Archive of Our Own ^beta

It began in early April. 

They didn’t understand. Not at first, not when they first came scrambling through the door of the apartment they all used to share, back when the world smelled of honey and lemon and ash from the cigarettes they passed around, always saying they would quit the next day, next week, next month. The time never came, the packs kept multiplying and their kisses always tasted like Marlboro’s. 

Sharon doesn’t smoke those anymore. 

Not now, maybe not ever. 

Natasha had left her.

Maria had left her when Natasha did.

Bobbi left her when Maria finally stopped dropping off clothes for her, when Sharon became withdrawn and dyed her hair so maybe Maria would stop confusing them when she dropped by in the mornings. Bobbi left Sharon started going through a pack of Richmond’s a day, her fingers turning yellow, the ashtrays full. She left when Sharon started refusing to eat. 

So why not disappear completely? Why not simply become a thick trail of weeds, poison ivy trailing up buildings and ruining landscapes, dandelions growing in a thick bunch, maybe something prettier like oxalis or willowherb. Maybe if she was quiet and pretty like a weed, someone would want to keep her around for winter. She didn’t care if they destroyed her in summer, she just needed someone warm and nurturing for the harsh winters. 

SHIELD sends her on countless missions, each one getting more dangerous than the last. She’s no Avenger, no powers or multiple lives, but she is smart and capable, so when Fury tells her she’s going undercover for the fourth time that week, she just smiles and nods. She gets on with it, despite the growing ache in her heart and her stomach, the hollowness almost comforting. 

The dark spaces of their apartment are shadowy and filled with cobwebs of people who were full of empty promises. Look how quickly they cleared out when Sharon started slipping again. Natasha said she was a liability, Maria asked her to get help and Bobbi just stared. She wasn’t sure who hurt the most. 

All she knew was that winter was approaching fast and things were only getting colder. 

Daisy smelled like earth and hibiscus, like something sweet and desperately fragile. Sharon wanted to scream at her that they’d destroy each other completely, that when someone decided to finally get rid of her weeds when it came back to summer time, the chemicals would burn Daisy out too.

Daisy didn’t listen.

They didn’t understand.

Coulson had left her.

May left her when Coulson did.

Jemma left her when Fitz decided he knew better than everyone else, the scalpel hot and fiery against her skin as he took and took and took.

They wanted a good little soldier, so that’s what she became. Machines don’t break, they don’t cry or sleep or bleed. Her eyes swim as she spends another long night on her laptop, watching and waiting for the next enemy to fight, the next villain to conquer, the next catastrophe that will ruin her.

She can feel Mack’s eyes boring into her as she sips black coffee, the air around her softly vibrating. Daisy couldn’t control her powers as well anymore, she was constantly exhausted and all the control she seemed to have had melted away when the Doctor ripped out the inhibitor chip. 

“Dee…” He starts softly and she leaves the room. She’s fine. 

He calls her back but she keeps going, all the way through the Lighthouse until she’s reached the top, looking out over the rolling waves. The protein bar she’d shoved down her throat to stop from passing out before training rears it’s ugly, banana flavoured head and she pukes over the edge of the cliff. 

She fucked up again. Mack was probably the last person to care about her, since she hasn’t heard from Bobbi or Nat or Maria in nearly three years, Jemma hated her, so did Fitz and Yo-yo, May was avoiding her, and Coulson was-

Dead. 

Daisy bangs her head against the railing, the sharp pain pricking at her eyes. She can’t do this anymore, can’t deal with Fitzsimmons frosty silence whenever she walked into the lab for results, or Elena’s accusing looks whenever they were in the gym together, May’s unanswered texts, Mack’s concern or Coulson’s face staring up at her whenever she opened her phone gallery. 

She shivers in the late night wind. Winter was fast approaching. 

A single snowflake drifts from the sky, even though it’s far too early for snow. Daisy catches it and watches it melt on her finger, the ice numbing her skin as she felt herself slowly slip away. 

Sharon smells like the ocean and thick veiny leaves. Daisy tells her that she’ll kill her, she’s a curse after all, doesn’t Sharon know that earthquakes and robots kill?

Sharon doesn’t listen.

The night they meet is the middle of an unseasonal September blizzard. They’re drunk in some club and the music is pounding, Daisy's hipbones are sharp against Sharon’s waist, their collarbones clashing. Both of them are on fire, burning into a supernova of carefully counted calories and decaying teeth. All eyes are on them, the ways they move in time with each other, fitting together like two pieces of a really fucked up jigsaw puzzle. 

