Archive of Our Own ^beta

The world after Coulson passes is quieter in a way that feels wrong.

It’s not peace. It’s absence.

The Lighthouse still hums—vents breathing, fluorescent lights buzzing, doors sealing with that soft hydraulic sigh like the base is trying to be gentle about it. But the center of it is gone, and everything that used to orbit him has started drifting, bumping into the edges of itself.

Daisy tells herself she’s fine.

It’s the oldest habit she has. The first rule she ever learned: if you need something, you don’t ask for it. If you want someone, you don’t reach. If you love them, you keep it small enough it won’t be used against you. She’s had that rule longer than she’s had a name.

And then there’s May.

May moves through these days like a blade she’s decided to keep sheathed—still sharp, still dangerous, but careful of everyone’s soft parts. Daisy watches her from the periphery because that’s where Daisy always lives when she’s hurting: a little outside the room, a little outside the circle, close enough to help but far enough not to be held.

May doesn’t talk about Coulson.

Daisy doesn’t either.

They do, sometimes, in code. In logistics. In clipped sentences about “his things” or “his office” or “that box that shouldn’t be left in Storage C because the humidity will ruin the paper.” They talk around him the way people talk around a wounds that are better left undisturbed. 

Tonight, Daisy finds herself outside Coulson’s door without remembering the hallway.

The lights are dimmed to night-cycle, and the air smells faintly like metal and antiseptic and the citrus cleaner someone insists on using because it makes the place feel less like a bunker. Daisy’s hand hovers over the access panel, then drops.

She shouldn’t go in.  She’ll probably end up a weeping mess if she does.

She also can’t resist going in.

The door slides open with a whisper, and the room is exactly what it always was—too tidy, too human for an underground fortress. Coulson’s desk. His chair. His little collectibles and antiques. The faint outline of where his coffee used to sit, like a ghost ring on the surface.

Daisy steps in and stands there, breathing carefully, as if too much air might make him disappear all over again.

There’s a box on his desk in the corner of the room.

Not one of the official ones—those are labeled and stacked and handled with gloves like artifacts. This is just a plain cardboard box with a strip of tape across the top, the kind that says someone did this quickly because if they didn’t do it quickly, they wouldn’t be able to do it at all.

Daisy knows, without needing to check, that May did it.

She shouldn’t open it.

Her fingers do anyway.

Inside: a few folders, some old mission photos full of familiar and unfamiliar faces of Coulson’s early days at SHIELD, a badge with a bullet hole that looks like it’s been tossed into a drawer and forgotten and remembered again. And, nestled in the corner, a worn blue folder with a bent edge—something that’s been handled enough to soften the paper.

Daisy’s breath catches before she knows why.

She pulls it out.

The label on the tab is in Coulson’s handwriting.

DAISY

The folder is heavier than it should be.

Not physically—though it is thick, swollen at the seams like it’s been fed too many years—but in the way it sits in Daisy’s hands like a truth she isn’t ready to carry. Coulson’s handwriting is familiar enough to hurt. The ink is slightly smudged at the edge, as if his thumb worried it a hundred times.

She expects the first page to be clinical.

It is, at first.

A neat stack of printed records: juvenile citations, sealed-but-not-really sealed entries, the kind of paperwork that always reads like an accusation.

Uncooperative.

Defiant.

At-risk.

The system’s favorite words for a kid it failed.

Daisy flips through them fast, stomach twisting, because she already knows these pages. She’s lived them. She’s outgrown them, except she hasn’t, not really, not in the way it matters.

Then she hits a divider tab.

Not a formal one. Something office-supply cheap. Hand-labeled in Coulson’s block letters:

PERSONAL

Daisy’s fingers stutter.

The first sheet under it isn’t a report.

It’s a note, typed, then printed, then—because Coulson can never leave anything alone—annotated in the margins in pen.

A list.

Not of threats. Not of assets. Not of protocols.

A list of Daisy.

• Prefers tea over coffee when she’s sick (ginger helps nausea; she’ll pretend it doesn’t)
• HATES being asked if she’s okay (ask what she needs instead)
• Stops eating when she’s stressed (put food in front of her; don’t make it a conversation)
• She sleeps better with weight (extra blanket / heavy hoodie / someone on the other side of the mattress)
• Will work until she shakes (check her hands, make her sleep—no negotiations)
• Doesn’t like being cornered (give her exits)
• Likes dumplings from that place in Queens (pork, extra chili oil; she’ll deny caring, she does)
• She hates the cold (she’s always chilly)
• She twists her fingers when anxious (hand her something to hold instead)
• Celebrates quietly (music, not crowds; small victories matter)
• Hates ice cream (would rather eat cream cheese frosting straight out of a can, what a weirdo)
• She’s gentle with animals (trusts them; they trust her)
• Her gunshot scars still make the muscle ache on occasion, usually when the weather changes (keep hot water bottles and heated blankets on hand, they help)
• Pretends to hate her birthday, but likes it acknowledged, not made a thing (a cupcake, a candle, one person who stays)
• She likes small gifts that are useful (tools, notebooks, good socks—she feels “wasteful” otherwise)
• She loves being shown something new (museum, planetarium, a stupid roadside attraction—she pretends it’s dumb and then gets curious)
• HATES “you’re safe” as a phrase (prove it instead; safety is a pattern, not a sentence)
• She’ll flinch if someone reaches fast near her face (slow hands, always)
• She’s most honest when she’s half-asleep (listen; don’t interrogate; just remember)
• Will fall asleep literally anywhere (let her sleep, she doesn’t get enough of it)
• Bad days: touch helps, but only if she chooses it. Don’t take it personally if she flinches.
• Good days: she laughs with her whole face. Tell her you noticed.
• She wants to build something that lasts (give her projects that aren’t about war)

Daisy’s vision blurs so hard she has to blink until the page comes back into focus.

