you'll never see the price it costs, the scars collected all of their lives (♫)
It's been a hell of a day. This morning, Daisy Johnson had been on Zephyr-3 with her team, drinking coffee and prepping for their next meeting with yet another alien species who would hopefully see Terrans as potential friends instead of food. Everything seemed normal, with no signs at all that things would go pear-shaped before dinner. Nothing could have prepared her for any of this.
The distress call comes from new allies, tentative friends who would lose all faith if they were ignored. It's a simple engine failure on their ship, easy enough for the Z-3 engineers to repair or for the ship to transport the crew back to their planet. They'll miss their meeting window if they all go, though, so Daisy makes the executive decision to go ahead alone in the quinjet shuttle. She can handle things by herself until the team catches up, and while they don't all like the decision, she's the one in charge.
She really should have listened.
After all these years, she should have known to expect the universe to do its worst to screw with her life. But a wormhole swallowing up her ship en route to the planet is a whole new level of screwing with her. The journey knocks her out, her ship jerking with violent force, and when she wakes... She's never been out on the ocean, never experienced that feeling of being truly alone without anyone in sight before, but she imagines it must feel a lot like being adrift in space without functional navigation.
After spending too much time failing to get the computer system to cooperate, she gets on the comms, trying to reach anyone who could help her and doing her best not to completely lose her shit as anxiety and panic set in. The whole dying in space thing? She's done that one and doesn't really fancy the idea of a repeat performance. Ultimately, that's what pushes her to just pick a direction and hope for the best — she can't just keep drifting, she has to do something. If Z-3 is too far out of range to reply, then she needs to either get back to them or wait somewhere safe for them to find her.
It takes hours for her to finally come across a planet, so many that her stomach reminds her that the coffee and protein bar that served as breakfast that morning had been long ago. But more important than food is getting somewhere with a breathable atmosphere so she has one less thing trying to kill her. Of course, the getting down to the planet is a... process. She'd been hoping to come across a space station or another ship, those she knows how to dock with now, but a planet? It's a miracle she manages to get down to the surface without the ship burning up in entry, and it's yet another miracle when the ensuing crash doesn't end in a fiery explosion, just a crumpled shuttle that she's pretty sure won't be flying again.
Cool. Cool cool cool. This is totally not fine. But at least she can breathe the air and the computer can still send out the beacon for when Z-3 finds its way to this part of space. (When, not if.) In the meantime, she'll just... see if she can find someone who doesn't want to eat her. If there are even inhabitants out there in that rocky landscape.
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they're written down in eternity.