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May finds her in the cockpit. They’d spent a few mornings there together, back before the Bus was grounded – May is always up before the others, but sometimes Jemma would enter with an extra mug of tea, saying her thoughts woke her up early. She’d take the co-pilot’s seat and they’d watch the day start through the clouds.
May enters slowly, deliberately making noise in the hope that Jemma will intuit that it’s her. She doesn’t mean to startle the girl. It’s the last thing Jemma needs.
“It’s the highest up I can get,” she says, talking more to the glass of the windshield than to May herself. The plane is enclosed; she’s staring at the concrete gray of the inside of the hangar, but May understands to an extent. The Playground is beneath dirt. They’ve only been there three weeks but May’s already had a few dreams of clawing her way to the surface.
Jemma’s hugging her knees tightly. Not a day since they all first stepped on this Bus has May forgotten how small Jemma really is.
“I thought you didn’t like heights,” May questions, sitting down smoothly in the pilot’s chair.
“I don’t,” she responds, “but my not liking it doesn’t seem to prevent me from falling.”
May can’t argue with that, as much as she furiously wants to.
“This is the longest we’ve been apart in ten years,” she murmurs.
May nods once, but Jemma isn’t looking. May has seen too much to tell Jemma it’s all going to be alright. She won’t spit out the same old desperate sentence. She’s already heard it from everyone else.
“When I was leaving for the Hub,” she says slowly, before sniffling, “before HYDRA, he said at some point you’re going to need my help.” May almost rolls her eyes. Sounds like Fitz. “And I said something flippant back, but…he was right, in a way.” She drops down to whisper. “I need him right now. I don’t know how to fix this without him.”
“This isn’t his area of expertise, it’s yours,” May probes, falsely benign. She needs to find the root of this without triggering any anguish in her scientist. If that’s even possible.
“I think,” but then she stops. Squints. Swallows. “I think if it was anyone else I would’ve solved it already. With or without his help.” May watches her hover near eruption. “I don’t need him. I don’t. I just very badly want him around.”
And she breaks apart. Gasps and white-knuckled grips on her forearms. But she’s still turning her head away, trying to stay silent, trying to hide it. May understands the instinct. But she can’t help but reach out, place a hand on her curled spine and try to comfort.
And this shatters her even more somehow.
“It’s all my fault,” she chokes out, wet and toxic. “I couldn’t leave him. It’s my fault. It’s my fault. I couldn’t leave him.” And she repeats it over and over as she rocks. May feels despair swimming in her core. No.
“Of course you couldn’t leave him,” May says. She’s unsettlingly shocked. How could she think this was a bad thing?
“Jemma,” May says sharply, and the girl startles a bit, unused to hearing her first name out of a mouth other than his. Her wide eyes cling to May’s. “Of course you couldn’t leave Fitz.” Jemma winces at his name. “You have done some incredibly brave and selfless things. Things you were never trained to do. And things have happened to you that never should have.” And I’m sorry, May wants to finish. “I’m so proud of you,” she says instead.
Jemma’s still crying but she seems to be properly looking at May for the first time. May hopes she realizes this isn’t just about Fitz’s condition. It’s about every single trial the last several months have brought.
“But you’re not looking for praise right now. That’s the last thing you want to hear.” And May knows it’s true. She’s seen this expression in the mirror before. No one wants to be admired for living with the fallout of the worst day of their lives.
Jemma braces herself a bit, hoping to get what she wants. May makes a different call.
“You’re looking for someone to yell at you. To confirm your suspicions that you made the wrong choice. You want the world to match how you feel inside. To tell you that this is your fault so you have a reason to burn yourself down. I know how that feels. But I’m not going to be that person for you. And neither is Coulson or Skye or Trip. You made the right choice, Jemma. You made the only choice.”
May doesn’t expect much. She knows this feeling. She knows Jemma can’t believe her just yet. But May will not stop telling her anyway.
“The guilt you feel about Fitz’s condition is—” May pauses to try and sedate the fury rising within her. “—undeserved.” She just barely gets the word out evenly, overwhelmed with an instinct she had scarcely felt in her life. She wraps her arms around Jemma’s heaving form and drops her voice to whisper in her ear. “But it’s okay to feel however you feel. It’s okay to feel like this. It’s okay.” Over and over. Over and over, and bone protests against muscle as the girl quakes. But May’s arms are very sure. Secure. “You can feel however you need to feel.”
May feels so tender, it terrifies her. But she holds on until Jemma is just sniffling, sleepy and wasted after being emptied out.
May leads the girl not to her own bunk, nor to Fitz’s. No one’s ever been inside May’s bunk besides May herself, but she helps Jemma lay down in bed anyway.
“I’ll be right outside,” May says quietly, “until you’re ready to go back down.”
(Jemma doesn’t know how to tell May that the smell of her sheets is so comforting she wants to cry again, or that it’s not her fault that any of these things happened to them either, or that she loves her. So she whispers a thank you and drifts as the door closes.)
And May stands guard all day.