Chapter Text
Upon hearing Hunter’s question, Fitz’s heart stops, and all the color drains from his face. What little air he might have had in his lungs whooshes out in an audible exhalation. He’s on the verge of both physical and mental collapse. No amount of time will be sufficient to recover from this most recent blow.
“Oh, god,” he manages to choke out, the torment in his words evident to each person in the room.
Hunter is a little childish—never one to pass up an opportunity to rib his teammates—but he isn’t cruel and he would have understood his faux pas even without the weak jab to his stomach from Bobbi’s elbow. As soon as he utters his careless response, he sees that what he meant as good-natured teasing has sparked an unimaginably painful reaction from his friend.
Bobbi, though on very good pain medication courtesy of her attending physician, remains the most observant person in the room. Mack had shared the details of Fitz’s experience while she and Simmons had been at Hydra, so she immediately understands the cause for the underlying fear responsible for Fitz’s actions and question.
“Hunter is just being an ass, Fitz” she assures him. “We can see Jemma. She’s standing right beside you.”
It comforts him slightly that Bobbi says Jemma’s name even when he hasn’t. Then again, he realized, Jemma probably would have been anyone’s first guess. Worried that Bobbi is just placating him as his other teammates have done in the past, he asks her another question just to be sure: “What’s she wearing?”
If Bobbi thinks the question is unnecessary, she masks it well, but it’s Hunter who answers.
“She’s got on a blue jumper and dark slacks, mate. I was just joking before. I swear I can see her.” He understands that he has just nearly been the cause of a mental breakdown, and he will do anything to reassure his younger teammate.
“Okay. Great. Yeah.” Fitz mutters in reply, his brain too busy coming down from overdrive to form words any more complicated than that.
For the second time in less than 15 minutes, Fitz feels his overwhelming sense of dread abate suddenly, but he has to take several deep breaths before he can turn to face Simmons. Their answers and the sight of Bobbi’s injuries, which he can't imagine hallucinating, convince him that this is reality and Simmons really didn't get pulled into an alien artifact.
Simmons has stood quietly, alternating between sending soft, questioning looks at Fitz and irritated glares at Bobbi and Hunter. Even in this moment, Fitz still looks like he is in utter anguish, and, as irritated as she is with his recent behavior, she wants to banish whatever is hurting him. This time she is the one to reach out to cup his cheek, completely indifferent to the fact that they have an audience.
“Fitz?” she croons, “What is this all about? What’s going on?”
His eyes flutter shut momentarily at the feeling of her hand on his face, and she feels the shudder that passes through his wiry frame. When he opens his eyes, she can tell that he is still troubled but there is a faint glimmer of hope and relief that hadn’t been there before.
He pulls her to him again, burying his face in the side of her neck before whispering, “I’ll explain; I promise. But back at yours or mine. Not here.” The conversation they need to have is not one he can get through in the presence of others. He imagines that she would probably feel the same way if she weren’t so confused.
Squeezing his shaking form to her one last time, she breaks the embrace, but she makes it a point to keep their fingers intertwined. She can tell that he needs the contact. She sends one final glare at Bobbi and Hunter, who have the sense to look abashed and apologetic, before pulling Fitz out of the room.
Their pace is far less hurried this time, but she finds herself standing in front of his door more quickly than she thought she would. Once they cross the threshold, she’ll get the answers for which she’s been desperate for more than an hour, but she’s more than a little wary of what he might have to tell her.
He has calmed enough to sense her hesitation, so he takes the initiative to open the door and pull her inside. She’s only been in this room a handful of times, but the random assortment of trinkets and photographs makes her feel at home immediately. His room, like hers, is more or less a shrine to their friendship over the years, and their synchronicity in that aspect helps to settle her.
When he tugs her over to the bed, she settles just across from him, their knees touching and their finger still linked. She’s a little hesitant now that she has his undivided attention, but they’ve needed to sit down and talk with each other for months. All they’ve been doing since she returned from Hydra is talk at each other. Neither of them has been willing to listen to the other. That stops now.
