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She hadn’t even seen it coming.
Stupid, Daisy thinks as pain lances like a lightning strike down her arm, pressing a hand to her shoulder and pulling it away to find it red with blood. A highly lauded SHIELD agent, someone as powerful as her, and she’d managed to nearly get herself taken out by something as insignificant as a bullet.
She’d been shot before, twice, but at least back then it had made sense: she was still Skye, was still merely human.
Now, though, she should know better.
But she hadn’t even seen it coming, and it’s only because Robbie—Ghost Rider—yanks her to the side at the last minute that the bullet lodges in her shoulder blade and not her heart. Sloppy, she can practically hear May’s voice in her ear, always lecturing her over being too emotional, too in her head during a fight. It’s easier said that done.
A hot gush of blood pulses from the wound, trickling through her fingers as she applies pressure, watching as the man with the gun goes up in flames. It hurts, bad, and as keyed up on rapidly fading adrenaline she is, she knows it’ll only get worse. It probably says something about her that her immediate thought—again—is disbelief that she’s this stupid, something that Dr. Garner would all but bully out of her at their biweekly sessions. Always scolding her about her self-deprecating-ness in that clinically caring way of his, so different yet somehow so similar to May.
But he can’t, because Hive killed him. Hive killed Lash, who was saving her, and Lincoln killed Hive, saving her. And Lincoln…
What happened to Lincoln should’ve happened to her.
But Daisy’s still here, for whatever reason, and as reckless, as borderline suicidal she’s been these past few months, she can’t waste it, that second chance he gave her even when she didn’t want it, even when she was begging for a chance to make her wrongs right. Even when, sometimes, she hates him for it.
She can’t have watched Lincoln trade his life for hers only to die as pitifully, stupidly as this. Bleeding out in an alley fighting beside a guy she’s sure doesn’t even like her.
“Daisy!” he hisses, when the final Watchdog falls scorched to the ground. The fire fades away, flesh regenerating on his barren skull. Suddenly, he’s not the Ghost Rider, not the monster everyone’s so afraid of, he’s just… Robbie. The guy who does everything for his brother, who’s surprisingly actually kind of funny, not that she’s seen much of his sense of humor.
They’d mostly been trying to kill each other, at first, and after that just trying not to die.
Daisy’s not sure when exactly she wound up on the ground, but she only realizes she is when Robbie has to kneel down to get on her level, face half-illuminated by a shaft of moonlight, wide eyes and an unfamiliar groove between his brows. She groans weakly, curling in on herself and pressing her forehead against the craggy brick wall, scrabbling with a shaky hand to stanch the bleeding.
“Hey, Daisy, c’mon,” Robbie says, tilting her head up so she’ll look at him. He sounds more worried than she’s ever heard him. Really, she doesn’t think she’s ever heard him worried, even when she brought up his brother. He’d just gotten angry, dark eyes and sharp jaw, lethal stolidity. Hot-headed, she thinks, ghost of a joke dying on her lips before she gets the chance to say it. Robbie wraps an arm around Daisy’s waist, holding his other hand over hers to continue applying firm pressure to the wound. It’s slippery, slick with blood, his fingers sliding to intertwine with hers in a way she thinks might be intentional.
The proximity is… strange. She’s a little out of it from both the pain and the blood loss, but she’s pretty sure the last time she’d been this close to someone (and not fighting them) was directly after Lincoln’s sacrifice. Simmons had taken her by the shoulders and pulled her into a hug so tight it felt like she was holding Daisy together, keeping her from shattering right then and there. Daisy had held her back just as tight, fighting to keep the tremors inside of her on lockdown. After the initial learning curve, controlling her abilities was pretty simple, but when she’s hurt, it gets a little more complicated.
Jemma’s not fragile by any means, but sometimes when Daisy looks at her she doesn’t see the woman who survived alone on an alien planet, who learned to fight and shoot and get back up stronger every time someone knocked her down.
She just sees… Simmons. The geeky little scientist she met four years ago, who she bunked beside and spent late nights alongside, and, in a lot of ways, grew up with. Falling into friendship with her had been about as easy as breathing.
Daisy’s been terrified of hurting her, ever since she first got her powers and it was just her and Fitz and the secret they kept from everyonr else. A crippling fear of losing control or lashing out without thinking of the consequences, adding Jemma’s name to the too-long list of people she’s wounded along the way.
It’s part of why she left, in the end. Lincoln’s death didn’t undo all the pain she’d caused, the pain Hive had made her cause. She remembers how it felt when Mack’s bones had fragmented beneath her fingers, the way he screamed. The way Fitz heaved for air that wouldn’t come, her hand the one to steal it away from him this time.
