#if you are suffering from PTSD or C-PTSD i wish you endless healing

[boyczar]

[dilkirani]

a better son/daughter

Summary: Exploring the effects of Fitz's relationship with his father throughout his relationship with his best friend, in three parts.

"You'll be better, you'll be smarter And more grown up and a better daughter Or son and a real good friend You'll be awake and you'll be alert You'll be positive though it hurts And you'll laugh and embrace all your friends You'll be a real good listener You'll be honest, you'll be brave You'll be handsome, you'll be beautiful You'll be happyYour ship may be coming in You're weak but not giving in" -- Rilo Kiley, "a better son/daughter"

A/N: Started writing this after the reveal about Fitz's abusive father. The first scene of the third part is set after that episode, but there aren't any references to the framework. I also wanted to address Jemma leaving after the pod in the context of Fitz’s father without glossing over her own trauma, so I hope that comes across. Thanks to @itsavolcano​ as always for the beta and for the help with the ending! She suggested "happiness and kids," so thank her for the fluff!

tw: verbal abuse mention, PTSD, panic attacks. 

Read below or at ao3!

--

i.  in the middle before we knew that we’d begun

Jemma has never suffered from panic attacks before but she recognizes the symptoms easily enough. She carefully charts the time and date of each occurrence, what she assumes the instigator has been, what it feels like: accelerated heart rate, trembling, sensations of smothering. Her lungs cannot draw enough air and she hates herself for it because she had, after all, drawn just enough air.

Her lungs had sucked up the oxygen meant to be shared and now she sits, back flat against her door, trying to hoard all the oxygen left in the world because she just can’t breathe.

When the attack passes, she presses her forehead against the side of her bed and cries, furious at herself because there’s no reason for her to be this weak. Her best friend is still recovering in a hospital bed because of what she’d done to him and the doctors told her he might never be the same. But she is perfectly fine.

She thinks, bizarrely, that she wants to go home. Not to her parents’ bright house in Sheffield, not to her cramped but familiar bunk on the Bus, but back to some amorphous feeling that’s already fading from her mind. Back to when everything in her world had been science and Fitz and cheap pizza at midnight, notes and schematics scattered along the floor. When her heart had been whole; when she hadn’t known it was possible to survive yet still feel the pressure of water drowning her every day.

Now, she cries so much the salt of her tears burns against the back of her throat and it tastes like inhaling the ocean. This is one truth she wishes she’d never learned.

++

Jemma drums her fingers nervously against her thigh. When Fitz had been in his coma, she held his hand, placed her ear against his chest to feel his heartbeat. Once, in a moment of weakness, she had crawled into bed next to him, holding him against her like her arms could keep him tethered to this world.

But now that he’s awake she retreats until there’s more space between them than there’s ever been. His confession mixes with her guilt until it’s a living, breathing entity that takes up all the space in his room.

When have they ever run out of things to say? When had their conversations ever been so one-sided?

“Fitz,” she says softly, speaking to him like he might disappear. Because what she fears more than anything is that he actually has. “Would you like me to call your mum?”

He turns to look at her for the first time since she sat down and shakes his head quickly, eyes wide.

“Don’t you think she ought to know?” Jemma persists.

Fitz stares at her as if sure she can read his mind but is refusing to. “Don’t w-w-want her to-to-to—��� He cuts himself off with a growl, fisting the arm that’s not still in a cast into his bedding.

“You don’t want her to worry?” Jemma finishes for him.

Fitz nods, but he’s staring off again, no longer meeting her eyes. They sit like this in silence for awhile, until Trip stops by to ask Jemma a question. She excuses herself and her heart clenches painfully at the way Fitz looks so dejected.

She goes back to her room after helping Trip in the lab, not having the energy to spend more stilted hours with Fitz. He wants her with him all the time but he never seems happy when she’s around. To calm herself, she meditates on a list of her sins and thinks up apologies she’ll never be brave enough to deliver.

Dear Skye, I’m sorry for taking the last breath. I know how much Fitz means to you. I know I’ve been impossibly selfish.

Dear Coulson, I’m sorry I wasn’t smart enough. I’m sorry we weren’t field ready. I’m sorry I stole your best engineer from you.

Dear Linda, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I know he’s all you have. I know I promised to take care of him in the field. I know you worried so much but you let him go anyway. I know you trusted me, and I know you never will again. I’m so sorry.

Dear Fitz —

But here her tears spill onto her cheeks and she can’t finish. There is no universe, she thinks, in which she can fully articulate what she feels when she looks at her best friend, when she hears him struggling to finish a simple sentence. There will never be enough words to fill up the space left between his smile and her scream.

And then there are times she looks at him, quiet and sweet in sleep, and feels a burst of anger because he made her take the oxygen, because he thought after everything she could just leave him behind, like she cares as little as his father had.

The self-hatred that immediately follows the anger is just another pinprick. She barely feels it.

++

“Hi,” Jemma says, letting herself into his hospital room. Fitz smiles at her and it’s like scotch tape over a pothole, but right now it’s the only thing holding her together. “I brought you a journal.”

She holds up a copy of Physics Review Letters, a recent issue she knew he’d been eager to read, before.

His eyes track her movements as she sits down in the chair by his bedside that’s become hers. She moves to hand him the journal, but he shakes his head, so she sets it down on the nightstand instead.

“La-la-ter,” he stumbles, and she thinks she manages to hide her disappointment well enough.

“Want to watch TV?” she asks, and he nods, settling back down against his pillows. She picks an episode of Doctor Who and when she starts nodding off in her chair, it almost feels like they’re healing.

++

The next day, Jemma steps into his room, determined to embrace a new, positive attitude. Fitz had always been a bit prickly, and being stuck in a hospital room was doing him no favors. But he is her best friend—surely she can think of something to ease his boredom and his fear. Despite what he thinks, he really is improving, and she’s done endless amounts of research on brain injuries. Perhaps she’s not a medical doctor, but she’s convinced she’ll be the one to help him.

