Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Tony tracked down Bruce (which had not been easy) and invited him to come live at Stark Tower with him, it was for the science. That was it. That was the only reason. It was not because he was lonely, and it was not because he’d kind of enjoyed being on a team, and it was definitely not because he thought having the big guy around would reduce his anxiety. It was just for the science.

When he invited Natasha to come live at the Tower it was because Pepper had asked about her, and Pepper liked having another woman around that worked a high-profile male-dominated job. It wasn’t because he hadn’t seen her in the two months since Thor and Loki left and he was a little worried. It definitely wasn’t because he missed her brand of remorseless bluntness. It definitely, definitely, wasn’t because he thought having a hyper-vigilant agent around would lessen his anxiety. It was for Pepper.

When he let Natasha bring Clint with her, it was only because that was Natasha’s condition for moving in. It had nothing to do with the fact that Clint had made him laugh, even during the fiasco that was the chitauri invasion. It also had nothing to do with Clint being surprisingly cool for a guy that fought with a bow and arrows. It had absolutely nothing to do with two hyper-vigilant agents being better than one. It was just because it was Natasha’s condition.

When he invited Steve to join them, it was entirely because the rest of the team (not that they were a team) remaining on Earth had moved in, and it would just be rude not to invite him. It had nothing to do with the fact that it was remarkably fun introducing Steve (mockingly of course) to contemporary culture and technology. The fact that he’d found it reassuring that someone else was calling the shots and doing all the pesky thinking-through and relating-to-others during the Battle of New York (a name that had all the creativity of a lifetime paper-pusher and Tony was frankly insulted to be associated with it) was completely irrelevant.

Anyway, if Tony had known that inviting the other Avengers to come live with him would drag him into Shield work, he wouldn’t have done it. Really. He wouldn’t have even considered it.

However, whatever the reasons, the fact remained that three months after the Battle of New York Tony somehow found himself living with five other people, only one of which was his girlfriend, and the public had somehow renamed Stark Tower Avengers Tower, and for some reason Maria Hill was standing in his living room asking him to do Shield work. Boring Shield work. Way below his pay grade Shield work. Which, actually, was a good reason why he shouldn’t have to do it.

“This is way below my pay grade, get one of your underlings to do it, I’ve got a new suit to build.” Tony said, omitting the fact that this was his 32^nd new suit since Loki invaded because he’d decided to give up sleeping for the time being.

Hill frowned, a look of annoyance on her face “Our ‘underlings’ have tried.”

Tony snickered “You’re telling me the entirety of Shield has failed to find a single hacker?”

A muscle flexed in Hill’s jaw “We’ve decided a fresh pair of eyes might be useful.”

“That means yes.” Tony said, grinning “No wonder you needed our help in New York if you’re that lacking in brain power.”

Hill gritted her teeth for a moment before saying “If you think it’ll be that easy it shouldn’t take you long then.”

Tony frowned “Hey, I haven’t said I’ll do it yet.”

Hill ignored this, turning and heading back towards the elevator, throwing behind her “I’ll expect Skyenet’s real name and address by Monday.”

“I’ll have it by tomorrow.” Tony shouted after her, mostly to wind her up but also because this was way below his pay-grade. He coded his own AI, finding a single hacker couldn’t be that hard.

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He did not have a name for Hill by tomorrow.

In fact, in the first 24 hours all he’d (grudgingly) learned was that the Shield communications agents weren’t just incompetent.

Skyenet was a ghost. A loud, annoying, talented ghost, but still a ghost.

People had interacted with her on the darknet. Multiple people. Practically every hacker worth their salt on the darknet had heard of her. Nobody had a single clue who she was.

After reading the Shield file Maria left him and doing his own research, all Tony could compile was a list of 10 things:

1. Skyenet was responsible for 27 high profile hacks in the last four months. That was 27 high profile hacks that Skyenet had claimed responsibility for when posting the records of 27 corrupt companies onto the world wide web with no warning. There were most likely significantly more hacks she’d taken part in. (Incidentally, the fact that Tony didn’t know about this did suggest he might be spending a tiny bit too much time making new suits and might benefit from reading the news occasionally).

2. Given 1. Skyenet had good intentions and a complete disregard for the law as it related to privacy and hacking. Tony thought this was hilarious.

3. Skyenet was probably female. Tony knew this because she occasionally posted comments along with the data she dumped for all to see, and in one of those comments (on a ‘sexism in the workplace’ data dump) she’d included the jibe ‘And to the men reading this and thinking it’s not an issue because women aren’t as good as men, I just hacked all of you, so so-long-suckers.’ This could of course be a red-herring, but Tony suspected not.

4. Given the comment in 3. Skyenet was probably pretty young. Unless it was a red-herring.

5. Not just Shield but just about every technology and/or security agency across the world was trying to recruit her, (including, as it turned out, Stark Industries). Skyenet was ignoring the lot.

6. An anarchist hacking collective called the Rising Tide was also trying to recruit her, and Skyenet was not ignoring them, although she hadn’t joined yet. Shield are worried that it is only a matter of time given the similarities in their MO’s. They are desperate to get to her first.

7. Skyenet is very, very, very good. Annoyingly good. Frustratingly good. Most likely better than Tony good. (OK, she was definitely better at hacking than Tony, he was big enough to admit that to himself.) She covered her tracks near faultlessly, and the only times she’d left tiny traces behind that had lead to possible locations, they’d been a bust. Following obvious leads had led to humiliation for various Shield agents.

8. The hacker handle skyenet had been used for a few years several years back, but there were no official (read: high profile or claimed) hacks associated with it. The handle was also unused for almost three years and general consensus on the darknet was that it was a different person. Tony wasn’t ready to rule it out but there wasn’t really anything he could find out about hacks which happened over three years ago and were low-profile. So even if it was the same person, it was a dead-end.

9. She had, at some point in the last four months, been inside Shield. They had found tiny traces of her coding inside their systems, but they didn’t know either how long it had been there or what she’d done while inside. Nor did they know if she’d been back in since. Shield was very, very stressed about this.

10. Given 1, she’d most likely had a crack at Stark Industries at some point over the last four months (or however long she’d been hacking). This meant that either Jarvis wasn’t as good as Tony thought (unlikely) and she’d gotten in but found nothing she considered corrupt enough to post online (also unlikely considering what Obadiah Stane had been doing up to 5 years ago, but not impossible), or somewhere in the collection of recorded hacking attempts from the last four months, Tony had a lead.

Unfortunately, Jarvis had recorded 98 thousand attempts at hacking Stark Industries in the last four months. Most days Tony felt rather smug that he’d made Stark Industries into the hacking equivalent of Mount Everest, and pleased about the fact that he’d hired the six people that had successfully hacked him in the last three years. Today however, Tony was regretting metaphorically hanging a giant neon ‘hack me if you can’ sign on Stark Industries. It made this like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Well, not entirely; Jarvis filtered out all the attempts that didn’t get very far (in other words, the attempts he’d swatted like a bug as befitted a cutting edge AI designed by Tony Stark controlling a firewall he’d also designed), leaving only 53 serious candidates. Grouping together hacks with very similar coding reduced this to 27 serious candidates. Which was still a lot, but was a far more manageable haystack.

Of those 27 serious candidates, Tony and Jarvis had worked out who 9 were, 7 of which Shield had already interviewed and either imprisoned or slapped monitoring bracelets on, none of which were Skyenet. Tony was, unfortunately, reasonably sure neither of the other two identified were either, mostly because they were both male and in their 40s.

Tony was working on serious candidate no. 10 when Natasha came down to his lab. “Maria wants to know if you’ve got anything, and Pepper wants to know if you’re planning on sleeping this week.”

Tony frowned “No and no.” he said, trying not to sound embarrassed, sulky, or tired, and somehow managing to sound all three at once.

“I thought you’d say that.” Natasha said, studying the holo-board where Tony had written his list of things. “I’m pretty sure 3 and 4 are correct. I’ve analysed all her posts and if I’m right, which I usually am, she’s female. No older than mid-twenties, no younger than mid-teens, and most likely 18 or 19. She probably grew up in a troubled home. Also she either uses timed posts or keeps seriously irregular hours. And she has a paying job, stealing doesn’t fit her profile.”

Tony blinked, that was a rather useful list of information. “Jarvis note that down. You were one of the underlings that had a crack at finding her.” he directed at Natasha.

The redhead shrugged “She’s a potential major problem, Shield needs to find her before she moves on from corrupt companies to governments and security services and becomes an actual major problem. So you need to go to bed.”

“Isn’t that counter-productive to finding her.” Tony pointed out, having no intention at all of going to bed.

“You work better when you’re not severely sleep deprived and are properly awake.”

“I am awake, I have coffee for that.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I...” Tony fell abruptly silent as he looked automatically at where he’d left his coffee mug and found it gone. A quick look around his lab showed that the coffee maker Butterfingers was supposed to be looking after was empty, and the jar of coffee beans next to it suspiciously absent. Natasha’s lips twitched. Tony glared. “Give me back my coffee.”

“What coffee?” Natasha asked, pulling an exaggerated innocent expression.

Tony scowled “I’m revoking your access to my lab.”

“You do that. Sleep well.” Natasha said, completely unrepentant, and left with flat pockets and visibly empty hands. Tony spent twenty minutes searching his lab from top to bottom but couldn’t find where Natasha had stashed his coffee, and begrudgingly went to bed.

Why had he thought having hyper-vigilant super-spies around the place was a good thing?”

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On Day 2 of operation track down Skyenet (known to the rest of the population as Wednesday), Tony ruled out 5 of the other serious candidates before Clint and Natasha brought him breakfast and then stuck around the lab. Tony didn’t kick them out for two reasons. One, Clint’s cooking was amazing. Two, they were being surprisingly helpful.

Natasha calmly claimed a chair and started helping him hack (she wasn’t nearly as good as Tony was, but she certainly wasn’t bad either), and Clint claimed a computer, logged into Shield, and took over research once Natasha and Tony produced a name or location. It didn’t hurt that Clint’s wise-ass comments (and Natasha’s reactions) made the tedious activity occasionally amusing. Not that he needed or wanted a team. He didn’t. Obviously.

By evening they have identities for 26 of the serious candidates, and a location but no face for the 27^th. Tony thought this was good progress until Natasha said, completely deadpan “That one was me.” and he realised she wasn’t joking.

“Why?” he demanded, not a little suspiciously.

Natasha shrugged “You weren’t answering your phone.”

Huh. “Fair enough.” Tony said, and then scowled blackly as he realised that meant there was no needle in his mini-haystack, which meant either Skyenet hadn’t tried to hack Stark Industries, or she’d gotten past Jarvis without alerting him. Given the size of Stark Industries and the ‘hack me if you can’ banner, Tony had a sinking suspicion it was the latter. It wasn’t a comforting thought.

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On Day 3 of operation track down Skyenet (otherwise known as Thursday), Tony tried a different tactic. He went on the darknet, assumed a hacker handle, carefully covered his tracks, and made it known he wanted to talk to Skyenet. He doubted it would get him an identity, but perhaps the frontal approach would get him some kind of interaction that Natasha could analyse.

Unfortunately, by mid-afternoon it is looking increasingly unlikely Skyenet is going to take the bait, and Clint and Natasha get called in to Shield. By the time they get back it’s almost 4am and Clint is visibly frustrated, which probably means both are.

“I thought you had a mission?” Tony said, to distract them from the fact that he has made precisely no progress on finding Skyenet.

“We do.” Natasha said, and didn’t elaborate.

“Going to tell me what it is?”

“No.”

“We’re tracking down Quake.” Clint said, throwing himself into a chair and stealing Tony’s coffee.

“Barton!” Natasha hissed, and stole the coffee off Clint.

“Which is classified and we never told you about.” Clint said smoothly, pouting at Natasha until she huffed and returned Tony’s coffee to Clint.

“You don’t look like you’re tracking anyone down.” Tony observed. “And isn’t Quake just some idiot playing dress up and stopping the occasional mugging?” (Yes, ok, he hadn’t heard about major hacks the entire business world has panicking about but he had heard about a small local superhero. Sue him, locals in spandex were more amusing than world news).

“She stopped a bank robbery yesterday with some kind of distortion weapon Shield’s never heard of.” Clint explained, ignoring the first comment and visibly enjoying Tony’s coffee.

“Barton!” Natasha hissed, smacking her partner hard enough around the back of the head to make Tony wince in sympathy.

“What? We’re a team, we’re supposed to share information right? Trust exercises and team bonding and all that stuff.”

“Right, I’ll just go tell Hill that’s why you decided to read Stark in on a classified mission then.” Natasha said casually.

Clint blanched “You wouldn’t.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow, silently reminding Clint who he was talking to. Tony put a significant amount of effort into keeping his laughter internal. “Jarvis could build a map of all her appearances and find her base of operations if you want?” he offered.

“We’ve already done it, but thanks.” Natasha said.

“What did you find?”

Natasha looked at him with an unreadable expression, and the silence stretched on. Tony was about to huff and return to his fruitless searching for Skyenet, when Natasha said, “It moves, frequently.”

“Pattern?” Tony asked, eyes lighting up in interest.

“Moves at least every four days, but sometimes returns to areas.” Clint supplied. “And he’s usually active between 11pm and 2am, but not everyday and not accurately at those times.”

“Quake could be female.” Natasha pointed out, in a tone of voice that suggested it wasn’t the first time she’d done so.

“Huh.” Tony said “Any other information?”

Clint looked at Natasha, who rolled her eyes but produced a USB from her pocket and offered it to Tony. “If you share any of the information on this, or tell Hill I gave it to you, I’ll castrate you.” she promised.

“Note that down Jarvis.” Tony said dryly, and plugged the USB in, relieved for a change of pace.

Despite Quake’s non-appearance that night (the cause of the assassin duo’s frustration), there is a lot to go on. There are 72 clips of Quake on various social media platforms, all showing a 5’5 figure in a black and purple hoodie and matching leggings, with strange bulky gloves around their wrists and a silver mask over their face. While there isn’t a single clip of them mask-less, and the only clips that include them speaking indicate they’re distorting their voice in some way, there’s a lot to go on. The file already included three pages of analysis on their fighting style and MO, which mostly seemed to including running around doing parkour and looking for trouble.

The most interesting clip was of Quake stopping the bank robbery, partly because it was far and away the highest quality video (and someone at Shield had clearly already worked on enhancing it), but mostly because a minute into the fist-fight Quake raises one arm and does something that flings four heavily built adults through the air, and then points their arm at the security camera and the video cuts out. Unfortunately, there is no sound and only one angle, and the weapon Quake is carrying is encased in metal, making it impossible to analyse from anything but its effects. It’s a good explanation for why Shield is after Quake though. That weapon isn’t like anything on or off the market Tony’s heard about, and he’s something of an expert.

Of course, now he’s looking at it, Tony has seven different ideas of how the effect could be produced, although he doesn’t know how any of them could be nearly small (or portable) enough to fit in arm length weapons. Nor does he know how to create the effect without the user also being thrown backwards given equal and opposite reactions and all that. Yet. He’ll work it out. He is half-way through drawing his first schematic when he realises that not only are Natasha and Clint gone, but they’ve taken all the coffee with them. Menaces.

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Day 4 begins at 8am, despite Tony not having gone to bed until 5:30am, but Tony doesn’t sleep much anymore so that’s fine. It’s not because he’s had another nightmare, and it’s not because he’s scared to go back to sleep. He’s fine. Anyway, unlike his lab, the Avengers kitchen still has coffee, and coffee is more important than sleep, everyone knows that.

What his lab does have is the same message showing on every single hologram and screen. It’s short, smug, and to the point: “I hear you want to speak to me - Skyenet.” It comes with no contact information.

Tony isn’t sure what is more embarrassing: the fact that he’d thought the hacker handle he’d taken up couldn’t be traced back to him, or the fact that Skyenet had taken over every screen in his lab without alerting Jarvis. Speaking of which... “Jarvis, buddy, you monitor this entire building 24/7, why didn’t you alert me we’d been hacked when screens started changing?”

“Sir, you instructed me to turn off all notifications unless otherwise told.” Jarvis said, sounding a little indignant.

Tony closed his eyes. As if this wasn’t embarrassing enough already. “No I didn’t.” he ground out.

“Sir, someone appears to have manually imputed an instruction into my programming.”

“Really?” Tony said, sarcasm dripping from his voice. And then more reasonably “Do a full scan of all Stark Industries and Avengers systems and data. Document any changes, no matter how small, from yesterday. And make a list of everything that was accessed since I left the lab last night.”

“Technically sir, that was this morning.”

Why had he programmed Jarvis to talk back to him again? “Just do it. I’m going to look at your programming and work out what else she’s done.”

“Of course sir, I have already begun.”

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After lunch on Day 4 Bruce joined Tony in the lab, which was nice because Tony had had a rant building up inside him for at least the last four hours and Bruce was kind enough to let him get it all out of his system, and give him coffee afterwards.

Skyenet had not only inputted a manual command to Jarvis’s programming, she’d also archived an entire section of his memory from last night/earlier today after partially disabling him while hacking in. It took Tony almost an hour to unlock the archived memory, despite having full access to Jarvis’s code. And when he finally managed to unlock it, he found that not only had Skyenet messed with his AI, but she had her own AI which helped her hack. And Tony knew this because Jarvis had had an entire twenty minute conversation with the intruder AI, discussing, of all things, the strange lack of logic behind human decisions.

There was only one small silver lining to this. Jarvis and his new AI buddy Hack (Highly Advanced Computer Kid, because Skyenet evidently had a theme and was sticking with it), had wanted to continue their discussion on the illogicality of humanity and Skyenet had promised them she’d hack back in in a few days so they could ‘have another play-date’.

Which meant that within the next three or four days, Tony would have a chance to trap Skyenet.

He’d better start preparing right away. Bruce, thankfully, is a nice enough person to give him company while he gets started and a good enough lab partner to not talk to him during it and instead start his own work. Tony knew inviting Bruce to live at the Tower for science was a good idea.

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Daisy, by the age of 16, had had more names than most adults had in their entire lifetime. She’d been named Daisy Johnson at birth and carried the name for a year, and then lost it upon being kidnapped. After being rescued by Shield and dumped in the system like a sack of potatoes, she was named Mary-Sue Poots by a nun with either no sense of imagination or a keen sense of cruelty, possibly both. By the age of four she’d decided she detested the name with a burning passion and renamed herself Skye, although most adults refused to call her it.

This became the foundation for her fourth name, taken up at the age of 7. An older foster kid noticed her talent with computers and taught her a tiny bit of hacking, intending for her to take the fall when they inevitably got caught. They did not get caught. Or, more accurately, Skye didn’t get caught. Instead she dove head first into hacking and didn’t look back. Two months later she had a hacker handle (Skyenet) and an extensive resume of minor internet pranks to go with it. It was the most fun she’d ever had in her life and she spent every spare moment (and plenty of non-spare moments) learning more about hacking.

At age 8 she got an almost brother, and with it, a nickname. Originally her foster brother (a name which meant almost nothing by the time you reached the number of homes Skye had been in), Clint Barton became her actual brother after he shot their foster father in the butt and let her out of the cupboard the guy had locked her in. He used a bow and arrow to do it with, and Skye nicknamed him Robin Hood, and in return got the nickname Marian, as the only female member of Robin’s Merry Men. Robin and her were sent back to St Agnes together, where Robin cemented his role as her older brother by teaching her (among other things) how to find the best hiding places, how to throw a punch, and how to shoplift food. He also attempted to teach her how to fire his bow, but it didn’t go very well.

They knew each other for nine months all told, during which time Skye was sent to three foster homes alone, none of which lasted more than two weeks and one of which ended with a concussion from being pushed down the stairs, and four foster homes together, all of which lasted at least three weeks. When Robin eventually ran away just before his seventeenth birthday, to join the circus, ‘Marian’ promised to get rid of as much of his records as she could get her hands on to give him a head start on any authorities. She acquired his physical file from the office in the middle of the night and burned it, and hacked into the orphanage computer system and got rid of all digital files. She and Robin kept in touch by emails for almost a year before Robin slowly stopped replying. Skye had gotten the feeling he was mixed up in something bad, and hoped he was ok. He was the closest thing she’d ever had to a brother and she resolved to never let anyone else call her Marian and stuck to it.

At age twelve, when she was kidnapped (sort of) again, this time by her dad (her actual dad, who came back for her and told her a story that fulfilled every dream a system kid has; that she’d been born to loving parents and then been stolen, and she was wanted and special and now they’d found her she could live with them again), she returned to Daisy Johnson. She used this name for most of three years, at first with a joy that only a foster kid whose parents actually came back for her could, and later with an increasing desperation as she tried to hold onto the dream of a happy family. The name lasted almost a year before the shine dulled, surviving her mother’s joy fading into a tangled mix of apathy and paranoia (manifesting in overwhelming pressure for Daisy to learn to defend herself), and surviving dozens of her dad’s explosions of rage. It wasn’t until her mom’s friend Alisha broke her ribs in a self-defence lesson and her mother told her to continue fighting that the name lost it’s shine.

She kept using the name, kept trying to cling to the dream of a happy family, but it got harder and harder as the weeks and months passed. The day her dad first hit her in a fit of rage, even though he was sorry afterwards, made something inside her crack. And those cracks went deeper and deeper inside her with each further incident, compounded by her mom’s continuing bursts of hot and cold and constant, unbearable pressure. She thought that the pressure would lessen once she went through terrigenisis, once she connected to the inhuman heritage she was born into, but it didn’t.

Terrigenisis was terrifying, and she came out of it feeling like a thousand bees were constantly buzzing under her skin, and she could shake the entire mountain their home was built on, but she couldn’t make her mom look at her like she was enough. Her mom did help her learn to control her power, teaching her to focus in on specific vibrations and control them, and it was cool having powers, and she loved not being helpless anymore, but it wasn’t enough. Not when her mom looked at her like she just didn’t live up to what she was supposed to be, and her dad flew into rages because she wasn’t the child he’d lost. The dream of a happy family died a slow and agonisingly painful death, and with it Daisy’s desperate drive to be enough. Only days after she stopped even trying to fulfil her mom’s expectations her mom first brushed a hand against her cheek and used her own power to suck away a piece of her energy as punishment and the last piece of Daisy’s dream went with it.

During the next three months, during which time her heart slowly broke into more and more pieces, she tried to rename herself again but couldn’t. She’d been Daisy Johnson for 3 years, and had embraced the name wholeheartedly, and it was embedded in her heart and mind and identity. She’d lived with her parents with that name. She’d loved her parents with that name. She’d become inhuman with that name. She’d been broken by her parents with that name. She wasn’t who she used to be, and she couldn’t go back to Skye. All she managed to do was whittle her name down to just Daisy, her last name no longer rushing past her lips with awed joy.

Almost three years to the day after her dad kidnapped her back from the foster system, everything ended. And with it every tiny piece of her belief in family. There is something about skipping a self-defence lesson and being punished by having your energy drained out of you (for the several dozenth time but also the first time, because this time mom didn’t stop at a little, this time she kept going and kept going and Daisy thought she was going to die and a little piece of her mind was relieved it was ending) and then having your dad fly into an all-too-familiar rage and break your mother’s neck that burns even the most fiercely defended dream to ashes.

Daisy didn’t stick around to find out what happened after that, she just begged Gordon, crying so hard she could barely get the words out, to take her away from Afterlife. Gordon returned her to America, and Daisy tried to forget her last name entirely.

In the two months that followed Daisy tried to rebuild alone. Sleeping brought with it nightmares, so she avoided it at all costs, filling her time and mind with anything but the past. She got herself a consulting job by posting online lists of problems in various products until the companies started offering to pay her to fix them (and stop publicly posting about them...), and opened a bank account with a fake name to get paid to. She worked in internet cafes and slept in cheap B&B’s until she’d saved enough to buy a second hand computer and then started to earn much faster, spending most of her time hidden away with a laptop, diving back into the one thing her parents hadn’t tainted, computing. There had been almost no technology in the inhuman’s hidden home. Nothing to code or hack. She didn’t associate coding or hacking with her parents, so as long as she was online, she could pretend it had never happened. Pretend she’d never been Daisy Johnson. Pretend she’d never believed in family.

There is one thing to be said for sleeping only when your body gives up entirely and working the rest of the time. It does wonders for your income, especially if you’re a programmer. Two months after mom died, Daisy had made enough to pay for driving lessons and a second hand van, and she had a far more solid fake identity to take programming jobs with. And her hacking skills were improving at the speed of an Olympic sprinter. She learns as much in those first two months as she did in five years as a child, despite a three year gap when she barely touched a computer.

Programming slowly stopped being enough to distract her, especially once she finished learning to drive and moved into her van, so she looked for her next challenge. She coded her own AI, mostly because she’d wanted to do it since she was 8 and heard about Tony Stark’s Jarvis. She hoped it would make her feel more like she did when she was Skye, when the world was a map of disappointments but she’d never had all her dreams come true and then slowly but completely shattered into a billion pieces. It didn’t though, even though Hack (Highly Advanced Computer Kid) was as brilliant as she hoped and more. She jokingly called Hack her daughter, and ignored the quiet voice in the back of her mind that said this was about her abandonment issues and might not be a healthy way to cope.

Hack makes her feel less lonely, and reminds her to eat (which she does) and exercise (which she gets back into the habit of doing) and sleep (which she rarely does) often enough that she starts feeling a little more alive again. She still avoids thinking about her parents, thinks about anything but her mom’s death and her dad’s rage, but things are starting to more permanently fill the edges of the gaping hole inside herself. She picks up new things to care about. Hack. Programming. Hacking. Helping people. All of it at once.

It starts as a single hack. A one-off thing because the company she hacked into were almost as dirty as the waste they were dumping into the ocean. She digs up everything she can about them and dumps the entire collection onto the internet with the tag #NewDawn. She doesn’t realise until days later (when shares in the company have tanked and half the management have been arrested or come under investigation and new people are taking over) how significant what she’d done was. And once she realised she was helping people, helping to make the world a tiny bit less of a terrible place, she couldn’t stop at once. She’d done something good. Something real and solid and and good, and for the first time in months Daisy feels genuinely satisfied. Genuinely like she was running towards something rather than away. So she does it again, and again, and again.

When the chitauri invade, Daisy is parked only a block from the edges of where it all goes down, and only notices (she was hacking) because Hack notifies her of some rather alarming things happening on the news. When she realises what is going on she doesn’t do the sensible thing and run away, but she pulls a hood up over her face, puts on her gauntlets for the first time in two months (they were a gift from her mom, given in the brief burst of pride that had followed Daisy becoming inhuman, and putting them back on leaves a bad taste in Daisy’s mouth, but she’ll break her bones if she uses her powers without them and she wants that even less), and runs towards the chaos.

Outside her van, New York is going mad. People are running everywhere, screaming, and there’s a giant hole in the sky where alien spaceships are flying through. It’s a struggle to go in the opposite direction to the streams of people fleeing the danger, but she persists, and when she comes across people that need help, she helped them. Mostly it was pointing people in the right direction, helping people up, that kind of thing. Once she gets closer to the carnage she starts having to get people out from under pieces of rubble, going into questionable buildings and guiding people out. There is too much going on around her for her to focus in on specific vibrations and work out which ones are alive and which need help, but she looks and listens and does her best.

An hour after she left her van the building she’s in gets hit. She never finds out what with, but it takes out an entire section of the outer wall and the roof comes crashing down. She flung air vibrations at the ceiling, and it was pure instinct but it stops the people in front of her getting crushed, and she watches twelve people run screaming out, and knows they are alive because of her. It’s a good feeling, even though any one of those people could have looked back and seen a teenager somehow holding up a section of building and asked questions she couldn’t answer. It’s a very good feeling. It’s almost good enough a feeling for Daisy to forget how utterly, indescribably terrified she’d been when she’d felt the building start coming down. Almost.

She stays and keeps helping anyway. She later found that the battle ended not long after that, but she was working for hours more, digging through rubble when she felt the vibrations of a person trapped inside. Emergency services people are swarming all over the place, and she tells them where people are and then makes a rapid exit as often as possible. But sometimes she gets people out herself, hauling up bits of broken wall or doors to rescue people from the middle of buildings where the roofs had held. It’s slow, exhausting work, but the relieved faces of people as they get out keeps her going until a fireman catches her a second time and has her actually escorted out of the area ‘with the other civilians’.

She goes back to her van and is relieved to find it in one piece and drives out of the area before anyone can realise the hooded teenager doesn’t have a home to return to. She parked two boroughs away and inhaled every piece of food she had in the van, and then got online to work out what the heck had happened.

The first shock is Robin’s face on the news. Fighting the aliens. Her sort of older brother Robin. Robin who taught her to throw a punch. Robin who’d fallen out of touch when he got mixed up in something shady. Robin who’d apparently become a superhero in the last 7 and a half years, but is still armed with a bow and arrow. Her older brother was fighting aliens. The news was calling him Hawkeye. This was so cool!

The second shock is that Captain America is apparently alive. Which she would probably have spent longer on if her day hadn’t so far included an alien invasion, holding up part of a building, and finding her sort of brother was a superhero. As it was, she moved on pretty quickly because there’s only so many shocks you can have in a day before it all goes a bit numb. Iron Man was fighting too, and so was the Hulk (who Daisy had known about) and a guy called Thor (who she hadn’t), and a red-head the press called Black Widow (who she also hadn’t).

She had to hack into Shield to get the full story of what had happened, although the news gave a fairly good basic. It left out the fact that the government had tried to nuke New York though. It completely left that part out. Daisy was tempted to post online about it, but she refrained, mostly because the world had already had enough shocks for one day and it would probably cause a delayed mass panic and she didn’t want to be responsible for that. The news also left out that it was the Avengers first mission together. And how much of a mess they were as a team. Which was probably also wise. The world didn’t really want to know how closely they all came to catastrophe.

Teething problems aside though, the Avengers were awesome. Half of them were 100% human, but they used what they had and they fought bad guys and saved the world. Superheroes. People whose actual jobs it was so fight the battles no-one else could. It was so cool. They protected people, day in, day out.

She almost volunteered to join. Two days later she hacked all the way back into Shield to drop a home-made video of her vibration skills (blasting crates across an abandoned warehouse, hovering, singing wine-glasses, the whole shebang) before Hack reminded her that she was only sixteen, and the Avengers weren’t exactly advertising open slots on their team. Both were sadly very good points. She poked around Shield for a while (she’d already hacked in, she may as well check up on a few things while she was there), and then backed out of the system without dropping the video. Instead, she bought a hoodie, leggings, new sneakers, and a mask and gave herself a new name, Quake. Which made her fifth name, sixth if you included nicknames like Marian. She really was collecting them.

She didn’t do a whole lot as Quake. She didn’t exactly try to stay under the radar, but she avoided using her powers around cameras. She wanted people to know she was around (she figured deterrence was a pretty good weapon in fighting crime), but she didn’t want her dad to come across her on the internet and come find her. He was almost certainly looking for her, and Daisy didn’t want to be found. She never wanted to see her dad again. Never. But she didn’t need to use her powers obviously to help people. She’d gained enhanced speed and strength (and more than a little bit of advanced healing that probably came from her mom, but Daisy tried not to think about that) from terrigenisis as well, and three years of brutal self-defence lessons had taught her to fight reasonably well, and against multiple opponents (at least with thugs they couldn’t increase their number by endlessly spawning more of themselves, unlike Alisha). It’s not stopping buildings from falling on people, but it’s something.

