As I said in the update on my profile page, I'm taking a small hiatus from Locked in Space to wait for my muses to return, which I'm hoping they will when I get this and one other fanfic out of my head. As soon as I wrote in my profile that I probably wouldn't be posting this story, Dua Lipa's No Goodbyes came up on Spotify, and since the song has the same tone as this story, I found the inspiration to keep writing. The title is from the song but, while it kind of works as a soundtrack, this isn't a songfic.

The second we found out how Coulson got sick, all I could think of whenever I tried to write was how Daisy would react when she saw Robbie next—did he know? Even more than whether or not he knew it would kill Coulson before he let it possess him (deals with the devil generally come before the possession, no?), the question of whether he knew while he was helping her on the plane is what really drives me nuts. As much chemistry as they had, that was the only time they got anywhere near flirting. Anyway, I needed to work out my frustration, so this is the story about that.

Started after Principia, tried to edit in some of the info from later episodes, but mostly based on stuff we knew at that point.

4/19/18

Prologue

Daisy sat at the control panel in the lighthouse, looking blankly at the screens as she tapped an anxious rhythm on the tabletop.

They had less than a week left.

How could they still not know whether breaking the loop was even possible? After months of searching for answers, the team had discovered that Hale's Confederacy cronies had put a gravitonium-infused bomb deep down in one of the ancient, underground Kree temples. The tunnels were guarded 24/7 by a legion of alien confederates, almost entirely made up of species they had never seen before. With so many unknown and possibly powered factors in play, with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s depleted numbers, the only time they could strike was right before the blast, when the alien confederacy had evacuated.

They knew Daisy could compress the gravitonium out of the explosive device into a container to carry it out, and that she had the best chance of escaping before the bomb went off. But knowing the probability of success–or even survival–was incredibly low, Daisy had refused the team's pleas that she not go in alone. There wasn't much of a chance that she would get even the gravitonium out in time and she wasn't about to let someone else sacrifice themselves.

After months of knowing she was never seen again after that video of her heading to the epicenter, Daisy was okay with dying; prepared for it even. But the fact that she would still be recorded heading to the epicenter alone weighed on her. She would have no way of knowing if they had stopped the destruction and broken the loop—or if they were even able to—if she died down there. There were only two things that would let them know for sure: what happened on that tape, and whether or not the Earth exploded. Nothing else had come with a timeframe attached. In an ideal world, the two events would take place more than a few hours apart, but the way things stood, their only chance to prove beforehand that she was even capable of stopping the second event was if something drastically different happened on that tape.

They had tried to talk her out of going in alone—Coulson and Yo-Yo in particular—but there was no way around it: Daisy was the only one who could deal with the gravitonium. Each member of the team had offered to come with—hell, Coulson offered to go just so Daisy wouldn't be alone if things went bad—but beyond just the Kree's mind-controlly security precautions, another person would likely slow her down, Coulson in particular. He was deteriorating faster than any of them had expected.

Yo-Yo was the only one even capable of helping get the gravitonium to the surface, but she was only just learning to use her new arms. Besides, even if she ran the container of gravitonium to the entrance to be lifted out, she would snap back to where she started and be in as much danger from the non-gravity-but-still-super-explosive bomb as Daisy.

She snapped out of her thoughts as Mack sat beside her at the table, no doubt to try again to convince Daisy to take someone with, or to the entrance of the Kree city at the very least. Daisy cut him off before he could start. "It's useless; you know that," she said calmly, sipping on her whiskey and ginger. Simmons would probably make some comment about self-medicating, but Daisy wasn't really in a mood to care. It was the first calm night since they'd gotten back, and she'd needed a drink since the moment she saw the Earth in pieces. "I can quake the gravitonium up the shaft; I won't need help to lift it out. And I can get myself out the same way. There's no need for anyone else to be near the epicenter of the end of the world."

Mack looked at her in frustration. "You know damn well that those tunnels could be crawling with LMDs even after they evacuate the people."

"And you know damn well I can fight them. Besides, who would I take with me? You? In a hurry to get possessed again?"

"You know I'm not, but if it's a choice between that and you going in alone—"

"You're not gonna be helpful as a rage monster, Mack." Daisy sighed, leaning her head in her hand, "And we still don't understand what made that happen to you and not the others, just that alien tech can react badly with human biology."

Mack looked like he was going to argue, but a noise from the entryway made them both jump. Yo-Yo leaned against a wall, looking pensive. "So, what if we send in someone who isn't human?" They gaped at her.

"You can't be serious—"
"You're in no shape to—"

"Not me," Elena interrupted. "The man on fire."

Super short chapter to introduce the setting. I'm not sure how long it'll be, maybe just two or three more chapters, but I'm planning it as I go. I'm trying to do it a different way than Locked in Space which has like 27 pages of bullet points and half-written scenes that plan it out from beginning to end.

This season has been driving me crazy with what seems like foreshadowing Robbie's return only to have nothing happen. First, The Real Deal (am I the only one who got excited when fake-Mike exploded because it kinda looked like Robbie did it?), then The Devil Complex...

So, back to the Spotify thing: in trying to get my muses back, I made a Quakerider Spotify playlist (it's public if anyone likes fandom-based playlists), and one of the other songs (Red's Let It Burn) inspired a true QuakeRider songfic that I should be posting sometime soon. Thankfully, it won't be anywhere near the size of Locked in Space, and it's basically the story's polar opposite in terms of action, so it'll also be a good palate cleanser for my brain.