“Fitz,” she questions softly once they’ve both made themselves comfortable, “what happened today?”
At first he can’t meet her eyes, still reeling from the events of last hour. When he finally does look at her, she can see that he can’t quite believe that she’s real. He has to swallow a few times before he can speak. He’s afraid to share what he thinks happened. He hasn’t spoken of it out loud, and he fears that when he does, it will become real.
“I must have been dreaming, but I swear, I thought that blasted Kree stone had trapped you, and I was trying to get you back, but I couldn’t figure out how.”
“How on earth could the stone have captured me? It’s completely solid and encased in a protective container you designed.” She finds his explanation puzzling to say the least.
He looks as if he is about to cry when he admits the next part: “It was my fault. When I was tripping over myself to ask you to dinner, I released one of the latches. I went back to find you when you didn’t meet me in the Garage, but you were gone and no one had seen you, so I watched the security footage. I couldn’t have been gone for a minute before you noticed the door was open, and, when you went to shut it, the stone turned to, well, liquid is the best word I have for it, and it pulled you in before it reformed. I watched the footage over and over again, seeing it take you and hearing you scream.”
“Oh, Fitz,” she consoles, very much aware of how it feels to believe that you are responsible for someone else’s suffering.
“None of that happened. I promise. One of the latches was open, but you implemented so many failsafe measures that the door was still secure. When I noticed it, I simply reengaged that latch and carried on with my analysis. Speaking of which, I’ll need your help. I really can’t get the readings I need without direct interaction with the stone…”
She trails off when she feels him stiffen, and she mentally curses herself for not being a bit more specific in her request. Clearly, the thought of her anywhere near the object is distressing to him.
“No, no,” she hurries to assure, reaching out to grab his other hand as well. “I don’t want to get any closer to it than I have to. There is something, I don’t know, sinister about that stone. I was hoping we could modify one of the DWARFs or design something similar that we could send into the container with it.”
He breathes out an audible sigh of relief. As soon as she’d made the statement, all he could see was the stone pulling her in over and over again. He answers quickly, but she can still see the lingering terror in his eyes.
“Sure. We’ll look at some specs tomorrow and figure out what will work best.”
Squeezing his hands once more in unspoken thanks, she looks about the room for his pad, but she can’t see it anywhere. She hopes that watching the real security footage, instead of remembering whatever he had dreamed, will convince him that nothing has happened to her.
“Fitz, where’s your pad?” she finally ends up asking when she can’t find it.
“Uh, I think it’s back in the lab. Why?”
“I’ll just go pop by my room and grab mine then,” she responds, not answering his question. She leans forward to press a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth before sliding from the bed. Perhaps it’s a bit forward considering they aren’t technically in a relationship yet, but she can’t resist the temptation, especially after he’d kissed her so heartily earlier.
She pauses at the door, turning back to face him, “I’ll be right back. Promise.”
With that she flits into the hallway, hurrying to her room so that she can return to his as soon as possible. The distance isn’t long, just a hallway and a half, but every second away from him feels wrong even if she knows that he’ll likely feel better after watching the footage.
He starts to shake as soon as she is gone from his line of sight—his subconscious still partially convinced that she isn’t real. He is so petrified that he can’t even move. He just stares at the hallway through the open door.
She’s gone less than a few minutes, and she’s breathing a little harder than normal when she returns. As soon as she’d grabbed the pad, she’d run back through the corridor to his room, eager to return to him and sort everything out. She’s dismayed to see his trembling form and the wary hope in his eyes when he sees her. The contrast makes her freeze for a moment, but the sight of his hand lifting and reaching for her spurs her back into motion.
Knowing knee to knee won’t be enough this time, even if it is more appropriate for having a conversation, she pushes him until his back rests against the wall. When she has him just where she wants him, she crawls between his bent knees and curls up on his chest, her head pillowed between his shoulder and neck. She reaches out to grab his arm and tug it around her waist, resting hers on top.
