A/N: Thanks to all the readers and reviewers - you all make me happy to continue writing! Enjoy!
"So what's the plan?" Coulson asks as the room starts to shake.
He and May don't look up; it's become the new normal for them, but he's surprised to see that neither Jiaying nor Gordon looks concerned by the seemingly random earthquake. Although, he supposes that if your partner was an eyeless man who could teleport, an earthquake might not be the weirdest thing you'd ever experience.
"Your base is under attack," Jiaying says, "so our first plan of action would be to distract these enemies long enough to retrieve Skye and any medical equipment she may need."
"Phil," May says softly from behind him, "are you serious? You're actually considering this?"
Coulson turns to look at her. "I don't want Skye to go," he answers. "But May… we tried. Andrew was here – she broke all the bones in her arms. We took her to the cabin, we gave her the gloves, and she ended up nearly dying. I think it's time we realized that whatever this is, it's far beyond our capabilities."
"We can't. We can't let her go," May says firmly. "We'll lose her."
The earthquake gets steadily stronger.
"We don't have a lot of choices," Coulson says, fairly certain that May's heart is breaking in the same way his is – shattering into pieces. "We want to keep her safe, and we can't do that here."
Tears glitter in May's eyes.
"Please," Coulson murmurs.
"Fine," May says at last. "But you're taking Jemma."
It's rare for May to use a first name, and the obvious love and care in that one word makes Coulson want to weep.
Jiaying looks at Gordon, who nods. "That's fine," Jiaying says. "It will be helpful to have someone better versed in the medical side of things keeping an eye on Skye as well."
"Still doesn't answer the question as to how we're getting out of here and through Gonzales' men," Coulson says.
"Or when the shaking will stop," Gordon adds.
It's as though his words themselves caused the earthquake to stop, because the room falls still around them. Before any of them can make a move, the door to Coulson's office bangs open and Gonzales and Bobbi march in.
"Now," Jiaying says to Gordon. He steps forward, grabs May by the arm, and sweeps his trench coat over them both; they disappear in a blaze of blue light.
As Gonzales approaches Jiaying turns to Coulson. "They'll get everything ready. All we have to do is stall."
"Turns out I'm pretty good at that," Coulson says.
He draws himself up to his full height. "Let's dance."
Skye blinks up at Simmons. The world is tilting again, it's hot and everything seems to be pounding against her ears. "Coul…?" she slurs, the word sucked up into the whir of the positive pressure mask.
Simmons' face is worried. "Skye?" she asks. "Can you focus on me?"
"Coulson," Skye gets out. Her hand clenches and something else shatters. Skye feels sick and tries to roll to one side, convinced she's going to vomit.
She hiccups and manages to lean over the bed. The bipap hose wobbles in her view, further disorienting her, and she squeezes her eyes shut, trying not to cry.
"Skye?" Simmons' voice is so calm. It makes Skye want to scream.
"Off, off," Skye chokes, and her fumbling bruised fingers grab for the bipap mask.
Some part of Simmons' training kicks in, and she yanks off the mask, dragging the garbage can closer to the bed.
Skye tumbles to the floor and has a few brief seconds of the air rushing at her face before she vomits.
"Do you see what you're doing to her?" Simmons demands, striding towards the wall separating the quarantine chamber from the rest of the lab. Since the lights exploded, it's hard to pick out where everyone else is in the room, but she knows Mack is by the door, his arms crossed. "And you want to take her out of here!"
"Stop yelling," Skye moans.
Skye looks up at Simmons. The Brit is splitting into two images, as is everything in the room, and the nausea is coursing through Skye's fevered body. "Something's… something's wrong. Jemma…?"
A bright flash of light flares through the lab. Simmons turns her head away from the flash, finding Skye's haggard face. Her friend looks worried, and things have started to shake again.
When the light fades there are two more people in the lab.
"Agent May?" Simmons asks, hardly daring to believe what she's seeing.
Mack bolts forward from his position near the door, but May's too fast for him. She raises her ICER and fires, and the tall man crumples to the floor.
"What's going on?" Simmons still can't believe what she's seeing.
May darts over to the quarantine chamber. "We're here to get you out," she says.
"You just… Mack…" Simmons can't figure out how to finish a sentence.
"Something's wrong," Skye croaks from the floor, and Simmons turns around.
"What is it?"
"I feel…" Skye's eyes dart around, unable to focus. She's sweaty and her hands are shaking. "Something… oh, no."
"Skye?" Simmons kneels down next to her, pulling hair away from Skye's face. "What is it?"
"I don't…" Skye manages to say, and then she slides to the floor. Her arms jerk in towards her body, her back arches, and her head slams against the floor.
