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Nightmares

"Okay, I need you to push now," the nurse beside her instructed as Bobbi's fingers clawed the sheets. "On your next contraction, push really hard. You're doing great." With the number of times she'd heard that from this woman, she would have thought this agony would have been over by now.

Bobbi couldn't help but let out a small cry as a fresh wave of fiery pain came over her legs and abdomen, but she pushed as the nurse had said. She was a S.H.I.E.L.D. specialist, damn it, and she was going to get this baby out of her if it was the last thing she—

Augghh. Her breathing came in rapid, light gasps and sweat coated her frame. "I can see the head!" the nurse told her cheerily. "You're almost done; you're doing great!" Bobbi fisted the sheets in response, throwing her head back at the next onset. This was...incomparable anything she'd done in the field, like she was being torn in two from the inside. Vaguely in between the now-fast coming contractions she thought of Mack in the waiting room, where she'd told him not to be. She hadn't asked anyone to come for this, hadn't asked for any of it. But as a true friend would he'd ignored her bull-headed request to suffer in solitude. But she would have to have put her foot down for real had he tried to barge into the birthing room. This was an ordeal she didn't really need an audience for—even if that audience was the brother she never had.

With the next wave there was a massive release of tension and the nurse exclaimed in delight as the piercing wail of an infant filled the small, sterile room. Her infant, Bobbi thought lazily.

"It's a girl," the nurse told her proudly, confirming the three ultrasound pictures Bobbi currently had stashed in her desk drawer. She could only catch a glimpse of the tiny squirming body before the nurse had cut the cord and whisked it—her—away to the exam table in the corner, where Bobbi knew they would clean her up, count fingers and toes, take a blood sample, give her a dose of Vitamin K, and immunize her against hepatitis B before wrapping her in a pretty pink blanket and handing her back.

Bobbi tried to ignore the fact that her baby was about to be stabbed with a large hypodermic needle.

After a few minutes of tense waiting—already, though she couldn't understand it, she missed the baby she'd been carrying close to her for nine months like an ache in every cell of her body—the nurse returned with a small bundle which she placed carefully on Bobbi's chest. Bobbi curled her arms around it, hugging it gently to her before daring to look down. A red, wrinkled little face stared up at her, and at once a feeling of intense anguish sparked within her. For a moment she knew as clear as day Hunter should be here, and it was like they'd separated yesterday instead of nearly eight months ago. Their daughter even looked a bit like him, although Bobbi couldn't even start to identify exactly what features caused that connection in her head.

Then Bobbi forced her ex-husband from her mind and lifted one hand—shaking from emotion or exhaustion or both—and stroked her thumb over her baby's soft forehead. "Do you have a name picked out?" the nurse asked kindly.

"Yes. Isabelle. Isabelle Marie Morse," Bobbi murmured, still staring down at the bundle in her arms. Isabelle sneezed, and Bobbi nearly jumped at the sudden movement of her otherwise languid baby. Then she smiled.

The door to the birthing room opened, and Bobbi looked up to see a man in a dark suit entering. The nurse did not seem to notice his presence in the slightest, but something about him made her want to tuck her still-aching legs up to her chest and her blood run cold. She hugged Isabelle tighter to her chest, beginning to shake her head emphatically. "No."

"Yes. It's time, Ms. Morse," the man said. He somehow plucked the pink bundle out of her arms, cradling it and looking down at her daughter. His eyes remained icy and impassive.

"No, please, don't..." Bobbi begged, reaching out for her daughter. Fear clutched at her heart, ignited every nerve in her body.

"It's for the best, Ms. Morse, you know that," he told her, turning away and taking her baby with him.

"Hey," someone said, shaking her. "Hey." Bobbi's eyes snapped open to see Skye's concerned face above her, and only her post-nightmare disorientation prevented Skye from getting put immediately into a headlock. "Hey, you were having a nightmare." Bobbi blinked several times and her room at the Playground slowly came into focus. She pushed herself into a sitting position, noting the way the covers were strewn helter-skelter around her.

"Sorry, did I wake you?"

Skye smiled. "Yes, but that's okay. The walls here are thin."

"Thanks for...you know," Bobbi gestured around her. "Waking me up."

