Chapter Text
It didn't happen suddenly — it wasn't as if one week she was at fifty percent and the next week seventy-five percent, and then one-hundred the next; it happened softly.
So softly, Daisy wasn't even aware of it.
Not until this one random day she paused to look down at her feet. And it could be because she wasn't entirely there, or because she'd been incorporeal for so long she'd finally gone a little crazy — always a safe bet — but she could swear that though the ground was not moving, it had this... steady beating, deep beneath it, like that of a drum.
Daisy sank to her haunches, laying a tentative hand on the ground.
It felt... familiar, somehow, in the way that Daisy had heard this before; familiar enough for a sudden urge to wrap her fingers around it and hold on with her life, impossible as it may be for her alone to tether it to this world, to surge forth from deep within her chest.
Daisy curled her fingers, and against the backs of her fingers, it beat, fragile but steady.
A gentle exhale parted Daisy's lips.
It wasn't a drum.
It was a heartbeat.
And if she closed her eyes, she could see it, like moonlight glimmering on a lake surface — from where she stood, there was a wide range where the heartbeats converged, but there was a faint line where the overlap was most concentrated; and if she charted a path along it, she'd find its source with a pinpoint precision.
Well — sources. There were multiple heartbeats, some easier to sense than others, and differed only by the smallest of variations.
Daisy closed her eyes and breathed out slowly, focusing all of her energy into listening, drawing a line in her mind. It was a little difficult — she had always been able to sense, and eventually recognize, the unique vibrations of her teammates, but she'd never tuned into their actual heartbeats before, and she ended up getting a little lost and having to backtrack more than once.
The tilt of her head was unconscious, the forward slide of her foot more instinct than an actual conscious decision.
What happened next wasn't something Daisy could acutely describe — the best she could come up with, in retrospect, was that she had sent out vibrations, modified from those that she usually utilized in combat, that, upon hitting the source of the heartbeat she was tracking, had... bounced back?
Her intention to amplify the heartbeat was only marginally achieved — it had grown a little more distinguishable from the others, but the main point of interest was that Daisy could see the person, and everything in the room they were in.
It wasn't as if she were absorbing vibrations and 'reading' them, as she'd sometimes done to ensure a building's infrastructure was safe enough to enter, nor was she feeling the vibrations of footsteps upon the floor. It wasn't 'seeing' in the conventional sense, either, but more like it was simply the closest word Daisy could think of to describe the culmination of feedback from vibrations running up and along the vague shape of a person, and with their feet on the floor acting as a second extension for her... senses?... the 'feedback' included immediate surroundings and even objects being held.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Daisy headed for the sealed glass doors, barely even flinching now as she phased through the material.
Finding herself surrounded on all sides by all kinds of equipment she couldn't even begin to pronounce, let alone remember the names of, was no new thing to her, and she in fact drew a strange comfort from the familiarity of it.
What was new to her, however, was the noise.
Daisy didn't know how Fitz or Hunter could stand it — all that humming, reverberating, and pulsing, not to mention the quiet, constant chittering of glass on glass. And if not that, then the perpetual shivering and oscillating of the very delicate, and very expensive, instruments was giving her anxiety.
Daisy faux-glared at a beaker sitting a little too close to the table edge for her comfort — with both of them juddering on the spot like they were little kids doped up with sugar and set free in a candy store, how could she be comfortable? — and though she knew her hand would go right through, reached out for it anyway.
Glass on glass squeaked as the beaker skidded back to sit in the direct centre of the table.
Daisy stared.
She... hadn't done that, had she?
No, she thought quickly, no way. She hadn't even touched it, and Fitz had been walking by; maybe he'd pushed it back on his way past. The previous 'seeing' incident notwithstanding, her powers didn't work anymore, Daisy had tried, early on, but she hadn't even seen the air waver or heard the thrum of vibrations that came with her otherwise-invisible 'abilities'.
Even if it did, Daisy told herself as she raised her arm and pointed it at Fitz's blueprints, she didn't know why it worked this time, of all times.
Daisy paused, watching her fingers spread apart and stretch forward; watched the stack of blueprints past the arc of her wrist.
...okay, so she was a high school dropout. That didn't mean she wasn't smart in her own way, even if she could never really keep up with Fitzsimmons' technobabble and she only understood about a little over half of what Mack always went on about while fixing up cars.
Still, she could puzzle together what had happened on her own once she had enough pieces.
When that building had collapsed, she had known it minutes before it actually did — even without the abrupt, concerning elevations in the vibrations she was 'reading', there had been a terrible stillness in her bones, and her muscles had tensed of their own accord, gooseflesh erupting on the back of her neck and on her arms as some deep, primal instinct had her standing to attention.
It was a far more human instinct that had her throwing up her arms over her head, as if mere bones sheathed in muscle and skin could possibly provide any protection from cement and brick and steel — but it was that same deep, primal instinct that sent vibrations surging forth from her fingertips.
She remembered opening her eyes, curious as to the lack of expected impact; remembered thinking her eyesight was blurring from the smoke but instead realizing, with the sudden deafening silence save for the thrumming of a hummingbird's wings, it was the very air around her that was wavering.
But when that last bomb they'd somehow missed went off, it had sent out a shockwave far more powerful than her own weak, unsteady vibrations — and the critical thing about high explosives, Daisy sighed now, was how quickly it gave out the energy, and how that energy then dissipated into the environment.
In this case, the 'environment' was Daisy herself.
In that the shockwave had blown back her meagre forcefield and somehow propagated the vibrations into her body.
