You guys are probably thinking, well, it's about time! Either that or you all hate me and none of you are reading this right now, so I'm basically taking to myself. My sort of lame explanation is at the bottom.

I did my best to make it longer, and I think I kind of succeed. It's like, a few hundred words longer than the last chapter...

Disclaimer: I do not own Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D or any of the characters. All rights belong to Marvel.

An hour went by: Skye's thoughts constantly wandered towards the box of letters sitting in the dumpster. She could easily just run back and get them. She should go and get them before someone else found them, and honestly, she would rather know what he wrote than have that happen. During a mission briefing, every word that had anything to do with letter, box, or Ward, dragged her thoughts back to the box in the dumpster. She was able to pay attention enough to know what was happening, and to not get herself or anyone else killed, but she was a robot. Every move, every punch was all reflex. Reflex, she reminded herself, that Ward had taught her.

A day went by: Curiosity gnawed away at Skye's stomach. It wasn't so much innocent wondering, but a desperate need.

On the outside, Skye's day went by pretty normally. On the inside, she felt like a giant storm had decided to rage around in her stomach. She wandered through the Playground, trying to keep busy and eventually decided that she may as well train. She made her way to her room and threw on a tank top and yoga pants, then she went down to the firing range to shoot away her emotions. When she got there, Simmons was just putting her handgun away. She greeted Skye with a smile and a nod, so Skye nodded back and picked up a gun. It felt heavier in her hand than normal. She turned off the safety, and raised the gun to point at her target. She was suddenly reminded of her old SO for the millionth time that day. She could practically hear his voice in her head while he lectured her about the different gun releases. Safty release will let you to fire the gun. A mag release will not not you to fire the gun. She fired the first shot, willing the voices in her head to go silent. She stared at the hole in the target's chest. The earmuffs she had put on muffled the sound, protecting her ears, but the voices continued to ring. She moved on to the next target, and imagined it was Ward. He was looking at her, with his bearded face as he sat in his cell, trying to get Coulson to let him talk to her. She shot him in the arm, wanting to see the blood running down his arm. She shot him in both knees, wanting to see him crumple to the ground, and try to run away from her. Then she shot him in the head, and emptied the barrel into his body. The anger cleared, and Skye was faced with a human shaped target with bullet-holes in various different parts of the body. She put the gun back in the rack, and left the target where it was, full of bullet holes. As she left the shoot range she could hear Ward yelling at her for not putting it away.

"Skye, I need a combat partner. You up for it?" Skye was sitting in her bunk with her head in her hands, her hair falling in her face, when Bobbi knocked on the open door. "You okay? You look kind of sick."

Skye swung her legs off the bed and started to shake her hair into a ponytail. "Yeah, I'm up," she said, eager for a distraction, then added, "and I'm fine."

Bobbi studied her for a few seconds, then patted the door frame and left as she said, "Okay then, see you in five."

When she was gone, Skye changed back into her workout clothes from earlier, and knelt down to grab the socks she had discarded. Beside the socks was an envelope, torn open and face down. It was one of Ward's letters. She reached for it and picked it up. It was the letter she had thrown on the floor before she read the second letter. Skye supposed that in her frustration she had just forgotten about it and only thrown the second letter in the box, leaving the other one behind. Sometime during the day it must have been kicked under her bunk. She stared at Ward's writing on the front, and made a decision.

Skye quickly made her way down the hall, taking a shortcut to through the lab and down the stairs. She reached the hanger, and ran to the dumpster to retrieve Ward's box of letter. When she looked in, the box was gone, and the dumpster was empty.

For the millionth time Skye was knocked to the floor.

"I gotta say, you're normally a lot harder to beat," Bobbi said, offering her a hand. "Something up?"

Skye brushed it off. "Nah, I told you earlier, I'm fine. Ready for another go?" She turned to Bobbi with her arms up to protect her face.

"I think I'm good for today, but I'll come call on you tomorrow if you want."

"Yeah, sure."

"'Kay, then. I'm going to hit the shower. You probably should too."

Skye nodded. "I'll shower in a bit."

Bobbi nodded and left Skye standing alone in the gym, sweating and sore. She went to the high-bar on the side and swung her arms as momentum to help her jump up and catch the cold metal bar in her hands. Hanging there, she closed her eyes, and hauled herself up. When her chin was level with her hands, she let herself drop back down, and then pulled herself back up. Fifty pull-ups later, Skye finally let herself fall down from the bar and drop onto the padded floor of the gym. The sweat was now running down her face. She was tired, and couldn't stop the image of Ward scolding her for stopping her pull-ups just because she didn't feel like it. You should've finished the set. You know that I'm just going to add them to the end of your next set and you'll be even more tired. It's always in your better interest to finish them.

Skye went back to her room to get a change of clothes, and some shampoo and conditioner so that she could shower. When she got there, she could hear someone's water running (probably Bobbi's). She grabbed a towel from the towel rack and walked into a shower stall in the far corner where she undressed and turned on the water, adjusting to the right temperature. She wet her hair, once again thinking about Ward and his letters. Whatever he had written would now forever be a mystery. She wished she had at least read the letters before throwing them away in anger. If she was going to be mad at Ward for writing to her, she should at least know what he wrote to her, and even though she wouldn't let herself admit it, she was kind of curious. She wanted to know what he though of her, how much she had really gotten under his skin, and if he really had truly felt something for her other than a simple crush. She filled her hand with conditioner and worked it into her hair, then she ran a soapy shower puff over her body. She went over Ward's written words in her head as she rinsed off the soap and dried herself off. She put on her pyjamas, Blue with little clouds and lightning on it, and made her way back to her room. On her way back, she stopped in the kitchen to make something to eat before continuing her route back to her room with a sandwich balanced on a plate. When she got to her room, the sliding door that she normally kept closed was open. Hunter was standing in the middle of the room holding a box, looking around for a place to put it. Skye cleared her throat loudly, and he turned around.

