Confetti Canon: Gossamer

Bobbi had seen agents after they'd been injured in the field. She'd seen it when her coworkers had come back broken and battered and shadows of their former selves. She had seen the way others looked at them, barely disguised pity behind their eyes. And of course, that relief that lurked just below the surface - relief that it wasn't them. Just a year ago she had seen those looks aimed at Fitz. She didn't know that one day she'd have those looks aimed at her.

Fitz and Hunter were the only ones in the entire building who didn't look at her that way, like she was a butterfly and one quick pull would disable her wings and leave her crashing to the floor.

Three months into her physical therapy and she knew she couldn't bend her leg far enough to lift the weight that she wanted on the machine, so she quickly adjusted the peg and flopped onto the bench in the gym. Carefully hooking her legs under the lift, she stretched her legs out and brought them down, taking in a slow breath and letting it out. She repeated the action nine more times before she turned her head to the side and looked at the person sitting on the floor.

If anyone looked like they were a butterfly who'd had flight stolen from them, it was him.

Fitz, head in his hands, was muttering to himself again. He'd been doing that a lot since Simmons had disappeared into liquified rock. He had a tablet in his lap, but he wasn't looking at it. Instead, he was staring somewhere beyond her, working something out in his brain that she probably wouldn't even be able to understand. She tried not to let herself look at him the way the others did. She tried to put herself in his shoes, but that only made her angry.

She did another ten lifts, keeping her eyes on him the whole time. When he sat up and ran his hands over his face in frustration, she realized it had probably been at least three weeks since he'd shaved.

"You should trim that," she told him, her voice rasping after not having been used while her lungs worked overtime to keep up with her punishing pace.

"What?"

"That beard. You're starting to look like a caveman."

"Hunter said it makes me look older."

Bobbi tried to snort as she began another set of lifts, but her knee pulled awkwardly and her chest felt tight, so it came out as more of a gurgled cough. Her whole body seized up, muscles tightening, and panic settled in every fiber of her being for just a second. That second was long enough for Fitz to see it though, and he was on his feet, tablet forgotten on the floor.

"Up!"

She followed his instructions, dropping her legs and pushing herself to sit up straight while he gave her a once over, hand on her back, moving in slow circles as though he could somehow make her damaged lung work the way it was supposed to.

"I'm fine," she told him, having to clear her throat before she could say it.

"Yeah, I know." Fitz dropped his hand from the spot between her shoulder blades and took a step back. "We're fine," he added under his breath. She could hear the eye roll even though he wasn't facing her.

She didn't move, letting her legs stay under the rods she was supposed to be lifting, but not making another attempt at it. He would probably start yelling at her if she did. And she hated when Fitz, of all people, put on the dad voice and called her Barbara. It would be another lecture on patience. That was the exact opposite of what she needed. Sometimes she did things just to get a rise out of him, when it seemed like he had gone too long without letting off some steam, when he was too deep in his research into the monolith and she wasn't sure if he'd eaten or showered. But right now, he didn't need that. And neither did she.

She took a few slow breaths in and out, testing how deep she could breathe. When she was sure she wouldn't seize up again, she carefully rolled her shoulders and allowed herself a small stretch.

"I still think you need to shave."

Fitz scoffed and picked up his tablet from the floor.

-o-

"Come on, Fitz. Please."

"Nope. Absolutely not."

His head was hidden behind a folder at the table. He was pretending to look at specs for an addition to the plane she knew he had actually finished two days earlier. In reality, he was reading something about a group who had access to the monolith two hundred years ago. He just wasn't supposed to be chasing another lead. Coulson had ordered them to focus on the situations at hand when 60 days went by without so much as a blip from the monolith.

"I need someone to spar with," Bobbi snapped, placing her weight on her good leg, and leaning forward to pull the folder down.

Fitz took a bite of his toast and didn't say anything.

"Fitz."

"Ask Mack."

"He's on a mission with Skye. Daisy. Damn. Now I owe her another five bucks."

Fitz took another bite of his toast and Bobbi took a seat at the table, letting go of the folder. She waited until Fitz finished the piece of toast and drained the last of his cup of tea.

"So?"

"I said no."

"Fitz."

"Bobbi."

"I need to not be completely out of shape when I'm ready to go back into the field."

Fitz set his cup back down onto the table and ran the tip of his finger up and down the handle. He didn't say anything.

"Oh. My. God. Are you afraid you're going to hurt me?" Bobbi leaned back in her chair with a huff. "I just need the practice."

"What? No!" The light pink coating his face told Bobbi that she was right.

