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"Dad... I really miss you. I don't know why I keep doing this, expecting an answer." He listens as she takes a shaky breath, trying (and failing miserably) to hold it together.
"Jane is close to a breakthrough, which is, like so amazing. The closer she gets to opening the bridge again the sooner I can come home." Another shaky breath. "Isn't it funny? How I'm the one that's away all the time now?" A slightly hysterical laugh this time that turns into a full on sob.
She doesn't talk anymore. She just keeps sobbing Daddy over and over making his already shattered heart crush into a million pieces. That message was over 3 months old. That's how long he'd been "dead". A month and a half spent in a coma. The rest of that time laying in a hospital bed at a remote SHIELD facility somewhere in Tahiti.
When he came to, she was the only thing on his mind. Not the excruciating pain in his chest. Not the fact that aliens had invaded the planet, and their only defense has been a group of extraordinary people who barely functioned separately, let alone on a team. He assumed since he was in fact alive and here on earth that the Avengers had succeeded.
No one would tell him anything.
He was alive but no one except a very select few people knew.
But the one person who mattered, the one person he let down the most by dying.. She didn't know. She didn't know and she was so broken because of it. His sunshine, his bright, happy Darcy didn't know that he was alive and trying to heal as fast as he possibly could to get back to her.