Part 1

She should never have taken this job, May knew that now. Right from the first time Fury had told her about Coulson and how he was forming a new team and how he'd be asking her to join up, she should have said no. After Bahrain, despite the front she put on for the team, she constantly felt like there was a small part of her holding her back. A part that told her she couldn't keep killing. That she didn't want to kill again. Death always haunted agents – it just made them human. To pull the trigger of a gun, push someone off a building, to cut through their flesh with a knife - to end the life of another always took an emotional toll. Even if it were the life of an enemy, and it was a life taken in order to save a fellow agent or team member, the guilt always remained, festering away in the back of the mind, like a time-bomb waiting to go off.

She knew exactly how it felt.

She felt it every day.

But to take the life of a person she had once worked alongside, someone she had trusted, someone she had called a friend…that was different. She didn't know if she would be able to do it...

May looked around at her surroundings. She was hiding behind an interior wall of an abandoned warehouse. Well, technically, it was a HYDRA facility underneath an abandoned warehouse. They were in the middle of nowhere, and the rest of the team were spread out in various locations around the building. She hadn't liked the plan from the start – it left them exposed – but there were few other options. S.H.I.E.L.D had fallen, there was no back-up. They had to do this themselves. A few HYDRA agents had already been taken down by herself, and Coulson + Tripplett were searching the other side of the building, but Ward was unaccounted for; he was most likely guarding Skye personally.

Skye. Oh God, if anything had happened to her, May wouldn't forgive herself. Only last week she had walked away from the team, out of the secure base in the mountains and into the wilderness, in order to find Hill. She had gone because Coulson asked her to. He didn't trust her, and so she had no reason to stay. She hadn't realised however she was leaving Skye unprotected with a member of HYDRA. If she had stayed then, she surely would have realised – she wouldn't have let him kill Eric and take Skye that easily. She could have taken Ward out, and none of this would have happened.

He had fooled them all, her included.

Coulson had got Skye back at first, but then during the debacle of Ward ejecting FitzSimmons in a pod into the ocean, having to find them, and the team then trying to fight off Cybertek's new robotic creations, somehow HYDRA had managed to take her again. During the fighting, Garrett had showed up, much stronger than before, like he had upgraded himself with project Deathlok, and him and Ward had kidnaped Skye.

Ward. She let out an involuntary shudder. When Hill had told her of his involvement with HYDRA, she had felt sick, and in desperate need of a shower. How could she not have realised what he was? She had been sleeping with him for weeks for Christ's sake! But, as Coulson said, they'd had a wolf in the flock the whole time. Ward had manipulated them from the very first day, gaining their trust across several months, and now he had used that to get Skye.

Why HYDRA wanted her so badly, May didn't know entirely, but she had a horrible feeling it revolved around the fact that a) she had the alien cure running through her veins, and b) she was an 0-8-4. An unknown entity.

A sound from the next room jolted May from her thoughts. It was a man, talking to somebody else in the room.

It was Ward.

She carefully peered her head around the doorframe, and in a flash of shock and horror, took in the room before her.

It was an operating theatre, and Skye was lying on the table.

[This will be continued guys! I'm hoping to have it around 4 chapters long. Please let me know what you think!]