Chapter One: Planet
Fitz’s newfound optimism - his belief that history could be changed, that time could be rewritten, that one day he would hold his daughter’s infant son in his arms - shattered the second Daisy was dragged in. Her face was beaten down and bloody; one of her eyes was puffy, black, tender looking like a piece of passed-away raw meat. Her lips were swollen and split. There were bright red markings of a knife’s cuts down her arms, and blood on her grey shirt that didn’t bode well.
The blue warrior that had brought her here was holding her forcedly up, an arm slung over his shoulders, ensnaring the other in a tight grip that pulled her body rigidly against his. As they walked to their leader he let go of an arm and shoved her down; Daisy went docilly, falling limply down with a certain form of grace improper to the situation. Fitz’s heart jumped in his chest as he heard the loud thud her head made as it hit the dirty grey pavement; Jemma, tied to his side, trembled and let out a sob. Lying brokenly to their feet like a ragged doll, her hair sprayed in the dust and her fingers rasping against the floor, Daisy was eerily quiet and still.
The man that had brought her here turned to Taryan, gave him a grave salute, and started talking in that grating, rasping tongue of theirs. Their voices, hoarse and rough, echoed strangely around the metal walls surrounding them. The air, thick of dust and from the smell of blood, seemed to grow rarer as he breathed, his heart pounding, his lungs burning, his head spinning. This was it, he knew, and he grew more certain as Daisy grew stiller. This was the moment that would make or undo history.
Jemma, whose arm was squashed against his by the strength of their captors, was gently crying. He could hear her every tiny sob, every small sniffle, and felt his arm shaking from the force of her own. He couldn’t cry himself – he felt detached from it all, his thoughts dumbly stuck far away, far from Daisy’s broken body, from the arm that was shaking out of his control, from the grip that was crushing his wrists, from Taryan’s sadistic, victorious smile. His mind was reeling slowly, his brain overflowing from a panic he should be feeling, from the overload of oxygen that he was rapidly inhaling.
“Silence,” said the warrior holding them, and jerked their body painfully against each other. Jemma gave a terrified gasp and held back her sobs, but didn’t seem to be able to control the whimpers and sniveling that came. Her entire body was still shaking in panic. Spread down at their feet, Daisy still hadn’t moved. The tremble in her fingers, coated with red blood and white in dust, was the only sign that she was still conscious.
Taryan and his cronies had stopped talking; silence fell in the rusted hangar quite abruptly. They turned their heads in a gracious arch towards them – the three humans crushed against the power of the blue warriors, like beetles in a child’s hands - and nodded to the warrior holding him and Jemma still. “The man goes,” Taryan said in English, his accent thick of the rolling undertones of a tongue that wasn’t from this world. “The woman stays.” He felt a pull against his arm; the cold touch of a knife against his arm, unbinding him from Jemma. “If the Destroyer doesn’t comply, he is next.”
Panic crashed back through his senses, tearing his mind back to action as Jemma was pulled away from his side, as two of the hateful blue creatures grabbed his arms before he could even lash out. “No,” Jemma sobbed; he heard a distinct whine from Daisy’s immobile body.
“Stop,” he growled, tried to pull away, fell instantly to his feet. They were dragging him from under the armpits, their hold strong and impossible to fight off, and he found himself tipping over backwards, feet kicking the air in vain, in desperation. “STOP!” he yelled, and tried to fold himself over, to lift his feet, to drag the two warriors down, but was hoisted in the air like a child instead. “Jemma – “, he jerked away again, but didn’t succeed in slowing them down – “JEMMA!”
Daisy had been pulled in an upright position, a blue alien’s hand in her hair. She was looking at him being dragged away silently, her big black eyes shining in tears, the undamaged one shining like a dark polished stone in the middle of the dark black sea. There were tracks from tears glistening above the coat of dust from her cheeks. In front of her, her back to him, Jemma had been forced to a kneeling position. Her face was turned upwards towards their friend; he couldn’t see her properly. “PLEASE!” he roared again, but they were already at the door. He threw his legs against the sidewall with all his strength and all his weight, hoping it would slow them, hoping to stall for time. Pain exploded in his knee; the men slowed. “Stop,” growled one of the men, the same one from before, whose war paint flashed blue for a brief moment in front of his eyes. “Taryan win forever,” he said in primitive tones, stopping their progression to let him see the scene enfolding in front of them.
Their master had a gun in his great blue hand, a human weapon, derisive in its simplicity and tiny in his huge paw, and was pressing against Jemma’s temple. Fear crashed again against Fitz’s mind, tidal wave storming against a frail brick wall. Daisy was standing there inertly, upright by her own will as her captor was pacing carefully away, behind Taryan and Jemma, inching towards another door. “Unleash your powers,” the Kree’s leader was saying, and his words whistled to Fitz’s ears like ones from a snake. “Destroy the world, or I blow her head.”
