Work Text:
Fitz will never be exactly the same, the scientific papers told her. Other papers also told her that she would never be the same, but no one needed to know that. It was her fault that Fitz was struggling to string words together, after all, so she just needed to deal with her trauma on her own. He had it worse than her. And given the way he seemed to get more frustrated whenever she was in the room, he probably regretted giving her the oxygen. He stumbled more over words with her despite her attempts to help, and it seemed they couldn’t talk for more than a minute or two without him getting angry at something that was probably her fault. She wasn’t worth all this pain, and seeing her doing well was probably just a cruel reminder of what she had done to him.
He said she was more than a friend to him, and she didn’t know how to untangle the 10 years of confusing feelings she had for him. Maybe talking to Skye about it would’ve helped, but Skye was busy training; she had her own things to worry about without trying to help Jemma untangle her feelings. All she knew was she wanted what was best for him, and she clearly was making him worse. She wasn’t enough for him.
She thought leaving for Hydra would help him, so he wouldn’t have to look at her every day and regret his decision. These days, she barely slept anymore, waking up to nightmares of Fitz drowning almost every night. She invested in heavier concealer for the dark circles under her eyes, and became good at smiling, even though she felt like she was dissolving inside. It almost didn’t even feel like a lie — she had to be okay for everyone else, so she would be.
When she came back to SHIELD, she tried to act like everything was fine. But how could everything be fine when the person she cared about most in the world could barely stand to look at her? She repeated to herself over and over that it was for the best, that her staying away was letting him form relationships with Hunter and Mack and to heal. It didn’t matter that all of his angry words to her felt like they were being carved into her heart with a sharp knife; she deserved all of it after what she had done to him. It was her own fault that she couldn’t do anything right with him, that she was too scared of the whole bloody world to deal with Skye changing too. She needed to be better, stronger. She needed to be able to deal with the pain better.
She felt like she was dissolving inside and there was nothing stable for her to hold onto, with Fitz ripping the sacredness of science away from her too. But she still deserved it; she was fully responsible for all the mistakes she’d made. She wanted to stop being in pain, but she knew she deserved it. So when blood began running down her leg as she shaved her legs without thinking too much about what she was doing, she felt almost a sense of relief wash over her. She deserved to be in pain, after all she’d put Fitz through, and maybe if she hurt herself enough, she would start to get used to it.
Scientifically speaking, she knew this wasn’t healthy. She knew the relief that washed over her as the scalpel she took from the lab carved through the skin of her forearm wasn’t what she’s should be feeling. But she had this under control; she was a doctor. She wasn’t going to do any permanent damage to herself, she was only trying to increase her pain tolerance. Really, this could help make her a better agent — field agents had to go through training to resist torture and to keep fighting even when in pain. If she wanted to help SHIELD, it was only logical that she should be more equipped to go out in the field, if needed. The slight ease of the guilt as she reminded herself that she deserved this as her arm throbbed in pain was just a nice bonus.
It’s not hard to hide things with long sleeves and a smile. No one knew she was hiding behind a facade; the pain made the smile feel more real, if anything. She liked the way it felt when the harsh fabric of her clothes rubbed against barely healing scars, the calm she got from pressing down on a cut she gave herself the night before when she needed to think clearly in the lab.
She stopped out of pure survival instinct on Maveth. She needed to get back to Fitz, and she needed to be alive. She could get what she deserved when she was back, but losing her would only cause him more pain. She would do whatever it took to get back to him. She told herself it had nothing to do with her loving him.
He thought the scars were from Maveth. He saw the ones on her forearms when he pulled her back to Earth. He thought the way her eyes slid away from his and her refusal to respond was because she didn’t want to talk about her experiences on the dark planet. When she eventually told him the story of what happened, he noticed she didn’t mention the scars. But he still didn’t ask, not wanting to push her.
She felt so guilty about how nice he was being to her through all this, despite her inability to understand and articulate her feelings. She felt so guilty about what had happened to Will, but also about how she hurt Fitz by telling him. The wave of pain that washed over her as she let the kitchen knife delve into the skin of her hip made her feel calmer than she had in months. She knew it wasn’t healthy, but the familiar pain was oddly comforting. She deserved the throbbing and the stinging and the discomfort at the brush of her clothes, after how she had made the people she loved suffer.
When she was tortured, she thought she would be able to keep herself from screaming due to her increased pain tolerance. Turns out things feel a lot different when you're not the one holding the knife. She felt guilty for how she tortured Fitz with her screams, for not being strong enough to handle it. Afterwards, she let herself be treated by medical, the recent cuts she’d given herself luckily being attributed to her ordeal as well. She didn’t exactly take the best care of herself while she was healing though, intentionally putting pressure on the wounds and reveling and the pain that arced through her.
