She didn't believe it. Daisy stared, disbelieving what was taking place on the surveillance footage on the Zephyr's monitor. In a wave of energy, Robbie, Coulson and Fitz had just… vanished.
She glanced down at Gabe, who also didn't want to believe his brother was gone. Just as the director started to speak, she interrupted him.
"Whatever you're going to say, don't."
Everyone looked at her.
"I see the way you're all looking at that screen. We don't know what happened down there, so we can't assume anything." She told them. Her personal belief didn't let her think they were dead, Robbie and Coulson had both been dead before and it hadn't stopped them from coming back.
"Daisy…" Mack started.
Mace held up his hand. "It's okay. This is a process."
"Do us all a favour and shut the hell up pretty boy." She snapped at him. "I don't want to hear another word out of that silver-tongued mouth of yours."
"You're stomping on eggshells here Daisy, and your fire demon friend isn't here to protect you, so I'd ask that if you won't mind your language, you at least lower your tone. I don't like you speaking to anyone that way." May tried to threaten her.
"In case you're forgetting May, I can shatter your entire skeleton, so don't test me. Besides, this is S.H.I.E.L.D, the impossible is the everyday, the machine ghosted that Lucy woman, is it so far fetched to believe it could've turned them invisible or something? Maybe they're in one of those boxes? I can't believe you guys of all people are willing to write them off so easily. Call Simmons, or Radcliffe for all I care, figure those things out."
Daisy then took Gabe's wheelchair handles and pushed him out of the control room, back down to the Charger in the back of the plane.
"They're my closest family, but I feel like I don't know them at all." He spoke the moment she sat down next to him. "They both… I knew Robbie wasn't all there in the head but I thought that was because of me, but I was afraid that was because of me, that I was holding him back."
"Gabe… You were the whole reason he endured having that thing in him, why he lived with it day after day. You kept him smiling, even in his darkest of days." She told him.
"I wanted him to take some time, figure himself out. I didn't know that he was dealing with something that could control his life so much."
Even though she hadn't known him for very long, she knew he needed someone to keep him grounded now, so she pulled him into a hug. He clung onto her arm as she talked to him, held him and kept him right in his own mind.
"Your brother loves you, more than anything."
"I just wish we'd talked more. You really think he's not gone?"
"I know the feeling when someone's… gone… and I don't feel it now." She spoke softly as she let go of him, sitting back in her fold-down seat, keeping her hand on his. "Plus, your brother is really stubborn."
"You have no idea." Gabe told her with a bit of humour.
At that moment, Mack, in full gear, leather jacket, gloves and shotgun axe on his back, hit the open button for the Zephyr's exit and mounted his bike. An agent tried to get him to stop but he punched the suited man and sent him tumbling. Then he drove away.
She stood up and ran her hand through her hair. "What the hell?"
Robbie rounded a corner and spied his uncle up ahead. Advancing fast on the man that was approaching him, he called out. "I heard some troubling things from Lucy. You tried to kill them? You were behind this the whole time!"
He lunged for Eli's throat, only pass right through him. Then he heard the agents approaching and speaking to the man.
"Mr Morrow, we're here to escort you out of here."
"What did you do?" He demanded of his crazed uncle, examining himself, then looking at him as he gazed at the dagger sized shard of carbon in his hand. When they saw it, one of the agents called out to the others, raising his gun.
"He's armed!"
"Tío keep your head man, don't do anything stupid!" He told the man whom he couldn't touch.
"Beautiful, no? Pure carbon."
When asked, Eli dropped the shard of carbon, and it shattered on the floor. Sensing danger, Robbie tried to warn the agents. "Get away from him!"
By the time he finished his sentence, they were all dead, carbon spikes having erupted from their chests. They dropped to the ground, and the crazy and newly powered engineer created a wall of carbon to prevent people from following him.
Mack and May came from the nearest corridor, guns at the ready. Upon seeing them, he tried to apologies. "I'm so sorry, I couldn't help them!"
They didn't seem to register him, then he realised.