“Do it now,” he added. “The man is next. I have the others from your team,” he said. “They are next.”
There was a sharp pull under his arms and Fitz was pulled backwards again, trembling in fear, gasping for air. Jemma? Jemma or Earth, was that the choice they had? Jemma, or seven billion other humans? The choice was impossible, the choice was unbearable, the choice clutched at his heart, blocked his lungs, pounded against his brain, stole his air. The raw panic coursing through his veins blocked his senses for an instant and he couldn’t see; he heard the glass door sliding close in front of him, cutting him from two of the people he loved the dearest. He opened his eyes again, cried out in despair. He could still see the figures standing away from him; Jemma’s prone, sobbing form, Daisy trembling like a leaf, staring at her, Taryan and the gun, trigger ready, a terrible rictus across his face.
He could almost see the finger curling, about to shoot, about to end it for Jemma, about to end it all… “ALRIGHT!” screamed Daisy, strangled voice breaking the beat of time, tearing through the air. He could hear everything clearly through the glass door. “I’ll do it.”
Jemma’s face shot upwards, moaning a defeated “no”. Fitz’s heart lurched in his chest, in favor or against this, he didn’t know. He didn’t know. A thousand emotions surged through him, drowning his thoughts, washing the rationale away, none of them as powerful as the panic that brought him again to his knees. Which was best, which would save them, which choice – the choice, the choice, how could he call it a choice?
His captors stopped, their grip slackened, they were looking through the door. The end of the world was not something to miss. He felt grounded to the spot by the same need to watch as them. To be a witness to the destruction of the human race, to the destruction of billions of years of geological history.
Daisy was standing straight, he could tell, even through the mist that covered the world. She was standing upright, her head turned up towards him, her back strong and her head high like a warrior. Her hands were in the air, still white from the dust and streaked in gore. There was a spatter of clay on her cheek, too, and some in her hair, hanging there like a funeral shroud. Her eyes shone towards him once more, one of them as black as dead skin. Her lips were red against her white face, vermillion streaked over her chin. She was the living ghost of a defeated soldier, made of blood, rags and torn flesh. But she was beautiful, and she belonged with him in a way he couldn’t explain, in a way that made him feel a flicker of want for his mother, a yearning for the days on the Bus, for peace, for quiet, for an end of all wars, for Jemma and Daisy by his side, always.
She was still looking in front of her, not a Jemma but at him, straight at him. Her lips moved and her eyes were still trained on his - the message she was conveying was meant to absolve him of something, he understood that, but he didn’t really understand it. “I love you both,” she had said, but why, why now, how?
Taryan’s gun jerked towards Jemma’s head again, impatient, nervous. Daisy’s hand shot out, not towards the ground, but towards her own head.
Towards her own head.
Her fingers threaded through her brown locks. Threaded –
- herbrown locks -
The world spun out of control, the sun went out, ice doused over him.
At once he knew and couldn’t unknow. A sense of terror, of horror, coursed through his veins like electricity, jerked him upright, threw him against the door, one of his fists exploding from pain as it pounded heavily against the glass, a scream ripping through his chest, through his heart, from the core of his being, piercing his ears, a scream of denegation, a scream for mercy, for it to stop, for it to not be true –
The world exploded.
He was sent flying backwards, his shoulder against something floppy, his face smashing against something unyielding. His cheekbone was in pieces and there was dirt in his mouth; there was a piercing wail ringing across the room, a sense of nausea, and everything was spinning.
Then the spinning slowed.
The nausea stayed.
He was lying against the solid ground. His arm was being shoved off by something blue and it landed at his side again, painfully. Dimly he was aware that something was crushing his lungs, that he couldn’t breathe properly. Noises were echoing in his head; the ringing noise was coming from him, not from the outside. A spasm took over his arm and his fingers brushed against something cold, something that left a trail of fire on them. A shard of broken glass.
His senses came back to him slowly; the knowledge of who he was, where he was slid back to his mind like a ghost coming to take possession of a foreign body. He was lying in a dark and long corridor, behind a closed door that held all the monstrosities in the world. If he couldn’t see it wasn’t of his own fault; the lights in the corridor were flashing on and off, in a sinister beam, obscuring his view and then filling it with flashes of swirling dust, shards of broken glass, swaying blue bodies slowly getting to their knees. What was keeping him from breathing was the weight of his own body against his chest; he was lying face down, knocked down by the explosion.
Slowly he rolled to a side. Air entered his lungs; dimly, he remembered an exercise where May taught them to breathe in, breathe out, slowly and profoundly. Vaguely he did as the tender memory instructed him to. A voice echoed in the ear to his right; a language that wasn’t really one, that he could never understand, that was as confused as him.
