Skye doesn’t think she’ll ever sleep properly again. Her mother is dead, her father doesn’t remember her, and she will never be free of her nightmares.
***
When Daisy sleeps next to Lincoln, she fears her nightmares more. Not because they’re any worse, but because she has to worry about hurting him too. She’s hurt too many people. She can’t do it again.
***
This isn’t what she wanted when she worried about hurting Lincoln in her sleep. Now, she sleeps alone. In skeevy motel rooms, on park benches. She knows that there are better ways to manage the nightmares and the tremors that accompany them, but she doesn’t have access to that now. She’s not with SHIELD now, so she self-medicates.
Self-medicate is probably a pretty generous term for the copious quantity of alcohol that Daisy drinks every time she needs to go to sleep. She wears her gauntlets as she sleeps too, just in case. But the pint of vodka or so a night knocks her out well enough that she doesn’t seem to shake things up too much.
She never drives anywhere once she’s started drinking herself to sleep for the night. If Lincoln could come back to haunt her ass, she’s sure he would if she was drinking and driving.
It gets to the point where her breath never quite stops smelling like vodka. Her head always hurts a bit, and her vision is blurred even when she’s stone-cold sober. She’s upgraded from a pint of vodka a night to more. She doesn’t keep track of how much. She doesn’t want to know.
***
Eventually, Daisy learns to sleep alone again. She learns to keep her demons at bay at night without the vodka that she had come to rely so heavily on. Every time she passes a liquor store, her eyes fixate on the display a second too long. But she remembers the pain in Lincoln’s voice as he spoke about his car accident, about his struggles with alcohol addiction. She remembers him later, saying that he was saving the woman that he loved, just before the radio cut out. And she moves on.
She punishes herself in different ways. No more alcohol.
Instead, she begs the Ghost Rider to kill her (she deserves it. Lincoln was dead because of her).
Instead, she doesn’t wear her gauntlets (they’re too conspicuous).
She doesn’t stand up for herself when Fitz is telling her off for leaving (he had gotten Jemma back. She hadn’t gotten Lincoln back).
She locks herself into the cafeteria of the prison as a surge of inmates surrounds her (she is ready to die for the people she called her family. No one dies for her again).
She’s been alright with the idea of death, but this is more than that. She almost craves it.
***
Daisy doesn’t know when she stops wanting to die. It isn’t really a switch that flips, more a gradual change.
She’s still willing to die for her friends. For the earth. Without question. She tries to stay behind in the future to break the loop, but Coulson pulls her back through time with them. She goes into the final fight with Glenn Talbot knowing it will likely be her last. But it isn’t. And there are so many times in her year of space travel with Simmons, Piper, and Davis where Daisy thinks she’s going to die.
She doesn’t fear death, but she’s trying to avoid it now.
***
Daisy has rarely had a night without dreams since Lincoln died.
Most of the time, they’re nightmares. Her greatest hits of letting her team down. And wow, there’s a lot of fodder there. She relives Quinn shooting her. She watches Trip die trying to save her, then the room spins and she sees Jaiying slit Raina’s throat in the dark of night. She feels the Inhibitor implant get ripped out of her neck, watches as Sarge stabs May.
Sometimes though, she sees what her life could have been. She sees Jaiying and Cal, playing with a toddler version of herself. Her mother’s face is unscarred, and her father doesn’t have the unhinged look in his eye that she remembers. There are father-daughter dances and science fairs. Her mother is always singing, and her father always tries to hum along.
These dreams are worse than the nightmares. When Daisy wakes up from the nightmares, her heart is heavy with what has happened. With the dreams, she spends days wondering about what could’ve been.
***
When Daisy sleeps next to Daniel, she rarely dreams. She didn’t know that nothing could feel so good, but here she is. She revels in it every morning.
And when she does have nightmares, Daniel is there to soothe her. He holds her and runs his hands along her back, her arms, runs his fingers through her hair. He shushes her softly as she gasps and clutches at the sheets with tears streaming down her face.
She does the same for him when he wakes up in a start. His dreams are different, but the same. She doesn’t know what he sees, but she knows that it’s parts of the war and parts of his time with the SSR and SHIELD. Some nights, he wakes up and grabs for a leg that is no longer there. Other days, he clutches his shoulder where Daisy has seen the thick, messy scars. He doesn’t talk about it, and she doesn’t ask. Someday she will, but they have time.