"Okay. You're stiffer, and heavier, so you vibrate slower," she told the beaker, very seriously. Turning to the blueprints, she addressed them in much the same way; "You're lighter, and more flexible, so you vibrate faster. And you," she hooked a thumb in her shirt collar, "are sentient, and have powers that involve vibrations."
Daisy hadn't had a single clue that her ability to generate and manipulate vibrations extended to the those within and of her own self, but here she was. Add to that, she had even less of a clue if what she theorized — heavy emphasis on the 'theory' part — held up with any kind of scientific principle, concept, or law, but she was going with it.
Because, well, how else would one explain the uncontrollable vibrating of their own body?
'Uncontrollable' because Daisy might have had the ability to manipulate her own molecules, but that didn't mean she just automatically knew how to do it once made aware of it.
Although... now that she thought about it, hadn't she done that every time she phased through an object, but managed to stay on the ground? If she were truly, wholly vibrating at a frequency that allowed her to pass through solid objects, she most certainly would've gone through the floor, too, but for some reason, her feet never seemed to match that frequency.
So if parts of her body could vibrate at different frequencies, then that meant she technically knew how to do it already, if un- and/or subconsciously, so it was really only a matter of figuring how to do it consciously... right?
"So," May's voice echoed in her head, and Daisy could almost hear the slight arch of her eyebrow, and the accompanying, playful if silent, challenge, "what are you waiting for? Get the hell on with it."
It was second nature to let her eyes fall shut, to use the filling of her lungs and the movement of air within herself to find the beat of her heart, letting it fill her ears and anchoring herself to solely that.
Daisy imagined her heart, imagined the blood filling her right atria, imagined the tricuspid valve snapping open and closed as blood was pumped into her right ventricle, where it would follow a path to her lungs, then to her left atria, through the mitral valve, and finally to her left ventricle.
And then she focused on what was beneath that steady thumping — on that gentle buzz, like a colony of bees, high in pitch and so much faster than her own heart.
With each contraction of her heart, she imagined a pulse radiating throughout her body, and the cells that the 'pulse' came in contact with. Slowly, she let her senses stretch, extend, allowing external stimuli to be accounted for, one at a time.
She hadn't noticed it before, and doubted she ever would have if she weren't stuck in this in-between, but there was just the slightest jarring of external vibrations affecting her own, natural frequency. It was briefer than brief, her own vibrations absorbing them, overpowering and returning to their rightful frequency within less than half a second, but it was there, and that was enough.
She slid her foot forward, the indiscernible vibrations she sent rippling through the floor more her body automatically following through with her thoughts rather than a consciously mediated action.
She pushed them towards the stack of blueprints, tunnelling on them, and then alone. They felt... 'faster' didn't seem to be the right word for it; it wasn't exactly that, nor was it more or less 'intense' or 'weighted' or 'fixed' or...
There was a difference about it, marginal but very real, that Daisy couldn't put into words, because none yet existed that could properly describe it.
Just as she couldn't describe how she knew her own molecules were suddenly responding, or how she had done it in the first place.
Nothing had changed, when she opened her eyes, it wasn't as if her field of vision had altered at all to make things more or less visible than others, and neither Fitz nor Hunter seemed to be moving at speeds out of the ordinary.
A tiny shift of pressure erupted into an inaudible sound reverberating throughout her body — and Daisy let it free.
There was a sharp clatter as the pen cup toppled over, spilling its contents all over the linoleum flooring.
"The hell...?" Fitz's head had popped up from his bench like a whack-a-mole, and even from all the way across the lab, Daisy could see his brow furrowed in confusion. "Hunter? That you?"
"Nope, haven't gotten up since I came in," Hunter's voice said a-matter-of-factly from somewhere beneath the bench and between the wall and shelf. "Probably something just wasn't put down right and tipped over."
The sudden urge to groan in exasperation dampened Daisy's moment of triumph just a little, and with a huff, she raised an open palm towards the safety shower. Fitz was already picking up the pens and sliding them back into the cup, setting it far from the edge before heading back to his project of the day, presumably brushing it off as just an ordinary happenstance.
Daisy huffed again; she wasn't going to allow her oblivious boys to invalidate what she'd just done, no siree. Besides, she contemplated as she extended her senses in a search for another, different yet familiar, frequency, it was kind of fun, exploring this new ability of hers. She hoped she would still have it, if and when she got back to her proper... dimension? World? Universe? Eh, what did it matter, the words were practically interchangeable.
"Wh— Hunter!"
"Hm?" Now the mercenary's head rose into sight, his eyes quickly finding Fitz. "The hell you think you're doing, mate?"
"It's not me!" Fitz spluttered against the jet of water that was firing right at his face.
"What, and you think I turned it on from all the way over here?" Hunter's grin was wide. "I appreciate the flattery, but unfortunately, it wasn't me. Now turn it off, you goof. You'll catch a cold at that rate."
"It's already off! I— sh*t— I think it's broken, or—"
Daisy giggled, and while she was not bouncing on the balls of her feet but vibrating with the absolute giddiness coursing through her veins, she barely recognized that, too consumed by the repeat and rebound crescendoing into unheard sound.
She hadn't yet known about the connections between herself, Inhumans, and the Afterlife when she'd first manipulated water. Coulson had sent her to a safehouse, and despite the loneliness and the pain that had lanced down her arms and fingers, that had been the first moment Daisy had been truly in awe of her newfound powers — a genuine awe, stained neither by terror, horror or despair.
It made sense, she now supposed gleefully, that she should return to her 'roots', so to speak.
Hunter had gotten up now, setting something down with a dull clack. Curious, Daisy stepped through a chair and closer, still dedicating a majority of her focus towards keeping the water's spray from stopping.
