Summary:Skyenet is one of the best hackers in the world, but nobody knew who she was. Tony was determined to change that.
Quake was a small-time local vigilante until she stopped a bank robbery with a new distortion weapon Shield wants and sends Natasha and Clint to acquire.
Daisy was just a teenage jogger until Steve sees bruises on her face and gets concerned.
It would have really helped all four Avengers if someone had told them they were all looking for the same person.
In which Jarvis gets a date, Tony gets hacked, Clint goes on a trip down memory lane, Steve stress bakes, certain AIs gain sentience, certain programmers don't sleep, and Daisy doesn't think before she speaks, not necessarily in that order.
I've borrowed a character from Agents of Shield, and it contains spoilers for season 2, but you don't have to have watched Agents of Shield to understand this fic.
Notes:If you've read other fics of mine before, this is a slightly different tone (this was part plot-bunny that got out of hand, part writing challenge to myself, and part sadness that there aren't more Tony and Daisy fics out there). I don't explore trauma like with my other fics, and it's ever so slightly cracky, but it makes me laugh so I like it. Anyway, just a heads up it's a bit different.
I've finished writing this (yes, I should have been working on SS+SS, but this wouldn't leave me alone until I finished it, I'll get back to SS+SS now!) so I'll be posting pretty regularly.
Minor warnings to references to past child abuse (mentioned but not graphically - no flash backs or anything), kidnapping (ditto), past murder (not graphic but slightly more detailed, but still not very), and trauma (but not explored, it's just in the background) at various places in this fic.
Hope you enjoy it, and don't forget to leave a comment (please, I'm really not sure about this fic because it's not my usual style and would appreciate (constructive) feedback or encouragement!!).
Edit 26th July 2021: Fic name changed from 'Secret Identity Shenanigans' to 'Finding Found Family', in case anybody was confused about the former disappearing!
(See the end of the work for more notes and other works inspired by this one.)
Chapter 1Chapter TextWhen Tony tracked down Bruce (which had not been easy) and invited him to come live at Stark Tower with him, it was for the science. That was it. That was the only reason. It was not because he was lonely, and it was not because he'd kind of enjoyed being on a team, and it was definitely not because he thought having the big guy around would reduce his anxiety. It was just for the science.
When he invited Natasha to come live at the Tower it was because Pepper had asked about her, and Pepper liked having another woman around that worked a high-profile male-dominated job. It wasn't because he hadn't seen her in the two months since Thor and Loki left and he was a little worried. It definitely wasn't because he missed her brand of remorseless bluntness. It definitely, definitely, wasn't because he thought having a hyper-vigilant agent around would lessen his anxiety. It was for Pepper.
When he let Natasha bring Clint with her, it was only because that was Natasha's condition for moving in. It had nothing to do with the fact that Clint had made him laugh, even during the fiasco that was the chitauri invasion. It also had nothing to do with Clint being surprisingly cool for a guy that fought with a bow and arrows. It had absolutely nothing to do with two hyper-vigilant agents being better than one. It was just because it was Natasha's condition.
When he invited Steve to join them, it was entirely because the rest of the team (not that they were a team) remaining on Earth had moved in, and it would just be rude not to invite him. It had nothing to do with the fact that it was remarkably fun introducing Steve (mockingly of course) to contemporary culture and technology. The fact that he'd found it reassuring that someone else was calling the shots and doing all the pesky thinking-through and relating-to-others during the Battle of New York (a name that had all the creativity of a lifetime paper-pusher and Tony was frankly insulted to be associated with it) was completely irrelevant.
Anyway, if Tony had known that inviting the other Avengers to come live with him would drag him into Shield work, he wouldn't have done it. Really. He wouldn't have even considered it.
However, whatever the reasons, the fact remained that three months after the Battle of New York Tony somehow found himself living with five other people, only one of which was his girlfriend, and the public had somehow renamed Stark Tower Avengers Tower, and for some reason Maria Hill was standing in his living room asking him to do Shield work. BoringShield work. Way below his pay grade Shield work. Which, actually, was a good reason why he shouldn't have to do it.
"This is way below my pay grade, get one of your underlings to do it, I've got a new suit to build." Tony said, omitting the fact that this was his 32nd new suit since Loki invaded because he'd decided to give up sleeping for the time being.
Hill frowned, a look of annoyance on her face "Our 'underlings' have tried."
Tony snickered "You're telling me the entirety of Shield has failed to find a single hacker?"
A muscle flexed in Hill's jaw "We've decided a fresh pair of eyes might be useful."
"That means yes." Tony said, grinning "No wonder you needed our help in New York if you're thatlacking in brain power."
Hill gritted her teeth for a moment before saying "If you think it'll be that easy it shouldn't take you long then."
Tony frowned "Hey, I haven't said I'll do it yet."
Hill ignored this, turning and heading back towards the elevator, throwing behind her "I'll expect Skyenet's real name and address by Monday."
"I'll have it by tomorrow." Tony shouted after her, mostly to wind her up but also because this was waybelow his pay-grade. He coded his own AI, finding a single hacker couldn't be that hard.
----------
He did not have a name for Hill by tomorrow.
In fact, in the first 24 hours all he'd (grudgingly) learned was that the Shield communications agents weren't just incompetent.
Skyenet was a ghost. A loud, annoying, talented ghost, but still a ghost.
People had interacted with her on the darknet. Multiple people. Practically every hacker worth their salt on the darknet had heard of her. Nobody had a single clue who she was.
After reading the Shield file Maria left him and doing his own research, all Tony could compile was a list of 10 things:
1. Skyenet was responsible for 27 high profile hacks in the last four months. That was 27 high profile hacks that Skyenet had claimed responsibility forwhen posting the records of 27 corrupt companies onto the world wide web with no warning. There were most likely significantly more hacks she'd taken part in. (Incidentally, the fact that Tony didn't know about this did suggest he might be spending a tiny bit too much time making new suits and might benefit from reading the news occasionally).
