The hallways were a blur as Skye stumbled down them. After she walked right past the turn to Coulson's office, she was aware of Hunter placing a hand on her back to help steer her in the right direction. Her multitude of spinning thoughts had the cumulative effect of rendering her absolutely numb. Only one fragment stuck out clearly.
The Obelisk...?
Coulson looked up as they entered, his brows lifting quickly as he caught sight of their faces. "What is it?" he asked, alarmed.
Hunter glanced over at Skye, meaning to give her the opportunity to speak first, but the stricken look on her face and the way she was staring unseeingly at a corner of Coulson's desk made it evident that he would have to be the one to tell the Director. He turned hesitatingly back to Coulson. "I think we've found the source of the earthquakes."
Coulson blinked, looking back and forth between the two of them. "Yes?"
Hunter held his breath. "Skye."
Coulson's eyes widened, his jaw slackening slightly. His gaze flew to Skye, who lifted uncertain, fearful eyes to meet his.
"What makes you think so?"
Hunter again gave Skye the opportunity to answer, but when she didn't speak, he explained. "When the earthquake happened yesterday, we were talking about what happened in San Juan. Skye started to become emotional, and that's when the shaking started. Today..." - he took a deep breath - "we were talking about it again, and when she got angry, some kind of shock wave pulsed through the room. It was strong enough to push me back a few inches."
Coulson searched Skye's eyes, confusion and concern warring on his face. The struggle cleared as a revelation seemed to strike him. "Nightmares last night?" he asked softly.
She nodded just perceptibly, then found her voice - little more than a whisper. "And every other time."
Coulson's lips tightened. He nodded, maintaining his composure despite being visibly shaken. He pressed a button on his phone. "Sam, I need you to pull Simmons out of the lab and send her over to my office. Tell her it's urgent."
"Right then," Simmons said briskly, pressing the last of the sensors to Skye's skin. "These will pick up and quantify any unusual vibrations at skin level." She glanced at Skye apologetically, and the thinly veiled anxiety in her brown eyes belied her professional demeanor. "Give Fitz a moment to calibrate the DWARFs, and then we'll be ready to start."
Skye nodded.
Simmons smiled tightly and went to help Fitz with the quadcopters.
Skye took a deep breath, trying not to notice that Coulson and Hunter were both staring at her as if she were gravely ill. Their concern was appreciated, but their scrutiny was incredibly uncomfortable. At least Fitz and Simmons were distracted, or she'd have been the focus of every pair of eyes in the tiny lab. She would be anyway, in just a moment.
She closed her eyes to shut them out and focused on her swirling thoughts, willing them into coherence. Slowly, the shattered fragments began to fit together like puzzle pieces.
Maybe her exposure to the Obelisk had changed something. She had been expecting physical change, like what Raina had gone through. But she really didn't know what to expect, anyway, or what that thing was supposed to do. Everything she knew had come from the delusional rants of her father and Raina, and she wasn't sure how trustworthy any of it was.
One thing was clear, though. If she was causing earthquakes, she didn't know how the hell she was doing it. And she was putting everyone in danger.
Things clicked into place. "Coulson?" she asked clearly, looking over at him. He lifted his eyebrows, acknowledging the first words she had spoken in more than half an hour.
"If this is me," she said steadily, trying to calm the trembling that was starting up in her arms and legs, "you need to sedate me and put me in the Cage."
Coulson looked torn. "Skye, I don't think -"
She cut him off, desperate for him to hear her. "It's made of a vibranium alloy. If I'm putting off seismic waves or whatever, it should be able to contain them. Right?" She searched his eyes for confirmation, but found nothing.
Instead, Coulson pressed his lips together firmly. "Skye, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
She locked eyes with him defiantly, the stubbornness in her gaze mingled with terror. He didn't back down.
"We will cross that bridge when we come to it," he repeated adamantly.
A fearful exhale escaped Skye's lips. She nodded warily. "Fine."
The DWARFs lifted off, taking up posts around the room at various heights as Simmons bustled back over to Skye. "We're ready," she said, with a forced smile and a nod that was barely reassuring. "The DWARFs will be able to measure and triangulate the point of origin of any vibrations or shock waves. We have everything battened down in here, so we should be ready to begin."
Skye nodded wordlessly.
Simmons sat down next to the monitor that was reading the results from the skin sensors. "Now, what has seemed to trigger the...phenomena?"
"Thinking about Trip," Skye replied quietly. "About everything that happened in Puerto Rico."
Simmons' eyes lit up with recognition. Skye assumed she was remembering their conversation in the middle of the night, after the second earthquake.
"So, strong emotions," Simmons summarized. Skye nodded. "All right, then...operating on the assumption that the strength of the emotions has an effect on the strength of the phenomenon, perhaps we should have you think of something that is only slightly upsetting?"
Skye let out a short, bitter laugh. Could anything recently be considered only slightly upsetting?
But Simmons was serious.
Okay. No. She would have to go back further. Skye closed her eyes and sifted through her memories, looking for something only "slightly upsetting." She settled on the maddening recollection of a potential foster brother who had teased her unmercifully. That had been a home she hadn't regretted leaving.
She allowed the hurt and irritation she'd always felt in the boy's presence to well up inside her, expecting to hear the rattle of glass beakers beginning to clink together. But there was silence.
Skye glanced questioningly up at Simmons, who shook her head. Simmons glanced over at Fitz, who shook his. "Nothing," he confirmed.
Simmons looked back at Skye sympathetically. "Maybe try something else?"
Right. Skye took a deep breath, closing her eyes and casting about for something more recent, sharper. She tried not to think about the four expectant pairs of eyes that were fixed on her, waiting for her to access a memory that was painful enough.
No pressure.
Okay. Something that was painful, but not unbearably so.
