Skye kept her eyes on the water as she tried to get herself under control. She'd known about Alanna, of course. The second she and Coulson figured out her father was Clay Quartermain, she'd dug up every piece of information on him that she could find. She knew he'd grown up in Austin, Texas with his parents and a sister. She knew Alanna had worked at SHIELD before she was married and had twin daughters, both sophomores at Georgetown.
She knew that Quartermain had followed in his own father's footsteps by entering the SHIELD academy. The unit assigned to track down Plan Chu in China had been his first big assignment, and he'd been about her age at the time. She knew he must have met her mother there, and that he had smuggled her out of China before leaving her at the orphanage in Austin. Ironically, she'd grown up with no family only a few miles away from her biological family.
Coulson had been sitting beside her for the last ten minutes, apparently content to let her start the conversation.
Skye sighed and turned her head, resting her cheek on her knee as she looked at Coulson. "I'm fine. It's just… that was the first time I'd actually seen Alanna and the twins, in person anyway. I'll cop to occasionally stalking their social media."
"You and Alanna have a lot in common," Coulson told her. "She was an analyst when she worked for SHIELD, and sources tell me she's an amateur hacker."
"Better than amateur, actually," Skye said, reaching down to pluck at the grass by her feet. "She helps the Austin PD track online activity for child pornographers and sex offenders in their area. She's even consulted with the FBI on a few cases."
She knew it wasn't healthy to keep such close tabs on a family that wasn't hers to claim, but she couldn't seem to help herself. She had something in common with her biological aunt, and Henna and Jenny were both smart, capable young women. Henna was pre-law and had interned at an Austin law firm over the summer. Like her mother, Jenny was good with computers and though she hadn't yet declared a major, she was considering computer science studies.
They were all tall and blonde and beautiful, hailing from a long-established Austin family who were well respected in the community, and the cynic in her couldn't help wondering if Quartermain had been ashamed to bring his half-Chinese bastard daughter into the family home.
As if sensing the direction of her thoughts, Coulson said, "For what it's worth, Alanna never would have left you in the orphanage if she'd known about you. I'm guessing that's why Clay never told her."
"I just wish I knew why!" she exlaimed, feeling that familiar frustration boiling up inside her. "Why even bother bringing me back here only to dump me off at St. Agnes? I know he told me that my mother died, but they have orphanages in China. What the hell difference did it make? And when I asked him that, do you know what he told me? That he didn't want to deny me my American citizenship. God, what an asshole."
"He's deflecting, Skye. I'm not denying that you have every right to be angry, and I'm certainly not denying that he can be an asshole, but the only reason he could have had for placing you in an orphanage in his hometown was if he was trying to protect you. From what, I don't know, but we've been over this. There is more to the story than he's telling."
"Well, apparently he's planning to take it to his grave," she replied, ripping up a few more tufts of grass and tossing them towards the water. She watched the ducks swim over to investigate before turning their attention to a couple of kids tossing bread pieces. "I just want to know something – anything – about my mother. Her name, what she looked like, where she grew up. How did they meet? Did he care about her at all, or did he just feel obligated to clean up his mess?"
"You're not a mess, and his lack of a relationship with you is his loss," Coulson stated firmly. "I suspect he knows that. I also suspect he wishes things were different. He never participates in flash ops, but he volunteered when he heard Ward say he wanted to take you into the field. And he may think I don't know this, but he's kept tabs on your progress within SHIELD."
"He's probably afraid I'll embarrass him," she commented with her usual snark, wiping her hands on a napkin she pulled from her pocket. "What did Grant tell him?"
"I don't know, but I think he'll probably want to talk it over with you first," Coulson observed as he stood and offered her a hand. "Ward's not stupid. He's going to have questions about Quartermain now."
"I told him months ago that my father was a SHIELD agent," she said as they began walking back to the Triskelion.
Coulson looked surprised. "Really?"
"It kind of came out when he asked about how I knew you," she explained. "I mean, I didn't name names, but he might guess now."
