Although the bag of chips said Be A Flamin' Hot Hero and had a picture of a blazing red, dazzlingly muscular superhero, it told the truth in small print on the back. Calories per serving: 1,217.
Daisy popped another barbecue chip into her mouth and crunched it. Just for a moment she had had a dream in which her job was easy - a simple preplanned itinerary of taking down the bad guys, saving the world and soaring off into the sunset in that order - and then a crumb lodged in her throat and she doubled over, coughing violently.
"Disgusting, aren't they?" said Hunter, referring to the chips. He had managed to enter the kitchen and slouch against the fridge in a single, fluid movement. "Koenig did the supply run. His idea of congratulating you on becoming Little Miss Richter Scale."
"Do not," she rasped, "ever call me that again."
Hunter popped the tab on a can of beer although it was not yet eleven in the morning.
From the tired, slight droop of his eyes, Daisy guessed he'd been up again all night with Bobbi. Bobbi was on pain pills all the time now. The med techs were doing their best to help her adjust to losing half a lung and breaking her kneecap but it wasn't much good without Jemma - the only one who knew the pharmaceutical science to test and develop new drugs.
"You have blood on your shirt," she remarked amicably instead. "Did you get a lead on Fitz?"
"Huh? Mnhm." Hunter poured a bit of beer on the dark patch of dried blood and blotted it with a clean paper towel. "He's in bloody Morocco looking for another dusty old scroll. Bob says he's grieving but if you ask me, he's just chasing a pipe dream."
Daisy made a non-committal noise. She eyed the small superhero printed on the bag of chips again and, not for the first time, felt sorry for Fitz. She missed Jemma every single day that the stupid stone had swallowed her up, still dreamt about her in her sleep and woke up drenched in sweat. But if she ran off on a wild goose chase across the continent, what was going to keep the team together?
"I have surveillance duty in ten," she told Hunter. "Since you clearly have nothing better to do than wallow in your weird British alcohol, want me to teach you how to get past the Pentagon's servers?"
He followed her to the door. "I don't need the Pentagon, Daisy, I want security access to Barclays."
Daisy smiled in spite of herself. "And I want a pay raise and a new laptop, but that's not happening."
He gave her his trademark sleazy wink. "Why not, if you hack the right places?"
They walked down to the server room together.
Despite his ability to parachute, forge documents, take out a mark, cut corners and commit a dozen types of fraud, Hunter had absolutely zero ability with computers. Daisy was pretty sure at least ten security alarms were going off right now at the Pentagon.
She sighed and closed off all the back channels. They ate chips. She went through the list of twelve or so potential threats that her algorithm had picked up across the globe. S.H.I.E.L.D. was still doing its best to deal with international security concerns despite the lack of funds and manpower - which basically meant she was dealing with it, no thanks to her status as resident hacker.
Hunter was on his second can of beer and had his feet up on the desk, apparently deciding that he'd rather put up with her and her computer chatter than inventory the ammo downstairs with May. Suddenly, his feet went down and he sat upright, staring at one of the monitors. "Is that supposed to be flashing red?"
"What?" said Daisy, irritated.
"Flashing red," Hunter enunciated slowly. "The monitor with the blue post-it stuck on the screen saying 'CALL DAISY IF THIS GOES OFF'. It's going off, mate."
She dropped her pen on the table and pushed past him, already racing down the possible list of suspects in her head. Sunil Bakshi was dead. Von Strucker's kid was in custody in a vegetative state. Which meant...
"Ward," she said aloud. Hunter stiffened next to her. "A street camera's gotten facial recognition of him. But I don't understand why..."
The feed of a road view in Washington, D.C. popped up. With a few keystrokes, she enlarged the screen and began jumping from feed to feed of adjacent traffic cameras to scope out the area. This was on the corner from the former site of the Triskelion, before the Helicarrier crash.
"Understand what?" said Hunter loudly, at once outraged and eager for information. "That he's a sadistic psychopath who put needles into Bob's fingernails?"
"Ward's not an idiot," she said shortly, not in the mood to deal with his histronics. "He's too careful to be caught on camera unless he wants to be."
A familiar broad-shouldered figure was standing on the street, observing the cars go by. Then as if he could sense her watching, Ward turned and looked straight up at the camera and raised his eyebrows.
Daisy could hear Hunter alternately pacing the length of the jet or assembling and taking apart his rifle. Mack was in the other seat in the cockpit, piloting. She tried to concentrate on her laptop. Ward had walked around a bit, never more than a few blocks at a time, always returning to his original spot.
It was the same method he had taught her to scout an unfamilar area. It didn't make any sense - she knew for a fact that Ward had been stationed at the Triskelion for several months years ago, even had an apartment in the city. He'd taken her around town the last time they had been there together. Digging up these memories of a lifetime ago hurt her in the same way that scratching an old inflamed wound hurt.
It made her hate Ward a little more.
"He's like a cockroach," said Daisy bitterly, throwing her hands up in the air. "I shot him four times, May tried to kill him twice and - Jemma almost stamped him out. But guess what?"
Mack shook his head. "And this is the guy you had a crush on?"
She frowned, slightly offended. "I also helped May stuff him in our basement and squeeze him like a lemon for every drop of intel."
"You figure out what's his play yet, Tremors?"
Ward's schemes, while logical and carefully planned, always stemmed from his inability to cope with his emotions. She hadn't seen him in so many months that it was ridiculous to guess at what tantrum he was throwing today. "I -" she bit her lip. "I honestly have no idea. Maybe revenge for 33? Maybe he just wants to talk. If I have to, I'll quake his ass."
