The Body Farm
Prompt Eleven: Body farm
Fitz could smell it before they even neared it. The rotting flesh stench soaked the air, and it was no wonder why this place was in such a secluded area. Pulling into the grounds, the facility had plenty of parking spots, there were more dead people here then alive. Most of the vehicles here were from mortuaries, so there were a lot of medical examiner trucks, with their resounding town or municipality plastered on the side.
Every few weeks Jemma would come out here, by herself, to record data and leave. Coulson intermittently loaned her the recovered dead bodies of Inhumans to examine if there were any decomposition anomalies. The bodies were all admitted at John or Jane Doe’s, so the on site scientists wouldn’t get suspicious of what Jemma was actually dealing with. They would collect the basic detail for her every day, as well as take pictures.
Jemma had made the case that observing and researching dead Inhumans could be helpful to saving them. Inhumans varied so greatly that she wasn’t sure of her own capabilities in treating them. She wondered if they would react the same way to human viruses and diseases. If a bullet in an Inhuman body should be treated the same way if it punches a hole in the flesh of a human. She knew that Inhumans could have superior healing properties, but it wouldn’t be all of them. The data on Lash being impervious to bullets was what sparked this idea.
As the car parked, Jemma gathered her briefcase and Fitz reached for a medical mask to help combat the offensive smell. He had been used to the smell of a dead body, but hundreds? There was nothing worse then that, well, maybe the dead cat liver she had put in the fridge next to his lunch that one time.
“I think it would be rather interesting to see if Terrigenesis worked on pigs, I mean, I wouldn’t kill pigs for the sake of killing them, but pigs, and monkeys, share a lot of similarities with us, so you never know what potential could be there,” Jemma explained. She said this because on top of rotting corpses, there were also rotting pig corpses, since their tissue was so similar to humans.
Fitz was flummoxed onto how Jemma could stand the smell. She didn’t have her mask on; instead it hung around her neck. She led Fitz into the facility to check in, Fitz followed. It was the first time he was making this trip with her, he now regretted signing up.
“Hello, Dr. Simmons,” the man at the front desk said with a thick Southern accent.. He was cheerful and the fact that he remembered Jemma meant that she was well liked here, that wasn’t hard to see as she was well liked every where she went.
“Hi Louis, how is your wife?” Jemma responded. They chatted colloquially for a few moments.
“This here is my associate, Dr. Leo Fitz, who will be assisting me today, Fitz hand over your license,” Jemma said. Fitz pulled his wallet out and complied with the instructions.
“First time at a body farm?” Louis asked, nodding to Fitz already wearing the mask.
“Yes, and this is the oddest date I’ve ever been on,” Fitz said, although it was hard to hear with the mask, of course.
In the few weeks that Fitz and Simmons had been dating, he had to make it a point to nearly everyone he met to point out that they were now, officially, romantically linked. It wasn’t a matter of possessiveness, although it certainly could be read that way, but it was more because Fitz still couldn’t believe it himself. They were still researching how to recreate and open the portal, so his fear really was anchored in there that Jemma would leave if Will were to come back in the picture.
They had a long discussion about that, Jemma assured him her heart was where it was supposed to be. It helped, but Fitz was insecure still, and shouting their relationship into the world helped build up that confidence.
Louis supplied the pair with their visitor’s badges and passed her the keys to a golf cart, and a map. The body farm was on acres and acres of land, and they would most certainly not want to walk all the way to Jemma’s corner, especially in the awful Georgia humidity.
As they climbed into the golf cart, Jemma prattled on and on about the different variables and how there were different buildings with temperature controls, water controls, chemical controls. Anything you could think of. Her excitement about it being the most prestigious body farm in the world was a bit jarring. Her enthusiasm for dead bodies was unparalleled.
“So is there anything abnormal popping up in your data?” Fitz murmured. Jemma could not understand him.