"You can't hear me can you?" He sank to the ground. "I couldn't stop him."
"It's not your fault."
He looked up to see Coulson gazing down at him. Fitz was with him.
"You see me?" He asked.
Coulson nodded. "Yeah Robbie, we see you."
He accepted the hand up despite his differences with the man, deciding to take what company he could get right now. "What'd he do to us?"
"You know, I hate watching my own demise." Coulson commented as the others, who could neither see nor hear them, watched their disappearance.
"This isn't death, trust me." Robbie rebutted him calmly. "I feel… sick. My stomach hurts. And the lights are darker right?"
"The lights… their voices are hard to hear. They can't penetrate wherever we are."
"What do you mean, where we are? You understand what this is?" The former director asked Fitz, questioning his statement.
"I think I understand why Lucy and her friends looked like ghosts now. They were out of phase with our reality."
The soulless man didn't understand any of the dimension talk Fitz was using. Suddenly, he felt freezing, like all of the heat had drained out of his body and he was in Canada with no clothes, or something. Then the agony began, and he felt the Spirit of Vengeance attack him from within with a fury he'd never felt.
He hit the deck of the Zephyr, screaming and crying out. He couldn't even hear Fitz or Coulson right now.
"We're being dragged down… he doesn't want to go... he won't go."
They struggled to understand what he meant, but he didn't have the tolerance for the pain to try to explain what he was talking about. "He won't go!"
He was wrenched upright by some unseen force, and then he felt the pain, agony and even the Spirit of Vengeance leave him. The other two 'untouchables' that were with him questioned as it took control of Mack and left on his bike in his body. It struck him.
"He's going after the Chinatown crew!"
Daisy grabbed her jacket and threw it on, speaking to Gabe as she cross the plane. "Tell May what happened, and if you get the chance, never tell your brother about this."
"Oh, we're way past that." He responded, even though she didn't hear him.
He jumped in the Charger as Daisy got in and drove it away, down the ramp and after Mack.
Swerving around a corner in the Charger that she hoped Robbie would never find out she borrowed, Daisy chased Mack down the streets. Drawing level with him, she yelled out the window. "Pull over! What are you doing?!"
"What needs to be done! Don't get in my way!" Was the response she got, and Mack increased the speed he was riding at.
He went down an alley, and she followed. Unfortunately, she scraped the right side of the car against the wall, causing masses of sparks to fly.
"It heals itself." She assured herself. "Scientifically impossible, self-healing car."
She pulled out of the alley after him, but he managed to ditch her by going into traffic. But, that wouldn't be good enough to ditch her for long. She reversed, and declared to herself, "This isn't over."
Not long after she pulled her attempt at finding another way around, she saw two Chinatown guys running across the pavement.
"Well this looks like the place."
She shot inside the building in the Charger, and smacked into one of them as she pulled off a wheelspin and got out. She quickly dismantled them and ran to find Mack. when she found him, she heard him speaking.
"... I could survive off his pain for years. I know where you're being dragged down to, I've escaped it before."
"Mack…" She breathed. "You need to come with me."
"I'm never going back."
His eyes burned with the devil's fire as he faced her, like she'd seen Robbie's do several times by now, and revealed the Ghost Rider within. It was at that moment she knew she'd made a mistake. She thought it was Mack, but it apparently the Spirit of Vengeance had taken over his body. On the plus side, it might mean Robbie hadn't been vaporised, but if so, it also meant he was weakened and unable to return without it.
Without warning, it seized her by the throat, and lifted her almost two feet off the ground. She was hardly aware of her legs dangling after a few seconds, too busy trying to avoid suffocation.
Going right past the thugs that couldn't see, hear or touch him, he made his way into the back where he knew the big, shotgun wielding man to be. "Mack."
Mack turned to face him, an expression he'd never seen on the dark-skinned man's face.
"No… You're smarter than that." He saw the devil's fire in the tall man's eyes, and he knew.
"You."
"I've been a voice in your head all these years, now finally we get to speak… face to face."
