prompt: skye dies
She's been out cold ever since the strike, for 17 hours and 32 minutes, approximately 17 hours, 31 minutes, and 59 seconds too long.
It's been 1,052 minutes, or 63,120 seconds, or .048 years, Fitz provides, and Jemma is too panicked to think about significant figures because all of them seem significant when it's Skye's life on the line.
There isn't anything anyone can do for her on the bus besides stare, wide-eyed and anguishing, at the pallor of her skin against the dark of her vest.
And there's nothing any of them can do at the SHIELD hospital either, and so they crowd outside the room, feeling all the world like a waste of space, a blockage.
None of them are accustomed to the ground not rumbling, to the silence in the place of the airplane's whoosh, but it seems almost fitting that what lies beneath their feet has stilled just as Skye has.
Jemma cries, silently and respectfully, but no one else can.
Coulson hands her a tissue, and when she reaches out he takes a moment to squeeze your hands, to say "I know" in a way that shared tears never could, and she recognizes this with a nod because a smile seems frightfully out of place.
Ward is staring at the dappled tiles of the floor like they're enrapturing, enchanting, but rather than bring him solace each pair of feet that passes reminds him of what Skye may never do again.
He sees the doctor first, sees his feet in tennis shoes and begins to wonder about that choice of shoes when May nudges him. Ward glances up. Sees the look on the doctor's face and knows, just knows.
For all intents and purposes. Brain dead. Little to no chance of survival.
It doesn't matter what the man says, because they all know what news he's come to deliver.
Jemma gasps and covers her mouth with both hands, and Ward instinctively embraces her, cradles her to his chest in memory of their friend, their partner.
One by one the team steps in to say goodbye.
Her eyes are closed, her skin cold, and her fingernails still chipped and half purple, and Ward is horrified by these thoughts, by the fact that she is so soon a body instead of a life.
And so he leaves and Coulson enters, and Ward doesn't realize until later that he never spoke, never said "good job" or "goodbye" or "I'm sorry," and so he does every time he steps up to the punching bag, every time one of them calls out for Skye only to realize that she doesn't answer, can't answer, won't answer.
It's more fitting a tribute anyway, Ward knows. She wouldn't want a fuss.
And it takes him weeks, but one day he picks up her coffee cup from the cupboard shelf — "Coffee is life," it reads — and pours his own coffee inside. And for the first time since that day, he feels okay.