Daisy Johnson (![]() ![]() @ 2015-02-16 12:36:00 |
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Somewhere beyond the room to which Skye had been directed there were a thousand different versions of happiness; young couples on their honeymoon, old men hawking cheap souvenirs, shrieking children with their lithe little limbs stretched at one another as the ran beneath the sun. And Skye could remember (stupidly) always wanting to travel. She remembered a swift and unflinching desire to fly and glide; it was why she’d chosen Skye, after all. It was a limitless name. It was fetterless.
“What a fucking idiotic dream.” Life got coloured in through dreams, certainly. But she had finally learned the skeleton got created long before and all she wanted to do was fall beyond the length of the identity she’d built. Because it all lead here. In a room - somewhere within the bowels of a hacienda or whatever they were called around here - dwarfed by her surroundings, she stood with her arms in shackles.
Then, a click to the door. She turned with an expectant brow and a quip by which to lacerate whoever stood on the other side.
He was a grown man of course -- older than his time, really, with lines of trauma and hard experience writ large on his face. And still, when it came to this, he held close to his heart a childlike naivety. This was his daughter. His. Of course she would be happy to see him, in spite of everything. They had an unbreakable connection, and they had suffered so much and had been kept apart for too long--
--that when he walked through the door, saw her, in the flesh, for the first time in a very long time, his smile tentative, his whole demeanour, forged in purpose and blood and vengeance for so many years now, became uncharacteristically tentative. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. His. “This isn’t how I envisioned this going. You must understand.”
“You envisioned?” Of course it was him. Her father. Of course he was part and parcel with this hellacious HYDRA face. Her lip curled. “Can you envision no cuffs, or is that beyond your power?”
“Those…” He scratched his head, jerked forward, stopped, then turned to one of the ever present guards standing by the door. “Please, take these off. She doesn’t need them.” And then, back to Skye, earnestly, “Those were just a means to an end. You see, you see this was all just a means to an end.”
They moved toward Skye, doing as the Doctor said with only a few clicks of a key. Skye brought her hands round and gave her wrists a few indulgent rubs. Even if she was thankful, there was still so much to say and she felt choked by it all.
Then, aghast -- “This was all a means to an end … ? An end to what, the world? Because I’ve seen what the Obelisk does.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, you really haven’t. This...this was all to get you here, to this point, at this moment. You’re special. You’re special and you don’t even know...how much. How long I’ve waited…” A darkness flashed across his eyes. The old anger resurfaced. How they stole her away from him. How they killed the woman he loved, cut her up and emptied her out, and threw her away like trash. He closed his eyes and bit his lower lip, willing the blind fury to recede -- he couldn’t...he couldn’t lose control. Not again. He couldn’t scare her. She’d been scared so much already.
“It is not...the Obelisk. We call it The Diviner. It’s your destiny.”
“I saw it turn people to stone. And look, Raina told me that there were these chosen few … but.” She shrugged, because it was the closest she could come to what she really wanted to do, which was ball her fists up and fight her way out like May taught her. This isn’t my destiny. This is yours. But I have to buy time.
“Why?”
“Those people weren’t worthy!” A hiss, an undercurrent of anger fuelled by insult. But no. No. He took a breath. “Because you are like your mother. This is her gift to you, to realize your full potential. And this can’t all have been for nothing, do you understand? We have gone through so much, so much now, to bring you here.”
At mention of her mother, she sucked in a breath and waited for him to continue. But when he didn’t - when the ranting started again - she took a step back and shook her head slowly.
“But this city is going to kill people.”
“A small price to pay.” He smiled, mirthless. Then brought up the case he held by his side and laid it down upon the table. He opened it and stared down at the Diviner. An object of so much misery, but now it had come home to pay its dues. "The meek, as they say, shall inherit the earth."
“That isn’t the price I’m willing to pay,” she told him, and took another step back. There were enough guards ringing the place that she’d never be able to get out, and shouldn’t anyway, knowing that SHIELD was on its way.
Then, when the Obelisk was unveiled, she stepped back further.
“No. Put it away.”
The fear in her voice caused him to look up in concern. He cursed himself. No -- no she wasn’t supposed to be afraid. Not of him. Not of this. “Please,” he held out a calming hand, “don’t be afraid. I don’t want you to be afraid. I’ve...I’ve bungled things up again, haven’t I? I always mess it up. I always mess it up.” Agitated now, he too backed away from the Diviner, hands clawing at his hair a moment as he searched frantically for solutions to fix this. “I could...I could tell you about your mother. Would you like that? I could tell you about her. She loved you. She loved you so much. We both did. We were a happy family. Before they came.”
