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“It’s not your fault.”
“She was dead before she hit the water.”
“There’s no need to beat yourself up over it.”
“She was protecting you.”
“The locking mechanism in place on the door would have taken too long for even the most experienced hacker to hack.”
“You couldn’t have made it anyways.”
“There’s nothing anybody could have done.”
“Fitz, Fitz come on, we need to get going.”
There’s a voice off to his side, one he distantly recognizes as Skye, a hand squeezing his in what is surely meant to be a reassuring manner.
They’re trying to get him to leave, probably to take him back to headquarters no that the ceremony is over. Now that everything’s been said and done they just expect him to get back to work, to act like everything’s normal when he stares at the empty half of the lab that she used to inhabit.
He’s been standing there for a while, staring at the same hunk of stone as if it’s supposed to make him feel better, give him the absolution that he doesn’t have, that he can’t seem to find no matter how hard he tries.
He fumbles with something pulling it out of his pocket, and setting it on top of the gravestone. The syringe that he took (stole) from the bus. The anti-serum. She spent so long drilling the world into his head, that he can’t get it out, no matter how hard he tries.
“Anti-serum, Fitz!”
“The anti-serum, it worked. Just took a minute for everything to kick in, the shock killed the mouse, but it would have worked. It would have…”
“I know, sweetie, I know. We all tried our best.”
Saved her.
It would have saved her.
Thing didn’t have to end up like this.
“I’m engineering, she’s biochem.”
“You’ve been right beside me the whole damn time!”
“Since I’m not the one wearing full spectrum googles, that I designed, I don’t know.”
Sometimes he replays every conversation that they’ve had, everything thing he’s said to try and find an answer for things, to try and make peace with her, with himself.
It doesn’t entirely work.
He can still hear her voice in the back of his head, nagging at him worrying, laughing again. He can hear her clear as day, clear as any of the days they had been together before, through college and the academy and SHIELD, and everything.
When he closes his eyes, the image is gone once more, and all he can see is the blackness and her voice wrapping around him like a blanket.
“I’m Jemma, Jemma Simmons. Though most people just call me Simmons…”
“Fitz and Simmons, we’re a team, always sticking together, remember that.”
“Oh Fitz!”
“I told them I wouldn’t go if they didn’t let me bring you with me. So I mean, do you want to? It’ll be exciting, an adventure in the field.”
“Fitz, I don’t know what you think you’re doing-“
“Together,” he mumbles the word’s frozen on his lips.
It was hardly even winter, but here and now it felt so cold that he could hardly breathe, trapped in his own skin.
Or was it fall, still.
Fall…
Fall…
Fall…
Falling.
“Jemma?! What are you doing? No. NO!”
However, the only thing that he can see is her falling from that plane and him being trapped behind the bullet-proof glass. He pounds against it, but it won’t give, and now he really wishes they had gone through field training so he would have known what to do when that moment came, so he wouldn’t have been standing there staring back at her unable to do anything.
Unable to change anything as she plummeted from the sky.
There was a moment there, at the very end, where she looked back. (Why did she look back? If she already knew that she was going to jump.) Just in time to see him, their eyes meeting briefly.
“No!”
“Jemma! No!”
Sometimes he stays up wondering at night if that was the last thing she saw, if she closed her eyes when it came time to fall, when she stepped out of his life, and into something else, into the nothingness.
His own eyes snap open, because it’s back again, the one thing he can’t forget, the wind whipping through her hair as it carried her away.
“You and Simmons are so tight, it’s like you’re psychically linked .”
Now, what was he supposed to do without her?
There’s no section in the SHIELD handbook to tell him how he’s supposed to go on when his partner dies, when he feels like half of his soul, the better half, is just gone and there is nothing left to fill the empty space left behind.
One of the higher up suggests that if it’s really getting to him that he could take to one of the SHIELD employed psychoanalyses.
Other people tell him to just move on, that this happens, that they all knew the risk when they signed up.
He knew the risks, but whenever he had calculated the risks, the things that he might have lost, injuries he might have sustained now that they were out in the field.
There was one thing that he had never considered, never even thought about.
Losing her.
And then realizing that he had been in love with her this whole time, and never getting to say it.
He could only echo the words to the empty air and a hole in the ground.
“I think I might have been in love with you.”