Hey babes! Back again with a new chapter for ya! Things are really starting to get more into plot territory now, and I'm so excited for you guys to see what I've got in store. :)
Enjoy!
Her head is pounding as she wakes up. There's a residual tingling all over her body and she immediately jumps at the memory that invades her mind. She relaxes again when she finds no trace of the foreign substance that had covered the surface of her skin and clothes, cutting off her view of the chamber and of Grant.
Grant. No.
Her eyes go wide and she frantically looks around the room for any sign of the man, hoping beyond everything that Raina was wrong, that he survived somehow and he'll get to see his son again. She doesn't know what she'll do if she has to raise Adian without him, the thought of what she'll have to tell Adian when he's older completely terrifying her. She does take notice that Raina is no longer there in the chamber and must have woken up first and found a way out. So then she can get out too. With Grant.
She lets out a breath of relief when she finds Grant lying unconscious on the ground a few feet away from her, his chest moving up and down as he breathes. There are burned-out holes in his shirt and jeans, drawing her brows together in confusion.
She crawls over to him and sits up on her knees, checking him over for any injuries. Other than the burns in his clothes, there's no evidence that there had been any kind of fire, which just confuses her further.
"Grant," she says softly, her hands cupping his cheeks and lightly patting them, trying to get him to wake up. "Grant, can you hear me? Please wake up. Come on, open your eyes, please. Grant."
A few seconds later, he releases a groan and his head starts moving slowly from side to side, his eyes squinting tightly together.
"S...Skye?" His eyes open and he looks up at her with furrowed brows. "What happened?"
She shakes her head, swallowing. "I don't know. All I remember is that stuff crawling all over me, and then everything went dark."
"The same thing happened to me," he tells her. He pulls himself into a sitting position, a quiet groan being released. "Where's Raina?" he asks, casting a glance around the small room.
"I don't know. She was gone when I woke up. But we need to go now." She wraps one arm around his torso and helps him to his feet, ignoring the odd heat that moves through her skin when she touches him.
"SHIELD followed us here," he says.
"I'm not sure if they actually did," she admits, slowly moving toward the exit as the walls slowly start to shake, small pieces of rock starting to fall from the ceiling. "I know they were close to getting the location, but we had a leg up on them because of Raina. And I disabled the GPS in the car when we were on our way here. They must have gotten the location not long after we got here or something. I saw Coulson when I went to find my—when I went to find Cal."
Grant nods. "I saw Coulson too. On my way down here. He tried to stop me."
"You should have listened to him. You're lucky that whatever that was in there didn't kill you."
"Let's not focus on that right now," he says as they make their way to the open exit above them. "Let's focus on getting out of here and getting back to our son."
She nods, letting out a small breath with a smile. "Sounds like the perfect plan to me."
As soon as they're out of the hole, they're immediately swarmed by SHIELD agents fussing over them and checking them from head to toe for any injuries they might have received down in the chamber. Thankfully, there are none.
All they want to do is get to Rose's house to see Adian, but the agents insist that they get back to the base first for a more thorough examination, to make sure that everything is really okay and that being down in the chamber didn't have any lingering effects on them.
She simply sighs and shares a look with Grant, knowing that he'd rather not be subject to poking and prodding, but that it was probably at Coulson's orders that they go through the exams and he doesn't want to upset the man. She doesn't want to either, really. He already went through enough having been beaten up so badly by Cal, she doesn't want him to worry too much about her health too. He really has enough on his plate already and he doesn't need anything else to take up his time.
.
.
.
"How much longer do you think we'll have to stay in here?" Grant asks as he paces back and forth within the glass walls of his shared quarantine cell with Skye. They've been confined to the small space while tests were run to make sure they're both okay, and neither of them has heard any news yet. It's starting to get to him.
"I don't know," Skye responds from her place on one of the two cots in there with them. "But I really want to see Adian. I need to hold him."
