Work Text:
I'm 11 minutes away and I have missed you all day
I'm 11 minutes away, so why aren't you here?
0:10 ─ㅇ─────── 0:22
The base had been empty for months.
The team had swept it three separate times since the portal had closed and Robbie Reyes had taken the Darkhold back to where it came from. Every room had been searched, every damaged system repaired or replaced, every piece of Aida's army cleaned from the floors and walls. As far as they could tell, there wasn’t a trace of those two months anywhere left in the building.
No LMDs. No ghosts. No Darkhold activity of any kind.
Just an abandoned playground for nightmares that had finally run out of monsters.
And they were lucky; it had stayed that way.
And yet… Daisy could feel something was different.
Not wrong, that she knew of. Just off.
And unfortunately for her, it wasn’t one of those feelings she could just explain to someone if she wanted to. To her, everything had a certain rhythm she could feel. Even this building had a vibe, the concrete shifting in a way that most people wouldn’t notice, couldn’t notice.
Daisy always did.
She had spent almost three years learning to differentiate between different vibrations, filtering out the ordinary and learning to read each person’s unique pattern until she could read the tremors like nametags, or read each shift in a building like a sign or historical plaque. It was second nature now, something her powers did before her brain had a chance to catch up.
And usually she never questioned it.
She just knew if it was Mack who was about to knock on her door before she heard his boots, or if Simmons was alone in her and Fitz’s room before Daisy knocked.
She just knew.
Which was why the dim rhythm weaving through the building made the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up.
It wasn’t loud or aggressive, not demanding of her attention. It wasn’t violent enough to register as a threat either. If anything, it was frustratingly distant, like trying to remember the name of a song stuck in the back of her head all week.
And yet… familiar.
The kind of familiar that made an ache settle in a pit in her stomach.
Before she could stop herself and brush it off entirely, her feet slowed. Her eyes drifted from the hallway in front of her to the corridor branching off to her left. It sat empty beneath the flickering fluorescent lights, every door hanging open at the exact angles SHIELD had opened them to months ago.
Nothing was moved; there was nothing missing.
Still, the feeling lingered right between her ribcage and her lungs, like she should know those frequencies.
There was one pulse, and she almost dismissed it at the building settling. Then she felt a second, and a third. It was definitely a person, someone she knew.
She just didn’t know who.
She frowned, taking an absent-minded step toward the hallway before she realized she was taking any step at all.
“Daisy?” Mack’s voice echoed from somewhere behind her, but it sounded further away than it should have. She lifted a hand without glancing back, asking for another second.
The rhythm was still there, faint and steady, deep inside that hallway. It wasn’t approaching, and it wasn’t retreating. It just existed, woven into the quiet vibration of the building as naturally as the hum of the overhead lights.
She closed her eyes. Thank God people were easy like this.
Without the distraction of sight, she could separate each individual strand into its own singular motions. She could eliminate the vibrations behind her; she knew where Mack was. Somewhere above her, she could feel a loose vent hitting one of the air ducts and making soft metallic waves of movement across the ceiling. The old, rusted pipes shook slightly as water moved sluggishly through them.
And beneath all of it, she could feel that same rhythm.
She reached for it instinctively, and the moment she did, the feeling vanished.
Her eyes snapped open, and she looked around.
Nothing.
The hallway stretched in front of her exactly as it had a second ago, empty and undisturbed. “You wanna tell me what you were looking at?” She could hear Mack ask from somewhere behind her. Daisy continued to stare for another long moment before slowly shaking her head.
Because she didn’t know, and that’s what bothered her.
Her powers usually didn’t make mistakes.
I think I missed you callin' on the other line
I'm just thinkin' all these thoughts up in my mind
Talkin' love but I can't even read the signs
I would sell my soul for a bit more time
0:24 ─ㅇ─────── 0:35
The rest of the Zephyr had gone quiet hours ago, only the occasional footstep echoing through the hallway outside her room, and Daisy had long since abandoned the idea of sleeping. Instead, she found herself lying in the dark, staring at her ceiling at three am.
She’d tried everything.
Closing her eyes. Rolling over. She’d counted backwards from one hundred three times.
She had even reached the point where she had gotten up to make tea, despite the fact that she hated the very concept of tea. Simmons swore by it, claiming that something scientific about it made it relaxing.
