There was absolutely.
No way.
In hell.
That this was happening.
He stood on the edge of the precipice, staring down into the bed of clouds, completely frozen. He couldn't see a damn thing, he couldn't breathe, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't turn off the wheels in his head that constantly churned of their own accord, spouting out calculation after calculation that screamed one inevitable conclusion.
Ward wasn't going to make it.
Fitz hadn't wanted to count the seconds, or dwell at all on the laws of physics and aerodynamics. But he couldn't help it. He was an engineer. It was ingrained in him to know the speed at which she was falling, the force her small form would be subjected to when she hit the water, the angle her lips had curled upwards in the last remaining image he had of her before she'd jumped. Those eighteen seconds that separated Ward from Jemma were eighteen seconds too long, and whether or not Ward could successfully maneuver his freefall would hardly make a difference with that large of a discrepancy.
But Fitz wasn't capable of following through on such thoughts.
He gripped the sides of the cargo hold, so tightly he couldn't feel his fingers anymore, and stepped as close to the end of the ramp as he dared. He knew he wouldn't be able to see them. May was already hurtling them through Atlantic airspace at nearly a thousand miles an hour on the off chance that they'd reach the Sandbox in time. So Fitz's attempts to find them was never going to be fruitful. He knew that. He knew that.
And yet he couldn't bring himself to move.
Somewhere in the back of his subconscious, he was vaguely aware of the ground shifting underneath his feet. He tried to keep hold of his balance, but someone was also tugging on the edge of his shirt, pulling him backwards. None of this was as alarming to him as the fact that amidst it all, the cargo ramp was closing.
Fitz heaved in a gulp of icy air before he forced himself to snap out of it. "Ward's out there, too!" he shouted to Coulson, who was firmly pulling him away from the edge.
"I know!" Coulson replied over the wind, grabbing hold of one of the seats to keep them both from being blown out of the plane. "We'll get 'em when we land!"
It took a few moments for Fitz to process what Coulson had said, his last word echoing through the chamber as the cargo ramp sealed shut. And even then he had to sort through words like "Jemma" and "falling" and "statistically probable death" before he found his voice again.
"Land?" he panted.
Coulson didn't immediately reply, and if Fitz hadn't known better, he would've said he looked somewhat...embarrassed? But no, that didn't make any sense.
"We're…about fifty miles outside of Casablanca," he said hesitantly.
Fitz stared at his commanding officer in stunned silence, unable to believe what he'd just heard.
Of course they were that close to land.
Of course they bloody were.
If Jemma was still alive (and she was, Fitz was sure of it, he couldn't comprehend the alternative), he was going to kill her.
Fitz's mind continued to speed along at a distressing rate, and he was pretty sure he wasn't breathing properly. But he managed to stay on Coulson's heels as they bounded up the staircase and charged into the Bus's comm room.
Skye's eyes widened as she glanced back and forth between Coulson and Fitz. "What-"
"Ward jumped after Simmons," Coulson explained tersely, bringing up a map of Western Africa on the Holocom. Fitz tried to remain focused on the task at hand, but all he could see was Jemma's face, the sickly pallor of her cheeks, her eyes darkened by hopelessness, wisps of her hair blowing in the breeze as they fell out of her usually neat ponytail, her body framed by a blue sky that seemed to mock his panic with its tranquility. It was an image that was permanently burned into his mind.
"She…she jumped?" Skye whispered, her voice catching in her throat. When neither of them answered her, she shook her head. "Well…well, he has a parachute, right?"
Coulson continued to ignore her while he zoomed the map in on a pair of blinking dots. "He has a parachute, doesn't he?" Skye repeated hysterically.
Fitz dug his fingers into his waist, focusing on the discomfort as he tried not to think about how he'd been completely and utterly useless in getting the straps of the device over his own shoulders, or the likelihood that he would've been able to catch her in the first place.
No, as painful as it was for him to admit it, Fitz knew deep down that Ward was Jemma's best shot at making it out of this alive.
And he absolutely hated it.
Somewhere in the midst of his swirling thoughts, Fitz registered that Skye's gaze was boring into the side of his face, and he distantly remembered her asking some sort of insistent question about parachutes. He must've given her a distracted nod, because she stopped pestering him, even though she was still standing a bit too close.
"May?" Coulson asked loudly. "Why aren't we landing?"
May's voice resounded throughout the comm room. "We've got a bit of a problem."
Coulson opened his mouth, but before he could respond, another voice crackled in through the speakers. Fitz found himself unable to comprehend what was being said, and it took him a couple seconds to realize that it was because it was in a different language.
"This is Agent Coulson with S.H.I.E.L.D. six-one-six," Coulson announced once there was a pause in the slew of words. "I need an emergency landing for me and my team. Do you copy?"
