She told me, a lifetime ago, that dying was nothing to be afraid of.
That it was all just the process of giving life to something else. And that's not a bad thing, quite the opposite - how can that be so terrible?
It's just the release of all the energy you've borrowed.
And it's impossible to trace back the path of that energy, scattered across time and space. As she put it, maybe I lived as a storm cloud, or a mammoth, or a monkey. But I'm pretty sure that once Jemma was a star, something bright and beautiful and inspiring, something that you can look to even on the darkest of nights and still see her shining down at her. She's my star. The first one I see every time the lights go out, the one I place all my dreams and wishes on.
Galileo once said that he'd loved the stars so fondly that he couldn't be fearful of the night. I loved Jemma so much that not even death could make me afraid.
Even now that I'm dead, I hope that fragments of our energy will meet again as a part of something else, and intertwine our stories once again, because that's the way it should be.
I killed a man once. I watched as the bullet that came from my gun ripped through his body and tore the life away from him. That man might have had a family, someone who loved him. I took him away from them.
So I guess I was lucky when I died in my sleep, and didn't notice until the next morning when I got up and left my body behind.
It's a blank canvas where I am the only speck of paint, and I've been wandering here for a long time now.
The wings of the wind carry voices, and the rain beats down relentlessly around me. I can hear her calling, and I think it's my name - "Fitz! Fitz!"
I just wish that I knew who she was.
My hair sticks to my forehead, my clothes weighed down by the water. The weather is the only thing that changes, the first time it was snowing, then briefly sunny, now grey and bleak and raining - and it's getting harder. I have no sense of time, I can't see the horizon, and I'm stuck at a standstill while the storm rages on around me.
She calls to me again and I spin around, trying to pinpoint the location of the wistful sound. I don't know whether it's coming from my right or my left, or even which side is which, and the voice infiltrates my ears so I can no longer hear the rain drumming on my skin.
"Don't be afraid, Fitz."
"Where are you?" I cry desperately, but the reply doesn't answer my question.
"You're not alone. You'll never be alone." she says gently, and I think tears are falling from my closed eyes.
"Please, where are you?" I shout.
"And I know this sounds cheesy and yes, I am quoting Winnie the Pooh - but really, I have nothing else to say to you. All of these years we've spent together, and all I can do is quote Winnie the Pooh.
"If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together, there is something you should always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart, I'll always be with you.
"So Fitz, I know that we're losing you, and I know that there is little chance that you'll ever come back, but please, just know that I love you. I have always loved you, and if you never wake up I will visit your grave and give you snowdrops every day alone because I will never be able to get over you. You probably can't hear me, but please just know that my love for you is infinite and it will always be."
Snowdrops are my favourite flowers.
Suddenly my lips move of their own accord and I'm screaming, "Jemma!"
I subconsciously know that Jemma is her name because it just feels so right, like honey on my tongue. And I also know that she means the world to me, no, the universe, to infinity and beyond.
"I love you!"
Suddenly the thunder breaks and her sobs die away, and the grey of the rain fades to black as it all disappears.
The walls of the hallway are white and bleak and almost intimidating. The floor is the same, and the ceiling too. The people who designed this place mustn't have been too fond of interior decoration.
I haven't seen anyone yet, but Jemma must be here - she has to be, otherwise why am I?
There is a clatter as a woman opens the door and it crashes into the wall. Her arms are hugged tightly around her slim body and there are tear tracks on her cheeks. It's Skye, and she seems upset.
"What's wrong?" I ask and move closer to her, and even if I am not the best at comforting it still might help her to have something.
Skye doesn't even acknowledge me and I repeat my question, an eyebrow raised. She chokes out a sob and turns to face the door again. "He's gone, okay? And Simmons is probably feeling like shit, or maybe - I don't know, an open book with a torn out page - or maybe an open book with half the pages missing - I'm useless at this, okay? You can't make her do this."
"Where's Jemma? And who's gone?"
Yet again Skye doesn't seem to hear me so I step closer to her again, and reach out to touch her shoulder. My mouth drops open as my hand doesn't make contact with her denim shirt. Instead, she turns and walks straight through me.
"Skye? What the bloody hell is going on?"
I look down at my body. It's slightly pearly, translucent - and I yell out in shock.
To experiment, I touch my arm, and my fingers yet again go through. They also go through my chest and if I punch myself in the stomach nothing happens.
Well. This is new.
Skye walks a few metres down the hall and opens another door. I follow her, my footfalls silent on the concrete floor, and when she shuts the door on me I walk through it. I call Jemma's name when I see her sitting on a chair in the far corner, her head resting on one trembling hand and the other holding someone else's.
My eyes are drawn away from her as they follow the arm connected to the hand that's sitting so awkwardly in hers. A pale blue sheet is draped casually over the body, and something about the whole scene really doesn't fit right at all.
"Jemma? What's going on, somebody, tell me, please?" I beg, and am greeted with an empty silence.
Skye's arm snakes around Jemma's shoulders and she pulls her in, and Jemma releases the hand gently to wipe away her tears. Not for the first time, I wonder why they are all crying. The arm flops lifelessly to face downward at an unnatural angle; Jemma notices this, and places it carefully back on the bed.
And then it hits me with the force of a speeding train, and I don't know why I didn't figure it all out before.
The hand, the body under the blue cloth - they belong to me. Or at least, they did.