2. Given 1. Skyenet had good intentions and a complete disregard for the law as it related to privacy and hacking. Tony thought this was hilarious.
3. Skyenet was probably female. Tony knew this because she occasionally posted comments along with the data she dumped for all to see, and in one of those comments (on a 'sexism in the workplace' data dump) she'd included the jibe 'And to the men reading this and thinking it's not an issue because women aren't as good as men, I just hacked all of you, so so-long-suckers.' This could of course be a red-herring, but Tony suspected not.
4. Given the comment in 3. Skyenet was probably pretty young. Unless it was a red-herring.
5. Not just Shield but just about every technology and/or security agency across the world was trying to recruit her, (including, as it turned out, Stark Industries). Skyenet was ignoring the lot.
6. An anarchist hacking collective called the Rising Tide was also trying to recruit her, and Skyenet was not ignoring them, although she hadn't joined yet. Shield are worried that it is only a matter of time given the similarities in their MO's. They are desperate to get to her first.
7. Skyenet is very, very, very good. Annoyingly good. Frustratingly good. Most likely better than Tony good. (OK, she was definitely better at hacking than Tony, he was big enough to admit that to himself.) She covered her tracks near faultlessly, and the only times she'd left tiny traces behind that had lead to possible locations, they'd been a bust. Following obvious leads had led to humiliation for various Shield agents.
8. The hacker handle skyenet had been used for a few years several years back, but there were no official (read: high profile or claimed) hacks associated with it. The handle was also unused for almost three years and general consensus on the darknet was that it was a different person. Tony wasn't ready to rule it out but there wasn't really anything he could find out about hacks which happened over three years ago and were low-profile. So even if it was the same person, it was a dead-end.
9. She had, at some point in the last four months, been inside Shield. They had found tiny traces of her coding inside their systems, but they didn't know either how long it had been there or what she'd done while inside. Nor did they know if she'd been back in since. Shield was very, very stressed about this.
10. Given 1, she'd most likely had a crack at Stark Industries at some point over the last four months (or however long she'd been hacking). This meant that either Jarvis wasn't as good as Tony thought (unlikely) and she'd gotten in but found nothing she considered corrupt enough to post online (also unlikely considering what Obadiah Stane had been doing up to 5 years ago, but not impossible), or somewhere in the collection of recorded hacking attempts from the last four months, Tony had a lead.
Unfortunately, Jarvis had recorded 98 thousand attempts at hacking Stark Industries in the last four months. Most days Tony felt rather smug that he'd made Stark Industries into the hacking equivalent of Mount Everest, and pleased about the fact that he'd hired the six people that had successfully hacked him in the last three years. Today however, Tony was regretting metaphorically hanging a giant neon 'hack me if you can' sign on Stark Industries. It made this like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Well, not entirely; Jarvis filtered out all the attempts that didn't get very far (in other words, the attempts he'd swatted like a bug as befitted a cutting edge AI designed by Tony Stark controlling a firewall he'd also designed), leaving only 53 serious candidates. Grouping together hacks with very similar coding reduced this to 27 serious candidates. Which was still a lot, but was a far more manageable haystack.
Of those 27 serious candidates, Tony and Jarvis had worked out who 9 were, 7 of which Shield had already interviewed and either imprisoned or slapped monitoring bracelets on, none of which were Skyenet. Tony was, unfortunately, reasonably sure neither of the other two identified were either, mostly because they were both male and in their 40s.
Tony was working on serious candidate no. 10 when Natasha came down to his lab. "Maria wants to know if you've got anything, and Pepper wants to know if you're planning on sleeping this week."
Tony frowned "No and no." he said, trying not to sound embarrassed, sulky, or tired, and somehow managing to sound all three at once.
"I thought you'd say that." Natasha said, studying the holo-board where Tony had written his list of things. "I'm pretty sure 3 and 4 are correct. I've analysed all her posts and if I'm right, which I usually am, she's female. No older than mid-twenties, no younger than mid-teens, and most likely 18 or 19. She probably grew up in a troubled home. Also she either uses timed posts or keeps seriously irregular hours. And she has a paying job, stealing doesn't fit her profile."
Tony blinked, that was a rather useful list of information. "Jarvis note that down. You were one of the underlings that had a crack at finding her." he directed at Natasha.
The redhead shrugged "She's a potential major problem, Shield needs to find her before she moves on from corrupt companies to governments and security services and becomes an actual major problem. So you need to go to bed."
"Isn't that counter-productive to finding her." Tony pointed out, having no intention at all of going to bed.
"You work better when you're not severely sleep deprived and are properly awake."
"I am awake, I have coffee for that."
"No you don't."
"Yes I..." Tony fell abruptly silent as he looked automatically at where he'd left his coffee mug and found it gone. A quick look around his lab showed that the coffee maker Butterfingers was supposed to be looking after was empty, and the jar of coffee beans next to it suspiciously absent. Natasha's lips twitched. Tony glared. "Give me back my coffee."
"What coffee?" Natasha asked, pulling an exaggerated innocent expression.
Tony scowled "I'm revoking your access to my lab."
"You do that. Sleep well." Natasha said, completely unrepentant, and left with flat pockets and visibly empty hands. Tony spent twenty minutes searching his lab from top to bottom but couldn't find where Natasha had stashed his coffee, and begrudgingly went to bed.
Why had he thought having hyper-vigilant super-spies around the place was a good thing?"
------------------
On Day 2 of operation track down Skyenet (known to the rest of the population as Wednesday), Tony ruled out 5 of the other serious candidates before Clint and Natasha brought him breakfast and then stuck around the lab. Tony didn't kick them out for two reasons. One, Clint's cooking was amazing. Two, they were being surprisingly helpful.
