Work Text:
one
She catches him just as he is finishing in the lab.
“New model?” she asks.
He needs to cut her off before she asks why - Daisy always asks why, even when she doesn’t speak a word.
“I thought it was time,” he says, rolling up his sleeve down to his wrist, avoiding Daisy’s eyes.
It’s okay, she doesn’t search for his eyes that much these days.
She probably suspects he’s hiding something (but could never imagine what it is). They have been bullshitting each other for months now. It looks like this.
He thinks about how small the things he hid from her were before: how he was struggling with his hand, the whole thing with Rosalind, his desperation. They were nothing compared to this
She moves for a moment towards him and he steps back, his reaction hurting him. He remembers the last time she reaches out to him. She touched his hand trying to comfort him. Now he wishes he had accepted it, since it was to be the last time and he didn’t know. Now what would happen if she were to touch him? His new hand? It can never be allowed. Not after what he did.
The new hand is more advanced, more sensitive, latest technology, not just meant to look more real, more human (the word is important here), but designed specifically to feel more.
Funny that.
He was looking to feel less.
two
When she finds him again his new hand is gone. Not completely. Severed at his wrist, you can see the machinery inside. It had looked so real, but all Daisy cares about is that the rest of him is fine.
“You came back,” he says, like he’s actually shocked (and scared, because she knows Coulson is here so she doesn’t have to be).
“You got caught because you were trying to save me from… from that thing.”
That thing that is her worst nightmare wrapped in the skin of the man who used to be her worst nightmare. She thinks Coulson understands both, and that’s why he ended up here.
“I was the one who put you in this position,” he argues, dropping his gaze.
Months of dropping his head. Daisy is done with all that.
She puts her fingers under his chin and forces him to look up at him. She should have done this ages ago, but she was hiding too.
“No, you’re not,” she tells him, sternly. Nothing else has worked so far, maybe sternly will do the trick. “You did the right thing.”
His face trembles in her hand.
When she finally drops her arm her hand still goes instinctively to the spot she wishes he had let her reach out for a lot time ago.
Sternly doesn’t do the trick, but wrapping her fingers around the broken end of his wrist might.
three
“This was the first thing I wanted to do,” he says, lacing their fingers together, testing the newness of more than just the prosthetic.
Daisy lights up. It’s quite the sight and he curses himself for not trying to make it possible every second of the day.
“The nerd squad told me this model was supposed to be more sensitive,” she is saying, turning their hands over so his is on top, moving her fingers across his to see if he feels it. He feels it. Technology or something else, he doesn’t care. He feels it. “That you almost feel as much as…” she pauses, not wanting to form the words. This, this is the reason. This is the thing only Daisy can do. “Is that true? Do you feel more?”
Coulson nods, wrapping his fingers into her hand and digging the fingertips carefully into her palm.
“Yes,” he tells her. “I feel more now.”
four
She asks again.
He wraps his new fingers over her naked hip.
“Do you feel more?” she asks.
He replies by pressing his fingertips harder against the curve of her hipbone.
She understands: he’s no longer searching to see if he can feel her body, he’s hoping to fit into it.
five
She’s wearing a bright blue dress. He says it reminds him of a movie. She’d say he’s not normally this mushy, but she’d be lying. She’s doing this because he’s normally this mushy. And because she makes him remember movies and songs and he looks at her like the universe just exploded into existence.
He watches on as she grabs his arm by the wrist. Thumb over the pulsepoint, which she has always commanded, from the moment he first met her. She lifts his hand, holding his ring finger between thumb and index. He feels it, of course. The technology has advanced with the tears. So has he.
“Wouldn’t you like me to wear it in my real hand?” he asks, wanting to do this right.
Daisy tilts her head slightly. Years after he’s still worried about that.
“This is your real hand, Phil,” she says, slipping the wedding the ring on his finger.