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Jemma Simmons has blood on her hands.
It’s not a foreign sight, especially after the past few days. Spending time in a dystopian future ruled by a blue alien with a god complex tends to increase the chances of injury. The blood of an imperfect servant pooling on the floor, the veil of red shimmering on Abby’s outstretched arm, the stains that still permeate Fitz’s shirt, even the dull pink that glistened on her gloves as she cleaned Mack’s wound that morning—it’s a wonder that she doesn’t see a crimson-tinged darkness each time she closes her eyes.
Lately, she’s been learning to welcome it. She lets the sight of blood drive her, remind her that there is a job to do; there are people who rely on her. Red beneath her fingernails means that she is doing something. Dried brown cracked on her skin is a distraction from the horrors that are sure to catch up and crawl into her already-bulging closet of demons. Blood can be cleaned up. Washed away.
The fear that slithers into every crevice of her body when she allows herself a moment of rest is a different matter. Fitz’s presence always helps, but years at S.H.I.E.L.D. have taught her that even the inseparable Fitzsimmons can't always be connected at the hip. So she lets the blood well up beneath her fingers and focuses on patching up her teammates—her family, really—and does what she can. She’s no medical doctor (not officially, anyway) but she knows enough.
She tries to tell herself this as they race towards the Zephyr, eyes flickering between Elena’s face as she mumbles incoherently in both Spanish and English, to the ground in front of her, to her own hand pressed to the blue blanket that has been wrapped tightly around the inhuman, turning more red by the second.
“We’re here. It will be fine,” she says, trying to inject some form of reassurance into her voice. But whether the comfort is for Elena, who becomes more ashen and quiet with every step, or Mack, who surges forward in an agitated pace that is hard to follow, she’s not sure. Maybe it’s for herself as she forces the trembling voice that asks her what she’s going to do—how she can possibly fix this—behind the calm facade of Agent Simmons, biochemist.
~~~
“Mum!”
Annette Simmons was out the front door quickly, arranging her hair into a loose bun as she walked. If it wasn’t for the dark smudges beneath her eyes, one wouldn’t even know she had just returned from an eight-hour night shift at the hospital. It took her a minute to find her six-year-old daughter crouched beneath the tree at the side of their house, brown hair just barely poking out from over the bushes.
“What’s the matter, sweets?”
“Mum, look!” Jemma called again, refusing to glance up until she saw her mother’s scrubs from the corner of her eye. “It’s a robin! I think it’s wing is broken.”
Annette followed her daughter’s pointed finger to see the little bird sheltered against the roots of the tree, one wing askew and dragging across the ground. She pressed her lips together and hummed while Jemma hovered over the disheveled creature. When a pair of birds had decided to nest in their tree that summer, Jemma had become so excited that she dragged Annette to the store to buy a notebook and pack of colored pens to document nesting habits and growth patterns with. The notebook was with her now, half covered in leaves by Jemma’s feet as she strained to get closer. Annette sighed and crouched down beside her, grabbing the notebook to brush the dirt off. “It does look that way. What a shame, poor thing.”
“We need to fix it,” Jemma declared, and Annette knew better than to argue with her daughter when she adopted that firm tone; it was something that both frustrated her and caused a surge of pride to well up in her chest. “You fix people, Mum. We can heal its wing too, right?”
After a brief pause, Annette nodded. “Tell you what, let’s go inside and find a box, and we will see what we can do.”
Jemma gave a bright smile, and sprung from the ground with a vigor that carried into the next few weeks as they fed the robin bugs plucked from the garden and adjusted the makeshift splint so that it would be more comfortable. Jemma’s notebook turned from one of egg sketches to a checklist of milestones for the bird to reach. When the splint finally came off and the robin refused to fly, even after a day of sitting on the back patio, Jemma’s smile was slowly replaced by a furrowed brow that wrinkled the freckles speckled across her forehead.
Annette found her sprawled on the floor, surrounded by every book on birds—as well as a few of her own pre-med books from university, she couldn't help but notice—that could be scavenged from every shelf in her husband’s study. “She won't fly and I need to know why,” the small girl muttered as she squinted at the text in front of her. “I think I did something wrong.”
“Jemma,” Annette started, pulling the thick book off her daughter’s legs so she could drag her into her own lap. She smoothed back the silky hair that had come loose from one of Jemma’s pigtails and placed a kiss to the crown of her head. “We did all we could. Maybe the bird just needs some more time to heal, or maybe it will never fully get better, but we’ve done what we can. Some things just can't be fixed, sweets.”
