Jemma has a very creepy plastic skull with a rubber model of all the muscles in the human face glued to the front for bonus creepy grossness.

She loves this skull perhaps more than anything else she owns.

Fitz hates this skull more than anything else she owns. It used to sit on a podium, lording over the biology lab at the Academy where someone a long time ago dubbed it Bartholomew and was, along with the nauseating smell of formaldehyde and the abundance of cut-open dead things, a major reason he refused to set foot into the building.

Until that day, right before they graduated, when he stole it for her.

In the stress of finals and writing her valedictorian speech and interviewing with the xenobiological research team at Sci-Ops, she had landed herself with walking pneumonia and on the morning of the Biochem department’s Graduate Hike, could barely get out of bed.

Fitz found her in a heap halfway down the dormitory hallway, clutching her toothbrush and sobbing, between violent bouts of coughing, about how she was never going to get to say goodbye. He put her back to bed and then broke into the biology department for the skull.  

The skull comes with her everywhere.

It sits in pride of place above the tv in their Sci-Ops apartment. Until Fitz makes her keep it in her bedroom where it sits in pride-of-place on her nightstand.

There isn’t really space for it in her bunk on the Bus, so she stuffs it in a cabinet in the lab and everyone stumbles unwittingly across it at least once with varying, amusing reactions of horror.

It is one of the few things she brings to Hydra with her, because by then she can’t quite fathom living anywhere without it, and when her cover’s blown and she has to fight her way out of the organization, she’s sure it along with everything else in her apartment is lost to the flames her undercover mission went up in.

But a few days later, Coulson deposits it on her bed along with a few other personal effects (her Doctor Who box set and the teapot he bought for her after his first debriefing visit).

It’s over the skull that she and Hunter get into their first drinking competition. She drinks him under the table and wins a hideous glass eyeball he’d knocked out of some mob boss’s head once upon a time. He watches sulkily as she glues the eye into one of the skull’s empty sockets. Her smirk could not be smugger if it tried.

When she is swallowed by the space rock, when she’s been gone for months, when everyone but Fitz (and Bobbi) have come to their own silent, horrified acceptance that she is not coming home, Daisy breaks into her bunk. She cries herself to sleep in Jemma’s bed, curled around the skull as if it’s a teddy bear, and she takes it, along with one of Jemma’s sweaters, to hold onto when the ache of her loss feels like a black hole in Daisy’s chest.

She waits a little while after they have Jemma home to return the skull. Waits until she can really believe she’s back, risen from the dead and working her way toward okay again. Daisy walks into Jemma’s room cradling the skull as if it’s a baby in the crook of her elbow, apologizes for barely visiting, for believing she was dead, for mourning her. And Jemma tells her its okay, tells her she had mourned each of them, mourned herself and they sob into each others’ shoulders with the skull pressed between them.

Lincoln is infatuated by the thing. When he moves on base, she brings it into the lab and sets it up on a shelf between their work stations. Once, Jemma, Lincoln, and Bobbi spend five hours tossing the skull back and forth between them because once they’d done it twenty times without dropping it they could hardly stop. 

May does not understand it at all. But when Jemma’s stuck in the medbay going crazy while her wounds from Giyera heal all too slowly, she brings the skull along with some of Jemma’s clothes and blankets and bites back a bemused smile as Jemma happily mounts the thing on top of her IV stand. 

And when Jemma, Daisy, and Fitz move into the rent-controlled apartment with the breakfast nook, it goes up on the mantel above the fireplace. Fitz objects, but it’s two to one, although they do agree that he can turn it so the stupid eye isn’t bugging out at him wherever he sits. But honestly, by this point he’s seen far creepier things than a muscled skull and, well, it’s kind of a nice reminder of how things endure.

~650 words

“You need to go get hosed down,” Bobbi tells Fitz once they’ve landed at the Playground.

“Jemma -” he starts, tightening his grip on her hand.

“She’s sedated,” Bobbi reminds him gently.

“What if she wakes up and- ?”

“She won’t.” And then, when he still looks unconvinced - “I need to clean her up, too.”

