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Jemma Simmons is five and there is a boy in her living room and she's not entirely sure how she feels about it. But she doesn't think that she likes it. He keeps on looking at her as she plays with her dolls, opening his mouth and then closing it again with a snapping sound. Finally, he bends down over a pile of Legos and five minutes later, something comes flying across the carpet towards her. It's a Lego house, just big enough for one of her dolls, and when she glances over at the boy (Leopold, his mum called him), he smiles at her.
Jemma Simmons is eight and Leo Fitz is her best friend. She knows this because he always eats the crusts off her sandwiches (she's told her mother that she doesn't like them), because he always sits next to her at lunch no matter how much he gets teased about cooties, and because he's promised her, blue eyes wide, to marry her when they grow up if no one else wants to. This is something Jemma worries about a lot—too much, probably—especially after she comes back from visiting her grandmother. But Fitz has an odd way of smiling at her that makes her head stop going in circles and for now, she's happy to leave it at that.
Jemma Simmons is twelve and she's wondering where, on a scale from a minor flood to the potential eruption of the Yellowstone volcano, her first school dance falls on the range of catastrophes. (Her mother uses that word to describe the state of Jemma's room, but she thinks that this dance definitely beats it out.) She's wondering how soon she can leave when Fitz asks her to dance and, before she can remember that best friends usually don't dance together, she says yes. At first it's awkward, all hands stiff on shoulders and swaying from side to side completely off the beat, but then she leans forward and tucks her head against the curve of his neck and it fits perfectly.
Jemma Simmons is fifteen and she's far too aware of her best friend sitting next to her on the couch, close enough that their knees brush and her hair falls across his shoulder when she leans over to grab the popcorn. He's fidgeting beside her, fingers nervously tapping against his thigh, and she's about to ask him what's wrong when he surges across the couch and kisses her. It's careful, tentative at first, his other hand resting on the arm of the couch like he's ready to pull away at any second, lips pressed softly against hers but then she slips her tongue inside his mouth, fingers knotting in his hair as she climbs into his lap and his arms come up to wrap themselves around her, and this, Jemma thinks, this is where they were always meant to end up.
Jemma Simmons is eighteen and Fitz is unzipping her prom dress with trembling hands, whispering something against her skin that sounds like her name and a song and a prayer all at once, and maybe she's trembling a little too, but then he whispers three words to her, over and over again, and even though she's heard him say them before, all of a sudden they seem completely new. And as she turns to kiss him, it's like a new world opening up before her eyes.
Jemma Simmons is nineteen and she's listening to a phone ring and ring in an empty room, and she knows that no one's going to answer, because he hasn't picked up his phone in days, and she feels so very young and so very dumb and so very heartbroken.
And right now, Jemma Simmons is twenty-four and Leo Fitz is staring at her from across a doorway, one hand shaking violently at his side. “J—J—Jemma,” he stutters and something isn't right, this isn't her Fitz, the one who finished her sentences and then went on to create new ones, this can't be him, the man with shaking words and shaking hands who's now gone silent, begging her with his eyes to understand.
“My sink doesn't work,” she blurts out, just to fill the silence. 'My neighbor said that if I asked at number fourteen, they'd know how to fix it. I...I just moved in today.”
“I guessed that,” he says. “I'm not always...I usually...I don't...I'm not this bad. The, ah...the?”
“Aphasia?” she whispers.
“Yeah. It gets triggered by—by emotions sometimes.” He shakes out the hand at his side, gulps a long breath in, and sighs it out. “When I'm not...when I can't...” He stops for a moment, tapping one hand against his knee, the way that he always does when he doesn't know what to do, and it's so unmistakably Fitz that it makes a lump rise up in her throat. “Anyway, there was an accident. A few years ago. Standard hit-and-run except the other guy was going at about 100mph and sent me over the bridge into the river.” He's speaking slowly now, carefully shaping his mouth around each word.
“Why didn't you tell me?” Jemma's trying to figure out what a few years means. The years when they were both in college, her back in the UK at Cambridge and on the other side of an ocean, sending surreptitious emails and text messages whenever her family wasn't looking? Or the years after college, when the stream of messages between them had already dried up?
“We were...Your parents already—they--they didn't like me much. Though they'd like me even less when I couldn't talk.”
“Fitz,I...” She doesn't know what to say. She wants to kiss him and yell at him and storm away and never let him out of her sight again. Because she's never been able to classify Leo Fitz, slot him into a neat box along with everything else in her life, but she knows that he is hers. But, just like him, she can't find the words and so instead she lets her voice die in her throat.