The creases in Jemma’s forehead deepened, and she shook her head. “She’ll get better. You'll see,” she said before grabbing one of her books and marching out the back door. Annette sighed and began to clean up the literary tornado, only for the books to come crashing back to the ground when she heard Jemma scream. She ran outside just in time to see the neighbor's cat jump the fence, robin clenched tightly in its mouth.
~~~
Elena has blacked out by the time they reach the Zephyr and taken to the air. The no-nonsense of May’s voice when she asks Daisy for coordinates becomes white noise to Jemma as she does her best to stabilize Elena with the Zephyr’s limited resources.
With a firm command for Mack to keep Elena as still and warm as possible, Jemma makes her way to the lab in search of supplies. Her hands waver as she rummages through drawers and cabinets and her mind flashes back to a different plane, a different friend who lay bleeding out in the next room.
Daisy is tucked safely away in the Lighthouse, she reminds herself. A little bruised and still suffering from an ICER-induced headache, most likely, but alive. Jemma had even less experience back then than she does now, and even that had turned out mostly okay.
She isn't surprised when his hand wraps around her wrist, his calloused skin warm and hers cold, and she allows herself a moment to pause her frantic rushing. Deep breath in, deep breath out, Fitz’s hand an anchor in the storm.
“Jemma,” he says, quietly, and not for the first time she's amazed with how much emotion can permeate a single word. Concern, comfort, fear, determination—they are all there. She drags her gaze to meet her fiancé’s blue eyes and lets out a shuddering breath at the familiar intensity. Psychically linked, Daisy used to call it, and Jemma can read every unspoken question in one glance: are you all right? Where can I help? Do you know how amazing you are, that if anyone can do this, it's you?
His thumb draw circles on her wrist. Jemma gives him a weak smile— I'm doing my best, you do what you need to do, after this we are getting married over a bottle of gin —and presses a feather-light kiss to the corner of his mouth. He nods and allows her to push past him with her bundle of scavenged materials. She ignores the ache for his warmth that seems to have a permanent place in her chest nowadays and makes her way back to Mack, who looks small against the Zephyr floor.
~~~
Accidents weren't uncommon at the Sci-tech division of S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy. Fire extinguishers could be found in every corner, and the whiteboards some senior cadet had rigged on the outside of every lab door rarely reached past the “2 days without an explosion” mark.
What was uncommon was for Jemma Simmons—who had the lab safety manual memorized three weeks before classes even started and was rumored to graduate at the top of her class—to be the cause of the not-so-small fire that had make its way through half of her and Fitz’s personal lab, destroying the past four weeks of research and a sizable chunk of the schematics Fitz had spent the last year drawing up and perfecting.
She had her head buried in her arms with her back pressed to the wall when Fitz found her. He said nothing, but he could tell from the way that her shoulders tensed that she knew it was him.
“What the hell, Simmons,” he said finally when it became obvious she was going to continue to pretend he wasn’t there. He let his backpack land at his feet with a forceful thump (Simmons was always telling him that his handwriting was little better than chicken scratch anyway, what were a few more wrinkles?) and slid down the wall beside her. “What was it you said to me last night? Oh, that’s right. I think it was something along the lines of, ‘Oh, Fitz! It won’t be much longer. I’ll go back to my room once I finish revising my notes for the crystalline nucleation process. You go on ahead, I’ll be right behind!’” A small smile tugged at his lips as he saw her fingers twitch at his high-pitched tone.
“Stop it, Fitz.” She mumbled around the soot-singed lab coat she seemed determined to smother herself with. “I’m not in the mood.”
“I mean, I know you and homework have a special connection that I will never understand, but pulling three all-nighters in a row is a little ambitious, even for you…” Fitz trailed off when her head finally snapped up to glare at him. The fire behind her brown eyes was familiar, although it wasn’t often directed at him, but the tears that trembled on her eyelashes were unsettling. Even though he and Simmons had grown close in the past year, seeing Jemma cry was something Fitz had only experienced a handful of times. And each time it created a dark curl in his stomach that he didn’t fully understand but knew he hated. He opened his mouth, planning to switch tactics. Closed it. Opened it again only for Simmons to interrupt.
