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St. Agnes looked exactly as Daisy remembered it, and that wasn’t a good thing. A welcoming, if a bit rundown, exterior, with flower beds out front and a giant cross above the entrance. The nuns had always told them to imagine that cross as the eyes of God looking down on them whenever they left with a new family, or in Daisy’s case, returned after getting kicked out of another one. May pulled the unmarked black van to the side of the road, parking along the curb. “You sure you’re ready for this?” she asked, looking back at Daisy.
“It’s fine,” she replied shortly. “Let’s just get this over with before the Chronicoms wipe me out of existence, or whatever.”
May nodded, pushing the driver’s side door open and getting out of the car. LMD Coulson gave Daisy a knowing look before pushing his door open to on the opposite side from St. Agnes, and she sighed and followed suit.
“Are you here for one of the children?” a voice asked. Daisy rounded the car to see a nun hurrying up to May, wiping her hands off on her habit from where she’d been wrists-deep in the hydrangeas. Sister Penelope. Daisy swallowed.
“Uh…yes,” May told her.
“Wonderful!” Sister Penelope said, then looked May up and down with a side glance at Daisy. “Do you have your…husband with you?”
“Right here,” Coulson came around the front of the vehicle, all charm and easy-going smile. “And this is our daughter, Daisy. Now that she’s all grown up, the house is pretty quiet—we thought we’d look to give back to the community, take in someone in need of a home.” Daisy stared at him—that was not the plan—but there was nothing she could do about it now.
The nun’s smile returned. “Of course, that’s a lovely idea. Right this way, I’ll show you to Mother Superior’s office—have you visited us before? Did you have a child in mind?”
“Yes, we did. A little girl,” May said. “S—“
“Sue,” Daisy cut in. “Mary Sue.”
“Oh,” the nun said, her face falling again. Her lips pursed. “Well then. Mary Sue can be quite a handful, and if you are first time adopters, I might suggest a different child... Six-year-old Samantha is about the same age, and she’s a delightful child. No behavioral issues at all.”
“We’re really just interested in Mary Sue,” May told her as they passed under that large bronze cross. Daisy averted her eyes from it, keeping her head down and trying not to look around too much. Unfortunately, she had spent a lot of time looking at the carpet as a child too, and even that brought back memories. “We think she would be a good fit for our family.” Daisy’s head shot upward to find May watching her, and a tiny bit of warmth flowed through her, pushing away some of the bad.
“Wonderful.” Sister Penelope gave them that thin, patronizing smile again and knocked on a large wooden door. Two small chairs, unoccupied, waited outside of it, and Daisy blinked, for a moment seeing herself sitting there, sullen or sad or afraid, as she had so many times in her youth as she awaited her audience with the chief nun and whatever punishment she would inevitably dole out.
The door opened, and Daisy found herself face to face with ‘the old bat,’ as an older, angrier teenage Skye had liked to call her when out of earshot.
Mother Superior looked her in the eyes and smiled warmly. “Welcome, please come into my office!” When Daisy failed to move, she felt a slight pressure at the small of her back, and she forced her face into some approximation of friendly.
“Thank you,” Coulson said as her legs began moving, stepping into the office. It seemed smaller than she remembered it, and the giant oak desk less large and imposing. When she sat down, her feet actually touched the floor. “We’re looking to meet Mary Sue today, if that’s all right.”
Mother Superior’s expression became plastered on. “Mary Sue? Mary Sue Poots?” Daisy tried not to let her cheeks redden as Coulson and May came face to face with exactly how unwanted she’d been as a child.
“That’s the one,” Coulson nodded.
“Is there a problem?” May asked testily behind a very fake smile.
“Of course not. Let me just give you her file to read first…so you know what you’re getting into…”
“We prefer to meet the child before we read up on her,” Coulson replied, his voice still light and pleasant. “First impressions are very important.”
The nun clucked her tongue. “Well. Mary is one of our long-time charges.” She eyed Coulson. “She’ll require a firm hand. Will you be able to provide that?”
