Missing moments from Episode 2: Window of Opportunity
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Doppelganger
Her gaze travels up from the feet that are walking away, the sight slightly blurry from the explosion. When her eyes reach his face, she thinks she must have hit her head. He looks just like Coulson.
She blinks hard, trying to make her vision go back to normal, and looks again. His appearance hasn't changed. And she knows she didn't hit her head hard enough to be seeing things. He barely looks at them before leaving with the woman, and by the time May is standing, they are gone.
She faces Mack in his office now, telling him about the explosion and the mysterious perpetrators. She hasn't mentioned this yet, though she knows she has to.
"This is going to sound crazy," she says, not looking at him, "but the one that killed Agent Fox? He looked like Coulson."
Mack stops looking at Fox's file, fixing her with his full attention. "How do you mean?"
She clenches her teeth at the mess of emotions in her blood. She doesn't have time to go back to that sad place, or let anger cloud everything. She has to keep her head. "I mean, he looked like Phil Coulson."
Mack's voice is gentle. "Are you sure? You said yourself the explosion made everyone a little disoriented -."
"It was him," she says stubbornly, as she fails to restrain the emotions she's locked away, and rage kindles inside her. It all seems like a sick joke. "Not our Coulson, but definitely something or someone that looks exactly like him."
She's staring Mack in the eyes, daring him to question her further. She knows what she saw. She may not know what kind of creature it was, but she knows it looked like him.
Mack doesn't seem as skeptical, maybe because he knows she would never lie about something like this. Coulson is a topic the two of them talk about only rarely. "Did anyone else get eyes on him?"
She swallows. "Agent Fox."
She doesn't mean it to hurt him, but she sees Mack flinch at the reminder of the young agent they've just lost. "And did you tell anyone else? Yo-Yo?"
"I thought you should know first."
He nods, and she can see the weight of responsibility settling on his shoulders. "You did the right thing."
She knows he needs time to process before he can make any decisions about this information. She needs time too. She also doesn't want there to be time. She wants to go out there, find the imposter wearing Coulson's face, and demand to know who or what he is.
She settles with finding a punching back and going all at it for the moment. She'll get her chance. She can give Mack a chance to do something before taking care of it herself.
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Eyes
Fitz doesn't like anything about this situation. Well, maybe one thing: he doesn't have to keep injecting himself with that drug to change his irises. He hated doing that so often. Of course, doing it had seemed a small price to pay as he received transport to Kitson. He has to get there, so he can refreeze himself and get to Jemma.
He knows they're close to the planet, but he doesn't trust The Collector. Once Fitz has finished repairing the airlock, he fully expects The Collector to chuck him outside it and never look back.
Fitz can't let that happen.
He'll try to appeal to The Collector again. He'll try to convince him to be reasonable, and decent.
He's about halfway through fixing the airlock when he realizes what's going to happen. He's told The Collector that his crew is unproductive. Doing this, he's proving it to be a fact. Concern for their safety floods through him.
Don't worry about them, a part of him says. They turned you in. None of this would have happened if not for them.
It's true. Yet he knows The Collector isn't a decent individual. He knows his appeals for himself will fall on deaf ears, and he realizes that he has, however unwittingly, given The Collector the smallest reason the man needs to dispose of his crew. And Fitz knows The Collector will use that reasoning, and get rid of them.
They turned him in, putting him in danger. Now he's gone and put them in danger. Sacrificing them in place of himself, he thinks in self-disgust.
He imagines Jemma's face when she learns about this, and his hand stops over the wiring. He remembers her expression, in their final moments in the Framework, all too clearly. It's been months, but that's been one of the images that periodically haunts his sleep. He can't bear to see that disappointment in her eyes again. If he fixes this, and The Collector doesn't try sending him to die in space, The Collector will still kill the crew, and he'll see that same look. Unless he changes the wiring, and, potentially, the crews' fates.
It's risky. Enoch won't like it. But if it works – if it works, he'll still be able to meet Jemma's eyes, when he finds her. He won't see that disappointment, and he won't feel it in himself. He'll be able to look at her with no new stains to his character.
That's how he knows he has to do it.
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A/N: There's another moment I seriously debated writing for this chapter. In May's final scene of the episode, after her fight with Sarge's crew, she faces the others and says "I lost." You know there's an important conversation there. But I don't know if episode three will show that conversation, so until the third episode airs, I can't classify it as a missing moment. May's fight was epic, though! It was a great scene for her.
If you think of any moments you wanted to see during an episode, let me know and I can try writing them. I'm going to update on Tuesday/Wednesday each week, to give myself time to think of more moments as well.
Let me know what you think!
