A/N: Slightly delayed since I hadn't had the time to see the Season 2 finale until a week or two ago. Just some FitzSimmons angst because you know that finale ending wasn't nearly enough to put FitzSimmon's shippers into a riot. Enjoy!

Dances with Ghosts

He thinks he'd have gotten used to it, after all this time. He thinks that he'd have learned to expect her to just up and leave without warning. Here one moment, gone the next. It's how she's always been, how they've always been. Why would now be any different?

It was only supposed to be the biggest breakthrough of their relationship. Why did he expect her to stay?

He wants to be mad at her for leaving again. He wants to hate her. He wants to curse her name and forget the day that they met (it was at the Academy; they shared the same molecular chemistry lecture and she had managed to trip and spill her coffee all over his reaction mechanisms). He wants to regret every moment he spent contently following in her shadow afterwards. But he doesn't. After all the hell she has put him through, he doesn't regret a damned thing.

But this time, he can't be mad, not really. It's not her fault. She didn't choose to get dragged by the ankles into a vicious wave of hostile alien goo. He has watched that clip on replay more times than he can count, and it never fails to make him shudder in horror, bile rising in his throat as he hears her scream. If he had just stayed a little longer, if he hadn't left her alone, well then who knows what would've happened. Part of him thinks that he would try to free Jemma from the goo, call for help and work on a strategy that got everyone out safely, but the rest of his mind knows that he would've been stupid enough to throw himself in Jemma's place entirely. He has always been like that when it came to her, stupidly self-sacrificing and noble and a litany of other things that he can't stand to be called. Because what is the freaking point if all the thanks he gets is more heartbreak?

He can't say that she wouldn't have run of her own volition, had the mysterious alien substance in the tank not taken her first, but it's not like that matters now.

She's trapped in a world of darkness, possibly dead, most likely scarred and damaged far worse than he ever had been. She's stuck behind thick glass and alien runes and a world of riddles that he isn't apt enough to solve.

And she's gone. She's gone and she's gone and she's gone. Why does she keep leaving him?

He wants to scream that he's sorry, that he shouldn't have ignored her for so long but he just didn't know how to move past the hurt that lingered long after the sting of betrayal wore off. He didn't know how to tell her that she shattered his heart and he was only just learning how to pick up the pieces, and that every time he looked at her face he saw her rejection replayed over and over again. He saw her run far far away, a whole agency away, a whole lifetime away from the one they could've built off his confession at the bottom of the ocean. And he just couldn't take it. Only now does he know that when he told her he needed space, she saw him running too.

They've been running circles around one another for years. Running and running and running but never once stopping to catch their breaths, always caught up in the next assignment, the next project, the next lab report, the next something. It never ends, and their dance continues.

One step forward, three steps back.

He sacrifices his air for her, and she flees the team. She comes back after months of lies, and he leaves the lab. He asks her to dinner, and she gets eaten by insidious alien technology. It all falls into the dance, just like all the other moves before. Except this time, he is terrified that Jemma won't be able to take her next steps. Forward or back, either is better than not being able to move at all. He would welcome a rejection if it meant that she was in front of him once more, living and seeing and breathing and just being.

He's already danced with a ghost once. It wasn't pleasant. People gave him dirty looks, told him that he shouldn't listen to the voices in his head, even if they did look and talk like Jemma Simmons. Even in his subconscious she was dancing around him, treating him like he was glass, never close enough to touch. Maybe he just knew her that well. Maybe he was taking his turn.

One step forward, three steps back.

But he's always hated dancing and Jemma's always had two left feet. Perhaps that was why their dance was such a mess, why they could never get their footing, why they slipped through each other's fingers every time they got close enough to latch on.

He's so tired of watching her pass him by.

It would be easier, he thinks, to let her go, to move on. He could be happy. He could finally feel like he could breathe. But then again, it would also be easier to cut his own heart out with a dull knife. And really, he knew both ideas would hurt him the same. Jemma was integral to his life, so ingrained in his routines and his being that if she were just to stop…well he didn't want to think about that. It was hard enough on him when she left without telling him where she was going. If he had the knowledge that she was leaving and never coming back, he had no doubt he wouldn't make it a month. He could easily retreat back into his oubliette and live happily ever after with hallucination Jemma, but there was only so long he could prolong that kind of projection without it wearing around the edges. Besides, he couldn't touch a projection, couldn't hold her in his arms or comb his fingers through her hair.

But he can't do that to the real Jemma either, not anymore.

Her absence eats a hole into him, wears him away and gnaws at his brain until he can't focus, can't function, can't even breathe. The lab is too quiet and the bunks are too empty and the dining hall is missing her special mug and the list keeps building and building and building until he feels like his head will split from the enormity of it. He spends his days working himself up into a frenzy and his nights staring at the awful glass tank that has taken his Jemma captive, willing it to give her back to the people who need her.

He's thought before, rather morbidly, that this dance of theirs was going to kill him. He's surprised that it hasn't yet. He thought he was meeting his end at the bottom of the ocean, but for some reason that he has yet to fully comprehend, he survived. He was alive for a reason, and he thought that reason was his second chance, his opportunity to make up for lost time, to prove to Jemma just how much he cared for her, just how much he loved her.

He just never thought that the dance would choose to take her instead. He always figured that, if anyone was leading this dance, it was Jemma. She had always been the one in charge, and he had always been the one happy to follow. He followed her through the Academy, to the same division in SHIELD, onto the damn Bus even though he knew no good could come out of it. But Jemma was the leader and she was in control and she was gone. Now he was spinning alone on the dance floor, aimless and without direction.

One step forward, three steps back.