Chapter Text
“Ah, Fitzsimmons. Exactly the people I was hoping to meet.”
Ward. Ward was here. He was standing right in front of them and Jemma felt her entire system fill with icy fear as his crazed eyes pinned them in place.
---
As Jemma fiddled with her tablet, she watched Fitz out of the corner of her eye.
He was bent over his drones case, as per usual, and she couldn’t help being distracted by him.
It wasn’t exactly the first time they had been out in the field during a mission but it was the first time since Trip, since the Monolith, since the kiss.
She shivered even now as she recalled their first kiss. Throughout the years, she had occasionally wondered what it would be like to kiss Fitz. At the time, she had told herself that these thoughts were fueled by natural human curiosity and nothing more.
Why couldn’t she, a healthy attractive female, wonder what kissing her healthy attractive best friend would be like? To her analytical brain, it had made perfect sense at the time and besides that, the likelihood of it actually happening was so slim that she could cast the thoughts aside with little consequence.
But then the medpod happened and everything changed.
All of a sudden, thoughts like that became loaded. No longer was it simply a scientific curiosity, now it was something that could be real, if she wanted it to be.
Still, she had always imagined, before and after learning that Fitz was in fact in love with her, that their first kiss would be slow and a bit awkward. A simple brushing of lips and blushes and nothing more.
Their actual kiss had been completely different.
It was hot and fast and hands clutching at her waist, taking her breath away and sending sharp jolts of warmth south as he pushed her up against the table.
Even now, the memory of it caused a faint blush to bloom over her neck and she ducked down behind her hair, thankful that it had grown out enough for her to be able to effectively hide behind it again.
“There we go.” Fitz muttered next to her, pulling her back to the present.
She turned to look at him just in time to see one of his new drones fly up into the air. It hovered there for a moment before it went whizzing away to do a sweep of the area.
“Simmons, are those coms up?” Fitz asked her, his eyes focused on the screen in front of him.
“Just going live now,” she answered, tapping away on her own screen and hearing the beep in her ear as the small ear piece connected to their network.
“Coms are a go,” she said and was greeted by Coulson's voice in response.
“Good. After Happy finishes the sweep, our agents will move in.”
Daisy and Mack joined in on the conversation as they waited and Jemma tried to ignore the bundle of nerves that had settled deep in her chest.
Ever since the realization that Hydra had been playing the ATCU from the inside, Coulson had been on warpath. He had told the team that he was tired of hiding in the the shadows and that they needed to cut off this particular head before things got too out of control. That goal had lead them to the present day.
She and Fitz were currently in the basement of a department store a block away from where the rest of the team had covertly surrounded a building. They had gotten wind eairler that day that Ward might be hiding within it. While she and Fitz ran back up and surveillance, the rest of the team would storm the building and attempt to take Ward down before he slipped away once more.
However, everything seemed too quiet to Jemma.
Happy was almost done with his sweep and so far, nothing could be seen. She watched Fitz’ jaw clench tighter and his brows draw together as his own worry began to set in.
He had turned his head slightly, as if to say something to her, when everything exploded.
It didn’t physically explode per-say but it felt like it did to Jemma.
The door in front of them was kicked open and both she and Fitz were on their feet instantly.
“Ah, Fitzsimmons. Exactly the people I was hoping to meet.”
Ward. Ward was here. He was standing right in front of them and Jemma felt her entire system fill with icy fear as his crazed eyes pinned them in place.
“Ward is here!” Fitz yelledd into his coms, pushing Jemma behind him in the process.
There was no response but a burst of static in their ears and Ward’s dark eyes continued to watch them, a faint smile of amusement playing on his face.
“I’m afraid no one is going to come save you two just yet.” He said, “They are a bit busy with some of my friends at the moment.”
“What the hell do you want, Ward?” Fitz all but snarled, his grip tightening around Jemma’s wrist.
“Well you see, I’m in need of that big brain of yours, Fitz. You have something that Hyrda wants.”
“Oh? A handbook for not betraying your friends and teammates?” Fitz spit back, but Ward only shook his head.
“Are you still upset about that? Come on, Fitz, you need to stop letting yourself get so attrached to people. It always seems to end badly for you.”
Fitz jumped forward a little at that and only Jemma grabbing his arm stopped him.
“You piece of-”
“Anyway,” Ward said, cutting him off. “I need certain information about how you got her back.”
He guested to Jemma and she felt her stomach twist.
“Go to hell.”
Ward sighed, “You know, Fitz, for once in your life why don’t you just come quietly instead of putting up a fight.”
