Chapter Text
Skye’s soulmates were both in the kitchen when she exited the bedroom. Maria was sitting over a bowl of dry cereal, reading something off her phone with her spoon halfway to her mouth, and Nat was at the stove cooking something that smelled good.
Skye stopped in the doorway as both their attentions caught on her. “Morning,” she said and waved, still feeling a little awkward waking up to the two of them.
In the last couple weeks, she had only stayed over about three times. She still didn’t feel entirely settled. Their relationship was still new, even if they were moving practically glacially for soulmates.
Maria and Natasha returned her greeting, both far too awake for this time of the morning. Skye could barely keep track of what she had been doing a minute ago, which reminded her:
“Thanks for the toothbrush, but I remembered to bring mine this time.”
Natasha turned back to the egg she was frying. “This way you can leave one here and keep one in the van. Less carrying it between places.” With one hand, she tossed the pan she was working with and flipped the egg, then turned to lean against the counter and face Skye. “Surprised to see you up this early.”
Skye shrugged. “Guess I felt like changing things up a little.” She didn’t want to admit that she had been woken up by the absence of their presence at her sides - it felt exceedingly sappy and codependent.
“Well, now that you’ve dealt with the morning breath,” Natasha said, pushing off the counter and closing the few steps between them. Instead of finishing the statement, she leaned in and met Skye’s lips in a brief open-mouthed kiss. Skye let Natasha rock her back on her heels a little bit and her eyes were beginning to slide closed when the oil in Natasha’s pan popped and the woman pulled away to check it.
“You can pull up a seat,” Natasha tossed over her shoulder. “If you don’t mind over-hard, you can have these. Or you can see what cereal we have in the pantry.”
Skye went instead for the coffee machine in the corner, stopping to open the cabinet above it in hopes of finding a mug.
Natasha saw what she was doing and pulled one out of the overhead cabinet next to her, passing it over to Skye. “They’re over here.”
Skye smiled in thanks and filled the offered mug with the ichor she needed to suffer through being awake so early. Only then did she sit at the counter next to Maria, catching the tail end of a warm look the woman had been giving the two of them.
Skye looked back over at Natasha, taking the opportunity for the hundredth time to admire how hot her soulmate was, even in the baggy shorts and tank top she wore to bed. “I’ll take the eggs. Maria’s breakfast looks super sad. Who eats cereal without milk?”
Maria shrugged. “Lactose intolerant.”
Skye looked back over. Just dry corn flakes and oats in a little glass bowl. There wasn’t even anything pretending to be milk there.
A plate slid along the counter to sit in front of Skye carrying two picture-perfect fried eggs looking up at her. When she looked back up Nat was already moving around the kitchen, splitting an egg over the now-empty pan. “So then, why no eggs?”
“She thought it would take longer to cook than it does for her to eat her sad bowl of cereal. Maria really doesn’t know anything about cooking.”
Skye judged the bowl of cereal. Still almost half-full. “How long did you think it would take? Even I know that eggs are like, the fastest thing ever.”
“I need to be at work by 8,” Maria said, ignoring Skye’s insightful commentary,“but Nat doesn’t have any assignments, so she can stick around with you for the morning, if you want.”
“How did you even survive before you met Nat?”
“I’ll be available for about half an hour around 1pm if you’re going to stay until lunch,” Maria continued.
“SHIELD and Marine bases have cantines. No cooking necessary. Not that you have room to talk, I didn’t see a kitchen tucked away in your van,” Nat answered her, already bringing another plate with eggs for herself over.
“I had foster families that had me cook sometimes. You can at least make, like, instant ramen, right?”
Maria let her phone she was reading from fall, giving them both a look that suggested it required a saintly level of tolerance. “My culinary abilities are at least up to the task of instant ramen, yes.”
“She can’t draw, either.”
“My drawings are perfectly serviceable.”
Skye watched Nat lean over the bar counter to kiss Maria’s protests away. “You’re right, your drawings are wonderful.” Then Nat immediately turned to Skye and gave a subtle but definite shake of her head.
