Chapter Text
“The damage to the frontal lobe was too much… He may never be himself anymore… We detected massive trauma in Broca’s area...“ The voices sounded so gloomy. Suspended in the whiteness, Fitz could not make out their faces - all his senses were focused on her face. She was crying. That was bad. He never wanted to make Jemma cry… He tried to shout. “Jemma, look at me. I’m here…It’s OK... Can you hear me? I’m here…” But she didn’t seem to hear, all her attention turned to whomever the gloomy voices belonged to. “Jemma… Don’t give up on me…” he pleaded. Her head turned around suddenly and Fitz was sure that this time she heard his words. She walked over to his bed and ran her fingers softly over his hair. Her beautiful face was close enough to feel her breath. Honey-brown eyes looked at him with such deep sadness that it made his heart ache. “You have to wake up Fitz. Please, you have to.”
-0-
Jemma jolted awake. She used to have regular nightmares about those nine days that Fitz spent in coma. It was the first time her world fell apart so completely. But those particular nightmares faded as new ones emerged, once the intense pain of that experience got buried under all the other fresher trauma. There were certainly enough terrors to choose from. This time though her dream was so vivid - she could almost hear the doctor’s subdued voice talking about the damage to the frontal lobe and smell the disinfectant in the room. It brought back a weird memory. On that day in the hospital she had had the strangest feeling; she could have sworn she heard Fitz’s voice calling her but when she went over to his bed, he was lying motionlessly hooked up to whirring machines, still in a coma. She had dismissed the voice as a hallucination brought on by the sleepless hours she spent by his bedside, and never really thought about it afterwards.
But now she wondered why she started dreaming about this again. She could not shake the feeling that it was somehow important. Fitz always used to tell her to sleep on the problems she could not solve, that sometimes the dreams would answer the questions she didn’t quite figure out how to ask.
She got out of bed and headed towards the kitchenette to make tea. As she stepped through the door, she found Daisy at the counter, nursing a cold bottle of water.
“Couldn’t sleep either?” Jemma looked at Daisy’s bloodshot eyes.
“No, I’ve been having trouble lately. The joint pains are getting worse.” The serum they created may have helped Daisy to save the world against Graviton, but it didn’t come without a price. These things never did. The power-up had put too much strain on her bones and joints and even though Jemma had tried everything she could to help her, so far, all she managed to do was to slow down the deterioration. Daisy put on a brave face, as always, but the diminishing supply of painkillers was a clear sign that things were getting worse. “What’s your excuse?” she asked flippantly.
“Nightmares.” Jemma admitted, but when she saw the concern in Daisy’s eyes, she immediately curled her lips into a smile and waved. “It’s probably nothing. All the stress of looking for Fitz…And now...you know... ”
Daisy furrowed her brow. “No, I don’t know. Is everything OK with him?”
“Yeah, of course,” smiled Jemma, but the smile faded under Daisy’s scrutiny. She shook her head slightly then sighed. “I don’t know - it just feels like he’s so far away. It makes no sense.”
“Could it be the adjustment?” Daisy asked. “I mean his memory problems…”
“What memory problems?” Jemma interrupted. Fitz never said a word about memory problems. Last time he woke up from cryo-freeze, he had no memory problems at all.
“He didn’t mention them to you?” Daisy seemed surprised.
“No.” Jemma felt annoyed. Fitz had no right to keep medically relevant information from her. Not only because they were together, but well, she was the only doctor on board. If anything was wrong, she had to know.
Daisy took a long sip from her bottle. “He’s probably just embarrassed by it…I mean you remember how he was after the coma...”
“Yes. Surely you’re right…and everything is fine,” Jemma nodded, stirring her tea over and over with a sinking feeling that nothing was fine.
-0-
“Wake up, Fitz. Please, you have to.” Right. He had somewhere to be. With Jemma, to be precise. He was somewhere, somewhere deep and dark, wet and spongy. It was completely crazy, but it felt like he was buried inside his own brain. The thought made him want to throw up, until he remembered that he had no body - well, not really. Bloody hell. He was a consciousness being buried alive by a rogue programming. He wasn’t even sure if “alive” made any sense in this situation. Was this what having a “soul” meant? Anyways, philosophy was not going to help him here. He had to think of it differently, like an engineer. To figure a way out of here, he needed to break the problem down to solvable pieces.
