Hey

Fitz said he had something promising.

He would have taken anything, even just for the distraction. Usually, there was no place he’d rather be than sitting by May’s bedside, especially now that he had the opportunity, with the search for Daisy being led by Mack. Usually he’d by happy to see her sleeping; finally getting the rest she so desperately needed. But he had waited by her bedside all morning, and her heavy slumber had been anything but restful. He knew her fever was high, high enough that Jemma was talking about moving her to a real hospital – she said she had given her something to help but still, Coulson didn’t like the troubled look on the young scientists face.

Guilt plagued him as Coulson watched Jemma from across the lab as he waited for Fitz. He had hoped that by moving May into her own room, it would take some of the pressure off of her shoulders – he knew Melinda could be difficult, but the poor girl looked close to tears the last time he had found her trying to examine May. Even later that night, she had given him 2 loaded syringes to add to May’s drip, unable to meet his eye as she stumbled through an excuse that May needed space. Whatever she had given him had certainly helped in sedating her, but her fever continued to spike.

‘Sorry – I needed Bobbi to check something on the Zephyr – is everything alright?’

Fitz’s arrival was a welcome distraction from his own thoughts, and he tried his best to summon a tight smile he was sus looked as unconvincing as it felt.

‘Worried about Daisy – it’s been 3 days, and we have nothing.’

It wasn’t untrue; his last exchange with Daisy was running on a loop in his head – as much as it pained him, he’d respect her wishes if she chose a life away from S.H.I.E.L.D but he couldn’t leave things the way they had. She needed to know the truth about Dr Gardner at least. His thoughts flashed compulsively back to May, as they always did, she would kick his ass if she thought he was hovering by her bedside instead of out there, tracking down their stubborn young charge.

Stubborn young daughter, his mind subtly corrected. He had probably felt it for much longer, but Melinda had been the first one to broach the subject, at the most unexpected of times. She had been uncommonly tender with him, stealing him away from his office in the early evening, and now laying contentedly in arms as he traced absent minded circles over her taut stomach, imaging how it might feel to be swollen and warm under his palm.

‘Do you think Daisy would want to live with us – even with a screaming kid in the house?’

The question caught him somewhat off-guard, they both knew that raising a baby on base likely wouldn’t be an option but it warmed his heart to know May had also been fantasizing about what could be.

‘We don’t even have a place yet, and you’re already trying to fill our spare room? Where’s your Mom supposed to sleep when she comes to babysit?’

He was pushing it a little, and hoped it would be cushioned by his jest. They had talked a lot of things through, and May had been more open with him than he had even hoped for, but still, there were some things they didn’t say, that he knew were both too real and too far away for Melinda to tolerate at the moment. Things like ‘baby’. And ‘pregnant’. And Will You Marry Me.

‘She should probably have her own room – she was technically our kid first – don’t you think? Certainly causes us enough trouble to be’.

Phil hid his sigh of relief in a small chuckle, because of course Daisy was basically their kid – even if she was someone else’s daughter, she still had a place in his heart , and apparently Melinda’s too, whether she wanted it or not.

Fitz dragged him out of his head (and out of the past) as he projected the contents of his tablet onto the screen before them.

‘I had to check if we’d be able to upload an unknown flight pattern into the Zephyr’s navigation system, and it looks like we can. If you look – here – Daisy’s cell is still pinging a signal back to us. But, when we try and trace it through our servers, it doesn’t show any GPS data – which should be impossible, and it turns out that it IS impossible – wherever Daisy is has some sort of GPS cloaking but it’s only obscuring the GPS data when we try to extract it. Which got me thinking if there was a way be could somehow harness that data without actually reading it through our system – it was just an idea, but it looks like it’s working – if we pair the signal to the Zephyr’s navigation system, it doesn’t give us a target location but it DOES accept it as a destination point – which we should be to get to by not activating a flight path, and simply letting the Zephyr auto-pilot there. You see?’

Fitz was wide eyed and a little breathless by the time he paused long enough to register his puzzled silence.

‘I see this conversation would probably be a whole lot more meaningful with an actual pilot’.

Fitz spared him a sad smile; he knew he was referring to May.

‘Really we just need to be able to take off and land, Bobbi said she –‘

There were a couple of confused shouts from the technicians across the lab as the base was plunged into sudden darkness. Or maybe it was not the darkness that perturbed them. Coulson didn’t quite hear the moment it happened, so much as he felt it; deep in his bones and inside his head. It was like thunder, without sound, and it left every hair on his body standing on end.

‘What the bloody hell –‘

As quickly as it had gone, the power flowed back through the base, and the screens on the wall began flickering to life as the gentle hum of the air conditioning resumed.

Fitz was already typing hurriedly when a flustered Mack appeared in the doorway;

‘Fitz – did you just –‘

‘Am already on it, give us a bleeding minute’, Fitz waved an agitated hand in their general direction, leaving the two senior agents to peer over his shoulder, trying to gather any sense of what had happened.

‘It looks like the East wing was the first thing to go, there’s not much down there that could have impacted our whole system like that, I’m just checking for the last visual we have before – ‘

Fitz fell silent, zeroing in on the only activity visible as he scanned the security footage from just before the system dropped. The group watched the scene unfolding on the screen before them but Coulson’s heart had already dropped to the pit of his stomach as soon as the first frame came into view. Through gritted teeth, he watched Melinda limping down the hallway, still in her loose sleep wear, her hair hanging loosing over her shoulder obscuring her face. It happened to quickly to know if she hit the ground, but the last thing he saw was Melinda slumping against the wall as the feed went blank. When it flickered back into focus a moment later, Melinda was gone, and so was any shred of rational thought Phil had left.

