TW for hospital setting, mentions of broken bones and (past) gun violence, minor swearing
The next hour or so felt to Skye like spinning around inside of revolving door. Somebody came by and put a few stitches in the cut on her stomach, which honestly hurt worse than getting the cut in the first place, as far as Skye was concerned, and another person came in to put her arm in a cast.
"Your x-rays showed you actually have two breaks," the doctor said. "I think Dr. Townsend is probably going to come and talk to you all about it in a little more detail, but basically there was the major break on the radius – that's this top bone here – and a smaller, more minor break on the ulna underneath. Whoever set your arm in the field did a pretty good job of getting the radius right, but they probably didn't know about the ulna break, because that one hasn't been set yet. That's most likely why your pain levels have still been so high."
The doctor set her arm without too much trouble – he didn't have to rebreak the bone, much to Skye's relief – and quickly encased it in a liner and a layer of fiberglass.
"It should dry before too long," the doctor explained. "It'll feel kind of warm for a while, but it'll cool off soon, too. You can't get it wet, so be sure to wrap it up when you shower. Try not to scratch down inside it, and be sure to let us know if your fingers start to hurt or swell."
"Thank you," Phil smiled as the doctor got up to leave.
"You're very welcome," the doctor nodded. "Good choice on the purple, by the way. Very cool."
After the cast doctor came Miss Hand with two police officers in tow. One was Izzy, which helped tamp down some of the nerves that bubbled up in the volcano of Skye's chest, and the other was a nosy guy who asked more questions than Skye felt like answering. Still, Izzy said that the best way to do this part was to just tell everything start to finish, so Skye did her best to power through. She couldn't look at Phil or Miss Hand as she recounted her conversations with Raina, the threat that had jumpstarted her ill-fated mission in the first place, or the plan she had cooked up to keep people safe. As she said it out loud now, with the stark reality of hindsight, she could hear just how stupid the whole thing had been. She should have just gone to May and Phil. Even if they didn't know exactly what to do, it would have been better than the mess she created by trying to handle it on her own.
She explained about how Jemma insisted on coming with her, on the clues Jemma had thought to leave behind, and about how they met Cal at the park.
"And how did he convince you to leave the park?" the pushy officer asked, scribbling furiously in his notebook. "Did he say something that prompted it? Offer you something?"
"He had a gun," Skye said flatly. The cold, dark steel glinting in the moonlight flashed in her mind's eye. She heard the ear-splitting explosion of the gun going off. She gave herself a shake. "He wanted to go somewhere we could talk, and he pulled out the gun when we tried to say no. So we got in his van. Jemma left the keychain so if someone came looking they would know we'd been there."
"I found it," murmured Phil, reaching into his pocket and extracting the keychain. "It was a good clue. That's how Melinda got the idea to check the parking lot footage." He pressed the keychain into Skye's good hand gently. "We thought you might want it back."
"I lost my backpack," she realized. "It's somewhere at the warehouse, I guess. I didn't even think about bringing it."
"We can get you a new one," smiled Phil. "That old one was pretty beat up anyway."
"So you got in the van," the officer pressed, apparently not interested in the backpack tangent. "Then what?"
Skye told him about the drive, about how Ajax and Vinny were waiting for Cal, so he locked her and Jemma in the room with the windows and the army cot while he worked. She explained Jemma's plan for their escape, how they'd pulled the window frames down and broken the glass, how Cal had grabbed her on the way out and how she'd fallen and broken her arm.
"We tried to run, but he was too fast. He got in the van and blocked the exit. He had the gun again and made us stop."
"Did he force you back inside?"
"No," Skye said slowly. "I agreed to go back in. We made a deal. We would go in, I would let him fix my arm, and he would put the gun away. I… I thought if I could get him to agree to that, then maybe later I could convince him to let us go. That was a dumb idea, I guess."
"Not dumb," Miss Hand said firmly.
"Any decision you made that kept you from getting hurt was a good decision," Izzy nodded. "Every minute of time you bought for yourself gave May and me an extra opportunity to find you and get you out of there."
The next part of the story was the hardest for Skye to tell. She described the conversation she and Cal had, but found it difficult to share all the details. The things about her mother got stuck somewhere along the way, not ready to be shared with so many people. Skye was still turning those details over in her mind, savoring their newness, their importance. She was still running her fingers over them, finding the special places, the bumps and cracks that helped fill out the picture that had been so empty for so long – the picture of who her mother had been, who Skye might be. So she kept some of those things to herself.
