I've seen a lot of people asking for a fic about Bobbi's recovery that took place mostly during the summer hiatus, so I thought I'd do a little something for it. Potential spoilers up through 3x04 "Devils You Know" and for the preview of next week's episode, 3x06.

He walks towards her in her dreams like he used to, only back then it wasn't followed by a spray of scarlet. She doesn't understand what this means until she wakes up, attached to tubes and wires and unable to feel much of anything below her abdomen. But he's seated there, head lolling slightly downwards, and it's all she can do to register that he's here, he's safe before utter exhaustion is pulling her under again.

Next time she wakes it's for longer, and with more clarity. She knows why she sees him in her dreams now; her dreams mirror the cruel reality they live in. He's asleep too, this time with his head resting against his arm, and it takes all the strength she can muster to say one simple word. "Hey."

He stirs, blinking sleepily, something akin to guilt deep in his eyes. He stretches, and she shifts her head to get a better look at him—to see all of him, to see that after all this he's unhurt, just as she intended.

He is but she's not, and the movement sends pain lancing down her spine despite the overall fuzziness with which she's currently interacting with the world. "You look better," he tells her. "Stupid, but better." His gaze meets hers and she drinks in the sight of him, whole and unharmed. Alive. "Taking a bullet for me was stupid."

His words, so undeniably Hunter, give her the energy to respond. "Walking into a trap when you know it's a trap is stupid." Her voice is low and scratchy, and it's a relief to lapse back into silence again after she's said it.

"You were the bait," he replies softly. A bit bit of anguish seeps into her at the immensity behind his statement. She was the reason he had been there in the first place. She was the reason he had been in danger. "Listen, Bob," he says. "Hang in there. It's a long road. Surgery again tomorrow. Haven't even started on your knee yet. But soon you'll be stable, and then…"

"And then," she whispers. "…I can't do this anymore." Mixed emotions flash across his face as he tries to parse the meaning behind her words but she can't tell him more than that; she's already slipping away again. Her injuries and the fuzziness-drugs are pulling her back under.

After a moment, he seems to decide it doesn't matter. "It's okay, Bob. We'll figure it out when you're on your feet again." His final words float to her as she drifts off. "Whatever you want."

Dr. Garner follows her gaze towards where Hunter waits impatiently by the door, then turns back to her with a small, understanding smile. "Last question, Agent Morse, I promise."

"Bobbi," she says reflexively.

"Bobbi," he amends, before asking, "Do you regret what you did?"

She pauses, feeling the lead weight in her legs despite the morphine. The real S.H.I.E.L.D. seems so long ago now. "No." This is the only question she's lied to in his whole series, and it's not even a true lie. She tells him the answer she thinks he should have for his purposes—not the one he wants, but the one most true to what he's asking. Not the one she feels in her heart. Of course she regrets it. She regrets every stupid action of hers that led Hunter being in danger, that led to her in this bed only awake for thirty minutes at a time and virtually immobile below the waist for fear of upsetting her shattered knee.

But that's not what he's asking. He's asking whether she still believes she did the right thing regarding the two S.H.I.E.L.D.s. She does. As any specialist knows, one can do the right thing and still regret it with every fiber in their body.

Dr. Garner nods and places his hand briefly on her shoulder before Hunter walks in and takes his customary seat at her bedside. The psychiatrist closes the door behind him.

Hunter holds the breathing apparatus for her as she struggles to inhale and move the ball upwards on the little dial. Simmons had explained how it worked when she first mandated she use it every few hours, but Bobbi honestly didn't care enough to remember anything more than it would help with her lungs, or what was left of them, as long as she doesn't overdo it. When she has done ten breaths, he places it back on the stand and takes her cold hand in his warm one. She knows she should be happy, elated even that the surgery went well and that Simmons projects for her a full recovery. The young biochemist's belief in this is so strong that she finally stopped hovering and gone to work with Fitz on the alien monolith that they'd discovered in the cargo hold of the Iliad. But she can't, not while facing months of rehab and even the prospect of sitting up—let alone standing—seems so far away.