A slightly alarmed frown creased Coulson’s synthetic eyebrows but he replied smoothly. “Of course. Discipline and structure are what all kids need.”
Mother Superior sniffed. “Well, I’m glad you understand that. Mary Sue has had six foster homes now, and I have no doubt she will still be in need of much discipline in her seventh.”
“Six,” May repeated. “And she’s seven years old.”
“As I said, Mary Sue is…difficult,” Mother Superior said.
“We’re still interested,” Coulson said firmly.
“I’ll go make sure she’s ready to meet you then. All the children are at Sunday mass right now, but I’m sure we can make an exception,” the woman said, adjusting her habit and rising from her desk before bustling out the door.
“I’m getting the urge to punch a nun,” May growled once the woman was gone. Daisy felt one of Coulson’s hands warm on top of her own and looked down to see she was gripping the arms of the chair hard enough that her knuckles had gone white. She let him pry it free, taking a deep breath.
“I’m fine.”
“Daisy…”
“The floor isn’t shaking. I’m fine,” she repeated. She was saved by answering anything else by Mother Superior’s return, causing them all to rise from their chairs.
“Mary is in the dormitory right now. This way, please.” They followed her immediately, Daisy trailing a little bit behind as she tried not to look too hard at her surroundings, despite the fact that they all needed to keep an eye out for the Chronicoms who by Simmons’s calculations could arrive at any minute. They passed the playroom, full of secondhand toys and books with their pages half ripped out, and the washroom, where Daisy had spent many nights on her tiptoes trying to stuff soiled bedsheets a washer taller than she was before the nuns found out.
Mother Superior stopped in front of the dormitory for girls ages seven to eleven. She did not knock on the door, but pushed it open, revealing a room with metal bunk beds against each wall. Only one was occupied, and the sight of her seven-year-old self seated on the bedspread in a stained shirt two sizes too big sent a jolt through Daisy’s chest.
“Mary Sue, this nice family wants to meet you,” the nun announced. The girl didn’t look up. “Mary Sue,” Mother Superior said again in a warning voice.
“M’name’s not Mary Sue, it’s Skye,” the little girl said defiantly, crossing her arms.
The nun sighed, glancing back at Coulson. “I’m sorry about her. She won’t even respond to her own name lately.”
“That’s all right,” Coulson said. “Hi Skye, my name’s Phil.”
“Don’t encourage her,” Mother Superior snapped, but was quelled with a somewhat affronted look by a death glare from May. “I’ll just leave you to get acquainted then. I’ll be in my office.” She bustled away, the door swinging closed behind her.
Skye shied away from Coulson as he approached, and Daisy winced. He immediately backed up, hands open and at his sides. “You’ll really call me Skye?” the girl asked once he was far enough away again.
“Of course. Skye is an awesome name,” he told her.
She grinned shyly, looking up at him. “Thanks. I choosed it myself.”
“I’m gonna check the perimeter,” Daisy muttered to May before turning and walking out the door. Once she was outside, she bent forward a little, hands resting on her knees as her breaths came a little faster. Had she really been that little and skinny? Had she really had that many bruises? How had so many foster families taken one look at that and still thrown her away like yesterday’s garbage?
The door opened again behind her, and Daisy didn’t have to turn to know May had followed. It was hard to fool her former S.O.
“It’s just…hard,” Daisy said. May nodded, stepping forward as if to put a hand on her shoulder before her eyes widened, looking at something further down the hallway.
“Daisy!”
She spun around, palm outstretched, and saw the Chronicoms immediately, two men in not-quite-right 1990s clothing and identically blank expressions on their faces.
“Quake,” one of them hissed. Her powers blew them backwards into the far wall before they even had time to draw their guns, but they got up again immediately.
“Coulson!” May shouted in warning before taking off toward them. She wrested the gun away from the first one, tossing it aside, and ducked under the blow of a second, Daisy rushing in to join her. She punched one of them in the face, not that it did anything, and got a hand wrapped around her throat in return, crushing her windpipe. She concentrated, and a second later he was blasted apart from the inside out, pieces of Chronicom littering the hallway. Coulson was in the fight now, grappling with two more Chronicoms, but his advanced body was more than capable of handling it. May launched herself onto the shoulders of the one she had been fighting, jamming her fingers into the hollow of its neck in the complicated motion Enoch had shown them for disabling Chronicoms. The robot fell forward, mouth open and emitting a piercing klaxon before May shut it up with a swift kick to the face.
