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She's barely clinging to consciousness as she's pulled out of the ocean, barely clinging to Fitz, but the absolute last thing she's going to do is let go of him until they're safe. Fury pulls her up, someone reaches down for Fitz, and Jemma casts one last look at his pale unmoving face as he’s taken from her grasp before the blackness rolls over her and she's gone.
She comes to in a decompression chamber, Fury just outside, and before she pays any attention to what he's trying to tell her she scrabbles at the hem of her shirt and lifts it enough to see that the words scrawled on her hip have faded from black to the silvery faint shade of a long-healed scar. "No," she says, and then again, louder, desperate, "No, no, no."
"Simmons. He's alive," Fury says firmly, and she flattens her hand over where d'you still need a lab partner? is practically unreadable now. "He's not doing great, but he's alive."
"Let me see him," she demands, and Fury shakes his head.
"You need to stay in there until you're stabilized. We're giving him the best possible care. You saved his life, Simmons, don't put yours in danger rushing to his side when there's no good you can do him now."
"Don't tell me I can't do him any good," she snaps, pounding one fist against the glass. "He'd know I was there."
"He doesn't know anything right now," Fury says, "There's a question whether he'll ever know anything again, to be honest. He went a long time without oxygen. His brain scans aren't too robust."
"He needs me," she insists, and then in a smaller voice, "I need him. Please let me see him."
"You're staying put until the decompression cycle finishes. No argument. After that, if the doctors are finished, you can sit with him for a while." She glares at Fury through the glass, but he's not the kind of person who can be affected by a glare, no matter how venomous it is. Finally she nods, and he looks a little less grim. "Good. Get some rest. Everything's gone to hell and we're going to need all hands on deck going forward."
"Yes, sir," she says, just to get him to leave her alone, and the moment the door closes behind him she pulls her shirt up again to examine her faded soulmark. Fitz's words have always been part of her, from the very beginning of her life, and she wonders if this means he won't wake up ever, or just that he was gone long enough for his mark to fade. She wonders if her words are still on him, her neat handwriting circling his wrist reading yes, please tell me you get this, tech isn't my specialty, or if his temporary death erased those too. She's never been that curious about soulmarks, something science could never approach an explanation for, but now she curses her lack of knowledge.
She wishes she could talk to Coulson. If anyone would know about what happens to a person's soulmark after being revived from death, he would. Although, she supposes he wouldn't know about what happens to the other person's soulmark. She'd ask Skye, but Skye had confided in her that she'd never had a soulmark at all, that part of the reason she'd thrown herself into the Rising Tide the way she'd done was because she knew there was no one waiting for her out there, no one who would miss her if their soulmark suddenly faded. It sounded so lonely, the thought that there was no one meant for you. Jemma had always had Fitz's words to look forward to while she was growing up, and then once they'd met she'd always had him, never too far away to reach somehow, usually no further than the other side of the lab.
He's too far to reach now, and she only hopes she can reach him again. She wants to remember the way he kissed her before he blew the seal, that last moment before he became so terribly still, but her limbs are still heavy with the memory of his dead weight in the water, her mind's eye troubled with that last glimpse of his drowned-pale face. She rubs a thumb over her faded soulmark, heartsick at the thought that he might be lost to her, that the best the doctors can do may not be good enough, that his brilliance and his fragile pride might have been scoured out of him with the saltwater in his lungs.
It takes hours for the decompression to finish, but the instant the cycle is complete she’s out of the chamber and looking for Fitz, half-panicked until someone leads her to where he’s still and silent, hooked up to all sorts of monitoring equipment. She watches the electronic signs of his continued life for a moment, the beats of his loyal heart, the breaths taken by lungs she’d feared wouldn’t move again, the too-slight waves of his brain, levels as low as a coma patient’s. She takes his hand, her fingers trembling against his utterly still ones, and realizes that his wrist is bare, that her words have vanished from his skin like they were never there, not even the faint trace that his words left on her.
She doesn’t sob. She’s too gutted to do anything but cry silently, bent over the hospital bed, her face pressed into his shoulder, the thin fabric of the clinical gown soaking through with her tears in a matter of moments. She cries for him, for the sacrifice he made for her, for the time they spent thinking they were the platonic kind of soulmates, for all the missed opportunities. She cries for herself, for who she’ll be without him. She cries until she’s run dry, and when she lifts her head from his shoulder she murmurs, “Damn it, Fitz, come back to me, please.” She straightens the gown, and through the wet fabric she can see something dark on his shoulder. She pulls the cloth out of the way, and there it is, blazing black against his pale skin: Damn it, Fitz, come back to me, please.
Her breath catches in her throat, and she scrabbles at her own still slightly damp clothing, lifting the hem of her shirt, pulling her sleeves up, frantically searching her own skin for proof that he’ll wake up. And there it is in the bend of her elbow, handwriting as familiar to her as her own: Where are we? Jemma, you saved me...
She looks over at the EEG scanner, the low level of activity it’s reading, and she knows that he will wake up. She doesn’t know when, but he’ll wake up, and she’ll be here when he does.