Chapter Text
The process of assessing Fitz's damage isn't a quick one, but certain things are almost immediately apparent. His fine motor skills have gone quite literally shaky, fingers clumsy on a pen or a pair of pliers, the instrument as likely to fall from his grip as to be retained. Even operating a tablet is as much luck as skill at this point, trembling fingertips none too accurate at his usual settings, only a little better when adjusted for accessibility. It doesn't take long for frustration to set in, for him to set his hands flat on the table where they can't shake.
Worse than the shaking is the vocabulary loss. For every sentence he finishes, three trail into "um" and a hand circling in the air. It seems random, what words he loses-- technical ones go missing, but so do common ones, even prepositions, even the name of the agent giving him the assessment. When he pauses with his mouth open, searching for Simmons's name, and finally manages "Jemma" instead of the name he was going for, that's when he shuts down entirely, refusing to answer any more questions, his arms crossed tightly across his chest.
"We'll work on it," Simmons tells him when he haltingly tells her what happened, arms still crossed, eyes lowered. "You've only just come out of a coma. You need to get your body used to moving again."
"Yeah, but that's only half of it," Fitz says, "It's the words..." He looks pained when he confesses, "Your name, even."
"You know who I am," she says, her hand settling on his shoulder. "My name was the first thing you said when you came to. I'm not afraid of you forgetting me, Fitz."
"Never," he swears. "I'd forget myself first. Though that's a... a, um, it could..."
"It's a possibility," she says, shaking her head. "No, it isn't. The damage is done, it won't get worse. You're Leopold Fitz, you won't forget that, and even if you can't remember one or another of my names sometimes, you'll remember who I am to you. I don't mind if you call me Jemma or Simmons or if you don't call me anything at all. The word doesn't matter as long as you know about us."
"You're my soulmate," he says, "my lab partner, my best friend, my... Jemma." His hand curls around her elbow, palm covering her soulmark through her sweater, and she smiles at him, hardly noticing the steadiness of his grip. "I know."
"That's a good place to start, isn't it?" He nods, slowly, and presses his forehead to hers.
They're comfortable in each other's space, always have been, but this is new. Before, Jemma's hand around his wrist was familiar, but he'd never dared to touch the mark at her hip. Standing here with their hands on each other's new marks, there's a tension that wasn't there before, a weight of possibility now that they've removed the qualifier "platonic" from the word soulmate. Her breath is sweet against his cheek, and he knows the only thing keeping them from a kiss is his fear that he doesn't deserve it, though he knows now that she won't rebuff him. He still can't quite get himself to close that last couple of inches, frozen looking at the fans of her lashes on her cheeks.
"Oh, honestly," she whispers, and tugs his shoulder, and at first it's just an awkward smushing of lips before she purses hers around his lower lip and suddenly it's a real kiss, the taste of her green tea chapstick imprinting itself on his tattered brain with the first touch of his tongue. The hand not on her soulmark comes up to cradle her cheek, and she sighs into his mouth, her thumb rubbing back and forth along his collarbone and the words printed on his skin there. Their kisses are clumsy, all trial and error and correction, a give-and-take like their rapid-fire banter across the lab table, a conversation with no sound at all. She gets the last word in by nipping at his lip before pulling back.
They've seen each other all across the emotional spectrum, from despondent to overjoyed, but they've not seen each other this way before: flushed cheeks, reddened lips, eyes dilated dark, still close enough to feel the other's rapid breath on their own skin. It’s overwhelming; he doesn’t know what to do now.
"Jemma, you're... you look..." He almost swears for lack of the word, but she just smiles up at him.
"Thank you," she says, not needing to hear the word to know what he means. He smiles faintly-- she hasn't seen him with a full smile in far too long, and who knows when she'll see it next-- and gives her elbow a gentle squeeze before releasing her. She reaches up to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear and smiles back, letting him reassert a little space. "Did they give you a physical therapy regimen to follow?"
"No, not yet. Tomorrow, they said. Have to uh, they have to..."
"Well, of course it'll take more direct assessment to figure out what the best exercises for you will be, but they didn't suggest anything for today?"
"I left in a hurry," he says, looking down at his hands and biting his lip. "Couldn't stand it. Poking at me like--"
"Like a lab specimen," she murmurs, "oh, you know you aren't, don't you? You're a patient, not a petri dish. Although you've always been an awful patient. Remember back at the academy when you got the flu?"
"When you gave me the flu," he says, pointing a shaky finger at her. "Stealing my... my cup."
"That hideous mug," she agrees, "but I told you I was taking your tea and you took it back even though I had a fever already, even though I told you I was contagious--"
"It was my tea! You have no respect for--"
"Contagion protocols, oh, will you ever get over that cat liver? It was only a small liver! It wasn't even touching your lunch!"
"That's not the point," he says mulishly, and she shakes her head, smiling.
"No. The point is you're an awful patient, as I found out when I nursed you through the flu-- that I gave you, yes! I felt beholden. And you were so pathetic."
"Is that what you think?" he asks, suddenly very still. "That you're beholden? That I'm pathetic?"
"No, that's not-- you are not pathetic. That's not what I think at all." He won't look at her until she takes him by the shoulders and gives him a little shake. "Fitz. Leo. That's not what I meant. The way you acted as a flu-stricken teenager was... like an ill puppy. Temperamental but adorable. This is different."
"Is it really?" Of all the things for him to get stubborn about... "You knew I'd get... uh..."
"Better?"
"Better, yes, from the flu, but I might not get better from this!" He runs a hand through his hair, holds onto his head like he could put whatever's gone missing back into place if he just pushed hard enough. "How long will you put up with me being, being… being an awful patient, Jemma?"
"As long as it takes," she says, reaching up to pull his hand down, to clasp it between her own. "Don't be so pessimistic. It's not even been a whole day since you woke up, and you're already resigning yourself to this condition before you even start trying to make it better. It will get better, you know it will."
"Do I, though?"
"Yes. And it doesn't matter how long it takes, you know. Whatever you're afraid I'm going to do, I'm not going to do it." Her hand slides to his wrist, the familiar way she used to cover his soulmark when it circled the delicate bones and crossed the blue veins there, a comforting touch she's given him a thousand times before. "I told you we'll figure this out, and that's what I meant."
"We will," he says, sounding like he's trying to convince himself, and then again more firmly, "we will." But when he pulls her into his arms and buries his nose in her hair, it's just as much to get her to stop looking at him with that careful expression as it is for the sake of holding her.