Confusion
Fitz looked up in shock at the woman. Flashes of his work as the Doctor gripped his fragile mind, pulling the blanket off of the memories he was already trying to sweep under the rug. Torturing Inhumans. Standing beside his father’s image. His work creating a machine to build a human body for the woman he loved.
He stared back as other memories--parallel memories--crashed together like tidal waves. Meeting Jemma the at the Academy...meeting Ophelia the same way. Endless experiences--the same, but different. Taking place in different worlds. One real, one not. But at this point, with everything collapsing around him, telling one from another was like finding up from down after being flung around by an undercurrent. He was drowning, but which way was to the surface? Which way was up?
“Leopold…” Ophelia spoke his first name, chuckling softly with the wonder of bubbling emotion.
He stared back at the woman before him, dazed.
“I am so happy to see you.” She articulated her words precisely and smiled broadly, gazing back at him.
He studied her in an absent, awed way. What had he created? Or rather: who? He had made Ophelia into a person, given her life. Had that been him? The hurricane of memories tore through his mind. The Doctor may not have been him, but the memories were his burden. They were part of him now.
Ophelia’s breath hitched, face changing shape. “This is what happiness feels like.” She wondered aloud, distant from the world that Fitz was living inside.
Mindlessly--almost as if she had a magnetic force pulling him to her--he crossed the room, steps unsure.
“Finally,” Her voice was thrilled and growing tighter with emotion, “you can touch the real me.” Her breathing sped up, and she grabbed his hand, pressing it to her chest in a desperate motion.
Fitz’s face remained unmoving, emotionless, yet his mind was in turmoil, sifting through two lives of memories, losing a grip on the truth of reality. One thing was very real, though. Jemma...
“Feel my heart beating. Touch my skin.”
His face was slack, searching eyes his only voluntary movement.
“We can make this world whatever we want.” Ophelia’s words were whispered, and suddenly Fitz was snapped into the realization that May had a gun aimed at them. All in one moment, Ophelia had enveloped him in her arms, and a dizzying flash pulled them out of the room.
--
Fitz opened his eyes and the scene had changed completely. Warm sand, rushing tides, and an open, clear sky surrounded him. In any other situation the location would have been peaceful-- romantic even--but in Fitz’s current state of despondency, it was overwhelming.
He swayed on his feet, head spinning. The crashing water roared in his mind, agitating the memories he was trying to process, and throwing them into the whirlwind, creating a storm of confusion, fear, love, manipulation, pain, guilt, grief, anger...his legs felt weak beneath the weight of it all, and he came close to tripping backward as the sand held his feet in place. With everything happening within him, there seemed to be no room for Fitz himself, and he got the dazed feeling of being separated from his own mind. His stomach turned in agonizing knots and he bent over, hands gripping firmly to his knees.
“I think I’m gonna throw up.” He stated weakly, blindly staring at the sand, which appeared to crawl underfoot. Everything was moving--or seemed like it was. Black, static dots edged his vision and he fell forward onto all fours, arms wobbling weakly as they pushed against the thick sand, before collapsing, landing his elbows in the dampness. His sand-coated palms ran desperately through his mussed curls. This...this...all of this. It was too much. What was real? What wasn’t?
He trembled, looking wide-eyed into the sand, vision focusing in and out as the foamy edge of the tide wisped around his firmly planted elbows. His jaw hung open and he breathed out slowly, breath and body shaking.
“...two lives worth of memories…” A faraway voice sounded in his cotton-filled ears, and slowly, jerkily, he looked up at the woman, realizing she was expecting a response, but unable to form words. A quick exhale flew from his lips and he sat back onto his knees.
“W-w-what...what did I do?” He asked, more rhetorically than as an actual question.
“You did what you had to do in order to survive the Framework.” Came her calculated reply, barely heard over Fitz’s loud thoughts. He was breathing heavily, distant gaze flicking over the face before him, trying to focus. Trying to make sense of it all. “But it was a simulation--an illusion,” She was kneeling at his level, and her hand brushed his cheek, making his breath choke in his throat as he froze, “created by Radcliffe.”
Trembling, he slid back in the sand, causing her hand to fall from his cheek. His stomach was in his throat now, and he felt even more-so than before that he would empty its contents into the sand within the minute.
“Not...not everything was an ill-lu-lusion.” He could feel the weight of the gun in his hands, feel himself issuing the kill order, feel the weight of another gun…
“Like me. I was there beside you the whole time. That was real.”
He looked back at her, horrified and appalled. Not what he had meant. The flow of memories spun recklessly through his mind, tossing everything inside his head around once more. She had been there the whole time, encouraging him, forcing him to do everything.
“You--You were there the whole time.” He echoed her, looking up with burning eyes. “You ma-manipulated me...made me do...do all those things...Why did...How...What…” He brought a palm to the side of his forehead, pressing hard as if that could hold his mind together.
“I had to. It was in my programming. I was programmed to save lives.” She responded, tilting her head just slightly.
Fitz shook his head, moving back into a seated position, legs curled underneath himself. “Whose life were you…sa...who were you protecting?” He asked, eyebrows drawn tightly together.
“My own.” She laughed softly. “I was saving my own life. Or giving myself one.” She smiled, still in wonder of life, being alive, feeling. She turned back to him with concern at his still distraught face. “Maybe it would be easier if we went elsewhere.” She said quickly to herself, then wrapped her arms around him, and the world became a static ocean of color.
Fitz was on his feel again as they appeared in the living room of a house that was a near replica of the one they'd had in the Framework and Fitz swayed dazedly on his feet, still feeling like he would throw up at any moment. This--none of this was good. This was bad. He was bad. This was bad.