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The No.1 Bus Kids Detective Agency - Chapter 2

AN ~ and now, the fic that a surprising number of people have been waiting for (shux, you guys) - Chapter 2 of No.1 Bus Kids Detective Agency! I’m hoping to get a 3rd and final chap up before canon returns but we’ll see how that goes.

Please note this fic 100% ignores the latest sneak peek. I haven’t seen it & would not like it spoiled. Thanks.

Also, please ignore my complete B.S. hacking ramble. I know nothing.

After Aida's mysterious malfunctions, Fitz is called into the Director's office for definitely-not-an-interrogation-we-promise. As the evidence at hand becomes increasingly concerning, Fitz decides to play it smart and set himself, Jemma and Daisy a challenge. Only, they may already be in deeper than they know.

Read Ch.1 on tumblr here x.

Read on AO3. (This chap: ~2000wd. All: ~4500wd)

-

The No.1 Bus Kids Detective Agency - Ch.2

Trust in the Ring

“Since when could May run a hack?”

Simmons frowned at Daisy, then at Fitz.

“Well, I haven’t taught her anything,” he said, and looked to Daisy. “You?”

“What, and make myself obsolete?” Daisy scoffed. “No way. I mean, she can do some basics of course, and she hacked a server manually one time but I had to give her help. No way she can pull off something like this, especially with the protections you had on this thing. Unless Radcliffe was helping her?”

Fitz clenched his fist, and pulled away from Simmons with a sharp intake of breath.

“It’s not Radcliffe,” he snarled.

“Fitz,” Simmons chided. “We have to look at all the options. If he’s an option…“

“No, he’s right,” Daisy interrupted. “It doesn’t make sense. Radcliffe wouldn’t have needed to hack in…Unless Aida locked him out somehow?”

Fitz shook his head.

“Then he’d hack in as himself. He has the highest command; once he got into his account he might even be able to shut Aida herself down. It doesn’t make any sense to hack in as May unless you’re May. It’s like…it’d be like chopping down a bunch of vines to get into an old pathway. Radcliffe just has to hack past some overgrowth. May’d have to keep hacking all the way through.”

“So you’re saying Aida could lock him out?” Simmons wondered. Fitz hesitated, in the midst of a stream of thought.

“Ah…” he struggled to reconcile this with the scenario he’d been working with thus far. “Well, it happens sometimes. Basic computer error, you know.”

Simmons hummed, unconvinced. She didn’t know nearly enough about computing to compete with Fitz or Daisy, and hardly would have dared attempt to advise them except that she could see Fitz wasn’t convincing himself. He rubbed his hands together, massaging a knot that probably wasn’t there. His eyes danced around the room, unsettled.

“What is it?” Simmons pressed. Daisy turned in her seat, facing Fitz more properly now so that she could pay better attention. Hands on his hips, Fitz sighed heavily.

“It’s just something that Mace mentioned earlier,” he said. “He thinks Aida might be…sentient. That’s what the book is for. I wanted to figure out if it had done something to her programming, rewritten it somehow like a virus, but I’m starting to wonder. Maybe it did more than that.”

“Well,” Daisy reasoned, “it did give a guy the ability to create stuff out of nothing.”

“Not create,” Fitz objected, the same time Simmons did with,

“Not nothing.”

“Yeah, sure, it was borrowed from another dimension or whatever,” Daisy corrected. “Wait, are you saying Aida could be…borrowing intelligence from somewhere?”

“Crazier things have happened,” Simmons offered, as if she were living proof of the statement. In a way, she was.

Fitz sighed.

“Either that, or something’s corrupted her. Like I said, she killed Nathanson, or at least it looks like she did. She shouldn’t have been able to do such a thing: her program demands that she does not harm humans, even in defense of other humans. R…Radcliffe and I, we figured that was the safest way.”

Fitz lowered his eyes. It was still hard to think about Radcliffe, to entertain the likelihood that he had been part of yet another betrayal. Fitz was more willing to believe in an accidentally sentient robot, awakened by a mysterious ghost-book, than he was in that, but willful ignorance didn’t make it any less of a possibility.

“I’m sure it wasn’t Radcliffe,” Simmons encouraged. Fitz shrugged, noncommittal, and Simmons shared a concerned look with Daisy. Daisy pressed her lips together and all but leapt out of her chair, hoping to rally the troops.

“Looks like we’ve got some work to do.” She clapped her hands together, a call to action. “Better be quick. I don’t know if Mystery May or Killer Robot is going to explode in our faces first but something always does, so…”

Riled by her implication that Aida was a killer, Fitz looked up with a glare. Clenching his fist, he held his tongue. After all, she was technically correct, and whether he liked it or not he had to resign himself to the fact that either Aida or Radcliffe or both were likely to continue the behaviour. He ground his teeth together.

“I’ll go find Radcliffe,” he suggested reluctantly. “Then at least we can cross something off our lists. One way or the other.”

“I’ll examine poor Nathanson,” Simmons volunteered. “The crime scene might provide some clues.”

Daisy nodded. “Good. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye on May. See what I can see. Once you two get back we’ll regroup.”

“We’re following up May and Aida at the same time?” Simmons wondered. “Seems like we might be stretching ourselves a little thin.”

“I don’t know about that,” Daisy mused. “I can’t help the feeling that all this is connected somehow. I mean. May was hacking Aida’s Book.”

“True.” Simmons shifted on her feet, uneasy. It felt like she was stepping out of her territory with this, and a glance at Fitz told her he was out there with her.

