bravejemma | Penance Inbox

[That is remarkably coherent, considering the version Natasha got from Fitz. As much as certain people—Fitz himself included—tended to forget she isn't completely unfamiliar with the tech side of things. She might not usually be the smartest person in the room, but that's because she's usually in the room with people like Tony Stark and Bruce Banner.

And really, she's not sure she'd say she's not as smart as they are as brilliant as they could be when it came to science and engineering, they were both liable to forget what they had for lunch if they weren't reminded.]

So we have a JARVIS in a sexy body, and she gets exposed to something extraordinary.

[Natasha might not have been there when Vision was born, but she's familiar with the concept, and it's not so hard to make that connection.]

I take it she wasn't wiped.

Unfortunately not. We were able to neutralize it by destroying the chassis, but Fitz was determined to find where the programming went wrong... I think he had a soft spot for AIDA. And in return, it developed a soft spot for him.

[Which wouldn't be a problem, except for everything that came after. Despite Fitz's perpetually open heart being one of the things Jemma loves best about him, she also can't deny that people who will happily take advantage of that have brought them a lot of pain and trouble.]

There was... more business with Radcliffe, but the short version is in the end we discovered he'd replaced himself with an LMD because he'd anticipated being captured by SHIELD. He'd also given AIDA another body, and they had replaced Agent May with an LMD as well, and sort of... plugged her into the Framework, which they'd augmented to behave as a virtual reality so real people inside can be programmed not to know the difference. Like The Matrix.

[The comparison is coming, so may as well lean into it.]

They were replacing the whole team with LMDs -- May, Coulson, Mack, even Fitz, everyone but Daisy and me and a couple others -- and taking the real agents, and uploading their consciousness into the Framework reality that AIDA had created herself. And it programmed entire lives that changed who they were on a fundamental level and so made the Framwork reality different from our real world. I'm not sure how much it was one then the other; I think it was probably both at once: individual lives affect choices, which affects the universe, which affects individuals, so on. And the major thing I think that changed everything about Fitz -- what AIDA did -- is in this world he'd been taken and raised by his father.

[She knows this is going to sound like an excuse -- but she's also not really interested in sparing details about Alistair Fitz or, in her opinion, his role in making the Doctor, and it's not something you're going to get out of Fitz short of more creative Hellish torture. So she lays it out.]

In our world, Fitz's father left him and his mother when Fitz was ten. He was awful. Nothing Fitz ever did could be good enough for him, he was never smart enough, a waste of space, which is just -- ridiculous of course-- [She takes a breath, doing her best to avoid being flustered. Stick to facts.] He was an alcoholic; Fitz never said but I suspect he abused both of them physically as well as verbally and mentally. [She stops again for a split second.] I have no doubt that, combined with AIDA writing itself as -- well, into my place during our Academy time, could have made such a monster.

Edited 2022-02-19 19:19 (UTC)

[Some of this feels irrelevant too, to a degree. Natasha's not entirely sure they need to dig into Fitz's abusive father. She doesn't interrupt, though.

She knows better than to think she can really have too much information, and if Jemma is including it, it's because she thinks there's a reason.]

This sounds actually fairly close to what I thought.

[Sexbot, Matrix, fascist.]

So how did you snap him out of it the first time?

[She scoffs lightly. The sad truth of it:]

We didn't. He couldn't be convinced the Framework was the virtual world and we were trying to save everyone from it. He had to be pushed out the backdoor we'd made to leave the Framework.

[She's leaving out details, but they seem to be at a point where Natasha is asking questions -- and if there's something vital, she'll add it in.]

But when he came out of the Framework, he was himself again, not the Doctor? In our world, the Doctor didn't appear as an alternate personality this way?

[She's not trying to skip important details, exactly, but she does want to be clear on some of the facts of the story.

She wants to be clear about the nature of this version of Fitz so she can understand what safeguards they can implement to prevent this from happening again.]

What does this have to do with his brain injury?

[Let's take those questions out of order, shall we.]

The best I can figure is that a confluence of factors were just perfect for the Doctor to manifest that way. The Doctor being such a strong personality, being so disparate from Fitz himself, and combined with his brain injury... maybe it was easier for the Doctor to maintain a toehold.

And... truthfully, I think Fitz holds on to the guilt of things he did in there. The Framework lives are sort of like the Hellburbia memories. They weren't real but they feel real. He came out of the Framework himself with with not just knowledge of things he did but the visceral memories, too.

[She hesitates a little, because honestly this isn't going to sound great, but in for a penny and all that.]

The Doctor did appear another time, Fitz did have a break but he hasn't lived it yet. We're -- I don't know if you know, but we're at different points in our timeline. I'm from a little more than half a year later than him. This had not happened to him yet.

Edited 2022-02-19 23:56 (UTC)

[Natasha hums at that, her eyes drifting to the ground as she considers the implications of that.]

He did mention you were a little ahead of him.

