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“You really have to leave right away?”
“Yeah. Gotta get this book someplace safe. Keep an eye on my brother?”
Daisy nods. She would’ve anyway. After all, she’s the reason Gabe was dragged into the S.H.I.E.L.D. flying circus to begin with. As she prepares to bid him goodbye — again, after having barely any time with him at all — Coulson interjects, “Come on, you have to at least stay for some grub. Crazy robot’s dead, the Darkhold’s not going anywhere. There’s cause to celebrate, Mr. Reyes.”
“Nah, I can’t. Thanks for the offer, though.”
“Look,” May puts in, immediately jumping on Coulson’s train, “you’ve still got ground to make up with me for what you did to Mace, but you did save all our asses from Aida. Let us buy you a burger or something.”
Robbie hesitates, then looks at Daisy as though expecting her to tell him to ignore them and leave. She shrugs. “What they said.”
So he does, after some more hemming and hawing and silent discussion — or argument, it’s hard to tell — with Ghost Rider that Robbie apparently wins. She’s not sure she could ever call him light, not while he shares his body with a demon, but it’s nice to see him sit among the rest of them like he’s part of the team. Once the first joke is cracked, so is the ice.
He fits, Daisy observes. He could continue to fit. Become a freelance agent if nothing else, an off-the-books consultant if S.H.I.E.L.D. remains too public to properly employ him, what with all the extrajudicial murders and all. Daisy wouldn’t have to look out for Gabe, nor face the kid’s disappointment and grief, because his brother would still be around. Surely the Rider has debts he can settle in this dimension?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Robbie asks, snapping her out of her musing.
“I’m not looking at you like anything,” Daisy says as she takes a prim bite of a fry. “You could belong here, that’s all.”
Robbie’s good mood falls. “Only place I belong is hell.”
“Jesus, you’re dramatic.”
“It’s the truth. The Rider agreeing to one burger doesn’t mean he’ll agree to staying forever.”
“He will if I have anything to say about it.” Daisy reaches over to place a hand on his arm. “I’m not gonna just let you go to hell.”
“You were an hour ago.”
“Yeah, well, an hour ago I didn’t think I had a choice.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“We’ll see.”
Robbie looks very much like he wants to refute that, but before he can, the lights shut off and what she assumes are government agents burst in. The poor waitress doesn’t even get to finish her spiel about pies.
“Phillip J. Coulson,” an agent greets in monotone.
Daisy smirks at the sarcasm in Coulson’s voice as he replies, “Yep, that’s me. You got us. Nice job. And hey, congrats on the whole power outage thing, that was very ominous.”
She doesn’t get to hear the agent’s reply, however, for the next moment lands her in a very disorienting room that’s empty save for a red-striped white — oh, for fuck’s sake — monolith in the center.
“Uh, what is that?” Robbie asks. Jemma lets out a despairing ha! that Daisy can hardly disagree with. If only he knew what a pain in the ass this is. It must be a different kind of monolith, to be fair, since it’s not the same bluish-black as the one that swallowed up Jemma, but Daisy’s not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Whatever this one does, it’s no less dangerous.
Indeed, they don’t remotely have time to come up with a game plan before the monolith melts into a wave of white and swallows not only Jemma but the whole group of them. In what seems like an instant, Daisy next finds herself in an equally, though different, disorienting room. A jail cell would be nicer in appearance than this one. The walls are made of grimy cement, what passes for furniture and machinery seems to be made of little more than scrap metal, and the sole light in the place is the kind one would see in a broom closet. It casts a sallow gloom over the place. God only knows where she’s been dropped.
More accurately, where they have been dropped. Robbie stands beside her assessing the room as well with a deep frown on his face. She wonders what the Rider thinks about this, whether he’s alert and ready to take the wheel or whether he’s content for the moment to let his host deal with whatever’s going on. Daisy can’t decide which she’d prefer. While she’d much rather have Robbie’s company, she can’t say she’d necessarily object to the Rider raising all kinds of hell to fix this shit. Maybe he’s even come across that monolith before, or at least has some idea of what it can do.
“Hellspawn care to weigh in on this?” Daisy asks. The stale air is suffocating.
“No,” says Robbie, tearing his eyes away from their surroundings to look at her. “We’re on our own.”
“Great. The one time we could actually use him, he’s taking a smoke break.”
“Fine by me.”
Robbie says it under his breath, as though voicing the thought at all is risking being smote where he stands. Perhaps it is. Not that she can blame him. She’d noticed how much more comfortable he’d become with both his powers and the Rider itself — something she doubts can happen in only a couple weeks. No, she’d stake the farm on time being different where he was, months if not years of traversing hell planets. All of which, from what he’d told her, was spent trapped in his own body unable to do anything but fight.
Weird teleporting monolith or no weird teleporting monolith, she can understand his relief at still being himself.
“Well,” Daisy says, “we won’t be able to figure anything out without doing some exploring. Are you up for that?”
Robbie adjusts the chain around his torso. “Yeah, let’s go.”
It’s helpful, she discovers, to have a being such as Robbie on their side. Not simply because meeting him had significantly upped their tolerance for strange — like being flung into the future — but because it gives them literal firepower they hadn’t had before. While Robbie keeps the spontaneous combustion to a minimum for the sake of maintaining a low profile, most of the time he doesn’t need to flame on at all. People can sense the power, the danger, in him even if they can’t pinpoint why, which means less resistance and more acquiescence. Hell, knowing she’s got an invincible friend sleeping one cell over even allows her to get a decent night’s sleep or two.
Nevertheless, the Rider yearns for violence, to unleash himself on the unworthy.
Kasius, needless to say, has met his match.