Work Text:
A/N: Can someone please cut Daisy Johnson a break??
Title from “Exile” by Taylor Swift feat. Bon Iver. Let me be the 10,000th person to title a fic from folklore (but Justin Vernon did what he needed to do on this track).
We Always Walked a Very Thin Line
Daisy’s thought a lot about all the ways that death could come for her – all the ways she could bleed out or burn up or be torn to tiny particles by the powerful emptiness of space. She never thought it could be like this.
She feels it in her chest and down her spine, when Malick snaps Jiaying’s neck, and instinctively, she looks down at her hands, some small part wondering if she’ll just fade away instantly. But it doesn’t happen like that, either.
May gets the shot off behind him, and takes chase when he runs, and then it’s just the two of them in the empty hallway, Daisy and her mother — a woman she could barely look in the eyes just minutes ago, but is connected to in even more ways than their shared DNA. The whole world goes fuzzy around her and she lowers herself to the floor, taking in shaky breaths that leave her lightheaded.
She can’t tell if the metal walls of the base are actually shaking with tremors, or if that’s just her. Her bones have been shuddering since the moment she prepared to fire back at Malick and it’s not going away. Another lightbulb explodes overhead and she barely registers the sound or loss of light. It feels like the early days of her powers, like she could flatten a city block or turn a skyscraper inside out, like the whole world could come apart at the seams if she just stopped trying to hold it together.
She sees her reflection flicker in Jiaying’s lifeless eyes, strokes a hand through hair that feels like her own, and wonders if it might come apart anyway.
“Sometimes trying to do the right thing comes out all wrong.”
It’s the kind of lesson every child deserves from their mother, and it’s one she’s spent 30-plus lonely years learning time and time again all by herself. It shouldn’t ache like this, to have had a tiny, stolen taste of the compassion she’s always craved, and then have it ripped away. There shouldn’t be this much space to mourn someone she never really knew.
But the universe is cruel, and a sob rips from her chest before she even feels it coming. She can feel herself starting to crumble, and worries this time it might be permanent.
They’re losing. The battles, the war, their people, all of it. They’re just barely scraping by every single time and she promised herself she’d fight until the bitter end. But what if she can’t?
It must be minutes later, but it could be hours, even days, before she feels hands on her shoulders, a familiar timbre in her ear. Everything sounds muffled, like she’s been packed in cotton, and she’s barely any help at all as they pull her to her feet.
Simmons and Deke are gone, May relays, and part of Daisy slips even further away. What happens to her if the timeline has bent around the circumstances of her birth? There are maybe three people in the whole universe who could make a close approximation, and their lives are all in immediate jeopardy.
Then, in her line of vision, there’s Sousa, with his unwavering, steadying presence. Daniel, her brain supplies privately. It’s okay to call him that here, it’s okay to think of him that way if she’s not going to live to regret it.
He takes her face in his hands and she can’t tell if they’re burning or freezing, or if she even feels them at all. She can read the concern in his eyes more clearly than she can hear it off his lips.
“I think she’s in shock.” He’d told her before that the things that scared him didn’t show on his face, but this one does.
“Jiaying,” May pauses before she finishes, like she knows what this will do to them both, “was her mother.”
Daisy watches two faces register the agonizing truth, and remembers, slowly — May does know what this means. To both of them. She can feel it.
Daniel turns back to her, and the way devastated shock melts immediately to selfless compassion in his eyes is enough to break whatever’s left of her heart.
She kissed him once, in another time. It feels like a tragedy now, that he can’t remember. Or maybe it’s a mercy. Part of her thought she might get another chance to try for one they’d both know was real.
It’s been so long since she hoped for anything like that.
And if she drowns in the rapids they’ve created in the timestream, if she vanishes into the ether of things that never were, what then? Will he forget her? Will they all?
Daniel’s a soldier, he carries these things with him — the tarnished flip side on a medal of honor. Daisy doesn’t think enough of herself to believe he holds her as highly as he does Peggy Carter, but she knows it’ll hurt him if something happens to her. And that’s quickly become the last thing she wants to do.
She’s never been someone who longed for the trappings of a “normal” life, not for a long time, anyway. But standing here now, on knees that feel like they’re about to buckle under the existential weight of an unwinnable fight, that feels like another regret. A world where she gets to watch her friends — her family, she’d insisted to Enoch when he warned her — grow old together, lead long, joyful lives full of love and laughter, it might as well be a fairy tale.
The focal point on humanity has sharpened down to a pinhole. There’s no room for dreams, there’s only their team, and the fight for continued existence.
Daniel helps her to an empty bunk, and she protests weakly, knowing there isn’t any time to waste. But her body follows him instead. She’s just so tired.
Don’t let me fade away, she wants to tell him. Don’t let me go.
She fairly certain she doesn’t say it out loud, but somehow he knows. It shouldn’t surprise her by now, but it still does, when he settles into a chair next to her bunk and reaches out to take one of her hands firmly in his own. She can still feel it, or at least she thinks she can.
“Daniel,” she whispers, the first time she’s called him by his first name, the first time she’s spoken out loud since calling helplessly after her mother.
If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. He meets her eyes with his usual resolve and the question she’s been working herself up to ask comes out as little more than a breath. “Will you stay?”
He squeezes her hand and bows his head and she wishes she could tell him that he’s a mirror image of the man whose eyes twinkled in a telling way when he admitted he’d like be the one to pick her up after she ran into a brick wall. He’s still that man, she realizes. She should have kissed him again when she had the chance.
Daisy’s been preparing to die for years now. But it seems so unfair, that it could come just as she was remembering what it felt like to live.
Then Daniel answers – “Of course I’ll stay. I’m where I need to be.” – and she remembers what it felt like when he promised her they were going home.
She was hazy then, too, in and out of consciousness and mired in the torturous pain her mother knew before her. But she’d heard him say it, over and over again, and she knew he believed it even now.
Home.
If she’s still here when she wakes up, maybe they’ll finally get there.
A/N: My feels about these two are endless -- come yell with me on Tumblr!