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She's been longing for the quiet.
Isn't that what she said? That it's too noisy in the lab, too crowded in the kitchen, too cramped in their bunk. But this is not what she had in mind.
The agents who swarmed this place are long gone, leaving her in the room where he was. The last room where he was.
It doesn't seem real to her. Just yesterday she was on a plane with a bag over her head, clenching her jaw shut so as not to scream every time her phone buzzed in her pocket. She tried to act calmly with boiling blood, knowing that he was calling, infuriated that she couldn't answer. Now, she looks back and remembers that her anger simmered into a kind of resentment. She didn't like working for a man who could send her who-knows-where; she was irritated at loving a man who could hide who-knows-what. Had there been a moment, a flicker of thought where she'd smiled inwardly, wickedly gratified that she finally had a secret of her own?
That's what makes her fingers curl around the pen in her hand—one he gave her. She clicks it once, and it's so quiet in this place that it almost sounds like the cocking of a gun. Her hands still. If a gun is what she needs to solve this problem, she'll get one. But what would she do with it? Put bullets in the walls? Punish them for seeing being the ones to see him last?
These walls remind her of him, too, of the day years ago when he dragged her into the hot desert to see the remnants of the Cold War. The missile had been the last of its kind. Is she?
It was so hot outside that the docent offered her a water bottle for the short trek around the outside of the silo. She'd clung to it while Fitz, of course, asked a positively indecent number of questions. In this age of miracles, she would have thought that being out that long in the blaring sun would have given her heat vision. She shot daggers at Fitz instead. At the end, though, they had wound up in a room much like this, with panels and switches and analog everything. That room was designed to end the world, but this one had done it. This one took him away.
She's not even sure what happened. No one is. She knows that Mack left to get an EMP and came back to this same empty place. She knows that something happened, some event that changed Robbie Reyes' uncle into a monster. She knows the first law of thermodynamics by heart, but she can't bear to think of it. There is no trace of Fitz, Coulson, or Robbie Reyes anywhere in the facility—not even so much as blood spatter. But Eli Morrow has gained an extraordinary ability to produce matter from his bare hands, and god or no god, the atoms must be coming from somewhere.
She shutters, and the pen almost falls from her hand. There are other options, aren't there? Eli Morrow could be taking molecules from the air, twisting and shaping them to meet his own cruel desires. Fitz could still be here, phased to where she can't see him, or he could have fallen through his own hole in the universe. Those are still viable options, aren't they? Sometimes, Occam's razor makes the wrong cut.
There's no sign of a ghost, no sign of him at all, but she remembers leaning her head on his shoulder the night she finally let go, pretending to do it subconsciously as her heart thundered in her chest. It was natural when he lifted his head and she followed, when her lips met his without thinking. She learned more in that moment than she'd ever thought possible, and would have unlocked the secrets to the universe if he hadn't wrenched himself away.
It's how is always is with them, isn't it? Pull and push, ebb and flow. Their time in calm waters had only choked them with stagnation.
But it isn't fair. She would have said goodbye to him if she could, would have held him close, kissed his cheek and told him that the secrets didn't matter as long as they didn't let anything come between them. She was going to do it, anyway. She just ran out of time.
No, she didn't run out; it was taken.
It was taken from her. Just like she was once taken from him.
And it's odd that she can suddenly remember so vividly the way he held onto her hand until she walked away. How much time has been taken from them, really? She went up the ranks to protect the team and him, but all she can see now are his puppy dog eyes and his silent pleas to stay.
The stillness that surrounds her is deafening. It's suffocating. It's a blanket of nothingness sent to smother her. She can't let it extinguish her.
She'll burn brighter.
The more she thinks, the clearer it is: he was taken from her, and she made a promise. They might think he's gone for good, but the truth is that they don't know for sure, and that means that there's a chance. She'll take every chance she has.
She's angry now, angry enough to melt away her numbness and feel his necklace burn against her skin. They've been through worse than this. They've been ripped apart by oceans and galaxies, and this is too much. She doesn't even know what it is, but she knows she won't accept it. She won't let it defeat them. She'll get him back, no matter what she has to do, no matter who stands in her way.
She made a promise, and she'll keep it.
And if she has to make her own deal with the devil, she will.