But when she sees him, she knows immediately that it’s going to be a bad day. He’s scowling and his eyes are shimmering with tears. She looks to where he’s staring and sees the copy of Physics Review Letters flung against a wall.

“Fitz,” she says, unable to completely hide the frustration in her voice. “Why did you do that?”

His voice is so quiet that she almost can’t hear him when she walks to pick it up. “I c-c-could-could... can’t—”

“Can’t what?” she asks softly, and she knows she’s using the tone of voice he hates but she doesn’t know how else to speak.

“Words,” he says, breathing out harshly and twirling a finger next to his temple, his new way of expressing frustration at the jumbled connections in his brain.

“Oh,” she replies, thinking that she might have known this would happen, wondering how it’s possible to know him better than she knows herself but still never seem to do the right thing.

Unbidden, an image of him appears, confessing a secret he might otherwise have died to protect. Maybe she doesn’t know him at all.

Jemma sits next to him, forcing a smile she doesn’t feel. “What if I read it to you?” she offers. “A physicist’s bedtime story?”

She had thought it was a fun, lighthearted, and reasonable suggestion, but Fitz clenches his fist in a way she knows means he’s upset.

“I’m n-not...a-a-a ch-ch—”

“—a child?” she finishes for him.

He won’t meet her eyes and suddenly tears are streaming down his face. She doesn’t know what to do—she reaches out to touch him, fingers barely grazing his arm.

“I’m-I’m-I’m just—”

“What, Fitz?” she asks, and every cell in her body is afraid of the answer.

“I’m worthless,” he spits, and she’s suddenly seventeen years old again, sitting in his dorm room and feeling like her heart has just been torn from her body.

“Fitz,” she breathes, finally finding the strength to grip his arm. “You are not worthless, and you never will be. You need to be patient with yourself. You sustained a serious injury and your brain needs to learn to make new connections. But you will.” She’s in clinical mode now, and she finds herself believing the authority in her own voice.

Fitz, however, looks unconvinced. Jemma feels desperation heavy and clawing in her stomach, feels sick with it.

That night, she prays. Perhaps to no one and nothing, but she prays nevertheless.

++

Fitz moves out of the hospital room and starts more intense physical therapy and TBI rehabilitation. She doesn’t understand why he seems to be making strides around everyone but her. The way he’d called himself worthless still rings loudly in her ears.

She takes him out to dinner and he complains the whole time. When she finally makes it back to her room and breathes through another panic attack, she discovers that she has no tears left. She considers the gaping empty feeling inside of her and thinks it’s always been there.

Two nights later, she’s come up with yet another plan to win Fitz over. In the back of her mind she wonders if this is a twisted repeat of when they’d first become friends, if he is as annoyed with her showing up at his room every day the same way he’d probably been annoyed by her following him around all the time at the Academy.

She pushes these worries away and grabs Fitz’s favorite snack, which she’d managed to procure earlier that day from a specialty UK store off-base. She smiles to herself, imagining his delight and the way his eyes will light up. Fitz’s sweet tooth is something she’d always chastised him for but secretly adored.

But when Jemma reaches his room she freezes, stunned at what she’s hearing. Skye’s voice filters softly through the open door, stumbling over the technical language of a physics article she recognizes from the journal she’d brought to him weeks ago. “Micrometer and larger scale positioning of the tip uses stick-slip piez-piezoelectric actuators, while microscopic positioning uses a p-piezoelectric single-tube scanner—”

Fitz laughs, not unkindly, and she can hear the sheets rustling as he presumably leans over towards Skye. “Pee-ay-zoh-elec-tric,” he sounds out, and it almost seems like he’s saying the word slowly solely for Skye’s benefit.

Skye groans good-naturedly. “I’m not saying that word again, Fitz. Also, is this a physicist’s idea of some kinky shit? Because if so, I don’t want to be reading it.”

“Wh-what? Of course-course not,” he replies, seemingly scandalized.

“Something about the tip and ‘stick-slip’ actuators? Are you sure this is a reputable article?”

Jemma hears Fitz scoff and then a slight tussle ensues, one Skye presumably wins because in the next second she’s sighing in resignation and picking up where she left off—“While in scan mode, the position of the tip in the xy plane is varied by tilting the tip as shown in Figure 3…”

Jemma looks down at the Scottish tablet in her hands and the truth she’s been avoiding for months slams into her ribcage like a gunshot. “It’s me,” she whispers to herself, suddenly adrift and a little bit dazed. She stands there, not moving, unsure where she has left to go. She absentmindedly sticks a piece of tablet in her mouth and the sugar tastes sour and heavy on her tongue. It settles in her stomach like a stone.

She finally turns to leave. She stuffs the rest of the sweets in the garbage. She takes several deep, clarifying breaths.

Then, she sets up a meeting with Coulson.

--

ii.  take me back to the start

“You’re my best friend in the world, Fitz,” Jemma sighs sleepily, snuggling further into his couch, her head almost touching his shoulder.

Fitz’s entire body seems to freeze, pen stopping mid-word, feet suddenly flat on the ground.

Jemma tenses and worries that she’s crossed some social boundary. She’s never been very good at picking up on people’s signals, but after a rough start she and Fitz had become incredibly close. To her, it didn’t seem like a revelation; they were together all the time.

“But if you’re not…well, I mean, naturally I don’t have to be your best friend—” she stumbles, face flushing bright red.

“No, no, it’s not...I just, um…” Fitz scratches at his neck, avoiding her eyes. “I’ve never had a best friend before, not really.”

Jemma grins at him. “Me neither! We probably never found anyone smart enough before.”

Fitz frowns, considering her words. “Someone has to be smart to be your best friend?”

