Chapter Text
Normally, Skye thought, hacking involved a lot less furious typing.
Unfortunately for her, this was not a normal situation. Stark Tower had some of the most flexible security systems she had ever seen before, and her normal scripts and workarounds weren’t working at all anymore. She said “anymore” because they had worked, briefly, only hours ago. Somehow, the security system was adapting to what she was doing, and it was doing it far faster than she had ever thought possible. She was rapidly losing ground, in fact, and most of her effort was going into maintaining the dumb little wi-fi vulnerability that was allowing her any access at all, and even that was reliant on her being physically present outside the tower.
The typing was completely ridiculous, something she would have mocked had she seen it on TV. Hacking was absolutely not about two people typing away as hard as they could on either end of a system until one of them beat the other. That wasn’t what was going on here, either. Her furious typing was less about actually tapping into the systems she wanted, and more about hastily editing the dozen or so half-finished projects she had sitting on her laptop that needed to be ready once Stark’s network security had adapted around the last thing she had thrown at it. She had gone through three polymorphic network mappers, a handful of cobbled-together lstm neural-net cracking tools, and just about the entire library of known issues in any commercial server system she had ever heard of. She was debating the merits of giving the whole approach up and going back to good-old-fashioned social engineering when a man grabbed her shoulder and she looked up.
There was quite a crowd around the tower, most dressed in casual clothes or bright-colored recreations of the costumes of the heroes of New York. The man who had grabbed her was an exception, a dark suit with a suspicious-looking bulge under the arm. He was also pressed closer to her than the crowd demanded, and the hand not on her shoulder was at his ear, presumably to touch an earpiece. Before she could really process what was happening, she was stumbling off the concrete planter she had been sitting on, her laptop clattering to the ground in a way that would have made her wince had she had more attention to spare for it. The man was wearing dark sunglasses, and there was an official-looking crest on the man’s chest pocket.
He was security, Stark or just privately hired, she realized. And then she did what she had taught herself to do when someone stronger than her tried to manhandle her through a crowd: she kicked him as hard as he could between the legs.
It didn’t bring him to his knees or even seem to hurt him too much, so maybe he was wearing some sort of protection for just this scenario, but it was startling enough for him to loosen his grip on her. Without a moment’s hesitation, Skye slipped away, ducking down to pick up her laptop from the pavement, before scrambling through the densest part of the crowd she could see. She was already tense and jumpy from her whole “hacking into Stark Tower” thing, and now her thoughts were pinging into emergency mode.
There had been infosheets passed around Legion boards about how to escape security if you were physically infiltrating a location, but it wasn’t the kind of thing most people expected to need being, you know, a hacker organization. It was just one of those fun things people talked about online to make themselves feel like badasses. Now, she was wracking her brain trying to remember the advice. Lose yourself in a crowd had been one, and it seemed to be going well so far. What were the rest?
Skye spotted a suspicious buzz cut ahead of her and turned away sharply, pushing someone aside. These were probably actual professionals, and she wasn’t sure how much hope she had to escape them if there were multiple following her. What was next? It hit her right as she slammed into a wall of muscle and backpedaled away, hoping she hadn’t been as cornered as she felt: remove identifiable clothing.
She used her flailing to catch her balance to duck slightly down, hoping to hide further in the crowd. Removing anything identifiable was easy, thankfully. She had put together a Black Widow cosplay, both to blend in with the crowd surrounding the Tower, and because she thought the super spy was kind of hot. While she was below the general shoulder-line of the people around her, she pulled the bright red wig off and slipped around the pursuer she had run into.
As she straightened up, she risked a glance behind her. There were not two, not three, but five different dark-uniformed figures in the crowd, all looking around and converging on where she had been a moment ago. Her haste to get away had apparently been noticed by the crowd as well, as they were generally following her own path and moving away from the area, back into the general crowd of commuters on their way back to their cars or subways from work, considering the time of evening. Skye turned back and started power walking with the crowd, one arm occupied with shaking out of the leather jacket she had worn to try to mimic Black Widow’s catsuit.. She really regretted wearing just the black tank top under the jacket, because it left her arms bare. She would just have to manage if she wanted to avoid the eyes of the goons.
She stuck close to a tall man dressed in a Captain America hoodie, hoping his height and bright colors would drown her out. Her arm got free of the coat and she passed her laptop over to that arm as she started pulling her other arm free. She felt exposed, the lines of words on her forearms visible to everyone, and she was getting a few sideways glances, but this was New York City. People were used to every kind of weirdo, and this was relatively tame, all things considered.