"You're not going to hurt me."

"You've got half a bloody lung. What if -"

"Leopold."

He looked askance at the use of his first name, and Bobbi knew it was the kind of betrayal that could annoy him enough to want to hit her, but whether that was enough to push him over the edge, she wasn't sure.

He snapped the folder shut as someone else walked into the room and headed for the coffee pot. "Fine, Barbara. But if I help you, you help me." He pointed at the pages hidden there.

"Deal." She stood up carefully with a grin on her face. "Go change. You can tell me what you're looking at while we warm up."

-o-

He didn't look her in the eye when she told him the doctors wouldn't clear her for field work. It had been more than four months since Ward tortured her and she took the shot meant for Hunter, and she was finally starting to feel normal. Almost. She decided not to tell Fitz that she was relieved that she wasn't cleared, that when she thought about being in her old uniform out in the field, it made her chest contract and squeeze painfully. It still made her nervous every time she saw Hunter put on tact gear and head onto a plane without her, but she was more nervous about the possibility of her freezing up on a mission and costing the team someone else's life.

Fitz kept his eyes on the computer in front of him, so Bobbi sat on the stool by his side and waited. After a few moments, he turned to her and shrugged.

"Tha's okay. I could use your help here. Can't leave the rest o' these idiots alone for too long."

Bobbi grinned at him. "Yeah, that's true," she agreed. "Last time you went after that lead in… where was it? Mexico?" She shook her head. "Doesn't matter." She pointed to one of the lab techs at the opposite end of the room. "That guy tried to modify the ICER cartridges you'd been working on. He put three of the techs in quarantine."

Fitz's lip curled back in disgust.

"Clearly, when you aren't here, I should be in charge."

"Oh, you think so?" Fitz pretended to think about it. "I mean, I might have to clear tha' with Coulson…"

"Ah, but then we'd have to tell Coulson that you plan on making another trip."

"Good point."

"So do I have the job?"

"Jus' 'til Jemma gets back."

Bobbi held out her hand to shake on it. When Fitz gripped hers, she grinned again.

"Now, what are we doing this week to make sure that I'm not in charge for much longer?"

-o-

She had kept herself firmly upbeat for Fitz's sake. She was the only one left who was fielding his theories about just where Jemma could be. Coulson was willing to accept her as killed in action. Most of the team was willing to accept his decision. Bobbi wasn't willing to take hope away from Fitz, and she'd been the one to ask him to delay telling Jemma's parents she was missing. But being the one to buoy Fitz up meant that sometimes, she was just using him to distract herself from her own shortcomings.

It was during a particularly grueling physical therapy session that Fitz saw her break down. It was the first time in months that she'd let things overwhelm her. And it was the first time in front of Fitz. It was usually Hunter who got the brunt of her frustration, and that was only because he had other ways of helping her work it out.

But when her leg gave out during her jog on the treadmill and she was forced to slide back off the machine, slamming herself down onto the ground as Fitz rushed to her side, she felt the angry tears sliding down her cheeks before she could stop them. She couldn't even run anymore. She was a secret agent who specialized in information gathering and she couldn't even run down an escape route if she was caught anymore. Her anger at her own body was compounded by Fitz giving her the look.

It was the wide and earnest eyes he gave Daisy whenever she lost control and he talked her down. It was the slightly downturned lip that was pretending to be a comforting smile he'd given Hunter when they were chasing down a Hydra lead. It was the way he hung his head when he felt badly that he didn't explain something well enough for even Mack to get. It was the firm set and quiet determination when he watched the video of Jemma being swept away. It was like all of Fitz's supportive and pitying looks had suddenly been combined into one and were all be levelled in her direction.

And she really wanted to punch him in the face for it.

But she couldn't even catch her breath to do that.

"Don't." She bit out the word before trying to suck in a lungful of air, but her chest wouldn't cooperate.

"What?" Fitz held his hands out in front of him. "I didn't do anythin'?"

"Don't look at me like that!"

The stricken expression on his face that followed made Bobbi realize that Fitz didn't know he was doing it. She knew how much he hated to be on the receiving end of similar expressions. He shifted next to her, putting his own back against the wall, and ran one hand over his face. "'m sorry."

She panted out a few more breaths, but she didn't say anything else.

"Count to five," Fitz reminded her. "Five in. Five out."

She nodded her head and did as she was told, edging her way back to sit next to him. He didn't say anything while she cried, and he stared straight ahead instead of watching her, which she appreciated more than she could tell him, so she reached over and wrapped one hand around his arm, squeezing to let him know that she wasn't mad at him.