The brain was like a giant processing chip, so he just had to get his bearings and find the pathways. Feeling the spongy walls with his hands he tried to judge its shape and dimension. It was curved, shaped like an almond. Right. He was inside the amygdala. That was no good. Too far from the frontal lobe where he could take over speech… But the amygdala was part of the limbic system that ruled emotions. Maybe that was a way to reach out to Jemma. After all, their love was stronger than any curse, any known law of science. Their psychic link that had saved them so many time in the past had to work.
These neural pathways on brain diagrams always looked like a straight tunnel. Oh boy, did those drawings get it wrong! The place was more like an impenetrable labyrinth of gooey gray flaps and slime. Fitz tried to pick a direction but could not get his bearings and soon he stumbled along blindly in the maze. The slime seemed to stick to him and weigh him down. OK, this was clearly a terrible idea. He would never make it out here, he thought dejectedly.
“Follow me!” The voice rang high and crystal clear. It was not Jemma’s voice, but still one that he recognized. The boy standing in front of him had sandy-brown curls and freckles, and the same unmistakably blue eyes that he saw every time he looked into the mirror. The boy was him. “I can lead you out of here,” he held out his hand.
-0-
The wires that crisscrossed the underside of the Zephyr’s control panel were a whole new amazing universe to discover. The design was the dream of an incredibly creative mind. His own mind, strangely. It was peaceful being inside of the puzzle. His worries about the other Fitz, about SHIELD or his thoughts of revenge on the inhuman melted away. Only the problem existed - it was as close as he ever came to being in the moment. Being aligned with himself, with the child who loved tinkering and figuring out how things worked.
“Can I get some more light here?” he said loudly. One of the little drones whirred and angled the light as instructed. The other one scanned the wires for possible malfunctions.
“So what do you think?” Mack stuck his head under the panel.
“Well, the glitch seems to be in this circuit over here…” The Doctor pointed to a bunch of wires.
Mack patted his shoulders with a grin. “You’re right, Turbo, you’re right.”
“I often am…” the Doctor muttered drily.
“This is just like the good old days…,” Mack handed him the crimpers.
“Yeah. Good old days.” he took the tools and hooked up the wires that came loose. As he crawled out from under the panel he found Jemma standing over him.
-0-
“There you are,” she said with a nervous smile.
“Fitz and I were fixing the navigation system; it’s been acting up lately.” Mack explained. “My man here still has the magic touch.”
Fitz smiled. It wasn’t a cold, detached smile. It was one of those real Fitz smile that lit up his eyes with warmth and love. “Jemma… be careful... he is not me.”
Jemma looked at Fitz startled. “What did you say?”
He stared back at her with expressionless eyes. “What? Nothing. The wiring is fixed. Were you looking for me?”
“Yeah, I need you in the lab,” Jemma looked away.
“Yeah, OK. I just need to put away the drone,” he said. He pushed the button on the remote, Happy and Bashful came buzzing through the air. Fitz opened the DWARVES-case and put the Happy inside.
“Wait! That’s Bashful’s place,” said Jemma.
Fitz looked at her blankly. “Pardon?”
“You mixed up the dwarves.” Jemma pointed out, her voice faltering.
“It doesn’t matter,” Fitz shrugged and closed the lid. “Didn’t you say you needed me in the lab?”
Jemma looked at him puzzled. Fitz not once in his life mixed up the dwarves. They weren’t drones to him, they were like personal friends. “ He is not me.” A cold shiver ran down her spine.
-0-
The stress fractures on the bones looked like delicate spiderwebs, spreading everywhere. That was bad news for the inhuman, but perhaps the opportunity he needed to deal with the threat she presented to him.
“That doesn’t look good,” he turned to Jemma.
“Understatement of the century, Fitz.” She enlarged the images on the computer. “These are from two weeks ago and this is from yesterday. You see?”
