#bobbifitz

i.

The stranger is on the couch again, her feet propped on thecoffee table. She’s leafing through a trashy magazine, and only notices him whenhe trips over his own feet trying to leave the room. His tea sloshes,uncomfortably hot on his wrinkled shirt. He reaches his bad hand up to smoothit out.

“Can’t get away from me fast enough, huh?”

There’s mirth in her voice, but also a bit of hurt. His earsburn. He motions to the Xbox, bounces on his heels as if to shake loose the nervousness.“I – uh – I was gonna play, but thought it might – uh – disturb you.”

She tosses the magazine aside and looks at him, a softening,unfurling sort of curiosity. “You’ll have to be Player Two,” she says, resolute.Turns on the console, hands him the spare controller. And that’s that.

ii.

The stranger doesn’t come into his life by sneaking up onhim. Rather, she barrels into him, and it’s a blinding flash of sunlight hairand sunlight smile, her presence suffusing like crisp summer. Two in themorning and she drags him, half asleep on a workbench, out of the garage andinto bed. Three in the afternoon and they are on the floor in the common area,hunched over a game of Operation, his left hand tracing the motions until thebuzzer no longer buzzes. The stranger becomes Agent Morse becomes Bobbi, whichbecomes Barbara when he’s in a particularly playful mood. He’s still Fitz toher though, the syllable somehow familiar and easy on the tip of her tongue.

One evening she pokes him with the corner of a folder. “Sayshere you never passed your field assessment. Something about abysmalhand-to-hand combat.”

That is how he finds himself being thrown repeatedly ontothe padded floor.

“Again,” he demands, but the effect is somewhat lacklusterwith his face squished between her forearm and the sweaty training mat.

She backs off, extends a hand toward him. He takes it andclambers to his feet. He holds her gaze. “You were holding back on me. Don’t.”

So she doesn’t. It wouldn’t be the only time she hurts him.

Then comes the real S.H.I.E.L.D. Then comes strange facescrawling all over the base, some new, some old, but they might as well be new.She’s standing in front of him and he can’t see past the betrayal that cloudsthe space between them. A childhood wound begins to ache, somewhere deep in hismarrow. This time, at least, he gets to be the one who walks away.

“We’re not the only ones after Coulson’s toolbox.” She patshis shoulder. “Be careful out there, Fitz.”

For a brief second he melts into her touch, seeking thereprieve from reality it offers. In the end, though, he shrugs her hand off.“Goodbye, Agent Morse.”

iii.

The next time he’s alone with her, she’s in a hospital bed,tangled in a million tubes, bruises red and raging on her skin. His anger suddenlydissipated, he sinks into the seat next to her. They exchange a smile that istwo parts water.

“I lost half a lung,” she begins, already out of breath. “Ilaid there in my own blood, wheezing, and I thought of you.”

The fluorescent light hums quietly. He brushes a thumb acrossthe back of her hand. “We’ll all learn to breathe again eventually.”

“You did. But what if I won’t?”

“Hey,” he says, and thinks of something golden, something light,“I had a little help, didn’t I?”

iv.

She’s on crutches and he’s on his last legs chasing anotherdead end. He catches a red-eye back from Yucatan, arriving at the base justbefore dawn. In the gym, she is doing simple stretches before her morning PTsession. He knows to go to her before she even asks.

His duffle bag hits the floor with a dull thud, and then he’scrying, gracelessly, the kind of crying that’s more half-choked sobs thantears. Every fiber of his being needs Jemma back, but every fiber of his beingis tired and lost and he just wantsto stop existing awhile. The process of getting through time is agony.

Rubber-clad metal thumps against the floor. Bobbi limpstoward him and leans on her crutches, shifting her weight away from her bad leg.She doesn’t say anything; she just stands there beside him while he clutcheshis heart and bones and other things that break.

Minutes – or maybe hours – pass before he looks up to meether eyes.

“I asked Coulson for a transfer,” she tells him. “Startingnext week, I’ll be working in the lab.”

And it sounds so much like moving on that for a moment heselfishly resents her for it. But then she bends down to adjust her knee bracewith a grunt, her crutches awkwardly in the way, and it occurs to him thatthey’re both stuck in the same hole, trying to claw their way out to find theirpurpose again.

It’s easier when they do it together.

He wipes away the last of his tears. “We have some timebefore your PT. Want to go to the lab and help me set up your new work station?”

He hears the clank of metallic crutches as they fall, andbefore he knows it her arms are around him, a hand stroking his back in slow,circular motions. She feels like the view outside his childhood window, hethinks idly, steadying her so that they lean onto each other.

“We’ll find her, okay?” she murmurs against his hair, voice asubdued kind of glow. “We’ll find her.”

v.

February is meant for restless sleepers. Especially thosecloudy evenings, when night falls in dim and icy veils, the sky awash with arolling, tainted black.

He wakes covered in cold sweats. The bedside alarm reads3:58 AM. His nightmares are always blue lately, but the tail end is a fieryred, punctuated by the sizzling sound of a burning corpse. It’s been burningfor months.

The couch in the common area is not empty. He flops downnext to its sole occupant, grateful for her presence but a bit sad too. No onedeserves to be awake alone in the long hours before dawn breaks.

Bobbi pushes a half-finished mug in front of him. “Here,drink this,” she offers. Black tea with too much milk and too much sugar. Justthe way he likes it. He wonders if she made it for him, if she’s been waitingfor him this whole time.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she laughs, a response to hisquizzical expression. “My knee and the cold don’t get along. I couldn’t sleep.Figured you couldn’t too.”