Daisy was beginning to suspect Simmons had lied to get everyone else to stop complaining about their lack of sleep.
Nothing would work for Daisy tonight.
Every time she got close to drifting off, her mind wandered back to that warehouse earlier this morning.
It had been a month since she had gotten that feeling at the base, and Coulson had gotten word of a warehouse fire.
The building had been suspected of housing stolen alien tech, and the thieves must’ve caught wind of SHIELD’s investigation, because the building was flames and ash before the sun came up.
By the time Daisy and May had arrived, the local fire department had already put out the flames, and all they had for evidence was a heaping hunk of what was basically moist charcoal on top of a concrete base. Everything smelled like wet ash and melted plastic, and the air was thick and humid from the sheer amount of smoke this building had no doubt created.
May had split from her almost immediately. “Check the east side,” she’d said, gesturing with flashlight toward an area that might have once been a hallway. “Call if you need anything.”
Daisy had nodded and picked her way through the rubble of the deep-fried hallway, carefully avoiding the charred beams scattered across the floor. Every step sounded like damp crunching beneath her boots, and every now and then, a droplet of water would fall from the blackened ceiling, hissing when it landed on something that was still smoldering beneath the debris.
It was quiet. Too quiet.
Not in the eerie, horror-movie kind of way, but just…empty.
Whoever had torched the place had done a thorough job.
She’d been halfway through what looked like a storage room, crouched beside the twisted remains of a metal shelving unit, when she felt it.
A vibration.
So faint that she had almost dismissed it as another support beam settling beneath the weight of the collapsed roof.
She paused anyway.
Her hand hovered over the scorched floor.
There it was again. Not the building. There was someone else here with her. She stood up slowly, scanning the smoke-darkened hallway beyond the doorway. “May?” She called out.
She got no answer.
Closing her eyes, she reached out with her senses again. The rhythm was longer than it had been in the base, not by much, but enough that she knew that she instinctively wasn’t making it up.
Someone was there, she could’ve sworn, not more than a room away.
She took a cautious step towards the hallway. The rhythm shifted; not closer, but different. Like whoever it belonged to had turned slightly, or taken a single step of their own.
Daisy frowned. “May?” She called again, a little louder. She was met with silence once again. She started walking, one careful step after another. The damp ashes crunched louder under her feet like a warning, and yet she continued to follow the vibrations rather than her eyes.
The waves threaded through the warehouse in faint pulses, disappearing beneath the groan of warped metal before surfacing again a second later.
She rounded the first corner and found nothing. The second corner turned up empty too.
The feeling persisted anyway.
It felt closer than before. Close enough that every instinct she had was insisting that if she just kept going, if she just looked through the next doorway, she would find who she was looking for.
She could feel her heart rate speed up as she reached the final doorway. But the second she stepped foot through the door frame, the vibrations vanished again. Not faded. Genuinely vanished. She found herself standing alone inside another charred storage room, and just like everything that had been in this room when the warehouse had burned, one second it had been there, and the next it was gone.
Daisy stood perfectly still. No, she’d thought. No, no, no. She closed her eyes, reaching even further this time, searching for that same rhythm again.
It was gone.
And now, lying in bed, she still couldn’t let that feeling go.
Every person had a pattern.
Every pattern was unique.
Mack’s footsteps landed heavier than anyone else’s. Simmons always moved quicker than most people expected. Fitz always had an off-balance walk when he was focused, one foot stepping slightly further than the other one.
So if she knew this pattern, she definitely knew this person. She just had to figure out who it was.
Definitely not Mack, definitely not May. It was too steady to be Coulson, too even to be Fitz. Not Simmons, not Yo-Yo.
One by one, she ran through her list, crossing people off until there wasn’t anyone left, except…
Her eyes opened. “No.” The word escaped before she could stop it. She stared into the darkness, trying to convince herself it wasn’t him. That would be impossible.
Because she had watched Robbie Reyes leave.
He’d made her promise to look after his brother and then walked right into that Hell portal. There was no logical explanation for why he would be lingering under her skin six months later.
And yet, the more she tried to picture the rhythm, the more she realized she had definitely come in contact with it before.
Standing beside a black Charger while someone disappeared beneath the hood.
Sitting in the passenger seat and arguing about how demonic possession worked.
Standing in the middle of an abandoned warehouse, both weary and tired from dealing with their own problems but happy to see each other because no one else quite understood the darkness that always lingered inside the other the way they did.