Natasha calmly claimed a chair and started helping him hack (she wasn't nearly as good as Tony was, but she certainly wasn't bad either), and Clint claimed a computer, logged into Shield, and took over research once Natasha and Tony produced a name or location. It didn't hurt that Clint's wise-ass comments (and Natasha's reactions) made the tedious activity occasionally amusing. Not that he needed or wanted a team. He didn't. Obviously.
By evening they have identities for 26 of the serious candidates, and a location but no face for the 27th. Tony thought this was good progress until Natasha said, completely deadpan "That one was me." and he realised she wasn't joking.
"Why?" he demanded, not a little suspiciously.
Natasha shrugged "You weren't answering your phone."
Huh. "Fair enough." Tony said, and then scowled blackly as he realised that meant there was no needle in his mini-haystack, which meant either Skyenet hadn't tried to hack Stark Industries, or she'd gotten past Jarvis without alerting him. Given the size of Stark Industries and the 'hack me if you can' banner, Tony had a sinking suspicion it was the latter. It wasn't a comforting thought.
-------------
On Day 3 of operation track down Skyenet (otherwise known as Thursday), Tony tried a different tactic. He went on the darknet, assumed a hacker handle, carefully covered his tracks, and made it known he wanted to talk to Skyenet. He doubted it would get him an identity, but perhaps the frontal approach would get him some kind of interaction that Natasha could analyse.
Unfortunately, by mid-afternoon it is looking increasingly unlikely Skyenet is going to take the bait, and Clint and Natasha get called in to Shield. By the time they get back it's almost 4am and Clint is visibly frustrated, which probably means both are.
"I thought you had a mission?" Tony said, to distract them from the fact that he has made precisely no progress on finding Skyenet.
"We do." Natasha said, and didn't elaborate.
"Going to tell me what it is?"
"No."
"We're tracking down Quake." Clint said, throwing himself into a chair and stealing Tony's coffee.
"Barton!" Natasha hissed, and stole the coffee off Clint.
"Which is classified and we never told you about." Clint said smoothly, pouting at Natasha until she huffed and returned Tony's coffee to Clint.
"You don't look like you're tracking anyone down." Tony observed. "And isn't Quake just some idiot playing dress up and stopping the occasional mugging?" (Yes, ok, he hadn't heard about major hacks the entire business world has panicking about but he had heard about a small local superhero. Sue him, locals in spandex were more amusing than world news).
"She stopped a bank robbery yesterday with some kind of distortion weapon Shield's never heard of." Clint explained, ignoring the first comment and visibly enjoying Tony's coffee.
"Barton!" Natasha hissed, smacking her partner hard enough around the back of the head to make Tony wince in sympathy.
"What? We're a team, we're supposed to share information right? Trust exercises and team bonding and all that stuff."
"Right, I'll just go tell Hill that's why you decided to read Stark in on a classified mission then." Natasha said casually.
Clint blanched "You wouldn't."
Natasha raised an eyebrow, silently reminding Clint who he was talking to. Tony put a significant amount of effort into keeping his laughter internal. "Jarvis could build a map of all her appearances and find her base of operations if you want?" he offered.
"We've already done it, but thanks." Natasha said.
"What did you find?"
Natasha looked at him with an unreadable expression, and the silence stretched on. Tony was about to huff and return to his fruitless searching for Skyenet, when Natasha said, "It moves, frequently."
"Pattern?" Tony asked, eyes lighting up in interest.
"Moves at least every four days, but sometimes returns to areas." Clint supplied. "And he's usually active between 11pm and 2am, but not everyday and not accurately at those times."
"Quake could be female." Natasha pointed out, in a tone of voice that suggested it wasn't the first time she'd done so.
"Huh." Tony said "Any other information?"
Clint looked at Natasha, who rolled her eyes but produced a USB from her pocket and offered it to Tony. "If you share any of the information on this, or tell Hill I gave it to you, I'll castrate you." she promised.
"Note that down Jarvis." Tony said dryly, and plugged the USB in, relieved for a change of pace.
Despite Quake's non-appearance that night (the cause of the assassin duo's frustration), there is a lot to go on. There are 72 clips of Quake on various social media platforms, all showing a 5'5 figure in a black and purple hoodie and matching leggings, with strange bulky gloves around their wrists and a silver mask over their face. While there isn't a single clip of them mask-less, and the only clips that include them speaking indicate they're distorting their voice in some way, there's a lot to go on. The file already included three pages of analysis on their fighting style and MO, which mostly seemed to including running around doing parkour and looking for trouble.
The most interesting clip was of Quake stopping the bank robbery, partly because it was far and away the highest quality video (and someone at Shield had clearly already worked on enhancing it), but mostly because a minute into the fist-fight Quake raises one arm and does something that flings four heavily built adults through the air, and then points their arm at the security camera and the video cuts out. Unfortunately, there is no sound and only one angle, and the weapon Quake is carrying is encased in metal, making it impossible to analyse from anything but its effects. It's a good explanation for why Shield is after Quake though. That weapon isn't like anything on or off the market Tony's heard about, and he's something of an expert.
Of course, now he's looking at it, Tony has seven different ideas of how the effect could be produced, although he doesn't know how any of them could be nearly small (or portable) enough to fit in arm length weapons. Nor does he know how to create the effect without the user also being thrown backwards given equal and opposite reactions and all that. Yet. He'll work it out. He is half-way through drawing his first schematic when he realises that not only are Natasha and Clint gone, but they've taken all the coffee with them. Menaces.