“Well, not necessarily. But it’s difficult making friends when you’re always the youngest in your classes and no one else cares about your research.” Jemma shrugs; she’d actually never considered herself lonely before. There had been so much to learn and so little time. It wasn’t until she’d met Fitz that she’d even realized it was possible to have someone add to your life in a way you couldn’t achieve on your own.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Fitz mumbles, but he appears vaguely troubled. “You’re my best friend too, Simmons.”

She breathes out a sigh and leans back against the couch cushion. It feels oddly like an official statement has been made—like today, January 24, will be a day she looks back on as important as the day she defended her first dissertation, or the day she was accepted into the Academy. The day she has allowed her fate to be sealed together with prickly, grumpy, brilliant, funny Leopold Fitz. She should be nervous, in a way, but as she lets her head fall back onto the sofa she feels only sleepy and fully content.

++

Fitz groans, leaning his head back in frustration and rubbing his eyes tiredly. It’s the first time he’s ever had such difficulty with any project, so Jemma certainly understands his annoyance, but she doesn’t understand the way his hands tremble or his barely-audible mutterings of “half a brain” and “stupid.” She doesn’t understand why his usual enthusiasm for a challenge has been replaced by panicked breathing and tears hanging on his lashes.

She bites her lip as she hovers nearby. She had finished her part of the project ages ago. Or, thirty minutes ago, but as he tries material after material and gets nowhere, it starts to feel like an eternity.

“Maybe we should take a break?” she offers. “You haven’t eaten in awhile, you have to be feeling peckish.”

“I’m fine,” he mutters, just as his traitorous stomach gives an unpleasant growl.

“Fitz,” she says, smiling a bit. “We have plenty of time. We’re way ahead of everyone else. Let’s just take a break.”

He drops the tool he’s using in frustration. “It’s no use,” he says, refusing to meet her eyes. “I can’t figure it out, it’s way beyond me.”

Jemma scoffs, leaning against the lab table and eyeing him warily. “That’s not true, Fitz. We’re obviously just approaching it the wrong way. We’ll figure it out.”

“You might be able to, but I’m just...I’m just useless.”

Jemma gapes at him, unsure what to say. Fitz always had a bit of a temper and he tended to get frustrated more easily than she did, but he’d never just given up. She’s never seen him look so...lost and defeated.

Before she can process what’s happening, Fitz has left the lab in a huff. She doesn’t even realize she’s crying until she sees water dropping onto her lab report.

++

Jemma gives him approximately 45 minutes to stew on his own before she can’t take it anymore. She’s pretty sure having a best friend means being supportive of them, even if you’re not entirely sure what to do or say.

She lets herself into his dorm room, having memorized his code long ago, and finds him sprawled across his bed, head buried underneath a pillow.

“Hi, Fitz,” she says, approaching him more tentatively than she has in over a year. “I made you a sandwich.”

Fitz doesn’t move; she’d think he were asleep if she couldn’t sense the tension radiating off of him. She holds the sandwich out in front of her, although he can’t see.

“I’ve been experimenting. This one is quite good, I think. Prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella with a bit of homemade pesto aioli. The first batch of aioli tasted a bit off, but I think I’ve finally got it right.”

It’s awkward and silent for another moment until Fitz turns around to face her. He does so slowly, as if reluctant, and she struggles to hide a grin. She might not know why Fitz is suddenly so upset, but the surest way to his good spirits has always been food.

He takes the sandwich from her without saying anything, inhaling before he takes his first bite, and the obvious pleasure on his face sends a tingling feeling down her spine.

They sit in silence, each eating half of the sandwich, until he brushes crumbs onto his floor and mumbles an apology.

“You don’t have to apologize, Fitz,” she reassures him. “I just...I didn’t know how to help. Or why you were so upset.”

Fitz picks at invisible lint on his pants, not meeting her eyes. He takes a deep, fortifying breath before saying something he’s never admitted to anyone: “My dad used to say...he always said I was st-stupid and useless. Said I’d never amount to anything and I was this huge dis-disappointment. Sometimes when I can’t figure something out I get...I’m afraid he’s right.”

Whatever Jemma expects him to say, this is not it. She doesn’t know how to respond. She has the oddest sensation in her chest, as if her heart is actually breaking.

“Fitz,” she breathes, feeling both honored that he’s trusted her enough to tell her and terrified that she won’t be able to say the magic words to make it all better. “I-I’m so sorry. Do you...do you still talk to him?”

“Nah,” he replies, shrugging his shoulders nonchalantly, and it’s this gesture, as if what he’s confessed is nothing, that really does break her heart. “He left when I was ten. Me and my mum haven’t heard from him since.”

“He’s...he’s an absolute wanker,” Jemma hisses, clenching her hands into tight fists. Fitz looks up then for the first time, mouth hanging open.

“What?” she asks, flushing under his stare. “I curse!”

There’s another pause and then suddenly Fitz is laughing and he can’t stop. He bends over, wheezing, until Jemma starts to seriously worry that he’s going into hysterics. He finally calms down, brushing tears from his eyes and looking up at her with such gratitude that she feels guilty.

“Thank you,” he says, smiling softly at her. “I needed to hear that.”

She smiles back at him tentatively. “I mean it, Fitz. You’re the smartest, most interesting person I know. Even if you weren’t, what he said to you is simply inexcusable. He didn’t deserve you.” She throws her arms around him then, pulling him towards her and sighing when he wraps his arms around her as well.

“You’re my best friend in the world,” she says. “I could never think you were useless.”

She can feel him relax against her, almost imperceptibly. They sit like this for awhile, embracing much longer than they ever have in the past. In the back of her mind, she worries that she hasn’t said enough. She’s never been close enough to anyone to be entrusted with this kind of information, and she’s afraid she’ll never be able to articulate everything she’s thinking in this moment.

She hopes, as they break apart and opt for marathoning television for the evening instead of working on their project, that somehow her presence will be enough. She fears, more than anything, that it won’t be.

--

iii.  the end of the beginning

Jemma walks into their bedroom, shutting the door with extra care. She needs every second she can get to process and plan her words, although she knows in the end they’ll spill out of her haphazardly. She can smell the burnt metal against her skin and it makes her stomach roil.