Because this is not an intel brief.

This feels like… things a dad would know about his kid.

It’s Coulson doing that thing he always did—collecting the details other people miss, turning them into a map so no one gets lost.

At the bottom, in a different pen, like he came back later and couldn’t stop himself, there’s a line written smaller:

May—if you’re reading this, it means I didn’t get to finish teaching her how to be held. Please do it for me.

Daisy’s throat closes around a sound.

She flips the page too fast, like she can outrun the ache.

And then—

Photos.

Not glossy mission shots. Not surveillance stills.

Photographs that have been printed and handled, the edges soft.

A baby in a blanket, face scrunched in a furious little grimace like she’s already offended by existence. A toddler with dark hair sticking up in odd tufts, staring at the camera like she’s deciding whether to trust it. A little girl in a cheap dress on a plastic chair, hands folded too neatly in her lap, eyes too old.

Daisy makes a noise—small, involuntary, disbelieving.

Because she’s never seen these.

She’s never had these.

She’s spent her whole life with emptiness where her beginnings should be, until finally she hadn’t cared.

Coulson had asked her once if she wanted help finding pictures of her childhood. She’d said no without a second thought. That was her past, and her past had felt like a closed door. 

She didn’t know he’d looked for them anyway. 

The photos keep coming, feeling like someone pried open the past with careful hands and refused to let her be erased.

Daisy at five or six, hair pulled into a loose braid, caught mid-step on a cracked sidewalk outside a group home, looking over her shoulder like she’s expecting someone to call her back. Daisy at a cheap folding table with crayons, coloring with fierce concentration, tongue poking between her teeth, the way kids do when they don’t have to be afraid for a minute. Daisy at maybe ten, hair tucked behind her ears, standing near the edge of a classroom photo—close enough to be included, far enough to leave if she needs to.

Coulson’s handwriting lives in the margins on sticky notes like gentle insistence:

She always stood near exits.
She learned to read faces before she learned to trust them.
She carried her own things like she didn’t believe they’d be there later.

The next picture is a school photo. Daisy’s smile looks practiced, like someone taught her how to show teeth without showing need. There’s a scribble on the back in pen:

St. Joseph's Catholic School, 3rd grade. Sister Mary Catherine sent it with a note from back in the day: “She reads under the stairs when she thinks no one is looking. She reads with a hunger that I’ve never seen in a child. She’s bright.”

Daisy’s fingers shake so badly she nearly drops it.

She flips again.

More photos—some clearly official, the kind foster care takes to document placement. Some candid: Daisy on a playground, Daisy on a bus, Daisy on a front step with a stray cat in her lap, head bent like she’s whispering secrets into fur. Daisy holding a paper cup of hot chocolate with both hands, eyes closed as if warmth is something holy.

Beside them, little notes:

She trusts animals more than people.
Corners felt safer than open spaces.
She learned to wait for other people to leave before she took up room.

Daisy’s chest hurts in sharp, clean stabs.

He didn’t just find her.

He found all the versions of her that the world discarded.

There’s another divider tab.

SCHOOL / PLACEMENTS

She hates the words on instinct.

She expects the worst.

Instead, she finds report cards.

Original copies, scanned and printed, complete with teachers’ handwriting in the margins.

Bright but disengaged.
Exceptional aptitude in computers.
Refuses group work; seems to expect rejection.
Needs stability.
Needs someone to tell her she matters.

Daisy’s breath comes in shallow.

These are the kinds of documents she thought were gone—deleted, buried, destroyed. She remembers Coulson telling her to wipe her history after SHIELD fell.

She remembers doing it before she did anyone else’s.

But he hadn’t let it be wiped somehow.

He’d kept it.

Not to use against her.

To keep it from vanishing. To keep her from vanishing.

There’s a single-page note paper-clipped to one of the report cards, Coulson’s handwriting again.

I told her to delete it all because it was necessary. But if she ever asks who she was—if she ever wants proof that she existed before us—she deserves to have it. Everyone deserves a beginning.

Daisy presses her knuckles to her mouth, hard.

A few pages later, there are letters.

Not many. Just… enough.

Printed emails from social workers. 

Three sentences from a kind teacher she can still picture.

She was precious and sweet. She deserved better. We all failed her. 

A scanned handwritten note in looping script on yellowed stationery.

Agent Coulson,
You asked what Mary Sue Daisy was like.
She was quiet. She was stubborn. She was kind when she thought no one could see it.
She hated bedtime because it meant tomorrow came faster.
She always waited for the other children to be chosen first, and she pretended she didn’t care.
But she did care. Yet she was always genuine in her joy for the children that were chosen.
Sometimes she would fall asleep holding a book like it was a shield.
I used to tuck the blanket around her shoulders. She never woke up. I think she didn’t believe anyone would stay long enough to bother.
—Sister Mary Catherine

Daisy’s heart does something ugly inside her ribs.