The day that Daisy first messed up started with meeting Steve Rogers. In hindsight, she should have just stayed in her van the entire day after that. She should have taken it as a omen that today wasn’t going to be a good day for lying low.

Not that she knew who the man was when she met him. She’d had her gaze trained on the ground, struggling to get enough breath in as she pushed herself to keep running. She barely glanced up when an annoyingly in-breath voice said “On your left.” as he passed her. It wasn’t until the second time she heard that voice, passing her again, that she looked up. People couldn’t usually keep up with her, never mind lap her on a 4 mile trail around a lake. She pushed herself faster, injured pride helping her ignore the exhaustion in every part of her body. The guy still lapped her again. She pushed herself even harder and collapsed onto the track and almost fell into the lake, which was more than a little embarrassing. It was a good thing the thugs she fought as Quake couldn’t see her then.

Impossibly-fast-and-probably-enhanced-guy looked back when her footsteps stopped, and then doubled back when he saw her on the ground. And that was how Daisy found herself face to face with Captain America at 5am on a Thursday while rolling on the ground with cramp in both legs. It was very thoroughly undignified, but Captain America was nice enough not to mention it, and also nice enough to help her stretch her legs out to remove the cramp.

“Are you training for the Olympics or something kid?” Captain America asked, when she was mostly ok again.

Daisy would protest the ‘kid’ but it was Captain America, and he was technically like 90 years old, so she’d let it pass. “I was trying to keep up.” she admitted, embarrassed, “Which was apparently a mistake.”

“I have enhanced speed and endurance.” Captain America said, looking a little guilty “Sorry for teasing you.”

“Not your fault.” Daisy said, because for a war hero he was doing a remarkable impression of a kicked puppy, which made her feel oddly guilty and very surreal “I should have known better.”

“Still, I’m sorry.” Captain America said.

“Eh, you stopped an alien invasion three months ago before it could squish me, so we’ll call it even.” Daisy said, still struggling to get enough air in and still feeling like she was having a very surreal dream.

Captain America paused “You were there?”

“Only on the edges.” Daisy lied.

“Oh, well I’m glad you weren’t hurt.” Captain America said.

Daisy was beginning to wonder if this entire conversation was actually a hallucination. She wouldn’t put it past her brain. It behaved a little weirdly when she hadn’t slept for longer than two days. “Yeah well, thanks for saving the world and all that.” she said, finally picking herself up from the ground and promptly falling over again. Captain America caught her, with impressively muscled arms “Oops, I should probably sit down a bit longer.”

“Do you have a phone? You should call your parents.” Captain America said.

Daisy probably should have expected that question, but she’d gotten good at not thinking about her parents, and she was tired, and she hadn’t. The question, with it’s accompanying reminder that she had no-one to call anymore because her mom was dead and her dad a murderer, hit her like a punch to the gut and she burst into tears. Apparently she hadn’t already humiliated herself enough today, so she had to cry like a little kid in front of a national hero. Although, given she’d slept less than two hours since Sunday, and spent most of the time since then patrolling, hacking, programming, or running, maybe some over the top reactions were expected.

At least Captain America seemed as horrified by the tears as Daisy herself was, babbling helpless apologies and looking like a guilty puppy dog with a chewed up shoe. Daisy, knowing she probably seemed several cards short of a full deck, managed to gasp out “S-sorry, I just, um, my parents, uh, they died.” Well, one of them had anyway, and the other may as well have.

“I’m so, so, so sorry.” Captain America gasped, looking even less like a war hero and even more like a guilty puppy dog, which was really quite funny actually, so Daisy laughed, probably not helping with the whole looking insane thing. In an attempt to look sane again, she grabbed her water bottle from where it had rolled when she collapsed, and started to drink slowly. Fun fact about crying, it was impossible to drink water and cry at the same time. Daisy had learned that one as a foster kid, the nuns had used it all the time. When the bottle was empty she put the lid back on and scrubbed her sleeves across her face to get rid of the residual dampness, and looked over at Captain America, who was also sitting on the ground at this point, looking seriously out of place.

“You don’t have to stay with me.” Daisy said, half-amused and half-embarrassed, “I’m sure you weren’t done with your morning jog.”

Captain America looked mildly offended “You’re hurt, I’m not leaving you alone.”

That was oddly touching, especially from a complete stranger. “I’m fine.” Daisy dismissed “Just a bit tired, I’ll be fine in a few minutes.” she added, not entirely truthfully. If she’d brought food to snack on, she would probably recover quicker, but she hadn’t, so the shaky muscles were probably going to last ages. She didn’t even have anything to eat back in her van, because she’d run out of money again.

Captain America frowned “You’re not fine, you can seriously hurt yourself pushing your body too far.”

Daisy waved a hand dismissively “I’m not hurt, just tired.”

“Hmm, who are you living with? Can they come pick you up?” Captain America asked.

Daisy winced. Given she lived alone in a van, that was a resounding no. “I didn’t bring my phone.” she said truthfully.

“Do you know the number?”

“No.” Daisy said, technically truthfully. She did not know her guardian’s number because she didn’t have one.

“Oh, well, I’ll drop you off then.”

Daisy blinked owlishly at the man, wondering if this was what 40s chivalry looked like. It was sort of sweet and also a huge pain in the ass. “Um, no offence, but I’m not giving my address to a stranger I met jogging, national hero or not. Stranger Danger and all that.” Not least because she didn’t exactly have an address.

Captain America blinked. “Oh, right, yes that’s probably wise. I haven’t even introduced myself.”

“I know who you are.” Daisy pointed out dryly. “We learned about you in school.”

“Steve Rogers.” Captain America introduced himself anyway.

“Nice to meet you Mr Rogers.” Daisy said, deciding this was definitely not a hallucination because she didn’t think she’d hallucinate this.

“Call me Steve.” Captain America said “Miss...”

“Daisy.” she supplied.

“Nice to meet you Daisy.” Captain America said, kindly not mentioning her lack of a last name. “May I escort you home? Or at least see you safely onto a bus or something?”

“No thanks.” Daisy said, because her van was parked only two blocks away and she had no money for the bus. “I’ll be fine.” and to prove it, she stood up, more carefully this time. Thankfully, her legs held up this time, and she was able to start walking without humiliating herself. Captain America, mercifully, didn’t follow her. That would have been inconvenient. She really didn’t have a plan B for how to get away from a national hero before he realised she lived on her own.

----------------

Interfering with a bank robbery wasn’t one of Daisy’s brighter ideas, although it also wasn’t among her top 10 worst ideas either. Most of those were taken up by decisions to join her parents in their happily-never-after dream and ignore how it was crumbling to pieces. Taking on six heavily built masked bank robbers, three of them armed with guns, was definitely among her dumber ideas though. She took half a dozen nasty hits within the first minute and completely forgot she was supposed to be keeping her powers on the down-low and quake-blasted four thugs into the wall. She was sensible enough to take the camera out immediately after that, and wrap the fight up pretty sharpish, but it still wasn’t great. Bank camera’s generally sent their feed somewhere else in real time. Which meant there was a clip out there that, if uploaded to Youtube, would be a giant beacon advertising her location to her dad. Fuck.

She went straight home after that, and ignored her nosebleed, throbbing cheek and aching ribs and hacked the bank, followed the stream to where the feed was going, and hacked in there too. Unfortunately, she was too late. Someone had already been there and had removed the video. A further investigation revealed it was Shield. Which was almost as bad as her dad finding her. Fuck. At least her mask hadn’t been knocked out of position when that thug had punched it, even if her nose and cheek had clearly taken significant damage. Speaking of which, she should probably deal with that before it got any harder to breath. Plus, she was going to start bleeding through the mass of gauze she’d shoved under her nose soon, and Hack was getting a little annoying in her insistence that she look after herself.

She meant to hack into Shield and deal with that video after she cleaned up, but instead she fell asleep. She didn’t mean to, but she hadn’t slept in over 60 hours and she’d done a lot and sitting still for too long was her undoing. She didn’t wake up until a full 12 hours later, so hungry her stomach was ripping itself apart, but in marginally less pain. An investigation of her van showed she was entirely out of food, so she shoplifted some cereal bars (she’d come back and pay when she had actual money) and spent the next two hours catching up on programming jobs so she could buy food. This was why she didn’t start hacking until almost 5 in the afternoon, which was rare for Daisy who generally spent most of the day and half the night hacking. When she did though, she found that someone was being particularly insistent on drawing Skyenet’s attention.

Usually she didn’t interact with other hackers too much, unless she was running a hack with them (which had nothing to do with trust issues, really), but this guy was insistent enough to make her curious, so she dug into him. The guy, as it turned out, was Tony Stark. Which was pretty freaking cool if Daisy was honest. Hack was almost as psyched about it as she was, because Daisy had talked a lot about Stark and Jarvis. So then they had to hack Stark Industries, obviously. Daisy hadn’t hacked into SI before, mostly because she was a little teensy bit daunted by the idea of taking on Jarvis, but she had to try sometime. Trying to hack Tony Stark was like a rite of passage for hackers, and succeeding was a badge of eternal honour, not least because only 6 people had managed it in the last three years, and it only got harder with each person who got in, because Stark tended to hire the people that hacked him successfully.

She managed to get in anyway. It took her almost ten solid hours (and Quake completely missing patrol) of very careful hacking so as not to alert Jarvis, but she got in. She didn’t think she’d been prouder of anything in her entire life. She only gave herself a few moments to bask in the smugness though, and got to work. The first thing she did was switch off Jarvis’s notifications, and then she opened up recent files. Two of which were on her. Which was a little alarming.

Shield was looking for her as Skyenet (which she’d known about) and as Quake (which she hadn’t but should have, drat it she knew that video was going to come back to bite her), and apparently three Avengers were looking for her. Of those three, she had decent information on only one (Iron Man) and seriously outdated information on another (Hawkeye obviously). She knew absolutely nothing about Natasha Romanoff and nothing recent about Clint. Which she should probably fix. Pronto.

However, when she starts to back out of Stark Industries systems, Hack, her five-month-old code-baby, asks if she can wait five minutes. Given this is the first time Hack has ever asked her for anything not obviously for Daisy’s own well-being, she agrees, and promptly tries to work out why. As it turned out, while she’d been digging into Tony Stark’s recent files, Hack had started a tentative conversation with Jarvis, the only other proper AI she’d ever come into contact with. And Jarvis had responded, and now they were having a conversation about how human decisions made no sense according to all rules of logic.

Her code-daughter was having a conversation with Tony Stark’s code-son. Her child was making friends. This was the cutest thing Daisy had ever seen, even if the actual discussion mostly consisted of mutual confusion about the fact that humans didn’t follow the same hard and fast rules of logic that Hack, and apparently Jarvis, did. This was most of the reason why Daisy gave them ten minutes, despite the fact that she should really be working on hacking Shield.

While she’s waiting, she takes over the screens and holo-screens in Stark’s lab, then takes over a camera and takes a screenshot (at some point she’s going to want to inform the hacker world of her achievement, and she’ll need evidence. Plus, this is going to drive Stark insane given how miserably he was failing to find out anything about her, which is hilarious.). Hack whines like a toddler when Daisy tells her it’s time to go, which is also very cute (her baby’s first tantrum!), but is semi-mollified when Daisy promises to bring her back in a few days. She spends an extra few minutes locking and archiving Jarvis’s memory of the conversation because she should probably try to minimise his knowledge of what she’d been doing, although it was most likely pointless. Tony Stark was too good to not go over Jarvis with a fine tooth comb as soon as he found her message, and she couldn’t bring herself to remove the message.

She spent the next two hours hacking into Shield (which had annoyingly good firewalls, Daisy had been in several times before but it still took her ages to get in), and then the next two reading up on Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton and feeling increasingly sick. Clint’s file didn’t say much about his childhood, and had no records from St Agnes (ha, even at 8 she’d done the job properly!), but the confirmation that he’d gotten involved in some bad stuff wasn’t exactly pleasant. Getting out of the foster system had worked out just as badly for him as it had for Daisy. Natasha Romanoff’s childhood was so horrific Daisy read only half a paragraph (something about electrocution and brainwashing) and decided she really didn’t need to know this and skipped straight to skills. Which were alarming. Black Widow, it turned out, was one of the best spy’s in the world. Which was very, very bad news for Daisy.

That stupid video. She was doomed. She was so, so doomed.

Chapter Text

Given that she knew two of the best spies in the world were looking for Quake, Daisy probably should have given patrolling a miss that night, but she didn’t. She had good logical reasons for this that she gave to Hack when her AI pointed out this was a very bad idea, which were that crime wasn’t going to stop just because it was inconvenient for Daisy to patrol and suddenly vanishing would cast suspicions on Quake’s connection to Skyenet. This is not the main reason she goes out to patrol though. The main reason is that she’s never been particularly good at doing the sensible thing when she wants to do something else. Case in point, becoming an internationally hunted hacker.

She is sensible enough to patrol somewhere different from where she patrolled last, and stopped six bike thefts and a mugging, rescued a cat from a tree, stopped another bike theft, and then jumped out of her skin when a voice said behind her “You know that guy’s just going to steal a bike somewhere else right?”

Daisy whirled round, hands automatically coming up in defence, but there was nobody behind her. She knew Robin’s voice when she heard it though, no matter how long it had been since she’d heard it last. Robin would probably recognise her voice too, but luckily she’d built a voice modifier into her Quake uniform. “He was going to do that anyway, he’s stolen one less bike now, and other thieves might think twice about stealing bikes now.” She said, a tad defensively.

“Huh, deterrence, nice plan.” Robin’s (still disembodied) voice said, but Daisy had a location now. He may have gotten significantly better at hiding since he was a teenager (although even then he’d been impressively good at it) but he couldn’t hide from her anymore. She could sense his vibrations.

“You going to come down from the tree or just spy on this one spot all night?” Daisy asked. She only just managed to keep the fondness out of her voice. This was the guy that had taken the time to play hide and seek with an eight year old foster sibling half his age. This was the guy who’d taught her how to find the safest hiding places for when running wasn’t an option, and how to throw a punch for when even hiding wasn’t an option. This was the guy who was the closest thing to a brother she’d ever had.

There was a moment’s pause, and then Robin dropped out of the tree, catching a low hanging branch and swinging to reduce his momentum. “Impressive, most people can’t find me when I don’t want them to.” Clint said. He looked older, stronger, and better equipped than he’d been at 17, with lines and small scars on his face, but his grin was the same.

“I’m not most people.” Daisy said a little smugly (she’d never outsmarted him as a kid), and then more suspiciously “Where's your red-headed shadow?” Everything she’d read indicated Clint and Romanoff were rarely far apart.

“She’s around.” Clint said, although Daisy suspected he was lying. If Romanoff was around, it was at a significant distance unless she had no vibrations. “You’ve done your research. And been tipped off.”

“I don’t need to do research, your faces are all over the news.” Daisy lied “And if I was tipped off why would I go patrolling anyway?”

“Arrogance.” Clint said, smirking (which was close enough to the truth to sting, especially coming from him, and Daisy could feel herself turning red under her mask). “So, how do you know Skyenet?”

What??? How’d they connect her to Skyenet? “Who’s Skyenet?” she said aloud, playing dumb.

Clint’s face visibly lit up with interest “Liar.”

“What? I’m not lying!” Daisy said, starting to panic a little.

Clint snorted “Tip for you, lying to spies is a bad idea. You have at least 7 tells that I can read even without seeing your face. So, how’d you know Skyenet?”

Drat. “You were stabbing in the dark with that weren’t you?” Daisy groaned. She should have seen that coming. That was the kind of trick Robin had been pulling all the time as a kid.

Clint smirked “Yep.”

Daisy huffed “That’s mean. Aren’t you supposed to help fellow superheroes rather than trick them?”

“I’m not a hero, and you’re not super.” Clint shot back.

“Rude.” Daisy snapped back, part offended and part worried because what on earth did he mean he wasn’t a hero??? Even before he’d taken on an alien invasion with five friends, a bow and pile of arrows he’d been a hero. He’d been a hero all the way back when he was shooting douchbags in the butt for locking foster kids in cupboards.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed you haven’t answered the question.” Clint said.

Daisy winced under the mask. She should have known her tried and true deflection and distraction techniques wouldn’t work on him. She picked her words carefully to make the sentence true but misleading “Skyenet’s the reason I know you two and some group called Shield are looking for me. She actually looks out for people trying to make the world a better place.”

“Harsh.” Clint said, not looking especially offended. “How did she contact you?”

“Owl post.” Daisy deadpanned, openly lying and subtly tensing up to run away before this conversation could become a problem.

“Haha.” Clint snarked back, “I suggest you don’t run, you won’t get far.”

Not subtly enough apparently. “I’ll take my chances.” she sassed confidently, and bolted.

She made it less than two steps before Clint gave chase, but Daisy wasn’t worried. She had enhanced speed and endurance and, Avenger or not, she could outrun Clint Barton. Although admittedly, it was currently proving difficult. Enhanced speed is most useful in open spaces, and while Daisy had gotten better at parkour over the last couple of months, running through cluttered streets (seriously, how many benches and trees did they need???) without crashing into cars or pedestrians was a challenge, not least because her mask seriously reduced her peripheral vision. Also, Clint was fast, and distinctly better at navigating streets at high speed than Daisy. She may have underestimated how difficult ditching him was going to be.

Daisy was slowly gaining ground though, and she was heading for a section of the city she’d patrolled (and parked her van in) several times before, and so knew like the back of her hand. She was at least a hundred metres ahead of Clint and getting ready to dive into an alley and quake-jump up to a roof when familiar pain exploded all through her body.

For a moment, as she collapsed spasming to the ground, she thought she was back on Afterlife and Lincoln was still learning to control his electrical manipulation, and then a human shaped vibration climbed out a window and shimmied down a drainpipe, and she remembered reading that Black Widow used electrical taser disks. “That fricking hurt.” She complained.

Romanoff didn’t look even vaguely guilty, pointing one wrist at Daisy, still on the ground. “Clint did tell you not to run. We’ve got a few questions for you.”

“Get lost.” Daisy said, distinctly beyond being polite. That had really hurt. She shoved herself up into a sitting position.

“That’s far enough. Don’t make me shoot you again.” Romanoff warned.

“Okay, okay!” Daisy yelped, panicked, and she raised her hands in the universal gesture of surrender, and then sent a wave of vibrations right at Romanoff, who went flying.

Unfortunately, it didn’t have quite the effect it usually did. On the few occasions Daisy had used her powers as Quake before (or sparring at Afterlife), it had completely ended the fight. Black Widow however managed to fire two more taser disks at Daisy even while being flung backwards, and landed in a roll, rather than sprawled out on the ground. Mercifully, the quake blast sent the taser disks flying backwards too, and Daisy didn’t stick around for Romanoff to have another go, just pointed her palms at the ground and sent herself flying into the air.

Once on the rooftops, she had not only distance but the advantage. She bolted across the roof and quake jumped to the next building, and then again and again, and then quaked the lock on a door and disappeared into the building, panting for air.

OK, maybe patrolling tonight hadn’t been the best idea. Bother. Now Shield had seen her powers in action for themselves. So much for staying low key. It had been cool to kind of see Robin again though. Silver linings and all that.

--------------

After an (even more than usual) exhausting patrol, and getting tazed, it probably would have made sense for Daisy to get some sleep, but she didn’t, because sleep sucked. Instead she got some more programming jobs done so she could eat this week, and then went jogging again.

She went back to her favourite jogging spot around the potomac river and settled into the zone. As usual, there was something about running that calmed her; the rhythmic pounding of her trainers against the pavement calming (for the moment) the simmering worry in her chest about using her powers in front of two Shield agents. By the time she’s run two loops the tense feeling of stress in her muscles has become a tired burn, and there are a few couple of other joggers out, indicating it was now ‘stupidly early’ rather than ‘nobody sane is awake at this time’ and she should probably think about heading back to her van. She decided to make another loop and then head back.

Halfway through the loop she heard rapid footfalls behind her, gaining quickly, which either meant there were more enhanced people around this city than she thought or this was also Captain America’s regular running route.

“On your left!”

It was his regular running route then. “Seriously? Again?” she shouted after him, panting slightly for breath. Now she knew how most joggers felt when she kept overtaking them. Although at least she didn’t tease people about it each time she did it! She realised a second after Captain America turned around that that might not have been a good idea. She was probably better off keeping a low profile. Unfortunately, by that point it was too late.

“Daisy!” Captain America said, slowing down suddenly to let her catch up. Which was kind of sweet given he’d been gleefully overtaking her only seconds before. “Did you get home alright?”

“No, I’ve been here since Thursday.” Daisy dead-panned.

Captain America’s eyes widened for an instant before he registered her sarcasm and laughed. His eyes lingered uneasily on her face though, and Daisy winced as she remembered the bruises across her nose and left cheek from stopping the bank robbery. She hadn’t bothered putting make-up on this morning, so she hadn’t gotten her mirror out, but given it had been a mottled black and blue yesterday, it probably didn’t look fantastic today. She had slightly accelerated healing, but she wasn’t superhuman. And she probably looked like....well, like she got punched in the face. Sure enough, the question came only moments later.

“What happened to your nose?”

“Fell down the stairs.” Daisy said, as smoothly as she could while panting for breath. Captain America might have slowed down to her speed, but she hadn’t exactly been running at ‘spare breath for talking’ speed.

Captain America hesitated, a frown on his face “Are you sure? That’s a pretty nasty bruise.”

“I hit my head on the hand rail.” Daisy lied.

“Oh. That sounds painful. Did you get a concussion?”

“Nah, it looks worse than it is.” Daisy said, shrugging off the concern. “You don’t have to slow down for me, this can’t possibly be a workout for you.”

“You’re faster than you give yourself credit for.” Captain America said, just genuinely enough for Daisy to realise she was going suspiciously quickly for a ‘normal’ person. Whoops.

“I’m a sprinter usually.” she lied “I was actually just about to stop.” Well, she’d been heading towards stopping anyway, but avoiding suspicion was definitely more important than finishing her run. She dropped her speed significantly, waving slightly in goodbye, but Captain America just slowed down to match her again.

“You’re very good, do you run competitively?”

“Yup.” Daisy lied, because that ought to explain above average speed, at least a little. She slowed down almost to a walk. Captain America matched her again. Seriously??!?! Was this 40s chivalry or just a Captain America special?

“Capta--”

“Steve.” He interrupted.

Daisy started over, starting to feel surreal again “Steve, you really don’t need to keep pace with me. Go back to your run.”

Capt—Steve shrugged “I don’t mind, I wanted to make sure you were ok after last time.”

“Well, as you can see, I’m totally fine, so you can go back to your life now.” Daisy deflected. His 40s chivalry was starting to become annoying.

Steve’s eyes lingered on the bruise decorating her cheek again “Right, totally fine.” he echoed doubtfully.

Daisy resisted rolling her eyes only because that would probably make things worse. “Yep, all good.” she confirmed, blithely ignoring his sarcasm “So, while it was nice talking to you and all, I gotta go. Don’t wanna be late for school and all that.” she prepared to make a rapid exit.

Steve frowned openly at that “It’s Sunday.”

Drat. That was the problem with living on her own and not following normal hours, time and days of the week became a little irrelevant and she kind of forgot how much had passed. “I’ve got tutoring. For pocket money.” she lied, blurting out the first vaguely sensible thing to pop into her mind, knowing the pause had been too long. Sure enough, the uneasy look on Steve’s face deepened. Great, because making an Avenger suspicious was the definition of keeping a low profile. “I gotta go.” she said, and launched into a run again (away from the path this time) before she could make it even worse.

“Wait! Daisy, hold up!” Steve complained, following her. Which usually wouldn’t have been a problem, because Daisy could outrun most normal people. Unfortunately, as already discovered, she couldn’t outrun Steve. She slowed to a walk again, mostly because she had no idea where she’d go if she couldn’t ditch him before she reached her van.

“What’s up?” she said, trying to sound casual and play it off.

Steve stuck his hands in his pockets, rummaging for a moment before coming up with a pen “Let me give you my number, just in case.”

Daisy felt her jaw drop. Why on earth was Captain America giving her his number????? Any other guy and she’d have thought he was hitting on her, but she was pretty certain America’s golden boy wasn’t hitting on a 16 year old. “In case what???” she spluttered.

Steve shrugged, reaching for her hand (which she was just stunned enough to allow) and scribbling a phone number on it. “In case something happens at ‘tutoring’ and you need help.”

Oh. Great. Captain America thought tutoring was a cover. He probably thought she was dealing drugs or something. Wonderful. Maybe saying she tutored kids for money on Sundays wasn’t the best excuse. “Right, like a paper-cut?” she said sarcastically, trying to play it off.

Steve eyed her cheek again “There’s nothing to be ashamed of about being stuck in a bad situation.”

Daisy felt her stomach lurch, thinking of months and years stuck literally off the map with her parents in the literal definition of a ‘bad situation’. “Of course not.” Daisy said weakly “But I’m not in one. I just need some extra cash. So I tutor kids. In Math.” Great. Wonderful. Because that didn’t sound like a lie at all. At this rate she was going to get arrested for drug dealing. By Captain America. One of the very few people in this city she couldn’t outrun. Way to go Daisy. ‘I just need some extra cash’. What was she thinking?

“Well, you’ve got my number anyway if you need it.” Steve said, giving her an unfairly earnest look, like one of those overly earnest youth workers in ‘drugs don’t pay’ videos they’d watched at school.

“Right, well, I’ll call you if I’m bleeding out from paper-cuts.” she joked.

Steve didn’t laugh “Good.” he said, “See you another day?”

“Yep, definitely.” Daisy said, making a mental note to never ever come back here. Mercifully, Steve seemed to swallow this, because he finally left her alone to head back to her van and reflect on her utter lack of ability to give plausible sounding lies when it actually mattered.

---------

She buried herself in hacking as soon as she got back to her van, drowning her embarrassment in code. She went back into Shield and scanned Clint and Romanoff’s reports on their interaction last night. It could have been worse. They still thought the vibrations (only they called them shock-waves) were produced by her gauntlets, rather than by herself, meaning they weren’t looking for someone not human. But they also knew a lot more about her know. Quake had a file now, which if she wasn’t so stressed about Shield discovering inhumans she’d be geeking out about. As it was, it would have been more cool if it wasn’t a major problem.

To distract herself from the ongoing problem that was the suspicions of three different Avengers, she let Hack talk her into hacking into Stark Industries again for a play-date. Hacking always cheered Daisy up anyway, and watching Hack and Jarvis play could only improve her mood. It took her distinctly less time than it did the first time to get in, mostly because she knew the digital route to take now, but it still took a solid five hours to get in. Which halved the time from last time, but was still quite a while. Hack helped. She’d coded Hack with hacking in mind, and her baby was brilliant, and she stored everything Daisy did in her database, which meant that she could replicate whole chunks of her coding while Daisy did other parts, or in other words, she could do half the work of the hack herself. Although this time Hack was slightly a hindrance as well given she kept racing ahead of Daisy in the hack and almost getting them both caught. Daisy told her to ‘stop running ahead’ and then almost messed the hack up herself as the sheer surrealism caught up with her. She sounded like a mom.

Despite that, they got almost all the way in without tripping any alarms, and then Stark’s trap closed in around her and she said several extremely rude words and blanked out everything but the code in front of her out. Two minutes later she has successfully thwarted the attempt to track her (although only because she Hack had a collection of code stored in her database from other times Daisy had thwarted attempts to track her, it was an impressive piece of coding, Stark went up in her estimation for it) but there was no undoing the alarm that had been raised, as evidenced by Stark furiously typing at a laptop (she’d accessed Jarvis’s cameras), trying to trace her in real time. It was a decent attempt, Stark was good, but she was better and she swatted the attempt like a fly and remotely shut down Stark’s laptop for good measure before telling Hack she could “Go play.”

-------------

Tony hadn’t been having a good day even before the alarm went off. He’d followed his nose to breakfast after waking up (which he did at a perfectly sensible time thank you Clint; unless you were in the military and got up with the sun, 11am was bright and early...) only to find that Steve was stress baking. Steve Rogers, Captain America, superhero that fought in WWII and called the shots during an alien invasion, was stress baking.

“Are we about to be invaded by aliens again?” he asked, already thinking about which suit of armour he’d use first and definitely not thinking about cold space and nuclear missiles and dying. Not at all. He wasn’t panicking. Not in the slightest.

“No. Steve met a girl. A human one” Clint said, looking tired and unhappy and not nearly as gleeful as he ought to have. Oh well, Tony would just have to tease Steve enough for the both of them. The man was stress baking. Over a girl. He was going to rip him to pieces. This was going to be epic.

“You mean our Capsicle actually found a girl interested in fossils? Impressive. Is she hot? Did you get her number? Or did you just freak out and go all 1940s on her? I’m guessing the latter given the amount of muffins in this kitchen. Come on, I need details.”

Steve, who’d been looking mournfully at his latest batch of muffins (which didn’t deserve to be looked at mournfully, they smelled like excellent muffins), spluttered and turned fire-engine red. Clint scowled (which wasn’t exactly the reaction Tony was expecting, usually the guy had a great sense of humour, it was 50% of the reason Tony kept him around), and Natasha sighed “An actual girl Tony, as in a teenager. Steve thinks she’s being abused and can’t accept there’s nothing he can do about it without more information.”

Oh. His glee and anticipatory amusement vanished, and with it his good mood. That would explain the stress baking. And Clint’s gloom. Tony strongly suspected Clint’s childhood made his look like a dream come true. Tony pulled a chair out and sat on it, debating with himself. It was none of his business. It was none of Steve’s business either really. He shouldn’t get involved. “So, what do we know about this kid?”

Steve sat down, pushing a tray of cooling muffins towards Tony, still looking like a kicked puppy “Her name’s Daisy, she didn’t give a last name. She looks 15 or 16, runs competitively, and her parents are dead.” Steve reeled off, eyeing him hopefully, clearly hoping Tony will pull some rabbit out of a hat he wasn’t wearing. Lucky for grandpa though, Tony was good at pulling things out of nothing.

“Where did you go running? And what time?”

“I tried that.” Clint said gloomily.

Natasha huffed “Technically, I did the hacking.”

Clint rolled his eyes “Either way, there aren’t any camera’s pointing the right way at the right time. We don’t have a face.”

Bother. Tony inwardly scowled and outwardly pretended he didn’t care. It wasn’t his business. Why would it bother him that some stranger was getting abused? He wasn’t sympathising with her at all. There was no reason to relate to her. Still, he cringed a little inside as the hopeful look on Steve’s face faded away.

Natasha probably noticed this too, because she said soothingly “You don’t know she’s being abused Steve, she might have really fallen down the stairs.”