Fitz is sprawled across the bed and she thinks he’s asleep until she sees his eyelashes flutter. He smiles shyly up at her and her heart stutters, beating out a rhythm that’s long ago become a unique response to his presence.

Jemma sits on the edge of the bed and he moves to curl instinctively to her side. She runs her fingers through his hair and smiles at the way he nuzzles even closer. Sometimes, she wants to keep him all to herself, and other times she finds herself strangely heartbroken that no one else is allowed to experience Fitz as she does. How can people truly understand happiness, she wonders, if they’ve never been enveloped in his arms?

She sighs softly. More than anything, she wants to fall asleep for days. But for some reason, today is the day she can no longer choke down her words. “Can we talk?” she asks, voice barely a whisper. “About...about after the med pod? Before I left?”

Fitz stills like a frightened animal, eyes scanning the room as if he’s unsure which of them will bolt first. “We’ve...but we’ve talked about it, Jemma.”

“Not really,” she replies, continuing to smooth his hair down methodically. “It’s always been too raw. It still feels too raw, but it’s safe now, isn’t it? You won’t leave now.”

He breathes out an incredulous laugh. “Where would I go?”

“Do you remember when I brought you that physics journal to read?” she asks, ignoring his question and the way it pulls at her heart. She lies down on her side then, reaching for his hand.

Fitz cringes and looks away. “Jemma,” he says softly, “I’m sorry. I know I treated you—”

She cuts him off by tugging on his hand, drawing his attention back to her. “You don’t have to apologize, Fitz. That’s not why...that’s not why I brought it up. I just…” She turns until she’s on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Tears prick at the corners of her eyes.

“I was trying to help, but I didn’t know how. I was having panic attacks and I felt so guilty and confused and then you...you said you were worthless, and all I could think about was what you told me at the Academy, about your father. I loved you, Fitz, even if I didn’t know then in what way. I loved you so much and I made you feel worthless.” She breaks off in hiccuping sobs, covering her eyes with her hands and realizing that this wound in her heart has never fully healed; it’s just scar tissue formed over scar tissue.

“Jemma,” Fitz murmurs, pulling her hands away from her face as gently as he can. “You didn’t make me feel worthless. It wasn’t—it wasn’t because of you.” He brushes her hair back from her face and swipes a tear away with his thumb. “I was trying too hard to be the same. I’ve always felt I had to be smarter and better for you, and at that moment I just...couldn’t accept what had happened.”

“But do you remember when you told me about your father? At the Academy?”

Fitz curls into her; his arm drapes across her waist in a protective cocoon she never wants to leave. “‘Course I remember,” he says. “You’re the only person I’ve ever told.”

“I didn’t know what to say, Fitz,” she whispers, increasingly panicked. “I didn’t know how to help and if I’d said the right thing maybe I wouldn’t have made you feel worthless later and you wouldn’t doubt your own worth now.”

Fitz places a kiss high on her cheekbone and she can feel him smiling against her face. “Of course you didn’t know what to say. We were kids, and you weren’t a psychologist. But you were my friend and you helped me.”

He brushes another kiss along her jawline, dusting over her lips. “I don’t think I can ever tell you what it meant to explain about my dad and to have you immediately defend me.”

Jemma faces him, incredulous. “Of course I defended you! It’s unspeakably awful what he did to you and if I ever—”

He cuts her off with another soft kiss. “Sometimes you know things intellectually, and sometimes you just need to hear your best friend in the world say that your abusive dad was a wanker and didn’t deserve you.”

Jemma laughs then, burying her head into his shoulder and breathing in his heady scent. “Still,” she says after a few moments of quiet, “I’m sorry I left the way I did.”

Fitz sighs, closing his eyes and gripping her to him. “And I’m sorry I never gave you a chance to explain. I’m sorry I was so focused on myself that I didn’t realize at the time how much you’d been hurt by the pod and everything that happened after.”

She nods against him, bringing a finger up to trace along his chest. There’s one more thing she wants to ask him but she worries now is not the right time, that all of the betrayals are too fresh in his mind.

“I can feel you thinking,” he says after a few minutes of silence have passed and she can’t help laughing. She leans over him, propping her head against her hand and staring at his eyes, somehow the color of the ocean and the sky and yet more beautiful than any of it.

She bites her lip, considering. “Do you think you might, someday, think about...that is, do you see yourself wanting kids?”

Fitz pushes himself up so that he’s leaning against the headboard, and she whines instinctively at losing the contact. He furrows his brow. “I s’pose I hadn’t thought much about it. I think...yeah, in an abstract way, but it always felt far off. I guess... I always assumed we would, though. Why? What about you?”

Jemma smiles up at him. “Yeah,” she replies. “Not soon, but someday. Honestly, I never really thought about it until you. But I’d like to, with you.” She pushes her fingers into the sheets, giving him a nervous half-smile. “I was uh...afraid to bring it up with you. I didn’t know if you felt...with your father and all.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding. He doesn’t say anything for awhile, just leans his head back against the bed. Just when she’s about to ramble something, anything, he clears his throat. “I’ve worried, sometimes,” he says. “About not having a good father figure growin’ up. But my mum is...I think she’s been the best example of parenting anyone could have.”

Jemma nods, feeling her eyes fill with tears at just the image of Fitz, small and safe in his mother’s arms.

“And we’d be together, yeah? I’ll just follow your lead.” He grins at her and she smiles tremulously back before throwing her arms around him and squeezing so tightly he gasps.

“I love you so much, Fitz,” she whispers, some dark, tight feeling in her chest finally unspooling, all these years later.

“I love you, too,” he replies, placing the gentlest of kisses against her forehead.

With all the insanity swirling around them, it’s still the best sleep she’s gotten in ages.

++

“You’re not panicking?”

“No, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Okay, maybe a little. A lot. No, a medium-sized amount.”

