Chapter Text
2019, somewhere in space
Their bunk on the Zephyr is dark, and outside the small porthole window there are stars burning brightly, still light years out of reach. As Fitz steps forward to take her hand, Jemma thinks about how far she and her team have travelled in order to rescue one of their number and bring him home.
‘Are you sure about this?’ she asks softly, because she has to. She lost him once and the thought of losing him again, when she has fought so hard to find him, is something she refuses to contemplate.
Fitz kisses her, his lips gentle and loving. Since he’d woken up from his cryo-sleep, he’d complained hourly of feeling cold and Jemma had ransacked the Zephyr for blanket after blanket, slipping gloves on his fingers and even pulling a woolly beanie firmly down over his ears. Now though, every part of him she touches finally feels warm.
Without breaking their kiss, he steps them backwards until her knees hit the side of the bed. They fall onto it together, their limbs intertwined and their hearts beating as one.
‘Yeah,’ Fitz whispers, and with his thumb he brushes a loose strand of hair back from her forehead. ‘Always.’
As their eyes meet in the dark, Jemma can tell that this is a promise.
Three months later, the Lighthouse
Almost a month after returning to Earth, Jemma is still struggling to adapt and it is beginning to frustrate her.
For the first few days, the entire team had suffered and, as she had the most experience dealing with re-adaptation syndrome, she had done all she could to ease their symptoms. She had prescribed peppermint tea to aid the nausea, light exercise for the fatigue and coordination, and regulated their salt intake to raise their blood pressures.
Gradually though, the others had begun to recover, leaving her behind to suffer the unabating consequences of almost six months in space on her own. At this point, it was nothing short of embarrassing.
One morning, Elena finds her throwing up her breakfast in the bathroom.
‘It’s okay to not be okay yet,’ she says, sinking to her knees to rub Jemma’s back. ‘You’ve spent longer in space than any of us. It makes sense that coming back to Earth will affect you a little bit differently, just try not to think about it too much.’
Which, Jemma thinks wearily, as she wipes the back of her mouth with a tissue and flushes the toilet, was easier said than done.
On leaving the bathroom, Elena turns left to head to the control room and Jemma’s feet take her right, in the direction of the lab. Inhaling deeply through her nose, she tries to smile at the agents she passes, feigning whatever normalcy she can while her head is still spinning and the back of her mouth tastes of bitter bile.
Since they’d been back, things at the Lighthouse had been forced to take on a new rhythm now that the end of the world was indefinitely postponed. It was far from business as usual, and it could never be what it had been at the Playground, but as new routines began to order their days Jemma was starting to see how SHIELD would rebuild itself to be the best it had ever been.
Mack and Daisy worked seamlessly as a team, dividing responsibilities based on their strengths and occasionally challenging the other, pushing them to their limits. Mack took on most of the day-to-day organisational tasks, while Daisy was expanding her skill set by learning to pilot the quinnjets. Their collaboration simultaneously made them better leaders and SHIELD a better organisation, and Jemma was hugely proud of them both.
May had come back to them days after their return to the Lighthouse. She had refused to disclose any information about what she’d been doing for the past six months, which would have been worrying if it wasn’t for the twinkle in her eye whenever anyone asked about Coulson.
‘Oh, I think we’ll see him again,’ she said knowingly. ‘Trust me.’
And, because she was May, they all did.
During their months in space, Elena had helped Jemma out with the engineering problems they’d encountered on the Zephyr, and discovered that she had a talent for it. Since then, she had followed Fitz around like a second shadow, eager to learn and even more willing to help. Fitz had taken her on with more than a little surprise and a great deal of gratitude, and Jemma had been touched to notice how patient her two most hot-headed teammates could be with each other during their teaching sessions.
And then there was Fitz himself…
Coming to a halt in front of the lab, Jemma feels her breath catch in her throat. Through the doorway, she can just make out the top of Fitz’s head, bent over a work bench as he concentrates on the device in front of him. It has been months, and still her heart leaps every time she catches sight of him.
Logically speaking, it ought to be Fitz taking the longest to adjust. After all, he was the one who had been frozen in space for months before being woken up seventy-three years earlier than he’d anticipated, only to find that the future he’d been trying to reach no longer existed. This on its own would have been a lot to take in, but combined with learning of his other self’s grisly death, Coulson’s illness and the aborted Armageddon, no one would have blamed him for struggling to take it all in.
