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Once they got a second alone, Simmons asked him, "Are you all right? Are you really all right? What did she do to you?" She put her hands on either side of his face, scrutinizing his eyes, seeking their depths.
Fitz laid his hands over hers reassuringly, and he met her gaze for a few seconds before closing his eyes. "I'm all right," he said. "I'm all right now. That was a very exciting trip and I never wanna go on another one like it. Not ever."
"Can you tell me about it?" Jemma asked. "Nothing that Sif woman said made any sense to me, especially not after you.... How did it even affect you?" Her words were tumbling over each other until she visibly forced herself to stop, to quiet so that he could speak.
"I'm sorry," was all Fitz could think to say for a moment. "That's some trick she has, it fills up your whole perception with whatever you want most. No matter how far that might be from what she actually is, it's all you can see."
Simmons frowned. "And you wanted her? Like, sexually?"
"Not really?" Fitz answered, biting his lip as he tried to make sense of the memories. "But she just seemed so... clever. She had such exciting plans, at least I thought so at the time. I wanted to follow her everywhere, see what she'd do. Nothing else really occurred to me. It was like... it was something like how I feel when you get all excited and drag me into things, except magnified, blown out of all proportion." Fitz's thumbs stroked down along the insides of her wrists as he spoke earnestly, almost pleadingly. "She wasn't anything to me that you weren't already, Jemma."
Simmons was tearing up despite herself, and she pulled one of her hands free to rub at her eyes as much as she could while not moving her gaze from Fitz's. "So when Sif said she becomes the embodiment of everything you desire...."
"Everything," Fitz said, nodding. "Absolutely everything." He leaned in to kiss her tear-damp cheek.
"Oh, Fitz," she said, sniffing and wrapping her arms around him, "you are too wonderful for words, do you know that?"
He smiled, feeling the weight of her in his arms, and he had everything he wanted.
After a contemplative silence, the constant churning of her thoughts bubbled to the surface again. "But Fitz," she asked, looking at him, "Why on Earth - or otherwise - does her power work only on men? It's obviously not based on lust, despite what Sif seemed to be trying to tell us, but that still leaves room for...." She stopped to free her hands so she could gesture with them. "Any one of half a dozen ways of distinguishing between genders, none of them absolute, and none of which I can imagine having any bearing at all on whatever means she used to - oh God - control you and Ward." She snuggled up to him again, protectively.
He looked down at her, loving the way her mind worked. "The simplest explanation is experimenter bias," he said. "I think on some level she only wants or expects it to work on men, so that's what happens. So the yes/no of it is based on her perception. I wonder if there's any way to test for that?" Fitz mused with a far too fascinated tone, and Simmons knew he was going to be all right.
She shook her head anyway. "Let's not ever find out," she told him.
When Fitz stopped to think about it, he really did have to agree.