The sun is practically on top of their heads when Fitz realizes the time. He and Skye have been talking for hours about the most random things and neither has apparently noticed how much time had passed.

And that got Fitz thinking: why hasn't Agent May started looking for him? Isn't she supposed to be looking for him right now-with him being in the middle of a training exercise and all?

Then suddenly, for what feels like the nth time that particular day, Skye pulls him out of his reverie.

"Andrew? Hey, I think lost you there for one second. Is everything okay?"

He shakes his head. Smiles. "No, no. Just remembered something I should do later." Going back to their earlier topic, he asks, shrugging "So, did you ever get to buy those Netflix gift cards?"

"Yeah, of course I did." She proudly affirms. "Since I only have that maxed out credit card and stupid me forgot my wallet in my van that day, I realized that I have to think fast."

"So what did you do?"

"I tried charming the cashier. Didn't work. We probably swing at the same direction for all I know." She leans towards him, as if she's about to tell him some deep, dark secret. "Let me tell you, that Target dude, Joey, he's into dudes."

He chortles. "Good for Joey, I think."

"Well, because of that unfortunate little hiccup, I was forced to resort into more, let's just say, creative means of getting what I want."

"You hacked Netflix." He guesses quickly.

"No, silly." She shakes her head. "Why would I ever do that? That'll be too easy. I hacked Mastercard."

A proud grin crawls on his lips. "Of course you did."

"Hey," she admonishes. "No need to sound so unimpressed about it. It was a $15 gift card!"

"I am not unimpressed." Then, he recalls something. "Wait, you told me you don't have a phone that day too. How did you do it then?"

"I may have picked the pocket of the guy behind me." She admits. "I returned it after use, I swear."

"I bet he didn't even notice." He knows he should've already been used to her amazing display of pick-pocketing skills, not to mention her hacking skills, but damn.

"Oh he did." She wiggles her eyebrows. "I think he even liked it."

Fitz grimaces as he fakes a gagging sound. "I don't think I even want to know."

"Andrew," she begins with a sudden shift in her tone, "you said you have a doctor friend, right?"

"Yes." He drawls, not liking where this is going.

She asks, "Do you think you could get her to help me with something?"

"I can try," Alarm bells ring inside his head. He suddenly feels worried for his friend. "Why? What is this about? Are you having some kind of health problem?"

"I already told you about the three months I've lost after the accident right?"

His heart is pounding wildly inside his chest. If she got sick or anything because of whatever Coulson did to her, he's never going to forgive that man. "Yeah, what about it?"

Her eyes turns glassy. "Call me optimistic, but I think I could still get it back."

He swallows. "It's not really my field of expertise," he tells her, "but I really believe that it doesn't work that way."

"I know she's not a medical doctor, but she does know about biochem and genetics. I still got to try! Maybe she could electrocute my brain, jumpstart it or whatever."

He offers her a tight smile. "Hey, it's just three months, is it really worth that much effort?"

"A lot can happen in three months!" She insists. "I even got some weird scars I couldn't explain. Surgical scars, if you could believe it. My records says I got stabbed twice by an ice pick somewhere in New York. Mugging, they say. All of it in three months, and I remember absolutely nothing."

"But still, three months is nothing compared to the rest of your life, don't you think?"

"I got fucking stabbed, Andrew!" Her eyes are filled with a mixture of frustration and fury as she yells. "I got stabbed, I don't even remember any of it!"

"It's a traumatic experience, Skye. There must be a reason why your mind wanted to forget about it." He reasons. "Didn't it occur to you that you forgetting about may be for your own good? That your brain doesn't want you to remember because you really do not want it to?"

"That's the thing!" She sighs, copying his stance and staring right ahead. "I know that, hell, I've been telling myself that all the time… but I don't know-I can't explain why… I just need to know. Something's missing. It's missing all the time, in my head, in my heart. I can't live like this!"

He can't say anything anymore. His heart is breaking for her. He couldn't even begin to imagine how that feels like-having part of your life torn from you. Even if it was her decision to make, even if he gave her a chance to choose otherwise, still, forgetting it all must be impossibly difficult for her.

"I never had a happy life. My childhood was awful… I got thrown from place to place by the foster system because no one would accept me, no time to make friends because I lived in my van all my adult life and I'm always leaving them…but that incident-" She falters, smiling despite herself, "It gave me a chance to pretend that at one point in my life I was, you know, happy. Maybe during those months I've lost, I've met someone, anyone, who's made me feel less miserable than I am right now. God knows how much shit this life has-"

"But Skye-"

She shakes her head. "No. I don't think I'm just imagining it, or romanticizing what happened or whatever. I feel it, deep inside. I was happy. I was really happy. There were some good moments for me hidden in there, somewhere. And I want it back." She looks at him in the eye, almost begging. "I need it back."

Later that day

"Fitz, there you are!" Simmons greets her friend the moment he returns to the lab. "So, how did training go? And where's Agent May?"

"I haven't got the slightest." Fitz absently replies, his mind clearly stuck elsewhere.

Sensing her friend's rather gloomy disposition, Simmons deposits herself beside him and asks, "Is everything okay?"

Fitz looks up at her. With a shaking voice, he murmurs, "I was with Skye."

It takes Simmons a good few seconds before his words finally sinks in, but when it does, her mind still refuses to accept it. She must've misheard him because really, what are the chances of the two of them crossing paths? "Right."

