Chapter 1
Daisy doesn’t think. As soon as she sees Lincoln sitting in the pilot seat, barely holding himself together, she quakes his head into the side of the quinjet. Hive quickly masks his surprise and smiles at her, thinking she’s finally seeing his point of view.
Good.
It’s almost too easy.
She tosses Lincoln’s unconscious body through the hangar doors and shuts them after him. Hive is content to let her take the lead, believing she will take them somewhere safe, where they can regroup before SHIElD takes the drop on them. She’s never flown a plane, so she nearly cries in relief when she sees that Lincoln already plugged in the coordinates and shortened the controls with his powers. The force of the plane launching upwards sends Hive barreling into the wall, but Daisy’s already strapped in, so she’s fine, though Hive is thankfully out cold.
She sits. Waits. The irony nearly makes her want to laugh, that it could’ve been so easy to just- fly a plane into space and Hive is defeated. Instead of laughing, she bites her tongue to try and stop the wave of tears that gather behind her eyelids.
They come anyways.
“Daisy!”
“Daisy come in!”
Daisy quickly fumbles for the responder, nearly dropping it in her haste to hear May’s voice.
“I’m h-here. I’m here.” She says it partially to herself. She still feels like her body isn’t hers, like she’ll never truly get a part of herself back, not after Hive took it from her. The words are to remember that her choices are now her own, even as the tiny voice in her head screams in self loathing.
“Daisy, what are you doing.” There’s an edge to May’s voice she has never heard before, a certain tremor to it that she didn’t know the woman was even capable of.
“ May. ” Her own voice is choppy, broken as the reality of what she’s about to do hits her, hard . She covers her mouth with her hands, desperately trying to muffle the sobs clawing their way out from the back of her throat. She doesn’t want to die.
“Daisy. Turn that plane around, now. ”
She chuckles wetly. May’s voice is now stoic and hard and void of emotion, and it sounds like home.
“S’ not a plane, May.” She laughs again at her own joke.
May is not amused. “Daisy, turn the quinjet around.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I know.” May doesn’t beg her to stay, or give her false hope of a different outcome. She’s always been a straightforward person, and she knows just as well as Daisy that this has to be done.
“You didn’t need to do this Daisy. Tell me your not doing this out of some misguided attempt to atone for your sins?”
Daisy doesn’t respond because May wouldn’t understand. Hive took over her mind, made her hurt her loved ones, and as if that wasn’t enough, made her enjoy doing it as well. The worst part was she didn’t even try to fight it, she knew what was happening and she didn’t even try to shake of his control. Without her involvement, this entire mess could have been avoided, if she had just fought him , then none of this would have happened. So, despite whatever May says, Daisy has to do this, she has to make sure they will live, even if she has to sacrifice herself for it.
The thought brings her no comfort.
The quinjet is still accelerating, still gaining altitude, and she can see them nearing the atmosphere. Behind her, she can hear Hive getting back up, but it’s too late. The coordinates are locked in, and the controls are fried. They’re trapped.
She hears May sigh over the line, and is comforted by the fact that she’s not alone.
Daisy has never wanted to die.
Not when she was five years old and her entire body was screaming in pain and it would’ve been easier to let go. Not when she was a boneless teenager and living in a van and life was so pointless she might of well been dying. Not when she was finally her own adult and meeting her parents for the first time, and learning they were not what she expected them to be.
And not now, when an alien parasite took over her mind, and she hurt the only family she’s ever known, and the guilt is slowly killing her from the inside.
No, Daisy has never wanted to die, even when she felt she deserved to. She wants to watch movies with Coulson, and listen to Fitz drone about electromagnetic thermodynamics. She wants to hug Mack and rope Jemma into her pranks. She wants to laugh with Hunter and talk endlessly with Bobbi.
Most of all she just wants to wake up at five in the morning because she can’t sleep and join May in the gym and relish in the silence and drink tea when they’re done.
Daisy opens her eyes and looks at her reflection through the pane of the front window of the quinjet until she can’t bare to stand the sight of herself. She looks scared, alone, weak.
The quinjet wasn’t made to withstand such high altitude, and Daisy can already feel herself begin to lose oxygen, the air is quickly thinning out.
“May.” She says, and her voice is even weaker, struggling to come out over the tightness of her throat.
For a moment, there is no answer, and Daisy is afraid she is going to die like this, that this time she made a mistake far to big to be forgiven, that she’s going to have to leave the earth without ever getting to tell May how she sees her and know she’s going to die unloved and guilt-ridden and utterly alone -
The next moment, she hears the familiar sound of static crackling and she refuses to think about Lincoln, instead, she focuses on the sound of May’s voice, softer than she’s ever heard it before.
It almost makes her want to smile.
“I’m here, Daisy. It’s okay.”
“C-can you-” Daisy cuts herself off and doesn’t even care that the older woman can here her sobs through the earpiece. She takes a rattling gulp of air and gasp out the question.
“Can you stay with me? Please?”
“Of course.”
They sit in silence, and the gentle sound of May’s breathing calms Daisy’s erratic heart, until she starts to hear the connection breaking.
“May! May, I don’t- I don’t want to die.” She doesn’t know why she says it, she can’t stop the accent even if she wanted to. She couldn’t release Hive back into the world. It’s over. She wonders if any part of her life held meaning at all. She wonders if any of this was worth it, if it all had to end like this.
“I know baby, I don't-” The static breaks through May’s voice once more.
“May! Mom please I-”
_____________
“I don’t want to go alone. Don’t leave please I’m-” The line goes dark as Daisy’s quinjet blinks off the radar.
In the distance, she can here agents sighing in relief over the death of Hive, and in the room, she can feel the silent tears of the team, despair threatening to swallow her whole. The transponder clatters loudly through the silence and for once, she wishes that somebody would fill it.
On a warm evening at the undisclosed location of a SHIEILD base, a heart breaks, and Melinda May learns what it’s like to lose a child.