“Not an option.” With that, Fitz hit a button on his watch and a blinding flash filled the space.
Jemma couldn’t see anything but she felt Fitz’ hand in hers and they were running.
She stumbled blindly after him as he led her through the twisty basement. Somewhere behind them, she could hear shouts and the sound of pounding feet as Hydra chased them. As Jemma’s vision returned, she registered that Fitz had stopped running and she almost crashed into his back.
She could hear curses pouring from his lips and she looked up to see why.
They had come to a dead end.
They stood in the boiler room for the building and the only way out looked to be a small window that was level with the street outside. Fitz slammed the door shut behind them and shoved over an old filing cabinet in front of it turning to her and gripping her shoulders.
“Jemma, you’ve got to get out of here.”
“Fitz-”
“Do not argue with me right now, Jemma, we don’t have the time.” Without waiting for her response, he dragged her to the widow and reached up to open it.
“Get out of here, go find the team, and use my tracker to find me okay?”
“Fitz, no! There is no way I’m leaving you here!” she clutched at his shirt, the fear induced adrenaline roaring in her ears.
Fitz pulled her into his arms, surprising her as his warmth encircled her for a brief moment.
“There is no time to talk about this, Jemma.” He mumbled into her hair and, even as he said it, the shouts of their pursuers came closer. “One of us needs to get out of here, they cannot be allowed to take us both.”
“No” she gasped, tears swimming in her eyes.
“Think about it, Jemma,” he pulled back a bit, “you’re smaller and faster than I am. You have a better chance of escape and I have a better chance of surviving their t- their capture.” he said, his voice breaking a bit.
“Fitz…”
“Go” he said, and then out of nowhere, he grabbed her jaw with his hand, pulling his face down so it was even with hers. “Go Jemma. Go and be free.”
His blue eyes were all she could see as he pressed his lips to hers for a fleeting kiss before bending down to form a step with his hands.
She hesitated, her mind full of fear, the taste of his lips, and his burning blue eyes.
“Fitz-” she began.
“DAMN IT, JEMMA LEAVE!” Fitz shouted, his eyes electric blue and shiny from something that looked like tears.
A crash sounded from the door and she knew time was up. She used his hands to clamber her way out of the window as the door slammed open in the small room.
She looked down through the widow and her eyes met Fitz’ own through the small sliver of sunlight that shone down into the room.
He gazed up at her like he was trying to memorize everything about her in the few seconds he had before the agents got to him and then, with a final glance he turned and walked out of her sight.
---
Jemma could hardly remember how she got back to the team. All she could hear was the roar in her ears, all she could see was a pair of blue eyes burning into hers, and all she could feel were his lips hot-and-sad against hers.
Bobbi got to her first.
She and Hunter had been running perimeter and they had rushed to find Jemma and Fitz after Coulson realized what was happening.
“Jemma!” The older women yelled and pulled Jemma into her embrace.
“Jemma, oh my god what happened? Where is Fitz?”
The sound of his name pushed ice into her heart and she stared up at Bobbi not seeing her at all.
“Ward. Ward took him.”
---
Over the next three days, the Playground dissolved into a mess of activity.
Coulson was furious that Hydra had taken one his own agents and his anger only burned stronger at remembering that the mission had been not out of necessity but out of his own need for revenge. He threw himself into trying to find Fitz but the new Hydra had fewer moles and less information among them and he kept hitting wall after wall in his search.
After quickly determining that the multiple trackers on Fitz had been disabled before he had left the city, the rest of the agents turned to outside sources. They called in old friends, acquaintances, people who they had used on missions, but everything was coming up nothing.
Jemma watched all of this happen around her.
A particular kind of numbness had settled into her bones, something she hadn’t felt since the nine long days she spent at Fitz’ bedside during his coma, willing him to wake up.
She knew she should be out of her mind with worry, knew she should be helping the team try to find Fitz but for the moment, she could barely function.
She did try to assist them but what they really needed now was insider information and Jemma had nothing to offer. After a few hours, she locked herself in the lab during the day and no one disturbed her. During that time, she stared at the research on the Monolith that they had gathered, the rocks that had once snatched her away from Fitz to the man that waited on the other side, and she couldn’t seem to muster up the same desperation to get back that she once had.
The guilt that she carried in her stomach finally overwhelmed her on the second night that Fitz was missing.
She hadn’t slept in over 30 hours and the stress of everything that had been creeping up finally came to a head. She was standing at his desk, flipping through some of his notes on the drones when she had come across the small note that she had once tucked into a sandwich stashed in a bag along with their last hope for Shield.
“Be safe! Love Jemma.”