But to his credit, Fitz had coped extraordinarily well. Granted, there had been several nights on the Zephyr that Jemma had stayed up with him, recounting the weeks he’d missed in painstaking detail and kissing away the tears that dribbled out onto his cheeks. There had been pain, and horror, and confusion as he learnt what he was capable of, of what he had done when the Doctor pushed through. At the same time though, there had been grim determination to never let it get that bad again, and Jemma had little trouble getting him to promise to tell her if he ever heard the Doctor’s voice again so that they could deal with it together. They were a team, and she had sworn to him that they would do whatever it took to stop it happening again.
Taking a deep breath, Jemma squares her shoulders and steps forward into the lab. If Fitz, after everything he’d been through, was able to adjust to being back home then surely she could too.
At the sound of her footsteps, Fitz looks up and gives her a sympathetic smile.
‘Hey. Are you feeling any better?’
‘Mmm.’ Jemma nods as she approaches his desk and returns the smile. ‘Much, thank you. What are you working on?’
Fitz spreads out his hands. ‘I took an ICER apart and now I’m labelling all the pieces. I figured I’d put it back together with Yo-Yo later, explain how and where they all fit.’ He glances at her, a little uncertain. ‘Does that sound like a good lesson?’
Ducking her head, Jemma kisses his cheek. Underneath her lips, his skin feels gloriously alive. ‘I think it sounds perfect.’
Leaving Fitz to his labelling, she drags a stool over to the opposite bench and takes up a fresh sheet of paper, more determined than ever to get her body feeling back to normal.
Jemma begins to detail her symptoms, before writing a solution to alleviate each one beside it. For her sickness, she could try ginger tea as well as peppermint. She could also try going to bed half an hour earlier each night to help her tiredness and vertigo, and as tempting as the bumper packs of ready-salted crisps were, perhaps substituting them for some high in protein nuts would be better for her cravings-
The realisation hits her like a bucket of ice water, and she sits up a little straighter, her heart pounding. Whilst all of her ailments are symptomatic of earth re-adaptation syndrome, looking at them grouped together like this reminds her that they are also symptoms of something very different indeed.
‘Jemma?’
Fitz’s voice jolts her out of her reverie, and Jemma looks up to find him standing next to her. He has a concerned look on his face, and is holding her pencil in his hand. She must have dropped it in her shock, and when she hadn’t gotten up to retrieve it he’d gotten worried.
‘Is everything alright?’ Fitz asks quietly as he passes the pencil back to her, his eyes flitting down to the page in front of her.
For the briefest of moments, Jemma thinks about telling him a white lie, even if just to buy a few hours to figure this out herself. But the thought is fleeting, and has passed almost before she has the time to consider it. They had promised always to be honest with each other, and besides, if this is what she thinks it is, she wants her best friend with her all the way.
‘No,’ Jemma says. ‘No, not quite. I need you to drive me somewhere.’
‘Oh.’ Fitz looks a little surprised, but quickly nods. ‘Yeah, sure, I can do that. Where do you need to go?’
Scrambling up from her stool, Jemma grabs her jacket from the bench and pockets her phone before spinning around to face him.
‘The pharmacy,’ she murmurs, and hurries out of the lab before she has to watch the realisation dawn on Fitz’s face.
At the River’s End pharmacy, they buy five pregnancy tests and are half way back to the car before Jemma decides to run back for five more, plus a bumper pack of vitamins and some cold and flu tablets. ‘Just because our base still looks how it did in the sixties,’ she reasons to Fitz, ‘doesn’t mean that our medicine cabinet has to as well.’
Back at the Lighthouse, they sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the bathroom floor as they wait for the test results. Jemma has lined the five sticks that they’d used up in front of them, equidistant to each other, and Fitz has set a timer on his phone. In three minutes, they will know for sure whether or not they are having a baby.
Out of the corner of her eye, Jemma sees Fitz glance across at her. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asks.
‘My nausea has finally abated,’ she tells him, drawing her knees up to her chest. ‘So that’s something to be thankful for. Although now I’m absolutely starving…’
Fitz sighs. ‘As good as that is to hear, it wasn’t what I meant. I meant, how are you feeling about…’ He gestures to the pregnancy tests lying in front of them. ‘…this?’
Pursing her lips together, Jemma tries to formulate her thoughts. ‘It’s certainly unexpected,’ she admits.
‘Really?’ When she looks over at him, Fitz raises his eyebrows with a wry smile. ‘Even when you’ve met our fully-grown grandson?’
