Hourglass

A

Jemma's already awake when we arrive in her room, sitting up with a mug of steaming tea next to her and a trashy magazine in her hand. The other hand is bandaged and resting gently on the comforter.

"How was your operation?" Skye asks, perching on the corner of the bed and picking up a magazine from the stash on the bedside table. She flicks to a random page and it falls open on her lap.

"It was fine," Jemma says cheerfully. "My hand is no longer black."

"So you don't look like Dumbledore anymore?" Skye jokes and Jemma smiles at her friend.

I pull over a chair and sit down next to the bed, placing my own thermos of tea next to Jemma's mug. I knew better than to have to resort to the abysmal excuse for a drink they serve at this dreary hospital.

"No. But I wish they could restore some of the feeling," she says, glancing down at her bandages. "I'm missing being able to do anything with both hands."

"Wait until you have to tie your shoelaces," Skye says and Jemma scrunches her nose.

I take a sip from my thermos just as Skye launches into a description of our activities over the last two days that she's been cooped up in bed. "May's been helping me strengthen my leg. The bullet wound isn't nearly healed yet but it's fine to walk on now, and I should be getting back on the treadmill in a few days or so. And May also said that my punches were getting more powerful."

"Glad to know you've been listening," I remark as I place my tea back on the bench.

"I can't wait until you can join us again. That 'girly bonding time', as Coulson dubbed it, was nice," Skye says and Jemma frowns.

"If you want to, of course," I interject, and her expression softens slightly, but her brow is still furrowed at the prospect of training, which would lead to missions.

I don't blame her at all for her fears. I would run for the hills if I was in her position.

"Get well soon, okay? We want you back home," Skye says, the slightest hint of impatience in her voice. "Bobbi and Hunter are always arguing and Coulson's always busy and May doesn't ever talk -"

"I do so," I say indignantly. It's true, I've opened up a lot lately. My family needed me to.

Skye rolls her eyes. "Anyway, it's getting lonely. I miss the good old days when Hydra wasn't an imminent threat and we weren't getting shot at every other day. The BUS was the first place I ever thought of as home, and now it's destroyed. Don't you miss it too?"

Jemma nods. "Yeah, I miss it."

✈

Coulson noticed the blood encrusted on my knuckles as I was washing them off in the bathroom sink. He walked in on me. I'd forgotten to lock the door.

And while I'm sure he knew what I'd been doing, he didn't say anything. He merely took my hands in his and resumed the gentle scrubbing against the red caked to my skin. He wrapped my hands in soft bandages, covering the areas where the friction scraped off the top layers of skin and I was left with angry, red, defenceless flesh.

And I knew as he was tending to my self-inflicted wounds that he forgives me for the things I said to him. Because he does know how I feel. He feels guilty over what happened to Jemma. We all do, in some messed up way.

When he comes in to collect Skye I realise that he'd planned it. He wanted me alone with her, because I'm the one she'll talk to. I'm the one who has survived similar experiences. I'm the one who is a shell of my former self. Not Skye, not Hunter, not Bobbi, not Trip. They don't understand, but I do.