The little buzzing press of warm energy against Skye’s throat came out as something almost like a giggle. She didn’t know why - it wasn’t that funny, but watching her soulmates play around like this in the morning was just too much for her. Neither of them commented or even seemed to notice her slip.
“If you are done slandering me, I was trying to go over what I can of my schedule,” said Maria. “I have that important meeting with the council this morning regarding - the report.” She was giving Nat significant looks, so Skye assumed they must have discussed something beforehand. Was this a Nat-and-Maria thing, or something they just couldn’t tell her because it was classified? “I assume the two of you will be doing some training, since you’re both here.”
Nat swept her gaze over Skye before answering. “No, Skye’s done her training for the week. We’re getting to the end of the easy part,” - she ignored Skye’s incredulous mutter that any of what they had been doing was easy - “and now she just needs more practice. You’re really a natural at this. I’m thinking of bringing Clint in so you can have some practice against other body types.”
Maria mimicked Nat’s assessment of Skye, with more curiosity in her eyes. “If she’s good enough for you, she must be a prodigy - at this as well as apparently everything else.”
Skye couldn’t hold back a brief eye roll at her soulmates’ praise. They had been consistently effusive over her abilities so far, and she thought they were laying it on a little thick.
“But if you’re not practicing,” Maria continued, going back to whatever she was doing on her phone, “I at least need you to hold off on the sex until after nine. It would be unprofessional to be distracted by your feelings through the link while I’m working with the council.”
Skye stopped with a forkful of eggs halfway to her mouth. “Oh my god. I didn’t even think about that part of the bond. How long have you guys had that? Wait, does that mean you feel, like, everything ? I am so sorry about all those times - Nat, why didn’t you warn me? And with your thing about sex -”
Maria cut her off by putting her hand on Skye’s arm. “It’s fine. It’s nice, actually. I can’t sense everything, I just get a clear picture that Natasha is - enjoying herself.”
“That part of the bond started about a year ago for us,” Natasha explained. “We can locate each other across the city and feel each other's emotions within about half that.” She had grabbed Maria’s other hand and laced their fingers together, fixing the other woman with a look of adoration.
Skye couldn’t help the tiny little sigh she gave. “That’s so cool .”
Maria leaned over the counter for a kiss that grew slowly more heated. Even now, more than a month into the relationship, Skye sometimes was surprised at how much she enjoyed seeing the affection between her two soulmates. She didn’t interrupt their moment, content to bask in the blissful energy they were giving off.
Eventually, Maria’s attention went back briefly to her phone and she must have spotted the time. She finished her last spoonful of cereal and hurried to stand, grabbing the uniform jacket that was folded on the back of the couch as she passed by. Maria exchanged brief farewells and a wave with Skye and Natasha, who was leaning out over the counter to watch her go. When the apartment door closed behind her, Natasha turned back to the stove where she was finishing up another pair of eggs.
“So if you’re eating my food and sticking around, that means you get to help wash the dishes,” Natasha said after a moment. “Then we can see what we can do about keeping entertained. Within Maria’s limits. Until nine.”
Skye knew something was wrong when Natasha sat up on the couch. Skye almost thought, for a moment, that Maria had walked in, and she had immediately pulled away from Natasha as though they had been caught out doing something they weren’t supposed to.
They hadn’t, for the record, seeing as it was still only eight forty-five. They were sitting at the couch in front of the TV, watching Chinese historical dramas in their original Mandarin. The most salacious they had gotten was a game of tracing increasingly complex shapes on each other's side or inner thigh and trying to guess what they were drawing. Skye had given up when she realized that Natasha was writing out simple Chinese characters.
Watching period pieces from a culture she didn’t know much about in a language she didn’t speak should have been boring, but Natasha had been teasing her about the dozen attempts she had made to learn Mandarin only to give up. Skye had been lured into it as an attempt at learning, but she found it was kind of fun trying to work out what was going on and exchanging her theories with Natasha, who of course spoke a dozen languages fluently and knew exactly what was happening.
