Fitz was in a cell again. Smaller this time, with unnervingly clean white walls and a tiny, metal framed bed on which he was now sitting, staring numbly ahead while the small band of aliens scanned him. Their long, rodlike device passed over each of his limbs, his abdomen, his head, bathing him in purple light and showing readings on the screen beside him. He didn't bother turning his head to look, he wouldn't have been able to read it anyhow.
It was a man now, mauve skin this time but with the same dark eyes as the woman, poking and prodding at him. She had lied, no one was giving him answers, they only took. They took his blood, his hair, pieces of his skin. They jammed their fingers in his mouth to examine his teeth and shone lights in his eyes that made him see spots. Then they peeled off pieces of skin and stuck tubes places that had no business having tubes stuck into them, cameras at the end allowing them to see inside of him or- much worse- grabbers at the end allowing them to take out pieces.
It was a nightmare.
And when they were done, they left him alone, moving onto the next cell in the row. He heard the sound of another door opening, seeping in from under the crack of his own, but he didn't have the energy or the motivation to wonder who else they were visiting.
His fever was back, along with the aching exhaustion, but more than that he was empty. This was it, this was all he had. They were going to keep him in here for the rest of his life, or kill him, or cut him up, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. No one was coming to stop them.
Tears rolled past his cheeks but he saw no point in wiping them off, of trying to pretend that he was strong, so he left them, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes.
He was doomed, and he was so, so alone. The memories from the other man's life hadn't prepared him for this, for this feeling of horrible loneliness. They hadn't prepared him to live belonging to no one. He didn't have anything real to hold onto, only what he'd inherited, memories that weren't his own, a love that would never be returned.
Exhaustion overtaking him, he slid down onto his side, pulling the blanket over himself as he felt the first chill run down his spine.
Maybe they'd given him something, slipped an injection in between blood draws, how would he know? He hadn't been paying all that much attention. This felt familiar though, he'd felt this way back at the Playground and no one had given him anything there. They'd been kind, especially in the end. He hoped they were safe. It was his one consolation in all this, that there was a chance he'd managed to protect them.
They were his friends. That was real, what he felt for them, the love he felt for Jemma, that was real and if his short time in this universe had ended with an act of love, then at least he had that.
/-/-/
At first, she'd tried to be everywhere. When they first began their search for him, Jemma had found herself needing to be involved in every aspect of it, to know what was happening in every area.
She quickly realized, however, that the most important thing she truly needed to do was focus. Focus herself and ensure everyone else was doing the same, which meant not distracting them with her perpetual demands for updates.
"We're going to find him," Skye had told her, meeting her eyes with something close to the hot, raging determination Jemma felt withering beneath her own skin. "I promise Jemma, we'll turn the universe inside out if we have to. We're getting him back."
Her friend's assurances hadn't succeeded in making her any less terrified, but they'd been enough to snap her out of the panic that had been driving her erratic behaviour. She'd calmed down considerably, at least on the outside, and she if she'd had the room to feel it, she'd have been grateful for Skye's steady strength.
It was amidst the chaos of people searching, between rushing feet and screens packed with data, that Coulson returned, followed by a familiar Asgardian.
Many of the other agents caught their eyes on her, pausing in their work to peek over, curious, a couple even appeared intimidated.
Jemma was neither of those things, she was furious, a tiger prowling towards them.
"What do you know?" she barked, coming to an abrupt halt just a few feet away. She glared at the woman who stood beside her leader. "Why didn't you come earlier?! You could have stopped them from-"
"We weren't aware that subject nine was created from one of your agents," lady Sif answered evenly and Jemma narrowed her eyes further, fighting back another outburst.
"You mean Fitz?" she asked, her anger quieting to a hiss. His name was Fitz not subject. "What have they done with him?"
Lady Sif tilted her head, examining her carefully. "You call him after the man he was created from," she noted. "Someone dear to you?" Jemma didn't reply but the other woman must have seen the answer in her expression because she nodded as if she understood and continued. "You believe this to be him?"
Jemma nodded back stiffly, patience rapidly wearing thin. "It is him," she answered between her teeth, inviting no argument, whatever lady Sif knew. "How are we going to get him back?"
That surprised her. "Then they succeeded," she marveled. "I never thought… It never seemed possible, life is meant to have only one beginning, one end."
"Well obviously there are exceptions to every rule," Jemma said, fuming at the time they were wasting. She was curious, of course she was, about what lady Sif was talking about, but as she stood, speaking in riddles, the clock continued to tick.
The Asgardian sensed her impatience. "Of course, we'll have time to debate what to do with him once we've recovered him from the Olos."
"Our alien friends," Coulson explained beside her. "That's what they call themselves."
"We've sectioned off the area around your planet," lady Sif went on. "No one is coming in or out of the radius between the ground and your moon. They cannot have left the solar system."
Jemma exhaled, a tiny fleck of relief finding it's way through all the turmoil. They couldn't leave, he was within their reach. And there wasn't going to be much of a debate when they finally did find him. Whatever he was, wherever he'd come from, he was Fitz and he belonged with them. If lady Sif, or anyone else, thought otherwise they were sorely mistaken.
