man sitting across from her. Skye tilts her head to the side.
"Okay," she says, after thinking for a moment. "One, I'm just that good. Two, I was really bored." The sad thing is, she isn't lying. Her new friend glares at her.
"Nobody is that good."
"There wasn't even a trace," the redhead tells the man, reading a manilla file. "In and out like a ghost." Skye has to supress a smirk at the woman contradicting her colleague.
"What can I say," she shrugs. "I have mad skills."
"That's her?" Rollins asks, staring through the one-way glass at the tiny slip of a woman being debriefed by Fury and Romanoff. The man isn't exactly subtle as his eyes flicker over Skye's slender curves and pretty face.
"Yes, that's her." Rumlow replies, wanting a reason to kick Rollins' arse into the ground.
"She rescued you?" Rollins repeats, his voice tinged with amusement.
"Obviously," Rumlow growls.
"Is there a problem with that?" Natasha asks, sliding into the viewing room with them. Rumlow suppresses a grin when Rollins squeaks out a reply.
"No Ma'am." Nobody crosses the Widow. It just isn't done. Even if your superior does get his arse pulled out of the line of fire by a girl half his size.
After another half an hour or so of Fury chasing his tail while trying to wrangle an answer out of her – and all they really learn is that her name is Skye – no last name, she can hack better than their specialists and that she really likes pie.
They run her prints – the name gives them nothing – and nothing pops up. They run her DNA next. Still nothing. According to the system, she's nobody. No name, no past, no future. She's like a Ghost. It's more than a little disconcerting. So they let her go with a warning – she did save the life of a valued member of their organization after all.
She walks past him and his team
"Call me next time you need saving Princess," she chirps with a wink and he scowls.
"There won't be a next time." He tells her, and she disappears from his life with a laugh and a toss of her dark honeyed curls. He taps out a note for Engineering, to tell them take the cost of fixing her van from his account.
It's the least he can do.
It's dark. It's storming. He really should be asleep. But he isn't.
Something about rainstorms appeal to him, and he spends a good part of the night sitting up on the wide windowsill in just a set of sweatpants and a thin shirt with a blanket draped over his shoulders, watching lightning flash across the sky.
So of course he's more than aware of his front door lock clicking open, and the hinges squeaking ever-so-slightly. Instinct kicks in and he's up in a trice, the blanket slips from his shoulders to the floor, but he's already moving silently across the room, hiding in the shadows.
Water drips to the floor as somebody slips inside the apartment. He moves quickly and efficiently, twisting behind the foreign body and tackling them to the floor; straddling the tiny form and pinning the intruder to the floor with his body.
"Well that's certainly an interesting way of saying hello." A familiar face, lit only by the faint moonlight that peeks through the rainclouds, stares up at him from the floor, her soaked honey brown locks fan out around her head and her lithe arms are pinned in place by his own hands.
"Skye?" Disbelief colors his voice as surely it does his face.
"Hey Princess," she smirks up at him and he glowers, letting go of her hands to settle back on his heels, still pinning her with his hips.
"What are you doing here?" He asks, baffled by her sudden reappearance in his life.
"When your techie's fixed my van, they missed a spot." She says, "So I stuck a bucket underneath the leak and parked in the alley."
"That ain't saying much," he points out and she snorts.
"It was freezing, I was soaked. Do you really want me being sick on your conscience?"
"How would it be my fault?" He yel–says, says – he most certainly does not yelp no matter what she claims.
"They were shooting at you. My van saved your life," she reminds him, sticking out her bottom lip and pouting (and it is not his fault that his mind goes right into the gutter, really, it isn't). It takes everything he has not to let out a frustrated noise.
"So…" she begins, wiggling her hips in an incredibly distracting way, "you gonna get up, or is this your idea of how to show a girl a good time? Because I'm really more of a wall or sheets kind of girl."
He gets up, although it takes an effort, and offers her a hand, pulling her upwards and laconically stomps over to the airing closet to get her a towel, because dammit if she gets a cold, she won't let him live it down.