"It's up to you if you want to tell him," he told her. "I noticed that you and he seem to be friends now."
"Mostly work friends, but yeah," she admitted. "Kind of surprising, I know."
"You know, he wasn't very happy about being assigned to the Triskelion, but he seems to have adjusted well. Better than I was expecting," he added. "I'm glad you're getting a chance to pad your skill set with the flash ops."
"Are you really going to approve me going into the field or am I wasting my time today?" she asked.
"If I think Ward can get you in and out in one piece, I'll approve it," he answered. "Since I don't think he would have suggested it if he didn't think he could keep you safe, I'll probably say yes. But I still want to see that mission plan on my desk first thing in the morning."
Back at the Triskelion, Coulson got his food from Grant's office and left, while Skye sat down with her now cold burrito. She could sense Grant watching her, assessing her mood, putting pieces together. She was almost certain he knew; however, he didn't pry or ask questions, choosing to let her finish her lunch as he went over the blueprints for SynesTek once again.
Grant had sent a runner to talk to his contact Kiara, who was now waiting to hear from Dr. Synes. Skye set up a net to catch messages going to and from Dr. Synes before sending the referral.
"Okay, it's done," she stated, looking up at Grant and stretching. "Now we wait to see if he takes the bait." The sun was fading outside, but Skye knew they had several more hours of work ahead of them if they were going to nail down the plan for Coulson by the morning.
"He will," Grant confirmed. "That's not a cold turkey kind of kink, and from what you said, it's been over a month since his last appointment."
"How can you be so sure, though?" she asked curiously. "I mean, this Kiara might not be his type."
"It's not really about having a type, and humans are predictable by nature. They like patterns and routines, and he's been off his routine. Kiara knows how to work that to her advantage when necessary."
"I'll bet," she quipped with humor. "So how do you know Kiara?"
"That is classified, Skye. I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you," he declared with a small smile, his dark eyes fixed on her with that same intensity that always made her pulse race.
A knock on the door interrupted her before she could answer.
"Come in," Grant called out.
The door opened and Ali sauntered in. She smiled at Skye. "Hey. Mission planning?"
Skye nodded. "We've been at it all day and we're still not finished. AC wants to see it tomorrow morning."
"Ahh." She glanced at Grant. "I guess that means you won't be joining us at McGillevrey's later?"
"Probably not," Grant said. "How was your weekend?"
Skye kept her eyes on her laptop screen, but she couldn't ignore the little burst of relief at the realization that Ali and Grant hadn't spent the weekend together, followed by a twinge of guilt. She'd been moody all day on Saturday, and Patrick had noticed and commented on it. She'd dismissed it, not wanting to admit even to herself why she felt out of sorts.
Skye continued to work as Ali and Grant talked. But when Ali mentioned Quartermain, her fingers paused on the keyboard.
"He doesn't usually volunteer for this kind of op, but I heard he's offered up his services. I bet you jumped on that," Ali was saying. "Do you know how many people you're going to need yet?"
"Not yet, but I'll let you know," Grant replied.
After Ali left, Skye bit her lip and looked over at Grant. "About Quartermain. I know you could probably use him on this mission."
Grant stared at her for a moment, and it was clear that he was weighing his response carefully. "You're the key to this mission going off smoothly, Skye. That means all factors need to be adjusted accordingly. If something will be a distraction, or if it will upset you, then it's not something we need on the team."
"You probably figured out that he's my father," Skye said, her tone matter of fact even as she swallowed down the nerves that erupted at saying the words out loud. When Grant didn't look surprised, she sighed and added, "And for the record, I don't usually react like I did earlier. I knew who he was before I came to work here. I've run into him here before, and I've had to deal with him in a professional capacity once or twice. It's not exactly fun, but it is what it is at this point."
Grant stood up and came to sit beside her. "Coulson thinks it's a bad idea, Skye, and I'm inclined to agree with him."
"Coulson is overprotective," Skye said with a smile.