Simmons is next to her in an instant, grabbing for a vial of Ativan and a syringe. "Hang on, Skye," she murmurs. "We'll figure it out."
Skye sees the next few seconds as blurry slices of pain and suffocation. Her body tenses and jerks, her chest burns with pain, her arms tingle and her head swims. The room is hot, then it's cold, and her visual field gets narrower and narrower, filled with black and sparkling dots.
"Please," she whispers to Simmons.
Then there's a man standing over her, standing next to May, and she has to be hallucinating again, because he doesn't have any eyes.
"Hi, beautiful," the no-eyed man says, and now Skye's convinced she's gone off the deep end, since her bruised, battered, seizing, sick body is the last thing anyone should describe as beautiful. "Are you ready to go home?"
"Home," Skye mumbles. "Everyone… safe?"
"They're safe," Jemma whispers, holding Skye's hand.
"They're safe." The man with no eyes smiles, and reaches down to gently stroke her hair.
As though his touch is a drug, the moment his fingers touch her head, her eyes close, the pain lifts, and she's somewhere else entirely.
"What the hell kind of game are you playing here?" Gonzales demands of Coulson, stepping close enough to poke Coulson's chest with a surprisingly bony finger.
"I was playing solitaire before you blew a hole in my base," Coulson replies. He sees Bobbi's gaze flick over Jiaying, and wonders how long it will take for her to bring up the fact that while there's still an Asian woman in the room, it's definitely not May.
"She nearly brought the whole base down!" Gonzales spits, his hands waving in the air.
"What?" Coulson likes playing dumb. It's far too easy.
"The earthquake!"
"That what now?"
Bobbi takes a step forward and puts a hand on Gonzales' shoulder. "He's merely trying to antagonize you."
"It's working," Gonzales grumbles. "I can't believe you people live with this day in and day out – your whole world shaking, everything breaking – it's demoralizing!"
"Okay, so, Skye has broken some lights. And some windows. And about sixty coffee mugs. And… a lot of other things. But she hasn't bombed us," Coulson says. "And honestly, we get those coffee mugs in bulk, so I'm less concerned about…"
"Stop," Gonzales says firmly, putting one hand up. "Your diversionary tactics will no longer be necessary."
Coulson looks at Jiaying. The other woman shrugs.
"I'd like you and Agent May to escort Skye to our facility," Gonzales says. "We'll talk about suitable positions for everyone here once she's been contained."
"I don't think that will be necessary," Coulson says. "I've made other arrangements for Skye."
He keeps his eyes on Bobbi. Until a few hours ago, he would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that she was loyal to him, and even now, with her standing next to the leader of "real SHIELD" (whatever that means), she looks uncertain about her position, as though Gonzales promised something he could never hope to produce. A lot of leaders were that way; Coulson made it a personal goal to aim as low as possible and work his way up.
"Agent Morse, you've been awfully quiet," he says. "Any thoughts on the events of the past day or so?"
"If you're trying to antagonize me, it won't work," Bobbi says quietly. "I made the decisions I thought were necessary to preserve the true mission of SHIELD. I'm not going to apologize for that."
Coulson leans back against his desk. "The true mission of SHIELD? I'm pretty sure there's something in there about not screwing over one's teammates, but I'd have to go back and reread the manual."
That seems to ignite something in Bobbi. "If anyone was going to destroy the team, it would have been you, Coulson. Chasing down alien artifacts, investigating people with powers – you were obsessed. You were willing to stretch this team to the breaking point to find something you weren't even sure existed, and people got hurt."
"So you decided the way to handle your discomfort with the situation was to join up with a rogue agency, then allow them to storm our base? Generally the way to handle workplace issues is to speak to one's supervisor instead of showing up with bombs and armed men."
"You jeopardized Skye's life for nothing," Bobbi spits at him. "She's terrified of herself. She thinks she's going to hurt everyone she cares about – and do you know why? Because you took her to Puerto Rico. You were the one… who made her what she is."
Gonzales holds up his hand again. "We can all agree that what happened to Agent Skye is extremely unfortunate."
"We can?" Jiaying speaks for the first time.
Gonzales and Bobbi turn to face her.
"I think the unfortunate thing is that Skye has been isolated, treated like a pariah, and allowed to suffer," Jiaying goes on, her voice modulated and calm. "And now, when she's desperately ill, she's being hunted down like a criminal."
"She's not…" Gonzales starts.
Jiaying interrupts him. "She didn't choose what happened to her. The temple in Puerto Rico activated something in her, something she didn't even know was there. She had no choice in the matter, and now you're all acting as though she has a choice in the way her body is reacting to her new gifts and the changes inherent there.
