"Skye, if you ask if we're ready yet one more time, I swear I will do you a serious injury," Fitz muttered through clenched teeth, trying not to hold his screwdriver like a weapon.

Jemma nodded, emphatically. "And after that, I'll refuse to treat you."

"Haven't you sworn some kind of oath?" Skye asked, swinging back and forth on her stool like a petulant child.

"Actually, no. That would be your garden variety MD. I happen to be a PhD."

"Times two," Fitz added.

Inside the cool of the camper, tensions were running almost as high as the temperature outside. It was close to three in the afternoon by the time the dwarves were fully charged, tested and ready to take Skye out for the first run of their mission. As much affection and sympathy as they felt for the fledgling agent, Jemma and Fitz had gotten to the point where they couldn't wait to be rid of her, at least until dinner time, for which Fitz was planning an authentic British baked dinner, complete with Yorkshire pudding and real gravy.

"Alright!" Fitz crowed, stepping back from the dwarf case, his hands held triumphantly aloft. "Let's get her out of here!"

Skye looked unimpressed. "You still have to talk to me, remember? I have stuff to get off my chest."

Jemma slumped on her stool. "Oh, yes. Ward. Wonderful."

Skye waggled her eyebrows. "Oh, don't worry. I'll keep it interesting."

Simmons shook her head. "That's what I'm afraid of."

Half an hour later, the scientists stood in the blistering heat, each shading their eyes with a forearm as they watched the dwarves shuttle Skye at an impressive pace out into the heart of the desert.

"Let's get back inside," Jemma urged. "I'm going to melt."

Fitz nodded. "And I have Yorkshire pud batter to mix."

Jemma sighed. "I suppose we should turn up the comms?"

Fitz looked at her pleadingly. "Just three minutes of silence first?"

"I suppose three minutes won't kill her."

By the time they turned on the comms, Skye was actually screeching. "Where on earth have you guys been!? I've been freaking out all alone out here!"

"Sorry, Skye," Jemma replied, rolling her eyes at Fitz. "Just took us a moment to get everything up and running."

"Ok, whatever," Skye's voice crackled over the comms. "By the way, this is probably the most amazing experience I've ever had. You two are total geniuses."

Jemma and Fitz warmed back up to their friend immediately.

"How's the temperature in there, Skye?" Fitz asked. "Not too hot?"

"No!" sounded her disembodied voice. "I'm cool as a cucumber. And have you guys somehow got some kind of tinting going on? It's not nearly as glary as I expected. I can take or leave my shades. Apart from the cool factor that they obviously impart."

"Obviously," repeated Fitz, laying his batter aside and taking a vegetable peeler to the nearest potato. "Crucial to look cool on your own in the middle of the desert."

"You know me, Fitz," Skye's voice agreed. "So, are you guys ready for me to start off-loading?"

Jemma raised her eyebrows at Fitz over the edge of her tablet on which she was monitoring Skye's general health and brain function as well as measuring any seismic readings. "Ready as we'll ever be."

"Coz first I have to start with how things would have gone between us if he hadn't turned out to be an evil, lying, son of a…"

"Go on then," Fitz intoned, already slightly bored. "Would you have taken him to prom?" he asked in the American accent that Skye loved so much.

"Ha! Well, in the absence of S.H.I.E.L.D. related prom opportunities, I'm sure I would have found some way to squeeze him into a tux." She left a pregnant pause. "If only to squeeze him out of it again."

Jemma caught Fitz's eye. "This is what I was afraid of," she mouthed.

"Did you guys even know," Skye continued, "That when we came to the Hub for Hydra's coming out party, Ward and I had our first kiss in a store cupboard?"

"Do go on, Skye," Jemma called. "Don't wait for us to prompt you."

"Well, it was totally hot. Oh my, had that man not turned out to be evil, there would have undoubtedly come a time when I would have thrown him across that holotable and…"

The next hour or so were excruciating for the scientists. Never had more care gone into the preparation of root vegetables as Skye enumerated in explicit detail the times and ways that she had fantasised about having her way with pre-betrayal Ward. Their initial shock at her sacrilegious intentions for their holotable was replaced by a red-faced silence as they pretended not to hear the catalogue of imaginary exploits Skye described and avoided even glancing in the general direction of the other.

At last she got to the point, after some detailed description of kisses that did actually take place, of reliving her discovery of Ward's treachery. In the camper, blood returned to flowing a little bit more normally, the intense stimulation/mortification replaced by their still-fresh feelings of anger and betrayal.

Jemma was transfixed by the activity of Skye's monitors shown on her tablet. "Fitz! Come and have a look at this!" she whispered urgently, briefly muting their end of the comms.

As Skye's description of Ward's betrayal became more emotional, the seismic activity around her seemed to develop simultaneously. Jemma switched on visuals. As Skye talked, she was punctuating her narrative with dramatic hand-gestures, almost like those you'd expect to see from a pantomime wizard. Each jolt of her arm made an intense impact and judging from what she could see of Skye's face, her friend was becoming more and more aware of just the edges of what she was capable of. By the time Skye began talking about hearing that Ward had dropped the two of them out of the plane, Fitz was forcefully wielding a somewhat disproportionate kitchen machete over the carrots, Jemma was trying to control her breathing and Skye was creating actual tremors that she could see shimmering across the desert sand beneath her. Her movements and the reaction of the earth continued to become more and more concentrated as she described her kidnapping and Ward taking her to meet her father. Jemma and Fitz, now both absorbed in what they were seeing on the screen above them, saw actual tiny fissures in the sand branching out from Skye's location.

She told them with some satisfaction about firing the bullets into Ward's abdomen, the fissures beneath her growing into crevasses. Her voice broke as she told them about how she had been forced to watch Cal beat Coulson into a bloody pulp, feeling powerless to stop him. She now openly wept, remembering cradling Coulson's bloody head in her hands and feeling that she had been responsible for the almost-death of the only real father-figure she knew.

Suddenly, tears streaming down her face, the memory of Coulson's broken face before her, Skye almost involuntarily threw both arms out to her sides. Jemma's instruments seemed to blow up on the tablet before her as an unparalleled seismic event occurred with Skye at the epicentre.

"Fitz!" Jemma cried. "Get her out of there!"

With the simple swipe of a carrot-stained finger across his tablet, the dwarves swept Skye high above the earth that was giving way beneath her and shot her back towards the camper.

Jemma earnestly watched Skye's vitals. She was certainly alive. Her eyes flicked to the screen above. Skye lay slumped, unconscious in the safety net created by the dwarves, winging her back towards the safety of The Haggis. It looked as though the same thing had transpired as under the city in San Juan. Skye had fallen into a coma.