Almost 24 hour later, Jemma felt like she was going insane. The search for something that would separate Fitz from Hive was not going well at all, no matter how hard Jemma wracked her brain. Though the lack of sleep probably did not help, she could not bring herself to lay in bed. She could not bring herself to take her mind off of Fitz, not when he needed her.
The problem was that Hive was an Inhuman, so despite seeming like a terrifying monster, he was theoretically not that different from the rest of them in terms of scientific classification. Daisy was evidence enough of , the difference between Hive and Fitz had to come from the difference in them as people. There had to be something that was so fundamentally different between them as people, in personality even, that it would simultaneously strengthen Fitz and weaken Hive. But what?!
The team was, unfortunately, not much help, though not for lack of trying. They wanted to be there, to help both Jemma and Fitz, but there were other things to be done. While Fitz and Hive were trapped in amber, the rest of the world still had to be taken care of.
"Ugh, why is this so hard?!" Jemma suddenly exclaimed, hitting her desk in fury as she hit another dead end in her line of thought.
"At this point, I'd be more surprised if it were easy," she heard Coulson say behind her.
Jemma found that she couldn't look at him for too long. She felt like she was failing everyone. "What if I can't do this?" she asked in a voice as small as she felt.
"I think that, in all the years I've known you, I haven't once found something that you couldn't do. I mean, for a while there was lying, but by some miracle you even got that down."
Jemma smiled remembering the time when she was a horrible liar, back when her life was so comparably easy. "But I've always had help. I've always had Fitz and even for those 6 months when I didn't, I had Will. What if this is a time when I simply can't do it." She just looked at her hands on the desk, trying not to give over to the despair clinging at her heart.
"That's why you're failing at this. You think that you're alone. Granted, we haven't been able to help too much yet, but you know that we're always here for you. Say the word and anyone here would drop what they were doing for you. And you also still have Fitz. You've been by his side for your entire adult life. You know him as well as he knows himself. When you were on Maveth you said that you used to talk to him, especially before you met Will. So talk to him. What would he do in this situation? What would he say? Think of how he would respond to you. Think of how your ideas would bounce off of him. Think about what makes Fitz. What makes him such a special person to you?"
Jemma thought of all this, experiencing all of her favorite memories with him. She could hear his laugh, see his smile and his bright blue eyes, feel his arms wrapped around her in a hug so wonderful she lost herself every time, no matter what kind of day she was having. She heard him tell a joke, she heard him wish for a monkey. She heard him at his happiest and his most vulnerable. She heard him tell her that everything would be alright, that he would never let anything happen to her.
The happiness of her memories with Fitz was almost overwhelming. She desperately missed the comfort and love that he had always given her, even when she felt she didn't quite deserve it.
Just as her heart was rising with all of the thoughts of Fitz and with all of the reminders of what made him special and irreplaceable, she realized why she would continue to fail at finding something to differentiate Fitz from Hive.
"That's just it though," she said in a slow voice as the puzzle pieces started to fit together to make a horrifying picture. "Fitz is so special because of his capacity for love. I've never met a single person who cares more about others than Fitz. That's just who he is. But though Hive is not nearly capable of such love, he can understand it. Hive understands relationships. He understands connections. Fitz can be bad at making connections sometimes. He's not the greatest at being social. But when he makes a friend, it's basically for life. He'll be there for that friend no matter what. Fitz completely throws himself headlong into every friendship he makes. Hive can't do that, but he can understand it." She paused before saying in almost a whisper, "This won't work." She was going to lose her best friend.
"Ok, maybe you're right. Maybe this isn't the way we should be going about this…But what if you were on to something anyways?"
"What do you mean?"
"We can't find a difference between them in their personality that will be so unfathomable to Hive that he can't tolerate being in Fitz's body. To be honest, it's probably the reason that Fitz hasn't been able to get control himself yet, and the reason why Hive is so comfortable in his body. But what if there's another way we can make Hive so uncomfortable he won't want to stay in Fitz's body anymore?"
"I don't follow."
"Well, maybe we have to kinda kill him a little bit. Just a little bit."