So I got this idea a long time ago after watching the episode where Skye goes to the Inhuman day spa (no idea what episode number it was); it's grown to include far, far more. This was supposed to be very different originally, but I couldn't get to a computer, so it stayed in my head, festering and changing (although I do believe the story is better for it). I tried writing it in a different way than I normally do (flashbacks? what?), but hopefully it turned out alright.

I don't own Agents of SHIELD.

The first time Skye is lied to, she's a baby.

Her mother holds her in her arms—it'll be okay, you'll be alright.

It isn't.

She is seven years old when she tries to run away (for the first time, anyways).

Truth: nobody wants her.

Lie: it's her fault.

(She doesn't know this yet, but when does learn, she'll question her whole past.)

The nuns at the orphanage try, they really do. But every single time she comes back, she wonders why she has to go there again. One by one, the people she know (she won't call them friends because they aren't her friends—she doesn't have friends because nobody wants her) stop returning, trickling away like water down a drain. But she is caught in the filter, not pure enough to get through.

One day she is fed up of it all, of foster homes and orphanages and names and Mary Sues, and she decides to leave. She packs up her possessions in a comically multicolored knapsack (there's still plenty of space left over) and hides by the front door before the nuns go to sleep.

But she is only seven, and the nuns have had this happen before, and there's an alarm that goes off when she tries to sneak out of the door (she should have chosen the window).

Afterwards, they scold her: "Mary Sue Poots, how could you do such a thing? We've been your home for seven years, and this is how you repay us? You'll have to..."

They aren't her home, though (they lied, everybody lies).

She doesn't have a home.

(She really hates her name. A few weeks later, she looks up at the moon at night and decides that her name will be Skye.)

Skye is ten when she is whisked away to another family, another house where she supposes she'll stay for a few weeks—a month at most—before they decide they don't like her.

She stays for six.

On the day she arrives, the nuns introduce her as Mary Sue Poots but she defiantly announces that her name is Skye. The nuns frown, but her soon-to-be-foster-father laughs, and she thinks that maybe this won't be so bad. (And it isn't—those six months are the best ones of her life.)

She wants the Brodys to like her so badly, because if this is what a family feels like she wants to be a part of one forever. (One day, her wish will be granted, but she will be twenty-four and it is an eternity away.)

There are no other children in the house and Skye is treated like a princess until the day she's turned away. Once, she tries calling Mrs. Brody Mom; she purses her lips and says nothing.

The next day, Skye is sent back to the orphanage.

(Truth: she expected it. Lie: she didn't care.)

By the time she is thirteen, she spends all of her time at the internet cafe down the street, fascinated by the machine that is called a computer (she used one for the first time because of the Brodys, but that is irrelevant to her interest).

Computers don't lie.

Skye leaves on her eighteenth birthday—the moment she can. The nuns offer to let her stay at St. Agnes', but she can't stay there any longer because then she'd be reminded that she isn't wanted. They give her a gift when she parts (After all, she thinks bitterly, I'm the only one that stayed): a PC that is far too expensive and far too nice for her.

She lives in her car for a year, working below the minimum wage to keep herself alive. One day, working as a waitress, she sees a man who is far by the most beautiful man she's ever met. He introduces himself as Miles, and she introduces herself as Skye; later that night, she is in his bed with nothing on (she says it's just this once, but just this once turns into every week).

Truth: she likes him.

Lie: she loves him.

Sometime over the course of her relationship, he tells her what he does and she tells him about herself. He likes computers; so does she. He says he's a member of a hacktivist group dedicated to finding people with superpowers and it seems like she can finally do something good with the world. And he seems so real, so tangible, unlike everything else in her life. He is a constant.

At some point in time, the conversation goes to finding out about her parents and her family. He teaches her to hack—not just well, but really well—and says she's his best pupil (she wonders who his others have been, but she soon forgets those words for another: SHIELD). She decides she wants to bring SHIELD down.

When she finds out what's really behind SHIELD, she's not so sure there's a line between good and bad anymore. She learns to love her team—especially a man named Grant Ward, someone just as damaged as she is.

(But then Hydra comes, and everything she knows is made of lies).

Her family is ripped apart, shorn down until it is ready to break. On the outside, she is a SHIELD agent, but inside, she is still that scared little girl who wanted nothing but her family back.

Truth? She wants a home again.

Skye has her family.

Her family rips it apart.

Sometime after she arrives at Afterlife, she realizes that the family that she had been looking for all her life wasn't the one she had gotten.

Or rather, she had found her family outside of her real family.

Her family is in Coulson, in Fitz and Simmons and May. Her family is her team, who has looked out for her her entire life.

But she cannot help but notice that her real family, in a way, is nice. It is made up of ghosts, shadows of real people; but they are ghosts together, able to share what they might have had once upon a time. Maybe this could be her happy ending.

She should have known that happy endings never last.

The first time Skye is forced to lie to someone who she cares about, it is to her dad.

It is to her mom.

It is to her family.

Welp. I hope you liked that!

(Also, if it's not clear, the last section refers to The Frenemy of My Enemy.)

R&R'ing would make this girl very happy!