"I've wanted you gone." Robbie admitted to it. "But our work isn't finished. Eli is out there, and we need to stop him."
"We? There is no 'we'." It rebuked him.
"Your time is over."
"Please, no, don't kill me!" The demonic spirit threw the man it was holding against the wall, knocking him out.
"Stay."
"We had a deal, you still owe me vengeance." He told the voice that used to be in his head, pointing at it in Mack's body.
"Your neighbourhood is soaked in the blood I spilled for you."
"None of that matters unless I take down the monster behind all this. Eli, he's my blood."
The other guy advanced on him, stopping about five feet away and standing opposite him in the corridor. "He will meet me too."
"You can't hold onto Mack's body forever, he's a good man, he doesn't have vengeance in him."
"It's not ideal, but Mack has a lot of pain. He lost Hope. I could survive off his pain for years. I know where you're being dragged down to, I've escaped it before." It told him as he fell to his knees, feeling the agonising pull.
Daisy appeared at that moment, and Robbie pleaded. "Come back, and I'll ride with you forever."
"Mack… You need to come with me."
"I'm never going back." The Spirit of Vengeance told him, then turned to face her.
It grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the ground, ever so slowly choking her with its grip on her neck. Seeing that, he became panicked and desperate, not wanting her to get hurt.
"Let her go!" He yelled at the Ghost Rider that Mack had become. "You spared her before, let her go!"
"She is innocent, yet she confronts me. This is a problem." It replied, still looking at her as it held her up whilst simultaneously strangling her.
"Come on man, she's done nothing to you! Please, let her go!"
"I've seen inside your heart, you care for this person. Yet you try to burying that feeling, believing yourself too tainted to ever deserve happiness, you're too deeply set in this crusade. You think that you don't deserve a future, even though you act otherwise when in the presence of others."
Everything the Spirit was saying was true, he did think all those things, and apparently so did Daisy. "Yeah, it's true, I do think those things, what does it have to do with Daisy?! Why won't you let her go?!"
Mere moments after he said that, she gasped out a single word.
"... why…"
"Because you're weak." It told them both, watching curiously as she drew short on air, beginning to lose the fight for survival.
"Your strength is an illusion, it comes purely from what you were given. You are not a warrior, you are like a weary soldier, fighting so that you don't have to fight again."
With no indication on pain, Mack's flesh burned away, revealing the Rider that went silent due to its now inability to talk. Truly fearful for her life, Robbie pleaded with the Spirit once more, this time fully beseeching to it.
"Please! Let her go! You'll kill her!"
He glanced at her face, which was warped with starvation of precious oxygen. Then he saw the power of the Ghost Rider beginning to flow into her. It was going to try her body next!
"Don't possess her too! Please, anyone but her! I'll beg, if that's what you want! Not! Her!"
It still didn't release her. Her hand that had been scrabbling against his skeletal gloved one fell slack to her side, and her eyes slowly rolled back as she began to lose consciousness despite her struggle. There was a fiery orange glow under her skin on her upper torso and face as the Spirit of Vengeance probed her, finding her body suitable.
Her flesh burnt off, revealing her skeleton beneath, engulfed in the devil's fire. She was becoming the Ghost Rider! He prayed Gabe and Daisy would forgive him, and stood in front of the thing that had been inside him not so long ago.
"You're right, I won't survive this without you, but the truth is you need me too!"
It snorted, as if laughing at his statement.
"We had a deal! How about a new one? Give me my vengeance on Eli, settle my score, and I'll settle yours. All of yours! Just let Daisy go."
Just before her lungs would have collapsed, it dropped her, and her burnt away flesh instantly grew back. Robbie fell to his knees beside her, forgetting for a moment that he couldn't touch her. He tried to lift her head, but his hand passed through it. Remembering his state as he felt the pull that was dragging him done grow stronger than ever, he took his hand back.
She was barely conscious, which he discovered when her eyes rolled in their sockets to gaze up through him at the Rider. He let out a sigh of relief.
