chapter one
At six years old, Daisy Johnson learns how to read the name curling around her wrist. It's a school exercise with everyone in her first grade class writing down and sounding out the names of their soulmates. It's hard to decipher at first, the child's handwriting large and blocky and ill-formed. The teacher helps her discover the cadence of the name, how to curl her tongue around the vowels. And her teacher assures her that the handwriting will change, will become more legible as her soulmate ages.
At ten, she goes through a phase of dotting the I in her name with a flower. A daisy, to be precise. She imagines it showing up on her soulmate's wrist the first day she does it and it's enough to make her smile all day. The name on her own wrist has gotten neater over the years and she often finds herself tracing the sharp lines and well-formed letters. It brings her comfort and she traces the name over and over and over when her social worker drives her to yet another foster home.
At sixteen, Daisy has learned to hate the surge of hope that accompanies each new school, each introduced classmate. The inevitable disappointment gets harder to bear each time and she tells herself she doesn't mind. She doesn't mind that several of her classmates have found their soulmate, that they've known each other since grade school. And if she still daydreams about her soulmate rescuing her from the living hell that is high school, no one else ever knows.
At twenty-one, she scours the internet relentlessly, searching for any sign of her soulmate. His name has become a hurried scrawl on her wrist, one that she covers up as much as possible. Bracelets, wristbands, whatever she can use to stop well-meaning ladies from asking after him by name after a surreptitious glance, only for their looks to turn to pity when she explains that she hasn't met him yet. It's easier this way, she tells herself. It's easier when every conversation doesn't turn into heartbreak.
At twenty-six, Daisy Johnson does not believe in soulmates.
oOo
“Have you thought about a detective?”
Daisy glances up from her laptop and frowns at Jemma. “For what?”
Jemma has the decency to look slightly apologetic as she taps her wrist. “I've seen adverts for detectives who specialize in finding... people.” The last word is said with a wince as she braces herself for the inevitable fallout.
Daisy does not disappoint. “You want me to hire someone to do a google search? There's so much wrong with that suggestion I don't know where to start!”
She takes a breath and it's enough of a pause for Jemma to mutter, “And yet...”
“The whole thing is a rip-off, Jemma. Have you seen those people? They're only in it for the money, profiting off the lonely and sad. All they do is run a google search, maybe contact the person for you. Soulmates.” Daisy scoffs. “Just because you met Fitz when you were kids doesn't mean this thing works. Would you have even spoken to him if you hadn't overheard his name?”
Jemma taps her fingers along the back of the couch. “Maybe not right then, but we were on the same team for the Science Olympiad. We would have spoken eventually.” At Daisy's raised eyebrow and opening mouth, she hurries on. “And don't make this about me and Fitz! This is about you and your tedious refusal to find the person the universe has decided understands you better than anyone. God knows I don't.”
Daisy rolls her eyes. “Fine. Let's pretend private detectives work. That doesn't change the fact that I don't make enough money to pay one of them to help me.”
“And if you did?” Jemma's neutral tone should alert Daisy to the trap.
It doesn't.
“If there was a private detective I could afford, sure. Why not, if it gets you to stop harping on about it.” Daisy closes her laptop and it's only when she sees Jemma's smile that she realizes what she walked into. “You found someone affordable?”
“I did. Reliable, too. I rather think you'll like her,” Jemma says, brandishing a business card.
Daisy glares as she snatches it, examining the obviously cheap card. “Alias Investigations,” she reads, tone skeptical. “Jessica Jones.”
“And,” Jemma adds, “I'll make you a bet. If she can't find your soulmate, I'll pay the bill. I'll even pay if the closest she gets is the usual google page of results that lead nowhere. Deal?”
Daisy taps the card against her computer. Cheap paper, simple design, located somewhere in Hell's Kitchen. Whoever this Jessica Jones is, she doesn't seem to have the resources to find someone that exists only on Daisy's wrist.
“Fine.”
oOo
The cardboard taped across the door has Alias Investigations written across it in large print with a sharpie, and below that, smaller and in ballpoint pen, Please knock – JJ
Daisy double checks the address on the card, looks around the hallway, and checks again. Cheap, she was expecting. This... this borders on dingy.
There's no way Jemma's winning this one.
Daisy knocks.
The seconds tick by and the only sound is the groaning of the ancient elevator descending back toward the ground floor.
She knocks again.
This time there's a crash from within, followed by a yelled, “Just – fuck – just a minute!”
Daisy has enough time to regret her decision before the door is yanked open. The woman standing in the doorway glares down at her, hair matted on one side and smelling of alcohol, and demands, “What.”