Jemma hiccups as she wordlessly buries her head in Skye's chest, clutching at her denim shirt with shaking hands. Skye gently rubs circles on my best friend's back and whispers into her hair.
They're crying over me, and it's the worst thing I've ever seen.
I spin around and run, my arms outstretched to push open the door, but I run straight through it, and my feet pound silently on the floor as I tear through the hallway. I turn corner after corner but it all looks the same, and I feel like I'm going in circles but I don't care.
There's a bathroom door open to my left and I head in there, my breathing short and quick. My gaze rises to the mirror and I do a double take - the room seems empty, my reflection isn't there.
"I'm dead," I say with an air of finality, and then the dam breaks.
I think I'm crying, but the tears trailing down my cheeks aren't real. I raise a hand to my face but again it goes straight through, and I'm met with nothing but empty air. My feet take a few steps backward as I gasp and choke.
I thought death would be peaceful, just a whole lot of nothing - so why do I have this, why do I have to watch my only friends cry over my own death, all while incapable of comforting them and saying goodbye?
Simmons... Oh god.
My back would have hit the wall if it wasn't for the fact that I staggered through it, quickly regaining my balance and standing upright again, arms going like windmills, and I would have hit a few bottles off a shelf had I been able to touch them. A second later I'm running again, trying to escape this awful reality that's my new goddamned existence.
The doors are larger at the end of this hallway and I go through them, ending up outside. There's an airplane runway heading in one direction but to the other there's just a whole lot of bush so I head over there. The concrete is damp from recent rain and it's getting late, the sky an ombre red, fading seamlessly into a deep purple with clouds scattered overhead.
I slow down to a walk as I hit the bush, and all of a sudden the world is green and glistening. Beads of water sit on the leaves, the tinkling sound of a stream meets my ears, and for once I truly feel alone.
There's a bridge over the stream and I test it to see if my foot will fall through, but it doesn't. I cautiously take a few more steps until I am standing in the centre, and I slowly lower by body to the ground, sitting down and dangling my feet over the edge.
I can't feel the water as it rushes through my legs, but it's nice to just sit there and feel at peace, even if I don't know why I'm stuck here like this because to be honest, I would rather be dead than live like this.
I can't survive watching Simmons fall apart at the seams, watching her collapse piece by piece. And if that's what I have to do, I don't know how I'm going to cope.
All I need is to feel her body on mine, to hug her one last time, to whisper goodbye to her, because if I at least had that, I could leave this world at peace knowing that she was too. I know she would never let go of what we had, but time dulls the ache of abandonment and loss - I, for one, know that all too well.
But for now, I have to sit here while the sky darkens and the universe screams at me, 'Look what you could have had!'
On the bank of the stream is a little cluster of snowdrops and to my surprise I can touch them, so I pick one out of the ground and twirl it between my translucent fingers. The stars are beginning to come out, scattered here and there across the navy blanket of sky, and I let another pearly tear escape my eye and roll down my cheek.
I sit there for a while before there's a rustling of leaves behind me; I turn to see Jemma walking toward me. She looks awful, her hair lank around her shoulders, eyes red-rimmed and glassy with dark shadows underneath, and her skin is unusually pale. In a way, she looks like a character from one of the Tim Burton movies we used to watch together in our dorms at the Academy.
She sits down on the bridge, unknowingly beside me, and I watch her kick her legs - they don't quite reach down as far as mine do and her bare toes skim the water. They have a steady rhythm, almost like a pendulum or a metronome, one, two, three, four, five.
I rub tentative circles on her back, but still she doesn't feel them; they seem to be bringing me more comfort than they give her. She's stopped crying for the while, and picks up a snowdrop. Petal by petal she drops it in the water and I can almost hear her thinking: he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me.
"I do love you, Jemma" I whisper. "And I always will."
After a long, silent moment, she raises her head to the sky. The stalk of the snowdrop slips through her fingers, creating a ripple in the flat surface of the water, and her voice is weak and shaky but simultaneously precious.
"If you're up there, Fitz, there's a few things I want to say to you."
Her brown eyes are glistening with the threatening tears, and her lower lip is trembling slightly. All I want to do is reach over and engulf her in a hug, but she won't feel it.
"Thank you. From the moment you stepped into my life, you made it a happy one, and there is no tragedy in that. But I'm crying because today I lost the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm crying because I'm never going to hear you finish another one of my sentences, or watch a Sherlock marathon with you, or have you sit next to me when it all becomes too much and calm me down. I wish that I could turn back time and tell you how much I love you, and how to save you I would do anything, but it's too late for that. And this isn't one of those things that you can fix.
"I'm never going to give you up, Leopold Fitz, because you are seared onto my heart forever, and when you left, you took most of it with you."
She was crying again now, and before I had a chance to process what I had just heard she turned around and left.
Notes
I referenced quite a lot in this chapter, and there's a few language features that I'd like to point out.
Yes, I referenced Winnie the Pooh in the first section, and Simmons' speech at the end was loosely based on Amy and Rory Pond, as you might have noticed.
The middle section had a lot of pathetic fallacy, which is used a lot in Gothic literature. What it is is using the weather to relate to events in the story: the snow was uncertainty, the sunshine was a positive turn but when his condition started to decline it started raining, finally ending with the thunder as he dies. This is also a reference to the lyrics of Neptune, 'if I time it right the thunder breaks when I open my mouth' as the last thing his subconscious says before he dies is "I love you."
Simmons did a little soliloquy at the end there, which is a common feature in Shakespeare.