Fitz nods and stands, but he can’t bring himself to let go of her hand. It’s a seven hour flight from England to the base, and he’s held onto her like she’ll disappear if he lets go.

“She won’t be alone,” Bobbi promises, and gently pulls his fingers away.

When he’s gone, Bobbi takes a steeling breath and gets to work. The equipment on the plane was barely enough to ascertain that Jemma isn’t radioactive or contagious, but now there are batteries of tests to run. Everything from Jemma’s vitals to her DNA needs to be checked for abnormalities. It’s obvious from just a glance that she’s severely malnourished and dehydrated. There’s no telling what kind of havoc another planet’s atmosphere has wreaked on her body.

Not to mention her mind.

(Bobbi tries not to think about the shiv.)

She gathers needles and vials ready for samples, lays out her equipment on a tray beside Jemma’s cot with meticulous care. Then finds herself completely unable to move. Jemma’s here. Jemma’s here. Not dead, not disintegrated by an alien rock while the rest of them were playing darts and eating chinese food, not adrift on the other side of the galaxy. It still feels entirely unreal, but she’s right here, breathing the same air Bobbi breathes.

Well, trying to.

Jemma’s breath is shallow and labored, and the sound is what jerks Bobbi into motion. Gently, she replaces the oxygen mask over Jemma’s face. She’s not a doctor - far from it - but she’ll be the best equipped to help the rest of the team understand what’s happened to her physically, so she stays with Jemma as the medical staff draws blood and hooks her up to monitors and puts her through scans.

And she promised not to leave her alone.

When they’re finally satisfied with their samples and data and have determined she shouldn’t need to go through quarantine - something Bobbi almost comes to blows over with the anal chief of medicine - they are once more left alone. Bobbi douses a soft cloth and starts to work the dust from Jemma’s skin and hair. There are layers of it, caked on and staining Jemma’s skin a dirty gray-blue. It’s under her nails, in her eyelashes, coating the back of her throat.

Bobbi ruins the cloth and then two more, slowly moving it over the contours of Jemma’s face and arms. She didn’t think it was possible for the kid to get any paler, but under the dust and grime her skin is almost translucent, stretched taut over features that have become hollow. New scars mark the landscape of her face and arms. Bobbi runs her fingers over them gently, as though she can wash these away, too.

There’s a knock on the door, soft and tentative. Bobbi expects to see Fitz, back from a hasty shower, but it’s Daisy, clutching a bundle of her own yoga pants and sweatshirt.

“I thought….” She shrugs and drops the clothes on a chair in the corner. “I went to dig her stuff out of storage, but I couldn’t find anything except blouses.”

Together, their eyes move to the ragged remains of the once-very-fashionable outfit Jemma had disappeared in six months ago. It’s hard to tell even what color the shirt is now.

“Is there - “ Daisy’s voice is a little choked, and she rubs at one of her eyes. “Um, is there something I can do?”

AN ~ this is slightly different from what you asked I think, but the crux of it is still there just with a bit more zany science sidekick vibe bc the fact that we never got a “cool things daisy can do ft the nerd herd” montage will forever leave a hole in my life. also, I somehow managed to write S2 fluff, what??

Read on AO3

-

Skye waited beside Fitz’s desk for a few minutes. Quite a few minutes. He worked on a prototype, quiet and steadfast and utterly focused, like he’d tuned everyone out and failed to notice that they’d all long since left for dinner by now.

Eventually, she cleared her throat and knocked on the end of his desk like it was a door. He jumped, his eyes snapping toward her before he recognised her and the tension dropped again.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I could…concentrate.”

“I feel you,” Skye agreed. “Actually it’s…sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. I was wondering if – maybe – you might – help me with my powers?”

Fitz frowned.

“Help you? How? I mean, sure, but how?”

Skye shrugged.

“I don’t know. It’s just, it sort of feels like there’s…electricity everywhere, you know. I mean, not literally electricity, more like…sound. And it’s around me all the time. I feel like I’m living in a colony of bees.”

Fitz smiled, recognising the feeling, though not in quite as literally a way as she experienced it.

