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They are running through the bus. The bus is technically a plane, but that should be the last technicality on Fitz’s mind right now. They sprint together to the lab. Of course they would go to the lab. It was the birthplace of their friendship. And this new one had tested them and stretched them beyond all possible belief-
There was Ward. Ward, standing in front of them with a soldiers-follow-orders-and-we-won’t-like-what-those-orders-are expression on his face. There was Ward, who had spent years with them on the bus (plane) facing down enhanced individuals with scary-ass powers, militant groups dead set on retrieving 804s, scary motherfucking ghosts, and more bullshit. All that bullshit only to lead them up to this one moment, standing here, that Fitz could never have imagined in his nightmares. Ward, chasing them in the same place they had all called home. Ward a villain. Ward what Skye had told them he was. A monster.
“You can stop now, Ward.” Fitz’s voice was desperate, and he could almost feel Jemma rolling his eyes behind him. “They can’t hurt you here.”
A lie. A last ditch, last effort lie.
“Fitz, you need to wake up.” Jemma’s tone was a bizarre mix of exasperation and fear. “Ward isn’t being controlled. He’s choosing this.”
Fitz shook his head. “No. I don’t believe that.”
Then why were his hands in the air?
“I have my orders.”
“No!”
Jemma threw something at Ward. Fitz didn’t see what it was, because in that mere second she grabbed his hand and they took off running again, this time to the holding containers.
“You’re really not making this easy for me!” Ward called out. They were in front of the containers. One look, and they moved as one, opening the door, rushing inside, and shutting it right as Ward appeared on the other side. “Open the door.”
Fitz slammed his fist at the glass, wishing that it could contact Ward’s face instead of the space between them. The space was growing wider every minute. “Open the door.”
“You BASTARD!” Fitz screamed. “WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS!”
The expression on Ward’s face now was almost unreadable. There was conflict in his eyes. Fitz could see that much. “You bloody cared about us. You bloody care about us.”
“I have my orders. Open the door.”
“Fuck you!” Jemma snapped. Fitz turned in surprise. The only other time he’d seen her this mad, this hurt, was when the biochem professor had docked her a half point on the quiz for not labeling one singular unit. “Fuck you! I can’t believe you. You fucker. Fuck you!”
Ward stared for a second, and Fitz suddenly saw what everyone else had apparently already caught onto. The deadness in his eyes. There was no mercy there. No solace. Only the mission. No wonder he had been such an effective specialist. Specialist at being a goddamn traitor.
Ward turned around and started accessing a datapad on the wall. Within seconds, Fitz realized what Ward was doing. He didn’t even have to guess. He had read the layout of the plane. Seen the maps. There was a hatch right on the other side of this holding pen. This fancy ass holding pen.
Jemma realized what was going on, she started begging Ward too. He ignored them. He ignored every word they said.
“You’re right. I do care about you. Both of you. It’s a weakness.”
The hatch opened. And Fitz, Simmons, and the holding pen went falling into the ocean below.
Fitz closed his eyes and waited for impact. It came and went like all the good times they had had together. All of that was destroyed now, sinking to the bottom of the ocean. SHIELD, gone. His PHDs, probably worthless now. The team, shattered. Even that sandwich that Jemma had made him that one time for an undercover mission where apparently, there had been no bloody extraction plan. Prosciutto, mozzarella, with a hint of pesto aioli. Probably either molding in Russia or torn apart by scavengers.
Why he was thinking of that probably-would-have-been-delicious sandwich now, he had no idea. Maybe it was because nothing mattered. Maybe it was because they were both going to die down here, and it would have been like neither of them existed. His life, coming down to this one moment, because of stick-up-his-arse Grant Ward.
Jemma. Unconscious. Right. He scrambled to her side, checked her pulse, checked to make sure she was breathing, checked to make sure there was no blood where she’d hit her head. Everything was fine. No blood. She would’ve been fucked anyway if there had been blood, because Fitz was not the biochemo-physiologist whatever crap she had so many PHDs in. He was an engineer.
