A soft swooshing sound jerks Skye awake. It isn't much of a loss though. Sleep isn't as comfortable as it used to. It doesn't even feel like sleeping anymore. It's more like lying still and doing nothing. She wonders if she'll ever sleep normally again. Maybe this is her new normal.
The very thought of it makes her shudder.
A man enters her line of vision. Is he—
"Yes, I'm the husband." He greets, answering her unspoken question with a friendly smile. "You must be Skye."
"If you dialed, 1-800-freak-show, then I'm your girl." She rubs the drowsiness off her face and sits up. "Dr. Garner, I assume."
He notes the edge of bitterness in her tone. He offers her his hand. She only eyes it warily, but he knows better than to take offense. "Please, call me Andrew. Sorry if I woke you. They told me to go right in."
They, meaning May. The kind smile he sends to her direction is comforting enough though, so she lets it slide. "S'okay. I wasn't in too deep yet."
The doctor may be aptly versed in pretending not to study a person's face, but May has trained her too well. Clearly, he's waiting for her to be the first one to talk.
She obliges. Leans in conspiratorially, "So… Agent May. How did you pull that one off?"
He tilts his head, his grin growing a tad wider. His former wife has briefed her that this topic might come up quite soon. At least she hasn't called him Mr. Melinda May yet. "Melinda did warn me about this."
Melinda, huh? Skye's ears flutter. She's so close to getting some juicy secrets about her S.O.—right from the very source. She could feel it. "About what?"
"Your admirable curiosity."
A small chuckle escapes her throat. "Oh, believe me; my curiosity about this particular subject is way beyond admirable."
"I didn't come here to talk about my marriage."
Less than a minute in, and he's already giving her that shrink-y look. "Well, mom only got me to talk to you because of your marriage." She tells him. "Tell you what, if you give me one dirty little secret about my S.O., you will officially be my new favorite person."
Mom? Okay, that's something. "She also told me a lot of other things about you." He mutters gently. The room has been fixed well. If not for his ex showing him the video feed of what happened mere hours ago, he'd think she's just making things up. "There's this incident with Agent Hunter—"
"Come on, just one—"
He cuts her off. "Stop."
Skye's rolls her eyes at his eerily familiar tone. Maybe he's more like May than she originally thought.
"Melinda told me you had a nightmare."
"Nah." She shrugs. "Everybody gets them. I had a dream once in which I accidentally drank—"
"Yes, but not everyone tears down things while at it."
She folds her arms across her chest. "Maybe I'm trying to go hipster this year for a change."
Andrew's been on the job far too long to let a little defense mechanism stop him from getting though. "You ordered Agent Hunter to shoot you, am I correct?"
"With an ICER." She points out. "By now I'm sure you know that I'm not exactly fond of being shot by real guns."
His ex did mention something about her being shot twice in the abdomen a few months back, but that's a story for another time. He nods vaguely. "What do you feel… when it's happening?"
She scoffs at the question. "When I get upset or scared, instead of peeing my pants like what normal people do, I shake the entire fucking country! What do you think?"
He shoots her that shrink-y look again. But instead of prodding further, he gives her a breathing room to collect her thoughts. If he pushed her too hard, she will almost certainly clam up and never speak to him again. "Uh, we eloped. And no, it wasn't Vegas. Though Melinda does love Vegas."
As expected, the frown slowly forming on Skye's face completely dissipates. "Oh my god." This is it. The opening she's been waiting for. "Did she wear a gown? Please tell me she wore a gown."
"I wasn't holding a gun to her head, so no, she did not wear a gown." He said. "But she could wear a couple of dish cloths and she will still be most beautiful woman I have ever seen."
She's starting to feel a little comfortable talking to him. But then again, he's a shrink. It's always dangerous to feel too comfortable with a shrink. "You are trying to make me feel comfortable." She says with a small chuckle. "You're good."
"Apparently not good enough; you still haven't answered my question."
She sighs heavily. Insisting on silence wouldn't get Andrew (and May for that matter) off her back. She has to give him something or he wouldn't stop asking. "I… I also asked him to shoot me because I couldn't stop it. I was trying to save the people I care about."
"You mean SHIELD?"
"SHIELD—the SHIELD now—is like a family to me. I will do anything to protect them."
"Even if they want to put you in the index?" He asks. "Seems a huge transition… from being an agent."
"Yeah, now I will be the one potentially hunted by agents." She replies casually. "Can't say I'm too excited about that."
"Are you afraid they'll turn their backs on you?"
"I don't think they have a choice." She tells him. "I have been there. Did my share of back turning. Wasn't very cool of me."
Though Andrew's impeccable calmness bothers her a little, she's starting to see what her S.O. means when she said she'll like him. There's no judgment in his eyes. He may not have some weird superpower himself, but they way he intently listens to her guilt-ridden venting makes her think that it really doesn't matter. He's easy to talk to, and as cliché as it may sound, talking to someone does help.
"You haven't been sleeping well." He points out.
She snorts. "Did the bags under my eyes give me away?"
"Do you want to sleep again, Skye?"
She merely stares at him and says nothing.
"Sleep makes you remember how monumentally painful your life is, how much on point was I?"
She looks away, and tries to blink her tears back. It's a lame attempt and she knows it. "My eyebags must be that bad."
"Whatever your abilities are, they are triggered by pain. Pain you keep buried deep within you. Your dreams don't bring you pain because the pain is already there."
"Well," she chuckles despite herself. "That sounds like a ton of psychobabble crap to me."
"Get used to it. There will be more from where that came from." He smiles. "And for what it's worth, I get paid a lot for this psychobabble crap."
"You should be." She said. "I've once been told that I'm sort of a shrink's nightmare. And that's even without this curse yet."
"Curse?" His eyebrows furrow. "Aren't you being a little too harsh on yourself?"
"What do you want me to call it? A superpower?" She scoffs again. "Wow… saying that out loud made it sound more ridiculous than it was in my head."
"You have a potential to help a lot of people, Skye. Haven't you realized that?"
For the first time since their conversation began, Skye's smile disappears. Whatever potential he's talking about, she's not seeing it. "I don't know which rock you've been staying under these past few days, but in case you haven't heard, I cause an earthquake that killed twenty six people and injured two hundred sixty three others."
Andrew is surprised to hear her say that. May told him that she kept that particular information from her, to lessen the amount of stress she's already in. Guess his patient is not that much in the dark as his ex wife led him to believe.
His shock may be too obvious in his face because Skye answers his questions without waiting for him to ask them. "I'm a hacker. In a room full of electronic medical equipment. Do the math."
"I'm under the impression that you already did." He says. "Those are pretty exact numbers."
The muscles in her jaw tenses minutely as she speaks. "Now you probably know why, as you've so nicely described, I'm so full of pain. Thank you for that, by the way."
Skye wishes her shrink won't look at her so sympathetically. It only makes her want to curl up in a ball and scream. He asks her, "Did you want all those people to die?"
"Don't." Skye warns. It's not a question of wants and intentions anymore. People died, and knowing what she could have and could have not done won't bring them back. "Just don't."
"The people who got killed are Hydra agents, Skye."
"Not all of them, doc." She said glumly. "Not all of them."