It happened so quickly.
One moment they were sneaking into the taped-off area of the alley to examine the artifact, the next he heard Jemma's scream as the men, dressed in black and armed, dragged her away. He screamed her name, ran after them, following her desperate pleas. But then they were gone, leaving him with nothing but the echo of her voice.
"What do they want?" He asked Coulson.
"They're looking for S.H.I.E.L.D. secrets, intel, anything. I've already talked to some people, but they told us to cut our losses. They're not giving up anything."
Fitz almost couldn't speak through the blood rushing through his ears. "Cut - our - losses?" He was too furious to say anything else.
"We'll see what we can do." Coulson said sympathetically, but then Skye let out a gasp.
"We're getting something - some sort of signal, I can't block it -" She broke off as a video stream opened up on the screen. Instantly, everyone gathered around the control table. The grainy film slowly came into focus. Fitz sucked in a gasp of air. Jemma was there, strapped down to a table. A man, tall and well-built with a mask covering his features was standing next to her.
"This is what happens to the people who disobey our demands." The man said in a husky voice, before turning to the girl on the table and releasing the gag on her mouth. Fitz couldn't move, couldn't breathe. Couldn't think.
"They want us to hear her scream." Skye breathed, and suddenly Fitz didn't want to watch, couldn't, but he couldn't move to look away.
The man reached for the set of tools set out on a platter, carefully examining them before plucking out what looked like a tiny scalpel.
"No, please -" Jemma's voice sounded small, quivering. And then the man skillfully picked up her hand and plunged the scalpel into the skin under her fingernail. Fitz remembered her telling him once that that was thought to be the most painful place to be injured, and then she was screaming and he was on fire, and he needed to stop it but he couldn't. He'd had nightmares of her screaming, but he realized that the terror he'd felt then was nothing compared to this.
The man continued applying this process to every finger on her hand, with Jemma alternating between screaming and pleading and sobbing. Every agonized scream, every gasping sob was like a thousand needles sticking themselves into his veins. No, Jemma, nononono-
"Fitz stop, we can't do anything." Skye pleaded, tears in her eyes. Fitz hadn't even realized he was speaking out loud. In the back of his head he heard Ward arguing with Coulson, heard them calling the bureau, trying to reason with them. But nothing mattered to him except the girl on the screen.
And all he could do was watch. Watch as every torture method he could imagine, and more that he could never dream of, was performed on his best friend, his better half, the one person he couldn't imagine living without. He waited for her to pass out, to give up from the pain, but she didn't and he realized with a sickening to his stomach that the man must've given her something to keep her awake, to extend her agony in a neverending cycle.
And then she was calling for him, "Leo, please, make it stop -" and all the agony in the world could never encompass this moment, the two of them separated by so much more than just the miles between them.
He didn't know how long he'd been standing there when the screen went black with a soft click. An eternity, maybe.
"Fitz, listen to me, Fitz" A voice broke through the haze and he turned limply to look at the team. "Coulson managed to talk to the bureau. They're sending in a rescue team." Skye said gently. He barely registered the words.
"So - so they're going to get her out?" His voice was hoarse, like it hadn't been used in a decade. Like hers would be, after the screaming.
"They're going to try." That was Ward. "But for now we're just going to have to wait."
Fitz didn't even try to sleep. He wasn't afraid of the nightmares, for once. Because what nightmare could be worse than this?
He couldn't stop thinking about what those people could be doing to her, to his Jemma, while they sat around and did nothing. Each possibility was worse than the last, and he spent the night curled up on the couch, incapacitated by the horrors in his mind.
Jemma. The one person he couldn't imagine being without. Fitz remembered the day they'd met at uni, in their basic maths class. They'd both breezed through it, of course, but studying together had been fun and before they knew it they were graduating as the most unlikely but perfect of friends. He remembered the way she looked when she was studying something new; the flush of excitement on her cheeks, the brightness in her eyes.
He was so, so afraid of losing her.
She'd been by his side ever since they'd met, challenging him, making him better. He couldn't imagine who he might be without her. She was his better half, the puzzle piece that completed him. He could never stay angry with her, because even after they fought she was the person he wanted to tell about it.
Morning followed the night of horrors, but the daylight brought no comfort. Fitz remained at the control table, waiting for the screen to flicker on again, but nothing came. He was sitting there when Skye broke into the room, panting.
"Simmons - the rescue team -" Fitz was out of his seat before she could finish her sentence, running down the hall to the common room where he knew they'd take her for medical assessment. He reached the room just as a team of agents rounded the corner, carrying a limp form in their arms. He stumbled to a stop, heart stuttering in his chest. She had to be okay, she had to be. One of the agents looked up, recognized him.
"Fitz, right? Get in here. You'll need to do the medical assessment." She's alive. The relief hit him like a pound of bricks, and he nearly fell from the weight lifting off of him. Numbly, he followed them into the room.
Jemma was unconscious as he performed the necessary tests, which relieved him. He couldn't imagine doing this as he watched her, in pain yet again.
Finally, it was finished. Her larger wounds were stitched, her smaller ones disinfected. He barely stopped himself from giving her an anaesthetic, knowing that it could cause serious damage if it reacted to one of the things she'd been injected with, but not finding it in himself to care. She'd be in pain without it, that was certain.
Now that he was finished, he collapsed into a chair, hands shaking uncontrollably. Now there was nothing he could do but wait.