Jemma laughs, her voice light and carefree. “I’m maybe a little worried, but not much.”

“Really? We’re about to have a real, live human baby and you’re not panicking about it?”

She shakes her head fondly, wrapping his arms around her belly and leaning back against his chest. The sunlight warms her face and she’s tempted to fall asleep right here on this park bench. “I’m pretty sure I’ve survived worse pain, I know I’ve survived worse sleep deprivation, and you’ll be there the whole time.”

“Yeah,” he whispers, flattening his hands against her stomach and concentrating on any movement. “I’ll be there the whole time.”

Jemma places her hands over his, fingers playing with his wedding ring. “Fitz,” she says finally, unsure how to get the words out without drowning in how much she loves him, “I trust you more than anyone in the world. You’re going to be the best father, and I’m so ready to do this with you.”

He drops his face down into her hair and she can feel dampness seeping onto her scalp. He pulls her even closer, impossibly gentle. “I’m ready too,” he says, breath tickling at the back of her neck. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

Jemma squeezes her eyes shut then and doubles over in pain. Fitz’s panic has already rocketed back up by the time she straightens, throwing him a strained little smile.

“That’s good to hear, because I think she might be coming early.”

“Oh, shite.”

++

“Daddy!” his four-year-old daughter shrieks, running to him from across the playground. He leans down to catch her, swinging her up as she giggles.

“Push me on the swing, daddy! Higher this time!”

Fitz frowns as he carries her over to the swingset. She squirms in his arms as soon as they near the swings, so he lets her go and watches her run off.

“I don’t know, Rosie,” he says. “We went pretty high last time.”

Rose settles herself in the swing, trying to kick herself into motion, and pouts at him. He’s tempted to close his eyes, because otherwise it’s just too difficult saying no to her. “Mummy said I could go higher,” she answers, and really he can’t believe how unfair it is that they’ve brought a miniature Jemma into the world.

He watches her carefully, putting his hands on his hips. “Fine. But we’re going to calculate the path using the law of conservation of energy like we practiced, okay? Just to make sure we’re safe.”

Rose nods solemnly. “Okay, daddy,” she acquiesces, and he has no doubt that it’s only a matter of time before she’s rolling her eyes at him like her mother.

She squeals with laughter as he pushes her, urging him to take her even higher. She’s so light against his hands that he feels like he’s barely pushing, and yet she’s swinging so far away from him. His brave little girl, who someday will want her own adventures. He hopes by that point his heart can handle watching her go.

++

Rose has worn herself out so completely that she refuses to budge from the car until he offers to carry her inside. She’s asleep almost as soon as he lifts her up, small puffs of air feathering against his neck.

Jemma smiles widely at him when he walks through the door, brushing a kiss against his lips before he takes Rose upstairs to her room. She doesn’t seem to notice as he transfers her from his arms to her bed, curling immediately around her stuffed monkey. He brushes the hair out of her face gently before leaving to find Jemma.

“Your mum brought over some dinner, but she couldn’t stay,” Jemma says when he’s back in the kitchen. She carefully spoons some pasta onto his plate while he fills glasses with water.

“That’s too bad. Maybe I’ll take Rosie ‘round tomorrow.”

Jemma sets his plate down and sits next to him, sprinkling some pepper over her own dish. “I have the day off tomorrow, actually. Maybe we could go by in the morning for breakfast with her and then leave Rosie for the day. Your mum was not-so-subtly insinuating that she hadn’t gotten to spend much time with her lately.”

Fitz looks up, delight lighting up his features. “You have the day off tomorrow? Why?”

She smirks at him. “Because I asked for it off.”

Fitz frowns, trying to quickly figure out if he’d missed an anniversary or other important date and Jemma laughs like she’s read his mind.

“Fitz, when have you ever forgotten an important date? Aren’t you the romantic one?”

He can’t help his scoff and accompanying eyeroll, but there’s no bite behind it. He grabs her hand, tugging until she scoots her chair closer to him.

“This is great,” he says, placing a kiss to her forehead. “Do we have any plans?”

Jemma smiles, taking a bite of pasta and chewing thoughtfully. “I have a couple of ideas. It’s meant to be a surprise though.”

Fitz scrunches up his forehead in a way that she finds particularly adorable. “Why’s it a surprise though? Jemma,” he whines, and she can’t help the “Ugh, Fitz!” that escapes her mouth.

“I don’t know why I even bother trying with you,” she huffs. “I wanted us to enjoy a day all to ourselves because things are about to get a lot more hectic around here.”

He tilts his head, analyzing the gleam in her eye but not making the right connections. “Please don’t tell me you accepted another assignment from Coulson. That man does not understand a proper work/life balance.”

“Nope!” she replies gleefully, spearing another bite of pasta. “This one is all your fault.”

“My fault?” he asks, incredulous, but then she drags his hand down to her still-flat stomach and her smile is so bright it could light up the world.

“Oh,” he whispers, breath caught in his throat. “Oh.” His fork clatters against his plate, and he reaches down with his other hand, pressing against her stomach as if he could feel anything yet. He looks at her in awe and she suddenly has the strangest flashback to his tremulous smile when they’d found an antiserum for an alien virus. It’s the same potent mix of relief, wonder, longing, and transcendent love, and seeing it once again on her husband’s face brings tears to her eyes.

“So you’re happy?” she asks, knowing his answer but needing to hear him say it anyway.

He laughs, drawing her to him in a lazy kiss. When they break apart, he trails kisses along her forehead, nose, down her jawline, until he’s resting his head against her shoulder. “Yeah,” he breathes, “‘m so happy.”

Jemma slides a hand through his hair, wondering how it’s scientifically possible for her heart to continue growing without splitting wide open. “Maybe you can try not to spoil this one as much,” she jokes, and feels his laughter reverberate through her.

“I do not spoil Rosie,” he insists, but Jemma just rolls her eyes and pulls him back towards her for another kiss.

