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When Skye popped her head around the door of the lab and announced that he needed to get to Jemma's room immediately, all the blood in Fitz's body ran ice cold.
He would have asked Skye what was wrong, but as soon as the last word of her declaration had left her mouth she had turned on her heel and hurried off down the hall in the opposite direction with a flick of her dark hair. That really only left him with the only option of yanking off his plastic gloves and lab coat and sprinting towards the med bay as fast as his feet could carry him.
It was still only his first day back at work since getting Jemma back. Coulson had allowed him two days grace at her bedside, before tactfully suggesting that it would be good to have him back in the lab on a daily basis. Once Fitz saw the backlog of work piled up on both their desks, he didn't really see how he could say no.
For the ten days that Jemma had been gone, the entire world had been put on hold.
Now that she was back again, it made sense that the earth had to keep on turning, that night had to turn into day and that he would have to deal with paperwork again.
But Fitz had found, as he sat slumped over in his chair and tapping a pen against his leg as he added to a blueprint for an improved security system for the base, that it was incredibly hard to pretend that things had returned to normal when you had almost lost your best friend in the world for the umpteenth time in two years.
Which was why, as soon as acknowledgement of Skye's words turned his blood from ice to fire, Fitz dropped everything and ran for her.
Because he should have known everything was too good to be true.
Again.
His heart was racing as he ran through the Playground towards Jemma's room; the halls were quiet (too quiet, he thought, trying to push back the waves of panic) and there was nobody about, which was unusual. Recently, there had been people everywhere.
As Fitz threw open the door to her room, he had been expecting the worst. What he had not been expecting, however, was what was now in front of him.
Jemma was sitting bold upright in bed, cross-legged and flush cheeked. Her hands were fiddling anxiously with the hem of her t-shirt and there was a delicate pink flower tucked behind her left ear. She looked up, her eyes widening, as he came barging into the room.
'Oh...! Fitz.'
'Jemma...what's...' Fitz leant on the door knob, his eyes anxiously darting over her and then the room. 'What's wrong, what's...' He trailed off, as his focus fell on the bed in front of her, and he inhaled deeply.
Jemma's eyes followed his down to her sheets.
Spread out on the covers were a dozen or so steaming foil containers, along with a pair of blue plastic plates and matching cutlery. As Fitz breathed in again, he smelt a multitude of different aromas and spices but all of them warm and inviting.
'What is that?'
'Dinner,' Jemma blurted out.
Fitz blinked. 'Come again?'
'Well, more specifically, there is Chinese, Italian...there's only a little bit of Indian, I'm afraid, but only because I wouldn't eat it, it's just for you...um, there's pizza, and I believe...' Jemma lifted the cover of one of the dishes to release a smell so familiar to Fitz that it made tears prickle in his eyes. 'Ah! Fish and chips.'
'Jemma...' Fitz began slowly.
'There's pudding as well,' she continued, hurriedly, pulling the covers off the containers as she spoke. 'Ice cream in the fridge, and a bottle of beer...but it's not near the blood samples!' she added hastily. 'I checked.'
She stopped, with a little sharp exhale, and looked up to meet his eyes apprehensively. Fitz continued to stare, his eyes flickering from one dish to the other as he walked across the room towards the bed.
'What,' he managed to say, sitting down gingerly on the edge of her blanket, 'are the entire contains of the nearest takeaways doing on your bed?'
Jemma's body seemed to sag into the pillows behind her a little, her teeth nagging on her bottom lip.
'I missed dinner,' she said, by way of explaination.
'Jemma, you missed about ten dinners. That doesn't mean you have to eat them all at once.'
She laughed, softly out through her nose and it was the loveliest thing Fitz had ever seen.
'What I meant to say,' Jemma said after a moment, 'was that I missed dinner with you. You know.' She fidgeted her fingers. 'Somewhere nice.'
'Oh,' was all he could think of to say.
He had all but forgotten about their dinner plans, the ones they had made the night it had happened. Before she was gone. The fact that they had even had that conversation had gone right out of his mind once he had found out, as had everything else that was not directly related to getting her back.
For the past two weeks he had had a one track mind, but now the centre of his thoughts was sitting directly in front of him and her eyes were shining with tears.
'I realise now that eating takeaway in the med bay is probably not exactly what you had envisioned when you suggested getting dinner,' Jemma said with a slight wince.
'No, no...' Fitz sat up straighter, anxious that she didn't take his silence as disappointment. 'It's not that.'
Jemma nodded carefully, licking her lips. 'I just didn't want you to think I had forgotten,' she explained and then took a deep breath. 'While I was...when I was...gone, I would think about...it was very important to me that...'
