A/N: Hey. I've written another pointless oneshot, because why not? This focuses a lot on Skye/Daisy and her thoughts and emotions about her two names, and also May and Bahrain, because I think they should have put in a discussion scene between the two of them.
Anyway, this is set after the Season 2 finale. I'm British and they haven't even decided an air date yet for Season 3, which is ridiculous, but I know most of the spoilers anyway thanks to Instagram and my obsession with FanFiction. I wrote the start of this quite early on, though, so if things don't add up, that's why.
If you review I will love you forever :)
Their world is destroyed.
It is shattered, crumbled, in splinters, and there's nothing left to rebuild it with because they've crushed it. They've crushed their own world, changed it until it's unrecognisable, and then burnt it to the ground until all they can do is sift through the ashes.
Those ashes are memories, and sometimes on bad days Daisy likes to go and kneel beside them and run them through her fingers like water, because gone are the days where she used to be innocent and unable to fight or kill, gone are the days where she was Skye.
She changed herself after her father. She changed her name and cut her hair and did everything she could to make herself a new person.
Maybe she wanted to be the daughter her parents wanted.
Maybe she just wanted to be a daughter: not the orphan, not the damaged child. Maybe she wanted to be Daisy Johnson, because Daisy Johnson could be whoever she wanted herself to be.
But today is not a day for contemplation of the present; today is a day for consideration of the past.
It is August ninth, and it used to be her birthday. She can remember this day well - for so many years she crept down to quiet, tucked away places with a cupcake or small pastry, and stuck her little candle in it, and with forgotten matches or a lighter lit it up for just a few seconds. Then she would blow it out and eat the cake and go and pretend she was OK.
This is the day she was brought to her first orphanage.
This is not her birthday.
Her birthday is July second, 1988. All through her life she's wondered, and now she knows, it seems so anticlimactic, so disappointing to her somehow...
And she lost a year of her life. She's twenty-six.
She doesn't know how long she's been sat there, staring at the small, flickering flame of her candle, when May walks in. A flicker of surprise passes over the agent's face but she says nothing, just comes and sits beside her.
"Skye," she says, by way of greeting, and a moment later corrects herself, "Daisy."
"Skye's OK," Daisy finds herself saying. She doesn't know why, when she's already told them all to call her by the name given to her at birth. May gives her a flash of what could be a smile.
"You've been different," May says.
"My mother was an evil physchopath who my dad - another psycho - killed. Then I arranged for my dad to be put through the TAHITI protocol. He doesn't even know who I am any more," she replies monotonously.
"I mean you're different around me. You see me differently. You found something about me?"
"I thought you might ... you know. I changed. I fought you. I could have killed you. I -"
"It's not that.
Daisy is silent for a long while. She's hesitant, but May deserves to know, and she wants to get it off her chest. The words blurt out of her mouth before she can stop them. "I know what happened in Bahrain."
As a child (and occasionally as an adult too) she's fantasised about when her birthday could be. Christmas Day - and this was the nuns - like baby Jesus. May Day, the day of springtime, or July fourth - American Indepence day.
She's watched all the other children at the orphanage have their parties, eat cake and receive presents.
She's changed her mind about it again and again.
She's wished again and again.
Be careful what you wish for.
It's hard not to wish when you have nothing.
May is thinking, she can see, thinking, thinking, thinking... Her face is set in stone, her eyes dark and stormy. Daisy looks at her and wonders if she made the right decision. "How?" May says at last.
"When I was at the Afterlife, my mo - Jiaying - told me a story about an inhuman who went rogue," she whispers. "And how she stole Terragen Crystals and used them on herself and then her daughter."
"Her daughter ..." May murmurs, more emotion passing across her face than Daisy's ever seen before.
"Her name was -" she starts, then stops herself. Nobody wants to hear this. "When she Changed, the power was too much for her ... it drove her insane ... she was driven mad with all the power. If she - if she hadn't have been killed - "
They were both silent.
"It wasn't your fault."
May stands up, then sits back down again. For once, she doesn't seem to know what to say.
"She was probably in pain. It was better that -"
"Skye."
She shuts her mouth again. It's strange, after all she's been through, that she still babbles, still has all her old habits, all her old ways of doing things that she tries but fails to hide...
"I -"
"Skye, please."
She stands up and starts to leave. "It's Daisy," she spits, furious for no apparent reason, upset with May, with the world. At the last moment she remembers the cake.
May sits there for a long time, thinking, letting the emotions inside her run wild.
Skye knows.
Or Daisy knows, at least. Are they the same person? She's not sure any more.
When Skye joined the team, she was young and beautiful and so innocent, despite all that she'd been through, and then she was shot, and that changed her. And then Hydra took over the first family she'd ever had, and that changed her. And then the man she loved betrayed her in a way so horrible that she became something of a new person.
As May began to train her, she changed even more. She became a hardened agent. She barely noticed that she'd killed people.
May rocks back on her heels. Memories flash past.
When Skye came onto the bus for the first time, a bag over her head, struggling but still full of bubbly, sarcastic remarks.
When she ran down stairs into a basement to see Coulson holding a bloody body.
When Skye and Coulson pointed guns at her and thought she was Hydra.
A girl. I need to feel your pain ...
She clenches her fists and forces the memory away, out of her mind, and turns her thoughts back to Daisy.
The only thing she can think is this: Skye isn't a child any more.
Gone is the childhood name she created for herself.
She's Daisy now, and she's changed.
When Daisy has been sat in her bunk for about half an hour, May comes in. The candle is still burning.
"What was her name?" May asks her softly.
"Katya." The name is strange and foreign on her tongue. May flinches slightly.
"Why was she like that?"
"Her mother, Eva. She was an Inhuman, but she turned against them and stole Terragen crystals for herself. Then she Changed her daughter too ... Katya was too young. The power drove her insane," she whispers. "And who knows what she might have done if you hadn't ... "
May closes the door as voices become audible it sounds like Fitz and Mack, arguing.
"Skye ... would you have done the same thing?"
Daisy looks up at her, wide-eyed, but suddenly the agent is as expressionless as ever.
She considers.
"If it happened now? Or then?"
"Now," says May.
"I don't know," Daisy mutters. "Yeah, I think I probably would."
And neither of them know if she's lying.
She turns the light off so that she can see her precious candle, the candle that's lasted her since she was eight, burn until it's useless.
She's counting.
Eighty-nine.
Ninety.
Ninety-one.
Ninety-two.
Ninety-three.
Two scientists are having a conversation outside her door.
"But you can't just add hydrochloric acid!"
"Why not? If it's dilute enough, a reaction either will or won't happen, and ... "
They sound like FitzSimmons when she first met them, she thinks drily.
Ninety-eight.
Ninety-nine.
One hundred.
Daisy places the cake on the table.
Skye blows out the candle.