Because it’s not just the facts.

It’s the witness accounts of her life.

Coulson went back and asked the people who saw her, really saw her, before she learned how to make herself invisible.

And he kept their words like they were sacred.

Then she hits the divider that makes her stomach drop.

INCIDENTS / REMOVALS

The paper under it is heavier stock. Official. Stamped. Redacted in places.

Daisy’s brain tries to refuse it—tries to shove her out of the moment and into the numb distance she used to survive with—but her hands keep moving, betraying her.

There are summaries. Case notes. 

Substantiated.

Investigated.

Removed.

The words are careful. Sanitized. Bureaucratic.

But Daisy knows what they mean.

She can feel it in her teeth.

And then she sees the photographs.

Not school pictures. Not placement headshots.

Documentation.

A set of prints clipped together, each numbered in the corner.

They aren’t graphic in the way her mind feared—just the awful, clinical plainness of injury recorded for proof. The yellow-green bloom of a bruise along an upper arm. A copy of a radiograph showing her broken humerus. A head wound stapled together. Cigarette burns on her belly and clavicle. A rib cage that’s extremely prominent. A cut on the outside of her thigh that came from a knife. A wrist with faint marks where fingers were too tight. A shoulder with discoloration that looks like someone threw her into a wall.

There’s one that is just her face, closer than any memory would choose. A split lip in the corner of her mouth. A shadowed bruise beneath one eye. A bloody nose. Her expression not crying, not pleading—just… blank, like she’s learned tears make things worse.

The flash makes it look like a mugshot.

Daisy’s stomach turns.

Her pulse gets loud in her ears. Her fingers go cold.

For a moment she feels like she’s looking at evidence of a crime committed against a child she’s never met—

—and then the floor drops out because she has. She’s met her. She was her.

There’s a page clipped on top, handwritten.

Coulson’s handwriting, uneven in a way she’s never seen from him. As if he wrote it too fast. As if he couldn’t make his hand behave.

These are the pictures they took when they could no longer call her a liar.
They never believed her, so she learned to stop complaining.
She will try to minimize it. She will tell you it wasn’t that bad. It was.
Do not let her carry shame that belongs to the adults who failed her.

And beneath that, pressed into the paper like he wanted it to scar through:

I should have found her sooner.

Daisy swallows. It feels like swallowing glass.

She keeps turning, because stopping would mean feeling it all at once.

There are reasons for “substantiated,” laid out in sterile bullet points that still manage to feel like violence:

School nurse note: “Student flinched when sleeve raised. Bruising inconsistent with explanation.”

Teacher’s report: “Repeated absences following weekends. Appears exhausted; reluctant to participate in gym.”

Neighbor statement: “Heard yelling. Child crying. Loud thud.”

Social worker’s observation: “Home environment inconsistent with safety standards. Caregiver evasive. Drugs present in home.”

Language that tries to be neutral. Language that isn’t.

Tucked behind the official pages is a single sheet of plain paper.

Coulson again.

It’s longer this time. Messier. Like he started it, stopped, came back, started again.

I keep thinking about the math of it.
How many nights she lived in fear.
How many doors she stood behind.
How many times she learned the lesson: don’t tell, don’t cry, don’t make it worse.
How many times she survived by becoming smaller.

There’s a hard slash through a sentence, the ink gouging like he hated the words:

I should have been there.

Under it, rewritten, steadier but no less furious:

I should have found her.

And then:

I read the case notes and my hands shook.
Not fear. Rage.
Grief.
The kind that makes you want to break the world open and crawl inside it and pull a child out with your bare hands.

Daisy’s eyes burn.

The next lines are smaller, like an admission he didn’t want anyone to see:

I sat at my desk after hours and I cried.
Not because I’m surprised.
Because I’m ashamed of how easy it was for the world to do this to her without consequence. How easy it was for everyone to call her a liar.

There’s a pause in the handwriting—an empty space like he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Then:

If she ever sees these pictures, she will think it makes her dirty.
Tell her it makes her real. Tell her it makes her true. It makes her a child who deserved protection.
Tell her it was never her fault.

Tell her these are proof she survived.
Tell her I’m sorry.
Tell her I am so sorry.

Daisy presses the folder against her chest as if paper can hold a person together.

Because Coulson didn’t just save her.

He mourned the version of her he couldn’t save.

He carried that mourning quietly, so she wouldn’t have to.

The next divider feels like air after drowning.

MEMORIES

Coulson built this section like a bridge: small, silly, human things that say you were more than what happened to you.

Ticket stubs from movies they went to watch together between missions. 

A receipt from a diner they’d been obsessed with while they lived at the playground. 

A folded paper napkin with a doodle of a lopsided flower and a note:

She smiled today without checking who was watching.

A pressed fortune cookie slip that says, “You will find what you’re looking for in an unexpected place. Coulson’s scrawl beneath it:

She rolled her eyes but smiled at it.

A printed screenshot of a text exchange dated just after Lincoln died:

C: “She ate half a burger. Didn’t pretend she wasn’t hungry.”
M: “That’s a win.”
C: “Yes.”

