NOTES: This was really difficult to write after seeing Cap 2 last night and not trying to work in certain developments. Looking forward to where things go with the show from here on out.

Thanks, as always, to the_wordbutler for the beta.

Anna's phone rings as she walks home from rehearsal. "Could it be?" she asks as she answers the call. "My fictionally named boyfriend is on my caller ID?"

"You're hilarious," Phil replies.

"I really am. So you made Skye an agent?"

"You know about that?"

Anna rolls her eyes, even if he can't see her do it. "Phil, she texted me a carefully cropped picture of her holding her badge with a series of smiley faces—not all of them that I understood—ten minutes after you knighted her or whatever."

"She needs to do a better job at keeping things quiet."

"Please, we both know if anyone is going to squeal like a pig on your team, it's Jemma. There's kind of no hope for that girl." He doesn't joke back with her, but instead sighs. "You sound tired."

"I think we got him," Phil says quietly.

"Him him?"

"Yeah," he breathes.

"Are you going to use him to expose others? Are there others? Do I still have to carry my gun with me?"

"No, I don't know, and it's up to you. He was killed during the capture."

She hears the off tone in his voice and she can't help but to pry. "Sounds like you didn't agree with that call."

"There wasn't a call that was made," he confesses. "Ward just shot him in the chest."

"Doesn't seem like that would be something he'd do without orders."

Phil's quiet for a second before admitting, "The guy was making threats about Skye."

"I'm surprised you didn't do the shooting, then."

"The thought crossed my mind, but I wasn't going to compromise things. We were ordered to capture, not kill."

She wants to mock his Boy Scout sensibilities but bites her tongue. "I thought you'd sound happier."

"I don't know," he sighs. "It feels off somehow. Like it was all too easy, too neat." She stays quiet and lets him talk his way through his thoughts. "I keep thinking about what you said when I told you about what I found—how it could've been set up. Some tailor-made distraction to push me away from the truth."

"Do you think that's what the big blue guy was?"

"No," Phil answers. "But this might be." The line goes silent for a second more. Anna tries to think of something to say, but all the words sound trite. "I think I should go," he tells her. "We're on our way to somewhere, I've got extra agents everywhere on the plane, but I just wanted to let you know."

"Is Grant going to be okay?"

"That's not my call."

She wants to ask if he'll stick up for the agent, but remembers there are two very distinct sides to the man she loves. While Phil probably would, she is less sure about Agent Coulson. But thankfully, she's not dating that version of him.

Yes, she technically knows she is, but denial is a lovely thing, so she lets it slide.

"Talk to me when you can," she says before he ends the call.

When she walks into the apartment, Felix whines to share his sadness in her interrupting his alone time. She ignores the cat and moves to the bedroom. Promising herself that she'll only lay down for twenty minutes before getting dinner started, she curls up in bed.

She hasn't slept well lately, but can't put her finger on a distinct reason why. There are dark dreams at the edges of her memory when she wakes, which is not something entirely new. She has her series of recurring dreams: David dying in front of her, going to his grave and finding out he had another wife, the car accident that killed her mother when she was five, and any number of vague shadows that haunt her. But this one feels different and new.

When she falls asleep this time, she sees what her new nightmare is. The room is dark and she can hear someone breathing. Yellow eyes glow in the dark to stare her down. She's frozen in fear, too scared to even blink. The thing comes out of the shadows slowly and stalks towards her. Once it leaves the corner of the room, there's barely enough light present for her to make out gray, slick skin. It is inhuman and terrifying, but her fear only ramps up when she realizes that the alien has Phil's face.

Anna sits up in bed with a jolt, which sends Felix out of the room in terror. It takes a minute for her breathing to calm down. She thinks about how she originally laughed at the notion of Phil having some kind of alien whatever in him. But now, she realizes part of her didn't find it so funny.

She grabs her phone and calls him back, but it goes straight to voicemail. She doesn't bother leaving a message; she knows he'll passive aggressively gripe at her later for that. Curling in on herself, she thinks back to when she spent four days in the fetal position sobbing as she tried to process his death. Part of her feels like he's died all over again with the reveal of the news, like he's been stabbed—

Her brain breaks off at that thought as she realizes she's never seen his scar, and that she doesn't even know if he has one. Did the alien magic wipe that away, too? Does his scar hurt? She reasons he must still have one since even when they slept together at his hotel, he never took his shirt off. Anna'd chalked it up to male brain in sex mode and him not wanting to waste any more time to get down to business.

Anna's imagination immediately takes off with what the scar could look like and how it's marred his freckled skin. She knows there can be pain associated with scar tissue and wonders if it plagues him. Her hand moves of its own volition and she stops her fingers seconds before they redial his number. If he sees two missed calls from her within five minutes, he'll think the end of the world is coming. She knows he's busy with work and the possible actual end of the world and doesn't want to interfere. But it doesn't make lying in bed spinning horrific thought after horrific thought any easier.