They had gotten to a particularly tense moment in the show - the characters were all in their fanciest robes and standing in a big room with an empty throne and there was a lot of yelling going on. Skye was thinking the emperor had just faked his own death, but Natasha stubbornly refused to explain anything and Skye was letting her theories get more and more outlandish to mess with her. And then Natasha had gone quiet and pulled away from her.
She tried not to feel hurt - it probably wasn’t her fault, maybe the show had unintentionally brought up something from Natasha’s past? She couldn’t decide if it would be rude to ask. Luckily, Natasha interrupted her thoughts.
“Something’s wrong.” Her tone was more serious than Skye had heard her since Natasha had initially grabbed her on the street. “Maria’s coming back.”
“What? Why?” Skye glanced at the digital time display on the blu-ray player. “It’s not even nine.”
Natasha shook her head. “She feels…” she trailed off, seemingly at a loss for words. Eventually she seemed to give up entirely. “She must have gotten bad news in her meeting. Let me just - “ she grabbed the remote off the counter and turned the TV off. They sat in silence for a moment that seemed to stretch out. Natasha could feel Maria’s presence, obviously, but Skye couldn't; she was just waiting quietly and wondering what was going on.
The door to the apartment slammed open.
“Fuck!” Maria exclaimed, startling her. She could name the number of times she had heard Maria swear on one hand. “They brought him back! Natasha, I need -”
She pulled up short at the sight of the two of them together on the couch. She froze entirely.
“What’s up?” Skye asked mildly.
Natasha stood and sounded a little more worried when she asked, “what happened?”
Maria’s attention seemed to stutter a bit. “I need to speak with you, Natasha. In the bedroom.” Her tone was carefully controlled , and Skye realized what was going on. This was something they couldn't talk about in front of her. She thought she felt something shift unpleasantly at the thought.
Natasha had clearly caught that too, and made her way over to Maria herself. “Alright. It’s okay. Why don’t you brief me?” She sent an apologetic look toward Skye, but most of her attention was now focused on their soulmate.
Maria also looked over at Skye. “It’s classified. I apologize for interrupting, but Natasha needs to know. I’m…sorry if this interrupts your plans for the rest of the morning.” Her posture and tone were unlike the Maria Skye knew. If she were anyone else, she might come across as somewhat tense, but having gotten to know her Skye knew that showing this much emotion was enough to suggest she was rattled and perhaps full-on desperate. None of it reassured Skye at all.
Natasha stood from the couch immediately. “Let’s go.” She had held onto Skye’s hand as she stood, but she gave Skye another apologetic look and her hand a squeeze before she dropped it to follow Maria.
Skye stood as if to follow after them and then stopped, realizing what she was doing. She paced over to the window instead. Suddenly she needed to move, to do something with her hands and her body. She felt a little like a whirlwind had just blown through the living room. Half a minute ago she had been content curled up with Natasha, and now she couldn’t avoid the thoughts of what might be going on in that room.
She knew it had to have something to do with all the SHIELD bullshit that went on in their job. But for it to blow through Maria’s impressive emotional control, it must be something extremely fucked up. And for her to come to Natasha outside of normal working time, there had to be something personal. What had she said? ‘The brought him back?’ That sounded ominous.
She found her feet had carried her into the kitchen and dining area, and she was staring at the closed door to the bedroom. It wasn’t soundproof - she could hear the faint sounds of voices on the other side. If she moved closer she might be able to listen in. This was something important and apparently personal that affected her soulmates. She knew she had talked with them about confidential information, things she wasn’t supposed to know, and she had grudgingly accepted that she couldn’t go poking her nose into everything about their jobs. But this? This was something big. Was she their soulmate or not?
That was what she struggled with as she crept closer to the door. With each inch, she could make out the words being spoken better until finally, when she was almost pressed up against the wood, she started hearing the whole conversation.
