#defacedagent

                              Denial shouldn’t have taken home in his bones as long as it did; it shouldn’t have weighed his shoulders down as heavily as it had; after all, he had accepted responsibility for her death long before he began his works in pumping breath back into Hydra. He’d drunk in all the blame for months, had ingested more than enough of it in the hopes that someday, it would poison him and push him toward the same end that he’d thrown her into. But alas, it seemed that, in his dictionary, continuing their work in her honor wasn’t synonymous to accepting the fact that she would no longer be able to see it happen. It appeared as though all his efforts were done as a bargain, and not in acceptance of her death.

                              He rejected grief, embraced denial every passing day; so much that he never even thought of visiting her grave. Then again, he didn’t even know if there was a grave to visit. That night, the darkest and coldest night of his life, he hadn’t stuck around long enough to see her buried. The moment the doctor he’d brought her to had announced her dead, he’d run, pushing out the door with all the strength he didn’t even know he still had. He ran, he ran far and fast from the truth.

                    And it’s only now that he’d found the courage to turn around and face it again.

                              Maybe he was drunk, drunk with the loneliness that had kept him company ever since she’d left. Or maybe he was just that much of an idiot, believing he had the bravery to face this truth. Nevertheless, whichever it was, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was back in the same place he’d seen her last, the last place he’d seen her lifeless eyes glint with death. He didn’t even know what he came there to achieve. Did he want to talk to the doctor? Did he want to know where he buried Kara? Could he really muster enough courage to visit her grave, see her name etched on a tombstone? Did she even have a marked grave? He didn’t know anything at all. But as he stood there, in the dark alley that led to the shady clinic---if it could even be called that---he’d brought her corpse to, a noise from somewhere nearby causing him to look up, there was one thing he knew for sure, he wasn’t expecting what his brown orbs saw.

                    He came there to face the truth of the past. But instead, he was                     faced with a ghost he wasn’t at all prepared to lay his eyes on.

          Fitz had managed to keep the sensitivity of his back hidden for weeks, and he was glad that it meant no one would question him, but keeping the ink on his skin a secret was starting to weigh on him. He wanted to be proud of the decision he’d made, and he was, but the idea of letting someone else in, of revealing his vulnerability to someone other than his therapist, was something he knew he’d need to do eventually. If the tattoo was his way of attacking his depression, then telling someone about it was the perfect way to combat his anxiety.

          Leo hated talking about the accident that had led to his near death and all the damage done to his brain, but the group sessions were an important part of his therapy -- apparently. It helped his speech fluency, at least, especially when he still got a few pitying looks from people outside of the group, the friends of his who had stuck by him through the coma and the weeks when he could barely move but didn’t quite understand that he didn’t want to be pitied or looked down on simply because he was different.

          Help with the more physical parts of his recovery and people who understood what his side of it was like was the end of the list of pros when it came to group therapy, in his opinion, but that didn’t stop him from going, or from sneaking in a snack from a vending machine in the hallway before searching out a place to sit. The chairs were arranged in a circle, like always, but there were more than there normally were -- exactly one chair more.

         He scanned the room quickly, taking in the familiar faces and trying to process them as fast as he could until he found the single unfamiliar one. After inhaling a short breath, Leo took careful steps over to one of the empty seats beside the woman he supposed was the newest member of their small group. It wasn’t like he had any friends within the group itself, just people who understood him a bit differently than the people outside of it, and it didn’t seem like she had anyone around to talk to -- he could very easily justify it with simply wanting to be nice if she questioned him.