‘Who had come from another timeline,’ Jemma reminds him, feeling a dull ache in the base of her heart at the mention of Deke. ‘A timeline that ceased to exist when the loop was broken. All the certainty that came with that loop disappeared when he did, and when you-‘
She breaks off abruptly, unwilling to say the word that still tastes like ash in her mouth. Understanding this, Fitz slips his hand into hers and squeezes tight.
‘We’re in uncharted waters now,’ Jemma says. ‘None of this has ever happened before, and there are infinite possibilities for what comes next.’
‘And one of those possibilities,’ Fitz remarks, his voice tinged with awe, ‘is us having a baby. Right here, right now.’
Jemma regards him for a moment, taking in the way his eyes are shining and the corners of his mouth are lifting upwards, as if he wants to smile.
‘What about you?’ she asks softly. ‘How do you feel about this?’
Fitz gives a short laugh and pulls their joined hands into his lap. ‘Jemma, when I went to sleep I had no idea what I was going to wake up to. There was no guarantee that I’d make it to where you and the others were, or that if I did there’d be a way for us to get home. As much as I knew I wanted a future with you, I didn’t feel safe to imagine it. I couldn’t think past finding you.’
This time, it is Jemma’s turn to give his fingers a supportive squeeze.
‘To wake up,’ Fitz continues, ‘and find that not only could I imagine our future but that it was within our reach…once I’d gotten over the shock, it was a pretty incredible feeling.’
Jemma nods slowly. ‘That’s how I felt,’ she says, ‘when we were looking for you. There was always something that needed checking or researching. There was barely enough time to think about everything I needed to think about, let alone what I might want to think about. Even when I closed my eyes, all I could see were maps of the galaxy and light-speed calculations.’ She shrugs, remembering how exhausting it had been. ‘There wasn’t the space inside my head to think about anything that wouldn’t help me find you.’
‘How about now?’ Fitz says quietly. ‘Is there space now?’
Inhaling deeply, Jemma’s eyes flicker shut. For the first time since she’d been told Fitz was dead, she allows herself to revisit the surge of excitement she’d felt whenever the subject of their daughter had come up. It settles in the base of her stomach, a pleasant fluttering feeling that could, one day soon, turn into a heartbeat.
Feeling a smile tug at her lips, Jemma opens her eyes.
‘Yes,’ she admits happily. ‘Yes, there is.’
Fitz lets out a huff of breath. ‘Well, that’s a relief.’
‘What do you mean?’
There is a grin on his face that reaches from ear to ear as he holds up one of the pregnancy tests for her to see. ‘Our three minutes ended while you were monologuing. All of the sticks are positive.’
Jemma grabs the test from him and stares at it, feeling her heart thump against her chest as the enormity of his words sinks in.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she breathes, looking up at Fitz. ‘We’re going to have a baby.’
He nods, his face utterly alight. ‘Yeah. Yeah, we are.’
Delight bubbles up inside Jemma until she has to laugh, every part of her body feeling like it has been filled with light. She reaches for Fitz, and in one fluid movement he pulls her across his lap so that they can wrap their arms around each other.
Holding Fitz tightly to her, the only thing Jemma can feel is joy.
A week later
‘Hey, Simmons. Can I borrow you for a sec?’
Jemma closes the lid of her laptop so fast it generates a small breeze. She is researching safety cots online and seeing as none of the team know she is pregnant yet, she isn’t all too keen for Mack to catch a glimpse of her screen and start asking questions.
Pining a cheerful smile to her face, Jemma hops off her stool. ‘Of course, Mack. What can I do for you?’
Mack gives her an odd look but passes her a tablet anyway. On the display, there a picture of a large, chrome chest with a heavy padlock on the front. Jemma zooms in on the image, and frowns at the sight of luminous green stains on the side of the chest.
‘Daisy and I picked it up on our mission to India this morning,’ Mack explains. ‘The local population seemed pretty disturbed by it. From what we could make out, they think it’s something alien.’
‘Did you put it in containment?’ Jemma asks immediately.
Mack nods. ‘We did. Nobody’s touched it, and it’s still secure in the loading bay. I was wondering if you’d mind coming down and checking it out for us? Make sure there’s nothing hazardous inside before we bring it onto the base.’