[The phenomenon itself is very familiar, considering she's almost ten years after Steve and Tony, but now it seems behind Bucky. Of course that might not be the same considering that her time is kind of a fixed point now.]

What brought him out again?

After the Framework, some of us were taken into a future where Earth had been destroyed, and when we came back we were working to prevent that outcome. Rifts in space-time were opening to another dimension. We figured out that we could use Gravitonium to close them and prevent more from opening, but we couldn't figure out how to compress it in order to use it. No one had been resting, we were under attack from the creatures coming through the rift, of course it was incredibly stressful... and he surfaced. Fitz had a break.

While we were in the future, our friend Daisy had a power suppressing chip installed, but because of where it was and how it was placed -- implanted on the nerve, back here -- [She indicates in the level in the neck, just behind the ear] we were hesitant to remove it. We could have paralyzed her, or killed her. But the Doctor resurfaced to make the cut, because with Daisy's vibration manipulation powers restored, we could compress the Gravitonium into its device and close the rift.

[She'd let it happen, it's right there on her list of sins. And while she wouldn't call it helpful -- not that the Doctor ever wanted to hear from her -- it had worked.]

It was a decision we didn't want to make. So he took control and made it, and Fitz had to finish the removal.

So the other personality comes out to do things that Fitz can't handle himself. Like say, for example, an extended captivity and torture. Fitz couldn't handle it and couldn't get out, so the Doctor strikes a deal.

[And gets magic in the mix, which makes things even more complicated.]

We can't exactly guarantee a low stress environment if we let him out of that cell down there, though.

More or less, yes.

[Though the way she says it makes it sound like a benevolent helper who takes the burden when it is too much, instead of a cruel opportunist. But anyone who has dealings with the Doctor knows there's no mistaking him for the former.]

No, Hell cannot on its best days be described as low stress. I don't know how present the Doctor might try to be, at least in the near future, but it's not as though we don't have a theoretical eternity for him to prepare again.

[Oh, Natasha doesn't think of him as benevolent at all. It seems more like a variation of DID, which isn't great.

She shakes her head.]

Do you think he's that active while he's not in control? If he's dormant and only wakes up from time to time, that would be a hell of a lot easier to deal with.

[Plotting in the back of Fitz's head for the rest of time is much less optimistic.]

In my experience of him? No. Or if he is, he's not-- if Fitz knew he was active without being in control, he could have told us what was happening. That's happened -- he knew his psychic split was coming, in that reemergence, and told me.

[Unlike this time, when he thought he had it under control. Bloody Fitz.]

You're going to have to forgive me if I'm not overcome with faith in Fitz's ability and willingness to self-report at this point.

[Natasha can't entirely hide her frustration on that.]

It sort of seems like he was intentionally blurring the line.

No, he was.

[One day, Jemma might find time to be properly angry over the fact that he chose to not tell her, not ask her to help him find another solution, not come to her at any point since the casino went up -- but for now it goes into its own box and gets shoved aside. But her own frustration is just as apparent.]

For what he believed were good reasons, but it was in the grey for sure.

[For someone who dislikes the grey area so much he's more comfortable operating there than he'd probably like to admit.]

So what's your professional opinion on what we do from here. Prison isn't sustainable, but he's not trustworthy to be free. And he's demonstrated poor choices on his own already.

[How do they rehabilitate him?]

[Is "???????" a response? It's about the best Jemma's got, but since one can't actually pronounce a question mark without words to go with it, she'll try.]

Unsustainable but good enough for the meantime. He said part of the Doctor and Barbas's agreement was to prevent him from undoing their work, and it would take blood given freely. I don't know if it's connected to what happened to Emmanuel.

[It's probably too much to ask that it had cut all the strings binding the three of them together; Barbas, Doctor, and Fitz. Why else would they still be here?]

If stress and captivity draw the Doctor out, then keeping Fitz locked up in there could actually manifest him again sooner.

[It's worth considering.]

Beyond that, keeping him in captivity when he isn't responsible for what happened raises some questions.

That would be the rock and the hard place we find ourselves between.

I don't know what the answer is.

[And boy she hates saying that.]

Me either.

[And she didn't expect Jemma to already have an idea.]

But it's what I'm trying to figure out. Hopefully before we run out our time on our current stop gap solution.

[She exhales, and nods. It's good to at least know they were starting on the same square.]

I suppose I don't need to overstate how committed I am to doing the same.

[Hey, they could each do worse than having the other on their team.]

That's half of why I'm here.

[Natasha hugs herself, shrugging.]

The other half being the fact you have all the information I seem to be missing.

Some of it, anyway.

["All" feels like a lot, but it is something she can offer that no one else can.]

Well. I'd like to think at this point I know a fair amount.

[But missing some key information.]

Honestly? Seems like you knew more than me -- of the two of us, you're the one who didn't get shoved into a stasis pod.

[Something, something objectivity compromised. She knows it. Fitz knows it. They all know it.]

Different pieces of the same picture. The question is how much of it we're still missing.

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