Chapter Text
As the echoing sounds of bullets drew nearer, Fitz firmly decided that he was not, in fact, a brave person. Field agent work would look good, Simmons had assured him, but he was almost positive it would do him no good in hell.
"Fitz! The faster you finish this, the sooner we can get the hell out of here!" Ward was nearby, covering his back, the only shield between him and the disturbingly close enemies. The yelling was far from a comfort.
"Right, right I know--I just have to finish re-calibrating the the laser and-and look! There's only a small chance that this jury-rigged battery will even be able to maintain the laser, and on the off chance that-that I've gotten the correct percentage, it could blow and--" Fitz felt his sentence stammer to a jagged end, his lungs suddenly filling fast and sorely, and he felt it rising like a slow wave, a painful clenching up from his gut. Pins and needles in his shoulders and neck, his face paled-- he needed it quiet. He felt ill.
He needed to get away. He need to get away, now. It was too much. Everything was overwhelming, and there planted in the middle of a catastrophe was Fitz and Ward and they were alone and Fitz was incompetent and there were men with guns outside and they were going to die, they were going to die they were going to--
"Fitz!"
There was more gunfire. His hands were shaking too violently to even hold his tools correctly.
"Fitz!"
He looked up dumbly, vision blurred, everything seeming to tremble and quake only for Fitz to realize that it was, in fact, just him. Small comfort that was.
"Fitz, you need to pull it together. Please." Ward's tone was odd and off-kilter. A tone dragging at the end that Fitz dimly registered as akin to the one gnawing at his insides--they were alone out here. Alone, trapped in a hole, and the only way out was to burrow through the wall and Fitz hands were shaking so hard he could barely hold the wires.
He'd have thought deep breaths were to be taken to fix his current situation, but it seemed they were all he could take, chest heaving and muscles clenched. Maybe smaller breaths, then? His subconscious didn't agree as he gulped in another painful breath.
He closed his eyes, hands skimming the machine below, following the curvatures. He zeroed in on the shape of the small box, strong enough to slice through the stone wall in front of them, and forced his numb fingers to move.
He twisted the last wires together, eyes blurring slightly, open only a crack, and-- hoping he'd fumbled for them correctly --jammed in the button along the top.
His eyes were closed and he missed the sight of the laser. Behind his eyes, he could feel the blazing warmth of the blue beam, and suddenly there were rough hands dragging him upwards and out. He stumbled along, his feet loose and unable to support his body and succeeding in feeling so jell-o like he almost doubted they ever did.
Nothing registered-- the ground was a blur, Ward's face was a smudge, the sky a smear...he shut his eyes to turn down the flow of information he was processing. He knew logically that this was a panic attack. An anxiety attack. Irrational! Trivial! His body overreacting!
This information did nothing to comfort him in any way.
He may have felt himself dragged onto a helicopter-- he wasn't sure --and he may have felt an arm, tense around his shoulders, forearm laid over his chest and not soon to ease up, clutching at him the entire way. He wasn't sure of that either, but even in dreamland it was highly comforting.
Imagine that. Ward taking care of another human being. He did find it the least bit odd that they clutched at him such as a drowning man clutched a buoy, as though it were the only other left in the world. As a child clutches their toy to them in comfort. But the thought passed.
By the time Fitz woke, the helicopter had just landed and sitting up made his brain feel bruised. He was splayed inelegantly across the seat, his leg uncomfortably jammed under, in the seat's narrow leg-space. He felt like shit, but the overall damage report suggested he ought to feel incredibly embarrassed about the mission in it's entirety as, so he proceeded to feel even more shitty. Making his way quietly from the chopper into the plane where his bunk was housed, he paused momentarily to make sure no one had noted his departure. He knew Simmons would want to talk, having been split up halfway through the mission, but Fitz just couldn't bring himself to see her at the moment.
Or much of anyone else.
Ward had needed him back there, and he'd let him down. It was like he'd not only dropped the torch, but had managed to accidentally trample on it repeatedly until unrecognizable. In this metaphor, the torch was Ward's trust-- Fitz starring as the dumbass rocket-scientist who had decided a job in the direct line of fire would be an 'experience'.
He hurried quickly up the stairs, almost jogging, until he reached his small pod of a room, sealing the door tight behind him. He didn't even bother to change before he flopped face-down onto his bed, humiliated and defeated.