-o-

The next day, she walked up to Fitz in the lab and tossed a set of keys on the table, acting like absolutely nothing tear-filled had happened the night before.

"What're these for?"

"Car keys. Come on, we're getting out of here."

"But -"

"No, I haven't been medically cleared. This is not an official mission. And there will not be combat. Unless you give me lip. Come on." She rolled her eyes and headed for the garage, trusting that he would follow her.

If Fitz was surprised that she made him drive, he covered well. Either that, or he anticipated that she'd want to be able to stretch her leg out as far as she could. She gave him instructions as he drove, and when her instructions had him pulling the car into a parking space outside of a very large mall, he made the appropriate face of disgust that she expected.

She grinned when he turned to her in confusion.

"Hunter and I were talking last night."

He raised an eyebrow at that.

"Okay, this morning," she admitted, "after -"

"I'm sure I can figure out when," Fitz cut her off and closed his eyes.

Bobbi tried not cringe. She was sure Fitz didn't need that particular mental image in his mind considering he'd been treating her like his favorite big sister lately. At least he wasn't lecturing her on overexerting herself.

"Right. Anyway. We think you need appropriate clothing for going undercover."

"What?" His eyes popped open in surprise.

"Hunter thought I should just raid the undercover closet for you, but I thought this would be good for you. And me. Getting out of the base for something normal. Just for a couple hours."

"Oh."

The sat in the car for a few more minutes and Fitz stared out at the people with shopping bags walking through the lot, people laughing and talking, people who had no idea that there were people like them in the world who could stop the planet from experiencing a nuclear meltdown, but hadn't been inside a mall for something that wasn't related to a secret mission in years. Bobbi realized that she genuinely couldn't remember the last time she had been in a mall. She wondered if Fitz could.

"We don't have to," she told him. "I just thought t-shirts and cardigans might not be the best thing to wear every time you chase down a lead. You need to look the part."

"Yeah." Fitz hesitated, but eventually he pulled the keys from the ignition. "No ties though. Sometimes, I still have trouble." He held up his hand and shook it a bit to emphasize his point. "Besides, Coulson can't tie his now. Wouldn't wan' to make him feel bad."

"Good call," Bobbi agreed.

In the end, they both got frustrated with the teenagers skipping school to shop, the women who clearly spent most of their lives in the mall, and the sales associates who wished they could be anywhere else but there that kept getting in their way. All Bobbi wanted to do was find Fitz clothes that he liked, that made him look like the fully capable SHIELD agent he was. All Fitz wanted to do was get it all over with. Bobbi managed to get Fitz to buy a pretty large amount of clothing for the 40 minutes they lasted in the high end men's store. And then, she rewarded them both by buying them chocolate shakes in the food court. And if she "accidentally" tripped a teenager she saw making fun of a stuttering girl on her way to the garbage can, she considered it good karma that she refrained from knocking him out cold. She was a grown woman and a trained spy, so teaching teenagers a lesson probably wasn't something she should do in the middle of a food court.

The way Fitz laughed at the boy's confusion before gathering up his purchases and walking to the car made her feel a little lighter about the whole thing though. She almost didn't notice that she was limping her way through the parking lot.

-o-

Bobbi tried to cross her legs the way she normally would, but the brace on her knee pulled and pinched, so she stretched her legs out in front of her again, waiting. You'd think after months in a brace, she would know better. She had seen Fitz walk by, eyes wide and with a frantic wave in her direction twice already, but Andrew wasn't going to let her out of her session so soon.

"So, how's that going?" Andrew gestured to her knee and Bobbi shrugged.

"It's getting there. Still a little tight. Not the same old range of motion. It takes time."

"Yes. You've been very patient with it."

Bobbi thought back to the times it was just her and Fitz in the gym or the lab late at night, one of them near tears about their respective problems, and the other working out the solution. She thought about all the times Hunter had held the punching bag for her while she tried to find a new way to balance her weight. She thought about both of them allowing her to spar with them, even though neither of them wanted to fight her. She thought about the time Fitz had run into the gym because he knew she'd be working alone at 4AM and had just started babbling at her about his findings, and she'd yelled at him to just leave her alone and let her work her knee. She thought about the time her leg had given out in the lab and she thought she couldn't breathe, and Fitz had made sure that no one saw, and the only one he'd told was Hunter. And she thought about Hunter, who was keeping her supplied with her favorite beverages every time a mission took him out to California, and was keeping her mind and body occupied when she dwelled too long on the pain - Hunter, who was searching for Hydra intel in his spare time the way Fitz was scouring the world for clues about the monolith. And she thought about the times she'd seen Fitz on the verge of a breakdown because he'd hit another dead end, but he would pull himself together long enough for her to help him find another trail.

