Hallowed Be Thy Name
A/N: Welp, I started watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I'm hooked. Here's my first short attempt at playing with these characters, just flexing the muscles. I really love the relationship between Skye/Daisy and Coulson, so here's a post-ep for 3x01. Let me know what you think! Feedback will be met with puppies and rainbows.
Flex. Flex. Flex. Fist.
Stop thinking about it.
Flex. Flex. Flex. Fist.
Coulson's eyes went to the fire-axe on the wall, and wow, how could a hand hurt that badly when it wasn't even really there?
Phantom pain, Dr. Garner called it. He said it almost always passes.
Eventually.
Flex. Flex. Flex. Fist.
Coulson jumped when a knock came at his door. He checked his watch. It was well past 1am. The only person who tended to visit him that late was May, on nights that sleep escaped her. May was gone, though, so that ruled her out. But she would come back, right?
Eventually.
"Come in!" he called, trying to still his compulsively fidgeting fake hand.
The door opened, and in poked Skye's head. Daisy's head. Damn, why was that so hard to get used to?
"You busy, AC?"
"You haven't called me that in awhile," he observed, a small smile playing on his lips. "I'm climbing the walls. Nothing new."
"At least you're not writing on them."
"Ha-ha."
"So can I come in?"
He gestured for her to enter. "Door's always open."
"Not always," Skye (Daisy, shit) said, stepping into his office and closing the door behind her, "Phil Coulson's door, yeah, but Director Coulson? Not so much."
"I'm glad you're so accepting of my apparently split personalities."
She chuckled. "Each one is more charming than the last."
Coulson smiled warmly at her. "What's up, Skye?"
She returned the smile, but corrected him with a gentle, "Daisy."
"Daisy. Sorry." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Am I really the only one having trouble with that?"
"It took Fitz a few weeks," she conceded. "But he's been..."
"Distracted," Coulson offered solemnly.
"Distracted," she nodded. "Everyone else just kinda rolled with it. Mack screwed up a couple times, but once I started threatening to call him Alphonso, he shaped up real quick."
"Seems a good deterrent."
Coulson didn't known why he'd struggled so much with Skye's new name—it had been six months, it should have been second nature by now.
Maybe you just can't stand to call her by the name that Cal gave her, whispered a small, bitter voice in the back of his head. The name that her real father gave to her.
Cal had been a hero in the end, and Coulson was more than happy to provide him with a mind-wipe and a new life. How much he meant to Sk—Daisy was enough to convince him to do that, ignoring the fact that Cal was a good man before Jiaying and his daughter were taken from him, and when it came down to it, he had found that man within himself again when it counted, forced down the evil inside of him and reanimated who he had been before he'd changed for the worse.
But that didn't alter the fact that the good doctor had spent the better part of the past thirty years as a monster. A monster that had turned his daughter's life upside down. Daisy Johnson was the name he gave her, his only legacy that really mattered. But Skye? Skye was the name that she'd chosen for herself.
The name that a child chose for herself.
He gazed at Daisy (got it right that time!) as she seated herself on his desk next to him. She swung her legs idly, a few heartbeats passing before her eyes met his.
"Maybe I just don't want you to grow up," Coulson said quietly. "It's my bad. Holding onto the past."
"Funny, that's what was keeping me up," she admitted, arching an eyebrow at him. "You know, I wasn't a kid when you pulled me into S.H.I.E.L.D. — I was a full grown adult."
He just shot her a knowing look.
"Okay, okay. Maybe an adult in name only," Daisy replied, raising her hands. "I'm at least less annoying than I used to be, right? That's got to be a definite improvement."
"You were never annoying. Just enthusiastic. Before..." he drifted off.
Flex. Flex. Flex. Fist.
"Before Ward. TAHITI. Hydra. The city...Afterlife."
"Before everything."
Daisy averted her eyes. "Do you ever miss it?" she asked, after a few moments of silence.
"Hmm?"
"How it was back then. You, me, May, Fitz, Simmons...Ward," she still said his name like a curse. "You know. When things made more since. When they were easy."
Coulson just shook his head. "Being in S.H.I.E.L.D. has never been easy."
"I mean comparatively."
His mind drifted back to 2013.
Skye, their bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, possibly-a-spy fresh-off-Rising-Tide hacking consultant. Shocked by the situation she'd found herself in but eager to learn and participate. To dig up the truths about her past and insist on transparency in a world of clandestine half-truths and outright lies, with the only veracity hidden behind thick black bars on Level Eight and above documents.
May, still cut open from Bahrain, flinching at that damnable nickname—the Cavalry—and barely speaking a word to anyone on the team, save him. But at least then, she'd been at his side. And maybe that was selfish, but he would always take a present May fighting beside him over an absent one halfway across the world.
FitzSimmons, back when there was never a breath between their names, when they spoke and thought as one entity, both in a rush of chaotic excitement that only the two of them truly understood. One thriving, in-sync organism that was not even close to ready to handle field work, let alone their entire organization collapsing in on itself in an implosion of subterfuge and sabotage. Or taking a ten thousand foot plummet to the bottom of the sea.
Fitz had pieces of him taken that would never grow back, and he and Simmons had never been the same. And now, he slaved in the lab, skipping meals, evading sleep, keeping conversations with the rest of them to short, one word responses, unless it was to press Coulson further and further for more liberties, more equipment, more "sabbaticals" to investigate even the thinnest leads. All in the hopes of finding Jemma. His other half.
Fitz was shattered. Just like their original team, and he hated it. Because the only one of them that deserved to be shattered like that was Ward, and he was still alive. Alive and well, taking the reigns in Hydra, and stronger than ever.
It all seemed so long ago, that strange, golden, glowing time after Fury had raised him like Lazarus from a grave he should have stayed in. When he'd had the team, the Bus, and faux-memories of R&R in Tahiti. He'd been a shell, then. But a happy shell. Almost.
"I miss it," he admitted. "I think back and it's like looking through someone else's eyes. It's..."
"Surreal?" Daisy offered.
"Exactly."
"A taste of normalcy before it all went to Hell." Daisy wore a sardonic smile, and he couldn't help but recall when her smiles weren't so strained.
Flex. Flex. Flex. Fist.
There's no point in bringing up the past. We have to live in the present. The one-handed, May-less, Simmons-less present.
"But the here and now isn't so bad," Coulson managed, trying to pull himself back into the moment, the inescapable reality of now. "Right...Daisy?"
"So you can teach an old dog new tricks," she laughed.
"Hey, watch who you're calling old—I can still kick your ass," Coulson bristled.
She gave him one of those smiles he'd been thinking about. Genuine. Warm.
"A new name, and a new era for S.H.I.E.L.D.," she said. "The past is nice, sure. But let's outdo ourselves."
"Build up S.H.I.E.L.D. better and stronger than before," Coulson responded, a sort of lightness in his chest forming thanks to her optimism.
Daisy nodded animatedly. "We're making a future here, Coulson. For ourselves, and the world. S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to go legitimate again, and Hydra? They're not going to know what's hit them."
Maybe she still had some of that old Skye enthusiasm left.
His hand had stopped twitching.
Coulson rose from his desk chair. He went to his liquor cabinet and picked out a decent scotch, a twelve year old bottle of Chivas Regal. He poured out two fingers each into two tumblers. He brought one to Daisy, and she graciously accepted it.
He raised his glass. "To the future."
Daisy grinned. "To the future."