She thought about what Coulson said earlier about Quartermain trying to protect her. She told herself not to ask, that it didn't matter why he'd volunteered for the mission. Despite having resigned herself to her orphaned status, she occasionally found herself hoping for more. In those moments she reminded herself that her life wasn't a Disney movie.
Skye nibbled her bottom lip and pulled her legs up into the chair. She played with the ends of her hair as she asked, "Did he volunteer before or after he heard I'd be going into the field?"
"After," Grant answered. "He asked about it again earlier too, at the park. It was what we were talking about when you walked up. He said he'd come by my office later."
She mulled that over as she continued to play with her hair, eyes on the floor. Her fingers stilled when she felt his hand on her back, and she raised her head to see him looking at her with concern.
"I don't have any problem telling him no, Skye. Yes, we could use him, but we can also manage without him. Ali, Natasha, Ricky and Tripp are all available."
"Yeah, but we're going to need a big team on standby, for the distraction and for possible extraction assistance if there's a problem," she pointed out. "I hate to tell you this, but if the bullets start flying I won't be any help at all. My shooting skills suck – the last time May took me to the range, I kept hitting the magazine release instead of the safety release."
Ward laughed. "I bet she loved that."
"Her sense of humor isn't as well developed as AC's," she said wryly. "She says the only thing keeping me from being field trained is a mental block, but I don't know."
"If Agent May said that then it's probably true. You're one of the smartest people I've met here, Skye. I think you can probably do anything you put your mind to."
She stared at him; the steady reassurance in his eyes took her back to that night she first met him at McGillevrey's. She'd felt like she could talk to him about anything that night and he'd listen, and she felt it again now. And it would be really nice to talk to someone besides May or AC about Quartermain.
Licking her lips nervously, she asked, "Do you want to get a drink when we're finished? I know we still have a couple of hours' work to do, but I'd really like to tell you about him – or what I know, which isn't much."
He reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear. "Yeah, we can do that."
Skye accepted the glass of Scotch from Grant as he joined her at their booth and took a small sip. "Wait – is this the same whisky we shared that night at McGillevrey's?"
"Johnnie Walker Platinum Label," he confirmed, smiling at her. "I figured I owe you for sharing the bottle that night."
They'd decided against McGillevrey's since it was likely there would be a lot of SHIELD agents there. Instead Grant had driven her to a small jazz bar located in his own neighborhood, and the mellow lighting and music suited her pensive mood.
He listened without comment as she related what she knew of her history. When she was finished, he said, "It's likely that your mother was from somewhere in the Hunan Province. Agent Garrett was on that mission and from the stories he's told me about Quartermain, they spent most of their time there. It's possible that Garrett knows more."
She was so tempted to have Ward look into it, but she knew it was probably a bad idea. "AC would be cranky if he thought I was stirring this up again. He thinks my father was hiding me in that orphanage and that's the reason he never told anyone except the family priest. When we went back to St. Agnes to ask questions, Father Thomas admitted that Quartermain confided that I was his daughter. He also confirmed that I was born in China and brought into the country in secret. All of my birth documents were falsified under the name Daisy Johnson, and my mother was listed as a deceased prostitute, father unknown."
"Johnson is his sister's married name," he remarked thoughtfully. "Maybe Daisy was actually the name your mother gave you."
"Maybe," she said with a shrug. "I honestly don't even know if my birth date is accurate since he's refused to talk to me about any of it. You should have seen his face the day Coulson called him into his office and he saw me sitting there. It was like he was looking at a damn ghost."
"Well, to be fair you said you made Daisy Johnson disappear after you ran away. If he was keeping tabs on you, he never knew what happened to you. And a fifteen year old girl on the streets… he might have thought you were dead."
"I would be really surprised if he cared enough to keep tabs on me," she said, staring at her glass.
"Hey," Grant said, reaching out and placing his hand over hers. "I'd be really surprised if he didn't because Coulson has a point. He had no reason to keep you that close to home under the care of the family priest. That doesn't scream indifference, Skye – and frankly, neither does volunteering to come on a mission that you're involved in."
