crumble – to break, or to cause something to break, into small pieces. To become weaker in strength or influence. To fail.
"He's a banker. He's a horrible father. He wasn't there for us," Simmons muttered under her breath as she prepped a bag in the lab. She could feel Fitz watching her from the other side of the table while he made a few modifications to one of the smaller versions of the night-night gun he would be taking with him, but she tried to ignore him. Very carefully, she scraped ashes into a decorative urn May had brought her. Very special, very modified, ashes that would leave a trail for them to follow. "He spent nights with other women, that's why I so loathe having to share this memorial with him."
"Simmons, are you alright?" Fitz finally asked her, packing his pair of guns into a case.
"Fine. Just fine." She twisted the top of the urn into place. Her hands were jittery, and she almost lost the entire thing on the floor of the lab. She was not going to screw this up for everyone.
"Have you been drinking coffee?" Fitz questioned, taking the urn from her trembling hands and placing it on the table.
"What? Of course not. You know I prefer tea." She grabbed the edge of the table and held on tight, the tips of her fingers turning white under the pressure.
"What's wrong?" With his packing halted, Fitz took the time to stare at her, witness her pale pallor and her darting eyes.
"I'm not very good at this." She swallowed. "Lying. Improvising. I know we're supposed to be. But I always mess up. I don't want to get Coulson killed. Or worse." She glanced at him, the tips of her fingers still gripping the table in front of them for dear life. "What if I mess up?"
"Tell me your story," Fitz commanded. "Say it over and over until your get it right, just like preparing for an exam. You're always better at everyone else when it came to homework." He waited until she began to speak before wrapping cables around his wrist, and sliding them into another bag. When she finished with her very long winded explanation of the young English girl who felt betrayed by her American father, she no longer had the table in a death grip, and some color had returned to her cheeks. Fitz nodded his head. "Again."
Jemma took a deep breath. "I thought we were a happy family once…"
And so it went, for two hours straight until she was sure she could stand up on a train car full of people and cry out, full of grief at her mother's passing, that her father was a horrible man. When the team members prepared to leave the bus behind in favor of the train station, Fitz squeezed her arm to reassure her.
"You'll be fine, Jemma. Just don't shoot anyone," he teased her.
She straightened her spine, head held high. "Only if I have to," she quipped. Jemma Simmons was not someone who was going to crumble under the pressure of an undercover op, she had decided. She was going to do this.
-o-
Jemma, much to her own surprise, didn't ruin the mission, not even a little. Though things did go horribly wrong, her over-preparation wasn't cause for any real concern. Her performance as a bereaved daughter was so strong that one of the passengers even offered his condolences. She could weep with relief at that. It's a little gratifying to know that Fitz and Skye would be able to hear it all over the coms as well, and while they're waiting for May to track the package through the train, she was tempted to ask Skye how the other girl thought she was doing – until Simmons and Coulson realized that their communication devices were full of nothing but a very soft static. It was like white noise in her ear, and she didn't even notice it until Coulson made mention of it. Not being able to reach Fitz, a slight panic built in her chest, but she pushed it down and listened to Coulson's orders instead.
She was to stay put.
Alone. In the middle of a train car. With potentially hostile security personnel on board guarding a package that they were trying to steal.
The panic fluttered again, but she nodded her head and sat still. The rest of the team was on the train too. There was no reason to panic.
Until Ward walked onto the car in his I'm-a-very-important-spy-on-a-mission-that's-going-badly-but-I-don't-want-anyone-to-know way. It was a subtle difference from his normal Ward-on-a-mission casual walk. But having worked with him for several months now, Simmons could tell the difference. And it wasn't a good sign.
Especially since he was sporting a superficial knife wound to one of his arms, and a few rips in his jacket. There was a thin sheen of nervous sweat on his forehead to boot.
"We've been made. Coms are down. Where's Coulson?" He said it all to her in hushed and calm tones, but the way Ward's eyes darted around the train car before landing on her gave him away.
"He went to the dining car to find the package –" she told him, confused as to how they could possibly have been made. None of them had deviated from the plan. They had all be perfect. Until the coms went down. She spotted the way he was holding on to his arm, and realized the knife wound might not have been quite as superficial as she believed. "You've been hurt, let me take a look." She made a move to reach for his arm, but he grabbed her hands and gently held them in place.
