Ehehehe I'm in a really good mood right now. We've got less than a month of agonizing wait until season 2 comes out. I hope that I'll like Lance Hunter, because I might be including him in the story.
(And if I'm completely honest, I wouldn't be entirely angry if Jemma became a bit of a villain. I really, really love Dark Jemma. I mean, I can practically see this stuff going down as I write. Should I be worried about that?)
In this chapter, you're going to see something interesting in Leo's thoughts. The story behind it is kind of my personal headcannon for his past, and the full story will be revealed in later chapters.
Chapter 3: There Was No Shot
"She'll be safe." The man in the white lab coat looked down at the small baby in the messily wrapped white bundle.
She swallowed. "Promise?"
He looked up at her, but it was Darwin's face. In his arms, Tian Kong was gone, and replaced by Skye. The girl's body was limp and lifeless with claw marks and blood covering her entirely.
"Of course," he sneered as she began to scream.
Raina's eyes snapped open. It was just a dream, but seeing Skye's body like that made her shiver. She'd witnessed Darwin do that to people in person before, but it had been while she didn't remember the other things. Now, she avoided it and him, at all costs.
Clutching her sheets, Raina tried to calm herself down by taking deep breathes. The moonlight streaming in from her window illuminated her small chest of drawers. On it, she had painted some of the flowers she remembered from the garden of one of her clearer memories. They had been times where things were happier, or at least she hoped they were.
"Please," she thought. "Please don't let them find her. Please let her be safe."
"It's time." The gravelly voice filtering through the phone said. "You know what you must do."
Jemma allowed herself a dark smile. "Of course."
"Excellent."
The call disconnected, and Jemma put the phone in her pocket. She grabbed the collapsible baton, red dye, and the wire cutters. Satisfied, she slipped out of her bunk, and walked toward Koenig's office.
"This had better be worth my time, Leo," Skye announced as she entered the rec room with a bowl of popcorn. "We've only got a few hours until Coulson, May, and Trip get back with the new people, and I really need to not slack off on finishing uploading the database for the Index."
Leo snorted. "It's worth it, trust me," he assured her as he slid the disc into the DVD player. "You are going to fall in love with this."
Skye raised her eyebrow. "You seem quite sure of yourself."
He flopped on the couch beside her. "Of course I am," he smiled at her as the swirling blue lights and police box appeared on the screen. "Doctor Who is a classic, Skye. It has everything in it! I can't believe you haven't seen it yet."
"Well, sorree." She pitched a bit of popcorn at him, which he threw back. "Did you watch this with Simmons at the Academy?"
Leo sighed and nodded as the first episode began to play. He'd offered for Simmons to come and join him in educating Skye in great British television. She's turned it down, explaining that she had work to do. During the conversation, she'd been very fidgety, as if she was waiting for something to happen.
The thing was, she had become even more distant recently, and it bugged Leo. He'd begun to notice it more in the past week, after his conversation about her with Skye. There was a colder tone to her voice when she spoke, and she was more secretive about the projects she was currently working on. She had also been taking a lot more calls from her parents recently. But Skye had only just managed to rebuild them again thanks to a back-up hard drive and Agent Hill finally managing to get SHIELD cleared of all charges filed against them. Simmons's parents were probably just catching up with her after the four to five months spent off the grid.
Everything that seemed odd about Simmons could have an easy explanation, but Leo couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. He was being paranoid, he knew that. Still….
"Uh, Leo?"
Skye was clutching a pillow close to her chest as she watched Rose Tyler flee from the plastic mannequins of death. "This is kind of creepy. Shouldn't Doctor Who come be with her?"
"It's just the Doctor, Skye," he reassured her, hiding his grin. "And be patient."
The mannequins were about to grab Rose. Skye was holding her breath in anticipation, while Leo waited in glee to see how she would react to Christopher Eccelston.
Then the lights went out.
Jemma stood up and replaced the wire cutters back in her pocket. All of the Playground's generators were completely useless, except for the one that she couldn't completely ruin, so she set it on a timer. They had an hour to carry out their mission in the orange glow of the exit emergency lights.
She looked at the leader of the extraction squad. "Send two of your most expendable men after me thirty seconds after that door closes. The rest of you wait here until I call you."
She pointed to the door leaving the generator room, then pulled the vial of red dye out of her pocket, uncapping it.
"Wouldn't it be easier to send all of us?"
Jemma silently wished for more light so the idiot could see her rolling her eyes. "They may not seem so, but these two are tough. To take them out, they must be worn down first."
