This was a filler for a drabble prompt over on tumblr which went a bit rogue. As ever thoughts and comments are very much appreciated.

Trigger warnings for blood/gore, death, and angst below!

It only took an instant for the mission to go from plain sailing to her own living nightmare. It came in one sudden, forceful blur of him screaming her name with an urgency that made her stomach clench and in a sharp, stabbing pain in her elbow as a sudden impact caused her to fall heavily to the ground. The thin cotton of her shirt was an unworthy opponent for the tarmac beneath her, and she felt her skin split, gravel embedding itself in her flesh as a small trickle of blood ran down her arm.

It all paled into insignificance, however, the moment she understood what it had all been for. The sound of a gunshot rang in her ears once, twice, three times, and he cried out and doubled over, sinking to his knees on the spot she had occupied mere seconds before.

"No!" a voice, a woman by the sounds of it, screamed. It wasn't until they screamed again, a harsh, guttural sound that tore at her throat, that she realised the woman was her.

He had collapsed fully to his side before she was able to scramble to her feet, feeling shaky and suddenly cold despite the afternoon sun that shone on unnaturally as if the world hadn't suddenly fallen apart at the seams, the threads that once held it together dangling uselessly on either side. She crouched beside him, tears flooding her vision and dimly registered Ward and Coulson forcefully apprehending the man who had pulled the trigger, their expressions fixed in fiery rage. She heard May radioing frantically for a medical team but it was all other-worldly, as though seen through a distant mist.

Never once had the sight of blood made her feel unwell, but as it poured out of him from the three, gaping bullet wounds, she suddenly felt clammy and faint, as though she were about to pass out.

His hand, soaked in his own blood, darted out, reaching like a child until it found her own and clenched around it.

"I'm…I'm sorry," he gasped out, "I didn't mean to hurt you."

She almost laughed at first. Since when did Fitz, stubborn to the core, apologise for such a trifling thing?

It occurred then that this was more than an apology for the way her left sleeve had been left in tatters.

Suddenly inexplicably angry, she tore her hand away, sweeping through her pack for a medical kit, looking to his face (and God how was it so pale already?) once she found it. She set about trying to pack his wounds to stem the flow of blood, continuing to fight what she knew to be a losing battle as if will alone could force the blood back inside and the skin back together.

"Don't," she told him, her voice an unexpected medley of tears and fury. "Don't you apologise for this."

"Jemma," he ground out weakly, wincing as she applied pressure to the wounds. His voice was faint and desperate and she found she did not want to hear what he had to say, lest he tried to say goodbye, or something equally unbearable.

"Don't distract me," she told him sternly, but with little real conviction.

"Jem," he tried again, knowing what that would get him, and both of his trembling hands clenched loosely around her wrists. "Stop. We both know it's no good."

She fought uselessly for a while, but the blood was coming too quickly, seeping out over the bandages and onto her fingers in a warm, thick stream.

"Why did you do that?" she managed to choke out, "you didn't have to do that."

"They were going to shoot you," he told her, as though his sacrifice had come from a simple formula, as though it was as easy as knowing that CO2 meant two atoms of oxygen and one of carbon.

He coughed slightly and gasped for the very air his lungs could not accept, she suspected one had collapsed.

"But you…you shouldn't…you didn't have to." Why wasn't there something more to say? Why wasn't there something of greater value to tell him, to tell the boy who had just taken three bullets for her?

"I know," he told her simply, a wry half-smile pulling at his lips until even that was too much of an effort.

She watched helplessly as the med team arrived, a sudden commotion of shock blankets and oxygen masks and she was pulled away from him, allowed to return to his side just long enough to place a firm kiss on his forehead and whisper a few words into his ear before they whisked him away to the nearest SHIELD medical facility. Still, she prayed those words had done the trick for his eyes seemed to open a little wider, his gaze was a little more focussed. And yet the look he gave her a moment later was one that said 'goodbye'.

Skye was at her side in an instant and she didn't leave for the long, empty hours that Fitz was in theatre. But when the surgeon emerged, they didn't need to hear anything. The look on his face was enough. The tears came again then, hot and seemingly relentless.

And when she found her way back to her bunk later that night, feeling lost and frightened, her eyes were swollen and her throat was raw and yet still she screamed into her pillow for hours until she physically could scream no more.

Eventually, when she couldn't fend off exhaustion any longer, and when she was tired of hearing the team hovering outside, she shed the clothes that were still covered in his blood, leaving them on the floor where they fell. The t-shirt she pulled over her head smelt of him, and it caused her to lapse into a fresh bout of dry sobs, and where once he might have crawled between the sheets with her, where once he might have held her when things were too difficult to bear alone, her heavy eyes instead gave in to a restless sleep, with only the pain in her elbow for company.