A metal keychain in a plastic bag—old SHIELD logo, scratched up and so faded the ridges of it are barely visible. Another note:

She likes having something in her pocket she can hold when she’s anxious. Don’t call it a coping mechanism. Just let her have it. She kept this one I gave her when she first joined SHIELD for three years. 

There are innumerable pictures of her laughing with various members of the team, all candid, all filled to the brim with love. 

A Polaroid—Daisy in a hoodie, hair in her face, sitting on a floor with a small screwdriver in her hand, surrounded by pieces of a computer disassembled. She’s laughing at whoever took the photo, caught mid-protest, mid-smile—real, unguarded. On the bottom:

She fixed it. Of course she did.

There are other scraps too, most with attached notes he wrote—proof of ordinary that feels almost sacred.

A crumpled poster that came in the Blu Ray box of a cheesy movie they watched for movie night in the rec room

She pretended not to like it; she quoted it for a week.

A coffee sleeve with a doodled smiley face.

She drew it while waiting; she was calmer by the time the coffee arrived.

A bunch of stupid sticky notes she’d written over the years—attached to personnel files commenting on what she thought of the potential agent, scribbles left on his desk as reminders, stuck to his door when she wanted to tell him something and he wasn’t available, doodles from when she was bored in meetings and wanted to make him crack a smile. 

A recipe card, handwritten in someone else’s script, with Coulson’s note: 

She likes this. Says it tastes like ‘home’ even though she says that word like it burns.

Then, tucked deeper, a divider that makes Daisy’s breath snag.

ASSESSMENTS

Daisy stares at it for a moment like it’s a bomb about to explode, but her curiosity gets the best of her.

There are plenty of evaluations from psychiatrists from when she was a child still in the system, all saying a variation of the same.

Patient exhibits all the classic signs of abuse.

Would benefit from long term placement.

Medication prescribed. 

Therapy recommended. 

The words are familiar, yet they still make her gut churn. 

An evaluation from when Andrew came to SHIELD, when she was still “Skye,” an assessment she pretended not to take seriously.

Skye deflects with humor, but she's in more pain than she would ever let on. Her powers terrify her beyond belief, and she recognizes that her emotions control, and that she is struggling to control them. She is convinced Mack and Simmons are right right, and that she is a risk to everyone around her. It is my deeply held belief that the environment SHIELD provides will do more harm than good at this time. She needs quiet, she needs stability. 

Daisy's jaw clenches, thinking of what had happened in the days that followed, of how alone she'd felt in that cabin. She hadn't needed quiet, she'd needed her team's support.

Then there's, another more recent one from when she’d come back to SHIELD after Lincoln. Someone, not Coulson, had written: 

Subject expresses, indirectly, desire for family stability. Mentions wanting to be ‘better’ than the adults who raised her.’

Coulson has underlined it and written in the margin:

She would be.

The next page is Coulson’s own handwriting, softer. Less sharp edges.

She asked once—joking—if she’d be a terrible mom.
She laughed like it didn’t matter.
It mattered to her. 

Daisy’s throat tightens so hard she can barely swallow.

She’d be great if she wanted to take that path. 

She has the instincts already.
She protects.
She notices the quiet kid in the corner.
She feeds people without calling it feeding.
She gives away her coat even when she’s cold.
She thinks love has to be earned, so she overpays.

If she ever tells you she can’t have a family because she’s “too much,” remind her:
the right people don’t call love too much.
They call it home.

Daisy’s vision goes soft at the edges.

Because she has thought that—about children, about the future—only in the safest corners of her mind, only as a question she never let herself ask out loud. A fragile want she treated like a weakness.

Something she’d never dared utter out loud. 

Coulson knew.

He knew, and he wrote it down like a promise that could outlast him.

Then--

She sees it.

A daisy, bleached pale from time, flattened between two sheets of plastic like he’d been afraid even the air might take it from him. There’s a strip of tape at the stem, careful and aging at the edges, and next to it a note in his hand.

Daisy’s eyes track the words.

We found this on a mountainside today, the only flower in the horizon. For some reason it made me ask her if she knew what her middle name was. She just shrugged. If she was mine, I think I would've given her the middle name "Louise".

For a second Daisy doesn’t understand what she’s reading, then she feels the emotion hit her square in the chest and she lets out a sob. 

Louise.

Daisy’s finger goes to it without permission—pads of her fingers brushing the ink like she can feel the moment it was written. Like if she touches it right, hard enough, she can pull Coulson back through time and into the room.

Louise.

It isn’t even the name, not really. It’s what the name stands for: the casual certainty. The impossible, unselfconscious mine.

If she was mine.

Daisy stares at the pressed daisy, at the way he saved it like evidence. Like a proof he wanted to keep close. Like he didn’t trust the universe not to erase the softest things.

She thinks of that day, the horizon empty except for one stubborn little flower. Thinks of Coulson looking at it, picking it up from the ground and handing it to her. Thinks of him thinking of her.

He had asked her about her middle name—like it mattered. Like it was something a father should know. Like the absence of an answer wasn’t a failure on Daisy’s part, but a gap he felt responsible for.

She can feel, all at once, the shape of everything she didn’t understand back then. That Coulson was collecting her in little ways, quietly, in the corners—saving a flower, saving a thought, saving a name he would’ve chosen if he’d gotten to choose anything for her at all.

Daisy’s vision blurs.