Daisy bristles. “Wow,” she deadpans, doing her best to keep her expression and tone neutral. “Do you greet all your potential clients with this level of hospitality? I'm shocked you're not booked months in advance.”
The woman eyes her, slightly less hostile than before, and steps to the side. “Sorry.” Her tone implies that she is both not apologetic and not familiar with how to sound apologetic.
Daisy steps inside anyway.
“Jessica Jones,” the woman says by way of introduction, turning her back on Daisy and stalking over the desk. She stashes the mostly empty bottle and glass that had been the centerpiece of her office in one of the drawers and sinks into her chair.
“Daisy Johnson.” She glances around, taking in the open door leading into a bedroom, the lack of any personal items in the space. The office (home?) has a sense of being occupied but not lived in. She knows this space.
It's every room she had growing up. Occupied, but not hers.
She looks back to Jessica and she sees it now: the guarded look in her eyes, the way she holds herself.
Foster kid.
“My friend recommended you. I'm looking for—”
“Your soulmate,” Jessica finishes, her face twisting when she says the word. She opens another drawer, pulls out a piece of paper. “This is my standard contract. Payment is due when I get results, but I'll need a three hundred dollar retainer in advance.”
Daisy stops three steps away from the desk and frowns. “Retainer?”
A pen joins the paper on top of the desk. “For expenses.” She looks up and sees Daisy's expression. “Look, this isn't some simple internet search. You're here because you've tried that and haven't found anything. If it was that easy, I'd be doing something else.”
Forcing a smile onto her face, Daisy takes a step back. Rent is due next week and while rooming with Jemma and Fitz has taken some pressure off, she doesn't have three hundred dollars to blow on a private investigator to find someone she doesn't believe exists. “I don't have the money. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
She gets to the door before Jessica stops her with a, “Jesus Christ. Fine. A hundred dollars retainer, and you get the fucking useless maintenance guy to fix the fucking hot water.”
Daisy turns back to Jessica. “The hot water?”
Jessica snorts, twirling the pen between her fingers. “It's been out for a week. A fucking week. And he's stopped answering the door for me. Get me a warm shower, and I'll get the hundred dollars to last as long as I can.”
A hundred dollars. She'll have to pick up a few extra shifts at work this week, but Coulson likes her. He won't mind. Besides, if it gets Jemma off her case...
“It's a deal.” She takes the pen Jessica proffers and signs the bottom of the contract.
oOo
They sort out the details – the name of Daisy's soulmate, contact information, the avenues Daisy has tried herself – and Jessica points her in the direction of the maintenance man's apartment.
(“First floor, in the back. Right next to the stairwell. No hot water, no discount.”)
The elevator shudders to a stop, a sickly ding announcing its presence on Daisy's level, and the doors creak open, one glacially slower than the other. Daisy looks inside. The light, while not fantastic on the way up, is now flickering, making the stains on the carpet stand out. It's difficult for Daisy to convince herself it isn't blood.
After a few seconds, the doors close with Daisy still in the hallway. She'd been concerned about the integrity of the elevator on the way up. Somehow, the prospect of going down in it seems terrifying. A glance around locates the stairwell, back toward the way she came.
The stairwell itself is only slightly less terrifying than the elevator and Daisy jogs down the stairs as quickly as she can. Exiting on the first floor, there's only one apartment door close enough to the stairwell to be her destination.
She stands outside of it for a moment, practicing what she'll say to the inhabitants after she knocks. In her mind, it goes something like this:
Excuse me, are you the maintenance man for this building?
Why yes, I am. How may I help you today?
I'm here on behalf of Jessica Jones,of Alias Investigations upstairs. She was wondering when the hot water would be fixed.
Oh, well, as it so happens, I just finished that ten minutes ago. Everything should be taken care of.
In reality, it goes like this:
Daisy knocks.
The sound echoes in the hallway for half a heartbeat before it's answered with heavy footsteps and a muttered, “Jesu fucking Cristo, what?” as the door is yanked open.
Later, Daisy will lament that it clearly wasn't her day to meet new people. Currently, she's staring down a possible maintenance man who has one shoe on but unlaced, a package in his hand in the process of being opened, and a leather jacket partially unzipped. His dark eyes soften from I will most certainly hunt you down and make you suffer for knocking on my door into polite confusion laced with embarrassment.
“Uh.” He glances around the hallway before looking back at Daisy. “Sorry. I thought... One of the tenants is a royal bitch. She's been down here every day yelling at me for the last week. Thought you might've been her.”
A premonition overtakes Daisy and she smiles apologetically. “Um, I think I'm actually here on her behalf?”
She didn't think he was showing any emotion before, but somehow his face goes flat. “Jessica Jones sent you.” It isn't a question, she doesn't think. Nothing about his tone indicates he needs confirmation. Apparently there's only one bitch in the building.
