I am so so so sorry for not updating this in forever. I should have done this sooner, but I had a lot of stuff going on in the past few weeks. Hopefully I can hurry up with the next chapter so there's no more long waits.

This chapter is about what happened to Skye while Leo was with Simmons. Not as heart-breaking as Leo's, but still a little sad.

Chapter 11: The Visit

"I never apologized," Skye admitted as she gazed up at the dark ceiling. "For snapping at you."

A squeak from across the room indicated that Leo had shifted toward her. She looked over at him. The moonlight seeping in the barred window glinted on the dark bruise on his cheek. He'd gotten it for attempting to stop her from being taken to one of the labs for tests earlier in the day. She made him promise to stop lashing out when they took her, but he agreed only if she would also stop. Reluctantly, Skye agreed, not because she wanted to stop fighting when they took her, but so he wouldn't get hurt because of her. She had already hurt so many people. The person she was falling in love with did not deserve to be on that long list.

"You don't have to apologize," Leo said. "I didn't know what the best way was to tell you about Simmons. I'm not even sure if there is a best way."

"No, not that," sighed Skye, shaking her head. "Well, yeah maybe. I meant earlier than that though. Back at the hotel, after May and Coulson got out of Cybertek, when I yelled at you for defending Ward's actions. We were all hurting, and I just…I didn't…I was just a total bitch to you and I'm sorry."

Skye brushed away the tears forming in her eyes and sniffed. "Maybe if I'd been more understanding like you and heard you out, then things would be different and you have gone down in that stupid med-pod and-"

A hand rested on top of hers. Leo was kneeling beside her bed. Skye sat up and scooted over, allowing him to sit next to her.

"Skye, it's not you who should be apologizing for that," he whispered, sitting beside her. "The truth about Ward was there, and I couldn't accept it. I didn't want to accept it because I hadn't seen it like you had. I wish I'd been more like you, and been able to accept reality. I should have listened to you, but I was too stubborn. I don't…I couldn't bear the thought of losing someone else…"

He stopped for a moment and swallowed before continuing. "Don't you even try to take the blame for the med-pod. I was the one who put myself and Simmons in there, not you. You had no part in it. It was all me, okay?"

"Yeah." Skye nodded and curled her knees to her chest. "Leo?"

"Uh-huh?"

"Why did it have to be the people who we cared about a lot about? Why did they have to be the ones who hurt us the most?"

His fingers curled with hers. Peering over, Skye noticed he was crying.

"If I knew," he murmured. "I would tell you. But whatever reason it is, it's not fair."

One day later

Skye repeated the steps she knew it took to hack into the CIA in her head for the third time since they'd taken Leo away. She hated when it happened because she always wondered if he was coming back. Right now, he was all she had. The hope that the team was coming for them was slowly shrinking, and Skye was beginning to think that her father would experiment on them first. He wanted to turn Leo and her into his science experiments, and the very thought of it made her sick to her stomach. If only she could find someone else who could help her…

The sound of the door getting unlocked jolted her from her thoughts. Skye turned wearily toward the door. There were two possibilities of people who could be coming through. It was going to be Leo coming back, or someone else, like Simmons, coming to take her away. Whoever it was, she was ready for them. At least that was what she thought.

Raina stood in the doorway. She was wearing one of her flower dresses, but her feet were bare and she looked as though she'd run down to the cell. There was a look in her eyes that held joy and relief and fear. Skye had never seen her this way.

"Oh my god," the girl in the flower dress murmured as she stepped inside. "It's really you."

Skye stood up, feeling months of bitterness toward Raina fill her soul with anger. "Of course you'd be here," she snarled. "If it's messed up and sick, then you're always here."

"No no no no, it isn't like that," Raina begged, coming forward. "It has never been like that. I can explain everything-"

"Explain?!" Skye gave a harsh laugh. "Explain what? Why you lured people into Centipede? Why you tortured Coulson? Whatever role you play in this sick game? Because I think I understand quite clearly what they are."

Raina flinched with every accusation as though they were physical blows. "I know I've done a lot of horrible things, but I'm telling you, I regret every single one of them. That's not why I'm here though."

"Then for what!" Skye shouted. "To gloat? To mock? C'mon, tell me!"

"Tian Kong, please," Raina pleaded. "I don't have a lot of time."

Skye froze at the mention of her real name. The only other person who had called her that was Darwin. The way Raina said her name was full of worry and concern and care, and Skye could see that she genuinely meant all of those emotions. "What did you call me?" she whispered, her breath tight.

Raina swallowed. "Tian Kong," she said quietly, but firmly. "It's your name. It means 'sky' in Chinese. Our mother, she would call you her precious sky. I was her little flower, Hua."

