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Daisy is crying before she hits the call button, feeling like the little girl she thought SHIELD would help her outgrow. Her chest is empty and full, collapsing and expanding, because this is a chance to make everything just a bit easier. If this doesn’t work, she’ll go back to crying in her room, and no one will know. If it does…
She has nothing to lose and so much to gain.
The computer rings once, twice, three times, and she feels like her lungs are stretching themselves out. Please, please, please—
An icon appears in the center of the screen, and faint static crackles over the laptop speaker. It cuts to a live video feed of blonde curls, swaying as their owner leans past the laptop to plug a pair of headphones in. She holds her breath, even though she recognizes the hair and neck and back of the woman in front of her, waiting until she straightens. A lot of things have happened in the past five months—Bobbi having an impostor would not be half so surprising as the revival of Ward as Death, or even yesterday’s frog-tongued inhuman.
“Daisy!” the woman exclaims, coming fully into frame and grinning widely. “It is so good to see you.”
“Bobbi,” Daisy breathes, because there is no doubt that this is the Bobbi Morse that she knows and misses. She dashes stray tears off her cheeks. “Oh my god, you’re here.”
“Not really,” Bobbi laughs. “I’m actually in Costa Rica. Pura vida, sestra.”
Daisy grins. “I see the sun’s been treating you well.”
It’s true. Bobbi’s now significantly more tanned, with sunstreaked hair loose and curly around her shoulders and full, rosy cheeks. She’s sweating lightly beneath her old Star Wars t-shirt, newly cut into a bro-tank that shows off her toned guns. When Jemma sees this, she’s going to have a stroke.
Damn. Jemma. In the rush of having Bobbi to herself, of seeing Bobbi, of knowing that Bobbi was okay she hadn’t died she was okay, Daisy’d completely forgotten about the people missing Bobbi the most.
As if reading her mind, Bobbi asks, “So how is…everyone?”
“We’re good,” Daisy reassures her. “Fitz and Simmons are good. They miss you, but they’re okay.”
She sighs. “I miss them too. God, I miss all of you. How are you? How’s Mack?”
“Mack’s alright, just out on a mission right now. And I’m…. Well, it’s been okay. We got through it.”
Bobbi smiles sadly. “Sometimes that’s all it is, isn’t it? Getting through it.”
“Yeah.”
“Anything else? How’s your team?”
There’s so much that Daisy wants to tell her, enough that it feels impossible to voice. Bobbi is her big sister, the person she turns to for warm support, and she’s just been gone. But as hard as that is, she knows it’s not for her to take up most of a call that might get cut off at any moment.
“The team’s good. Very green, very hotheaded. God, was I ever like that? Don’t answer that. We’re still pretty spread out, but it’s working.” She smiles. “But we can catch up later, now that I’ve figured out this secure connection. Do you know what I’m gonna do right now?”
Bobbi rolls her eyes. “Surprise me.”
Daisy shrugs, slipping off of her bed and leaving the laptop facing the door. “Suit yourself!”
“What? Daisy—“
Ignoring Bobbi’s demands to know what’s going on, Daisy nearly bowls over a tech in her rush to the lab. “Fitz!” she yells. “Simmons!”
“Yeah?” Fitz says, tugging his ear and looking up from his holotable. “What is it?”
“I have someone who would love to talk to you. Where’s Simmons?”
“Her, uh, session with May. Does it have to be—can it be later? I talked to Joey and Dave yesterday,” he grumps. “I’m working on this.”
“I’ll go get Simmons, but it’s not Joey and you are coming,” she enforces, shaking her head internally. The boy is jaded. “You won’t wanna miss this.”
A bit of hope enters his eyes, the first bit of optimism she’s seen from him in a while. “It’s not…”
“Wait for Simmons,” she orders, already taking off down the hallway.
Thud. Thud. Slap. May and Simmons are definitely training, and from her vantage point in the doorway Daisy is able to admire the way Jemma’s form has improved. Her body now knows how to twist itself into a weapon, capable of handing out springy punches and receiving resilient blows. She dances precisely, with thought and strategy and a dab of what Daisy expects is pure instinct. As much as she hates that Jemma has been forced into this, well... It is hot.