Her own face, sketched with lead and charcoal, drew her up short. Mid-laugh and with her hair freshly cut to her jaw, she looked every bit a girl still growing into womanhood.
Distantly, she heard Hunter and Fitz sigh in relief.
Daisy tore her eyes away, just for a moment, to find the right angle that would let her flip the light switch off — not that it did much, what with walls being more glass than anything else that allowed the hallway lights to bleed in.
Fitz only sighed, wiping droplets out of his eyes."If I didn't know better, I'd say Tobias was back," he muttered, rubbing his hand on his jeans before wiping at his face again, a tad uselessly.
Hunter tossed him a roll of paper towels on his way to try the light switch, already padding dry his own, drenched, shirt to the best of his ability. "Who?"
"Tobias Ford. We ran into him back in our BUS days, before the Fall of S.H.I.E.L.D." Despite the circ*mstances, nostalgia pulled the purse of Fitz's lips into a small smile. "The short of it was, we thought a girl had some form of telekinesis after a particle accelerator exploded. Turns out, the technician— Tobias— kept loosening the couplings so she'd come check it out. When the particle accelerator exploded, he was trapped between two worlds, and all he was doing was trying to protect her from everyone who was blaming her. 'Cause he liked her. D-Daisy was, uh, was the one who figured it out. And May was the one who convinced him to let the girl go."
When Hunter looked up, it was with a smile entirely too soft for a scruffy mercenary's face. "Yeah?"
Fitz bent over a little, scrubbing at his hair. "Yeah. Coulson said it was because she saw the good in people, knew what made them, uh, tick. She was a friend to— to the, uh, girl, she couldn't wait to get inside May's head, and she figured out Tobias without even trying."
The admiration in his voice was palpable, the little smile on his face nothing if not adorable and, for once, reaching his eyes, even through the glaze of nostalgia.
But Hunter was fixed on one very important thing: "'Couldn't wait to get inside May's head'?"
"Yeah they didn't, uh..." Fitz's smile was sheepish, and if they weren't soaked through and stuck to his thighs, he probably would've shoved his hands into his pant pockets. "They had a bit of a... rocky start."
That was a bit of an understatement, Daisy mused with a curl of her lips, considering she had been thoroughly convinced May hated her for a good portion of their BUS days.
Fitzsimmons had been easy to befriend, and Coulson had been the one to give her a chance, and even Ward had eventually warmed up to her, enough that he offered to become her S.O. The only one who hadn't seemed to want to give her either time of day or a chance, had been their pilot, Melinda May.
Daisy figured, in retrospect, that she had been an unknown variable and, given May's mission to watch over Coulson, it was understandable May would be wary of some hacker Coulson had picked up in an L.A. alleyway out of her own 'mobile office' — which was unfortunate for the both of them, given May had unwittingly cemented herself as something of a role model for Skye within a day of their meeting.
And Daisy would never say so to May, especially not now considering all they'd become, both individually and to each other, but if there was one interaction of theirs she would never forget, it was when May's words, harsh with bitterness and sharp with severity, had cut her in ways even she hadn't expected.
"You have to decide why you're here. We have a mission, and it's not to find your parents. If you can't put aside your personal attachments, then you shouldn't be here."
Though Daisy tried to forget, Skye refused to let them go; they still echoed in her ears from time to time. It was why she had worked so hard to lock away the foster child inside of her who longed for the unconditional affection and validation of a parent — or as close to a parent as she could get, anyway — and desperately craved the comfort of a lingering touch that wasn't meant to hurt, but was gentle, and kind.
It was odd, Daisy thought to herself with a perhaps misplaced fondness, that her first memory of such a touch was also from May.
When Simmons had been infected with that alien virus, it had been May's arm at her back, May's hand that was on her arm, firm and supportive and gentle and everything Skye had needed, as she'd turned her away from the lab and led her upstairs.
It hadn't lasted very long, but it had been enough for Skye to hold onto, and let that hold her together.
Odder still, Daisy thought again, as she carefully flipped a page to a sketch of herself and Mack leaning against one another on the couch, gaming controllers in their hands and wide grins on their faces, was that such lethal hands could have the most delicate of touches; that they could take lives and break and hurt, but also heal, shape, and piece together what had been shattered.
Odd, yes, but then again, wasn't that who Melinda May was, at her absolute core?
From one who was born feeling too deeply for their world, a walking contradiction was born.
Initial frustration had quickly shifted into fondness, and even a little amusem*nt, after that realization.
Coding was like solving a puzzle, with the most enjoyable part being she got to decide how to solve said puzzle — a principle Skye had applied to her approach in searching for the woman behind Agent May's mask.
She had wanted to know Melinda, not May; wanted to know her the way Coulson did.
Well, Daisy amended with a mix between a grimace and a light grin, perhaps not exactly the way Coulson did.
But May was always the strong one, the rock, the level head that everyone turned to when things got tough or confusing. And while Skye had appreciated her guiding hand, looked for it and relished in the steady safety it provided, she had come to notice that though May rarely refused a chance to help, it was even rarer for her to accept help for herself, from anyone.
She had pushed herself harder than before, then, to become someone Melinda May could not only be proud of, but could depend on and be okay with doing so.
She had pushed May, too, prying at the cracks when she could and backing off to give her space to breathe when she could see she needed it.
And slowly but surely, the field of landmines had transformed into a smooth road.
Daisy quickly slammed her eyes shut when a charcoal sketch of Bobbi, hair mussed and barely covered in only a bedsheet, graced her eyes. She immediately flipped the next page over, willing her mind to bleach that image from her memory.