“Think anyone heard that?” Coulson asked with a grimace.
Daisy sighed, remembering what Deke had said about time travel. “So much for small ripples.”
Skye poked her head out out the dormitory, eyes wide. “Was that the fire’larm?” she asked around the little white stick in her mouth.
“Just a false alarm,” Coulson assured her.
Her eyes widened at the sight of the bodies on the floor. “WHAT ARE THO—?” A blue circle appeared on her forehead at almost exactly the same moment Daisy heard the ICER shot, dendrotoxin spreading quickly through the girl’s now slack face before fading away as she crumpled to the ground.
“May!” There was no time to argue about it, and going by the grim look on May’s face they didn’t need to—four more Chronicoms rounded the corner and opened fire, creating scorch marks in St. Agnes’s faded wallpaper. Coulson executed a perfect barrel roll and came up right next to Skye’s limp body, bundling her in his arms and disappearing back into the dormitory. Daisy let off another blast of her powers, tearing off a chunk of stolen skin from one of their faces, before diving back into the fray herself with her forearms smarting from the lack of gauntlets. Unfortunately, they weren’t exactly incognito.
“You shot me,” Daisy said in a faux-wounded voice, once all of the Chronicoms had been disabled. The look May gave her was pained, and she hurriedly backtracked. “Which was a good call, May.”
The specialist didn’t answer, just started dragging one of the bodies toward the exit. Mother Superior came running down the hall, her habit falling sideways and a familiar scandalized expression on her face. Daisy’s ICER was out before she quite knew what she was doing, shooting the nun in the chest. Her lips twitched upward, and she pulled the trigger two more times—just to be sure.
May looked at her. “Puny and sad,” Daisy said. “I know.”
Her S.O.’s lips twitched upwards ever so slightly. “Not that puny.”
After transporting all of the bodies back to the van, May and Daisy returned to find Coulson sitting on Skye’s bed with the girl still passed out next to him. His hand stroked gently over her forehead. “I think that’s all of them. Time to go,” Daisy said, ignoring the dull ache in her chest at the sight.
Coulson looked up at her, a pained look on his face. “We can’t just leave her.”
“Coulson…”
“At least until she wakes up,” he said. “That was a large dose of dendrotoxin. It’s never really been tested on children.”
She nodded, then spied the half-dissolved candy on the carpet, having fallen from Skye’s mouth. “Did you give me—her—a lollipop?” Daisy asked. LMD Coulson nodded. “That’s…” Daisy felt her eyes burn. “That’s really sweet.”
“You deserved it,” he said, looking down at the little body on the bedsheets. “You deserved everything…”
“Not according to Mother Superior,” Daisy muttered. “Or any of the other foster families.”
“They were wrong,” May told her. “They—” She stopped as the girl’s eyes fluttered open. Skye pressed a hand to her forehead where the ICER bullet had hit.
“It hurts!”
“Sorry, you just hit your head,” Coulson told her, giving her a smile. Skye shied away from him immediately, retracting her legs into herself, and he backed away.
Skye’s eyes filled with tears. “It hurts a lot.”
To Daisy’s surprise, May approached. “Let me see, Skye,” she said in a soft voice. Skye slowly lowered her hand, and May made a show of checking out her forehead, though ICERs left no discernible marks. “Nope, you don’t even need a band-aid. Just a kiss and it’ll be all better.” Daisy’s breath caught in her chest as May lowered her lips to Skye’s temple, then pulled away. “All better?”
Slowly, as if she couldn’t quite believe it, Skye nodded.
“I have something for you,” Coulson said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a familiar-looking hula girl figurine, holding it out to her—the hula girl that Daisy had always had since she could remember, and could never quite figure out where it came from.
“For me?” Skye asked, not daring to take it.