She dries off, and crashes on the couch with his blanket, snoring softly the entire time. He dozes off around three in the morning, and when his alarm goes off at six, she's gone – a note of thanks is sitting on the countertop and one of his bagels is missing.
He shakes his head and gets ready for work.
A fortnight later, he hauls himself home, exhausted from a long slog through a very wet and rainy stint in Maine. He's not expecting to find his couch already occupied by his very own home invader – she's more persistent than a mouse after cheese.
"Hey Princess," she teases, happily eating a piece of toast, and he suppresses the urge to growl, "did you miss me?"
He drops his kit by the washing machine, and stomps past her into his room.
A shower and a phone call for take-out later, and he's feeling a lot more sociable, settling onto the couch next to her and stealing the remote to turn the news on. She doesn't complain, just moves over so he has more room. Half an hour later, he hears the washing machine cycle down and absently wonders when it was put on – a question answered by his visitor sliding off the couch and heading for the dryer.
Just for that, he's willing to share the Chinese he ordered. She's better than he is at using chopsticks, which is interesting to note.
He almost shoots her. He's half asleep when he hears a clatter.
"Dammit Skye," he groans, lowering the glock and rubbing at his eyes. The girl in question stares at him with wide deer-in-the-headlight eyes, frozen in place on the countertop, an apple halfway to her mouth.
"You looked tired," she protests, "I didn't want to wake you." He sighs, putting the safety on and the gun back in its holster.
"If you're going to keep doing this, at least don't try to be sneaky. I'm trained to shoot sneaky." He reminds her, and she nods in agreement slowly.
"Okay. Got it. No sneaky."
Over time he becomes used to Skye appearing in his apartment, stops jumping every time she shows up, gets used to her crashing on his couch or finding her in his bed (he doesn't appreciate needing cold showers because of that last one though). He gets used to buying twice the amount of cereal that he used to, or picking up a second half and half container every Saturday.
He enjoys her company, she never asks where he's been, just quietly helps him rewrap an injury if needed. He gets the feeling that she already knows what happened, even if IT hasn't picked up any trace of being hacked by her.
They need a hacker. They need the best hacker.
Somebody who can be in and out like a ghost. He knows the perfect girl for the job.
So the next time she shows up at his place, he scoops her up and slings her over his shoulder, depositing her in his car before driving straight to the Triskellion – it's entirely likely that he runs a few red lights on the way, but the IT department can fix that.
Surprisingly, she agrees easily enough – of course Fury has to agree to erase her from their systems, and in the end they settle on a sparse, locked consultant file under the codename "Ghost" that contains a subroutine preventing anybody from running her prints or photo. She even gets a nifty little pager out of it so they can call her when they need her.
Quinn Worldwide has no idea what hits it. She zips through the firewalls and into the mainframe unnoticed, manages to pull up the files Fury asks for within minutes. The entire event, something they've been planning and agonizing over for freaking months (something he was almost shot over, and Skye's van certainly took a bullet for) is over and done within an hour. It's… humbling. And more than a little embarrassing. It goes without saying that what happens in the command center, stays within the command center.
Skye thinks it's hilarious.
"Bye Nick," She calls, waving cheerily as Rumlow escorts her out. The eyebrows of the collective command center shoot up in shock, but Fury just laughs. The girl has courage.
He unlocks the door and lets his team into the apartment. It's (as Rollins calls it) a guys' night. The big game is on and the fridge is well-stocked with beer. He's got his head inside a cupboard, searching for the biggest bowl he has, a bag of doritos in his hand when something suddenly occurs to him.
"Oi," he shouts through to the living area.
"What is it?" Rollins yells back, and the background noise tells him that the flatscreen has just been switched on.
"If the door suddenly unlocks in the middle of the night, don't shoot." He says, sticking his head around the door as he tries to juggle the chips, bowl and six-pack he's just yanked out of the fridge. The team stares at him, confused.
"Okay…" Rollins says slowly. "Why?"
"Sometimes I have a visitor." He dances around the truth, hoping to brush it off. Instead he ends up being the center of attention.