Natasha sounded tense, and her voice was moving back and forth inside the room. “...I was there. There’s no way Coulson’s -”
“It was that project he worked on for Fury.” Maria’s voice was tight and her words clipped off, like she was down on the end of each one “I don’t know how - he wouldn’t say and the information is classified beyond even my clearance. He’s still recovering now, and I’ve managed to find some of the reports on previous patients. The outlook doesn’t look good long-term.”
“Did he know?”
“...no. He recommended the project be shut down.”
There was no response for a long minute and Skye considered stepping away. She was pressed almost against the door but she couldn’t hear any movement or anything. She hoped she would have enough warning to step away and look innocent.
“You can’t say anything to anyone. Fury intends to keep him away from anyone he worked with until we know he’s stable. I could be brought up on charges just for telling you, but you needed to know.”
Natasha sounded terse and final in her response. “Right.”
There was another long silence, and this time Skye did step away. It sounded like Natasha was completely shut down, and Skye didn’t want to be caught if she decided to storm out. Sure enough, only a few moments later the door flew open and Natasha appeared again. She looked calm, her expression blank and her movements loose and casual. She stopped short when she spotted Skye still standing in the kitchen.
“Well, sorry, babe,” Natasha said, her tone unnaturally light. “Looks like I’m going to have to cut this short. I’m going down to the training gym. I’ll see you for the workout on Tuesday.”
“I could help?” Skye offered. She wasn’t sure what she was helping with, but Natasha had just gotten some sort of bad news. She wanted to be there for her.
Unfortunately, that just got a laugh from Natasha. “Sorry. I need to spar with someone and I don’t think you’ll give me the kind of workout I need.” She stopped herself then looked Skye up and down. “Then again…no. I’ll see you on Tuesday.”
She strode out of the apartment before Skye would get in a word edgewise.
Skye was left standing in the kitchen, watching where her soulmate had been a moment before. She looked back to the bedroom door, still standing ajar. Maria was still there, sitting on the bed with her head in her hands. So she couldn’t help the soulmate that really needed it. Maybe there was something Skye could do for her other soulmate. She crept into the bedroom as delicately as she could.
She didn’t feel equipped for this conversation at all. She knew when she started agreeing to see them that the SHIELD thing would come up, but the past few weeks had lulled her into a sense of security. They had had dinner together, watched old action movies, exercised together, even slept together, and they had managed to mostly avoid the subject. Skye couldn’t forget, exactly, that her girlfriends were SHIELD, but when she was seeing them so often outside the context…it had slipped into the back of her mind.
The funny thing was that Skye didn’t know how she felt about it. On one hand, she really did want to know what had led Nat to storm off like that. Wasn’t it her job to know what was bothering her soulmates? She didn’t know what she needed to do to support them when the both of them seemed so much in shock. They were two of the most unflappable people she had ever met.
On the other hand, a part of her was afraid of what she might learn. She had hated not knowing what SHIELD knew about her, and then finding out had almost shattered her. She was still having trouble wrapping her head around all that had happened when she was a baby. Natasha had looked calm, but she had all but ran from the apartment and Maria was still obviously distraught, and the two of them were the most level-minded people Skye had ever met.
She was almost sitting on the bed herself when Maria looked up and acknowledged her, visibly collecting herself as she addressed Skye. “I apologize for Natasha.”
“I take it it was bad news, then,” Skye said, trying to stay light.
Maria’s posture drooped a fraction of an inch. “It’s classified.”
“Right. And Natasha was in the ‘need-to-know.’”
She could see Maria hesitate at that. “It’s personal to Natasha. It involves someone she was close with.”
Skye thought that maybe, if it was personal to Natasha, that kind of meant it was personal to the two of them, too. That was how being soulmates worked. “Is she going to be okay?” she asked instead.
“She needs some time. It was a big surprise.”
“Like, ‘happy birthday’ surprise, or ‘guy with a knife in your backseat’ surprise?”
