Resurgam
"Coulson, I don't wanna rush you," Daisy leaned around the corner and let loose another blast; the concussive force shook the walls and plaster rained down from the ceiling, "but we could really use that extraction!"
A drumline rattle of bullets drowned his first attempted response. The damned frequency jammer their intel hadn't foreseen at the HYDRA base scrambled most of his second.
"Heavy—jump—so—ang on."
"What the hell do you think they mean by that?" Lincoln shouted. He was pressed against her side, shaking and pale. Even through her flak jacket, she could feel the slow pulse of blood dripping from beneath the tourniquet he'd hastily applied.
Daisy spared him a glance, swallowing hard. She wasn't a doctor, but even she could tell that the purple shadows spreading underneath his eyes weren't a good sign. And if the Hunger Games had taught her anything, it was that tourniquets were a dubious good at best.
She turned and fired once more, narrowly missing getting perforated herself. Time to abort.
"Damn it," her hands were shaking as they hadn't in months, "If they can't come for us, we're getting out of here right now. Blow the power."
"Are you kidding?" he shot back, "We went through all this to hack the mainframe, not put it offline!"
"You're gonna bleed out before we get there," she replied. The vibrations of the HYDRA goons were growing ever nearer, a rumble of terror that—with all May's instruction and training—Daisy was having a hard time keeping from shaking through her heart. "Blow it. I'll take the consequences."
Lincoln concentrated, face ghastly under the industrial lights. Blue-white forks of electricity snaked from his fingers and darted up the walls. After a blinding flash of sparks, there was darkness through the hallways. Darkness shot through with the frantic yells of men sensing their prey on the run.
"Come on," she whispered, grasping for Lincoln's slowing pulse unerringly in the dark, "this way."
She'd memorized the blueprints of the compound long before being picked for the op; now she navigated those memories with the information her feet fed her. No need for night vision goggles when you had built in sonar.
"Squad coming," they drew into an alcove and waited.
The hesitant footsteps of soldiers approached, passed, and then—
"Daisy, extraction incoming, do you read?"
"Shit!" she slapped her radio, but it was too late. The squawk of Coulson's voice was unmistakable in the hushed silence of the facility.
"Feel the walls," she ordered Lincoln, "two right, one left, and straight; there's a doorway at the end of the hall that goes straight to the roof."
"Daisy—"
"Go!" she yelled, stepping into the hallway and letting loose with her powers. No need to hold back now; if she brought the roof down, at least Lincoln would get away. Already she felt him retreating, following the path she'd laid out.
Daisy didn't pray; she didn't believe in God, any God. But she did hope that if karma—or some kind of cosmic balance—was listening, that it would let Lincoln get away. It was all her fault he was there in the first place.
She was still hoping for that when they took her down.
()()()
Slogging back to consciousness was like dragging her heavy, unwilling body through a swamp. When she finally surfaced from the muck, she half-wished she could just go to sleep again, whatever happened.
"Great," she muttered, "I'm hallucinating now too."
"Why don't you trust what you see?"
"Because you can't be here," she replied. The world around sharpened at the edges, but the illusion of Grant Ward sitting in front of her, leaning forward on his knees with that damned cocky smile she knew so well, did not fade away. If anything—
Daisy swallowed. "You're not real," it was a challenge, a flung gauntlet, "and why the hell would HYDRA play this kind of mind game with me? It's not like I wouldn't know that Grant Ward is d-dead."
God damn it. She'd never actually said the words out loud before. There was a sharp pain just behind her breastbone that had nothing to do with the bullets pancaked into her vest.
Alone on an alien world, underneath the cold, robotic grip of Coulson's vengeance, Grant Ward had died. Daisy could see it just as if—at the moment his sternum had cracked and his last rush of breath had been squandered in the empty air—she'd been kneeling right beside him.
Sometimes she wished she had been. It didn't seem right that Ward, even after everything, had died without the comfort of someone who had—
"And Coulson's never lied to you before, has he?" was his only reply.
There was something very, very wrong here. Now that the world had stopped spinning and Daisy could see him clearly, she could tell some of the details were off. Ward's face was almost skeletal, the strong lines of cheek and browbones prominent in his oddly thin face. The attitude of his body was the same, but he lounged without any appearance of ease.
Whoever this person was, he was only aping the man whose skin he wore.
This was not Grant Ward.
"What are you?" she whispered. Her heartbeat shivered along her skin, sinking into the cold steel of the chair she was cuffed to. If she concentrated on it hard enough, it would amplify to twist the very foundations of the building.
"Clever girl, aren't you?" it smiled. "Wouldn't it be easier to pretend I was him?"
"No, it wouldn't." Don't fight the fear, she reminded herself. Channel it. "So why don't you tell me?"
"Well, there's a problem, Skye," she jumped as though he'd struck her, "If I told you, then I'd have to kill you. And I don't think either of us want that."
"You're that thing," she said, trying for anger, trying for hate, trying for any emotion that would drive the quiver out of her voice, "That thing HYDRA was trying to bring back."