Behind his back, Jemma sees Fitz’s ears prick up. He has been tinkering with a device at the opposite end of the lab during their conversation, and Jemma knows exactly what word has caused him to pay attention. If he had wanted her to be cautious around hazardous material before, now that she is pregnant she knows he’d rather she avoid it entirely. Until they let the team in on the secret, however, that wasn’t an option.
Shooting Fitz a firm I’ll be careful look, Jemma gives Mack back his tablet.
‘That shouldn’t be a problem. Shall we get started?’
To sooth both Fitz’s and her own nerves, Jemma insists on taking a hazmat suit to investigate the box. Luckily, Mack has known her long enough to trust her judgement without question and he agrees, carrying the suit down to the Zephyr for her.
There, as she struggles into the unwieldy fabric and organises her diagnostic equipment, Daisy frowns.
‘Hey, are you okay? You look kind of flushed.’
‘Hmm?’ Lifting her head, Jemma presses the back of her hand to her cheek. ‘Oh, I’m fine. It’s just quite warm down here, I suppose.’
Daisy, who is wearing a woollen jumper and a leather jacket, looks unconvinced but says nothing.
It is only as she pulls the hazmat helmet over her head that Jemma realises she is in fact feeling quite hot. And now that she comes to think about it, a little nauseous too. Discovering that she is pregnant has done nothing to cease her morning sickness; if anything, she swears it has gotten worse.
Jemma sighs, and fastens the strap of her helmet. The sooner she carries out her checks, the sooner she can head down to the kitchen and eat an entire packet of digestive biscuits.
‘Keep at least ten feet away,’ she instructs, and Mack and Daisy fall back, letting her climb the ramp to the loading bay on her own.
The chrome chest is zipped inside a containment unit and Jemma sends two dwarfs in to do a preliminary scan before she approaches it herself. After the images come through clear on her tablet, she steps forward and unzips the containment curtains to reveal the chest.
The front visor of her helmet is already fogging up with her breath, and Jemma is unnerved to find herself feeling claustrophobic, something she’d never experienced in a hazmat suit before. Swallowing down her nausea, she lifts the Geiger counter’s probe towards the chest.
‘Simmons?’ Mack’s voice sounds very far away. ‘Are you alright in there?’
‘I’m not getting any radiation readings,’ Jemma calls back, neatly sidestepping his original question. ‘But I’m fairly certain your locals were right. Whatever is inside here must be alien.’
‘Can you be one hundred per cent certain?’ Daisy asks.
Jemma grits her teeth and nods. ‘Give me a minute.’
Ungainly in her thick suit, she crouches beside the chest and taps at her tablet a few times. As it begins to run a further test, Jemma finds herself growing even warmer, and a faint buzzing starts in her ears as the sick feeling returns to her stomach. She breathes deeply, fighting back the urge to rip off her helmet and breathe in the fresh air, and keeps her eyes firmly fixed on the screen in front of her.
The dwarfs were scanning the contains of the chest for every element known to SHIELD, and since the organisation had many more elements in its database than a high school periodic table, it took rather a long time. Eventually however, her tablet beeps to tell her that the test is complete and a positive match appears on the screen.
Struggling to her feet, her nausea worse than ever and dark spots darting across her vision, Jemma feels the tablet slip from her fingers as she fumbles to pull off her helmet.
‘It’s perfectly safe,’ she hears herself say. ‘Nothing to be concerned about.’
Then the world tilts on its axis, and the last thing Jemma sees before she blacks out is the floor of the Zephyr rushing up to meet her.
She wakes up in a bed in the med bay, having been stripped of the horrible hazmat suit and with her head aching. Feeling something tight pull at her temple, Jemma frowns, wriggling her hand out from under a heavy blanket and lifting it up to find that she has a bandage wrapped around the top of her head.
‘I’d leave that alone, if I were you.’ At the sound of Daisy’s voice, Jemma turns her head in surprise. Her friend is sitting cross-legged on the chair beside her bed, giving her a small smile. ‘You hit your head pretty badly when you fell.’
Jemma tries to return the smile but as her memories of fainting come back to her she falters, feeling a flush of alarm in her veins. It wasn’t just her own body that she had to be concerned about anymore, and if her falling had done anything to hurt the baby –
‘It’s alright,’ Daisy says quickly, obviously having noticed her panic. ‘Jemma, the baby’s okay. Here, listen…’
She jumps up and presses a few buttons on the monitor above Jemma’s head. All of a sudden, the room is filled with a rhythmic pulsing sound and Jemma’s eyes fill with tears as she realises she is listening to her and Fitz’s child’s heartbeat for the first time.