"Not now." Ward, she thought, always putting everyone else first. Of course he wasn't going to let her look at his injury. "Go to the luggage car. Lock yourself in with Fitz and Skye. Don't come out until I get you. I'm going to get Coulson." He was walking away from her and toward the dining car before she could even respond. If the jig was up, it was up, so she tossed the non-prescription lenses that had made up part of her disguise to the seat, leaving the urn behind for an unsuspecting train employee to find later.
Simmons didn't stop to think about what a young woman running through the train cars like a bat out of hell after talking to someone in a conductor's uniform would look like. She didn't know if there were strange stares that followed her. She didn't know if her actions would create some sort of panic. All she could think was that she had to get to Fitz and Skye and make sure they were okay, warn them about what was happening, and make sure that they stayed safe until Ward could come back for them.
We've been made.
One foot in front of the other.
Fitz.
Her breath was coming in short gasps.
Skye.
She was not going to panic. She was calm. She was just running like a crazy person because she was told to do so. Simmons, as she had explained to Skye on many occasions, was excellent at following rules and taking the orders of her superiors seriously.
We've been made.
Bursting through the doors to the luggage car, Jemma repeated the same words Ward told her at the top of her lungs, "We've been made."
She was almost too late to tell them.
"Aw, bloody hell."
When she barreled through the door, Fitz and Skye clearly had problems of their own to deal with, and it only took her a second to take stock of the situation. Jemma was closest to the man with the device in his hands. A device that looked suspiciously like a design she and Fitz had tinkered with, but never perfected, right after fixing the night-night gun. She had a pretty good idea of what it would do. And if she was wrong? Well, if she was wrong, at least Fitz and Skye would have a chance to help complete the mission.
The last thing Simmons heard before she dropped to the floor, before opening her eyes to find a gun in her hand and her body hidden behind someone's suitcase, was Fitz yelling for her. It reminded her of panic and fear and a dangerous alien virus, so she jumped to her feet, waving the gun wildly and taking shots at now empty air.
-o-
"Where are Fitz and Skye?"
It didn't take Simmons long to understand what had just happened to her. Dendrotoxin was something she was very, very, familiar with. Working with it, making it nonlethal, had been one of the greatest accomplishments in her career so far, at least in her opinion. So as soon as Ward and Coulson ignored her question and attempted to explain the paralyzing grenade to her, she interrupted them, turning to May instead.
"Fitz and Skye? Are they alright? They were here when I-"
"No sign of them," May responded curtly, gesturing to the mess of ruined electronics around them. Simmons followed her gaze, eyes widening when she spotted the cracked monitor screens and fried cables. She didn't see the man who had used the dendrotoxin on her, though she was sure he had to be around somewhere, considering they were dosed at the same time. She took a breath, her eyes zeroing in on Fitz's ruined equipment.
"Look for a small black backpack," Simmons commanded, trying to use the same level of authority she often heard in May's voice, but her words were a little shaky.
"Are you sure?" Ward asked, glancing around the train car full of luggage and damaged equipment wearily. This mission was already more dangerous and more time consuming than any of them had anticipated, and Simmons wasn't exactly field-ready going in.
"Fitz packed a small bag with additional supplies, including an extra tracker, and some hand held tools, just in case there was a problem with the electronics, so yes, I am sure," Simmons shot back, diving under a shelf and rifling through a pile of bags. It wasn't here. She was sure it would have been near their workstation. Fitz wouldn't have left it somewhere he and Skye couldn't get to it. But all she saw were the large duffels that had looked like regular old Americans backpacking through Europe fare.
"I don't see anything small," May commented.
"Then they followed the package." Simmons was out of breath again, sure in her assessment of the situation. She might not have always known how to best act when out in the field, but she knew Fitz.
"What makes you so sure?" May asked.
"It's what Skye would do," Coulson responded calmly, and Simmons met his gaze with a small amount of trepidation.
"And Fitz wouldn't have let her go alone," she added. "We have to get back to the bus. I need to locate the tracker."
"Pack everything up," Coulson told them. "No SHIELD equipment gets left behind."
While they traveled, she thought getting back to the plane was the longest journey of her life, but it was only a few minutes. All Coulson had to do was flash his badge at the officers interviewing passengers outside the train. They were permitted to leave, just like that. She spent the brief ride back reciting Fitz's instructions for using their mobile GPS locator equipment in her mind. She was not going to think about the fact that Fitz and Skye had gone after a dangerous group of people, people who had managed to get the upper hand on both Ward and May at one point or another today, just to get to Ian Quinn. She was beginning to hate this man more and more. Instead, she told herself, make sure the unit is fully charged, login with Fitz's codes, not mine, he programmed the units this morning, select the path for either tracker Blue or Cricket, those were the only two that should be activated, sync the mobile unit with the program, and follow the map.
