A/N So this is my first attempt at an actual fanfic after years of reading and doing RPG! I'd appreciate any reviews that come my way ^^ My writing style is (naturally) very dark, so you can expect a lot of dark themes and trains of thought. Set in Agents of SHIELD Season 1 – Skye is not inhuman and gets her powers via a Hydra experiment. SHIELD believes she ran off after they discovered she was a Rising Tide hacker still. Fair warning, this first chapter moves pretty fast and is short because it's solely setting up for the actual plot.

She'd stopped counting the days when they started to blur into weeks, months… hell, maybe even years. Her eyes were closed, hands gently trembling as she pressed them against her legs. She couldn't show weakness, not here… They were always watching her, waiting for her to give them a reason to take her back to that room. She'd curled up in the corner, a permanent ball of a woman with her knees pulled tight to her chest and her eyes closed, face buried against the rest of her body. DROP IT! It was the voice of a woman, one she was certain she'd never heard before in her life… what was happening?

True fear struck into her heart, her shaking continuing as Skye tried to force herself to breathe. She'd been trained better than this… what would Ward say if he could see her like this? And May? What did they think of her anyway? She knew what they probably thought – they found out she was still Rising Tide, and they thought she ran back to her 'friends' and that she'd never truly been interested in SHIELD.

They had no idea.

A vaguely familiar redhead came into view, breaking into the small container that had been her cell for who knows how long, those unfamiliar eyes locking onto her figure. Skye couldn't bring herself to look up at the woman, unsure of her true intentions. She was quick to fight off the guards that had worked their way to them in the deafening silence between the pair. "Clint, I've got one… find the other two so we can get out of here. Cap, I need someone to carry her." She was talking through some kind of communication device, Skye figured.

"Hey, my team is going to get you out of here. What's your name?" The demands were said in a soft tone, not harsh like before but Skye did not answer. At this point, she didn't trust her own voice or her brain's ability to portray the information accurately. She instead sucked in a harsh but deep breath, shaking her head. The floor around them started to tremble, taking Natasha by surprise and causing the fear to become worse within Skye herself. The assassin jumped into action, knocking the prisoner out with a swift blow to the head (though the trained assassin naturally was able to do so without giving her a serious head injury) and the trembles subsided.

"Watch yourselves, we have powered individuals in rough shape and they might not take too kindly to anyone's presence, even if we're here to help. We need to get them to the tower so Bruce can look them over." She reported in through the comms as Steve showed up, carefully picking Skye up bridal style as Natasha covered him.

"Subdue but don't kill if provoked… we need answers, even if they are aggressive." Steve added on as Clint located the other two prisoners.

Skye was quickly carried back to the quinjet along with the two other victims, both of whom were already unconscious when they found them. Bruce instantly began to look them over, starting with the other girl in the mix as she was in the worst shape. "They've been electrocuted and kicked around at the very least. I need a CT scan to see the damage, check for internal bleeding, and do full workups to find out just what Hydra did to them."

Clint hopped in the pilot's seat and they took off, heading back to the Tower where they could hopefully bring these prisoners back from their trauma and put them on a road to recovery.