Chapter Text
Daisy Johnson won’t admit she’s going through a rough patch.
She won’t admit that she can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t function.
It’s been four days.
Four days since May calling her and telling her that Coulson was gone. It happened when he was asleep, she tells Daisy. He was peaceful.
Daisy isn’t sure the peace thing is shared. She doesn’t understand how May sounds so normal, so calm over the phone. She knows what it feels like to lose the man you love. Though she knows what May and Coulson shared was beyond words so simple.
May won’t be back for another four days, Mack is way too busy being the Director, things between her and Yo-Yo are still strained. Jemma is busy preparing for their soon-to-happen space trip and Fitz... there is nothing she wants more than waking up and realizing what happened to Fitz was a horrible nightmare.
Knowing Fitz, one of her best friends, the only person who stood by her side after Terrigenesis, being dead, with all of their last conversations being full of hatred, invades her mind every single night.
She trusts Jemma when the young scientist insists there is a Fitz out there, alive and frozen. But she doesn’t know what it’ll mean for them if they get him back. How can everything go back to normal when this Fitz is not the one who came to the future, proposed to and was proposed by Jemma, who got married and met his grandson?
the one who cut into her as she screamed and begged and screamed?
She spends a big amount of her time thinking about the Framework.
So much had happened since that artificial hell they’ve been plugged into and she hadn’t had the chance to digest everything that had happened back there. Nightmares? Sure. Analyzing, not so much.
She tries not to think about the Doctor. The memory of that man wearing Fitz’s face — he is not her Fitz, she knows — slapping her still makes her feel uneasy.
She doesn’t want to remember Fitz with those kind of memories. She wants to remember him with his cardigans and boyish smiles. But her brain is a jungle and she can’t escape the inescapable.
She remembers Ward. Not the one who killed Rosalind just to hurt Coulson. Not the one who killed Koenig and Victoria Hand. But the one who joined Resistance to protect the girl he loves.
So, he did have good in him all along. Damn you, Garrett.
She wonders if, it's just an if, there is a universe out there where what happened in Framework was real. If Ward and Trip and all those other people are still trying to fight HYDRA. If Ward got his Skye back.
If there is, Daisy has no doubts that HYDRA doesn’t stand a chance.
She had met so many incredible people during her very short time in the Resistance, she knows what they can do when they are together.
A man can accomplish anything when he realizes he is a part of something bigger – a team of people who share that conviction can change the world.
She remembers the young girl with an Avengers t-shirt.
She still wonders how HYDRA was able to get rid of Avengers.
Kamala Khan, she had introduced herself as. An admirable young girl that was awestruck by Daisy’s powers. Way too enthusiastic for the world she lived in but carrying a great potential.
It’s three a.m. and May is still not back when Daisy thinks of the young Inhuman for the first time since they’ve been out of the Framework. And it hits her that that girl exists somewhere in the real world.
And she knows she shouldn’t, she really knows that but she logs in seconds and searches the name in the S.H.I.E.L.D. database.
She is alive, Daisy checks first. After searching Lincoln and Jemma in the HYDRA’s database and finding out they were both dead, her eyes check it unintentionally.
Kamala Khan is a fifteen year old who lives in New Jersey.
She goes to high school. Lives with her parents and her big brother. She is an active part of her community. Goes to the mosque regularly.
She has fan accounts all over the internet. There is no doubt that this girl is the same girl with the Avengers t-shirt in the Framework. She has a YouTube channel that she talks about superheroes. An account on a fanfiction site she had written about… Captain America and Black Widow? Okay, yeah, Daisy can see the vision.
A Twitter account she fights with people who hate on superheroes.
“Someone get this girl in front of the Watchdogs,” she snickers as she reads the arguments.
She stops reading for a second and shakes her head.
“Now that I think about it, don’t,” she says.
Watchdogs seem like such a basic thing after saving the world from being destroyed.
—by you.
No, not really, it was Talbot.
It was your powers though. Remember? The world cracked like an egg!
Ugh.
She spends the night laying on her bed, half of her face buried in her pillow, reading the girl's tweets on her phone.
She can go back to professional-hacker-searching in the morning, stalking for fun is just enough for her at the moment.
Not having any missions or not going through some current trauma feels weird. She waits ready for any orders from Mack but he seems to think she should rest until she and Jemma starts looking for Fitz. The last time she felt this aimless, she was living in a trailer. And even then she had actual things to do other than stalking a teenager who has no idea she exists.
DUUUT!
@sensibleguy
Do we really believe Quake / Agent Johnson was working for SHIELD all along?
Here are documents of illegal things she’s done.
She was literally on the WANTED list.