She knew that rhythm.
She knew him.
Silence filled the room for a moment, then Daisy groaned, flopping back on her pillow and throwing an arm over her eyes. “I’m losing my fucking mind.”
I'm 11 minutes away and I have missed you all day
I'm 11 minutes away, so why aren't you here?
You're 11 minutes away and I have missed you all day
You're 11 minutes away, so why aren't you here?
1:10 ─ㅇ─────── 1:34
The Zephyr was grounded for the night; no one had enough energy to fly after today’s wild goose chase.
Daisy sat alone in the cargo bay, typing away at her laptop and hoping to look like she was busy enough to not be bothered. Really, she just needed an excuse to not sleep, because it just could never find her like she wanted it to. The ‘report’ she had been working on hadn’t been touched in forty minutes.
Instead, she was looking for proof.
Proof that Robbie was really back.
She wasn’t proud of it.
Somewhere between the burned warehouse and tonight, she’d started checking mission logs for unexplained sightings and news reports about people dying from suspicious-sounding circumstances. She’d started cross-referencing reports of strange energy spikes with places SHIELD had been operating in. She’d even caught herself lingering in the garage longer than necessary after missions, listening for the unmistakable rumble of a ‘69 Charger that she knew wasn’t coming.
Every lead had ended the same way.
And she’d almost convinced herself to stop looking.
Tonight was her last attempt. If she couldn’t find anything after all of this, she was done. She had to be.
She would chalk it up to exhaustion, tell herself she’d spent too much time chasing ghosts that had already left her, and move on.
At least, that was the plan.
Her cursor blinked impatiently at her from the bottom of her screen.
She stared at it for another few seconds, finally letting out a slow breath and closing the dozen browser tabs she’d opened over an hour and a half ago.
Because there was nothing.
No mysterious fires. No eyewitnesses claiming they’d seen a flaming skeleton. No suspicious deaths.
Just nothing.
Daisy rubbed a hand over her face. “You’re losing it,” she mumbled to herself, reaching out to close her laptop for the night.
That’s when she felt it. Something brushing against her senses the way a cat might brush against your hand. Soft but persistent.
Her hand froze.
It was moving. Slow. Deliberate. Familiar enough that every muscle in her body locked before she could understand why. The energy entered the cargo bay from somewhere behind her, but she didn’t turn around. She couldn’t.
She simply sat there, listening with every instinct she had as it drifted across the room, steady and unhurried, passing only a few feet behind her chair.
Her heartbeat climbed into her throat.
No, she thought. This isn’t possible. She knew the Zephyr, knew everyone on board right now, and yet…
That rhythm belonged to none of them.
She closed her eyes. Sight had a tendency to get in the way sometimes, but the vibrations didn’t lie.
She reached for it carefully, trying to separate from the familiar hum of the Zephyr without scaring it away. The engines were shaking softly as they worked to keep the plane running; the electrical systems vibrated through the walls as carefully as a whisper. Somewhere down the hall, Fitz was shifting in his bunk.
Then she felt it.
It was him.
The realization hit her so hard she suddenly forgot to breathe.
She knew the rhythm. She’d spent months standing beside it while he leaned over the Charger with grease on his hands. She’d felt it walking shoulder-to-shoulder through abandoned warehouses, old power plants, and alleyways that somehow always ended in a fight.
She knew it.
“Robbie?” The name left her mouth as barely more than a whisper. The rhythm paused.
Not vanished. Paused.
Her eyes flew open, her chair scraping loudly against the metal floor as she stood. “Robbie?” She called again, louder this time. She got no answer.
She spun toward the rear of the cargo bay. Empty.
Every crate was strapped down. Every toolbox sat right where it belonged. The ramp was sealed.
There wasn’t another person in sight, but she could feel him.
Just outside the doorway, moving away from her, just like it had six months ago into that portal.
Damn it.
So call me stupid, call me sad
You're the best I've ever had
You're the worst I've ever had
And that keeps fuckin' with my head
1:58 ─ㅇ─────── 2:08
Working out was one of the few times where Daisy felt like she could shut her brain off entirely.
When she hung up that punching bag in the cargo bay, when she kept moving and punching and giving her body something else to focus on, the endless stream of questions in the back of her mind vanished for just a moment. She could pretend everything was normal.
Almost normal.