"No problem," Skye said. The young hacker perched on the edge of her bed as if planning to stay. "You want to talk about it?" Bobbi must have frowned slightly because Skye added, "I'm a really good listener."

Bobbi gave a wry smile. "How are you with secrets?" She'd meant it as a sort-of joke but Skye seemed to think about the question seriously.

"My past may not look like it what with all the Rising Tide stuff, but I've kept my share," Skye replied carefully. "It must've been really bad. May gives me the feeling specialists aren't supposed to have nightmares."

"Biggest lie in the book," Bobbi rolled her eyes. "Well, I guess we are equipped to deal, but...some things surpass that. A really bad mission, or..."

"I'm listening."

Bobbi considered it for a moment. It might be good to get some perspective. A woman's perspective, and someone who wasn't trained not to wear her heart on her sleeve like the rest of them were. "You won't tell Hunter?"

"Your ex-husband? Wow, how bad at keeping secrets do you think I am?" Skye caught her eye and nodded. "Sorry. No, I won't."

"I had a daughter." Bobbi watched the hacker's face for any flicker of shock or indignation. Nothing. "That's what I was dreaming about. Her."

"A daughter," Skye said. "...had?"

"I gave her up," Bobbi admitted. "The nightmare, it was half-dream, half-memory...giving birth, that was all the same, but the man who came to take her away... That wasn't how it happened. It was my choice. Three weeks after we got home from the hospital...I finally realized what I knew in my heart. That I couldn't keep her."

"That must have been hard," Skye told her, sympathy in her gaze.

"I thought it could give her a better life," Bobbi continued. "I'd used S.H.I.E.L.D. resources to check out the parents, did everything I could to ensure she'd have a happy life, but now...something went wrong. They're sending her back, and I have..." She checked her phone. "Less than seventeen hours to decide whether I'll let her go into foster care..."

The effect on Skye was immediate as her pupils dilated and the soft, reassuring smile she'd been keeping up dropped off her face. "Foster care?"

Bobbi cocked her head, running a hand through her sleep-mussed curls. "Yes, why?"

"I...I was in foster care," Skye said falteringly. "Moved from home to home, never in one place for more than a few months."

"I didn't know that."

"Yeah, it's not something I advertise," Skye replied. The first hint of bitterness Bobbi had ever heard from the normally cheerful hacker laced her voice. "I couldn't wait to turn eighteen and get out of the system." The naked fear must have shown in Bobbi's eyes because Skye backtracked, saying, "I mean, it's probably not like that for all kids. In my case I later found out that it was S.H.I.E.L.D. making sure I was being moved to keep me safe from my past—my father—but I knew other kids like me. Normal kids. It's the reason I got into hacking and joined the Rising Tide in the first place—to find out information about my parents. Why they couldn't keep me, or why they didn't want to."

"I don't want Isabelle to go through that," Bobbi said uncertainly. "But what kind of life can I offer her here?"

"It's not so bad," Skye murmured, looking around the room. "Coulson would take you off active duty, I'm sure. It's not like you're taking her into the middle of a war zone. And everyone here would care for her." The hacker smiled. "She'd be the most spoiled kid for miles around with all of us watching over her."

"But Hunter..."

"I don't know everything that's gone on between the two of you, but I doubt he'd hold any of that over your child," Skye said.

Bobbi snorted. "Have you met the guy?" She paused. "No, sorry, that was unfair. You...you think I should bring her here?" The younger woman looked almost uncomfortable with the weighty question, but nodded.

"How old is she now?"

"Four," Bobbi revealed. "She would have had her fourth birthday just last December."

"A Christmas baby," Skye smiled. "Isabelle. Is that for Hartley? But back then she wouldn't have been..."

"Yeah, it's for Izzy," Bobbi said. "Back when I was about six months pregnant with Isabelle, Izzy went MIA on a mission of hers. By the time she was born, we all presumed her dead... I named the baby Isabelle, in her honor. Then of course Izzy resurfaced two months later, but I never told her about the child. I just...didn't know how to even start that conversation, seeing as I didn't even have Isabelle by then..."

Skye smiled. "I get it."