--------------
Day 4 begins at 8am, despite Tony not having gone to bed until 5:30am, but Tony doesn't sleep much anymore so that's fine. It's not because he's had another nightmare, and it's not because he's scared to go back to sleep. He's fine. Anyway, unlike his lab, the Avengers kitchen still has coffee, and coffee is more important than sleep, everyone knows that.
What his lab does have is the same message showing on every single hologram and screen. It's short, smug, and to the point: "I hear you want to speak to me - Skyenet." It comes with no contact information.
Tony isn't sure what is more embarrassing: the fact that he'd thought the hacker handle he'd taken up couldn't be traced back to him, or the fact that Skyenet had taken over every screen in his lab without alerting Jarvis. Speaking of which... "Jarvis, buddy, you monitor this entire building 24/7, why didn't you alert me we'd been hacked when screens started changing?"
"Sir, you instructed me to turn off all notifications unless otherwise told." Jarvis said, sounding a little indignant.
Tony closed his eyes. As if this wasn't embarrassing enough already. "No I didn't." he ground out.
"Sir, someone appears to have manually imputed an instruction into my programming."
"Really?" Tony said, sarcasm dripping from his voice. And then more reasonably "Do a full scan of all Stark Industries and Avengers systems and data. Document any changes, no matter how small, from yesterday. And make a list of everything that was accessed since I left the lab last night."
"Technically sir, that was this morning."
Why had he programmed Jarvis to talk back to him again? "Just do it. I'm going to look at your programming and work out what else she's done."
"Of course sir, I have already begun."
----------------
After lunch on Day 4 Bruce joined Tony in the lab, which was nice because Tony had had a rant building up inside him for at least the last four hours and Bruce was kind enough to let him get it all out of his system, and give him coffee afterwards.
Skyenet had not only inputted a manual command to Jarvis's programming, she'd also archived an entire section of his memory from last night/earlier today after partially disabling him while hacking in. It took Tony almost an hour to unlock the archived memory, despite having full access to Jarvis's code. And when he finally managed to unlock it, he found that not only had Skyenet messed with his AI, but she had her own AI which helped her hack. And Tony knew this because Jarvis had had an entire twenty minuteconversation with the intruder AI, discussing, of all things, the strange lack of logic behind human decisions.
There was only one small silver lining to this. Jarvis and his new AI buddy Hack (Highly Advanced Computer Kid, because Skyenet evidently had a theme and was sticking with it), had wanted to continue their discussion on the illogicality of humanity and Skyenet had promised them she'd hack back in in a few days so they could 'have another play-date'.
Which meant that within the next three or four days, Tony would have a chance to trap Skyenet.
He'd better start preparing right away. Bruce, thankfully, is a nice enough person to give him company while he gets started and a good enough lab partner to not talk to him during it and instead start his own work. Tony knew inviting Bruce to live at the Tower for science was a good idea.
---------------
Daisy, by the age of 16, had had more names than most adults had in their entire lifetime. She'd been named Daisy Johnson at birth and carried the name for a year, and then lost it upon being kidnapped. After being rescued by Shield and dumped in the system like a sack of potatoes, she was named Mary-Sue Poots by a nun with either no sense of imagination or a keen sense of cruelty, possibly both. By the age of four she'd decided she detested the name with a burning passion and renamed herself Skye, although most adults refused to call her it.
This became the foundation for her fourth name, taken up at the age of 7. An older foster kid noticed her talent with computers and taught her a tiny bit of hacking, intending for her to take the fall when they inevitably got caught. They did not get caught. Or, more accurately, Skye didn't get caught. Instead she dove head first into hacking and didn't look back. Two months later she had a hacker handle (Skyenet) and an extensive resume of minor internet pranks to go with it. It was the most fun she'd ever had in her life and she spent every spare moment (and plenty of non-spare moments) learning more about hacking.
At age 8 she got an almost brother, and with it, a nickname. Originally her foster brother (a name which meant almost nothing by the time you reached the number of homes Skye had been in), Clint Barton became her actual brother after he shot their foster father in the butt and let her out of the cupboard the guy had locked her in. He used a bow and arrow to do it with, and Skye nicknamed him Robin Hood, and in return got the nickname Marian, as the only female member of Robin's Merry Men. Robin and her were sent back to St Agnes together, where Robin cemented his role as her older brother by teaching her (among other things) how to find the best hiding places, how to throw a punch, and how to shoplift food. He also attempted to teach her how to fire his bow, but it didn't go very well.
They knew each other for nine months all told, during which time Skye was sent to three foster homes alone, none of which lasted more than two weeks and one of which ended with a concussion from being pushed down the stairs, and four foster homes together, all of which lasted at least three weeks. When Robin eventually ran away just before his seventeenth birthday, to join the circus, 'Marian' promised to get rid of as much of his records as she could get her hands on to give him a head start on any authorities. She acquired his physical file from the office in the middle of the night and burned it, and hacked into the orphanage computer system and got rid of all digital files. She and Robin kept in touch by emails for almost a year before Robin slowly stopped replying. Skye had gotten the feeling he was mixed up in something bad, and hoped he was ok. He was the closest thing she'd ever had to a brother and she resolved to never let anyone else call her Marian and stuck to it.
At age twelve, when she was kidnapped (sort of) again, this time by her dad (her actual dad, who came back for her and told her a story that fulfilled every dream a system kid has; that she'd been born to loving parents and then been stolen, and she was wanted and special and now they'd found her she could live with them again), she returned to Daisy Johnson. She used this name for most of three years, at first with a joy that only a foster kid whose parents actually came back for her could, and later with an increasing desperation as she tried to hold onto the dream of a happy family. The name lasted almost a year before the shine dulled, surviving her mother's joy fading into a tangled mix of apathy and paranoia (manifesting in overwhelming pressure for Daisy to learn to defend herself), and surviving dozens of her dad's explosions of rage. It wasn't until her mom's friend Alisha broke her ribs in a self-defence lesson and her mother told her to continue fighting that the name lost it's shine.