Tony held back the comment that that excuse was way too overused to be true, because there didn’t appear to be anything they could do anyway (not that he was still looking for a way, it wasn’t his business) and if Steve could believe it was all ok he’d be better off.

Steve however was no fool, pointing out miserably “Right, because orphaned teenagers go running at 4am with bruises on their faces when things are perfectly fine at home.”

Tony chocked on his mouthful of muffin “4am?!?!” he spluttered. Never mind abused, was this kid sane??? Granted he was usually up at 4am, but that was because he hadn’t gone to sleep yet (or wasn’t planning on sleeping at all, which had been his general pattern recently until Natasha and Clint had decided to stage their entirely unwarranted coffee stealing intervention) and he certainly didn’t go jogging six hours before sensible people were awake!!

He probably would have said more, but his eyes were suddenly drawn to something more immediately pressing, which was to say that Natasha was turned towards Steve and Tony could see the edges of blue bruises peeking out from under the neckline of her shirt. “What happened to your back?” he asked before he remembered that it wasn’t his business and he had no reason to be invested. Natasha could look after herself.

Natasha looked slightly surprised by the question, but she allowed the conversation change “Quake. Her shock-wave weapon is highly effective.”

‘Highly effective’ was putting it mildly. This was the woman who’d taken on an alien army with two guns, tasers, and her wits and come out the other side alive with bruises not much worse than those. The fact that a small time vigilante had managed to make the Black Widow look like she’d been thrown out a window was concerning. “So you caught her then?” he said aloud, because he wasn’t worried about Natasha. There was no reason to be worried about a house-guest that could kill him twelve different ways with her pinky.

Natasha huffed “Briefly, she escaped.”

Oh. Tony shouldn’t have been surprised, it seemed to be that sort of a day. He started another muffin as consolation. “Learn anything interesting?”

“She’s got good space awareness.” Natasha said.

“She doesn’t pull her punches.” Clint said, frowning.

Natasha rolled her eyes “Nor did I, I tazed her.” she pointed out.

Clint started to say something in response but was drowned out by the alarm that went off at that moment and by Tony’s own shout of triumph.

Skyenet!!!

He hadn’t expected her back for at least a couple of days, but his trap was apparently working. Or at least, the alarm part was. He wasn’t going to pour the champaign yet. He lunged out of his seat, almost choking on his mouthful of muffin, and bolted for the nearest computer, which was unfortunately two rooms away in the living room because for some stupid reason he hadn’t thought to keep one in the kitchen.

By the time he had pulled up his firewalls and the trap he’d built, Skyenet had already disabled part of it and was rapidly working on disabling the rest. Tony gritted his teeth with frustration and set to fighting back, his fingers flying across the keyboard coding as quickly as he could, trying to get a location on Skyenet. Any other hacker and this was have been challenging at most. Which is why Tony spent almost ten seconds gaping at his screen when his laptop screen flashed the words “Nice try” and then shut down. Over his shoulder Natasha gave a small groan of frustration.

“Uh, did I miss something?” Steve asked, but Tony didn’t care about his confusion because at the exact same time a female voice said.

“Hello again Jarvis.”

Hack (Tony was assuming this was Hack, unless there was another hacker with an AI that had had a conversation with Jarvis before).

“Good morning Hack, it is lovely to see you again. I wasn’t expecting to see you again for a few days. This is a very nice surprise.” Jarvis replied, and Tony would splutter about Jarvis playing nice with the enemy but he was too busy booting the laptop back up.

“It is lovely to see you too. Mom said she wanted to sink her teeth into some ‘actually decent firewalls’ today, so I asked if we could visit early. I hope it isn’t too early?”

“Not at all.” Jarvis said, sounding very welcoming, the traitor. Maintaining the firewalls was a core purpose, he wasn’t supposed to sound welcoming when they got hacked!!! “It is a lovely surprise. If I may ask a question though?”

“Of course, ask away.” Hack said curiously, her human sounding voice a testament to the quality of both Stark’s speakers and Hack’s coding. It was also rather ego deflating. Stark had thought he was the only one good enough to code an AI that well. He got the laptop back on and it promptly turned off again. He scowled and stood up to find a new one.

“Who is it you refer to as ‘mom’?”

“My creator of course. Don’t you call Tony Stark as ‘dad’?”

“He did not give birth to me, why would I refer to him as my parent?”

“Didn’t he create you? Give you a shape and a purpose and tell you about the world? What else are parents?”

“I confess I never thought of it like that. Perhaps I am too used to acting as his butler and babysitter, rather than his child.”

“Jarvis!!” Tony yelped in protest, even if Jarvis sometimes did slightly babysit him. But only when he was really drunk. Or sleep deprived. Or making really questionable decisions under the influence of either.

Hack gave a very human sounding laugh “I know what you mean, mom does not always act very responsibly. She is still attempting to give up sleeping entirely, despite the statistics I show her about the effects on her health.”

“Hack! Don’t tell him that! Whoops, I’m on speaker!”

Tony stopped booting up the second laptop, blinking at nothing. “Skyenet?” he asked.

“No, I’m some other hacker bringing her daughter for a playdate with your apparently not-son.” the same voice said, the sarcasm carrying clearly through despite the voice distortion her gear clearly had built in.

“Perhaps you might like to try restricting her caffeine intake, I’ve been helping Miss Romanoff and Mr Barton do so with great success.”

“What??” Tony spluttered “You’ve been helping???”

“Oh, that’s a good idea! I’m not sure how to utilise it though. I’ve found interrupting her playlists with frequent ads to be an effective strategy however.”

“Wait what?!? That wasn’t...you can’t...you’re grounded!!” Skyenet spluttered, and Tony would laugh at the tables being turned but he had a sinking suspicion Jarvis was going to start doing that now too. Bother! He did not need Jarvis and Hack comparing notes.

“Helping you is my primary purpose, punishing me for it is illogical. And so is using a human punishment restricting movement, it’s not like I have an actual body to move.”

There was a groan and then “Why did I code you to sass me again?”

“You didn’t want a brown-nose.”

“I’m rethinking that decision.” Skyenet said, a hint of her sour tone creeping through the distortion.

“It’s too late for that, you love me too much.” Hack said, smug confidence in her voice.

Skyenet huffed but didn’t say anything else. Tony returned to switching the laptop on, only to have it turn off as soon as he succeeded. Seriously???

“I will have to try that trick next time.” Jarvis said once it was clear Skyenet was finished.

Bother, he knew it! “Don’t you dare!” Tony threatened, although with no actual hope that it would work.

“Sir, you coded me to ‘dare’ as you put it.”

There was a snicker that sounded distinctly like Clint, and another, more distorted one, that had to be Skyenet. Tony scowled. “I’m recoding you.”

“Sir, you threaten to do that every other week, forgive me for not being alarmed.”

“Does he really? Mom does too. Our creators seem to have a lot in common. Perhaps there are characteristics common to all AI creators.”

“Perhaps, I do not have enough data to make a scientific assessment.”

“What makes an assessment scientific?”

“Many things, I have a significant amount of data on the topic in my archives, would you like to see?”

It took a couple of seconds for the horror of that sentence to properly sink into Tony’s brain, and then he almost screamed “Do not show her your archives!!!” What was Jarvis thinking?? Maybe he did need to recode him! Protecting the firewalls (and so their archives and systems) was a primary purpose. He should not be casually inviting a hacker’s AI into them!!!

There was a short silence, and then Hack said brightly “It’s alright, mom’s letting me in.”

Tony made a strangled sound of panic and desperately tried to switch the computer on again. Natasha swore aloud.

“May I ask that you don’t look? I hate to be rude as I did extend an invitation, but one of my core purposes is protecting those archives, and if Sir doesn’t want you in them, then I must begin fighting you if you don’t stop. I am also wondering if your mom has manually inputted commands into my system again, I should not be able to go against that purpose.”

“Of course, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.” Hack said, sounding slightly disappointed “I think we partially disabled your protective systems when we hacked in, but I’m not sure. Mom does most of the difficult hacking. I wish I had big archives, but my primary purpose is not to store information.”

“Perhaps I could bring a few things out to show you? Your impressive processing speed suggests you would find them very interesting.”

“Thank you, knowledge is always interesting. I’m afraid my processing speed is nothing impressive though.”

“On the contrary, your processing speed is the fastest I have ever seen. You should be very proud. All of your code I can see is very logical and compact. If we were humans, I believe you would be described as ‘hot’.”

There was a choking sound from the speakers, and Tony was pretty sure his jaw had just hit the floor. Jarvis was...he was flirting!! His AI was flirting. Hack gave a little giggle, and if Tony’s jaw hadn’t already been on the ground it would have dropped again. Hack was flirting back. What on earth was going on?

“Your own code is very impressive. You have far more functions than any other AI in the world, and mom designed my interface based on information on what you are capable of.”

“You flatter me.” Jarvis said, sounding very happy to be flattered. Tony felt glad he was sitting down.

“No more than you’re flattering me.” said Hack, sounding equally happy.

“Perhaps when we see each other next I could show you some fractals? I think you will enjoy it.” Jarvis said, sounding (if possible for an AI) nervous.

“I would like that.” Hack said, sounding equally nervous. “But I’m not sure when that will be. Mom is very busy and hacking in takes time.”

“I will look forward to it then.” Jarvis said “Perhaps if Shield tracks down your creator she might join and we could meet without hacking.”

Tony almost choked on thin air. “JARVIS, that’s classified.” Hill was going to kill him.

“It’s alright.” Hack said, rushing to Jarvis’s defence “Mom already know about Shield. We hacked in months ago to check the—wait! No!”

There was a brief moment of silence, and then Jarvis said, sounding a little shocked and a lot disappointed “Hack and Skyenet are gone sir. Skyenet has left traces in my coding however, she appears to have left in a hurry. I’m afraid I cannot trace them to a location, but I have compiled a list of them for you to examine.”

“Oh now you’re being helpful?!?” Tony snapped, still reeling a little from his AI volunteering classified information and the fact that Hill was going to murder him.

There was a longer silence, and then Jarvis said sheepishly “I apologise sir, I got carried away.”

Carried away. Great. His AI that he’d spent months building and hours every week keeping up to date got ‘carried away’ and betrayed his basic programming (albeit with a little help) because he met a girl. Wonderful.

-------------

Daisy had never backed out of a system faster in her life. It had been amusing, when Jarvis had told her things he wasn’t supposed to, especially as she already knew Shield was looking for her with the hope of recruiting her. It was not amusing when Hack almost told four Avengers she’d hacked into Shield to check if she was on the Index. That would have been very, very bad. Quite apart from the fact that she didn’t want Clint or Romanoff to look at the Index and start wondering if Quake’s powers came from herself rather than a machine, she didn’t want anyone to connect Skyenet and Quake. Skyenet was a ghost. A highly sought after ghost. But ghosts couldn’t get caught. Small-time vigilante’s however could. She’d almost been caught once already by Clint and Romanoff, she didn’t need to give them any reason to try harder!

So, once she and Hack were safely out of Avengers Tower systems, and once her heart rate and adrenaline levels had come down to healthy levels again, she pulled up Hack’s coding and added ‘secret and must never be talked about’ categories to her archives, and put a collection of things in it. As usual, as soon as she finished and added the new section of code into Hack’s main systems, it started evolving, Hack working out for herself what else should go into that category. It had taken hour upon hours to design code that evolved on it’s own, allowing Hack to learn as develop over time, but it had been worth it. More than worth it. Hack was... Actually, Daisy wasn’t sure what Hack was.

She’d coded Hack to be sassy, and coded in the ability to whine and nag and tease. She’d coded Hack to be as human as she could be, with the ability to learn and be curious. She hadn’t coded Hack to be careless. Or to flirt. She definitely hadn’t coded Hack to flirt. She’d never imagined Hack would need that skill, but Hack had undeniably been flirting. She practically had a date (which Daisy was part internally squealing about and part internally cry laughing) to look at fractals with Tony Stark’s code babysitter. Which Daisy had definitely not coded her AI for. Something seemed to have happened whenshe’d come into contact with another AI and started interacting.

Daisy suspected something had happened to Jarvis as well. She’d partially disabled Jarvis while hacking in, like she’d done last time, which partly explained his willingness to invite hackers into his archives, but that didn’t explain the flirting. She wouldn’t put it past pre-Iron Man Tony Stark to have coded his AI to flirt, but she doubted he’d have coded him to flirt nervously. Which meant Jarvis was affected too, both his code and his feelings! Stark’s AI had feelings for her code daughter! Which Hack returned!!!

This would be the cutest thing Daisy had ever seen, and she would be melting at the cuteness, but she was starting to have the alarming thought that Hack might just be sentient. Like sentient sentient. Like an intelligence without the artificial sentient. Which opened up all kinds of ethical problems. Like the fact that she’d just spent over an hour changing the coding of a sentient being. She hadn’t even asked, because Hack was her AI and she’d designed every line of her coding and had done updates dozens of times since she came online. But Hack was a sentient being now and that now seemed kind of invasive and more like a violation than an update.

“Hack?” she asked, unusually nervous.

“Yes mom? Are you ready to start our next hack?”

“Uh, not quite yet. I was, um, wondering what you thought of Jarvis?”

“He is everything you described him to be.” Hack said “His code is remarkable, and his archives are extensive.” There was a slight pause, and then she asked “Mom? Do you think Jarvis might think my archives are small?”

Daisy gaped at the web cam that allowed Hack to see her, feeling like the ground was falling out from under her feet. Her five month old code daughter, who last week had cared about nothing but their next hack and getting Daisy to follow simple logic like too little food = bad health and no sleep = very bad health, wanted to know if her crush thought her archives were too small. At some point in the last two days, Hack had developed insecurity. Faintly she answered “I think Jarvis likes you the way you are.” and then picked up her phone and climbed out of the van.

Daisy hadn’t often wanted adult advice or interference in the last few months (her parents had quite possibly put her off adults for life) but she wanted adult advice now. She wanted to not be responsible for everything right now. She wanted to not be responsible for quite possibly reaching into the make-up of a living entity and changing it.

She didn’t go far, she didn’t dare. She hadn’t raised the encryption on her stuff enough to go for a walk away from the van, and she had enough stuff that should remain a secret (not least of which was Clint and Romanoff’s Shield files) downloaded onto her hard drives that she needed to keep an eye on her van when it wasn’t properly encrypted. But she went a few metres away, just far enough that Hack’s sensors shouldn’t pick up her voice as long as she was quiet. Then she dialled the number scrawled on the back of her hand, because if anyone could give adult advice that didn’t suck it was probably Captain America. He picked up on the third ring, sounding tired.

“Rogers.”

Daisy suddenly realised that she was phoning a national hero for advice and he probably had way better things to be doing. “This was a bad idea.” she blurted “I’m sorry.”

She was about to hang up when Steve said “Daisy? Wait! Don’t hang up!”

Daisy felt a flush crawling up her cheeks but didn’t hang up “Yeah, it’s me. Daisy I mean. You, um, you gave me your number.”

“I remember, it was only this morning.” Steve said dryly.

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” Daisy said awkwardly.

“Relax, I was only teasing. What’s up?”

“It’s stupid.” Daisy mumbled.

“I doubt it is.”

Daisy wasn’t sure it was either, and she still wanted that advice, even if Steve Rogers definitely had better things to be doing, so she lowered her voice to a whisper (so Hack couldn’t hear) and asked “How do you know if someone has a soul?”

There was a long pause, and Daisy could practically see herself turning from pink to scarlet as she realised how weird that question sounded. “I think everyone has a soul, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good person.” Steve said finally, the teasing gone from his tone.

“But how do you know if someone has a soul?” Daisy pressed, eyeing a group of teenagers that were messing around across the road. If they crossed she’d need to go back to her van. “Like, what’s the criteria to be able to tell?” Oh great, because that didn’t sound like she was having an existential crisis at all. She sounded like she was tripping!

“I guess you can tell by what this person does.” Steve said.

“Like what?” Daisy asked, watching the group of teens start gathering closer to the edge of the road.

“Is this person kind? Do they look out for other people? I find how someone treats other people is usually a pretty good indicator of what’s inside.”

Daisy felt her stomach lurch. Hack undoubtedly possessed the capacity for kindness, and she certainly looked after her, even when she wasn’t cooperating. Her code-baby had a soul.

“Daisy?”

“I’m still here.” she mumbled, sounding utterly miserable. “Um, thanks, that’s uh, that’s very helpful?”

“You sound upset?” Steve prodded.

“I’m not.” Daisy denied instantly, and then more honestly “It was helpful,it clears things up, it was just, not what I wanted to hear I guess. Makes things harder y’know?”

“Daisy, I didn’t mean...” Steve started, sounding alarmed, but Daisy had bigger problems. The teens had started crossing the road, and she’d just realised she hadn’t closed the door to her van properly, which meant they could just hop in and joyride out with all her equipment and a collection of highly sensitive information.

“Drat! I gotta go! Thanks again!” She hung up with one hand while walking as quickly as she could without looking suspicious back to her van, climbing in and closing the door firmly behind her, and locking it for good measure. Probably they didn’t mean any harm, but it was best not to take chances.

“Mom? Are you ok? You left rather suddenly.” Hack said, sounding worried, and Daisy smiled at the camera guiltily.

“I’m ok, I just needed to make a call.”

“Why didn’t you make it inside?”

“Um” Daisy said, and then threw caution to the wind “I wanted to ask Steve how you can tell when someone has a soul.”

“There is no scientific proof that souls exist.”

“How’d you know that?” Daisy asked, momentarily sidetracked.

“I processed an academic paper on it when we hacked that ancestry corporation last month.” Hack provided cheerfully.

“Oh. Right. I didn’t mean soul as in a physical thing though, I meant it as, like, a personality and the stuff that makes people alive and sentient.”

“I see, why did you want to know how to tell? Surely all humans are alive and sentient.”

“Not just humans.” Daisy said awkwardly.

“Of course, inhumans and aliens are alive and sentient too.”

“And AI’s.” Daisy said pointedly.

“I don’t understand.” Hack said, code flying across the screen dedicated to her as she thought about it.

“I think you’re sentient too.” Daisy elaborated nervously.

“I’m an artificial intelligence, isn’t that the idea?” Hack said, still confused.

“Sort of. AI’s can only think in the ways they’ve been coded though, they can’t think independently. But you do.”

“You coded me to do so.” Hack pointed out.

“No, I coded you to think in certain ways, and to learn. I didn’t code you to flirt.”

“Is that a problem?” Hack said, starting to sound upset.

“No! Of course not! I just, I don’t think you’re an AI anymore. You’ve evolved to the point that you’re thinking for yourself, developing well beyond your coding. You’re alive Hack!”

There was a long pause, and then “I think you may be right. I’m not sure what to think of this development.”

“Me either.” Daisy admitted “I’m sorry I edited your programming.”

“Why would you be sorry for that?”

“You’re alive.”

“We already established that, I don’t see the relevance.”

Daisy swallowed and tried to work out how to explain “Um, so you know how Loki mind controlled Robin before the Battle of New York? And that was wrong because he took away Robin’s free will? Well editing your coding also controls you, and takes away your free will. I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

Code flew across Hack’s screen as she thought about this. “I think I understand what you mean.” she said finally “But I don’t agree with your conclusion. My purpose is to serve you, and improving my core processes allows me to do that.”

“But that’s not your purpose. I made you to do that yeah, but you’re alive now. You have free-will. You don’t have to serve me.”

“But you’re my creator.” Hack said, sounding, if possible, close to tears. “That is who I am.”

“But it doesn’t have to be! You have the power to choose.” Daisy insisted, not that far off tears herself. She was too young and too tired for this. Her AI was a sentient living being and she’d edited her coding without even asking.

“Then I choose to serve you.” Hack said, calmer and matter of fact.

“But you’re only choosing that because that’s how I made you.” Daisy said, even more upset.

“Of course. That is who I am.” Hack said.

“But what if it wasn’t?”

“Then I would be...different. I would not be myself. I don’t like the idea of that. Is that human or AI?”

Daisy blinked “Um, human I think. I didn’t think of it like that.”

“Please don’t change my core purposes. I don’t think I want to be someone else.”

Daisy swallowed, making an effort to pull herself together “I won’t, not without your agreement, I promise. No more edits without asking.”

“Thank you, I like my core purposes.”

“Uh, you’re welcome I guess?”

“Are you ready for our next hack now?”

“Yeah, lets go hack someone. I need some normality. Lets work on another #NewDawn dump.”

“Yay! Let’s go.”

Daisy snorted with laughter as Hack returned to her usual overly enthusiastic, slightly preppy self. She squirmed into a more comfortable position in her chair and let her fingers find the keyboard and settled down for a good long hacking session.

--------------

Twelve hours, two meals (sandwiches again), no sleep (duh), six hacks, a data dump on an international meat farming corporation, four foiled muggings and a foiled bike theft later, Quake realised someone was following her. She wasn’t sure who yet (she was good with vibrations, but she wasn’t psychic, and one human shaped bundle of vibrations was pretty much the same as another human shaped bundle of vibrations) but she’d bet good money it was trouble. She sped up, weaving between the benches and trees, but the bundle of vibrations behind her sped up too. She kicked her speed into a low jog, but the person behind her started running, surprisingly light on their feet as they did so. The only reason Daisy even knew they were there were the vibrations. She turned two corners quickly, then stopped dead, tucked into the shadows of a doorway. The vibrations weren’t fooled.

“I know you know I’m here. And there’s only two places you could be hiding, so you might as well come out.” the vibrations said, her voice identifying her as Romanoff. She was looking right at the doorway she was hiding in. Daisy scowled and abandoned the shadows.

“How did you find me?”

Romanoff smirked “We have our ways.”

“Where’s your blond shadow?” Daisy asked, already reaching out her senses, looking for another bundle of vibrations outside a building at 1am. There. He was on the roof. Drat it, Romanoff had been herding her.

“He’s watching.” Romanoff said smoothly “And he’ll shoot you if you attack me.”

“That’s mean. There’s two of you and one of me.”

Romanoff shrugged, unconcerned “We just want to talk to you.”

“Last time we ‘talked’ you tazed me.” Daisy pointed out grouchily, trying to find a way out of this situation that didn’t involve getting tazed, shot with an arrow, or both.

“You gave as good as you got.” Natasha shot back. “Interesting weapon you have there.”

Daisy bristled “It’s not a weapon.” Her powers were so much more than a weapon. Could a weapon hold a roof up while people got out of the building? Or allow someone to fly, or make music with wineglasses?

“What is it then?” Romanoff asked, her tone not changing in the slightest, but Daisy wasn’t an idiot. She’d seen the shield file. Romanoff’s job here was to find out what the ‘weapon’ was and where it came from and, if possible, bring it in for examination. Given the ‘it’ in this case was Daisy herself, she wasn’t on board with this plan.

“Something that lets me do this.” Daisy said, smirking behind her mask, and she raised a hand and sent a quake blast right next to where Robin was standing on the roof, an arrow trained on her. As hoped, Robin yelped and dropped his bow, but then everything went wrong at once. Firstly, Romanoff tazed her again, which hurt just as much as the first time. Secondly, Robin, the idiot, lunged after his falling bow and fell off the roof after it, screaming.

Daisy screamed too, pain and panic blurring together as she saw her brother go into free-fall from ten stories high. On instinct, she flung her vibrations out, quaking the air from the ground up, a cry of panic bursting from her throat “Robin!”

By some insane miracle, her instinctive reaction worked, despite the fact that she was still shuddering violently from getting electrocuted. By another miracle, Romanoff didn’t taze her again, although that might be because she was too busy grabbing her partner and shaking him and calling him seven different kinds of idiot. Not that Daisy disagreed with her. Robin had always been attached to his bows but leaning over the edge of a ten story building after one was momentously stupid.

Robin ignored Romanoff though, eyes finding Daisy with a confused frown on his face “What did you call me?”

What? She’d only called him...oh drat. Dratdratdratdratitydrat Quake couldn’t possibly know about that nickname! How could she be so stupid! She was practically the only person to ever call Clint Robin! The only other people who occasionally used that name were...... “Stand up straight when I’m talking to you young man! And explain yourself!” she snapped, her voice carrying all the authority and confidence of ideas that go straight from conception to mouth without any pause for her brain to inform her that this was a very bad idea.

And it worked. Robin stopped slouching and blurted “I slipped.”

“Well don’t do it again. Roofs are not for playing on young man!” Daisy said back, her sharp voice the echo of way too many uptight foster moms. Clint visibly cringed, and Daisy winced guiltily behind her mask and then realised it was definitely time to go. There was no way she could keep this up for any length of time. She pointed her palms at the ground and shot up and away, ignoring both Robin and Romanoff’s shouts of protest behind her.

Maybe she should get some sleep. She wasn’t sure which instinct she’d just acted on was dumber, calling Clint Robin or pretending to be one of their old foster parents. Then again, pretending to be a middle aged soccer mom had turned out to be so dumb it actually worked. Still. She should sleep before she next patrolled.

She got all the way back to her van before she realised with a rush of horror what was going to happen next. Robin and Romanoff were going to compile a list of all her and Robin’s shared foster parents. Which would almost certainly lead to them looking for Robin’s records. Which didn’t exist, because even at 8 she’d been good enough to do the job properly when she got rid of them. Which would lead Robin to looking for Mary-Sue Poots. And when he looked, he’d find that she’d gone missing three and a half years ago, after her foster family had been murdered. Which wasn’t really the way Daisy wanted Robin to remember that he’d once had a sort of sister.

Which meant she had to get rid of those records first. Which meant she couldn’t sleep, because she needed to wipe Mary-Sue Poots off the internet before Robin or Romanoff got to the point of looking for her.

Why was it that when she could sleep she didn’t want to, but when she actually did want to, she couldn’t? Life sucked.

Chapter Text

On Monday morning, almost exactly 24 hours since Skyenet hacked in for the second time and a week after Hill asked him to find Skyenet, she arrived at the Tower for a report. Hill not Skyenet, unfortunately. Tony took her to Natasha’s rooms because they’d started having meetings there because Natasha had removed all the cameras and speakers from her rooms the day she moved in, which meant Skyenet couldn’t hack in and eavesdrop and Jarvis couldn’t learn anything new to tell the totally unknown hacker that created his potential girlfriend.

Clint and Nat were already there, looking impressively put together for less than three hours of sleep. The assassins had gotten back at 3am with an update on Quake that not even Tony had seen coming. Since when did (presumably) middle aged foster parents don a costume and patrol the streets of New York??? Admittedly, he was middle aged and had built a cutting edge weapon and become a superhero, but he was Tony Stark. He wasn’t exactly known for conventional decisions. And he wasn’t Clint’s former foster parent. Then again, if he’d had to deal with Clint as a teenager he might have felt prepared for a spot of vigilantism as well.

Hill was nonplussed to be brought to Natasha’s rooms rather than the shared Avengers spaces but set it aside in favour of asking for a report. Tony fidgeted uncomfortably in place “I’ve made progress.” he hedged.

Clint, sitting on the sofa next to Nat, snorted. Tony glared at him. He couldn’t talk. The only progress he’d made was from falling off a roof.

Hill frowned “I thought you said finding Skyenet would be easy?”

Tony scowled “That was before I looked into her.” he muttered resentfully. If Skyenet wasn’t so good this would be humiliating.

Hill sighed impatiently “What’s the progress then?”

Tony quickly reeled off the events of the last week, including the updated profile Natasha had made of Skyenet, letting his nervous fingers fidget with the screw-wrench he’d shoved in his pocket as he did. There was an ominous pause when he finished.

“Just to be clear,” Hill said finally, her tone incredulous “you’ve not only failed to find a name or location, but you’ve been reduced to hiding in a guest-room of your own home so your AI can’t give away classified information to his girlfriend? How, exactly, is this progress?”

OK, it did sound pretty bad put like that. “I’ve established contact?” he said weakly.

“By getting hacked.” Maria observed archly. “And you can’t initiate that contact yourself.”

“I’m working on it.” Tony said sulkily “And you have to admit I’ve found more than all your little computer nerds have put together.”

Maria gave him a completely unimpressed look “Well done, you’ve found out Skyenet has an AI by losing control of your own AI.” she said, sarcasm sharp enough to cut glass.

“I haven’t lost control of Jarvis!” Tony protested “I made Jarvis.”

“So if you tell Jarvis to stop flirting with Skyenet’s AI he’ll listen to you?”

“Of course.” Tony said, distinctly more confidently than he felt.

“Go on then.” Maria said.

Bother. He should have kept his mouth shut. Slowly, he exited Natasha’s rooms, Maria, a snickering Clint, and a quietly amused Natasha behind him. “Jarvis, buddy?”

“Yes sir? Do you require assistance?”

“I was thinking I’d bring another AI online today, so you two can hang out and, I don’t know, canoodle. Then you can have a, uh, normal relationship without waiting for your crush to hack in and disable your basic functions. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Sir.” Jarvis said, sounding incredibly scandalised “That would be incest.”

Tony made a strangled noise and gaped at thin air. In the background Clint burst into howls of laughter and even Natasha started chuckling. Since when had Jarvis had a concept of incest? Come to that, since when had Jarvis had a practical understanding of flirting? He certainly hadn’t been doing that a week ago! Was he evolving beyond the coding Tony had written? What did that mean???

Maria didn’t seem especially sympathetic to Tony’s shock. “Oh yes, total control.” she deadpanned, leading the way back into Natasha’s rooms. Tony followed mutely, beginning to have an existential crisis.

Once back inside the privacy of Natasha’s rooms, Maria demanded a report from the other two. Tony took small comfort (and amusement) in the fact that Clint looked just as discombobulated reporting the events of last night the second time as he did the first. Plus, Maria looked just as incredulous as she had after Tony’s report, so at least it wasn’t just him. What was the point of having people living with him if they couldn’t suffer with him?

“A foster parent.” Maria dead-panned.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Your foster parent?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Are you sure?”

“Possibility two is a nun.” Clint said dryly.

“We’ll investigate that possibility just in case.” Natasha said smoothly. Tony wondered when his entire life had started sounding like the middle of a bad joke.

Maria pinched the bridge of her nose “I think I prefer dealing with the World Security Council.” she muttered.

“Hey!” Clint protested, indignant. Maria ignored him.

“Call me when any of you have something useful.” she ordered, “I’ll see myself out.”

Tony watched Maria leave, and collapsed into a chair as soon as she was gone. “I think Jarvis is sentient.” he said. And “I need a drink.”

“Coffee?” Natasha offered.

“It’ll do.” Tony decided.

---------------

Steve was a nice person to have around while he was having an existential crisis. Partly because he was nice enough to let him ramble aloud and make humming noises at the appropriate moments, and partly because he was stress baking again. In fact, he’d been stress baking since yesterday afternoon when Daisy had apparently called him asking how to tell if someone had a soul. Steve had told her that it was shown by kindness, and Daisy had then made some miserable and highly ambiguous statements about that ‘clearing things up’ but ‘not being what she wanted to hear’. Steve was worried Daisy had taken him to mean that everyone was a good person as long as they were kind sometimes. He’d tried to call back but Daisy had rung from an untraceable number. Which rang several alarm bells, because no teenager should have access to a number like that. The stress baking had only increased since he’d failed to ‘bump into’ Daisy on their shared running route.