Mostly, awfully, she remembers liking it.
She doesn’t think Robbie would break like that. He’d held up against her in a fight, had beaten her, and it wasn’t because she let him.
It’s because of this that Daisy leans into the contact instead of pulling away. Lets him help her stumble out of the alley. Staggering over the unconscous bodies and the not-unconscious bodies and away from the encroaching police sirens.
It gets a little hazy after that.
The buildings they pass are little more than a muzzy blur, nebulous smudges of light and color ill-defined through tinted glass. Everything’s seemed to fade away into pain, into the car window pressed icy against her cheek, the murmer of the engine a humming lullaby dragging her towards the soft-edged embrace of sleep.
She thinks Robbie might still be talking to her, one hand still bearing down on the wound while the other tightens like a vise on the steering wheel, but Daisy can’t make out a word he’s saying, lips moving inaudibly. All of it a million miles away from where Daisy’s curled up in the passenger seat.
“Eyes–” she coughs weakly, slurred words drifting just within reach as her own eyes start to slide shut. “Eyes on the road.”
Then, nothing.
Some indeterminate amount of time later, Daisy wakes, careening into consciousness like tumbling out of the sky. One of those strange dreams where you plummet down and down and down, cascading headfirst towards the ground like a raindrop. Waking that split second before impact.
It takes a second to register her surroundings. An unfamiliar bedroom, not a hospital. Not a jail cell, either. She looks down at herself, pulling back an oversized shirt she doesn’t recognize, peeling away blood-dappled bandaging to see a tidy row of stitches holding the round, puckered wound shut. It hurts still, but it’s more sore than biting, fuzzy-edged and floaty like she’s taken a dose of pain medications. A glance at the nightstan—orange medication bottles lined up beside rolls of gauze and tape and isopropyl alcohol—confirms her suspicion.
She’s reminded suddenly of another time she’d woken up like this; in a strange place with different clothes, needles sticking out of bruised skin like she was a human pin cushion. That was back when she met Lincoln.
Daisy blinks away the memory.
There’s blood under her too-pale fingernails, still. Little flecks like rust beneath the chipped black polish. The rest of her is scrubbed clean, and not the raw, red way it would be had she done it herself.
She sits up unsteadily, the movement jostling her shoulder, tugging uncomfortably at the stitches. Her arms still hurt from using her powers without her gauntlets, little bruises blooming like purple-black blossoms under her skin. Her feet hurt when she sets them on the floor, and there’s a twinge in her side where someone must have gotten her with a lucky punch earlier on in the fight. She wishes, not for the first time, that her powers included faster healing. She can’t really remember the last time she didn’t feel sore, even through the gauzy lull of the painkillers.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Robbie says when she goes to stand.
Daisy hadn’t even heard his approach, but she turns towards the voice, and suddenly there he is, walking in through the open doorway. Mug in one hand and a bundle of fabric in the other. He sets it—her clothes, she realizes, freshly washed—in a pile on top of the dresser. A little more relaxed now that she knows where she is, Daisy leans back against the propped-up pillows, sitting crosslegged on the bed. He hands over the mug.
“Careful,” he murmers, hands gentle over hers on the handle to make sure she’s got a good grasp of it. The contact’s a little like static electricity, some intense undercurrent to it. She doesn’t know until she’s taking a long sip of tea just how parched she’d been. He looks her over, probably scanning her face for any indication of pain, and sits gingerly on the bed by her feet.
“How–” she swallows harshly, voice scratchy with disuse, and takes another gulp of tea. The mug’s warm against her palms, grounding. Golden arrows of sunlight stream through the gap in the curtains, a beam of light cast across the otherwise dark room. “What happened? How long’ve I been out?”
“Since last night,” Robbie says, eyes roving over her again. Same furrow to his brow that she’d noticed before. She doesn’t need the years of espionage training she’s got under her belt to know that it’s his biggest tell. That he’s worried. About her, for whatever reason. “You were bleeding a lot. You were… out of it, but you passed out when I took the bullet out.”
That much Daisy remembers, she thinks, flashes of a memory resurfacing—on his couch, scrabbling weakly, helplessly, while he worked at her shoulder, the epicenter of the absolute agony spreading like wildfire through her. Not just the agony; earthquakes too, in that unpredictable way they get when she hurts too badly to control herself. Breaking glass and flickering lights, ground unsteady beneath them. Somewhere in the upper half of the Richter scale, Robbie close enough that he should be crushed like a bug. She’s not looking forward to Gabe coming home and sees the wreckage she’s left, not after the way he kicked her out last time. At least that time she'd left his house intact.