He felt the Ghost Rider clamp its hand on his shoulder, and the Spirit of Vengeance return to him. Mack fell to the ground, back to normal, and the soulless man stood.
"Sorry Daisy, but I had to make this deal."
And then, he changed, becoming the Ghost Rider once more.
The moment he saw her, Mack scrambled over to Daisy and sat her up, holding onto her. "Oh my God! Daisy, are you okay?!"
It took her a large amount of gasping and heaving to regain her ability to speak, and even then it was a rasp. She barely managed two words before she went back to gasping for air.
"… What… happened…"
"That thing… Robbie… he took it back… oh God, I strangled you!"
"It wasn't you." She managed.
"This is how Robbie must feel after the other guy does something he regrets when he gets his body back." He commented regretfully, patting her back. "I can't believe I strangled you."
"You okay? You said you were in pain?"
"It's okay, that thing just dug up every painful memory I have, I'll be okay soon."
"I know." Lincoln's face flashed before her eyes.
She wiped the tears before the big guy could see them. She didn't want his sympathy, or his condolences. "Believe me I know."
Once she recovered her ability to breath fully, Daisy made her way to the Charger. When she saw it, she also saw the nasty series of scratches on the right side.
"Robbie's gonna kill me."
Pulling up on the motorcycle , the figure dismounted outside the warehouse.
"So this is where it was last in control." The person clenched their gloved hand into a fist and stared at a burn mark on the ground.
"I'm coming for you Ghost Rider."
Gazing down at the small picture of Lincoln and herself, Daisy held back tears that threatened to become real. When the Spirit of Vengeance had attempted to take her body after Mack's, it had dug up every single pain she'd ever felt. That included her heartbreak over Lincoln's death, in fact it was the main one that was haunting her right now, and she wished it would just go away.
The moment the evil power first entered her body, she'd relived every pain as if she were there again, feeling the feelings, thinking the thoughts and shedding the tears. She'd hardly been able to drive back safely, she was shaking so much, and immediately sought isolation.
If that was what Robbie lived with every day, she didn't know how he did it. To relive every loss, feel every heartbreak each time he called on the Rider's power, she knew he had his own share of torment in the past, but she couldn't figure out how he did it, survived the pain that held him to the mistakes he'd made and the losses he'd suffered. It was just as if it tortured a host every moment it was present, forcing them to go through the awful things they'd experienced in their life, as if they were what sustained it,
She remembered a bolt striking her in the chest, a blunt impact, her back crashing on the ramp before she fell out of the Quinjet and back into the Zephyr. Then, rushing to the radio, finding out he'd stolen the necklace from her. Then she was telling him she couldn't take it if he died, that it wasn't right for him to die in her place. But he stuck with his decision, telling her that saving the girl he loved and the world felt right. Then, knowing he was gone, Hive too.
She was sitting in the room in the Playground within which Radcliffe's android Aida had constructed a portal that brought Coulson and Fitz back from wherever they'd been stuck, and where Robbie presumably was right now. She didn't know why, but this was where she felt she should be.
"I miss you… but you're never coming back. I'm sorry, but it's time for me to move on, I've been living in the past too long." She told the picture.
She pulled a Zippo lighter from her jeans and flicked it open. Sparking the gas alight, she set the picture on fire. When the fire crawled close to her fingers, she dropped it, watching the capture of a time when she was happier curl up, blackening before turning to ash.
"Goodbye Lincoln."
It finished burning, and she put the lighter away. She closed her eyes.
A moment later, an orange light shone over her eyelids, and she heard cries of exhaustion from a voice she knew and had come to trust. She opened her brown orbs to see Robbie Reyes on all fours before of her as she moved to kneel right in front of him. He noticed her movement when he opened his eyes to see her knees in the top of his vision.
He looked up in time to catch a glimpse of her short hair as she pulled him into a hug that anyone else would have sworn she'd be trying to break their neck. He returned it, standing up slowly due to his lack of energy, pulling her up with him.
"I knew you'd come back." She spoke loud enough for only him to hear her. "And I know you're not alone."