(Okay, so maybe Daisy’s in a relationship with Lincoln, but so what? God gave her eyes to look, after all.)
When the two sparring reach a break, she interrupts. “Simmons!”
“Yes, Daisy?” Simmons asks, standing up and wiping sweat out of her eyes. “What is it? Is something wrong?”
“Jemma, Bobbi’s on Skype,” Daisy bursts, unable to hold it in, “on my laptop, in my room.”
Jemma’s hand flies to her mouth, her brows furrowing. Daisy knows this look—surprise, grief, pain, disbelief—but she won’t let Jemma get swept up into it. This is supposed to be happy, a reunion. A celebration of things both lost and found. Jemma doesn’t deserve to have it tempered by guilt and hurt.
“Fitz is waiting for you in the lab, the laptop’s in my room,” Daisy tells her. “She can’t wait to see you.”
“Really?” Simmons asks, holding on to a last reservation.
Daisy softens, walking over and placing a hand on her back. “Would I lie about something like this?”
Simmons shakes her head. Gently, Daisy gives her a little push forward.
“You guys better not have phone sex in my room,” she says, but there’s no bite in it.
“I hope you don’t have clean sheets on,” Jemma counters, recovering enough to give a quick comeback. If ever there’s someone who’ll break themselves out of a deeply emotional moment just to have the last word, it’s Jemma Simmons.
“Go,” May says from beside them. She’s been watching them with warm eyes, old eyes. “You’re putting it off. Just go.”
With a last breath and a nod, Jemma turns and begins her path out. By the time she reaches the door, she’s running. She no longer creeps through the halls like a ghost that’s forgotten it still lingers.
May and Daisy look at each other, communicating solidarity in solemn happiness. Fitz, Simmons, Bobbi, they all deserve this. They all deserve so much more than this.
May pushes a stray strand of her eyes. She beckons with her hand, a wry smile curling at her lips.
Squaring her shoulders, Daisy grins back. Her hands ball into loose fists, and her feet shift into a ready fighting stance.
Leave lovers to lovers. It’s game time.
-
Bobbi waits anxiously for Daisy’s return, not that anyone would know to look at her. She’s long mastered the art of worrying without seeming worried. All you have to do is sit there and try to imagine about your high school reading list; it provides you with the glazed, torpid expression normally worn by non-worried people.
Of course, it’s kind of hard to think about Othello when you’re probably about to see your people for the first time in months.
That’s what they are to her, Fitzsimmons. They’re not just her girlfriend and boyfriend, or her lovers, or her polyamorous pack, or whatever the hell else Daisy likes to call them these days. They’re her people. She was never one for the concept of soulmates, still isn’t, but they just…inexplicably, they just work. Through the sting of laboratory antiseptic and battlefield bandages, they find companionship in each other.
But now they’re late. And she can be patient for as long as she needs to be, but there’s a line, you know?
Five minutes pass, and then ten, and it’s nearing on minute fifteen when she considers whether she should just hang up. It’s possible they’ve all been called out on an impromptu mission and they’ve all forgotten about her. She decides against it. Picking up the book next to her, she gets ten pages into Violeta se fue a los cielos before she hears something through her earbuds.
“Bobbi?” she hears. “Are you there?”
Tears rise to her eyes, and she tastes the burning alcohol of a spy’s goodbye at the back of her throat. Two shadows slide slowly into the light, no longer as young as she wished they could be.
“Yeah, Jem,” she whispers. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
Gulped-back sobs echo soundlessly across the video connection. She can just feel them in the air, permeating the humidity, crossing a continent with no regards to material laws. Jemma bites her lip and sits down on the bed, pulling Fitz down next to her.
She has new sharp edges, Bobbi notices. Cords of muscle where before there was only the soft flesh of survival. Bruises, now on the surface, that once lingered beneath the skin. Fighting eyes, self-assured with the knowledge of defense. It breaks Bobbi’s heart.