It starts as a sting, the first sharp warning of tears, and then her body betrays her completely. She lets out a sound that isn’t graceful. Isn’t dignified. It breaks out of her like something that’s been trapped behind her ribs for years.

Her hand shakes where it rests on the plastic.

“Louise,” she whispers, and it comes out wrong—too reverent, too devastated—like she’s saying a prayer she doesn’t believe she deserves.

Her chest caves inward. She tries to breathe and can’t find enough air.

Because she can see it now, so clearly it’s unbearable: Coulson standing on a cold mountainside with the wind cutting through his jacket, the team scattered, the world big and dangerous—and he’s holding a small white flower and thinking, my kid should have had a name that was hers from the start.

Thinking, if she was mine.

As if he didn’t already treat her like she was.

As if he hadn't already chosen her over and over.

The sob hits harder, coming up from somewhere low and animal.

Daisy presses her knuckles to her mouth like she can shove it back in, like she can keep the noise from escaping, but it doesn’t work.

She can’t stop.

She runs her finger over the name again—Louise—slowly, like it might anchor her, like it might keep her from floating apart.

It only makes it worse.

Because the more she touches it, the more real it is.

He would’ve named her.

He would’ve given her something soft and steady and ordinary.

He would’ve given her a middle name like a hand on the back of her neck, like a tether, like a place to come home to.

And he didn’t get to.

And now he’s gone.

Daisy bows over the file, shoulders shaking, grief spilling out of her in broken, helpless waves—not just for Coulson, but for every version of her life where she could’ve had this from the beginning. 

And in the middle of it, impossibly, is love—so big it hurts.

Because even without blood or years, he still looked at one lonely flower on a mountain and thought of her name like it mattered.

Like she mattered.

Like she was his.

Daisy is still staring at the flower when she hears a sound behind her—soft, bare feet on the floor—and rushes to dry her tears, to pretend she hasn’t been reading the folder and that she isn't absolutely wrecked by what she found. 

“Don’t,” a voice says gently from the doorway. "It's okay."

Daisy jolts, turns too fast, the folder clutched like contraband, hand still wiping furiously at her face. 

May stands in the open door. She’s barefoot, hair loose around her shoulders in a way Daisy doesn’t see often. Her face is composed in the way May’s face is always composed, except her eyes are red-rimmed, which feels like walking in on something private and sacred.

Daisy’s mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

May steps in and lets the door close behind her, sealing them into the quiet.

“Sorry— that box,” Daisy manages with a shaking breath, because it’s easier to talk about cardboard than it is to talk about the ache chewing through her ribs. “I… I didn’t mean—”

“You did,” May says. Flat, not unkind. Just factual. Her gaze flicks down to the folder Daisy is clutching like an injury. “It’s fine. He didn’t want it hidden. He just… didn’t want you forced to face all the things he found. He was waiting until you were ready. He just ran out of time.”

Daisy looks down at the tab again, at her name in Coulson’s careful block letters, and something in her breaks in a way that isn’t loud but is final.

“He kept all this,” she whispers. “He kept—” Her voice goes rough. “This is… my whole life.”

Her breath comes out wrong—half laugh, half sob. “He cared about everything. Like it was all important. Like—” She swallows. “Like I was important, even back then when he didn’t know me.”

May doesn’t answer right away. She crosses to the desk slowly, giving Daisy time to back up if she wants to.

Daisy doesn’t.

May reaches out—not to take the folder, not to close it—but to touch the edge of it, two fingers on paper like it’s something fragile. Like it deserves gentleness.

“He loved you. More than he ever loved anyone else,” May says simply. Her throat works once. “He was proud of you.”

Daisy’s eyes sting. “I know.” And then, softer, more furious with herself, “it took me a long time, but I know that now. That’s not— that’s not the problem.”

May’s gaze lifts, sharp in the way May’s attention always is. “Then what is?”

Daisy tries to swallow the frustration, the anger, the grief. 

“It’s just—” She presses her fingers to her sternum like she can hold the grief in place. “I keep looking for him. Everywhere. Like if I turn a corner he’ll be there with that stupid grumpy cat coffee mug and that stupid half-smile like he already knows what I’m going to say.”

May’s jaw tightens. It’s the only sign she gives.

“And he’s not,” Daisy says, voice cracking. “He’s not anywhere. And I’m—” She laughs once, sharp and ugly. “I’m so mad at him for it. And I’m mad at myself for being mad, because he chose it. Even after we tried so hard—” Her voice breaks on the word we. “And then he left us even before he died.”

May’s eyes close for a beat. When they open, they’re steady. “He thought he was protecting you.”

“I didn’t need protecting this time,” Daisy snaps, and then the anger drops out from under her because it was never sturdy enough to hold her. “I didn’t get to be there at the end,” she says, smaller now. “And I wanted to be.”

A beat—her throat tight, her eyes burning like she’s furious at the universe for making her say it.

“Because… that’s what you’re supposed to do,” Daisy whispers, like the words embarrass her. “That’s what daughters do when it’s their dad that’s dying.”

The word ‘dad’ lands like a confession. Like a truth her ribs have known for years that her mouth is only just catching up to.

May’s hand tightens on the edge of the desk.