The next sketch, which Hunter had likely been working on before Fitz had interrupted, did just that.
Even partially done, Daisy could still make out the softness of May's face, the relaxed slope of her shoulders, the little whisper of a smile that was almost always unconscious but always reached her eyes, made all the more apparent on paper.
But Hunter wouldn't have added those things on a whim, he wouldn't do something like that, not with a depiction of May, of all people, which meant he had merely amplified what was already there, and Daisy knew what to look for so the little nuances of her S.O. was more obvious to her than most... but she hadn't noticed it, at the time.
She hadn't noticed May leaning quietly against the doorway rather than standing, or the way her eyes were fixed solely on her, even when Coulson stood opposite. She hadn't seen that warm sheen in her eyes, or understood what it meant beyond a fleeting glimpse of May's affection for her. She hadn't noticed the way May seemed to stand easier, breathe easier, once she'd laid eyes on her.
Her greatest regret, if Daisy was ever asked, was abandoning the hand that had nurtured her for one that she had dreamed of but had never truly been — followed closely by throwing May's greatest trauma in her face.
"My greatest regret is that you weren't mine from the start," a murmur so low and quiet it barely made a ripple in the air still managed to etch itself in Daisy's mostly-asleep mind, and though she had fallen asleep to a warm hand on her head, upon waking, she had never quite been able to figure out if it had been a dream or not.
"Really?" Hunter's eyebrows flying up to his hairline was audible in his voice. "Wait, so you're telling me there was a time when Mama Bear and her duckling weren't joined at the hip?"
Daisy rolled her eyes, feeling that very specific kind of annoyance that only came about when provoked by Hunter, and, without thinking, sent a quake gentle enough to cause him to stumble.
Except apparently, as she listened to them exclaim while shivering, she just gave them the shivers, even if they couldn't feel the quake itself. Interesting.
"I think this base has a ghost," Hunter joked with a flash of his teeth, gently punching Fitz's shoulder when he noticed the look on the engineer's face. "Well, either that, or someone's playing with the thermostat again. And I think we both know which one's more likely." His efforts were rewarded with a half-hearted smile.
...oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Daisy's face split into a positively wicked grin.
Oh-ho.
Daisy flicked her wrist, and in the relative silence of the lab grew a whispering, shifting sound, as every page of Hunter's sketchbook flipped towards the left, the back cover following with a sharp snap.
"Oi—" Daisy giggled when Hunter practically crashed into Fitz when the pencil he'd been sketching with rolled over the floor to nudge his shoe, causing the engineer to yell out as he fumbled for his own balance.
"What on Earth went on in here?"
"Hi Jem, hi Bobbi," Daisy waved cheerfully, her grin only widening at the suitably aghast and stupefied looks on the women's faces.
"Seriously, Hunter," Bobbi shook her head, grabbing a towel — that had somehow escaped either man's notice — and moving forward to help her ex-husband dry off, "I leave you alone for ten minutes—"
"The safety shower broke," Hunter defended, closing his eyes instinctively as the damp towel slapped him in the face when Bobbi went to scrub at his hair. "Fitz wasn't doing much on his own, so I went to offer my assistance."
"And you couldn't do that without making a mess everywhere?" Jemma sighed, the look on her face wholly unimpressed. "Oh Fitz..." Now that was decidedly more fond than exasperated, this time, even with the mountain of soaked paper towels wadded up beside her sheepish partner staring her right in the face. Tutting, she pointed at the door, "Go have a shower and get changed. You'll catch a cold at this rate."
"That's what I said," Hunter grumbled, only to yelp as he was sent from the lab with a sharp smack to his behind. "What was that for, you hellbeast?"
Daisy hummed happily under her breath, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. Even if it was just for this brief moment, she'd caught glimpses of the people she'd known and loved in the emotions that pitched their voices and contorted their features, the almost-childish carelessness in their movements, and the smiles that didn't seem so fake or forced. And for that alone, she would gladly play her part.
It wasn't like anyone else had a body that could vibrate at different speeds, after all.
Daisy paused, and promptly made a face. "Oh, ew, there has got to be a better way of putting that."
It didn't happen suddenly — it wasn't as if one week everything was normal and the next week it was only about seventy-five percent normal, and then fifty the next; it happened softly.
Flickering lights could easily be chalked up to old bulbs needing replacing, or a redistribution of power.
And if things disappeared only to reappear the next bench over, or in an entirely different part of the base, it hardly proved anything beyond the fact they might have been overtaxing their poor minds, or that they at least should consciously try not to be so absentminded.
The occasional staggers and stumbles were just from standing up too quickly; it wasn't like they were being pushed or were tripping over anything, and hardly needed to be paid any mind.
And perhaps the odd hot and cold spots that persisted throughout the entire base was just their bodies' way of reminding them to eat and hydrate — and if they worsened to the point where a couple layers had to be donned or stripped, then maybe someone was arguing over the thermostat.
Mack looked up from his gaming console as the lights above flickered once, twice, thrice... and then went out.
"Again?" he frowned, standing up. Fitz was already pulling a tablet over, flicking through an overview of their systems and manually checking for anything amiss. "That's the third time this week."
"I don't understand it," Fitz mumbled from the couch, finger tapping a compulsive pattern against the edge of the tablet and nibbling on his lower lip. "Everything's working, the backup generators are fine— they would've kicked in if it was a storm or if the power was cut, but it just... it looks like..." Fitz looked up at Mack helplessly, "It just looks like someone's turned off the lights."