Balancing the pad against his other knee, she attempts to cue up the security footage. She’s unwilling to let go of his arm, but she really needs both hands. She only has to struggle a moment before he reaches out to steady the pad so that she can type and select unimpeded.
Making sure to start replaying the footage several minutes before he left the room, she winces a little at the terseness of her responses. She wonders why he even bothered asking her at all given her apparent disinterested attitude. She hadn’t meant to be short, but she was too engrossed in her work to hear the kind of tone she was using. She resolves then to be a little more aware in the future.
Feeling him tense when their conversation draws to a close, she knows what he is expecting to see. The reality is far duller than what he had imagined. She continues puttering about the room, noting significant information on her pad with an absolutely foolish smile on her face.
Knowing that he needs the reassurance, she lets the footage continue to play even when she remembers what is coming. About five minutes after his departure, she’d looked back over to the door and let out a girlish squeal of excitement, her giddy anticipation for their evening overcoming her usual composure.
He can feel the heat of her blush when she presses her face into his neck and groans after seeing her childlike display. Finding her embarrassment utterly endearing, he pulls her a little closer and presses a kiss to her hair. She remains tucked up against him as he watches her walk about the room for a few more minutes. He’s seen her do it thousands of times before, but the normalcy and predictability of her actions help to sooth away most of the tension in his form.
Unable to help himself, he also pulls up the feed for the Garage. Jemma seems content to rest against him without speaking for the moment. He sets the playback as fast as it will go; he doesn’t need to see much, only his own entrances and exits from the lab, to satisfy his need for the truth and quell his apparently overactive imagination. After only a few hours of work, which takes less than 10 minutes to watch, he sees himself fall still, barely balancing on the chair as he slips easily into sleep. Based on the timestamp of the video, he'd fallen asleep much sooner than he realized. He'd never gone looking for her. He'd never seen the door to the container wide open or shut it. Never spoken to any one other than Skye. He'd never sobbed over the agonizing thought of losing her. Never drafted any plans. Everything he though that had happened between leaving to look for her and when she had startled him awake had never happened. He'd dreamed it all.
A few more minutes of watching shows her finally entering the room and their tense encounter. He pulls her a little closer, remembering the moment when he’d been so sure she wasn’t real all because of a stupid dream. What happens next confirms what he already knows. He left the lab immediately after speaking to her and returned about thirty minutes later before working nearly that long until Skye came in and gave him reason to hope once more.
She understands why he needs to see this footage as well as what she showed him. Fitz has always preferred hard facts to conjecture, and he won’t be easy again until he is sure of what is real and what is not. She feels completely relaxed, lounging in his arms this way, but there are still a few more questions she needs answered, and she imagines he might have a few of his own. Watching the recording of his time in the Garage brings her most pressing question back to the forefront of her mind.
Reluctantly, she extracts herself from her comfortable position and resumes their earlier pose. She takes a moment to stare into his eyes and enjoy the peace she now sees there before speaking.
“Earlier, why did you immediately assume I wasn’t real?” she asks cautiously. She had hoped that the trust they had begun to reform in recent months would have made him more convinced of her permanence in his life, but that clearly isn’t the case.
His smile drops instantly. “It’s that damned sweater!” he cries accusingly while reaching out to clutch the material on her arm, scowling at the blue yarn.
She looks down in bewilderment before returning her gaze to his face, “Pardon?”
“She always had it on,” he admits and then continues when he sees her face of confusion. “Other you. The one that my scrambled brain conjured up when you were gone. It’s the same sweater you were wearing during that god-awful day with the Chitauri virus and the same one she always wore when she appeared.”
She’s horrified that something as simple as her choice of clothing is enough to make him question her existence. Not for the first time, she berates herself for leaving without telling him the truth. If she had, he never would have had a reason to wonder where she had gone or why.
