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The Zephyr 4 sent up flurries as it landed in the field next to the Fitzsimmons’ cottage so that when Daisy got her first look outside, it was through their own private snowfall. The ship gave a slight shudder as it came to rest under her guidance. Daniel laid a hand on her shoulder, silently letting her know that he’d entered the bridge. She released the controls and reached up to squeeze his hand. For a moment they took in the scene quietly. The cottage had taken on a very special place in their hearts. Whenever they returned to Earth, they visited here first, making it the welcome mat back to the planet they called home and the loved ones they left behind with each voyage. And it had been the location of their wedding the last time they were on Earth, four years earlier.
A lot had changed in those four years. The commotion of those changes echoed behind Daisy, and Daniel slipped away to go help. Feet stomped, bags were dragged into the hallway, and coats were wrestled with. Daisy let Daniel handle it, lost in the idyllic snowscape in front of her. Like something out of a storybook, or a painting on the front of a Christmas card. Once it would have been a dream to set foot in a place like that. That was the kind of place families lived, and as a child Daisy might have affixed all sorts of hopes and stories to a sight like that. But her own family had ended up so much wilder and weirder—and better—than any of those stories she’d once told herself could have imagined.
A small bright pinkish-red hand tapped her arm. Daisy looked down into the lavender eyes of Lenna, her youngest daughter
“Daddy said to come get you.” Daisy grabbed the little girl’s hand and followed her off the bridge.
Daisy led the family down the ramp, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. Daniel followed, Lenna held against his side with one arm and his own bag on his other shoulder.
Pulling even with her, Daniel reached out a hand toward her bag. “Here, Sweetheart, let me take that for you.”
She lightly swatted his hand away. “Your hands are full! You’re gonna drop her.”
“No, no. I’m fine.”
“Honey, I love you, but you are not going to do this the entire time. I can carry my own bag.” She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Now go inside.”
He walked on sheepishly, and she turned back to the others who were dawdling in the Zephyr’s hold. Kora half pushed Kennar out the door. Kennar was twelve, and tall for his age. Daisy thought. She wasn’t entirely sure, given that he wasn’t human. The boy was half Xandarian and half something else (he wasn’t sure, since his mother had died when he was a baby, and his Xandarian father a few years after that). He looked mostly human, as all Xandarians did, apart from brilliant gold eyes and a pair of tiny horns that were just beginning to sprout up through his curly hair. He’d lost his right arm when he was younger and now had a cybernetic replacement. Daisy and Daniel had rescued Kennar and Lenna from the ruins of a village on a war-torn planet just over two years ago. They’d both been orphaned nearly a year before and had been living on the streets. Kennar had taken Lenna, a then four-year-old Krylorian, under his wing and provided for both of them by stealing food and picking pockets.
Finally, their oldest, Nyr-Atta, came strutting down the ramp. Nyr was a teenage Kree girl. Her parents had been exiled from Hala before she was born for reasons she never knew. (Privately, Daisy thought that being on the bad side of the Kree Empire was probably a mark in their favor). Nyr’s parents had died almost a decade ago, and she’d first encountered the Zephyr crew as part of a gang of pirates. She’d accepted Daisy’s offer to join them 14 months before they’d found Lenna and Kennar.
While Lenna delighted in the snow and Kennar ogled at his first glimpse of Earth, Nyr walked straight ahead, chin high and back straight, as if she’d lived here every day of her life. Daisy noted that she had her knife strapped to her belt.
Before their eclectic family made it halfway to the cottage door, Alya Fitz burst through it in Christmas pajamas and over-sized rubber galoshes.
“You’re here! You’re here you’re here!” She skidded down the path and body-slammed Daniel with a hug, putting him in real danger of dropping Lenna. Before he could recover, she’d bounced off him to wrap her arms around Daisy, who swept her up in a bear hug before she could take anyone else out.
Alya was eleven and had recently decided that Daisy was her favorite aunt, and also that she was going to write a book documenting all the Zephyr’s discoveries about alien life and planets. She’d written about 200 pages of volume one and estimated that when all was said and done it would probably end up being a 15-volume series. Her research meant that she made video calls to the Zephyr whenever possible and spent a considerable amount of time talking to all the ship’s various inhabitants, recently predominantly Kennar and Lenna.
Simmons appeared where Alya had left the door standing open. “Stop knocking people over! Let them come inside; it’s freezing.”
