Set right after the season two mid-season finale.
This kind of got more intense than I was expecting.
Is it even canonically consistent I don't even know.
Hunched over her laptop in the little glass cubicle she had called her home for the past few days, Skye glanced up as someone entered the room. Through the glass she could see her friend Simmons, the biochemist wearing a bright, false smile, clutching her clipboard tightly to herself.
"I'm just doing another routine check!" Simmons informed her with forced cheerfulness, looking down at her clipboard and not at her patient. Despite her megawatt smile there were bags around her tired eyes.
Routine is right, Skye thought to herself, sitting down on her cot with a big whump and tucking her feet underneath her. Three checks a day for the past how many days, now?
"I've already been checked today. Fitz did it," Skye answered as casually as she could, given the circumstances. The circumstances were most definitely not conducive for casual-ness, or whatever the word was. Ever since they'd returned from Puerto Rico after some weird otherworldly experience with a Diviner and alien stuff, Simmons had been a little neurotic.
Not that Skye could blame her. Of the three trapped in the room with the crazy stone, only the ex-hacktivist had come out okay. (Or, almost okay. There was the whole maybe-earthquake powers deal-) Raina had turned into, basically, a monster, and Trip--
Skye didn't like to think about Trip, but she couldn't help it.
Now Simmons sidled up to the display on the other side of the glass, rapidly tapping in a passcode. "Pulse reader, please!" she said, her exclamation directed to the screen rather than to Skye.
Skye obediently stuck her wrist into the machine, reflecting once again on the strangeness of the situation. There Simmons was, with that blinding smile pasted on her face as if everything was normal, when Skye hadn't been out of her glorified cage in days, when they didn't even need to open the door for an examination because doctor-y reasons, and when there was a glass wall, for crying out loud, between Skye and someone she liked to consider her best friend.
She spoke up, once again keeping her tone noncommittal. "Hey, I understand the need for quarantine, and stuff, but isn't all this a little, I don't know, excessive?" Though she wore an almost comical expression and waved a hand in exaggerated motion, Skye was serious--all this was getting extremely tiresome.
"Of course not!" At this, Simmons looked up from the display and straight at Skye for the first time. "It's anything but excessive, Skye! We need to take all the necessary precautions to protect you and everyone else on this plane." Her tone softened, just a little. "I know it's inconvenient, but just hang in--" Before she could finish, the computer bleeped and she bent over, furrowing her brow at the figures on-screen.
"Is something wrong?"
Simmons straightened. "No, no, everything's fine. Like I was saying, just hang in there! But," she added firmly, "I'm extending your quarantine for two more days."
"What? No!" Taken aback, Skye got off the bed to stand in front of her friend. "But why? You said I could get out tomorrow!"
She couldn't bear another minute of isolation; she really couldn't. Even with Internet and junk food and trashy magazines from Bobbi this was really starting to get old.
"It's just two more days," Simmons said, shaking her head, once more avoiding Skye's eyes. "I promise I'll ask Fitz to come and visit." She made as if to leave, but Skye stopped her, banging a fist lightly on the glass.
"Come on, Simmons. You know it isn't contagious!" Kind of sad that she was resorting to practically begging now, but, well, she was desperate.
Simmons turned, and suddenly seemed to lose the willpower to keep her smile on. "No, I don't!" she burst out, throwing out her hands with abandon, voice high and strained. "I don't know anything, Skye! It would help if you actually told us what went on in that cave!"
Skye stared at the biochemist. "I've told you everything I know," she said, clenching her teeth a little. A quarter balanced on the edge of her table suddenly fell to the floor with a soft clink. Alarmed, Skye glanced at it from the corner of her eye, but Simmons didn't seem to notice.
"No. No, you haven't." Simmons shook her head, unusually blunt. "You're keeping something from us, Skye. What are you keeping from us?"
"Nothing!" A pencil started to tremble, rolling also towards the edge of the table. Skye swallowed, attempting to keep her shaking hands still by fisting them by her side.
"You have to tell us," Simmons went on, her voice rising, the knuckles on her hand clutching the clipboard white. "Skye. Please. Tell us." On meeting only stubborn silence, Simmons cried, "I need your help. Trip is dead, Skye. He was in pieces."
Skye squeezed her eyes tight shut, hearing the pencils jiggle on the table. Surely Simmons heard them, too. Why couldn't she hear them? Why couldn't she see the plastic bottle in its unnatural dance? "I know he's dead," she said evenly.
"Then help me stop anyone else from dying, too."
Skye's head shot up, and she glared at her friend in incredulous horror. "Look at me, Simmons. You really think I'm going to kill anyone on this bus? Just look at me, really look, for the first time since I've been back, can't you? Simmons. What are you trying to do? What do you want?"
Skye's words made Simmons flinch involuntarily and move back. Her face was white, drawn, pleading, her eyes rimmed with red. "I just want things to be back to normal, Skye. That's what I'm trying to do," she said softly, staring down at the ground. Before Skye should respond, the scientist turned silently and left the room.
The pencils fell to the floor, one after the other, and the bottle followed, toppling onto the carpet.
Skye sat back on her cot, wrapping her arms tightly around herself.
She wanted things to be back to normal, too.
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