Chapter Text
Agent Coulson is down.
The truth is, she hadn’t noticed. Amidst the explosions and gunfire, and a 500 pound green rage monster crashing through the helicarrier, smashing everything like rolls of tin-foil, Skye had forgotten about her father.
The engines were failing, the helicarrier was falling, things were on fire, people were on fire -
The truth is, Skye was too busy trying to not get killed. Loki’s brain-washed minions were either single-minded or empty-minded, because they seemed to care for nothing but their assignment, not even their own lives. Fortunately for Loki’s minions and less fortunately for Skye, the agent who had an unhealthy obsession with Galaga didn’t know jack squat when it came to hand to hand combat. Plus, he was rubbish with a gun. How anyone let him onto the Helicarrier, Skye will never know, but that didn’t stop her from trying to protect him from getting turned into a block of French cheese by the onslaught of bullets raining down on them.
Yet, even when it finally stopped, after Loki escaped, after Stark fixed the engine, and after both Thor and the Hulk got inevitably ejected from the “floating fortress”, there were still casualties to account for, stations to pick up on, and duties to attend to.
Skye had been manning four seats by herself (med bay took three of her best colleagues into treatment), so it came as no surprise that she hadn’t remembered to ask about Coulson. Because this is Coulson, the second greatest spy only after Bond (who is fictional), Coulson who could disarm a gang of thugs with a bag of flour, Coulson who would always be fine…
Agent Coulson is down.
A medical team is on their way over.
They’re here…they called it.
When Fury made the announcement through the intercom, no one around Skye stopped to give her a second glance. Sure, many of them paused in their tasks for a brief moment of solemn respect, and some who knew Coulson squeezed their eyes shut and let out thick pants of air, but this was still war and they still had orders. People died. It was sad. But everyone needed to move on.
And of the total thirty seven seconds the agents on the bridge allotted aside to mourn their fallen comrade, not one second was spared by any of them to pay mind to a young agent who had frozen solid in her seat.
Agent Skye, Level Three. A nobody of no relations to anyone. Least of all Agent Coulson.
To her, everything had grown quiet, but the silence in her mind was deafening, and the heat of her anger could not chase away the ice in her veins. She couldn’t feel her toes, or her fingers on the keyboard; everything was just nothing, and every thought was but ghostly wisps and remnants swimming in the void behind her eyes.
Her father is dead.
Vaguely, Skye detects a slow set of footsteps coming towards her. "Agent Skye."
Maria’s warm palm felt like a patch of scorching iron curling around her shoulder, and her voice, soft and low and meant to be consoling, drilled into the young agent’s nerves like a long thin nail straight down her spine.
There was a paralyzing pain inside her like she never felt before, and in that moment, she swore she could have died.
Leaning over, Maria called her name in a hushed voice so that no one would hear, “Daisy. Daisy, I am so -.”
Daisy. My best girl Daisy. She couldn’t recall the last time her father even called her by that name. She was Skye now; Daisy Coulson was a thing of the past. Gone. Just like her father.
"Agent Hill," Miraculously, Skye found her voice. It sounded rough, like she’d been screaming herself hoarse, but it didn’t waver the slightest. She learned that trick from her mother.
Oh dear god, her mom…
“I’ll be alright.” Skye reassured her godmother monotonously, flexing her fingers once, and got back to work. Maria looked as though she wanted to argue, but she didn’t.
As Skye surveyed the scene around her, she thought to herself that she could survive this. Without the pitying glances and gossipy whispers, it made it easier for her to block out the distractions and focus on the task at hand.
She thought herself strong. Tough. Unbreakable just like the Cavalry.
But she was wrong.
"Lost my one good eye." Nick Fury sighed, a while later, when the remainders of the barely cohesive ‘Avengers’ gathered in the bridge. They each bore a grimace of self-loathing and remorse as Fury scattered the stained vintage cards across the table.
Those were her father’s cards. He loved them! And now they were ruined.
What’s it matter? A part of her argued. He’s dead. But it did matter. It still matters, and it will always matter. At least to her.
