#hive!daisy

“What are you doing here?” Daisy demanded.

“Trying to help.”

Simmons’ toes scrabbled at the ground, barely enough to support her against the invisible noose. Her voice trembled with fear, but she didn’t feel as suffocated as she had expected. She was being held – roughly, but still held. Not strangled. Yet.

“Trying to help.” Daisy sneered. “Of course you are.”

“Fitz told me what you said,” Simmons explained. “I know you said to stay away, but I couldn’t help it. You’re my friend.”

There, she felt it, the pressure on her trachea. She tried not to think how easily Daisy could rupture it. It was not a friendly answer.

“You were my friend too,” Daisy hissed. “I would have done anything for you.”

“Me too,” Simmons insisted, nodding and trying to blink away the tears beginning to well in her eyes. “Anything.”

“I don’t want your help.”

Daisy refreshed her grip, lifting Simmons off the ground fully, but adding pressure to her whole body, pinning her completely against the glass. Entirely at Daisy’s mercy. Simmons felt her heart begin to race again. It only took 3000 or so Newtons to break a rib. 4000 for a femur. In theory, the human body could deliver much more than that if muscles and bones cooperated – 50 000, maybe. With the aid of her gloves, Daisy could probably even top that. She could snap any of them in half like – well, maybe not like a matchstick. Maybe like a thick carrot or a particularly tough jar. But still, not many options were open to Simmons now except to stop Daisy wanting to snap her in half. At least thinking about it had brought her heart rate down and reduced her desire to vomit; she was in more of a state now to observe, and maybe, she could achieve what those before her had not.

A miracle, she couldn’t help thinking.

“Daisy. Please. I know you don’t want to do this.”

“You think you know everything!” “I know you. You don’t want to do this.”

“I have to,” Daisy insisted. In that moment, her eyes betrayed a flicker of something other than the righteous fury with which she had entered. Was it fear? Was it…doubt?

“Why do you have to?” Simmons pressed.

There it was again. Fear, doubt. Daisy’s own eyes were filling with tears. No doubt she remembered what she had done to Fitz, to Mack; no doubt she felt bad, because even though she had to – or thought she did - she still hated it.

“I tried to save you,” Daisy promised. “I wanted to save all of you. That’s why I hurt Mack. He was trying to stop me saving you.”

“I understand.”

“I just want you to be safe.”

“I know that. I want to help. We can all be safe, Daisy, if you just let me help you.”

“I don’t want your help!”

The glass around the room shattered, and Simmons yelped as her bones crunched in Daisy’s flash of force. Which ones were actually damaged, she would have to tell later. For now she just had to talk her down before Daisy left her a sobbing mess of ruptured internal organs and continued her hunt for, presumably, their research.

The research!

“Daisy. Daisy. I’m sorry, it’s okay,” Simmons apologised. Breathing heavily, Daisy reduced the pressure back to its previous level, and eyed Simmons warily.

“I have something that can help right here,” Simmons promised. “In my pocket. We created it from studying – “ don’t say parasites, she’ll argue – “bugs. We tested it on Lincoln. Do you remember Lincoln?”

Daisy’s eyes softened. Of course she remembered Lincoln - she remembered all of it, she wasn’t brainwashed – but it was a tick on a checklist for Simmons.

“It didn’t work at first, I had to drill into his head. Potentially very painful, but he did it. For you.”

Simmons continued to speak, watching Daisy’s expression: the way her eyes drifted, the way her lips opened a little, as if she wanted to speak to him. The force pinning Simmons’ limbs back began to lessen, and she slid slowly down the wall. It took concentrated effort not to sigh in relief when her feet finally met solid ground again.

“He did it twice, actually, so we could make a working version. He loves you very much.”

Just like that, Daisy’s expression hardened. Simmons felt herself shoved backward against the glass. Was it something she had said? Maybe Fitz was right. Maybe there was something in Daisy fighting against the control. But it was like a drug. Medically that was impossible, or close to it – unless. Unless she was still holding onto some sort of warped version of her own motives. Unless she was experiencing dissonance between what Hive wanted her to do and what she wanted do to and was trying to make sense of it. Unless part of what seemed like Hive’s control wasn’t Hive at all, it was Hive-infected-Daisy struggling to shut down her own superego.

Daisy – real Daisy - wanted to save her friends. That’s why Hive-Daisy was after the research. That’s why she hadn’t killed them all on sight. If she could solve the problem, turn them Inhuman, they would be safe. Hive-Daisy thought she was following Hive’s will, when in fact, it was the same goal as Daisy’s.

That’s why she had been warning them to stay away. She knew she would be expected to put on a show, to hurt them or even kill them. She knew she would want to do it – she just didn’t want to want to. But every time she was reminded of any of this, she saw it as weakness, or a lack of commitment. No, that wasn’t it: insecurity. She doubted the realism of what she thought was, and wanted to be, happiness the likes of which she had never had in her life, and when flaws in that bliss were highlighted – like when she was asked to hurt her friends - she lashed out against the dissonance. Hence the beakers earlier, and threatening to kill Fitz immediately after instructing him to avoid being killed.

“What are you doing?” Daisy growled. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I told you, I just want to help.”

“And I told you I don’t want your help. You don’t understand.”

“Then help me understand.”