Daisy answers anyway. “She asked me to come down and see when the hot water would be working again,” she says, glossing over the finer points of the private detective's rant.
“You're a friend of hers,” he asks in the same not a question tone, and the assumption rankles her.
Daisy nearly says, No, a client, but the words stop in her throat. She's not looking for her soulmate, she's just trying to get Jemma to let the stupid idea go, and she doesn't want to have to explain that to a stranger. Just the thought of it exhausts her.
“Do you really think Jessica Jones has friends?” she retorts instead, raising one eyebrow to convey just the right amount of skepticism.
And just like that, the blank expression is gone. He laughs, his whole body releasing a tension she didn't notice earlier. “Fair enough. Just got the piece I'd been waiting for. She's going to have to wait a little longer, though. It's a two man job, and my brother doesn't get out of school until two thirty.”
A surreptitious glance at the clock on the wall behind him confirms that it's barely ten. Jessica Jones never said as much, but Daisy suspects the discount is a timed offer and this afternoon is much too late.
“I can help,” she offers, surprising both the maintenance man and herself.
He looks her over and for a moment she thinks his gaze stops on her wrist, covered today with a wide leather bracelet. “Any experience with plumbing?” he asks and the skepticism in his voice makes her bristle.
“I'm a fast learner.”
He doesn't say anything for a moment, just looks at her. She's ready to retract her offer and take off when he shrugs. “Alright then. You got a name?”
“Daisy.”
“Robbie,” he returns and hands her the package he'd been holding. “Here. We're going to need that.” Once his hands are free, he pulls on his other shoe and quickly laces them up. “My tools are down in the basement already. Come on.”
Daisy edges back into the hallway as he steps out of the apartment and closes the door behind him. “You're not planning on murdering me down there, are you?” she says, tone light and eyebrow raised. “Because, fair warning: I know kung fu.”
He glances over his shoulder at her as he opens the door to the stairwell and... He doesn't smile, but his expression lightens and his eyes soften and somehow, it seems more personal. “Do you now? I'll have to be careful, then.”
The door swings closed behind Daisy as she follows him down the stairs into the basement. The yellow light that flickers on does nothing to dispel the gloom that presses in on them. She thinks she sees cobwebs in the corners, hidden by the shadows and visible only when the breeze caused by the closing door reaches them.
“This looks exactly like a place someone would get murdered,” she decides, not moving from her spot two feet inside the doorway while Robbie walks over to a toolbox lying open on the ground.
“That's what my brother said the first time he saw it,” Robbie says after a short, huffed exhale that she thinks may have been a laugh. “I have to bribe him to get his ass down here and help me.” He grabs a flashlight and holds it out to her. “Here. You're on light duty.”
Daisy steps further into the basement and takes the flashlight from his outstretched hand. After she turns it on, she sweeps the beam across the dark corners. It illuminates the cobwebs she'd glimpsed earlier, as well as stacks of ancient looking boxes covered in dust.
“Hey,” Robbie calls, kneeling beside a hot water tank that looks older than she is, “light needed here, por favor.”
His voice jerks her attention back to the situation at hand – getting a discount until she can talk Jemma into paying the retainer in good faith – and she kneels at his side, pointing the flashlight in the general direction of the tank.
Robbie takes the box out of her other hand and fishes out the contents. “A little to the left, if you would?”
Daisy shifts the light and watches Robbie take something apart. “Does it pay well?”
There's a clatter as something drops to the ground and Robbie lets out a string of Spanish under his breath. “What?”
“Being the maintenance man for a building like this.” She redirects the light until the metallic object glints and Robbie grabs it.
He shrugs and points to where he needs the light. “Apartment's free, so I can't complain. Too much.” A pause as he reaches back underneath the water tank. “What about you? How do you survive in the city?”
Daisy shrugs and quickly apologizes when the beam bounces and he gives her a look over his shoulder. “Anything I can. Bakery, bar tending, dog walking. The usual stuff.”
He lets out that weird huff that might be a laugh again. “Dog walking?”
She bristles and opens her mouth to retort – it pays the bills! – but he continues before she can.
“Someday, I'd love to have enough money to own a dog and pay someone else to walk it. Can you imagine?”
She can't.
“The dogs are pretty great. The owners, not so much,” she admits, handing Robbie the wrench he gestured for. “One time, I was going to pick up Buster, this gorgeous golden retriever, and...”
oOo
“...and that's why Dick Grayson was the best Robin,” Daisy says, laying on the ground with her arm stretched under the tank, the flashlight illuminating whatever the hell Robbie is doing on the other side. She tries not to think about how many spiders are living in the basement and are possibly crawling up her back.
