“Carry on this mission and cherish it, for it will be your last mission together.”
Daisy sits across from Mack as they slowly float around in space, Sousa courteously pretending he can’t hear them from the passenger seat.
"Enoch said this would be the team's last mission together." Daisy's inner turmoil clashes against the beat of her heart.
Mack pauses, the look on his face clearly suggesting he wasn't expecting her statement.
"Even if we survive?"
"That was… my impression, yeah."
He sighs and shrugs his shoulders as if it's inconsequential. "Maybe it's time, we've had a crazy ride." He chuckles, albeit a little humorlessly.
"What?" She says it a bit too loud, but whatever- Daisy has the right to freak out over this.
"How can you say that? It j- That's it? Just, talk to you later? That's-" Her words are choppy, broken, and she knows she isn't making much sense but Mack seems to understand anyways.
"Now look, we have things called phones. I know, I know, you millennials like to use them to take pictures of yourselves. But in the eighties? We actually use them to talk to each other." He attempt to lighten the mood, like he always done, with his usual Mack-Hammer humor, but it doesn't work like it used to.
"I'm serious. We… we're not going to turn into those people who used to work together and- you know. 'Hey I'm in town and we used to be close a long time ago' You know, that's-"
She breaks off once again, trying to stop her voice from breaking.
"Sounds like we might."
The way Mack says it- it should infuriate her. As if it's almost nothing to him, as if SHIELD wasn't her entire world, as if this team wasn't her everything. It doesn't. all it does is make her sad. Because this feeling is familiar. This feeling is staying in St. Agnes, praying to find her forever family. This feeling is being sent away once again from a foster home, letting her hopes rise only to fall to the ground with a crunch. This feeling is getting close to Grant Ward, thinking that maybe, maybe, there could be something there; only for life to once again prove that she shouldn't let herself be happy. This feeling is saying goodbye to Lincoln, another person who got hurt simply because they dared to get close.
This feeling is pain. Deep, raw, pain. And all Daisy wants to do is yell and scream and cry because hasn't she given enough of her happiness to the universe?
"You guys are my family." She says instead, "I don't know who I am… without you guys."
"Daisy-" He tries to interrupt.
"No it's-" It's not okay. Her voice finally gives and she can't find it within herself to keep talking. Because it is not okay.
In the background she hears Mack talking, but she doesn't care anymore.
Daisy remembers being twenty something years old, living in a van, and hacking her way through life. She remembers the team, of course rather skeptical at first, accepting her as one of them. She remembers for the first time in her life, having a family.
Jemma, Fitz, Coulson, and May. They always stuck by her. Her parents were both maniacal sociopaths. She had these freaky earthquake powers. She does terrible things in the name of an alien parasite. She is, quite literally, the Destroyer of Worlds.
Through it all, these people have never left her, which is a lot more than she can say about the previous people in her life; whether or not they left by choice.
And now both Enoch and Mack are saying that this may be it, this could be the end of all this, this family, her entire life.
They don't understand that without them, she has nothing. She is nothing.
A couple of Mack's words make it into her ears.
"It's okay."
Daisy thinks about that. Then she thinks about that word okay. And she wonders what that really means. And she comes to the conclusion that maybe this is where her life was leading to. Maybe time was progressing to this moment. Maybe the Universe decided to give her everything she's ever wanted- only to take it away. Maybe fate decided it so.
And Daisy thinks that nothing about her life is really fucking 'okay'.