Except Daisy didn’t understand it herself. Not really. She wanted to make them see something that she couldn’t see. So of course, she rejected the question. Perhaps Simmons had spent too much time around Doctor Garner, but she couldn’t help but be grateful as she crept slowly toward progress.

“You don’t want to understand,” Daisy whined. “You want to stop us. You would have killed us.”

Simmons shook her head.

“I never wanted to hurt you.”

Mistake.

There was a flash of violence in Daisy’s eyes and all of a sudden it felt like there was a hand in Simmons’ chest, smashing through her ribs, burning her heart, hauling her forward by the sternum. Daisy threw her across the room. Shocked and winded, Simmons couldn’t make a sound beyond gasping for breath as she rolled onto her back and tried to look for Daisy. She could only hope Daisy was not done with her, and wouldn’t continue after the others before they could get away. She spared a moment to hope that Fitz had not stayed behind to make sure she was okay – if somebody died, as the vision would have it, she’d rather it just be one somebody.

Fortunately, the sound of Daisy’s combat boots crunching slowly on shattered glass told Simmons that it was, indeed, not over yet.

“You never wanted to hurt Skye,” Daisy spat, and shoved one of the benches across the room. “If it was anyone else you would have done it with a smile on your face. You like to think you’re objective but you’re just as changeable as the rest of us.”

“I made a mistake,” Simmons rasped. “I changed because I used to think Inhumanity was bad for you, but I was wrong. I was wrong.”

“You would have taken it away from me!”

“Only because I thought it was hurting you!”

Another desk screeched to the side of the room. Daisy was getting closer.

Simmons gritted her teeth and unraveled herself, clenching her jaw against the fierce pain not just from her ribs, but from where the broken glass from the pocket she had landed on, was digging into her side. She crawled across the puddle from the busted sink and propped herself up against the leg of the fixed benches at the back of the room. Daisy might need to put a little more effort into moving them, so at least she wouldn’t get crushed before she got found.

“You think this is hurting me?” Daisy raised her hands, making the whole room shake. “It has freed me. Inhumanity freed me. Hive freed me.”

At one gesture, the remaining moveable benches parted like the Red Sea, leaving Simmons exposed, propped up on the floor near the sinks, with blood staining her shirt and lab coat and now-useless antitoxins joining the puddle in which she lay. Letting her head loll more than it needed to, exposing her damaged side to, hopefully, the part of Daisy that would care, Simmons tried to buy time. She had one hand in her least-damaged pocket, searching for her last hope, and begging that if luck indeed existed, in whatever form, that it would be on her side.

“Hive will do anything to fool you,” Simmons explained, letting the laboured breathing from the pain in her chest show through unhindered. Every once of softness, of pity she could wrangle would make this easier. One break in her voice – and that was coming, any second now - might be the difference between life and death. “He is trying to take away the people who love you so that only he is left. Can’t you see that?”

Daisy stopped. Bent down. Took Simmons by a clenched fist in the collar of her shirt and lifted her to standing. She leant in, so that their faces were inches from each other, and Simmons saw with horror and sorrow that Daisy’s hesitation and fear seemed to have disappeared. There was only pity, now, and determination.

Even if she’d wanted to, Simmons doubted she’d have been able to stop the tears of pain and hurt seeping down her cheeks. Tears of sorrow, too, borne of the fear that this might not work after all and that the last things she and Daisy might see of each other was this, and that the last thing Daisy might ever feel, was this.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Daisy hissed, all but spitting in Simmons’ face. “And you don’t know anything about Hive. You blindly hate him because he took people from you. You don’t see what he’s trying to give you. What we are trying to give you.”

With the hand not scrunched in Simmons’ shirt, Daisy reached into Simmons’ pocket, and pried the precious vial from the fingers that so desperately clung to it. Slowly, making a point of it, Daisy lifted it out of the pocket so Simmons could watch as Daisy crushed the glass and let the antitoxin run over her fingers and drip into the puddle at their feet, useless.

Oh Daisy, Simmons thought. I wish you could see what I am trying to give you.

But there would be time for sentimental speeches later, if all went well. Now was the time for action, so, steeling herself all of a sudden, Simmons lunged forward. The vial she had been holding was a decoy – whether she had offered it as a bargain or for destruction would have worked equally well. The real, fully developed antiserum was in another innocuous vial that had been left safe, and that now, Simmons ripped the lid off of and all but shoved down Daisy’s throat before trapping it with a hand, trying to force Daisy to swallow.

Perhaps she had learnt something from all the documentaries she had ever watched. Perhaps it was her training kicking in. Or perhaps it was just the power of one, specific, unspeakably important desire that kept her hanging on for dear life as Daisy immediately went on the offensive. She couldn’t flip with the extra weight, but she shoved Simmons against the walls and benches, and sent shattering quakes through the wrist and hand clenched firmly over her face. Simmons screamed and screamed and screamed, exorcising the pain, but she didn’t let go until finally, the desire to breathe won out and Daisy swallowed in the process.

Simmons tumbled gracelessly to the floor as Daisy doubled over and gagged. She scrambled backward, not sure how long it would take for the antitoxin to kick in, and stared in horror as Daisy fell to one knee, grabbing at the benches to try and support herself, and then collapsed fully.

Perhaps they hadn’t got it working quite yet after all.

“HELP!” Simmons screamed. “HELP!”