“Fitz,” she draws out his name. “It’s not the same one. I promise. I don’t even have that sweater anymore. The saltwater damaged it too much, and I wouldn’t have wanted to keep it anyway. I don’t like thinking about that day any more than you do.”
When he looks closer, he realizes that she’s right. This sweater is uncannily similar, but it isn’t the same. It’s a lighter shade, and the pattern at the cuffs and collar is different. In his manic state, he hadn’t noticed those small details. He takes some comfort in knowing that Skye had thought it was the same as well, but he’s startled out of his momentary lapse in concentration by her next words.
“It seemed like a such good idea at the time,” he hears her admit. “Now, I wish I’d never worn it.”
“Why did you? If your memories are as awful as mine, why would you buy and wear one so similar?”
She blushes again before answering, averting her eyes because she isn’t sure how he’ll react. “Blue is your favorite color, and I thought if I wore something like this you wouldn’t immediately remember how much I’ve changed.”
Now it’s his turn to be embarrassed. He’d been so harsh with her, so quick to condemn her every action since her return, that he’s made her even more self-conscious than usual. She is amazingly skilled and confident when it comes to her work in the lab, but he knows that she, like he, struggles with the more personal side of her life. Part of it has to do with their genius level intelligence—it’s difficult to learn how to form meaningful and secure relationships when everyone looks at you as if you are a freak—and the other part is their dependence on each other for reassurance as a result. Before they became part of a field team, that dependence had made them unstoppable. More recently, however, it’s been more of a dividing force than anything uniting them.
Throughout their time at the Academy and Sci-Ops, he’d been her sounding board for nearly every decision she’d made and she’d done the same for him. He’d been the one she’d talked to when she was unsure or needed another perspective, and his hurt over her leaving had caused him to spurn her when she probably needed him most. He remembers the harsh condemnation in his voice when he’d told her that her change was scarier than the changes in Skye and himself. In the months since it occurred, he hadn’t given that conversation much more thought, but clearly she had.
“We’ve both changed,” he offers as he reaches out to recapture her hand, “and I don’t think we’ll ever be who we were. I don’t think we’re meant to be. But maybe together we can get through it and come out alright in the end.”
He’s offering her so much more than what he’s saying, and he hopes that she understands it. He’s never been good with these kinds of words, even before the hypoxia affected his speech. When she gives him a hesitant smile, he knows that she does.
She wants to say something meaningful, but before she can their stomachs growl in tandem. Their eyes widen for a moment before they both break into helpless laughter. It’s the most normal moment they’ve had in more than a year. What little tension had remained in the room bleeds out in an instant.
“I know it’s late, but dinner?” she proposes with a bright grin, hopping off the bed and extending her hand for his.
He takes it gladly, already comfortable with this external sign of their affection for each other. Until recent months, they’d had very little in the way of personal space barriers when it came to each other, and he’s happy to see that they’re moving back to that place again without any of the awkwardness or fumbling he remembers from his few other relationships.
Even though it’s well past dinnertime, there are a few agents milling about in the kitchen and pseudo dining area. With a single look, they reach an unspoken agreement that they will prepare their meal but return to his room to eat it. Poking through the refrigerator, she quickly assembles a few sandwiches as he finds some crisps and prepares their tea. Their movements are amazingly coordinated for two people who have spent remarkably little time together in the past year, but they are drawing on the muscle memory of all the years prior to that.
It comforts them both to know that they haven’t lost all of the FitzSimmons of days past. To be sure, they are willing and perhaps even a little eager to see what their budding relationship will hold, but that doesn’t mean that they want to start from scratch. Rather, they want to build on the strong parts of their foundation and shore up the rest, to hold fast to the positive parts of the past while embracing the promise of the future.
In fewer than fifteen minutes, they collect what they need to return to his room. The trip is quiet, neither feeling the need to break the silence with words. They eat side-by-side, stealing quick glances at each other between bites and sips, enjoying this meal perhaps more than any other they’ve ever shared. This is a turning point for them, and they both know it. They’re both finally ready for it.