Daisy tastes like rum and hastily swirled mouthwash, the same spearmint flavour Maria used to use. 

Sharon kisses with a ferocity Daisy hasn’t felt since Lincoln died.

“I know what you’re doing.” Sharon whispers to her later, as she slides between Daisy's legs, muscular and skeletal all at once. A walking robot corpse.

Daisy whines as Sharon bites at her, bruises blooming across her thighs. She grips blonde, brittle hair between her fingers. “Of course you do. You’re doing it too.”

Sharon says nothing, just gets back to work, the alcohol drumming in her ears as Daisy stutters and moans beneath her mouth. She tastes like pomegranates now, as Sharon takes Daisy’s extended hand to become the Goddess of Hell. She never expected to meet Hades in the flesh, but the God writhing beneath her is stunningly damaged and Sharon craves the tastes of ash and decay like candy. 

When she wakes a few days later, Daisy is watching her. Sharon smiles, and extends a hand out, just to check the girl was real and not just some starvation filled hallucination. She’d been having a lot of those recently. “Hi.” 

“Hey.” Daisy grinned. She still smelled of hibiscus, but underneath the soil and earth was the smell of sunlight, it seemed to radiate from her smile. Her cheekbones were sharp as blades and her eyes sunken, but she was still the most stunning thing Sharon had ever seen. “Uh, not to be weird but I think we might have a few people in common.” 

“Huh?” Daisy pointed over to a picture Sharon hadn’t smashed yet, one of her, Maria, Nat and Bobbi at the beach a few years back. They all gloriously happy, drunk on wine coolers and sunshine, so in love with each other it actually hurt a little. 

Sharon shrugged. “You know them?” 

She nodded, Sharon’s heart sunk. They’d probably told her all about the poor little broken agent they’d left in the dust, who was so obsessed with being perfect that she’d given herself an eating disorder and drove them all away. Daisy traced her jaw with such care and attention that Sharon actually held her breath. “I was…involved with them a few years ago. But then Bobbi dropped off the face of the planet after a mission went FUBAR and I never heard from any of them again.” 

Sharon can’t help but feel like fate was leading them together at the club that night. What were the chances of meeting another person that had been burned by the great constellation that was Natasha Romanoff, Maria Hill and Bobbi Morse? Stardust leaked from her and Daisy’s veins and somehow made them glow in the erratic lights of the dance floor, vodka and diet coke flavoured kisses causing them to combust into something glorious. 

“I’m sorry.” Sharon said, kissing Daisy’s temple. 

Daisy just shrugged listlessly. “It hurt for a while, but times change. I wasn’t what they wanted.” 

“Neither was I.” Sharon says quietly, tucking some hair behind her ear. She sighed and instead looked back up at Daisy. “Wanna go for a run?” 

“Always.” Daisy grinned, kissing her. 

They create a routine as October rolls around. Run in the morning, black coffee whilst reading whatever mission reports they had that day, head off to SHIELD, paperwork or training or whatever mission they were sent on by their superiors, if they were both back home at the same time then they would take a walk to the park or the library or wherever else didn’t involve calorie-laden sweet treats and half-off deals on Halloween candy. After that they would return back to the apartment, smoke to avoid dinner, shower if they could be arsed, whatever boring SHIELD shit needed done that night, train, smoke, 200 crunches, weigh in, and normally Daisy would read aloud from one of the books she kept on her tablet until Sharon fell asleep. 

It was horrifyingly domestic, heavily unhealthy, but Daisy couldn’t help loving it. It was effortlessly simple, watching the numbers on the scales decrease, the crinkle around Sharon’s eyes when she finally loses that five pounds that had been troubling her all week, the colour in the leaves changing from dark green to crisp browns, the occasional snowflake that no one else seemed to catch falling from the sky. 

She gets bored one day and dyes her hair black, even though it had finally turned back to its original brown after she ran away from SHIELD the first time. Technically, she hasn’t run this time, she just doesn’t live on base where she’s constantly watched and hated. Daisy tells herself this a thousand times over when Jemma sends a text asking to talk after she had a fight with Fitz, or when Mack offers a game of COD, or when Elena asks her why she isn’t returning May’s phone calls. 