She didn’t know if it was the sudden realization that this was the only time she had said those words to him, when she truly meant that she was in love with him, or the fact that he had kept it with him all this time but as she looked at it, a sob rose up in her throat.
She didn’t think when she stumbled out of the lab, she was just driven by pure instinct to the door she stood in front of.
Room 105. Right next to her room, 104.
Her hands typed in the familiar passcode - the first four digits of Pi - and she was in his room.
All at once, she was overwhelmed by his presence. He was everywhere. From the unmade bed, to the sketchpad and pencils on his desk, to the shoes lined neatly next to his dresser, he was everywhere and nowhere and the thought only made the tears drip down her face at a faster pace.
She half ran to his dresser, tugging open the third drawer to pull out the first jumper or cardigan she could get her hands on. Her hands closed around a cardigan and she pulled it out, stopping for a moment when she registered which one it was. It was one of his favorites, blue and worn from use, and she couldn’t help but think that, maybe, it was his favorite because she had once said it brought out his eyes.
She buried her nose into the soft cotton and breathed in his scent. Fitz’ scent was something that had been burned into her memory for years. It smelled like mint and metal along with something that she could only describe as the scent of Fitz. It was the smell of home.
She tugged the cardigan on over her shirt and curled up in his bed, swaddling herself in his duvet as the tears streaked down her face.
She cried because he was probably hurt, if not dead at this moment, and she had no way of helping him. She cried because she had let him, once again, sacrifice himself for her. She cried because she had realized fully in that moment how very much she loved him and how she might never be able to tell him that.
That was how Bobbi found her sometime later. She was curled in the fetal position, her eyes red from crying tears that had stopped sometime ago and her hands clutching at his pillow.
The older woman said nothing. She simply crossed the room and sat down beside Jemma, extending one hand and beginning to rub her shoulders.
“He sacrificed himself again. He sacrificed himself for me again.” Jemma finally gasped, fresh tears gathering in her eyes as she finally said the words that had been eating at her chest since she had left Fitz behind. “He sacrificed himself for me and I just let him do it.”
“Jemma, don’t blame yourself. Fitz made his own choices and-”
“Yes, but he always does this. Shoving himself in front of me like it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter what happens to him as long as I’m safe.”
“He’s protecting you.”
“Well I can’t take it!” Jemma shrieked, her voice breaking. “I’m going mad with worry for him and there is nothing I can do about it. And the worst part of it all is, I can’t tell him myself! I can’t tell him that I need him to be okay and alive as much as he needs me to be alive and okay! I can’t tell him how much he means to me and how everything will and does fall apart without him!”
Bobbi drew Jemmainto her embrace as she sobbed and let her cry before saying, “What if there was a way?”
“A way to what?” Jemma said, wiping some of the tears off of her face with the back of her hand.
“A way to rescue him.”
-----
A while later, Jemma was sitting in Bobbi’s bedroom when the door opened. Bobbi walked in first and, much to Jemma’s surprise, May followed closely behind her.
Since Lash’s true identity was revealed May had been isolating herself from the team. The older agent was present at all the staff meetings but she slipped away as soon as they were over and catching glimpses of her in between these meetings was rare.
“Simmons,” May said with a nod, noticing her stare.
Jemma didn’t quite know what to say but Bobbi saved her by sitting down on the bed beside her.
“Jemma, May thinks you may have a way of tracking Fitz.”
Jemma shook her head, “I told Coulson that they removed the trackers from his shoe and watch and they must have disabled the one planted in his arm,” she shuddered, considering for a moment the ways in which they would have gone about that, “I’m as clueless to his whereabouts as everyone else.”
“Jemma, when you were at the Shield academy, you worked with trackers, didn’t you?” May asked.
“Yes, but only somewhat. Fitz engineered half a dozen new models which are still in use today but I don’t see how-”
“I read about your work with them. In one of the early papers, you mention that you had a prototype for a tooth implant that you were working on.”
Jemma gasped, memories of her second year at the academy flooding her brain.
She and Fitz had been working on a small implant that would be inserted behind a filling for a cavity and would be invisible to both the human and mechanical eye. It was one of their brightest ideas at the time considering how hard it was to completely hide trackers from machines. In the end, however, the fact that the implant required the person it was intended for to have a cavity, it deemed a bit impractical and so they had moved on but not before Fitz had managed to, through a gross lack of personal hygiene that Jemma quickly put a stop to after finding out about it, give himself his first ever cavity.
“We were so excited about the tracker that when- when Fitz got his cavity - we decided to try it on him. It worked for the most part but it only supplied longitude and latitude coordinates and not the altitude so we called it a failure.”
