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“Daisy!”
She pokes her head into Coulson’s room at the sound him calling her name.
She’s been waiting a few paces away, unable to make herself leave his vicinity even though the nurse had all but pushed her aside. The nurse is someone new — she doesn’t know his name yet, hasn’t learned the names of a lot of new people in SHIELD — and she mildly-comforts herself with the idea that someone who knew her wouldn’t have ignored her.
“Hi?”
Coulson’s nurse frowns, looks like he’s holding back an eyeroll.
“Daisy’s here!” Coulson announces loudly, as though to a room full of people and not just the one nurse, who no longer even tries to hold back his eyeroll. Daisy smiles awkwardly, raises sympathetic eyebrows at the long-suffering employee.
“What’s he on?”
“Morphine,” he says as he taps the IV tube. “The good stuff.”
“Is he…okay?”
Coulson is smiling, at least, nothing like the pale, shaking body she had half-carried in here, no trace of the blood that had gotten on her hands. It’s not the first time she’s seen him hurt, not the first time his blood has been on her hands, but it’s the first since she’s been back.
She feels so responsible for him — for more than him, obviously, but also very specifically for him, for Coulson. And she’d thought about it a lot while she was gone, about how it would feel if someone hurt Coulson (if Coulson…).
Thinking about it doesn’t help anything, so she forces a smile that’s returned by a blinding one from Coulson, the kind that makes her worries sort of evaporate, makes her smile turn real.
“He’s fine,” the nurse tells her, maybe reading her thoughts, and he maybe looks a little less annoyed. “The bullet didn’t do any serious damage.”
It releases a knot in her chest, one that had formed when she stormed into the room to see Coulson slumped over.
“Then why so much morphine?”
Coulson doesn’t usually do painkillers, she’s sure of it. He had weaned himself off of them so fast (too fast) back after… She looks down at his left hand, or rather, down to where his left hand isn’t.
“Protocol,” the nurse answers with a shrug, and Daisy takes another step towards Coulson, is surprised when he reaches across his body and takes her hand in his right.
“Daisy,” he repeats her name, almost sing-songing it, “Daisy Daisy Daisy,” and the nurse sort of backs out of the room.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better,” he answers, smiles at her with this smile that’s almost too open, and she’s never consciously thought of him has guarded until she sees him like this, wide eyes and a grin. “Daisy.”
“You’re saying my name a lot, Coulson.”
“Hmm,” he agrees. “I like it.” He closes his eyes, licks his lips before he says it again, like it’s something sensual. “Daisy. It’s beautiful,” his eyes pop open, fixed on her, “like you.”
She can feel her cheeks get hot.
“Um, thanks?”
“You’re... so beautiful. Like...a flower.”
She wants to laugh, but it’s not a joke at all. He just looks so earnest, and that’s actually harder to deal with, so she focuses on the thought that if sober Coulson could see himself right now, he’d probably die of embarrassment.
She’s going to pull away, leave him alone to avoid adding to his embarrassment, but his fingers grip her hand tighter, his face suddenly serious.
“I’m sorry I didn’t like it at first.”
“You...didn’t?”
That’s not something she’s ever realized; it gives this weird new tinge to all of the memories of him tripping over her name, of the way he avoided calling her anything at all for a little while.
“No.” He shakes his head, a look of almost-stubbornness sweeping over his features. “No, I wanted Skye.”
He closes his eyes as he says it, and the way his lips curve into a soft smile is… Her stomach twists, and she slides her top lip through her teeth.
“I’m...I was the same person,” she reminds him, and he nods, eyes shut for another moment. When he blinks them open, they’re shockingly blue, still just a little distant, just a little not quite...normal.
“I know. But at first I thought Daisy was different. That Daisy might feel...different.” He looks so serious, still, like he’s just made a stirring point or expressed himself very well.
There are questions she wants to ask, about how he thinks she felt and how he worried she was different, but it feels like cheating to try to pull it out of him now. She’s not sure he’d be able to give coherent answers anyways.
His eyes drop from hers, down to where he’s holding her hand, and they both watch as his fingers play over hers, his thumb drawing little spiral patterns over her skin. It’s intimate in a way she’s pretty sure they aren’t, and in a way she suddenly wonders why they aren’t.