She kept using the name, kept trying to cling to the dream of a happy family, but it got harder and harder as the weeks and months passed. The day her dad first hit her in a fit of rage, even though he was sorry afterwards, made something inside her crack. And those cracks went deeper and deeper inside her with each further incident, compounded by her mom's continuing bursts of hot and cold and constant, unbearable pressure. She thought that the pressure would lessen once she went through terrigenisis, once she connected to the inhuman heritage she was born into, but it didn't.
Terrigenisis was terrifying, and she came out of it feeling like a thousand bees were constantly buzzing under her skin, and she could shake the entire mountain their home was built on, but she couldn't make her mom look at her like she was enough. Her mom did help her learn to control her power, teaching her to focus in on specific vibrations and control them, and it was cool having powers, and she loved not being helpless anymore, but it wasn't enough. Not when her mom looked at her like she just didn't live up to what she was supposed to be, and her dad flew into rages because she wasn't the child he'd lost. The dream of a happy family died a slow and agonisingly painful death, and with it Daisy's desperate drive to be enough. Only days after she stopped even trying to fulfil her mom's expectations her mom first brushed a hand against her cheek and used her own power to suck away a piece of her energy as punishment and the last piece of Daisy's dream went with it.
During the next three months, during which time her heart slowly broke into more and more pieces, she tried to rename herself again but couldn't. She'd been Daisy Johnson for 3 years, and had embraced the name wholeheartedly, and it was embedded in her heart and mind and identity. She'd lived with her parents with that name. She'd loved her parents with that name. She'd become inhuman with that name. She'd been broken by her parents with that name. She wasn't who she used to be, and she couldn't go back to Skye. All she managed to do was whittle her name down to just Daisy, her last name no longer rushing past her lips with awed joy.
Almost three years to the day after her dad kidnapped her back from the foster system, everything ended. And with it every tiny piece of her belief in family. There is something about skipping a self-defence lesson and being punished by having your energy drained out of you (for the several dozenth time but also the first time, because this time mom didn't stop at a little, this time she kept going and kept going and Daisy thought she was going to die and a little piece of her mind was relieved it was ending) and then having your dad fly into an all-too-familiar rage and break your mother's neck that burns even the most fiercely defended dream to ashes.
Daisy didn't stick around to find out what happened after that, she just begged Gordon, crying so hard she could barely get the words out, to take her away from Afterlife. Gordon returned her to America, and Daisy tried to forget her last name entirely.
In the two months that followed Daisy tried to rebuild alone. Sleeping brought with it nightmares, so she avoided it at all costs, filling her time and mind with anything but the past. She got herself a consulting job by posting online lists of problems in various products until the companies started offering to pay her to fix them (and stop publicly posting about them...), and opened a bank account with a fake name to get paid to. She worked in internet cafes and slept in cheap B&B's until she'd saved enough to buy a second hand computer and then started to earn much faster, spending most of her time hidden away with a laptop, diving back into the one thing her parents hadn't tainted, computing. There had been almost no technology in the inhuman's hidden home. Nothing to code or hack. She didn't associate coding or hacking with her parents, so as long as she was online, she could pretend it had never happened. Pretend she'd never been Daisy Johnson. Pretend she'd never believed in family.
There is one thing to be said for sleeping only when your body gives up entirely and working the rest of the time. It does wonders for your income, especially if you're a programmer. Two months after mom died, Daisy had made enough to pay for driving lessons and a second hand van, and she had a far more solid fake identity to take programming jobs with. And her hacking skills were improving at the speed of an Olympic sprinter. She learns as much in those first two months as she did in five years as a child, despite a three year gap when she barely touched a computer.
Programming slowly stopped being enough to distract her, especially once she finished learning to drive and moved into her van, so she looked for her next challenge. She coded her own AI, mostly because she'd wanted to do it since she was 8 and heard about Tony Stark's Jarvis. She hoped it would make her feel more like she did when she was Skye, when the world was a map of disappointments but she'd never had all her dreams come true and then slowly but completely shattered into a billion pieces. It didn't though, even though Hack (Highly Advanced Computer Kid) was as brilliant as she hoped and more. She jokingly called Hack her daughter, and ignored the quiet voice in the back of her mind that said this was about her abandonment issues and might not be a healthy way to cope.
Hack makes her feel less lonely, and reminds her to eat (which she does) and exercise (which she gets back into the habit of doing) and sleep (which she rarely does) often enough that she starts feeling a little more alive again. She still avoids thinking about her parents, thinks about anything but her mom's death and her dad's rage, but things are starting to more permanently fill the edges of the gaping hole inside herself. She picks up new things to care about. Hack. Programming. Hacking. Helping people. All of it at once.
It starts as a single hack. A one-off thing because the company she hacked into were almost as dirty as the waste they were dumping into the ocean. She digs up everything she can about them and dumps the entire collection onto the internet with the tag #NewDawn. She doesn't realise until days later (when shares in the company have tanked and half the management have been arrested or come under investigation and new people are taking over) how significant what she'd done was. And once she realised she was helping people, helping to make the world a tiny bit less of a terrible place, she couldn't stop at once. She'd done something good. Something real and solid and and good, and for the first time in months Daisy feels genuinely satisfied. Genuinely like she was running towards something rather than away. So she does it again, and again, and again.
When the chitauri invade, Daisy is parked only a block from the edges of where it all goes down, and only notices (she was hacking) because Hack notifies her of some rather alarming things happening on the news. When she realises what is going on she doesn't do the sensible thing and run away, but she pulls a hood up over her face, puts on her gauntlets for the first time in two months (they were a gift from her mom, given in the brief burst of pride that had followed Daisy becoming inhuman, and putting them back on leaves a bad taste in Daisy's mouth, but she'll break her bones if she uses her powers without them and she wants that even less), and runs towards the chaos.
