Simmons walked down the hallway of Zephyr One 4.0 (original, space travel, time travel, and now the latest iteration) to the small common area, where she hoped to find her family.
Only upon making it there and looking into the room, she was no longer quite so sure that she really wanted to have found them after all.
"Is this one of those situations where I should just turn around and walk away, and not try to figure out what my husband and wife are doing with my daughter?" she asked mostly rhetorically to alert them to her presence.
For Daisy was lying on her back in the middle of the floor, using her quaking powers to literally fly their two year old daughter around the room four feet off of the floor. Fitz, meanwhile, sat on the couch against the far wall watching Daisy as she quaked Alya through a course of hoops and upright posts that he had clearly built out of Alya's toys, that were really just for the parents to play with, as the kids who they were sold for were far to young to actually be building anything yet, even ones as smart as Alya.
"Oh — hey, beautiful," Daisy replied as she stopped Alya in a hover, and looked backwards at the biochemist from where she lay.
"Don't 'hey, beautiful' me when you're risking my daughter's life and limb in the middle of the air!" Simmons exclaimed, glaring at the younger woman.
"I don't recall her being your daughter at two in the morning last night when she wouldn't stop crying," Daisy retorted, as she floated a completely oblivious Alya back directly over top of her, so that if her quaking did fail, the two year old would at least fall onto her instead of the hard floor of the Zephyr One common room.
"You were already up and awake helping May fly, and planning your mission with her for this morning, so of course we made you get her instead of either of us having to get out of bed," Simmons retorted right back. "And I remember a certain painful childbirth that very much makes her my daughter."
"Ladies, ladies," came Fitz's placating voice from the couch. "You can fight later over who loves our daughter more. Jemma, what brings you to playtime? I thought you were going to be busy in the lab all afternoon."
"Right — of course," Simmons replied crisply.
As she began crossing the room to the couch, Daisy resumed flying Alya through the air, but made the mistake of flying Alya right past Simmons as she crossed the room, and the English biochemist snatched her daughter out of the air, and held a wiggling, laughing Alya to her chest as she finished her short walk to the couch and sat down next to Fitz, deliberately ignoring the pouty faces that Daisy was making at her.
"One project finished up way earlier than I thought it would, and the other almost literally blew up in flames, so long story short, I unexpectedly became free for the afternoon, and came looking for my family in order to spend some time with them since we were suddenly all off at the same time, a relative rarity for us," she explained, before finally giving up on the squirming daughter in her arms, and setting Alya down on the floor where she happily scampered back over to Daisy, who immediately began flying her around again, ignoring Simmons' stern glare at her.
"Well, we're certainly happy to have you join us," Fitz said, wrapping his arm around his wife's shoulder and pulling her lightly into his side to hopefully distract her a little from Daisy playing with their daughter. "We've just been playing with Alya, and doing an incredibly good job of entertaining ourselves at the same time, if I'm being honest."
"Yes, speaking of that…."
"Come on, you're not really mad, and you don't really think she's in any danger," came Daisy's voice from the floor, the literal roll of her eyes audible in her tone. "I've practically flown you around on cases before to get up to places that you otherwise couldn't reach, and I've caught people falling plenty of times. Not to mention a little extra assistance on particularly tricky positions in bed that normally wouldn't be possible without something to hold on to."
"Okay, fine," Simmons huffed out relentingly with a roll of her own eyes. "It was just the shock of seeing my precious, little, fragile girl literally flying through the air. And I did offer to just turn around and walk away, and pretend I never saw you being reckless with our daughter."
"Fair enough," Daisy chuckled. "But what fun would that have been? And this way, you have something to hold against me to get something you want in bed tonight that I don't feel like doing."
"I would nev—! Okay, yeah, you and I do that to each other all the time. Fitz always does whatever we want him to without complaint, but we'll both pull the girl-card on each other," Simmons replied. "And speaking of pulling cards, I'm pulling the mum card and saying that we're figuring out something else to do for the rest of the afternoon than fly Alya through an obstacle course — which now that I'm actually looking at it, was quite nicely built, Fitz."
"Thank you, and we're more than happy to do something else, if someone can come up with it," Fitz answered. "This is just what we came up with, and Alya certainly seems to enjoy it."
Simmons grudgingly had to admit to herself that that was certainly true, as their daughter was laughing and giggling up a storm as she was flown through the air. But there was absolutely no way that she was saying any such thing out loud and giving Daisy the satisfaction, or an even bigger head than she already had as an inhuman superhero and superlative lover. So instead, Simmons set about thinking of what they could do for the rest of the afternoon as a family that wouldn't try to give her a heart attack.
And after a minute of thinking, she suddenly exclaimed, "We can go to the lab and she can play with the cuttlefish in their tank!"
"You do know that the 'cuddle' in cuttlefish isn't supposed to be taken literally, right, Jemma?" Fitz muttered mostly under his breath.
While at the exact same time Daisy retorted, "And that's less dangerous than flying?" before immediately continuing on cheerfully, "I'm all for it!"
"Oh shut it, you — who knows what kinds of dangers you would have got our daughter into by now if Fitz and I weren't here to be the reasonable parents," Simmons playfully retorted right back at her wife. "She'd certainly be addicted to pop tarts and ice cream, and consider that a full meal when paired with some wine because chocolate is a vegetable, the rest of the pop tart is grains, ice cream is dairy, and wine is a fruit. Steal a slice of someone else's leftover cold pizza from the kitchen fridge, and you've got a meat to complete the food pyramid — or so you told Fitz one day when he pointed out that maybe you should eat real food on occasion."
"First of all, Fitzy, I can't believe you ratted me out to our wife like that, and secondly — do they make chocolate pop tart or ice cream or pizza flavored baby food? Maybe babies would actually eat it if they were offered something other than carrot mush and asparagus goop," Daisy replied. "I mean, ninety percent of the parents feeding their kids baby food don't eat the real life version of those foods."
"You know, she's got a point," Fitz said. "And it's probably why Alya stuck to breast milk for as long as you would let her, instead of going to the various vegetable mushes that were her alternative. I mean, we Brits are known for some pretty bland foods, but nothing like baby food."
"Probably because the last thing we need to do is get people addicted to sugar and pizza when they're still babies," Simmons retorted with a roll of her eyes. "As nations we're bad enough about doing that to our kids, it certainly doesn't need to start any younger. But on a more relevant note to the current moment, are we going to the lab to play with the cephalopods or not?"
Fitz shrugged. "I don't mind."
"What if she'd rather continue flying?" Daisy countered, just to stir Simmons up some more.
Simmons looked at Alya, who Daisy had hovering again, and asked her, "Alya, do you want to go pet the really cool fish that change colors?"
Alya enthusiastically nodded her head, rapidly repeating, "Fishies, fishies, fishies!" over and over.
"Well, when you put it like that," Daisy groused, but gently lowered their daughter to the ground so that she could run over to her mum, who readily picked her up in her arms before standing up.
Fitz, meanwhile, stood up himself and walked over to his younger wife, holding out his hand and pulling her up off of the floor, before the four of them walked (or were carried) through the plane to the lab, to play with the chromatophored cephalopods for a while.