She turned her hand over and linked their fingers together. "I guess I just think it's safer to assume he doesn't give a damn. The only people at SHIELD who know he's my father are Commander Hill, AC, May, and now you. They all agree that it's better if I don't poke the sleeping bear and risk dragging up secrets best left buried, but sometimes I think having no family, no sense of self or personal identity, is even worse."
"You have a lot of people who care about you, though. Maybe Daisy Johnson was a lie, or a partial truth, and maybe you'll never know the whole story. The important thing is you made yourself the person you are today, and Skye is pretty great."
"You know, I think this hardened agent front you put on at work is hiding a teddy bear at heart," she teased him. "Why are you so nice to me?"
"You deserve nice things," he said quietly, running his thumb over her knuckles before releasing her hand. "Don't let anyone tell you differently."
Skye drained the final sip from her glass. "You know what? Put him on the team. I knew what I was getting into when I came to work for SHIELD, and I don't want mission parameters changing because I have daddy issues. If you can use him, then I'm fine with it."
He observed her closely for a moment. "You're sure?"
She nodded firmly. "Absotively, posilutely sure."
"You're making up words now, so I think it's time we get you home," he joked, referencing her habit of loosely interpreting English whenever she was tipsy.
Grant drove her back to her apartment and walked her up to her door, ensuring she got safely inside.
"Do you want to come in?" she asked, flipping on the lights and slipping out of her shoes.
He shook his head. "It's late, and I'm presenting our mission plan to Coulson in the morning."
"Well, we've locked that baby down, so I have high hopes he'll approve it." Leaning up, she kissed his cheek as he stood in the doorway. "Thanks for listening. I didn't realize how much I was holding in. I mean, I can talk to May and AC, but May kind of hates Quartermain. I hate to give her any more reasons to give him the stink eye whenever she runs across him at the Triskelion."
His lips quirked up as she spoke. "I'll see you tomorrow, Skye."
She closed the door and locked it, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and sank down onto the sofa. Pulling out her phone, she saw two missed calls from Patrick. She groaned and curled into the corner of her sofa as she pulled the throw blanket over her head. Why did everything have to be so damn complicated?
She liked spending time with Patrick, but she was beginning to suspect she didn't care about him as much as she should. They'd been in a holding pattern for months, and she was reticent to change anything one way or another, which wasn't exactly fair to him. Skye wasn't in the habit of fooling herself – she knew that she had feelings for Grant and that was a large part of the problem. She just didn't know what to do about it.
Skye spent most of Tuesday practicing her hacking technique on a security system Patrick, Greg and Fitz had mocked up for her that closely resembled the one she'd encounter at SynesTek. She'd been at it all morning, and she groaned when she checked the stopwatch to see that she'd passed the eight minute mark once again. "Damn it."
"Don't worry," Jemma said in an encouraging tone. "You've only been practicing for a couple of hours. You'll get it."
"Yeah, well, I need to get it today," Skye grumbled, resetting her stopwatch and standing up to stretch. "Starting tonight, we're on standby and could go at any time." The nature of flash ops meant being ready to go in at a moment's notice. In this case, they were simply waiting for Dr. Synes to take an evening off, which would ensure most, if not all, of the other scientists also being out of the office.
"Oww!" Fitz jumped, pulling his hand from a metal plate he'd been resting it on.
"Level?" Jemma asked, pen poised above a pad of paper.
"Probably a five," Fitz told her, shaking his hand.
"Excellent! That should be sufficient for us to gauge the remaining pain responses," Jemma replied, making some notes before setting the pad of paper aside.
"I can't believe you guys are shocking each other to test the new stunner guns," Skye remarked. "Don't scientists use mice or monkeys for that kind of thing? Not that I'm suggesting animal cruelty is the way to go, but there has to be a better way than human trials."