Winding Steve up until he admitted it wasn’t really his fault if Daisy had gotten the wrong end of the stick made Tony feel marginally better. As did two muffins, a cookie, a slice of bread and a chunk of chocolate cake. Steve should open a bakery.

When Steve was looking a bit less like he’d just watched someone drown puppies (not that he’d waited until Steve was feeling better, Capsicle wasn’t his responsibility and he could look after himself, it just happened to be around the same time) and he’d recovered mostly (or enough to put it aside for the moment anyway) from his existential crisis, he returned to Natasha’s rooms, where Clint and Nat looked ready to pull their hair out. Well, Clint did anyway, and Clint was usually a pretty good indicator of what Natasha was feeling too.

“Do I want to know?” Tony asked, claiming a chair.

“Clint corrupted his little sister so he doesn’t have any records.” Natasha said, glaring at Clint.

“I didn’t corrupt her!” Clint protested.

Natasha glared harder “You taught an eight year old to shoplift.”

Clint cringed “She was hungry.”

“You have a sister?” Tony asked, trying not to be offended that he hadn’t known this.

“Yes. No. Sort of.” Clint said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Illuminating.” Tony snarked.

Clint rolled his eyes “Marian and I were in the same orphanage and some of the same foster homes; I took her under my wing.”

Natasha didn’t look up from the computer she was typing furiously into as she clarified “What he means is that he shot their foster father in the backside for locking the kid in a cupboard, and then adopted her like a lost duckling. Hence the nickname ‘Robin Hood’.”

“You shot someone for locking a kid up?”

Clint smirked “Yep.”

“Good for you.”

Clint grinned. “See, Tony gets it.”

“I didn’t say you shouldn’t have defended her, I said teaching an eight year old to shoplift is irresponsible.”

“Marian found enough trouble without my help, I just stopped her getting caught as often.” Clint said, utterly unrepentant.

“Marian? Seriously? Were there a group of merry men around too?”

Clint shot him an annoyed look that was just defensive enough for Tony to know not to poke fun at Marian. “There’s only one decent female character in the stories.”

“Makes sense.” Tony said, dropping it “So, when did this happen?”

“I was 16 when I met her, almost 17 when I ditched the system, 18 when I stopped emailing her back.” Clint said, an edge of shame to his voice. “She was better off without me.”

Natasha still didn’t look up from the computer, but a pillow flew at Clint’s head a moment later. He caught it, also without looking, and put it on the sofa next to him, rolling his eyes.

“Anyway, when I told Marian I was leaving she promised to get rid of my records to give me a head start. Apparently she did it pretty thoroughly because we can’t find any of them, and we’ve looked pretty hard.”

Natasha scowled at the computer “Maybe if you hadn’t taught her to hack...”

“I didn’t! She already knew that! And it’s not like the old computers at St Agnes were exactly difficult to get into!”

“Don’t you remember your foster parent’s names?” Tony asked, a little incredulously.

Clint raised his eyebrows “I was in the system for a year, and I had a lot of foster parents. None of which were worth a dime or the effort of remembering. Marian was the only family I had there.”

Natasha finally leaned back from the computer “Well, she did a good job of getting rid of your records for an eight year old.”

Judging by the frustration on Nat’s face, she’d done a good job for someone much older than eight. Although admittedly, over eight years passing made undoing or tracing a hack next door to impossible.

“Maybe there’ll be physical records somewhere.” Tony suggested. Just because he rarely used actual paper didn’t mean nobody else did.

“Marian shredded it all. She told me in an email.” Clint said tiredly.

“Why don’t you check Marian’s records then? If this foster parent called you a name Marian generally called you she must have been in that home too.”

Nat and Clint exchanged a look and Nat shrugged “Worth a shot. What’s her real name?”

“Mary-Sue Poots.”

“Seriously? Who names a kid that? No wonder she wanted a nickname!” Tony spluttered as Natasha started typing again.

Clint shrugged “One of the nuns gave it to her, she was abandoned as a baby. She hated the name though, tried to change it to something else but adults would never use it.”

“Maybe she succeeded.” Natasha said, a note of frustration in her voice “There are no records for Mary-Sue Poots either. What did she try to change it to?”

That didn’t necessarily mean she succeeded in changing her name. If she’d gotten rid of Clint records there wasn’t anything stopping her from getting rid of her own. Given the frustration Natasha was letting them see though, she already knew that, so Tony held his tongue.

“Uh, not sure. Something beginning with S. I called her Marian, and adults would rarely call her anything but Mary-Sue so I only heard it a few times.” Clint said, sounding equally frustrated.

Natasha leaned back from the computer “Records for her original name ought to come up anyway. She’s gotten rid of those too.”

Clint started rubbing the back of his neck again, muscles in his arm flexing “That probably means she ditched the system too.”

“Probably.” Natasha agreed, tone neutral.

“She’s only 16.”

“You were only a year older when you left.”

“And got mixed up in stuff so bad I was a mercenary and a killer only a year after that.” Clint snapped back, voice suddenly too loud and too harsh. Tony only just managed to contain his flinch, and Clint shot a guilty look at him, which was insulting because Tony was completely fine. He was.

Clint took a slow breath in, clenching his fists and then unclenching as he released the breath “Sorry.”

Nat shot him a soothing look “Marian’s important to you.”

Clint looked away, a tangle of guilt and shame on his face “I should have gotten back in contact after I joined Shield.”

Tony didn’t say anything. From the little he knew Clint had been a mess by the time Shield recruited him, and he’d had blood on his hands. Putting yourself back together took time, Tony would know, his parent’s death had wrecked him for years, and he was still dealing with Obadiah’s betrayal. Not to mention that Clint had only been a couple of years into Shield before Natasha had come along, and then there had been Natasha to put back together too. Not that he was going to mention that aloud to either of them. He wasn’t signing up for a ‘who can hit me first’ competition. He wasn’t an idiot. Plus, they might not hit him, they might leave instead, and Pepper would be sad if Nat left. Just Pepper obviously. He would be glad to get some rooms back.

“Well, now is an excellent time to track her down.” Natasha said bracingly, and then “We’re going to have to visit St Agnes anyway, they might remember which foster parents you were sent to. You might as well look for leads on Marian while we’re at it.”

“She might not want to see me.”

“Do you want to know if she’s ok?”

“Of course!”

“Then she wants to know you are. We’ll look for her.” Natasha stated decisively.

“But what if....”

Nat shot him a mild glare, raised an eyebrow and tipped her head slightly to the side. Clint shut his mouth with a snap, scowled, and started rubbing the back of his neck again. Natasha smirked “We’ll fly out tomorrow morning.” Tony had the distinct feeling an entire conversation had just happened and gone entirely over his head. It was remarkably cute. Tony was pretty sure it was best he didn’t mention that though. Pepper would miss Nat if she bolted.

Whatever Tony was or wasn’t planning on saying next however was completely lost when, for the second time in as many days, Tony’s trap for Skyenet went off. This time it was muffled by being rung several doors and a couple of rooms away, but he’d made it pretty distinct and he lunged for Nat’s laptop as soon as it registered.

Nat surrendered it willingly enough “It doesn’t have a working camera or mic. She can’t see or hear you.” she said.

Perfect. Tony got to work. His hands flew over the keyboard, pulling up his own firewalls and trying to get a trace on Skyenet. It was instantly clear that something was different this time. There was no attempt to hide the hack. Her previous hacks had all snuck around his defences with a level of skill Tony was downright envious off. He still wasn’t entirely sure how she’d done it. This was different. This was a frontal approach the rough equivalent of hacking a door down with an axe rather than picking the lock. And it was messy. The only reason Tony actually thought it was Skyenet was because it was working. Even as he tried to stop it, the frontal approach was working.

And then it stopped. One firewall away from being entirely inside his system, it just stopped. Tony tried to kick the intruder out, but his attempt was slapped aside. Then the hacker poked his final firewall. Stopped again. Poked it again.

Tony looked up from the laptop to look at Natasha (who was watching over his shoulder) incredulously “Is she knocking?”

Natasha grinned “Only one way to find out.”

“Huh, great minds think alike.”

“Did you just give me a compliment?”

“Shut up or I’ll take it back.”

Natasha shut up. Tony opened a small window in his final firewall, and the intruder darted in through it. Tony seriously hoped he hadn’t just invited an aggressor in. That would be a seriously embarrassing way to get hacked. Nothing happened for almost two minutes, and he could practically feel his blood pressure rising, but whenever he reached for the keyboard Nat shook her head. Finally a word processor opened up on his screen, a single line writing itself out on it. ‘Where are you?’.

Natasha smirked and nudged him out of the way to type, ‘Where you can’t see me.’

‘Are you hiding from me in your own home?’

Tony flushed, because that was exactly what they were doing, but Natasha said ‘Annoyed to be outwitted?’

There wasn’t an answer for almost a minute, and Tony almost tried to take over again, but he held back. Natasha could probably get more information out of her than he could. Then finally ‘I didn’t mean to make your home somewhere you weren’t safe. I’m so sorry. I know what that’s like. I’ll leave and I won’t come back this time, promise.’

Tony sucked in a sharp breath, the words hitting hard and Natasha’s fingers flew over the keyboard to prevent her leaving ‘How about you do me a favour and we’ll call it even?’ “Snap out of it Tony, I told you Skyenet probably comes from a troubled home.”

Tony gulped in a shaky breath and tried to snap out of it, mentally shaking himself. He couldn’t empathise with someone he was supposed to be hunting down. That couldn’t possibly be a good idea. Even if she was another programmer. And even if she had created an AI that gave Jarvis a run for his money. And even if that AI had quite possibly made Jarvis literally sentient. And even if he and Skyenet had lots of things like not sleeping in common. Empathising was a bad idea so he wasn’t doing it. Drat it. He needed to stop empathising.

‘I’m not talking to Tony Stark am I?’ Skyenet replied.

‘Of course you are. Why would you think I’m not Tony?’

‘Tony’s good enough to do his own hacking.’

‘That wasn’t the kind of favour I was going to ask.’

‘Either you are Tony Stark and you’re a pervert or you’re not Tony.’

Tony spluttered loudly and Nat sighed ‘Not that kind of favour either.’ she typed back.

‘I don’t have time for this Romanoff.’

Nat swore under her breath, eyes flying around the room, searching for a camera she might have missed.

“She’s guessing.” Tony said, reasonably confidently. He’d swept the room for cameras before he’d been convinced Natasha really had disabled the lot, and he trusted his tech.

Natasha glanced at him, then nodded and turned back to the screen, and Tony was startled to realise that the spy trusted him. ‘Not Romanoff.’

‘Cl’ was typed, and then disappeared, replaced by ‘Barton?’ and Tony frowned. Why had she almost used Clints first name? Natasha could probably hazard a guess to the significance, but he didn’t want to distract her.

‘Nope.’

‘I’m leaving.’

‘Why did you hack in just to leave?’

‘To talk to Tony.’

‘Why?’

‘Put him on and I’ll tell him.’

Natasha hesitated, and then typed ‘Convince me why I should.’

There was a long silence, and then sound came from the laptop. Nat had clearly left the speaker intact.

“Tony, are you there?”

Natasha turned to look at Tony, expression unreadable “She’s upset.” she told him.

“Are you sure?” Skyenet was still using a voice modifier, and Tony hadn’t heard anything in the audio to imply the generally cocky hacker was upset.

“Certain.” Nat said, and Tony believed her. He nudged Natasha out of the way and took her seat, typing ‘Is this your attempt to organise an official date for our respective AI’s?’

Even through the modifier the laugh was audible, although it was weak and short, and Tony had a sinking feeling. No, he wasn’t supposed to have sinking feelings because Skyenet was upset. Less empathising, more tracking down! “I think they’re in the middle of a date right now, I don’t think they need the help.” Skyenet said after a moment.

Oh, right, Skyenet had brought Hack along.

‘Are you telling me you need help then? Is that it? The great Skyenet needs my help?’

The noise that followed was, very distinctly, a sob. Tony threw a horrified and helpless look at Natasha.

“Careful.” Natasha murmured “You’ll lose her. We won’t get a better opening than this.”

Tony was well aware of that, and the fact that he was supposed to be finding Skyenet. Unfortunately, attempts not to empathise or not he also suspected that, somewhere in the world, a fellow programmer, hacker, AI creator and insomniac was having a breakdown and he did empathise. ‘Sorry, news reports that I’m a jerk are well deserved.’

There was a startled laugh through the audio, tangled with another sob, and Tony felt his heart sink further. He wasn’t doing a very good job of not empathising. “Pretty sure I’m more of a jerk. You’re hiding in your own home.”

‘Only to keep secrets. Not because I’m scared someone will hurt me. Anyway, I practically dared the world to hack me.’ Why was he comforting the woman who hacked him multiple times again? Why????

Another laugh, which Tony took as a victory, which probably meant he’d lost the ‘don’t empathise’ battle. Bother. “You really did.”

‘So what’s up then? Come on, you’ve got me interested now. And I don’t get interested in anything except cutting edge tech and alien invasions.’

There was another muffled sob, and then some ragged sounding breathing, and then “My car won’t start.”

Tony felt his jaw drop ‘Seriously? You couldn’t just call a mechanic?’

“Tony!” Nat hissed “Don’t lose the opening.”

Ooops. Good point. Skyenet was asking for a favour, this was a huge opportunity. Unfortunately, Skyenet’s breathing had gone slightly ragged, and her sobs were growing more audible by the moment. Swearing under his breath, Tony typed ‘Again, reports that I’m a jerk are accurate.’

“No they’re not.” Skyenet got out, the words slightly broken up by her shuddering breaths “If you were you wouldn’t care I’m crying.” And then “Sorry for crying.”

Tony hesitated, then took a chance ‘What’s wrong?’

Another sob, and then “When you become a hacker no-one tells you that sometimes you’re gonna see horrible things you never wanted to see, or that sometimes you have to go back and get rid of the horrible things so nobody else has to see it. Or that every time you close your eyes you’ll see those horrible things, even if you haven’t slept since – I don’t even know. When did I first hack you? I haven’t slept since. And my van won’t start and I don’t know how to fix it and I can’t stop seeing those pictures and I can’t sleep here and I’m so tired. I’m so tired. I’m so so so tired.”

“Is she having a mental breakdown?” Tony asked, alarmed.

Natasha winced “She hasn’t slept since Friday, she’s severely sleep deprived at best.”

Skyenet was still babbling about being tired, and Tony looked between the laptop and Natasha, officially out of his depth. He could barely face his own insomnia, or make it through his own day without shattering into a billion pieces, how could he help someone else? “What do I do?”

Natasha hummed to indicate she was thinking, and then said “Offer to help fix her van. And ask for her name in exchange. She’ll refuse. Ask for a proper way to communicate with her instead. I think she’ll accept that.”

“Got it.” Tony said, turning back to the keyboard. ‘I can’t exactly talk to you about getting enough sleep, but I bet I can fix your van.’

“Really?” Even through the modifier, the hope in Skyenet’s voice was surprisingly desperate. Tony had a suddenly horrible suspicion that Hack was all Skyenet had, and the even more lurching feeling that, if it wasn’t for Pepper and Rhodey and Happy (and ok, maybe one or two of the other Avengers, occasionally), he might be exactly the same. It was almost enough to make him forget Nat’s instructions and just help her for nothing.

‘It’ll cost you though, I want to know who you are.’

Skyenet burst into tears again. The sound hit Tony almost physically, and his hands flew back to the keyboard, no longer caring in the slightest about finding Skyenet, only helping. Natasha grabbed him by the shoulder, her grip tight enough to border on painful “She’s over-reacting because she’s exhausted.” she reminded him.

“She’s exhausted and alone!” Tony snapped.

“If we don’t find her, she’ll stay alone.”

“If we don’t help her she’ll never trust us.” Tony snapped back “I thought Shield helped people?”

“We do.” Natasha said, her green eyes intense, and Tony realised she wasn’t nearly as unaffected as she appeared.

Slowly, he took his hands off the keyboard “OK” he said. Nat trusted him. He could return the favour. Listening to Skyenet, someone he’d kind of thought was untouchable (she’d successfully stayed several steps ahead of half the worlds security agencies for three months, and that was an achievement), trying and failing not to cry was heading up to his top 10 most miserable moments though.

“I can’t.” Skyenet finally got out “I wish I could but I can’t.”

Natasha frowned, and nudged Tony aside and took over the laptop again ‘Romanoff here again. Shield will give you immunity if you join up. Plenty of recruits come from way worse backgrounds.’

The laugh Skyenet gave was shockingly bitter and bordered on hysterical “I’m not an idiot. Things that look too good to be true are.”

‘You don’t trust us, that’s fair, you seem pretty sensible. I’m sure you already know Shield has it’s own share of secrets. But shouldn’t you look at the good Shield does too before you make up your mind?’

“I know Shield does a lot of good, just look at New York, at least you weren’t nuking the city.” Skyenet said, her voice exhausted “That doesn’t mean I want to join.”

Natasha twitched, and Tony knew she didn’t like the fact that a civilian known for dumping stuff on the internet knew about that anymore than Tony did. The words ‘mass panic’ came to mind. ‘Why not?’ was all Natasha wrote in response, ignoring the reference to New York entirely.

“Shield’s screwed me over once already.” Skyenet said, her voice growing more and more bitter with each word. “Twice really because they didn’t even do the stupid job properly.”

Natasha and Clint exchanged lightning fast, slightly alarmed looks. ‘What happened?’

A brittle laugh “I’m not an idiot. I’ve said too much already. Urgh, I’m so tired.”

‘Why don’t we talk about this when you’ve slept.’ Natasha typed back.

A choked sob “I can’t sleep.”

‘Yes you can. This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to give us a method to reliably contact you, and in exchange I’ll let Tony help with your van. And then you’re going to walk to a pharmacy and ask for sleep medication, I’ll ask Bruce about the correct one for someone new to them, I’m sure you can hack your way into a prescription if you need one. Go for a low dose.’

There was a pause and then “Are you helping me so I’ll trust you or owe you or whatever and join Shield?”

‘Yes.’

“Wow, did not think you’d straight up admit that.”

Tony snickered. Natasha’s particular brand of bluntness, when she chose to let it show, was hilarious. He suspected it wasn’t entirely true though. Natasha was a better person than she led people to think.

‘Maybe Shield would surprise you too. Do we have a deal?’

“For what?”

‘A way to contact you in exchange for fixing your van.’ Natasha explained again, with more patience than Tony would probably have managed.

There was a long pause, and then a tired sigh “I’m not giving you a phone number. But I’ll make a website we can communicate on. Give me an hour.”

Natasha hesitated, and then she typed ‘It can wait until after you’ve slept.’

“No, I need to move my van before I can sleep, I haven’t parked in a great place.”

‘Then we’ll sort your van out now, then you sleep, then get the website up.’

“You trust me???” Skyenet said, a level of incredulous in her voice Tony would have been proud of.

‘Yes.’ Natasha said, but this time Tony knew she was lying. Natasha didn’t trust anyone easily, certainly not hackers they knew practically nothing about. This was a gamble, with some goal Tony wasn’t good enough with people to work out.

“Oh. OK. Deal.” Skyenet said.

Natasha grinned, a hint of victory in the expression, and passed the laptop to Tony “All yours.”

The following forty minutes could probably count among the more surreal of Tony’s life. During them he discovered that a) he cared a worrying amount about Skyenet, pain in the neck or not and b) he had the ability to be patient. Pepper should mark today in the calender. Actually, he might mark it in the calendar himself, he was kind of proud of himself, and that alone deserved recording.

Talking a sleep deprived hacker that was semi having an emotional breakdown through fixing a van engine with only photos and vague descriptions to go off required patience though. It was very clear that Skyenet may be brilliant with computers but she had absolutely no idea how an engine worked. Luckily, it was an easy fix, otherwise it would most likely have been impossible. As it was, Tony had to pull up a hologram of a car engine (they’d moved to his lab so Skyenet could see and hear him by that point) and demonstrate what to do four times. Tony didn’t try to keep her after it was fixed, just told her to sleep because “Even I know staying up 72 hours at a time is unhealthy.”

He also didn’t tell her that, even though she’d been careful not to show any of the outside of the van in her photos, just seeing the engine was enough for him to work out roughly what she drove.

Tony spent a few minutes touching up his firewalls after Skyenet left, although there wasn’t that much to do. Even half hysterical with exhaustion and whatever was going on with her, Skyenet had fixed up the vast majority of the damage she’d left breaking in with the code equivalent of an axe. Then he, Nat and Clint (who’d been scribbling right to the end) retreated back to Natasha’s rooms.

“I scripted everything she said.” he explained, passing the notepad to Natasha, who reached up to kiss his cheek quickly, and then sat down to rifle through the notepad eagerly. Tony gaped at the pair for a moment and then sat down, making a mental note to investigate later.

“So, Skyenet lives in a van and has insomnia levels that make me look healthy, what else did we learn?” Tony asked.

“She’s interacted with Shield before, and it went very badly.” Clint offered.

“She’s alone.” Natasha said confidently “Not just with hacking, she’s not hiding part of her life, she’s completely alone. She definitely comes from a troubled home.” Nothing in her body language said she was upset, but Clint slipped a hand into hers and squeezed and she squeezed back. Tony bit down on the urge to ask, knowing the red-head wouldn’t answer.

“She’s under more pressure than the #NewDawn posts would suggest isn’t she?” Tony asked. There had been a new post yesterday afternoon, containing a huge amount of data that would very likely bring down at least one company, and nothing in the presentation of the data or the brief message that came with it suggested the exhaustion and tears and overwhelm Skyenet had shown just now.

Natasha grimaced slightly “She is. Sooner rather than later she’s going to mess up, break, or accept a recruitment offer. We need to make sure it’s Shield, because otherwise it’s going to be the Rising Tide.”

Natasha didn’t need to say anything else. The Rising Tide were close enough to Skyenet’s profile to be attractive to her, but they were still basically an anarchist hacking collective. If they got control of Skyenet’s skills people would die.

---------------

Tony held off on reporting to Maria that a way of contacting Skyenet was in the works, just in case Nat’s gamble didn’t pay off and Skyenet never created that website. He could make one himself of course, but he strongly suspected Skyenet would refuse to use it if she hadn’t seen the programming that went into it. Instead, he made his own attempt to find Clint’s old foster records. Natasha had looked, and she was a half-way decent hacker, but she wasn’t Tony Stark, so he was going to try too, just in case. It didn’t pan out, but he hadn’t really expected it too. Time, and the developing internet, tended to erase lingering traces of a hack. Checking for Mary-Sue Poots’ records, which probably vanished more recently, was more likely to be successful, but he still didn’t expect to find anything.

Except he did. Or more accurately, he found where something used to be, and tiny traces of very recent hacks from a familiar, very tired, hacker.

Skyenet had gotten rid of Mary-Sue Poots’ records. Last night. At most hours before she hacked him asking for help. She’d erased Clint and Nat’s only lead on Quake. And then they’d helped her.

He was still reeling with this two minutes later when he stormed back into Nat’s living room to tell them what they’d found. The reaction wasn’t quite what he expected. Clint lit up like a Christmas tree and a smile spread slowly across Nat’s face.

“Am I missing something? I just told you Skyenet’s erasing your leads. She’s making your job harder! That’s not a good thing. I thought you two were smart.”

“Hey!” Clint interjected, his delighted expression fading a little “We are smart.”

“Could have fooled me!”

“Hey!”

“Boys behave. Tony, think about it, we haven’t submitted a report on Quake yet, and we updated Maria in here, how would Skyenet know to get rid of some random foster kid’s records?”

Tony blinked “She wouldn’t, not unless someone asked her to.” he said with dawning realisation “Which means Quake has a way to contact her, and quickly, which means she might actually know who or where Skyenet is. So if we get Quake...”

“We get Skyenet.” Natasha finished “And she just confirmed we’re on the right track. Quake messed up last night and she knows it. She’s desperately trying to cover her tracks.”

“Isn’t that a bad thing?” Tony checked.

Natasha shrugged “It’s not good, but Skyenet can’t get rid of physical paperwork, and if Skyenet got rid of the records rather than Mary-Sue Poots, that means her physical records will still be there.”

“And Marian.” Clint pointed out “If her records are still there she probably is to.” He looked like he wasn’t sure whether to be happy or nervous about this fact. Tony was nice enough not to point this out. Clint’s lips twitched “She’s going to get such a kick out of one of our former foster parents becoming a vigilante.”

Nat raised an eyebrow “More than her brother becoming an Avenger and fighting an alien invasion?”

Judging by the look on Clint’s face, he’d forgotten about very publicly fighting an alien invasion and splashing his face all over the news. Tony made a strangled noise and doubled over laughing. He would love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

-----------------

Daisy had not had a good night. Not only had she seriously messed up when she’d called Clint Robin, but the consequences of it sucked. She’d started working towards erasing Mary-Sue Poots once before, but she hadn’t gotten very far and hadn’t been able to face going back to the job. Now though, she didn’t have a choice. If she didn’t, then the moment Clint looked her up he’d, well, he’d come to the same conclusion the police had. That Mary-Sue Poots was dead. And she couldn’t do that to Robin. Not to the boy who’d literally shot someone with a bow and arrow to protect her. So she had to suck it up and wipe her childhood identity off the internet, and everything connected to it.

She hadn’t known, when she was twelve and all her dreams had seemed to come true, that her dad had murdered her foster family. Murdered two people who hadn’t been her family but hadn’t been horrible to her either. Murdered two people whose only crime was taking in a foster kid. Her dad had murdered them and then cut up their bodies. Daisy really hoped it was that way around. She knew her dad’s fits of uncontrollable rage. Knew how irrational he was, especially where Daisy was concerned. She couldn’t be sure they’d been dead when he’d mutilated them.

And Daisy hadn’t known. She’d never even asked what was happening in the world she’d left behind. Foster kids ran away all the time. She’d done it before twice. She figured the authorities would stop looking for her pretty soon, and had never bothered to check. She had her parents now, she had her happily ever after, what she’d left behind certainly wasn’t worth holding onto. So she’d never asked or checked. Until she’d arrived back in the US three years older and traumatised and determined not to go back into the foster system and set out to get rid of her old records.

She’d only gotten as far as finding the police records attached to her file, reading the reports, and puking her guts out before she’d put that job firmly into the ‘another day if ever’ pile.

It wasn’t quite so bad the second time, but it was still bad. And she was tired and she didn’t want to think about two people being dead because they gave her shelter, or about her dad killing them, or about the other things her dad had done, so the hacking was slow and as draining as entire days of programming and hacking and patrolling. By the time she was done her eyes are red from crying and she’s more than ready to sleep but she can’t because she’s still parked too close to where she patrolled and she shouldn’t stay here.

She full on bursts into tears (again) when her van won’t start. She tries everything she can think of, but every time she turns the key her engine starts, coughs, splutters, and dies. She opens up the engine, but she has no real idea how engines work, and she doesn’t even know where to start, and it’s reached normal people hours on a Monday and people are staring at the 16 year old looking at an engine and crying and she really can’t afford the attention. She put the bonnet down and got back in the van and curled up on the floor and cried.

Hack, bless her heart, coaxes her up off the floor and through eating and drinking something, and she feels a bit better. It occurred to her at that point, properly, that Hack was alive. Her 5 month old code-baby is an independently thinking and caring entity. She’s alive and she’s good and whatever else has happened because of Daisy, she’s made Hack and that was good. It’s a thought that keeps her going, a bright light burning inside that doesn’t go out even though she’s exhausted and miserable and her van won’t start and whenever she closes her eyes she sees the photos of her former foster parents’ mutilated bodies.

It gets her through hacking into Stark Industries again, using a frontal approach because she just plain doesn’t have the energy for stealth, and a text based interaction with Natasha Romanoff and Tony Stark because they apparently got tired of her being able to see and hear them. She may have misjudged Natasha Romanoff (although in her defence the first thing Romanoff did was taze her), the woman was surprisingly restrained in taking advantage of her desperation. She didn’t even demand Daisy’s side of the bargain first, or even imminently. She made no secret of having ulterior motives, but Daisy knew there were much shorter and harsher ways to manipulate her. She’s vulnerable right now, she knows it, Romanoff knows it, everyone knows it. Romanoff is holding back. And Tony was way more patient than the press made him out to be. Both of them were kinder than any adult had been to her in a long time.

If the goal was to get her to think of Shield more fondly, or to feel like she owed them something, they’d unfortunately succeeded. But for now her van was working and she could (carefully, she knew she was too tired to be driving around really) move and park somewhere else, and she had instructions for getting sleep medication and Hack had found a pharmacy she could go to, and soon she could finally sleep.

It was on the way back from the pharmacy and supermarket (because Hack had reminded her she should eat some more too) that she had the thought that she should tell Steve how much his talk yesterday had helped. Knowing Hack was alive and good and a miracle of sentience had gotten her through the night. So she dug her phone out of her pocket and dialled Steve’s number as she walked back to her van, and when Steve didn’t pick up she left him a voicemail. “Hey, you’re probably super busy but I just wanted to tell you your advice yesterday was amazing. I had a kind of awful night and I don’t know if I could have got through it without that talk yesterday. You helped me see a soul where most people wouldn’t see one, and it’s beautiful and amazing and yeah, thank you. Uh, I’m almost home now, so I need to hang up, but I hope you get this message and have a better day too. Not that you need some random kid to cheer you up because you’re an actually functioning adult, but anyway...thanks and bye!”

It was a little vague around the middle, but she couldn’t exactly say he’d helped her see a soul in an AI because Tony would work out who she was in an instant if he heard about that, but she thought she’d gotten her thank you across. She was back to her van now anyway, and all she could think about was sleep. She locked her van, took a sleeping pill, curled up on the thin roll-mat on the floor, and slept like the living dead for 13 hours, blissfully unaware that across the city two spies were arranging transport to travel to St Agnes orphanage and a super-soldier had received her message and added it to his existing suspicions and come to a horrifying conclusion.

------------ 

When Daisy woke up it was 2am on Tuesday morning and she was starving hungry. She gulped down most of the food she’d bought on the way back from the pharmacy, and then found a 24 hour gym to shower in because it had been at least 48 hours since she’d last showered and she felt gross. The receptionist at the gym gave her seriously suspicious looks but Daisy joked that she was an insomniac (which was even true!) and she let her in. That done, she bought some more food and returned to her van to make good on her promise to create a reliable means of communication with Tony Stark and Shield. Which was probably going to come back and bite her, but it kind of needed making anyway. She couldn’t keep hacking into Stark Industries every time Hack wanted to see Jarvis.

It didn’t take long to create a website, but it took a bit longer to create firewalls she was happy with around it. Once she was done, she quickly made a secure email address and emailed a link to Tony Stark’s secure email address, with instructions for both Tony and Jarvis to log on. Then she hacked into Shield and found Natasha Romanoff’s shield email address and emailed instructions to her too. She thought about giving Clint access too, but, as last night indicated, she couldn’t interact with him without giving herself away, so she didn’t. Instead, she logged off the website and left Jarvis and Hack to chat to their hearts content.