That night, after they’ve fed Rose and struggled with putting her back to sleep, they both collapse into bed, perpetually exhausted.

Fitz turns to Jemma, smoothing down her hair and resting an arm lightly across her body. “It’s scary and difficult,” he whispers, “but I’m so glad we’re doing this.”  

She smiles, a melancholy wistfulness settling across her face. “Sometimes I wish I could go back and tell myself that things will be okay. That all of that heartache and pain will be worth it in the end.”

“Yeah,” Fitz agrees, considering. “But it’s not the end, is it? It’s just the beginning.”

Jemma twines her fingers with his and settles her head over his heart. The steady beat is the most comforting sound in her universe. She thinks about how lucky she is, to have created her perfect family from grief and tragedy and friendship and love deep as the ocean floor. How lucky she is, to have every day feel like the beginning of the rest of their lives.

[yespoetry]

What Dementia & Sexual Trauma Have in Common — And How to Heal

By Joanna C. Valente

He didn't remember me. Sometimes, there would be glimpses of him coming out of his body and I could see in his eyes that he recognized me, but those moments were becoming more and more fleeting. Moments of remembering, of having memory, were rare. I would push the grocery cart around every week, following him as he picked out his favorite foods (vanilla wafers were a must), and listen to him talk to himself. I would agree and nod. Most of the time, I didn't know what he was talking about or even understand what he was saying.

It didn't matter. I didn't need to understand. He didn't need me to understand. Manny was my great uncle, a Greek immigrant, who worked as a medic in World War II, then later as a mailman. He never married and lived alone in his one bedroom apartment in Yonkers, New York - only a few minutes away from my parents and my yiayia, his sister. When I grew up, there was an unspoken truth about him: He was "different." We didn't speak about why. No one called him "special" or said he had special needs or a disability. He just was. And that's what mattered. He was just Manny. 

When I was in high school, he was found inside his apartment one day, muttering to himself. It quickly became clear he had dementia. My mother found him on the hardwood floor. He was alone. He was babbling. He was surrounded by forgotten garbage. He was a human suffering in his own humanity, in a world that doesn't cater to those who don't fit into neatly an able-bodied society. 

Soon after, he was moved into a nursing home where he eventually died. He lived in that nursing home for close to 10 years. No one wanted him to be there, but the question any caretaker and family member asks themselves when a loved one is diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer's is this: How can you take care of someone who can't remember themselves? Who can't remember to eat or go to the bathroom? Unless you have 24-hour care in your home (which requires a lot of money), it's impossible. That fact alone, the impossibility of that kind of care, is devastating.

Everyone feels like a failure. How can you not feel like a failure when you feel like you're abandoning someone you love, even if it's in their best interest? Even if you aren't actually abandoning them, but allowing them to continue living. But that idea of living is different than thriving - and what does it mean to live without your identity, your sense of self, your memory? What does it mean to exist inside a shell, to have your spirit trapped inside a place in the body that is no longer accessible? 

When you don't remember yourself, your agency is lost. This means we aren't in control of our bodies anymore - our bodies have become something or someone else's, but whose? Caretakers, in a legal sense: Our bodies are controlled by our caretakers, by a seemingly indifferent universe. But what does consent mean in those situations? Legally, we allow others, usually loved ones who act as power of attorneys, to control our bodies and make major decisions; yes, we have rules for this, but rules can't govern the spirit or the mind. They can't govern what you don't see. They can't govern ghosts, or the ghosts of ourselves. 

In those moments, it can feel as if your body was never really yours to begin with. If you believe in any kind of God, it feels like an awful trick, as if God is Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream putting an ass' head on you and watching what happens. In many ways, I started learning about consent because of Manny, because of his dementia. I didn't want to, but I was. 

My mother would drive me to visit Manny in his nursing home often. I grew to look forward to the visits, even if I pretended I didn't want to go as a depressive, moody teenager. Most of the people in the nursing home were like Manny, unable to remember, unable to care for themselves. And if they could remember, sometimes it seemed worse - to be stuck inside a body that no longer does what you want it to. I couldn't decide which fate was better, which luck of the draw I wanted as I got older. 

This fear of forgetting is exactly why we write about ourselves, detailing our lives even in obscured details, as a way to keep a tab on ourselves even when we can't. What's the point of other people remembering us if all we exist in is a void of darkness? It was Nabokov, after all, who told his friend Edmund Wilson in April 1947 why he wrote his memoir, Speak, Memory: "I am writing two things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls - and it's going to be called The Kingdom By The Sea - and 2. a new type of autobiography - a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one's personality - and the provisional title is The Person In Question."

Nothing exists as stationary, our minds are always changing, even with dementia. Manny's life was measured in black and white photographs my yiayia kept, his endless stories he would tell me, his repetition. As Nabokov illustrated in his own memoir, if the self is only endless projections, like a projector showing us a film of who we're supposed to be and who we want to be (and where our self meets somewhere in the middle), what does this mean? 

I of all people understand how flawed memory is. We often misremember details, black them out, or purposefully color them in, all as a way to survive and navigate trauma. As an assault survivor, I often have questioned my own memories, both happy and traumatic ones. Like many survivors of trauma, I blocked out certain details for a long time, usually details during the assaults themselves, because it was easier not to remember. Nabokov does the same thing when he recalls the idyllic events of his life, painting a gorgeous memory for us that may not be accurate; here is he painting an exquisite picture of his mother:

As often happened at the end of a rainy day, the sun might cast a lurid gleam just before setting, and there, on the damp round table, her mushrooms would lie, very colorful, some bearing traces of extraneous vegetation—a grass blade sticking to a viscid fawn cap, or moss still clothing the bulbous base of a dark-stippled stem. And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child’s finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.