‘We did an ultrasound while you were out to make sure he, or she, was okay,’ Daisy explains, allowing her to listen to the heartbeat for a little while longer before switching it off. ‘I thought you might want to hear it when you woke up, so I recorded it.’
Jemma’s relief at knowing her baby is safe is marred by a sudden wave of guilt.
‘Fitz told you, then,’ she guesses.
Daisy nods. ‘Yeah, as soon as he knew you’d passed out. You can’t blame him for telling us though, he was really worried. We all were.’
Jemma shakes her head, before pushing herself up into a sitting position. ‘No, of course I don’t. I would have done the same thing.’
She blinks, looking around the room. There are fresh bandages on the sideboard and the ultra-sound wand dangles from the machine with a bottle of gel beside it. On the chair next to Daisy’s, Fitz’s jacket hangs from the armrest, as though he had been there only moments before.
‘Where is he? Fitz?’
‘He’s helping Mack move the alien case into storage, since we could hardly keep it on the Zephyr,’ Daisy says. She holds up her phone and waves it at Jemma. ‘But I just sent him a text to tell him you were awake, so my guess is he’ll be back in a couple of minutes.’
Jemma nods, noting the way her whole body relaxes at this. It has been long enough since she’d seen him for her insides to twist with anxiety, and she can’t wait to feel his arms around her again, pulling her close and making her feel safe.
Daisy sinks back onto her chair, playing with the sleeve of her jacket. Sensing that she has more she wants to say, Jemma stays quiet.
‘We actually had a long talk,’ Daisy admits, ‘Fitz and I, while we were waiting for you to wake up.’
‘Oh?’ Jemma pretends ambivalence, at the same time as her heart jumps to hear this. ‘You did?’
Understandably, things between Fitz and Daisy had been more tense than usual since they’d found him. They had never had the opportunity to resolve the Doctor incident before he’d died and Jemma knew that Daisy had been torn up by the situation almost as much as she had been.
Daisy was still angry with Fitz, but the one they’d rescued hadn’t hurt her the way she remembered and, deep down, she still loved him. They had talked together once or twice in the months since, but for the most part Fitz had been giving her a wide berth, respecting her feelings and not wanting to make her face anything before she was ready. To hear that they had sat together as they waited for her to come around fills Jemma with hope for all three of them.
‘Yeah,’ Daisy says, and her lips curve into a smile again. ‘And it was a really good talk, the best we’ve had in a long time.’ Suddenly, her face falls serious. ‘Which is why I don’t understand how neither of you told me you were pregnant.’
Ah.
Feeling another twinge of guilt, Jemma shakes her head. ‘Daisy-‘
Before she can speak, however, her friend gets up to sit on the edge of the bed.
‘Jemma, listen. I know that things were…complicated between all of us for a while, and I know that I bear partial responsibility for that. But you and Fitz are still two of the people I love the most in the world. Even after everything that’s happened, you could have told me.’
‘No, Daisy.’ Jemma shakes her head. ‘It wasn’t because of that. Or at least not entirely.’
‘Okay.’ Daisy raises one eyebrow at her. ‘Care to elaborate?’
Sinking back against the pillows, Jemma thinks carefully about her next words. While Fitz hadn’t wholly agreed with her reasoning, he had at least understood and supported her desire not to tell the team straight away. She is not entirely sure that Daisy will react the same way.
‘We were travelling in space for almost six months,’ Jemma begins eventually. ‘And that’s a long time to be away from home.’ She gives Daisy a pointed look. ‘Especially if you’ve just inherited a covert spy agency tasked with protecting the world from the forces of evil.’
‘Yeah, but it was my choice to go with you,’ Daisy points out. Reaching across the blanket, she covers Jemma’s hand with her own. ‘There was no way we were going to let you go out there alone.’
‘I know,’ Jemma says softly, feeling a sudden flood of gratitude towards her friend. ‘But even so, you were away for a long time, all of us were. It’s taken a month to get SHIELD back up and running, and it’s going to take even longer to track down our agents, get re-legitimised and build the base up to standard.’
She watches Daisy’s lips twist; as much as she might like to argue with this, she can’t.
‘Fitz and I were the reason you had to go to space,’ Jemma says, and she shrugs. ‘After that, and everything that happened before, I felt like we owed you a just little more time to get things back to normal, before we interrupted your schedule again.’