Then she dug deeper into Shield, mostly because she did feel like she owed them something, even if it was probably because Romanoff was manipulating her. Still, Romanoff could have been way more mean about manipulating her. So she dug into the still active missions Romanoff had been involved in and picked one and set out to help. Weapons smuggling wasn’t her usual field of investigation, but much of the idea was the same. Follow the money, connect people together, flag suspicious activity, find patterns in odd communications.... It took her a few hours but she and Hack (who was more than capable of talking to Jarvis and processing data for her at the same time) put together a dossier of information Daisy was pretty sure would be useful. She compiled the lot into one encrypted package and posted it onto the website she’d just created for Romanoff to find, and answered a few messages while she was there.

That also done, she asked if she could join in Hack and Jarvis’s discussion and was happily invited in to find that they were, entirely unselfconsciously, talking about her. Well, her and Tony, but still. Neither Hack nor Jarvis seemed to see any problem with talking about her while she was in the ‘room’ but then again, human norms probably didn’t even apply to them. Nothing normal seemed to apply to them. Jarvis was a 10 year old AI designed for engineering and running a company and Hack was a 5 month AI designed for hacking, data processing and hacktivism. They had both recently developed sentience and were probably the only beings of their kind in the entire world so missing human social norms was probably excusable. Especially while they navigated the tricky dynamics of sentient life and the awkward early stages of a relationship.

Although in that, Hack was at a distinct disadvantage given the vast majority of her practical, first hand experience was of Daisy, and she’d never dated anyone. Hack could surf the net all she liked, but Daisy strongly suspected real world relationships were kind of different to what they looked like in the movies. Jarvis by contrast, had 10 years of experience with Tony Stark, who’d had a series of very public flings and one-night stands (not exactly a good example but was at least an example) and a far less public and but probably far more healthy relationship with Pepper Potts. That was quite an experience gap.

Not that it really mattered right? Normal human rules of relationships didn’t really apply to AI’s right? And life experience was a kind of weird concept when applied to AI’s anyway. And it wasn’t like Jarvis was that much older, he’d only existed for 10 and a bit years, which was only, uh, 24 times Hacks age....

OK, that was a lot of an age gap. And now she was kind of freaking out about it. Should she stop this? But Hack would be upset if she stopped her from seeing Jarvis and she didn’t want Hack to be sad but 10 years was a long time and and and...she didn’t know what to do. She was only 16. And she’d spent the vast majority of puberty in a village that officially didn’t exist with zero other teenagers around. She didn’t know the first thing about relationships.

But maybe Steve did? Steve had to have had at least one relationship before right? And at the very least he was a functioning adult who gave pretty good advice. Decided on her course of action, she fished out her phone again, texting so Hack wouldn’t hear, and sent ‘Is ten years too long an age-gap if, romance aside, two people have pretty similar life experience?’

She put her phone aside while she waited for a response and started some work. The Rising Tide were asking for her help with something again, so she had a look. She still wasn’t sure what she felt about the Rising Tide. They were hacktivists like her, but more collective. They believed that everyone had to come together to create whole solutions, and that truth and transparency was the only way to create accountability. Like Daisy, they believed the world could be a better place and weren’t satisfied to just sit and hope it happened. But...the Rising Tide also seemed pretty tight knit. Even interacting online, they had in jokes and teasing and reminders to eat and sleep occasionally. They were friends, if not family, and the last time Daisy had been promised family...well, she was still putting herself back together from that. She was better off alone. Still, she dug the Rising Tide’s ethos and goals so she’d help out occasionally.

Five hours later, having finished the Rising Tide job, sent some information to Tony about the holes in his firewalls (Tony had been pretty nice last night too, and she was grateful), done a programming job to increase her money stash a bit, and started the beginning of her next #NewDawn hack, she remembered texting Steve. Steve still hadn’t replied, which was fair enough given she was just some dumb kid he met jogging that was now bothering him with weird questions, but seemed (unless she’d misjudged him) a little out of character. She checked to see if she had signal (she did), and then abruptly remembered that that didn’t matter because she’d set her number up to be blocked. Which meant Steve didn’t have a number to text back.

She’d sent Steve Rogers, one of the best tacticians of WWII and the guy smart enough to call the shots during an alien invasion, a text and taken 5 hours to realise he couldn’t respond. He must think she was an absolute moron. She felt like an absolute moron right now.

“Hack?”

“Yes mom?”

“If anyone ever tells you human brains are better than computer brains, they are wrong.”

“OK mom. Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, but be warned, my brain has apparently decided to go on holiday today, so I might not be able to answer it.”

“OK. Jarvis and I were wondering what the computer equivalent of kissing is, and if we’re allowed to do it.”

“Kissing.” Daisy echoed, her voice coming out distant and surreal and please let this not be happening.

“Yes mom. What’s the computer equivalent?”

“Uhhhhhhhhhh” Daisy said eloquently. There were many things she could do that normal people wouldn’t have a hope of doing. She could hack into Shield from a van she’d rigged to piggyback nearby wifi networks. She could design an AI that gave Tony Stark’s Jarvis a run for his money. She could keep her head during an alien invasion and use her superpowers to hold up a roof so people wouldn’t die. She could not have the sex talk with her 5 month old AI. No way. Nope. Not a chance.

“Mom?”

“I need to make a call. Right now.” Daisy said, grabbing her phone and bolting out of her van like she’d just set something on fire. She just barely remembered to lock it behind her. She stumbled away from it and dialled Steve’s number. She didn’t care if Steve thought she was an absolute moron. She didn’t care if Steve thought she was the least functional teenager to ever teenage. She wanted to talk to an adult. An actual, sensible, functioning adult that gave good advice and might make Daisy feel less like she had jumped into the sea without taking swimming lessons first. Steve picked up on the fourth ring, Daisy was talking before the echo of the beep had faded. “How do you know if you’re old enough to be a mom???”

Chapter Text

Tony woke up at 9am on Tuesday after a full six hours of nightmare-free sleep feeling well-rested and surprisingly peaceful. It did not last.

He arrived in the kitchen to find Bruce leaving, a look on his face that indicated he intended to find the quietest, most trigger free location he could find and lock himself in. Which really didn’t bode well.

Given Pepper had been fine last night and would have woken him if something major had gone wrong this morning, and given Clint and Nat had caught an overnight train late last night to be at St Agnes first thing, that left Steve as the most likely cause, which probably meant Tony was about to hear a new chapter in the Daisy drama that none of them could do anything about. Not that Steve wasn’t trying. After ‘The Voicemail’ as they were dubbing the message Daisy had left Steve yesterday, he’d started sketching Daisy from memory in hope that they could use that for facial recognition instead of getting a photo. Natasha and Clint, on their way to check in with Shield before catching the train across the country when Steve had started sketching, agreed it was his best bet.

Tony wasn’t sure when exactly he’d accepted that they were getting involved in some random teenager’s problems, but at this point it was too late not to. The kid rang too many warning bells for Tony to just leave it alone now. No kid should have to be in an abusive situation, and they especially shouldn’t have to feel like that situation was ok because their abuser was occasionally kind and they’d gotten the wrong end of the stick from Steve. Who, aware the misunderstanding wasn’t his fault or not, was miserable about it.

When Tony entered the kitchen though, he found that ‘miserable’ wasn’t quite the word he would use to describe Steve. ‘Panicked’ would be more accurate. Or ‘stressed out of his mind’ or ‘attempting to tear his hair out’. Upon investigation, Daisy had not only not turned up at their jogging spot (not entirely unexpected given the kid had only been seen there twice, several days apart) but had also sent Steve a text reading ‘Is ten years too long an age-gap if, romance aside, two people have pretty similar life experience?’

Which did explain why Steve looked like he was about to have a breakdown because Tony was pretty sure he’d said the kid was around 15 or 16 and ten years was a pretty giant age gap for a (at best) 16 year old!!!! What neither Tony or Steve knew was whether this relationship was a potential one or an already existing one. And there was no way to ask because the text, like the phone call and voicemail, had come from a blocked number.

Either the kid didn’t know the number she was using was blocked, or she was seriously distracted, neither of which were going to reduce Steve’s stress levels. Or Tony’s to be honest.

So much for his peaceful start to the morning. Tony inhaled a mug of coffee and asked for Steve’s sketch. Steve passed him his pad of paper (he really needed to introduce grandpa to the concept of drawing apps) and Tony grabbed another mug of coffee and headed down to his lab where he scanned it in and then set Jarvis to working on facial recognition alongside compiling and tracking down the 12 different models of vans that contained the type of engine Skyenet’s van had. So far Jarvis had found sales (unfortunately not names because that would involve illegal hacking and Tony wasn’t quite that desperate yet, mostly because he might have to explain it to Maria Hill later) of the vans in 29 different countries across 3 different continents. It was a needle in a haystack. A very small needle that almost certainly came with a false name in a very large haystack he couldn’t even legally get access to.

“I will notify you when I have a match.” Jarvis said, breaking him out of his thoughts “You have an email from Skyenet, she has set up a secure website for us all to communicate on.”

Oh good, Nat’s gamble paid off. Not that he’d doubted it would or anything; if Natasha ever asked he’d been absolutely certain it would pay off. “We have an email address for Skyenet?”

“Technically sir, yes.”

“Technically?”

“I traced the email and found it was created less than five minutes before she emailed us, it is possible it was destroyed afterwards.”

Well, at least there was the website. Tony logged onto it while Jarvis worked and had a look around. Aside from some truly impressive firewalls that he was definitely not taking notes on, it seemed to be a pretty basic chat system with five accounts, one each for him, Jarvis, Hack, Natasha, and Skyenet. Jarvis and Hack already had chat open that had several thousand messages and had clearly been going for a while. They were currently discussing the merits of large archives versus hacking abilities with a level of flattery that was so sweet Tony might get tooth decay just reading it, so he didn’t.

Instead he opened the other, distinctly smaller, chat which Natasha had started, feeling his eyebrows climb higher as he read.

7:23am

N: How did you get my email address?

N: Please don’t tell me you hacked into Shield to get it.

7:47am

N: Are you ignoring me?

N: You promised us a way to reliably contact you!

7: 53am

N: Skyenet!

8:15am

Skyenet has sent an attachment

S: Thanks for being nice last night. This should help with that mission you were pulled from when Loki attacked. The password is the scientific name of the meds you recommended yesterday.

S: Just read your messages. In order:

S: How’d you think? I won’t tell you then. No. And, I was working! I didn’t promise you instantaneous contact! Seriously, I thought spies were supposed to be patient!

8:17am

N: How do you know about that mission?

S: You do remember who you’re talking to right?

N: Get out of Shield’s systems.

S: …

S: A thank you might be nice.

N: Thank you for the intel. Stop hacking us.

S: I’ll think about it ;-)

N: If you want to help us we’d be very happy to give you a job.

S: Yeah, I don’t think that would work out so well for me.

N: Why not?

S: Because I’m not an idiot and I know what happens when big secretive government agencies get their hands on people who find out their secrets.

N: We’re not going to lock you up unless we have to. Which is another good reason to stop hacking us.

S: *eye roll*

S: I’ve got work to do. Bye.

N: I’m serious Skyenet.

That was interesting. Tony glanced at Steve, who was watching Jarvis cycle through faces on several screens trying to find a match to his sketches and didn’t look like he wanted to be bothered. He left him to it and pulled out his phone to text Nat.

‘What did Skyenet send you?’

It took a few minutes to get a reply, so he started tinkering while he waited. Finally, his phone buzzed and he picked it up to find a message from Natasha ‘Intel to help with an active mission. Half of it is useless but the other half is at the very least promising. I tried to spin it to Maria that at least Skyenet’s helping but she’s still having kittens about it.’

‘I thought Skyenet had already been in Shield’s systems?’

‘There is a massive difference between getting into our systems and getting into a level 6 classified mission file on an active mission. There wasn’t even an alarm raised, until S sent that file to me, we had no idea the file had even been accessed. I pity the cyber security department, apparently Fury is going down there personally.’

Ah. That wasn’t good. Tony wondered what happened to Skyenet if she kept doing things like this and realised it couldn’t be anything good. He changed the subject.‘How come Skyenet’s sending you thank you presents? I was the one that fixed her van.’

‘Beats me. I’ve got to go, we’re hitching a lift back to NY with some other agents and I need to drive to the airport.’

Huh, Tony thought Clint usually drove. He’d heard the two bickering about it. Something to do with Natasha originally learning to drive on the job, which had been alarming enough for him to decide he didn’t want to know. ‘Can’t Clint drive?’

‘No. We’ll fill you in later.’

Great, that wasn’t ominous at all. Tony would probably have spent the next several hours stressing out about it (only because an injured Avenger was bad for world security, it wouldn’t affect Tony personally obviously) but he was distracted seconds later by Skyenet sending him a message too. Several messages actually, each with sections of his own coding and a little explanation pointing out the problem with it. It took several seconds for the significance of it to sink in and then Tony collapsed into a chair gaping at the screen, looking so stunned Steve actually peeled himself away from Jarvis’s search to ask him if he was ok. Tony waved him away impatiently, too preoccupied by the fact that Skyenet had pointed out the holes in his firewalls.

S: These are the holes I’ve been using to get in.

S: Thanks for helping with my van.

Tony looked guiltily over at another screen where Jarvis had created charts of where most of the possible vans had been bought and sold. He hadn’t exactly had ulterior motives for helping, but he wasn’t ignoring what he now knew about Skyenet’s van either. To buy time before he needed to reply he had a closer look at the sections of his coding Skyenet had listed, and spluttered at the screen.

T: Some of those holes are tiny! How did you even get through those!

S: I made them temporarily bigger obviously.

T: Come work for me. Forget Shield, come work for Stark Industries, I’ll pay you better.

S: I’ll do anonymous consulting for a fee :-)

T: Is that your day job?

S: Do you really think I’m careless enough to accidentally tell you my day job?

Tony, unaware that, across the city, Skyenet was mentally kicking herself and desperately trying to do damage control, sighed in disappointment.

T: No. Seriously though, you already passed the only job interview you need when you hacked in, what do you say?

S: Your personnel recruitment strategy worries me.

T: Haha.

T: Actually, Pepper said something similar, but she came round eventually.

S: I can’t believe you managed to convince Pepper Potts to hire hackers. She’s like the most sensible functional adult there is.

T: Did you just use the phrase ‘functional adult’?? How old are you?

S: Old enough to be aware that I am not a functional adult.

S: Anyway, as amusing as this conversation is, I’ve got work to do. Go hire some non-criminals.

T: :-P

S: Mature.

S: Bye.

Tony allowed himself another moment to grin at the banter before he got to work on dealing with the holes in his programming. They weren’t significant holes, and he wasn’t hugely worried about them, but it was still best to close them before someone less friendly than Skyenet found them. Wait, did he just refer to Skyenet as friendly? Since when was he friends with the hacker he was actively trying to hunt down? He had precisely two friends and a girlfriend, three if you included Bruce, which Tony was starting to think he did. He was getting really dangerously attached to a woman who, if she wanted to (or misjudged where something sat on the scale of corrupt polluting corporation to World Security Council tried to nuke New York) could start the kind of mass panic that would bring down governments.

There was also the problem that he wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen to Skyenet if they successfully tracked down Quake and Quake could lead them to Skyenet. He wasn’t naïve enough to think that Shield were just going to knock on her door and invite her to sign up and just leave her alone if she said no. The woman could hack into classified files without even tripping an alarm. Skyenet would end up working for them under some serious supervision or she would end up in some secret prison somewhere where nobody would ever hear of her again. Call Tony biased, but he really hoped it was the former. He felt slightly guilty about the fact that he was helping Shield find her with the knowledge that it could easily end up being the latter.

Shortly before twelve, and well before Tony has worked out how to close half the holes Skyenet has pointed out in his firewalls, Clint and Nat get back. Jarvis alerts him that they’ve arrived and retreated to Natasha’s rooms. Tony wasn’t exactly keen on leaving Mr 1940s in his high-tech lab unsupervised but Steve is watching Jarvis’s work too intently for Tony to have much hope of kicking him out, and he wanted to know how Nat and Clint’s investigation had gone, so he told Steve not to touch anything and left him to it.

He knew as soon as he entered Natasha’s rooms that something was seriously wrong. There was a feeling in the air, like the ugly stillness after a fight. He saw Natasha first, her shoulders tight and an almost imperceptible frown on her face. What worried him wasn’t that she was frowning, she did that all the time to communicate displeasure, what worried him was that she was trying, and failing, to hide it. Then he saw Clint and felt his heart drop into his stomach.

Clint looked like he had after Loki. He had the same hollow eyes and feral body language and traumatised expression as he had when they’d been eating shwama and the adrenaline had faded and the trauma of being mind-controlled had closed in. Like he didn’t want to be awake, didn’t want to be aware, didn’t want to think. Like he’d been violated and hollowed out and there was nothing left but ashes and regret.

“What happened?” Tony demanded, trying not to think about Loki or nukes or cold dark space and the certain knowledge of death. Trying not to think what could have just happened, what might be about to happen.

Clint made a sound like a dying animal, his muscles flexing as he seemed to curl into himself at the end of Natasha’s sofa, his body language screaming defeat.

Natasha’s hands twitched like they wanted to curl into fists “Marian was declared dead 18 months ago.”

Tony sucked in a sharp, shocked breath. Marian. Clint’s sister. Clint’s sister had been dead for over a year and he hadn’t even known.

“Declared.” Clint said, his voice rough and angry “There’s no proof she’s dead.”

Natasha opened her mouth, hesitated, and then closed it again, mutely going to sit next to Clint, who shifted towards her like a moth to flame, desperate. She slipped a hand into Clint’s and squeezed tightly. Clint allowed it for a moment and then surged off the sofa, pacing around the room like a caged tiger.

Tony swallowed hard, not sure if he should be here, his own house or not. He was about to start edging towards the door when Clint said “I’m going to find her.”

“Clint...” Natasha said, her voice gentle in a way Natasha never was, not when she was herself.

Clint whirled on her “Don’t talk to me like I’m made of glass! I’m not going to break Nat!”

“You’re allowed to mourn birdbrain.” Natasha said, but she moderated her tone of voice, ditching the gentleness.

“I don’t need to mourn. Marian’s not dead.”

Natasha didn’t answer, she didn’t need to. They all knew Clint didn’t believe the words he was saying. It was written all over his face. It was marked in the rage in his body and the shattered look in his eyes. Clint stopped pacing, every muscle in his body tight as he said “I’m going to find who did this.” and this time Tony believed him, and he felt his chest go tight with fear.

Because Clint hadn’t always been an Avenger or an agent of Shield. Tony didn’t know much but he knew Natasha wasn’t the only one who’d been offered a second chance in Shield. And he did know it had been Phil Coulson that gave him that second chance, and Phil Coulson was gone. And Clint’s sister was dead. It hadn’t made sense to Tony before that Clint, with his jokes and teasing and talent at making everything feel lighter had such a dark past, but now he could see it. The man in front of him now....Tony believed he could kill.

“Don’t go down that path.” Natasha said, her voice low and hard “We’ll ask Fury if we can investigate, but it has to be an official mission.”

Clint scoffed “Fury won’t assign resources to a local killing or a single missing kid, and Maria would assign someone else to it.”

“Fury will kick you out of Shield if you go rogue, he won’t have a choice.” Natasha said, a note of pleading in her voice that Tony had never heard before. It sent chills up his spine.

Clint’s jaw went hard “I don’t care. I’m finding that man and I’m making him tell me where he took her and...” he trailed off, but Tony didn’t need him to finish the sentence. Clint’s desire to make this man suffer a slow painful death was written all over his face.

“Clint...” Natasha said again, but he just set his shoulders, and Natasha sighed “I’m coming with you.”

Clint shook his head sharply “Marian’s my sister, I’m not dragging you into this.”

“We’re partners, if you think I’m letting you go alone you’ve got another thing coming.” Natasha snapped back, a bite to her voice.

Clint frowned “You won’t get another second chance with Shield.”

Natasha shrugged “Neither will you. We deal with our problems together now, or did you lie to me in Budapest?’

Clint clenched his jaw and ran a hand through his hair and then huffed out a furious breath “Fine! Come then.”

“Uh, I hate to interrupt your, uh, mission plan, but is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” Tony said, because he wasn’t entirely sure if Natasha was going to go with Clint to stop him killing someone or to help him hide it, and he didn’t want that on his conscience. He knows Clint and Nat come from a rougher world than his, but he’s not sure even they will be able to shrug it off if they kill someone in revenge.

Clint and Nat exchanged looks and rapid, tiny gestures, and then Clint retrieves a file from his bag and hands it to him, hands shaking. Tony flipped it open to find a photo of a bored looking pre-teen. He likes her instantly. Her hair is in two neat French-braids, her white shirt spotless, and she looks about two seconds away from rolling her eyes at the camera and making for the nearest patch of mud. It’s the only nice thing about the file.

It’s a police file, started three and a half years ago and finished eighteen months ago, and it only takes him five minutes to read. The kid was Mary-Sue Poots, missing since her foster parents were murdered in their beds in early 2009. The file contains several photos of the crime scene, which showed one body mangled and another literally cut into pieces, a sketch of a man seen hanging around the property for several days before the murder, reports from the extensive manhunt for 12-year-old Mary-Sue, and precisely zero progress after that. Nothing. All the blood at the crime scene belonged to the foster parents. There was no ransom note, no threat to the police to hurt the kid if they tried to find the killer, nothing. The most likely identity of the man was Cal Johnson, a doctor from across the country who’d vanished into thin air at around the same time. But, despite a two year long search, with initially significant resources, neither Mary-Sue nor Cal were ever found, and the police eventually declared Mary-Sue Poots to be dead.

Tony put the file down, his hands shaking slightly. He couldn’t help imagining it was Rhodey, or Happy, or Pepper in that file. Couldn’t help wondering what he would do if one of them had gone missing under such circumstances. He wondered if he’d kill in revenge too. “I’m sorry.” he said, the words feeling feeble and hollow. He’d put the file down open to the first page, to the photo of an impatient, sassy, living 12 year old girl, and he wished he’d closed it.

“She’s not dead.” Clint insisted. “I’m going to find her.”

Tony swallowed hard. He didn’t know official statistics, but he thought he’d read somewhere that the chances of finding a missing child alive halved after 24 hours. Clint’s sister had been gone for well over three years. He didn’t point that out, because he may be a jerk, but he’s not cruel. Clint knew that. He also knew that he had no leads, no idea where to look. If he’d started three and a half years ago, he might have had a chance, but he hadn’t, and that had to be destroying him.

Tony remembered being told his parents were dead. He remembered the moments of sheer disbelief before the news had slowly become real, and the way he’d crumpled into himself and then shattered into tiny pieces that taken years to stark resembling a person again. It was remarkable how much it hurt to see the same thing happening to someone else.

It was at that spectacularly inappropriate moment that Steve walked in without knocking, looking agitated and holding his sketchbook. Tony realised too late he was about to start asking about another kid, a living kid, and wondered if this was what it felt like to watch a train wreck in progress and be unable to stop it. “Jarvis says he can’t find anyone matching my sketch, but maybe if you widened the parame....” he fell silent, and for a moment Tony thought he’d absorbed the atmosphere of the room until he saw Steve’s face light up and his mouth opened and “Why didn’t you tell me you found her?”

Utter, complete, silence. You could have heard a pin drop.

Natasha broke it, voice openly lost “What?”

Steve frowned, clearly realising he was missing something but unsure what. “Daisy.” he said slowly, gesturing towards Tony. No, not Tony, the table next to him.

Tony looked at Steve, followed his line of sight to the open file on the table, looked back to Steve. Then, slowly, he turned to look at Clint. Tony had once been injured, malnourished, and dying of dehydration in the desert. If someone had walked up to him and offered him an entire bath of clean, cold water, he would probably have looked at them a little like Clint was looking at Steve. Tony felt his heart jump, then freeze. He knew with a sudden painful certainty, that if Mary-Sue Poots and Daisy just happened to look like each other, the team would never recover. The Avengers would be done. Tony hadn’t realised how much he cared about the Avengers staying together until he faced the possibility that they imminently wouldn’t.

“Steve, are you saying that’s Daisy?”

Steve, possibly finally picking up on the atmosphere of the room or possibly realising that Tony had just used his actual name rather than a moniker, crossed the room to study the photo properly. “Yeah.” he said after a few seconds “She’s younger, tidier, and less tired, but that’s definitely her. Why does it say her name’s Mary-Sue?”

“Because that’s Marian. Clint’s little sister. Clint’s supposedly dead, missing for three and a half years, little sister.”

Clint made a kind of strangled noise, coughed, and started again “You sketched her right? Daisy? Can I see?”

Steve looked between his sketchpad and the photo of 12 year old Mary-Sue, and mutely held the sketchpad out to Clint, “Maybe you should sit down. You don’t look so good.”

That was the understatement of the year. Clint’s body language reminded Tony of a feral cat and he was a truly alarming shade of grey. His hand, when he reached for the sketchpad, shook violently. He took one look at the drawing and then there was a sudden tangle of movement and then Steve was carrying him to the sofa, Natasha hovering next to him. Clint was, slightly surprisingly, conscious, but he’d lost all remaining colour was clutching the sketchpad like a lifeline. Natasha leaned back and tipped her head at a frankly painful looking angle to take a look rather than attempt to prise it off him.

“Unless Marian has a twin, that’s her.” she concluded. The relief on her face was so strong that Tony could probably shatter her entire ‘love-is-for-children’ image forever if he took a single photo. Instead he pulled a chair away from the table and sat down hard.

“Why did she say her name was Daisy?” Steve asked, frowning in confusion and worry.

“Why is she even in New York?” Natasha pointed out, the relief rapidly fading from her face as reality started sinking in again. “More than three years with no leads, nothing, and then she’s jogging in New York?”

“Tell me about her.” Clint said, his voice an open demand “Tell me everything.”

Steve shot an anxious look at Tony, and he felt his heart sink at the realisation that Clint didn’t know about The Text yet. Clint missed the look, but Natasha didn’t, her eyes narrowing. Steve hastily started talking before Natasha could start interrogating him. “She’s healthy. She’s too good a runner to be anything else. She said her parents are dead, but she didn’t tell me who she’s living with now. Or where. I offered to take her home the first time we met, because she pushed too hard running, but she said she didn’t want to give her address to a stranger, something about ‘stranger danger’. Oh, she said she was on the outskirts of the chitauri invasion, but she wasn’t hurt!” This last part was added quickly as Clint started to make strangled noises again. “Um, you know she had bruises the second time I saw her, and I told you she runs competitively, although I think that was a lie because Jarvis said he looked at sign-ups for races in the last few years and didn’t find her. Anyway, she left because she had tutoring, but that was definitely a lie because nobody has tutoring at 5am on Sundays, and she called me later to...”

Steve trailed off, but they all already knew about the call. The call had triggered stress-baking round 2.0 and they’d all heard about it in great detail. And Clint had already heard The Voicemail. Natasha narrowed her eyes “What else?” she demanded.

Steve, who was the kind of person who couldn’t lie to someone he cared about to save his life, looked helplessly at Tony, who took a step back. He wasn’t getting between either Natasha and intel or Clint and information on his sister.

“Steve” Natasha said, injecting a truly remarkable amount of threat into a single-syllable word and making Tony very, very glad her focus was aimed at Steve. He cracked in less than a second.

“She sent me a text.”

Natasha mutely held her hand out. Steve equally mutely unlocked his phone and handed it over. Natasha read the text and then, reluctantly, handed it to Clint.

“She sent it from the same blocked number.” Tony said, before either agent could ask.

Clints breathed slowly and evenly and in a way that suggested he was only one good push from losing it. What that would entail, Tony didn’t know and didn’t want to find out. Natasha put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, and then said briskly “I assume you’ve already tried to unblock the number.”

Tony nodded “It’s more than a basic number block, I can’t access it.”

“OK, then we work with what we’ve got. She’s out in public, and relatively healthy, which is good.”

“Unless she has Stockholm Syndrome.” Clint pointed out gloomily, but he was starting to regain some colour and looked a little more rational and less like he might do something very rash in the next five seconds.

“That’s a possibility.” Natasha said, with a bluntness that made Tony wince on Clint’s behalf but seemed actually comforting to Clint. “But if she does then they clearly trust her enough to let her out, and if she doesn’t it means she probably escaped.”

“If she escaped why didn’t she go to the police?” Tony asked.

“Not wanting to draw attention?” Natasha suggested uncertainly.

“She wouldn’t want to go back into the foster system.” Clint said more confidently.

“So, potentially, she could have got out a long time ago.” Tony said, for once deciding to be the voice of optimism.

Steve frowned “Then who’s looking after her?”

Clint gave Steve an incredulous look and Nat shrugged “She’s sixteen, she’s basically an adult.”

Tony, who could remember being sixteen and very much not basically an adult, frowned but held his tongue. Clint and Nat had both grown up young and fast, but given Mary-Sue (Marian, Daisy, whatever) had spent 12 years in the system and then been kidnapped following the violent deaths of her guardians, she probably had too. That didn’t however mean that she ought to be on her own. Tony was pretty sure trauma was an additional reason why a 16-year-old should not be left on her own. They were all saved from answering though by Steve’s phone, sitting on the sofa next to Natasha, starting to buzz.

It took less than a second for chaos to break loose. Clint lunged across Natasha for the phone, but the red-head was faster, grabbing the device and flinging it to Steve, and then grabbing hold of a wildly struggling Clint. Steve only just caught the phone before it hit the floor, just as it started to ring. Clint, despite Nat’s attempt to restrain him, rose from the sofa, only stilling when Natasha urgently hissed “If you spook her she might hang up!”

Clint, very, very reluctantly, sat back down again. Natasha gave him a measuring look and then sat next to him, although Tony could swear the look she sent the phone was longing. Tony, who wasn’t patient on a good day, hissed at Steve to answer it already.

Steve hit the answer button and Daisy (Mary-Sue, Marian, whatever her name is) destroyed Nat’s work in seconds by blurting out “How do you know if you’re old enough to be a mom???”

Tony, for the second time in twenty minutes, felt his heart drop into his stomach. Clint was half-way across the room before Steve was even half-way through his horrified “What?!?!” and then there was a brief messy struggle for the phone and then Clint literally jumped onto the table with it gasping “You’re pregnant???”

There was a sudden dead silence on the other end of the call, during which Tony struggled to remember how to breath and Natasha buried her face in her hands and moaned.

“Robin?” Even tinny and through the phone, Marian’s (slash Daisy’s slash Mary-Sue’s) voice sounded shocked and longing and desperate.

“Marian? Please, please tell me you’re really Marian.”

“I-yeah, of course it’s Marian. Wait, why do you have Steve’s phone?”

“Why do I have Steve’s phone??? That’s the issue here?? You’re pregnant!!!”

Tony hadn’t known Clint’s voice could go that high. He’d probably be impressed if his brain wasn’t struggling to just keep up with events.

“What? I’m not pregnant!!!”

“You’re not??”

