all_inclusive | Amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got

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Amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got

Everything is beginning to weigh on her with the weight of the ocean's pressure.

Not the best thought, but it's the right one. Simmons still feels like she hasn't left the ocean floor, with Fitz beside her, and even though she clings to old habits, every time she looks to her side to make sure Fitz is there and alive and his heart is beating, she remembers that he's not. On unsteady feet, she finds her way to a door to the Nexus, more relieved than she's been in so very long, and she takes herself to the luxury hotel, but keeps far away from the room she's been using as a lab.

She can't look at it without thinking of everything that's happened. She can't even breathe some moments without thinking that she wouldn't even have breath, if it weren't for Fitz -- who can't even remember, who's healing, who is...

She claps a hand over her mouth to stifle the sob that does its' level best to escape. She's not able to keep it in and when the weight of the last week (last few months) catches up to her, Simmons presses her back against the wall to keep herself upright, sliding down until she can wrap her arms around her knees and pretend, pretend, that she's not alone and that when she looks to her side, Fitz will be there, even though she knows he won't.

She can still hear her voice, hear the echo of panic in his all those months ago, and now she knows what he'd felt like when she'd jumped from the plane. It's like everything has changed and parts of her have been ripped out, only to be replaced by love and grief.

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Beyond the mission of Bucky, of attempting to find a balance between his own desire to hunt for his friend to remind him of who he was and what they had lost, of what was not necessarily lost, and the understanding for the need patience, Steve was something at a loss. The presence of friends he had made in recent years, and that of the opportunity for more, or at least new interactions without his past weighing heavily on both sides of the equation, kept his days from dragging in between the windows of the feeling of being watched.

His needs were simple: that of the hunger that had become an ever-present thing in his life, rarely uncomfortable though it seemed to gnaw at him at a low-level throughout all he did, as if he could never quite get enough to eat; and that of the need to then burn off the energy that buzzed through him, unspent on battle or fights outside of those organized in matches against those who could take him at more than a half-level.

Steve was on his way back from satiating the first, emptying plate after plate at the buffet and trying not to draw too much attention to himself as he did, when he heard the sound it took him a moment to recognize. A muffled sob, a ghost of a thing half-swallowed, but carrying enough weight to it that he could not help but stop there in the hallway and look for the source of that sound. The breadth of his hearing had him needing to search around several corners before he was able to trace the soft, high sound back to its owner. When he caught sight of her, a slip of a woman who looked as if she were a second away from shaking apart with what she was holding inside her, he slowed but did not falter as he moved in toward her.

"Miss?" He called, attempting to make himself as non-threatening a shape as he could as he spoke to her in a voice kept gentle. "Are you alright? Do you need any help?"

Simmons frantically brushes away at the tears, aware that every person is allowed to have an emotional break, especially considering what's happened to them, but she still feels embarrassed about doing it in public. That embarrassment only worsens when she sees through the bleariness and recognises the face. "I didn't exactly figure that I'd be found crying by Captain America today," she confesses, voice steady but for the tremble she can't stop.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I was overwhelmed. Everything has been so hard lately and the one person who helps me through it is..." She shakes her head, touching a bent finger to her nose mildly. "It's been very hard," she clarifies, not wanting to get into why Fitz isn't at her side when he's supposed to be.

Steve realized he had become used to the relative anonymity the Nexus offered only when referred to by his title. After all, the only ones who had called him Captain or so much as knew his name before he spoke it himself had been those he had met and known personally before he had come to stay in that strange hub between worlds. While it was nothing he regretted, or even felt guilty over for having forgotten what it was like to be known by his face before he introduced himself, it was a small recognition he had not expected in speaking to a strange young woman he found crying in a hallway.

He did, however, feel a pang of sympathy for the woman, one side of his mouth ticking up in a hint of a smile. "You don't have to apologize, Miss. I was the one sticking my nose into someone else's business."

He had not wanted to interrupt her for the sake of interrupting, but it just wasn't in him to have walked past her or ignored what had rang so clearly as someone in distress. He regretted that his presence embarrassed her, that having been almost the exact opposite of his goal, but he could not help but continue towards her and stop an easy distance away. "You can tell me to leave you alone, if you want. I won't take any offense, I promise." After a pause, he added, "But if you want to talk, I'm a pretty good listener. Sometimes it helps to talk."

Once she had made good and sure that her hand was properly clean (using some sanitizer wipes from her pocket), she extended her hand out to him, wanting to present a decent impression for the sake of her dignity. "I'm Jemma Simmons," she introduces herself, "and I would very, very much like to talk," she confesses.

He even has the proper classification level that she can tell him everything and she won't get in trouble -- not that she thinks she has any superiors left who can get her in trouble, seeing as their secrets are all over the world. She gestures to the spot beside her. "I am, was, a scientist with SHIELD," she begins. "And then things went...well, you already know."