She didn't tell them about what she had said to Cal, either. About her anger and resentment and all the things she'd admitted about how much it hurt to feel abandoned for so long. She wasn't sure she could bear the sad looks on everyone's face, the pity, the soft noises of sympathy. She didn't need anyone feeling any more sorry for her than they already did. So instead, she explained how Cal had gotten more and more agitated as their conversation wore on, how she had tried to bargain for Jemma's freedom, and how that had backfired so horribly.
"He almost bought it, I think," she said. "But Jemma didn't like the plan, and she tried to talk me out of it. That made him mad. I don't think he liked Jemma very much. And he didn't like that she called me Skye. He got really mad then, and he slammed the gun down. It went off. I don't think he meant to shoot it. That's what he said, at least. I didn't realize at first that Jemma had gotten hurt. I should have realized sooner, but I… it was hard to think. The sound was really loud and everything was kind of crazy. She… she tried to talk to me, but she fell. I caught her. Cal told me to put pressure on the place where she was bleeding from. He said that was the only way to keep her from dying. I held on as hard as I could, but I didn't really know what I was doing. I kept asking him to help, but he didn't really know what he was doing, either. I think he was freaked out.
"I… I don't know how long we were like that before Bobbi showed up," she continued. "She came in and Cal almost lost it again. He was really jittery and sweaty and he was really worried that Bobbi had brought other people with her. He made her get down on the floor. He had the gun again. And then he got the idea to make Bobbi put pressure on Jemma so he could take me and run, but before he could make us switch… May got there. And Izzy. And they… I don't really remember. They stopped him, I guess. And somehow I got off Jemma. I don't think I wanted to let her go. I can't… I don't…"
"That's okay," Izzy said kindly. "You don't have to remember that part. We got what we needed. You did a great job, kiddo. Really great job."
"We'll be in contact if we need further information," the other cop said stiffly. Izzy rolled her eyes at him.
"You'll have to forgive Watts. He forgot to take the stick out of his—"
"Izzy," cautioned Miss Hand.
"What? I was going to say butt," Izzy protested, chuckling slightly with hands raised in surrender.
"Somehow I doubt that," smirked Miss Hand. Skye bit back a smile. She liked Izzy, and she liked seeing a more playful side to Miss Hand.
"I've heard people say 'ass' before, Miss Hand," Skye informed her, giving her best impression of a sanctimonious, know-it-all grown up. Izzy snorted, and Phil coughed loudly to keep from laughing. Even Miss Hand's eyes seemed to flicker with momentary mirth.
Izzy and the other officer headed for the door then, and Izzy turned to offer Skye a wave on her way out. "Try to stay out of trouble, kiddo. Hope the arm heals fast."
"I should step out, too," Miss Hand said, checking her phone. "I have a few calls to make about some of my other cases, and I need to check in on Bobbi. She was on the hunt for some food down in the cafeteria."
"Sounds good," smiled Phil. "We'll be here. We're still waiting for another doctor and some discharge papers."
Miss Hand left, and Phil turned his attention to Skye, giving her that sad, soft look she had been dreading. The brief respite of laughter had lapsed away, leaving them with the grim reality of everything Skye had told the police about. "That was quite a story, Skye. I can't believe you had to go through all that."
"I'm really sorry," she said quietly, not for the first time that day. She could feel the shakiness that she had staved off during her conversation with the police returning to her body and her voice. She knew he wasn't mad, but she didn't want him to be sad or disappointed in her, either. "I never should have tried to handle that on my own. I know I should have come to you, but I… I just couldn't. I don't know why. I don't know why I can't just make myself do the things I'm supposed to do. I can't make good decisions. I do stupid things that scare people and get them hurt."
"Hey," Phil soothed. He crossed over to her quickly and, before Skye had understood what he was doing, hopped up onto the exam table where she was sitting. He settled in beside her and, after checking to see if it was okay, wrapped an arm around her trembling shoulders. "What happened today wasn't about making good decisions. You were in an impossible situation. And do I wish you'd come to me and Melinda? Sure, of course. It's our job to help you with impossible situations, and maybe things could have turned out differently. But it's hard to think clearly when you're afraid. It's hard to make any decisions, much less good ones, when you feel like people are in danger. I'm just glad everyone's okay. This could have ended really badly, Skye, but it didn't, because you and Jemma did what you could to make sure things turned out as best they could."
"I'm a lot like him, I think," Skye whispered. She took herself by surprise as she said it, admitting something that she had been trying to deny ever since she'd started to get to know her father. "Little things. Like, he turns his head one way when he's thinking, like this—" She demonstrated the way Cal would cock his head to one side. It was a familiar position, because it was a pose she had struck many a time before herself. "But it was bigger things, too. He said he rushes into things, doesn't think things through. He gets mad easily, like me. And he does things that I don't think he means to when he gets angry. Things he shouldn't do, but it's like he can't help himself."
