She touches his hand and she hears a voice, a disembodied voice with no source, echoing in her mind, and then the visions begin.
The sky shatters.
In another life, she dies in infancy. The lengths her father had gone to avenge her mother were not enough, and someone finds her and kills her as she sleeps.
It is not what we wanted to shatter.
In another life, she never meets them. She dies alone after getting mugged in the alleyway where she parked her van, and it takes a week for anyone to notice. No one mourns her.
It is not the victory cry that we wished for.
In another life, he doesn’t betray them. Hydra never comes back, she is the maid of honor who is engaged to the best man at her best friend’s wedding, and she dies of old age in her bed. Human, and happy.
The shards that come scattering down do not scintillate in the sunlight
but leave us bleeding on their jagged edges.
In another life, she never meets him. She dies with her friend in an underground city, under heaps of rubble that were shaken down because of the inhuman powers she will never get a chance to learn how to control.
The wall goes up.
In another life, she dies and takes her best friends with her. Her powers are too new and volatile, and she is too emotionally unstable and afraid. She sends out a massive shockwave that shatters her from the inside out, and they are caught in it while trying to help. Her last memory is someone screaming, and she’ll never know who it is.
It is not a wall we wanted to build.
In another life, they can’t get over the fact that she has powers. She accidentally brings the whole base down while trying to protect herself from her own family. She is the only survivor, and she never recovers.
It is not the promise we wanted to make.
In another life, she dies slowly. They don’t realize the affect her powers have on her body until it’s too late. She bleeds out internally, alone in a field, and the last thing she sees are four hazy figures running towards her.
The lines in the sand are not erased away as we had hoped,
but get carved and hardened into cement.
In another life, she dies inside Afterlife. Her emotions take control of her and she takes Raina and Lincoln with her, and never meets her mother.
But skies have shattered before,
In another life, she grows up happy and healthy with two loving, happy parents. Her mother is never kidnapped and dissected, her father never goes insane, she is never abandoned, never has to live in a foster home, and she can’t imagine anything better.
and been pieced back together again.
In another life, she gets adopted. S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t interfere with the adoption, and she grows up in a full, loving house with happily married parents, two brothers, a sister, and a dog. She grows old with the neighbor’s kid and gets married, and continues the cycle with adopted children of her own, in a two-story house with a white picket fence. She is happy.
Walls have gone up before,
In another life, she runs away from the orphanage at the age of 8. A kind old woman who could never have children of her own finds her on the street, and takes her in. The old woman teaches her everything she knows about computers, and leaves everything to her when she dies.
and been torn back down again.
In another life, she makes it into the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy of Science and Technology. She bumps into Fitz and Simmons during freshman orientation, and they are inseparable from there on out. They meet Trip on a secret rendezvous to prank the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy of Operations, they hit it off and they welcome him into the fold immediately. She was there when Trip first called them FitzSimmons, she is the maid of honor at their wedding, and she can’t stop smiling at the best man, who is also her husband.
And beneath the shattered ceiling of the sky,
The visions are coming faster now, flashes of her doing things she’s never done. She sees herself when she’s older, laughing with people who are long dead, she sees her younger self hugging people she’s sure she’s never met.
and within the boundaries of the wall,
Flashes of her smiling, kissing people she’s never kissed, looking at wounds that make scars that she doesn’t have, seeing herself live different lives, die different deaths, she sees every possible variation of every way her life could have gone.
there is something gentle and precious and tender
She sees different women of mature ages holding her face, kissing her on the forehead, telling her they love her and that they’re proud of her.
that is always beating on and on and on.
She sees herself at countless different graves, graves she has never seen, for names she does and doesn’t recognize, in cemeteries she’s never been to. She is kneeling at a grave with a name she doesn’t recognize with a ring on her left hand, and a stranger is behind her with his hand on her shoulder, a ring on his left hand as well. Another flash and it’s Trip behind her, another flash and it’s Lincoln, another flash and its Ward, another flash and it’s Fitz, it’s Simmons, it’s Robbie.
Another flash and she’s kneeling in front of a grave with a name she does recognize, there is no ring on her left hand, there is no one behind her with a ring on their left hand, and May is kneeling next to her, crying silently and wiping her eyes with her left hand, that bears a ring. Another flash and this time it’s Coulson kneeling next to her, crying openly, and his left hand has a ring on it as well. There are many flashes of visions of her at different graves, but she is never alone in any of them.
And we will stand with our lips held firm in a smile
The visions are beginning to let up, and she sees death. A stranger in a hospital bed falling motionless as their heart monitor flatlines. Simmons’ dead body, limbs skewed from the impact of the water when she jumped out of the Bus. Fitz’s dead body, skin tinged blue from hypothermia and asphyxiation, dead after the explosion at the bottom of the ocean, no matter how hard they tried to revive him. She sees Trip’s death but it’s not in an underground cave, it’s after he jumps in front of a bullet for her. She sees herself killing Mack, a parallel of when she was under Hive’s sway, but no one comes to stop her. She sees Lincoln bleed out on the floor right after she asks him if she messed up their chance to be together. She sees Yoyo dying from bullet wounds to the stomach, the ones meant for Mack. She sees Simmons being killed by Aida. She sees the Coulson LMD blowing the base before they can safely escape. She sees May dying in Bahrain. She sees Coulson dying before the battle of New York, except no extreme measures were taken, and he isn’t brought back to life.
and our bodies poised high on our toes,
She sees deaths in the past, present, and what must be the future, things she couldn’t possible have been there for, different variations of things that happened, and things that haven’t happened yet.
She sees her own death multiple times, in many different ways. She sees herself being killed as an infant. She sees herself getting mugged and shot. She sees herself dying after Ian shoots her. She sees herself dying multiple times because of her powers, when she gets them and when she’s trying to control them. She feels the ache in her bones after every vision of herself being shaken apart, she feels the echoes of pain that must have happened somewhere, sometime, to some version of her. She sees Hive kill her because of her attachment to her family. She sees Ghost Rider kill her for her crimes. She sees Watchdogs try to kill her, and she sees herself die and take them with her, while emitting a shockwave so forceful it completely shatters every single bone in her body and immediately turns her insides to liquid.
and our fists clenched tight and ready
She sees herself live entire lifetimes. She sees her friends live their lives, she sees her children, she sees her parents grow old, she sees the lives of complete strangers, she sees everything.
and greet the sunlight when it comes.
She doesn’t know what any of it means, and as soon as the visions stop, she collapses, the emotional toll of the memories being forcefully shoved into her mind making her physically unable to stand. The voice whispers one more thing in her mind, that these were her lives in parallel universes, these are all things that have happened to her, and it’s up to her to remember it for the rest of them, and it echoes in her mind until she passes out.