An astute observation supported by the fact that the lights were still on outside of the common room, and by the lack of uproar, the power outage hadn't seemed to spread anywhere else.
Mack's brow furrowed, and he was about to open his mouth and tell Fitz what he thought of that when the very familiar sensation of vibrations travelling up his bones caused him to stagger.
Mack had to widen his stance to steady himself as the tremors in the floor grew stronger, the walls and everything within the room following suit. Fitz snatched up the beers and the glass bowl of pretzels before they could judder right off the coffee table, his eyes wide and frantically darting around the shaking room.
"This almost feels like..." Mack twisted his torso and found big blue eyes already fixed on him.
Daisy, passed unspoken between them. This feels like when Daisy first got her powers.
Before either of them could give that thought voice, everything went still, the tremors vanishing as quickly and abruptly as they'd occurred, and the lights snapped back on.
"...maybe we really are being haunted." Fitz wasn't entirely joking as he slowly set the beers back onto the coffee table.
Mack scoffed, crossing the distance in a few strides and dropping heavily down next to the engineer. "I doubt ghosts can cause earthquakes, Fitz. Besides, wouldn't the haunting be more..." he waved his hand vaguely at the TV, "...lights, cold spots, dead channels, flickering shadows?"
"We got the lights, didn't we?" Fitz muttered, sinking deeper into the cushions and tucking the bowl of pretzels to his chest. "And I'm pretty sure we got cold spots... and stuff just falling off benches."
"Well, then it's a pretty benign haunting," Mack scoffed again, reaching over to grab a large handful of the salty biscuits. "Let's just play."
Fitz huffed, a deep frown carving itself into his face, but wordlessly set the bowl down on his crossed legs and picked up his controller.
Later that evening, however, he found himself filching a small perfboard, two miniature LEDs, and a good number of wires, among other things, from the lab, all of which were small or malleable enough to be stuffed in his pockets. A small detour to the kitchen for a couple bottles of beer, and he was ready to hide out in his bunk for... probably the rest of the night, if he was being honest.
Fitz emptied his pockets before him on the bed, and then set up a tablet to play a random episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Out of everything in the Star Wars franchise, that show had been Daisy's favourite, for reasons Fitz could only partially fathom.
It took him three and a half episodes to wire it all up, and the rest of the fourth episode to painstakingly adjust the switches so that even the lightest touch would be enough to flip it on.
When asked much later, Fitz would say it was because he simply had wanted to satisfy a scientist's and a sci-fi geek's curiosity, and if he had the time on his hands to do so, then why not? But honestly, there was a part of him, no matter how deep or subconscious, that hoped the timing of this 'haunting' and a building falling on a girl with superpowers that still weren't fully understood wasn't coincidence.
Not that he'd ever admit it, even to himself.
Fitz brushed the switch with his fingertip, watching as the little red light blinked to life.
"Alright, Blinky," he muttered, leaning back against his pillows and lifting the beer bottle to his lips, "s'just you and me here. Green is yes, red is no. You there?"
Daisy was oddly comfortable on the floor these days. Maybe it was because it let her keep tabs on everyone despite following only one, or maybe it was because it made her feel a bit like a kid again, sitting down by the highway and watching all the cars going by.
Now, she was sitting down by her own bed, arms folded on the mattress, and watching Coulson shuffle in and out of her room.
If it wasn't slipping a hot water bottle by her feet, then it was switching out the wet cloths on her face. If it wasn't that, then it was checking her temperature, or that the blankets were pulled up properly to her chin, or it was replacing the cold tea on her bedside table with a fresh, steaming cup.
It was a little amusing, and a lot adorable, Daisy thought, that the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., even with all his paperwork and duties and to-do lists, seemed to find time at least every ten minutes to check in on his sick partner.
May would've kicked him out for his mother-henning long ago, if she'd had the energy been awake to do so.
For all the fuss she kicked up as a notoriously horrible patient in the medbay, when sick, May seemed to be even quieter than usual, doing nothing but sleep, wake up enough to blink blearily around, pull the blankets over her head to fall asleep again, and rinse, repeat.
Maybe that was why, Daisy mused, May never seemed to stay down long those rare times she caught a bug; she always just slept it away.
But as it was with everything, it had its ups and downs — not for the first time, Daisy saw the blankets shiver slightly as May stiffened in her sleep, lying eerily still without even breathing, it seemed, for a handful of seconds before waking up with an audible catch in her breath and wide eyes flickering around the room without truly seeing.
Daisy shifted, resting her back against the side of the bed and sliding down until the edge of the mattress cradled the back of her neck.
"Skye...?"
It wasn't unusual. She usually talked to her once a week, twice if it was a bad day.
But this time was different.
Daisy craned her neck, turned her head, let the mattress gently push against her cheek — bright eyes were glazed dull, but somehow, they still managed to look at her. Not through her, not a little off to the left or right, or above her head, but directly at her.
Daisy fought to not stake any real hope in it.
"C'mon, May, you know it's Daisy, now." Her smile was half-hearted, edged with a pain she felt she shouldn't have, not when they were the ones suffering unnecessarily. "You and Coulson are the only ones who keep forgetting. I never pegged you for the forgetful type, so do you have some secret vendetta against flowers or something?"
She tried to joke. To get her to smile.
May didn't hear her, and she didn't smile.
Heavy eyelids blinked lazily, long eyelashes brushing the tops of her cheeks. "You've never let me be lonely before."
Daisy swallowed. "I'm sorry."
She still didn't hear her.
