Their little star

Melinda

Walking through the BUS, Melinda can hear the voices of her team, happy to see that Skye isn't hiding away in her bunk anymore. She only has energy to handle one person hiding and Phil is testing all of her energy right now.

"I'm picking up on the rivalry between Sciences and Operations. You and Coulson past all that, or are you going to help Ward steal their mascot?"

She hears Skye ask and a mental image of her, Natasha and Clint working something out for a heist like that enters her mind and she wish she could smile. Knowing it will only confuse the two men, she makes sure to keep her normal stoic face.

"We're not going. After we drop you off, Coulson and I have other matters to attend to."

She informs the group before she starts to walk off, she needed to make sure everything is done and ready for when they land. She's not all to happy to let Skye go without her, but she knows Jemma will make sure to keep her safe and what she and Phil is about to do... it's just for the best that she isn't around for it.

After dropping of the children and making sure her plane is in auto pilot, she decides it's about to time to take the bull by its horns. Leaving the silence and comfort of her cockpit and heads for Phil's office, not even knocking on his door. She already knew what she would find when she enters after all, it has been the same thing since they got him back.

"You have got to put that away."

"How can I? You read it."

She not only read it, but she also has the whole file and the things that wasn't in it memorised, not that Phil needs to know about that part.

"And you haven't stopped reading it."

"I just can't get my head around it. I remember what happened, the pain, but I also remember Tahiti. It's..."

"What's in that file, it's the truth."

"Says who?"

"Director Fury."

"If I hadn't asked, he'd have kept it from me, kept me from knowing."

"And now that you know, do you feel better? Put it away."

It was like speaking to Natasha and Clint when they put their mind on something that would most definitely end badly. A solid wall that would take a lot of effort to break down, and if she wasn't still angry with him on how he treated Skye, she would have had more energy to try and break that down. Seeing how he closes his own file; she is at least happy that he is somehow listening to her.

"You wanna tell me why we're flying to Mexico City?"

He asks her instead, a question she at least can answer him properly. Before he had been taken, he had asked if she had heard anything from Maria or Natasha about Skye's past and with what she had found now, she thought this would help push him into the right direction of actually realise who she is, without Skye telling him herself. Or having Melinda breaking her promise to Skye.

"To get your head working on something else. I've been looking into Skye's past like you asked, into the agent who dropped her off at the orphanage."

"Agent Avery. She was killed."

"But her partner wasn't. He disappeared."

She informs him, handing over a tablet for him to read.

"Richard Lumley."

"Went off-grid 23 years ago. Day after Avery was crossed off."

"He's resurfaced?"

"A few days ago, a Mexican teenager posted a selfie on his Facebook page and managed to capture our guy leaving a grocery store in the background."