“Yes.” He held it a little closer, but the girl still looked suspicious.
“I don’t have to share?”
“Nope, just for you, angel eyes,” he promised her.
Skye took the toy wonderingly from his hands, turning it over in her little fingers before hugging the plastic figure to her chest. She looked between May, who still knelt in front of her, and Coulson, standing slightly behind. Her eyes were big and round, the barest glimpse of hope alight on her face. “Can I come home with you?”
Coulson’s expression immediately fell, and Daisy swallowed, blinking back tears of her own. This was why they never should have crossed paths with her younger self, why they should have stuck to the plan from the beginning and protected her from afar. Skye couldn’t come with them, she had to stay here and live out the rest of her life to get to this moment where Daisy was standing now. She had years of pain and trauma and wondering ahead of her, from the Masons who would show up in two months’ time to return her for being “unruly” and “sullen” to the Brodys who would end up returning her no matter how much she wanted to stay. Skye had to stay here so that she would eventually stop trying at all, nearly flunking out of high school to exit the system at eighteen to join the Rising Tide and live alone in her van for two years, scouring the internet for any trace of her parents. And, when she did finally find them, she would have no idea of the horrors lying in wait for her or how little time it would last—barely a moment to know the warmth of Jiaying’s hug and the pride in her gaze before the true depths of her madness were discovered, and barely a moment to meet the unconditionally loving and playful side of Cal before it all had to be wiped away. Skye would have no idea how important the people that stood in front of her now would be, how important the goofy AC and the beautiful warrior with a heart of ice would come to be to her. And she would have no idea about Ward’s betrayal, or the terrible things she would do under Hive’s sway, or the hole in her heart that would never quite heal after Lincoln, or that the original Coulson would die when she’d only just found him again.
This Skye was just Mary Sue Poots. Unwanted and unloved for another seventeen years.
“Please?” Skye asked, looking hopefully at May. “I’ll try better to be good this time. I promise.”
May pressed another kiss to Skye’s forehead, centered this time. Her thumbs brushed softly over Skye’s rounded cheeks. “No, baobei,” she whispered. “Hái méi.”
“Oh,” Skye said, retracting into herself once more.
“Someday, your family’s going to find you,” Coulson added, as if he couldn’t resist. His eyes were red as well. “And they’re going to love you more than you know, Skye.”
“Sure,” Skye said, and Daisy knew she didn’t believe them.
“C’mon,” Daisy said, motioning them toward the door. “Simmons’ll be waiting.”
Slowly, May stood up, and she and Coulson joined Daisy at the door. Still sitting on the bed, Skye watched them go sadly, still holding the little hula doll. Coulson exited first, Daisy pulling him into a hug as soon as they were out of sight in the hallway. It wasn’t the same, with his Chronicom-manufactured body—for lack of a better word, he didn’t squish quite right, and the vibrations she could sense were certainly different than when he had been flesh and blood—but it was still him, and she held him tightly, trying to put all the emotions trapped inside her into this one gesture. When they broke apart, his face was wet, and she knew he understood.
“May?” she asked, turning to see her. The specialist still hadn’t managed to exit the room, still staring at Skye with a tortured expression on her face. Daisy tugged at her arm slightly but the woman resisted her, stuck in place as if in stone.
“I want to sweep her away from here too, Mel,” Coulson murmured. “But time travel. No big ripples. We want Daisy to be right where we found her.”
“May,” Daisy said softly when the woman still didn’t move. “She’ll be okay.” She swallowed. “I’m okay.” And then she was hugging May too, both arms looped around her small frame.
“We’re both so proud of you,” May whispered. “Of the agent and the woman you’ve become.”
Daisy squeezed her hand. “I know, May.” This time, when Daisy tugged at her arm, May stepped away from the door, giving seven-year-old Skye one last long, lingering look. “And she’ll know too.”
Arms still looped around each other, the three of them made their way to the exit, back to the van and then the Zephyr and the next time period in which they would be needed to once again save the world.
(And if May punched Daisy’s least favorite nun on the way out, well, that was a small ripple. Probably.)