She only had to repeat the instructions to herself twice before they were back at the bus and she was throwing the door open, sprinting to the plane. In less than a minute, Jemma was antsy, bouncing on the balls of her feet while Ward and May loaded themselves down with weapons. The unit kept showing empty countryside in her hands, no blinking beacon to tell her where Fitz was.
"Anything?" Coulson asked, slipping a gun, a real gun, not a model of the night-night gun just meant to incapacitate their enemies, into a holster underneath his suit.
"Not yet," Simmons whispered before a sharp beep sounded from the device in her hands.
"Are you sure you've got everything in there right?" Ward nodded to the small piece of electronics in her hands. "You were just frozen by a toxic grenade."
"And how are you functioning?" Simmons snapped, not her usual bubbly self. "Are you able to do all of your normal gun wielding activities? No loss of faculties on your part? Yes, I thought not. I'm just fine." She took a breath, glanced back down at the screen held in front of her. "I've got them!"
Between May being detained, Ward and Coulson having their own experience with the dendrotoxin, and waiting for the tracker to be activated, it seemed that their fellow teammates had plenty of time to get half way across the country side. If Simmons had thought the wait for the tracker to go live had been long, this was torture. Anything could be happening to Fitz and Skye right now, and there was nothing they could do about it until they got there. May had decided driving wasn't an option, but they couldn't very well land a plane down right next to the compound, now could they? She had already had to spend an agonizing five minutes going over what little blueprints existed for this compound. And they were all itching to get there. And so, she found herself as navigator in the front seat of the SUV next to Coulson. The scenery wasn't passing her by fast enough.
"Can we go any faster?" Simmons asked him for the third time. She was already gripping the door handle with one hand, the mobile tracking unit in the other, trying to steady her nerves.
"If this car could move any faster, it would," Coulson answered.
"We should have Fitz modify the cars when we get back to the plane. He could get them running at optimum levels."
Coulson didn't respond to her, but opened his mouth to ask about a fork in the road up ahead.
"Left," Simmons demanded before he could get the question out.
When they pulled up outside the sprawling mansion acting as a hideout for a very wealthy criminal, she thought they were just in time. There was a man flying through the air, and landing on a vehicle in the drive. A vehicle that another man was crawling out from underneath.
"Fitz," Simmons whispered with relief, but that relief was short lived when she spotted another man with a gun coming down the front steps. "Ward?"
Ward was already out of the vehicle, aiming and firing as he walked, and Simmons scrambled to get to Fitz. She had no weapons on her, but she'd be damned if she came all this way just to wait in the car.
May and Coulson met them at Fitz's side, and Jemma reached out to him, wanting to make sure he was really standing in front of her. Her fingers barely grazed his arm when the others began speaking. Skye was still inside.
"I'm on it." Ward pulled another gun from his second holster, brandishing them like some sort of cowboy out of an old movie.
"Do we get guns," Fitz wondered aloud, his left arm reflexively reaching around Jemma's waist to verify that yes, he was here, and yes, he was glad to see her too. He gave her one quick, affectionate squeeze before letting her go. "I counted at least five different people in there by the shoes. Probably more." A yell sounded from the room where there was no longer a window, and a slew of shots were fired before it was silent. "After you, Agent Ward."
Ward hadn't been listening to them though, and was already up the steps and busting open the front door, May right behind him. Coulson had gone around the side, so intent on catching Ian Quinn unaware that he was willing to leave the scientists behind.
"Fitz, are you alright?" Simmons asked him, her hand resting on his forearm while they followed May, far enough behind her to be out of the line of fire, just in case.
"Course." He smiled uncertainly at her, and she knew he was wondering, like she was, if Skye was alright after that burst of gunfire. "Did you use the gun I left you?"
"I almost took Coulson's head off," she whispered back. "Well, not really, since it just would have temporarily paralyzed him, but you know. Though I do appreciate that you left me a weapon. Don't have it anymore though…" She trailed off.
"Didn't really want to leave you at all, but it looked like all the bad guys were leaving the train, so Skye and I thought going after them was the best bet." He stopped just outside the front door, shuffling his feet.
