Cut It Out and Restart *Daredevil*Damned*Agents of SHIELD*

2) The Team

The birth of Agent Nicole Davis and the death of Vera Murdock was a long process; while the second half was a raging sea of emotions fading into nothingness, until only agonizing moments in the morning remained, the short periods of sleep blending into wakefulness, confusion of a missing life growing in her abdomen, a silent cry and unspoken words of grief and goodbye, the first half was dull and mechanic. Stereotypical.

One day like the previous one, the following one just as endless and yet fleeting in a blink of an eye. Training, studying, training. Target practice, hand-to-hand, endurance. Meals four or five times a day. Stretching. One week blending into the next one. Sundays were the hardest, the routine minus one work-out session giving her too much time to think.

With each nightfall and each dawn, a piece of Vera seemed to fade into black; or perhaps grey. Nicole – Nica, the only connection to her past – was coming, staring a new life; exciting, perfectly professional and dull. Two panic attacks was all. What they called therapy was just a fancy term for learning how to push emotions away, to push them so deep inside that they would never claw out.

Nica didn't listen to much music these days, but there were few songs that seemed to resonate too much to be ignored and work-out was sometimes better with loud music, loud enough to swallow up memories and dark thoughts of people who might be grieving the person whom Nica decided to bury.

She liked her instructors; efficient, not babying her too much. She wouldn't be able to handle kid gloves, people with whom she would feel safe enough to open up, safe enough to break down in front of. It would have undone all the hard work she had been putting into dulling herself, building up shields (the irony was not lost on her) to protect her sanity. Cassidy was her favourite despite the instructor's efforts not get attached; mostly because she was the one to tell her that the spy diet was cool and all, but the ban on alcohol was only half-heartedly meant. They spent an hour working through a bottle of vodka and the next Nica threw up twice before she got her ass to the training room; no compassion shown to her, she had suffered through a regular session. And she survived.

That was good.

Survivor's guilt was a bitch, no matter how many times she had heard of people who were proud to be survivors. Fortunately for her, most of the time, she was not a survivor; Vera took her own life, hence she could not be one and Nica Davis was practically a new-born.

People of SHIELD didn't ask where she had come from; a common practice, she supposed. She was grateful.

Letting the water turn cold, she allowed the icy needles to pinch her skin before stepping out of the stall of her lounge; a cubicle, to be honest, yet more than enough. Slipping into a t-shirt and sweats with a SHIELD logo, she lied down; exhausted, she entered the land of dreams in no time.

-.-.-

Nica was on the board ever since the unplanned extraction Coulson's team formed.

The women on the team hadn't known about her; she had been hidden in Coulson's office, as he had requested. They had had enough on their plates and Coulson wanted to only introduce her after making sure they got their two guys of agents back. It warmed her heart a little and it only confirmed her suspicion; she had made the right choice. If not joining the SHIELD, then trusting Coulson. He was a good man and he never left a man behind.

As much as it was dangerous for her to think that kind of thoughts, widening the cracks in her façade, she didn't try as hard to resist as she probably should have. There was just something about him, something amiable in his eyes, something fatherly...

Her phone beeped – a signal they had agreed on. She left the office, coming to the common space with the bar.

"What's going on, Sir? I thought you wanted Fitz and Ward to recover before anything else," a woman with strong British accent asked, sounding genuinely surprised – and a little accusing.