Everything was a funny colour.

It wasn’t until May swayed dangerously and shuffled forward to catch herself that she realized their was grass beneath her bare feet. Taking in her unfamiliar surroundings, it all looked real enough, but the grass appeared to sway in a breeze she could not feel on her too hot skin.

Something is nagging at the back of her mind, just a little too far for her sluggish thoughts to reach. When she closes her eyes she sees glimpses of a familiar scene she doesn’t remember the ending of. The heat seemed to squeeze all around her. Her head was spinning and the room was spinning and she hadn’t eaten anything solid in days but her body wouldn’t listen and she heaved until her stomach hurt. It burned, it burned more than it should, even when the heaving stopped. And suddenly she was on her feet, and she didn’t feel like she had the strength to stand but something told her it was important. Yes, that was right, something had told her to move, had called out to her. She knew the voice wasn’t real, wasn’t familiar, and the grass beneath her feet probably wasn’t real either and hopefully soon Phil would wake her from her hazy nightmare but her legs were still carrying her numbly forward.

Come to the water.

There it was again, the voice was in her head but was not her own.

Be swift. Come to the water.

The strength that kept her on her feet was not her own, and she found she didn’t feel compelled to fight it as her feet carried her forward. She needs the water, she knows it isn’t far.

Daisy is gently manipulating the air in front of her, following her mother’s instructions to feel the air within the water molecules, and use it lift small water droplets from her glass, one by one. Sweat is beading on her forehead from the effort of the careful control until she finally breaks focus and the walls around them shudder violently.

She looks down at her hands in horror, taking a second to register that they are still, and the earth beneath her feet is shaking.

‘What’s happening – ‘

She moves quickly to her mother’s side, and the walls stop shaking but the earth still rumbles beneath her feet in a threatening hum. A siren blares somewhere in the distance, but she still registers the subsonic crack of Gordon appearing beside them, a slender woman with large green eyes at his side.

‘Mom? Did I do something?’

‘Not directly, I don’t think, Jai-Ying you need to see this’, Gordon answers before Jai-Ying, nodding his head towards the woman still clutching his arm.

Daisy watches, bemused, as her mother moves forwards and cups the woman’s face gently, ‘What have you seen Grace?’

Instead of answering, the woman’s eyes slip shut and she reaches forward to lay her hands against the blank wall. Before Daisy can question her any further, swirls of colour build around the woman’s fingertips, spreading out across the wall like paint seeping into a canvas, until eventually sharpening into a clear image, which quickly begins to move.

The first thing Daisy recognises is the now familiar stone temple, standing proudly atop its grassy hillside. However, it now appears to bear a large crack down it’s centre, creating almost on entrance of sorts – she briefly wondered if the quake she had felt had cracked the stone, or if it was the other way around. Her mother mutters an unfamiliar curse under her breath before Daisy recognizes the blurry figure approaching the opening in the stone. The shock is still rippling through her when the image of May’s face finally sharpens into view and subsequently begins to fade as the silent green eyes woman dropped her hands from the wall she had made her canvas.

The scene was jarring in her brain – maybe it was discordant image of May in Afterlife. She doesn’t have time to ponder it long, the walls shudder around them once more and her mother’s eyes are almost wild as she rounds on Gordon.

‘Gordon – you must hurry – round up as many of the others as you can. Afterlife is compromised but there is another place, Grace will show you, she has seen it. Be wary – the intruder was in plain clothes, there may be more of them among us. Go, quickly!’

‘Wait – wait – why are we leaving?’ Gordon disappears with Grace at his side, leaving her alone with Jai-Ying, who is frantically stuffing the contents of her desk into a bag. ‘They’re probably here looking for me – I’ll tell them to leave – I won’t let them take your home!’

Jai-Ying comes to a stop and draws her into a warm embrace before cupping her cheek, her brown eyes a mixture of love and sadness;

‘My sweet little flower, you are the most precious thing on this island, but they have not come for you. You remember, I told you of the temple’s strength – it is a source of ancient power, a power that others would wish to take from us – but without its protection, Afterlife will be destroyed and our people will be lost’.

Tears burned at the back of her eyes, held only in place by the metallic taste of rage in her mouth;

‘Mom – I’m so sorry – they came here because of me, I can help stop them, I can – ‘

Jai-Ying cut across her, clasping her hands in her own;

‘Here is what you will do – go to the centre of the village, there is a bunker there, the others know to gather there when the alarm sounds – Gordon will come and get you and take you to safety’. Daisy started to protest but her mother shushed her softly as she continued. ‘These people have stolen you from me once before – I will not allow it again – head to the bunker, help the others if you can, be strong for them – I will follow you – Go now’.

With a final embrace, Jai-Ying ushered her gently out the door, handing her the bag she had gathered before calling for Gordon, who appeared and whisked her away almost immediately.

The dull hum beneath the earth was building, filling the air with a vibration that tingled against Daisy’s skin. In the street outside, the residents were cowering in their doorways, waiting for the shaking earth to still once more before they continued towards the centre of town. With a start, Daisy remembered Dr Gardner, still laid up in the infirmary after his run in with May. The carers had already abandoned their posts and Daisy dashed from room to room in the abandoned infirmary until she found the only one that was left occupied. From where he sat in his bed, Dr Gardner’s eyes were wide with shock but his dark skin was pallid and Daisy new his heart was no longer beating. She had no time to mourn him as a deafening crack rippled through the air and sent Daisy running back to the street outside, just in time to see the distant temple begin to shudder and crumble. Using her rage to drive her, Daisy pushed the air from under her feet, the way Jai-Ying had taught her, and propelled herself forward; towards her mother and the hillside temple in the distance.