"You did the right thing. Look," Simmons nodded, and they could see Coulson, Ward, and May with Quinn in the foyer. The two of them slowly came through the doors, sure that the gunplay was over since May didn't even have a weapon drawn.
"Where's Skye?" Coulson demanded, his gun pressed to Ian Quinn's jugular.
"You know, Agent Coulson, it's dangerous, to keep sending her in like that all alone…" Quinn was smug, self-assured even while two of the most dangerous people Simmons had ever met were standing right next to him, even while a gun was on him. She couldn't believe his gall. But then again, she could. And it worried her. "…when she means so much to you."
Agent Coulson, who Simmons had rarely seen lose his temper, hauled off and backhanded Quinn before commanding them to find Skye. She took a step closer to Fitz. Coulson was not someone she had ever been scared of before, but she never wanted to see the anger in his eyes right now directed at her. By some sort of psychic agreement the team split off – Simmons following Fitz up the stairs, while May and Ward took the ground floor, and Coulson went for the wine cellar.
It was Coulson who yelled for her before she even made it to the next floor's landing. In her rush to get down to him, and presumably Skye, she almost tripped over several downed members of Quinn's team, but she gripped a doorframe for support and kept running. Coulson's tone of voice did not sound like Skye was okay. It sounded much, much worse than that.
She met Ward at the top of the stairs to the cellar, and he pushed ahead of her, gun drawn, just in case. Fitz was right on her heels. She wasn't sure what she had expected to find, but she wasn't prepared for Coulson on the floor next to an unconscious Skye, whose shirt was soaked through with blood.
"Keep her upright," she commanded, going on medical autopilot, barely even registering what anyone around her was saying. Her practical medical skills were limited, but she knew they had to stop Skye from losing any more blood. That was Gunshots 101 at the Academy. Her hands hovered over Skye's abdomen, pressing into her shirt, trying to see if there was a way to halt the blood flow. Injuries to the abdomen were almost always fatal without immediate attention. The body pumped too much blood there. You couldn't stop it with your fingertips.
"I got no pulse," Coulson told her, the panic in his voice starting to set in.
Jemma's mind raced. "Ah… She's lost too much blood. I don't kn-" Her eyes darted around the room, spotting a most happy coincidence at a time like this. And several pieces in her mind clicked into place. She knew what she was doing. For now. "Put her in there," her chin gestured to the corner.
"Do you even know what this thing is?" Ward cried, his skepticism at her ability to deal with the situation not hidden very well from her. She knew that he was used to protecting her, all of them really, but right now, these decisions were going to be made from someone like her, not someone like Ward.
"It's a hyperbaric chamber, and I said put her in there. Now." For once in the field, she wasn't having to fake the authority she heard so often in May's voice. The hyperbaric chamber was the perfect, if temporary, solution to their current problem. She had no idea why Ian Quinn would have one in his wine cellar in the Italian countryside, but Jemma was not about to lose Skye by wasting time finding out. Skye had become one of her closest friends. And if she had just been able to get to Fitz and Skye about 10 seconds earlier on the train, she would have been with them when they followed the package, and Skye wouldn't be in this position now.
As one unit, the most cohesive they'd ever been really, the group lifted and carried Skye into the chamber. And though Simmons knew how to use the machine, in theory, she had never actually had to care for a human being in one before.
"I need to get her temperature down, Fitz." It was easier to rely on him, to tune everyone else out, and pretend that this was something taking place in their lab. He could make any piece of machinery work. He could help her fix this. Like always.
"Yep. Yeah. I got it. I got it."
He rushed to the control panel, which Simmons hadn't been able to see, and began pushing buttons in quick succession. It was like his mind was one with the machine, a fact Simmons had never appreciated more before this very moment. She ran behind him, watching his movements over his shoulder to make sure everything appeared to be reading properly. Her gaze flitted from Fitz to the machine's panel, to Skye.
"Temperature's dropping," he began.
"Pressure's stabilizing." She finished for him, nodding her head with quite a bit of relief, and turning to check on Skye. As long as the bloody machine worked, as long as they had got her inside in time –
"Is it working?" May asked. Simmons had never heard her sound so concerned for someone else before, but she didn't give her an answer.
"Is it working?" Coulson echoed, his voice now on the verge of full blown panic.
