The spoon in her tea kept Lissa’s attention for a moment. All of the memories, all of the strange feelings, everything was starting to make sense but she still felt confused, Zasha or Lissa there was so much she wished she could figure out.
She looked up as she heard the other three take a seat around the table with her, their drinks in their hands.
“Has anyone else talked to anyone they think might be more aware of the truth?” She asked looking around at the three of them her mind wondering to how they were handling knowing the truth.
Daisy shook her head as she sat down with her coffee. Her head was still spinning with the realization of who she really was. Daisy Johnson, not Tahlia Cole. The memories that had come rushing back were a lot to wrap her head around. Chris - Grant - was someone she had a really complicated past with and she’d spent the past few weeks planning a wedding with him. May and Coulson as her parents didn’t seem nearly as weird to her as all of that, but what was important was figuring out what to do now.
“I thought about saying something to Chris - Ward - god, this is weird - but I didn’t know what I’d say and I’m pretty sure he’d think I was crazy,” she admitted.
Rocco was glad that at least he had his family and even if they’d been different people for the last several weeks, they were still together. The hard part was trying to put this all together and wondering how to hide his magic, assuming that it had come back along with everything else. “I haven’t spoken to anyone about it,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t know if my sisters or my brother know who they are or not. I’m fairly certain that they don’t or one of them would have said something especially Alicia, I mean Charlie. Merlin’s Beard, this is confusing.”
More sweet drinks for the mutant as she listened to everyone else, thankful that at least she wasn’t alone in this craziness. Family she didn’t have, a can of worms for a committed relationship and a job that seemed like a stupid joke at her expense would have been harder to stomach alone - and it was already extremely hard.
“My boyf- you know, not really, uh he doesn’t seem to know anything’s off. Which is a little worrying because I can’t just go to sleep…” She sighed deeply. “I can’t just share the bed but I can’t pretend to have fallen asleep on the couch the whole night forever, either. But I’ll sure start acting weird and people will start asking questions. I’m not good at pretending.”
Lissa nodded as she listened to all of them, she knew the best thing would be to figure out what had happened even if it did seem like a daunting test. So far it seemed like they were the only four that fully remembered everything.
“I think we need to figure out who else is starting to remember naturally, it’s not my area of expertise but we might be able to do some kind of test to figure out what possibly caused all of this, but what we could do is start working to figure out who else, who else knows…” She let her words trail off as she looked at Daisy for a moment remembering she was good with tech. “I don’t want to invade anyone's privacy but we could possibly use your skills to help narrow down who might be remembering, running anything someone is saying through an algorithm.” She shrugged. “Also we could come up with a timeline of any events that we might have found more regularly in Atlantis rather than here.”
Daisy nodded. Lissa’s suggestion was a good one and privacy was sort of secondary to figuring out what the hell was going on and how to get back to Atlantis. Maybe her fake life had been a good one, but it wasn’t real and this all felt a little too Frameworky for her liking. At least HYDRA wasn’t running the world here.
“I’ll get to work on that, but in the meantime, I don’t think we should tell anyone. I don’t know if it’s just us four or if there are others who remember, too, but we should keep this to ourselves until we know more. Looking over at Clarice, she couldn’t help a wave of sympathy. “I know it’s not easy pretending, but we don’t want to freak anyone out. Just try to act as normal as possible. We’re all going to have to keep living our lives here like everything is normal.”
“Daisy’s right,” Rocco said. “We need to know more about this before we tell everyone or else they’ll think we’re mental. Hell, a lot of people think I’m mental anyway but that’s beside the point. Anyway I suppose we could watch people, see if they are acting differently. Like I was at work and it just felt like this wasn’t my job, I wasn’t a physical therapist but then it went away.” he shook his head. It had been a very strange sensation.
“I remember we said stuff like ‘I feel like we’re supposed to live somewhere else’ a lot. Maybe that could be a key phrase or something.” Clarice offered. Nothing she could do in Atlantis was available to her here or really all that helpful, of course. She looked at Daisy with a pained expression, but only nodded. There was nothing she could do but pretend to be with a version of a guy she was actually into. And once again none of it was actually real. “Fine. I can keep my ear to the ground see if my, uh, ‘family’ says anything. Or people at work.”
She muttered, “if I actually bother going back, anyway.”
