TW for hospital setting/medical language, mention of blood
Melinda didn't know what to do. She was kneeling amidst a blanket of broken glass on the marble floor of the Cybertek offices, holding the only person in the world she cared about at the moment, and feeling the life slip away from her with each agonizing, passing second. Daisy's breaths were growing shallower and sharper, fewer and far between. What little color was left in her face was draining away. And Melinda didn't know what to do.
Trying to focus her panicked mind, Melinda looked around the destroyed office wildly, as if there might be some kind of sign about what her next move should be. Daisy needed help. Medical attention. Treatment from somebody better trained than she was.
Melinda got to her feet, ignoring the sharp twinge in her knee as she lifted Daisy up along with her. Even without her super strength, Daisy hardly weighed anything to her anymore, after that thing had nearly sucked her dry. The lights of the alarm still flashed, making everything around the office look blurry to Melinda's eyes as she staggered over to the elevator. It took her a second to realize that it wasn't just the lights that were blurring her vision – it was tears, too.
She reached out to hit the elevator button with shaking, red-streaked fingers, only to notice that the elevator was already lit up and humming. Someone was coming.
Melinda's mind raced. Quinn had tipped off SHIELD earlier, and SHIELD had sent Hive. Maybe they were sending someone else to finish the job. She backtracked, pulling Daisy along with her. She was limping – stupid, stupid knee – and couldn't get to cover quickly enough. The elevator dinged, and she heard the sound of the doors sliding open. She lowered Daisy back to the floor and positioned herself in front of her, drawing a knife from her belt. She braced herself for a fight, ready to keep her body between the newcomers and Daisy at whatever cost.
"Melinda, fucking hell…"
It was Rosalind.
Rosalind, whom Melinda had contacted an hour ago. Who had promised backup. Whom Melinda had completely forgotten about.
Melinda's knees began to tremble, and she sank back to the floor numbly, shaking so bad it was like Daisy was quaking the place.
"Melinda, talk to me." Ros was at her side, a team of ATCU agents advancing in behind her, clearing the floor. Ros quickly took stock of the scene in front of her and motioned to one of the agents. "Radio for medical, stat. We need an evac team."
"The floor's secure," Melinda said flatly, her old agent training taking over and putting her on autopilot. "Quinn's in the back office, injured but alive. One confirmed kill." She twitched her head over in the direction of Hive's body, but she wasn't able to bring herself to look at him. "One agent down and in critical condition."
"Jesus, is that Quake?" Ros asked, kneeling down to check for a pulse on the side of Daisy's neck. "Quake is your contact inside SHIELD? What happened to her?"
"That thing… Hive… drains people. She saved me from him, but I wasn't fast enough… I wasn't fast enough to… she's just a kid…"
"Hey," Rosalind's voice was kind, but firm. "We've got her now. We'll do everything we can."
More ATCU agents emerged from the elevator, including two with a rescue stretcher. They began to work on Daisy, getting her on the board, checking for vitals, strapping an oxygen mask over her face. They had only been with her for a few seconds when Daisy let out a horrible noise, a gurgling, choking kind of breath, and her whole body seized. She convulsed for a moment that felt like an awful eternity, and Melinda felt Rosalind's strong hands on her arms, holding her back from rushing over to Daisy's side.
"Daisy!"
As quickly as it had come on, the seizure passed, although Melinda felt like she had just aged about ten years in the few seconds that had ticked by. She wrenched her arm out of Ros' grasp and elbowed past the medical team, scooping up Daisy's limp hand.
She glared up at the med team. "Do something!"
"We need to get her out of here, now," one agent said, more to his colleague than to Melinda. He pushed Melinda gently out of the way and both men lifted the stretched and headed for the elevator. "Start her on full-spectrum antibiotics and antiseizure medication, prep for a blood transfusion…"
Melinda's head swam. The medic's voice sounded like bees to her ears, but one thing he said caught her attention.
"Penicillin!" she choked out, as the men carried Daisy into the elevator. "She's allergic to penicillin!"
"Copy that," the medic nodded. "We'll do our best, ma'am."
The elevator doors closed, and a painful, swollen silence fell over the hallway, but only for a moment, before several ATCU agents emerged from the other end of the building, a handcuffed Ian Quinn in tow. His ankle was splinted, and he dragged it behind him awkwardly. Melinda felt no sympathy for him.
