Just to clarify, since this story is already halfway done (as in 35000 words done), my present shipping preferences would not be affecting it in any way.

Unbeknownst to Skye, all that shaking is not confined in her head. The room she's in is trembling as well. Contents of shelves move from side to side unsteadily, bottles crashing and exploding to a thousand pieces.

Hunter is just passing through the door leading to Skye's glass cell when he started sensing the quakes. At first, he blames lack of sleep—that plus the three bottles of beer he accidentally finished all by himself a couple of hours ago. But that was before he heard a muffled cry coming from inside the room.

His head turns towards the sound. "Huh."

Another cry bursts out.

Curious, and admittedly, a little worried, he knocks at the door gently. There's nobody in there but Skye. It's got to be her. "Are you okay in there, love?"

He isn't entirely surprised not to get an answer in return. Unless she is torturing somebody else in there (unlikely), he deduces that what he hears from inside is a product of a very horrible nightmare or something. He opens the door slowly and walks in. "Skye?"

The sight that welcomes him is way beyond what he's expecting. He didn't find a trembling girl, lost in the depths of a bloody nightmare. No, it's not even close.

His eyes train to the flickering lights hanging above him. They sway back and forth, their unforgiving movements making him slightly dizzy. The noisy protests of the room surely aren't helping.

"Bloody hell."

The shaking continues, growing stronger and stronger the more time he spends gaping at the room and doing nothing. He instinctively holds on to the wall for stability.

Skye groans. She's not shaking like the rest of them. In fact, she lies so still, Hunter's beginning to doubt that they are in the same room. She's clutching her covers for dear life.

An enormous shelf falling dangerously close to Skye's legs is all the motivation he needs to get moving. He runs to her as fast as he can. It takes him ten nerve-wracking seconds and a thwarted chance of sustaining a major head trauma to figure out the controls of the glass door. The swooshing sound of it finally sliding open sounded a tad sweeter than it should be. He walks right in and heads straight to her cot.

"Wake up." He nudges the hacker's shoulders none too gently. Life or death situations tend to make people forget about bedside manners. He hopes his (temporary) colleague would understand. "Hey, Skye, wake up!"

Without warning, one of the light bulbs above him explodes to bits. He uses his body to cover her from all the glass shards. Bloody hell fifty times over! "Skye, come on!" He lightly slaps her in the face. "Wake up before—"

It is then when Skye finally gasps awake, cutting him off. Seeing Hunter in her room—in front of her face—confuses her like hell, but not as much as watching the entire room behind him swing madly like a ship in a raging storm.

"'Bout time you wake up little lady." Is all the greeting Skye gets from him. He helps her up while beakers keep on falling from both their sides—an excellent reminder that although he has already managed to reach point A to point B without breaking a single bone, the entire place is still shaking. This means that his limbs (and hers) aren't completely out of the woods just yet. "We should get outta here." He tilts his head towards the fallen shelf. "You almost lost a leg there."

Did that just happen? She just destroyed a huge building in her dream. The same building, which, as far as she could remember, had already been destroyed by a helicarrier the same day Hydra came out of the shadows?

What the hell was that about?

"Hey, sweetheart?" Hunter's annoyed tone drags her back to the present. "Can you even bloody hear me?"

She does not answer, but her bandaged hands starts to tremble so she pockets them quickly, out of his sight. The buzzing inside her ears returns, though it's not as loud now as it was back in the temple.

The former mercenary opens the door for her, his hold firm on her upper arm as he attempts to pull her along with him and towards safety. But, as he now realizes, he might as well be dragging a corpse because she doesn't seem interested to move at all. He senses not even a single bloody hint of cooperation coming from her. She's far too busy glaring at the floor, and truthfully, he doesn't really have the time or the patience to ask her why.

"Now is not the time to freeze up and wait for a fucking carriage, Skye! What the hell are you waiting for?" Disbelief drips in his every word as his attempts to physically drag her out the room is met by a firm resistance from her. Short of dragging her by her hair, kicking and screaming, he couldn't think of anything else to do to convince his colleague to snap out of whatever trance she's stuck in. She just refuses to budge.

"Skye, come on!"

He's starting to consider hauling her up his shoulders like a caveman, damn being a gentleman to hell. He pulls her again towards him—nothing. She didn't even seem like he felt it. She's simply stands there, stiff as a board, glaring at the fine cracks that are slowly forming underneath their feet.

There's a very strong fighting chance that they will be buried beneath at least half a ton of ceiling fixtures and concrete any minute now, and Hunter is running out of choices. So, with a loud curse that would probably make even the most foul-mouthed sailor cringe, he grabs Skye by the shoulders and tries as much as he could to calmly inform her of what he's about to do. "Okay, Skye, I'm gonna carry you out. No funny business, I pro—"

A little explosion above their heads steals Hunter's attention. He is too busy figuring out how a light fixture chooses to autodestruct the exact moment Skye chooses to take a deep harsh breath to notice that her eyes finally snap back to the land of the living.

She almost falls on her ass at what she's seeing. Things are getting way out of hand. "Oh god, Hunter, I—"

"Come on!" He did not live this long just to die inside a man-sized blender.

She's shaking so much. Even if she grits her teeth and shuts her eyes, she's still shaking so much. She's running out of choices. The force inside her is building up for a huge one. She could feel it. "Do you have an ICER?" She asks frantically.

