A/N: I can't handle my feelings about what's happening on MAoS right now, so I'm writing more of this sick!Skye fic. I hope you'll like it.
Her next breath in is full of dust and it clenches in her throat. Her eyes open and she sees, heart sinking, the temple around her. Raina, in the corner, her hand still reaching for the Obelisk. Skye wheels to the side, hoping, praying, that somehow Trip had been left out in the corridor. That she wouldn't have to watch him die again.
"Skye," he says, and her heart contracts like there's a fist squeezed around it. His voice. His voice that she thought she'd never hear again. God, she misses it. "Skye, what's happening?"
"I don't know," she says, although this is clearly a lie. She wants to scream at him – Trip! Run! – but somehow her voice isn't working.
She feels more than she hears or sees Trip draw his gun. He's got a bead on Raina and the Obelisk, and Skye wants to tell him not to bother. That it's too late… too late for Raina, too late for her, and definitely too late for him.
"Please, Trip," she whispers. "Go. Run."
"I'm not leaving you here," he says, and gestures to Raina. "What the hell is this thing going to do?"
The girl in her flowered dress gives them her sultry, sly smile. "It's time to meet your destiny, Skye."
Skye's brain isn't working. Most of her knows she's still back in the safe house, running an ungodly high fever, but these images before her are so convincing. And she doesn't want to go through the mist again. Doesn't want to remember what led her to end up at a safe house, isolated for her own protection and the protection of everyone else, running that ungodly high fever, waiting to die on the kitchen floor. Doesn't want to think about quarantine, about the fighting, about the gun exploding in her hand. Just wants to stop thinking altogether.
"Trip, no," she manages to say. "Don't shoot it."
There's no way of knowing whether or not she can change things in this fever dream, but she has to try.
"Skye, I'm not letting this whack job hurt either of us," Trip replies, just as she knew he would.
"It's too late," Raina says. "It's already begun."
As it turns out, she's right – the mist is pouring from the Obelisk and the cocoon is clouding Skye's vision, breaking up just in time for her to see Trip crumble into pieces while the entire temple shakes around them.
Skye screams as the temple goes dark around her…
… and wakes with Simmons' hand on her wrist, a burning sensation in her lungs, a swimming sensation in her head, and the sudden all-consuming fact that she needs to vomit.
"Breathe, Skye," comes a soft British voice. "Please breathe."
"Help," Skye manages to get out. "Help."
A light snaps on and Skye rears away from it; the sudden motion exacerbates everything she feels, including the overwhelming nausea. She wobbles out of bed, tripping and stumbling, and manages to grab the nearest receptacle – a big mixing bowl – before she has to throw up.
She retches and vomits and heaves, the world spinning around her. Her chest aches and her eyes burn.
But then it stops, and she's on the floor gasping, breathless, aching, mumbling.
"… can't bring him back. Bring him back, please, please.."
Skye reaches up, her vision blurry, desperate for Simmons' hand in hers, desperate for anything to pull her out of the ocean of pain she's drowning in. "Please. Hold. Please. Can't. Can't breathe. Can't."
She hears Simmons talking, but the words sound foreign and out of place. Skye coughs and vomits again. She can hear herself whimpering and moaning, but she's somewhere above her body.
"Coulson, she needs a med-evac," Simmons says as she kneels down next to Skye. "She's hallucinating, the whole cabin is shaking, and she just started vomiting."
"I'll send May." Coulson's voice comes from somewhere above the puddle of misery that is Skye's body.
"We won't be able to treat her at the base," Simmons goes on. "She needs to be seen in a specialized facility."
"I'll see what I can do," Coulson says. "Worst case scenario, we get her back here and fly someone in to treat her."
"Sir, wait," Simmons says. "With the way she's causing tremors, there's no way we'd be able to keep the plane in the air."
"I'll figure it out," Coulson says.
Skye coughs and retches; the room gets spinny and dark around her. "Please," she whimpers to Simmons, but she doesn't have the time to complete her request before she slips back into the abyss.