Almost unbidden, an image flashed into her mind's eye of Miles, his stupid laughing face as he showed her some hacking trick. Emotions came with the image - the pleasure at his interest in her, the confidence instilled by his belief in her, the satisfaction of shared ideals and purpose.
The crushing disappointment and betrayal when she realized that he was all a lie.
Skye heard a faint humming and opened her eyes. Simmons was lifting her eyebrows at the sound, but shook her head. "Nothing here," she reported, watching the screen.
Fitz broke in. "Hey - hey. We're getting something." He studied the readout from the DWARFs, scrunching his eyebrows close together, then smiled and flashed a thumbs-up. "We're definitely picking up vibrations." He touched a button. "Triangulating source now."
Simmons turned to Skye, smiling, her apprehension forgotten in the thrill of discovery. "Keep it up!" she encouraged.
Skye flashed an ironic smile and closed her eyes again, trying to hold that image and those emotions in her mind without letting her thoughts go anywhere else.
What seemed like an eternity later, she heard Fitz's enthusiastic exclamation. "Got it!" She opened her eyes. "Yep." Fitz was nodding vehemently. "It's definitely coming from Skye."
The room fell silent.
Simmons turned to Skye, the thrill fading as the ramifications of the discovery sank in. "Oh dear," she murmured.
Fitz's grin faded. Hunter was looking at Skye almost apologetically, and Coulson had stiffened, his eyes very wide.
Skye took a deep breath, purposefully blanking her mind. "Okay," she said, sounding much more composed than she felt. "Now sedate me and put me in the Cage."
Coulson hesitated. He seemed uncertain, and Skye couldn't imagine why. This was an open and shut decision; there couldn't possibly be any debate about it. But Coulson looked as if he were having a fierce debate with himself.
The thought struck Skye that maybe he felt as bewildered and fearful for her as she did.
That was incredibly meaningful. But this wasn't the right time for it.
"Skye," Coulson began quietly, his empathetic eyes meeting hers, "I don't know that we need to -"
"No, you do," she cut in, fending off the icy claws of panic that were beginning to dig into her heart. She struggled for composure. "Look, I get that you're worried about me. But you don't need to be worried about me; you need to be worried about everyone else in this base. We don't know what this is, and I don't know how I'm doing it..." - her words tumbled over one another - "...and I don't know how to control it, and none of us know how bad this can get." She locked eyes with Coulson, silently pleading with him as her arms and legs began trembling again. "I'm compromising the safety of everyone here. Your safety."
Coulson's eyes cleared. Resigned, he looked to Simmons, who grimaced uncertainly. "We don't really know what effect sedation would have," she explained, with an apologetic glance toward Skye. "It could have the opposite effect and trigger the vibrations."
Suddenly, Skye's head was spinning as the sheer weight of overwhelming uncertainty came crashing in on her. She was both more powerful and more utterly out of control than she had ever been in her life.
From the cabinets came the clinking of glass beakers bumping into one another.
Oh no.
Coulson glanced around the room, then looked at her, his eyes suddenly registering panic as he caught sight of the panic in hers. "Skye?"
Her hands were trembling uncontrollably now, her breath coming in short gasps. She desperately tried to rein herself in, and was horrified to discover that she couldn't. Whether from overuse or simply overload, her self-control was failing her.
The rattling intensified as the floor began to shake.
Oh. NO.
Hunter and Simmons stared at her, mouths agape, as Coulson and Fitz looked wildly around at the cabinets.
Skye looked back and forth from Hunter to Simmons, locking eyes with each of them. "You have to get out of here," she gritted out through chattering teeth. Hunter nodded crisply, grabbing Simmons by the arm and turning purposefully toward the door.
Into Skye's mind flashed, with nightmarish clarity, the images of Coulson and Simmons crushed by falling rocks in her dream last night. She cried out, burying her face in her hands.
Then everything began happening too quickly for anyone to react. The floor was suddenly rolling like ocean waves. Hunter stumbled, falling against the cabinets, as Fitz, Simmons, and Coulson struggled to stay on their feet. From out in the hangar came the sound of crashes, cries, and what sounded like at least one explosion.
Skye could only watch, powerless, as unconsciously she tore her world apart.
The cabinet latches failed, spilling glassware and metal instruments onto the countertops with a cacophony of crashes. The door out to the hangar swung open violently. From somewhere, a heavy metal piece of equipment came flying through the air toward Simmons, and Skye watched in horror as it connected with the scientist's head. Simmons crumpled to the floor. Skye saw a small pool of blood begin to collect beneath her temple.
Oh, God.
A severe shake took Skye down to her knees, and she grasped at the cabinets for stability. Hunter was lying a few feet away now, shielding his head with his arms. Next to him on the floor lay his ICER, which must have been thrown free in the chaos.
That's it.
"Hunter!" she yelled at the top of her lungs. But the noise was so deafening he couldn't hear her.
Skye staggered to her feet, clinging to the cabinet, and then flung herself toward him, reaching desperately for the ICER. She just barely felt its cool barrel graze her fingertips, and she squirmed closer until she could get a good grip on it. She released the safety, aimed it at her own thigh, shut her eyes, and squeezed the trigger.
A/N: I've had a couple of terrific readers point out that, in the comics, Daisy is immune to her own powers. I did see that on the Marvel wiki, but, not being a comics reader myself, I'm not sure what that always looks like. For the purposes of this fic, I've made her immune to her own vibrations (hence Simmons not picking anything up at skin level), but not necessarily to their effects - for example, if the floor is bucking and rolling under her, she'll struggle to stand like anyone else, and she could be injured by flying or falling debris caused by her vibrations. If any Marvel readers out there want to set me straight (I'm a bit of a canon freak, and the wiki is far too vague for my taste), I would welcome a PM! :)