"I pretty much knew this was what I wanted do by the time I was nine."

"When I was nine I think I wanted to be a brontosaurus."

- Olivia Dunham and Peter Bishop. Fringe 1x03, The Ghost Network.

o-o-o

Simmons looked over the tissue samples she'd been given, another gifted, one who could spin like a top at breathtaking speeds. She'd read the file this time, over her supervisor's shoulder. His name was David Cannon, but she tried not to think about that. She tried not to see his face, picture Donnie under their control, wonder if David was too.

Blocking it out. That was easier said than done. She'd seen her friends the other day, seen Skye kill someone to protect them when Simmons herself couldn't.

Skye, smiling, sarcastic Skye. She had never killed anyone before, as far as Simmons knew, and Donnie hadn't deserved to die, he'd been under Hydra's control which was, at least in part, Simmons' own fault.

How many more horrible things would she need to do to keep her cover?

She bit her lip, reining in her fear and unhappiness as another scientist, a woman in a black lab coat (why on earth were their lab coats black? Lab coats were white for a reason, but maybe Hydra was too busy screaming 'I'm evil' to notice) sat down next to her and Simmons remembered Coulson's advice.

Make friends, create connections, move up.

"Hello," she chirped, turning up the sunshine to UV warning levels. "I don't believe we've met, my name is Jemma Simmons." She held out her hand. "And you are?"

"Olivia Dunham," the woman smiled, taking it and giving it a firm shake.

'Olivia Dunham, or Olivia Brainwashed Dunham?' Simmons wondered, missing her old team's easy humour. Who would have said that? Skye, Coulson... Fitz perhaps...?

"How are you liking it here?" Olivia asked, interrupting her thoughts.

'Stop it,' she scolded herself. 'Missing them isn't going to help them.'

"It's... interesting," she told her honestly. 'And terrifying in a secret evil corporation bent on turning everyone into zombies sort of way.' There was Skye, in her head, she really needed to stop. "I'm able to do my own work, unrestrained," she told Olivia, "and I'm making great progress."

"So when did you know this was it for you?" Olivia asked raising her arms and gesturing towards the lab. "When did you figure out this was what you wanted to be?"

"I pretty much knew this was what I wanted to do by the time I was nine," Simmons answered, talking about becoming a scientist, hoping Olivia wasn't asking her about her reasons for joining Hydra.

"When I was nine I think I wanted to be a brontosaurus," Olivia chuckled. "I wasn't always so smart," she tapped her head with her fist, laughing.

Simmons smiled, truly amused.

"You know-" she began.

"Yeah, I know, the brontosaurus isn't a real dinosaur," Olivia finished, grinning. She shrugged "I grew up, I learned a few things. I'm not the same person anymore."

'Me neither,' Simmons thought grimly. "So... would you be interested in going for lunch?" She offered, smiling again. This wasn't so difficult, she almost wanted to go out for lunch with Olivia. She was lonely, she could use someone to talk to even if they could never be a real friend. "I hear Salty's is... salty."

Olivia raised her eyebrows. "I actually like Salty's, don't let the name fool you," she mused. "The food is fine. Did you want to leave in, say, an hour?" She asked, checking her watch.

"Sounds great," Simmons answered, maybe a little too enthusiastically.

Olivia chuckled at her, at least finding her funny rather than strange, and returned to work.

o-o-o

Salty's went well. Simmons ordered the fish and Olivia tried something called a Tornado Potato (which looked even more unhealthy than her deep fried cod, like crisps covered thickly in cheese).

"Mr. Turgeon's a little fidgety isn't he," Simmons commented lightly, munching on a chip.

"Well, if you get in trouble at a normal job, you get fired. If you get in trouble here, you get knocked off," Olivia reasoned, slicing a finger across her throat before chuckling nervously. "I think he's just a little stressed out by that. Not you though," she added, seeming impressed. "You were cool as cucumber when those guards took you up. What was that about anyway?"