"Do you really think Skye wants to hurt herself? To hurt any of you? To destroy the place she thinks of as home? No," Jiaying continues. "All she wants is for things to go back to the way they were, and because that can't happen, it's even more frightening and horrible."
Bobbi looks down at the ground.
"I agree," Coulson says after a moment. "Which is why Jiaying and her associates will be taking Skye to a safe place where they can treat her and help her learn to control her gifts."
"That was not the deal we made," Gonzales says angrily.
"We didn't make a deal," Coulson snaps. "You stormed in here and demanded things. And as far as I know, as the director of SHIELD, I'm responsible for what decisions are made regarding my agents."
He takes a few steps towards Bobbi. "For what it's worth, were the situation reversed, I'm positive that Skye would be here supporting you. Trying to help you deal with anything you were facing."
"I'm not Skye," Bobbi says.
"No," Coulson agrees. "You're not. And I feel sorry for you, because even if you had a tenth of her compassion and her generosity, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now."
From the hallway there's a flash of blue light. The door opens and Gordon strides into the office. "We're ready to go, Jiaying," he says. "And we need to hurry."
The eyeless man turns his head to look at Gonzales. The older agent jerks back in surprise, but it doesn't seem to bother Gordon. "If you had taken her, if you had been able to remove her to your experimentation facility, she would be dead. She's nearly there now, in a very low-functioning state, but do you know what the last thing she asked was? She wanted to make sure that everyone she cared about was safe."
"And you're the ones who jeopardized that possibility," Coulson says. "I may be responsible for what happened to her in San Juan, but I swore to her that I would protect her, and I stand by my word."
He looks at Jiaying. "Keep her safe. Both of them, really."
The dignified woman nods. "We'll keep you updated on Skye's condition. I'm sure Agent Simmons will get in touch tomorrow."
"Thank you," Coulson says.
Gordon takes Jiaying's arm and the office fills with blue light. When it fades away, Coulson stands by his desk, looking at Gonzales and Bobbi. "If you'll excuse me, real SHIELD, the director of this SHIELD needs to check on the rest of his team."
He doesn't wait for a response, simply walks through the open door into the hallway.
Neither of them follow him.
Their strange rescuers have a plane. Simmons isn't sure why she's surprised, but she is. She's also surprised at how gentle their new friends are. The woman radiates calm and peace, and the man, while stolid, is obviously concerned for Skye.
Skye lays on an improvised stretcher in the main cabin of the plane. Simmons sits at her head, her eyes trained on the monitor and the ventilator. The man sits in the cockpit with the pilot, and the woman sits near Skye's feet, surrounded by the boxes and suitcases they'd packed full of medical supplies and personal items, watching both younger women.
"I'm Jiaying," she says once the plane is in the air. "My associate is Gordon."
"I'm Jemma," Simmons says. "Simmons. Jemma Simmons."
"It's a pleasure to meet you," Jiaying replies, "although I wish we were meeting under different circumstances."
Simmons gives her a tired smile. After the man without eyes had come into the quarantine chamber, Skye's condition had deteriorated. She'd given up breathing on her own, forcing Simmons to turn off the positive pressure system and switch the machine into ventilator mode. Now Skye's sedated and unresponsive, and Simmons can't help but think it's all her fault.
"You've taken remarkable care of her," Jiaying says. "I know it can't have been easy."
Simmons bites her lip. "Skye's my friend. I'd do… anything for her."
"She's lucky to have someone like you."
It's the other way around, really, Simmons thinks. She bows her head, unable to continue the conversation, clinging as gently as possible to Skye's bruised fingers.
"Trip?" Skye calls into the void. Around her it's white and foggy, and she's completely alone. Her hands and feet feel numb, as though her body is no longer her own. "May? Coulson?"
She isn't sure she wants to see anyone in this space, but something in her is terrified of being alone. "Jemma?"
The mist clears somewhat, and a regal-looking woman with scars on her face approaches. "You're not alone," she says as though she knew exactly what Skye was thinking.
It still doesn't feel right, and Skye takes a hesitant step back.
"Please, don't be scared. I'm here to help you."
"The last time someone said something like that in here, it turned out to be a lie," Skye says, remembering her hallucination of Simmons.
"I don't lie," the woman says, a small smile on her face. "You can trust me."
"I don't even know you."
"But I know you." The woman steps forward and touches Skye's face gently. "I've known you for your entire life."
Skye furrows her brow.
"I'm your mother," the woman says. "And I've been looking for you for a very long time."