In truth, she wants them to leave her alone. She once craved their love and affection, ran off their attention like fucking oxygen, always chasing the serotonin high of a hug or something equally small. Now she finds that high in replacing a meal with water or coffee, the ashtray piled high as Sharon leaned into her, the light of the TV sending her to sleep. 

Daisy kissed her head and breathed in the scent of Richmond’s and salty ocean waves, ignoring the scent of rot that seemed to cling to them. No one else could smell it, only Daisy. She wondered if she was going fucking crazy, carding her fingers through Sharon’s long hair, pretending it wasn’t coming out in clumps when she braided it for her in the morning.

They were both pretending not to see a lot of things recently. 

November brings the first accident. Sharon comes home woozy and tired after a long training mission and Daisy isn’t home yet. She doesn’t panic, they’re SHIELD agents this happens all the time. She just continues their usual evening routine, smokes through three cigs in a row as she files reports, showers, smokes again, trains lightly in the gym down the street since she over-did a little earlier that day, weighed herself, frowns when she sees that she hasn’t lost or gained, her weight staying stagnant like a mosquito breeding pool. She ignores the roaring in her stomach for food and instead rolls out her mat to begin a series of 200 crunches, 60-second planks, 150 jumping jacks, eventually exhausting herself to the point where she just curls up on the couch and falls asleep there. 

She wakes again to the sound of the front door unlocking, tensing when she heard more than one set of footsteps come through. Sharon drew a knife and whipped the light on to confront her possible attackers, gasping when she saw Natasha Romanoff supporting a very bloodied Daisy. 

“What the actual fuck?” Sharon says as she rushes over, Daisy mumbling incoherent nonsense that she was fine, nothing to worry about, she didn’t need anything, leave her alone, the usual bullshit. Nat just stared at her incredulously. Sharon nudged her for some information. 

Natasha helped the younger woman over to the couch and turned back to Sharon, something in her eyes lighting up. Sharon kept her eyes downcast after that. She couldn’t deal with anymore heartbreak, they left her and Daisy, albeit at different times. It had been four months if crippling loneliness before she got with Daisy, she couldn’t go through that again. “Fury put us on mission together. It was meant to be simple, but it never is. Agent Johnson was sent in first as bait, since she’s stronger and shit. They put up a hell of a fight, but she…” Natasha bites her nail anxiously, something Sharon had never seen her do before. “I don’t even know, I think she passed out or something, next thing I know, they’re beating her to a pulp.” 

Sharon nods, unsurprised. It had to happen eventually, they’d both been passing out on runs or in the gym. She wet a rag and pressed it to Daisy’s head, pretending she couldn’t see Nat’s wide eyes at their closeness. Daisy had clearly kept quiet about their relationship, just like they had agreed. The others had left them out in the cold, they didn’t need to know that they were sheltering each other from the rain. 

Daisy stirs, groaning as she came to. Sharon smiles and kisses her bloody forehead, the dark gashes tasting sweet and warm beneath her lips. The taste of pomegranates, the smell of hibiscus. Sharon could drown in it. 

“Hey sweetheart.” She whispered as Daisy looked around for her, melting their bones together when she finally realised who she was. “Quite a mess you’ve got yourself into.” 

“I’ll leave you two for a bit.” Natasha says quietly, softer than Sharon had seen her in a very long time. Maybe that’s what happened when she wasn’t burdened with the disaster that was Sharon Carter. Natasha had finally softened her marble exterior, becoming delicate and warm like a slowly forming star. Sharon had become harder, her soft edges and kindness becoming stone, wrapping around her like a chrysalis, she’s becoming something monstrous. 

Something woefully glorious. Wretched and disgusting and sad, but glittering golden like lava, her bones sparkled beneath her graying skin. She could never lose enough weight to be enough for them, to be small enough to fit into their arms again, but she could be perfect for Daisy. 

Natasha left and went into the kitchen, Sharon tuned her out and focused on the girl in her arms. Daisy was already sitting up to stitch up her wounds, stone-faced and quiet. Sharon nudged her. 

“You did good out there.” 

Daisy shook her head. “I wanted them to kill me. I didn’t want her to save me, I wanted to die.” 

Sharon just nods, tightens her grip and takes over sewing up Daisy’s wounds. “I’m glad she brought you home.” 