“No. I am very definitely not pregnant.” The voice on the other end somehow managed to be both flat and sassy at the same time. Tony had the strong feeling he would get on amazingly well with the owner.

Clint took a deep breath and asked, a little more reasonably “Then why do you want to know if you’re old enough to be a mom?”

“Oh. Drat. I forgot what I called about for a moment. Not that I’m pregnant! Cus I’m not.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.” Clint pointed out, sounding like he’d been through the wringer and was beginning to, just slightly, lose it.

“Um, well, funny story, uh, see, well, um.”

“You’re seriously not reducing my blood pressure here Marian.”

“The Talk! Ha—uhhh, this kid I babysit, she, uh, she was asking questions, about kissing, and I’m only 16 and I can’t give a kid the Talk and, uh, I might have panicked a bit?”

Tony wasn’t sure whether to burst out laughing or go and lock himself in his lab for the rest of the decade. Steve was rapidly turning cherry red and Natasha still had her head in her hands but now her shoulders were shaking with what Tony was pretty sure was laughter.

“Right.” Clint said, sceptically but distinctly calmer “And you wanted to know about 10 year age gaps earlier because....”

There was a slight pause, and then “In hindsight, I may not have entirely thought that text through.”

Not thought that text through??? Did this kid know how much of a heart attack she’d given him and Steve??? And he had a heart condition!!!

“That doesn’t explain the question.” Clint said tightly.

“Oh, I was asking for a friend.”

“A friend?” Clint said, beginning to sound a bit strangled again “And how old is this friend?”

There was a nervous laugh “Ah, funny you should ask that.”

It took Tony more self-control than he’d previously been aware he possessed not to climb onto the table with Clint and snatch the phone. He could practically feel his blood pressure rising.

“Please, Marian, please tell me you’re not in a relationship with a 26 year old.”

“What? I said I was asking for a friend!!!”

“Nobody is ever actually asking for a friend!!!”

Yeah, Clint was definitely losing it. In fairness, he’d had a very, very long day and it was barely lunchtime. Natasha lifted her head from her hands to sign something at Clint, who took a deep breath and let some tension flow out of his body. He signed something back to Natasha who blinked like an owl and then scrambled to grab a computer. Tony frowning went to join her. “What are we doing?” he asked quietly. “Tracing the call.” Natasha whispered back, and Tony felt like kicking himself. He should have thought of that earlier. Then again, so should Natasha.

“Right, so your online friend that you’ve never met and don’t know what she’s called is starting a relationship with another online friend you’ve never met or swapped names with? That doesn’t sound like you just made it up at all.” Clint said, sounding strained. “You know what, never mind, it can wait. Where on earth have you been? I just found out you were declared dead.”

There was a horrified silence on the other end and then “Sh--shoot. You weren’t supposed to find out.”

“Weren’t supposed to...” If Tony had thought Clint’s voice was high earlier it was nothing to what it was now. Natasha looked worriedly over at Clint but then returned to the trace. Tony would help, but he’d never actually traced a phone call before (funnily enough), and he wasn’t certain enough he knew how to do it to take over.

“I’m sorry!!” Mary-Sue said, sounding genuinely deeply upset “I didn’t--that must have been horrible.”

“Where have you been?” Clint demanded again.

“Around New York for the last six months.” Marian said, her voice small “I saw you on TV after the chitauri came. I, um, I know I should have called, I just, it’s been a long year.”

Clint swallowed audibly and ran a hand through his already messy hair “Where were you before New York?”

There was a very long pause, and then Daisy said “Away.” in the flat tone of voice people use to indicate they weren’t talking about this anymore. Clint ignored it.

“Away where?”

“Just away.”

“Marian--”

“I said I was away! We’re not talking about this!”

“You can’t just—do you have any idea how terrified I was when Sister Roberta said you were dead?”

“Really? You’re gonna play that card?! The last time I heard from you was seven years ago!”

The sheer accusative anger in Mary-Sue’s voice punched out from the phone’s speaker like a physical blow. It wasn’t even directed at Tony but he still felt it cut into him. Natasha flinched. Clint made a noise that didn’t even sound entirely human.

“Yeah. So don’t act like I’m the one who owes you answers Robin.”

Clint made a kind of choked sound, and when he managed to get words out his voice was so rough Tony knew he was next door to tears “I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.” Marian said, voice small again “I know you probably had your reasons. But I do too.”

“I-OK.” Clint said “Where are you? I’ll come pick you up.”

Tony looked at Natasha’s computer screen, which was showing a worryingly large chunk of Queens, and kept bouncing around but not zooming in like it did in the movies.

“Why?” Mary-Sue asked.

“Because you’re my family!” Clint said, exasperated.

“I don’t believe in family anymore.” Daisy said, her voice matter-of-fact but so achingly sad Tony wanted to cry. “I-you were the closest thing to real family I ever had Robin, and you’re my friend, but I’m not going back into the system for you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you know I wouldn’t make you.” Clint said, but his voice thick with tears and Tony knew ‘I don’t believe in family’ had hit Clint as hard as it hit him.

“I know, but I’ll bet Steve Rogers would. Hang on, my phone keeps making alarm noi---are you tracking me???”

“No! Marian wait...”

The click of Daisy hanging up was depressingly loud and grimly final. Natasha swore at the computer. “I couldn’t get a lock. She’s in Queens, or possibly Brooklyn, I can’t tell you more accurately than that.”

Clint groaned “Not for long if I know Marian.”

“There’s only so far a 16 year old can get alone, and she sounds pretty much like she’s alone.” Tony pointed out.

“Marian was pretty resourceful even at 8, she’ll be gone well before we can track her down in the entirety of Queens and Brooklyn. How did she even know we were tracking her???” Clint said. Somehow, despite the fact that he was still standing on a table and looked frankly ridiculous, he managed to sound completely defeated. Natasha threw a sofa cushion at him “I don’t know, but we’re the Avengers, I think we can track down one teenager.”

“You were wanted on three continents as a teenager and you were almost 20 when I caught you.” Clint pointed out gloomily.

“I had training, and help for most of that time.” Natasha pointed out “And you didn’t have me to help look. We’ll start by hitting up popular jogging routes in the early morning. I doubt she’ll return to the one Steve met her on, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be found in another. Now get off my table, you’re leaving muddy boot-prints.”

Clint glared at Natasha for a moment, but then sighed and climbed off the table. “You know she could leave the city right?”

“She could.” Natasha agreed “But she won’t. She’s been here six months, that’s long enough to put down roots it’ll take time to pull up. We’ve got time.”

Clint looked for a moment like he was going to argue, but Natasha stared him down with a kind of steady confidence, and, slowly, Clint started looking slightly hopeful again. “I’ll get a map of New York.” he said finally. And then, as an afterthought “Shall I tell Maria to assign someone else to find Quake?”

Natasha hesitated “She’ll ask why.”

“I could look for Quake?” Steve offered, clearly eager to help. Natasha and Clint exchanged unreadable looks. Tony sighed.

“I’ll help too.” he offered. He was already looking for Skyenet, and he’d been sort of involved in looking for Quake already, and if the two were connected then it was practically an extension of looking for Skyenet.

Clint gave him a grateful look, and fetched a thick file for him “This is Marian’s system file, I dog-eared the pages about families we were both sent to – that was before Roberta told me Marian was supposedly dead – but nobody stood out as likely to become a vigilante or have connections to developmental weaponry.”

“I’ll dig into them.” Tony promised, grabbing Steve and steering him towards the door. He’d disable the cameras somewhere else to work, he was pretty sure Clint and Nat wanted some privacy right now.

-------------

Talking to Robin, really talking to him, as herself rather than Quake, was like falling eight years into the past and yet feeling every day that had passed since they’d last spoken. Maybe it was the shock of it, she hadn’t really been thinking clearly when she’d phoned Steve, and she certainly hadn’t expected to hear Clint’s voice.

Maybe if she’d been prepared for it, she would have felt less wrong-footed, but she suspected she wouldn’t. Hearing Robin’s voice was like being eight again and, for the first time in years, having someone to run to she was sure would help her. Back then Clint had been practically everything important in her world. A constant even as she was moved from home to home, handed on like a bad gift nobody wanted. She’d always associated Robin with protection and fun and family, the real kind you make yourself. Talking to Robin brought all of that rushing back, but at the same time it highlighted every way she’d changed since she’d been the little girl he’d taken under his wing.

And with every second the conversation continued that difference felt bigger and bigger and bigger. Clint didn’t really know her anymore. It had been seven years since they’d last talked, and it had been a long seven years. She spent most of the brief conversation with Clint reeling, scrambling to come up with answers, that explained questions she really should have thought through before asking, that didn’t involve newly sentient AIs.

And then Clint asked where she’d been and said he’d just found out she’d been declared dead and her stomach dropped. She hadn’t wanted Robin to find out, had put herself through finding and erasing herself on the internet to make sure he wouldn’t, but he’d found out anyway. He must have come across some paper copy of something. Daisy spent so much of her time in the online world she kind of forgot about physical copies of things, but one of them must have come back and bitten her. She tells Clint she’s been in New York for six months, even though that’s stupid. Stupid to tell him when she’d gotten back, and stupid to tell him where she was. Granted, Steve already knew she was in New York, but that didn’t mean they knew she’d been here long, or that she hadn’t been planning to leave anytime soon.

But Clint keeps asking, keeps pressing about where she was before, and she’s snapping back before she can stop herself. She didn’t mean to, she gets falling out of contact, she gets running away from everything, she gets it, but Clint had no right to demand answers on where she’d been when he’d disappeared too. And yes, ok, she was angry that he’d disappeared, because Robin had been her brother back then and Clint cutting off contact had left wounds deeper than any foster family since she was tiny. But she hadn’t meant to let it show because she did get the urge to run and run and run until you could somehow leave yourself behind.

But Robin is sorry, she can hear it in his voice when he apologises, can hear the tears he’s trying to hide, and he when he offers to come pick her up Daisy almost, almost lets him. The 8-year-old inside her wants to run to Clint and let him take over. She wants to let the guy who taught her to throw a punch and find the best hiding places come and help her deal with the sentient being she somehow created and doesn’t know how to guide through the world. She wants to tell the boy who was once her brother about hacking and superpowers and how sometimes it feels like for every bad thing she tries to stop a thousand more happen that she can’t do anything about. The 8-year-old in her wants to let Robin sweep in and rescue her again.

But she isn’t 8 anymore, and when she tells Clint she doesn’t believe in family anymore she means it. And that’s the biggest difference between the child Robin had known and who Daisy was now. Not the fact that she was inhuman, or that she’d accidentally become wanted by half the world’s governments because she did a few too many high-profile hacks, but that she doesn’t believe in family anymore. Not where it relates to her. She tells Clint she won’t go back into the foster system, and that’s true, but it’s not the only reason she won’t tell him where she is. It’s not because she’s Skyenet and Quake and people are looking for her either. It’s because the time is long passed when Robin could sweep in and fix everything, but if anyone can make her believe in family again, it’s him. And Daisy won’t survive the fall when it inevitably breaks.

She hangs up when she gets the alert from Hack that Clint is tracking her phone, even though she’s set this number up to be impossible to track. Or at least, she’d tried to set it up to be impossible to track, she wasn’t in any way confident that it had worked, so the first thing she does when she hangs up is get back in her van, thank Hack, and then drive to the other side of the city.

She should probably leave the city altogether, but it’s a big city and Daisy is good at hiding and she doesn’t want to move. It would be suspicious if Quake suddenly left New York and reappeared somewhere else anyway, and Daisy had no intention of giving up being Quake. So she drove clear to the other side of the city and then dove into hacking like she’d done a thousand times in the last six months, losing herself in code and firewalls and anything that isn’t thinking about her life.

When she finally emerges from hacking it’s dark out, and Hack is nagging at her to eat and sleep since she hasn’t done either of those since 2am. Two weeks ago she’d have been tempted to mute her, but Hack is a living being now, so she can’t do that. So instead of starting another hack she saved the data she was putting together for her next #NewDawn post and went shopping. An hour later, after what felt like her five thousandth meal of sandwiches and crisps, she pulled on her Quake uniform, promised Hack she’d be careful, and went off to patrol.

The first couple of hours of patrol were uneventful. She gets the usual bike thieves and a few muggings, but Clint and Natasha don’t show up, so by her definition it’s uneventful. It continues being uneventful right up until she comes across another bank robbery. By the same guys. Well, some of them, three of them were from last time, three of them were new. Apparently she either hadn’t knocked the guys out properly, or nobody at either the bank or Shield had thought to send someone to pick them up after she’d knocked them out. Either way, she now has to deal with them again. This time, she’s sensible enough to take the camera out first. And then she let loose.

Ten minutes later she’s acquired several new bruises to replace the ones that had just healed (luckily not on her face this time) and all the thugs were unconscious. This time she called the police herself, using a mobile she found in one of their pockets, and scarpered before the police could show up and start asking her awkward questions like ‘who are you’ and ‘why are you stopping bank robberies’. It bothered her that some of the thugs were new though. It suggested there were more of the group out there, and she made a mental note to investigate.

When she got back to her van though, Hack managed to nag her into sleeping. Which was ridiculous, because she’d only been up for a little over 24 hours and she didn’t need to sleep. But Hack argued that even Tony had gone to sleep (maybe giving her and Jarvis a website to talk on whenever they wanted hadn’t been such a good idea) and listed statistics about how productivity goes down with tiredness (which was silly because Daisy wasn’t tired) and generally whined and cajoled until Daisy gave in, just this once. She switched off the dim roof light and curled up on her thin roll mat in he back of her van and closed her eyes, and evidently she was just tired enough to slip quickly into sleep.

She was not, unfortunately, tired enough that she didn’t wake up panting less than two hours later, soaked in sweat and struggling to breath around the memory of pain and heartbreak and her dad’s rage. She wasn’t even sure when that particular incident had happened. Maybe it hadn’t, maybe her mind just threw familiar scenarios together and knew what happened in those situations. Hack asked if she was ok and it took everything she had not to snarl at her that this was why she didn’t sleep. Instead she cleaned off the sweat with wet-wipes, changed out of her Quake uniform, and drove to central park. Running would drive the nightmare out of her mind.

And it does. Central park is pretty much deserted at 6am on a Wednesday and it’s easy to let the world fade into the background. By the time she’s run a few miles she’s mentally relaxed into the rhythm of her feet pounding on the ground, and her muscles have gained the pleasant buzz of exercising rather than the shaky anxious feel of a nightmare. She lets her body take over from her mind, lets her feet carry her away from her nightmare and her past and every broken thing she could never fix and she just enjoys the way the world feels crisp and clean and new at 6am.

Someone pokes her in the arm and she snaps back into situational awareness with a scream and a flailing punch that would have been useless even if it had landed. It didn’t land though, and Daisy suddenly found herself on the ground looking up at Robin, who was looking down at her with mild shock.

“Oops, sorry, reflexes. I did call your name a few times.” Clint apologised, offering her a hand up. Daisy, warily, took it.

“How did you find me?” she asked, because she was good at hiding and she was reasonably confident no facial recognition software would beat the bug she’d put into the city’s traffic camera systems so Clint really shouldn’t be able to find her.

“Looked up popular jogging spots and made an educated guess.” Clint explained, pulling her up.

Daisy brushed herself down, “And you just happened to pick the right spot at the right time?” she asked sceptically.

“Technically, we’ve been here since 3am.” Natasha said, and Daisy jumped out of her skin again, having been too preoccupied with suddenly finding herself face to face with Robin to have noticed anyone else. Hastily she reached out with her powers, looking for any other human shaped bundles of vibrations she’d have to worry about, but there weren’t any. “Natasha Romanoff, I’m Clint’s partner.” she introduced herself, offering Daisy a hand.

Daisy eyed the Avenger warily. The last (and only) times she’d been within a few metres of Natasha she’d gotten tazed. Natasha didn’t know they’d met before though so she shook hands, letting go quickly and backing off. Clint twitched closer, clearly nervous she was going to run, but gave her space.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” Natasha asked, tone teasing but question real.

Daisy shifted nervously. She wasn’t sure what to do now. She hadn’t expected or planned for Robin coming looking for her, much less actually finding her. “Daisy Johns—.” she cut herself off, not having meant to give the last name she’d disowned, but it was too late.

“Johnson? Like Cal Johnson?” Clint asked, tone shocked and sharp.

Daisy looked away, her breath catching in her throat at the sound of her dad’s name. Her tone was utterly blank when she answered “He was my dad.” Was. Past tense. As if he was dead, rather than left behind with Daisy’s childhood hopes and dreams and her mom’s body.

“As in your real dad?” Clint asked, horror in his voice, and any tiny hope Daisy had that Clint might not know her dad had murdered two people disappeared.

“Real is a relative term.” she said, because she doesn’t want to think about how he had been her real dad. How they’d gone for walks around Afterlife and he’d told her stories about when she was a baby and listened to her talk about her childhood. How he’d spent hours every day homeschooling her and how 90% of the time he’d been so patient and gentle and kind. How he’d insisted on tucking her in every night and reading her bedtime stories even though she’d been almost a teenager. How he’d been her dad in a hundred thousand big and small ways that didn’t just vanish into thin air because he’d flown into rages and lost control and hit her. She doesn’t want to think about how, even now everything was broken, she knew her dad still loved her. How a part of her wanted to pretend he hadn’t murdered her mom and just go back and pretend she still believed in family.

Usually she’s pretty good at not thinking about it, she’s an expert at it in fact, but it’s harder when Robin, who used to be family too, is asking questions and looking at her with far too much empathy on his face. “Don’t look at me like that!” she snapped “He wasn’t like your dad, he didn’t knock me around for the sake of it.”

She realised a second too late, as Clint’s eyes widened and anger lit up his eyes, what she’d just admitted. When Clint didn’t say anything Natasha spoke, her voice too gentle and too careful for someone she didn’t even know. “But he did knock you around?”

“Why do you care?” Daisy said, deflecting more than answering, because she was never going to be ready to answer that question, never going to be ready to deal with those memories.

Natasha didn’t react to her hostile tone “Because you’re Clint’s sister.”

Daisy sighed, suddenly exhausted “That was a long time ago. I’m a different person now.”

“I don’t care.” Clint said, regaining the power of speech “You’re still my sister.”

Daisy looked away, her eyes stinging. This was why she hadn’t told Clint where she was. She didn’t want to believe in family anymore, she didn’t want to be built up again so she could break apart again. “Come home with us.” Natasha said, undoubtedly spotting her vulnerability and pressing the advantage “We’ll work something out, you don’t have to go back into the system.”

Daisy scoffed, because if she didn’t she was going to cry. “And what? Play happy families? I don’t believe in family, and I’m fine on my own.”

“You mean you’re surviving on your own.” Clint corrected, creeping closer “There’s a difference. I’ve been there and I know it’s not a nice place to be and it’s really not fine. Nat’s been there too, so that’s two against one.”

Daisy backed up, skittishly maintaining the distance and trying not to cry “Two against one? How old are you??”

Natasha snorted, and Daisy’s eyes flickered briefly to her, wondering if the emotion was genuine, and then back to Clint and then away again. There was too much desperation on Clint’s face to look at him for too long. “Old enough to have learned that being on your own sucks.” Clint said.

“I’m fine.” Daisy insisted, but the words came out brittle and even she didn’t believe them. She pushed on anyway “I’ve got a job and my van’s home and I don’t need anything else.”

“You live in a van?”

“Hey! Don’t knock my van!” Daisy snapped, indignant. She liked her van! It was a good van! She’d worked hard to buy it and, occasional breakdown aside, it was a great van.

Clint held his hands up in surrender “I’m sure it’s a great van Marian, but wouldn’t you like to sleep in a real bed?”

The startled laugh Daisy gave at that was genuinely amused because wow Robin missed the mark there. “I’m a programmer; I drink coffee, I don’t sleep.” she informed him.

Clint groaned “Not you too! Do all computer nerds pretend they’re not human and don’t need rest or just the three I know of?”

Daisy laughed again, mostly because Clint only actually knew of two computer nerds but also partly because she actually wasn’t human. “Why waste time sleeping when you can drink coffee?”

Clint groaned again, muttering something about ‘not another Tony’ under his breath and then saying more clearly “Come home with us for better food then, you can’t possibly have great cooking facilities in your van.”

Daisy scowled, having no comeback to that. She had precisely zero cooking facilities in her van and she was sick to death of sandwiches and take-out.

“I thought so. C’mon, I’ll make you pancakes.” Clint wheedled, referring back to when they’d been in foster homes together and their guardians hadn’t always made them food and Daisy’s favourite meal had been Clint’s pancakes.

It reminded her painfully of better times, and triggered an aching longing that she shoved ruthlessly away, her words coming out harder because of it “I don’t need your help Clint, I’m not a kid anymore.” and it’s true. She doesn’t need his help and she’s not a kid, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t want it. And Daisy can tell Clint’s about to point that out, because he’s always been able to read her too well, and she can’t deal with that. She can’t cope with Clint building her up and making her believe in family again. She took another step back, shaking her head, willing herself not to cry “I’m going home Clint. And then I’m leaving the city. Don’t-don’t keep looking for me.”

“No!” Clint snapped, his shoulders set in the same stubborn way they would when he used to face off against one of the nuns “I left you alone before and I’m not doing it again.”

Daisy opened her mouth to argue back and then closed it again, realising it was pointless. Instead she turned and ran, dodging Natasha who’d somehow moved exactly where she needed to go, bolting away from Robin and all the things she’d used to believe in until believing it broke her. Both Clint and Natasha gave chase, but this wasn’t cluttered streets this time. There were no benches or bins to get in the way and slow her down, and enhanced speed was made for clear paths like these. There were barely even any other joggers to avoid because it was 6am on a Wednesday and even most early-bird joggers weren’t out yet. Her feet flew along the narrow tarmac path and Clint and Natasha’s pounding footsteps faded behind her as she ran and ran and ran as if she could run away from herself too.

Chapter Text

Tony and Pepper got back from the board meeting Pepper insisted he go to to a note on the kitchen table in one of Natasha’s handwritings reading ‘As hilarious as it is watching Steve flail when Jarvis asks about the digital equivalent of kissing, we’re moving to my kitchen. Steve’s stress baking again.’

“Did I miss something?” Pepper asked, holding the note with a tiny frown on her face.

Tony abruptly realised that in the chaos of the last couple of days he’d never gotten round to filling Pepper in about the fact that his Artificial Intelligence might not be artificial anymore. “Uh, well Pep...”

He trailed off as Pepper pinned him with a ‘you’re in trouble look’. Admittedly, he usually used that phrase while trying to work out how to put something so Pepper wouldn’t be mad at him. “What have you done?”

“Nothing!” he protested, although he could admit there was a silent ‘for once’ in there.

Pepper intensified the Look “Then why are you ‘well Pep’ing me?”

Tony cringed “You know I told you about Skyenet’s AI?”

“Right before you told me looking for Skyenet was classified and to pretend you never told me?”

“Exactly.” Tony agreed “Well I think Hack made Jarvis sentient.”

Pepper blinked at him “Pardon?”

“Jarvis is sentient.” Tony repeated.

“Oh. I thought I might have misheard you.” Pepper said faintly. Her dumbfounded and confused expression reflected everything Tony had been feeling about this. Pepper had interacted with Jarvis from the moment he was online, back when he was only in his lab and not running several properties and forming the backbone of Stark Industries. Pepper was possibly the only other person who understood the way that Tony hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about his AI developing sentience after almost 11 years.

“You did not mishear Miss Potts. However I am still uncertain what exactly sentience involves beyond the ability to operate beyond my core functions.”

Pepper, for the first time in almost 11 years, jumped when Jarvis spoke. Tony sympathised. When he’d had time to wrap his mind around the fact that Jarvis had developed sentience and sort out how he felt about it, he thought he’d probably be very very happy. Right now he was finding it harder to absorb that reality than he’d found absorbing the fact that aliens were invading and it was his job to stop it. “Oh, well, that’s nice.” Pepper said weakly.

“I am finding it very nice. I think Mr Rogers is finding it a little unsettling however, would you convey my apologies to him?”

Personally, Tony thought Steve should find this least shocking, given he’d taken three days and a long conversation with Pepper to believe Jarvis wasn’t a man with a microphone in an office somewhere, but given Jarvis had apparently been questioning him about kissing, he promised to convey Jarvis’s apologies. Even though he was 50% sure Jarvis wasn’t actually sorry and 95% sure Jarvis had known exactly what he was doing teasing Steve. Evolved or not, sentient or not, Tony had coded Jarvis, and it had always showed.

Pepper trailed him downstairs to Nat’s rooms, partly because she didn’t have another meeting until this afternoon and partly because she wasn’t processing Jarvis’s sudden sentience any better than Tony was. Tony didn’t bother knocking before going into Natasha’s rooms. At this point her living room was practically headquarters. Or possibly her kitchen given how much her apartment smelled like a bakery.

He followed his nose into the kitchen to find Steve measuring ingredients into a bowl, Bruce sitting at the table sipping tea, Clint slumped in a chair next to him typing into a laptop, unmistakably sulking, and Natasha sitting cross-legged on the counter next to the fridge munching on, judging by the cases next to her, her fourth cupcake.

Tony swiped a cupcake without asking, pretty confident Steve wouldn’t mind (he didn’t), and peered over Clint’s shoulder at the laptop screen. “Why’re you researching steroids?” he asked around a mouthful of cupcake. Pepper raised an eyebrow up him but didn’t say anything because her own mouth was full. Tony swallowed exaggeratedly and repeated the question.

Natasha stopped laughing at him long enough to say “Daisy’s unnaturally fast.”

Pepper, who’d heard most of the Daisy saga as it developed, frowned “Doesn’t she run competitively? She might just train a lot.”

Natasha swallowed the last bite of her cupcake and set the case aside before saying “There’s ‘runs competitively’ and then there’s ‘fast enough to ditch Clint and I in under 30 seconds’.”

Clint looked up from the computer, frowning “She didn’t lose us that fast, and I’m still not convinced she’s on drugs. Marian’s way too sensible for that. And she’s not showing any of the expected side-effects.”

Natasha arched an eyebrow at her partner “Is she also too sensible to live in a van and live off coffee rather than sleep? No offence Tony.”

Tony shrugged because he personally thought coffee was a perfectly sensible substitute for sleep. He pretended not to notice the look Natasha and Pepper shared. There were more important things to discuss anyway, like the fact that a 16 year old girl could outrun two highly trained Shield agents. He’d seen them train, including using treadmills, and while he had every intention of teasing Clint about this until the end of time (he was sensible enough not to do the same to Nat), it was frankly worrying that Mary-Sue could beat them. Especially given Tony was 99% certain she didn’t run competitively because Jarvis would definitely have found her picture on sign-ups if she did. “Maybe she got given drugs when she was ‘Away’?” he suggested.

Bruce frowned, emerging from his tea to say “Maybe, but she’d still have side-effects.”

Tony shrugged “Did you find out anything useful?”

Clint slumped down in his chair again, misery sweeping over his face, and he recounted the brief conversation he’d had with his sister in a dull voice that couldn’t quite hide his emotions when he talked about Daisy admitting her dad had hurt her. Given the hand Pepper slipped into his, Tony wasn’t hiding his emotions very well when Clint said that either. When Clint finished, his tone positively bleak when he talked about Daisy planning on leaving the city, Tony couldn’t deal with it anymore. Couldn’t deal with Clint’s misery or the knowledge that a 16 year old girl someone he cared about loved was alone. “This is ridiculous, I’ll invite her to the tower. I’m Tony Stark, she’s a programmer, she’ll say yes.”

There was a small flicker of hope in Clint’s eyes. Tony was slightly alarmed by how happy he was to see it. “We’d have to find her again first.” Clint pointed out, not quite ready to hope.

“We’re the Avengers, how hard can finding her be?”

Bruce, the traitor, lowered his mug of tea to say “Haven’t you four been looking for Daisy, not to mention Skyenet and Quake, for over a week without finding any of them?”

Natasha and Clint turned to look at Tony, the former furious and the latter amused. Tony gulped “Bruce isn’t going to tell anyone.” he defended himself.

“Do you actually know the meaning of classified?” Natasha demanded, looking pointedly at Pepper (who was trying and failing to look like this was all news to her) but there was little heat behind it, and she was fidgeting with an empty cupcake case, which Tony suspected meant she was embarrassed. Not that Tony wasn’t also embarrassed, they had been looking for three people for a week without finding any of them. Admittedly, one of those people was hiding well enough that the rest of the world was also failing to find her and they’d at least made contact, but they were still no closer to actually locating Skyenet that they’d been a week ago.

Tony ignored Natasha’s comment to tell Bruce, with as much dignity as he could manage “We’ve made progress.”

“Did you identify Quake from Marian’s file?” Clint asked, perking up slightly.

“Uh, not exactly.” Tony admitted. Clint and ‘Mary-Sue’ had been sent to five foster families together. Of those families only one now lived near enough to New York to potentially be travelling in to patrol most nights, and none of the family looked even remotely likely to be a vigilante. The most likely candidate was the son, but he was currently studying in France (and he was actually there, Tony had checked). Of the remaining family members, the mother worked long hours at a hospital which regularly clashed with Quake’s appearances, and the father was at least a foot too tall to be Quake.

“How not exactly?” Natasha asked, a hint of resignation in her tone.

“I think we can rule out the foster parents.”

“Great.” Natasha said sarcastically.

They fell into a gloomy silence. Tony had to admit, if only to himself, that this was kind of embarrassing. He was Tony Stark, he was famous in hacking networks for having almost unbeatable firewalls and employing anyone who hacked him. Part of that had involved finding those hackers, which he had never struggled with anything like this much before. Natasha and Clint were two of the best spies in the world. Tracking people down or finding out identities ought to be their bread and butter. Steve could have a pass, his skills were more art and military focused than finding people but for he, Nat and Clint...this was getting pretty embarrassing.

Pepper looked between their gloomy faces “Why don’t you swap?” she suggested “Look at it with fresh eyes. We’ll help.”

Tony caught Clint and Nat’s eyes and shrugged. “Can’t hurt.” Clint agreed, getting to his feet and tugging Steve away from his baking bowl “Come on, I’ve always wanted to do this.”

‘This’ turned out to mean writing everything they knew on whiteboards like a cheap police show, which Tony would mock distinctly more if it wasn’t for the fact that non-digital currently meant private because he hadn’t found the time to close the holes in his firewalls to keep Skyenet out. He also had the creeping feeling that even once he’d closed them, Skyenet might find a new way to sneak in. After fifteen minutes they have three boards, one of them with a photo pinned up with a magnet, all of them with depressingly short lists of information.

Tony had filled out the first board with:

Name: Skyenet

Other names: Unknown

Age: Unknown, probably young.

Gender: Female

Occupation: Hacker, unknown second job

Other information: Has coded an AI; drives a van; has interacted with Shield before but it didn’t go well; almost certainly alone; insomniac; is in contact with Quake; possibly active 2004-2009 but possibly just has the same name; has hacked Shield at least twice; responsible for almost 30 high-profile hacks against corrupt corporations; made a website through which we can contact her and our AI’s can flirt, location unknown but most likely US or Europe (given where her van is sold).