The heavy bag swung toward her again. She caught it with another punch.
Swing. Thud. Swing. Thud.
The rhythmic impacts echoed through the room, accompanied by the quiet squeak of her sneakers on the floor and the steady hum of the Zephyr’s ventilation system. A rhythm like…
No. She squeezed her eyes shut for half a second, then slammed her fist into the bag again. Thud.
“Get it together,” she muttered under her breath.
She wasn’t doing this anymore. She couldn’t. She promised herself she was done chasing every familiar vibration, every strange feeling that triggered her senses.
Robbie Reyes was gone.
She’d accepted that. Or at least, she was trying to.
She reset her stance, rolled her shoulders back, and threw another combination into the bag hard enough to send it nearly into the ceiling.
The chain groaned overhead, the bag swung back, and then she heard it.
A low rumble echoing through the cargo bay.
Daisy froze. Not because she felt it. Because she could hear it. The sound was brief, swallowed almost immediately by the Zephyr’s engines and ventilation system, but there was no mistaking it. An engine. Deep. Uneven. Familiar.
She didn’t even try to convince herself this time. “Robbie?” She called out. Silence was the only answer she got, the only answer she ever got. But she was already moving before her brain could catch up.
She pushed past the punching bag, breaking into a jog. Her footsteps echoed across the cargo bay as she headed for the loading ramp. She had no instincts left, only the voice in the back of her mind telling her that if she just ran quick enough, she’d find him standing against the Charger, giving her the same unimpressed look her gave her every time she did something reckless.
The doors opened with a hydraulic hiss. Daisy could feel the cold night air nipping at her skin, but she kept going, stepping out onto the tarmac.
It was eerily empty.
The Zephyr sat alone under the lights of an unfamiliar new base, its shadow stretching across the concrete. Beyond it was nothing but an open runway, a chain-link fence, and a city about as dim as the disappointment she was feeling right now.
No black Charger. No tire tracks. No taillights disappearing into the distance.
Nothing.
Daisy stood there, listening. The wind whistled across the runway. Somewhere nearby, a generator hummed steadily. An aircraft taxied on the far side of the airfield. But the engine she’d heard only seconds ago was nowhere to be found.
“Daisy?” She heard Jemma’s voice from behind her. “Daisy, get inside! You’re going to get hypothermia.”
Daisy didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at Jemma. She stayed right where she was, eyes fixed on the empty stretch of concrete in front of her, as if staring hard enough might somehow make the car materialize out of the darkness.
“Daisy?” Jemma repeated, slowing as she reached Daisy’s side. “What are you looking at?”
“I heard him.”
She frowned. “Heard who?”
Daisy swallowed, the words she was about to say tasting bitter on the way down. “Robbie.” She knew she sounded ridiculous, but she couldn’t help it. She’d never felt her powers sense a presence like this before, and now the car?
Jemma’s expression softened immediately. Her eyes scanned the runway themselves, but came up empty. “There’s no one here, Daisy.” She pointed out quietly.
“I know.” Daisy let out a soft laugh that held no amusement at all. “God, I know. And I feel like I’m going crazy. I mean. Is it because I met him at a bad time in my life? And because I still don’t feel… normal again, I’m creating this false reality.”
Jemma was quiet for a long moment, the kind that made Daisy feel queasy. She knew that Jemma was better than most when it came to understanding the human mind and how it processed loss. It filled in the blanks. It created its own patterns. Sometimes it held on to people long after they were gone, like how Lincoln’s memory had hung like a dark cloud above all their heads for the first year he was gone.
But she also knew Daisy.
Daisy didn’t imagine things.
“I don’t think you’re creating a false reality,” Jemma admitted quietly, making Daisy finally look at her.
“Then what is this?” She asked quietly.
Jemma hesitated for a moment before shaking her head. “Honestly? I have no idea. Your powers have always been remarkably consistent.” Jemma folded her arms, fighting against the cold and failing miserably. She continued anyway. “You’ve trusted them for years, and so have we. If you’re sensing something, I’m not going to tell you you’re imagining it simply because I can’t explain it.”
Daisy turned back toward the empty runway, nodding.
“However,” Jemma added gently. “I also can’t tell you that Robbie is standing somewhere that we can’t see. Those are two very different conclusions.”
The silence stretched between them for a few minutes as Daisy took in everything Jemma had told her.