She said nothing, just kissed Sharon with bruised lips, as they fell further and further into Hell. Sharon wonders how long it would be until she realised that the seasons weren’t changing without her in the world, how long she could live down here in the dark and the ever-long winter with Daisy. Hell was comforting, Hades was a bright burning constellation, Persephone was falling further and further in love. 

They’re in too deep. 

December is their worst month. The entire four weeks are plagued with belated Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas preparation, at some point, they stop answering calls unless it’s SHIELD. Daisy wakes up one morning and struggles to get out of bed, knowing she had a mission to get to, but feeling like if she moved she’d snap. Her catsuit didn’t fit anymore, she’d had to get a new one, the SHIELD techs faces growing increasingly more concerned as they measured her. 

Sharon finally stops smoking but only because she started coughing up black ash when the common cold hit her like a dump truck. She was bedbound for a week, sniffling and breathing like an asthmatic who just ran a marathon with no inhaler. Daisy stayed beside her the whole time, distracting her with board games or trashy TV, bone broth and saltine crackers until she started feeling better. The first few days without her cigarettes, she’s a stone cold bitch, snapping at anyone and everyone, blowing through nicotine patches like a junkie, which she supposed she was. 

Only instead of being addicted to heroin or cocaine, she’s addicted to her empty stomach and protruding collarbones, for the feeling of eyes on her when she goes to the club undercover, dressed in red, knowing that Daisy was the only one who could really touch her the way she wanted. 

But December brings Christmas, and Christmas brings food. The wind is howling, snow falling in thick flurries, this winter is the worst that North Dakota has ever seen. They huddle together for warmth, the heating on full blast all day long, and even under thick blankets and duvets, they’re both still freezing. 

“Shar, do you think we should stop all this?” Daisy asks one day, feeling hopelessly small. Her sweatpants are falling off her as she waits for her body to feel warm off to strip off to get in the shower. Jemma cornered her in the hallway earlier, eyes red and puffy after she’d had another fight with Fitz. They’d finally become friends again in late November, a long dark night filled with forgiveness and apologies and a lot of gin. Daisy had done her part, comforting Jemma like she always did, pretending her scar didn’t itch and pull, that Jemma wasn’t digging to her lungs with her elbow. 

Sharon shrugged and continued brushing her teeth for the fourth time that day. No matter how much she threw up, she couldn’t seem to lose that last five pounds, last ten pounds, last hundred pounds, never enough. She was dying, she knew that, but she just couldn’t stop. 

“Soon, Dais.” She promised, though they both could hear the hollowness of a cavern of lies in her voice. “We’ll stop soon.” 

Daisy knew she should fight back, that she make them both get help. She should walk right of Hell and into the sunlight, burning the world as she went, scream and wail for someone, anyone, to help them. They couldn’t do this alone, and the winter kept dragging on. She wasn’t Hades, Sharon wasn’t Persephone, both of them were just lost souls, the threads of their life hanging constantly between the Fates scissors. 

But she was already in too deep, drowning beneath the thick waves of their illnesses. She just nodded, and finally braved the cold air, avoiding looking in the mirror. For someone obsessed with her image, she hardly ever looked at herself. She hated what she saw, the sunken eyes, hollow cheekbones, a rib cage full of a bruises and air, shrunken stomach and ruined kidneys.

Daisy wondered how long she had before her organs started shutting down, how long before her and Sharon would descend to their kingdom beneath the earth. 

Or maybe she was really just afraid of seeing what everyone else did. A fat, hideous monster who killed everything just by looking at it, who took what little she had and murdered it, just like Lincoln or her mother or Coulson. Something stutters in her chest when she thinks of him, of the last time she got this bad. Right after Lincoln, before she left SHIELD, he made her promise not to disappear completely. People needed her, he needed her. 

But he was gone now. 

Sharon caught her hand before she got in the shower. Daisy smiled as she looked up at her, the most beautiful and dangerous thing in the whole world. Sharon pressed their foreheads together. “I love you.” 

“I love you too.” Daisy murmured, catching sight of herself in the mirror. She frowned at the stack of vertebrate exploding from her skin, her scars illuminated by the lack of protein, her eyes dead apart from the love that shone for Sharon. God, she looked like something from a bad dream, like AIDA’s LMD’s before they had skin. Daisy pressed her face against Sharon’s bony shoulder and quaked the glass, flinching when the glass cracked into a million pieces. 