Memory can only be as accurate as accurate as we allow the exercise in remembering to actually be, which is mutable at best. In 1966, Nabokov said, “As a writer, I am half-painter, half-naturalist." He also wrote about butterflies in Speak, Memory - which are intrinsically beautiful, but also indicative of change (and change confuses memory and how we remember):

I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret, as a fat hatless old man in shorts . . . Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. 

So, what does this mean, trying to invoke beauty into memory, or take out the grotesque? What does it mean, then, when we talk about illnesses like dementia or PTSD, or our brains post-trauma? With any trauma or illness, we are forced to forge new identities and reinvent ourselves; if we don't, we die. How can you remain stagnant when parts of your own agency are taken away by something or someone outside of you?

Our minds yearn to be transcendental, and transformed, into magic. We want to live in a curated fairy tale whenever possible, which means much of our power as humans is distortion, is storytelling. Much of our power as humans is memory, and the ability to recall, regardless of whether this recalling is truth (and whose truth?).

A better question, then: What does it mean to our humanity when we can't remember? This doesn't make us less human, but it does take our power and our agency away. My own misremembering of my assaults has been both powerful as a coping mechanism and a means to survive, but also as a way my own identity shifts, for better and worse. Who are we without our memories and our "real truths?"

When Manny died, we were relieved. We were relieved as much as we were devastated. Manny was in his late-90s when he passed, and in some ways, you could hardly say the death was tragic, that being released from his own mind-prison was unfair. If anything, he was free, regardless of where he went after he died. I remember throwing a flower into his open grave, the soil freshly dug, the air smelling of earth - both sweet and rotten. 

I cried. But I didn't cry long, because I wasn't sure what or who I was crying for. I had mourned him a long, long time ago; I wasn't sad for his body or the fact that his body could no longer move or breathe. Years later, I realized I was sad for his lost memories, for his lost self. He never wrote a memoir like Nabakov, he didn't leave behind a long journal of his experiences during the war, or if he ever fell in love or what his favorite childhood memory was. He didn't leave behind anything except for our memory of him, a faulty legacy in the brains of bodies that will also forget. 

People warn you about this, about forgetting them, begging you not to. We lose each other in the noise of our lives long before we lose our minds. When we part, we pray and wish each other luck, do spells to direct energy to the right places, hoping for the best. Even on a daily basis, we say phrases like "I'm always around," as if our self is capable of that. While we might mean it, for as long as we humanly and bodily can, our bodies sometimes strip ourselves from us. That is perhaps what I'm afraid of most: losing myself. 

In all my art, like many artists, I explore identity. I explore what it means to be alive in a body in a place in a time, locked inside a structure we can't control, to have a fluid identity in a rigid society (a society that still questions interfaith and interracial relationships and queer bodies and different backgrounds and religions and skins). I, like you, am trying to find agency when everything around us vies for our freedom and our minds.

What's the solution, other than science trying to find a cure, than writers trying to scribble down their lives and truths on paper and in the vast space of the internet? Dementia is just one face of finding and losing our true selves, of finding and keeping love, of trying to hold and make a future.

We try, constantly, to be our perfect selves in a world where capitalism pushes us to the impossible goal of "having it all" and being perfect versions of humans. That idea takes away our vulnerability, because how can we truly be vulnerable when we search for the impossible, and try to be the impossible? In my uncle's dementia, I didn't find hope or a cure or an answer, but the realization that wasting time is the truest crime.

This realization, the fear of dementia, gave me the freedom of "coming out" as queer and nonbinary, to write about assault and trauma, to write about abortion, to make hard choices that I know will make me more fulfilled ultimately. It's not bravery, as some people will call it, the will to be yourself, but it's a decision made out of the fear of forgetting everything, of never having been to begin with.

And that's the only thing I come back to, after every trauma and heartbreak and change and anxiety: Don't waste time on things you don't love, on things that don't love you, on something that isn't helping you figure out your identity and your happiness. Legacy, that perfect history and reputation (whether in textbooks or curated on a social media feed), will be forgotten too. Because everything passes, even you. And what's the use of living a fake life when that life will be forgotten by you and everyone around you anyway?

Joanna C. Valente is a ghost who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), and Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017), and received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM, as well as an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of their writing has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, Them, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. 

[declassroomedteach-blog]

Jailhouse Salvation 101

Jailhouse Salvation 101

(word count approx 1570)

By Gina Fournier

 The Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View features a poignant scene following a street fight that ends in murder.  Lucy (Helen Bonham Carter) comments that you witness something memorable and think you’ll never be the same, but then you forget and return to your old self.  I hope to do a better job holding onto my jailhouse conversion, from skeptical to convinced about the existence of God.  

 Disclaimer: My conviction has wavered intensely even before I finished editing this essay.

Thanks to my former employer and its bad actors, an institution I’ll call Land of Motown Community College, where I served as an English teacher, I’ve seen the best and the worst of pure Michigan humanity.  If God created humans, God sure must have a sense of humor.

Even a smattering of details from my story sound like a rollercoaster Lifetime movie no one wants to watch.  Since 2012, I’ve been sexist witch-hunted through an ongoing living nightmare that has included hack shrinks, illegal and involuntary lock up in a Catholic mental health ward and now incarceration for thirty-four days in a mid-Michigan county jail for a crime I did not commit. College administrators, union teachers, dirty cops, dirty doctors, dirty nuns and dirty priests, plus the state’s top most government officials, have participated in the protection of white collar criminals and encouraged my simultaneous downfall.   All this for me, so one man can prove his power over unions near union ground zero.

The U.S. Constitution’s first amendment makes clear that government is not to establish any official religion, not protect any particular religion from existing laws. Perhaps the founding fathers could foresee the distant future.  Nearly two hundred fifty years later, a female citizen has found cause to invert the phrase “God bless you” with blasphemy, attempting to redress grievances.  