Simmons ignored him, her eyes zeroing in on Skye through the observation window. Come on, take a breath, let me know you're okay in there. Mercifully, no one else said anything for the next few seconds, and Simmons felt tears spring up in her eyes when she saw her friend inhale, the heat from her body fogging up the rapidly cooling air in the chamber.
"For now." Simmons couldn't tell them what she was really thinking though. This was just a temporary fix. Like putting a Band-Aid on a stab wound. This wasn't going to fix Skye. It was just going to hold her steady until her body gave out from the trauma. "We have to get her out of here. Fitz, is this a mobile unit? Does it have its own power supply? Can we get it out of here without taking her out?" Without waiting for a response, she whirled on May, "We need the bus. Now."
It took a lot of maneuvering, and a few close calls, a bit of under the breath cursing, and a lot of dirty looks amongst team members, but eventually, they got Skye, inside of her temporary sleeping quarters, on to the bus, smack dab in the middle of the main room. Simmons ignored everyone else's words, gestures, presence, working around them, checking Skye's vitals. She was imagining herself as an ER doctor having to work triage after a major accident to get her through, but the truth was, she wasn't in a position to do much for Skye. And it was scaring her. Really scaring her.
-o-
When she couldn't take the incessant questions anymore, when she had gathered all of the information she could, Simmons mentally braced herself, and stood with the team.
"Her core temperature is hovering around 44 degrees Fahrenheit. If we don't bring her back up to temp in the next few hours, she could sustain permanent brain damage." Simmons tried not to think about Skye with a damaged brain, keeping her tone of voice as level as she could. "We need to get her to a medical facility. And fast. Until then, I'll do everything I can to keep her alive. Excuse me."
With that, she moved through the entry way to the lab, just around the corner. She just needed to be out of everyone's sight line. She needed a moment to catch her breath. Their silence following her words was more than she could handle right now.
To distract herself, Jemma opened the drawer of the cabinet, searching for something to use to clean up her hands, but there was nothing. She tried another drawer ripping at a package of gauze she found. It was absorbent. It would do for now. It would keep her busy and focused. But her hand came away with just a scrap. She tried to wipe the blood from her hands, fumbling with the bit of cloth, but she knew it was no use. You can't just wipe blood away, especially without any kind of solvent. Lady MacBeth knew that too, and look how things turned out for her family. Though Lady MacBeth was a bit of a sneak. And not a nice person, not really. That was an all around poor comparison.
Simmons's mind rambled on at about a thousand miles a second. She needed soap and water, but she couldn't make herself move from the cabinet. She felt herself begin to break apart, piece by piece, now that she was away from everyone else, now that there was a moment where she wasn't giving orders or checking vital signs. Now that she wasn't seeing Skye's face through the tiny window. She wasn't sure how much longer she could even remain on her feet, but Simmons knew she was the only one on this bus even remotely qualified to help Skye. With her mind so jumbled now, she wasn't sure she would even know how.
She sniffled, opened her mouth with a gasping sound that she couldn't stop. She tried so hard to hold herself together for the good of the team, but alone, it proved to be much harder. A hand on her shoulder didn't startle her, because she knew there was only one person who would come after her immediately at a time like this, only one person who wasn't going to be purely focused on their mortally wounded teammate. She practically fell into Fitz's arms, trying not to transfer the blood on her hands to his jacket. He didn't like bodily fluids at all. And even if she was slowly falling apart, sobs racking her body, she was not going to get blood on Fitz.
Fitz just tightened his arms around her, fingers splayed across her back, letting her cry for what felt like an eternity. She knew it wasn't. None of the little moments today had been, no matter how this day had dragged on. And now, time was an issue here, and someone would have come looking for her if she had run off for too long. She couldn't make herself stop though. Even as the sobs slowed, the tears kept falling. Taking in a shaky breath as he ran one hand up and down her spine, she turned her head just enough to breathe in the familiar sent of Fitz and lab chemicals that was now mixed with a coppery one that she didn't like. She leaned in as far as she could, pushing him slightly into the wall, her forehead pressing against his neck, before she tried to pull away. Fitz only held her tighter, and she sniffed again, realizing that maybe this wasn't just about comforting her, but about comforting himself as well. When he finally did let go, neither of them looked one another in the eye. Instead, Jemma stared at her hands, her hands that were covered in blood, Skye's blood. She still had a bit of gauze gripped in her right hand, and she used it to uselessly swipe at the palm of her left. She couldn't even wipe the tears from her own face right now.