“Guess I’m not getting my deposit back.” Sharon said, checking them both for glass shards. 

Daisy pressed her fists to her eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that. I can pay for the replacement or something.” She was rambling now, breaths quickening as her decaying lungs struggled to suck in enough air. “I’m so fucking stupid, I’m sorry, I broke it and it was probably expensive, and you don’t deserve that, I’m so sorry, I-“ 

“Daisy, breathe.” Sharon grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to stop. Daisy suddenly noticed the black spots in her vision, the sweat creeping across her forehead, that she could literally see her heart beating under her skin. She took some deep breaths, forcing oxygen into her deprived lungs, feeling like she’d just fought her hardest battle and won by the skin of her teeth. 

“M’sorry.” She mumbled, feeling all of two feet tall. Not for the first time, she wished for them to go back to the night they met, when they hadn’t touched yet, still just strangers eyeing each other over the bar. Daisy wished for the days when they were strangers dancing together, when they were kindred spirits laughing before Sharon took the proffered pomegranate and they both fell back to Hell. 

Could they really have lost those people in just four months? 

“It’s okay, Dee.” Sharon whispers, holding her close. “Everything’s going to be okay.” 

Winter drags on, painfully slowly. Daisy begins to wonder if they’ll ever make it through December, Sharon gets the flu on mission and is ordered on bed rest until further notice. 

She doesn’t listen, obviously. 

The January blues are no fucking joke, Sharon thinks miserably, going through some quick yoga moves on the plane ride to her first mission back since the docs cleared her, with strict rules on what to eat and when, how to restore the weight, how to keep from fainting. They were treating her like she’d break, but they didn’t know that she was made of vibranium now, her glass bones coated in silver. She wouldn’t break so easy now. 

She pulls her jacket closer as she walks back to her apartment when she finishes the mission. It wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t pretty either, she hates playing the damsel in distress. All batting eyelashes and short skirts and make attention that she’d rather live without. 

“You’re practically a skeleton.” One of them had said and she felt an odd rush of pride. “A skeleton with boobs.” 

She was definitely putting that in “Weird Things Men Have Said To Us” scrapbook. January had brought blustery winds and sleet so thick she could barely see. That’s probably why she missed the motorbike parked outside, and the sound of shouting coming from behind her front door. 

“Baby! I’m home!” She called through the house, finally picking up on the yelling. Sharon quickly pulled her gun and walked slowly toward the noise, just in case they were being attacked and Daisy had decided on the “words first, actions later” technique. 

“You have no right!” Daisy shouted at Bobbi, red-faced and sporting a black eye and a gash across her cheek from her latest mission. Why was she always cutting that cheek? “I don’t see you for three years and now you want to tell me I’m anorexic and killing myself? Seriously?”

“You know why me and Hunter had to leave, Daisy. Maria and Nat too. It wasn’t safe for us there anymore, we didn’t want to leave you, I’m sorry.” Bobbi tries to level with her but Sharon can tell that Daisy is only getting started. She’s shaking with the effort of not screaming at the blonde, the air around her thrumming. Hell is crumbling, there’s a gathering storm outside. Eurydice has arrived. “But I’m here now.” 

“That’s not good enough, Bobbi.” Daisy says quietly, all the anger in her leaking onto the floor and disappearing through the floorboards. “You can’t come here after leaving me, leaving her too, and just expect to fit back into whatever jigsaw puzzle we were. You can’t just slot yourself into our lives and tell us we’re killing ourselves and each other.” 

Bobbi wiped away a tear and nodded, standing to leave. “You’re not ready yet.” Like it was that simple, lie one day they’d magically wake up and think, “damn I’ve really fucked up, let me just call up the people that abandoned me and let them destroy me all over again”. Bobbi met Sharon’s eyes suddenly and her heart started beating ten times faster. Eurydice, in the flesh, hopeful eyes and a hunger for something rotting and burning. “Call me when you are. Winter’s nearly over.” 

Daisy dissolves into tears once Bobbi leaves, whispering endless apologies to Sharon. She doesn’t even know what Daisy is apologising, she’s pretty sure it’s because Daisy apologises for literally everything under the sun even when it wasn’t her fault. But she holds her anyway, puts on some shitty game show and lets the sound send them both to sleep. 

She didn’t see the bike in the garage because she was too busy looking at the blossoms on the trees that had just started to bloom. Winter was coming to an end, she’d have to leave Hell soon, get back on the train and rotate the seasons again. She wonders if she can take Daisy with her this time. 

