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“How did you find me?” Jemma’s eyes still look cloudy with trauma as they cover her with a shock blanket and help her to sit on the medical cot in the lab.
“When you didn’t show up for… dinner.” Fitz says cautiously, aware that others were surrounding the two, “I began to get worried that maybe I… misunderstood… um… That you…”
Jemma looks up at him with large brown eyes, and he gets flustered. He worries that everyone is staring at him, and he hurries on, not finishing the sentence.
”So I went and hacked into the video surveillance of the room. I saw what happened and…” He can’t finish speaking, and instead focuses intently on wrapping the vitals monitor around her arm, trying not to cry.
“A lot’s happened since then, and we’ll debrief you later, but for right now get some rest.” Coulson tells Jemma encouragingly.
“She’s been gone for months, she deserves to know.” Skye argues back at Coulson.
“Protocol states that we should give her a full medical examination and a psychiatric evaluation.” Bobbi chimes in.
“I agree with Bobbi. That rock gives me the creeps. What if it changed her into something alien?” Mac agrees.
“I don’t know about that, but the trauma of being pulled between worlds can be drastic. Let me speak to her first. We don’t know what she experienced over there. She may have PTSD, or some other psychiatric issue that’s better to catch early.” Andrew says clinically.
“The rock was a portal. Her vitals are fine, we can give her the workup later. Right now she needs rest. Fitz can stay with her. Monitor her for any changes. We’ll do a full workup when she’s feeling more up for it. For right now we need to have a conference for what we’re going to do about the giant one way portal I have sitting on my ship.” Coulson says with resolution that tells the crew it’s not up for discussion. He nods over at Fitz reassuringly.
Everyone leaves the medical section to go reconvene for a meeting in Coulson’s office. Part of Fitz thinks he should be part of the meeting, he knows he’ll be missing important decisions, but he can’t even think about leaving Jemma right now. She looks so tired, and has been alarmingly quiet ever since they rescued her.
“Do you want to lie down?” Fitz asks, feeling both awkward and relieved at being left alone with her.
“I’m alright.” She says, but there’s a hint of sadness behind her eyes.
“Ok… Good.” Fitz says, suddenly feeling shaky and drained. The entire events of the last few days suddenly hit him at once and he goes pale. He suddenly can’t stand and he catches himself on the hospital cot turning himself to sit next to her.
“Are you ok?” She asks, looking at him in a concerned manner, which is ridiculous considering she’s the one they just yanked out of a giant rock/other dimension.
“Yeah. Just having a little trouble processing that you’re really here.” Fitz says, trying to pull himself together. He doesn’t want to admit to her his mind’s tendency to hallucinate her presence when she’s gone. Something about it seems a bit unhinged. Plus it might go to her head.
She reaches out between them and takes his hand, “I’m really here.”
He grips her hand so tightly it bruises, but she doesn’t complain. He finally breaks down in sobs of the stress, the panic, the pain he’s been feeling without her all this time. The dam breaks and it pours from his body. On top of it all he feels completely horribly guilty because he should be comforting her.
“Shhh… It’s ok. I’m here.” She rubs his back in a comforting way. “You rescued me.”
Fitz pulls back to look at her, and can’t help but notice Jemma’s smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Did I?” Fitz finally says the thing that’s been bothering him. Addresses the sadness and loss he sees in Jemma. She’s unusually quiet and introverted. It’s like she’s mourning the loss of something and Fitz doesn’t think it’s their cancelled dinner plans.
“Of course you did. I’m here, because of you.” Jemma may never be able to lie, but she’s gotten surprisingly good at stepping around questions with half truths. Fitz calms down, his brain distracted by trying to solve the new puzzle. Looking at her cautiously, it takes him a moment before he can get out the words.
“I researched the soul gem you know.” Fitz leaves out the part about the manhunt they went on, the people they tortured and the lives lost to retrieve Jemma. “I know what it does. It’s a portal to another world. One that almost no one returns from.”
He pulls her hand up to press his lips firmly against the back of it, reminding himself she’s here for now, regardless of the past or the future. He holds her hand to his heart and finds the courage to tell her what he’s thinking. What’s worried him ever since he found out what the soul gem does.
“No one escapes the soul gem because no one wants to leave. It’s a Eutopia.”
He watches the realization that he knows what happened to her wash over her. She averts her eyes to the floor, avoiding his gaze.
“Am I right?”
“It was…” Jemma’s voice shakes with grief as she remembers the calm serene world she had left behind. “...It was beautiful.”
Fitz clenches his fists and shakes his head up at the ceiling. When she’d first been taken, he was afraid she’d died. But somehow he knew she wasn’t dead. That he would somehow sense it if she was. He’d then gone through hell to get her back, worrying that he was leaving her trapped and miserable in some torturous existence. When he’d heard of what the other world was like from Adam, he’d at first felt great relief and then an even greater grief. How could she come back to earth after experiencing such pure happiness? How could she come back to him?
“You were in paradise, and I took that from you. I needed to bring you back because I needed you here with me. It was the most selfish thing I’ve ever done. How can you ever forgive me?” Fitz begs.
“I knew you’d find me. I was waiting for you.” She says comfortingly to him, “Fitz, out of all the souls inside that world, mine was the only one that crossed over when you opened the portal. Doesn’t that tell you something? I wanted to come back.” She assures him.
“How could you want to leave Eutopia?” Fitz asks. “I brought you back to a world full of death, sickness, terror, pain, war… How could you want this place over where you were?”
“Well, Eutopia wasn’t really all that great.” Simmons says, and her tone says that she’s clearly downplaying it for Fitz. Nudging him with her knee she says softly, “You weren’t there.”
“You came back… for me.” Fitz says, not sure whether this truth makes him feel better or worse.
“Well,” Simmons says, a small smile forming on her lips and a blush creeping up her cheeks, “I didn’t want to miss dinner.”