I’ve never met the emergency room doctor who signed me into a Catholic looney bin for a week.  To my horror, I was held in a Catholic Siberia, it turns out, on campus with my all girl Catholic high school.  I was raised and violated by the same church, which now pretends it’s never met me.  Thirty five years ago, for Halloween, classmates mimicked the Robert Redford movie Brubaker to stage a failed, backboneless prison break.  These classmates, who have also turned away from my plight, dressed not in hospital gowns or orange as the new black, but plaid skirts and knee socks adorned temporarily with stripes. (Good girls, we stopped mock rioting when the nuns glared.)

Unfortunately, there is no law or principle governing the intersection of religion and families.   In my time of need, even my immediate and extended family has turned away, exponentially multiplying my distress.  My extended Catholic family has not advocated for me, though it would cost nothing except some skin.  The anger caused by this and so many betrayals envelops like nuclear explosion.

However, I realized something on day thirty-three of my lock up in the big house.  Because the ties between families and religion tend to act like strangleholds, my estranged Catholic mother is incapable of doing the one thing I want and need her most to do: to demand that Livonia Catholics honestly investigate me claims.  Because of my new found belief, I forgive my aging mother.  She’s only human and doing the best she can.  (Unfortunately, the damage done feels irreparable.  Forgiveness does not mean I can tolerate her presence.)

Through five solid years of loss, I have been cornered mentally and financially into a nearly impossible position.  But the kindest of strangers have helped me to survive.  Downstate, nice generous neighbors responded to my cries for help by giving. Up north, the same.   People have given money, food, house wares, helpful supplies such as wood, shoes, warm clothes, plus their time and honest well wishes.  I wish I would have kept better track of the names and faces of the many regular people who have been so kind, forming a lifeline, keeping me alive.

My fighting spirit has kept better track of my transgressors, including Fox News Detroit, which ran a sexist hack piece in 2015 cutting together footage I asked them not to shoot in order to make me look looser than loopy.  In search of more positive and helpful press, my creative and liberal mind encouraged me to tag my own, downstate old-ring suburban home with a metaphoric phrase that offended and confused.  “A religious figure criminally violated me!” Only my version was Twitter-short.  Basic sentence: subject, verb, object.  

Passersby assumed I was nutz.  I’m not. Unfortunately, the human resources’ labor attorney and architect of my nightmare is smart enough to know that once a crone-aged female is labeled crazy dangerous, most people won’t bother to parse the facts.  Just ask Hillary.  Voters elected a man without ethics, unwilling to practice stability, a sexual harasser, eager to “lock her up!”

I recreated my civil rights protest up north at a lake named after the largest city in New Brunswick. Maybe I watched too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie, after numerous rereadings of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.  In middle age, without an income, I’ve been forced to gather wood and water for two years, for two winters, with a third approaching, in order to survive in my dead husband’s summer cabin, which is facing tax forfeiture, and soon.  In both iterations, I repainted my eye-catching sacrilegious phrase with “Act Peace.”  I’m not a bad person, or dangerous, or interested in spreading evil. But Fox News Detroit has been not interested in my actual story.  

While I was incarcerated, nasty locals ran down my mailbox to which my sign “Act Peace” was nailed, and then took the sign.  Two paintings espousing the Statue of Liberty have been stolen.  My sign about the connection between the dirty cop who put me in jail and Land of Motown Community College was stolen, I’d guess by the dirty cop.  My cries for “help!” with needed justice have been ignored.  Instead, community officials at this private lake community have bent the law with the help of dirty local county officials, who may try to re-arrest me over the care of my feces.  Yes, you read correctly.  My troubles continue.  Danger surrounds. This is not a pretty story.

(FYI. Please believe me. I’m still be getting my proverbial shit together, but I’ve always I properly and responsibly discarded my poop.)

Something wicked this way came, and stayed, but I pray to harness goodness and finally slay the beast on my back. I’ve been falsely accused of being suicidal and a danger to society within a country that has grown accustomed to men mass murdering and sexual harassing.  I know the pain of mental illness in the form of mental torture, so I feel very sympathetic to those, especially military veterans, who suffer from PTSD.  Mental pain is real.  And can be excruciating.  I realize no matter my idiosyncratic tendencies, finally winning a measure of justice will require the help of other people, and, well, by any name, I guess God.  I know that God may not intercede with my legal and financial problems but belief in a higher power does help with gratefulness and tranquility.

In jail, every day is a good day to die.  However, the smallest graces save a tattered soul and help a person carry on to the next long minute.   I want to thank the two women who ran Bible study every Tuesday.  Yes, you read correctly.  Unbeknownst to them, they gave me gold for a writer without means: a composition notebook, on my 54th birthday, which was an otherwise desolate milestone.  Moreover, these women of God showed me a respectable and inspirational version of Christianity.

On cable tv, my cellmates preferred back-to-back episodes of Cops, shows about zombies, the shallow high jinks of Jerry Springer, endless sci-fi.  (I prefer comedy and drama.)  The day I was eventually sprung from the slammer, my legal troubles abated but not erased, Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on St. Pio, an Italian priest who was said to develop stigmata and miraculously heal.  Angered, under stress, I admit I acted out loudly like an ass (even by jail standards): “I hope they roast his nuts!”  

Many jail birds claim to accept Jesus as their savior, though none gave up their bottom bunk for the pregnant woman in our ranks.  Critically, I recognized around me the kind of souls who would have rejected Mary and Joseph. But I was forced to realize this was not a television segment that was going to uncover more Catholic dirt.  Although St. Pio may have self-inflicted his wounds, trapped in a county cell block, I dropped my bad attitude and truly felt in my body an undeniable wave of love.      

No surprise, in the short time since my release on PR bond, my nascent jailhouse conversion has been tested and wavered, fallen apart, and needing rebuilding.  Im not a saint.  My days are terrifying and unresolved.  But.  If I breathe calmly and deeply, and repeat my affirmations, what some call prayers, I recognize a connection between hope and light.    

House of Hope in Hersey, Michigan, offered me a composition notebook.  Any additional help readers may offer with legal defense, plumbing, back taxes, transportation, work or grace are appreciated. Thank you.  

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