"Oh, hi Skye." He looked at the box, and then to her, then the box, and back to her. He held out the box to her and said, "I think this is yours. It had a bunch of envelopes with your name on them and I found it in the dumpster earlier, so I figure you'd probably want it back." When she didn't reach out to take the box, he put it down on the desk and cleared his throat. "Well, I'll uh, be going. I gotta go see Bobbi and do some uh, stuff so…" Hunter patted the box awkwardly and and then left.

Once he was gone Skye grabbed the box off the desk and ripped off the lid. Sure enough, it was full of Ward's letters. She searched through and grabbed the third letter, dated 10/03/13, and smoothed out the folds and started to read, feeling some sort of guilt eating at her stomach.

Dear Skye,

Please, just kill me now. I can't stand being your SO. I just can't deal with you whining about too many pull-ups and getting up to early. I tell you again, that if you're hanging off the edge of a building, you're going to want to do at least one. If something goes wrong, or someone attacks you in the middle of the night, you won't have half an hour to make sure your makeup looks good. It's training, who cares what you look like? Your hair is going to be sweaty and everywhere at the end anyway, so why bother making it look good? Maybe start paying attention to what I'm trying to teach you. I've shown you how to disarm someone multiple times, yet you never get it! You do nothing during briefing, just sit around playing with your phone. Next time you have something even sort of useful to say, just come out and say it instead of making us play games. You may not have anything against breaking international laws, but we do, and we don't have time to guess what you have or haven't done thins time. You don't take the job seriously, and make jokes about thing that could probably make this world that we live on go to hell. You do basically nothing, expecting everything around you to just magically happen. At first I thought the way you somehow just talked your way into Quinn's office was extremely impressive, but later when I was listening to you telling Fitz that you didn't use you breasts, and that you told him we were listening, I was absolutely disgusted! You could have cost us the mission, not to mention that you put one of our coms. In a glass of champagne? Those things are expensive, you know. Dr. Hall ended up being the source of the leak, but if he hadn't, he would have been well protected, and doing that could have gotten him killed. We can't trust you to be a reliable agent. Why am I wasting my time with you, training you, pouring my blood, sweat and tears into training you? I'm training a failure, and a time bomb. It's only a matter of time before you explode into a huge mass of betrayal. I can tell that you're hiding something. You always seem so interested in my past, but whenever I ask you about yours, you close yourself up and tell me some sob story about a foster home and nuns being mean to you. As much as it makes me feel understood, and that someone knows what it feels like to be hurt, I know there's more to that. I know it. Remember when you said you were going to talk to Quinn, and you said something like "Skipper to doggy" and blah blah blah, that could have been a huge risk. People will look at you weird if they here you, and then they will start to be suspicious. It could have blown your cover, and the whole mission would have failed. The gravitonium would have submerged the entire island under water, and thousands of people would be dead. It would have been your fault.

Think about that for a while,

- Grant

Skye slowly lowered the letter to the floor. She'd never thought about how Ward had felt every time she complained about pull-ups or god knows what else. She thought back to the person she used to be, and the person she was now, and she could not imagine being that person now. That Skye was a different Skye who would follow people with superpowers through the streets and tell them to look out for S.H.I.E.L.D. Now she would follow people with superpowers though the streets with S.H.I.E.L.D and try to protect them from other people and themselves. She didn't hack S.H.I.E.L.D for redacted documents anymore, but occasionally she used to steal Coulson's access card to look for information on her parents. May caught her once, and told her never to do it again, saying that if she really wanted to search S.H.I.E.L.D for traces of her parents, May would let her use her card, but only if she was present. "If I catch you taking it without permission…" The threat was always left hanging in the air. May was mysterious like that. They never found anything, and Skye hadn't asked May to help her in a few months.

Skye dug though the box to find the next letter. It was dated 10/14/13. As she opened it, she started thinking to herself that even though she did the willing and with more stamina now, one thing that hadn't changed about her was that she still hated pull-ups.

It was originally going to be May that gave the letters back to Skye, not saying a word, just coming out of her room as Skye came back, and her finding the letters on her bed, but my friend Vivian said that that would be out of character for her, and it's something that Hunter would probably do, him being the occasionally clueless guy we love. So May, letters, out of character, Hunter, clueless, there you go.

If you've read to this point, thank you so much! I know I haven't posted in forever, and I honestly have no excuse for it. The only thing I can say I that I had an exchange student living at my house for three months, and now I'm living in her house for three months, but there were still like two months in between that, so I got nothing. I'm so sorry guys! But I'll do my very very very best to have something up at least by March. At least I know what my new years resolution is now.

If you haven't already, read my other story, Playing With Fire, Water, and Love about how the Wicked Witch of the West became evil. (Hmm, maybe that's another reason I haven't updated this one…?)

Also, I'm curious, how do you all feel about the events that occurred in the mid season finally? Most importantly how do we feel about Ward? I know my friends thought I was crazy when I said I cried when [SPOILER!] Ward died. [if that was a spoiler for you then you don't know the half of it.] I want to know what you thought!

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- DragonJade