Work Text:
Simmons was not usually bothered by people watching her work; or rather, she never had been before. Aside from anything else, she was impeccable in her procedure, good at her job, and beautiful to look at – if she did say so herself. Plus of course, she had never been particularly conservative with her private space, especially since lab work was collaborative – especially since the advent of ‘FitzSimmons’ had made her accustomed to working on some projects as essentially a two-person entity. So aside from the usual, minor risk of plagiarism, there had never been much reason to worry.
Not until Hydra, that is.
After the Fall of Shield, and even more intensively during her time undercover, Simmons’ awareness of her surroundings had intensified to a sometimes painfully acute level. Every change in breath or footstep, every sideways glance, could have been the death of her, so here, she watched out for them. At this very moment, the hairs at the back of her neck were bristling. Someone was staring at her – the new guy, the mercenary. Hunter.
She was making a point of not looking at him as she moved about her work. Currently, her strategy was to ignore him and hope he went away of his own accord – but he lingered. She was beginning to realise that she had underestimated either his dedication or his stubbornness. She ground her teeth together, and with a sigh, abandoned her previous strategy.
“I assume you’re here to talk about Fitz?” she asked, trying to keep her tone on the cold side of hospitable, still hoping he would leave her alone.
“No.”
He had her then – she paused. She was tempted to look up, but she resisted.
“Wanted to get another side of the story, actually,” Hunter continued. “I heard something serious went down between you two.”
Simmons pursed her lips. He was striking an inviting balance between caring and casual, but even when she wanted to, it was hard to quiet down the voices that screamed, louder than her own pain, about what she had done wrong, how much she had hurt Fitz. Liar, betrayer. Opening up to a stranger was hardly going to make the screaming stop.
Or was it?
Because when she thought about telling the story, to somebody who didn’t know it, she passed the Hydra roadblock in time, passed recovery, passed the nine longest days of her life until she was back in the Pod, struggling to breathe as she processed the information. Fitz loved her. Fitz was going to die. Two pieces of information, in one sentence. In two words.
So, please.
With that her slowly crumbling façade was broken down. A tear, one of many that had been hovering just below the surface for some time now, slipped down her cheek, and Hunter’s eyes couldn’t help but zero in on it as she wiped it away. Rather than sharpen and lift with his victory, Hunter’s face softened. He relaxed his posture, and looked away for a moment - giving her an out - but Simmons was exhausted from the screaming guilt inside her head, and if recounting her pain instead would give her even a moment of respite… She found herself surrendering, almost enamoured by the very thought.
“What do you know about Grant Ward?”
-
An hour later, they sat in silence in the lounge. Simmons leant on her knees, a bottle of beer still half full in one hand. She was scared to drink it, scared to try and drown it – she knew where that could lead – and scared that the alcohol would flush something out that she wasn’t ready to think about, let alone tell.
Meanwhile, Hunter was on his third beer. He’d had his fair share of betrayals and had become long accustomed to drowning out the pain. Simmons still clearly had more to tell, but she was done for now. She’d fallen into a deathly silence, with which Hunter was more than familiar. He could see it in her eyes: standing on the edge of the abyss, knowing that one more word would mean stepping from stability – albeit pain, grief and guilt – and into the tumultuous oceans of situations and emotions that had yet to be processed. There were monsters.
After a while, Simmons sat back in her seat. She scratched at the label with her thumbnail, a little dazed by the realisation that it hadn’t been so bad after all. The ground was still stable beneath her, and the story was told. Everything flushed out into the open.
Well, not everything. It was impossible to count the number of times and ways her heart had been broken and battered over the last few months. Even every day at Hydra was a pinprick. Sometimes it wasn’t enough to know that she had been pretending. Some days her only solace was that they had never let her get high enough in the ranks to ask her to do any serious damage. On this topic, her thoughts were always drawn to the Milgram Experiment. How far up had she already twisted the voltage? How much further would she go?
It depends, it always depends. That was the answer they gave at school, no matter which level. It was probably true, for most people, but ever since she’d come so close to really being in such a situation herself – though of course, not quite so blatant (she hoped) - she felt a burning, self-flagellating need to walk into that room on the tapes they played, and hear the white coats’ repetition.
Please continue.
It had been easy at first. Obvious. She had pulled Fitz from the ocean because it was right, because it had been necessary, and because she had loved him, and she had wanted it. It had been easy. She had continued to wake up every day, and if not move forward, at least stay in the same place; ever more determined that getting knocked down would not mean staying down. When he’d awoken, and hardly been able to speak, and had looked at her like all he had wanted in the world was to be good enough again, she had been able to bear it because it was a given that she would continue alongside him, helping him step by step up the seemingly endless staircase of his recovery. Even when he’d had fits, and yelled, thrown her help back in her face, she’d picked herself up. It was bred into her; it was her nature, to help. It was her choice, every minute of every day, to continue to help, and to refuse to let that choice be exhausted or corrupted. Even when the best way to help had been to leave, she had tried to do it with a smile on her face.
The experiment requires that you continue.