"What?" His colleague is not making the slightest sense, but he chooses to answer her anyway. "Of course I have an ICER. You have an ICER. At least, I think you had one before—"

With eyes scared shitless, she cuts him off. She doesn't have much time. "Shoot me!"

Hunter gapes at her. Was she hit in the head by a boulder back in Puerto Rico? "Why on earth would I do that?"

"I don't have time to explain, damn it. I can't—god—I can't hold it anymore!" She grits out, teeth gnashed together so tight. She tries to calm her mind, to urge the noises stop, but the only thing it accomplishes is to make her more breathless than she was before. Her heart beats wildly inside her chest as she hopelessly watched the world crumble all around her. "Just do it please!"

Hunter is still debating whether he should just Skye's (very questionable) judgment when May abruptly barges in to the room. "Skye!"

Seeing her S.O. entering the room increases the dread in Skye's eyes a thousand fold. Eyes wild and panicky, she looks back at Hunter and pleadingly screams, "Shoot me now!"

"No!" May yells just as a soft whizzing sound suddenly comes slicing into the room. A hard thud immediately follows.

The shaking stops.

May's steely façade drops. "Skye!"

Mouth wide, Hunter moves his eyes from the smoking ICER on his hands, to the paralyzed agent in front of him. He drops the gun as if it just burned him. Did he just—

Bloody hell.

He shot Skye.

He fucking shot her!

What the hell was he thinking?

On cue, May's fist comes at warp speed towards his face. The former mercenary, unfortunately, is too dumbfounded at the time to dodge it.

"Ow!" He yelps the moment The Cavalry's steel fist reaches his jaw, sending him face first onto tiled floor. He is already well aware of how mean a punch May could throw, he's heard the rumors. But after having such a first hand experience made him realize that the rumors, as bloodcurdling they were, did not do her enough justice. Being shot by a fifty caliber round felt more like a caress from a baby compared to the Cavalry's fist. A little stronger and she could've easily broken his jaw.

"Oh god, Skye, no." May says in a very worried tone that freaks Hunter out. It freaks him out more than the possibility that the female agent had just damaged his very handsome face for good.

May gingerly picks Skye up from the ground. She checks her pulse and cradles her face. The young hacker is unconscious, but alive.

It's an ICER. The gun was an ICER. Thank god.

Hunter stares at the two women in front of him. Save for the residual swaying of the lights, the room has turned completely still. He tries putting two and two together, however, no matter how he attempts to move the facts around, the answers that comes to his head still isn't making the slightest sense. He stands up, and reaches for the door. "I will get Simmons—"

"Don't." May's terrifyingly calm voice stops him dead on his tracks.

"But Skye needs—" Skye needs what exactly? Hell, whatever it is, he doesn't think two field operatives armed with nothing but guns and knives would be the smartest choice. "Simmons—"

May cuts him off again. Her voice can be completely menacing when she puts her mind to it. "No, you are not going anywhere, or the next bullet that will echo inside this room will end up in your face."

His eyes widens at that. Her words sounded more like a promise than a threat. He feels like he needs to apologize, but he holds it back instead. There is still the glaring fact in front of them that there is an unconscious person lying on the ground in dire need of medical help. "Simmons can help with, er…I don't bloody know! But she can do something!"

A conflicted look briefly passes through May's face. It doesn't suit her. "It's Skye."

Huh? "Yeah, clearly it's Skye. You are holding her right now, and she needs someone other than us to help her!"

May sighs. "Skye is making those earthquakes, Hunter."

Hunter is still wondering why May seems to be missing the urgency of the situation, and their obvious necessity to have someone with much more medical experience in the room when her words finally sink in. Skye's making the—

His jaw falls slack. Wait, Skye? As in our Skye, Skye?

He completely forgets what he's about to say. In fact, it takes him a good half minute before he could formulate something which could be remotely considered a response. "Oh."

"That information does not leave this room, understood?" May's voice is stern, almost threatening, but still utterly calm. Hunter wonders how the hell she manages to do that. Her face, however, that is another story altogether.

The absence of neutrality in the Cavalry's face, on a normal day, is already enough to make his insides churn… but seeing panic in her eyes—that's another terrifying matter entirely. That he does not see so often. Hell, come to think of it, he could not remember any other time when he has seen it. Not even when Hydra was about to shoot their plane off the sky.

"The quake in Puerto Rico… was it um, her?" Please say no. Please say no.

The tension in May's posture is all the answer he needed.

"Damn." He mutters. That earthquake shook almost half the continent.

"This is the first time since then." May replies curtly. Her tone was blatantly accusatory. "What did you do to her?"

"Me?" He asks, taking a more defensive stance. "I didn't—"

"What did you do?"

"Nothing!" Hunter fiercely shakes his head, waving his hands in front of him as if to manually drive all suspicion away. "It was already shaking when I got here. I'm the innocent bystander here who's merely trying to help."

She scoffs at that. "Help?"

"Yes!" Hunter insists. "She was having a nightmare, and everything in the room was exploding to tiny bits and pieces, so I tried to wake her."

"A nightmare." May repeats.

"Yes, a nightmare. People tend to have that sometimes, you know?" Hunter says. "It was a pretty bad one, as it seemed. Whatever it was about, it got her so terrified. Is she really making those quakes?"

May's reaction is a non reaction. She brushes the stray hair from Skye's face and grits her teeth before finally turning to look at Hunter. She hopes she wouldn't regret this decision. "Close the door."

And then she tells him everything.

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