“When I was at Li Shi - Afterlife – with Lincoln and my mum, it wasn’t so bad. I like, trained it I guess. We did stuff like, music and glasses and all that, you know, stuff that requires vibrations. I caused an avalanche once! I mean, on purpose. I miss having control of it like that, I guess is what I’m saying.”

Fitz narrowed his eyes. “You think I can help you make earthquakes?”“Well, no, that’s all me, but like…you’re my sidekick science crew, party of one. You must have some cool zany science tricks to teach me, right?”

“I think I can think of a few,” Fitz said, his expression a little preening. “In fact, if the Court is free, we can try one right now.”

“Really?” Skye leapt at the chance, and Fitz enthusiastically led her to a room between the gym and the shooting range, which had what appeared to be squash courts drawn on the floor and what appeared at first glance to be an automated ball feeder, except for the lack of balls.

“What’s that?” Skye asked, torn between keeping her eyes on Fitz and on the enticingly new machine.

“Oh of course, you wouldn’t have used one of these before. Silly. It’s a, um. Pigeon shooter. For the –“ he clicked his fingers. “Pigeons. Clay pigeons. You know.”

Skye’s eyes widened. It had been a long-time, probably superhero-related fantasy of hers to use one of those.

“Now obviously it’d be better to do this outside,” Fitz explained, his voice becoming louder as he struggled to hear himself through his hearing protection from the shooting range next door. “But since we can’t right now, this’ll have to do. See if you can focus enough to break the pigeons without bringing the roof down on us.”

“Loving the confidence here.”

“Hey, I’m still in the room, aren’t I?”

Fitz a pair of safety goggles and gave her the thumbs-up. She steadied herself in a loose braced position. Was this going to be anything like firing a gun? Or more like exploding those glasses? Or would it be different altogether?

The first clay fired, and Fitz yelped as Skye sent a blast ricocheting around the room. Fortunately, it settled before it could do too much damage.

“Sorry!” she squeaked. But the fallen clay gave her an idea. She walked over and picked it up, studying its resonance on the way back to her standing position. If she could somehow attune herself to it, like she had to the rock, maybe she could concentrate her powers.

“Ready?” Fitz called. They counted down in unison, and the second one fired.

Instinctively, like drawing a weapon in an Old Western duel, Skye flicked her hand up and pointed her fingers at the clay. The sound of it, the density, the resonance flickered through her and out her fingers, sailed through the air and shattered it. A tiny explosion later, clay-sand rained down on the Court.

Fitz let out a loud, wordless cheer behind her, and Skye felt her spirits immediately lift.

AN ~ for an anon prompt, Fitz helps May when she develops some cognitive issues from her extended time in the Framework.

Title from Lean On Me by Bill Withers, which doesn’t fit the tone of this fic but does fit its message.

Read on AO3 (~1800wd)

Lean On Me

The first thing Fitz could remember from after the Framework was Jemma hugging him and sobbing. Bawling her eyes out. He’d been replaced by an LMD he had attacked her, she’d killed the fake version of him and it had been graphic and heartbreaking, and all of that was crashing down on her as he only just started to climb out of the daze. He hugged her back for as long as he could, before his turn came to be poked and prodded and have his eyes and ears and every other sense tested and answer inane questions about his name and date of birth.

All the while, Jemma wasn’t far away. She sat on an empty bed nearby, watching him until the medics came around and forced her attention on them as they tended to her bruised and bloody, sweaty face. In the end, he was done before she was, and one of the medical team called him away.

“Agent Fitz,” the doctor said. “Could you come help us, with May? I think it’d be good for her to see a familiar face, and you’re the best candidate under the circumstances.”

Fitz looked back over his shoulder to Jemma. More than anything he wanted to be with her, but if something was wrong with May and he could help, he couldn’t let that slide.

“Of course,” he said. “Lead the way.”

Read on AO3

-

“Abort!” May calls into the microphone, bringing all their units back in. On the screen before her, she watches Fitz pounding hell-for-leather toward the quinjet as she hears everyone else file in calmly. Bobbi peeks her head over May’s shoulder and frowns at the screen. Fitz has a head-wound, he’s bleeding, and as he approaches he starts to stumble.