"A girl?" Jenson asks. Of course the idiots would be interested in hearing if he was getting laid.
"Yes a girl." He says, before adding. "But not in the way you're thinking." He muses for a second before settling on the most basic instructions he can give.
"Be nice. Don't shoot her. This is the kind of girl who would take it personally and hack into social security to erase your entire existence." His team stares at him in shock, and he takes advantage of the silence to meander off in search of the salsa he had somewhere in the fridge.
"Dude, what kind of girls does he date?"
"Jesus Christ!" Jenson yelps, starling them all awake in a second – everybody reaching for the nearest weapon as their training kicks in.
"You said not to be sneaky!" Skye yelps, from where she's hidden behind the couch, and he put his gun down.
"The hell Jenson?" He asks, throwing the nearest cushion at his overly-jumpy squad-mate. "I said don't shoot her."
"I didn't!" Jenson protests. There is a grumble of disagreement from behind the couch, and it sounds a lot like Skye's impression of an angry cat – something she only does when she's severely annoyed.
"Skye, nobody is going to shoot you." He says, rubbing his temples and fumbling about for his beer. It's lukewarm, but it chases the away taste of what-the-hell-crawled-into-my-mouth-and-died, which makes it easier to think. The tiny hacker peeks her head over the couch, eyeing every single one of them warily.
"They'd better not," she warns testily. "I can and will hack their birth records. I can make them disappear." Rollin's chokes as she unknowingly echoes his words from earlier.
"Oh god," he gasps out. "You two deserve each other," before devolving into peals of laughter.
Any possibility of a peaceful life spirals out the window and falls three floors to a nasty and painful end. His team seems to like her, and he's not sure if it's a good thing.
By the time the sun comes up, she's trounced Jenson at battleships half a dozen times, won the contents of Rollin's wallet in a poker game (and who knew she was that good?) and blackmailed him into teaching her how to fire a gun. Jenson throws up his hands in defeat as she sinks his latest battleship and she throws back her head and laughs.
In the early morning like, sun just cresting the horizon and bouncing off the floor and highlighting her face, she's never looked more beautiful to him.
It happens because of a bagel – the last one to be specific. It's always food with her.
One minute he's holding it over his head, using his superior height to his advantage while she tries to climb his taller frame like a tiny monkey, and the next, she's hooked her ankle into the back of his knee causing him to topple like a stack of dominos.
They come together in a heat-of-the-moment kiss and clothes are discarded in order to feel skin on skin. It turns out that while she claims to be a wall-or-sheets girl, she can make do with almost anywhere; the couch, the floor, the table – she's not very picky. The bagel lies forgotten on the floor, and when they finally make it to the bed, he takes her again before falling asleep with her in his arms.
When he wakes in the morning, she's still there and he shamelessly takes advantage of that to rouse her – she doesn't protest, enjoys it if her mewling is anything to go by, and things begin again; this time with her straddling him and the faint light of dawn glistening against their skin. When they're done, she lies pressed to his bare chest, tracing her fingers over the scar left by a bullet and he combs his fingers through her long hair – no words are needed.
That's when he realizes he never wants to let her go.
A week later, and suddenly his brain kicks in. He realizes they didn't use protection. When he brings this up with her, Skye laughs. Seriously, she just laughs at him. Then she promises it's taken care of, and that she's clean of anything. He tells her that he is too. She laughs again.
"I know. I hacked your files and your medical record was attached." She's read his file. Of course she knows. Because that's not totally embarrassing. She pauses and smiles mischievously. "What was with that thing in St. Petersburg?"
Oh hell – she knows about that too?
"When the hell did you read my file woman?"
More laughter.
It's been a long day. Standing in the doorway of his apartment, boots covered in mud and his jaw slack in horror. He really doesn't need this.
Smoke wraps itself around the corners of the doorway, slides across the floor and snakes up the walls toward the ceiling. He panics, throwing his leather bike jacket to the floor and bolting for the kitchen where Skye is coughing, the oven wide open and a baking tray held in her oven-mit.