He rummaged through every storage pocket of this blasted container while simultaneously cursing himself and blessing himself for making it. They were alive, but not for much longer. They were going to fucking die down here. What a shitshow. And his inner sarcasm was the only thing keeping him from spiraling into the abyss of nothingness that was existentialism.
Jemma. They had to stay alive long enough for Jemma to wake back up. Judging from the hit, he had probably an hour and a half before she regained consciousness. Would it be worse to never wake up at all, or to wake up only to know that you were going to die anyway? Fitz didn’t know. He needed to concentrate. He needed to think of a way, any way, that they might get out of this.
He started doing math. He was good at math. He calculated how many feet down they were in the ocean. He calculated the amount of oxygen that they had left based on different variables like how much they talked, how much freaked out breathing Jemma was going to do when she woke up, and how much time before the pressure of gallons and gallons of water just shattered the structure’s integrity. He found the food rations and counted them and he found some water and counted that as well and knew exactly how many days they could stay alive for if needed.It might as well be nothing because no one knew where they were. They might as well be dead. They might as well find a way to shatter the wall and let the water in, crushing their lungs in seconds-
“Fitz?”
Jemma was sitting up now, groaning in pain, rubbing her head. He rushed to her side immediately. “Jemma.”
“H-how?”
“I did the math. I know why we sank instead of got crushed into oblivion. This pod is supposed to adapt to whatever environment is thrown at it. Once we got thrown into the ocean- oh yeah, Simmons, we’re now at the bottom of the fucking ocean- it must have tried to compensate. We sank and the walls got denser so we didn’t fucking die.”
Simmons sat up, took a few breaths, then stood. She walked to the window. Nothing but blue.
“We are literally swimming with the fishes.”
“We’re lower than the fishes. I did the math. We’re ninety feet down.”
Simmons continued to look around. Like that would make any sort of difference in their current circumstances. Hah. Current.
“How did we survive the fall?”
“The plane must’ve been a lot closer to the ocean. You got knocked out immediately, but I managed to strap us to the backboard before we hit.”
Simmons smiled. “My savior.”
An uneasy silence followed. Fitz felt guilty now for ribbing Simmons just moments after she’d woken up, when they were literally in a life or death situation. Most likely a death situation. Certain. Death.
Simmons is looking around. Fitz knows exactly what she is thinking. They’ve spent time together in a lab for years, for goodness sake. She is analyzing everything. He knows it doesn’t matter what he’s already thought about. Two minds are always better than one. She would always say that when he got irritated by the fact that she was going over everything he had already been over in the past when they were trying to solve whatever the problem of the day was.
“There’s no way out, Jemma.” The finality of this was starting to hit Fitz. Now that she was conscious, he had a sinking feeling, yet also this urge to just get closer to her.
“But we won’t be going out, Fitz.” she said. “We’ll be staying. Just different. There’s this law of thermodynamics I’ve thought about whenever I’ve felt like we’re going to die. No matter is ever created or destroyed-”
“Just recycled.”
Jemma smiled. This was a different smile, though. Fitz was sure he had never seen it before. He wasn’t sure he knew how to describe it. But they were still helpless. How uncomfortable that all human emotions were preventing them from really thinking clearly at this moment.
He was in love with her, he realized helplessly. He had been in love with her for a very long time. Not that any of that even mattered anymore. The likelihood of them surviving this… it was the only thing he hadn’t been able to bring himself to calculate.
Jemma was rummaging through things now. Counting however much emergency resources they had. But there was food. No water, unless you counted the useless massive amount of water that was thankfully not crushing them. He mentally cursed and blessed himself for designing such excellent environmental controls. Then he pondered what was worse. Immediate death, or knowing you were going to die but your imminent death being delayed due to random coincidence.
“We’ll just… become part of something else. Maybe a starfish. Or a whale.”