Daisy’s forehead furrows, and she turns away to processes this. Jemma waits, folding her hands in her lap until Daisy turns back with a new determination on her face.
‘Okay,’ she says, ‘as your immediate superior, I probably should discipline you for withholding important medical information from the team.’
Jemma nods, but when Daisy pauses she takes the opportunity to ask hopefully: ‘but as my friend?’
With a deep sigh, Daisy takes up both of her hands and holds them.
‘Jemma, for as long as I have been a part of this team, you and Fitz have been our fixers. You find the solutions to our problems, and you come up with the hare-brained schemes that save the day. You make the tech that keeps us safe, and you patch us up when we come home. You’ve given your lives to SHIELD.’ She gives a watery smile before adding, ‘one of you in a very literal way.’
Jemma gives a snort of laughter, feeling tears well up in her eyes. Daisy grins at her and squeezes her hands.
‘SHIELD doesn’t need your baby’s life as well,’ she whispers.
Looking up at her through wet eyes, Jemma feels the tightness that had been pinching her chest loosen and, all of a sudden, she can breathe easy again.
On the bed, Daisy’s phone vibrates, making them both jump. Daisy flips the screen over to check the message and grins.
‘It’s Fitz,’ she reports, hopping off the bed. ‘He’s on his way up now, so I think I’ll head out.’ She waggles her eyebrows. ‘Give the two of you some privacy…’
Jemma scoffs and rolls her eyes, but grabs Daisy’s hand before she can move too far away. She pulls her friend close enough in to wrap her arms around her in a hug and it only takes a moment for Daisy to sink into it, dropping her head onto Jemma’s shoulder.
‘Thank you,’ Jemma whispers.
‘Yeah.’ Daisy pulls back and gives her a wink. ‘And thank you.’
She is half-way to the door before she turns back, holding up one finger as though she has just remembered something important.
‘Oh! One more thing…’ She flashes Jemma a stern look. ‘You’re officially barred from all field missions from now on, and from working on anything involving hazardous substances. Are we clear?’
Jemma ducks her head to hide her smile.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
All things considered, it seems like a small price to pay.
That evening, Jemma takes the liberty of discharging herself from the medical bay and returns to her own bunk.
Despite her repeated protestations that she feels perfectly fine, Fitz insists on her taking things extra easy and Jemma has to admit that the tender care he is taking of her is incredibly endearing. He changes the bandage on her forehead, brings her a cup of tea, and even places an extra pillow underneath her feet before jumping into bed beside her.
He lifts up his arm, allowing her to tuck herself into his side, before bringing it protectively around her shoulders. He is reading a parenting book that he’d found in the dark depths of the Lighthouse earlier that week and now no longer needed to hide out of sight every time a member of their team walked past.
‘It was in a box in one of the bunks,’ he had explained to her, showing her how the book detailed the foetal development stages and early month milestones. ‘The place was stacked with stuff, completely random things, like some maniac hoarder was staying there. I don’t think anyone is though.’
Jemma hadn’t had the heart to tell him the bunk had been Deke’s.
She leans her head against his chest and smiles to feel the beats of his heart through his shirt, and the press of the ring hung around his neck. Soon after they’d found him, she’d split the two rings she’d been wearing on a chain and given one to him to wear. Now, he wears hers and she wears his, and they tease each other about who will propose first this time. Secretly though, Jemma knows that there is no contest. This time, she wants to hear his every word.
As Fitz reads, Jemma starts to think, her mind wandering back to her earlier conversation with Daisy.
SHIELD doesn’t need your baby’s life as well.
In the loop, their daughter had grown up in the Lighthouse. She had been born there, lived there, loved there. She had died there too, in the worst possible circumstances that she and Fitz had been powerless to prevent. Until, that is, they’d broken the loop.
‘You’re awfully quiet,’ Fitz murmurs. Setting his book down, he kisses the top of her head. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Yeah,’ Jemma says. ‘Just thinking.’
‘Okay.’ Fitz strokes her shoulder with his thumb before asking: ‘are you thinking about anything in particular?’
‘Mmm. Something important.’
‘Oh? And what’s that?’
Twisting in his arms, Jemma looks up at him. With one hand, she reaches up to touch his cheek and smiles to feel how warm it is. He is her living, breathing proof that time can be changed, and she loves him for it.
Giving Fitz a soft smile, Jemma takes a deep breath.
‘I think it’s time for us to say goodbye.’