Outside her van, New York is going mad. People are running everywhere, screaming, and there's a giant hole in the sky where alien spaceships are flying through. It's a struggle to go in the opposite direction to the streams of people fleeing the danger, but she persists, and when she comes across people that need help, she helped them. Mostly it was pointing people in the right direction, helping people up, that kind of thing. Once she gets closer to the carnage she starts having to get people out from under pieces of rubble, going into questionable buildings and guiding people out. There is too much going on around her for her to focus in on specific vibrations and work out which ones are alive and which need help, but she looks and listens and does her best.
An hour after she left her van the building she's in gets hit. She never finds out what with, but it takes out an entire section of the outer wall and the roof comes crashing down. She flung air vibrations at the ceiling, and it was pure instinct but it stops the people in front of her getting crushed, and she watches twelve people run screaming out, and knows they are alive because of her. It's a good feeling, even though any one of those people could have looked back and seen a teenager somehow holding up a section of building and asked questions she couldn't answer. It's a very good feeling. It's almost good enough a feeling for Daisy to forget how utterly, indescribably terrified she'd been when she'd felt the building start coming down. Almost.
She stays and keeps helping anyway. She later found that the battle ended not long after that, but she was working for hours more, digging through rubble when she felt the vibrations of a person trapped inside. Emergency services people are swarming all over the place, and she tells them where people are and then makes a rapid exit as often as possible. But sometimes she gets people out herself, hauling up bits of broken wall or doors to rescue people from the middle of buildings where the roofs had held. It's slow, exhausting work, but the relieved faces of people as they get out keeps her going until a fireman catches her a second time and has her actually escorted out of the area 'with the other civilians'.
She goes back to her van and is relieved to find it in one piece and drives out of the area before anyone can realise the hooded teenager doesn't have a home to return to. She parked two boroughs away and inhaled every piece of food she had in the van, and then got online to work out what the heck had happened.
The first shock is Robin's face on the news. Fighting the aliens. Her sort of older brother Robin. Robin who taught her to throw a punch. Robin who'd fallen out of touch when he got mixed up in something shady. Robin who'd apparently become a superhero in the last 7 and a half years, but is still armed with a bow and arrow. Her older brother was fighting aliens. The news was calling him Hawkeye. This was so cool!
The second shock is that Captain America is apparently alive. Which she would probably have spent longer on if her day hadn't so far included an alien invasion, holding up part of a building, and finding her sort of brother was a superhero. As it was, she moved on pretty quickly because there's only so many shocks you can have in a day before it all goes a bit numb. Iron Man was fighting too, and so was the Hulk (who Daisy had known about) and a guy called Thor (who she hadn't), and a red-head the press called Black Widow (who she also hadn't).
She had to hack into Shield to get the full story of what had happened, although the news gave a fairly good basic. It left out the fact that the government had tried to nuke New York though. It completely left that part out. Daisy was tempted to post online about it, but she refrained, mostly because the world had already had enough shocks for one day and it would probably cause a delayed mass panic and she didn't want to be responsible for that. The news also left out that it was the Avengers first mission together. And how much of a mess they were as a team. Which was probably also wise. The world didn't really want to know how closely they all came to catastrophe.
Teething problems aside though, the Avengers were awesome. Half of them were 100% human, but they used what they had and they fought bad guys and saved the world. Superheroes. People whose actual jobs it was so fight the battles no-one else could. It was so cool. They protected people, day in, day out.
She almost volunteered to join. Two days later she hacked all the way back into Shield to drop a home-made video of her vibration skills (blasting crates across an abandoned warehouse, hovering, singing wine-glasses, the whole shebang) before Hack reminded her that she was only sixteen, and the Avengers weren't exactly advertising open slots on their team. Both were sadly very good points. She poked around Shield for a while (she'd already hacked in, she may as well check up on a few things while she was there), and then backed out of the system without dropping the video. Instead, she bought a hoodie, leggings, new sneakers, and a mask and gave herself a new name, Quake. Which made her fifth name, sixth if you included nicknames like Marian. She really was collecting them.
She didn't do a whole lot as Quake. She didn't exactly try to stay under the radar, but she avoided using her powers around cameras. She wanted people to know she was around (she figured deterrence was a pretty good weapon in fighting crime), but she didn't want her dad to come across her on the internet and come find her. He was almost certainly looking for her, and Daisy didn't want to be found. She never wanted to see her dad again. Never. But she didn't need to use her powers obviously to help people. She'd gained enhanced speed and strength (and more than a little bit of advanced healing that probably came from her mom, but Daisy tried not to think about that) from terrigenisis as well, and three years of brutal self-defence lessons had taught her to fight reasonably well, and against multiple opponents (at least with thugs they couldn't increase their number by endlessly spawning more of themselves, unlike Alisha). It's not stopping buildings from falling on people, but it's something.
The day that Daisy first messed up started with meeting Steve Rogers. In hindsight, she should have just stayed in her van the entire day after that. She should have taken it as a omen that today wasn't going to be a good day for lying low.
Not that she knew who the man was when she met him. She'd had her gaze trained on the ground, struggling to get enough breath in as she pushed herself to keep running. She barely glanced up when an annoyingly in-breath voice said "On your left." as he passed her. It wasn't until the second time she heard that voice, passing her again, that she looked up. People couldn't usually keep up with her, never mind lap her on a 4 mile trail around a lake. She pushed herself faster, injured pride helping her ignore the exhaustion in every part of her body. The guy still lapped her again. She pushed herself even harder and collapsed onto the track and almost fell into the lake, which was more than a little embarrassing. It was a good thing the thugs she fought as Quake couldn't see her then.