"Isn't there supposed to be a back-up generator or something?" Skye asked nervously after clicking on the flashlight he had just handed her. "I mean, it's a SHIELD base. They probably have a back-up. Why isn't it working?"
"I don't know," Leo admitted honestly. Last month, he'd checked all of the generators out, and they'd been fine. "Something must have happened to all of them."
"Like what?"
Leo was about to reply when the sound of distant running hit his ears. Signaling Skye to shut off her light, he flicked his off as well. The emergency lights in the hall bathed her face in a creepy shade of orange.
"No, no, no, no" a terrified voice pleaded. "SOMEBODY! HELP ME!"
Leo looked over in Skye's general direction. "Simmons," they said together.
They managed to maneuver their way around toward the door without a problem. On his way past the pool table, he grabbed one of the sturdier cues. Trip had told him that just about anything could be used as a weapon. Leo already had a pocket knife, but preferred a bit of extra insurance. Odds were that the intruders had guns, the thing that Leo despised more than anything in the world. ICERs couldn't kill, but guns…
A single shot. The limp form. Red, green, blue, grey, and copper. He shook his head, ridding himself of the horrible memory.
Peering out into the hallway, they saw Simmons stumbling toward them, clutching her side. In the eerie orange glow, Leo could see her hands were stained with something dark. She'd been shot, but by who?
His answer came a moment later when two goons, carrying rifles rounded the corner, and advanced toward Simmons, who had fallen just inches from the doorframe, in the middle of the hallway.
He felt Skye move past him, and watched as she jumped out in the open. Her flashlight flew out of her hand and slammed just below the visor of one of the goons. He dropped his gun and fell on his knees, groaning. The other turned his attention to where Leo and Skye were now visiable, and raised his rifle. Leo dove and pulled himself and Skye to the ground as a burst of gunfire passed overhead.
Getting up, Leo charged at the shooter, while Skye made her way over to the other goon who was now getting up. Spinning the cue, Leo knocked the gun out of the enemy's hands, then swept his feet out from underneath him. Unfortunately, the cue snapped in two. Still, Leo was able to grab the gun, and slammed the butt of it against the helmet. The guy dropped like a stone, but he was still breathing.
Skye had dispatched the other goon a bit faster, and was now at Simmons's side. As soon as he saw the blood, Leo turned away.
"I saw them," Simmons was hysterical, and was keeping her hands overtop her wound. "I heard noises from Koenig's office, and when I went in, he was on the floor with them over top of him. I screamed and ran, and then- then they shot me!"
"You're okay now, Simmons," Skye soothed, easing the hands away. "Let me look."
Leo cringed a bit at the wall. He hated to see people bleed, especially those who he was close too.
Blue sky. Red barn. Birds chirping. Then the gunshot, shattering the peace. The total si- Wait a moment!
Leo tuned out Simmons's whimpers and retreated into the library that was his brain. Simmons had been shot, that's what she had told them. Bullets come from guns, and a gunshot is heard when the trigger is pulled and the gun is fired. Unless, of course, you happen to have a silencer.
The guns at his feet had no silencers.
Since the power went out, there had been not a single sound except for Simmons's scream.
They should have heard a gunshot. They didn't. That meant that Simmons….
A thud and the following groan brought him back to reality.
Leo turned around slowly, feeling his blood go colder by the second. Simmons was standing over Skye's limp body, a collapsible baton in hand. Her hands, which once looked wet with blood, had now dried into something lighter, and he couldn't see any more flowing. The way she held herself disturbed him. This woman before him was not the one who had befriended him at the Academy. She wasn't the one who dragged him into making the best decision of his life. She wasn't the Simmons he'd given the last breath of air to. She wasn't the Simmons he knew.
"Simmons," he breathed, stepping back. "Why- what are you doing?"
The woman before him sighed and looked up at him with…..sympathy?!
"Oh, Fitz," she sighed, as though preparing to lecture him. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this."
She advanced toward him.
"Stop this, you're scaring me."
She gave a chilling laugh. "Oh, I've missed being able to do that. It can get awful tiring, pretending to be nice and sweet all the time."
Her smile dropped. "I'm sorry for this, Leo," she whispered. "But you'll soon understand."
Something hit his temple, and he fell to the ground, right next to Skye as his world turned to darkness.
*creepy smile* So do you guys understand the title now? If you saw it, of course.
So, between Hua (flower) and Yu (rain), which is a better name for a female character?