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“How long has he been like this?” Simmons asked softly. Beyond the glass in front of her, Fitz was puttering around the lab. His mouth was moving as he muttered to himself, gaze shooting sideways every so often, like- like-
Like there was someone else there.
“A few weeks?” Skye, standing next to her, approximated. “He barely does anything or talks to anyone anymore. He just works.”
Simmons wrapped her arms around herself. The thinness of her sweater had nothing to do with the chill she felt stabbing at her spine. “I never should have left.”
“Hey, you can’t blame yourself for this,” Skye said firmly, though she’d had the same thoughts herself on some of her more frustrated days. “You went through something crazy traumatic. You were betrayed by someone you trusted to protect you above all else, you almost drowned, and then even after you’d been saved your best friend, well, he-“
“He shattered,” Simmons breathed. She reached out and rested her hand on the glass. It wasn’t reflective; if Fitz looked up, he would see her. Old Fitz would have teased her about looking like a longing sap.
Simmons had no idea what New Fitz would do.
“I should go in and see him,” she said finally, reluctance and anticipation warring for dominance in her chest, “instead of just standing here watching him like he’s some animal at the zoo.”
Skye nodded, reaching out to give her shoulder a quick rub. “Good luck.”
Simmons inwardly flinched. Leo Fitz was her best friend, her platonic (or maybe more than platonic?) soulmate. She shouldn’t need luck.
The door made a soft hissing sound as Simmons pressed the button that slid it into the wall. She took a deep, deep breath, inhaling chemicals and courage, and cautiously approached her parter. “Fitz?”
“Hm?” Fitz’s head jerked up and around, and he glanced in confusion towards his right before looking back to Simmons. His face cleared. “Huh. You changed clothes.”
“You haven’t seen me today,” Simmons reminded him with a strained laugh.
Fitz gave her an odd look. “Silly Jemma,” he mumbled, turning back to the table. “Of course I have. We’ve been working together all… all…” He snapped his fingers, searching for the word. “Afternoon. All afternoon.”
Simmons felt her heart sink. Apparently the vocabulary instant recall still hadn’t quite recovered from the multiple minutes Fitz had spent without oxygen to the brain. A shudder ran up her spine and Simmons chomped down on her cheek as memories of icy cold salt water and burning lungs filled her mind.
“Fitz, I just got back,” she pressed gently. “From my trip, remember?”
“Going to get coffee is hardly a trip,” Fitz snorted. He glanced at her, eyes softening. “You need to get out more, Simmons.”
Said the man who’d been, according to Skye and May, cooped up in a lab almost nonstop for over three weeks.
“Well, um…” Simmons felt her throat catch and she looked away. “Well, I’m just going to step out for a bit. I’ll be back soon though, okay? Don’t- don’t go anywhere.”
He gave her an offhanded wave, more like a shooing gesture if anything, and Simmons made a break for the exit.
“I don’t understand,” she gasped to Skye, who’d barely had time to make it halfway down the hall. “He wasn’t even- he wasn’t even surprised to see me.”
“That’s because he has been seeing you.”
Simmons spun in surprise to see a tall, broad shouldered man making his way towards them. “Alphonso Mackenzie,” he introduced himself, sticking out a hand. “My friends call me Mack. You must be Jemma Simmons, huh?”
Simmons nodded, too frazzled by his words to concentrate much on being polite. “I’m sorry, Mack, but what did you mean when you said that Fitz has already been seeing me? I haven’t made contact with him -anyone- for weeks.”
Mack tapped at his temples. “It’s all in here. At first I wasn’t sure exactly what the deal was; it was like his eye kept catching on something that I couldn’t see. But then I started tuning into what he was actually saying. All those times he was muttering to himself in the lab, he was talking to you.”
Simmons felt like someone had taken a hot butter knife and slipped it between her ribs. No physical damage. Nothing she could patch up. Just pain, pain, pain.
“Excuse me just a moment,” she mumbled, before pushing past the small throng of agents and rushing down the hall. She heard Skye calling after her and panicked, ducking into the nearest empty doorway.
That doorway ended up being a supply closet. Simmons let out a half-laugh-half-whimper and shrank against the wall, tucking in between a mop and a hazmat suit. She was barely there for three seconds when the door creaked open again.
“Um…” Skye poked a head in, eyeing her concernedly. “Simmons… what are you doing in the closet?”
“I don’t know,” Simmons admitted with a slight wail to her voice. “I just needed to get away from all of… that.”
“Fitz is going to be okay,” Skye told her gently, pushing into the closet and sitting down opposite Simmons so that their knees just barely bumped. “Don’t you think he’s made improvements since you last saw him?”
Simmons stared at her incredulously. “Skye, he didn’t even think I was real.”