Finally, Jemma bumped Daisy’s shoulder with her own. “Come inside.” She nudged gently.
Daisy didn’t move. “Do you ever wonder where he ended up?” She whispered instead. “After he, you know.” She gestured vaguely at the air in front of them.
Jemma thought for a moment, then nodded, smiling sadly. “More often than I would probably admit.”
“He said he’d just take the Darkhold somewhere no one would ever find it. And I always just kinda assumed that once he did, he would come back. I think…I think it would be easier if he had said goodbye. If he had told me he wasn’t coming back.”
Jemma didn’t answer, but Daisy knew.
They all thought the same thing.
They had watched him disappear into a world none of them could follow him to, convinced that one day, somehow, he'd find his way back.
And every day that passed made it a little harder to keep believing that.
But Daisy had to. She had to move on. She needed to stop believing it.
And going to sleep that night was the first step.
You're 11 minutes away and I have missed you all day
So why aren't you here?
Why aren't you here?
Why aren't you here?
Why aren't you here?
3:16─ㅇ─────── 3:47
It had been almost six months since the warehouse incident.
Almost three since she’d heard the Charger.
And almost a year since Robbie Reyes had vanished.
That silly thing called life did what it’s always done; It kept moving. Missions came and went. Reports piled up on her desk. Coulson found new fires to put out, Mack found new things to complain about, and Fitzsimmons somehow managed to invent three new problems while solving five old ones.
And somewhere along the way, Daisy stopped checking the news every night.
She stopped lingering in the garage after missions. She stopped listening for an engine that was never going to be there.
She’d gotten good at pretending she was letting go.
The mission was supposed to be normal, or at least, as normal as a SHIELD mission could get.
A break-in at an old storage facility outside of Los Angeles had turned into nothing more than a group of scavengers trying to sell salvaged Chitauri technology to the highest bidder. The operation had been over in less than an hour, and now all that was left was documenting the evidence before the cleaning crew took over.
Daisy wandered between rows of dented metal shelving with a scanner in one hand and a flashlight in the other, absentmindedly sweeping the beam over cracked concrete and abandoned crates.
“You see anything?” Mack’s voice crackled over comms.
She scanned another shelf, watching the screen flash green before shaking her head. “Nothing interesting.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
Daisy smiled to herself. For once, she intended to.
There were no strange vibrations, no impossible feelings setting beneath her skin. No memories were waiting around corners, and no familiar noises echoed in her ears. It was just another warehouse, another report, another day.
She reached the end of the aisle and stopped.
The warehouse was quiet now. Somewhere on the other side of the building, agents were cataloging crates, metal clanged against concrete, someone laughed over the comms.
Ordinary.
She'd missed ordinary.
She carefully set her flashlight down on one of the shelves, taking a deep breath and exhaling. “I can’t keep doing this.” She whispered to herself more than anyone else.
The words surprised her because they were true.
She’d never been known to be a quitter, but she was older than she had been when she became a SHIELD agent or went through terrigenesis or was possessed by Hive, and she was tired.
Tired of every familiar vibration making her heart race.
Tired of wondering if every strange fire had his fingerprints on it.
Tired of looking over her shoulder every time she thought she heard an engine.
Tired.
She smiled sadly, shaking her head. “I’m done chasing ghosts.” She let the sentence linger in the air for a moment. It wasn’t just Robbie’s ghost she was chasing. It was Lincoln’s ghost and every other ghost of every other person she’d ever loved, but never got to say goodbye to. She was mourning all of them, chasing goodbyes she never got by thinking Robbie would come back and let her say one.
“I’m done chasing you.” She added quietly. Her throat tightened, threatening to cut off the words, but she continued. “If you wanted to come back,” her eyes fell on the dusty concrete floor, and she swallowed hard. “Then you would’ve.”
She closed her eyes, leaning against the shelf. “I hope you’re okay, though. Wherever you are. I’ll keep Gabe in line for you.”
She should’ve left it at that. Should’ve found her way back to Mack and gotten the hell out of that building. Instead, she uttered one more word into the quiet, one more word that made her feel the tiniest bit of closure.
“Goodbye.”
Now I see you standing all alone
I never thought the world would turn to stone
1:53 ─ㅇ─────── 1:58
Two weeks later, life looked exactly the same.
Which, Daisy had finally come to terms with, was probably a good thing.