Again, though, it feels wrong to let it happen now.
“Okay Coulson.” She pulls her hand back, and he takes a moment to relinquish his grip with a frown. “You’re so high right now, and —”
“Stay?”
He looks so small and needy and un-Coulson, and she thinks that asking her to stay might be the most un-Coulson thing about all of it. He’s never asked her to stay, not once.
So she does. She stays, finds a chair and pulls it up to the side of the bed and just...stays. They’re quiet at first, and it feels safer — Coulson being quiet and not saying things he might regret — and then it starts to feel just as dangerous — Coulson with his bright blue eyes, almost staring at her, into her. It’s like she can hear him thinking, can hear that there’s a lot going on in his head.
“Daisy,” he calls her name when she looks away, so their eyes lock again, and she suddenly needs them to be talking. Something to take up the space between them. She definitely, definitely casts a net for a safer conversation topic, though.
“Are you...feeling okay?”
She’s annoyed with herself that she’s not better at this, at sitting at someone’s hospital bed, given how many times she’s done it, how many times she’s been on both sides of it.
“Yeah,” Coulson answers, and his smile is back, his loopy, open, not-quite-Coulson smile.
“I’m really sorry you got shot.” Daisy sighs and stretches her hand back out to touch him on his left shoulder, just below where the bullet had hit. She feels tentative, but also like maybe it’s okay, like he’s come through something terrible and this is allowed. The Watchdogs had used him to get to her, basically her worst nightmare, Coulson getting caught up in her fight, but he’s still here and maybe this is okay.
He’s warm under her fingertips, relaxed and easy, and her hand flattens onto his chest, over the hospital gown. He feels good, solid, and she takes a slow, deep breath, lets herself just feel him alive and here.
“I’m okay,” Coulson tells her, his voice softer and more serious than it has been since she walked into the room, and she can feel the words under her palm as he speaks them.
“I know,” Daisy tells him, forces herself to smile because she doesn’t like the thought of him worrying about her feelings, not when he’s in a hospital bed, not when he’s been shot.
She closes her eyes for a moment, lets herself feel his heartbeat, feel the vibrations of his very alive body, like it will maybe push out the memory of Coulson slumped in a chair. When she opens her eyes, he’s still looking at her, eyes wide and soft and blue.
“I knew you would come save me,” he informs her, something distressingly earnest in his eyes, and it makes her stomach hurt that he could be so sure of her when she’s not that sure of herself most days. “You’re a superhero.” He whispers the last, like it’s a secret.
It startles a laugh from somewhere in her stomach because she’s getting more used to the attention, to the label, but it’s weird to hear it from Coulson, said so reverently.
“Sure,” she agrees easily, like she’s playing along with a joke, and when she might pull back, he settles his right hand over hers, holding her hand against his chest.
“I have fantasies where you save me,” Coulson says, like this is an easy conversation and she guesses it is when you have no filter or shame, “but I’m conscious, and you kiss me.”
“I... kiss you?”
It feels weirdly not shocking, or at least less shocking than it should be. And she would swear that not that long ago she would have found it shocking, but it seems...normal. And actually, kind of nice. Kissing Coulson, she thinks as she slides her eyes down his face to linger over his softly smiling mouth, would probably be nice. He would be warm and soft and gentle, and actually probably a lot better than nice.
“Hmmm.” He smiles, eyes closed and face open, but then he suddenly looks like himself — guarded and nervous, eyes locked on hers. “I’m not supposed to tell you that,” he informs her, and it all strikes her as so sad all the sudden: Coulson having these thoughts that he’s not supposed to tell her, Coulson looking like himself when he’s guarded and unsure.
“It’s okay,” she offers because it honestly is. More than okay actually. She thinks that when he’s back to himself, she might possibly kiss him. She wonders if he would smile like this, like open and happy, if she kissed him when there was no morphine involved.
Coulson seems pacified by that, loses the worried look, so his eyebrows kind of unwrinkle and his mouth curves back into the not-quite-Coulson smile.
“They’re really good fantasies,” he tells her, and actually he looks more than a little smug as his eyes drift shut, his hand still clutching hers to his chest.
