The invisible vibrations began to pulse through the room, riding the rhythm of her breathing in a pattern she'd never used before — something like the natural background oscillation of the world itself. Invisible, constant, always present.
Following her own understanding of it, Daisy carefully tried to mirror the movement of qi — borrowing the techniques those K'un-Lun practitioners had built over generations, attempting to find a resonance that was uniquely her own.
It didn't work. Pure imitation, especially fragmented imitation, couldn't touch the accumulated wisdom of dozens of elite K'un-Lun masters across centuries. She tried three times. Three times, she was just finding her footing when something pulled her back — some unnamed interruption she couldn't explain.
She was about to give up entirely when something unexpected happened.
Her vibration-sense caught a fragment of consciousness. Something faint. Something helpless.
The only person close enough to register on her frequency was Viper.
Images came rushing in — flashes, like watching someone else's memories on fast-forward. Adult recollections were sparse. Mostly it was a young girl, fragile, crying alone in corners and darkened rooms.
Alone. Abandoned. The kind of feeling that whispered I might not make it to tomorrow. Daisy knew that feeling. It lived in her bones.
Something in that recognition made a bridge. A thin one — but a bridge. She felt herself and that lonely girl briefly, faintly, align. Scientifically speaking: a minor resonance between their mental frequencies. In the language of ability-users: she had just, accidentally and for the first time, performed something like psychic reading.
Her consciousness stretched like taffy, and a flood of memories that weren't hers poured past — too fast for active processing, too overwhelming to stop. She could only sit in the current and receive.
"—Ah!"
She snapped back to herself. Her watch said three hours had passed.
Every muscle ached. Her head felt packed with wet sand. And scattered throughout her mind, like debris from a flood, were fragments of knowledge that hadn't been there before.
More striking, though: something had shifted between her and Viper. They'd been enemies — barely-tolerant enemies who transacted when necessary. Even dragging Viper to safety hadn't changed that dynamic.
It had changed now. In Daisy's perception, the hostility had thinned. Not gone — they were nowhere near friends — but the active antagonism had quietly stepped back.
"That was awful," she muttered, pressing her hands against her temples. Her awareness felt blurry at the edges. She let her external sensory range collapse inward, and the discomfort slowly faded.
She combed carefully through what she'd taken in. Beyond glimpses of Viper's childhood, she'd seen fragments of her early adult years as well — not just the pain and the hardship, but the training. Chemistry. Biology. Synthetic toxins. Organic toxins. Compounds engineered specifically to destroy the human body. Some she recognized. Others she'd never encountered.
And those were only Viper's early memories. Whatever she'd developed in the decades since would be far more refined.
The mental resonance had left Daisy with a basic foundation — entry-level toxicology and counter-toxin principles. For her purposes, that wasn't nothing. Knowing more about poisons was always useful.
There was something else, too, though she couldn't be certain it wasn't coincidence: it felt as if the resonance had offloaded a portion of Viper's illness onto her — redistributed it, somehow. Correspondingly, the edge of Viper's fever seemed to have dulled. Her vitals looked marginally less catastrophic.
Daisy continued rotating ice-compress towels throughout the night.
By morning, the fever had finally broken.
She went out for food, picked up extra supplies, and came back to find the woman in the shower. She waited. When Viper emerged, she did so very directly — no bathrobe, nothing.
Seeing Daisy still there, she paused, then recovered quickly.
"Changed your mind? Thinking about ditching S.H.I.E.L.D. and working under me?" She moved toward Daisy in a way that left very little to the imagination.
Daisy glanced once, objectively. She'd seen a lot of impressive women — including herself, she supposed, being fair about it. The only ones who could genuinely compete with Viper purely on looks were Black Widow, Hill, Mariko, and possibly the maid. All of them fell slightly short in at least one department.
She reached out and gently redirected Viper to arm's length. Back when she'd first arrived in this world, someone this blatant would've undone her completely. These days, she was a little harder to rattle.
"Put some clothes on. I need to talk to you."
Viper seemed unbothered. She walked in that same unhurried, deliberately fluid way to the bathrobe, pulled it on, and sat across from Daisy.
She produced a cigarette. "You don't mind?"
Daisy waved a hand.
"You're not worried it's laced?" Viper asked.
"I'm not picking up any hostility from you. I'll take the risk." It was more confidence than true calculation — contact-dispersed airborne toxins were logistically complex to produce. The synthesis, the drying, the binding to tobacco — all of it took significant preparation time. Viper had been pulled out wearing only what she had on. The cigarette was fresh-bought.
"No fun." Viper sighed, lit it anyway, and took a long, satisfied drag.
"So. What is it?"
Some trust existed between them now — fragile, but present enough to actually talk.
"I need to kill Madame Gao," Daisy said, no preamble. "And I need your help."
Viper's expression shifted — a quick flash of something light, almost entertained. "The Hand's old woman? Her?"
Daisy nodded.
"She's a S.H.I.E.L.D. target?"
"She's my target."
The exchange was rapid, almost rhythmic.
Viper's curiosity sharpened. "As far as I know, Gao keeps a very low profile. How did she end up on the radar of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s rising star?"
It was a question several people had asked, but Daisy had only explained it fully to Hill. She gave Viper the short version.
It was simple enough: Madame Gao had overestimated herself. She'd seen Daisy as an insect she could step on without looking. Things escalated, and what had started as an offhand dismissal had ballooned into a mess that created serious problems for both parties. Gao, worried about how high Daisy might climb within S.H.I.E.L.D., had decided to deal with her now, personally, before it became impossible. Daisy had been equally determined to deal with Gao first.
Irreconcilable. Full stop.
"Ha — oh that's good." Viper had dissolved into laughter before Daisy was even halfway through. She hadn't read the particular genre of story this plot arc echoed, but she could feel the irony in her bones, and it delighted her.
"So you joined S.H.I.E.L.D. because of this?" she managed, hand over her mouth.
Daisy's original goal had been a look at the Tesseract — but everyone who knew the broad strokes of events, Nick Fury included, had independently concluded that she'd joined S.H.I.E.L.D. to escape Madame Gao. It was a logical read, impossible to poke holes in, and Daisy had long since stopped correcting it.
Viper laughed until her whole body shook, the bathrobe shifting with it, and it took her quite a while to compose herself.