A/N: anonymous said: "Jemma Simmons, memories. Pretty please? In your au or not, up to you."
Jemma's always thought it an odd choice, the use of sepia for flashbacks in movies and television. It's for distinction purposes, she knows, to clearly differentiate between present and past, but why sepia? Most of her memories are bright, washed out by the glare of fluorescent lights—in laboratories, in lecture halls, in doctors' offices.
Of the last, she sees plenty, especially when she's very young. The first is when she's six years old, and she sits in the waiting room of a consultant's office and listens to words like 'prodigy' and 'testing' float out through the open door.
She sees a lot of testing, too. Her early years are filled with it, with being sat down and told to take her time, do her best, no one will be angry if she can't finish. She always does finish, though, and that leads to the next part of the process, strange grown-ups asking kindly if her parents helped her study—"It's all right if they did, love, you won't be in trouble"—and giving her disappointed looks when she says no.
They never believe her, that she hasn't had help. Not at first. They always sit down with her and ask to be led through the steps of how she found her answers.
"How do you know this is the answer?" quickly becomes her least favourite question. It's not that she minds being asked, just that they never like her response.
More than once she's driven to tears by the frustration, the futility of trying to make them understand—facts are facts are facts, and this is one of them. There's no finding the answer, just knowing it, and she's unable, her vocabulary and her education lacking, to say anything other than, "It just is."
The tests themselves she doesn't mind. At first, they're simple and boring, but she begins to enjoy them as they become harder—more challenging, the doctors say, and maybe that's why she likes them, because she's never been challenged before. It's fun.
The results are fun, too, once everyone accepts that no, she isn't cheating and yes, she really is that smart. She's moved forward several years, put in classes where she's actually challenged, where she has to work for the answers she wants, where there isn't a guarantee that she'll make perfect scores, and she loves every second of it.
She doesn't love the looks she gets. From everyone—her mother, bewildered but encouraging; her father, proud but worried; her gran, who thinks she's strange; her classmates, so much older than her, unimpressed by the child in their midst—no matter to whom she's speaking, she receives the same blank stare every time.
No one can follow her thought process when she speaks about her interests. And, more importantly, no one wants to. She learns to recognise the signs, the impatient nods and insincere smiles, which mean her conversational partner is just waiting for her to pause for breath so they can change the subject.
She thinks things will be different when she leaves school, but they aren't. Even at university, she sees the same signs, receives the same blank stares.
No one wants to hear about the experiments she wants to run, or about the articles she reads in Chemical Society Reviews, and most definitely not about her doctoral dissertation. Even her classmates are uninterested, and since they are all pursuing the same course of study, she has to assume that it's her they object to, not the topic of conversation.
She keeps trying, though. The sting of rejection, the embarrassment that curls in her chest when she realises she's only being tolerated, is still not as bad as the loneliness that is her constant companion. So she persists, trying again and again, hoping that this year, in this class, things will be different.
They aren't. For all of her time at Cambridge, things remain the same.
Things are, however, different at the Academy. Not at first—at first, she's isolated, being (as usual) so much younger than her peers. Then she meets Fitz, just as young, just as brilliant as she, and just as eager to have someone to talk to. In Fitz, she finds what she's always wanted: not just a partner, but a friend. Her other half, really, and after so many years of knowing she was only being tolerated, it's more than a relief to find someone who so easily, excuse the pun, fits with her.
They fall easily into sync, finishing each other's thoughts and sentences, working together on experiments and inventions, pushing one another farther and harder to succeed, and it's perfect. People begin to call them FitzSimmons, and it's so wonderful, so amazing to be understood so well by someone, that she doesn't even mind being treated as a single entity.
Fitz remains the closest and dearest of her friends, but once she has him, she begins to make more. It's easier now, because she doesn't care as much. If it works out, she has a new friend, and that's lovely. If it doesn't, well, what of it? She still has Fitz.
All of her memories of Fitz—meeting, befriending, and years upon years of working together—are illuminated, brightened by fluorescent lights and computer screens. All except one.
What happened in the pod, underneath the ocean…it's not brightly lit. It's not sepia, either. She doesn't remember all of it—she did have a moderately severe head injury, after all—but what she does remember is tinted grey and blue.
Blue from the light coming through the window, of course. Grey…
It's emotion, of course, just her despair and worry for Fitz affecting her memory. He wasn't really fading as they sat there and spoke about death and thermodynamics. He remained in full colour the entire time. He was never drained of it, becoming a greyscale character in a colour world.