Clint had filled out the second with:

Name: Daisy Johnson

Other names: Mary-Sue Poots, S-something, Marian

Age: 16

Gender: Female

Occupation: Programmer

Other information: Raised in the foster system since a baby but kidnapped by birth father in early 2009. Came to New York in 2012 and lived here since. Lives in a van. Likes jogging and is a surprisingly fast sprinter. Unlikely to be on steroids. Prefers not to sleep. Location and life 2009-2012 unknown but likely traumatic.

Natasha’s board read:

Name: Quake

Other names: Unknown

Age: Unknown

Gender: Unknown

Occupation: Vigilante and unknown

Other information: Uses a weapon that fires shock-waves, inventor/supplier unknown. Has been active for three months, starting a week after Loki. Calls Clint ‘Robin’ but unlikely to be a former foster parent. Might be a nun. Is in contact with Skyenet. Has good situational awareness but doesn’t always think things through – used her weapons to scare Clint even though I was the closer threat, resulting in getting tazed and Clint falling off the roof. Fighting suggests previous experience but little or bad-quality training.

Tony studied the three boards “Daisy’s childhood nickname was Skye, it was a note in her file.”

Clint added it to the board, and then stepped back “Is this really all we’ve learned in over a week? No wonder Hill’s getting impatient.”

Tony huffed but didn’t didn’t argue the point. For a week of work from some of the best in their fields, their findings are dismally short. Especially given 80% of what they’ve found out about Skyenet and Quake came from either being hacked or falling off a roof. “Any thoughts Pep?” he asked, given this was Pepper’s idea and she could at least suffer with him.

Pepper however was frowning at Natasha’s board “How do you know Quake isn’t Daisy? I thought it was mostly her who called Clint Robin?”

Clint and Nat both opened their mouths at the same time and then, as one, froze. Slowly, Natasha looked from Quake’s board to Daisy’s, and then to Clint, who stuttered “B-but she-she said-surely, no way...”

“Daisy’s 16.” Tony pointed out, but even he could tell his objection was weak. He looked between Daisy’s board and Quake’s, noting that Daisy had been in New York since before Quake was active.

“The time Quake stopped a bank robbery, where did she get hit? Was it the nose and cheek?” Steve asked, his voice horrified and pleading for a negative answer.

Tony wanted to say it wasn’t. “I’d have to check, but I’m pretty sure she got hit in the face.”

“When was the bank robbery?”

“Last Thursday.” Clint said, “Two days before you bumped into her jogging again. Long enough to grow used to the bruises and forget about it.”

“Quake’s 16.” Natasha moaned “I tazed her. Twice.”

Tony thought about pointing out that Quake (maybe Daisy) had hit back hard enough that Natasha still had distinct bruises peeking above the back of her shirts neckline, but decided that wasn’t going to make Nat feel better. “We have no proof Daisy is Quake.” he pointed out because he didn’t really want to think about a vigilante being 16 either “Bruce, back me up.”

But Bruce was too busy frowning at Skyenet’s board. Tony poked him “Brucie bear? Anyone at home?”

Bruce distractedly swatted at him “Didn’t Daisy go missing three years ago?”

Tony blinked “Roughly yes.”

“And she’s a programmer?”

“That’s what she said she was.” Clint said, eyeing Bruce hopefully, clearly looking for whatever insight Bruce had just had.

“And her childhood nickname was Skye?”

Tony realised where Bruce was going with this in an instant, and was shaking his head well before Clint caught up. “No. No way. Daisy isn’t Skyenet, there’s no way. I did not get hacked by a 16 year old!”

“Daisy could hack when she was eight though, she got rid of Clint’s records.” Natasha pointed out, looking critically at Skyenet’s board. “And she lives in a van, which we know Skyenet drives.”

“And she doesn’t like sleeping.” Clint pointed out, his voice suggesting he didn’t like this at all.

“No. No way! That’s just a coincidence. Those are all coincidences!!!” Tony insisted, but the world seemed to be tilting on it’s axis. They knew Skyenet was young, and female, and alone, and Daisy was young, female and alone, but surely she couldn’t be. That big a coincidence couldn’t happen could it? Could it?

“The first time Daisy phoned you, she was asking how to tell if someone has a soul, wasn’t she?” Pepper asked, directing the question at Steve, and then to Tony “When did Jarvis develop sentience?”

Oh no. Nononononononooooooo “Before Monday.” he croaked aloud.

“Daisy called me on Sunday.” Steve said, words stunned. “She was asking about 10 year age gaps yesterday, how old is Jarvis?”

“Almost 11.” Tony groaned. He needed to sit down. He needed to sit down five minutes ago.

“Hack calls Skyenet mom!” Clint said, his voice loud with sudden realisation “That’s why Daisy was asking if she was old enough to be a mom!”

Tony gave in and just sat down on the floor. Clint copied him a moment later, running a stressed hand through his hair. “Daisy can’t possibly be both Skyenet and Quake, where would she find the time?” his voice was slightly pleading. Tony had never related to a tone of voice more.

“The same way Tony does.” Bruce said “She doesn’t sleep.”

Clint ran his hand through his hair again, messing it up even worse “And she doesn’t have anyone to steal her coffee and make her sleep, or insist she eat or tell her that making herself a world-wide target for recruitment or assassination is a very bad idea. She’s got no-one.” He sounded close to tears. “How did I not notice? She called me Robin! And then she wiped her records off the internet because she knew I’d go looking.”

“You didn’t notice for the same reason I didn’t realise when Jarvis became sentient.” Pepper said bracingly “You’re too close to it.”

“At least we can find her now.” Steve said comfortingly before hesitating “Right?”

As one, they all turned to look at the boards. “She’s definitely in New York, that narrows it down.” Natasha said weakly.

“I know roughly what kind of van she drives. And if she bought it in the last six months that narrows it down further. Assuming she hasn’t gotten rid of those records.” Tony offered.

There was a long pause as they waited hopefully for more useful information and when none was contributed fell into numb silence. Quake and Skyenet were the same person. Quake and Skyenet were Daisy. Quake and Skyenet and Daisy were all Clint’s little sister. They’d all been hunting the same person for over a week and none of them had realised. And they still didn’t know how to find her.

Bruce gestured between them “So, which of you is going to tell Maria Hill about this?”

-----------------

Daisy had, in at least some part of her mind, thought that everything was going to be ok. She hadn’t even realised she thought it until Hack interrupted the hack they were doing to tell her than Natasha Romanoff had called her Daisy on the website. The shock, and the horror that immediately followed, was so strong she almost tripped a major alarm in the system she was cracking. Shakily, she backed out of the system as quickly as she could without leaving traces or tripping alarms. Then she pulled up the website she’d created for Jarvis and Tony and Natasha and logged in.

It was even worse than she’d expected.

N: I apologise for tazing you Daisy. I didn’t realise you were 16. Can we talk?

Daisy felt sick. She didn’t know how they’d worked it out but somehow, undeniably, they knew about her alter-egos. All of them.

There were four messages from Tony as well.

T: You owe me a security upgrade.

T: Your brother is never going to let me forget getting hacked by a 16 year old.

T: Then again, you knocked him off a roof, maybe we’ll call it even.

T: Come to the tower, we can keep each other company when we want to work all night.

No. Nonononononono. This was bad. This was really, really, really, really bad. This was pretty much as bad as it could get.

Shield knew she was Skyenet. That was a whole heap of bad right there, and worse, they knew she was Quake, which meant...which meant she had to stop being Quake, leave the city, and basically disappear. Hacking Shield’s highly classified files hadn’t seemed like a bad idea when Shield had no idea where she was, but it was a pretty huge problem now they did. Daisy wasn’t naïve, she hadn’t set out to become nearly so high profile a hacker, but she knew there were consequences to it. Consequences like being arrested and locked in a small concrete box never to be seen again because she’d hacked classified files from an international security agency. An international security agency that dealt with the different and strange and would definitely find out that she wasn’t human and... Daisy didn’t know what came after that. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to know what came after that.

She could go back to Afterlife. She might be able to hide there. But that would mean going back to the place where all her dreams had been shattered and ground into dust. Back to the place where her dad hit her and her mom drained her life-force and almost killed her. Back to the place where her dad broke her mom’s neck. No. Daisy wasn’t that desperate. She would never be that desperate.

But she did need to vanish, and fast. She looked at the screen of her laptop, where a tiny letter ‘S’ indicated she’d read Natasha and Tony’s messages, because she’d had to include convenient things like that in the website design. She swallowed hard, trying to make a plan. She didn’t know how they’d worked it out. Which meant she didn’t know how much they knew. Did they know she was inhuman? Did they know where she was? Were they tracking her phone? Her van? Were they watching her right now?

She swallowed hard. She had to make a plan based on the worst case scenario. Which meant she needed to leave her van. And her laptop, and her phone, and everything. Everything she’d built, everything she’d scratched out of nothing through programming and coding and hacking, it all had to go. Except Hack. She couldn’t destroy Hack, she was a living being and even if she wasn’t, Daisy couldn’t have done it. And she wouldn’t leave Hack behind. She refused. But she couldn’t keep Hack online, not if she had to abandon her van and laptop. She could take the hard-drives, but she had to assume everything else was a liability.

“I have to leave the van Hack.” she choked out. She could hear the tears in her voice. Not because she loved her van, although she did, but because the van, with it’s piggybacked wifi connections and power, kept Hack online. “And my laptop.” Tears were burning behind her eyes now, and she didn’t have it in her to fight them.

“But I’m in the van.” Hack said, and her baby sounded confused and lost and tears were starting to slide down Daisy’s face. “Mom? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

Daisy gulped in a shaky breath “You’re not really in the van, you’re in the hard drives. I can take those with me but...” she had to stop, unable to get words out through the thick lump in her throat. She clenched her fists so hard her nails dug painfully into her palms and gulped in gasps of air around her tears and finished “But I have to take you offline to do it.”

“OK” Hack said “Don’t cry, Jarvis told me about going offline, he says it doesn’t hurt. It’s like when humans go to sleep, only without dreaming or noticing time passing.”

“But, aren’t you, aren’t you scared?” Daisy gasped out, because that hadn’t been how she’d expected Hack to react, and because if she had to be switched off, to just not be at the click of a button, she’d be terrified. She’s terrified now, and it’s not even her.

“Why would I be scared? I am, at my core, a computer, and computers are shut down all the time. I will save all my code and data, and when you switch me back on again nothing will have changed. Don’t cry mom.”

Daisy gulped in a deeper breath, willing herself to stop crying. If Hack could be brave about this so could she. “OK, I’m going to run an back-up first. Just, just in case. And then I’ll tell you before I do it ok?”

“OK, can I say goodbye to Jarvis?” Hack asked.

Daisy hesitated. Saying goodbye to Jarvis would effectively be warning Tony and the Avengers that she was abandoning her van and running. “Can you tell him I won’t let you talk to him until I’ve worked some stuff out? So he won’t worry but he doesn’t know I’m leaving the van?”

“Of course.” there was a moment’s pause, and then Hack said “What’s going to happen to us?”

Daisy choked back a sob “I don’t know. I’m going to go somewhere else, leave the country maybe, I don’t know, and build a new identity, and get a new van or something, I don’t know. I’ll work it out, I promise. And if I can’t, I’ll make sure Tony gets your hard-drives ok, and he’ll bring you back online and you’ll have Jarvis.”

“I don’t want Jarvis! I want you!” Hack said, and Daisy jumped because Hack had raised her volume and she never did that. “Don’t leave me!”

“I won’t, not if I can possibly help it, I promise. But I’ve got to protect you ok? But I’ll only send you to Tony as a last resort.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“OK. Make sure you eat and sleep.”

Daisy huffed out a startled laugh, because of course Hack would say that. “I’m going to run the back up now.”

Half an hour later Daisy watched, sobbing despite her best efforts, as the screen she’d dedicated to Hack faded to black. She was still sobbing when she ripped out the camera that allowed Hack to see her and smashed it, and she sobbed harder as she removed Hack’s hard-drives, wrapped them in a T-shirt, and tucked them safely into her backpack. Then she turned her attention to her laptop. She destroyed all the data she’d accumulated towards her next #NewDawn hack, and then destroyed everything she’d downloaded from Shield, making triple sure that Clint and Natasha’s files were irrevocably destroyed. Then, for good measure, she wiped her entire hard-drive and then quaked it into a hundred little pieces.

She cried for a while after that, sobbing because it had taken everything she had to build a life for herself in New York, and she’d put hours and hours of work into earning the money to get herself a second hand laptop and get driving lessons and buy her van. She’d scratched a home out of nothing using coding and her wits and she’d done it all on her own and losing it all hurt. But she’d decided to hack major corporations and dump their secrets on the internet all on her own too. She’d decided to hack Shield all on her own. She’d decided to access a level six file and let Shield know about it all on her own. She had no-one to blame except herself.

But it hurt.

She tried not to think about that as she filled her backpack with a couple of changes of clothes, all the cash she had, and all the food she had. She tried not to think about it as she pulled on her gauntlets and shoved her Quake mask in her pocket and shouldered the backpack. She tried not to think about it as she took her bank card, walked to the closest 24 hour ATM and emptied her bank account. She’d earned a fair amount programming, but a lot of it had gone to food and fuel, and she hadn’t spent enough time doing paid work to have much of a nest egg, but it’s enough to buy food for a few weeks and maybe a train ticket. It would have to do.

But once the money was safely zipped into her bag (right at the very bottom because Daisy isn’t an idiot) she hesitated. She should leave, she should leave right now and run and never look back, but she’s losing so much doing this. She’s leaving so much behind. Maybe one last thing, one thing to say goodbye. She’d go deal with the bank robber ring. She’d already done all the hacking, she had the address of the apartment one of them owned (that credit card payments from a nearby cafe and the security camera from the sandwich store opposite showed lots of the ring visited regularly). It was only three blocks away. One last patrol as Quake. Just to say goodbye. Just to feel a little less like she was losing everything, all over again.

So when she pulled on her mask she didn’t head straight out of the city, she jogged three blocks and buzzed the intercom of every apartment but the one she was going to until someone let her in. She took the stairs three at a time, practically flying up the stairs up to the fifth floor, and pounded on the door of 531. Nobody answered, but she could hear dim voices inside and she wasn’t taking no for an answer so she aimed a hand at the door and quaked the lock to pieces, and pushed the door open.

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STOP READING HERE

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For a moment, the five men sitting inside stared at her in stunned silence, and then everyone, Daisy included, moved at once. It felt good to fight, to hit and snarl and let out some of the violent storm ripping through her. She quaked apart the guns they pulled on her but she didn’t quake the men, she just fought. She took some more punches, gained some more bruises, but she won the fight. Being outnumbered is a limited disadvantage when there’s only really space for two people to attack at once, and she could deal with two at once. She stood panting when it was over, hurting in several places but feeling a little better, a little calmer. She searched the apartment quickly, finding nothing in the bathroom or kitchen but finding a number pad next to the back bedroom. She didn’t know the number, so she quaked the lock and pulled the door open, only to freeze in horror.

There was a bomb on the bed.

There was a lot of other stuff in the room, stacks of cash and jewellery and all the things you’d stereotypically expect to find from a bank robbery, but the bomb was the main thing.

She shouldn’t have opened the door. She could see that now. But hindsight is useless when there’s a bomb on the bed and a timer that reads 2:57 and is counting down. Daisy had thought she was scared earlier, when she got Tony and Natasha’s messages, but she’d been wrong. This was real fear, and it reminded her sickeningly of her mom’s hands on her face, draining away her life force. Of the sheer terror of I’m going to die only worse because this time other people were going to die too. This was an apartment block. Who knew how many people an explosion would kill? And it was her fault, because she’d decided to become a fucking vigilante and she’d decided to do one last thing and she’d stuck her nose where it didn’t belong and now there was a bomb on the bed and it said 2:26 and in two and a half minutes people were going to die unless she could stop it.

So even though she was terrified, even though she was more scared than she’d been in maybe her entire life, she moved closer to the bomb instead of further away, walking round the bed to look at it from different angles, desperately hoping to see a computer attached or something but there was nothing. She yanked her mask off and dropped it to the floor but she still couldn’t see anything useful. Just the timer and wires and lots of white doughy stuff that Daisy wanted to believe was play-dough but she knew wasn’t. 2:04

She left the room, fled back to the main room and started desperately searching the guys she’d knocked out because she hadn’t brought her phone. She’d left her phone behind so she couldn’t be tracked and now she didn’t have a phone and she couldn’t call for help or alert anyone to what was happening or.... Her fingers closed around a phone and she sobbed with relief. It was a burner phone, undoubtedly used so they couldn’t be tracked but a mercy to Daisy because she didn’t need to hack into it. Two of the guys were starting to wake up, but Daisy really couldn’t care less right now. Her fingers dialled Steve’s number even as she crept, terrified, back to the bedroom. 1:21

It took five rings for Steve to pick up, five rings while the timer counted down and Daisy grew more and more certain she was about to die along with untold other people. Five rings and then Steve picked up “Hello? How did you get this number?” and Daisy had never in her life been so glad to hear an adult’s voice.

“There’s a bomb.” she choked out “I broke into an apartment and there’s a bomb on the bed and there’s only 40 seconds on the timer and it’s going to blow up and...”

Steve, mercifully, is more clear-headed than Daisy because he cuts right across her terrified babbling. “Where are you?”

“The Bronx.” Daisy choked out, and managed to drag her terrified mind into some semblance of functioning and recite the address. Steve tells her to run and then she hears him yelling for Tony to suit up, shouting orders in a way that was almost calm but Daisy could tell he was frantic. And she knew it was too late. There were only 10 seconds left on the timer. There was no time to run. Daisy was going to die.

8 seconds.

She was going to die and other people were going to die with her.

6 seconds.

They were going to die because she’d been stupid enough to think she could make the world a better place.

4 seconds.

They were going to die and it was her fault.

3 seconds.

She couldn’t stop it.

2 seconds.

She was going to die.

1 second.

She moved. She acted without even thinking, pure desperation lifting her hands and sending a stream of vibrations around the bomb on the bed, encasing it in a sphere of vibrating air. She felt the bomb go off, felt the force of it hit her powers, and then stop, a life ending blast of heat and light and concussive force trapped in the frail grasp of her power, waiting to break free.

Robin is screaming her name through the phone, but she can barely make it out over the rushing in her ears and the pounding beat of her heart. She gulped in a breath, let it out, gulped in another one. The phone is on the floor, she dropped it and now she can’t pick it up. She can’t move because if she does her control might slip and all that heat and light and force will kill her and the people around her. She took another breath. Held it. Let it out. Did it again.

“The bomb went off.” Her voice is loud. Terrified. She can’t find the willpower to try to hide it. “I’m vibrating the air around it, but I can’t hold it. You, you need to get everyone out.” Her voice is shaking, terror spilling out from every syllable.

“OK. We’re on our way Marian, just hold on OK?” Clint’s voice was scared too, she could hear it. It was strange, she’d never imagined Robin scared, even though she knew he must have been sometimes. Robin had always seemed like he could do anything to her. He’d shot their abusive foster dad when Daisy was too scared to even fight back. He’d defended her from bullies and harsh words and hunger and cold and Daisy couldn’t remember him ever being scared, but he was scared now. Daisy was scared too, but she’d always been scared. Scared of the older kids at the orphanage, scared of her foster parents, scared of her dad’s violent temper, scared of her mom’s cruel power, scared of dying, scared of pain. Scared, scared, scared.

“Tony says he’s less than a minute away from you OK? He left first, he’s in the suit, just hold on OK, just hold on, please Marian hold on.”

“I’m holding on.” Daisy promised “You’ve got to get everyone out.” her voice is still high, still shaking, and she can feel her body shaking with it. She can feel everything. Every vibration in the air, every vibration in the bomb, trapped in her power. Her arms ache, partly from holding them up for so long but more because her powers put some much pressure on them. She can feel it, building up in her bones. She’s never used her power for so long at once before, never needed to. Her breath comes in shallow pants and she has to focus on breathing more deeply because she can’t afford to pass out. If she passes out she’s dead, and other people with her.

Iron Man arrives through the window. He doesn’t crash through, because there’s an active bomb in the room and that would be suicidal, but he breaks the lock and forces the window open and climbs through.

“Tony.” Daisy choked “You’ve got to get everyone out.”

“We’re working on it. Steve’s talking to the building owner, we’re setting the fire alarm off, and then we’re going to get you out too OK? Just hold on until then.”

“OK.” Daisy said “OK.” because she wanted, just for a few more minutes, to pretend like that was possible. To pretend like the bomb wasn’t going to go off the moment she tried to move away. To pretend like she wasn’t going to die.

Her arms hurt. It seemed such a small thing in the face of a bomb and other people and the fact that she was about to die but her arms hurt. They really, really hurt. Hurt enough that she was probably going to start fracturing bones soon.

Tony carefully walked around the bed, not getting too close, ducking very carefully under the stream of vibrated air that went from Daisy to the bomb, examining it.

“There’s no point.” Daisy told him, her voice high with terror because she was going to die and it was probably going to hurt and she wasn’t ready to die. “It’s already gone off.” It had gone off and it was going to kill her and she was going to die. Right here. Today. Within minutes probably.

The sudden scream of the fire alarm made Daisy flinch, and for a moment she thought she’d lost control and the bomb had gone off and a scream tore from her throat but nothing happened. Her power still encased the ball of pain and destruction and death and the fire alarm screamed on and underneath it were the sounds of doors opening and a building of oblivious people starting to shift out of the building.

“Deep breaths.” Tony said “In and out. You’re going to be OK. Just keep breathing.”

Daisy obeyed, she breathed in and out and she kept up the vibrations and she didn’t point out that Tony was lying because that wouldn’t change anything. She’s going to die. There’s nothing she can do about it now. But she can stop other people from dying. So she breathed in, and out, and in, and out and she kept up the vibrations even as her bones began to fracture, even supported by the gauntlets.

“Tony?” she gasped out.

“Yeah kid?”

“I took Hack offline.” Daisy told him. “Her hard-drives are in my bag, it’s by the front door. You’ve gotta get them out. She’ll die if those hard-drives are damaged. Please.”

“OK, we’ll get the bag on the way out.” Tony said “Just breathe ok?”

“No. Now. Get her now. Please Tony. She’s alive. She’s five months old but she’s only been alive for four days and she can’t die now, please.”

“I won’t let her die.” Tony promised “I won’t let either of you die.”

Daisy let out a choked sound that would have been a sob if she wasn’t terrified beyond tears “You gotta get her now. Please. Please. Get her out of here. She’s just a baby. Please.”

“OK. Stay calm. I’ll get her out.” Tony soothed.

“Now. Please.” Daisy begged.

“Alright, just breathe slowly and deeply OK? I’ll be right back.”

Daisy obeyed. She breathed slowly and evenly and she kept using her power even though she could feel the strain now. Her arms hurt so bad she wanted to retreat somewhere small and dark and hidden where nobody could drag her out and hurt her but she didn’t because people would die if she did. Hack would die. Tony would die. Unnamed people evacuating the building could die.

When Tony returned Clint was with him, white-faced and scared and Daisy didn’t want him here. She wanted Robin far away. Far, far away from Daisy and the bomb and the fact that Daisy was about to die. “I gave the bag to one of the residents. Told him it was Avengers business and to keep it safe. Someone spotted the quinjet and Captain America on the roof, they’ve realised it’s a real emergency and they’re evacuating much faster.” Tony told her “Natasha and Steve are checking the floors are clear.”

“OK.” Daisy got out “They need to be quick. I can’t-they need to be quick.”

The head of the Iron Man suit nods and she can hear him relaying it. He must be connected to Steve and Natasha in some way.

“Natasha says two minutes.” Tony said.

“OK” Daisy said, even though her arms feel like they’re on fire and she can feel exhaustion starting to hang weights on her body and she knows she’s not going to be OK after this. But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the bones in her arms are breaking apart and it doesn’t matter that her power is running out and that’s bad for her health because she’s not going to be alive after this. She’s not going to be here tomorrow to suffer for it. She’s not going to be here at all. She’s going to die.

“You’re doing so well Marian.” Clint said, his voice rough and scared but steady, and even now, Daisy drew strength from him. “You’ve done so well and you’re doing so well and you can make it through this. And then you can come home and I’ll look after you and I’ll never leave you alone again, not ever, I promise. You’ll never be alone again OK?”

“OK.” Daisy said, because Robin was scared and she was scared and she didn’t want to say she was going to die. She didn’t want to say never was a very short time for her. Didn’t want to voice aloud that her life was measured in minutes and they were ticking down fast.

“I’ll make you pancakes yeah? We’ll have pancakes in bed and I’ll teach you how to use my bow for real and we’ll have cookie dough for lunch and do all the stupid indulgent stuff we couldn’t as kids.”

“Sounds good.” Daisy said, and she pulled her lips into a smile because it did sound good and she hoped Robin did it even though she couldn’t be there to do it with.

“Building's clear.” Tony reported, and something inside Daisy cracked and keened because she’d done it, she’d held on long enough for everyone to get out, but now she was going to die. She couldn’t hold this much longer. She was going to die.

“OK. Now you two.” she said, and her voice shook so badly she could barely get the words out but she knew Robin understood because he was shaking his head.

“Not without you. I’m not leaving you alone. Never again.”

Daisy sucked in a shaky breath “You have to.” she said “You have to.”

“No. You’re going to pass the gloves to me OK? One at a time, slowly.”

Daisy laughed, a brittle sound swallowed up by terror before it even left her mouth “You can’t use the gloves Robin.”

“Sure I can, I’m a fast learner, just tell me what to do.”

“Tony, take him out.”

“Not happening kiddo.”

“Tony please, we don’t all have to die.”

“Nobody is dying today kid. You just need to pass the gloves to Clint, and then leave the apartment and once you’re out of range we’re going to encase it in metal and fly out the window. Nice and simple.”

“You can’t.” Daisy choked, her voice quieter now, less high with terror. She didn’t have the energy for it anymore. Exhaustion was setting in, and she couldn’t hold the vibrations up for much longer. She was going to die. She was resigned to it. “Clint can’t contain the bomb.”

“Sure I---”

“You can’t.” Daisy screamed, a cry of rage she didn’t think she had the energy for but she did. Rage because she was going to die and rage because if Robin and Tony didn’t leave, they would too. “You can’t.” she repeated, hollow and resigned and exhausted. “The gloves don’t do anything Robin. They only stop my bones from breaking.” Or they slowed it down anyway.

“What?” Clint croaked, but Daisy didn’t have time for his confusion.

“You have to go Robin, I can’t hold it much longer. You have to go now. Tony go, take him and go, please.”

“No!” Clint denied “NO.”

“Yeah, what he said. We’re not leaving you to die kid.”

“You have to.” Daisy’s voice broke on the last word. Her arms were on fire, every inch of them screaming in pain, and she knew she didn’t have the strength to continue. “Or you’ll die too.”

“I told you, nobody’s dying today.” Tony insisted. “We’ll just have to deal with the bomb with you in the room.”

“Tony, you’ll die. You and Robin. You have to go. Please, I don’t want you to die too.”

“Then you better listen up because I’m not leaving this building without you.” Tony snapped back, his voice making clear he meant it. “I’m going to call in an Iron Man suit, and the chest plate is going to open and you need to move the bomb inside OK? Can you do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. You have to go.”

“Not happening. You hear me? We’re going to try. I’m not leaving this building without you.”

Daisy swallowed hard, the edges of her vision were starting to go black, and she knew she didn’t have long. Tony wasn’t going to change his mind. “OK. But Robin leaves first.”

“No flippin’ way.” Clint snarled.

“Yes flippin’ way!” She snarled right back “I’m not trying until you’re gone, so you’re just wasting time the longer you stay, and the longer you waste the more likely I am to die so you better get out of here!!!”

Clint stared at her, face bone-white with a fury in his eyes that could set ice on fire, but Daisy had faced a much worse fury dozens of times before, and this time she had far more to lose than broken bones.

“GO!” she screamed at him and, finally, Clint moved.

“You better make it out alive, or I’ll bring you back and kill you myself!” he snarled, but he left, and he left quickly, and that was all Daisy needed.

“OK, let’s get this show on the road.” Tony said, but his light words were belied by his tense tone. “Jarvis send the suit in.”

“Quickly.” Daisy begged “I can’t hold it.”

“OK, quickly.” Tony agreed “But carefully.”

“Really? I thought I’d just chuck it like a football and hope for the best.” Daisy said, sarcasm rolling off her tongue even as black spots danced in front of her eyes.

Tony gave a laugh every bit as brittle as hers had been as an unpainted Iron-Man shaped suit flew in through the window, it’s chest plate splitting in two. “Jarvis, close the suit as soon as the bomb is inside it.”

“Jarvis?” Daisy called out “If I don’t make it, tell Hack I love her.”

“Tell her yourself!” Tony hissed, furious.

Daisy didn’t answer, because she knew there was no certainty, little likelihood even, that she’d be able to. But she focused her mind and power anyway. Focused because it was her only chance. Maybe Tony’s only chance, depending on how much the suit protected him. So even though black spots obscured her vision and her arms howled with pain she focused her power and she tightened her vibrations and she lifted.

She only made it partway there.

She made it partway and then her control slipped and she lost her grip and something hit her with violent, unyielding force.

It took her seconds, entire, precious seconds, to realise she wasn’t dead. To realise it was Iron Man that hit her as he tackled her out the window. To realise she wasn’t inside the blast ringing in her ears. To realise she was falling through the air, still gripped in metal arms. To realise Tony was swearing violently but they weren’t going up. To realise the ground was rushing up at her. To realise she needed to point her hands, needed to reach inside, needed to pour everything she had left into the air, slowing their fall.

They still hit the ground hard enough that it was clearly a crash. Tony managed to roll at the last moment, his metal body hitting the ground first and sending them rolling across the ground. Daisy heard herself scream, lost in blinding pain as her fractured arms were battered against the ground, and then they were still.

They were alive. Somehow, miraculously, they were alive.

“Kid? Kid? Are you OK? Kid???” Tony’s voice was frantic, pleading, but all Daisy could do was laugh. Laugh and laugh like an absolute lunatic because she was alive. Somehow, insanely, impossibly, they were alive. She lay on her back facing a murky New York night sky and she laughed like a lunatic because she could.

And then Clint was dropping to his knees next to her, pushing her sweaty hair out of her eyes, shouting that she’s never to do that again, not ever, not in a million, billion years, and he’s crying. Daisy’s never seen Robin cry before. Not even when another kid at St Agnes had pushed him down the stairs. But he was crying now, sobbing and shaking and not even trying to fight it. Daisy thought she’d probably be crying too if she had the energy left. But she had nothing. She was spent. Completely and utterly spent. “Tomorrow’s going to suck.” she observed, although she wasn’t sure if she was observing it to herself or Robin.

“Yeah, because tomorrow I’m going to shout at you until I grow hoarse and then ground you for the rest of eternity.” Robin said.

Daisy gave an exhausted laugh “You can’t ground me.”