Earth, he remembered dimly. Earth or Jemma. Daisy. A choice…
“No,” he croaked, and turned around on his knees. A small piece of glass under him cut through his leg sharply; he felt the pain only dimly, as though it was far removed from his mind, from what was going on. He didn’t stop but crawled on forward. “No,” he repeated dumbly. The lights turned off as he put his arms in front of him, still on his knees; his fingers came against an upright but broken pane of glass. He was at the door.
The lights came on again as he pushed against what remained of it. As the glass broke down some more, shattering beneath his fingers, he saw rather than felt blood pooling and trailing down their length. Something took a hold of his ankle as the lights turned off again; he gave whatever it was a strong kick and heard a groan. He was free instantly, and he crept over the broken door on all fours, fingers ripping against the pieces of glass from the floor, his tights tearing against what was left of the door. Still he continued blindly, for he was remembering. Remembering the unthinkable; remembering Daisy’s bright black eye, shining like a dark jewel against the cruelty of the rest of the world; remembering her words; feeling, more than anything else, a sense of failed responsibility, of loss, of denial.
The lights turned on again. There was blood on the ground in front of his hands, underneath his fingers, spayed in wet drops in an awkward, unrealistic arch. He looked up. A few feet in front of him was the sole of a black, military boot, attached to a leg clad in kaki military pants. In front of that –
He saw red, so much red, a puddle of blood, and he did not get to see more. There was a violent tug at his collar, he was pulled back up, his head reeled backwards, the world spinning before his eyes in a horrible display of grey and white and scarlet. But it did not matter; his heart was splitting in halves in his chest, thoughts were echoing through his head, tripping over one another, distilling the same macabre knowledge. Daisy – Daisy had done it, a choice had been made, Daisy, Daisy…
There was a shrill, piercing scream somewhere in front of him. A shout, orders barked in a tongue he didn’t understand, covered by the sound of loud, throaty sobs. A shout, the noise of a gun; Fitz’s mind snapped back to attention.
He was still in the hangar, held by the back of jumpsuit by one of the Krees, and Taryan had just taken a shot at Jemma from the toy gun in his palm. Standing thunderously, majestic in his fury, he was screaming to his men in rage, not looking at anything but the scarlet display before them. He had missed, his aim off. Jemma, a foot behind him, was doubled over in the dust, shaking from head to toe, weeping violently over a puddle of something white and shiny. Understanding came through Fitz as he looked at her prone form; grief and fear was creeping back, threatening to overcome him… His eyes slid back, almost automatically, drawn to the khaki pants, to the site of gore…
A blue fist flew towards him, blocking the body from his sight. Fitz welcomed the dark.
What came after, when he thought about it in the coming days, was a painful blur. There was a cell, he knew, and Jemma had been unconscious, tied to his side. A rusted nail by their side; the dim awareness that he should cut the ropes, wake her up, run away. Another room in the hangar; more dust; a terrible, pounding headache. Somehow smashing the window with a brick. Finding the strength to walk away.
They had fled to the pine woods around them. The feeling of the polar, frosted air was what came back to him now, much more clearly than his jumbled thoughts. They had trekked through the snow, and it was below zero, and his toes were rotting from the inside. He had passed an arm around Jemma’s red arms. The Quinjet was there. The little seer girl, whose name no longer mattered, had found them; Mack and Yoyo were full of questions, had too many demands.
Fitz barely remembered their panic, their grief: it had washed over him, it had been lost even then to the chaos of the world. Jemma had started crying again. He had taken her in his arms.
They were in the air. Davis was flying; Fitz had turned to Mack, asked for May. He wanted reassurance, a sense of comfort, something to ground him. But both her and Coulson were unreachable.
A shudder had gone through the plane; The Quinjet tipped, and was being pushed further, faster, higher in the air, out of Davis’ control. A shout, Mack thrown against the side of the plane.
An American military air strike. The north of Montana had been nuked.
They still couldn’t get a hold of May or Coulson, not even Agent Piper, nor anyone on their plane. He had the knowledge of something terrible once again; the shared evidence of it hung around them heavily, poisoning their air. It teared at his flesh. His nails were digging through his skin. Something raw was clawing at his throat. In the coming days he tried not to think about it, to forget that moment, yet the weight of it hung continuously from his shoulders, shadowing his world.
They had landed on the ground, back to the Lighthouse and familiar walls. Something then had struck him clearly; this one sight was the one that continuously came to him, like an imprint against his eyelids.
They were climbing down the rail of the jet. Davis’ hands were full of equipment and he was sliding down clumsily; Yoyo caught him in a strong grip, her eyes unseeing, her face long and strained. By her side, Mack was holding Jemma gently, keeping the blankets around her shoulders as she laid her weight against his side. Their figures detached themselves from the scenery of the Lighthouse; shadows against the electric lights.
It came to him then that they were the only five members left of Shield. Five banal agents, barely qualified for being in the field. The thought was insidious, irrepressible and true. Tears came then that he clamped down; he climbed down the rail after them. The Quinjet was abandoned behind them, engines still warm, plunged in darkness.