The morning passed in a flurry of activity. They settled into the guest rooms—Fitz and Simmons had, over the years, transformed their house into something a hub for the scattered team members and so had found it necessary to add a series of guest rooms to accommodate multiple visitors at a time. Daisy’s children, warmed quickly to the Fitzsimmons family, whom they had never seen in person but had met over calls many times. Alya took charge of both giving the house tour and explaining everything about Earth to her “cousins.” Fitz attempted to rein in her lectures, since Alya’s understanding of what constituted essential information left something to be desired—her topics ranged from “this is soup” to why Frosty the Snowman couldn’t be a true story (probably) but was still a favorite, to some notes on human cellular anatomy. It took Fitz’s best efforts to settle Alya down enough to get everyone situated with lunch in front of the tv for some Fitzsimmons family essential Christmas viewing: Doctor Who Christmas specials. Simmons and Daisy slipped away to the kitchen.
“I hope it’s okay them watching that. Do you think Doctor Who seems racist to people from other planets?”
“Simmons, I need to you to understand how very very little I know about Doctor Who.” She laughed and waved her hand. “It should be fine. We showed them E.T. and Star Wars. Daniel cried.”
“At both,” Daniel said, appearing from the living room. “And this one won’t let me forget it.” He wrapped his arms around Daisy from behind and kissed her cheek.
“At least you admit it. Kora’s still in denial, but I know what I saw. Nyr saw it too.”
Jemma smiled. Watching those two together was something special; she knew too well the years of loss and loneliness that Daisy had gone through to get to this moment. Each breath of quiet intimacy must be its own victory, every normalcy a small miracle. That was how it felt for her and Fitz after all they’d been through. It meant the world to her that Daisy had found that too.
Simmons sipped her mug of tea. “So. There’s six days until Christmas. Everyone else will probably be getting here on Christmas Eve day. Except Yo-Yo. She’ll be coming Christmas morning.” Daisy and Daniel being on Earth was a special occasion, and she and Daisy had managed to convince nearly everyone from the team to gather for Christmas. “Alya has decided to give you a ‘proper English Christmas’—which Fitz objects to—so it might take some creative scheduling to fit in everything she has planned. How long are you planning on staying?”
Daisy and Daniel exchanged a look. “It… might be a little longer than we’d talked about,” Daisy began haltingly. “We were thinking close to a year.”
Simmons’ eyes widened. Daniel jumped in quickly, “Not in your house that entire time. We’ll be getting a place nearby.”
Simmons waved that away. She’d lived with Daisy for years. “Why? I mean,” she caught herself. “I’m thrilled. But you weren’t even on Earth that long for your wedding.”
Daisy rested her hands on top of Daniel’s which still rested around her middle. “There’s some things we’d like to do. We want to show the kids Earth so they can know where we’re from. Give them a chance to really get to know you guys and the rest of the team. And I’d like to be here when… the baby’s born.”
Simmons gasped. “You’re pregnant?!”
Daisy and Daniel’s faces split into huge grins. Simmons crushed Daisy in a hug.
“If I’m going to give birth, I want an actual human doctor, who works on humans.”
“Of course, of course. Who have you told?”
“We told Kora and the kids. Everyone else we wanted to wait until we were here.”
They were interrupted by the sound of the front door opening and closing. Leaning out into the living room, they saw that Nyr had walked out. Fitz cast them a puzzled look from the couch.
“Should I?” Daniel asked.
Daisy shook her head. “I’ll go.”
Outside, the day was clear and bright. The snow had fallen just the night before, so it lay smooth and even except where the Zephyr and their own tracks had disturbed it earlier that morning. The rural landscape was like a held breath, expectant and maybe a little fragile under all that quiet. Nyr sat by herself just beyond the garden, on the top of a sloping hill. Her blue skin, bright against the snow, and her jet hair, teased slightly by the wind, gave her a vividness against the frozen day. Even silent, she had an intensity that bent the world to be her backdrop.
The crunch of Daisy’s footsteps intruded on the vigil. Nyr didn’t turn.
“It’s cold out here.”
“I’m fine.” Nyr pressed her arms a little tighter to her sides to prevent a shiver from exposing her lie.
Daisy held out a coat. Grudgingly, the girl took it. Daisy slipped on her own coat and took a seat beside her. The quiet crept back in and curled around them. Daisy studied the girl beside her. Nyr was a girl with a hundred different silences, each with its own weight and meaning. Sometimes Daniel read them best; sometimes Kora or Lenna or Kennar. But most of the time they spoke to Daisy. And this one she’d thought she’d seen rising up for days.
“What’s wrong? And don’t say ‘nothing’ because it’s like twenty degrees out here, so if there isn’t something wrong, I’m gonna need a good reason for why we’re out here sitting in the snow freezing to death.”
The corner of Nyr’s mouth twitched toward a smile but fell back into a straight line without reaching it. “Things are just changing, that’s all.”