[file attached: quake_illegal.docx]
@slothbabyonline replying to @sensibleguy
She is literally a hero! She was fighting the Watchdogs. Protecting her people. That’s like… the most heroic thing you can do??
And I’m pretty sure that “wanted list” thing is long gone.
We have NO idea what they were dealing with while we were sitting at home watching TV.
Aliens? Robots? HYDRA again? Who even knows???
Well, Daisy sometimes really forgets that people know her, her nickname, her face, her name even.
What she doesn't know is how Kamala succeeds to count everything they faced in that last year in one single tweet. That girl's got fire, for sure.
Daisy doesn't really think she is a hero. She is far from it. But this girl believing she is one doesn't irritate her. It makes her feel hopeful, if nothing else.
She stops reading her tweets and goes back to searching to see if there is anything abnormal about her. S.H.I.E.L.D. would have known if she was an inhuman but it still doesn't mean she is safe.
A.I.D.A. didn't give random people inhuman genes, that much Daisy knows. Kamala Khan had powers in there that caused her trouble and that is enough proof for her to know it could very well do the same thing in the real world.
But she finds nothing, Daisy sighs with annoyment before putting her laptop aside.
She leaves her bunk, not caring about people seeing her in her grandma-style pajamas. It's four in the morning, so it's unlikely for many people to see her.
She walks towards the kitchen and starts the coffee machine. She would rather open a bottle of beer but she can't risk Mack needing her in field and her being incapable of helping. After terrigenesis her body seemed to have a resistance against getting drunk but she knows she still can. She tested it very well after Lincoln's death. So, better safe than sorry.
She opens the kitchen closet to take a cup and suddenly she is face to face with the Trust Cap cup.
She feels the haze she was in whole night fading away in instant. The whole night she was acting like a careless teenager, she chastizes herself, stalking some teenager, reading tweets like she has nothing to care about.
Philip J. Coulson is dead. He is gone. They're going to bury him, Mack has got the whole thing planned.
He had the whole thing planned before he died.
Coulson is dead and his favorite cup stands there, mocking her and she feels her throat tighten.
"Hey," she is startled by the sudden voice in the silence of the Lighthouse.
She turns back to see Yo-Yo staring at her with a sad smile on her face. "Hey," she says with a low voice that she is trying to keep controlled.
Her and Yo-Yo are better, she's been trying to convince herself for days. Sure, they had their fall out but a few fights during stressful times shouldn't be able to ruin friendships. And she remembers, faintly, hugging Yo-Yo after seeing Fitz's dead body. So, yeah, they are better.
Well, we didn't pick you!
She can't blame her, can she? She didn't exactly rock the whole leader thing. She wasn't the mini-Coulson everyone expected her to be. Coulson expected her to be. She was too busy trying to find a way to save Coulson to be a good leader.
He is just one man.
She hates admitting Yo-Yo was right. She knows how everything ends up when they save him, they've seen that future. But living in a world where he is dead just hurts.
She's been staring at her, she realizes when Yo-Yo ends up right in front of her and pulls her into a hug.
She lets her body relax as she buries her head on Yo-Yo's shoulder.
"I'm sorry." Yo-Yo says when they pull away from the hug.
Daisy doesn't know what she is apologizing for. For their arguments? For the way she treated her when she walked in with her mother's dead body in a bag? Or simply because Coulson is dead and like everyone else she also pities poor-Daisy with no real parents?
She doesn't know but she can't afford caring for it at that moment. "I'm sorry too." She whispers with a broken tone. Because she is.
The next time she is in the kitchen, the cup is long gone.
She doesn't search Kamala Khan again but the algorythm of Internet is just frustrating and her YouTube videos keep popping up on her for you page.
And Daisy has got lots of free time. Mack assigned her with a searching duty, after her almost begging to him for days. But it doesn't even take her an hour to finish the job. So, what's better to do other than watching a video about theories about Hulk?
Daisy doesn't know how she always succeeds to do everything she swears not to do at the end of the day. It's a gift, really.
But there is something so tempting about doing these kind of things and this one won't even hurt anyone. Not at all.
purpleskye
Hey!
I just watched your videos and
I've been wondering your opinions about
Captain America being a fugitive
like hellooo? How??
She is so going to regret this.
slothbabyonline
Hey! Oh my God, right???
Like this man has done so much,
literally gave up the normal life he could've had.
And his prize is being a criminal because he didn't
want to be controlled or for other
people to be controlled!
Yep, she is going to regret it alright.
purpleskye
Right?!
Maybe Kamala would just let her get away from the conversation, right?
slothbabyonline
I'm Kamala btw
Yeah. Not so much.
purpleskye
I'm Skye
Nice to meet you, Kamala