Impossibly-fast-and-probably-enhanced-guy looked back when her footsteps stopped, and then doubled back when he saw her on the ground. And that was how Daisy found herself face to face with Captain America at 5am on a Thursday while rolling on the ground with cramp in both legs. It was very thoroughly undignified, but Captain America was nice enough not to mention it, and also nice enough to help her stretch her legs out to remove the cramp.
"Are you training for the Olympics or something kid?" Captain America asked, when she was mostly ok again.
Daisy would protest the 'kid' but it was Captain America, and he was technically like 90 years old, so she'd let it pass. "I was trying to keep up." she admitted, embarrassed, "Which was apparently a mistake."
"I have enhanced speed and endurance." Captain America said, looking a little guilty "Sorry for teasing you."
"Not your fault." Daisy said, because for a war hero he was doing a remarkable impression of a kicked puppy, which made her feel oddly guilty and very surreal "I should have known better."
"Still, I'm sorry." Captain America said.
"Eh, you stopped an alien invasion three months ago before it could squish me, so we'll call it even." Daisy said, still struggling to get enough air in and still feeling like she was having a very surreal dream.
Captain America paused "You were there?"
"Only on the edges." Daisy lied.
"Oh, well I'm glad you weren't hurt." Captain America said.
Daisy was beginning to wonder if this entire conversation was actually a hallucination. She wouldn't put it past her brain. It behaved a little weirdly when she hadn't slept for longer than two days. "Yeah well, thanks for saving the world and all that." she said, finally picking herself up from the ground and promptly falling over again. Captain America caught her, with impressively muscled arms "Oops, I should probably sit down a bit longer."
"Do you have a phone? You should call your parents." Captain America said.
Daisy probably should have expected that question, but she'd gotten good at not thinking about her parents, and she was tired, and she hadn't. The question, with it's accompanying reminder that she had no-one to call anymore because her mom was dead and her dad a murderer, hit her like a punch to the gut and she burst into tears. Apparently she hadn't already humiliated herself enough today, so she had to cry like a little kid in front of a national hero. Although, given she'd slept less than two hours since Sunday, and spent most of the time since then patrolling, hacking, programming, or running, maybe some over the top reactions were expected.
At least Captain America seemed as horrified by the tears as Daisy herself was, babbling helpless apologies and looking like a guilty puppy dog with a chewed up shoe. Daisy, knowing she probably seemed several cards short of a full deck, managed to gasp out "S-sorry, I just, um, my parents, uh, they died." Well, one of them had anyway, and the other may as well have.
"I'm so, so, so sorry." Captain America gasped, looking even less like a war hero and even more like a guilty puppy dog, which was really quite funny actually, so Daisy laughed, probably not helping with the whole looking insane thing. In an attempt to look sane again, she grabbed her water bottle from where it had rolled when she collapsed, and started to drink slowly. Fun fact about crying, it was impossible to drink water and cry at the same time. Daisy had learned that one as a foster kid, the nuns had used it all the time. When the bottle was empty she put the lid back on and scrubbed her sleeves across her face to get rid of the residual dampness, and looked over at Captain America, who was also sitting on the ground at this point, looking seriously out of place.
"You don't have to stay with me." Daisy said, half-amused and half-embarrassed, "I'm sure you weren't done with your morning jog."
Captain America looked mildly offended "You're hurt, I'm not leaving you alone."
That was oddly touching, especially from a complete stranger. "I'm fine." Daisy dismissed "Just a bit tired, I'll be fine in a few minutes." she added, not entirely truthfully. If she'd brought food to snack on, she would probably recover quicker, but she hadn't, so the shaky muscles were probably going to last ages. She didn't even have anything to eat back in her van, because she'd run out of money again.
Captain America frowned "You're not fine, you can seriously hurt yourself pushing your body too far."
Daisy waved a hand dismissively "I'm not hurt, just tired."
"Hmm, who are you living with? Can they come pick you up?" Captain America asked.
Daisy winced. Given she lived alone in a van, that was a resounding no. "I didn't bring my phone." she said truthfully.
"Do you know the number?"
"No." Daisy said, technically truthfully. She did not know her guardian's number because she didn't have one.
"Oh, well, I'll drop you off then."
Daisy blinked owlishly at the man, wondering if this was what 40s chivalry looked like. It was sort of sweet and also a huge pain in the ass. "Um, no offence, but I'm not giving my address to a stranger I met jogging, national hero or not. Stranger Danger and all that." Not least because she didn't exactly have an address.
Captain America blinked. "Oh, right, yes that's probably wise. I haven't even introduced myself."
"I know who you are." Daisy pointed out dryly. "We learned about you in school."
"Steve Rogers." Captain America introduced himself anyway.
"Nice to meet you Mr Rogers." Daisy said, deciding this was definitely not a hallucination because she didn't think she'd hallucinate this.
"Call me Steve." Captain America said "Miss..."
"Daisy." she supplied.
"Nice to meet you Daisy." Captain America said, kindly not mentioning her lack of a last name. "May I escort you home? Or at least see you safely onto a bus or something?"
"No thanks." Daisy said, because her van was parked only two blocks away and she had no money for the bus. "I'll be fine." and to prove it, she stood up, more carefully this time. Thankfully, her legs held up this time, and she was able to start walking without humiliating herself. Captain America, mercifully, didn't follow her. That would have been inconvenient. She really didn't have a plan B for how to get away from a national hero before he realised she lived on her own.