She's standing at the edge of the football field, frozen, watching her father as he strides across the grassy expanse towards Coulson. She wants to scream, to tell Coulson to watch out, but her voice is frozen in her throat. Her body's frozen, her feet are frozen, her arms are locked in towards her body and they throb with spears of pain.
She's powerless to watch as Cal comes within five feet of Coulson; she's still trying to will her body to move, her voice to work. A whimper escapes from her lips but it's swallowed up in the throbbing in her head. She reaches out a trembling hand, her fingers crackling and bruising even as she tries to stop it.
"No," she chokes out, just before Cal reaches out for Coulson. "No!"
There's a split second of silence and then the world collapses around her. The ground shakes, the earth quakes, and the pain threatens to split Skye's ribcage in half.
She looks up to see Cal and Coulson, May and Andrew and all of Cal's various ragtag killers, slam into the ground. The impacts shake her chest wall and she gasps. "No. Oh, no. I didn't mean… I didn't mean…"
All is still. Nothing on the field is moving any longer, except for Skye's chest, heaving with every painful breath she can get in.
"Please get up," she begs. "Please get up."
There's no response. She's alone on the football field, alone with the dead bodies of everyone she loves.
Skye wakes up screaming. Her body jackknifes in, her hands fly up to cover her ears. She coils into a ball, her breath slicing hot spears through her chest.
"Skye." She hears a soft but firm voice. May. "Skye, I need you to relax. Breathe in… breathe out…"
It's just too much. The noise and the pain and the hot tears streaming from her eyes – they've all combined and Skye's world is crashing in around her.
"Skye, if you can't breathe and relax, we'll have to ICE you again."
That breaks through and Skye forces a slow breath down her sore throat. On the next breath she feels her arms and legs unclench slightly, and on the breaths after that she finds that she can bring her arms down from her ears. She blinks and looks over at May, but her SO is blurry, like a painting left out in the rain.
"Wha'… wha'…?" Skye tries to ask, but her mouth won't cooperate.
"You're in a hospital," May says. "In an oxygen tent."
"Wha'?" Skye knows she sounds like a broken record, but she's having a hard time processing everything.
May's blurry face gets closer to Skye's, and for the first time Skye can see the plastic between them. "We got to the cabin just in time. You stopped breathing and you'd gone into convulsions. Your fever was a hundred and eight."
"Coul…" Skye tries to get out.
"Coulson's here," May says. "We're all here."
"Simm…"
"I can send her in," May says. "But you need to stay very calm. You're not out of the woods yet, and you've got a long way to go."
"How'd… here…?" Skye blinks, and her eyelids feel as though they weigh a thousand pounds each.
"Simmons ICED you," May replies. "She had to, Skye, you were bringing the house down around you."
"Sorry," Skye whispers.
May doesn't say anything, but the look in her eyes seems to suggest to Skye that the younger woman has nothing to apologize for.
Skye closes her eyes and when she opens them again, May is gone and Simmons is next to the oxygen tent's clear side. "Hello, Skye," the Brit says gently. "How are you feeling?"
Hot. Scared. Achy. Confused. Nauseous. Words flit through Skye's head but she can't get them to come out of her mouth. "Tired," she mumbles.
Simmons nods. "That's to be expected."
She goes through a long series of sentences describing Skye's treatment – "big gun" antibiotics, IV fluids and nutrition, heavy-duty mist treatments, chest physiotherapy, and heavy-duty painkillers – that Skye only hears part of. She's still thinking about Trip, and her father, and how Coulson and May looked when they were dead on the ground.
Skye doesn't realize she's shaking until Simmons' face gets closer to the oxygen tent. "I'm so sorry, Skye," Simmons says. "I should stop talking and let you rest."
Skye tries to keep her eyes open, but she can't fight the exhaustion and the rattling wheeze in her chest. "Coul…" she gets out.
"He's just out in the hall," Simmons says.
Skye doesn't stay awake long enough to see Coulson come into the room, but the next time she floats back to the surface, she's aware of his hand on hers, of his solid presence in the chair next to her.
It's just enough to lower her heart rate, and she slips back into the darkness and whatever's waiting for her there.