Hourglass

Move

We've left the hospital now. The nurses told us to look after Jemma in a medical pod on the plane trip back to our base, and Jemma nearly threw up.

Too many awful memories, I suppose.

So instead she's in her bunk, the limited space in the small space taken up by various machinery. She's still covered in tubes and wires and had to be transported to her bunk via a gurney.

I watched it all from afar. I feel so powerless, having put her in this position but unable to extend a hand and pull her out again.

Instead, Trip's been conducting the procedures: he's the only one of us left with any experience in this field. I haven't seen Coulson, either. But perhaps that's a good thing - I can't look him in the eye after saying those things to him, but I don't regret it.

Skye sits in front of me, her wounded leg extended in front of her. I hold the sole of her foot slightly in the air.

"Push into my hand," I say and she responds, but the pressure is nowhere near as strong as it normally would be.

She brushes a stray bit of hair from her forehead. "It still hurts."

"You got shot, of course it does," I say shortly. She looks down, her jaw hard.

"No, not my leg."

She pushes into my palm again. "Well, my leg does actually hurt, but it's not the external pain that hurts the most right now."

I gently lay her leg down on the foam mat. We're in the hangar, but I put out some mats and hung up a punching bag. We still need to keep physically fit, just in case we're called on for a mission.

"You can treat physical pain. Take painkillers, ice a wound, bandage it up. But with grief, nothing you can do makes it go away. It's stubborn, it wants to be felt. And we're powerless to do anything but hurt," she says, tilting her body backward until her back is on the mat.

"We're all so broken now. Every single one of us. We've watched our friends fall one by one, watched the people we trust turn their backs on us. Fitz, Koenig, Hand, Ward, Garrett, we've watched them all leave us behind. We're the survivors, the collateral damage of our own civil war."

I shuffle across the ground and lay beside her. She laughs slightly. "They should have put it in the job description."

A smile tugs at my lips. "Would you have signed up if they had?"

"It's not like I had anywhere else to go, and besides, S.H.I.E.L.D. remains the best place to be to find any information I can on my parents. They were always my primary mission," she says quietly. "I really want to know who they were."

I feel like I'm asking so many questions. "Why?"

Skye turns her head to look at me. "Imagine I'm a jigsaw puzzle. My parents are some of the pieces. I can't complete it without finding them." And then she stops and laughs. "You have an imagination, right? Do you need me to draw a picture for you?"

I whack her lightly on the arm, grinning. "I know what you mean."

Her face falls as she looks once again toward the high ceiling of the hangar. "I don't think Jemma will ever complete her puzzle again."

I bite my lip. "No. Fitz had hard pieces to replace. Probably a funny shape or something."

"Aw, you do have an imagination. Hang on to it, it's an easy thing to lose, cooped up in here. Yeah, Fitz was one of those pieces shaped like a car or a star or... I don't know, a carrot or something that used to turn up in those puzzles at Saint Agnes'. And it probably took up half the damn board," she says, her voice faintly reminiscent.