Chapter 2
Sleep comes more as a relinquish of control rather than a quieting of thought. Several times she finds herself back in the midst of the sandstorm, searching frantically, silently, for Will. Or for his body. Or Fitz. Or Ward. Or herself.
When she finally drags herself back to consciousness, the first thing she notices is Fitz’s arm still around her, lying carefully over the bandages. For a split-second it’s comforting not to be alone, but then the reality of the situation settles over her and she suddenly feels trapped under the weight. What has she done? No, no, no, she should not have done that. It was foolish and selfish and weak.
Trying not to wake him, she pushes his arm off and scrambles out of bed. She rakes her hands through her hair, trying to get a hold of her breathing, and looks down at him, asleep in her bed. He looks so young like that, his curls mashed against his forehead, shirt askew. It brings her right back to the Bus, to the way he was before they went into the field. God, she loves him so much, but she can’t –
She turns and slips out of the room.
Xxx
“Have you seen Jemma?” Fitz asks blearily, sitting down next to Daisy and Lincoln in the crowded kitchen. He cranes his neck around, but doesn’t see her. Most people are up now, although the room is unnaturally quiet for how full it is.
“She’s probably still sleeping,” Lincoln says. “Those pain killers Bobbi gave her knock a person out.”
Fitz shakes his head. “She wasn’t there when –. When I stopped by her room. This morning. When I was coming here from my room.” he adds quickly, awkwardly. Better the rest of the team doesn’t know they shared a bed. Not that anything happened, but he cringes at the thought of what Hunter would say anyway.
“Maybe she’s in the lab,” Daisy suggests, sipping her coffee.
“Maybe,” Fitz mumbles.
Daisy sets down her mug and punches his shoulder in the way she has that is somehow comforting. “Hey, she just needs some time. She’s been through a lot.”
Xxx
Simmons tries the lab, but for only the second time in her life it doesn’t work. Things are supposed to make sense there. The cool, clean space usually clears her head, sucks her into tangible, fixable problems. But there are no missions, no urgent need for lab work to be done right now. There are no distractions.
She takes instead to wandering the base with no aim but to avoid people. She lingers at the doors to the gym, but her body aches and this has never been her space. It’s only been welcoming lately because she’s wanted to be someone else, but she isn’t sure she wants that anymore.
She doesn’t know what to do with herself. There are too many things building and crashing inside of her. She balls her hands into fists, letting her nails bite into her palms just to remind herself that she can, that there are still some things she can control. Unbidden, Ward’s face looms up behind her eyelids.
I’ll catch you if you fall…. You know I’d never hurt you….
Her side throbs where Bobbi had to seal her up with seventeen stitches and she lets out an involuntary cry and pounds her fist against the wall. And again. And again.
“Simmons.”
A hand grabs her wrist, vicelike and unshakeable, but not hurting.
She blinks those stupid, despised tears out of her eyes again and turns to look. May gently folds her raised fist down to her side. Simmons writhes inside, hating being moved under someone else’s volition.
May looks at her a long while. She knows her hair is a mess, her breath coming in uneven pants. She thinks of Andrew and thinks she might be sick again.
“Come with me,” May says, and turns, walking back toward the sparring room where, of course, she would be at this time of the morning.
Simmons thinks about ignoring the order, to prove that she can, but she doesn’t want to be that person anymore. She likes orders. She likes following rules because she wants to, not because she has to. She makes the choice to follow.
May has already taken up her stance in the middle of the mat. Her eyes are closed. She isn’t practicing fight moves, she’s calming herself, centering herself. She has shut out the rest of the world. Simmons leans against the wall, slowly sinks to the floor as she watches May sway and weave, hypnotized.
She doesn’t know what’s inside May, but she’s sure it’s at least as big as what’s inside her.
Xxx
Fitz is starting to get seriously anxious. She’s not in the lab. She’s not in her room. He’s ready to start searching the security camera footage when he runs into Bobbi, who tells him she’s with May in the sparring room.
The sparring room? When has Jemma ever hung out in the sparring room? With May? But they’re not sparring. May’s doing her centering martial arts thing, and Jemma is curled up against the wall, watching.
Careful not to sneak up on her, he slides down next to her. Fitz looks between her and May several times, trying to decide if it’s safe to ask about this morning and her not being there when he woke up. That’s when he notices the hand she’s cradling against her chest.
“What happened there?” he asks, nodding to the bloody knuckles.
She looks down as if she hadn’t even noticed.
“Let me have a look.” He starts to reach for her hand, but she jumps up.
“I should go… eat something….” And she darts away.
Fitz looks after her, baffled. They kissed last night, and now she won’t even look at him.
The back of Fitz’s neck prickles and he looks around to see May scowling deeply at him. He scurries from the sparring room.
Xxx
This is nice, is all Daisy can think. Lincoln’s hands are at her waist; his lips are soft and sweet on hers, his weight a pleasant, reassuring pressure against her. They both hear the footsteps, but they don’t stop. She never got to do this, make out with a boy in the halls, for the whole school to see. She almost wants to giggle.
“Oh… my.” The footsteps skid to a halt. Simmons sounds extremely awkward.
“Hey,” Daisy says casually, flipping her hair out of her face. She wouldn’t have stopped, but Lincoln, who has a little more sense of decorum, pulled away.
“Oh, don’t let me interrupt,” Simmons says quickly, holding up a hand.
She makes to slide past them, but Daisy, noticing that she’s nursing the other hand, grabs her elbow.
“Hang on, what happened to you?” She prods the bloody knuckles and Simmons winces. “Who’d you sock?” Daisy asks, impressed by this new development.
Simmons grimaces. “The wall.”
Starting to sense a bigger problem here, Daisy slides out from under Lincoln. “C’mon, I’ll patch that up for you.”
“Oh, you don’t have to…” Simmons trails off, looking between her and Lincoln.
Daisy rolls her eyes and slips an arm around Jemma’s shoulders. “Don’t worry. We’ve got plenty of time for that later.” She turns to wink at Lincoln over her shoulder, feeling her stomach flutter at his approving nod.
Xxx
Jemma’s quiet as Daisy cleans the abrasions on her knuckles and gently wraps gauze around them.
“I think you might have fractured something,” she says, running her thumb lightly over a swollen knuckle. “But you’re the doctor. Remind me to teach you how to punch one of these days.”
Jemma keeps staring at her fingers. It’s like right after she got back from that place. Daisy isn’t sure if she can hear her.
“Jemma, you can talk to me. You know that, right?”
Finally Simmons looks up, smiles a little. “Of course.”
“And… it’s okay to be not okay for a little while. After what they did. And everything. As long as you don’t let it consume you.”
She lets out a long, shuddering breath and wraps her arms around her stomach, folding in half on herself.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispers.
“Do what?” Daisy asks, alarmed, taken aback by this sudden transparency. She’s glad at the honesty, but she wasn’t expecting to be let in so easily.
“Everything,” Jemma says, looking up at her a little bit desperately. “I just… there’s just so much inside of me that I can’t sort out.”
Daisy doesn’t know what to do with drowning people. She’s usually the one drowning. But she knows who is good at dealing with drowning people.
“Have you talked to May?” she asks.
Jemma shrugs. “She caught me punching the wall.”
Daisy jumps to sit next to Jemma on the gurney, squeezes her shoulders in a sideways hug. “You should talk to her. She knows a lot about sorting things out inside yourself. And punching walls.”
Jemma gives a watery laugh.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Daisy promises.