She met resistance as she tried to keep walking, and realized that her coat had been caught on something. She swore as quietly as she could manage and tugged her arm away, leaving the entire coat behind as she all but ran out at a right angle, joining a group on the crosswalk instead of turning around the corner like she had intended. She wasn’t able to resist peeking at who had caught her there, but the crowd was tight enough that she couldn’t see anything. That was probably a good thing, when she thought about it. The light turned as she made it to the opposite curb and she did her best to gauge which direction had the largest grouping of pedestrians.
She followed the crowd for almost a block before it started to thin out. Her heart was still pounding from the close call and the unexpected fight with Stark’s systems before it. She was swearing to herself under her breath as she realized she had left her bag in front of the tower. That had had some of her notes, her driver’s licenses, and most of her cash. She had also lost the jacket, which was really nice and shockingly expensive. She’d have to cash out from one of her accounts if she wanted to eat tomorrow, and definitely needed to get back into the DMV systems to get another fake.
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk as she realized she didn’t have a destination in mind. She had taken a few turns already and had hopefully lost any pursuers, but she didn’t know if it was safe to return to her van. Would they be hunting her down, or had they just been trying to chase her off? She glanced down a nearby alley, then checked the upcoming intersection. It was probably paranoid, but she might as well take the long way back home; no sense risking it, just in case, right?
She rejoined the pedestrians as she mentally mapped her route out. There was at least one cafe on the way that wouldn’t mind her loitering for a few minutes without buying anything, and she could check her laptop there to see how badly the fall had damaged it.
“Hey! What a small world,” came a voice at her side, tossing her train of thought off its tracks and freezing her in place. An arm slipped around hers, squeezing deceptively tight, as the voice finished in a much softer whisper, “I know a dozen ways to break an arm from this position. Give me an excuse to try one.”
Skye glanced at her sudden captor, her eyes wide and her breath frozen in her throat. “Holy shit, this day is not going the way I expected.”
That drew the other woman up short as well, and Skye got a chance to examine the person who had just upended her reality. She was a few inches shorter than Skye, kind of mousey-looking, with straight black hair and glasses that distracted from a smattering of freckles. Cute, in a librarian kind of way that was undermined by the wiry strength her grip on Skye’s arm indicated. She was giving Skye a glance over, probably doing the same kind of evaluation Skye was.
She was either a corporate or a government goon. It was not in a million years what Skye would have expected of her soulmate. Any of her soulmates.
The woman broke the silence first, but not to speak to Skye. She tapped something in her ear and said, in a businesslike tone, “target secured, change of plan, code L.” She let that arm drop and returned to staring at Skye.
“Not what you were expecting either, huh?” Skye asked because she was pathologically incapable of remaining silent.
“Which arm?” The woman’s tone was curt.
Skye shrugged a little to indicate the arm facing her partner. “You're kind of holding it.”
The woman’s other hand went to Skye’s wrist and turned the forearm to face her, her touch surprisingly gentle even though her other arm was still keeping Skye in a death grip. She had to turn her head to read the words on Skye’s skin, and Skye used her free hand to indicate the black lettering closer to her elbow.
As all soulmarks did, the words matched the first thing she had said to Skye perfectly, as they had for as long as Skye could remember. “I know a dozen ways to break an arm from this position. Give me an excuse to try one.”
The woman stared at words for longer than Skye expected it took her to read before letting the arm drop. She abruptly started walking, pulling Skye along with her. She maneuvered them around until they were facing back toward Stark Tower, no doubt to stick Skye in a cell somewhere. The thought led her to realize her dilemma: her newfound soulmate was trying to bring her into custody. Did she go along with it to talk to her fated love more and find out more about her life, or did she try to make an escape and risk not knowing how to find her again? Did she even want to find this woman again, beyond what fate was, apparently, going to force on her?
“Ah, do you think I could at least get your name? I’m Skye.”
Her captor looked over at her before her expression softened, a hint of a smile slipping in., Her grip didn’t, though. “You can call me Nat.”
“Great meeting you Nat!” Skye said, her voice betraying a bit of her confused emotions. “I know what they say about soulmates and all, but don’t you think we should at least wait till the first date before you drag me down into your dungeon?”
That was an actual smile on Nat’s face, even if she rolled her eyes too. “Great, another joker.”
The words made Skye’s thoughts lurch like a skipped step. “So you’ve already met…” she trailed off, unsure if that was really an appropriate question for their situation.
For a second, Nat stared at her blankly. “Oh, I was talking about Sark.”