“Something is off, is this really my job, or home, anything along those lines could be useful,” Lissa said nodding with Clarice at her suggestion. She hated that people were going to have to live lives and pretend when it wasn’t who they were. Lissa was lucky, her life was one she could see herself living anyways.
“It’s good to keep an ear out, but as for a timeline, it probably doesn’t need all of us. I’d be happy to lead that, Daisy if you want to lead the computer side of things.” It was only logical. “Rocco, you see a lot of people from PT, that is a great place to see what someone is saying as well, or if they bring up someone saying something off.” Clarice had already offered from her side. “Clarice, your sister, or I guess not your sister, but she’s a detective, right? It might be worth seeing if she brings anything up or mentions anything strange, as well as Grant, um, Chris,” she said looking to Daisy with a pained expression. It couldn’t be easy.
Daisy nodded. “I’m on it,” she said, already pulling out a tablet to make some notes on what she’d be doing.
“I can do that. I see patients in the hospital and also in the outpatient clinic so I can keep an ear out for anyone who says something strange,” He usually tried to talk with his patients as much as he could since they were usually in a good deal of pain during treatment and he wanted to keep them focused. “Hopefully it will turn out to be something we can put right fairly easily.”
At Rocco’s word’s, Daisy nodded. “Our first step is finding out if anyone else is awake or if it’s just us. Then we can figure out if there’s a safe way to wake the others up. Either way, we’ll need to figure out how the hell we’re going to get back to Atlantis.”
It was a challenge for sure, but she knew she and her team had faced worse and she was confident they’d all come through this, too.
“I can try to see if the woman formerly known as my sister caught anything. Uh, anyone wanna suggest sneaky ways to ask about it without me sounding terribly specific or getting caught snooping around in her stuff?” She shrugged. “She’s not known for sharing about work, really. Um, also, given how many different world people come from, should we check if anyone’s gone through something similar to this? I don’t know, a Matrix type thing, mass illusions or hallucinations, magic shenanigans?”
Rocco grinned. “Magic shenanigans I can relate to. We have those a lot in my world. All my siblings are here and are actually still my siblings so I can feel them out without looking too fishy.” Although he thought it might be best to avoid Elle. “Once we find out if we’re the only ones, maybe we could think about telling some people that we know we can trust even if they haven’t picked up on anything already. It would have to be someone who wouldn’t try to put us in the looney bin.”
Daisy shook her head. “You have to remember that the people you’d normally trust aren’t really the same people right now, not if they haven’t woken up from whatever this is. They don’t have the same memories you do and they probably will think you’re crazy if you try to tell them what you remember now.” She got the impulse, because a part of her really wanted to run to Jemma and Fitz with this, but she knew it wasn’t a good idea, not yet.
Looking at Clarice, she added, “I’ve been through some pretty weird stuff. There was this place called the Framework that was kind of like this - everyone had different memories, it was like this alternate reality, only our bodies were asleep and we were basically in a computer program.” She wondered if COS had gotten ahold of the Framework. Maybe that’s what this was. It was as good a theory as any. “We’ve had some weird stuff happening lately, so maybe start there, Clarice. Ask if she’s noticed things have been weird. Start small and try to get her talking about the weird stuff and then look for clues in how she answers you.”
“We have to be careful, we don’t know what trying to wake someone up early will do to them either,” Lissa added in agreement of not trying to tell people just yet. “Small questions, or starting conversations about anything weird that has happened is probably the best option. I can spend more time on campus and see what I can figure out as well.” She offered.
“We should make sure to meet back up this evening, or tomorrow morning with anything we’ve found out.”
“I can be careful, I’m pretty good at pulling stuff on my sisters,” Rocco said “What about tomorrow morning? That will give us a bit more time.”
“Let’s meet back here tomorrow morning,” Daisy agreed. “Does 7 work for everyone?” She knew they should still go to their jobs and that meant meeting early enough to be done before work for most of them.
Clarice eyed Daisy, narrowing her eyes “So, the Matrix. Okay, we can explore that later.”
Nodding, Clarice bit her lip in thought. “There’s people who got struck by lightning and picked up by the wind, we should reach out to them. Not outright asking, but just to suss out if they’re feeling something.” She finished her drink. “Seven works.”
Lissa nodded. “Seven is okay for me,” she’d need to move something but that wasn’t difficult for her to do. “In the meantime if anyone needs anything between now and tomorrow morning, please feel free to text.” She offered, even if it was just to talk. None of this was easy, Lissa knew that.