A few moments passed before an answer came through, preceded by the sound of muffled voices. "You do not have the proper authorization to land here," another man replied in heavily accented speech.
Coulson's knuckles were white as he pressed them into the Holocom. "I know we don't have the proper authorization, that's why I'm asking you very nicely for an emergency landing. I've got-"
"HQ records indicate that S.H.I.E.L.D. six-one-six is currently en route to the Sandbox to deliver hazardous material."
Coulson pursed his lips together, looking positively livid. "Look, right now I've got two agents, one unconscious, down in fifty-degree water with no one to get them out and I'll be honest, I'm not feeling all that patient at the moment. So either we scrap the politics and you let me land, or as a Level Eight superior officer I'll personally see to it that you and your pals over there are all relocated to the Oymyakon branch. And let me tell you, white sandy beaches? They're not a thing in the Arctic."
Fitz held his breath in the silence that followed. After a beat, the accented voice returned. "We'll relay you through to the office."
"No, no," Coulson said quickly, leaning in towards the Holocom. "You-"
"Please hold."
Coulson briefly closed his eyes and sighed. "They better get me someone who speaks English," he muttered, almost to himself. "And not that idiot Thompson." He shook his head at Fitz and Skye. "I can't stand that guy."
Fitz was staring at the two blinking dots on the screen, but in his peripheral vision he saw Skye shift from one foot to the other. "Sir?" she asked, sounding somewhat strangled. "How long can-"
"Ward's a specialist, Skye," Coulson interrupted. "He's trained to tread water for hours at a time, even cold water and even with dead weight on him."
Fitz dug his fingers further into his side.
"Wait," Skye said breathlessly. "So…"
"Both Simmons and Ward still had their comm trackers in when they jumped," he explained, indicating the flashing markers on the map. He selected one of the dots and a live feed of vital information displayed on the screen. "Which means even though we can't make contact, we've still got this." Fitz could feel Coulson watching him while he stared at the infrequent yet existent spikes. "She's unconscious," he continued hesitantly. "But her heart's still beating."
Fitz heard a small sob next to his shoulder as Skye leaned against the Holocom. "Oh my God."
"I take it you guys managed to find a cure?" Coulson asked in a low voice, his eyes still trained on Fitz. And even though Fitz's thoughts were all over the place and he vaguely felt like he was going to vomit from relief, he heard the implicit question in Coulson's words: Is Simmons going to kill Ward?
"The antiserum worked," Fitz choked out, blinking back tears and resisting the odd urge to laugh that he'd used the correct term. "But she didn't…" He shook his head as he saw the wind carry her away again. "She didn't know."
There wasn't any visible change in Coulson's expression, but he gave Fitz a curt nod. "We'll get 'em out as soon as we can," he promised. "Even if we have to resort to a vertical landing in the middle of the Atlantic."
"Not gonna happen, Coulson," May said through the comms. "They'll shoot us down if we go below three thousand feet."
Coulson simply blinked. "We'll get 'em out as soon as we can."
The next two hours were (up to that point) the longest two hours of Fitz's life. The agony of that interim period, of being stuck in the limbo of knowing and not knowing, was so acute that he thought he was going to go mad. Perhaps he was already mad. He didn't know. He just wanted to know why the bloody hell Jemma and Ward were still not out of the water. Ward might be skilled and all that, but hypothermia was still hypothermia.
Sometime in between one of Coulson's threat-laced tirades to Agent Thompson (because it was Agent Thompson, of course) and the dispatch of a chopper to the specified coordinates (the fastest compromise they could achieve), Fitz left the comm room, hoping that maybe he could push down the panic by pacing or something. He didn't realize where he was heading until he was standing at the door of her bunk.
It shouldn't have surprised him, really. What had he been expecting to see anyway? An empty room? Aside from the painfully absent occupant, everything looked exactly the same. The meticulously-made bed, with not so much as a wrinkle in the duvet. The two framed photographs on the shelf, one of her parents and one with him on the day they graduated from SciTech. The assortment of scientific journals and her favorite books placed in strategic spots. It was all so very…Jemma.
And yet, it was the fact that everything looked the same that twisted his gut the most. Because everything was not the same. Everything was different, and she wasn't there, and she was supposed to be there, and this was not supposed to happen. Not to her.
Not to him.
Not to them.
Feeling bile in the back of his throat, he turned away and walked over to one of the small windows set into the plane. As he rested his head on the cool glass, he felt the warmth of someone standing near his side, and a small hand on his back.
