Trip woke Sharon shortly before they reached the Playground. She was out of the car as soon as it stopped, but halted two feet away looking for some hint as to which direction would lead to her son. Trip grabbed her suitcase out of the trunk before leading her towards the main door.

Director Coulson was waiting for them in the foyer. "Sharon Fitz, I presume?" he said as he held out his hand in greeting. "I'm Phil Coulson, acting director of S.H.I.E.L.D."

Sharon took his hand but her eyes were over his shoulder, searching for any sign of Jemma. Trying not to forget her manners she said, "Thank you for getting me here, Director, now please let me see my son."

"Of course. Right this way."

"I'll drop your suitcase in the guest quarters, Sharon," Trip called after the pair, and Sharon managed an absentminded "thanks" before hurrying away.

Coulson led her through a twisting maze of corridors, past far too many false windows and doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY for Sharon's taste. Finally they passed through double doors into a corridor of white tile where Sharon recognized the faint scent of antiseptic. Coulson mumbled something about the facilities being more extensive than their surroundings suggested, while guiding her to a door on the right.

When Phil opened it, she saw what no mother ever wants to see.

Leo was lying in the bed, a sheet half-heartedly tucked over him, with an IV in his arm and tubes running out of his nose, his mouth, and from various places under the sheet. He looked small, shrunken, as if he was already losing muscle tone from inactivity. But the worst part, she thought, was how absolutely, utterly, completely still he was. Her son had never laid that quietly in his life, neither waking nor sleeping.

With tears in her eyes, she forced herself to walk towards him, to take his hand in hers, to bend and kiss his forehead. "Oh, Leo, baby . . . can you hear me? It's me, it's your mother," she murmured.

"Sharon . . ." Jemma's tearful voice broke in. "Sharon, I am so, so sorry."

Sharon walked around the bed and enfolded the younger woman in a fierce hug. "You poor thing, are you all right?"

Jemma nodded, blinking back tears. "Leo saved my life, Sharon."

The mother took a seat and reached out for his hand. She looked at him, not at Jemma, when she asked, "What happened?"

Jemma sat next to her and struggled to keep the sobs out of her voice as she explained. "We lost the BUS—that's the plane where we were stationed—in the initial Hydra takeover. Leo and I tracked it down but got captured before we could call for backup. One of the Hydra moles was . . . he had been a member of our team. Leo tried to reason with him, but he locked us in a medical pod and threw us out of the plane in the middle of the ocean."

She burst into tears, then, and couldn't speak. Sharon handed her a handkerchief and made shh-ing noises, but never let go of Leo's hand. It's cold, why so cold?

"Did the pod float?" she asked in what she hoped was an encouraging tone.

Jemma didn't lift her eyes, but she shook her head. "No. We were trapped underwater for hours." She took a deep breath. "Leo was magnificent, Sharon. He jury-rigged an emergency beacon, and we found a way to blow the window out of the pod. But the only way out was to swim for the surface, and we knew we'd only be able to hold our breath at that pressure level if we forced some oxygen into our lungs, and there was only one puff left in the oxygen tank so . . ." Another sob, more attempts to stop crying, then a desperate cry: "He made me take it!"

Sharon's eyes snapped to Jemma's face. "What? Why?" she cried, fresh tears running down her cheeks. You know why. But my son . . . oh, dear, why didn't you fight harder for yourself?

"Because . . . he insisted that I'm a better swimmer," Jemma whispered. "And I am. Especially since he has a broken arm. I took the air, and I dragged him to the surface with me, and we were rescued. But he wasn't breathing for at least two, probably three minutes. He's been unconscious ever since."

When Jemma summoned the courage to look at Fitz's mother again, the middle-aged woman was staring into the distance, gripping her child's hand so tightly that both of their knuckles were turning white. "How long?" she asked.

Jemma swallowed the lump in her throat. "Almost three days."

Sharon had counseled plenty of family members through similar situations. She knew what kinds of questions would be useless. But she couldn't help asking the most unanswerable one of them all: "Is he going to be all right?"

Jemma would have cut off her left foot, then and there, if she could have said "yes."

Instead, she had to settle for vagueness and what she couldn't help but think of as "doctor talk."

"It's very difficult to predict the outcome of a case like this. His brain scans showed some damage, but patients have been known to make excellent progress even when their scans seemed catastrophic. He's not brain dead. We'll have to wait for him to wake up before we can assess whether there's been any loss of motor coordination, or memory impairment, or speech impediments. But we've got access to all kinds of resources. S.H.I.E.L.D. still has loyalists. We have a whole medical team here, we even found a neuropsychologist to come work with us, the doctors have been reading S.H.I.E.L.D. research for hints about experimental therapies, we're trying all kinds of things to bring him back to us, I promise you that, Sharon. I won't ever give up."

Sharon leaned towards Jemma and took the younger woman's hands. "Jemma! Jemma, stop going on. I trust you are already doing all you can. We have to hope that one of the things you've tried does the trick. One of them will. My Leo's a fighter. He'll pull through."

Jemma nodded mutely. "I'm scared," she admitted, "That's why I can't stop babbling."

She said, "I know you are." But she thought, I'm frightened too.