Title: Exactly Like Hell
Collaborator: @tisfan
Link: AO3
Square Filled: B5 -- Skye -- Daisy Johnson/Self-cest
Ship: Skye/Daisy Framework
Rating: teen
Major Tags: Implied Torture, Self Hatred, Ambiguous Ending
Summary: Daisy needs information that can only be found in the Framework. Unfortunately, Skye was waiting for her.
Word Count: 556
Created for @mcukinkbingo
“I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to come back here,” Skye said. “I’d hoped, but I didn’t expect it. I’d be disappointed, if I wasn’t so pleased.”
Because it was Skye, not Daisy, not the Inhuman, but the Hacker, and completely faithful to Hydra.
It hadn’t been the plan. The plan had been to reinhabit the body of Skye, to use it to search through the impossible database that was the Framework. But when did anything ever go the way Daisy planned?
“Wasn’t exactly like I had a choice,” Daisy muttered. She struggled with the cords, but they were some sort of adaptive material and they held her fast no matter which way she turned. “You know none of this is real, right? You’re not real.”
“No? I’m not the sum of my experiences, the results of my choices, a consciousness given form?” Skye wondered. “If a meat and blood shell is what makes me real, I can probably arrange that, too. But if I’m not real, then you’re not real, in here, either. Your mind is in here, with me, and your body won’t survive without it. If I kill you in here, bang, you’re dead. So, who’s real and who is not, those are interesting questions. How long do you think it’ll take them to notice that you’re not the one who came back?”
“And how do you plan to do that?” Daisy demanded. She tried to reach for her ability to quake, but she couldn’t it, she couldn’t reach, it was like a broken arm that she couldn’t move.
“Oh, stop that,” Skye told her. “Do you think I’d let you into a body that had been through terragenesis? When you tried to shut this world down, tried to pretend that the other world was the only thing that mattered, did you think the survivors of that apocalypse learned nothing?”
Daisy huffed out a breath. It was hard to look at herself. The young idealist, a hater of inhumans, a tool of Hydra. A lie. That was all Skye was, she was a lie. She was something stretched and changed and distorted, built on the same base that had made Daisy, but twisted, somehow.
“I am you,” Skye said, getting up close and personal, right into Daisy’s space. “I am you! You think you’re so much better, but you’re not! I am you, and I will be you, and I will get out of this hellhole of your making.”
“If I’m you and you’re me, then we made this hellhole together,” Daisy pointed out.
Even the ringing slap that Skye delivered didn’t quite wipe the smirk off of Daisy’s face. She spat a mouthful of blood and just grinned, knowing what she must look like.
“That’s what you’ve got? Pain?”
“I think you’ll find out that it’s an adequate method of persuasion,” Skye told her. In here, we have all the time in the world, and all the pain that I can give you, that never touches your physical body, your body in that other world will just go on and on. And you can’t come out unless leave here on your own. But when you leave, you’re going to take me with you.”
“Like hell,” Daisy snapped. She struggled again, because she couldn’t not.
“Exactly like hell,” Skye responded.