For her first time with Fitz, she turned out the lights and stayed under the covers. She didn’t want him to see the ugly things she’d done to herself, didn’t want him to ask questions. If he felt a cut he’d assume it was from the torture. But if he could see her, he would see the scars that decorated her limbs, crisscrossing lines twining around her body.
The second time though, back in his bunk on base, he wouldn’t let her hide. She hoped he wouldn’t notice or would at least ignore the grotesque lines, but the look on his face after he took off her shirt quickly shattered that fantasy. He gently cupped her cheek with one hand, concern written all over his face.
“Talk to me Jemma. Please?”
She spent over a year acting like she was fine but one plea from him and she was finally breaking open, curling up into a ball on her side, tears and guilt spilling out of her. Fitz wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her to him, letting her cry into his chest. He was glad she couldn’t see his face, because he was on the verge of crying himself. He didn’t want to interrupt her, knowing she needed to get it all out, but it broke his heart to know she has been holding all of this guilt inside of her and that a lot of it was because of him.
When all of the words had spilled out of her and her sobs had quieted to small sniffles, she felt better than she had in about as long as she could remember. Better than the bite of a blade had ever made her feel. After desperately trying to hold herself together for so long, it felt good to finally break apart, and to know that Fitz was there to put her back together at the end of it all.
“You’re trying to hold the weight of the world all by yourself, Jemma. Feeling guilt isn’t a bad thing — it means you care about people and you are a good person — but you have to learn to let it go. We can’t change the things that have already happened, as much as we might want to, so we just have to learn to live with them. Tearing yourself apart doesn’t help anyone, Jemma. You don’t deserve that, no matter what you keep telling yourself. It’s okay to feel guilty, but you have to let it out, to tell someone if that helps, so you can move on. You deserve to be happy.”
He wanted to tell her that she didn’t even need to feel guilty for most of the things she hated herself for, but he knew that wasn’t what she needed to hear right now. She needed to learn to let go of guilt, and then they could talk about putting less pressure on herself. She truly was a good person for how much she cared about the effects of her actions on others, but boundaries have to be drawn and she needed to know not everything was her responsibility. But those were conversations they would have to have later; he knew better than anyone that healing was a long process. Baby steps.
“Thank you,” she whispered to him, pulling back to look up at him, tears still glistening in her eyes a bit. She wanted to say more, but she knew he understood.
He laid her down on her back and carefully took off the rest of her clothes, watching her to make sure she was okay with everything. Starting at her feet and slowly moving up her body, he softly kissed all her scars and healing cuts. He whispered to her that she was beautiful and strong, and she maybe even started to believe him a little bit. She felt tears welling up in her eyes again, but this time from the sheer love and tenderness in his actions.
After that, she knew he was watching her. He made sure she was actually taking care of her cuts and letting them heal, catching her whenever she started to put pressure on them to feel the bite of pain. She knew he did it out of love, but it also made her feel guilty. She didn’t want him to feel like he had to take care of her; this should be her issue to deal with. When he found her in her room one night, crying softly, a blade poised over her forearm, he wanted to cry. He wished he could take her pain away from her, but he settled for placing the knife on her desk and gathering her into his arms, telling her to squeeze his hands instead of hurting herself. When she told him he didn’t have to do this for her, he smiled softly and pressed a kiss to her hairline.
“I know. I’m here because I love you, and you can’t make me stop caring about you.”
There were days where she was doing fine, but also days where she shut her eyes tightly against the tears that wanted to break through and grabbed his hands tightly. Sometimes it was in the lab, sometimes it was at dinner, sometimes it was in the middle of the night. He always wanted her to know that there were people there who cared for her, and she didn’t need to feel guilty for letting them help her. Jemma eventually talked to Daisy about it too, who admitted that she knew what it was like. Bouncing around foster homes for her whole childhood wasn’t exactly conducive to the best mental health, but one thing she learned was that ice cubes helped: the bite of the cold was far less dangerous, but could effectively curb the urge.
It would be a while before Jemma would be able to fully let go of her guilt for everything that has happened and to deal with guilt over new events, but she would get there eventually. The urge to pick up a blade and blame herself would probably never fully go away, but that wasn’t the real end goal of healing. It was more about learning to deal with the bad, to choose to tell Fitz or Daisy how she was feeling instead of holding it all inside. Perhaps her Britishness was to blame for her struggle to let go and break down, but sometimes falling apart was the only way to rebuild.