Bobbi shrugged, a new pain deep in her chest. "Now it's oddly fitting. I just wish if this was going to happen, that Isabelle could have come here and met her namesake. Izzy would have made a great aunt."

Skye gave her a sympathetic look, getting up from the bed. "Well, I'll let you get back to sleep."

"Like that's going to happen," Bobbi scoffed. "Sorry, no, yeah, you should go. Catch some Z's yourself. It's four already; I think I'll hit the gym. Pound some of this out into the punching bags."

"I feel bad for the punching bags," Skye laughed.

Bobbi joined her, feeling a tiny release of the tension that had weighed on her for the last few hours. After Skye left she donned her workout clothes and grabbed her phone on the way out. After flexing her fingers on the way down, she decided against the punching bags after all, as they were still a bit sore after nearly getting her baton wrenched from her hand in Bruges. She made a beeline for the treadmills instead, three machines lined up in a row. The middle was occupied.

"Agent Morse," Coulson greeted her as the mounted the one on his left and plugged in her iPhone.

"Director," she responded respectfully. She pushed her headphones deep into her ears so they wouldn't fall out and started her playlist, setting the treadmill at its second-to-highest setting. Bobbi began running, feet pounding out her problems onto the rotating mat. The beat of the song eventually modulated her pace as she quickly fell into a smooth, practiced rhythm. Soon, though, unbidden images began to percolate into her head, and she jacked the volume up higher in a futile attempt to drown them out. Isabelle as a baby, hugged against her chest. Isabelle in Bobbi's first messy swaddling. Isabelle engulfed in Mack's large arms, at first bawling her eyes out at the unfamiliar touch but soon acclimating to his warmth. A deep-seated ache was developing in Bobbi's chest, one that she now realized had lingered there since that fateful January morning when she handed her over to the adoption agency. She'd buried it under excuses and reasons and work and other relationships, but it had never really gone away. It wasn't until now that something forced her to really feel.

Coulson's treadmill slowed to a stop beside her and he stepped off, done with his workout. He took a white towel from the rack and ran it over his face before letting it hang around his neck. His lips moved, but Bobbi couldn't hear him. She reached for her phone to pause the music but was going too fast and hit the wrong button, somehow opening up the photo album and ending up on a picture from four years ago. Her, sitting in that stupid old rocking chair neither she nor Hunter could ever explain why they had, the one she had nicked from the moving sale when he wasn't looking when she found out she was expecting. Isabelle was in her arms, gazing curiously at the flash from Mack's camera with a little smile on her face.

The picture almost caused her to trip off the treadmill.

"Sorry, what did you say?" she asked after she'd recovered her footing and managed to stop the music.

"Just that I was finished and heading to the kitchen to start some coffee," the director replied good-naturedly.

"Oh, right," Bobbi said. "I'll take a cup when it's ready." She wasn't normally a coffee-drinker—Hunter had called it sludge, and apparently even the scent annoyed him, so she'd been forced to stop. She hit the end button on the treadmill and it slowed to a halt as he walked towards the door. "Director," Bobbi called out. He turned back. "I need to discuss something with you and May."

"Can we wait until May's done with her Tai Chi? She really doesn't like being interrupted," Coulson said earnestly.

"No, sir, it really can't wait."

Please leave a review if it's not too much trouble! I really would love to hear your thoughts!


Responses to Guest reviewers:

Sasha: Yeah, I loved that line too. I'm pretty sure Mack (and Gonzales and the rest of the "real SHIELD") call her Barbara when they're close to her. Makes you wonder which she actually prefers, seeing as her work with Coulson's team technically was somewhat of a cover.

Grace: No, thank you for reading and enjoying it so much!

Andy: I'm glad that comes through. She is uncertain as to what the right thing to do is, but she is trying to do the right thing by Isabelle.

Shawn: Congratulations, you totally called this chapter ;)

Holly: I can't either! It will be soon, I promise.

Ana: I'm glad you liked it. It's the kind of line that sounds like an exaggeration, but it's probably true! Thanks for the name suggestion (Ana is really pretty!) but it doesn't work as well for something I'm planning down the road. I hope you enjoyed this chapter just as much as the last one!