Disclaimer: I don't own the show. Its very simple really, I just write fanfiction instead.
Fitz rose from his coma, a couple of days after the team found their way back together again. But, he didn't find his way back to them.
She thinks this is a thousand times more torturous than when she sat at his bedside, while he lay there comatose. Fitz is just on the other side of the lab, dressed in his white lab coat and sorting through some parts laid out in front of him. Except he isn't, he's not really Fitz. Not truly.
He is unfocused. His usually clear blue eyes are clouded. She watches with a growing sense of uneasiness, as Fitz confuses one hypothesis from the next. As he has trouble finding the right tool in his own lab. As he doesn't even complain when she brings in tissue samples. As he doesn't ask for her input. She in turn, struggles to get answers when she asks for his.
Where there once was an flowing ease to their conversations, now this not really-Fitz is an obstruction, like a window closed to the breeze.
She's noticed his hands shake now. So much so that he's stopped tinkering with anything mechanical, like he used to. She misses the tinkling of metal and the infectious spread of blueprints that streamed out from his constant imaginations.
She's become a stranger to him. It's in his eyes when he addresses her from across the lab. Her breath catches in her throat when this happens. It's in his short clipped answers and the total lack of banter which shrouds the lab in silence. She notices how big and empty it is compared to when their joint experiments used up all the space together.
It's in the way he calls her 'Jemma', like he didn't previously reserve using her first name only on the rarest occasions. That way she knew it was purely to comfort her in the worst most horrible circumstances. Something precious he only used in the highly futile moments, that cracked straight through the shell of everything, to her heart. He doesn't say it reverently anymore. He says "Jemma" so clinically and proper, so much so that his Scottish accent doesn't even impede his pronunciation. He says Jemma instead of Simmons.
It doesn't touch her heart anymore, it just shatters it instead.
She's trying to keep it together, but there's moments where she slips. It happens when May says she needs the Night-Night gun, the tears form when a confused Fitz asks if she's referring to the tranquilliser gun. She turns her back to the lab and it takes a moment before she can gather herself and be anywhere near ready to face him again.
He is there, right in front of her very eyes. If she was braver, she'd easily be able to reach over and touch him. Yet Fitz is truly absent. If anyone, can tell, she can. It's like Fitz; her Fitz from the academy, her lab partner, her savior- never got the chance to save himself from the pod at the bottom of the ocean.
She hopes he'll be back soon because she's struggling to hold it together and Fitz is too broken to help her. Just like he didn't really come out of that pod, she's holding them both up, still treading water. Their relationship is symbiotic, they're friends and they're partners. But the gap between them stretches and her reach isn't that long, she can't hold him and keep treading water.
I wanted to post this before the show returns tomorrow. Its my first AoS fic but I have discovered a major soft spot for FitzSimmons, it's been building since the F.Z.Z.T. really but whoa that pod scene hit me like a ton of bricks.
This is angsty, I suppose its my way of releasing all this Hiatus stress, like a- what could hurt more than this -kind of thing. But we'll see I guess.