"Skye has a very good point," Fitz agreed. "If we had a monkey…"
"Oh, Fitz!" Jemma interrupted, crossing her arms and raising a brow. "We both know if you had a monkey in this lab, it would never see an experiment or a day's work."
"Well, I could teach it to assist me in the lab," he protested. "Patrick said he'd help me."
"I think a monkey in the lab is a great idea," Patrick offered, looking up from the computer across the room. "Okay, I've input that data, Simmons. I'll add another circuit board, and you should be good to go."
Skye tuned them out as she got back to work, hacking the system again and again over the next couple of hours.
"You're under eight minutes now," Patrick noted at one point, strolling over to check her progress. "That's good."
"Grant said the closer I can get it to five minutes, the better, so I'm going to keep going," she told him. "I think I can at least break six minutes by the end of the day." Compared to the external system, she was pretty sure the firewalls on the computers inside would be a piece of cake, but she planned to run through several of her programs that night to determine which ones might work the best.
"It's so exciting that this is your first field mission!" Jemma exclaimed. "But with all the armed guards, it does sound quite dangerous. I'm actually really surprised Agent Coulson approved it, not to mention Commander Hill."
"She'll be with Agents Ward and Romanoff," Fitz pointed out. "They're the best of the best, and then agents like Quartermain, Morales, Mathis and Tripp on the external team. She couldn't be safer, really. And besides, they probably won't even know they were there. That's the whole point."
"Best case scenario," Jemma argued. "What about worst case scenario?"
"Yeah, apparently that one involves us going out the back door," Skye interrupted. "And by back door, I mean Dr. Synes' office window on the twentieth floor while Romanoff runs interference. I really, really hope it doesn't come to that because I'll probably throw up all over Grant on the way down."
"You'll be fine, but if you do throw up, I'll forgive you. And we can practice the jump at the range tonight if you want."
She turned to see Grant standing in the doorway. "Yeah, no thanks. I'm currently living in denial that this will be even remotely necessary."
He walked over to her and nodded at the mocked up system. "How's that going?"
"I'm under eight minutes," she said, holding up the stopwatch to show her last time of seven minutes, fifteen seconds. "It's starting to go faster now, so I think I can break six by tonight."
"Alright good. I'm going to order dinner in while I work through the plans with the team. Do you want anything?"
"What are you getting?" she asked.
"Cheeseburger."
"Ooh, rebel," she quipped. "If it's from Eddie's, I'll have the same but…"
"Hold the lettuce, extra sauce," he finished the order. "Fries and a vanilla shake?"
She nodded. "Can you order the chicken sandwich for AC? He's working late again tonight, so I'm going to make him take a break and eat with me."
Grant left and she checked her watch, sighing when she realized she had a good three hours of work ahead of her.
"You know, Agent Ward would probably make a good boyfriend, the way he remembers the little details," Jemma observed. When Fitz and Patrick turned to stare at her, she hastened to explain, "Not that I think he should be anyone's boyfriend, but it's nice that he remembers what Skye likes. Of course, you do that too, right Patrick? Of course you do. And really, it's probably his training and nothing more than that. He even remembered what kind of sandwich I like at the panini place that day, and we've never…"
Skye was behind Fitz and Patrick, and she threw up her hands when Jemma paused, a clear sign that she should stop talking.
"Uh – we've never spent any time together, really," she finished awkwardly.
"What are you blathering about?" Fitz asked incredulously. "Do you really want to date Agent Ward?"
"Of course not. Don't be ridiculous," Jemma answered him, raising a brow in Skye's direction. "It's merely a scientific observation."
Skye rolled her eyes and turned back to the security system, resetting the timer before connecting her tablet to the mainframe and getting back to work.
A/N: Okay, it's now four parts lol. I decided to post the parts as I'm finishing since there's so much more happening here than I originally planned for - this chapter alone is over 4,000 words. Next up we'll have some planning leading up the mission, the mission itself, and the aftermath. We'll get some May, too, because I've finally decided how I want to use her in this story. Hope you enjoyed the update! Last part coming soon :)