All the air left Skye's lungs in an instant, and she forgot how to inhale for a moment. It felt like Darwin had slapped her across the face again with his clawed hand. She couldn't believe it was true. Sure, there were similarities between them, but sisters? Skye wasn't ready to fully believe Raina yet. "How do I know you're not trying to trick me?"

"On the back of your left heel, there's a birthmark that looks like a crescent moon," Raina told her. "Mom would say there was a moon on her sky. It made me laugh, and you giggled a lot at it."

What she said was true. There was a birthmark on the back of her left heel in the same shape that Raina had described. Skye felt her arms drop limply to her sides. "You're…you're really my sister?"

Raina nodded her head. There were tears visible in her eyes as she stepped closer to Skye. Tentatively, she reached out and hugged her. The embrace was familiar, and Skye couldn't stop herself from returning it.

"I've missed you so much, little sister," murmured Raina. "He hasn't done anything to you, has he?"

"You mean our father?" Skye felt Raina's head nod. "No, they've just been testing me. How are you here? And alive?"

"What do you mean, alive?" Raina stepped back and frowned, crossing her arms.

"Darwin told me that my sister was gone, and he said it in a way that meant you were dead," Skye explained. "But you're not. You're here and alive. So why would he say that?"

Raina's hands clenched into fists. "Because he's dead to me, and I'm pretty much the same to him. I learned what he did to me so I wouldn't be afraid of him."

"What did he do?" Skye asked, sitting back down on the cot. "To you, and to me. I want to hear the full story. It doesn't matter how long or short it is. I have time, and clearly I'm not going anywhere."

Raina nodded and sat down beside her. "Where do you want to start?"

She paused for a moment, thinking about all her options. "The beginning," Skye decided. "Start from the beginning. Tell me everything."

"I'll do what I can," she replied.

"What do you mean by that?" Skye asked with a frown.

Raina pressed her lips together. "For the longest time, I had these large blank spaces in my memory," she explained. "A few months ago, Darwin asked for people to investigate a clairvoyant at Centipede because he wanted to get him or her on his side. I volunteered, but he didn't want me to go. In the end, I did convince him, and he let me go with a warning to stay in close contact with him. After a few weeks there, I was shown a machine that could bring back buried memories. I was curious, and convinced the inventor to try it on me. It worked, and I saw Darwin had been erasing memories of times when I had been scared of him, all so I would stay loyal to him. I saw almost everything I had forgotten."

"Almost everything?" Skye raised her eyebrow. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Raina's eyes shifted downward. "Right when I hit a memory of Mom, one before you were born, everything stopped. The operator was dead at the controls. I'm pretty sure Darwin had someone else there to keep an eye on me, and I guess they decided to stop what was going on. They were a little too late though. But since then, things have been coming back in patches. They're not all there yet-I still can't piece together who Mom was yet-but I can get a good idea of the story."

"Okay then," Skye shivered a bit at the mental image in her mind. "So start from where you best remember. What's our story?"

Her sister (Skye still was amazed that she and Raina were related) brushed a curl behind her ear and took a deep breath.

"Our father injected me with a serum he created. I think he did it when I was a few months old. I've got hazy memories of other injections around my second birthday, but I don't know what they were for. His serum can give people miraculous abilities, so I assume that the other shots were to suppress any abilities I received from the original serum. I don't know for sure though. But I remember I was ordered to never ever tell Mom. I never did, because Darwin always got really scary when he said this to me and I didn't want to get into trouble."

"The serum you mentioned," Skye thought back to her meeting with her father days ago. "Is this his miracle serum? The one that he gives to restrained people and makes them suffer so they get powers?"

Raina's eyes widened as she nodded. "Did he show someone getting it?"

"Yeah, some Hydra guy they captured. Silas Brigman was what they said his name was," Skye could still hear his screams and remembered the tortured look in his eyes. "It gave him these really weird electrical powers. Our dad made me watch it, and I went into the lab when he and Simmons wouldn't. I got him out of the chair, but I couldn't stop the stuff from affecting him."

"That's the one," her sister confirmed. "But back to the story. I was four when you were born. I was pretty much in love with you as a baby. You were so adorable and cute. I remember that I was always sneaking out of my room at night and going into yours to see you." A wistful smile crossed her features. "Sometimes I fell asleep in there, and woke up in my own bed. I think Mom was the one who found me in your room and took me back to my own."

The smile faded as she moved onto the next part. "Around that time, there was a lot of yelling that went on between Mom and Darwin. I don't know what it was about, probably because I was too young to really listen or understand. But when I heard them arguing, it made me scared."