“They're going to expel me, Fitz,” she gasped, voice small and as close to breaking as Fitz had ever heard it. The tears in her eyes grew but didn't yet spill over onto her cheeks. “I just wanted to prove to Vaughn that instantaneous nucleation was plausible and now I'm going to get expelled. My career was over before it began.”
Fitz frowned and pulled at the sleeve of his cardigan. A sense of unease creeped into his veins at the thought of attending the academy without his lab partner. “Did Agent Weaver say that? Have you talked to her?”
Simmons’ lips pressed together in a thin line before she answered. “Well, no. But even if by some miracle they allow me to stay it will take weeks for our lab to be repaired. Weeks, Fitz! And that's only if they allow us to keep it. Not to mention all the work we've lost.” Her eyes widened, and though they were still a little red Fitz was relieved to see that the tears had disappeared. “Fitz! Your designs for the holographic modifier! They’re due next week and you worked so hard and—I'm so sorry!” She scrambled to her feet, nearly knocking Fitz over in process. “It's okay. I swear I can fix this! I'll go talk to Agent Costa and tonight I can—”
“Whoa, Simmons! Hey, hey!” Fitz surged to his feet as well, gripping her flailing hands in his to keep them still. Simmons blinked at him in surprise and he released them, feeling heat bloom in his face. “It's fine. I'd already uploaded them to the Sci-tech database. After the, erm, tea incident last semester I thought it best to make back-ups, so there's nothing for you to worry about.”
“Oh.” Simmons blinked a few more times, and Fitz nudged her arm with his own.
“And you won't be expelled. Cadets with half your brain have done worse and are still here, so I doubt much will come from it. And Professor Vaughn is just upset that you keep showing him up in class. He knows full well you are capable of creating a freezing compound with your eyes closed. Although, that might be the reason our lab was set on fire in the first place.”
Simmons slapped his shoulder lightly, but her lips had pulled into a smile. “Honestly, Fitz. I didn't fall asleep. I just forgot to set the timer when heating the solution.”
“Well, tonight I'll be there to make sure all the timers are set,” Fitz stated, nodding his head as though it was already decided.
“Are you sure? I don't want to drag you into my mess,” Simmons said, but with the hopeful smile that was so big it was almost blinding, Fitz wondered how she could possibly believe he would say no.
“Of course. We fix things best when we're together. Although, you should probably get some rest first. We don't want you knocking any expensive equipment over just because you can't see a foot in front of your face, yeah?”
~~~
Mack hasn't left the makeshift operating room since they've arrived. He'd been a great help at first, setting up equipment while Jemma changed into a surgical gown and smoothing Elena’s hair back while waiting for the anesthesia to take hold, but now his nervous fidgeting is threatening to break through Jemma’s tunnel of concentration.
Her focus is on Elena, on keeping her gloved hands steady as she stitches and swabs and does her best to make the inhuman as whole as she possibly can. Elena’s vitals are stable now, and she casts a brief glance to the corner of the room where Mack stands.
She recognizes his expression—can practically feel the guilt and self-blame as he clenches and loosens his fingers in a rhythmic pattern. Jemma's not the only one with blood on her hands today.
Bent over Elena’s prone form, she calls his name a few times. When that fails to elicit a response, she barks out a sharp “Agent Mackenzie.”
She doesn't see so much as feel Mack jump, can feel his panic shoot through her spine he turns attention to her. “Yoyo,” he starts. “Is she–”
“She is fine for now, Mack.” Jemma allows her voice to soften slightly, though her “Doctor Simmons” voice remains at full strength. “But I need to give her my full attention, and you need to take care of yourself. Clean yourself up, drink some fluids, attempt to rest even if you don't feel like you can, but standing here blaming yourself isn't doing you or Elena any good.”
“She was coming to help me,” Mack croaks, and Jemma's mind flashes to 70 years in the future, the body of Kasius at their feet with Mack looking helplessly loss. “She was trying to get to me and they got her. It's the bullets all over again—with Hive. She protects me and she pays the price for it.”
This is a spiral Jemma knows well, one that began during nine of the longest days of her life and continued to yank her under, from being pulled through a portal and leaving her companion behind on another planet to when she released a friend-turned-monster, trading the lives of several innocents for her own. It's a dizzying path, one that she knows is not easy to come back from, and she takes a few precious seconds to fix Mack with a steely look.