“You’re more than that, too, you know. You always have been,” she offers as she reclines against him again, both too full and content to do more than simply enjoy each other’s presence. She knows that she was right in speaking the words when she feels him smile against her neck before pressing a quick kiss there.
There is still much to discuss, but they’ve each privately come to the realization that they don’t have to hash all of it out tonight. In this moment, it is enough to know that they will proceed together through whatever life throws at them.
Before long they start to doze, the surges of emotion they’ve both experienced finally getting the best of them. Their reclined position isn’t the most comfortable for sleeping, and she startles violently when her head beings to loll. Her sudden jerk is enough to pull them both out of their stupor.
“Mmmm,” she mumbles, stretching a little before curling back into his embrace. “It’s late. I should leave.” She can’t remember the last time she felt this peaceful, and she’s reluctant to let go.
“Stay,” he asks immediately, pulling her tighter. The slightly frantic pitch of his tone has her fully awake again and craning her neck to meet his eyes.
He averts them, a blush now staining his cheeks. “Just…would you stay? At least for tonight?” He knows he shouldn’t pressure her to do anything she doesn’t want to do, but he isn’t sure that he’ll be able to sleep without her. “I’m always a little foggy in the morning, you know, and I don’t want to think I dreamed all this up, too.”
Maybe they are moving too fast and maybe there are hundreds of conversations they need to have before they take this step, but in the moment, seeing the new bit of tension in his eyes, she can’t bring herself to care.
“Of course,” she soothes. “Of course I’ll stay, but I’m stealing your pajamas. These pants are too nice to sleep in.”
The gentle teasing in her voice helps him unwind a little, and he gestures to the dresser shoved in the corner of the room to indicate that she should help herself. She doesn’t move immediately, preferring to hug him close one more time before climbing out of the bed. Gratified to note that he still keeps his pajamas in the bottom drawer, she pulls out a set for each of them.
Tossing his to him, she sets hers on the end of the bed before bringing her hand to unbutton her slacks. The almost inaudible choking sound he makes causes her to pause. When she meets his gaze, they both flush noticeably and smile bashfully. When he stands and turns his back to her, she takes the hint and does the same, allowing herself a moment to think about the reason for their reactions and the promise of what might come.
Even as she feels her cheeks heat up again, she finds it endlessly amusing that they’re acting like they’ve never changed in front of each other before. They’ve been friends for too many years, lived together too long, and had one too many minor accidents in the lab to have never seen each other in various states of undress. Nevertheless, it’s as if they’ve only just become friends again as they quickly change into their pajamas.
She loves the feeling of the soft flannel of his bottoms and threadbare fabric of his shirt on her skin. Even if he has added some bulk to his frame in recent months, he’s by no means brawny. Still, the pants and shirt hang off her frame comically.
She turns back seconds before he does and catches sight of the pale skin of his back as he tugs down his shirt. She nearly groans before she remembers that she can indulge her mental fantasies without feeling guilty anymore. He has nearly the same thought when the sight of her once again dressed in his clothing reignites feelings he’s spent many years trying to suppress.
Content in the moment, she walks to the door to cut off the lights before joining him in bed. They expect to have to fumble with the placement of their limbs or the pillows like any other new couple, but they aren’t like most. This isn’t the first time they’ve shared a bed; it’s just the first time that there is something more to it.
Completely unselfconsciously, they slot together as if two pieces of a whole. He rests on his back so that she can curl up next to him with her head pillowed on his chest and one leg thrown over his. He catches her fingers and brings them up to his mouth for a brief kiss before entwining them in his own and leaving them to rest just below his heart. He feels more than hears the soft sigh she releases at the gesture.
Before long, their eyes flutter shut and their breathing evens out. He falls asleep to the sound of her soft, steady breaths. She falls asleep to the rhythmic beat of his heart, which, she notices just as she finally loses consciousness, beats in sync with her own.