"Got it in one," he answered, leaning back. "So what will you do with that information? Blow my cover on Twitter? Crowdsource a solution with the Rising Tide? What is it you do with SHIELD now, anyway?"
The inflection, the sneer...it was all Grant. Grant as he'd been post-HYDRA-revelation, anyway. But he wasn't Grant. How was this possible?
She had to keep her focus. "Why don't you want to kill me?"
A pause. Then, not-Grant dragged his chair forward until they sat, knees brushing.
There was something wrong with his eyes. The pupils were blown wide and the iris seemed to be melting, bleeding brown unevenly into the whites. From a distance, it was hardly noticeable. Up close...
Daisy's stomach turned and she choked down bile. Satisfying as it would be to lose her lunch all over his combat boots, it probably wouldn't help her escape. She forced herself to be still as one of his hands reached out and plucked at the hairs fallen lose from her tight braid.
"You cut it," he said, wistful, "It's more practical short, of course, but it was such a part of you."
"What the hell are you talking about?" fear was curdling into anger and she jerked away from his idle fingers. "Don't touch me!"
His hands lifted, open wide. She knew that gesture, damn it. "Relax. I'm not gonna hurt you."
"Why not?" she ground out.
"Because Grant Ward loved you."
It hurt. It hurt so much, to hear those words from Grant's mouth and to know that it wasn't Grant saying them. The tangled knot of emotion in Daisy's gut was so tightly wound that it nearly bent her in two. Shame, fury, heartbreak, longing...all of it directed at him and her, both. She had never had him—had she ever wanted to?—but he was gone, and it hurt, damn it, it hurt.
"Does that surprise you?"
"No," she breathed through the pain, "What does it matter to you? You're not him."
"I'm not," he agreed easily. "Yet I have all his memories. And his memories of you, well," he leered, "they were some of his brightest. Would you be surprised to know he thought of you, as he died? You and that woman, Kara. The two loves of his life. Both such...disappointments."
"Stop it!"
He did. For a moment. Then, as though talking to himself, "I have the memories of hundreds of mortal men, spread across the centuries. Every one of them had loved someone, once. But I've never been able to experience someone's love firsthand, so to speak. It would be a shame to throw away such a unique opportunity."
Grant's eyes, so familiar once, now scanned her from head to toe with a stranger's gaze.
"I look forward to the experience."
She shuddered and he grinned, a skeleton's gape in the hard white light.
Control the fear. Make it work for you.
"If you've got Grant's memories, then you know how well kidnapping me usually works out for him," she reached for a smile of her own, catching a crescent sliver of it. "Save yourself a lot of embarrassment to let me go right now."
He huffed a rueful chuckle. "I hope this face doesn't make you forget the truth of what I am."
"And I hope you don't forget that I could rip you apart right here and now," she waggled her fingers; it was enough to shimmy the flimsy drywall.
"You could rip this body apart," he corrected her. "And when you did, what's inside...well. Easier to show you."
Images swelled, swamped, flooded. Memories—his, hers, any of those nameless men before—of blood, of death, of torture and pain and madness...and more than all of this...
Second foster home, five years old—an older sister, face twisted in rage, her hand raised to slap: you little brat! Cocktease bitch: a hand between her breasts, hard enough to bruise bone; another fumbling between her legs and her throat too dry to scream. Just shut your mouth: a fist across her face from a foster father and a loose tooth to explain to the dentist.
Running, solitude, friends who smiled on one side of their face and gnashed bloody teeth on the other. The fear of homelessness and the shame of showering at a sink in McDonald's, the hunger of three days without food and the final humiliation of standing streetside with a rattling cup in one shaking hand.
Everything, everything, everything. A torrent of filth and rot building like a geyser inside and overflowing through her throat until she choked on the bitter rising madness.
When it stopped at last, her head was throbbing and her lips were raw, bitten nearly through. Her face was swollen and damp, tears still leaking down her cheeks every time she blinked.
"I'd rather not have to do that again, Skye," Grant—it—sounded almost gentle, "But I will if I have to."
She nodded. "Don't," she rasped, pleading. Her shoulders heaved and she could not meet his eyes.
There was silence again between them, a silence only broken by Daisy's desperate attempts to rebuild her shattered self.
At last she looked up.
It had not moved. They still sat, knee-to-knee, so close she could feel his chill breath on her flushed face. His fathomless eyes studied hers, tracing the aimless salt-tracks of her tears.
She was too tired to flinch when he leaned forward and uncuffed her. And despite wanting to, she could not push him away when he put one strong arm beneath her shoulders and pulled her upright.
"You're letting me go?"
"Wouldn't be fair to keep you," he replied. "It's not what Grant would have done. He always wanted you to find your way to him on his own. You know that. Don't you, Skye?"
"It's not Skye anymore," for some reason it seemed an important point to make, "It's Daisy."
"Daisy?" he looked puzzled, "Oh, the father. You must have reconciled, in the end. For your sake, I'm glad," his arm tightened around her shoulders as her exhausted legs buckled, "but you'll always be Skye to me."
()()()
This story was inspired heavily by Overdressedtokill's story: goodnight, travel well. Read it on Ao3 and leave lots of comments; it's amazing work!