Skye let out a breath of relief, tempered somewhat by confusion. Whoever this Nat was, she was apparently important enough to speak to the boss, at least, which did not bode well for their potential relationship. She tested Nat’s grip again, to the woman’s apparent amusement, and then weighed the pros and cons of hurling her laptop at the ground to destroy any evidence. “So…” she said, still holding onto hope that she might be able to worm her way out of Nat’s clutches by distracting her, even if she was still unsure if that was what she even wanted. “How long have you been working for Stark?”
That actually prompted genuine mirth in Nat, even provoking a quiet laugh from the woman. “Oh, I don’t work for Stark,” she said.
She followed it up with the most distressing four words Skye could possibly imagine hearing from her soulmate in that moment, leaving Skye with a rolling ball of disappointment, frustration, and rejection in her gut:
“I work for SHIELD.”
Skye was quiet the entire rest of the trip, too upset to even put up much of a fight. Nat took her into the tower itself, pulling her past checkpoints with muttered words to the guards manning them. There was an elevator too, all brushed steel and surprisingly empty for the end of a workday. When the door dinged, it wasn’t to let them out into some super-secret sub basement filled with high-tech biometric scanners, it was to an open lobby bereft of furniture and looking like it was partway through renovations.
There didn’t appear to be anyone else on the entire floor, but Nat clearly had a destination in mind, directing her with unsubtle force out to a hallway further down and then into what appeared to be a repurposed conference room. There was a classic metal interrogation table, but it was considerably smaller than the room warranted, and she couldn’t help but think this wasn’t meant as an interrogation room at all. Despite that, Nat still forced her down to a chair and handcuffed her to the table. Was SHIELD only just moving into the tower? The Battle of New York had been weeks ago!
Once she had gotten Skye locked in, Nat stepped back to stand stiffly by the door, looking Skye over. Instead of meeting her regard, Skye took the opportunity to look around a little more. Bare drywall painted a painfully bland tan, no windows, and an embarrassingly low-tech security camera hanging in the corner of the room. Even the mirror was fake - it wasn’t a one-way mirror, it was just a big hanging mirror positioned on the wall right where TV had trained everyone to expect a one-way mirror in these kinds of setups. In any other situation, she might find the whole thing funny.
She hadn’t been sitting there for more than a moment when the door opened to admit someone new. She was almost a head taller than Skye’s newfound soulmate, with a strong jawline and hair in a military bun so tight that, combined with her bangs, it could have been mistaken for a pixie cut. Unlike Nat, she had a recognizable uniform on, dark blue and with SHIELD branding on the shoulders. She was making her way to the chair across from Skye.
“Are you supposed to be my bad-cop?” Skye asked.
That drew the woman up short, but instead of provoking her, her expression slowly morphed to a warm smile. She just stared at Skye for a moment filled with a strange tension she couldn’t put a name to. When she spoke, it was deliberate, as if she were tasting each word before speaking it.
“We’re here to be whatever you want us to be.”
Skye barely comprehended her words. The woman said more after that, but Skye didn’t hear it. The world had almost shrunken down to her view of the table and the woman’s face.
The first emotion Skye was able to recognize was fury, and she latched onto that before any of the others could pull her thoughts away.
“Wow,” she said, hoping her emotions were clear in how she spat the words, “I did not give SHIELD enough credit. You guys are somehow even more fucked up than I had thought. Did you have to have me followed to figure out what to say, or do you just have a database somewhere of soulmarks of petty criminals?”
The two other people in the room, her two supposed soulmates, exchanged a look filled with more concern than Skye was comfortable with. “They’re our actual words,” the new one said, affecting a conciliatory tone. As she spoke, she hooked her fingers under one of her sleeves, pulling it back to expose her forearm. She turned it to face Skye.
There were two lines of text, one pitch black and curving away from the wrist in a diagonal, the other green-toned gray almost perfectly centered and parallel to the arm. In black it read, “Why bother sending rookies when your best can’t keep up?”
The text in gray read, “Are you supposed to be my bad-cop?”
Skye felt something break a little inside at the confirmation of the soulmark. She glanced toward her other apparent soulmate, but she was still standing guard next to the door and didn’t appear to be making any moves to show off her own arm. Not that it was necessary. Skye’s mind was throwing up plenty of potential explanations, but she wasn’t able to hold onto believing any of them.
Skye couldn’t find anything to say.
Taking her silence as some kind of affirmation, her second soulmate pulled her chair out and sank down to sit in it. Her arms were crossed loosely on the surface in front of her. “Neither of us are going to threaten to lock you away. We just need some information on who you were working with, and we can let you go on your way. I’m sure this is a...difficult revelation for you, and we don’t want to make this harder for you than it needs to be.”