“But you never removed it.”
“No, that would mean we would have had to pull out his filling first….”
“So the tracker is still in him?”
“Yes,” Jemma breathed.
In record time, May was back with Jemma’s laptop in tow and the younger girl frantically searched through her old databases from the academy, searching for the tracking program that Fitz had set up and tuned to his own left molar.
The program was old, almost a decade had passed since they had first come up with the idea, but the whole idea behind the tooth-tracker was that it would be a permanent implant and that meant that Fitz had taken special care in making sure the program was stable enough to last.
Sure enough, as Jemma typed in the command to locate Fitz, a single green dot appeared on the screen, blinking softly in the middle of the Andes.
Jemma looked at the dot that told her Fitz’ location and felt her throat constrict with emotion. For the first time in two days, she knew where he was.
“There he is,” she managed, trying to not cry as she turned the computer around to show the two agents.
May and Bobbi exchanged a silent look and then Bobbi turned to Jemma.
“You’re 100% sure this is accurate?”
“Oh yes, Fitz and I made sure that the chip itself ran off of kinetic energy that the movement of the mouth opening and closing provided. Not to mention, it’s undetectable by metal or thermo scans because we put a shell around it that mimics the surface of the filling around it. I’m just glad to know that we didn’t waste that three months and that-”
Bobbi cut her off, a smile playing on her lips as Jemma became aware she had been rambling.
“Sorry, I got a bit carried away. Anyway, the only thing that matters now is telling the team where Fitz is and-”
“We’re not telling the team.”
Jemma’s head snapped up from where she had been watching the dot that was Fitz blink away and stared at May.
“Why in the world not?! We finally know where Fitz is, not to mention whatever base Hydra is keeping him at and you don’t-”
“Jemma, think about it.” Bobbi said, “We finally finally have an upper hand on Hyrda. They don’t think we can track Fitz but thanks to you, we can. No one besides us three knows about it and, if we want to maintain the element of surprise, we have to keep it that way.”
“So what are you suggesting? That we just do nothing with this information while Fitz-”
“We get him out.”
May said it so simply that it took Jemma a moment to process what she had said.
“When you say we you mean-”
“You, Bobbi, and myself, yes.”
Jemma stared at the both of them in shock. It was one thing to go into the field with an entire team behind her, it was another thing entirely to go into the field with two other people at her back and nothing else to fall back on.
“We have a rough plan and from the looks of things, it might be a little easier than we thought.” Bobbi began. “With our small party, we should be able to locate the base and infiltrate it without being noticed. Once inside-”
May almost smiled as she held up a disk, “We let Daisy have some fun.”
“But I thought you said it was just going to be the three of us on this mission?”
“Oh it will be, this is a device that we had made for Daisy just before the fall of Shield. She programed in a nasty virus that attacks any and all nearby electronic devices. If we set this off in the middle of Hydra’s base, they will find themselves quite busy while we hopefully get Fitz out.”
Jemma sat in stunned silence. The way the two senior agents had laid out the plan made it sound so easy and her heart constricted at the thought of seeing Fitz again. But yet, something just didn’t ring true.
“Why are you really doing this?” she asked, “It’s not just to get Fitz back, is it?”
“No,” Bobbi sighed, “No, it isn’t. The other reason we’re doing this is to see what information we can get from Hydra while we are there. The virus has a nice side effect where it dumps any data it finds into a secure server that Shield has. The more time it has to dig, the more information we get.”
Jemma nodded, that part made sense, but as she looked at May, the woman who hadn’t quite been the same since Andrew’s disappearance, she saw herself in the agent for possibly the first time in her short life. .
“You want to know where they took him. Where they took Andrew.” It wasn’t a question but May nodded anyway.
“We only have a small window of opportunity here. If we wait too long… well we just can’t wait. We’re heading out tomorrow from the hangar at 5. Are you coming with us?”
“Why do you even need me to come along? Surely the two of you would be quicker getting in and out without having to worry about me?”
“Fitz is most likely being tortured.” The words were like a punch to Jemma’s gut “And so, we will need you there to A. keep him calm and B. assess his physical stability and do any first aid that you can.”
“You can hold your own in a tough situation, Jemma. I saw that in you when we were undercover at Hydra.”
Jemma took a moment to process everything. What they had proposed was not only incredibly dangerous but would also violate Coulson’s trust. It was a gamble that they would be able to even find the Hydra base, let alone get inside, but if they managed to get Fitz out...
Jemma took a steady breath and looked up at Bobbi.
“I’m in.”