From the back of the plane, Hunter yelled something that indistinctly sounded like "-ing to put that son of a bitch six feet underground and a bit deeper!"
"Vault D is eight feet deep," Mack boomed back.
Daisy shared the same desire to unload several rounds into Ward's face. She stared at the lone, still figure on her laptop screen but before she could feel any pity for him, preemptively conjured up an image of Fitz, brain-damaged and unable to pick up a fork without dropping it. Just like that her earlier adrenaline washed away, replaced by a sick, cold feeling deep in her gut at having to face him again.
"That's not what I bloody meant!"
"Coulson's orders," said Mack firmly, in the same tone one might use to shut down a child's demands - which she supposed Hunter was in his own way. "Just in case Ward knows anything about an arm of HYDRA we haven't brought down yet."
The altitude meter had been dropping steadily over the past hour and Daisy now buckled up. Mack pulled back on the throttle and prepared to make a soft field landing. The cloaked Quinjet touched down in a public park five minutes away from where Ward was sitting meditatively on a bench.
Hunter set himself up a block away at a good vantage point. She and Mack had been forced to pat him down and remove all lethal weapons, a thoroughly unpleasant task, seeing how as she was really on Hunter's side.
Daisy glanced at Mack as she tugged on her gauntlets. "Want to come as my emotional support teddy bear?"
"That bad, huh?"
"The last time I spoke to him, like when he dragged me off to Puerto Rico, he chained me to a staircase." Daisy pivoted from one foot to the other, and thought about it. "I also headbutted him and called him a lying bastard and a son of a bitch and told him to walk into traffic. Not that I'm taking that back but -"
Mack said, very gently, "You know I can't leave the Quinjet alone out here, man."
"I know," she said, clipping her gear in place as she walked backwards down the exit ramp. "See you in a bit with our favourite cold-blooded murderer."
Across the road, Ward had stopped to stare at a street directory, obviously searching for something. A drop point? When he raised a hand to scratch his nose, she felt a strange shakiness settle over her - that small habit of his was familiar and hit too close to home.
Finally, the few civilians on the sidewalk disappeared down the corner, along with her excuses.
"Can I help you?" she said, leaning against a lamp post. "Need directions to somewhere?"
"Yeah, I'm trying to find the Triskelion," he answered, turning around. Just for a moment Ward went completely still except for a muscle twitching in his jaw. He closed his eyes and opened them again, then slowly turned to look at her with a funny expression. "Skye?"
"Don't call me that," said Daisy, on reflex, then stopped and glared at him, feeling uncomfortable and small under the ridiculous height of his gaze, so unwaveringly turned on her. He was still staring at her with that same funny expression as if he could not remember exactly who she was or how he knew her.
Maybe it was because she had chopped her hair off, or changed her uniform. Daisy's temper rose and she held her head up to return his gaze. "So, how's life been? Have fun going out and about torturing innocent people you have a grudge with?"
"Skye," he breathed again. "You're not real."
"What do you mean, I'm not re-"
Ward stepped into her personal space and wrapped his arms tightly around her. Suddenly she found her nose scrunched up against his chest and his face buried in the juncture of her shoulder and his lips were moving against her neck with a familiarity that hurt. Just for a moment Daisy was as stiff and frozen as a board - and then she kneed him hard in the groin.
A hail of dendrotoxin bullets pelted the concrete around them. "Hunter, stop!" yelled Daisy into her comm. "Stop it!" She brought up her right hand and blasted Ward against the wall, pinning him several feet up.
His head snapped back against the wall and she saw his mouth shape itself into a groan, but otherwise he neither struggled nor tried to fight her.
"When I let you down," she said, every trembling bit of emotion inside her rippling out through her palm in powerful, terrible shockwaves, "you have one chance to turn over your weapons and surrender."
"Skye," he said hoarsely. "Skye, it's me."
She shifted her hand until her powers were crushing his windpipe - nothing permanent, just enough to get him to shut up. "And if you dare to lay your hands on me again," she continued in a cold, clear tone, "I will quake you apart, molecule by molecule. Got it?"
Daisy allowed him to slide down the wall and crumple to the ground. Ward got to his feet, rubbing his throat and still staring at her with the same choked-up expression she was gradually coming to peg as mixed parts disbelief and longing. Quite against her will, she temporarily doubted her own faculties. She was pretty sure that four bullets had been enough to make him hate her as much as she really hated him.
"I don't have weapons on me." Ward turned up his palms in the careful, yet somehow remarkably blasè way that he always did. "Look, I'll do anything that you want me to but first, we need to talk."
She briefly considered blasting him down the street, but felt sorry for all the old ladies doing their weekend grocery shopping who'd have heart attacks.
Ward took that as permission to speak. "I don't know what - I've done in this reality to make you hate me so much. But I'm not from around these parts."
Daisy frowned at him with the same frown she reserved for insurance salespeople and wondered if it was time to knock his teeth out.
"I woke up this morning in a safehouse downtown. Couldn't find the Triskelion or Coulson, or Fitz. And then you turned up and I -" his dark eyes searched hers, as if memorising her features. Daisy suddenly understood and jerked back, repulsed and horrified. When he spoke, his voice was rough. "I've missed you so much."
"Let me get this straight," she said, deciding to gloss over the fact that the only person in the world she would feel no regret about torturing was in love with her. "You...are from another world. Like Star Wars style."
Ward looked confused. "Star Wars?"
Daisy gave him a hard, assessing look. "Lift up your shirt. Just up to your chest."
Ward tugged the bottom of his shirt out from his belt and did as she asked. Where four gunshot scars should have been, there was only clean smooth skin.