‘Come on, come on.’ Daisy grunted while digging up her mother's coffin. She would have to move fast. Move before someone decided to check out what was happening. Daisy was on America’s most-wanted list, goddammit, she couldn’t afford any more attention to herself.
She was almost done when she heard a voice behind her. ‘You know, it’s illegal to dig up graves.’ Daisy felt her heart already beating faster before her mind had even processed who that voice belonged to.
‘Nat.’ She breathed.
‘That’s me.’ Natasha smiled, but not the cocky smile she usually wore, but a slightly insecure one. Had Daisy been trained by anyone other than May, she wouldn’t even have noticed it. But she hadn’t been, and now Daisy could see all the emotions on Natasha’s face, just as Nat could no doubt read all the ones on hers. Natasha started saying something, stopped herself and repeated the process.
‘I should have called but…’ Daisy said, at the same time Natasha started speaking.
‘I left you voicemails.’ The former redheads, now blonde’s voice was shaking. So was hers, Daisy realized. This was the first time Daisy saw Nat face to face since the Ghostrider's thing. And her love for the Avengers hadn’t decreased in the slightest.
‘Where have you been?’ Natasha asked.
‘Long story.’ Daisy sighed. ‘First, a few teammates got stuck in a VR called the Framework, and we had to go in and save them, which kind of screwed us all up, and then we didn’t get a moment's rest because almost all of us got kidnapped to the future and…’ Daisy had to pause for a second to keep her voice from shaking. ‘We found our way back, but we only have a month to stop the world from dying and A.C. is dying as well, but we don’t know how to save him. And we found out that we probably can’t save both the world and him, but I have to try, and everyone wants me to take over but I don’t know what I’m doing and…’ Daisy felt tears rolling over her cheeks and realized that she’d just turned into a rumbling mess in front of her crush. ‘I can’t do anything right.’
Natasha’s head was spinning, Daisy was here, and she was okay, but she was crying, and she just told Nat that Phil was dying, even while she didn’t know that Nat even knew that A.C. was Phil, and now she had to choose between comforting the woman she loved and asking about Phil and demanding answers and turning into a crying mess herself because she just found out Coulson was alive and now it turned out that he was dying again and Nat just didn’t know what to do.
First things first, she needed to be a good friend to Daisy. So she wiped off the woman's tears with her hands before she helped dig up the bones from whoever it was for whatever Daisy needed it for. Then she helped carry the bag of bones to Daisy’s car, where both of them got in.
By the time they had finished, Daisy had collected herself again, so Natasha decided to ask. ‘Daisy, I need to know. I found out Coulson still is alive when I hacked into the most wanted database to find clues as to where you went. He’s A.C., right? Are you saying he’s dying again?’
Daisy exhaled shakily before answering. ‘Yes, to both questions. The reason Coulson survived in the first place was because of the drug I had told you about. It generated new tissue and healed the magical wound. But when we were originally fighting AIDA, Coulson made a deal with the Ghostrider. He hosted the Ghostrider temporarily, but it removed the drug from his system, and the wound has been slowly spreading since. Of course, he didn’t tell us about that until after we were in a position to cure him and let it pass.’ Daisy sounded angry. Nat couldn’t blame her, she was angry as well. How dare Coulson with his nonexistent self-preservation instincts leave her behind, again?
‘This is all such a mess.’ Natasha sighed and decided to change the conversation. ‘So whose bones are those?’
‘Oh, my mothers.’
‘WhAt?’