Jemma asked him to remove the mask to speak. Taking a gasp of air, Fitz repeated sans masks, and without breathing without the mask. She rolled her eyes at this, but divulged into the information at hand. Nothing yet spectacular had shown up, except for maybe the coloration of skin. On her plot of land she had three Inhuman bodies and an additional three human bodies who did not possess the genes.
Dead bodies didn’t gross Jemma out. The only time they really upset her was if they belonged to someone she had known. It was always sad when someone died, but if you didn’t have a personal connection, Jemma had learned she needed to put emotions away to deal with it. She couldn’t help people if she was sad.
The first time she went to a body farm was the one at the Academy, two weeks into her first semester there. She remembers the professor, Professor Blight, who stood in front of a dead body while the students covered their noses and peeked through their fingers to look.
Professor Blight stood firmly and instructed everyone to remove their hands and get used to the smell because they would become very familiar to the smell of decomposition. Initially the worst thing Jemma found wasn’t the smell, but the putrid colors the human body turned in various states of rot. She guessed it disturbed her because of the way the body would first bloat, then decompress, the skin tightening and reminding her of stretched leather. It was strange to look at dead body, to think it was once a purpose. But Jemma would do anything for science.
“I feel like I need ten showers already,” Fitz had pulled off the mask this time to speak. Jemma rolled her eyes and continued driving on.
She pulled the gold cart up to a quiet patch of wooded land. She dug rubber gloves from the briefcase and handed Fitz a pair. She pulled up her own mask, and put safety goggles on as well. She would be poking at a couple of bodies today, and sometime gases would get trapped in the body. They make for a nasty mess if there is an explosion. She knew that would scar Fitz. There was to be little talking during the data collection point.
Jemma walked confidentially through an opening of some trees and Fitz followed in tow, hesitantly.
The first body was one of the humans. While she knew where all the placements were of the bodies it was helpful that the toe tags were color coordinated. This body had a lot of flies around it, as it was one of the fresher bodies she had brought to the farm. She thought how lucky Fitz was that he didn’t see it when it was maggot infested, he certainly would have thrown up inside his mask.
As the body came in to site, she could hear Fitz groan.
Jemma set her case down a few feet from the body and took out a notebook and a fancy looking gadget. Fitz and her had concocted a device that she had implanted in the bodies to record data throughout the week. She would sync up the device every week with her records. It cut out a lot of the dirty, grunt work. She still liked to manually prod at the body, too, some things she just needed to see for herself.
Two of the human bodies she had on her plot of land had died from natural causes, a third had died from a gunshot. All three of these humans had previously donated their bodies to science. The Inhumans had all died from unnatural causes. Two of them had been from Lash, Andrew when he had been around hunting Inhumans, and the third had died from a gunshot wound. It made her job a little difficult because she didn’t have an Inhuman who had died of natural causes, it removed the one constant she needed. She couldn’t let it hold back her work. People’s lives may depend on the work she was doing here.
Jemma crouched beside the body, and observed it for a good minute before syncing up her device. She had to hold the device there for a while for it to get a good reading, and when it was finished she looked over the results. Things like the temperature and what the weather had been like since she last checked up on the body. The device also estimated the rate of decomposition of the organs, but Jemma always liked to take a peek for herself, make sure the device’s reading was accurate.
After glancing at the device, Jemma set it aside and grabbed prongs. This is where things got messy. She looked back at Fitz who was a pastier then normal. Jemma laughed to herself. He was not going to enjoy this one bit.
Jemma used the prongs to probe the corpse. When she inserted it through the skin, a noise reminiscent of flatulence occurred. Jemma could hear Fitz footsteps run in the opposite direction, she was pretty sure to vomit. In Europe, and the rest of the world, body farms didn’t exist; they were only here in the States.
Jemma removed her mask for a moment and called Fitz back. She didn’t want him to be uncomfortable for too long, so she would have to hurry up. She moved on to processing the next body and then the next. She finished by taking pictures of all the bodies.