May's bare feet met the floor with barely a whisper of the sheets, and just as silently, she padded over to the wardrobe. There was an odd rummaging sound that Daisy for the life of her could not place, despite it being her own wardrobe, but when May set an unfamiliar box in her lap and withdrew a frame from within, she smacked her head. If May had moved into her room, as all signs seemed to point towards, then it made sense whatever mementos May had held onto would move with her.
May picked out a white candle and a lighter, setting both on the floor next to her before closing the shoebox and shoving it back into the depths of the wardrobe. Rather than the floor, the frame was laid in her lap as she rummaged, still settled on her knees, for a... purple shirt?
Daisy blinked, and squinted; it looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn't recall wearing such bright colours since... well, a while.
May stared at it for a long moment, callused fingers gently rubbing the cloth of the long sleeve before draping it over her arm so she could pick up the other three items. But despite the ease in her motor dexterity, her shoulder was almost instantly pressed to the wall when she wavered as she stood.
"You're sick, May," Daisy... didn't fret, she chided, hovering anxiously over the woman's shoulder, "you shouldn't be doing... whatever this is you're doing."
May walked right past her, collapsing three steps later atop the bed despite the short distance covered, but as Daisy watched, still found the strength to gently prop the photo on the bedside table. May made no move to retract her arm, leaving her fingertips pressed up against the glass for a long moment.
"Oh," Daisy breathed when it finally clicked in her mind what shirt May had chosen. "I remember now — that's what I was wearing when Coulson pulled me out of my van." And softer, "When you and I first met."
May didn't say anything, simply setting the white candle directly in front of the frame and lighting it expertly. Folding the shirt, she set it down to the side of the candle, and then — finally — settled back down in the bed.
In the golden flickering of a newborn flame, Daisy could see the faint shine of salt running down May's face, and wished, not for the first time, that she could fix what she had never intended to break.
She wished she could hug her mom S.O.
She wished she could hear her.
"You've let me be alone, when I needed to be, but you've never let me be lonely before."
"I'm sorry," Daisy whispered; repeated. It was all she had left to offer her — an apology she will never hear.
May watched her a little bit longer.
Daisy felt the vibrations first, but she didn't care to tear her eyes away.
The door slid open, and Coulson came in with a new mug of tea, still hot enough to leave visible steam trails in the air.
"Lin," he said, surprised, "you're awake." He set the tea down first, faltering just slightly at the set-up that hadn't been there when he'd last visited, before taking a seat on the edge of the bed. He reached out to brush a stray lock of hair out of May's face, tucking it behind her ear with a touch that was gentler still.
Daisy bit the inner flesh of her lower lip and lowered her eyes, feeling oddly like she was intruding. It was hardly the first time; she'd walked in on them once or twice since moving into the Playground, and though each time they'd never really been doing anything, there had been an intense sort of... intimacy, perhaps? that had always had Daisy backing away silently, leaving them to themselves and whatever undefined 'thing' was between them.
"Hey," Phil's voice shifted the silence a little to the wayside, careful not to break it but nudging it over just enough to make room for his voice, "how're you feeling?"
He could count on one hand the amount of times Melinda May had looked at him with red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks, and still have fingers left over.
As if that look alone said all that could be said — which it did, really — Melinda's eyes drifted back to the photograph, as if drawn by some magnetic force.
Phil followed her gaze. "She's beautiful, isn't she?" A rhetorical question, and one he didn't expect an answer to, even if it had been a good day. "I didn't know you had a photo like that hidden away." His smile was not returned. "I hope you didn't stay out of bed too long setting that up. If you'd waited a little longer, I could've done that for you, Lin."
Melinda lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. Phil got the message; if she couldn't get closure with a body or her own choice to let the girl go, then the best she could do for herself, even if it was a mediocre 'best', was this, and it was something only she could do.
He never knew what to do, where to start, when Melinda, who was by all accounts the most tacitly strong person he had ever known, became overwhelmed with what she couldn't accept.
'You may not be hurt by giving up kindness, but you are hurt by closing yourself in,' he wanted to say just as he wanted to back then, but how could he, when the voice he heard was filled with so much sorrow now?
'It's okay if I keep hurting, I don't feel pain anymore,' said the drag of her feet as she still walked on. 'I've already sealed away the hole in my heart.'
'That hole inside your chest you've turned into oblivion was made to protect you, so you could live through,' he wanted to tell her, but he didn't want to say what it was that she had to live through. 'All those scars on your heart, if you trace them and see them through, then nothing can scare you. So, you see? All that pain was meant to protect you, it always was meant to.'
But he would never; could never.
So instead he started to talk, about Mack taking all the coffee faster than they could buy, about Hunter complaining about lost pencils and Bobbi twirling her batons whenever he opened his mouth. About Fitzsimmons and their most recent mishaps, both in the lab and the kitchen, and from there Jemma's hero-worship of Peggy Carter and her exploits that, of course, led into an endlessly-reiterated, never-ending ramble about Captain America.
All trivial things, nothing of huge importance, but enough of a mention to remind Melinda of what was still here for her — of who was still here for her.
(Daisy listened, and laughed, and smiled. It reminded her of when she'd hang out down at the pool hall, listening to the old men who'd tell lies and, in the same breath, fill her head with stories about places and things that they'd seen.)
And somewhere, sometime, between one word and the next, Melinda's face started to crumple like a wet paper doll.
'That distant cry I hear all the time, it's mine, isn't it?' was all that was left in the tears that were falling down fast from her eyes at last. 'Is this the reason that's been leading my whole life?'
"Lin, what..." Though he knew it was probably the worst response he could've had, Coulson could only stare, stunned; the last time he had seen her cry was... in a cold basem*nt in Bahrain. "Come— Come here, come on."