"Hey," he greets her, leaning down to kiss her forehead. Despite her misery, it coaxes a smile out of her.

"Hey."

"Fitz is planning on asking Simmons out on a date."

Her eyes widen. "Really? When?"

"Asked me for advice about an half an hour ago, so I'd say…in about two weeks, when he works up the courage."

If Bobbi could, she would swat him. But she settles for a, "Hunter!" Her admonishment is followed by a bout of light coughing that has him staring down at her concernedly, ready to call Simmons back at a moment's notice should the coughing get any worse or any blood appear.

The fit subsides quickly though, and he relaxes, seeming happy to have lightened her mood. "How are you?"

"The same as when you left." She stifles a yawn, which he picks up on immediately.

"You should get some rest," he tells her.

"All I've been doing is resting," she grumbles, but she can tell he's right. It's an effort just to keep her eyes open. "Stay with me?"

"Always," he says, kissing her hand. "I'll be right here."

The day she moves back into the lab—recently repaired after an encounter from the Jekyll version of Cal, apparently—is the same day Simmons goes missing. In the morning, the young scientist is helping Hunter wheel her bed into the infirmary section of it. By night, the entire base is in a panic over her disappearance. Even Hunter leaves Bobbi's side to help them look, anything he can do, but she just watches as her friends run haphazardly back and forth in the hallway, a thin sheet of glass separating here from there. She feels—she is—useless in this bed, not even able to search security feeds for the young woman due to her drug-induced concentration issues. So when no one comes by to administer her nightly dose of morphine, she just lies there waiting for her mind to clear instead of calling for help.

This is a mistake, though, because at four AM when she presumes everyone outside is passed out from exhaustion the pain really sets in, no longer dulled by a drug running through her veins. She can't sleep for the agony, rendered completely inert until she couldn't even have reached for the phone had she chosen to.

It's in this state that Hunter finds her the next morning, the dark circles around his eyes telling her he got just as much sleep as she did. He swears at her, immediately starts a new morphine drip, and for once she doesn't protest that she doesn't need it. It's all too clear to both of them that she does.

Two weeks later Simmons is still missing, and the atmosphere around the base is somber. They've ascertained what happened to her easily—sucked up by the alien monolith, and immediately when Hunter informs her of this she wishes she'd just followed Fury's orders and sunk the Iliad way back on the day S.H.I.E.L.D. fell. She cares a lot about Simmons, from when she'd watched her as her charge within HYDRA to when the young woman managed to ICE her in the locker room when everyone found out about the existence of the real S.H.I.E.L.D. and its agents who had infiltrated their ranks. She's become one of Bobbi's true friends on this base, discussing Fitz and Hunter and everything else going on, and it's hard to believe she is just gone.

"No one's taking it as hard as Fitz," Hunter tells her, hand wrapped tightly around hers. "We haven't seen him in a fortnight except when we go in the lab, and even then he treats us like we're not even there." His eyes are sad as he adds, "Poor bloke."

"He can't stop looking," Bobbi agrees.

"It's stupid." She understands what he means but he says it anyway. "Stupid like you taking a bullet for me."

Her growing frustration finally takes on a target when she first tries to stand and can't even do it with Hunter's arm steadying her and a set of crutches to lean on. She's not even putting any weight on her right leg, but just moving into a position where it's upright sets her lump of a knee on fire. She falls back into her wheelchair with a whump, immediately struggling to get back up again. She can do this; she has to do this.

He's the one who made it so she has to do this. Hatred fills her at the thought of Ward and she allows her flagging strength to be bolstered by it. She hates him. She hates him, Star Wars and the Dark Side be damned.

Bobbi stands through the burning in her leg that feels as if it's being sawed off, and when she looks like she's faltering Hunter grabs her arm to steady her. "I know what to do," he says. "We should—" She crashes to the floor at his words, something primal and instinctual taking over as she scrambles across the mat to get away from him. He runs after her but all she can see is his face as he takes the handgun from Kara and promises her a worse fate than death.