From her vantage point behind a row of computers, Skye couldn’t see much, but she could hear the faint splatter as the cards landed against glass, and knew it was her father’s freshly spilled blood.
That sickening, wet noise drove her over the edge, and in the chasm of her fall there was nothing but red.
Had Hill not stepped in the minute she did, Skye would’ve screamed right there on the spot.
"Agent Skye, Med Bay requests to see your head wound." Maria scooped one hand under her arm and lifted her from her seat. "Velasquez, take over here."
Somewhere between the hanger and the bridge, she lost Maria. Or perhaps the older woman simply let her go, knowing she needed the space alone.
Her feet, growing instincts of their own, carried her to the place where her father departed from this plane. It wasn’t difficult to find it; the crew said he died beside the cage that contained Loki, and the large smear of blood against the wall was evidence of Coulson’s bravery and loyalty.
But Loki had gotten away, and Skye couldn’t help but feel cheated that her father’s legacy was to be nothing but a smudge on the wall.
Was he married?
Rogers and Stark found their way there eventually too, out of guilt perhaps.
She’d hidden herself in a corner, shielded from peeping eyes by the debris and bits of metal scraps. They never saw her, and she had no inclination to make herself known.
Stark was an acquaintance of her Father’s at best - they weren’t friend, not really. And Captain America? Her father idolized the man, but the man hardly knew a thing about his most devoted fan.
And yet here they were, talking as if Phil had somehow meant something more to them during his life…
No…There was a cellist, I think.
A cellist.
As if the only thing he left behind was a cellist…
But yes, if the Earth managed to avoid enslavement by a psycho alien with daddy-issues, after all this is wrapped up, someone will inevitably go find Audrey. There will be a funeral, with white carnations, loud trumpets, and a folded flag. Fury might even be there…to give Audrey the flag.
Not to her. Not to her mother.
Melinda’s personal life with Phil had been strictly confidential. On paper, they were never legally married. They never had a daughter, never shared a dream. Margaret “Daisy” Americus Coulson was a faction of a life that never was, and the person she became - Skye - is no more than the ghost of a fairy tale.
Once, there’d been a little house in Wisconsin with burgundy walls and a large willow tree in the back, several yards from the waters of Lake Superior. In the spring of ‘95, her father had made her a tire-swing and painted it pink because she begged.
The weed in the back grew rampant, because neither of her parents ever figured out what ‘gardening’ is supposed to be, and so every year when the summer came, there would be a field of wild daisies blooming beneath the willow tree. She loved that willow tree… and that tacky pink tire swing. For hours on end she had spent her afternoons there, giggling and twirling around and around.
Daisy, honey, you’re going to make yourself sick.
No I won’t!
The truth is, sometimes, on the wooden deck in front of the back kitchen door, when he thinks no one is looking, her father would wrap her mother in his arms and kiss her in the ecky way adults do…
Dad, we’re pals right? For her birthday, Phil had bought her Lion King on VHS, and she had since watched it a gazillion times and memorized all the lines. And we’ll always be together, right?
In hindsight, that was so not a movie for kids.
Fat drops of tears slipped through her lashes. We’ll always be together…right?
Is this the first time you’ve lost a soldier?
No, thought Skye, listening to their conversation. I already lost one to Bahrain.
We are not soldiers!
But he was. Coulson, he was. As much a soldier as he was a spy.
Skye was proud of her father, of the spy, the soldier, and the man that he had been, and only more proud was she to call herself his child. So she cried, lowering her head onto her knee and sobbed in silence, teeth sinking into her bottom lip, and her whole body shaking as she anguished over the loss of one who promised they’ll ‘always be together’.
Phil Coulson was not married, and yes, there had been a cellist. This is true.
But it is also true that he was once married, and that he had a child, a daughter, who loved him and worshiped him as reverently as the cub in the movie worshiped his own father. A child, who was there on the helicarrier the day his heart was perforated, who sat in the shadows of the wreckage, just feet way from where Steve Rogers and Tony Stark made their peace, and mourned the man they will never know.
The man that no one knew.