“I'll take the evidence into consideration,” Robbie says, his voice muffled by the large tank between them, “but I'm still going with Jason Todd. Okay, I think I got it.” There's a shuffling sound and she thinks it means Robbie's standing up, but she doesn't move just in case.
Then she hears his footsteps heading toward the toolbox and she levers herself to her feet. The front of her is covered in dust, her left leg is mostly asleep, and the cold from the floor has seeped into her bones, but she smiles and rests the flashlight against her shoulder as she rounds the hot water tank. “So, how'd I do as replacement flashlight holder?”
Robbie looks over at her and his lips quirk in what she thinks is a repressed smile. “Well, you lacked the miserable suffering of my normal assistant, but made up for it in your willingness to crawl on the ground. Nine out of ten, would wrangle into repairs again.”
Daisy places her hand not holding the flashlight on her hips, giving him a mock glare. “Nine out of ten? What did I get marked off for?”
Picking up the toolbox, Robbie glances over at her. “For thinking Dick Grayson was the best Robin.” He turns toward the stairs and for one second, Daisy thinks she sees him smiling. “Come on, it's going to take a while for the water to warm up.”
She follows him out the basement door and back up the stairs to the first floor. When he opens his apartment door and sets the toolbox inside, Daisy holds the flashlight out to him. “Um, I feel like I should say thanks for some reason,” she says with an awkward smile.
“Nah, I should be the one thanking you.” He takes the flashlight and sets it in the toolbox and when he straightens, she thinks for a moment once more that his eyes stop on the bracelet covering her wrist and the name written on it. “Not many people would hang out in that basement for two hours. Tell you what,” he says, leaning against the door frame, “There's this great deli just down the street. They have the best sandwiches in Hell's Kitchen. Let me buy you one. As a thank you.”
Daisy smiles, slow and soft. “Yeah. Okay.”
It turns out the deli is owned by Robbie's high school friend, who greets them with a loud, “Reyes! And friend!”
Now, Robbie smiles. “Hey Foggy. This is Daisy. She's filling in for Gabe today.”
Foggy, standing behind the counter wearing a smile, an apron, and a hairnet, gestures to the display full of deli meats and sandwich toppings. “Daisy! Anyone who can put up with Reyes for more than five minutes has got to be a saint. Mi casa es su casa. A lovely phrase which means: your sandwich is on the house. So, what'll it be?”
Daisy glances over the chalkboard menu, filled with sandwiches with names like Disbarred and Yer Honor and Plea Bargain. She gives the descriptions cursory glances but her focus is on the names. About halfway through the list, Daisy's eyebrow goes up and she asks, “Avocados at Law?”
“It was late,” Foggy says with a shrug, assembling a sandwich with practiced ease. “I may or may not have been drunk. Law school's a bitch. Blame Matt – he made me keep it.”
“Now that sounds like a story worth hearing,” Daisy says. “And I'll take the Avocados at Law.”
“Matt's the better story teller.” Foggy wraps up the sandwich he had been working on in a layer of butcher paper and saran wrap before grabbing another sandwich roll. “Like I said, I was either tired beyond belief or drunk. Or both. You might catch him next time you're in.”
Daisy doesn't know how to respond to the blind acceptance that she'll be back so she says nothing. After a second, Robbie starts talking about some occurrence in the neighborhood. It's easy to see their shared history in the way they talk, and a pang of jealousy shoots through Daisy before she can tamp down on it.
Long-time friends are not something she has an abundance of.
“Alright,” Foggy declares, setting two sandwiches on the counter by the register. “One Avocados at Law and one Daredevil. That'll be seven dollars, Reyes, and don't even joke about putting it on a tab.” He fixes Robbie with a look that even Daisy can see is mostly bluster, but Robbie just sighs in defeat and pulls out his wallet.
Foggy takes the cash and hands them their sandwiches. “Now get outta here before my lunch rush sees what kind of company I keep, Reyes. Daisy, you're welcome here any time, lunch rush or no.”
Robbie waves him off and Daisy, not knowing what else to do in the face of his relentless cheeriness, laughs. “Thanks,” she says, following Robbie toward the door. “I'll keep that in mind.”
They head across the street to a small park, filled with trees and tables and a water fountain. Other than the pigeons and an older man reading a book, the park is empty. Daisy picks a table near the fountain, under one of the trees, and they sit.
For a moment, there is silence as they unwrap their sandwiches and Daisy wonders if this is going to be weird. Lunch with someone she only just met. They had a good conversation in the basement, but there was a lull and will they ever get back to that easy discussion, no awkwardness permitted?
She doubts it.
And then:
“I can't believe you don't like Jason Todd.”