“It’s deteriorating fast,” nodded the Doctor. The human body was not designed for inhuman powers, they were unnatural. It was just a fact. That’s why he designed Project Looking Glass with such care. It was meant to give Ophelia a body so perfect that could take on all the powers they had collected without any problems. To be the hero she was meant to be. “So even with Daisy not using her powers, the stress on her body continues to worsen.”
“Exactly. I’ve tried to slow it down, but I’m out of ideas,” Jemma confessed looking at him expectantly. Right. This was the part where Fitz was supposed to jump in with brilliant ideas.
“Have you tried putting back the inhibitor?” the Doctor asked. The device could be a real shot to give the inhuman’s body a chance to heal, and well, as an added bonus, he would be safe from her powers.
“Fitz, we don’t know anything about the Kree technology.” Jemma looked at him horrified. “Daisy is not a lab rat.”
“Come on Simmons. Isn’t unknown technology what drew you to SHIELD in the first place? Expanding knowledge? Using it for humanity’s betterment?” He remembered these lines from her SHIELD intake file.
“Yes, but there are immense risks…” she objected. “Even if it works, the surgery itself could have complications.”
“There are always risks. But you’ve thought about it - didn’t you?” He looked at her and she bit her lips. Bingo. For all her goody-goody talk, Simmons was a hard scientist like him, ready to push boundaries. Working in the lab with her had its appeal. He could almost see why the other Fitz was so crazy about her. “Of course you did. You’re a scientist after all. A good one. That’s what we do, we follow the puzzle.”
“There is nothing it can tell you. I’ve checked the device, but there is no obvious clue as to how it works,” Jemma pulled out the inhibitor from a box.
It sounded like a challenge. Maybe Jemma Simmons was not as brilliant as everyone seemed to think. The Doctor held out his hand. “Maybe you just didn’t know what to look for.”
-0-
Jemma watched Fitz taking apart the Kree device with agile fingers. Laser-focused on his work, it really felt familiar, working side by side, like the good old days. Still, something seemed off - the callousness, the cold science - it just wasn’t the Fitz she knew. It sounded exactly like him . The Doctor. But he was Fitz or was he? “ He is not me.” She could have sworn she heard him say it. Maybe her mind was really just crumbling under the stress.
She turned her attention back to the images on the computer, trying to figure out the pattern of the progression of the fracture lines. Analysing the data could help predict the rate of deterioration. As they worked silently for a while, each focusing on their task, Jemma couldn’t stop herself stealing sideways glances at Fitz who seemed completely absorbed with the device.
“We have a winner here,” Fitz exclaimed and she walked over to his work-station. He had the device hooked up to a machine that showed a rhythmic pulsating pattern. Jemma leaned closer.
“You’re measuring the resonant frequencies, but I’ve already tested for that…”
“Not in the Theta-wave range...” he pointed at the screen.
Jemma frowned. “But that doesn’t make sense - Daisy’s abilities work when she’s awake, not in deep sleep…”
“My research has shown that inhuman abilities work already at lower resonant frequencies… so I bet this gizmo functions like a continuous EMP disrupting the neuropaths by blocking the lower waves.” He sounded obviously pleased with himself. But Jemma was only half-listening to the explanation.
“ Your research?” she asked sharply.
Fitz looked taken aback. He bit his lips. “The Doctor’s research, obviously,” he corrected on a low, strained voice.
“You said you don’t hear him.”
“I don’t. But I have the memories, Jemma, so why not use it?” he asked. Why not indeed? Jemma thought. Still, the Framework was tainted by the Darkhold. Could they trust anything coming out of there? Could she trust Fitz? Or whoever this person was?
“Even then, we don’t know how we could attach it. Or if it’s safe,” she shrugged.
Fitz pulled up the images from before, taken when the device was still inside Daisy’s head. “It looks like it was connected to the vestibulocochlear nerve.”
“Are you suggesting we do brain surgery here on Zephyr?”
“You asked me to help. What did you expect exactly?” he snapped at her impatiently.