Simmons frowned, not really wanting to talk about it.

Olivia chortled. "Need to know, right." She rolled her eyes. "Sometimes I feel like I'm working for SHIELD, all this compartmentalization. Except Hydra is a step ahead of them," she went on between bites of her meal. "We're doing stuff those dumb SHIELD scientists don't have the authorization to do, so there's that. What is with them? Are they afraid of progress? Or are they just too broken now that Hydra kicked their butt to do anything interesting?"

'The answer is C, all of the above,' Simmons thought, channeling Fitz and biting down words in defense of her organization, an organization her friend was in charge of. Hydra hadn't kicked their butts... they hadn't won. Simmons herself, infiltrating their ranks, was proof of that.

She couldn't bring herself to be too smug about it though, it was far too terrifying.

"Yeah, those... backwards... um..." she nervously fumbled for an insult. "Butts."

"I guess we really shouldn't be talking about this so publicly," Olivia pointed out, glancing around and thankfully misinterpreting the source of Simmons' unease. "Let's talk about something else. What do you do for fun?"

Simmons shrugged. "I don't really have much free time," she admitted.

"Yeah but you must have some," Olivia insisted. "Lemme guess," she narrowed her eyes, leaning back and taking Simmons in. "You like Karaoke."

"I do," Simmons answered, surprised. "How did you-"

"I heard you talking to Mr. Turgeon before the goon-squad took you up," Olivia laughed. "Do you like him or something? It almost seemed as if you were flirting."

"No, not at all," Simmons blushed. "I mean... he's nice enough... I wouldn't mind being friends... but... he's not really my type."

"Mine either," Olivia agreed. "He's cute and he's actually pretty nice when he isn't busy, but he's kinda jumpy. Besides, you shouldn't go having feelings for your co-workers," she leaned in towards Simmons as if she were saying something important. "That's advice from experience, I've been burned bad by someone I worked with. I made the mistake of confessing my feelings for them in a moment of weakness and after that things were weird for a long time."

"I'm not interested in anyone we work with," Simmons assured her.

She had little energy left to nurse a crush while keeping up her cover. She was too busy looking over her shoulder, fearing she'd be caught. And besides, her heart wasn't with Hydra.

Olivia took a swig of her soda. "Good, 'cause that's just heart ache waiting to happen."

'My heart's already aching,' Simmons thought. "Thanks for the advice," she smiled.

"Hey, we gotta look out for each other right?" Olivia replied, smiling back. "I mean the man upstairs isn't going to."

"No, he certainly isn't," Simmons agreed, thinking uneasily of her recent assignment on the ship.

o-o-o

Over the next few days, Simmons developed a budding friendship with the other scientist. Olivia seemed nice enough and Simmons was actually beginning to warm up to her, to look forward to their chats. She'd almost deluded herself into thinking she'd found an actual friend until a blunt reminder of where she was hit her in the face like a rotten orange filled with squiggling grubs.

"You're testing 4632 today," Mr. Turgeon told Olivia, handing her the file.

"Another gifted," Olivia grinned. "Cool, this should be interesting. What's up with you 4632?" She wondered, flipping through the pages on the person, likely held against their will, as if scanning a magazine. "Am I required to keep him alive?" She inquired and the detached way in which she said it, as if this man were an insect under a microscope, left a lump in Simmons' stomach.

She thought of Donnie, shot and sinking as he froze himself, dying because Hydra had turned him into a puppet, used him as if he were nothing more than a weapon. As if he hadn't been a frightened eighteen year old boy who'd dreamed of being a SHIELD scientist, much like herself, much like Fitz.

"That would probably be best," Mr. Turgeon answered, equally uncaring.

Simmons struggled not to let show how distressed she was, fought to go back to work with a blank expression.

She managed it but, rather than being proud of her accomplishment, she found herself feeling as if a piece of her had broken off.

o-o-o

That night Simmons returned home to what was once again an empty fridge in an empty room among several other empty rooms. For all the furniture, all the cheerful paintings on the wall, she'd never felt more as if she were surrounded by nothing. She'd never felt so completely alone.