"What the hell did you do to my kitchen woman?" he cries, reaching to where he keeps his fire extinguisher and turning the pressurized foam onto the flaming baking tray and switching on the ventilator to clear the room of smoke.
"I was making cookies," Skye protests.
"You call those cookies?" He says in disbelief, eyes flicking over the carnage that is Skye's attempt at baking. She makes that adorable-grumpy-kitten noise and he can't help it if he finds it incredibly attractive.
"So I'm not exactly Martha Stewart," she admits, giving him the look – the one that all women seem to be born capable of, the one that does its best to make a person feel like dog shit, "but I was doing okay."
He stares blankly at her. She twitches.
Then he's chasing her around the apartment and she's screaming with laughter. Her socks and his wooden floor make it easy for her to slide around quickly, but he's faster, scooping her up like a rag doll and putting her over his shoulder.
It ends the same way most of their disagreements do, in bed, with their clothes all over the room and every glass surface fogging over from shared body heat.
[One day he'll wonder if she did it on purpose. She'll never tell.]
After that, Skye is banned from cooking. She doesn't complain.
"Admit it." Skye teases from where she lies, belly-down on his bed, wrapped only in his sheets and a sense of smugness leftover from the enthusiastic bout of sex that they just had. "You like your world with me in it."
"You sure are something," he mutters from his spot leaning against the edge of the window, looking out at the foggy cloud that blankets the city skyline.
"Mmm," she hums, stretching like a cat and the sheet draped over her body shifts, revealing more tanned skin.
"I'm going to wake up one morning, and you won't be here… will you." He voices the thought that's been racketing around inside his brain for the past three weeks.
"What can I say," she tells him, looking down at the bed, "I hate the cold." He pushes off of the wall and crosses the room to sit next to her, tangling his fingers in her long curls. She tilts her head up to face him.
"I'll come back," she promises with a sad smile.
"You'd better," he warns her. They both know he's possessive like that. "Or I'll come looking."
"I'm not exactly easy to find," she reminds him, eyes glinting at the idea of a challenge – cat and mouse is exactly the kind of game she'd enjoy.
"Finding elusive folk is part of my job description darlin'." She laughs.
"I suppose it is."
He's in love. It makes no sense, but somehow she's wormed her way into his heart.
She blazed into his life like a wildfire - with the force of a supernova in her voice and the warmth of a thousand summers in her smile. She's passionate when he's controlled, a rule-breaker while he's a soldier. She flares when she's angry, while he only knows how to go cold. She's the day to his night, and the balm to his weary soul. She sits up with him when he has nightmares about his worst memories, and snores through every thunderstorm. Likes sweet popcorn while he eats salted – which should be a crime in itself, but somehow he doesn't mind.
She's everything he isn't, sees the good in everyone with that childlike wonder of hers, believes in freedom of information while he automatically compartmentalizes - although she seems to respect his position in Shield most days. She makes him believe he can be a better person, or at the very least try.
The price of her love, is that she never stays, moving west to hide from the cold eastern winters.
She leaves the same way she came, like a breath of cool wind with the quiet melancholy of soft autumn rain before a storm. One day, he wakes up and she isn't there. Or the next day, or the day after that.
Summer fades into a cold DC Winter, and with it the memories of the girl with a heart bigger than the sky. That's how it is though, the price he pays for falling in love with a woman who is just like the wind.
I'll be back in the Summer… says her note.
Until Summer arrives and she isn't there.
AN. To be continued in "Like a Ghost"
I blame Ozhawk for this one. Ships in the Night was just that good - so go read it. Still no idea how thinking about it spawned this. To hell with the Plotbunniees, I got bitten by the Fluff-monster, that's for sure!
I know the characters are OOC, but if Skye could interest Ward (before he went bat-shit-crazy-as-hell-on-a-stick), then I reckon she could interest Rumlow – and let's face it, we all want what we can't have. And he knows he can't keep her. He can damn well try though.
Playlist - Chewing Gum [Nina Nesbitt] on repeat.
For the record, I have no idea what happened in St. Petersburg. The Rumlow in my head refuses to talk. Use your imagination. ;)