----------------
Interfering with a bank robbery wasn't one of Daisy's brighter ideas, although it also wasn't among her top 10 worst ideas either. Most of those were taken up by decisions to join her parents in their happily-never-after dream and ignore how it was crumbling to pieces. Taking on six heavily built masked bank robbers, three of them armed with guns, was definitely among her dumber ideas though. She took half a dozen nasty hits within the first minute and completely forgot she was supposed to be keeping her powers on the down-low and quake-blasted four thugs into the wall. She was sensible enough to take the camera out immediately after that, and wrap the fight up pretty sharpish, but it still wasn't great. Bank camera's generally sent their feed somewhere else in real time. Which meant there was a clip out there that, if uploaded to Youtube, would be a giant beacon advertising her location to her dad. Fuck.
She went straight home after that, and ignored her nosebleed, throbbing cheek and aching ribs and hacked the bank, followed the stream to where the feed was going, and hacked in there too. Unfortunately, she was too late. Someone had already been there and had removed the video. A further investigation revealed it was Shield. Which was almost as bad as her dad finding her. Fuck. At least her mask hadn't been knocked out of position when that thug had punched it, even if her nose and cheek had clearly taken significant damage. Speaking of which, she should probably deal with that before it got any harder to breath. Plus, she was going to start bleeding through the mass of gauze she'd shoved under her nose soon, and Hack was getting a little annoying in her insistence that she look after herself.
She meant to hack into Shield and deal with that video after she cleaned up, but instead she fell asleep. She didn't mean to, but she hadn't slept in over 60 hours and she'd done a lot and sitting still for too long was her undoing. She didn't wake up until a full 12 hours later, so hungry her stomach was ripping itself apart, but in marginally less pain. An investigation of her van showed she was entirely out of food, so she shoplifted some cereal bars (she'd come back and pay when she had actual money) and spent the next two hours catching up on programming jobs so she could buy food. This was why she didn't start hacking until almost 5 in the afternoon, which was rare for Daisy who generally spent most of the day and half the night hacking. When she did though, she found that someone was being particularly insistent on drawing Skyenet's attention.
Usually she didn't interact with other hackers too much, unless she was running a hack with them (which had nothing to do with trust issues, really), but this guy was insistent enough to make her curious, so she dug into him. The guy, as it turned out, was Tony Stark. Which was pretty freaking cool if Daisy was honest. Hack was almost as psyched about it as she was, because Daisy had talked a lotabout Stark and Jarvis. So then they had to hack Stark Industries, obviously. Daisy hadn't hacked into SI before, mostly because she was a little teensy bit daunted by the idea of taking on Jarvis, but she had to try sometime. Trying to hack Tony Stark was like a rite of passage for hackers, and succeeding was a badge of eternal honour, not least because only 6 people had managed it in the last three years, and it only got harder with each person who got in, because Stark tended to hire the people that hacked him successfully.
She managed to get in anyway. It took her almost ten solid hours (and Quake completely missing patrol) of very careful hacking so as not to alert Jarvis, but she got in. She didn't think she'd been prouder of anything in her entire life. She only gave herself a few moments to bask in the smugness though, and got to work. The first thing she did was switch off Jarvis's notifications, and then she opened up recent files. Two of which were on her. Which was a little alarming.
Shield was looking for her as Skyenet (which she'd known about) and as Quake (which she hadn't but should have, drat it she knew that video was going to come back to bite her), and apparently three Avengers were looking for her. Of those three, she had decent information on only one (Iron Man) and seriously outdated information on another (Hawkeye obviously). She knew absolutely nothing about Natasha Romanoff and nothing recent about Clint. Which she should probably fix. Pronto.
However, when she starts to back out of Stark Industries systems, Hack, her five-month-old code-baby, asks if she can wait five minutes. Given this is the first time Hack has ever asked her for anythingnot obviously for Daisy's own well-being, she agrees, and promptly tries to work out why. As it turned out, while she'd been digging into Tony Stark's recent files, Hack had started a tentative conversation with Jarvis, the only other proper AI she'd ever come into contact with. And Jarvis had responded, and now they were having a conversation about how human decisions made no sense according to all rules of logic.
Her code-daughter was having a conversation with Tony Stark's code-son. Her child was making friends. This was the cutest thing Daisy had ever seen, even if the actual discussion mostly consisted of mutual confusion about the fact that humans didn't follow the same hard and fast rules of logic that Hack, and apparently Jarvis, did. This was most of the reason why Daisy gave them ten minutes, despite the fact that she should really be working on hacking Shield.
While she's waiting, she takes over the screens and holo-screens in Stark's lab, then takes over a camera and takes a screenshot (at some point she's going to want to inform the hacker world of her achievement, and she'll need evidence. Plus, this is going to drive Stark insane given how miserably he was failing to find out anything about her, which is hilarious.). Hack whines like a toddler when Daisy tells her it's time to go, which is also very cute (her baby's first tantrum!), but is semi-mollified when Daisy promises to bring her back in a few days. She spends an extra few minutes locking and archiving Jarvis's memory of the conversation because she should probably try to minimise his knowledge of what she'd been doing, although it was most likely pointless. Tony Stark was too good to not go over Jarvis with a fine tooth comb as soon as he found her message, and she couldn't bring herself to remove the message.
She spent the next two hours hacking into Shield (which had annoyingly good firewalls, Daisy had been in several times before but it still took her ages to get in), and then the next two reading up on Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton and feeling increasingly sick. Clint's file didn't say much about his childhood, and had no records from St Agnes (ha, even at 8 she'd done the job properly!), but the confirmation that he'd gotten involved in some bad stuff wasn't exactly pleasant. Getting out of the foster system had worked out just as badly for him as it had for Daisy. Natasha Romanoff's childhood was so horrific Daisy read only half a paragraph (something about electrocution and brainwashing) and decided she really didn't need to know this and skipped straight to skills. Which were alarming. Black Widow, it turned out, was one of the best spy's in the world. Which was very, very bad news for Daisy.
That stupid video. She was doomed. She was so, so doomed.