“Yeah, but-“ Skye broke off and sighed. “Okay, okay. Things are still kind of rough. But, like… you’re here now. What if that was what was stopping him from fully getting better?”
Skye knew she’d said the wrong thing the moment Simmons’ eyes welled. “Oh God,” she whispered, ducking her head. Her hair, cropped chin-length just before she went undercover, flopped forward to cover her face. “How could I leave him?”
“I don’t know how many different ways I can say it, Simmons,” Skye sighed, reaching out and patting her knee. “He wasn’t the only one who needed to heal. Sometimes hurt people can’t help other hurt people. But now you’ve had time, and now you’re… okay?”
Simmons shrugged.
“Well, now you’re mostly okay, and you can work your magic and then Fitz will be fine and we can just-“ Skye let out a frustrated breath. “We can just get back to normal, already. Or… as close as we can get to normal with Ward locked up and new team members and, you know, no functioning SHIELD.”
“I shouldn’t have run away,” Simmons murmured, lifting her head. For once, she wasn’t talking about the time a few weeks ago when she’d abandoned the team. She was speaking of running away from Fitz in the lab, just a few minutes before. “I need to stay and deal with whatever- whatever he’s-“
Whatever he’s turned into came to her mind but Simmons shut that down. Fitz was still Fitz, Leo, the young man she’d spent practically every waking moment with since she was fresh into the SHIELD academy. He was still the person she’d worked side by side with on every project that meant anything to her. He was still her best friend.
“I need to deal with whatever he’s dealing with,” she finished finally. “We need to- we need to deal with it together.”
With that, she stood up, and banged her head on a shelf.
“But first I need to get out of this bloody closet-“
W / T \ Y
Fitz was admittedly quite confused when Simmons stepped into his lab wearing her usual black shirt with the neat white collar, her hair in a tidy low ponytail and a slight smile on her face.
“You… changed,” he said blankly, squinting at her. “Again…?”
“Silly Fitz,” Simmons huffed, shaking her head fondly at him. “I didn’t change, and you know it.”
Fitz frowned at her before quickly turning back to his work. His technology was simple. Well, no, it was vastly complicated, but at least it didn’t have mood swings. At least when it was acting up, there was a legitimate reason. “I don’t… I don’t understand.”
Simmons rested her hand on his shoulder. Fitz stilled. He loved that touch, so simple and intimate. Simmons did it so often these days, when he was stressed or lonely or frustrated, which was admittedly most of the time.
“Fitz,” she said quietly. “You do know I’m not real, don’t you?”
The blood drained from Fitz’s face and the hand he’d been lifting to cover Simmons’ abruptly fell back to the desk. “I don’t-“ he began again.
“I’ve never been real,” Simmons went on, rubbing her thumb across his shoulder. “And I think some part of you knows that. Sure, maybe there’s some bit of Simmons in me, real Simmons, the Simmons that lives on in your memory. And because of that, I can’t let you go another moment believing that what you’ve deluded yourself into thinking is reality is, well, real. It’s not. I’m not really here.”
Fitz’s mind scrambled to keep up. He gripped the edge of the table, trying to bring himself back to the days after he’d drowned. Everything was so fuzzy and blurred. His first clear memory was waking up in the med lab with Simmons in a chair beside him, dressed in a black shirt with a white collar.
“That was really her,” Simmons said as if reading his mind, which Fitz supposed she could do, because she was his mind. “That was the day she left.”
Fitz whipped around and stared at her, eyes instantly damp. “So she’s- she’s dead?”
“Oh goodness no.” Simmons laughed, gave his arm a quick rub, and hopped up onto a nearby lab table. Fitz sank into his swivel chair, both relieved and regretful over the distance between them. “No. But she did leave. She needed to heal herself and she couldn’t be here to do it. She told you all of this, Fitz, you’ve just… bottled it up and tucked it away. Really, imagining me is a very curious coping method for dealing with your trauma. I’m sure that if you brought this to the SHIELD psychologist they would be very interested in a further analysis-“
“Jemma,” Fitz interrupted, holding up his hand. Simmons quieted, but that was only because he’d quieted his mind, wasn’t it? Because she was the physical embodiment of his mind? “Did the- is the- the Simmons that was just in… the one with the- the-“ He slapped his hands at his neck.
“The haircut?” Simmons supplied. “Yes, Fitz. That was the real Simmons.”
Fitz jolted out of his chair. “Then what are we waiting for?!” he demanded, before catching himself. “What am- what am I waiting for, that is.”
Simmons smiled and nodded. “Very good.”
He stared at her, this beautiful, perfect figment of his imagination, the only thing that’d made life bearable for weeks on end. “Will you… will you vanish?” he asked quietly, reaching out and touching Simmons’ wrist. “If I go to see her, will I lose you forever?”
“Nonsense.” Simmons patted his hand brusquely. “I’m always with you. Perhaps I’ll be in a slightly more updated wardrobe, however.”