He nods. "I know how you feel. I just want to see our boy."
"I can see if Rose is available to FaceTime," she suggests. "That way we can still see him and explain to Rose that we might need her to watch him for a little bit longer, depending on when we're let out of here."
"Yeah, okay." He moves to stand next to Skye and waits while she pulls up Rose's contact info on her tablet, requesting a video call with his sister.
They both wait and watch as the line tries to connect, the sound of a ringing phone echoing off the glass around them.
He can't help the wide smile he gets and the tears that rush to his eyes when he sees his son's face filling up the screen of the tablet. His son shrieks happily a second later and moves even closer to the screen.
"Adian, you've got to sit back a little," Rose's voice sounds from behind the baby. "Your mom and dad can't see you if you sit that close."
"Hi, baby," Skye says from beside him and he casts a small glance at her to see her with tears in her eyes as well as a smile on her face. "Mommy misses you so much, Adian."
"Daddy misses you too, bud," he chimes in, smiling at his son. "Daddy misses you so much."
Adian sits closer to the screen, but not as close as he was a few seconds beforehand, and babbles incoherently. They're both content to just sit and listen to his babbles, not really caring that he isn't making any sense at all.
"Dada."
His body goes stiff and his eyes widen at the word. He looks at Skye to find a matching look on her face and he shifts his eyes back to the screen. "Did he just...did he just say what I think he did?"
"I think he did," Skye says from beside him. "Rose, is that the first time he's said that?"
"As far as I know."
"I think that was his first word," Skye muses. "He's been babbling a lot more and stuff but I think that was his actual first word. I didn't think it would happen so soon, he's not even six months yet."
"Looks like you've got one of the smart ones, then," Rose tells her with a smile.
"Dada dada dada."
"Yeah, bud, I'm right here," he says to his son, a smile on his face and tears falling from his eyes. "Dada's right here."
"Are you guys coming back to get him soon?" Rose asks once Adian gets distracted by something else in the room and leaves their view. "Not that I don't love spending time with my nephew, I'm just wondering how long I'm going to be watching him so I can plan accordingly."
"We honestly thought we'd be back by now," Skye tells her. "But...things didn't turn out as we hoped so we might need you to watch him for a little longer."
"How much longer?"
"We're not sure," Grant says. "A couple of days, maybe more."
Rose nods. "Okay. Are you guys doing alright?"
"That is still yet to be seen," Skye replies. "We uh...we have some complications going on here, nothing you need to worry about, though."
"Are you sure?"
Skye nods. "Absolutely."
He sees movement out of the corner of his eye and turns to see Fitz cautiously making his way into the room, a tablet in his hands and a furrow to his brows.
He manages to get Skye's attention and gestures with his head to where Fitz is standing.
"Rose," he says to his sister, "we actually have to go now. But we'll talk to you soon, okay?"
Rose nods. "Yeah, of course."
"Can you give Adian kisses for us tonight before he goes to bed?"
"You know that I will."
"I love you, Rose," he says to his sister with a small smile.
She smiles back. "I love you too, Grant."
The video call disconnects and the two of them focus all of their attention on Fitz.
"Judging by the look on your face, I have a feeling we're not going to like whatever you're going to tell us," he remarks.
Fitz's brows furrow deeper. "Um, no, I suppose not. Skye, you said that when you came to, there were burned out holes in Grant's shirt but nothing else. I checked the readings from your monitoring anklet from when the temple collapsed," he says, looking directly at Grant. "Your body temperature was almost a couple thousand degrees Fahrenheit."
"That's very high," he says to the engineer.
Fitz shakes his head, swallowing. "No. That's inhuman. A normal person wouldn't have a temperature reading that high. Ever. I thought it was a mistake, that it must have malfunctioned during the whole event. But uh...there was...the anklet, when it was taken off you when you came back, there was only charring on the inside, on the part that was on your leg. It didn't make any sense at first when I saw it." He begins pacing back and forth in front of the cell.