He blanched when he saw Hive's body, but still managed to turn a scornful glare at Melinda on his way out.
"None of this is going to stick, you know," he called back to her. "No one's going to believe a word you say. You're a villain who killed two SHIELD agents and attacked a philanthropist tonight. You'll be taking my place behind bars soon enough."
"Shut up," an ATCU agent grunted, cuffing Quinn roughly on the back of the head. "You have the right to remain silent – maybe you should try it."
The elevator doors opened and shut once more, this time whisking Quinn and the rest of the agents away, leaving Melinda and Rosalind alone in the terrible silence.
"Melinda, what the hell happened here?" Ros asked quietly. "It looks like a bomb went off, you're covered in blood…"
"Quinn was trying to make a run for it," Melinda finally said. "So Daisy and I came over to cut him off, stop him before he got away and we lost one of our best leads. He called SHIELD for backup, and SHIELD sent him." Melinda nodded towards Hive.
"SHIELD sent a life-sucking alien?"
"He's an agent. A hero, ironically enough. One of SHIELD's experiments. The tentacles are just a feature of his transformation. There was a fight. People got hurt. I killed Hive. That's the short version."
"I'll call an ATCU clean-up crew to come take care of this office," Ros said, looking around at the broken glass, the cracked pillar, the blood on the floor, the body. "We should get you looked at by medical, too. Then maybe later you can tell me the long version."
"I'm fine."
"Don't bullshit me. I'm getting you checked out."
"Ros," Melinda said suddenly. "SHIELD's going to know. They're going to know everything's blown when Hive doesn't report back in. You have to move on them now, before they can cover everything up again."
"What exactly does 'everything' entail?"
"Everything that we were afraid of," Melinda said, her voice low. "We were right, about pretty much all of it. The dirty deals with Cybertek, the secret experiments… worse than we thought, honestly. Whoever the Clairvoyant is, Pierce or Whitehall or whoever the hell… You can't let him get away."
"Do you have proof? Something my people can act on?" Ros looked pained. "I believe you. And I want to help. But we have to do it right, or it won't matter. It won't stick."
"I have proof." With some effort, Melinda managed to twist around enough that she could extract the small, black box from the hidden pocket on her suit. The tape recorder.
"Daisy—" Her voice stopped working for a second, her throat suddenly thick. She coughed and tried again. "It was her idea, to bring this along. In case she could manage to 'get the bad guys monologuing,' in her words."
"Smart kid."
"You have no idea."
Melinda passed the tape recorder to Rosalind. "Everything you'll need is on there, straight from the mouths of the ones responsible, including me."
"I'll start making some calls."
Melinda had eventually agreed to be transported to the ATCU's medical facility, although the doctors there quickly discovered she didn't have much in the way of injuries that needed attention. Which she had told them. More than once.
They did at least give her some strong medicine for her knee pain, plus a compression sleeve for it that they insisted she wear.
"You really should be icing and elevating it, too," the doctor had scolded her. "But if I can't make you stay in bed, you can at least wear the sleeve."
She wanted to stuff the stupid thing down the doctor's throat, but she figured Ros wouldn't be particularly happy if Melinda traumatized one of her doctors, so she forced herself to play nice and offer the doctor a begrudging 'fine.'
They wouldn't let her see Daisy. Said things were still 'touch-and-go' and the situation was 'too delicate' for Melinda to be there. The updates they brought her were sparse and sporadic, and often filled with only measly bits of information that, more often than not, made Melinda feel worse, rather than better.
"Her body isn't responding to the first round of medication."
So try something else. Try anything. Save her.
"The blood loss is putting a strain on her heart and lungs. We've put her on a ventilator to increase oxygen flow and we're using a percutaneous VAD to help her heart keep pumping what blood she has left."
Is that good or bad? What's a percutaneous VAD? Why can't you get her more blood?
"She's been moved to a hyperbaric chamber. We've dropped her core temp and stabilized her for now."
Stabilized. Did that mean—?
"You can come see her," the doctor nodded. "I want you to be prepared, though… it might look frightening to see all the machines she's hooked up to."
"I don't care," Melinda said automatically. "I just want to see her."
The doctor led her through the halls of the medical facility, stopping outside a heavy, windowless door. "She's in here."