She was struggling with her words, a pain he was all too familiar with and to see her reduced to it made him want to clench his teeth.
'I thought about it a lot,' Jemma admitted, and Fitz finally understood.
Whereas to him their dinner plans had become trivial over the last two weeks, unimportant and a part of another life, to her they had become a lifeline. They had been something for her to cling to, to remind her that she would get back. She would get back to him. Because they were going to go to dinner.
'I'd be lying,' Fitz said. 'If I said that I'd thought about it a lot too.'
Jemma giggled, then sniffed. 'Yes, I suppose you would be.'
'And I'd never have thought you'd have forgotten.' He moved further onto the blanket, leaning one of his arms over the food so his body straddled the bed.
'Mmm.'
'I wouldn't. Ever.'
She nodded, nibbling at the skin by the nail of her thumb. 'I wanted to do it for you, as well,' she said suddenly. 'I thought you deserved it.'
'Who me?' Fitz shook his head in disbelief. 'Jemma, you were the one who got sucked into an alien rock!'
'Well, yes, I know, but it must have been hard for you. And I'm so sorry, Fitz.'
'Hard for me?'
He couldn't believe what he was hearing. She had been eaten by a sentient Kree rock, had God only knew what happened to her while she had been inside all those days and now she was concerned about how hard it had been for him?
'It's hard being the one left behind,' Jemma said quietly.
Oh.
The room fell quiet, but for the beats of Fitz's heart pounding in his head.
They had never really talked about the time he had been in the coma (nine days, he had been later told by someone other than Jemma. You were gone for nine days). Once they had passed, those days became one of many things the two of them had not talked about: he had not asked and she had not volunteered any information for him.
And so, like many things, it had gone unspoken.
But now, having spent ten panic-stricken days in that same position, Fitz had a good idea of just how alone she must have felt. He had been surrounded by people the whole time, Skye and Mack and Coulson and the others, and yet he had never felt so lonely in all his life.
He had been very alone and he had been so very afraid. And those were two things he never wanted Jemma Simmons to ever feel.
And yet she had been.
Gently, Fitz moved his hand across the sheets until it covered both of Jemma's, clasped together in her lap.
'Thank you,' he whispered. 'For dinner. It's perfect.'
She looked up at him and gave a watery smile of gratitude, her fingers giving his a small squeeze in return. 'You're welcome,' she whispered back to him.
Fitz held her gaze for a few more seconds, returning a comforting smile and feeling the warmth from her hands spread up through his skin, relaxing the tension around his heart. It was easing, with every day she was back. Slowly, he was becoming able to breathe again.
'Right!' he said, eventually, drawing his hand back to clap them together and sweeping his gaze over the food in front of them. 'Shall we get started then?'
'Oh, yes!' Jemma picked up a plastic plate. 'Before it gets cold.'
As she began loading up the plate with the Indian takeaway dish, Fitz understood what she was doing and picked up the other plate. Once she was finished, Jemma handed over the plate to him and he did the same for her, each of them having chosen the other's preference perfectly.
They ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes, Fitz glancing up every so often between his own mouthfuls to make sure Jemma was eating as well. It was slow going, but she was making progress on her meal, and there was still a small smile on her face.
'So,' he asked after a while, his mouth full of fried rice. 'How did you manage all this?' Suddenly, he narrowed his eyes. 'You didn't...'
Jemma rolled her eyes. 'No, Fitz, I did not leave this room. I did not even leave the bed. Honestly, you're as bad as Skye.'
Fitz exhaled, relieved.
'Okay, then how did you...?' He gestured to the food. 'Get...?'
Jemma gave a light shrug. 'Well, since you were back at work this morning, I had a few more visitors than usual. Lance and Bobbi. May, Coulson. Mack came as well, during his lunch break, actually.'
Fitz couldn't help feeling a stab of gratitude towards his friend for taking them time to check on Jemma when he couldn't.
;And then when they came,' Jemma continued with a little smile, 'if I happened to mention to them I had a certain hankering for a certain food type...' There was a smug glint in her eyes he had not seen in a very long time. 'It just sort of appeared.'
Fitz put down his fork. 'Jemma Simmons, did you guilt-trip our teammates into buying our dinner?'
'Oh, not guilt-trip, exactly,' she protested. 'There was just some...subconscious persuasion.'
Fitz snorted.
'And Skye got a lot of it, as well.'
'Oh, yeah? Was she in on this too, then?'
'Well, she had to be. I needed someone to get you for me.' Jemma picked up a chip and nibbled at it. 'Actually, once I mentioned the idea to her, she was very enthusiastic. Wanted to get candles and fairylights too.'