Normal was good. Normal meant no more interdimensional books, no ghosts crawling through walls, no androids trying to replace her and her friends, and no portals opening to places no one was meant to survive.
Normal also meant paperwork, endless mountains of it, but Daisy could live with that.
She sat alone in the common room, one boot hooked on the edge of the coffee table while a mission report glared accusingly from her laptop screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the first paragraph, waiting for her to explain, in professional SHIELD terminology, why three senior agents had ended up waist-deep in a drainage canal chasing Chitauri scavengers.
She still hadn’t figured out how to make that sound competent.
Somewhere down the hall, Fitz and Jemma were arguing over something scientific enough that Daisy had lost the plot three sentences in. Mack was on the phone with Coulson, discussing requisition forms with the enthusiasm of two people planning their own funerals.
Everything was exactly the way it should be, the way things used to be.
Exactly what she promised herself she would accept.
She reached across her laptop to grab her coffee and froze. There it was again. The same persistent pattern. It felt steady, warm and close, and yet…
She tightened her fingers around her mug so tight, she thought for sure it would crack.
No. She closed her eyes. Don’t give me hope.
She couldn’t do this again. She couldn’t go back again, like she did in the warehouse, in the Zephyr, on the runway.
Every time she let herself believe was another time she was wrong, and she couldn’t go through it again.
She took a deep breath, then forced herself to pull the mug up. She settled back into the couch, muttering, “I’m not falling for this again.” And yet, the rhythm didn’t disappear.
If anything, it got closer.
She could feel her heart stumble over itself, but she refused to look up from her laptop. “I’m serious,” she whispered to the rhythm. “I’m done chasing you.”
Then she heard it.
The soft knock sounded on the doorway.
A familiar voice outside saying her name.
Not a vibration. Not an echo. Not a memory. A real-life voice, low and rough around the edges, but…
It was unmistakable.
And she almost choked, her coffee mug slipping from her fingers and crashing to the floor, ceramic pieces scattering across the concrete. She looked up, her eyes locking on the doorway. Her eyes locked on him.
He was just standing there.
Leather jacket.
Hands shoved into the pockets like he hadn’t just escaped into another dimension nearly a year ago.
Road dust was caked on his boots.
There was a fresh gash across his knuckles, probably no more than a few hours old and definitely not old enough for the Rider to start mending it.
His hair was a little longer than it had been when he left, and with a start, she realized it had a little curl to it.
But it was him.
It was Robbie.
He shifted against the doorway, glancing down at the shattered coffee mug at her feet before looking back up at her. “You know, most people just say ‘hi’.”
Daisy kept staring at him, and he tried again. “Or a ‘good to see you’ works too.”
Still nothing.
He was becoming more and more unsure by the moment that showing up unannounced was the best idea, but it was too late to turn back now. He tried one last time to cut through the silence. “I would've also accepted, ‘Wow, Robbie. You somehow got even uglier.’”
That finally earned him the laugh she snorted out. She clamped her hand over her mouth like it had come out without her permission, and she glared at him like he was the one being unreasonable. “You are… such an asshole.”
Robbie let out a breath that, to Daisy, sounded suspiciously like relief. “Yeah.” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, that’s the Daisy I remembered.”
She crossed the room before she consciously decided to move, jabbing her finger directly into his chest. “No. No, you don’t get to waltz in here and joke your way out of this like a fucking clown.”
He looked down at her finger, then back up at her before shrugging. “I wasn’t planning on it, but thanks for the warm welcome, I think?”
She shoved him once. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make him take half a step backward. “You disappeared.”
“I know.”
“For a whole year.”
“I know.”
“You couldn’t be bothered to call?”
And Robbie had the audacity to blink at her. “... From Hell?”
Daisy threw her hands up in exasperation. “I don’t know, Robbie! Send a postcard! Possess a pigeon! Literally anything that could’ve let me know you were fucking alive, that Ghost Rider didn’t just abandon your body somewhere in Hell once the Darkhold was gone!”
Despite the fact that Daisy looked like she was ready to kill him, he laughed. “A pigeon?”
“Don’t laugh at me!”
“If it makes you feel any better, I tried really hard not to.”
“It’s not funny! I’m serious, Robbie.” Her voice cracked as soon as she said his name, and it immediately wiped the smile off his face. She took a shaky breath, suddenly finding the floor below their feet much more interesting and easier to look at than him. “I didn’t know what happened to you. Gabe asked about you constantly and… and I wanted answers too.”