Fitz gave her a tight smile, deciding not to tell her that he’d found that outfit very comforting (not that he needed to tell her, considering she knew, considering she was his mind). He decided not to turn around on his way out of the lab. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know whether imaginary Simmons was still sitting on the desk, watching him with that fond smile on her face.
When he stepped out of his lab and into the hallway, it was to find Simmons emerging from the… closet? with Skye close behind. If Fitz hadn’t been entirely all-consumed with nervous thoughts regarding this encounter, he would have wondered whether Simmons’ romantic disinterest had anything to do with Skye and that closet. But, considering those thoughts wouldn’t have been correct, perhaps it was a blessing they didn’t even occur.
“Fitz!” Simmons called in her overly-perky voice, the voice she used to mask how anxious she was. She waved, and Fitz raised a hand in response, then let it fall. When he blinked, he found Simmons suddenly much closer than she’d been a moment before, and closing the distance further with every step.
“I just wanted to say-“
“Simmons, I-“
They both fell silent, staring at each other in a slightly stand-offish way. Then suddenly, Simmons dove forward and buried herself into Fitz’s chest. “I missed you so much,” she breathed, banding her arms around his neck. “I thought of you every day.”
Fitz’s hands hovered awkwardly in the air before he settled them on her back. He felt weirdly emotional having Simmons so close, his throat tightening like it was preparing to seal off forever. He heard a sniffle right near his ear and realized that Simmons appeared to be feeling the same.
“If you, ah…” he trailed off, fighting against himself. On the one hand, he didn’t want to do a single thing to ruin this perfect moment. On the other, hearing that Simmons had missed him made frustration bubble up, breaking through even the tightness in his larynx. “If you missed me so much then, uh, why didn’t you- didn’t you- why didn’t you come back?”
Simmons went a little stiff and quickly stepped back from Fitz’s chest. She tucked her hair, her unfamiliarly short hair, behind her ears and then clasped her hands in front of her. “Fitz, the last time I saw you, you were in a gurney and could barely count to three,” she said in a highly controlled voice, not meeting his eyes. “You remembered who I was… twice, but mostly just looked at me with blank eyes. It was- after so much time spent together, it was just very- very hard.”
“You think it was hard for you?” Fitz squawked.
“It was hard for both of us,” Simmons said quickly. “But I- there was no way for me to make it easier for you. There was- or at least, I thought there was- a way to make it easier for myself. So yes, I left. Because I couldn’t wake up each day and see you look at me like- like-“
Fitz’s eyes skated frantically over her face, trying to read her micro-expressions and predict what she’d say next. Look at her like he’d forgotten what he’d said at the bottom of the ocean? Look at her like he’d stopped loving her?
“Like you didn’t know me anymore,” Simmons finished hurriedly, shaking her head with a brief crease of frustration between her eyebrows.
Fitz nodded once, shortly, then turned and strode away.
“Fitz, wait!” Simmons called desperately, and he heard her heels clicking after him. “Fitz, please, come on-“
He spun. “You know what you are, Jemma?” he cried. “You’re a coward. You’re a bloody coward.”
Stung, Simmons shrank back.
“You’re a coward because you left, you’re a coward to try and pretend like nothing’s wrong now that you’re back, and you were a coward down at the bottom of the ocean, too, because you couldn’t just- you couldn’t just-“ He let out a near-roar of pent up frustration. Of all the times for his brain to stop functioning.
Then, in his periphery, he saw his imaginary Simmons. The sweet, supportive, loving Simmons that he’d dreamt up to heal his own broken heart.
“You’re a coward because you couldn’t just tell me that you didn’t love me back,” Fitz finished in a dull voice.
Simmons’ eyes welled. “Fitz…”
He held up a hand. “No. Nothing you say could possibly make this any better-“
Simmons took three neat steps forward, grabbed the front of his sweater, and kissed him.
For one horrible moment, Fitz thought that he was still dreaming. That this was all a continuation of his Simmons-hallucinations, ones that had taken a truly desperate (and hyper-realistic) turn. But when he brought his hand up to cup the back of her head, willing to give into the vision even if it hurt more in the end, his fingers tangled in the ends of Simmons hair. Her short hair. The hair of the Simmons who came back, not the one who’d been living rent-free in his broken brain.
“Jemma,” Fitz whispered when she eased away. He pressed his forehead against hers, refusing to let her back off. His fingers brushed the skin of her neck, ran along her soft jaw and cheekbone.
“You said I couldn’t say anything to make it better,” Jemma said breathlessly, sounding like she wanted to be playful and teasing but was too dazed. “So I didn’t. Say anything, I mean.”
“That, uh…” Fitz finally let some space grow between them. He gazed into her sparkling eyes, heart racing. “That may be the best great idea you’ve ever had.”