He was nearly asleep before a scream jolted him back to alertness. He was on his feet beside Jemma in an instant. She had rolled off the bed and bolted to the door, which someone had luckily decided to lock. She banged on the door, then slid to the ground sobbing unintelligible words. Fitz knelt down next to her, careful not to do anything to startle her.
"Jemma, it's me." He murmured soothingly, wanting to reach out to her, but stopping himself. "Look, Jem, no one's going to hurt you, a'right? You're safe." The sobs faded a little bit, and Jemma lifted her head just a fraction to look at him.
"Leo?" Her voice was hoarse, barely loud enough for him to hear her. "What - where -"
"You're on the bus." It was killing him, watching her like this. "You were - captured. S.H.I.E.L.D. sent in a rescue team to get you out." Jemma was silent for a minute, except for the gasping of her breath.
"I'm - I'm safe? He can't get to me here?"
"You're safe, I promise." Fitz said, swallowing. Jemma almost looked convinced for a moment, but then she shook her head like she was trying to bat away an image.
"No - no, he said he would find me he said they would always find me -" and then the sobs were back and they turned into screams and all Fitz could do was hold her.
He held her for minutes that turned into hours, until her voice was raw from screaming and his from murmuring reassurances in her ear.
She eventually fell asleep, her breaths evening out and her head resting on his chest, tucked in the corner of the room. And Fitz held her even though his arms were sore and his legs were stiff, until he fell asleep as well. She woke up a couple times, screaming at the nightmares, but he held her until the sobs stopped and the tears dried on her cheeks.
The next few weeks were difficult for everyone. There were setbacks to Jemma's recovery, many of them, like when Ward had taken out a knife to chop up some vegetables and she had curled into a corner murmering nonsense to herself until Fitz was able to talk her out, or when May had left some case files lying out, and Jemma had looked in and saw the pictures of the casualties of an alien weapon. That time it had taken them hours to find her, shrunken into the back of a supply closet.
She slowly returned to her old self, but now she slept in Fitz's bunk because the one time she'd tried to sleep in her own she'd woken from the nightmares, unable to move for the paralyzing fear.
They avoided taking on jobs with any significant danger, and Jemma never left the bus, but Fitz still found himself searching the room for her, stroking her hair absentmindedly - anything to remind himself that she was there, safe.
And he couldn't deny what he felt for her, not anymore, not after what happened. But he couldn't bring himself to tell her while she was still piecing herself together.
Months passed. Things returned to normal, with the team taking on jobs and Jemma even venturing out on one or two of them. But there were signs that would be there for a long while - the scars under her fingers and in the crevice of her elbows and along her ribs, the panic attacks that occured if she was away from Fitz for too long, the way she shyed away from needles or sharp objects, the panicked reactions to anything too violent. And some days were better than others. One moment she would be laughing, acting like the incident had never happened, and then something would happen out of the blue and she would be reduced to hysterics in an instant. Fitz had made the mistake of watching the Fellowship of the Ring with her, stupidly, and she'd spent the rest of the night screaming from the nightmares.
"Leo?" The whisper woke him, and he jumped to alertness. Jemma was standing in his doorway, huddled down in the way she'd been since the incident, looking so small and fragile it hurt to look at her.
"Nightmares?" She'd taken to sleeping in her own bed a couple weeks before, and it had been fine for the most part.
"No, I just - I'm sorry. I shouldn't have woken you." She turned to leave.
"Jemma - wait. I'm awake, come on." She hesitated, then turned back and closed the door behind her before crawling onto the bed with him. "What is it?" Fitz asked cautiously, flicking on his bedside lamp. Jemma pursed her lips, swallowing.
"It's just, ever since the - incident - you've always been by my side when I needed you. Even when I was sleeping, you were there." She took a deep breath. "I wanted to - that is, I'm just wondering if it was entirely because you felt like you had to, or if there was something else -"
Fitz was suddenly hyper-aware of the points of contact between them - their knees touching on the crowded bed, her hand brushing his arm. And if she was saying what he thought she was - then the distance seemed so much larger.
"I understand, if you don't feel this way - you know, this was stupid, I'm sorry -" She took in a deep breath, moved to slip off the bed. And suddenly Fitz knew he couldn't let her go, not this time.
He grasped her shoulders, gently, not wanting to alarm her as he brought his lips to hers. She let out a small gasp, and he started to pull back, suddenly not sure if this was what she wanted, but she grabbed the collar of his shirt with both hands and pulled him toward her and suddenly the kiss wasn't so much gentle as it was fire. His hands moved to her back, and her fingers tangled in his hair, and the space between them was gone. And they were skin on skin and it was all burning and breath and the feel of her skin against his hands and her fingers moving on his legs.
It took all of Fitz's willpower to pull back, because he knew she wanted her first time to be special, not rushed on a small bed, within the earshot of everyone on the bus. And they were both breathing heavily, the distance between them marked.
"I guess that answered my question." She said quietly, a smile creeping up onto her face.
"I love you." Fitz said. "In case it wasn't obvious." He heard Jemma's breath hitch, her eyes widening.
"I love you." She breathed back.
The confession changed something, then. He could feel it even as Jemma curled up next to him, them fitting together like two halves to a whole.
They fell asleep that way, fingers interlocked, breath mingling together as if they were dying and only the other could save them.
And, in a way, that was true.