"Where do we start then?" she asked, lifting her chin and taking in a slow breath, prepared to do whatever she needed to do.
Lady Sif and Coulson exchanged a glance and her eyebrows rose, the fact that they'd already had a similar discussion becoming readily apparent.
"I think we know someone who might have an idea where they took Fitz," Coulson told her. "He's serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison."
/-/-/
They'd moved him when his body temperature had began to plummet, carrying him into a plastic incubator and covering him with a warm blanket. Then they'd stuck more tubes into him, scanned him again, given him a worryingly wide assortment of brightly coloured fluids and pills.
From the outside he must have looked terrifying, lying within a clear, cylindrical capsule, pale and shaking and drowning in blankets and see-through spaghetti.
He wasn't sure what they were doing, he couldn't focus on what was going on around him long enough to puzzle it out, the moving, colourful aliens a blur against the white walls, their voices muffled and distorted.
"They're trying to keep you alive."
Startled, he managed to turn his head towards the familiar voice, confused for several seconds until he realized what was happening. His fever must have been really high. Or had he moved on from the fever? He couldn't tell.
"You're going to have to help them you know," she went on, rubbing a slow circle into the clear, solid plastic above him with the palm of her hand and looking down on him with undisguised concern. "You have to want it."
Her message was familiar. Hadn't one of his captors said something like that as they'd carried him in? He has to want to live. That was it. He needs to want it, or we can't help him.
They were helping him then? That was funny, he'd been doing fine where he was, before they'd threatened his friends and snatched him away.
"That isn't true, you were sick there too," she reasoned. "But you got better, why do you think that is?"
'I don't know,' he thought hazily, head pounding from the effort of holding onto a coherent thought. 'Why does it matter? I'm nothing. Even if I live I have no future.'
"You have to fight this," she urged, growing in desperation, her fingers gripping the hard plastic above him.
Why?
"N- not real," he gasped, tasting blood when the movement made his lips crack, but he needed to say it outloud. "You're… not here."
"She risked her life for you," the hallucination pressed on, stubbornly refusing to disappear. "Why would she do that if she didn't care? Don't you want to go home? They must be looking for you. They said they'd protect you. She promised you."
She had, hadn't she? And whatever he was, Jemma was good and kind and she'd keep her word.
What would he do though? If she did? Where would he go?
"The world is still beautiful," she reminded him gently, drawing his attention back to her unbelievably clear shape. "It's big and beautiful and you can be a part of it."
The real Jemma had said that, or something like it. She'd help him, they all would.
"You could be a part of it," she repeated, quiet now, but as determined as ever to make him listen. She leaned closer, gaze running across his face, pleading with him. "You just need to fight this."
His eyes fell on her hand, pushed against the plastic, and he marveled at how detailed it was, how much his mind had remembered to play out in front of him. Laboriously, he lifted his own hand and placed it on the other side of the barrier, matching their fingers together and returning the kind smile she beamed down on him when he did.
Already he felt stronger, the awful chill beginning to thaw, though his answer was still little more than a whisper.
"OK."
/-/-/
Neil Chung sat in the visiting room of the prison, waiting for their arrival.
When Jemma and Coulson entered the room, a small smile appeared on the man's lips and it was obvious that he'd been expecting them.
It didn't surprise her, Fitz had told her about what had happened the night he died, the way he'd known things he couldn't have known, spoken the words in his head before he'd had a chance to speak them himself. Perhaps he was a gifted, inhuman even, or perhaps he'd been bestowed these powers by the Olos.
"You aren't here to kill me this time," he remarked evenly, watching them from behind eyes that shone, sharp and alert.
"I obviously didn't kill you last time either," Jemma remarked dryly.
"You're glad you didn't," he told her, unfazed by her aggression.
She glared back, wanting to smack him. He was right but she hated that he knew it. "Where have they taken him?" she demanded.
Neil shook his head, turning to Coulson. "You have an offer."
Glancing at her uneasily, her leader reached into the pocket of his suit and pulled out folded form, sliding it across the table.
"Your transfer to a minimum security prison," he let him know needlessly. "In exchange for information that will get me my agent back."
"The Olos offered me eternal life," he said, eyes moving swiftly across the page.
Coulson scoffed. "Yeah, but do you think they'll actually deliver? They didn't come for you when we took you in. It doesn't look like your foreign friends care too much about you."
He seemed to considered this.
"No," he said after moment. "They don't." The pages slid between his fingers and for a fraction of a second, he seemed almost wistful. "I wasn't given my powers by the Olos," he told them. "I was born with them. They chose me because of them."
"Chose you for what?" Jemma asked tersely, uninterested in his life's story. She didn't give a damn where his powers had come from or what those monsters had promised him. She wanted Fitz back. "What did you do?"
He sat back in his chair, studying her carefully. Then he smiled, eyes sparkling. "I was a part of a miracle."
/-/-/
Thank you to notapper for being an Asgardian of a beta :D
Neil Chung has the same name as the character in Fringe he is based off of, although this one has a very different ending than the guy in Fringe.
The Olos colours are inspired by the Tosok from Robert J. Sawyer's Illegal Alien. I didn't make them quite as creative as he did, but I figured a humanoid alien would fit better into what we've seen in AoS.