A/N: So I haven't seen episode 1:18 yet, keep that in mind as this likely has already been AU'ed. I wrote this while being stuck in an airport after my flight was delayed, making me miss Agents of SHIELD nooooo! I might make it multi-chapter depending on what y'all think, please let me know! Massive 1:17 spoilers within... sorry, UK.

They leave him stewing in an interrogation room for hours, chained at the wrists and ankles to the table. He knows he's on a military base because of the guard in Army camo behind him, but aside from that, he's still scattered and confused since regaining consciousness and finding himself in enemy hands.

When the door opens, he's not sure who he was expecting, but it sure as hell wasn't her. He tries to hide his shock but fails, his eyes wide and mouth falling just the slightest bit open at the sight of her. She looks small and fragile, clutching two water bottles and a metal clipboard tightly to her chest. She nods curtly to the guard in the corner, who then proceeds out of the room, closing the door with finality after himself.

She sits in the chair across from him without so much as glancing his way. Several minutes go by in silence, she's staring down at the clipboard in her lap, and his eyes are fixed on her. Eventually she looks up at him, her brown doe eyes uncharacteristically hard. His heart stutters and it betrays him into speaking.

"Skye." It comes out rather dry and choked. Ward winces.

Skye responds by unscrewing the cap from one of the water bottles and popping a plastic straw into it. She slides it across the table and he immediately bends over to drain most of it.

"Thank you," he says when he sits back up, and she raises an eyebrow. He frowns. "What?"

She shrugged. "I'm just thinking, why bother with the courtesy? You're a traitor and a murderer, is being polite really a necessity at this point?"

He stares at her, noticing all the little things he has been missing so desperately over the last five months. The long curls of her hair, the smoothness of her skin, the bright spark of intelligence in her huge eyes. She's wearing a long purple sweater and black leggings and she looks young and vulnerable. No, he thinks to himself. He can't do this. Stay strong. "Force of habit," he shrugs in reply.

"Ah," she says, and he thinks there is a flicker of hurt across her face. Good. They can't weaken him by sending her. She shouldn't even be here.

"You shouldn't be here," spills out of him before he can stop it.

She cocks her head. "Why not?"

"You're not an interrogator," he sneers. "This is a waste of time."

She blinks. "Well, maybe I just wanted to see you."

"No," Ward snaps in reply, but inside his chest clenches. Dammit. She shouldn't be here, he won't be able to keep it together if she's here.

"Okay, then," she says slowly. "So I'm here because it was my operation that brought you in and I wanted to see the results with my own eyes."

No no no no. He knew it was the truth, even as he tried not to believe it. "How?" he choked out.

She pulled a flat rectangular object off the top of the clipboard and slid it onto the table. The hard drive. The one she gave him with all their team's secrets. He stared at it, not understanding.

"Hidden tracer program & Trojan. Every time you plugged it in, I had you. Location, systems access, every keystroke entered. We've been inside every Hydra system since you left."

He could hear his blood rushing in his ears. "But that would mean…"

"I knew. Yes."

"How long have you known? How?" he asked, his voice sitting strangely in his throat.

Skye's face was expressionless. "AC says I'm good at reading people. I guess he's right. I always knew you were holding something back, Ward. It was obvious. And when things started to get really heavy, you began saying stuff that worried me. About never forgiving... about never regretting... disconcerting things. When I started combing through psych profiles, I read yours and I knew for sure."

His mind was racing, the questions piling up in his brain faster than he could organize them to put to her. "Did Coulson know? Why didn't you stop me?"

Skye chewed her lip briefly, and nodded slowly. "Yes, I told Coulson and we made contingency plans. Things like the hard drive. He wanted to take things further, but... but I..." She trailed off and looked down at her hands. He could see that she was fighting for composure.

"Skye?" he whispered.

When she looked back up, her gaze was hard again. "I made a bad call. I thought, based on your past, that maybe there was hope... that maybe what you needed was a family and a place to belong and someone who loved you." Her voice cracked at the end and she seemed furious about it. "I was wrong," she spat. "And good men and women died because of it."

Someone who loved him. His head started to swim. "In the supply room... you knew..."

"Yes," she snapped. "I knew but it didn't matter to me. I wanted to show you, Ward, that whatever happened, there was someone real who cared about you. Something worth fighting for. I knew I was out of time. I thought I could convince you..." she shook her head in anger. "That's enough. We both know how that played out. You left with the hard drive and our world collapsed."

An unfamiliar cold feeling had begun tingling in the pit of his stomach. He wondered if it was the feeling of having made a terrible mistake. "The hard drive..." he murmured. "It's encrypted."

"Of course it is," Skye scoffed. "Despite the events in the janitorial closet, I'm not a total idiot. I note that quite a few hackers took a crack at it, though."

His breath was quickening. "They are hunting you, Skye! They need you to decrypt it. I was trying to throw them off, little things, whenever I could... trying to protect you. Please, you have to believe me..."

"I do," she interrupted. "I was watching everything you did, remember? It took me a while to figure out what the hell you were doing. A deleted log entry here, a misplaced decimal or a typo there... you were taking stupid risks. They almost caught you a few times, I had to revert your changes more than once."

He stared at her. "So while I was trying to save you, you were saving me."

She shrugged sadly. "Unlike you, Ward, I never wanted anyone to die."

He bit back his excuses and denial of her words, he knew it would be a waste of time and breath. He was even more confused than before, he felt like he might shatter apart from the inside. He started to shake, foreign emotions beginning to bubble out of him. He looked up at Skye, his eyes wide and pleading, his face deathly pale.

She stood up abruptly, snatching the hard drive back up from the table. "So that's the story," she murmured. "There is an interrogator en route for you, I'm sure that isn't a surprise. I heard they sent Agent Romanoff. You should be proud."

"Skye, wait..." he whispered miserably.

"Save it," she retorted. "This is the mess you got yourself into on your own... and that's how you'll face the consequences. Alone."

He shook his head in despair. "No, that's not... I mean, yes, I know it's my mess and I'll pay any price. But Skye... it's you that I'm scared for. They are going to find you and I would die to protect you if I could, please. Please listen to me!"

She had turned her back to him but his words still pierced her. Ever so slightly she began to tremble, and it was only seconds later that the door opened with a bang and Agent Triplett strode in, his face like thunder.

"Time to go, Baby Girl," he said to her warmly, at total odds with the look of absolute hatred he had turned on Ward. Trip gently folded an arm around her shoulder and she nodded. Without looking back, she allowed Trip to guide her from the interrogation room, completely missing the look of utter devastation on Ward's face.

The door closed behind them and her family was there. Hands wrapped around her, rubbed her back, pushed the brown tresses from her face. May took the hard drive and clipboard out of her arms as Fitz murmured soothing words. Simmons smiled encouragingly and Coulson nodded at her.

"You were great, Skye," May told her, which helped to slow the tears that were building in her eyes.

"You're a trooper," Coulson concurred. "I'm so proud of you, sweetheart."

"We watched the whole thing," Simmons chimed in. "I don't think he noticed, do you?"

Skye shook her head. Her hands pressed against her oversized sweater and thoughtfully wrapped around the bump of her rapidly expanding waistline. "Nope," she said with a small smile. "I'm positive. He didn't catch on to our little monkey at all."