Watching the woman before him pull what looked like a cross between a tissue and a handkerchief from her pocket - what he recognized as one of the endless little quirks he had caught sight of in the modern age - was not what he had expected as a precursor to a handshake. Then again, of what he had seen just in the past two years? Well, there'd been stranger.

He reached out without hesitation, offering her a shade of a smile as he folded his fingers around hers for a firm (if very careful) shake. Although it was not his purpose there, assessing her then was as second nature as the focus he used putting pen or brush to paper. She was young, not more than a few years younger than himself, as long as you counted the years lived and not the whole span of his life, modestly dressed, British, and overall presented a very neat figure of herself.

He supposed if he hadn't known both the Starks, particularly Howard, he might have picked her out as a scientist immediately.

Steve nodded as he retracted his hand, keeping his arms from crossing across his chest (as he had been told he made some of the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists nervous when he did, or maybe that was looking at them too directly). The understanding of her having been part of what had happened, as directly or indirectly as the case might have been, added a new angle to the situation, and one he could understand would have shaken her world as to the core as it had his. "I do. Your friend, did she-?" there was no real softshoe way of approaching the topic, but Steve thought he knew enough to be able to see someone who had lost something or someone very valuable to them.

"He," she clarifies, because the flutter in her stomach reminds her that only weeks ago, it had been she, it had been Skye and she had been the one in the hyperbaric chamber, trying to heal after receiving a miracle cure. She really doesn't like that her life has become such a constant revolving door of death and injury. "Leo Fitz, he saved me. He saved us," she clarifies. "He's alive," she breathes out the words, more grateful than anything. "He set out the signal, he gave me the oxygen."

If only they hadn't gone on the plane. If only there had been two canisters.

If only Ward hadn't betrayed them.

"We're so extremely lucky that..." She hesitates, remembering that no one is supposed to know about Agent Fury and she doesn't want to be the one to tell the secret. "That someone found us based on the signal, because we didn't think anyone would be listening," she finishes, her lying getting better, but still not impeccable. "I'm still jobless, partnerless, and I don't exactly know what comes next."

The decision might have been made in an underground bunker a long way from the rest of the world, after a revelation that had rocked his world to its core, but Steve had not order the dismantling of S.H.I.E.L.D. without understanding that there would be consequences. That his order would directly affect each and every member of S.H.I.E.L.D., that whether or not they had been tainted by Hydra, their lives would be changed. He had not forgotten a single one of the ones he had met in the two years he had served S.H.I.E.L.D., or been able to look beyond Rumlow's betrayal to think that they had not all been tainted by Hydra's influence and believe that they could and would stand beside him.

He could not say for certain whether this woman had had her allegiance belonging to S.H.I.E.L.D. as it had been founded to be or Hydra, although he would prefer to hope that it was the former rather than the latter.

"You're partnerless?" he repeated, though he understood the rest of what she had said, "But your friend is alive, right? You're alive, capable if S.H.I.E.L.D. employed you, you haven't lost your friend. As hard as it might be to not know where you're going, if you focus on that, you'll do just fine."

"He's alive, but he doesn't have any memory of what's happened," she says, swallowing the thick lump that's begun to knot in her throat, like it wants to take hold and take control. "I don't know who I am without him. Fitz has been beside me every step of the way, from the Academy, to the Hub, to the field and I would be dead if it weren't for him and..." She breathes shakily, before the hysteria can take deeper hold.

She rubs her palms under her eyes, to try and avoid the tears. "I don't even know what we're doing anymore. Agent Coulson is meant to be rebuilding SHIELD? I don't know. I honestly don't know if I care if Fitz isn't there at my side."

While nothing of his concern or sympathy for the woman left him, at her words, Steve froze. He wanted to focus on the edge of panic to her voice, to attempt to soothe away the strained sound of her voice and ease her back to her assurance that her friend had survived whatever they had gone through. That the man was safe, no matter what he may or may not remember.

For a moment he said nothing at all, but instead gaped blatantly at her as his thoughts tripped over themselves and left him nothing to say of any coherency. And then, finally, he spoke. "I'm sorry, but did you say Agent Coulson?"

The fact that she had spoke of rebuilding S.H.I.E.L.D. when he had risked his life along with his friends and allies to take the agency down for good was a note he would have to return to, but in that moment he focused particularly on the mention of a man who was supposed to have been long dead.

Simmons loses her breath for a moment, the guilt and intense emotions making her forget that she's not supposed to tell people that, especially not the Avengers. Her face works through worry and a variety of fearful places before she thinks the damage is done and maybe she ought to tell the truth. "Agent Coulson, yes," she agrees. "I wasn't supposed to say anything, I know he would want to tell you himself, especially you, sir," Simmons says, given how Agent Coulson feels about Captain America. "I don't know the details, I only know that somehow, he's absolutely fine. I know, I ran the tests myself."