"She's gonna be okay, Fitz," Skye murmured. Fitz had to breathe out slowly to keep from doing something reflexively stupid like lash out at her. He knew she was only trying to help, that she wore her heart on her sleeve and cared about Jemma and Ward much more than any other field agent would. But there was something wrong about the feeling of her fingertips on his arm, and the fact that she was standing too close to him, and the never-ending sea stretched out below them with no sign of the people they were looking for. It felt like he was being suffocated.
If the circumstances had been any different, Fitz might have laughed. Because a day before (hell, three hours before), he would've been thrilled at the prospect that she was not only in such close proximity to him but also that she was trying to hold his hand. Maybe it was because of his anxiety or maybe it was because it just didn't feel right, but as much as he liked Skye and appreciated her attempt to comfort him, her presence was doing very little to drive away his panic.
He didn't want to hurt her, though, so he tried to give her some semblance of a nod or a smile before he extricated himself from her grip and went back to the Holocom, where Coulson continued his exasperated negotiations with the Moroccan S.H.I.E.L.D. office.
Eventually, a rescue team was dispatched from the base and May was finally permitted to land the Bus, on the condition that as soon as Jemma and Ward were processed they proceeded on their way to the Sandbox with the Chitauri helmet. Jemma was examined and released a little too quickly for Fitz's comfort, especially considering that she was still unconscious, but he figured everyone was a bit on edge from the potential spread of the alien virus and wanted them gone as soon as possible. Fitz thought about arguing that they had, in fact, developed an antiserum to counteract the virus. But for the sake of Coulson's sanity, he kept the information to himself. The sooner they dropped off the helmet, the sooner they could try to move past this entire situation.
If they even could move past it. Fitz still wasn't quite certain that that was even possible.
As soon as Ward carefully set Jemma down on her bed, he immediately headed towards the cockpit to get them back up in the air while May and Skye worked on getting Jemma into clean, warm clothes. Outside the comm room, where Coulson was fielding (or ignoring) calls from HQ, Fitz quietly paced back and forth, not really seeing or hearing anything. And when May joined Coulson in his office, with Skye making a beeline for the cockpit to most likely interrogate Ward, Fitz found himself once again in the doorway of her bunk.
If anyone else had seen her there at that moment, lying peacefully under an absurd amount of blankets, they would never have guessed that she had just attempted to end her life by jumping out of an airplane. Even Fitz was having trouble connecting the girl in front of him with what she'd done, despite the fact that the scene was still repeating itself over and over in his head.
Why had she done it? Did she really not value her own existence enough? But no, that hadn't been it. She'd done it to save the team, hadn't she? (To save him?) Jemma was more pragmatic than anyone he'd ever met. If she jumped, it meant she hadn't seen any other way. It meant that she'd mentally made a list of all the variables and come to the conclusion that she'd needed to remove herself from the equation.
Not that he agreed with her. Obviously, the antiserum had worked. But even if it hadn't, he wouldn't have given up. He would've kept trying, kept testing out antiserums, done anything and everything except give up. So why had she, then? Didn't she know how important she was? To the world? To S.H.I.E.L.D.? To the team?
To him?
No. She didn't, did she? She didn't know.
(Because until now, he hadn't either.)
How could he not have known? How could he not have known that he couldn't handle losing the one person that understood him better than anyone else? How could he not have known how important she was? How could he not have realized that she'd been beside him the whole damn time?
Ten years. He'd been beside her for ten years. He'd never had a friend last half as long as Jemma Simmons had. And as much as he loved his mum, she'd never been able to fully understand the way his brain worked. Jemma had. Jemma did.
And he was such a bloody idiot that he didn't realize that until she'd thrown herself off a damn airplane. But that wasn't the worst part, was it? No. The worst part was that there wasn't a single thing he could do to stop her.
What a fantastic partner he was.
Fitz wasn't sure how long he leaned against her doorframe, simply watching her countenance as she slept on. Somewhere in the back of his mind he supposed it was a bit creepy, but he gave himself a pass under the circumstances. It wasn't every day that he almost lost his best friend.
As she began to stir awake, though, Fitz felt a moment of sudden panic and darted away from her room. He didn't know where his feet were taking him, but his eyes fell on the spiral staircase heading up to the top level of the Bus. Before he knew what was happening, he was up the steps and knocking on the open door to Coulson's office.
Coulson glanced up from a stack of papers on his desk. "What is it, Fitz?" he asked nervously, a flash of fear in his eyes. "Is she-"
"She's, um…she's fine," Fitz stammered as he became aware of how he must have appeared. "She's waking up now, I think." He powered forward before he could change his mind. "But sir, I was wondering if I could maybe ask you something."
Coulson still seemed a bit wary, but he gave some kind of shrug before going back to the papers in front of him. "Shoot."