“How long have you been up?”

She simply shrugs. He nods, a mutual understanding for theintricacy of silences, and hands her back the tea. They pass it back and forthuntil there’s barely anything left, the residue leaving a lonely smudge at thebottom. Then he turns on the Xbox and they content themselves with somemindless FIFA matches.

(All the first-person shooter games have been thrown away.No one ever questions why.)

When they head back to the living quarters, the sun is juststarting to rise. Sleepy light drifts in through the window as they walk pass,slanting on her face in bars of gold. There’s this unbidden fondness for herthat overwhelms him, and he bumps her shoulder to whisper a soft thank you. Sheanswers by nodding toward the sunrise. A clean slate. February is meant forrestless sleepers who are trying to forgive themselves.

“Good morning, Fitz,” she says.

Neither of them knows that it’s the last private moment theyhave together.

vi.

After Russia, he stops doing shots. It’s not a consciouschoice, not really. In Bucharest, he gets a tequila shot and just picks at thelime for a while, the dull ache like a phantom limb that he knows is there butcan’t quite touch. Then he gives up and orders one of those garish florescentcocktails instead.

In the afterglow of it all, tangled between the sheets, helistens as Jemma tells him about an undead monster who looks like Grant Ward whoacts like Will. “It’s awful, Fitz,” she concludes in a hushed tone, hershuddering breath ghosting his skin. “I’m just glad at least Bobbi and Hunterare not caught up in this mess.”

He hums in agreement.

“Do you think they’re doing okay?” she asks, the sheetsslipping off her shoulders as she sits up to meet his gaze. She’s holding her immenseheart in her hands like a little bird, and god,maybe the universe is forever expanding and maybe we’re all dying as we live,but she’s the only one who makes it less devastating.

Overwhelmed, he surges up to kiss her. They’re both smiling,he can feel it against his lips, contentment unfurling in a haze. When theypull apart, he answers in earnest, “I don’t know, Jemma, but I hope they’rehappy too.”

vii.

Eventually, they all carry on living. He does shots againand they re-stock the fridge with Bendeery. It’s not a form of forgetting; theyjust learn to re-shape their lives around the dull ache, which is only noticeablewhen they choose to remember.

This evening, however, he’s acutely aware of the ache in theempty.

After Radcliffe, he and Jemma decide to leave for a while.Just make a run for it, like if they’re fast enough maybe they can leave thehurt behind. In the blur of it all, the headwind stinging their eyes, they findthemselves with an overnight layover in Changi. Except for a bored cashier in a7-Eleven down the walkway, they’re alone in the terminal.

Jemma’s dozing off, a backpack wedged between her head andthe floor, but he can’t sleep, so he decides to wander for a while. It’sstrange, this dreamlike atmosphere of an airport after midnight. He feelssuspended between places, out of sorts. Usually he appreciates the chance toslip into a state of not-being, clear his mind and all that, but now the liminalityjust makes him sad. He likes belonging. He likes it when their team felt likehome.

He goes to 7-Eleven for a bag of chips. Outside, night fallsmore heavily on the tarmac, a vague yet persistent melancholy. He takes his timein the aisles just to keep the cashier company. That way, the loneliness iseasier to bear. They don’t make small talk over the counter, choosing to sharea smile instead, but when he reaches for his wallet, he hears a voice behindhim.

“On me,” it says, languid and syrupy and gold. “I still owe you a shot.”

viii.

It’s Bobbi, of course. He shouldn’t be that surprised. Here,in a country not even visible on the maps, where sharp skyscrapers are builtupon mottled history, people are bound to run into the ones they lost.

They sit by a giant glass panel that overlooks a vacanttaxiway. It has begun to drizzle, and raindrops trap the terminal light withinas they trickle down the glass like liquid diamonds.

Bobbi sneaks the occasion chip from him as she tells him stories.There’s that time she and Hunter hitch-hiked across The Great Plains to shake atail and ended up in Mexico with no passports, that time they accidentallyjoined a cult in exchange for protection, and that time Hunter got into a barfight with an Irish gang so she had to drag him away kicking and screaming.“Jemma would have loved to see that,” she remarks before snatching the lastchip with a grin, and it swells and swells until it fills up the empty airport.

He wants to tell her stories too, Stories-with-a-capital-S,the kinds that don’t include ancient monsters or dead friends or killer robots,but he can’t, so he holds his tongue.

They watch the rain in silence. He glances at her from timeto time, and is struck by how far away she looks against the backdrop of sultrytropical rain, spilling over the foreign skyline that’s stirring at thetail-end of its dream.

After a while, she nudges him gently. “Hey,” she says. “Whatare you thinking?”

You, actually, hethinks. You hogging the Xbox. You makingdreadful tea. You steadying me when my hands are not steady. You dying on ahospital bed and you hobbling around the lab learning to walk again, battle-scarredand heavy, heavy hearted. You believing in me believing in you. When I think ofyou I think of broken and persistent light, and it makes me want to scream tosilence the absence of you between my ribs. It’s not the same without you. Thisteam doesn’t feel like home because the roof caved in after you left. Lay downyour load, take your heart home. Goddamn it, just take it home.

He inhales sharply. “Nothing.” He shrugs. “I was just wonderingif you are happy.”

Past the jut of her shoulder, he catches a glimpse of a few bleary-eyedpassengers shuffling into the terminal to catch an early flight. Down the walkwaytwo duty-free clerks fumble with their keys to unlock the store. Just likethat, the liminal inertia is gone, and slowly but surely everything movesforward again.