“Who I was working with?” Skye asked in disbelief. Did they think she was a Chinese spy or something? Fuck, were her soulmates racist, on top of everything else?
“Your attempt to breach SHIELD data must have used quite a bit of resources. If it hadn’t been for Stark's systems, it might have even gotten through. You had to have gotten them somewhere, and we need to know who might be targeting SHIELD data like that.”
Skye still stared back, not entirely comprehending what she was saying. What she did get… She leaned back in her chair. “I want a lawyer.”
“You’re not under arrest,” her soulmate responded. “So far no one can even prove you did anything wrong, and we’d like to keep it that way, if possible. We just need to know that your employer isn’t going to come after you in retaliation.”
“I’m not talking until I’ve got a lawyer.”
Her interrogator sighed. “You were using intelligent systems to attempt to access some of SHIELD’s highest-security servers. There is some extremely dangerous information in those records that can’t get into the wrong hands, but if you work with us we can keep you from suffering too many repercussions for this. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve cut a deal to get a soulmate on board.”
Something unpleasant curdled inside Skye’s chest and she barked a laugh. “ Dangerous information ? If they’re so carefully guarded, do you even know what’s on them? You want to make a deal?” She rocked as far forward as she was able, meeting her soulmate’s eyes over the interrogation table. “Then here’s a deal for you: my parents .”
Neither of her soulmates reacted to her words, obviously unfamiliar with what she was talking about.
“I was looking for access to those systems because somehow, my birth is ‘dangerous information’ that can only be trusted to your ‘highest-security servers.’ Case H-I-6-1-1-5, not that you’d know, because good little piggies don’t get Level 8 clearance and don’t ask questions they aren’t cleared for. So if you want to get me ‘on board,’ try to sell that to your bosses.” She tried to get herself to relax, with only moderate success. “And for the record, I don’t have an employer. Your security just isn’t as good as you think it is.”
Her two soulmates’ eyes widened as she spoke, and after a second’s thought, the one in uniform stood. She turned to look back at her partner, a silent conversation going on that Skye couldn’t parse. She glared at the table instead.
“Sit tight,” her interrogator said, startling Skye out of her brooding. Her voice was unbearably gentle. “We’ll figure this out and be right back.”
Skye didn’t acknowledge her words, but they must have taken her silence as acceptance, because she heard the door open and then close. She glanced up to see she had been left alone, still handcuffed to the table. “Not like I can do much else,” she muttered.
She collapsed back into her chair and tried not to cry.
Skye wasn’t sure how long she had been waiting. Longer than “sit tight” usually implied. Obviously, her supposed soulmates were having as much difficulty getting access to that file as she had.
She felt stupid and childish, thinking back on her soulmates. Not for how she had reacted during the interrogation - she had a right to be upset about being tied to feds - but for her feelings before that. The only reason she had felt so betrayed was because she had built up an image of her soulmates in her head throughout her whole life that couldn’t have matched the reality. It wasn’t like she hadn’t realized that she would meet Nat in less-than-ideal circumstances. “I know a dozen ways to break an arm from this position” made that pretty clear. But in her mind, she had turned that into something said jokingly, or perhaps a reference to a TV show or movie that hadn’t come out yet.
She’d known better than to try and build her perfect soulmate, but it was hard not to personify the words on your arms when they were the only things you had left. In the hard nights, after being taken from a home she had been sure she would stay at, or after a relationship ended badly, she would trace the colors on her forearms and imagine who they were.
Nat, funnily enough, had always been stong and gruff, either one of those big tough guys who was secretly a sweetheart underneath, or a butch girl with, like, half a dozen dogs. Something about the words had given off the “can totally beat you up” energy. Skye supposed, if she really was a SHIELD agent, that was still true, even if she had gotten the appearance entirely wrong.
The other one, the uniformed woman whose name Skye had missed, she had always imagined her as blond, in big multi-colored sweaters. Maybe she was one of those hippie-superstitious types that stayed silent when someone spoke their words until they found the most perfect romantic moment to put the most perfectly romantic words on their partner’s skin. The thought that someone would care about her enough to make those their first words had always filled Skye with warmth.
She ducked down a little so she could wipe away some moisture from her eyes while she worked on unlocking the handcuffs. She would have thought she had gotten used to being let down by people, but apparently she hadn’t yet. At least she still had the third mark, on her other arm. After meeting her first two soulmates, though, leaning on the thought of her third was just asking to repeat her disappointment.
