Neptune

But

She walks outside, the cold air biting her pale skin, and the sky begins to open up as rain cascades down around her. She seems undeterred, however, letting the water touch her skin without a second thought.

Grass beneath her boots, she walks - her coat drawn around her narrow frame and her face turned to the sky. Her steps aren't brisk but slow, almost as if she doesn't have a destination, but she knows where she's headed and so do I. It's the place where we've both been to clear our heads, multiple times alone but only once together and this was before she was aware of my presence.

The light slowly starts to fade, long shadows on the grass and green trees tinted with blue. Jemma's footsteps are muffled by the thumping of rain and the occasional boom of thunder; mine are silent, the way they always have been since my death.

When she reaches the bridge she sits down on the damp wood, the toes of her boots brushing the surface of the stream. It's more sheltered here. Water collects in the leaves and all we can hear is the occasional drip, drip, drip.

"I don't want to talk to you right now."

Her voice is as sharp as the air. It was a reply I had been expecting to hear.

"We both have the same haunt," I say, sitting down beside her but as far away as possible. "We still seem to have that mental syncronisation. But we don't have to talk to each other if you don't want to."

She doesn't say anything, her eyes downcast. I glance instead at the wilted snowdrops on the bank, purposefully not watching her. She thinks it's creepy.

It wasn't creepy when I did it in the lab, back when I was alive. I just couldn't tear my eyes away from her: the delicate curvature of her back as she bent over her latest specimen, the way her warm amber eyes lit up when she got excited, the annoying piece of hair that came loose from behind her ear and dangled in front of her face (I always wanted to tuck it back). But with this newfound distance she would rather our backs be turned on each other and I hate it, but there isn't much I can do. It's not my fault I'm here.

Silence falls between us again, the frosty blue kind. I concentrate on the life around us, the drip, drip, drip of the rain onto the grass, the rare call from a bird brave enough to be out in the rain, the gentle rushing of the water as it meanders down the stream. It's peaceful.

 "Why do we have to be like this, Fitz?" she says quietly.

"I thought you weren't talking to me," I reply and she adjusts her scarf around her neck. "Why the sudden change of mind?"

"I hate feeling like this. It's like when you left you turned the lights out and left me in the dark with all the monsters under my bed. It's scary, I hate it." She sounds hollow.

"Remember that episode of Doctor Who that we watched at that nice hotel with the pool? There's nothing under the bed. Nothing to be afraid of," I reply.

She sighs. "When I was a child, my mother had to look under the bed every night before I went to sleep to check for monsters. And I always had -"

"The closet door open too, so that you could see that there was nothing inside. And you slept with a nightlight until you were eleven," I finish, smiling slightly. "It's okay to be afraid of the dark."

"I'm terrified," she admits. "It's silly, but I'm terrified."

"You're not silly."

"But I am stupid?"

I scoff. "Don't bring that up. Two PhDs, the youngest graduate from the Academy - not to mention the fact that you aced every test - you're not stupid, Jemma. I wasn't thinking when I said that."