Steve thought nothing of blaming the woman for the bomb she had dropped in his proverbial lap, whatever her responsibility might have been to S.H.I.E.L.D. or to her team, it had nothing to do with the lies he had been told. It had not been her voice over the loudspeaker of the Helicarrier, informing them of Agent Coulson's death. It had not been her stern eyes he had been unable to meet as he had contemplated his own stubbornness and what part he had played in allowing Loki the opening he had needed to kill a man who had been, if strange, then at least a part in collecting them all together in the belief that they could be something more.

He wants to ask how but assumed that the Agent's supposed death had been nothing more than an exaggeration of the condition he had been left in. Thor had spoken of seeing his brother stab the Agent, so the injuries could not have been faked, but Fury's track record made it all make far more sense that he had inflated that injury to manipulate them all.

After a breath, fingers curling into fists at his sides before he let them fall lax once more, he shook his head. "I guess we're going to have that talk soon enough." The reminder that the man had announced he had been a fan of the Captain America mythos growing up did not make the bitter truth of the matter the least bit easier to swallow.

She still feels wracked with guilt, wringing out her hands in front of her and still not feeling like she's done the right thing in telling him. It's an awfully big thing, but with Hydra, she's not sure things are ever going to be normal again, so maybe she ought to calm her mind and stop worrying so much. "I'll make sure to tell him the next time I see him, that you know, now." And she'll take whatever licks come due to her. "What are you going to do?" she asks, suddenly. "Now that everything has fallen apart?"

The promise of S.H.I.E.L.D. as renewed on secrets and lies did little to settle Steve, though sheer force of will had him taking that deep, even breath and forcing himself to calm. Fury had proved nothing in past weeks but that he was a man who was built on secrets atop of secrets and as sure as Steve was that he understood him a little better than he had, he could not but feel as if he had had his knees kicked out from beneath him to see that the man had gone around his back (as it was presumably Fury who orchestrated it, puppet master that he was) and done as he damned well pleased anyway.

Her words stopped that line of thought, leaving him to set it aside for further exploration at a later time. "I have a friend of my own," he admitted, deciding against naming the man or, rather, against naming what Bucky had been made into. "One I thought I lost a long time ago, but...he's not lost. Not completely."

That's enough to give Simmons a bit of hope. She perks up, looking at Captain Rogers curiously, wringing her fingers in her lap as she debates how to go about this. "Lost as in dead?" she clarifies. "Or simply lost to you in terms of distance." Either way, she feels that she's lost people far too much recently, between Fitz being in such a perilous condition and Ward having been the one to put him there.

It's a difficult thing just then to look back at the memory of so much as that bombed out bar in Switzerland, the sound of Peggy's voice, salt and whiskey and smoke on his tongue as he had attempted to drink away the loss of the one person who had meant more to him than the rest of the whole world. Even in the understanding that the had not lost Bucky then entirely, that so much of what he had known in that moment where his whole body had ached down to his bones in sorrow and confusion had been lies, the memory was still too raw to touch.

He doesn't know this woman from Adam, knows nothing of her other than what had been shared in a few minutes in generalities that had not so much as given names beyond that of a much less known man whose death had been a lie. While something of that allows him to speak around the tightness of his chest without choking, he isn't fool enough to share his every waking thought on the subject with a stranger.

He can see that lift of hope in her eyes, in the lift of her chin and the straightening of her shoulders and wants to do anything but crush that again when he speaks. "I thought he'd died," he told her, his voice scraping a moment harsh around the thought before the tone settles once more. "I guess I need to start doubting those reports a little more now."

"I'm very sorry," Simmons says, feeling as if the weight of empathy and sadness is in the small lines around her eyes, stress marks that she'd swear up and down didn't exist until only weeks ago. "I think we're all starting to doubt the things we're told," she confesses, hoping to bring something of a brighter tone to all this. "When the world around us isn't so easy to understand, doubt is the only reasonable safe harbour."

"Maybe everything we see might not be exactly what it seems," he admitted, watching her as her expression shifted to a shade more pale and wan. "But doubting everything will just have you jumping at shadows. Sometimes it might be a matter of listening to not just what's being said, but who's saying it. Other times...maybe it's a matter of listening to your gut, not your head."

With all that had threatened to make him lose faith in past years, the recent reemergence of Hydra and things he had thought long laid to rest being in no way the least of them, holding onto his trust in the basic nature of people had been all that had kept his head above water. There would always be bad apples, maybe always another monster to fight, but there were - and of this he was sure - also always good people out in the world.

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Amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got

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