The words, “No no no - you’re okay, it’s alright, stay right here,” were in a bright red on the arm that was otherwise empty. She had imagined the speaker to be someone kind and nurturing, some who would - given the words - attempt to comfort a stranger. Part of her had always been a little wary of it, because it suggested she would need comforting from a stranger like that, but now her mind was trying to find other ways to imagine the words. Maybe it would be someone trying to stop her from running from the cops? Maybe she would say the words first and her experiences with her previous two soulmates would be so bad that Skye would try to run away instead of face her third?
What had she even been thinking, anyway? That they would meet her, a twenty-three year old runaway who lived in her van, and launch immediately into a whirlwind romance? Even if they weren’t spooks, that couldn’t ever have worked out. The marks were a guarantee that you would wind up together, sure, but it didn’t necessarily mean you would be ready for each other right at that first meeting. There were always stories of people on opposite sides of a war speaking each others’ words. The week-after proposals and weddings three months later were far more common, sure, but if it was going to happen to anyone Skye really should have guessed it would be her. Maybe she would have been better off if she hadn’t gotten the marks and just stumbled through it. Two thirds of the population did just fine without them, right?
There was a click and her right cuff came undone, leaving her free to stand up and explore the room. It had been a long time since she had practiced lockpicking - she picked it up as a kid on the somewhat fatalistic belief that she would probably be arrested sometime and it would be best to be prepared. Her first destination was the door. She tried the handle, just in case her soulmates were extremely careless, only to find that it was indeed locked. She took a step back.
The door was a dark brown wood that was probably actually powderboard, so she took the risk and slammed her shoulder against it. To her surprise, it was quite solid, and neither it nor the doorframe budged. She turned back around to examine the room. It was exactly as bare as she had thought when she was brought in, with a lot more floorspace than the simple table and chairs required. It also had dense high-traffic carpeting instead of tile, which only furthered Skye’s thought that this probably wasn’t an interrogation room a month ago. Up in the corner behind where she had been sitting, a cheap-ass security cam was affixed to the wall.
She abandoned her attempt on the door to examine the camera. It really was shitty, not even the closed-circuit thing you’d find in a department store. It was closer to a webcam, something Skye would have been more prepared to see from a small business or a concerned homeowner than the actual literal men in black. She fantasized briefly about dismantling it and turning it into some kind of escape device, but then remembered that she wasn’t Tony Stark and didn’t actually know anything about electronic engineering. Anyway, if she stopped the camera from watching her, she’d probably get someone coming in and cuffing her back down to the table. Really, she would have expected someone to come in anyway, unless whoever was watching her was particularly incompitent.
She gave the camera the bird for the benefit of the guard watching her and slumped into the chair her unnamed soulmate had sat in, her arms crossed. Despite the whole “half-finished interrogation room” thing, SHIELD probably wasn’t careless enough for her to be able to escape, but she had to give it her best shot. She let her head loll back, trying to come up with another direction to take on the problem. Then she saw it.
Almost directly above her head was a ventilation duct. She sprung back out of her chair and started climbing onto the table. It was metal, it would hold. She was able to stand all the way upright without her head touching the ceiling but the grating was easily in reach. She gently lifted the grating out of the way, only to find a disappointment behind: even under the grating, the vent narrowed down to about the size of her head. She would never be able to fit through the gap. Maybe if she were willing to tear away the metal end cap she could get through the rest of the vents, but that would be really noisy. She also probably couldn’t just rip through the metal with her bare hands.
But it was not all for naught. She realized as she was considering the vent that the entire ceiling was made of removable tiles. Drop ceilings had a gap that she might be able to crawl through if she were careful. As a bonus, maybe the walls wouldn’t extend up that far and she could climb over them. Reinvigorated, she lifted one of the panels next to the vent off and let it fall to the floor. The metal borders between the tiles were not designed for holding onto, but she managed to work her hands into a position that she thought could support her weight. She took a moment to breathe. She had never actually done a pull up since middle school gym class, but it couldn’t be that hard, could it?
She had just psyched herself up to leverage herself through the hole in the tiling when the door to the room opened, admitting her two soulmates.
She looked down at them, caught in the act. They looked back at her. She looked down to the ceiling tile and vent grating she had tossed to the floor, then met their eyes again.
“Hey,” she offered smartly.
Nat folded her arms as she studied her. “The ceiling frame and the vent aren’t strong enough to support your weight. If you could pick the cuffs, you would have been better off going for the lock on the door.”