“And now all I— all I get to do is miss him. I didn’t get to be his daughter. I didn’t get to be… enough,” Daisy whispers, and the word enough is a trapdoor. It drops her into something older than Coulson, older than SHIELD. “And now I have all this proof that he knew everything. That he talked to people who knew me then. That he knew everything about me and he still loved me— and he just—”

She breaks off, breath snagging hard. The folder creaks in her grip.

Daisy doesn’t look up. If she looks up she’ll fall apart, and falling apart has never been something she’s been allowed to do in front of people, not without consequences. 

Her lungs won’t fill properly. Her skin feels too tight over her bones. She can hear her pulse like a warning.

She tries to do the thing that always works: make it smaller. Make it manageable. Make it finished.

Her fingers slide along the edge of the folder, searching for the tab like she can close it and close this with it. She lifts it higher against her chest, an instinctive shield.

Her stomach turns.

May’s voice cuts in, quiet and steady. “Don’t.”

Daisy stills. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t shut yourself away.” May doesn’t raise her voice. Doesn’t have to. “Don’t run from this. Don’t run from your grief.”

Daisy’s laugh is wet. “I'm not running. It’s— it’s just—”

“Surviving,” May finishes for her. The word lands gently, like May isn’t judging the instinct—only naming it. “I know. I get it.”

Daisy’s throat works. “Sure you do.”

May’s hand lifts, hesitates—not because she’s afraid, but because she’s giving Daisy the choice. Then she sets her fingers lightly on the folder, right where Daisy is white-knuckling it, a quiet I’m here in contact form.

“I found all of this too,” May says.

Daisy blinks. “What?”

May’s gaze doesn’t move. “Years ago.”

The air in the room shifts—like something sealed has been unlatched.

“I did my own digging,” May admits. She doesn’t dress it up. She doesn’t apologize. “Not because you owed me an explanation.” Her thumb presses against Daisy's forearm, grounding. “Because I wanted to understand you. So I wouldn’t be careless with you.”

Daisy’s eyes burn hard. “That’s… that’s not—”

“It is,” May says, very quietly. “I needed to know what the world taught you. What it took from you.”

Daisy’s voice turns thin. “So you’ve known.”

May nods once. “Yes.”

“And the folder?” Daisy asks before she can stop herself, the words raw around the edges.

May’s mouth tightens, the smallest tell of pain. “I read it later.”

Daisy stills.

“After,” May clarifies—gentle, precise—“I had already searched on my own.” Her gaze flicks to the folder in Daisy's arms, to the careful proof of years of love. “When he started keeping it.”

Daisy’s breath catches.

“I recognized what it was,” May says. “A map. A way to hold you, even when he couldn’t be in the room.” Her voice roughens. “So I read it. So if you ever opened it… you wouldn’t be alone in it.”

Daisy’s hands tremble around the folder like her body doesn’t know what to do with being witnessed this completely.

“And you didn’t—” Daisy tries, and fails.

“No,” May agrees. “Because it wasn’t mine to drag into the light.” Her gaze sharpens, just a fraction. “But I watched you. I watched what made you flinch. What made you shut down. What made you disappear.”

Daisy gives a wet, ugly laugh. “I’m standing right here.”

May’s gaze doesn’t waver. “But you don’t want to be. You are trying to turn this into a file you can close, so you don’t have to feel it. You are trying to make yourself small enough that grief can’t find you. Your breathing is running away from you. Your hands are white-knuckled on that folder like it’s going to bite you.”

Heat flashes behind Daisy’s eyes. “It did bite me.”

“I know,” May says, and there’s something careful in it, like she’s trying not to step on a bruise. “But running won’t make it stop hurting.”

Daisy’s throat works. “It usually helps.”

May’s voice softens, not permissive, just honest. “Maybe it helped when you were a kid, but you know it doesn’t anymore. It didn’t work with Lincoln or Trip.”

The words make Daisy flinch.

She hates that May can see her. Hates it, yet somehow needs it.

Daisy’s grip loosens a millimeter. Then tightens again.

“I’m not running,” she insists, because if she says the truth out loud it becomes real.

May takes one slow step closer, not blocking the door, not cornering her, just closing the distance like an offering.

“Okay,” May says. “Then talk to me.”

Daisy swallows. Her jaw aches with how hard she’s holding it shut. “I—” Her voice fails. She tries again, smaller. “I only got to have him for five years. And I never even knew—” Her breath catches, jagged. “That he cared like this. That he went searching for my past, for pictures of when I was little. And I wish—” Daisy draws a sharp breath that ends on a sob, the hand not holding the folder coming up to muffle the cries that follow.

Silence stretches as she cries.  

“I know it isn’t the same kind of loss,” May says, holding Daisy’s gaze without flinching, voice and rough around the edges so quiet Daisy almost misses it. “But you don’t have to go through this alone. We all miss him.”

Daisy’s throat works, catching what May isn’t saying. “I know. I know you lost him too. That you’re hurting like I am.”

May’s eyes soften by a fraction, like a door unlatched. “Then stop trying to carry it without letting me help.”

Daisy looks away because if she looks at May’s face too long she’ll start to understand something she’s been avoiding for years.

May doesn’t let her hide behind angles and distance the way people usually do when Daisy is difficult and sharp and grieving.

May reaches out, not grabbing or cornering, just… touching, gently and reverently. Her fingers brush Daisy’s hair back from her face with a gentleness that feels almost reckless.