“I'll fix the sink in a few minutes,” he says finally. “Just give me—let me—it's all too much right now.” She's too much, she knows. So she turns and goes, and tells herself not to look back. Fifteen minutes later, Fitz fixes her sink in complete silence and hovers on the threshold for a good two minutes before he finally lets himself out with an awkward (also silent) wave.
Jemma sits in her new apartment, surrounded by piles of boxes, and tries very hard not to cry. Finally, she calls Skye (Bobbi is somewhere classified, probably overthrowing another dictator) and before she can finish saying Fitz's name, Skye is on her way over with Thai food and alcohol. She lets Jemma be for a while, chattering on about the latest drama in Communications and the cute new guy from Ops that needed something hacked (“his grandad was a Howling Commando, Jemma—only three degrees of separation between me and Steve Rogers' ass), until Jemma's ready to talk again. And when she is, Skye lets her talk for what feels like forever, through all the food, half the alcohol, and a quarter of the ice cream. “That's some weird star-crossed shit,” Skye says, sprawled out across Jemma's couch.
“We're not star-crossed,” Jemma corrects her. “We're not even dramatic. At least we never used to be.” Being with Fitz had felt as easy as shutting her eyes and falling asleep at night, curled up next to him, as natural as walking, putting one foot in front of the other until they arrived at their inevitable destination. Nothing star-crossed about it. Skye just mutters something skeptical under her breath and takes another bite of ice cream.
The next day is going to be perfectly normal, Jemma tells herself. She's going to wake up early, unpack some more boxes, go to work at the not-quite-classified SHIELD lab where she's stationed for the moment, have a scientific breakthrough or two, go home, unpack some more boxes, and order takeout. She's not going to make brownies at nine pm and accidentally make too much so she has to take some over to Fitz. And there's no way she's going to make a second batch when the first doesn't turn out right (baking is a science she has yet to master). But here she is, brownie pan in hand, wearing the silk blouse that normally stays at the back of her closet (her other clothes were covered in flour anyway), and more nervous than she cares to admit. “I had extra,” she blurts out when he opens his door. “And I know that you like them and I thought it could be a thank you and maybe we could talk—or not talk, if you're not feeling...You could just show me a bunch of old photo albums or something...”
“You can't do any of that unless you come in,” he points out and smirks at her. He looks better, Jemma thinks—his hand is mostly steady at his side and although he's still speaking slowly, his words are steady too. “Are those brownies safe to eat?”
“Of course they are!” Jemma huffs. “The egg shell incident was ages ago.”
“What about the time you mixed up the sugar and salt?” He's teasing her now, smiling easily, and she can't help but smile back, even knowing all the things that they're burying beneath it.
“I was twelve,” she protests and flops down on his couch. “But if you don't want them...”
“Are you insane?” Fitz tries to snatch the pan from her, fails, and grabs for it again. She throws a pillow at him and misses by a mile, giggling. It's like they're in elementary school again and Jemma wonders if maybe this is what they have to do, start from the beginning again and see where it takes them. So they talk and they learn to shape themselves around the new silences—the classified details of Jemma's job, the crossed wires in Fitz's head—and together, they unpack the details of the last five years. He doesn't skip over anything, and neither does she. And hours later, after he's called for takeout and they're arguing over the last piece of naan, perched across from each other at his kitchen table, Jemma thinks that they're going to be okay.
They aren't always, of course. There are days when she misses the him that he used to be so fiercely that it hurts, days when she thinks she's making him worse instead of better, days when they shout at each other until they go hoarse. But then there are days when she realizes something new about the Fitz he is now and it's so marvelous that she aches with it, and days when he looks at her like she's a breath of sunshine on a cloudy day, and days when they talk for hours, words overlapping and twisting around each other. And there is the day when she realizes that he—that they—would have always been different, that time would always have warped them in new ways, that this is just one version of where they could have ended up. That in parallel universe after parallel universe, she would still be with him.
Jemma Simmons is twenty-five and she is falling in love with Leo Fitz all over again. She is falling in love when he fixes the kitchen appliances that she breaks just to have an excuse for him to come over, she is falling in love when he gestures with his food to explain some important scientific point, she is falling in love when he watches movies with her on the couch at three in the morning and lets her cry into his sweater,she is falling in love when he finds the right words and when he doesn't, she is falling in love when he smiles and when he doesn't, and she is falling in love always.
And, most of all, she is falling in love on a sweet June night, when he bursts into her apartment and kisses her without a word of explanation, hands on her hips as hers tangle in his hair, lips everywhere they can reach as she sighs against him, and eyes open the whole time. Because, he tells her afterward, as they lie curled up beneath her sheets, he's spent too much time without her to lose a single minute now. She tells him that they'll find each other over and over again, for as long as they need to.
He doesn't tell her that he loves her. She doesn't tell him that she loves him. They already know.