"Bob!" Hunter shouts, pinning her hands above her head with all his weight as she writhes to get away. It's her name said in the way he says it that brings her back to the present and she looks up at him regretfully as he gently releases her, kneeling beside her. She has no words to explain what just happened but somehow they both understand it, know now that it's not just a physical affliction Grant Ward has caused her, but a mental one too.

He puts his arms under her to lift her back into the wheelchair but end up holding her instead as she cries for this first time since the shooting.

Her hatred of Ward carries her through the next month, during which she learns to call Skye 'Daisy,' they realize the true scope of the Inhuman outbreak, and Coulson officially declares the search for Simmons no longer the top priority. She's even able to stand with crutches for a few minutes at the small pseudo-memorial service they hold for her, pseudo because it's clear Fitz can't let go yet and Coulson hasn't contacted her parents yet on Fitz's insistence that she's not KIA. They hold it because the rest of them need closure, or as much as something like this can give them with Fitz running out of it halfway through with a wild new idea on how to prove she's still alive and out there somewhere. Like the hundreds of others he's had, it comes to nothing, but not even Coulson has the heart to tell him to stop.

It carries her through to the day when she is cleared to go into the gym and wheels in to find three new pieces of specialized exercise equipment. "May ordered those for you," Coulson tells her from the doorway. "It's the last thing she did before she left." Bobbi feels a surge of gratitude towards the older woman.

"I'll have to tell her thanks when she gets back," she replies, nodding for Hunter to help her onto one of them. That May will return is no question in her mind and Coulson seems to sense that, leaving them to work with a happier look on his face than she's seen in a long while.

She wakes up from her nightmares in her own bed now, with Hunter sleeping close beside her. In the darkness it helps that she can run her fingers along the unbroken skin of his forehead and reassure herself that he's unhurt, that the crack and spray of blood in her dream has not rendered him lifeless before her as Ward intended. Normally Hunter wakes up at her touch and holds her until she falls asleep again, but not tonight—he's exhausted from a mission of some sort, one that she knows he's keeping from her. Coulson's held off from putting him back on the duty roster until she can manage on her own, so she knows it isn't what Hunter claims.

She can't bring herself to question him about it though, for fear of the answer. She doesn't know how to explain to him that she put herself between him and the rifle so that he wouldn't be in danger, not so that he could put himself in the path of Ward's bullet again avenging her injuries. So he could run off and do something stupid again, walk into another trap without her even being caught in it this time. Hatred of the now-leader of HYDRA is replaced by fear of what he'll do next, not to her but to the people—person—she loves. The Mockingbird doesn't fear but the Mockingbird isn't here right now. Only Bobbi is left, and Bobbi has more fear than she knows what to do with locked inside of her where it can never come out.

And in the daytime Hunter wonders why the frequency of her nightmares has increased.

She's sure they offer her a job in the lab just to let her feel useful again, but when she arrives and sees the state it's in she realizes how much they really do need her there. The only tidy part of it is Simmons's desk, the rest piles of papers and racks of samples strewn helter-skelter across it. She's just crutching her way by the desk in question when Fitz comes running at her with a shout of "Don't touch that!" and she knows how far gone he's really been all this time.

"I'm not going to," she tells him softly.

"Right, no, of course you weren't…" The engineer shifts on his feet, slightly abashed. "Well, uh…you can work over here then." He gestures to the whole of the lab except Simmons's old workspace.

"Sounds good," she replies, making her way painstakingly slowly to one of the chairs. "What are we working on?"

Fitz looks around, walks over to the cabinet, pulls out one pile of papers, and then shakes his head. He leans down and pulls out a large, heavy cardboard box from the last shelf, checking it before carrying it over to Bobbi's new desk. She opens it and looks inside at the large stack of files, filling it to the brim. "This is the stuff Coulson wanted us to look into. So you can get started on that, and I'll, uh, get back to what I was doing." He turns away without waiting for an answer, and she can see even from this distance that it's a diagram of the monolith on his computer.

"Sure, Fitz," she says, taking out the first folder. "Whatever you need."