When Jemma gave Fitz the thumbs up that she was done, he booked it to the golf cart, tossing the gloves in the trashcan that was on the way. Jemma followed in pursuit, knowing how anxious he was to leave. They drove back to the facility to collect their licenses and also the paperwork the facility had collected for Jemma throughout the week.
Fitz also spent ample time in the bathroom washing and rewashing his hands. He hadn’t even touched a body. Jemma did the standard doctor wash and knew she’d be fine. He raced back to the car and cranked on the air condition. Jemma couldn’t drive fast enough back to the Zephyr One, apparently. He hadn’t talked much on the plane ride and still hadn’t regained the color in his face.
It didn’t take long before they were back on the Playground, and Fitz immediately bounded to take a shower, not stopping to say hello to anyone once entering the base.
Jemma snuck into the bathroom and sat on the toilet cover. She could hear Fitz humming to himself.
“Fitz,” she said delicately, but loudly enough that her voice carried over the sound of rushing water.
He banged a limb into the tiled wall.
“Jemma – what--,” Fitz stammered, surprised she was there. He poked his head out from the side of the curtain. Water dripped from his nose and chin on to the bathroom floor.
“I wanted to know if you were okay, you seemed very repulsed about the body farm,” Jemma said.
Fitz pulled his head back in the shower.
“Yeah, you no, just not my sort of thing,” he said. But it didn’t have a lot of conviction in his voice.
“I’m coming in there,” Jemma announced, lifting off the toilet seat.
“Eh, what?” Fitz sounded flabbergasted again.
“It’s not like we haven’t seen each other naked, Fitz,” Jemma used her all too familiar impatient tone on Fitz. She slid off her jeans and shirt and her underwear and pulled the shower curtain slightly back to jump in. Fitz took a step back. The relationship was so new for him that sometimes he forgot that they weren’t just best friends.
He made space for her under the showerhead, she stood in front and close to him, simply staring up at him. He didn’t just feel naked in the physical sense, but felt very emotionally unguarded as well.
She placed a hand on his cheek.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” she added, with her hand lightly brushing up and down his cheek.
Fitz looked down at his feet for a moment and then back at her.
“I just don’t like seeing dead people, I’ve seen too many people I know dead and for Christ’s sakes I knew there was the chance that you could be dead at one point… it just gave me such a weird, unpleasant feeling,” he spoke rapidly.
Jemma ran her hands through his hair, and popped up on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his forehead. She was so desensitized to dead bodies that she sometimes forget what they actually were. Fitz responded by wrapping his arms around her and resting his head on top of hers. It was his way of saying thanks, just thanks for being there. Some days he’d wake up and for just a moment not remember that she was here and alive. And the body farm reminded him of that. He stayed with her in his arms for quite some time until Jemma shifted, slinking out.
Fitz smiled at her reassuringly. She returned it, warmly. She learned that she couldn’t drag him there again, that kind of place isn’t for everyone. And that science can’t always explain how people react or see things.
“Thanks for that,” he said.
“Of course. Pass the shampoo,” Jemma laughed, pointing with her chin to the bottle above his shoulder behind him. Fitz broke out in a laugh too. Jemma pressed a finger to his lips, her eyes wide.
“Sh! We can’t get caught in here, remember when Hunter caught us two weeks ago?” she huffed.
Fitz motioned for her to turn around. He clicked open the lid and poured a heaping amount of shampoo onto her hair, having no idea how much women actually put. Jemma could feel it.
“Oh my gosh, Fitz!” Jemma exclaimed cheerfully. She could tell the amount by the weight, and could feel it saturate her hair as he worked it into her scalp.
She turned back around to face him, her face full of suds. Fitz couldn’t help but laugh again.
“Not cool!” she feigned frustration and began piling the excess shampoo onto his head. They both lost themselves in wild laughter. That is, until there was a knock on the door.
“Not in the bloody shower!” Hunter’s brash voice sailed through.
Fitz and Simmons looked at each other in silence for a moment, biting their lips. Much to Hunter’s dismay, they burst out in laughter again.