“Honestly? Something more like a new superhero suit...” she had hoped that just like the time when he made Daisy’s gauntlet, he would come up with something ingenious.
“Right, because playing dress-up is how you solve problems,” he scoffed. Jemma frowned - it was all wrong - Fitz always loved superhero suits. “Come on, you know I’m right, Jemma,” he said evenly. “Let’s work with what we have.” He picked up the Kree device with tweezers and dropped it into a blue specimen bag.
Jemma stared at him dumbfounded. “Why did you put it in the blue bag?”
“It was the closest.” he shrugged. “What is your problem?”
B is for blue for biological. It was on the tip of her tongue, but then the words flashed in her mind again. “Be careful, Jemma… He is not me.” He couldn’t know what she suspected. She needed more proof.
Think fast, she told herself. “OK, I hate to admit, but it may be our best shot. However, I’ll need to set up the brain scanner first, to make sure it works properly. I’ll hook you up.”
Fitz frowned. “Why on me? I’m not an inhuman.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk to Daisy until I’m certain there’s a good chance this works. I don’t want to rattle her unnecessarily. She’s been through a lot. Don’t be a wuss, we are just testing the monitor.”
“I’m not a wuss,” he grimaced then pondered for a minute. “Fine.”
Jemma hooked up the sensors on his head, sending the map of his brain to the computer screen. The activity going on was astounding - it was lit up everywhere; frontal lobe, limbic system, amygdala were all buzzing. Jemma didn’t know how else to put it - it seemed like there was a war inside his brain.
“Are you having memory problems?” she asked.
“No. Why? Do you see something wrong?” he seemed nervous. His dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex lit up with activity. He was trying to deceive her in some way.
“Daisy mentioned something,” she said casually.
“Oh that? It was only temporary. That’s why I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want you to worry,” he replied. Jemma had her eyes fixed on the screen. Science showed it to her black and white. He was lying through his teeth.
“All set. Thanks, Fitz.” Jemma smiled, even though she felt numb inside. A fter everything she lost, after everything they went through to find him again - this is what the universe gave her? Instead of the man she loved, her greatest fear. A mockery of her dreams. Fitz was right, they were truly cursed. “I’ll go and find Daisy. In the meantime, can you check the motion control of the containment module, please? It’s been acting up.”
“Yeah, sure.” Fitz grabbed his tools and stepped into the module.
Her heart pounding, Jemma pushed the button sealing the the door of the pod shut. S he was either doing the right thing or the biggest mistake of her life. Fitz looked up startled and Jemma saw hate flashing in his eyes for a moment before he managed to school his features. They looked at each other for a long, tense moment. Fitz broke his eyes away first, then started to bang on the door.
“Let me out, Jemma!” he yelled.
“Not until you tell me what’s going on, Fitz,” she shook her head. “Or shall I call you Doctor?”
“You are out of your mind. It’s me, Jemma,” he pleaded softly. She wavered for a moment, he almost sounded like Fitz. But the message kept playing in her mind; “ He is not me .”
Jemma pressed her hands over her ears. “I’m not sure who you are. Tell me the truth, please. We can figure it out together if you talk to me.”
Fitz didn’t reply. Instead, he took out his tools and started unscrewing the control panel inside the pod.
“I created an override. You will not be able to open it from inside,” Jemma warned him, holding up a remote button.
“No, but I can do this.” The sirens started to blare, filling the Zephyr with the sounds of emergency. “Let’s see which one of us will sound crazy,” he said coldly.
Mack, Yoyo and Daisy came running to the lab. All three of them stopped short as they took in the scene in front of them.
“What’s going on?” Mack demanded in his booming voice.
“Let me out, Mack. Jemma is acting confused, she locked me in here. I have no idea why. Just open the door, I can help her.” Fitz pleaded with Mack. Jemma had to give it to him, he certainly sounded concerned.
Mack turned to Jemma frowning. “Simmons - what’s going on. Are you completely crazy? Open the door.”
She looked back at him trying to hold back the tears stinging her eyes. “It’s not him. It’s not him. I can prove it.”