'You knew it right from the start, the path you would carve, not just for you, but those who would come after you.' His arms were opening on autopilot, his hands reaching for her even as she shook her head and shut her eyes, turning her face into the pillow and away from him — but she didn't fight him as he carefully gathered her in his arms, against his chest. 'That's why you stayed in S.H.I.E.L.D. all this time, isn't it? Because that voice was calling, always reminding you, of one you couldn't leave.'
"What can I do, Lin?" This all felt horribly, awfully, familiar — stuck in her own hell, a loss of self, a heart like broken glass and a withered shell. And all he could do was repeat the same words from back then that he thought she needed to hear, "Tell me what you need."
"Bring her back, Phil," Melinda whispered— begged, part of his sleeve caught in her fist and one desperate strain away from ripping apart entirely. "Bring her back. Bring her back to me."
"...I'm sorry," Phil echoed Daisy's own words, making no effort to hide the anguish tightening his face — there was no one else to see, after all.
("Not as sorry as me.")
"I'm sorry, Lin, I want to, I do, but I can't. She went somewhere neither of us could follow."
He held her just that tighter when a sob finally broke through her silent tears.
"She loved me."
'Do you remember that day? Before we were crushed by the weight of the world and sky; by the very presence of our lives?'
"Lin..."
They'd only met in the Academy, but Phil would swear on his life that they might as well have known each other long before then — they'd watched each other grow and so many stories had been told.
He wouldn't have said it before, knowing his place in her life, but they'd been through... all the world could possibly throw at them, now, and Phil had no qualms admitting, even if only to himself, that he honestly didn't know what he would do without Melinda May.
'I remember that day, when we decided to go straight ahead, with those scars.'
So when the very foundation of Melinda cracked and broke apart, when her world fell out from beneath her and life as she knew it turned to ashes around her, he was there. Even when she froze him out, pushed him away and created a distance he could never cross no matter how hard he tried, he promised himself, if not her, that he'd always be around.
And when he'd come back to life, confused and searching for answers and casting about for some kind of anchor amidst it all, she'd returned the favour. She'd been around for him, piloting the BUS and reporting for combat duty after five years behind a desk, for him. Maybe that promise hadn't been so one-sided after all.
And then when one of their own, too young and unscarred and undeserving, lay on the threshold of Death's door, and she'd lost herself to her anger, Phil had been there to reel her back in before her fists did something her mind might not regret, but would be burdened by all the same.
"She loved me," Melinda said now of that same young, unscarred one. "Even though I didn't deserve it, even though I tried to keep my distance because I... I couldn't lose another one, but she just kept coming at me with everything she had, she kept choosing me and she made sure I knew she loved me, but I never did the same for her and now she's gone and I don't—"
A sharp inhale cut through, and was held in a futile attempt to dissolve the hiccups that always, annoyingly, without fail, came when she cried.
The next words came out in a rush alongside the release of breath, and it was with a very rarely seen, but very real, fear in her eyes that she asked, "Phil, what if she doesn't know?"
Phil rubbed his thumb into her shoulder. It was perhaps the wrong time to think such a thought, but for all the platitudes that could've been on his mind, the only thought was that he wished all those fairy tales about soulmates were real, because if they were, then maybe he could take the pain away somehow. Because watching her heartbreak, Phil had discovered long ago, made his own heart ache.
"She knows," he assured around the unsteady beating of his own heart. He tilted her chin up, and hoped that the same firm belief was reflected in his eyes. "Neither of you said it in as many words, but you've done a lot to prove to her — to those you love — that they're good enough. She knows, Lin."
A forehead, warm and damp with fever, fell against his shoulder. "...I don't know if I'd be able to handle it if she died not knowing."
A stark admission, if any, even when whispered as shamefully as if it were some insurmountable and unforgivable inadequacy.
It only served to make Phil feel insurmountably, unforgivably, inadequate.
It was one thing to want to be someone's saviour, and another thing entirely to actually be able to save them. He could make a promise that time would make it better, but empty words could only do so much.
"I don't know how to handle this, either," he admitted right back, because it was all he could do in that moment. "Just..."
Fingers curled into his shirt material above his chest, gently this time, and Phil knew there was no need for more words; she understood.
'Can we stay like this?'
'Forever until the end, if you wish.'
He couldn't take her pain away, or be her 'saviour', but what he could do was be her 'pick-me-up' when her heart was too broken to be open. He could bring the tea when she was crying in her bed, and he could hold her in his arms until she smiled a little. No matter what time, day or night, he'd be around.
Because watching her heartbreak, Phil discovered now, was breaking his heart.
(Daisy closed her eyes so she didn't have to watch May cry herself to sleep again, wishing she could shove the sand back into her hourglass, even if it was just to get enough time to be the one that was holding onto May long and tight enough to make her feel loved.
Regret was one hell of a motivator to stay.)
She tilted her head, squinting. "Is that really what I have to start out looking like? It's kinda creepy, you know, with just two pointy ovals for eyes, and no hair. Like a mannequin. I hate mannequins. Did you know I hate mannequins? Because I do."
"...no idea how he does it, honestly, it would've driven me up the wall."
"Then it's a good thing you're not the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., now, isn't it, Jemma?"
Daisy popped her head up from where she'd been watching over Hunter's shoulder — he'd been drawing her a lot lately, by herself and with various members of their team, and occasionally a few group sketches — when Jemma's exasperated voice carried into the kitchen, followed by Fitz's gentle tease.