Fitz, on the other hand, looks much the same as he did before. He has a bit more grizzle around his chops—it’ll look just like Hunter’s scruff, if he keeps it up—and a bit fiercer of a blaze in his eye, but otherwise he’s still the man she left behind. There’s comfort in that, and an ache.
She misses them both so forcefully.
“Y–You’re okay,” Fitz says quietly, like he can’t quite believe it. “We lost track of you two months ago, and Daisy said she’d keep trying—said she’d keep trying, but…”
“We thought that something awful must have happened,” Jemma completes, fretting at her nails but unable to look away from Bobbi’s face. “But you’re alright? No broken bones? No clotted arteries? No dermal overexposure to UV rays?”
“I’m okay, you two. No death, nothing broken, no sunburn.”
“Miracles do happen,” Fitz mutters, eyes raised to the ceiling. “Where’s Hunter?”
“Oh, he’s somewhere. Playa Grande, I think. ‘We’re in Guanacaste, we’ve gotta see the turtles, Bob. It’s the law or something.’ He’s gonna be upset when he finds out he missed this.” She puts on a purposefully bad British accent when she impersonates Hunter, just to watch Jemma’s nose scrunch in disgust. Fitz snorts despite himself.
“But you’re okay?” he checks, looking directly at her. He must be staring at the camera. “Really? Not just, you know, physically.”
She thinks for a moment. Is she okay? Separated from her new family, thrust into a life of constant movement but constant boundaries? Stuck with Hunter, of all people? (All right, the last one’s not that bad. Don’t tell him that, though.)
“I’m getting there,” she admits finally, letting a bittersweet smile creep onto her face. “It’s a process.”
“A process,” Jemma repeats, matching her smile. “Yeah.”
"Kumbaya,” Fitz gripes. “I declare this bloody therapy session to be in order.”
“Shut up, Fitz,” Jemma and Bobbi chorus.
He puts his hands in the air. “What’ve I done?”
Jemma cuffs him on the shoulder, and he whines. “Ouch! That hurts, now that you’re under May!”
So Jemma’s started sessions with May. That explains some things.
“Thanks, Jemma,” Bobbi says. “I love how you can sense exactly what I’d do if I were there.”
“Hey!”
Jemma’s eyes have fallen, though. Her hand cups her forehead as she gazes at Bobbi’s virtual face with such heartbreak that the blonde can feel herself wanting to tear up again.
“I know what I’d do if you were here,” she admits. Her eyes well and spill over, now an outlet for anger and frustration. “I’m fucking tired of it! You not being here, Hunter not being here, everyone not being here…”
Fitz wraps a careful arm around her shoulders. Jemma’s fingers reach up and tangle with his.
Bobbi wants to gather them up in her arms and press them to her chest, wants to cling to them and hold them so tight that they can never let go, so that she can never leave them again. She wants to press kisses up and down their faces and chests and necks. She wants to curl up with them at night, sweating and passionate.
The warmth of the Costa Rica sun beats down on her, trapping her. Birds that once sounded melodic now shriek the tolling bells of a mourning town. Only years as an operative keep her from breaking down then-and-there.
“I don’t know that I can ever come back,” she chokes. “And I thought I could leave, but I can’t.”
“Then come back,” Fitz pleads. “We’ll figure out a way.”
“You know we could!” Jemma cuts in.
It’s tempting—oh, so sweetly tempting. Hope is intoxicating, though, so she’s learned she cannot allow herself to be dulled by it. Life has beaten mistrust of hope into her soul. It should have done the same to Fitz and Simmons, after everything, but it hasn’t. It hasn’t, because while children who walk among nebulas with stars in their palms might stumble, might trip, their paths are lined with fusing atoms. Their detonation is implicit and impossible. Hope is the only stubborn thing to outlast the void.
“I can’t, babe,” she sighs, pursing her lips to stop them from trembling. “What’s been happening since I left?”
They glare at her, unhappy at the prospect of letting the subject die. But they cede in the face of her immense tiredness, and eventually give way to other topics.