Maria’s lack of response only made Skye’s stomach sink more. It wasn’t like she thought it might somehow be good news, but she hoped she might at least be able to distract her soulmate a little bit. And yet she only seemed to get more wrapped up in her own head.
“It’s complicated,” Maria eventually settled on.
In order to keep herself from pacing, Skye sat down on the bed next to Maria, the motion a little more forceful than she had intended. “Well, I can’t really help you guys with anything if I don’t know what’s going on.” She hoped she didn’t sound as petulant to Maria as she did to her own ears.
Maria responded with a sigh. “I told you there would be things we couldn’t talk about. That’s the risk of being with spies.”
She was right. Skye knew she had accepted that at the time, as an implicit part of seeing them. It didn’t do much to settle her nerves, though, and it didn’t stop her mind from going through the possibilities. What if whatever the secret was caused Skye to be in danger? Or, worse, for Maria or Natasha to be in danger because of her? Things were usually classified because they were dangerous to someone, and Maria obviously thought that included her for some reason.
Maria had not been listening to her private little freakout, so she was still trying to reply to her earlier statement. “And you’ll help her - you help us - by being here. Natasha needs some space right now, but she’ll go and spar with the dozen SHIELD agents who have the worst sense of self-preservation on the base right now. She’ll probably talk to her old partner. And then she’ll feel better.”
“And what about you?” Skye asked, trying to convey her worry with a look. She was clearly not okay either, no matter how much she seemed to want to push all the concern onto Natasha. “What will you do?”
Maria stood, straightening her uniform jacket and rolling her shoulders back. “I am going to go back to work and have my next meeting.”
“Natasha’s not the only one who’s freaked out about this, whatever it is. You can’t just ignore it and pretend you’re fine.”
Maria gave her a glance. “Of course I can. It’s part of the job.”
Skye stood up to join her. She felt like she wasn’t getting through to Maria. She needed to make sure she understood, and make sure she had what she needed to be there for the two of them. “Come on, I can’t help if you freeze me out like this. Just - give me something, at least let me get an idea of what’s going on, here.”
Maria’s brow furrowed almost imperceptibly. “And I told you. You being here helps. You trying to get me to break confidentiality does not.” She regarded Skye for a moment. “We already talked about this and I thought it was settled. I have to get to another meeting, so if you would like to stay in the apartment you are welcome - the door should lock behind you if you leave before one of us gets back.” She left, leaving Skye feeling like she had been slapped in the face.
It took a moment for her to recover and go after Maria. She was already in the front entryway, fiddling with the door. Skye called her back, “Look, I said, you don’t have to tell me, just - “ Maria gave her a look and deliberately left, closing the front door a little harder than Skye thought was necessary. “ - and you’re gone.
Skye sat down on the armchair nearest to her. She had not, she guessed, handled that as well as she maybe should have. Did Maria really expect her to just leave the problem alone? What kind of relationship did she think this was supposed to be if they were keeping important things like that from each -
She deliberately stood up, cutting off her thoughts. Maria had been upset, so that meant it was up to Skye to be the bigger person and give her some time. She looked around the apartment. The Chinese period drama was still running on the television and she grabbed the remote and shut it off. Then she collected her bag and her shoes and got ready to leave.
Maria and Natasha could have their space and recover from whatever it was that was messing them up. That gave her time to get to work.
They hadn’t given her a lot, from the conversation she had overheard. The most important word in the whole conversation was the name: Coulson. So that was who Skye went on a hunt for when she got back to the van.
Even though Skye had been making an effort to be a little less cynical about SHIELD since she had met her soulmates, she hadn’t completely let it off the hook. She had gone to a lot of work over the years to get into the SHIELD servers, and this was exactly the kind of thing she had planned to use it on. With a name in hand, she immediately did the same thing she had done for Natasha and Maria: she went looking through HR’s paperwork. That was the first challenge. SHIELD apparently had about eight employees named Coulson. She narrowed it down a little bit by cutting out the very low-level staff - custodians, truck drivers, building groundskeepers, that sort of thing. Not that they weren’t important, but because she didn’t think Natasha or Maria would have spent enough time with any one of them enough to develop a relationship.