"I was wondering if maybe…well, I mean, you don't have to, I suppose, I was just thinking that if…I don't know, if the opportunity arose, then perhaps you could-"
"You got a point, Fitz?" Coulson asked with a raised eyebrow.
Fitz let out a sigh, cursing himself for the whole disastrous enterprise. "I was wondering if maybe you'd consider putting me out more in the field. Sir."
The pen in Coulson's hand paused on the page. He looked up at Fitz again, tilting his head to the side as if he were trying to figure something out. After a few seconds, a look of realization dawned on his face, followed closely by an expression that was just a little too patronizing for Fitz's taste. "I know you were going to go after her, Fitz."
Fitz was momentarily thrown, but he shook his head once he realized what Coulson had implied. "That's not what this is about."
There was that raised eyebrow again, like Coulson didn't believe him or something. "Okay," he said unconvincingly. "So you're saying you…want to leave the lab and walk into potentially life-endangering situations?"
"No!" Fitz protested quickly, feeling a burn in his cheeks. This had been a mistake. "I just meant that…what I was trying to say was that if-"
"I get it, Fitz," Coulson interrupted with a miniscule smirk that quickly disappeared. "And I'll think about it, okay? Let's just…" He sighed in exhaustion. "Let's just get this object the hell off my plane and relax for a little bit before we go down that road."
"Right, then," Fitz replied quietly, hoping he could salvage what small amount of dignity he had left and leave as quickly as possible.
But Coulson had thankfully gone back to his papers and was no longer paying any attention to him. "When you get a chance, could you send Simmons and Ward up here? I need to debrief them ASAP."
"Yes, of-of course, sir," Fitz said as he edged out the door.
"Hey, Fitz?" Coulson called out.
He spun around, bracing himself for further embarrassment. But Coulson was looking at him with an odd expression that Fitz thought resembled something like pride.
"She wouldn't be alive right now if it hadn't been for you."
What the hell was Coulson going on about? Fitz hadn't done a single bloody thing that day. Scraped some epithelial cells off a helmet, sure. But Jemma could have done that herself. And when it boiled down to it, she'd never needed him to create the antiserum.
There were a lot of reasons why Jemma was alive at the moment. But not one of those reasons was Fitz.
He gave Coulson a small nod, mostly just because he didn't have the energy to argue with him, and left the office. As he slowly descended the staircase into the Bus's common area, he was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he almost didn't see Jemma rushing towards him.
In that moment, there was nothing he wanted more than to wrap his arms around her and basically never let go. So he surprised himself when he froze in his tracks, looked into her stricken face as she approached him, and said the first words that popped into his head.
"Fitz, I-"
"Coulson wants to talk to you."
He supposed it hadn't really come out harshly, but they weren't the words he'd meant to say and his timing was bloody awful and there was also the issue that his words prevented any of what he'd wanted in that moment.
Jemma paused a few feet in front of him, looking somewhat deflated as her arms fell to her sides. "Oh," she said in a high voice, her cheeks inexplicably turning pink. "Right." A small laugh escaped her lips, but her face was twisted in a nervous grimace. "I suppose I'm in a bit of trouble, aren't I?"
Before Fitz could answer, Ward emerged from his bunk and made his way over to the two of them. Fitz was mildly (or not so mildly) perturbed that the guy showed absolutely no visible signs of having just spent an hour and half treading water in the middle of the sea. "It'll be fine," he assured Jemma. "Just let him rant and don't try and interrupt him. It'll make your life easier, trust me."
Jemma glanced anxiously up the spiral staircase. "'Course," she murmured, giving Fitz a wincing smile before she followed Ward to Coulson's office.
Later, when she found him in his bunk, he wrung a pillow in his hands so he'd have something to do with them. It helped a bit, if nothing else than to keep the panic at bay as he continued to avoid her gaze. He was acutely aware of where she was in relation to him. How she continually tried to talk over his ramblings. How her hands hovered just above his shoulder while he spoke. As if by some stretch of the imagination she too had to force herself from clinging onto him.
Hours after she'd left, Fitz continued to wring the pillow in his hands, trying not to think about how dangerously close he'd come to losing her that day. He replayed her words in his head and focused on the memory of her lips on his cheek, to keep himself convinced that it was over, that she was alive, that he didn't have to worry anymore.
But all he could see when he closed his eyes was the fall.
She'd called him a hero, hadn't she? Because of what he'd done in the lab? Because he'd helped her do something that she was perfectly capable of doing herself? Because he'd stood behind the glass doors helplessly, completely incapable of catching her when she'd fallen? It was a nice sentiment, he supposed, for Jemma to call him a hero.
If only he could believe her.