She wanted Coulson back there, making her feel cared about as he prepared her dinner.

She wanted May, watching over her, making her feel safe from everything she'd seen.

She wanted Skye, giving her hope, reminding her of the bright side or how a rainbow was coming after the storm.

She wanted Trip with an easy smile and a joke to lighten the tension, the darkness.

She wanted Fitz, wanted his hand on her shoulder before he opened his arms and gave her a place where she could find shelter from the howling wind and cold that beat against her, freezing her limbs, her heart. Fitz was always warm even when his body wasn't. He would have thawed them, let her cry into his shoulder until she could face the icy gales again without turning to ice herself.

She wanted them, all of them, so badly it hurt and she sat on her bed, hugging her knees to her body and struggling not to cry because she needed to be the lie all the time. Even when Hydra wasn't watching she needed to fool herself into believing she was alright or she'd unravel.

She was icing over though, the way Donnie had after he'd plummeted off the edge of the ship, and she found herself thinking of Fitz, of that warmth, even if thinking of him was painful because things had become so complicated and because she didn't really know how he was or if he was angry with her or hurt.

She needed to hold onto his warmth so she took a quarter from her purse and thought instead of a time when they'd been happy.

Flipping the quarter over her knuckles, she remembered him teaching her how to do it. She remembered the way he'd effortlessly somersaulted the coin back and forth across his fingers, making it look easy, graceful.

She'd never been very good at it but she tried now, slowly flipping it over one clumsy finger, then the next, dropping it several times but picking it back up and trying again.

It was soothing, something to concentrate on while her mind stopped churning and the ice around her heart receded. Over and over, the quarter passed over the back of her fingers, over and over it fell and over and over she retrieved it to try again.

'You need to feel it in your hand,' she heard him telling her. 'Even though your fingers are doing all the work- and no cheating with your thumb.'

She smiled at the memory of his playful warning, of his smile when she'd finally done it the first time.

Her left hand became sore so she passed the coin to the other one. It was awkward and backwards at first, but she soon became used to it. She didn't want to stop because after a while she'd started to feel as if she wasn't so alone.

There were people out there who cared about her, who had her back even when she couldn't see them, who cooked her dinner because it mattered to them if she was eating right. Out there, there was someone who had, at least at some point, been ready to catch her anytime she fell, to hold her when she needed to cry.

There were people whom she loved and who loved her, out there somewhere, and they needed her to be strong for them, for everyone. And so she could be.

Even if she were by herself, in a strange, awful place, flipping a coin across her fingers and pretending she could hear her friend, telling her how.

o-o-o

"Am I required to keep him alive?"

"That would probably be best."

- Walter Bishop and Olivia Dunham. Fringe 1x03, The Ghost Network.

o-o-o


Wow, that was an amazing episode. I loved it and I thought Simmons totally rocked (despite the fact that I wanted to have someone build a forcefield to put around so she'd be protected from pretty much everything around her, oh my goodness :O).

The rotten orange is a reference to The House of the Scorpion in which Matt actually does throw a rotten orange at someone's face (that someone was shooting him with a pea shooter to be fair).

The Tornado potato is a dish served where I work. It actually looks delicious haha.

Olivia Dunham is named for the Olivia Dunham from Fringe but, of course, they aren't at all the same character.

David Cannon is an actual Marvel gifted who is friends with Donnie in the comics (at some point).

The coin trick is also from Fringe. In one Universe Peter's mom teaches it to him to pass the time when he's sick and in the other his dad does (of course, only one of these two Peters survives).

The first quote is Olivia talking to Peter about how she always knew she wanted to be an FBI agent (and then Peter with one of my favorite responses ever XD) and the second quote is Walter, pondering over how he is going to figure out how a man is predicting disastrous events. Walter is awesome... but he is a little scary sometimes.