“This was not your fault. This was Hale, and betrayal, and things we don't yet understand, but this was not you. Elena made her own decision, and yes it was one with an unfortunate outcome, but she knew the variables going in. We are a team, Mack, meaning we protect each other and when everything crumbles down around us we help each other heal. This is not on your shoulders alone, so don't act like it is.” Jemma's breath comes out in short bursts when she finishes, mingling with the constant ticks of the monitor.
Mack is still, his eyes still clouded over, but the single nod he gives her is enough to loosen some of the pain in Jemma’s chest and allow her to breath again.
~~~
“You're going to help me fix this.”
The gun in her hands wasn't real. Jemma knew this, knew that both it and the man in front of her were nothing more than a stream of numbers, but never before had she been so aware of the heavy metal in her hand. What once were innocent codes of programming had tangled things, created a hellish world where friends were enemies and enemies were friends and the man she loved had been warped into becoming one of his greatest nightmares, all because of a corrupted robot who decided to play Pinocchio.
Alistair Fitz eyed her callously and Jemma couldn't understand how compassionate and brilliant Fitz could share even a strand of DNA with someone so calculating and cold. She adjusted her grip on the gun and stepped forward until Alistair had been backed into his own house.
Jemma had two PhDs and was one of the brightest minds ever to come from S.H.I.E.L.D, and she didn't care that this wasn't her smartest plan because there was no way she was about to leave the other half of their duo behind. For once, she knew this wasn't her fault—the framework was the result of a greedy scientist and a book that no amount of science would fully be able to understand. It wasn’t her fault, but Jemma was a S.H.I.E.L.D agent who had already failed one of her teammates (the image of Mace being crushed flat by slabs of concrete and steel haunted her virtual dreams last night—another failure to add to her ever-growing queue), and she was going to try her hardest not to let it happen again.
Jemma Simmons and Leopold Fitz fix things best together; it's a well-established fact of the universe, as scientifically accepted as the first law of thermodynamics or Newton’s laws of motion. Jemma Simmons and Alistair Fitz, on the other hand, are two parallel lines when it comes to doing what they think is best for his son.
Jemma couldn't remember pulling the trigger; she could remember the sensation of hands clamped tightly around her throat and her back digging into the carpet, and then a loud bang that seemed to rattle the walls as Alistair’s body slumped on top of hers. She could remember the desperate screams coming from the discarded phone as Fitz—no, not Fitz. The Doctor—called for his father.
She could remember backing away from the scene, feeling the blood soaking her jacket and knowing that once again her attempt to make things right had gone sideways.
Stop talking. Just fix it! (I wish I could)
You have to fix this. (I don't know how, Fitz)
I don't want to change Skye—the Diviner did that—I'm just trying to fix her! (You never used to be this scared, you know that?)
Voices—ones she thought she had been long past buried—erupted in her mind, and Jemma pushed them back to join the fear that she might have just lost her best friend. Again. She pushed them back and swallowed the lump in her throat, then turned from the house to go find Daisy.
~~~
Nestled beneath blankets and bandages, Elena looks peaceful. Jemma watches her chest rise and fall for a few minutes and casts one more glance at the steadily-beeping monitor before she rises and makes her way to the sink at the far end of the room. For a S.H.I.E.L.D. base that has been relatively untouched for decades, the Lighthouse is in good shape: running water, lights bright enough that she can actually make out her friends’ features, a wide variety of food. Of course, it's a little hard to see it as a paradise after experiencing the nightmare it would become if they couldn't alter the future.
Jemma rips her disposable gloves off and unties the blood-stained gown, then deposits them in a trash bag before gingerly running her hands under the water. Her eyes close at the soothing heat, and even after she has scrubbed all of Elena’s blood away she keeps her hands under until they themselves start to turn a rosy red.
She pulls up a chair and sits by Elena’s bed for a minute, hesitant to call Mack (hopefully resting, but most likely hovering by the door) just in case something should go wrong. The hills and valleys on the monitor remain consistent—unnaturally high for a normal human but relatively typical for a hummingbird like Yoyo Rodriguez.
It's not the first time Jemma’s sat by a bedside, and she's sure it won't be her last. She finds a shred of comfort in the fact that Fitz is probably already drawing up plans for potential prosthetics that would make even Coulson jealous. She adjusts the blanket around Elena’s neck and pulls the hair away from her face. She doesn't know what is going to happen next; she only knows that it won't be easy, but when has it ever been? When things inevitably go to hell, be it within the next ten minutes or next ten years, she'll be there, doing her best to pick up the pieces.
Jemma Simmons can't fix everything, but she sure as hell is going to try.