"He told me that we were born with a disease, and it's why he gave the serum to both of us" Skye told her. "Apparently our mother didn't know he'd given it to us until after I was born. There were a lot of fights between them and, according to him, she abandoned us. Then he got a job in China and we moved."

Raina shook her head. "The disease thing is a lie. I don't know anything about what my health was like when I was born, but I'm sure we didn't have a disease. It was just an excuse for him to give you the serum to see what would happen with you. The fights thing is true, but Mom never abandoned us. The night we left is one of the more stronger memories that I got from the machine. I was coloring in my room before supper. Mom wasn't home yet because she was working again and she often came home late. Darwin came into my room and told me to get a bag and put in three things. One was the coloring book, another was a stuffed horse, and the third was this."

She rested a finger on her necklace. "I'd been peeking in Mom's jewelry box earlier that day, and being a curious toddler, grabbed the necklace to play dress-up with. Once I had everything, he told me to go get in the car while he went to get you. We left the house and ended up on a plane flying to someplace. It wasn't China though. Between leaving home and going to China, there were a lot of other places we visited. They were all facilities like this one, and I can only guess that he was starting them up or checking in on them. The people in those places, they did all these tests on us. It was like going to the doctor's office, only worse. I wanted to go home, and I told Darwin that. His response was that we were home. As long as the three of us were together, he told me, we were always home."

"So how did I get separated from you?" Skye knit her brows in puzzlement. "What happened exactly?"

Raina bit her lip. "It was me…"

24 years ago, China

"Shush, you're okay," cooed Hua as she held her whimpering baby sister. She hadn't been able to sleep in the room with all the empty beds that Daddy had called 'the children's ward', so she had set out to find her little sister. It had been a while since she had seen Tian Kong, let alone played with her, and she really wanted to see her again. She'd found her way into a room with a lot of empty cribs. Tian Kong was in one of them, crying all alone. Hua had taken her out of the crib, holding her the way Mama had taught her, and sat down in the corner with her.

Tian Kong was still crying though, but at least it wasn't as loud as before. Hua wasn't sure what to do, so she started to sing the lullaby Mama sung to them at night. She wet her lips and began to sing. "Rest your head, sweet baby…Close your eyes, little darling…"

Tian Kong began to quiet down, and at the end of the song, she was making quiet happy noises. Hua smiled down at her little sister and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

A bright light suddenly shined over her. "What do we have here?"

Hua curled Tian Kong close to her chest, and looked away from the light. It wasn't Daddy, so she probably wasn't in trouble. Yet. But she shouldn't have been down here.

The light lowered, and Hua peeked up. She could see a man in a white lab coat holding a flashlight. He had a kind face. "What's your name?"

"Hua," she whispered.

The man nodded and pointed to Tian Kong. "Is this your sister?"

"Her name is Tian Kong," Hua said with a nod. "Please don't tell Daddy I'm here."

"Did your daddy bring you here?"

"Uh-huh," she replied meekly, holding her sister, who was beginning to get sleepy, a little closer. "But I don't like it here. The doctors always see me every day and they poke me with needles an' it smells funny in there an' I'm scared. I wanna go home. I wanna see Mama."

Thinking about her mother made her feel sad. Hua began to sniffle a little, even though she was getting to be a big girl and big girls didn't cry. But the man shuffled forward and patted her shoulder comfortingly. "Do you want to go home?"

At the mention of home, Hua nodded vigourously. The man smiled at her. "I know some nice people who can look after you for a while until some other people can come to take you home," he told her gently. "If you come with me, I can take you away from here to meet them. I promise that they are good, and will look after you for a few days. Then I will come back with my other friends, and we will get you back home."

Going home. Seeing Mama and hugging her and telling her how much she had missed her. Hua liked the sound of it. Lately, Daddy was scaring her, and she didn't like to be scared. She wanted to go back home to her house, her room, her other stuffed animals, and everything else that she liked. Especially Mama…

'Always look after your little sister Hua. You're older than her, and she's very young right now. If something happens, then you need to protect her, okay? Both of you need to look after each other.'

Mama had told her that when Tian Kong first came home. She told her to always be there for her little sister, and to make sure she was safe. Hua made sure that her little sister was okay-that's why she was always running into her room at night. She wanted to make sure her sister was okay like Mama said. But Hua realized the man had said nothing about her baby sister.

"What about Tian Kong?" she whispered. "She's gonna come with me, right?"

The man's smile faded, and he looked sadder now. "I can't take you both," he explained. "I'm sorry, but it's risky enough to take one of you out already. I can take you to the people now, and then bring your sister later."