Sharon’s heart stops for the first time in February. She passes out in the shower, and Daisy panics, turning off the water, supporting her head in case she vomited, letting her come to on her own just like they always did before she realised the emptiness in Sharon’s chest. 

She’d grown so used to Sharon’s vibrations, filling her head like a second skin, she’d know Sharon’s body blind. Daisy knew every curve and angle, every crinkle around her eyes when she laughed, every ridge of her lips, every brittle nail bed and every stunning smile. So when all she felt was a sudden and vast emptiness, a cavernous wasteland of Sharon’s empty stomach, her lungs finally giving in, she nearly starts weeping. 

But she has a job to do. 

Daisy quickly starts CPR, pumping at Sharon’s chest with an ache growing larger and larger in her gut. If Sharon died here, butt-ass naked on the bathroom tiles, it would be another dead body to add to her list, another person Daisy had loved and lost. She could have made them stop all of this months ago, made them both accept that Hell was freezing over,it was time to walk in the sunlight again, but she couldn’t find the strength. 

They're addicted to hollowness. Daisy hasn’t felt this light since she was a little kid, when the only heartbreaks she knew were foster families sending her back to the orphanage, the occasional slap or punch, things didn’t get really bad until she was seven. This illness, anorexia, is a horrid string of eight letters that define something she could never explain to people. She was perfection, carefully sculpted and built to withstand whatever SHIELD threw at her. Her software was outdated, tech was beginning to rust and fail, but she was a well-functioning machine and it’s never been easier to accept that she caused all of this and she doesn’t even care. 

She ends up quaking Sharon’s heart, gut twisting when she remembered doing it to Lincoln. Her hands are covered with the marks of everyone that has ever made the mistake of loving her, stained black and red and purple with the bruises and the blood of people she just wanted to stay. Just once, she wants someone to choose to live for her, instead of dying. Daisy pumps at Sharon’s heart, tears streaming down her face as she desperately tried to bring her back to life. 

A few hours later, Sharon came back to consciousness very painfully, the bathroom light blinding as she took in the fact that she was in fact, alive. She turned to look for Daisy and found that she was not in the bathroom anymore but on the couch in the living room, Daisy was watching her so intently she’s pretty sure she wasn’t even blinking, and Nat, Maria and Bobbi were talking quietly in the kitchen. 

“Hey, pretty girl.” She murmured to Daisy, voice cracking. 

Daisy shook her head and smiled, leaning forward to kiss her forehead. “You’re alive.” 

“I am, shockingly. How’d that happen? I thought I was gone for good this time.” 

“Quake powers.” Daisy said absently, fretting with her hands. Could Sharon see the scorch marks? The blood? The layers of scarring from all the times she’d rubbed her hands raw trying to wash off all the rotting remains of the people she had killed, whether she meant to or not? 

Sharon should have listened all those months ago when Daisy told her she’d kill her. 

“You called them?” Sharon asked, voice quiet and small. 

Daisy nods, looking away guiltily. “We can’t fix this alone, Shar. Winter’s coming to an end.” 

“Winter never really ends, Dais.” Sharon says, leaning her head back on the cushion, accepting her fate. “It just hides behind the sunshine and flowers. It’s always comes back.” 

But it’s time to walk in the sun again. Eurydice, Orpheus and Hermes have arrived, it’s time for Hades and Persephone to leave Hell. It’s been six months since they met, six months since the world started ending for them. They’d forged a new one from their molten veins and broken bones, but now it seemed to be caving in. Sharon isn’t sure she’s ready to leave just yet. 

“Daisy?” She asks. 

“Mhm?”

“You're staying right?” Daisy’s eyes were wet and shiny when Sharon finally looked at her. “I can’t lose you too.” 

Daisy kissed her then, fierce and bold, holding her like she’d break, and maybe she would. Sharon pressed into her, seeking every ounce of warmth she radiated, Daisy’s kisses always tasted like sunlight. She chased it, completely forgetting about everyone else in the room. 

And when she pulled away, Sharon felt something on her tongue. She chewed it, sweetness exploding in her mouth, sudden and light. Normally she’d be too anxious to eat something she hadn’t carefully counted or measured, but when she realises what’s in her mouth, she can’t even begin to overthink it. 

Pomegranate.