“Jemma.”
“I think it’s beautiful. Everything being part of everything else in an endless cycle. Every particle of us becoming part of something else. We will live on.”
“And we were something else before. A storm cloud, a mammoth.”
“A monkey.”
“A monkey.”
“And all of them were just as terrified as we were. To die. To never exist anymore.”
“We’ll give them new life… I can only hope that it’s a good one.”
Fitz couldn’t look away from her, but she turned her head and stared out the window.
“It’s fitting that this should be our final resting place. This is where all the life on the planet started, after all.” She stood up and took a few more steps till her fingers were resting on the glass. “Just outside the glass…”
“Jemma.” Something had just occurred to him. And suddenly, he was incredibly glad that he had chosen to be friends with a biochemist. Also, fall in love with her but that was besides the point right now.
“What?”
“The glass!” The idea was so brilliant he couldn’t stay still, so he stood up and began to pace. “Jemma. The glass. It’s bulletproof. Pressure-resistant. But the seal-”
“Four-hydroxy-four-methyl-2-pentanone, but the flash point is too high for it to burn.”
“But! Medical ethanol has a
low
flash point. It burns-”
“Hotter! Wait a second. If we could use the defibrillator as an ignition source-”
“Thus building a compressed explosive-”
“Then the seal would ignite and the pressure on the outside would-”
“Blow the window in!”
They were back. It was by some lucky chance that both of them had been brought together. Two geniuses, who originally hated each other but now had grown so close that they couldn’t even envision that there was any distance between the atoms that composed them at all. They were laughing now, looking at each other and smiling and relieved at this solution.
“Well.” Jemma said, bringing the laughter to a halt. “Now that we’ve figured that out, we’ve got work to do.”
It was another hour for them to prepare everything that was necessary. The blueprints appeared in Fitz’s head almost faster than he could handle them. He was glad he had Jemma. Jemma, who always knew what to say, what to hand him. The process was a blur, but before he knew it, he was standing with her, holding a functioning detonator in his hands.
He was breathing deeper now. He couldn’t help it, despite the fact that every deep breath was wasting more oxygen and letting out more carbon dioxide that was seeping into the room and would soon consume their lungs- but he planned that water would consume them first.
“Jemma, you understand, right? When I press this button-”
She interrupted him. “The windows will blow in. The water will come into the inside.”
“It won’t feel good. It will feel like a thousand punches into the abdomen.”
Jemma rolled her eyes. “Oh Fitz, I know you’re trying to talk more technical to make me less nervous, but that’s really not helping right now.”
Fitz switched the detonator to his right hand and picked up the oxygen mask with the other. Jemma watched and suddenly without him having to say anything, she realized something. He could see it in her eyes. “Fitz. Why is there only one mask?”
The panic was starting to set in in Jemma. But Fitz stayed eerily calm. Perhaps it was because he trusted her with his life. It made perfect sense. She was worth his very last breath.
“Jemma.”
She was shaking now. “No, no, no, no, no. I know I’m a better swimmer because you’ve told me so yourself, but this- this is- no. Fitz, I can’t. I can’t, Fitz. You're my best friend. You’re my very best-”
He dropped the mask and put a hand over her mouth. He tried to communicate everything with his eyes. “Yes. I’m your best friend. But you’re not just my best friend, Jemma. You’re so much more than that.”
She ripped his hand off her mouth. “I can’t live without you.”
“Neither of us are going to die. I’m sorry I’m a coward who couldn’t tell you this before.” He picked up the oxygen mask. “So right now, I’m going to show you.”
“N-”
“It’s okay.”
Her screams were cut off by Fitz pressing the oxygen mask to her face and pressing the button for detonation. His body was slammed by the full force of water, filling his lungs instantly. His vision went black and he lost consciousness. The last thing he thought of was her. He trusted her. He knew he’d wake up. He knew they’d wake up. Together.