Hunter tells her his plans to go after Ward one night in bed, and she pretends to already be asleep because she dreads the thought of him going after that psychopath alone. After a few moments of silence she convinces him, feeling him shift next to her to roll over and find sleep for himself. Only once his breathing evens out does she ease herself out of bed, performing a semi-controlled fall out of it, crawling on three limbs towards her wheelchair, and pulling herself into it—without help, she can only get herself up on crutches from a sitting position.

She makes her way quietly out of the room and Hunter doesn't stir, hobbling down to the gym and letting herself inside. The room is dark until Bobbi turns the lights on, gets her machine going. The familiar burn in her lungs is increasing but she's not stopping this time, not stopping until she gets a halfway decent number of reps done. She can't let him go out there to face Ward alone, but she can tell he's getting impatient as he closes in with whoever his contacts are on the outside. She has to show him that she's making progress, that it won't be long until she'll be back to full form. Until she's back to being the Mockingbird.

"Burning the midnight oil?" a voice interrupts her, and Bobbi looks to the side to see Daisy standing there.

"Something like that," she replies, continuing her workout. The young agent crosses to the other side of the room and sets a punching bag on the hanger. "You too?"

"We lost another new Inhuman today," she reveals. "Disappeared out of his apartment with definite signs of a struggle." Bobbi slows in her movements to watch Daisy as she lifts her hands, aiming them at the bag. Waves of power burst out of them, hitting the bag hard enough to send it swinging wildly. She closes her palms and follows it up with a few well-placed punches, then turns away frustratedly. "I could cause a very large earthquake with what I'm feeling right now," Daisy mutters.

"Don't," Bobbi advises, flipping the switch to turn her machine off. "But I understand."

"Yeah." Daisy walks over to stand next to her. "I guess my problems are a little small compared to yours."

Bobbi shakes her head. "They're not. People are disappearing; you care. It's a good thing that you do, because there aren't many others willing to."

The younger agent looks down at her hands. "I'm sorry for, you know...using my powers against you back at the cabin."

Bobbi laughs, even though it hurts while so out of breath with only one and a half lungs working for her. "You don't have to apologize for that."

"Yeah, I do, and I never did," Daisy tells her. "You warned me about Calderon. You were always on my side, even with the other S.H.I.E.L.D." She glances down at Bobbi's specialized rehab machine. "And I'm sorry for not shooting Ward in the head back in San Juan."

"You couldn't have known he was wearing body armor," Bobbi replies. "You tried. We all tried." She can't help the bit of bitterness that seeps into her voice with that last sentence. "Bastard just won't die."

"You know Hunter's going after him, right?"

"He just told me tonight, but I've known for weeks," she nods unhappily. "He's not exactly a good liar, or maybe I've just had too much practice at reading people. I don't know."

Daisy seems to make the connection between Hunter breaking the news and Bobbi's sudden appearance down here in the gym. She flips the switch and Bobbi feels her machine start moving again. "Come on, I'll spot you."

Hunter doesn't listen. He's bullheaded and she hasn't felt this scared for him since she was in Ward's clutches with an automatic rifle aimed at the door. She's made so much progress—standing and walking without crutches even—and he still won't wait for her. She's piloting again, both Zephyr One and the Quinjet, and Coulson's even bringing her along out in the field to collect Professor Randolph. And Hunter still won't listen.

Worst of all, she can't even tell him how much this issue really means to her. He's hellbent on making Ward pay, and he can see in her eyes how much she wants him dead too. He takes that as his ticket and packs to leave.

She just doesn't want Hunter to end up dead too.

But she can't say it because that would crush him, that she doesn't trust him to do this for her. Because a small part of her knows that if he has an in, he has to take it now because opportunities don't last forever. And because the woman whose fighting skills she trusts most in the world besides Romanoff's will be helping him—as long as May doesn't kill him first for interrupting her vacation.

So instead she checks that he knows the plan and accuses him lightly of liking her being stuck in the lab all the time and listens as he waxes eloquent—not really—about her physical attributes, which could basically be summed up in two words: you're hot. When it's time for him to leave both of them initiate the kiss goodbye, but it's too fleeting for her liking before he's shouldering his pack and turning away. "Don't die out there," she says, and he glances back and nods. Then he's gone.