Fitz couldn't help a grin, and had to duck his face into his plate to hide it. 'Did she now?'
'Mmhm.' Jemma nodded. 'She also got me my hairbrush and a mirror from my bunk so I wouldn't look like such a mess...'
Glancing up at her sitting opposite him with her plate balanced on one knee and her hair drifting down over her shoulders, safe in the knowledge that she was right there and he could reach out anytime and touch her, Fitz wasn't sure that she could ever look like a mess. In fact, he doubted Jemma Simmons could ever look anything other than celestial.
'I like the flower,' he said and Jemma's fingers instantly went up to touch the petals brushing against her ear. 'Nice touch.'
'Skye's idea,' she admitted. 'She wanted to do my make up properly, but the food arrived and we didn't want it to go cold so she had to improvise, I'm afraid.'
Jemma tugged at the bottom of her t-shirt, brushing her hair back behind her ears self-consciously, and Fitz realised with a slight shock that she was feeling self-conscious about her appearance because of him.
'Jemma, I told you,' he said, softly. 'Everything about this is perfect.'
She looked up to meet his gaze, a flush creeping into her cheeks as she realised what he had said, what he had meant. It made her entire face light up, and in that Leopold Fitz could see his entire world.
They would have time to talk. They would have time to talk and to cry and to scream if that was what they wanted to do, if that was what they had to do. There would be time for that, because Fitz was going to make time for that this time around.
Right now, though, he only wanted to sit on Jemma's hospital bed and eat takeaway food with her, while marvelling over how he had ever gotten lucky enough to call her his best friend.
'There is a beer,' Jemma said suddenly, gesturing towards the medical fridge in her room where samples were kept. 'If you could...'
'Oh! Right.'
Fitz nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to pull himself off the bed to go over to the fridge.
'And how did you get this part of the meal, then?' he asked. 'More subconscious persuasion?'
'Well...actually, that part may have required some emotional blackmail of Lance.'
'Oh, really?'
'Mmm. Just a tad.'
Fitz allowed himself a small chuckle as he pulled open the fridge door.
The laugh died on his lips, though, as he was met with a neat row of sample tubes on the middle shelf, all of them filled with blood. Jemma's blood, freshly taken from the crook of her elbow and waiting for analysis in the morning.
A sour taste filled Fitz's mouth and he had to bite it back, as he remembered what they had had to go through, what she had had to go through, in order for them both to be here. And how much further there still was to go.
'Fitz?' Jemma's voice from behind him felt muffled and far away. 'What's wrong? Can you find it?'
But did it really matter how much further they had to go? Surely, what really mattered was that they did it the way they always did.
Together.
Fitz took a deep breath.
'Yeah.' He swiped the bottle of beer off the top shelf of the fridge and shut the door, turning around to flash a grin and shake it at her. 'It's here.'
Looking at the bottle, he gave it a little toss in his palm. 'But, uh, I was just thinking something...'
'Oh?' Jemma cocked her head at him. 'What are you thinking?'
'I'm thinking that for our next date we should go somewhere where they don't store their beverages with blood samples.' He looked up at her nervously, hoping she would hear his unspoken question. 'What do you think?'
He needn't have worried. Of course she heard it.
She was Jemma Simmons, and unspoken was what she did best.
Her face lit up again, and Fitz thought that it was like the first ray of sunshine after twelve days of darkness.
'I'd like that,' Jemma said softly, and a slow smile crept across her face. 'For our next date.'
She said the last word carefully, like it was made of stardust and might crumble if she spoke it too hard.
It sounded beautiful when she said it like that.
'Alright then.' Fitz grabbed two paper cups from the bedside table and twisted the cap off the bottle, pouring out the liquid into them. 'I know that technically, with your meds, you're not supposed to be drinking yet, but...'
'...I think for this we can make an exception,' Jemma finished, taking the cup he held out to her.
Fitz lifted his cup up, feeling that a toast was necessary.
'To...' he began, then trailed off as realised he probably should have thought of something to say before bringing the toast.
'To our next date?' Jemma suggested with a smile.
'To this date,' Fitz corrected her. 'Where everything is utterly perfect. Everything.'
Jemma giggled again, her face hidden in her cup.
Fitz raised his own paper cup to his lips with a grin, and drank. The beer was cold, and bitter on the back of his throat, but there was also a sweetness to the taste that warmed Fitz's lips as it seeped through to his heart.
It was a sweetness that Fitz dared to put a name to. It was a dirty, four-letter name that felt like spring days and prosciutto with mozzarella and feeling the warmth of Jemma's skin beneath his fingertips.
Hope.