"Simmons." His eyes turns frantic, wild. "I was with her."

Her breath catches. How can that even be possible? There's no way she could find them. Hell, there's no way she could remember that she even has them to find in the first place. "What?" She stammers. "B-but how?"

He starts pacing, hands twitching uncontrollably on his sides. "She saw me first. Approached me. Bloody hell, what are we supposed to do now?"

Fitz's question doesn't even register to her because at that precise moment, there is only one thought running in her mind. She had stopped hoping. She knows she'll never return to them. But now… what about now? "Does she-did she-?"

He stops and rubs his face dejectedly. For the first time in a while he sees a sliver of hope in his friend's eyes, and it kills him that he has to be the one to destroy it. She's been right, after all. They can never get their friend back. Not now. Maybe not ever. "She remembers nothing of us. Not my name, not this team, not even a single moment of the last three months of her goddamn life!" He doesn't even realize that he is screaming.

Simmons blindly reaches for a nearby chair to sit on as her knees slowly started buckling underneath her. She tries to open her mouth to say something, anything, to make the truth hurt less, but she couldn't think of a single word.

With a yell, Fitz angrily takes off his jacket and throws it with all his might to the other side of the lab. "Did we actually mean anything to her at all?"

"How can you even ask that, Fitz?" Simmons voice rises a tad. "We are her friends, of course she cares about us!"

"You mean cared?"He scoffs. "It's all past tense now. Haven't you noticed it yet? She chose to forget!"

"Skye loves us. We are her friends."

"Well, she has a damn awful way of showing it!"

Simmons lets out a breath. Call her pessimistic but it's been weeks since she has given up all hope that in time the team will be back to normal, that they'll be whole again. But christ, the repeated reminders of the fact is getting harder and harder to stand. She wished, just for once, something will happen that would make fate go easier on their team. They deserve a break. Or some semblance of it, at least. They've suffered enough.

"This is all Coulson's fault, you know?"

Simmons shakes her head. "This was her choice as much as it was his, Fitz." She argues, albeit halfheartedly. Like she herself is not believing her own words. "She chose to go."

A look runs through his features. It's like the just realized something with her words. For the first time since this whole nightmare began, he finally understood. "Was it? Was it really?" Fitz asks her. "Come to think of it, I wonder why I failed to understand until now. You didn't see her. She didn't choose this. Any of this!"

"I know how bad you want us to return to what we used to be, but let's be realistic here, Fitz! We can't keep on hanging on to hope like this. There's nothing we could do to help her. The process is irreversible."

His jaw tightens. "I am very much aware of that." He had lost count of the many nights he and Jemma spent scouring literature, looking for something that would bring Skye back, only to find nothing.

"You've explained the protocol to her," Simmons says, trying a different tactic, "offered her a choice. Hell, you even begged her to stay. She still chose to go through with it. I think it's time we finally accept it."

Fitz shakes his head. "No. You didn't see her, Jemma. She was miserable! She's was trying to hide it, she was trying to mask everything with her jokes, but I could tell. I could bloody tell. She didn't want this at all." He looks at her, vestiges of hope reaching him for the first time since this whole conversation had begun. "She wants to go back to us."

"You can't possibly know that, Fitz." She lamely counters. "You've had nothing but one conversation, surely you-"

"What do we know about Skye, huh?" Fitz asks, gazing at his friend expectantly. "What's the one thing that she wants, the one thing she's been looking for all her life?"

Simmons opens her mouth, but before she could let anything out, Fitz cuts her off, answering the question himself.

"Her family, Jemma." He gestures wildly with his hands. "A sense of belonging. Of being a part of something."

A realization dawns on her. "She one of us."

"Of course she's one of us! We are her family!" Fitz cries, "We are her bloody family, and we abandoned her-I didn't stop her." His voice breaks, "she wanted me to stop her and I-."

"Oh, Fitz." She rushes towards her long-time friend and gives him the only form of comfort she could think of. She hugs him. Tightly.

"Her face when she told me that she just wants to hug me-" Fitz trails off, voice cracking. He's openly crying then. "She was so bloody confused out of her mind, and there was nothing I could do." Even if they drag her right then and there, re-introduce her to SHIELD, to the team, there's no way she'd regain whatever she'd lost. The protocol is permanent. Her memories are not simply sitting somewhere inside her brain, hidden from her consciousness, and waiting for some sort of trigger. They're just… gone. Permanently wiped out.

Using the back of one hand, Simmons wipes the growing wetness underneath her eyes. "We can never get her back, Fitz."

Perhaps, but that doesn't mean she could not be their friend again. A determined expression overcomes his face. "But we could be friends with her again, right?"

She wants to agree with him, to assure him that she'll be with him every step of the way, but she couldn't say a single word. She couldn't lie to him. They can't be friends with Skye again. Coulson would never allow it.

"I just miss her, Jemma." He mutters quietly. He knows how impossible his plan is. It's nothing but wishful thinking. Short of quitting their jobs, there's no way they could befriend a civilian like her. Not now. Sure, they could have some sort of friendship, but it would not be the same as what it was before. They'd just be filling her with lies at every turn, and as far as he's concerned, people don't lie to their friends. Not if they really value their friendship. "She was right in front of me, and I still can't stop missing her."

"I know, Fitz." She murmurs. "I miss her too."

Happy Christmas guys!