"And how we found you two—basically unharmed in the collapse, with destruction all around you! I thought I was losing my mind all over again..."
He glances over at Skye, noticing the worry in her eyes as she glances around the lab. He follows her gaze to see some of the equipment starting to shake. His brows furrow.
"I thought that there was something wrong. It took a while to dawn on me, or maybe I was just afraid to think it—that...you both survived the destruction because...one, or both, of you caused it."
Skye shakes her head, standing from the cot and moving toward the door of the containment unit. "No. No no no."
"Raina wasn't the only one changed in there," Fitz explains. "And I'm pretty sure the DNA results we're running right now are gonna confirm it."
He watches as Skye backs away from the doors, holding onto the sides of her head as she shakes it, her eyes closing tightly. He winces when he feels an odd tingling sensation in his hands. He looks down, wiggling and stretching his fingers, trying to get the sensation to subside, but it doesn't, it only grows throughout his body.
"There was nothing wrong with the data in my head," Fitz continues. "There's something different about both of you."
"No!" Skye shouts, clutching her head tighter as the light above them shatters.
On instinct, Grant moves to cover her, wanting to protect her from the shards of glass raining down on them from the busted lamp. He continues to hold onto her as she sobs, her body shaking as tears stream down her face. She doesn't push him away, she lets him hold her.
He can't even begin to imagine what she's going through. He glances up to speak to Fitz, only to find the engineer gone from the room. For whatever reason, he isn't sure.
.
.
.
It's sometime later when Fitz finally returns. Grant had finally managed to get Skye calmed down enough from her breakdown and she's resting on one of the cots. She'd wanted to clean up the mess but he made her relax while he took care of it.
He's in the middle of scooping up another pile of charred glass shards when he sees the engineer entering the lab again, a tablet in his hands.
"Fitz," he says, gaining the man's attention. He can hear Skye shifting on the cot behind him, most likely sitting up to focus on the scene. "You're back."
The man nods. "I am. You've both been given a clean bill of health, and I made sure to pass the news along to Coulson."
"That's great," Skye says.
"Yeah, it is. But where did you go earlier?" Grant asks. "You got out of here pretty quickly."
The doors to the quarantine cell slide open and Fitz takes a step inside. "I, uh, um...I wanted to switch your blood results with old samples. For both of you."
Skye breathes in sharply. "The new samples are different?" She's standing beside him a second later.
"Drastically. But until everything calms down around here, I don't think we should tell anybody. There's a lot of tension happening, and the way some of the agents around here are going on...I don't think it's a good idea. For now, we should just keep this between the three of us—keep you guys safe until we figure it out."
He watches as Skye's eyes fill with tears before she steps forward and throws her arms around Fitz's neck in a tight hug, crying into his shoulder.
"This is all my fault," Skye mutters through her tears.
"No," Fitz says, hugging her back and shaking his head.
"I could have stopped her," Skye continues. "I let—I let this happen. And I'm so sorry." She glances up at Grant as she apologizes. He knows she didn't mean for this to happen to him too. She tried to convince him to stay out, but he meant what he said about not letting her go through it alone.
"There is something very wrong with me," she says, still looking up at him. "With both of us."
"No, you're just different now," Fitz replies quickly, pulling away to look her in the eyes. He glances between the both of them. "You're both different now, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all."
So? What did you think? Let me know in a review down below. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Also...I have no idea if I'm going to be working or not yet for the New Year, but if I'm not, or I'm able to be home in time to watch the countdown on tv, I'm going to be doing my annual New Years Eve/Day Q&A. So feel free to leave me any questions you'd like answered on there, whether it's about my own personal life (just nothing too crazy), or about any of my stories you've read. I want as many questions as I can get. You can leave them here, message me personally, or even message them to me on my twitter, gillybean729. :)
Until next time,
Jellybean96 out!