The room inside wasn't very large, and most of the space was taken up by a large, humming machine that looked almost like a metal cocoon. A complicated computer panel was attached to one side, glowing with numbers and readouts that meant nothing to Melinda and giving off a quiet, steady beeping. She approached the machine tentatively and found a small window in the top of the cocoon.
"Oh, Daisy…"
Daisy was inside the machine, resting supine on a stretcher. Her face was pale and gaunt, which made the angry, red gash on the side of her head from the Berserker staff look ten times worse. Her chest rose and fell weakly, always in time with the beeping of the machine.
"The hyperbaric chamber has stabilized her, which means she's not getting any worse," the doctor explained, stepping in closer to Melinda and the machine. "At this point, it's hard to say if she's getting any better. She's lost a lot of blood, and the ectoparasites that attacked her caused a neurochemical reaction – they attacked her nervous system and her brain chemistry. That's likely what caused the earlier seizures. We're not entirely sure the extent of the damage, but our preliminary tests suggest that the attack is designed to make her body more susceptible to surrendering to the host."
"What does that mean?"
"We think the neurochemical attack made it easier for the ectoparasite to feed on her blood, like how mosquito saliva acts as an anticoagulant when it feeds, and created a neurological response in her brain that overrode her body's natural survival instincts. It overstimulated the nucleus accumbens in her brain, creating a kind of dependency on and longing for connection with the host. Think of it almost as an addiction."
Melinda pinched the bridge of her nose. She was too tired and too stressed to try and decipher the scientific jargon. "Is she going to be okay?"
The doctor was quiet for a moment – too long of a moment for Melinda to be comforted.
"We don't know, yet. We've given her a blood transfusion to try and replenish what she's lost, and we're hoping that the latest course of medication we've administered will help with the seizures and the withdrawal symptoms left behind from the ectoparasite's chemical attack. But at this point, I think we'll just have to wait and see."
Wait and see.
That's what they'd said when Andrew first got sick. They'd given him what medicine they could, but they had no way of knowing if it would help. Wait and see, they said. Wait and see and hope he pulls through.
It had been so long since Melinda had allowed herself to hope, had needed to exercise that atrophied muscle. She didn't know if she could do this a second time. If she could sit by, unable to do anything but wait and watch as someone important to her withered away.
"There's not anything you can do?" she asked. It came out harsher than she meant, almost a demand. "You're a doctor for god's sake, isn't there something else you can do for her?"
The doctor fixed her with a heavy gaze, the feeling of resignation overtaking the room.
"I'll give you two a moment alone."
The doctor left, and the sound of the machine's hums and beeps filled the room, their noise almost deafening in the absence of anything else to distract Melinda. She let out an angry huff, furious at feeling so helpless and began to pace the room in agitation.
Wait and see. Wait and see.
"Damnit!" In a moment of lost control, she spun around and slammed her fist into the wall behind her. She must have swung harder than she realized, because when she pulled her hand away, the imprint of her fist had dented its way into the wall.
Her throat grew thick with emotion, although which one, she couldn't be sure. Maybe shame at her outburst, or guilt for putting Daisy in this situation. Maybe just fear, pure and simple. Fear that she would lose Daisy. That she had left things unsaid, unfinished in their short time together. That she would be alone all over again.
She crossed back over to the machine and placed her hand on the small window. Spread her fingers out. Tried to imagine that it was the same as holding Daisy's hand.
"Come on, Daisy. Don't quit on me. Please. Please. Don't you dare give up."
She lost track of time in the windowless room. There was a chair – she sat eventually, when her knee made it too hard to keep standing. She must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing Melinda knew, she was awoken by the sound of the door opening. She straightened up in the chair and saw Rosalind, looking very tired and very rumpled, step into the room.
"Hey."
"How's she doing?" Ros asked.
"Not sure." Melinda's voice was quiet, croaky from being woken up. "The last time we talked, the doctor said she wasn't getting worse, but they were still waiting to see if she'd start getting better."
Rosalind didn't say anything for a long time, just stepped closer to the machine to take a heavy, careful look at Daisy inside. Melinda could feel a bundle of emotions swirling out of Ros – exhaustion, anxiety, anger, and, interestingly, satisfaction.