"I can't…" she whispered, unsure what to say.
It was Fitz who knew what to do, as usual. He gently took her shoulders and led her over to a sink in the corner of the room. The walk was an awkward shuffle for the two of them since she was so intent on not moving far from the cabinet that she had gone to for some sort of support. When they reached the sink, it was Fitz who turned on the water, checking the temperature. It was Fitz who pumped soap into her hands from the dispenser. And it was Fitz who guided her hands into the steady stream of water and began to scrub.
A rusty trail flowed from their fingertips to the drain, swirling with the pearls of soap suds and rushing liquid. He picked at her fingernails with his bare hands, trying to get the flecks of blood that had latched onto her cuticles to come away, but every so often he would stop his work, rubbing his thumbs in soothing circles over her skin. His hands were taking on their own reddish hue now too.
"You don't have to-" she started to whisper, but he cut her off.
"I've got it."
Jemma swallowed her protests and glanced up at his face, full of concern and concentration. Fitz, who didn't even want to be in the lab when she had a saliva sample to analyze, was helping her wash the blood of a possibly dying friend from her skin. She didn't know what to say to him at this point. Thank you didn't seem like it would be enough.
"Fitz?"
"It's going to be okay, Jemma."
She liked the way he said it, the words coming out slow and sure and quiet, rumbling up from his chest in his accent. She almost believed them.
"What am I going to do? I'm not a surgeon. There's no SHIELD medical personnel here. Can we even take Skye to a hospital? I don't even know Skye's blood type. I-"
His movements on her hands slowed, and he turned his head so that they were eye to eye.
"If we have to have May dictate the methodology to us and put our hands in Skye's bloody abdomen ourselves, we will fix her. It's what we do. We fix the problems that no one else has solutions to. Just like we have since our first project together at the Academy."
The look on his face was one of pure hardened resolve, and Jemma understood what he was really saying.
"This is. Not. Your fault. Fitz."
"She went in alone."
"You didn't tell her to. No one makes Skye do anything. You know that."
"But I was right outside. Making sure the cars couldn't be used. I could have-"
"You could have what, exactly, Fitz? Gone in with her? With just the one gun? So you could both get shot?" Jemma spun on him, her hands out of the water, gripping his wrists. "This isn't your fault. Do you understand me?" She hissed the words at him. "This is bloody Ian Quinn's fault. He pulled the trigger. We wouldn't have been here at all if he wasn't getting that stupid package."
Fitz swallowed, nodding his head. Jemma was starting to scare him a little bit, he was seeing shades of Coulson in her, and she could see that in his eyes now.
"Oh." She glanced down at their hands, her fingers gripping his wrists so tightly, they would probably leave marks. "I'm so sorry." She let go, her hands stilling in midair now, unsure what to do with them.
"S'alright," he mumbled, and tried to smile at her, but the expression fell somewhat flat, and became a grimace instead. Reaching next to them, he opened another cabinet to find a towel, and wrapped the fabric around her hands reassuringly, his fingers intertwining with hers even though there was an inch of fabric between them.
Simmons stared down at their hands, wrapped together. Fitz had never been a particularly touchy-feely kind of a person. It was usually her who initiated any kind of physical contact between them, unless they were simply running into one another in the lab, which used to happen pretty often. But apparently she wasn't the only one for whom tragedy sparked a need for human contact. She just wanted to pull him close again and hide somewhere that no one could find them, but that would be selfish. Biology was in her job description. The rest of the team was going to be counting on her to fix this, fix Skye. And she couldn't let them down.
Fitz very gently pulled his hands, and the towel, away from hers. His eyes searched her face for a moment, and after some hesitation, he used the now damp towel to wipe at her cheek. She had left a bloody stripe where she had swiped hair out of her eyes.
"We should put something on that," Simmons told him softly, gesturing to the mark on his own face where he had taken a hit on the train car.
"Nah. It's fine." He dropped his hands, holding the towel awkwardly at his side, his gaze not leaving hers.
"Alright then," she said with more conviction than she felt, pulling the pieces of herself that had slowly been crumbling away during the course of the day back together. "Let's figure out a way to fix this, shall we?"
-o-
A/N: This started out as a fifteen minute challenge for the word crumble, and I just wasn't happy with it, so I decided to tell the entire episode from Jemma's point on view. I love Elizabeth Henstridge, and how she does so much even when she has so few scenes. Love her.