So, I was driving along earlier and Ed Sheeran came on the radio, and this image popped into my head, and... well, this is it. Skye finds her roots, and a little bit of closure.
Usual disclaimers, the characters aren't mine, just borrowing them, etc.
Enjoy.
She waves as he disappears behind the elevator doors. Flanked by two Tac agents who are armed to the teeth, and he just smiles wistfully, as if he only has an appointment to keep, and wasn't disappearing from her life forever. She tries to pretend, just for a moment. She tries to pretend that she hasn't just lost everything all over again.
She returns to a room she had abandoned only a handful of weeks before, and yet it feels like a million years, like everything should be moldy and covered in dust. She half-expects Gonzales's people to have sacked it, but it all remains as she left it. It lacks the personality her little cubby on the bus had, and yet that seems right. A very different girl called that cubicle home. A very different girl had walked into this room in this underground base and decided this would be where she slept and stored her stuff. And now a brand new girl walks in who is somehow a bit of both of them.
Someone has left a box on the bed. One of those cardboard bankers boxes, marked sharply in black ink on the ends with the name "Johnson, C", and she knows this is what remains of Dr. Calvin Johnson. She doesn't know who left it for her. It takes her a few minutes to work up the courage to open it, but she is disappointed at what she finds. A set of keys on a tarnished ring with a plastic tag attached to it that proclaims that Milwaukee is the best place to be; a striped necktie; a plastic hair comb; a leather bag that's been emptied and folded, with a tag explaining that its contents (a selection of scalpels and doctor's equipment) had been retained as evidence until further notice. It assures her the missing items will be returned if and when they are no longer evidence. She throws the bag in the trash because she knows where it's been and what it's seen, and she doesn't want to remember her father like that.
No one questions her when she takes her father's things and catches a ride with a departing team, nor does anyone bother asking where she's going or when she'll be back.
Her father's building is still in shambles. His office door is open, and she's half-expected it to be ransacked or occupied by squatters, but it remains as it was. She kicks shell casings away from the door and carefully locks it behind her. Her training as an agent won't let her do much of anything until she checks the whole building, gun drawn, but she is alone.
Somewhere along the way, Coulson had worked all the details out; the building belongs to her now, legally, and she has already agreed that she has no use for an office building in a bad neighborhood of Milwaukee. But before clean-up teams come to take away any memories of what had happened here and prepare it to be sold, she has come for a few memories of her own.
The medical kit he had so proudly shown her goes in the box, even though it still makes her uneasy; she even goes and searches the debris for the missing scalpel. The dancing Hawaiian doll too. There's a framed copy of his medical diploma on the wall that joins it. She finds an envelope of yellowing photos in a drawer, all obviously taken when he had been younger. They are full of strangers, but she thinks she sees flashes of her own features in them. She realizes with a start that she is looking at pictures of her grandmother when she sees an older woman with a warm smile wearing a brightly colored apron, showing off a pie to the camera. Another is of young Cal grinning madly as he tosses his cap into the air. She puts them in the box, though she thinks that maybe she'll track down the people in the background someday. Maybe he had been wrong and one of them is still alive and well, and still remembers that day. Maybe she'll find whatever family she might have left.
Or not. It doesn't really matter.
She just wishes she had one picture of her and her father, even though she knows none exist, and even if they did, they wouldn't be here. This place was Cal Johnson's tomb. Calvin Zabo had risen in his place, and Mr. Hyde wasn't her father. Still, she searches in vain for a little while longer. When she finally gives up, it is with a heavy sigh. She closes the lid on the box and leaves the building.
The picture eludes her, but she supposes a matched set of dancing Hawaiian dolls will have to do.
She is quiet for the next couple of days, though she must've said something to someone about wishing she had a picture of herself and her father, because one afternoon, when she returns to her room, she finds something lying on the bed.
She doesn't know who put it there, or who found it, or printed it out. She doesn't know if they know they just granted her impossible wish. But it is there. The picture she thought didn't exist. It's printed on heavy paper and it looks like someone had tried to touch it up, but nothing can hide the slight blur or the odd camera angles that tell her it had been taken from a traffic camera or a surveillance system.
She doesn't care, though, because when she picks it up, she is back in the moment and she sees it like she hadn't the first time: they walk down the street, melting ice cream sandwiches in their hands, and he nearly flings his into the face of an unsuspecting passer-by with his wild gestures and she giggles at him like the little girl she had been once, a long time ago. His face is alight with a grin that belongs to a man who had died twenty years ago, but for a moment, Cal is himself again, and despite her situation, despite her fear and uncertainty, she is having fun listening to his bad jokes and stories about his life there, and she is smiling a real smile, not a forced one, and she realizes that for an afternoon, Cal and Daisy Johnson had made a reappearance.
She sinks to the floor and for the first time since the cabin, she allows herself to break down into tears.
When she stops crying, she carefully puts the picture with the others in the box. She'll find a frame for it somewhere, and maybe then it will take a place of honor on her nightstand, with a matched set of dancing Hawaiian dolls.
She studies her box for a long moment, brushing her fingers over leather and paper, the metal coins of the charm her mother had given her; there was even a small shard of a broken Terrigen crystal she'd found after the attack on the carrier. She'd meant to give it to Fitz and Simmons for study, but somehow it had found it's way into a tiny bundle made of an old t-shirt instead, tucked away safely into her box of memories. Good and bad, she'd already decided firmly; she even retrieved Cal's medical bag from the trashcan.
It's a sad and sorry collection, but it's all that is left of a family ripped apart at the seams. No amount of tape or thread or glue could put them back together again, but now maybe Cal will get his second chance, and Jiayang can perhaps rest at long last. And their little girl can finally move forward.
Once, when she was sixteen, she walked past the jewelry counter at a fancy department store and saw a delicate silver locket. She daydreamed about putting pictures of a family in it one day, and when she told him this, a boy who'd thought he was in love stole it for her. It had been right before she'd run away the last time, and he'd told her, as he dangled it in front of her and explained how he'd gotten it, that if she really wanted it to be, the only limit was the sky itself. She'd long forgotten his name, but she remembers his advice, and it had been from that advice that she'd taken her new name.
Maybe that's why she still wears that stupid locket. And now she finally has a picture to put in it. She chooses the graduation photo because Cal looked so happy in it, and this is how she wants to remember her father, ecstatic and grinning like a fool. With no picture of Jiayang, apart from security footage from the carrier attack that brings back memories she'd rather forget, she ties the little coin charm to the lanyard she wears her badge on instead. It's supposed to be a good luck charm, after all; a symbol of protection. She likes to think that the Jiayang she never met, the one who was really her mother, would approve.
A week after that, she changes her name officially. It's nice, she decides, to have a real last name finally, even though she remains Skye. But there will always be a place for Daisy, even if only as a middle name; because the sky might be her limit, but now she has roots too.
Roots… and a cardboard box full of memories under her bed. She'd crossed out the crisp, sterile text that had identified it as the belongings of a SHIELD prisoner, and replaced it with her own messy scrawl.
Now it simply reads "the Johnsons". And maybe it isn't so sad and sorry after all.
And... that's it, that's the end. Reviews are nice if you feel like it.