It was two days after they got back that they found her crying. It was late, nearly midnight, and Hunter went looking for Bobbi and found Simmons sitting cross-legged in the middle of the empty lab, sobbing. When she didn’t even seem to hear him, he got Bobbi, who got Daisy who got Fitz. She came unresisting into his arms, soaked the front of his shirt as he cradled her on the lab floor, crying quiet and steady until exhaustion claimed her and Mack carried her back to her room.
She left the next day. Her hair was pulled back into a ragged ponytail. A gray sweatshirt swallowed her, made it obvious how much weight she’d lost since that place and hadn’t been able to gain back. She’d only packed a bag for the week, kissed him on the cheek before she went and murmured without looking at him that she’d see him soon, but a sick, hollow feeling sucked at his gut as he watched her plane take off. He wouldn’t blame her, this time, if she didn’t come back.
Mack and Hunter and Daisy and Bobbi and Lincoln found him in the kitchen. Hunter wordlessly slid a beer in front of him and cracked one for himself. Daisy squeezed his shoulders as she swung herself onto the stool beside him.
“She’s going to be okay, Turbo,” Mack said in his deep, assuring voice.
“She’s strong,” Bobbi said quietly.
And Lincoln, hovering quietly in the background, nodded with what little authority on the matter he had.
Tears sprung to his eyes suddenly and without his permission. He sniffed and wiped them away harshly, shaking his head.
“We broke her,” he said unsteadily. Realization had been flooding him since yesterday, and he had to get it out before it choked him.
“What are you talking about?” Daisy asked. At the same time Bobbi said, “She’s not broken.”
“She’ll heal,” Mack intoned sagely, but Fitz kept shaking his head. They didn’t understand.
“No, I don’t think she will.” He felt like sobbing and stared up at the lights, blinking hard. “And it’s my fault.”
They all rushed to contradict him.
“No!”
“Of course it bloody well wasn’t!”
“How do you figure that, Turbo?”
And Daisy loudest and angriest of all. “Ward and Hydra are the bastards that hurt her.”
“S.H.I.E.L.D. and H.Y.D.RA. and Ward shattered her, but I’m the one who broke her first.” He took a shaky breath.
“Turbo –”
“You didn’t know her before,” he bit out angrily, pushing Mack’s comforting hand away and glaring around at him and Bobbi and Hunter and even Lincoln. “She used to have this smile… all the time. You couldn’t turn it off. It made you feel like there were no dark places in the world. You’ve never seen it.”
“He’s not just being a soppy romantic,” Daisy murmured, staring soberly at her fingers. She took the beer he was obviously not going to touch and gulped down a mouthful. “Once, she discovered a lethal alien virus and you would have thought she won the lottery. Everything used to make her excited.”
“When we were at the bottom of the ocean, when we thought we were going to die,” he started and everyone stilled to listen hard. “She started talking about the first law of thermodynamics, and how we all came from beautiful things and we’d turn into more beautiful things. She was going to die and rot and be eaten by fish and sea worms, and all she could think about were her atoms turning into stars and storm clouds.”
He laughed hollowly, humorlessly, and buried his face in his hands.
“That’s the last time I saw her smile like that.”
Daisy set her beer down on the counter with a sharp clang. “That was Ward. Not you. Ward. I’m sick of the two of you dragging around guilt for what happened down there –”
“Aren’t you listening?” Fitz interrupted, swiveling to face her. She was the only one who’d known Jemma before. She was the only one who could truly understand the confession he needed to make right now. “Ward sent us down there, but that didn’t break her. She’s the one who figured out how to blow the window. She hit her head when we dropped. I had plenty of time to think of a way out while she was unconscious, and I couldn’t, but she wakes up, muses cheerfully about reincarnation, and figures the whole bloody thing out. She’s smarter, she always has been.”
He took a great, shuddering breath. They were all staring at him, mouths agape.
“I realized there was only enough oxygen for one of us while we were still rigging things up. I knew, and I didn’t tell her.” He closes his eyes with the pain of this one, horrendous, irreparable mistake. “She’s smarter than me. We still had time to come up with a new plan, and even if we couldn’t, I had a broken arm. I couldn’t have swum up to the surface anyway. She’s logical. She would have seen that our best option was for her to take the oxygen and try to pull me up. She would have seen that was the only way to save me.
“But I didn’t do that. I turned it into a grand gesture. I decided when I found that mask that she would take it because I loved her and I couldn’t live with myself if she didn’t make it out of there. I made it about me and my feelings and saving her, and I sprung all of that on her seconds before I blew the window out.
“I was supposed to know her better than anyone. I knew she always blamed herself for everything. If we’d made the decision together, she would have accepted it as the only viable option, but I made it about her or me. I didn’t let her decide anything. I set up a situation where she would be torn apart with guilt every time she looked at me. It’s no fucking wonder she left.”
“Fitz…” Daisy whispered.
He shook his head, jumped up and started pacing. “If I hadn’t been so self-absorbed, if I’d just been the friend I was supposed to be instead of the jerk who was in love with her – if you lot hadn’t all taken my side –”
“We’d probably still be here looking for someone to blame,” Bobbi cut him off.
Daisy drained the beer in a long gulp and dropped the bottle on the counter. “You want someone to tell you you’re an awful person?” she said, and her gaze was a challenge. This was really between the two of them. The only ones who’d been there to watch it happen. “Fine. You’re the selfish jackass who stopped talking to your best friend when she needed you the most. She abandoned you, you abandoned her, now we’re all broken, fucked up people together. Happy?”
They stared at each other, and there was utter misery there. There was mourning.
Bobbi slammed her hand down on the table and they all jumped.
“Jemma Simmons is not broken,” she said quietly, firmly. “Maybe you put her through Hell, Fitz, I don’t know –”
“I’m trying to tell you –”
“Fine, you were a misogynist dick who took away her agency, whatever. The point is, Jemma is not broken. She’s been dragged through Hell again and again, been beaten down by this world and another world, but she’s still here, and that is fucking strong as hell. And maybe it’ll take a long time, and maybe she’ll never be quite the same, but she’ll get back on her feet because anyone who can hold on through that much shit doesn’t just stay down.
“She’s strong, and she can do this with or without your help, but I will put all of you through hell if you decide to give up on her now.”
She stared each and every one of them down, even Lincoln. No one said Jemma was broken again. There was a lot whirling through their minds now from the last two years, a reevaluation of their actions and inactions. But no one said Jemma Simmons was broken again.