This agitation, putting Skye in mind of the reports she read regarding her father and the tableau (his hands upon Raina’s neck) in which she originally met him, brought her back to herself. And with a step back toward the Diviner (could she use it to break out?) her hand stretched toward him.
“Stop. Not here.”
“They came,” he said, ignoring her entreaty, his voice growing harder, meeting her gaze directly and not looking away. “And then they took her apart. They wanted to know what made her so special, and when they did, they tossed her out. She was special too, like you. Do you know what she could do?” His gaze finally glanced around the room, at the four guards, with utter, naked loathing. “She could pick it up. The Diviner. You can too. You are...so worthy. Pick it up. Daniel Whitehall killed your mother. Pick it up.”
And the guards began to close in.
Before they could grasp either Skye or the Doctor, she grasped the Diviner with both hands and squeezed with all her might. As the glyphs began to glow beneath the pad of her thumb, she sensed the power inherent in the device flow through her arm and her body. She was one with this device. It was as much a part of her as her own arm …
A breath.
“STOP. Stop or I’ll kill you all.”
The guards paused in their tracks, wary of the object she held in her hands. They knew, after all, what it could do.
A slow clap interrupted the tense standoff.
Daniel Whitehall entered the room, a full entourage of armed men flanking him, guns pointed at Skye. If anything, he appeared amused and intrigued. “Well, this is a surprise on many levels. Doctor...I am glad to see you have revealed your true colors so early. And you,” he pierced Skye with a calculating, ravenous gaze. “You are quite the surprise. I remember your mother. She was...so wonderful. What a treasure. What a gift. And now, so will you be.”
This is it. This is him. Whitehall’s entrance gave Skye a momentary pause as she considered her options. The freezing of the guards who’d been poised to attack told her much of his own power, as did her father’s bristling rage behind her. It seemed smartest to throw the Obelisk at him, hoping and praying it would touch enough to turn him to stone as well. But instead, she brought the implement into her chest and narrowed her eyes at him.
“You’ve done enough to this family, Whitehall.”
Whitehall tilted his head clinically, peered at her through his far-sighted glasses as one would examine an insect beneath a microscope. “Discovery requires experimentation, and I am an eternally curious man.” To his men: “Take the girl into custody. Shoot the Doctor.” With a gesture, he beckoned his men forward.
And as they circled around them like sharks, the Doctor could no longer hold it in any more. With an audible snarl, he swerved unexpectedly and punched the nearest guard in the face, disarming him in the same move before pivoting and shooting the next point blank in the head.
Holding the Obelisk - the Diviner - in her outstretched hand, Skye was able to ward off the goons who came at her long enough to punch one in the throat. Another, who attempted to flank her, ran into the Diviner itself and before she could whip it away he began to crumble … done. Wresting his semi-automatic from the wreck and rubble that was his body, she turned the gun on Whitehall.
“ … I’m pretty curious, too. Should you get a clean killshot or would it make more sense to let you writhe it out for half an hour in the gut?”
Slowly, Whitehall held his hands out and smiled at Skye. “You can try and answer that question, but I will guarantee you that your father will be killed immediately.” His gaze, then, traveled beyond Skye’s shoulder to where Bakshi now held a gun to the Doctor’s head, close enough for an fast kill shot, but far enough away that the Doctor could not take him down too soon either. “I suppose it is up to you now -- me or the only family you have left?”
The Doctor could not remove his furious gaze from Whitehall, shoulders nearly heaving with the efforts of containing his all-consuming rage. “Shoot him,” he told Skye flatly.
The Obelisk glowed in her palm, casting her features in its rough glow as she considered Whitehall’s gambit. Somewhere within him the same heart which sped to give her life beat and as she considered her mother - considered Whitehall’s subsuming greed - her chin lifted. “Yes, Dad.”
And she squeezed the trigger, firing a round which meant to lodge squarely in his temple.
The shock on Whitehall’s features would be forever writ across his face as the bullet drove through his skull and his body reeled back and fell lifelessly to the ground. A cry tore itself from Bakshi’s throat -- enough distraction for the Doctor to turn and raise his own gun, putting two bullets in his chest before the other guards to recover from their shock and bring up their own weapons to bear.
“Run!” the Doctor shouted at Skye, throwing his gun aside once the magazine had run out, throwing himself bodily at the next guard and using the man’s body to shelter him from the sudden rain of bullets aimed at him. “Take the Diviner and run, Daisy!”
The retort of Skye’s gun dropped to of the guards who’d turned their attention to the Doctor - bullets to knees, to legs - and as she stepped over Whitehall’s body, she looked back to her father one last time. Daisy rang hard in her ear; the name taken from her, the perpetually springing hope in its syllables juxtaposed against her tear-streaked slack jaw.
Dad.
She turned, clutching the Diviner tight to her chest, and ran.