Skye glanced behind them to the door they had just entered through. True to her soulmate’s word, and in keeping with the unprepared state of the room, there was an exposed keyhole in the door’s handle that she just hadn’t noticed. Her soulmates were both standing halfway between the door and the table now. While Nat was still stone-faced, the one in the uniform was betraying a hint of amusement at Skye’s predicament. Neither seemed particularly eager to tackle her down from the table and handcuff her again, so she tentatively let her arms drop. After a moment’s thought, she sat down on the table.
“No luck on my file, then?” she asked, as sweetly as she could manage. For good measure, she kicked her legs back and forth under the table.
Neither of her soulmates reacted to her derision, but the one in the uniform surprised her by presenting a manilla folder.
Skye glanced at the file without taking it. It didn’t have any markings on it, but she understood implicitly what it was supposed to be. Neither of her soulmates were letting anything slip, but she couldn’t help but search for the trick. “So, what? This is supposed to be my actual file? In paper, in a temporary base in Stark Tower, that you both somehow got Level 8 clearance to access and permission to show some rando off the street?” She huffed, not amused enough by whatever this was to actually laugh. “Right.”
Her soulmate pushed the file more consistently toward her. “Take it,” she said simply.
Skye rolled her eyes. Playing along with this game couldn’t actually hurt her; SHIELD had her in custody already. They could do pretty much anything and cover it up later, if they wanted, no need to mess with her like this. Besides, her curiosity was piqued now. She took the folder.
When she opened the cover, the first thing she saw was a full-page shot from a satellite of what looked like a countryside somewhere. She didn’t recognize any of the location names marked, but on the bottom left hand corner was a label, “Hunan province, People’s Republic of China” and a series of coordinates. She flipped past that to a long printed text of a report from an agent.
“I understand your skepticism, but as luck would have it, both of us have level 8 clearance,” her unnamed soulmate explained. “I didn’t need a superior’s permission for the file - I’m Maria Hill. The deputy director of SHIELD, and commander of this base of operations.”
Skye had only gotten far enough in the report to understand that there had been some sort of massacre of a village in China that a SHIELD team had been sent to, but she looked away in hopes of finding any hint of a lie on her soulmate’s face. She didn’t know the woman well enough yet to say if her stony expression was honest. Behind her Nat was folding up her glasses and scrubbing at something on her cheeks.
“The file you have in your hand had never been accessed by a human since it was placed under level 8 security. It was put under level 8 restrictions by the acting team leader, the same woman who delivered you to St. Agnes Orphanage using falsified credentials.”
Skye went back to reading, growing less amused by this diversion by the moment. SHIELD team was killed, new team was sent instead, yadda yadda yadda. She flipped past multiple pages describing the layout of a ruined village piled with corpses. A baby. She stopped and read that part. The only living thing in a village of the dead, an infant in the cold arms of the leader of the first SHIELD team. They gave it a designation of 084. She didn’t know what it meant.
She looked up to her soulmates for clarification and was briefly distracted by Nat, who had apparently been wiping away her freckles. She consciously chose not to think about what was going on there. “Zero eight four?” she asked instead, getting back on track.
“Object of unknown origin,” the woman in uniform - Maria - said. “Strange stones of no earthly substance, alien technology, anything we don’t have an answer for.”
“And -” Skye began, unable to finish the question.
“And people. In at least one case.”
That wasn’t the end of the file. Skye went through everything, skimming more often than she was actually reading it. She stopped comprehending what she was reading once the file reached St. Agnes, but it didn’t stop there. The agents, after they had realized something had followed them from China and was picking them off, had created a hidden protocol in the child services system. It had forced her to move from place to place, to keep her from being found by whatever it was that was after them. The protocol had dutifully kept track of every move she had made and recorded it in her file, up until she had run away at fifteen.
“Oh my god,” she gasped when she was able to vocalize anything again. Her soulmates hadn’t moved from their spots, she realized, and they were watching her with matching expressions of - of something. “Oh god.”
Maria started forward as Skye heaved another breath, but stopped herself. “What do you need from us?” she asked.
Skye looked up at her, uncomprehending. What did she need from them? She needed to not have this...whatever it was hanging over her head. She had thought that nothing could be worse than what she had built up in her head, but this...this was far beyond her wildest imaginings.
“Obviously, you have SHIELD’s protection,” Maria said. “No matter how you decide to proceed with this - relationship, you are the soulmate of the agency’s deputy director and one of its most critical agents. Anything you need to feel safe is yours. It turns out more than one SHIELD team has already given their lives for your safety, and no-one wants their work to be in vain.”