“Daisy–”
“No, don’t.” She shook her head before he could interrupt. “Don’t do that. I watched you walk into a portal with the Darkhold, and then there was nothing. No message. No weird, mystical warning from Ghost Rider. Nothing. I had to go to your house and explain to your brother that there was a chance you were never coming home.” She let out a sharp, miserable laugh. “Do you know how many times I convinced myself that if I just looked hard enough, I would find some sign you were still out there?”
With a start, Robbie realized that she wasn’t mad at him, and his expression softened. She just didn’t know how else to express herself. He let her keep going.
“I felt you in the wreckage, those weeks we were examining what remained of the base. I felt you in a burned-out warehouse. I tracked your vibration through the Zephyr like someone had walked right past me, and then I thought I heard the Charger on the tarmac.” She finally lifted her eyes to meet his. “I thought I was losing my mind.”
For the first time since he had appeared, Robbie looked genuinely startled. “You felt that?”
Daisy blinked. “What? What does that even mean?” She yelled in frustration, and Robbie flinched.
He looked away for a moment, running a hand over the back of his neck. “I…I didn’t think you could.”
“Could what?”
He stayed quiet for a moment, trying to find words for something that he wasn’t entirely sure he understood himself. “Every once in a while, I’d end up somewhere that wasn’t…” He frowned in frustration. “Wasn’t hell anymore, I don’t think. At least, not entirely, anyway. He gestured vaguely with one hand. “I’d see pieces of this place. Hallways. A room. Sometimes I’d hear people talking.” He met her eyes again carefully. “Mostly you.”
And this time, she held eye contact with him.
“I thought it was the Rider messing with me.” He confessed, his eyes never leaving hers. She studied his, like she was looking for the lie somewhere in his words.
“Robbie…” She whispered, decidedly not finding one.
“I tried to find where it was coming from. I tried to find a way back.” He let out a small, humorless laugh. “Every time I got close…” He snapped his fingers, making her break eye contact to look down. “Gone. Like someone slammed a door in my face.”
She looked back up at him, her mind racing with every moment she had spent chasing him. Every sleepless night, every long drive, every late mission report. Every impossible feeling she couldn’t explain.
It was never in her head.
“You were really there.”
Robbie nodded. “Just… not enough.”
Silence settled between them, and for the first time in a year, the guilt Daisy had been carrying around finally cracked. She hadn’t imagined him. She hadn’t been losing control of her powers. She hadn’t been so desperate that she'd invented the feeling.
Somehow, impossibly, they had been reaching for each other from opposite sides of a door neither of them could figure out how to open.
A watery laugh escaped her lips before she could stop it. “I spent months thinking I was crazy.” She whispered, and she could see his shoulders slump in relief.
“I’m sorry.” He admitted.
And to Daisy’s surprise, there was no sarcasm. It didn’t sound like the punchline to a bad joke. It was quiet, honest.
“I know.”
Neither of them moved.
Robbie looked like he wanted to step forward, but hesitated, and after a moment, Daisy realized why. He’d been away for a year, and now he was unsure whether or not she was going to tell him to leave. She solved the problem for him, closing the last few feet between them and throwing her arms around him without a second thought.
The force of it caught him completely off guard, making him stumble back into the doorframe before his arms came up around her instinctively.
She held on as though if she let go now, he’d surely disappear all over again.
Robbie buried his face in her hair, closing his eyes. “Easy now,” he murmured, although his voice wasn’t nearly as steady as he was hoping it would be. “I would almost think you like me.”
She pulled away slightly, punching his arm without much force. “Shut up.”
He let out a real laugh this time, that kind that made Daisy feel warm from her head to her toes. “Okay.”
She settled back into his arms, gripping his sleeve tightly.
Not because she thought he would disappear.
Because she didn’t have to wonder anymore.
She had spent nearly a year chasing echoes. Familiar vibrations, the rumble of an engine that was never there. She had searched empty hallways, burned buildings, and silent airfields, convincing herself that if she looked hard enough, she’d find him.
And yet… she never found him.
He found his way back to her.
You're 11 minutes away and I have missed you all day
You're 11 minutes away, so why aren't you here? (Why aren't you here?)
2:34 ─ㅇ─────── 2:46