His eyes stay closed for a long time, his eyelashes almost fluttering against his face as he apparently fantasizes about her and him and kissing, and she looks at him for longer than she probably should. She looks at him and thinks. A lot.
She doesn’t know how long she sits and watches him, eyes tracing over the length of his nose and the smiling curve of his lips and the sharp line of his jaw. Coulson is handsome, which isn't a new thought, but it's like she's never quite processed it like this. Coulson is handsome, and she loves him more than she's ever loved anyone, and she'd kind of like to kiss him. She’s only startled from her contemplation when he moves, releases her hand and turns slightly on the hospital bed.
“Coulson?”
He doesn’t respond to the whisper, so Daisy gathers herself quietly and slips out of the medical room, back to her bunk.
The thoughts, though, stay with her.
“Hi,” she greets him quietly as she sticks her head into the medical room, not quite sure what to expect.
Coulson greets her with a tired smile, nothing like the exuberance of the night before.
“Less morphine today, huh?”
He almost visibly closes in on himself, and she wonders if she should leave him alone, makes a move back to the door.
Something in his face makes her think that he wants to her to stay, though, even though he doesn’t say it. But she’s not sure, is scared of making him uncomfortable, is really not sure how to behave after his admissions last night; so she sort of hangs there, one foot out the door, like some metaphor for her entire life.
“Daisy.” He says it restrained and serious in a way that’s so different from yesterday, nothing sing-song about it. It sounds like an apology, like regret, different from how he usually says it, actually. She’s never paid attention to it, the ways Coulson says her name, like there’s a whole story in each syllable.
It draws her into the room, towards his bed.
“You remember last night, huh?”
“Yes.” He nods, looks into space for a moment. “But for at least part of it, I think you were a flower —”
“You said that,” she blurts, eve though she doesn’t mean to. “That I was…”
She can’t say the words, can’t make her tongue wrap around the concept of Coulson saying she’s beautiful.
“Oh.” It’s a breath and a shape of his mouth more than a sound, and he curls in on himself a little more, his cheeks pink with embarrassment.
And last night, she had had thoughts. She had wondered about bringing things up when he was sober, about how he might smile if she kissed him, but his pink cheeks and embarrassed smile won’t let her push it.
As she’s talking herself into backing away from this topic, though, Coulson seems to have made the opposite decision, like he’s psyched himself up to address something he’d rather forget.
“I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t.” She says it mostly as a reflex, because of course that’s what she should say, but it’s also true. He didn’t make her uncomfortable, not at all, and she can’t bear the idea that he’d beat himself up about telling her something good. Something nice.
Coulson raises his eyebrows at her, at the way she’s hanging in the middle of the room, at the way she’s not coming closer.
“Honestly, Coulson, you didn’t. But you look so embarrassed and I —”
He turns pinker even though she swears that should be impossible, and he’s just...so extremely pink.
“I don’t want you to think that I…” He licks his lips, mouth hanging slightly open as he searches for words that don’t seem to be coming.
“It’s okay,” she starts to say, but is cut off by another nurse gliding into the room. This one looks a lot less annoyed to be tending to Coulson, if the way she sets a hand on his arm is any indication.
“Ready to get out of here?”
“So ready,” Coulson agrees, and it’s like he becomes somebody else before her eyes — less pink and a lot more self-assured, it’s like he actually gets bigger in the hospital bed.
“I’ll catch you later,” Daisy offers, and backs out of the room. Probably it’s better that whatever conversation they might have happens when he’s back on his feet anyways.
It takes her three days to understand that he’s avoiding her.
It all seems normal at first, that she doesn’t see him alone at all. After all, he just got shot, so of course he’s locked up in his room resting. And when he comes out, of course it makes sense that Mack is hanging close to him.
But, well, she wants to talk to him, to kiss him, to see him smile again, and the more time passes, the more she starts to second-guess the whole idea that Coulson even wants her to kiss him in the first place.
And then on the third day, she walks into the common space to find him alone, and he freezes like a deer in headlights.
“Hi,” Daisy says, practically a question, and she can see Coulson forcing himself to smile.
“Hi. I was just going —”
“You’re avoiding me.” It’s more pointed, more angry, more confrontational than she meant it to be, and her eyes widen. “Shit, I’m sorry Coulson. You can —”
“Daisy,” he cuts her off, eyebrows furrowed as he steps forward, like he’s abandoned all his plans to avoid her. “I thought maybe...you’d prefer it if we avoided it.”