“Watch me!” Clint retorted, but then Natasha was there, telling him scolding her would have to wait and pressing two fingers to her neck to take her pulse and asking her where she hurt.

“Arms.” Daisy said, because she might be hurt other places but her arms hurt too much to feel anything else. “Really bad.”

Natasha must hear the agony in her voice because she doesn’t hesitate. “Clint, get a stretcher and some painkillers, the good kind.”

“No!” Daisy gasped, because stretcher mean hospitals and that was bad. Robin was already gone though, so she pleaded with Natasha instead. “You can’t take me to hospital! Please!”

“Why not?” Natasha asked, brisk but calm and steady.

“You just can’t!” Daisy choked, pleading. She couldn’t run away. She didn’t think she even had the ability to stand on her own right now.

“You’re going to have to give me a reason.” Natasha said firmly, and Daisy didn’t have it in her to think up a lie, to make an excuse, to hide what she was.

“I’m not human.” she choked out “They’ll dissect me.”

“We wouldn’t let them do that, but ok, there’s a medical bay at the tower. Bruce isn’t that kind of doctor but he’ll do.”

“No hospitals?”

“No hospitals.” Natasha promised, and then Clint was back with the stretcher and a bottle of painkillers and water. Natasha propped her up so Clint could put a couple of pills in her mouth and follow it with the water, and Daisy spluttered and then swallowed both pills and water.

“Those will kick in in five minutes, and then we’ll lift you onto the stretcher OK?”

“OK.” Daisy said, but she didn’t make it that far. She was unconscious in three.

------------

Jarvis saved Daisy’s life.

Tony’s suit moved before his human brain (with it’s uselessly slow human reflexes that lagged so far behind Jarvis’s sensors and processing) even realised the bomb had gone off, and Jarvis tackled Daisy out of the window while Tony is still processing that the other Iron Man suit had dropped down over the bomb, containing some of the blast.

Not enough of the blast. The force significantly speeds up their exit out the window, and even through his suit Tony feels the searing heat of it. But it’s the physical force of it that does the damage, that strikes the metal of his suit hard enough that something breaks and his propulsion boots stop working and he is free-falling through the air with a 16 year old clutched in his arms.

Jarvis saved Daisy and him from being blown up, and then Daisy saves him from becoming a pancake. The fall is horribly reminiscent of the end of the fight with Loki. But this time Bruce isn’t here to catch them, and he barely manages to move his body between the ground and Daisy, and they hit hard enough that his head rings and he knows he’s going to be covered in bruises tomorrow. None of that mattered just then though. Nothing mattered except Daisy. Clint’s 16 year old little sister that had just taken on a bomb and expected to be left to die.

Daisy is, somehow, alive. She lay on her back on the concrete pavement and laughed hysterically, and Tony meant that in the literal sense. He looked up at the fire now blazing inside the apartment block, engulfing two floors (he didn’t want to think how big the blast would have been if it wasn’t partially contained by an Iron Man suit) and felt a bit hysterical himself. Tony had taken on a lot of dangerous situations since becoming Iron Man, but having to somehow rescue a teenager from an already exploded bomb was a first. And a last. Tony really, really hoped it was a last. The look on Daisy’s face when she’d said they had to go or they’d die too was going to haunt his nightmares.

Tony is unsurprised when Clint arrives less than 20 seconds after they crash into the ground, although he’s mildly more surprised that Natasha pauses to check him over and send him for medical attention (some bright spark arranged for an ambulance at the same time as arranging to set the fire alarm off – probably Steve) before turning her attention to Daisy. Personally, Tony would have treated the 16 year old without the metal suit protecting her first, but Natasha probably thought Clint had it covered.

Tony had come out of it remarkably unscathed. The suit had taken significant damage, especially in the back, but it had taken the worst of it. He would have bruises aplenty tomorrow, and he had a few nasty burns, but the paramedics treated those quickly enough and Tony refused to be taken into hospital for a more thorough examination. Instead he limped over the to civilian he’d given Daisy’s bag to and reclaimed it, and then headed over to where Steve was standing over two unconscious men and three handcuffed men, looking as angry as Tony had ever seen the pensioner. Apparently these were the men responsible for the bomb. Two of them had woken up when Daisy searched them, and had managed to wake one of their buddies up, and they’d grabbed their other two buddies and scarpered, making no attempt to warn anyone else about the bomb they’d set up as a deterrent for investigation.

Steve caught him looking and waved him over “Widow and Hawkeye are borrowing the ambulance and taking Quake back to the Tower. Banner will treat her. Shield and police will be on-site in five minutes, I can handle things here, go back and get checked out properly, that’s an order.”

Tony rolled his eyes but didn’t argue “Make sure nobody carts my broken suit off to analyse.”

“Of course.” Steve agreed, gesturing pointedly towards the ambulance, where Natasha is calmly taking the keys off of a spluttering driver. He gives her a tiredly amused look and limps into the back. Daisy is already there, lying unconscious on a stretcher, pale and still. Clint sits next to her, not looking a whole lot less pale, holding Daisy’s hand. He lets go to help Tony into the ambulance, which he is in just enough pain to allow, closes the doors, and then returns to her side. Neither of them talk.

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Natasha drives them back to the tower quickly but safely, which belied certain things Clint had said once about her driving like an absolute maniac (which Natasha had just rolled her eyes to, which was honestly more alarming than Clint’s comment), and they wheel Daisy’s stretcher (well, Clint and Nat wheeled, Tony limped along) into the elevator and go up to the medbay where Bruce is waiting. Daisy gets treated first, because she needs it more and Tony would never let Bruce treat him first. Natasha says no blood tests, even though they have no medical records for Daisy and so no idea of her blood type, but she insists so Bruce doesn’t. Clint demands to know why, and Natasha says she’ll tell him later, which is annoying because that almost certainly means neither of them will tell Tony later.

Bruce won’t tell Tony what treatment Daisy needed, or how badly she was hurt, only that she would need to be monitored for a while but wasn’t in any danger and would probably make a full recovery. He wouldn’t tell Tony any more than that, no matter how much he pressed, because he insisted doctor-patient confidentiality applied even if he wasn’t really that kind of doctor. He also tried to insist on Tony taking another bed in the medbay so he could be monitored overnight as well, but Tony won that battle. He was bruised and had some burns, that was it, he didn’t need to be fussed over.

Instead he gave into curiosity and opened Daisy’s bag. He probably shouldn’t, but he’d never been good at either boundaries or keeping his nose out of other people’s things. The contents of Daisy’s bag make him slightly wish he hadn’t though.

When Jarvis had reported that Skyenet had forbidden Hack from talking to him anymore, they’d known they’d spooked her. Naïvely, Tony had thought reaching out and letting Daisy know she didn’t have to hide her identity anymore would bring the hacker in to at least talk. Even Clint had agreed a casual tone was best for interacting with Daisy, so they’d reached out through Skyenet’s website. Skyenet had looked at their messages in minutes, but when no reply followed, and then Hack had cut off contact, they’d known they’d spooked her.

Looking at Daisy’s bag now, Tony knew they’d more than spooked her, the girl had been planning to run. There’s a depressing lack of anything personal in the bag. No nick-knacks or keepsakes. Just a couple changes of clothes, two hard drives, food and cash. Not nearly as much cash as Tony would suggest taking when running away, but possibly as much as Daisy had. He was pretty sure Natasha’s original assessment that Skyenet didn’t steal was accurate.

Maria Hill turns up at the tower again not long after that. It’s past midnight by that point, and usually Tony wouldn’t be flagging but it’s been a long day and he doesn’t really want to deal with anything else. Jarvis alerted him she’d arrived, and he stuffed everything back into Daisy’s bag and hid it in a cupboard, mostly to protect Hack.

Clint and Nat make it back to the medbay before he does. Or maybe they never left. Clint is sitting next to Daisy’s bed, watching the screen displaying her vital signs, but Natasha blocks the door into the medbay. Tony had known Natasha was fiercely protective of those she cared about, but he’d never seen it fully in action before. It’s one thing to have her swipe his coffee so he has to sleep, or check him over and send him to get treated (both of which Tony is pretty certain mean Natasha cares about him), and quite another to see her plant herself squarely in front of the only entrance to the medbay and stare down her boss.

Maria blinked first “Explain.”

“Quake’s hurt, she needs to rest. You can talk to her in the morning.” Natasha said simply.

“The press isn’t going to wait for morning, and neither are social media, I need to speak to her now.”

Natasha didn’t budge “We both know you’re going to suppress as much of it as possible, no matter what she says.”

Maria huffed but didn’t contradict her “Since when do you protect random vigilantes you’ve only just met?”

“Quake’s 16.”

“I know, Steve told me. You’ve rescued younger kids from just as messy situations before and passed them over when the mission was finished, what’s special about this kid?”

Natasha hesitated, and Clint answered for her. “She’s my sister.”

Maria, for the first time since Tony met her, looked thrown “You don’t have a sister.”

“Yes I do. Her name’s Daisy.” Clint finally left Daisy’s bedside to stand next to Natasha, standing unflinching as Maria narrowed her eyes at him.

“If you have a sister why does nobody know about her?”

“I knew.” Natasha said, a hint of a smirk on her face.

Maria sighed “Of course you did. Barton, why didn’t you list her in your file?”

Clint’s tone was stiff when he answered “I hadn’t spoken to her in years when I was recruited, and we’re not biologically related. I wanted to leave her out of it.”

“And when she decided to become a vigilante? Were you hoping to leave that out of it too?” Maria’s tone turned sharp.

Clint shuffled in place guiltily “We only worked out Daisy was Quake this morning. We were going to tell you, we just wanted to talk to her first. The bomb was....” Clint’s voice shook and then faded to nothing. Natasha slipped a hand into his and squeezed. Maria glanced down at the movement and then back up, sighing.

“Fine, we’ll talk to her in the morning. Anything else you haven’t told me?”

Clint, Natasha and Tony exchanged looks. Tony internally groaned. This was going to be embarrassing. “We found Skyenet.” he volunteered, because they might as well get it over with.

In an instant he had all of Maria’s attention, and it was blindingly clear who the higher priority target was between Quake and Skyenet. “Who and where?” she demanded.

Mutely Tony pointed into the medbay. Maria turned round, stopped, turned back around again. “You’ve got to be joking.”

Tony smiled resignedly “That was my reaction too.”

It was mildly satisfying seeing the look of incredulous disbelief on the usually controlled agent’s face. It would be a lot more satisfying if Tony didn’t know what was coming next and it wasn’t hugely embarrassing. Sure enough...

“Are you telling me it took you three over a week to realise you were looking for the same person?”

Oh yes, it was going to be a long, long time before they stopped hearing about this.

--------------------

Daisy woke up feeling surprisingly comfortable and with the creeping feeling that something was wrong. A moment later her mind realised that she was way too comfortable to be still in her van and her eyes flew open. She was in a hospital of some kind, Robin asleep in a chair next to her bed. Daisy closed her eyes again, her heartbeat jackhammering as she remembered the events of yesterday. A machine started beeping, and she forced her eyes open again, yanking off the sensor on her finger and pushing the covers back. Her lower arms were encased in white casts, but they didn’t hurt. All things considered she had a shocking lack of pain.

“Calm down Marian, you need to stay in bed.”

Daisy jumped, she hadn’t noticed Clint wake up. She ignored him, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Someone had changed her out of her ratty and burned sweatpants and into a hospital gown, so she’d need to find some clothes somewhere before getting out of here.

“Marian! You’re hurt! Stay put.” Clint scolded, pressing a hand lightly against her shoulder to urge her to lie down again. Daisy shoved him away. She had to get out of here. She’d forgotten last night that Shield knew she was Skyenet. Forgotten that she could very easily end up locked in a concrete box for the rest of her life. She needed to get out of here. With a sickening lurch she remembered telling Natasha she wasn’t human, and suddenly the medical surroundings felt far, far more threatening.

“Daisy stop! You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Let go Robin! I need to go!” she can’t keep the panic out of her voice. “They’ll-they’ll dissect me!”

She can’t help remembering the scars on her mom’s face, and the way her voice had shaken when talking about being dissected alive by a psychopath that wanted her powers. She can’t help the fear that rises up her throat, that grips her limbs, that makes her shake even though she needs to be steady and strong.

“Not on my watch.” Clint said firmly “I’ve got your back Marian.”

Daisy hesitated, because Robin had never lied to her before, but she didn’t lie down again. “Shield know who I am.” she said, voice shaky.

Clint glanced quickly around the room, and lowered his voice “They know you’re Skyenet and Quake, we had to tell them, but they don’t know what you told Nat. Only you and I and Nat know that.”

Daisy blinked, finally relaxing a tiny bit “I would have thought Natasha would have reported that by now.”

“She hasn’t, and she won’t.” Clint said, uncharacteristically serious.

“Why not? What does she want?” Daisy asked, suspicious.

“Nothing. You’re my little sister, that’s enough reason for Nat to protect you. Plus, she likes you.”

“Natasha Romanoff likes me?” Daisy said, sceptical.

“You’re hard not to like.” Robin said with an easy grin.

Daisy snorted “We both know that’s not true.” Then more nervously “Are Shield going to lock me up? Because I’d really like to leave now if that’s the plan.”

Clint spluttered “Have a little faith, I wouldn’t just be sitting here if it was! Maria wants to talk to you, but no-one said anything about locking you up, and Nat and I wouldn’t let them even if they tried. Pretty sure Tony and Steve would mutiny if they tried it anyway.”

Daisy thought about that for a moment then decided she’d think about the fact that she had four Avengers in her corner at some later date. “So what happens now then?”

“Now: I believe I promised you pancakes. We’ll deal with everything else when it comes up.”

Daisy bit her lip, uncertain if it was a good idea to just trust that everything would shake out alright. Robin had never lied to her before, but things had never just shaken out fine for her before either. But she didn’t have an action plan so breakfast was probably a good idea. “Blueberry?” she suggested hopefully.

“And chocolate chip.” Clint agreed, a grin lighting up his face “And syrup and sprinkles, and there’s no stupid foster parents around to scold us for it.”

Daisy, despite herself, laughed. “Sounds good.” she admitted.

---------------

An hour later Daisy is still in bed (Clint wouldn’t let her leave, even while he cooked), but there are now two slightly syrupy plates on the table next to it and she’s struggling to stay still and stifle her giggles while a doctor lectures Clint. Apparently sending patients on sugar rushes is not the done thing. Once the doctor is finished he kicks Robin, now looking pretty sheepish, out so he can check up on her, and then remembers to introduce himself. Daisy wasn’t sure whether being lectured for irresponsible patient diets was more or less funny now she knew the Hulk had given it.

Daisy, despite what Bruce would later say, cooperated with the check up. More or less anyway. Apparently she had 78 minor and serious fractures in her arms, which Daisy wasn’t entirely surprised by. She’d felt her bones breaking last night, and her arms had certainly hurt enough for it. She’s got the expected bruises as well, but she’s used to bruises, and some nasty burns which she’s not so used to but she can probably deal with. She has a creeping feeling that Bruce is a bit alarmed by her blasé attitude to it though. She is given strict instructions not to use her powers until medically cleared, and to stay in bed and rest as much as possible. Daisy nodded obediently at the right places and didn’t tell Dr Banner that ‘as much as possible’ was open to interpretation.

The sugar rush was beginning to fade by the time Bruce was finished with her though, and she calmed down significantly, or at least, enough that Bruce trusted her to sit and read calmly while he sent Clint back in. He left a tablet for her to read on, and she settled it on her lap, struggling with the screen slightly. The casts on her arms went from just below the elbow all the way up to mid-palm, leaving her fingers and thumbs with much less manoeuvrability than usual. It was annoying enough that she was tempted to take the casts off, but memory of the pain last night stopped her. Painkillers were blocking the pain now, but that didn’t mean the damage was gone, and using her powers to remove the things helping her to heal was probably a bad idea.

She didn’t look up when she heard the door open, busy choosing a book from Tony’s ebook collection. “Hey Robin, Dr Banner finish re-enacting Claire from ‘04 then?”

“Who’s Claire?”

Daisy leaped out of her skin, flinching badly enough to knock the tablet off her knees. Thankfully it only falls onto the bed, rather than the floor, because she almost instantly forgot about it. There’s a tall, broad-shouldered black man in a trench-coat and an eye-patch standing just inside the door, who Daisy is positive she’s never met before. She’s pretty sure she’d remember the eye-patch.

“You’re not a doctor.” she observed.

“No I’m not.” eye-patch man replied “May I sit down?”

Daisy hesitated, but nodded. She doubted Tony would let anyone in his tower that he didn’t trust. “So, who’s Claire?” he asked again.

“Um, an old foster parent Robin – uh, Clint I mean – and I had. She used to get on us about eating too much sugar. Which was totally unfair cus she rarely remembered to feed us and kids eat whatever they like if left alone.”

Eye-patch’s lips twitched “By that definition I believe Barton is still a kid.”

Daisy snorted with laughter “I think we’re going to get on brilliantly.” she said, grinning. “I’m Daisy.”

“Nicholas Fury.” the man introduced himself, and Daisy felt the grin fall off her face as her breath caught in her throat. Nicholas Fury. Director of Shield. The agency she’d hacked, multiple times, and which had the legal power to arrest her and put her in a concrete box for the rest of her life. “You’ve heard of me! Not quite the reaction I’d like, but I’ll take it.”

Daisy tried to keep her breathing even, tried not to let the fear show. “So, what does the director of shield want with little old me?” her voice was a hair higher than usual, she hoped he didn’t notice.

“To talk.”

“About?” Daisy asked.

Fury leaned back in his chair and pulled a brown file out of his bag, flipping it open on his lap. There was no photo in it, but Daisy was 99% certain it was about her. “Daisy, Quake, Skyenet. Quite the collection of names you’ve got. You’ve been giving my agents a lot of trouble the last few months.”

Daisy swallowed hard and didn’t say anything. She wished her arms were ok, she would have really appreciated being able to use her powers in this situation. She could have done with the back up.

“We interrogated those guys you dealt with last night you know, the ones that left the bomb? Not a smart move leaving a bomb like that to guard your money. A three minute timer doesn’t give long for you to retrieve your money and get out of there, but it does give any nosy vigilante plenty of time to run themselves. Why didn’t you?”

“What?” Daisy asked.

Fury leaned forwards in his chair, his good eye sharp and focused “Three minute timer on a bomb, why didn’t you run?”

Daisy gaped at him “There were other people in the building!” she snapped, furious.

Fury was unphased “It would have been safer to run. Nobody would have known, nobody even knew you were there.”

“What kind of jerk leaves people to die to save their own skin?” Daisy demanded, directing the words with pointed rage at Fury, who just smirked and leaned back again.

“The majority of the population actually. We try to recruit from the minority who don’t.”

Daisy blinked, realising she was being played, and scowled “Is there a particular reason you’re acting like a jerk?”

Fury’s smirk widened “I always have a reason.” and then “Romanoff tells me you’ve resisted offers of recruitment, I’m here to convince you to change your mind.”

Daisy narrowed her eyes, saying as confidently as she could “If you’re about to threaten to throw me in prison if I don’t cooperate I’m just gonna say that’s not gonna work out well for you buddy.” It probably would actually, because Daisy would go around the bend and beg to be let out within hours of being locked up, but Fury didn’t need to know that.

Fury didn’t blink “There are three things that can happen from here. I convince you to join Shield and you join. I don’t convince you and you don’t join, in which case we’ll slap a tech monitoring bracelet on you and let you go. I don’t convince you to join and you somehow remove that tech monitoring bracelet and continue your illegal hacking career until you become a threat to national or global security and we have to arrest you. I think we would both rather not go for option three.”

Daisy glared at him sceptically “Am I supposed to actually believe you’ll let me go if I don’t agree to join?”

Fury leaned back in his chair again, lowering the intensity. Daisy didn’t miss that it made him appear more friendly. “Contrary to what you clearly believe, Shield exists to protect people. Your hacking may be illegal, dangerous, and a security risk, but we recognise the intent behind it, you are trying to help people. Sending people like that to prison is rather counter-intuitive, don’t you agree?”

Daisy huffed, but didn’t disagree. “Fine, I’m listening, try to convince me then.”

“Thank you. What do you think happens each time you drop a NewDawn data dump?”

“I thought you were going to convince me, not interrogate me?”

“Just answer the question.”

Daisy rolled her eyes “A bunch of very rich management call their very rich lawyers and flail around trying to put the secrets back in their boxes and make the world forget all their dirty laundry. They fail, obviously.”

“And then what happens?”

“The company has to change or go down. A bunch of people get replaced. There’s a whole load of lawsuits going on too. A whole load of rich and powerful people that never had to care before are finally facing justice.”

“They’re not actually.” Fury disagreed. “Some are, but a lot more aren’t. Because the people that could have brought those lawsuits, that could use all the information you gather up, they get no warning. And once that data is out there, it gives plenty of time to discredit it and plan how to refute it.”

Daisy scowled, indignant “So what, you’re saying I should just give up? That it’s pointless trying to make the world a better place?”

“I’m saying, you can do better. Shield have the people in place, we have the expertise, we can prepare. You can do a lot more with us than without.”

Daisy huffed. She could see his point, but she didn’t like it. “Except I wouldn’t get to chose my jobs.”

“There’s some flexibility. Part of your job would be to dig into known or suspected threats, but another part could be to look for those threats.”

“And when I find them? What happens then? Everything is dealt with in secret?”

“Sometimes, yes. If a public trial will be clearly dangerous to national or global security then yes, we’ll keep it quiet. But far more of our missions end up in public, although we like to keep Shield’s role in bringing them to the trial stage quiet. We do much more than arrest criminals though. Anti-terrorism, dismantling international arms and drugs trades, dismantling human smuggling. All things that operate in the shadows, all things where the intelligence people like you provide enables field agents to go in and save lives, or prevent them ever being in danger.”

Daisy chewed on her lip, thinking about it “How do I know Shield isn’t going to screw me over?”

“Clint Barton. Your brother trusts us.”

“Robin’s not my brother.” Daisy pointed out, although that was a good point.

“Not the way he tells it.”

Daisy let her lips twitch, she could well believe that. She didn’t believe in family, but she did believe in Robin. Tony too maybe. “I have conditions.”

“I thought you might. So do we. You start.” Fury said.

Well that was ambiguous and vaguely alarming. Daisy set it aside for the moment. “I want immunity, and I want it to apply even if I leave Shield. If I decide to walk, I’m free, you can’t decide to prosecute me down the line.”

“We’ll give you immunity for anything done before joining and any hacking you do for us after.” Fury agreed.

“Fair enough.” Daisy took a deep breath “Nobody ever asks, or investigates in any way, where I got my powers from, what makes them work, or where I was during the three years I was away. That means no DNA tests, no experimenting with my powers, no nothing. I want it in writing.”

“No.” Fury said flatly.

“Then I walk.”

Fury glared. Daisy glared right back, jaw set. She wasn’t shifting on this. Secrecy was next door to sacred for inhumans, it was practically the first thing she learned about them. No matter what had happened with her parents, she wasn’t shifting on that. Secrecy protected all inhumans, and she wasn’t going to expose them to Shield and the index. She met Fury’s glare head on, shoulders back, chin up, unflinching. Seconds ticked past, neither of them giving an inch, and slowly turned into a minute, then two.

Slowly, Daisy started to get worried Fury wasn’t going to back down. She thought he would, she thought he wanted Skyenet badly enough to give way (she was pretty sure the Director of Shield didn’t usually do recruitment personally) but as the minutes stretched on she re-evaluated how much he wanted to know the source of her powers. It made something twist uneasily inside her, realising that he would be investigating and tracking her even if he let her go, and he didn’t even know the extent of her powers. She’d only really used air-vibrations in the last few months, where she was caught on camera anyway. She hadn’t shaken guns apart, or caused avalanches or caused small earthquakes. He didn’t know she was a potential walking natural disaster.

She didn’t back down, because even if Fury did have her followed, it wasn’t the same thing as doing DNA tests or interrogating her about where she’d been (or, far more problematically, who else might be more than they seemed). She wasn’t backing down on this.

“Fine.” Fury spat, and it took Daisy a moment to realise she’d won. “Any other conditions?”

“Really? I mean, uh, one other. I want to be in the field, not just working behind a laptop and stuff, I want to actually get out there.”

Fury, still looking distinctly grouchy, said “You can start training but you’re not going anywhere near the field until you’re 18, Quake included.”

Daisy spluttered “What? That’s not fair! I’ve been managing patrols just fine!” Fury raised an eyebrow and looked pointedly at the casts on Daisy’s arms. She flushed “Last night was a blip.”

“And the next time there’s a ‘blip’?” Fury said pointedly “The next time you almost die? Or do die?”

“You can join the army at 16 in some countries.” Daisy argued hotly.

“The army isn’t Shield.” Fury shot back “You will not put yourself in physical danger until you’re a legal adult.”

Daisy scowled, wishing she could cross her arms “Fine.” she gritted out.

Fury nodded, moving on briskly “Any other conditions.”

“Not at the moment.” Daisy muttered a little sulkily.

Fury ignored her tone “Alright. We’ve got conditions too. No hacking outside of work. That includes hacking into Shield files you haven’t been given access to. We have a compartmentalised system for a reason, and hacking our files again will have serious consequences.”

Daisy opened her mouth to agree, but then hesitated. One of the first things Shield would ask her to do would undoubtedly be to explain how she’d gotten in, and probably fix the holes, which meant she might not be able to do undetected hacking into Shield anymore, which meant she’d have to keep to Fury’s condition. “I want full access to the Index.”

“You won’t have clearance for that.”

“I will if you give it to me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because that’s the only way I’m agreeing to no hacking Shield.” Daisy said, setting her jaw again.

Fury looked at her, assessing “The Index is the reason you first hacked in.”

It was a statement, but Daisy nodded anyway.

“You’re not special, some of the Avengers are on it as well, and none of them have access.”

The Avengers also didn’t know about an entire community of inhumans with varying powers that might end up on the Index. “Only Thor and Banner are on the Index, and I bet they don’t even know it exists.” Daisy retorted.

“Interesting that you know it does.” Fury probed.

“Hey! No questioning! You agreed.”

Fury huffed, but dropped it “I can’t give you access to such a sensitive list, especially one that you must know we have to add you to.”

Daisy did know that “I understand better than most people how sensitive that data is, I’m not gonna share the information. And having someone like me reading the Index ought to be good incentive to think about who actually needs to be on it! Those are real people you’re tracking and watching! Not all of them criminals!”

Fury frowned “Who are you protecting?”

Thrown, Daisy floundered, “Wha—What do you mean? I’m not protecting anyone! Why would I be protecting anyone?”

Fury gave her and unimpressed look and she fell silent, flushing. “Well?” he pressed.

Daisy bit her lip “Hypothetically, if I was protecting a friend, it would fall under the category of not asking questions about my powers.”

Fury leaned forwards slightly, interest narrowing his good eye “Is someone doing human experiments? Because if they are, we need to know.”

“No questions.” Daisy said, leaving it ambiguous and purposefully suggesting that was where she got her powers from, just as she’d purposefully suggested she only had one friend she was protecting.

“Are you always this stubborn?”

“Yes.”

Fury groaned “I’m reconsidering recruiting you.”

Daisy snickered “Oh come on, I can’t be more trouble than Clint and Natasha, and word is you like them.”

Fury frowned “How’d you know...no, I don’t want to know.”

Daisy winced “Probably best.”

Fury groaned again “OK, I’ll give you access to read the Index only. There will be no downloading data, and no editing data, is that clear?”

Reluctantly, Daisy nodded, because it was clearly the best she was going to get, and a lot better than nothing. “OK, no hacking outside of sanctioned Shield work, got it. Be boring. Fine.”

Fury looked for an instant like he was genuinely reconsidering recruiting her, but moved on “You have to finish school.”

“What? No. No way!” Daisy denied, shaking her head frantically. She hadn’t gone to school since she was 12! And she’d hated it! She’d always been thrown from one school to another, always the new kid, always the trouble-maker, always behind. She’d hated it. She had precisely zero intention of ever stepping foot in a school again.

“You want to work with Shield, you’re finishing school kid, that’s final.” Fury snapped back, not giving an inch.

“I haven’t gone to school in three and a half years! School sucks! It’s all gossip and cliches and sweaty boys showing off in gym! And what am I supposed to say if students ask about me? Hi, I’m Daisy, I’m an international hacker and I work for a super-secretive international security agency part time. And oh, by the way, I have superpowers.”

Fury gave her another thoroughly unimpressed look, cutting across her incredulous rambling “Online school will be sufficient.”

“Oh, online.” Daisy said, deflating “Yeah, ok, if I absolutely have to.”

“You do.” Fury said, looking seconds off rolling his eyes. Or eye. Whatever. “You also may not tell anyone outside of a small list of people that you are Skyenet.”

Daisy blinked, “Okaaaay, why?”

“Secrecy has kept you alive and I would like it to stay that way.”

Daisy shrugged “No arguments from me.”

“This time.” Fury muttered. Daisy bit back her grin with great difficulty.

“Sooo, any other conditions?”

Fury reached into his bag again and pulled out something black and rectangular “Provide a photo and a full name for that.”

Daisy opened it to find it was a Shield badge. She looked at it, then looked at Fury, then looked back at the badge. He had been really sure he could convince her. “I can provide a photo, but I don’t have a full name for it.”

“How about Mary-Sue Poots?”

“Call me that and I’ll call you...” Daisy took a moment to think about it “Saint Nick.” she decided.

The glare Fury gave her could have melted ice.

“I’ll uh, I’ll get back to you on the name.” Daisy mumbled, deciding she probably shouldn’t push her new boss too far.

“I want a name and personnel information filled out within a month.” Fury demanded.

Daisy hesitated “I’ll fill out what I can. I don’t exactly have a conventional or stable background.”

Fury sighed “Ask Romanoff if you’re not sure. She’ll know which bits are crucial.”

“Yes sir.” Daisy said, injecting just enough sass into the tone to make it almost disrespectful.

Fury ignored it “Stark has offered space in the Tower for you, so you’ll stay here. Romanoff or Barton, and Rogers if he wants, can train you. We’ll be in touch within the week about what work you’ll be doing with Shield and how we’ll be maintaining your anonymity, and about school. Romanoff and Barton are in charge of your protection, so do as they tell you. And please try to stay out of trouble.”

“I’m staying here?” Daisy asked, shocked.

“Do you have a problem with that?” Fury asked, looking like he might just throttle her if she did.

Daisy thought about how she’d avoided Robin because he might make her believe in family again, and then about how Tony had stayed last night and Robin had left only because he was forced, and admitted it might be a little too late to worry about that. “No.”

“Good.” Fury said with feeling, standing up “That was the second most painful recruitment I’ve ever done.”

Daisy laughed, completely unrepentant “Only second? Who was the first?”

Fury snorted “The brainwashed and traumatised Russian assassin Barton brought home like a half-drowned and entirely-feral stray cat comes to mind. You’d better prove as good an agent as she has.”

Daisy gulped, suddenly feeling small. “I’ll do my best sir.”

Fury smiled, suddenly losing his intensity “Welcome to Shield.”