It’s a small touch.

It’s also everything.

May’s fingertips graze Daisy’s temple, slide along her scalp with slow care, like she’s not afraid of Daisy’s flinch, like she’s stopped rationing tenderness.

Daisy goes utterly still.

Not because she doesn’t want it.

Because she does want it, and wanting it feels like stepping onto ice.

And May is close enough now that Daisy can smell her—soap and warmth and something soft and steady underneath it. Jasmine, maybe. Lavender. Green tea, faint and real like it’s seeped into May’s skin from a lifetime of refusing comfort for herself and making it anyway for other people.

It hits Daisy like a memory she never had and somehow has always known—May smells like home.

Her throat tightens until it hurts.

“May—” Daisy’s voice comes out small before she can stop it.

May’s hand pauses but she doesn’t withdraw. She shifts closer, just enough that Daisy can see the faint tremor in her breath.

“Tell me what you need,” May says.

Daisy swallows, because the answer is terrifying in its simplicity.

“I don’t know how to do this without him.”

May’s eyes don’t leave Daisy’s. “You don’t have to.”

May’s hand slides from Daisy’s hair to her cheek, thumb resting just beneath the corner of Daisy’s eye where a tear is threatening to fall. Daisy goes tense—reflex, old fear—but May doesn’t punish her.

May just holds her there, thumb warm, gaze steady.

Then May’s other hand settles over Daisy’s sternum—gentle pressure, right above her heart. Not claiming. Grounding.

Daisy’s breath hitches.

May’s voice is quiet. “He’s part of you, right here” Her fingers tap once, light, with the beat under Daisy’s skin. “He loved you enough to stay with you for the rest of your life even though he's gone. And now you get to keep him by keeping his memory alive. And you have me,” May says. Simple. Certain. “I’m here. I’m not leaving you.”

Daisy lets out something broken sob. “That’s… that’s not the same.”

“No,” May agrees, fierce in its gentleness. “It isn’t.”

Daisy’s throat closes, ashamed at how her words had sounded like a rebuke. “I’m sorry—”

May’s thumb catches the tear before it falls. “He’s gone,” she says, voice steady with effort. “And I know I am not him.”

“I know,” Daisy says too quickly.

May’s gaze sharpens. “Then listen to me.”

Daisy freezes, because May saying listen has always meant orders, training, survival, but May isn’t looking at her like Daisy is an agent.

May is looking at her like someone who loves her.

“You have spent your whole life wanting someone to choose you,” May says, running a thumb over Daisy’s brow. “And even now you keep acting like you don’t deserve it when they do.”

Daisy flinches like she’s been struck.

May’s hand leaves Daisy’s cheek only to take Daisy’s wrist—gentle, firm—and lower the folder slightly, as if easing armor down inch by inch.

“You wanted parents,” May says, and the word is rough around the edges. “Because parents are the ones that are supposed stay, no matter what. But people choosing to stay isn't just about biology, Daisy. Let me stay.”

Something in Daisy’s chest goes tight and bright all at once—like May just pressed a thumb into an old bruise and found the exact center.

Because Daisy remembers May at Afterlife, when Gonzales had come to talk to Jiaying. Remembers that May had said Coulson wasn’t impartial enough to meet with Jiaying. Remembers that May had said she, herself, wasn’t objective when it came to Daisy—like that was a flaw instead of a confession.

And then, as if she was closing a door with her own hands, May had looked at Daisy and said, soft and careful:

“I hope your mother is everything you wanted her to be.”

Daisy had been puzzled. Not because the words were cruel—they weren’t—but because May had said it with a kind of melancholy she didn’t understand. Because Daisy hadn’t known what to do with May looking almost distraught for just long enough for Daisy to notice. 

But Daisy understands it now, with a clarity so sharp it almost hurts.

May wasn’t talking about Jiaying like she was sure Jiaying would be perfect.

May was talking like someone giving Daisy permission to leave.

Like someone swallowing the love, the desire to keep her, because keeping her wasn’t the point.

The point was Daisy getting what she’d always wanted, even if it wasn’t May.

Even if it cost May.

And that—that is the thing Daisy couldn’t name back then: how profoundly parental it is to step aside for your child’s happiness. To choose their safety over your own need.

Daisy’s pulse stutters, the room suddenly too small for how much she feels.

Because May is standing in front of her now, years later, raw with grief and steady, hands gentle, eyes unflinching.

May tried to let her go back then.

And when Daisy came back, broken and bruised, May still kept her anyway.

Not in a possessive way. Not in a you’re mine way.

In the way a mother keeps a child: by showing up. By staying. By reading the hard parts so Daisy wouldn’t be alone in them. By seeing Daisy start to disappear and saying stay like it’s allowed. She's been showing her over and over again. In the way she never flinched when Daisy is difficult. In the way she touches only when Daisy can bear it. In the way she holds the line without making Daisy feel like a problem for crossing it. In the way she notices—always notices—when Daisy starts to disappear and says stay like it’s a promise and an order and an invitation all at once.

Daisy’s throat tightens until it hurts.

The thought comes without warning, simple and terrifying and true:

“This is my mom.”

Not because Jiaying wasn’t her mother.

But because May is the one who has been doing the work of it for years. Quietly. Relentlessly. Even when she was preparing to step back.

Even when she thought Daisy would be happier without her.