Always look after you sister.

If something happens, then you need to protect her.

Hua swallowed and made her decision.

"You hafta take her," the little girl said. "I need to look after my little sister. She's gotta be safe before me."

He looked surprised. "Are you sure?"

Hua nodded, and looked down at her baby sister. Tian Kong seemed to be asleep now. She leaned forward and kissed the baby's forehead. "Love you," she murmured. "You're gonna go home soon."

"It'll be okay," the man reassured her, holding out his arms. "May I?"

Wordlessly, Hua passed Tian Kong into his arms and stared up at him. She took a deep breath. "She'll be safe?"

"Yes," he replied. "She will. She'll get home, and so will you. Now go on back to bed and get some rest. I'll come back for you in a few days."

Hua nodded and scurried toward the door. She took one last look at the man and her sister before running back to the big empty room.

"He never came back though," Raina continued, her voice a little bitter. "The next morning, Darwin was furious when he found you were missing. He didn't know that I had given you to the man, and I'm glad he had no clue. But he was screaming about how there was a lab assistant missing and that he had kidnapped you. After that, he disappeared for a few days. When he came back, he was covered in blood, and I was scared. All he would say was that you were dead. I threw a fit, screaming that he was a liar, that it wasn't true, that I hated him. That's when he first erased my memories. Until I went to Centipede, I didn't remember you or Mom or anything that had happened in the first four years of my life. I grew up believing that Darwin was the greatest man ever, and I let myself grow up in blind ignorance to what he was really doing."

"That could have been me," murmured Skye. Finding out Raina was her sister was one thing. But to learn that she had grown up away from their sadistic father because of her was another thing. Her life in the foster system might have sucked, but it seemed preferable to growing up with Darwin. "You could have gone, but you let me go instead."

"Mom told me to always look out for you," her sister replied. "Although I've done a terrible job at it. But I'm going to fix that. I'm going to get you out of here."

"How do you plan on doing that?" Skye looked at her curiously. If there was one thing she knew about Raina, it was that she was prepared.

"Do you remember how I was busted out of the Fridge and ended up with Hydra for a while?" Raina asked her.

Skye bobbed her head in response, and Raina continued. "I still have a link to their communications network. A few weeks ago, a Hydra team got too close to this base, thinking it was a secret SHIELD facility. Darwin had them captured, and has been experimenting on them since them. One of them, Brigman, the one you mentioned earlier, is apparently a valuable member of Hydra. Over the communications, I've heard them blaming SHIELD because they don't know about Darwin."

"So that's why Hydra's been popping up more frequently during SHIELD ops," Skye realized. "So what does the Hydra communications network have to do with getting out?"

"I can send a message to Hydra through on a channel that Brigman is being held here, along with the other Hydra agents," Raina explained. "Hopefully, it'll be enough to create a nearby mobilization to attack the base. Brigman's an asset to them, and I'm sure they'll have some firepower. With the chaos going on, you and me can get out of here."

"Just you and me?" Skye shook her head. "No, we need to bring Leo."

"Leo?" Raina raised her eyebrow.

"He was kidnapped with me by Simmons," Skye told her. "He's my friend, and I can't leave him behind with Simmons or our father."

"Okay, we can bring him then," Raina agreed, although she sounded slightly reluctant. "Look, I don't know how much time I have left, but I need to get out soon. No one can know that I've been here. Not even your friend. Just tell him to be ready in two days, okay?"

Skye murmured in agreement and stood up alongside Raina. She hugged her sister tight. "Please come back."

Raina hugged her back. "I will, Tian Kong," she promised as she stepped back toward the door. "Just hold on for two more days, okay?"

Skye nodded, and her sister left the room. As the door closed, she lowered herself back onto her cot. She rubbed her eyes, and was surprised when her hands came away wet. All her life, Skye had just thought the only family she had out in the world were her unknown parents. She'd never even dreamed of having a sister. Now, finding out that she had an older one, and that Raina had prevented her from growing up with her insane father, it felt amazing. And she was going to help her and Leo get out of this terrible place.

The door opened, and Leo tumbled in. He looked pale and horrified, as if he had just seen a ghost. But concern added to his features when he saw her. "Are you okay?"

Skye nodded, wiped her eyes, and smiled. She wanted to desperately tell Leo that Raina was Hua, that she was her older sister, that she was good, but she couldn't break her promise. If she wanted to escape with Leo, and she did, then she couldn't tell him everything.

"My sister's alive."

Leo's jaw dropped.

Hope you all liked this. I promise things will be heating up in two chapters. That will be when the poop hits the fan.

Please review!