"Mm," Bobbi pulled out a chair and dropped down into it, quickly leaning over the table as her danish started to crumble. "Speaking of," she started, because she had clearly been listening longer than Daisy had and so found an opening for her following question, "how's May?"
"Well, health-wise, standing out in a lightning storm did her no favours." And there was that straightforward, mildly — just mildly — disapproving tone that alerted them to the transition from 'Jemma' to 'Dr. Simmons'. "But Agent May has always been as fit as the proverbial fiddle, especially for a woman of her age, and once the worst has passed, it shouldn't be too long before she's up and about again. Though it, ah," Jemma cleared her throat, the volume of her voice dipping just enough that only those in close proximity could hear her, "might be a little longer before she's... properly back on her feet."
"Understandably so," Fitz muttered as he passed by her to reach for a mug.
"Yes, understandably so," Jemma agreed a touch too quickly, ducking her head and refocusing on her crumpet with a little too much intensity.
Daisy sighed through her nose, eyes closed and chin resting on the knees drawn up to her chest. She'd come here for a distraction, hoping to avoid dwelling on the conversation she had caught snippets of despite doing her best to avoid listening in — 'Then why stay,' one might ask, 'if you felt like you were intruding?' The answer was simple: she hadn't wanted to leave May just yet. — but wherever she went, it seemed, only one thing echoed endlessly within the confines of her own mind.
"I couldn't lose another one," May had said. Daisy hadn't understood at first, what May meant by that, but now, she thought that she might.
It was all too easy, almost disturbingly so, to draw parallels between herself and Katya from the way May would've seen them. Including a hard call that had ended each story that had ended up breaking her heart, even if the second one hadn't been her call.
But what gave her pause was the 'another' — not in the fact it had been used but in the way it had been said.
Daisy had been around May long enough that even if she couldn't decipher the inflections in her voice, she could still recognize that they were there, that they had happened, and May had said 'another' in the same intonation as any reference she'd made in the past to 'that little girl in Bahrain'. Not 'Bahrain', but 'that little girl (in Bahrain)'. Part of that might have been because she hadn't known Katya's name, but...
Daisy automatically raised her head to search for May's eyes. What if... Am I... Are you trying to say I'm your 'little girl'?
"Aw, hell, where did my— Bob, did you take my pencil?"
"What would I want with your pencil, Hunter?" Bobbi raised an eyebrow.
"But— But I know I had it right next to me," Hunter muttered as he lifted the throw pillows, patted the seat cushions and dug his hand into the crevices between. "I look away for one second..." Shaking his head, he unfolded his legs and tucked his sketchbook against his side, starting the short trek back to his bunk. Daisy pushed herself off the couch to follow him.
The muttering continued even when he unlocked his bunk and started searching for his pencils, which he seemed to be losing a lot of lately. Cursing, Hunter hoped that hadn't been his last one, and made a mental note to buy a couple packs more the next time they went out to restock supplies.
"...seriously, it's not that big of a base, and it's not even like they can be used for actual writing, so I don't..." Something caught his peripheral vision, and upon turning, a yell was promptly ripped from his throat as he threw himself back, only to land on something cylindrical that rolled out from under his foot and propelled him right into the wall behind him.
"Ow, what the sh*t—" Hunter hissed, one hand clutching the back of his head and the other cradling his foot. He groaned when he saw one of Bobbi's spare batons on the floor — what the hell was that doing here, what if she needed it?
"I'm probably concussed, yeah?" he rhetorically, and rather breathlessly, asked the pencil that was rising slowly, oh so f*cking slowly, to hover, suspended, in the air. Hunter squinted, "Or drunk. Or high." With a morbid fascination, "Maybe even got injected with some weird substance in my sleep. That'd be a much less cool way to die than... say, getting buried by an avalanche I triggered. Wouldn't you agree?"
There were little black pinpricks littering his sight, and it was either because his eyes were so wide he could physically feel the strain and yet he refused to blink, from the bang to the head, or from the sheer shock of it all.
But the feel of his heart beating against his ribcage much too much, much too quickly told him that, despite his merry commentary, he was one horrifying moment away from fainting like an old Victorian madame — and like his words had been the trigger, the pencil began to spin.
Hunter was going to fling himself off the first roof he could find.
"Oh hell no," he exhaled harshly, edging along the walls as his eyes darted from the spinning pencil to his door — it wasn't particularly sharp, but anything could pierce if it just went fast enough, and he didn't quite fancy the idea of being stabbed in the neck by his own drawing pencil, oh no, he drew the line at that, thank you very kindly, pun unintended.
He'd just gotten within arm's reach of his door when the pencil abruptly stopped spinning and dropped — right onto an open page of his sketchbook, which Hunter had sworn had been closed when he set it down.
"Well that was... dramatic with a side of creepy," he muttered under his breath, edging closer, against his better judgement, to see the page it had landed on.
Daisy's smile, in black and white and various shades of grey, greeted him.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say Tobias was back."
"I think this base has a ghost."
"...no," was all Hunter could say, a deep furrow to his brow. "No, it— it couldn't... could it?"
A violent shiver rippled down his body, and there was the oddest tingling chill on his shoulder, like ice dripping into his muscles—
("Yes," Daisy deadpanned beside him, propping one elbow on his shoulder and massaging her wrist. "Yes, it f*cking could, and the sooner you recognize that, the better off we'll all be for it.")
—and Hunter...
That was it. There was literally nothing else that could be said.
Hunter uttered a Hail Mary, crossed himself, turned on his heel, and fled.
"Simmons!"
(He left a ghost, doubled over with her own mirth that had grown beyond laughter and into silent wheezing, behind him.)
