A new world. a new truth
“Do we even know where that would leave us?” Jemma asked.
“What are you guys talking about?” May asked
“If we do it this close to the ground, what would happen to the people that might be there?” Skye added
“Hey?” May tried again.
“It’s our only option to avoid dying right here, right now.” Dasiy said
“HEY!” May yelled “What in God’s name are you kids talking about.”
“Cliff notes version” Scott said “This is the machine that brought Skye to our world and then brought us all to this one. We don’t know where it came from and we don’t know how it works. All we know it was built by the Howard Stark of a different earth than ether ours or yours. And it is currently our only way out of here that doesn’t involve body bags.”
The four SHIELD agents quickly had the casing of the Stark device open and were trying to find some way to control it. Eventually, they were able to wire a laptop into it. They also put the burned out Tesseract back in for safety’s sake.
“OK… come on… Got It” Fitz yelled.
They gathered around him and the computer. There was a list of ten numbers on the screen.
“It might be some sort of coordinate system. Each of these could be different Earths the machine has been on.” Jemma theorized.
“Great, how do we know which is ours?” Daisy asked in response.
“We don’t” Fitz said.
May leaned over the other’s
“There has to be some sort of system to this.” She said. “Look here” May touched the screen. The numbers suddenly lit up and the machine started glowing again.
It was a touch screen computer and her touch had activated the machine.
“Oh hell no…” Fitz muttered as the light show started.
Within the blink of an eye, the plane had vanished from view of the SSR assault squad waiting outside. The sudden silence from there no longer being a running jet engine made it all too obvious the plane wasn’t just invisible again
“Damn it!” Leopold yelled. He pulled out his pistol and shot a nearby Virginia state trooper in the head
“Mr. Fitz” Garret said, admonishing him “How many times have I asked you NOT to do that?”
Much to the amazement of the passengers of the Zephyr Zero, they were still alive. More amazing was the plane was suddenly miles high in the sky and falling fast.
“I don’t think this is our stop” Scott said sarcastically, working his way towards the controls.
“What was your first clue” Fitz answered back.
Scott made it to the cockpit with time to spare, throttling up the one working engine and getting the plane into level flight. He switched the plane over to the autopilot and returned to the others.
“Try it again.” Scott told Fitz. “There are only ten numbers on that list.”
Fitz tapped another set on numbers on the screen, but nothing happened.
“Great. We might be stuck here for a while.”
“Stuck?” May asked “What do you mean stuck?”
“I mean this thing might as well have a mind of its own. We’ve been stuck dealing with it four days now and we know just about as much as we did when we started.”
“I have to go back” May said “We’re about to start distribution of the cure. My people, my world needs me.
“These two” she continued, pointing at Simmons and Skye “can do whatever they want but you HAVE to take me back.”
“We’re trying.” Scott said.
“Well then try harder!” She yelled before storming towards the rear of the plane.
“I still can’t get magnetic bearings right now” Scott said having checked the instruments, “but I do have GPS back. And the strange thing is, we’re hundreds of miles from where we should be.”
“Nothing got fried?” Fitz asked.
“Systems are fine.” Scott answered “No signs of another spike. We just need to replace the compass neddle and the flight controls should be like nothing happened”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have taken the cube out.”
May was sulking in the rear bay on the plane, sitting on the ramp. Skye, feeling a bit useless compared to the others went back to talk to her.
“What do you want?” May told the girl.
“Well to… apologize, for starters.” Skye answered, sitting down across from her.
“You don’t have much to apologize for. You were little more than a windup toy for that tin pot bastard Rodgers. You only thought your ideas and actions were your own.”
“I mean, I was doing what I was told.”
“That’s just the thing, Skye, you weren’t being told. You were being programmed. Like a machine. You stick some punch cards into a computer, you get an answer.”
“I still joined willingly. They offered me the job and I said yes. I rmemeber my first day, meeting Jemma. I remember my first assignment…”
Skye stopped, clutching her head in agony.
“Oh no… Oh GOD no… NO NO NO”
She got up and ran to Jemma, who was resting on their bed.
“I did it!” she cried “I killed them! It was me!”
“Our fuel reserves are starting to run low.” Scott told Daisy, unaware of what was going on. The pair were sitting in the cockpit, looking for a safe place to land. “We can maybe do another ten hours in the air if I’m careful. We wasted a ton with the plane searching for us. With the engine out of idle, the backup batteries are charged up enough that if we leave everything off when we land, the repulsors will start when we need to take off, but we need to refuel and fix the other engine.”
“Which means not matter where we land, we can’t cloak.” Daisy responded. “We’re sitting ducks in a big, black plane, full of hardware someone might just love to get their hands on. I did some checking. There’s no refences to SHIELD, Inhumans, the Avengers or Hydra on this earth’s internet.”