Back in the makeshift infirmary, he had promised, "Whatever you want." This isn't what she wants. Now he just has to come back alive so she can tell him so.

Simmons is back—for once Bobbi rejoices with the rest of them and that feeling of alone recedes for a few hours—but soon it's clear she's not good enough for the lab. It starts as B is for blue is for biological sample bags but quickly spirals outwards now that Fitz's concentration is no longer completely taken up by his search for the young biochemist. Simmons is back, and he wants her back—not Bobbi, whose focus and indeed love was never found in the cultures of a Petri dish or the inner mechanisms of an ICER. She's not like them, a specialist before a scientist, working in the lab of two people who might just put the pursuit of knowledge above life itself.

Fitz's disappointment in Simmons's reaction to being in her precious lab again is palpable, but it's only a matter of time and readjustment. Bobbi can feel the change coming, but she just can't isolate it yet. She trains. She refuses to call it rehab anymore.

Then she catches Simmons hard at work in the dead of night and the agent reveals her most precious secret: she has to go back to the planet. Bobbi's first thought is 'no.' The second is just how much this will break Fitz's heart.

The picture appears on her phone in a text sent by a woman she hasn't heard from in months, whose name is uttered on the base in almost as hushed a voice as Simmons's was in the time she was unofficially KIA. A quick snapshot, one that tells her all she needs to know even without the two-word caption: He lied. The bruises—the blood—May shows her on Hunter's torso, arms, and head make the statement all on their own. He's being stupid again, the kind she both loves and hates him for. He needs her.

The initial message is followed by one more of equal brevity. Be ready.

She seeks Coulson out immediately, walks straight into his office without so much as a knock. "I want to take the examination," she tells him.

His eyebrows furrow; she can tell he's not much pleased by the prospect. "Agent Morse—Bobbi—I want you back in the field as much as you do. But I don't want you to risk injuring yourself further trying to pass the physical if you're not ready." He closes the folder on his desk, coming to stand in front of her. "Are you?"

"I have to be." Hunter's not allowed to be stupid without her anymore.

After a moment of staring each other down, he nods, seeming to understand that there's nothing more he can say that might change her mind. "Okay. It might have to wait until Daisy and Mack get back from the ATCU, as there are a lot of other things going on right now."

"Sir?" she asks. "The sooner you let me—" His phone rings, interrupting her.

"Later, Agent Morse," he says, picking it up. He gives her a gesture that is a clear dismissal.

She decides against pacing outside his office only to discover she should have, as her next glimpse of him and the rest of the team are of a Quinjet taking off without her. Fitz is still here, though. "Coulson's leaving with a tac team?" she asks, though the answer is obvious.

"May and Hunter have a lead on Ward," Fitz replies. He doesn't say it, but everything about that sentence screams danger to her, danger that Coulson will arrive too late to protect him from. "Sounds like a dodgy situa…" Fitz frowns. "Wait. They didn't tell you?"

She doesn't reply, but that's an answer in and of itself. She knows, and he does too, that Coulson didn't inform her on purpose. She doesn't even try to parse his reasoning now, just takes in the fact that he kept her, one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s senior and most elite agents, in the dark about an operation so close to home.

"It's tough when people keep things from you," Fitz says a little too nonchalantly, turning and exiting the garage. Coming from a friend she for whom covered to their boss for months on end, she won't deny that it stings a little. But she doesn't control Simmons.

Bobbi controls herself.

She turns on her heel and heads to the infirmary, gathering up a cart full of monitoring equipment and electrodes. She attaches it all herself according to protocol, then does the run, the climb, the punching session… She doesn't need the instruments to tell her that she's passing; she can feel it in the way her muscles flex and contract more fluidly, closer to when she was the Mockingbird than she's been since the shooting.

When Coulson returns, he finds a flash drive with the last few hours' gym security footage as well as the medical data lying on his desk. There's a sticky note on top with words written in Bobbi's concise handwriting.

Reporting for duty, Director.

Now they can be stupid together.

Who else is excited for the return of the Mockingbird next week? Seeing that afterwards was the icing on the cake that was Elizabeth Henstridge's performance in "4,722 Hours."