It's just emotion, that's all.
Just like it's emotion that's affecting her now. He's not really smaller. It's the effect of the hospital bed, of the various equipment monitoring his vitals and brainwaves, of the peaceful, relaxed look on his face. It's just her own despair and worry for him weighing her down, as it has for weeks now.
The others are worried about her, she knows.
Trip tries to coax her into eating, but she has no appetite at all. Even looking at food makes her feel ill. She eats anyway, at least a little, because Agent Coulson threatens to have her fed intravenously, and they can't waste medical supplies. Fitz needs them.
It's been weeks, and there's no change.
She can't bear to leave his room, afraid of what might happen as soon as she walks away. Skye keeps trying to drag her off to bed, begging her to sleep—"Just for a few hours, Simmons, I'll stay with him the whole time, I swear"—but she won't leave his side. She can't.
She compromises by attempting to nap in the chair next to Fitz's bed, but she can't sleep for nightmares.
Sometimes she dreams of the day she almost died from the Chitauri virus, when she threw herself from the Bus while Fitz watched and screamed. It was a cruel thing to do. She knew it then, of course she did—it's why she hit him with the fire extinguisher, so that he wouldn't have to watch her die. She failed on that score; by the time she jumped, she was weak, lacking the physical strength to hit Fitz with the force required to keep him unconscious for more than a few seconds.
She knew, when she turned around and saw him standing there, struggling with the door to the lab, that what she was doing to him was cruel. Now, having been forced to watch as he sacrificed himself to save her, she knows it was more than that. Not just cruel—it's so much worse, so much more severe. She doesn't even have words for it.
Those are terrible dreams, but they're not the only ones.
Sometimes she dreams of waiting. In those dreams, she's back at the Academy, in the study room she and Fitz claimed for themselves in their first term. She has a stack of books in front of her, ready to be read, but she doesn't open any of them, because Fitz isn't there yet. Eventually, she gets impatient and tries to read one without him, but the words turn to illegible scribbles in front of her eyes, and she wakes in tears.
Sometimes she dreams of being dropped from the Bus, over and over again, a man who saved their lives more than once standing and watching as they're inexorably dragged beneath the ocean waves.
She dreams of Ward often, actually. Not so much in the first few days, but once word reaches them that he's escaped military custody and disappeared, he becomes a regular feature of her nightmares.
She dreams of everything he did—not just to her, but to everyone. To Skye, who (for all of her nagging) doesn't appear to be sleeping any more than Jemma is. To Coulson, who watches the agents at the Playground with wary, calculating eyes. To May, who often lingers in the hall, standing guard over Jemma and Fitz despite the security of the base.
She dreams of the people he killed—Eric Koenig, Victoria Hand, Thomas Nash, and countless others whose names and faces she will never know. She dreams of Norway, of his kind eyes as he told her that her fear would take over if she dwelt on it.
And, of course, she dreams of that moment—the way his eyes went cold as he said, "Have it your way," and pressed the button that doomed them.
Doomed Fitz. Jemma is fine. Her concussion is gone, now, her abrasions mostly healed. Fitz is still comatose.
It's been weeks.
Jemma has never considered herself to be a particularly courageous person. However, she has also never considered herself a coward. Yet these days she seems to consist of nothing but fear.
Fear of heights—not a problem, in the underground base. Fear of enclosed spaces—definitely a problem, in the underground base. Fear of having her head underwater—she's mastered the art of the seven minute shower. She has a whole laundry list of them, fears that stop her heart and send her skin crawling, but there are ways to deal with them. She knows that with time, and with therapy, she can conquer her various fears. She's done it before, and she'll do it again.
Except one. The worst one, naturally.
Because what she fears most of all, above heights and closets and drowning, is that Fitz will remain nothing more than a memory. She fears, with a desperation that is only increasing as the days pass, that he will never wake up. She fears the day that one of the Playground's doctors will sit her down and say she needs to consider whether to remove Fitz from life support.
If Fitz dies, it will be unarguably her fault. He sacrificed himself to save her. And more than that, the only reason he was in a position to sacrifice himself—the only reason she needed saving—was because of her insistence upon joining a field team.
"You were wrong, Fitz," she says quietly to her comatose partner. "This is the moment I regret."