It's been a couple days! Sorry! Updates are going to get less frequent unfortunately though because I'm moving this week (but yay moving!)

Also, sorry if there are more mistakes in this one than normal, I've got a killer headache but I wanted to get it up tonight.

xx

The night passes. Ward sleeps and Jemma and Daisy stay up, alternating between scouring the internet on their phones and staring blankly at the walls. It's too cheap a motel to have a TV, Jemma doesn't know if the addition of one would make the boredom better or worse. If May doesn't show up soon they're going to have to rethink their plan.

She gets a couple of texts from Fitz around two in the morning telling her a prototype should be ready for her to see by the middle of the afternoon. They agree to meet at his home lab upstate. After some arguing, Daisy agrees to let her go alone if they haven't found May yet.

"Why am I hungry?" Daisy sucks one finger into her mouth, ridding it of powdered sugar while her other hand skims across the box of donuts, searching for another. They're from one of those extra fancy shops that has more social media followers than customers and a name with some kind of food related pun in it. Daisy procured the box as they were walking back to the motel, – after a not so subtle attempt to draw May out - claiming the need for comfort food, even though Simmons is pretty sure she just likes the sugar rush.

"Because what you're eating has absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever," Simmons mumbles as she flips through the newspaper. It's a longshot but they're looking for news – any news – on HYDRA and since Ward said they're out of the shadows, the four different newspapers this place keeps in the lobby seemed like a good place to start. "It's pure sugar, which, studies are showing is more addicting than many illegal stimulants. Are you going to help?"

Daisy ignores her. "No, like, I'm not a real body, I'm just an avatar, so why am I hungry?"

Oh. "You feel pain, don't you?"

"Yeah, Ward's punch hurt like a bitch."

Simmons pauses, only continuing when Daisy doesn't catch on to where her thoughts are headed. "Well I suppose it's the same principle. Physical sensations heighten the reality of the illusion. It's far simpler to make someone feel hungry than it is to erase the instinct that they need to eat."

"Huh." Daisy finally chooses another donut. "Does that mean I'm gonna get my period too? Because what's the point of a fake reality if you have to deal with all the shitty parts of real reality?"

She hadn't thought about that. It raises a larger question than Daisy probably realizes. Are these bodies, which feel real, but aren't real, capable of change, of progression? Could they get pregnant? Would their bodies age along with the child's?

If they had stumbled into a different reality of the framework, would she have found herself somewhere other than a grave? Perhaps in a cottage in the countryside, warm from the fire, with a ring on her finger and a daughter in her arms. Or a son, she's not picky.

She shakes herself from the daydream. "Theoretically yes, all of your body systems will function as they would in the real world." Simmons looks up from the papers, Daisy's face has scrunched up in displeasure. "I'm hoping we're not in here long enough to find out." It's only been a day but they're still basically nowhere.

There's only a moment of silence – punctuated by one of Ward's obnoxious snores – before Daisy jumps back into conversation.

"We still haven't talked about Fitz."

Jemma's stomach twists. She'd been trying rather hard not to think about him.

She sighs. "There's nothing to speak of, he didn't recognize me."

"Simmons you told me you woke up in a grave. Something must have happened-"

"Nothing happened, we just never met is all." She flips another page of the newspaper. None of what Daisy wants to talk about is worth remembering.

"But-"

"Fitz and I met at the Academy in 2003, the date on the gravestone was before that."

Daisy frowns. "But then how did you die? If it wasn't because of SHIELD?"

"I don't know." She has several ideas, though all of them send a chill through her veins. Before the Academy, before she met Fitz, things weren't exactly going particularly well for her outside of getting her degrees. "But as far as we know this Fitz hasn't ever even heard of SHIELD, much less attended the Academy."

"Oh."

But Jemma can tell that Daisy's already thinking of other things. Things that cause fifteen year olds to end up six feet under. She shakes the thought from her mind and turns another page of the newspaper, skimming the headlines.

Shit.

Three More Inhumans Dead in HYRDA Raid!

"Daisy." Simmons' voice has gone cold in an instant, not that she wasn't serious a moment ago, but this is different, this is 'bad things are happening presently' voice not her 'bad things happened previously' voice. Daisy's become a master in their recognition.

"What?" She sets aside her donut, peering over Jemma's shoulder to read the paper.

The headline catches her eye in an instant and makes her sick to her stomach. It gets worse a second later when her eyes start automatically skimming down the article and she finds names. Familiar names.

Lori Henson

Shane Henson

Lincoln Campbell

For a second she's torn between stumbling backwards, to retching her guts out in the grimy bathroom not three feet away, and tearing the page from Simmons' hands, soaking up every piece of information on this possible. What she settles for is something in the middle, numbly staring at his name on the page.

He was alive here.

She let him die again.

"Daisy." Jemma is now in her quiet 'I'm so sorry' voice. She puts a hand on Daisy's shoulder, shakes her slightly when she doesn't respond.

"Daisy look at the date."

Somehow she manages to focus.

March 12, 2017

They were spat out on the 15th. It's currently the 16th.

She doesn't know if it's better or worse knowing there was still nothing she could have done. Knowing that she's too late, again.

"It's not your fault." Simmons' whispers, her hand curling around Daisy's shoulder, squeezing tightly.

Daisy tries to not to cry. She tries to breathe, to pack back up the emotions that she's been doing such a good job of suppressing, of denying, all these months. A half sob, sort of a hiccup, chokes her for a moment and her eyes fall shut. It shouldn't still hurt this much.

But they still haven't found Mack, or Mace, and they need to convince the others to come home so she puts this aside as something to have a good long cry about when they get back and takes the paper from Simmons. Her fingers only shake slightly as she does so.

The article makes her feel ten times worse. It's hate rhetoric, published hate rhetoric in a major paper, that goes on about the 'plague to humanity' that her people are. She's surprised that it doesn't also end with a 'Hail HYDRA'.

"I don't-" she drops it to the floor, the single page floats down. "How could this happen?" Her fingers come up and she presses them to her temples. "How could the world get so colossally fucked up? This place is supposed to be a mirror of our world, the same, but it's-"

"Horror house shaped." Jemma fills in when she cuts herself off.

"Like something out of a nightmare." Except even her mind isn't messed up enough to give her this dream.

"I don't know." Simmons says quietly after a moment. "They must have made changes, which must have spiralled things out of control." She takes a deep breath. "But none of it matters, it's not real." Daisy thinks Jemma's convincing herself as much as she's trying to convince her.

"We just need to get them all back, then we can go home."

Daisy nods. "Then we can go home."

And never think of this place ever again.

xx

Let me know what you thought and as always I'm around on tumblr at sinkingsidewalks.