She eventually located one Agent Phil Coulson. She settled on the reference to him mostly because his file was the most blacked-out. It stood to reason that if Natasha worked with a particular agent a lot, he was likely to have a similar amount of classified information in his file as she did.
Much like her check-up on Maria and Nat, she was able to put together some information on the guy despite the redactions. He’d been in the organization for almost as long as she’d been alive, for one thing. Some of his early missions were even classified low enough that she could read through them, but she wasn’t exactly familiar with how secret agent missions were supposed to go. She couldn’t draw many conclusions from how he handled those.
The farther she went in his file, the more highly classified the missions until, less than halfway through, his reports were entirely blacked out. Whoever he was, he must have been very well-trusted to get that many important assignments. Unfortunately, that was a bit of a detriment to her search. Even after a few days of work looking through the files she could find on him, she couldn’t get much on what was going on with the guy over the last few years. The clearest lead she got was that there were a bunch of updates to his files uploaded on the day after the battle of New York, and that there were urgent transport orders to an undisclosed location very quickly afterward. Everything else was hidden behind far too high of security.
She wasn’t entirely out of options, as far as getting into SHIELD’s records went. She had tools that might give her some of the credentials from some of the mid-level agents. She could also start some good old-fashioned social engineering if she needed to. And there was always the nuclear option. She contemplated that a few times, lingering over her chat with miles in one window.
Redfordayz: wed be the next redhack
Redfordayz: or d3dc3l
Redfordayz: keep the pressure on the spooks
CLoud.exe: I said, I’m busy w/ my soulmates
Redfordayz: sure
Miles had gotten it into his head that he could make going after SHIELD his thing for a little while and was trying to rope her into his plan. If she brought him in to help with SHIELD stuff, there was no way he wouldn’t use it for his newfound crusade. It wasn’t a particularly tempting option.
He wasn't the only one keeping in touch. Despite having left on a somewhat strained note, Skye was surprised to find that Maria kept texting her. She had held off for almost a full day after their conversation, but afterwards had given an oblique apology for being so short with her. Skye did understand that Maria wasn’t really at her best, so she wasn’t exactly blaming her. It was just…her being sorry didn’t really resolve the issue. All it did was further motivate her to work on her research into Coulson.
If anyone was having trouble staying in contact, it might have actually been her, really. With the addition of the hunt for information on Coulson, she had three big projects ongoing. She was doing a big thing for a local construction company to try to grab info off their server as part of a white-hat bounty. She was also - more importantly, in her mind - looking into the federal agency that was managing the fallout of the invasion. They were a small, practically unheard of department, originally part of SHIELD and now under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, called Damage Control. She wasn’t necessarily doing it out of any specific malice towards them. She just didn’t trust secretive government agencies with dangerous tech like that, and this whole thing with her soulmates was only reaffirming that thought for her.
She was so busy, in fact, that she managed to miss one of her days with Natasha because she made the mistake of pulling an all-nighter the day before. She felt immensely guilty about that when Maria texted her to question her about it - apparently Natasha was still off-balance and Maria had been hoping that seeing her would help. Skye figured that if whatever happened was that bad, there wasn’t much that teaching self-defense tactics to a mediocre computer nerd would be able to help her with. Still, Skye made a point to make the next one in time, even if it also increased her focus on finding out what had been going on with this Coulson problem.
Considering she had been storming off to beat someone up the last time Skye had seen her, Natasha seemed surprisingly calm when Skye met her for her scheduled lessons. She addressed Skye with the same dry flirtatiousness that Skye was used to, and if she seemed a little more eager to join Skye on the treadmill and with her normal warm ups, maybe it was just that she thought it would help Skye’s continuing motivation.
The reality became much clearer when they got onto the mats.
