A/N: TRIGGER WARNING for panic attacks and flash backs
The thing about Skye
She's fazed. God does she get fazed.
It's days- weeks- before Daisy gets a chance to breathe. So, as soon as her team is found, and they are back on the base, and have Aida and Fitz locked up in containment, Daisy finds the first dark alcove she comes across and lets herself fall apart.
The Framework was… intense. Far more than she or anyone was expecting. Waking up next to Grant Ward, in bed with him, almost had her lose it before she even got a chance. Only the need to find her team kept her together.
It was like a sick joke, making her Framework life revolve around the man who hurt her- betrayed her- and making him good. Making him the Grant he could have been.
It's not closure that Daisy feels, having seen what he could have been. She doesn't feel better, she wants to hate him forever. She wants to have never had to face him again after everything that happened- everything he's done- but it's like no matter what happens, even after he's long dead, he keeps coming back. Keeps invading her mind and her space and her sanity.
She barely held it together in that awful, hellscape, world, and now she's in some closet and she can't breathe.
She couldn't breathe (not really) before, but now she allows herself to double over and gasp, and scratch desperately at her throat as her lungs scream for air. The tears start streaming in hot rivets, down her cheeks, and she can't do anything to stop it anymore.
She needs this. She needs to fall apart before the next bad thing happens and she has to be okay and keep moving again. She needs to scream.
So, she tucks her head into her knees, squeezes her hands around her throat, and screams. The room shakes, things topple off the shelves, but that's as far as Daisy allows it to go. She keeps the destruction close to her body, scrabbles for the sanity that barely made it this far, but it's loose now and it's hard to scrape it back up into an acceptable, functioning, form.
She doesn't have much longer until the next disaster is due to hit, but she can't bring it back, not yet- did she ever have it?
The door to the closet opens, spilling light in, and she shouldn't have been surprised. She should have felt the vibrations, but her powers are beyond her right now. It already takes all of the fragments of her shattered awareness to keep it contained as well as it is.
The door closes quickly, and someone reaches for her.
Daisy flinches, rearing back, and a spike of pain jolts through her spine as she runs into the corner of a shelf. It sends a shock of feeling along her skin, grounding her slightly, so she does it again. Harder.
The hands reach for her again, she can feel them brushing along her arms, and Daisy scrambles away. "D-don't- don't touch me," she manages to get out past the cotton in her mouth.
"Then breathe, Daisy. I need you to breathe and stop hurting yourself."
"W-w-what do you think I'm t-trying to d-d-do?" Daisy hisses at the muffled voice beyond the ringing in her ears.
Daisy rams herself backwards again, throwing her head back as well, and a burst of color flashes across her vision.
"Skye," the voice hisses, and it's the mistake of the wrong name that sends Daisy spiraling completely. Because she was Skye in that other, awful, world.
She opens her eyes to a strange room. The world is quieter than she ever remembers it being, and it feels fundamentally wrong. There is a body behind her- warm and solid. Her phone pings and she reaches forward and: WAKE UP YOUR BOYFRIEND. WE'RE BEING CALLED IN.
For a moment, her heart soars. Her biggest regret, after all, is Lincoln. And this is supposed to be a world where your biggest regrets are erased.
But then she turns, and comes face to face with a sleeping, shirtless, Grant Ward.
Her lungs seize. Her fingertips tingle. Her ears ring.
Instinct, desperation, mindlessness- Daisy reaches out her hand and wants him away.
But he doesn't move, doesn't stir, isn't flung from Daisy's space. The world remains as eerily quiet as it has since she woke up, and she realizes she doesn't have her powers.
She doesn't have her powers, because this is a fake world. A fake world Daisy entered to find her real world team.
Grant Ward's arm feels very real around her waist, though, the smell of Old Spice and mint are very real in her nose, teasing at her memories. Daisy's mind feels fractured, and she still can't breathe- but her team. Her family. She can't break down- can't fail- Jemma. She has to find Jemma. Then everything can be put right again, and together they can get out of this hellscape-
Daisy reaches forward to wake her second biggest regret, and he calls her Skye like time hasn't passed since she last heard it from his lips and it's the only name she's ever had.
"Goddamnit, Daisy, breathe! Come back to me," the voice hisses, shaking her, and she recognizes it now. There are only two people who sometimes forget to call her by her new name.
Daisy gasps in her first lungful of air, and it burns on the way in- like inhaling shards of glass. She does it again, because May told her to. When she is lost, Daisy can always rely on May to tell her what to do. Instead of shoving the hands away, Daisy clambers and clings to them.
A sob bursts out with the next billowing exhale, and May crowds closer.
"I woke up in his bed," Daisy heaves painfully, trying to keep breathing like May instructed, but she chokes on the snot and fresh wave of tears. "In the Framework, I woke up in his bed. And he kept hugging me, and trying to kiss me, and I couldn't do anything about it or it'd look suspicious and-" Daisy loses the ability to articulate anything as she runs out of the little air she's managed to suck in.
"Oh, Daisy…" May maneuvers her way around Daisy until she's hugging her firmly from behind, and Daisy clings to the arms holding her. She chokes, and gasps, and, eventually, she breathes.
With May's support- her May- not the apathetic Framework one- Daisy manages to somehow calm down enough until the room stops shaking, Daisy stops blubbering, and the only sound in the closet is her quiet sniffles and May's murmured words of support.
Her mentor doesn't ask her to pull herself together, or be strong. All she wants is for Daisy to breathe.
Daisy tries her hardest.
They are sitting in absolute silence for close to 10 minutes when the loud, flashing, alarms throughout base start screaming.
Daisy wipes her tears, gives her face a good scrub, and then pushes herself to her feet with a shaky sigh. May takes her offered hand, and Daisy hauls her up.
They don't say anything to each other as they push out of the closet to face the next big disaster. And as they race down the hall to find out the danger, Daisy doesn't feel the inevitability of crumbling to pieces. She would actually hazard to say that she feels somewhat stable.
She has her next purpose, and it's time to get to work.
A/N: Thanks for reading, guys! Please let me know what you think!
~Silver~