"We had a good night," Ros finally said, stepping away from the machine and settling into the other chair beside Melinda. That explained the satisfaction. "Quinn flipped the minute we threatened to freeze his assets. Between everything you caught on tape and everything Quinn told us once he started squealing like a stuck pig, we had everything we needed for a full takedown of SHIELD. Got support from the DOJ and a UN taskforce, so we had the manpower we needed for a complete raid. Obviously there's mountains of bureaucracy to work through before anybody starts answering for their crimes, but we've got all the major players in custody. Pierce, Whitehall, Hall… We're starting to round up all the agents with that tricky little signal the kid found in their files. Even Malick got picked up by INTERPOL on financial charges."
"Good," Melinda said numbly. "That's good."
"That's very good," Ros stressed. "You did it, Melinda. You stopped them. You made sure those bastards will never make another dime off of a gun sale or a hero's back. You made sure they'll never have a chance to run another twisted experiment or put an Enhanced person through hell for the sake of their mad science. You did that."
"No. Not me."
"Yes, you." Ros looked at her, long and hard. "Just because you're beating yourself up right now doesn't mean you don't get to take credit for the win, here. Because this was a big fucking win. This is going to change everything."
"I couldn't have done it without her," Melinda whispered, eyes burning. "And it's going to cost her her life. One more hero I've killed. One more kid whose future I stole. All for the goddamn greater good. I'm just like them. Still. After everything, I'm still just like them."
"Don't—"
"It should have been me. It was going to be me, but she had to go and be a big, damn hero—"
"Melinda," Ros said sharply. "Stop. You can't think like that. I won't let you, because it's not true. You didn't get the kid hurt, SHIELD did, and now SHIELD is facing justice because of what you – the two of you – managed to do. Plus, if I know anything about Quake, I'm guessing she'd give you an earful if she knew you were blaming yourself. She's a hero. She made a heroic choice. The same choice she'd make every time, I bet."
"Every time," Melinda said softly. "She's a hero, through and through."
They were both quiet for a moment, watching the lights on the machine, the feeble rise and fall of Daisy's chest. Both lost in memories, no doubt.
"There's something you should know," Rosalind finally said. Melinda tore her eyes away from Daisy and looked up, curious.
"What?"
"Everyone we've brought in so far – Quinn, Pierce, Whitehall – none of them are giving us anything on the Clairvoyant. No one's claiming the title, no one's giving up a name…"
"They're lying," Melinda shook her head. "Covering for each other, or… or…"
"I don't know…"
"But it has to be one of them," Melinda frowned. "I mean, Pierce… the Clairvoyant had high level clearance, had to be smart enough and connected enough to pull all those strings. That sounds like Pierce to me."
"He says it's not him. Says that he got encrypted messages from the Clairvoyant, same as Quinn. And he had no idea what we were talking about when we pressed him on Project Terrigenesis."
"Whitehall, then," insisted Melinda. "He's certainly twisted enough to go all-in on the science experiments. He'd stop at nothing to make his next discovery."
Ros shook her head. "Same thing. Claims he got orders, that he only cares about the science part. Something's not sitting right with me. As crazy as it sounds, I honestly think I believe them all. I think we're missing something, that we haven't found the Clairvoyant yet."
"So how do we find him, then?" Melinda asked. "Go through every single agent tagged in Project Insight until one of them gives him up? We can't just sit around and wait until he sends another blood-sucking science experiment after us."
"Starting with the Project Insight files probably isn't a bad idea," Ros admitted. "SHIELD's whole system is locked down at the moment, and we probably won't get clearance to starting combing data for a few days, until we can get our paperwork and warrants lined up. It's honestly too bad Quake's out of commission, we could use somebody like her to break us into the SHIELD files and let us look for anything we could use to trace the Clairvoyant."
Melinda thought hard for a moment, before a small, hopeful filament of an idea flickered to life in her mind. "What about the SHIELD agents who are left? The ones who weren't a part of Project Insight? What if we got one of them to give us access? Would that work?"
"Maybe." Rosalind gave her a curious look. "Why? Do you have someone in mind?"
Melinda got to her feet, inhaling sharply around the twinge in her knee. Maybe she couldn't do anything to help Daisy right now, but this could be her opportunity to at least make sure Daisy's sacrifice wasn't in vain.
"There's one person, an agent, high level. Someone who's helped me before. Let me reach out to him and see if we can't smoke out the Clairvoyant once and for all."