Daisy’s hand trembles in May’s grip like her body is trying to decide whether it’s allowed to hold on.

And grief makes room—just a sliver—for something that feels almost worse than grief.

Relief.

“I used to… picture it,” she admits, voice rough with the confession. “Not her. Not Jiaying. Not Cal. Just—” She swallows. “Someone.”

May doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t rescue her from the wanting. Just stays close enough that Daisy can keep talking.

“Someone who didn’t look at me like I was a problem to solve,” Daisy says. “Someone who didn’t get tired of me.”

May’s eyes soften. “You are not a problem.”

Daisy huffs a laugh that doesn’t have humor in it. “I used to think it would be stupid stuff,” she says, and her voice cracks anyway. “Like… she’d know when I was lying about being fine.”

May’s thumb strokes once over Daisy’s knuckles.

“She’d know and she wouldn’t call me out in front of anyone,” Daisy continues, voice thinning. “She’d just… come sit down next to me. Like it was normal. Like I was normal.”

“You are,” May says, quiet and certain.

Daisy blinks hard. The tears spill anyway.

“And she wouldn’t leave,” Daisy whispers. “Not when I got too much.”

Daisy’s breath shakes. “But all I had from… from them was disappointment,” she manages, and it comes out like something scraped raw. “I had parents who didn’t know how to love me.”

May doesn’t look away. Her grip doesn’t change.

“And then you had him,” May says quietly.

The words land like a hand to the chest—firm, anchoring, unavoidable.

A beat.

“And now he’s gone,” May finishes, just as softly, naming it like an incision. Like the truth is the only thing that won’t rot.

Daisy’s throat tightens until it hurts. She can’t tell if she wants to argue or just fold in half.

May’s thumb strokes once over Daisy’s knuckles. “So you’re trying to disappear again.”

May’s grip steadies—solid, unflinching, and she draws a deep breath, exhaustion making her shoulders sag.

“I know I didn’t find you,” May says, so softly Daisy almost thinks she imagined it. “Phil did.”

Then May’s voice roughens, the admission laid down like a vow. “But I’ve been keeping you—” May swallows, looking almost like she’s steeling herself. “Loving you—ever since.”

Daisy’s breath catches—sharp, helpless, caught off guard.

Because that’s the thing about May: she doesn’t promise with poetry. She promises with the simple, brutal honesty of someone who means every single word she ever utters.

Daisy tries to straighten. Tries to swallow it back down. Tries to do the thing she has always done—hold herself up, hold herself together, hold herself away.

She fails.

It isn’t dramatic. It’s worse than dramatic—quiet, inevitable.

It feels like her whole life has been a single, endless act of keeping her own weight from falling. Like every muscle has been braced for impact for so long she forgot there was another way to exist.

Her shoulders drop.

Her knees loosen, the tension finally giving up its post.

The folder slips lower against her ribs, no longer held up like a shield, just… held. Heavy. True. Hers.

Daisy’s breath breaks on the way out.

She tips.

Not a collapse. Not a fall. Just the slow, exhausted surrender of someone who has been running on sheer will for too long—tilting and tipping until she’s against May.

May catches her without a word.

An arm comes around Daisy’s shoulders with calm certainty, like May has been waiting for her to stop fighting gravity. Like this is what May meant by keeping—nothing possessive, nothing sharp, just the steady refusal to let Daisy drop alone.

Daisy’s forehead lands against May’s collarbone.

She makes a small sound that isn’t quite a sob. Just the noise a body makes when it finally stops bracing for impact.

May’s hand slides up, fingers threading into Daisy’s hair with slow care. Not fixing. Not soothing for show. Just touch, steady and patient, as if May is teaching Daisy’s nervous system a new language.

Daisy’s voice is muffled, small enough it barely counts as sound. “I don’t want to be a burden.”

May’s hand stills, then resumes—slower, gentler, like she’s smoothing something jagged inside Daisy.

“Daisy,” May says—just her name, but spoken like it belongs to someone cherished. “I am not burdened by you, I am here because I want to be.”

Daisy’s hands clutch at May’s shirt like she’s drowning and May is the only solid thing in the room.

She hates that she needs it.

She also can’t deny how her body finally, finally stops trying to flee its own grief.

“I wasn’t ready for him to go,” Daisy whispers into May’s collarbone, voice raw and small like a child’s.

May’s breath shudders against the top of Daisy’s head. It’s the only crack in her composure, and it feels like a gift.

“I know,” May says, softer than anything else in the room. “Neither was I.”

May tightens her hold—just enough to say I’ve got you, not enough to trap.

Her fingers keep moving through Daisy’s hair, slow and grounding.

Daisy swallows, her throat thick with tears, and manages a quiet, “I love you too.”

May's breath catches, and she holds Daisy tighter. 

They stand like that in Coulson’s room, grief pressed between them like a third heartbeat.

Coulson had brought Daisy home.

But May has kept her, held onto her, just as much as he had. 

Not by blood. Not by paperwork. Not by fate.

By choice.

By staying.

By the quiet, relentless love of the woman who is—terrifyingly, beautifully—the mother Daisy always wanted.

Not perfect. Not effortless. Not a fantasy.

Real.

Here.

Holding her like Daisy is worth the risk of tenderness, like Daisy is worth the cost of staying.