Skye watched her soulmate’s speech in a terrible mix of consolation and dread. After news like this she wanted to be comforted, wanted to believe that someone else could protect her. But two whole SHIELD teams and an entire village had died. For her. Somehow. “But. What could - why?” she managed to ask.
“We don’t know,” Nat said, brushing past Maria as she made her way over to Skye. She pulled a chair up so she was sitting down just outside Skye’s personal space. Close enough to be a firm presence in Skye’s mind without being uncomfortable. “But we promise, the both of us? We’re going to find out.”
Skye glanced over at her. She looked different without the glasses or the freckles, less bookish and more conventionally gorgeous. She also looked really familiar and it was beginning to ring bells in her head that she was having trouble ignoring.
Interpreting her look, Nat glanced away and reached up to her own head. Skye was briefly baffled when she pulled her hand away and her hair went with it, exposing copper locks carefully bound back in pins. Only then was Skye able to match the face with where she had seen it before. If she weren’t so numb, she thought she might be freaking out right now, meeting one of the heroes of New York.
“Nat’s short for my full name: Natasha Romanoff.” Despite the serious atmosphere in the interrogation room, there was a bit of a wry smile on Natasha - the Black Widow ’s face. “Based on your costume choice, I guess you know who I am. Didn’t want to put too much on you at once, but - if it makes you feel any better, you have at least one Avenger in your corner.”
And oddly enough, it did. Skye at least didn’t feel the same intense pressure on her chest robbing her of breath. She still wasn’t able to properly acknowledge the...danger the file had implied she was in, or had caused, or had escaped or whatever. But Nat - Natasha - her soulmate , apparently, had fought and survived an actual alien invasion, as insane as that sounded. Whatever doubts she had about their connection, whatever issues she had ideologically with SHIELD, that connection was real and important.
“Whatever this is,” Maria said, from where she stood what felt like a long way away compared to Natasha’s closeness, “it hasn’t found you so far. The file only goes up until you turned fifteen and then it has a missing person’s report. Is there anything you’ve been doing that might have been keeping it away from you?”
“Yeah,” Skye responded after a moment’s hesitation. A quiet, distant part of her thought maybe she should be worried about telling her soulmates she was basically homeless. “Yeah, I - I’ve been living out of my van since I ran away.” Her voice wasn’t steady, still, and it hitched a little in her throat any time she paused. “I’ve been all over the country. Just...drove around to wherever interested me.”
Natasha nodded at that. “Good, it’s hard to pin you down if you don’t stay anywhere for very long.”
Maria folded her arms leaning in. “What was the longest you stayed in one place?”
Skye thought back. “Five months? At the college towns. I hacked into the rosters and attended a few classes. A semester at a time, different colleges.” Then the question reminded her of something the rest of her day had made her completely forget. “Wait, no. I was with my boyfriend for eight months. Ex-boyfriend.” She couldn’t help but look to her soulmates, desperate to somehow convey that that relationship didn’t mean anything, even though Miles had only broken it off a couple months ago. God, only hours into knowing them and she was already latching onto them for their approval. She didn’t even like them.
“Skye, it doesn’t matter if you’ve had other relationships before,” Natasha assured her, “we don’t expect you to have put your life on hold until we met. What matters is making sure you’re safe now. How long have you been in the city?”
“About six weeks.”
Both of her soulmates winced. Maria was the one to clarify why. “You were there on the fourth.”
“Yeah. The van was almost squashed by one of those giant...whale...things. But I was fine.”
Natasha was staring down at the ground as if she was doing the mental math. “That means we have four and a half months here, three if we want to be safe, then you come with us when we go back to Washington -”
“Nat,” Maria cut her off, causing the redhead to glance over to their taller soulmate. They exchanged another nonvocal conversation. Skye couldn’t tell if they had been together long enough for an empathic bond to form, or if they just knew each other well enough to communicate through looks. Then Maria turned back to address Skye. “This was a lot to put on you at once. It sounds like you will be safe where you are for the time being. It would be best if we took some time to rest, recover, and think about how we want to go forward. Agreed?”
Natasha crossed her arms and made an ambiguous nonverbal sound that was clearly meant to be a reluctant agreement. Skye blinked up at Maria. They were just going to...let her go, after all of this? “I -” She hesitated, glancing around the interrogation room. “Don’t you need to, I don’t know, question me? Or keep me under observation or something?”
Maria shook her head. “We’re the only two in the building that know you’re here. When Nat called in the Code L, I had her bring you to an unused interim questioning room. Code L is our signal that one of us has met a soulmate. There’s no one else on the entire floor right now.”