Natasha had never actually sparred with Skye. Which made sense: Skye was only here to learn basic self-defense, and had only been doing this for about a month, whereas Natasha was a world-famous assassin trained since childhood. Actually fighting would be ridiculous. What would be the point? Still, they did occasionally go to the mats for something resembling a fight. Usually, it would be Natasha showing Skye some techniques, and then afterward having Skye test them on her. Generally, she approached Skye in an intentionally clumsy way, as though she were an untrained mugger or home-invader or something. Today, however, she seemed to have trouble staying in character. She would perform the demonstration just fine, but when Skye would go to practice the movement, she found Natasha countering the moves she had just taught her.
More than once, after pulling off a perfect break from a hold, Skye would find herself thrown to the floor. She worried a little, in the back of her mind, that it might be intentional; it almost felt like some strange sort of hazing, if it weren’t for that fact that Natasha had been training her for a month already and hadn’t been like this at all. She thought maybe Natasha was mad at her for some reason, but she always apologized profusely whenever it happened.
It wasn’t the only way she was more aggressive. Natasha had always used a healthy dose of physical affection to encourage her in these sessions. A deep kiss, a nip at the neck, hands slipped under her workout tank. Even if the tower was mostly empty, this was still technically a public place, though, so it rarely escalated past that. But now, almost every time Skye fell to the mat, she found herself on her back, with Natasha’s body pressed against her front, at least one hand in Skye’s hair, the other tracing the skin under her waistband, and pulling Skye into a long, passionate kiss. It was extremely distracting, and she thought they might have spent more time on the floor like that than actually learning any techniques. It wasn’t that she disliked it; on the contrary, Skye would have been completely down, if it hadn’t been happening in response to something big that Natasha wouldn’t tell her about.
For what must have been the twentieth time this morning, Skye slipped out of the hold Natasha was supposed to be showing her how to escape, only to be thrown against the nearby wall when Natasha shifted her weight instinctively in response.
Natasha was right on Skye‘s heels, her hands hitting the wall on either side of Skye’s waist. She was a little shorter than Skye and her nose almost hit Skye’s mouth before she pushed off and away. She muttered a brief “sorry, babe,” but she didn’t step back. Skye found herself distracted by the look in Nat’s eyes as she leaned in to meet Skye’s lips.
She kissed Skye hungrily, nipping lightly on her bottom lip as she pulled away. Her fingers pulled away from the wall and slid under Skye’s tank, tracing quickly up her sices and to her sports bra underneath. Natasha had barely broken a sweat, was barely breathing heavily, but she didn’t seem to mind that Skye had gotten a workout already. Her mouth dropped down to her jaw, and then Skye’s neck.
She bit lightly at the skin around Skye’s collar, eliciting a low whine at the sensation. Skye traced Natasha’s spine through her shirt and was rewarded with a slight shiver and Natasha meeting her eyes intently. Nat let one hand fall down and squirm slightly under Skye’s waistband. Skye’s breath caught a little bit in anticipation, and -
She pushed Natasha away lightly. “Not that this isn’t hot,” she said, reluctantly, “but public sex isn’t my thing.”
Nat took a step back and stood a little straighter. Her eyes darted around briefly as if she had forgotten where they were. “Whoops. You’re a little bit distracting today.” Her teasing smirk was back, but this time Skye wasn’t willing to let this go.
“Sure.
I’m
being distracting today. What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Natasha took a deep breath, as though she were actually considering the question. “I’m fine,” she finally answered.
“Right. And that’s why you’ve gone full Amazon warrior babe.”
“It’s a work problem.”
Skye let her weight fall back against the wall and she crossed her arms, hoping she looked disapproving enough. “It’s the same work problem. The - “ she almost said ‘Coulson,’ and then remembered that she had gotten that bit by eavesdropping “ - confidential thing. That Maria told you about the other day. How bad is it if it’s throwing you off this much?”
“It’s not,” Natasha said, matching Skye’s pose with crossed arms. “At least, not just that.”