“I was starting to think you weren’t gonna wake up,” he says after another beat of silence. It’s oddly vulnerable, something raw and genuine in his voice that she’s never heard from him before.
It’s a hell of a difference from how they’d been before—You’ve got the devil in you too, he’d said to her that first night they met. Daisy had learned all about the devil back at St. Agnes’s, but she can’t reconcile the guy the nuns had warned her about with the man in front of her.
He’s done bad things, does bad things, that much is undeniable. But really, Daisy’s hands aren’t much less bloody, if at all. His vendetta’s not too different from her own. Some part of her just... understands him, twin stars matched in their orbit.
The last time she opened up her heart, it ended in a funeral. The time before that, a betrayal that cut into her so deep she still feels it, residually, today. Raw wounds and achy scar tissue that fundamentally affected who she’s become as a person. Still, somehow, she looks at Robbie, at the crease between his eyebrows, the way he’s using one hand to fidget with the keys clipped onto his belt loop, and she thinks she might be willing to try again. First, though, she’s seen him worried more than enough—
“Yeah, well, getting rid of dead bodies is, like, your specialty, right?” Daisy keeps her tone light, so he knows she’s joking, and there it is: a smile, the briefest flash of it, a sliver of pale teeth before Robbie turns away, shaking his head. His freckles move with it, pulled up by the draw of his lips.
“Glad to see you didn’t lose your sense of humor with all that blood,” Sarcastic as it is, some part of her thinks he really is. Glad, that is; that she woke up, that she’s alright enough to be sitting here in his bed drinking tea and not going cold and blue back in that alleyway. A little banged-up, moderately worse for wear, but she’ll be fine. One thing she’s discovered about herself in the last five years—something she’s been capable of for her whole life, really—is that she can get through nearly anything. Impossible as it seems in the moment, she’s too stubborn not to get back on her feet, too spiteful to give up when everything around her is screaming at her to.
“Would you believe me if I said I was a comedian before the vigilantism?”
“No,” he scoffs a little, raises a disbelieving eyebrow. “Were you?”
It’s something she used to do, lie about herself. She’d been constantly moving around as a kid, growing up and rarely ever spending more than six months in a single place. Often less. Eventually, she’d started to change herself with each new foster home, each new place she got to call home for a moment before she got packed up and moved elsewhere. Then she’d run away from it all, erased herself altogether. No trace of her online, no paper trail to follow. Only the murky memories left in people’s heads. She’d reinvented herself entirely, after that, and then again when she found out her birth name.
“No,” she says, and she’s not sure where the sudden honesty comes from, but she finds herself admitting to him– “I’m a SHIELD agent. Or– I was, at least. I left.”
She realizes suddenly that, for whatever reason, she doesn’t want to lie to him.
“Because of your powers,” he guesses, and she shakes her head.
“Because of the guy in the photo,” she says, remembering the way she’d felt when he pulled it out of her bag. Like he could see under her skin. Uncomfortable, then. Now it just feels like being seen. “Lincoln. He– he died, and… that was on me.”
Hesitantly, Robbie reaches over, lays a hand on her knee. It’s warm even through the fabric of her—his—sweatpants, and she wonders offhandedly if he’s always run hot or if it’s an added side effect of whatever it is that changed him, made him the way he is.
He doesn’t speak, at first. Not to forgive her, not to absolve her. Daisy’s grateful for it. That was what she hated about being back in SHIELD; their firm insistences that she had no right to guilt for how it all went down, that it hadn’t been her fault. What was meant as a comfort felt more like erasure.
Turning to put the now-empty mug down, Daisy grimaces at the stretch on her stitches, and Robbie takes the mug, setting it on the nightstand. Stupidly, she finds herself missing the warmth of him against her leg.
“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. That he died. And that I– what I said, before.”
“It’s okay,” she says, and it’s true, for the second half of it, at least. She’s still learning to live with the first. “Sorry I… broke your living room,” Daisy winces a little as she remembers the way the couch had practically collapsed, splintered wood breaking beneath her, vases shuddering and tipping onto the floor. “And– y’know, bleeding all over your car.” Though not entirely her fault, that part’s arguably worse. She’s half convinced he’s in love with the damn thing.
But Robbie just shrugs, something soft in his eyes. “S’alright. Not the first time it’s gotten a little bloody.”
She grins, and he grins back, and Daisy feels something inside of her pull together, some sharp edge smoothed out and stitched shut like the wound on her shoulder.