“Which change are we talking about?” Nyr bit her lip and didn’t respond. “Coming to Earth? The baby?”
“The baby is great news. I’m happy for you.” Nyr’s knife had made its way off of her belt and into her hands. Even as she played the still and stoic Kree warrior, her hands betrayed her, as her thumb traced the ridges of the hilt over and over again. Daisy had watched her at this many times. She’d had the knife since before they’d met her, since even before she’d joined up with the pirates. When she was anxious, Nyr would hold it and rub her thumb over ever nick and groove, feeling its history, and feeling the way it had worn to the shape of her hand, reminding herself where she’d been, what she could do. With that knife she’d carved her self-sufficiency.
Daisy’s heart ached. Of all her children, Nyr was the one in whom she saw herself the most. But right now, she wasn’t looking at shades of Quake, or Daisy Johnson, or even Skye. She was looking at Mary Sue Poots. Mary Sue harboring the fear of so many foster children: the fear of being replaced.
“You know that when I was growing up, I didn’t have a family.” Daisy began quietly. “I bounced from foster family to foster family, and I never belonged anywhere.” She glanced at Nyr, but the girl had turned her head away slightly. Daisy pressed on. “But when I joined Shield, my team became my family. Coulson, May, all of them. And Simmons became like my sister. Then I found Kora. My biological sister. And you know what? Simmons is still my sister.” Daisy angled herself so she was facing Nyr, though she still couldn’t see her eyes. “Nyr, loving someone is always a choice. May and Coulson chose to love me. Jiaying didn’t, no matter what biology said. Kora—and Simmons—they aren’t my sisters because of blood. They’re my sisters because they choose to love me, and I choose to love them. I will be this baby’s mother not because I give birth to them, but because I choose to love them in a way that Jiaying and a dozen foster parents didn’t do for me. I will choose to love them in the same way that I love Lenna, and Kennar, and you.
She gently took Nyr’s hand, lifting it away from the knife. “Look at me when I tell you this.” Slowly, Nyr met Daisy’s eyes.
“Nyr-Atta Sousa, you are my daughter. My firstborn, even if I wasn’t the one who gave birth. You are my daughter because I choose you, and nothing can change that. Not even you. You could run away to the other end of the galaxy, and you would still be my daughter because I would still choose to love you. Do you believe me?”
Nyr clenched her jaw and fought against the tears welling in her eyes, and managed a single, tight, jerky nod. Daisy put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight against herself. “But don’t you dare run away.”
They sat in the quiet afternoon together, Daisy cradling her daughter like the small child she wished she could have known sooner and spared from so much pain.
New sunshine filled the air as Daniel and Kennar made their way outside, bundled into warm coats, and began playing in the snow in the garden. Daisy watched as Daniel crouched to show the boy something. Daisy pulled back from Nyr, put a finger to her lips, and quickly formed a snowball. Daniel gasped as the snowball exploded against his back. He turned to face the attack and ducked as another followed close behind the first. He fired back, just missing Daisy who was instructing Nyr to build a wall. Kennar fired off two of his own.
Alya came racing outside, shrieking in delight, trailed by Fitz and Lenna. Alya fed snowballs to her father, and he pelted them rapid fire in Daisy’s direction. Daisy flung up a hand and quaked the barrage apart before he reached her.
“Ay! That’s cheating!” Fitz protested just before Nyr’s snowball hit him in the gut with impressive force.
“No superpowers!” Alya declared ecstatically.
Daisy held up her hands, acknowledging the new rule, and was pelted by a fresh hail of snowballs in response until Nyr pulled her down behind their makeshift embankment.
Simmons slipped out to join Fitz and Alya’s team, as the three sides prepared to make their stands. The fighting was fierce and displayed an impressive amount of military strategy for a snowball skirmish. Lenna switched sides incessantly, managing to personally betray every single other person individually and still walk away having been hit the least. In the end Fitz managed to ally his team with Daniel, Kennar and the late addition of Kora, against Daisy and Nyr, citing their position as the initial aggressors as justification. When they returned inside, a tired, grinning, somewhat damp mess, they left behind a well-worn battlefield.
That evening Daniel gathered the family, brightly arrayed in brand new Christmas sweaters, in front of the Christmas tree. They wanted a family picture, with the idea of sending out some last-minute Christmas cards for their first Christmas together on Earth. Daisy leaned into Daniel’s shoulder and wrapped one arm fiercely around Nyr. Kennar was on Daniel’s other side, Kora behind Nyr, and Lenna placed herself front and center for all to see. Just before Fitz snapped the picture, Daisy held four fingers up in front of her stomach and winked at Simmons.