And she knew that as much as Andrew was telling her she appeared patient, she wasn't. She wanted to be back to her best. She wanted to take the brace off and burn it. She wanted to be able to take a deep breath and not feel like her lungs were going to explode. She wanted to help Hunter track down Ward. She wanted to help Fitz find a way to bring Jemma home. She wanted to know what was going on with Daisy and Mack's missions. She wanted to know where May was and why she wasn't coming back. She just wanted to hold them all together a little while longer until Coulson felt like Coulson again, but her patience was wearing down.

She suspected Andrew knew that.

But she just smiled.

"Yeah, well, there's a lot of other things to do around here that don't involve being out in the field."

He made some sort of noncommittal noise of agreement. "How are you liking the lab? I hear you're running it."

"Fitz is in charge," Bobbi answered automatically.

It was like her saying the words summoned him, because his head popped up on the other side of the door - she could just make him out in the window. She ran a hand through her hair and gave another stretch. She couldn't quite read the expression on his face. He didn't look panicked, so she was pretty sure the lab wasn't in flames or anything like that. He didn't look terrified, so she knew nothing had happened to Hunter on his latest mission. He also didn't look completely calm though, so she knew something was bothering him. He hadn't hovered over one of her therapy sessions with Andrew in a long time.

"Is there somewhere else you need to be?" Andrew asked.

She was clearly out of practice at diverting her attention between the person in front of her and the person behind them. Being undercover at Hydra felt like a decade ago.

"No." Bobbi shook her head. "It's not that. I think -" She forced herself to her feet. "I'll be right back."

But when she poked her head out the door and found Fitz leaning against the wall, she had a feeling she wouldn't be so eager to return.

"I found somethin'," he hissed at her so no one who happened to come down the hall would overhear.

"Okay." Bobbi smiled and nodded her head. "Tell me."

"There's a scroll," Fitz started, and Bobbi tried very hard to keep her smile in place. A scroll was never a good thing. A scroll was like an 084 that only existed in a legend. A scroll could be worse than the monolith itself with SHIELD's track record. "-tha' was found with the monolith centuries ago. It's ancient. It's supposed to tell you exactly what the rock is. And I know who has it."

"Fitz," Bobbi cut in, stepping completely out of the room and closing the door behind her so Andrew couldn't hear her. "You can't break into anyone's national archives. That could be an act of war depending on the country. We can ask for it though."

"What? No!" He held out his tablet and showed her a picture of a group of men who were considered known terrorists in their home countries. "They have it. They stole it. I jus' have to get it from them."

He looked so excited that Bobbi didn't have the heart to tell him that this particular lead seemed like the longest of his long shots, and likely the most dangerous. She had become so used to him being the one to help her keep her head above water that she forgot she was doing the same for him. Six months was a long time to feel like you weren't gaining any ground.

"Okay." Bobbi let out a slow breath. "Okay," she repeated, trying to think of a game plan for him, but Fitz was already ahead of her.

"I have a plan. They want weapons. I can give them tha'. Or make them think tha' anyway. I worked it out." He ran through a quick explanation of his fake splinter bombs, something he had apparently spent the night working on without her or Hunter. "I jus' need you to cover for me. Jus' for the day."

"Oh, yeah. Okay." She nodded again and tried not to be hurt that he didn't need her help with an actual plan. She had spent months helping him. It had been the perfect distraction. And now, he didn't need her. She hoped his plan was solid. She hoped Fitz wasn't walking into a deathtrap.

"So I'll see ya tomorrow. I'll let you know what I find, yeah?" He turned and headed down the hall, intent on getting to the next piece of the puzzle.

"Don't die out there," Bobbi whispered softly. Unlike Hunter, Fitz didn't need to hear it, but it made her feel a little bit better to have put the wish out into the universe anyway, especially with him going off on his own while Hunter was out on a job with Mack and Daisy, May was nowhere to be found (though she still suspected Coulson knew the truth about that), and Jemma was still in an alien space rock. And she was in the base. Heading into therapy. Again.

When she returned to her session with Andrew, taking her seat carefully across from him, it was the first time during one of their talks that she felt like a brand new butterfly with wings too weak to use, like she was stuck on the ground, and the slightest pluck would send her spiraling.

-o-


I had some requests for more Bobbi, so you got another story from her point of view this time around. I don't have a lot of practice writing for Bobbi, so hopefully I've been doing her justice.