“Take over,” May orders, and Bobbi slips into her seat as Fitz throws himself up the ramp. It closes and they take off, and May watches, quietly assessing the damage, as Fitz rests his back against a crate and struggles to get his breath back. He coughs and coughs, spitting blood that May suspects was already in his mouth – he almost certainly got punched a few times in the face, with those markings – but when she tries to approach he waves her off.

From the ground, he picks up a slip of paper. It’s covered in blood and spit but it could be gold from the way he looks at it.

“Coordinates,” May evaluates, kneeling beside him and taking the paper.

“I think so too,” Fitz nods, panting. He grimaces and presses his head wound. May turns her attention to it. It’s not deep, but bloody, and there’s a substantial bruise around it.

“What happened?” she asks

“Got whacked with a computer monitor,” Fitz explains. “Almost strangled a guy with the cable but he got out, hence the mouth bleeding. I might have to get you to show me that again.”

“He got out? How?”

“Had a knife.”

Fitz gestures to where a bloody patch is spreading on his shirt. May scowls at it. It doesn’t appear to be in a particularly dangerous location, but in a vulnerable area like that an inch could have made the difference. And all for a tiny, bloody scrap of paper.

“Fitz.” She doesn’t mean to sound condescending, but letting him down gently in this scenario is a delicate operation. “What are these coordinates for?”

“Jemma!” he insists. “I think. I hope. Well. The burial site of this ancient tomb that has the same writing as the document I translated last month, that’ll lead to Jemma.”

She sighs. He’s so wrapped up, so full of adrenalin and hope and need, that he can’t see her crestfallen expression. She puts a hand on his shoulder, beckoning him to look up at her, and slowly the intensity in his eyes drains away and becomes shock, hurt, betrayal.

“You need to stop,” May insists, as gently as she can. “I’m sorry, Agent Fitz, but I can’t in good conscience let you do this anymore. You could have died, for nothing more than a whisper. You have to let it go, or next time you might not be so lucky.”

Fitz shakes his head. He pulls away from her and struggles to his feet.

“I’m not giving up. You can if you want but I’m not. Not ever. I’ll do it alone if I have to.”

He glares at her and she almost lowers her eyes.

“She’d be ashamed of you,” he hisses. “You were her hero and you’re going to leave her to die?”

May doesn’t respond, which only seems to disappoint him further. There are tears on his cheeks, in his voice. He sets his jaw nonetheless, and hobbles away – presumably to get medical help, but she doesn’t ask after him. She’s pushed enough for now.

When she returns to the cockpit, Bobbi has her teeth clenched and her hands tight around the stick. May slips into the copilot seat and lets her fume for a while, and as predicted, Bobbi eventually brings it up.

“That’s it?” she demands.

“What’s it?”

“’I’m sorry for your loss, move on,’?”

“I hardly said that.”

“You might as well have. May! This is the first lead he’s had since that paper, and they’re getting fewer and farther between. You’re going to crush his hope if you keep talking like that.”

“That was the idea,” May explains. “I love Jemma, I do, but there comes a point when it’s too much risk for too little gain. I have to keep Fitz safe. He’s my priority now.”

Bobbi hisses.

“You think telling him ‘no’ is going to do that, hm? He’s going to fight every person on the planet if he has to, with or without our help.”

“You think encouraging him to get his head beaten in is helping him?” May returns. “Go ahead then. I wash my hands of it. Apparently, that’s all I can do.”

Bobbi curses under her breath and gets up with a sigh. She gestures vaguely at the controls behind her and storms off after Fitz. May takes over control of the plane again and stares out into the sky. Is she doing the right thing? Is it really time to let Jemma go?

If she were Jemma, she would want them all to do whatever it took to stop Fitz coming after her. Anything, any suffering she could face, she would not consider worth his sacrifice. Better to lock him in a tower than let him throw his life away for her, if that’s what it takes.

