Chapter Text
It was so quick.
Daisy didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.
They’d been about to go on a mission. It was supposed to be normal; a completely regular scouting mission of an old warehouse that was suspected to have an 084.
Everything was going right, until everything went wrong-
Elena was the first to go. She yelled on comms that her legs were disappearing.
(Everyone thought it was a splinter bomb, at first. Then they thought it was the 084. They didn’t know it was Thanos until after everyone had been long gone.)
A stream of rapid fire curses in portugese hit them until they stopped. Elena’s heart monitor screamed at the base that she was gone.
Gone, just like that. A fire that burned bright was now... gone.
“Yoyo? Yoyo!” Mack was yelling into his comm device. He’d been running point. “Check in! Elena!”
Daisy had decided to stay back for that mission. She had just returned from space with Fitz and was too compromised and tired to go out. She had planned on observing, but began to panic when Elena went silent. She started checking in with everyone else on the others: May, Coulson, Piper, Lowell, and Miller. She stole Davis’ computer and began accessing their heart monitors.
“No, nononono,” she muttered as she saw May’s heart monitor flatline. “Crap! Mack!” She looked up to tell him that they needed to be pulled out, but there was nobody there. He was gone. “What the fuck? Davis-” she turned to look at the communications agent, but he was gone too. She looked around as roughly half of the people in the room began turning to dust. “What the hell?”
She turned around as the large screen in front of them displayed that Coulson and Miller went dark as well.
“Piper! What happened?!” She said into the mic.
“I- I dunno, they turned into dust! I’m with Lowell right now, east corner.”
“Retreat. Come back right now!”
“Copy.”
Daisy swallowed and stood up, looking at the remaining people's faces in horror. They all looked at her.
“What do we do?” One of the younger agents asked.
“Uh. Um.” She stared at them blankly, vaguely realizing she was going into shock before remembering that Fitz and Jemma were upstairs. She took off, sprinting around corners of the lighthouse and heading up the elevator. She started gulping in fast, panicked breaths and shot out of the elevator when the doors opened to the lab floor.
She heard screaming.
“No, no!” She stopped at the large doorway of the main lab to see four or so agents in tears. None of them were FitzSimmons.
“What happened?!” she demanded.
“We don’t know! They- they just crumbled into ash!” Agent Tracy responded, her face red and stained with tears.
Fuck.
“Including Fitz and Simmons?”
A couple of them nodded. Daisy felt her legs go weak under her, then took a deep breath to steady herself.
“Okay,” she said, taking temporary charge. “I need everyone to make their way down to the operations room. Understood?” A few of them answered in the affirmative, so she left. In the elevator, she restrained herself from breaking down and crying.
They’re not dead. They’re not. They can’t be.
When the doors opened, she grit her teeth and pretended to have an air of calm so the others wouldn’t panic. She strode into the operations room falsely confident, seeing that quite a few more agents had arrived. Everyone looked bleary eyed and terrified, though some masked it better than others.
“Ma’am,” one of the agents caught her attention, “Look at the news.”
Daisy watched for a few seconds as the news reported half of the world being wiped out of existence.
She couldn’t breathe.
“Uh- okay. Okay.” She turned away from the monitors and addressed the room. “Everyone!” They all fell silent. “We need to keep our heads about us. I’m not sure what happened, but I have a feeling the 3.5 billion people-” she swallowed, “-left will need someone to protect them. That’s us, alright? Work through the pain. We’ll get to the bottom of this. For now, I need this to happen.”
Everyone looked at her with their full attention. Daisy swallowed. “Decker, Whill, I need you two to get in touch with the US government. Find out who’s dead there. Fedder and Davis, I need you to take your strike team to the streets. Make sure that nobody is taking advantage of this to commit crimes.” As she listed off jobs, the agents wiped their tears and walked off to complete their missions.
Once the room was mostly empty, she saw Piper walk in with Lowell. In 3 quick steps, she hugged the last person alive in her family and broke down for the first time since everyone began disappearing.
Piper just held her.
“We’ll help them. We’ll fix this,” Piper soothed as she helped Daisy crumble to the floor. They sat there for a moment, the last two of the core SHIELD family left, for all they knew, and cried.
They all were gone. Sweet, funny Fitz, badass, caring May, her family . They were gone.
“Director,” someone said as they walked into the room. Daisy looked up, startled. “Director Johnson,” The agent clarified. Daisy sighed and wiped her tears, shouldering her burden, and walked over to the man. After helping him, she looked back up at the large display showing terrorism running rampant and steeled herself for what was to come.
Piper walked up behind her. “Welcome to the end of the world,” she muttered.
End of the world, indeed.