Scott held out his hand and Daisy took it “At least we’re all in one piece.”He said “And together.”
Simmons marched back to talk to May.
“What the hell did you tell Skye?” she demanded of May “she’s practically inconsolable!”
“Nothing,” The older woman said, feeling a bit guilty anyway “Whatever got her upset she remembered on her own. I told you you’re going to have to tell her the truth. She needs to know everything. We might not have ‘Skye’ much longer.”
“But what did she remember?”
“She mentioned her first mission…”
“Oh god no… It’s too soon…” Simmons started to freak out.
“What was her first mission?” May asked
“Take out a CHIMERA safe house…”
“What? Which one?”
“Fairfax….”
“No. My God…” May said in shock “It can’t be…
“She remembers” Simmons cried sitting down next to her old friend “She remembers she killed her parents…”
Two hours later, Scott and Daisy noticed a seemingly abandoned airfield.
“Bingo!” Scott cried.
“We’re playing poker.” Fitz yelled from the back as a joke
“Shut up and buckle up, we’re landing. Go tell the others.”
Scott switched the repulsors on and kicked the plane’s nose up to kill off horizontal momentum before bringing it down on the old airport’s apron.
“This is perfect.” He said, as he shut the plane down. “Everybody off.” He called out.
The Shield agents did their usual checks and sweeps, with Daisy quaking herself into the air to get a better look.
“Not much around.” She reported. “There’s a road nearby, but we’re mostly surrounded by trees.”
“My God” May said, steeping out of the plane “How can a place like this exist?”
Simmons looked around in much the same way, almost forgetting why she was upset.
“When Skye told me what the other world was like, even I could hardly believe her” She told he old friend.
May looked off into the distance. The blue sky, the greenery on the trees and the hills on the horizon. “It’s all his fault. Everything is. When we’re done with him, he’s going to pay for all of it. ”
“Hey” Daisy said “Where’s Skye?”
“Skye… you alright?” Daisy asked, entering the bedroom.
“No.” her twin cried “No I’m not alright. I’ll never be all right. I killed them, Daisy. I killed my parents! I’m a murder!”
“No.” Simmons said, entering the room behind Daisy. “You’re not a murder. Garret is the murder. He simply used you to kill them…”
“I DID IT! I REMEMBER PULLING THE TRIGGER! I taunted them and then I shot them!”
She sat down next to her wife. “Skye… That wasn’t you. That was someone else. They messed with your mind far, far worse than you realized. I should have told you this. I should have told you everything, but I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t want to see you like this. I knew this would happen. I wanted to protect you from this.”
“Jemma… What am I?” Skye cried. “WHO AM I?”
“You’re my wife. The woman I love. The woman I would do anything for.” she answered “And to me that’s all that matters.”
“No… something is very wrong and I want to know what it is. My head hurts even worse. I feel like someone’s on the inside trying to break out with a sledgehammer. WHO AM I?”
“Skye… I” Simmons started to cry also. The two leaned in and embraced. “You’re remembering. The cure I created is stripping away the mental blocks they put in your head.”
Simmons gave her a kiss and wipped away some of the tears.
“You… You were one of us.” Simmons told her. “You were CHIMERA. Your parents were early members. You grew up in one of our bases. We grew up together. We fell in love. We got married after you finished high school. We were a team. We were the best. And then, one day, we slipped up. They had us surrounded. You ran out to draw their attention. To let me escape.”
At this point Simmons was crying even harder than Skye was.
“You told me to go. I ran. I looked back and then… And then… They killed you! You died! Daisy… SKYE… You DIED!”
The girl’s head started to burn as if someone had replaced her blood with gasoline and tossed in a lit match.
“But, somehow, they brought you back. I joined SSR to find you. To bring you home… And there you were alive! But the girl I found had forgotten me. You didn’t know me. They’d created someone else within you. But I saw the glimmer in your eyes. I knew you were in there. I knew there was a way for you to come back to me!”
Skye was moaning and screaming, loud enough to draw attention from the others, who all came running. Her body was bucking, her eyes rolling back into her head and she was starting to foam at the mouth. Then, she suddenly convulsed and passed out.
“No…’ Simmons cried “Daisy! Daisy!”
“Should someone call an exorcist..?” Scott asked, Jemma slapping him in the back of the head.
“Jas?” a voice murmered.
“Daisy… You called me Jas” Simmons cried. “You’re back… You remember!”
“Jas… run Jas… run… please… go…”
“I think she’s talking in her sleep.” Jemma said before turning to her twin “And you, missy, have got so much explaining to do, it’s not even funny.”