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skyeward month → week three: alternative universes ↳ day 1: reversed roles
It wasn’t all Daisy’s fault.
It wasn’t her fault that her father was a Hydra scientist and her mother an Inhuman subject who fell in love. It wasn’t her fault that her mother’s health was failing after years of testing, after years of her father’s research running dry. It wasn’t her fault that SHIELD had stolen the Kree artifacts that they needed to keep her mother alive.
It wasn’t her fault that Alexander Pierce revealed Hydra hiding inside SHIELD before she could complete her real mission. It wasn’t her fault that John Garrett had been assigned as her Hydra handler, and that he later went completely insane. It wasn’t her fault that SHIELD agents died in the war between the organizations.
But it was her fault that she let down her guard during the months undercover as Skye, an orphaned hacker searching for her parents. It was her fault that she actually liked her team, deluding herself into thinking that, for the first time in her life, she belonged somewhere, that she fit in. It was her fault that she thought maybe, just maybe, they would understand that she was only doing what she had to do. For her family. Because you don’t turn your back on family, no matter what they’ve done.
It was her fault that May had been shot in the gut in order to force Coulson to seek out the Guest House. It was her fault that Fitz was brain damaged, that he could hardly function. It was her fault that Grant Ward was dead inside, his eyes cruel and empty, instead of warm and encouraging, the way they should be. And it was her fault that while she rotted in this prison cell, her mother was most likely out there somewhere dying while her father slowly followed Garrett into insanity. That was her fault, the consequence of her failures.
But the rest of it? No. That wasn’t Daisy’s fault. And it wasn’t fair of them to blame her for that.
So when Coulson sat outside her cell, accusing her of crimes she’d had no choice but to commit, telling her that nothing she could do would ever, ever, make up for her sins, she would sit with her back to him and gave him nothing but silence.
She never said a word to anybody. But inside, she desperately wished that instead of Daisy Johnson, Agent of Hydra she could truly be Skye, Agent of SHIELD, the woman they once thought she was.
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It was all Grant’s fault.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t Grant’s fault that Skye - no, it’s Daisy, dammit - turned out to be a traitor. And it’s not his fault that Hydra had been hiding inside of SHIELD for 70 years in the first place. After all, that all started long before he joined the organization. Long before he was even born. So even he could admit that if Nick Fury couldn’t stop that from happening, if Captain America couldn’t stop it, it certainly wasn’t Grant Ward’s responsibility.
But it was his fault that he didn’t see the threat inside their very own team. It was his fault that he fell for the deception, the lies, the seemingly genuine innocence of the woman they recruited from the Rising Tide. It was his fault for not realizing that Skye’s ability to completely erase her digital existence really meant that she’d never existed at all. He was the specialist on the team, trained in risk assessment and eliminating those risks. But when Skye waxed poetic about freedom of information, about people working together to make a better world, rising above the petty rivalries of government bureaucracies and oligarchical corporations… it appealed to something inside him. Ten years of working as a secret agent takes its toll, it strips away your ability to remember that not everyone in the world had a secret agenda, not everyone was hiding alien artifacts or weapons of mass destruction in their basements. It was refreshing to work with someone who didn’t automatically assume the worst of everyone.
It was completely his fault for falling for the lie that she cared about him. For falling in love with her.
Which meant it was his fault that FitzSimmons were caught up in this awful war, injured and traumatized. It was his fault that May now suffered the same risks as Coulson from being pumped full of some weird alien drug. It was his fault that Koenig was dead, that the Fridge security system had been hacked to allow Hydra agents access, and the team was shattered. None of that would have happened if he’d just done his damned job instead of letting a pair of brown eyes melt away his training.
So even though he knew Sk-Daisy was kept on their own base, he didn’t argue when Coulson kept him off the guard roster for her cell. He stayed away from the medical unit when he heard rumors that she’d been transferred in there for emergency care, trying to convince himself that they would all be better off if whatever was wrong killed her. And he jumped at the opportunity to leave the base on solo missions from Coulson, looking for more examples of that weird writing they’d first seen in Belarus and later scrawled by Garrett into the glass of the Bus.
And when Coulson finally told Grant that he was to go down to Cellblock D and interrogate their prisoner, he simply nodded, locked away the part of him that just wanted to have Skye back again, to listen to her teasing him and saying bang when she pulled the trigger on the practice gun, to see her goading May into a smile and begging Coulson to let her drive Lola, to kiss her until the world faded away and nothing existed except for the two of them… and he vowed to do his job. Nothing more. Nothing less.