It goes so quickly.
Sunlight and woodchips and a dead campfire. "Talk to me, Simmons," Coulson says. The bodies, surprised and surprising. The breeze is refreshing.
"Bullet to the brain," she says, which is quite evident. "But…"
"I have a fear of flying." The American agent had left them alone with his offer and silence, and she can almost hear Fitz wagging his stubborn curly head.
"You have a fear of dying," she corrected him.
"Yeah, well," he says. "Don't you?"
The smell of charcoal and forgotten meat. Paleness in their eyes, the dust of dried sweat on their foreheads.
"The bullets might have been a precaution," she admits.
Coulson squints in the sunlight. "A precaution against what?"
Sunken cheeks and terror and tents.
"Something faster," she says, not knowing why.
"There are no windows in here, Fitz, you can't even tell we're in the air."
"My stomach can tell," he said, sourly.
She sighed. "Is your stomach smarter than your brain now?"
"I don't know, that's your area of expertise, Simmons." Fitz ran his palms over the cool steel of his work table. "Do you think they have snacks here?"
"Ask your stomach and let me know what it tells you," she said, sliding a heavy brain specimen out of their multitude of refrigerated packing cases. "And didn't you just eat?"
Fitz grinned, that little boy smile. "It goes so quickly," he said.
The autopsy data runs normal at first, which seems to relax Coulson and May but only heightens Simmons' anxiety. Their minds were focused on gravity now, on what made these men float instead of what made them dead.
That was two hours ago, and Simmons has been on her feet all day. Her fingers sweat in her thick rubber gloves as she flicks through notes on infection, virus transmission, and the kinds of bacteria that made Fitz put his hands over his ears and loudly hum "God Save The Queen."
Simmons hums it now, in tune with a vague buzz in her ears and the promise of a headache.
She keys in commands for more thorough testing, clicking through dreadful search parameters as the machinery creaks around her.
"Simmons!" Fitz's muffled voice cuts through the thick glass window of the lab; her neck aches as she turns to see him, paused with a hand blocking the corpse on the table from his line of sight.
His eyes lock on hers, the grin draining from his face, his mouth forming a terrible "O."
The screen beeps, a flashing red warning.
It goes so quickly.
They shared the last beer as night settled in around the Slingshot.
"I'll miss this stuff," she had said. "I don't expect there's a Tesco's around here."
Fitz shrugged, his shoulder moving against hers. "It's bottled anyway. Maybe we could get a tap installed! We've already got a bar."
She giggled, buzzing pleasantly with the alcohol and the mechanics of the Bus beneath them. "I don't think the Director would like that, Fitz."
"It's not his bus," he said, almost indignantly. "It's ours after all, isn't it."
Simmons laughed again, snatching the beer from his hand. "I think it is," she said.
It goes so quickly.
They move her to the cargo bay and she sits there, imagining Fitz's warmth against the locked laboratory glass. Coulson's voice crackles through the intercom, reassurance and anger warring for control as he asks her to repeat the data and she does, her throat clenching of its own accord around the words.
Fitz makes jokes at first, clinging to calm, and Simmons is so happy he is on the other side of this catastrophe that hot tears trickle down her cheeks.
The Bus takes off, deafeningly loud from the cargo hold, but not loud enough to kill the buzzing in her brain which makes her shake her head and wedge her fingers into her ears. The pain is so intense, Simmons is surprised that her ears are not bleeding.
A few more tears at that, and Leo sees, and his face falls.
She leans on the intercom, trying to smile. Are you still afraid of flying, she means to ask him.
"Are you still afraid of dying?" is what comes out instead. She can hardly hear her own voice.
"Jemm-"
She's reading his lips now, as well as she can with the whole world vibrating around her like she is the only still thing in a centrifuge. He says things about brains and stomachs, minds and hearts; Jemma watches his lips tremble with the words and the unending buzzing. After a while, she loses the meaning, but continues to focus on his lips, and the flat pattern of his palms against the glass.
When the metal doors silently open, so quickly
Her palm on a button
The buttons of her soft white shirt
A door closing somewhere and an aching lock
A scream?
Jemma Simmons smiles at the sun.
It goes so quickly.