Then again, if she were Fitz…

Read it on AO3 and if you like May & Fitz there’s an older post-Maveth one here

-

Fitz feels May’s eyes on him as he works, going over and over the data that’s pouring onto his screen and ensuring that all the tabs and electrodes attached to her are properly secure. At first, it’s curiosity he feels, but as time wears on, it devolves into irritation. She’s glaring slightly by the time he finally meets her eyes.

“Jemma rubbing off on you?” May speculates. Gesturing with one drip-infused, electrode-studded wrist to the rest of the contraption he’s set up around her, she explains: “Very thorough.”

“I’m sure everything is fine,” Fitz assures her, but even his voice is fidgety. “I just want to make sure nothing is…”

He can’t make his lips form the next word, not for lack of trying but because ‘wrong’ is the one that comes to mind and it’s not right, it’s not fair.

“I just want to make sure I didn’t hurt you,” he corrects himself. May frowns up at him, her irritation taking a backseat to stubborn concern.

“You?” she repeated. “What do you think you’ve done to me, exactly?”

There’s nothing concrete he can point to – no damage, no change, except slightly less stable blood sugar and a barely perceptible loss of muscle mass. For a moment, his jaw hangs as he searches for the words but then he realises he can’t find them because he’s trying to answer the wrong question. It’s a moral question, what she’s put forward. He sighs.

“The Framework,” he explains. “You were stuck in it for so long, I thought it could have done something to your brain. It hasn’t, but…it would’ve been on me. I invented the bloody thing.”

He wishes it were a solid entity, so that he could cast it across the floor, smash it into pieces. But even if it was, even if he did that, it would never leave him. It’s in all the computers, on the net, surrounding him. It’s in his mind. You can’t kill an idea. He looks up at the roof, blinking back tears that sting his eyes.

“Fitz-“ May tries to interrupt.

“Potentiality,” he hisses. “They warn us about it from day one. I still went and got a big head, didn’t I? I still…”

“Trusted Radcliffe?”

Fitz drops his eyes from the roof, turning to look at May. She’s got a slight, soft, sad smile and one raised eyebrow, as though pleased that she’d finally goaded him into listening. As he watches, her expression sinks back to its solemn neutral state.

“I trusted Ward, you know,” she says. It’s like a confession, like she’s slid it across the space between them and is waiting for his judgment. All he has is shock and confusion – and that bubbling pool of lava in his gut that is Ward.

“W – We all did,” he tries to comfort her, but that’s not what she’s after. She shakes her head gently.

“Not like me.”

She takes a deep breath. It’s hard to look at him, but she does.

“I chose him,” she explains. “Right from the beginning. I chose him. I chose all of you, except Daisy. I put all of us together on that plane. I put him in the position to get to you. To all of you.”

Fitz can’t do anything but stare. The air continues to pass in and out of his chest. His heartbeat seems to disappear for a moment, but then it’s back. May’s voice grounds him as much as it shocks him.

“Would you blame me for what happened to you?”

If he’d known at the time, he probably would have, but he shakes his head. It seems ridiculous now to think that May ever did anything but protect him. It’s both a confrontation and a comfort that he hasn’t noticed until now how deeply she’s infiltrated his circle of trust. Plus, after all the decisions Ward has made since the ocean, it’s hard to blame anyone else for his actions – least of all May, who sits before Fitz flushed and exhausted, having fought her way out of the simulation Fitz helped create, over and over, in an effort to get back to them. Ward and May. They simply do not line up in his mind.

May nods slowly.

“Exactly,” she says. “And if anything had happened to me - which it didn’t, according to you and Jemma and three techs Coulson had check me out - that is how I would feel about blaming you. The fault is on Radcliffe. The man who kidnapped me and strapped me into his virtual prison. Not on you.”

Fitz presses his lips together, unsure how he feels about that, unsure what to say. He’s heard similar from Jemma before and they’re probably right, but it seems to be taking a while for their words to expunge the guilt. Still, he offers her a smile. If he doesn’t hear them say it, he’ll never believe it himself, so at least it’s a start.

May smiles back, sort of, in that May way that’s not really quite a smile, and she holds her arms out, still dotted with electrodes and IVs.