Chapter Text
Daisy Johnson could honestly say that this isn't the weirdest thing to happen to her - it doesn't even make the top five.
Maybe the top ten? She thinks, picking herself up from the ground, her whole body sore from the sudden crash landing. Last she remembered, she’d been sitting in Fitzsimmons’ lab while the two scientists had been attempting to identify the weird piece of glowing tech found in one of the Chronicom’s space vessels.
Definitely not there anymore, she thinks, as she watches the weird thunderstorm that rages above the alley she’s found herself in.
It’s not just the thunderstorm that gives weird vibes (quite literally) but the whole area, her vibrations feel off, and when she tries to quake, her target, the random coffee cup with the word ‘JITTERS’ on it, doesn’t move, as if her powers refuse to work, even with her gauntlets on.
Huffing, she turns to her other senses, but comes up empty. It smells like a normal alley (terrible, but nothing short of alien guts makes her gag anymore) and she can hardly hear over the thunder, though in the distance she can hear sirens.
From what she can see in the dim light, and it’s not a lot, as the storm must have caused an electrical outage, it’s a generic alleyway, one similar to where she used to park her van to sleep and hack, the brickwork worn but not crumbling, the overflowing dumpster next to her graffitied - apparently Darren is a manwhore.
The wind sweeps up litter from the ground, an old crumpled newspaper hitting her leg, the words ‘S.T.A.R. LABS PARTICLE ACCELARATOR TO TURN ON TONIGHT: A NEW AGE FOR CENTRAL CITY’ flashing up at her.
"Where the fuck is Central City?" She mutters, at least the date is right. She leans down to grab the newspaper, cautious of her bruised ribs (suddenly crashing into a dirty alley when you’d just been sitting in a lab doesn’t give you much time to brace), she attempts to investigate further but the rest of the pages are ripped and the words illegible from random street muck.
Her phone and emergency beacon are both lost causes as well, as the former is so well shattered that not even Fitz could salvage it, and the latter electrocuted her when she attempted to press it.
All this to say, Daisy fucked. Not on her Earth, but not any other planet, and the dates match up, she can rule out both alien planet and time travel, but that leaves only a few options. If it’s another Framework, she’ll be staging another revolution in pure spite, but then there’s the seemingly only sci-fi trope that she hasn’t been through. Goddamn alternate dimensions.
Okay, she thinks as she slowly ventures out of the alley, fists clenched in preparation of anything, maybe this is in the top five.
NINE MONTHS LATER
It took Daisy around seven months to get through the five stages of grief. Grief over losing everything - her family, her job, her literal world.
Denial was the shortest stage, she’d spent a month trying every way she could to get back home - she analysed every single speck of that alleyway, hacked into every single agency, company or lab she could find (including what seemed like a SHIELD ripoff called ARGUS, which is not as cool sounding as SHIELD, in her opinion) but there was nothing. It was like her entire life, her entire world was a dream. It was like she didn’t even exist, she’d just appeared from the air.
Well, there was a Daisy Johnson. A twenty-six year old woman in the Hunan Province of China, working at her mother and father’s medical centre. From what she had gathered by hacking everything she could, the Kree either didn’t exist in this universe, or they never came to Earth and created Inhumans. The Daisy Johnson of this world was happy and blissfully unaware of how different her life could have been.
The anger stage was spent going back to her teenage ways of handling anger, as Skyenet, hacking corrupt billionaires and politicians, and trying to adapt her powers to her new environment (she went through more wine glasses than a fancy gala).
The bargaining stage was short, Daisy knew her reality, she was stuck here. It had been five months at that point and if the team were going to find her, they would have by now. Depression followed swiftly, mostly spent moping at bars and occasionally hooking up with whoever could ignore her scars and broody attitude.
And now, nine months after crashing landing in that alley, she was doing alright. She’d managed to create a name for herself in the hacking community, even getting a job offer from Rising Tide, but unlike her sixteen year old self, twenty-six year old Daisy had declined, instead taking random jobs that wouldn’t get her black-bagged by a secret government agency.
From that, she forms what she could actually perhaps call a business as a PI, where she gets to leave her van and, if required, work off some steam by punching some assholes that don't like getting caught cheating on their wives. It's not exactly beating up HYDRA agents or Watchdogs, but it's easy work that gives a steady enough income.
She’d also found a great van she bought second-hand, the nostalgia of her pre-SHIELD home making it too hard to pass up. She even had a little hula girl on the dashboard like before. Most of the time it stayed parked in the alleyway beside a cafe called Jitters, where she became a regular during her breaks of hacking and suddenly realised she hadn’t eaten in ten hours.
She was there, stretching her legs after finishing a hack for a client (Mrs Jones’ son had run away from home and had employed Daisy to find him, which she did after some hacking of street cameras and train ticket transactions), when she first heard about ‘the streak’.
Standing in line, vaguely people-watching and trying to ignore the guy next to her trying to chat her up (who cares about how many cars you have? After Lola, Daisy didn’t care about a Mercedes or Lamborghini unless it could fly), the TV on the wall playing the same news stories as usual (normal news is boring, Daisy thinks, oh yay, a new library is being built at CCU! Note the sarcasm) when a few words caught her ear.
“... Many citizens have spotted a mysterious streak of red flashing through the city, with some witnesses stating the unusual phenomenon seemed to be a man in a red suit.” one of the co-anchors said, a photo of what looked like a streak of lightning rushing through a street appearing on screen beside her. “One woman even saying that the so-called streak returned her purse after being mugged last night in the Englewood area. Do we have our very own vigilante, like the Hood in Starling City?”
“Very true, Judy,” the male anchor says, “though unlike Starling, this one seems to have powers. More on this story at 8.”
Powers. Someone here has powers, Daisy realises. They couldn’t be Inhuman, but they weren’t the only types of powered individuals she’d met in her old world, she wonders, thinking of the Avengers.
Ignoring the exclaims of the car-douche calling out, she dashes out of the cafe, making her way to her van with quick steps. Looks like she’s got some hacking to do.
Finally something interesting.