"Skye, you're your own person. A very different person from someone who hurts people the way he does—"
"But I'm not, not really," she insisted. "Maybe I didn't do some of the stuff that he did, but I could, if I was his age and the same bad stuff happened to me… I do things I shouldn't because I don't think them through. I get angry or scared and I hurt people or I do things that get them hurt. My two best friends have both ended up in hospital because of me in the last week."
"The circumstances aren't the same, Skye. Not at all."
"And the worst part…" She paused and cleared the catch from her throat. She hadn't been sure she wanted to say this part out loud to anyone, ever, but she suddenly found that she couldn't stop herself from speaking. "The worst part is, I get it. At least a little bit. I understand why he might lose it the way he did. He thought he was getting a new baby and a new life with his family, but instead his wife died and some twisted doctor was going to take away his kid, too. He was hurt and heartbroken, and he was out of options, so he did something bad because he thought that was the only choice he had. I understand, and I think that either means that maybe he's not as bad as I thought, or maybe I'm not as good as I thought."
"Just because someone has a sympathetic backstory, that doesn't make them a good person all of the sudden," Phil said thoughtfully. He frowned a little as he spoke, like he was working hard to pick out his words. "A tragic past doesn't make them the hero. But it does make them a little more understandable, a little more human. And humans make choices. Every day. To do what's right or not. To help people or hurt people. So maybe somebody has some pain in their past, something that makes us understand why they chose to do the things they did. That's important, sure, but not as important as the choices themselves. Our choices, our actions, the things we do and say whether anybody's watching or not – those are the things that make us who we are. And that doesn't mean we don't make mistakes sometimes. Everybody's made some bad choices in their life, everybody's done something that they wish they could take back. But a good person, a hero – we call them that because they've shown us that's who they are. Because their good choices outweigh their bad ones. Because they try to do the right thing, even when it's hard, even when they're hurting. Because their trying matters more than their mistakes. That's why the important thing—"
"—is to try," she finished softly. "But what if it's not enough? What if you try to be good and you just can't be? What if you try and never make it? What if your bad choices are too heavy to outweigh?"
"No one's perfect," he said. "No one's ever going to be. No one can be 100% good. But what we can always be is better. Just a little bit sometimes. But better than we were before. And the only way you ever get better is through trying. Through practice. We learn and we grow and we fight to leave the world a better place than we found it. We try, because that's all we really have to give. That's all we need to give. And you, Skye… you try harder than anyone I know. And that is why I know you are a good person."
"Then why don't I feel like one?" The question she had been nestling in her chest for as long as she could remember, holding onto and cradling like a mother hen tending to an egg that would one day hatch a scaly beast instead of a fluffy chick, spilled out from her, finally breathed into being.
"You haven't had it easy," Phil said, after a moment. "Life hasn't been kind to you, hasn't been gentle with you in the way that you deserve. You've had to deal with so many hard things, things no kid should ever have to deal with, and you've had to make a lot of hard decisions well beyond your years. People haven't protected you the way they should have, they haven't made you feel like the good person that you are. You've been told so many things about yourself, so many things that are hurtful and untrue, that it's hard to stop seeing yourself through their eyes. One day, though, you're going to be able to look at yourself through your own eyes, and I promise you, you're going to love what you see."
"How can you know that?"
"Because the Skye that my eyes are looking at right now, she's incredible," Phil declared with a watery smile. "She's kind and brave and smart and funny and so filled with goodness she can barely keep it all inside her. And I am a lucky man to get to know her. It nearly killed me to think I'd lost her, because she's a person who I want to know for a long time."
"All the trouble I've caused… all the things I've done… don't you wish you'd never even met me? Don't you wish you'd never taken me home that night?"
"What? No, of course not. Skye, you are worth so much more than the mistakes you've made, and the night we met you and Jemma was one of the best nights of our lives. We… we love you, Skye. We love you and we can't imagine our lives without you."
She leaned hard into Phil, burying her face near his shoulder, and she was crying now too, not even sure exactly when she'd started again. It felt like the hundredth time that day, but this time the tears were softer, sadder, sweeter than the ones that had come before. They weren't gasping, panicked sobs of fear or guilty, jerking tears of remorse. They were relief. They were the unburdening of shame and the lightening of a load she had been bearing for weeks, maybe years. They were the power of being wanted, of being chosen. They were pain and vulnerability; they were absolution and release. They were love.
A murmur, a mumble, something almost lost in the fabric of his shirt drifted out of her mouth. It wasn't something she had ever thought she could say to someone like him, but it was something that she felt deeply, knew she had to say, because it was the truth. "I love you, too, Phil."
He hugged her even tighter after that, and she knew that, finally, one of her decisions that day had been exactly the right one.