“I’ve been training with May for almost as long as you’ve been gone,” Jemma says. (She doesn’t mean to make it sound accusatory, but Bobbi has to hold in a flinch.) “We hunted down Lash.”
“There was that whole thing with Ward being Death.”
“Oh, don’t forget the accidental impeachment of a U.S. president.”
“I wasn’t going to. It’s a bit hard to forget that. Ooh, what about the army of inhumans?”
“The mind-controlled one?”
“No, the other one.”
“Oh, yes. Then there was the fight yesterday, with the inhuman with the frog tongue.”
“And Joey got engaged.”
They’ve been bouncing words off each other, filling themselves in seamlessly, but their eyes remain fixed intently on Bobbi’s face. They don’t want to let her go, not even with their eyes.
“What?” she asks, forcing herself to sound more curious than she is numb. “Joey got engaged? Explain.”
So they do. They verbally meander through their lives and tell her all about them. Interrupting each other and integrating her into the conversation is effortless when the three of them are together, a harmony made of freshly cracked voices, and it is difficult to separate herself from the consuming need to buy a one way ticket to the Playground as quickly as possible.
It feels like they’ve only been talking for a while when Daisy pokes her head in, her hand over her eyes. “Um, guys, I don’t know how long that call can go untraced, but it’s already been two hours. Could you maybe finish up? And Jemma, I put you in responsibility of cleaning my sheets.”
Jemma giggles. “Sure, Daisy.”
After Daisy closes the door again, Bobbi asks, “What was that?”
“Daisy thinks we’re having Skype sex.”
“In her bedroom?”
“Yes. I don’t know where she could have gotten that impression, do you?”
Fitz rolls his eyes.
They smile, but realize what Daisy had come in to tell them.
“So…this is it?” asks Fitz.
Jemma shakes her head. “No, I think Daisy can make this a semi-permanent occurrence, depending on whether Bobbi has Wi-Fi.”
“I’ll make sure I do, for this,” Bobbi promises. The unspoken, for us, for you, trembles between them. They look at each other and almost cry again.
“Bobbi Morse, you’re the strongest woman I know,” Jemma says. “And I wish– I wish we could…”
“I know.”
Fitz doesn’t look at her. It’s one of the quirks that he has; if he’s not forcing himself to, he prefers not to meet anyone in the eye. But he’s smiling his rough smile, his warm smile, his secret smile that used to be just for Jemma and is now for her too, and Bobbi feels like she’s drowning in it. To be so close, and then to be so far.
“I,” she can’t stop herself from having to gulp down a sob. She’s a trained agent, dammit—she’s withstood Hydra, Ward, rehab, and a collection of truly terrible missions—but these two always seem to break her. “I love you. So much. To the moon and back.”
“To the sun and back,” Fitz adds.
“To Pluto and back,” Jemma says, because fuck NASA that’s why.
Bobbi huffs wetly. “To…what’s after Pluto?”
“Proxima Centauri.”
“Rigil Kentaurus.”
“Wolf 359.”
“Nerds,” she teases affectionately. “I love you to the ends of the universe, all right?”
“Love you too, you wuss.” Fitz blinks tears away, hard.
Jemma whispers, “We love you.”
“Love you,” Bobbi echoes again, a plea of reaffirmation.
“Tell Hunter we’re glad he’s okay,” Jemma remembers. “Also, I donated all of his favorite jackets.”
Bobbi smiles. “All of them?”
“Almost. I kept one.”
“I wish I could kiss you.”
Fitz and Simmons share a look, and then turn back to her. In unison, they raise their right hands. Pinky, forefinger, and thumb stick out, forming an upright Spiderman hand. ASL.
I love you.
These dorks, she swears. She raises her own hand to mirror theirs.
“Not goodbye,” she vows.
“We’ll talk to you soon.”
“We love you. Stay safe.”
Bobbi’s the one to hang up, but that’s okay.
She can leave, but they’ll never let her go. They’re her people. She’s theirs, too.
Transitive Property of Love, she thinks, and she beams.