Skye just stared at her, askance. “Right,” she said, more questioning than statement in her voice, “and because you’re the deputy director, you can just...do things like that.”
That did bring a smile to Maria’s face. “Correct. Now, I can take you back through security and we can get you back to your van.”
“You’re welcome to stay in our apartment here in the tower too, if you prefer” Natasha offered, earning a quelling look from Maria.
Skye glanced between the two of them. “Um. No,” she settled on. “I think I need to get back home. To...process all of this.” Natasha seemed strangely disappointed at Skye’s response.
Maria moved to the door, holding it out open ahead of Skye. “Then let’s go.”
Skye glanced back to her other, more famous soulmate as she left. Natasha didn’t stand up or even watch them as they went. Before Maria closed the door behind them, she shot back, “debriefing at the apartment in fifteen,” to which she didn’t receive any verbal reply.
“Natasha can be protective,” she explained as she guided Skye back to the elevator Nat had led her in on. “If she hadn’t taken her disguise off to reveal herself, she would probably want to be the one escorting you down. If you let her, she’d make sure you were safe the whole way to your van. Unfortunately, she’s a lot less inconspicuous than I am now.”
Through her haze of shock and numbness, Skye was able to feel a tiny hint of guilt. It had been a Legion operation that had leaked those videos of the Battle of New York. She had even been involved with that project. It was kind of her fault her soulmate couldn’t show her face openly without being mobbed by fans. Granted, people deserved to know what had happened and who was protecting them, but this…
They reached the elevator and Maria passed an ID card through a reader before pressing the call button.
They stood in uncomfortable silence as they waited, Skye’s need to get to know one of her fated people warring with her dislike for SHIELD as she tried to figure out how to hold a conversation. It wasn’t made any simpler by recent revelations undercutting her moral certainty about the agency. She didn’t know how she felt about any of this anymore, and wasn’t prepared to touch the worst discoveries with a ten foot pole just yet.
“I understand your feelings about SHIELD,” Maria said, saving Skye from the emotional morass. She didn’t know how her soulmates kept doing that: sure they were destined for each other, but how was it fair that they could read her so easily while she hadn’t figured them out yet? “I was in the Marines for a few years. Special Ops.” She glanced aside, meeting Sky’s eyes. “I left to join SHIELD for the same reasons. A dozen different generals answering to congressmen and cabinet members who’re being pulled this way and that by lobbyists and unofficial ‘advisors?’ Even when you’re in the middle of it, it’s hard to know if you’re being sent somewhere for the right reasons.”
The door dinged and they both stepped into the elevator. Maria only began speaking again when the doors had closed and they had begun moving “I trust Fury.” She leaned back to rest against the handrail on the wall. “I’ve had my doubts in the past, but I worked with him while he was on SOCOM, so when he made the offer, I jumped. It’s the only reason I’ve stayed in the business.” She paused, maybe expecting Skye to say something in response. When she didn’t Maria kept explaining. “You don’t have any reason to trust the agency, and I don’t expect that to change just because we’re in it. Just…give us a chance. As people.”
Skye still wasn’t sure how she was going to reply when they reached their destination. The doors dinged open and Maria strode out to talk with the first security station. By the time Skye had caught up, the agents there were passing two very recognizable bundles over the counter. Maria handed them to Skye in turn, her expression and bearing entirely different than it had been a minute before. “Your coat and bag, Ms. Jones,” she said, radiating professional disinterest. “Next time, please contact Mr. Stark or Director Fury to schedule formal penetration testing with your agency. You have our contact information.”
She quirked her head and glanced deliberately down as she handed Skye the messenger bag that she had discarded while fleeing the front plaza. She had to repeat the gesture twice more before Skye got it and reached inside to check. Sure enough, on top of her laptop, wig, and assorted contents of the bag, Skye felt a paper card that hadn’t been there before. She assumed, given Maria’s words, that it had instructions on how to contact them later.
“Uh, of course,” Skye said, wincing at both the delay in her response and her terrible ability to improvise. “Yeah, sorry about the miscommunication. Won’t happen again.”
After a moment of Skye standing, awkwardly staring at her soulmate, Maria gestured to the doors, her expression unimpressed. “Well, Ms. Jones? Have a safe trip.”
Embarrassed, Skye followed her direction. “Right,” she said, passing by the other security stations before calling back, “you too!” Wait. Shit.
She turned back to her soulmate to revise that statement or take it back, or something, but Maria had already started back for the elevator. Skye watched her go before leaving the building to make her way back home. She had a lot to process.