Fitz felt his mouth dry out. He still very much remembered early on in their time in the field, when Hydra had first come out of the shadows and May had nearly shot him in the head. He’d moved past the emotion of the incident – the sense of betrayal had long since evaporated – but the sight of three bullet-holes in the glass, uncomfortably close to eye-height, would haunt him the rest of his days.

“Be careful,” he warned.

Daisy let a shadow of solemnity show through her hardy enthusiasm for a moment, before the smile sprung back onto her face.

“3,2,1, Break!” she declared, and clapped Fitz on the shoulders as she started them moving, charging enthusiastically out of the room.

-

It was little things, mostly, nagging at Daisy like flies. Not quite biting, but too close, intently bothersome. It was in the way May seemed to walk a little too tall, leaning on the side of propriety rather than power; majestic, but like a queen, not like a warrior. It was in the way she prepared her tea: efficiently, without so much the sense of ritual Daisy was used to. It was in the way – and Daisy felt a little guilty for thinking it, but couldn’t help noting it nonetheless – May seemed quicker to smile. Even only a small smile, that quiet May smile, Daisy was not used to seeing so much.

Then, all of a sudden, with a tone so familiar Daisy had not been expecting it amongst all these oddities, May caught her once, and asked:

“Is there something you wanted to tell me?”

Daisy jumped, but recovered quite smoothly afterward with a shrug and an easy swing of her arms, as if she were stretching.

“Yeah, I – uh, I’ve been meaning to ask if you’ve got time to go a few rounds?”

She asked as if she had just thought of it, or just remembered that she’d been meaning to ask. Under May’s relentlessly cryptic, scrutinizing gaze, Daisy felt her heart beating almost painfully loudly in her chest with the weight of all their discomfiting suspicions finally coming to a head.

(Discomfiting suspicions which very well could be nothing, she reminded herself. Or could in fact be a positive sign; May starting to show a vibrancy that had been lost to her for too long. Hadn’t Coulson said, once, that May before Bahrain had reminded him of Daisy?)

May, however, did not appear to notice – or at least, to acknowledge – Daisy’s fretting, and nodded a small, slow nod as was her way. Daisy smiled, trying not to sound as breathless as she felt when she said:

“Yeah. Great. Meet you in the ring in five?”

May agreed again, and Daisy found her hands growing clammy. Her mind, however, was anything but: it raced with the possibilities. She was in too deep for worry now. She was on the trail of something. Something big. Possibly on the cusp of uncovering the great secret itself, whatever that may be.

(If the secret was that Coulson and May were finally loving it up, she would leave that one right where she found it.)

Daisy gagged at the thought, both sickly sweet and – though Daisy would agree, not that mature – straight-up sickly at the same time. But she was grateful for it. It gave her some perspective. The chances that May was in on some sort of top-secret conspiracy to which Daisy was not party were admittedly higher than she might have liked, but they weren’t exactly likely. Perhaps May simply had some skills she’d not had occasion to use in Daisy’s presence, her being the resident hacker and all. Although, that said, May’ potential reasons for using them the way she had, hacking into the Book of Doom files, did leave some innocent potential-explanations wanting.

Her resolve steeled once again by curiosity, Daisy stepped into the ring. Her hands and arms were bound up, more out of habit and a slightly overzealous sense of precaution than anything else, but her bare feet tingled on the plastic of the matting. It had been ages, months, since she had last sparred anyone. It would be nice to have a fight that wasn’t life-or-death, for once.

At least, it would have been, but it seemed May did not have such an entertaining afternoon in mind. She kept Daisy on her toes, almost everywhere at once, throwing her this way and that around the mat. Daisy was surprised, but kept her head. Perhaps May wanted to make sure her time away had not dulled her reflexes. May should have mentioned they were about to play for sheep stations before they got into it – and usually, she would have – but Daisy had neither the rank nor the breath to demand it. At one point, she even had to backflip to keep out of the way of a killer kick.

“Geez, May,” she laughed, keeping her fists raised though she hoped for a few seconds of reprieve for her burning lungs. “Can I at least get some props for the- woah!”

She ducked as May’s fist flew straight at her face, quick as a bullet. May tripped her backward, wrenched her arm around, and by the time Daisy could get her bearings, she was being shoved into the mat face-first, so hard it felt like her jaw would break and her arm be ripped out of its socket.

As best she could with the arm her face was almost pinned down on, Daisy tapped out. More and more insistently she pounded the mat, struggling to breathe as tears seeped out of her eyes. Around her, she felt the brickwork quiver as panic and defensiveness struggled to take over.

“I tap out!” she gasped. “I tap out!”

Finally, May let go her arm, and rage took over for the pain.

“What the hell was that?!” Daisy growled, nursing her arm with venom in her tear-filled eyes. “I tapped out. You could’ve broken my arm. I could’ve killed you.”

May looked at her arm with sympathy and sorrow, as if she hadn’t quite been aware of herself when she’d done it. Belatedly, she looked up to Daisy’s eyes, hurt and burning.

“Trust in the ring,” she murmured.

“Exactly. Where was it?” Daisy snapped, but she found it hard to keep her sharp tone. Something was wrong with May. She never would have hurt Daisy willingly, and the knowledge that she had seemed to be taking a heavy toll.

“I apologise, Agent Johnson.” May bowed her head, uncomfortably humbled, and turned and walked away.

“No, wait-“

The words died in Daisy’s throat. She had nothing more to say. She’d hoped to at least answer some more questions in the process of this – especially since, once again, she’d almost paid with her arm and her face for the information. But perhaps it was the new question that might actually get them somewhere, at last.

I apologise, Agent Johnson.

What kind of person talks like that?

And like that, she had it. The answer, snatched from thin air. Suddenly it all seemed so obvious. Of course it was all connected.

What kind of person, indeed?

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