“Just...let everything go back to normal.”
Even she can hear her disappointment with that statement.
“Normal’s not so bad,” he offers with an almost-cringey smile.
She nods because he’s right, because she’d take things being normal with Coulson over the avoidance, over pretty much anything else.
“Yeah,” she acknowledges, tries to cover the edge of disappointment.
“That’s good.”
She’d swear that Coulson sounds disappointed, too, disappointed underneath the relief, but she focuses on him being relieved, focuses on things being normal, and on the way that normal really isn’t bad. Not bad at all.
“Does that mean you’re gonna stop avoiding me?”
He looks sheepish again, and she’s fucking up by even mentioning it at all — definitely stopping things from returning to normal — but it’s hard, after days of squeezing her courage into a ball, of thinking about his mouth and his body solid and warm under her hands.
As she looks at him, watches him frown and try to process and compartmentalize everything, she remembers him smiling, remembers wondering whether he’d smile like that if she kissed him.
That’s what gives her the courage — not thinking about what she wants, but rather thinking about what might make him smile like that again.
“Are you going to keep having fantasies where I kiss you?”
His mouth falls open, and she can see the fight or flight response playing out over his face, settling back into a blush and that sheepish, guarded smile.
“How much did I…?”
“Nothing, really. You said I save you, and then...” She can’t say it again, like it took every ounce of the courage she’s screwed up to say it the first time.
“It’s not...bad.”
“I never thought it was bad.”
“It’s just, it’s not like I only think of you like…”
She can almost hear him swallow, in tandem with the bob of his adam's apple.
“You don’t think about me sexually,” she fills in for him, and it’s weirdly disappointing to put those words together, given that she’s just barely wrapped her head around it, around the idea that it could be a good thing, around the idea that she wants it. It’s also embarrassing that Coulson can probably hear the disappointment.
She can see him almost brace himself.
“I don’t only think about you sexually,” he corrects her.
“Oh.” The sound rushes out of her on a surprised breath because actually, his way sounds much, much better.
He’s not looking at her, is looking very intently down to where he’s squeezing his left index finger with his right hand, so he definitely doesn’t see the way she suddenly can’t stop smiling; her cheeks are hot and her stomach twists as she moves towards him without consciously deciding to.
Coulson doesn’t look up at her until she’s right in front of him, until she rests her hand on his chest where she’d touched him before, just below the bullet wound. She can feel his breath stop in his chest as he slowly turns his eyes up to meet hers.
“How do you think about me, Coulson?”
His lips part slightly as his eyes scan over her face, and she can’t tell whether he’s struggling to find words or to hold them back.
Instead of waiting for him to settle on words, Daisy leans forward and presses her mouth to his, catching the fullness of his lower lip between hers. For a moment, all she can feel is her heart beating too hard, is Coulson too unnaturally still, and then he exhales a moan against her lips and begins to actually kiss her back.
The awkwardness and fear evaporates, and Daisy kisses him harder as her right hand fists in his shirt, barely remembering to be careful of the fresh wound on his shoulder. Everything around them fades, so that all she notices is Coulson’s mouth — just as good as she’d imagined it could be — and the shivers tingling down her spine, and his right hand sliding up her left arm to gently curve around her elbow.
When she leans back enough to catch a breath, Coulson chases after her, needy lips and a quiet noise as he sucks in air, his left hand clenching and relaxing at his side, like he’s holding himself back.
“Daisy,” he breathes her name between them, his eyes still shut but his face open like it was the other night.
“Was that as good as your fantasies?”
His eyes pop open, shockingly blue, and there’s a guarded moment as he takes her in, and then his whole face melts into a smile.
“Much better.”
It makes her laugh, not because it’s funny but because she’s happy.
“You said the fantasies are really good.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, a little breathless laughter behind the word, like he’s just as happy as she is. “Reality is better.”
She laughs and kisses him again, smiling lips meeting smiling lips as his left hand lands softly on her hip and his right hand slides further up her arm, curves around her shoulder to cup her shoulder blade.
Maybe, though, she’ll get him to tell her more about the really good fantasies later.