Skye gave her an unimpressed look. She really hoped there weren’t two things that could throw Natasha off her game this much coming up within a week of each other.
“I’m being put back on duty,” Natasha admitted. “I’ve got a mission this weekend.”
Skye’s brow furrowed in disbelief. They would send her out after - whatever the Coulson thing was? That seemed like a shitty move. Skye could see that Nat was distracted already, and her missions were usually the life-and-death kind of thing. With a jerk of shock, she realized that she could lose her soulmate only weeks after meeting her. That thought was repulsive, and she kicked off from the wall and moved back to the center of the mats to try and distract herself from it.
“Your partner’s better?” she asked, feeling a little frantic, “I thought you were on leave. Is it…” she trailed off, realizing that any questions about Nat’s mission were going to be confidential.
Natasha shrugged lightly, and it said a lot about her headspace that Skye was able to tell how calculatedly casual it was. “I’ve been assigned a new partner.”
“They can’t just change your partner like that, can they?” Even as she asked it, Skye knew the question was stupid. Mission partners were at SHIELD’s discretion, and they could probably do whatever they thought would be the most effective. Even if she knew how much Hawkeye meant to Natasha from the way she talked about him.
“I think they can, actually,” Natasha replied, clearly finding some humor in her dumb question. “It’s fine.”
“How can you just…pretend to be okay with this?” Skye found herself blurting out. “You’ve told me about your missions with Hawkeye and him sponsoring you when you joined. And they’re just throwing someone new at you? And that’s not even mentioning whatever it was that Maria told you that’s got you all…” Skye floundered for a word in the face of Natasha’s raised eyebrow. “...randy” she finished lamely when she couldn’t find a more appropriate word.
Her word choice elicited an actual smile from Natasha. “Randy?”
“You know, the whole, ‘I really want to fight someone but I’m also really horny,’ thing you’ve got going on.”
Nat had fallen back on her teasing half-smile. “Sounds like someone’s projecting.”
Skye huffed. “Right, like you weren’t about to finger me against the wall of the gym.” Said aloud, the words sounded a lot hotter than they had in her head, and she was beginning to question why she had stopped Nat in the first place.
Nat stepping back into her personal space was not helping at all. Her smirk was wicked. “Well, if that’s what you want…”
It took all of her willpower for Skye to remind herself that this was still a public area. She was still worried about her soulmate, and this was just Nat trying to deflect, no matter how much she was winding Skye up. She managed a small step back.
“Are you really okay going on a mission? Now ?”
Natasha didn’t answer immediately. She was still studying Skye intently, but it was with less arousal and more actual consideration of her question. “I think that it’s supposed to help,” she admitted, finally. “An easy mission to distract myself with. I don’t do well with this…” she gestured vaguely at the room around her. “So they - Fury or whoever - want me out doing something. Get my mind off it.”
That was something Skye understood. She had never been good at this either, waiting around without any clear direction for the other shoe to drop. She wasn’t good at it now, as she practically buzzed with energy wanting to do something about whatever had thrown Natasha off so much. So as much as it galled her…she felt her shoulders relax a little. “Okay. That I believe.”
The best thing, though, was the way Natasha looked like a little bit of weight was off her shoulders just from talking with Skye about it. Nat huffed a small laugh. “Good. Now if we’re done with all the mushy stuff,” she stepped closer into Skye, intentionally getting close enough that Skye could almost feel the body heat radiating out from her. She hung her arms languidly around Skye’s neck. “Then we can still slip back up to the apartment and I can finally get you out of those sweatpants. Maria won’t have a meeting for another hour and I haven’t had a chance to make you scream for a whole week.”
Skye prided herself on her willpower, but even she had her limits. They had gotten their run done, at least, and if she had missed the proper self-defense instruction, it wasn’t like this was for her job or anything, so it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. So she let Nat drag her back to the elevator and into the apartment. And besides, they spent the remaining hour athletically enough that Skye thought she still got a pretty good workout.