Most mornings, to her credit, she had succeeded in keeping the smile on her face, at least for a little while. She’d held onto the thought that she was at least doing something productive, which was better than being miserable and useless. The dullness of the science was only a small price to pay. Whenever the dead eyes on the wall or the silence of her apartment had gotten to her, she had looked herself in the mirror, and told herself to continue. They were depending on her. It was a darker reiteration of something that had driven Simmons her whole life: feeling like part of something, feeling productive, had always given her motivation, joy and courage. Even courage to walk back into the belly of the beast.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Once she’d found out about the intel they had – on Shield, on their operatives, their families, their wards – and the ‘incentives program,’ and the brainwashing, she’d put this one on herself. Even terrified, even when she was hauled off to Bakshi’s office or stared hard in the eyes, expected to crack, she was unstoppable. Every day, she worked, without complaining. Every day, she delivered her messages, and transferred her data. Every day, she kept an eye out for potential escape routes, and alternate targets for suspicion. No matter what happened, she must continue. It was too late now, anyway.
You have no choice but to continue.
“He knows your name.”
She’d slipped the message into his desk. She’d kept her mouth shut. Bobbi had known, of course, the whole time, but that didn’t make it any better. Once a mole had been revealed it was betray or die. And even then, it had been for nothing.
She could still see the fear in his eyes.
-
Simmons stared at the bottle for a long time, unblinking. Hunter watched carefully as her whole body seemed to still. Her nail stopped scratching at the label. Her knees stopped bouncing, or relocating themselves even long after the posture should have become tired. Even her chest seemed to stop moving. Tears ran down her face and she didn’t seem to notice. She was just staring.
Shit.
Hunter put his bottle on the table and knelt, trying to put himself at the edge of her field of vision.
“Simmons. Simmons, hey. Look at me.”
On his knees, he walked over to her, and put a hand on the edge of the seat; the cushion next to hers, to make sure she had space.
“Jemma. Look at me. You’re okay.”
She blinked, and immediately noticed the tears. She wiped them from her face, and studied them, surprised.
“I- “ Her jaw flapped, unable to explain, unable to comprehend.
“You’re okay,” Hunter repeated. “Has this happened before?”
“No. I don’t – I don’t know.” The breath rasped in and out of her chest, fear rising again as the time she’d lost and the uncontrollable tears overwhelmed her.
“You’re okay,” Hunter assured her again. “Should I get someone for you?”
Simmons shook her head, curling up into a ball, hugging her knees. “No. No, you can’t – you can’t tell anyone-“
“Okay. It’s okay.”
Gently, he removed his hand from the couch, and slowly rose from his knees to sit there instead.
“I know it’s scary,” he continued, “but you’re going to be okay.”
He decided to save any attempt at a clinical explanation for later. This was not the time or place for it and besides, he was hardly qualified. She was a science-y type, she might just look it up for herself, or – well, she seemed hardly likely to see a counselor about it, but sometimes that did more harm than good.
“D’you want a hug?”
To that, Simmons nodded. A simple answer, in amongst all these new questions, all this fear. Hunter gently wrapped his arms around her, and eased her toward himself. She uncurled a little, just enough to let herself settle into the weight of his arms. He tugged the blanket off the back of the couch, wedging it as best he could over and around them, and prying the beer bottle from her hands and replacing it with the blanket.
“There, what does that feel like?”
She peered around at him. She couldn’t quite see him from this angle, but he could see enough to catch her confusion.
“It’s called grounding, it’s a thing,” he told her. “What does it feel like?”
Still on the verge of tears, wrapped in the arms of a stranger, Simmons found herself feeling unusually safe. His casual question – stupid question though it was – must have a reason behind it… A reason that, even as she thought about it, she was beginning to feel: it was a distraction. Pure and simple.
She sniffed, and as requested, experimented with the material in her hands.
“Heavy. Warm. It’s…a little scratchy, but still soft. That’s so you don’t have to clean it…”
Hunter nodded and made little affirmative noises as Simmons launched into an analysis of the particular fibres and why they would have been chosen, and took a guess – “just a guess mind,” she’d need a microscope at the very least to be able to say for certain – at the dyes. Her speech was rapid, but not frantic, and definitely a welcome change from the tearful confessions, half sentences and long silences that had characterised her storytelling earlier. Gradually, they broke out of the hug, but she trailed him to the kitchen for a glass of water and back to the lounge, and by the time they sat down she’d moved onto telling him about fish with such enthusiasm he could hardly believe this was the same girl.
“Skye!” she greeted, when she found her seat occupied. Concerned flickered in Skye’s eyes even as she smiled and greeted back, and moved aside for Simmons.
“I was just telling Hunter about Pterophyllum scalare,” Simmons continued. “You know, angel fish, they never actually look like the ones in the movies. They’re little and blue. The ones you see around are actually Pterophyllum altum, which, yes, technically, is also an angelfish but not the normal one and actually there’s a third kind called Pterophyllum leopoldi, which I thought was hilarious. Fitz, of course, took ages to get the joke…”
As Simmons recounted the story that surrounded this joke, Skye was sure to move close to her, and keep a subtle contact. Skye cast her eyes to Hunter for a moment, and Hunter nodded, assuring that he understood the weight of what Simmons was carrying, and that she really was okay, at least for now. That this was not defensive babbling, but honestly excited.
“…and then the ratbag has the nerve to tell me that it should be called ‘Pterophyllum Jemmaldi’ because it is – and he quoted my own paper on this – the smallest and most aggressive of the angelfish.”
“Damn right,” Skye cheered, raising a hand. Simmons beamed, and clapped it enthusiastically before hesitating.
“Wait,” she said, and Skye and Hunter sat on edge. But then her face crinkled with laughter – “You weren’t supposed to take his side!”