Work Text:
"Jemma, where are we going?"
It's his eyes that kill her. She can see the concern and the despair behind them, and tendrils of warm regret threaten to choke her.
I would do anything—
She reaches over to squeeze his hand and finds that she cannot let go of it.
Once, she had watched the stars, her belly full of a predator turned prey, and basked in the victory she'd squeezed out of dust and rock. That night, as she laid by the ashes of her fire, she'd thought that there were no surprises left in this universe.
But she had not anticipated Fitz.
These past few months have been filled with as much wonder as there was tragedy, thanks to him. He has amazed her with his goodness, his kindness, and his unswerving devotion. And even now, as May goes through her preflight checks, she is astonished by him. She is astonished at the way he waded through the pain to get to her, how he is still with her.
How is he still with her?
"Jemma?"
Jemma, where are we going?
She opens her mouth to speak, but the words escape her.
"London," answers May.
Fitz looks over at May, then back at her.
"Are your parents there?"
Her parents—of course. He thinks this is for her.
"No," she says, shaking her head as she tries to smile, "it's just . . . it's just us, if that's alright. I thought we could . . ."
Back in her room, there is a drawer full of ideas, of plans, and she almost jumps up to run and grab it. Instead, she scoots closer, daring to lean against him, and she's overjoyed when he doesn't push her away.
Another one of his many surprises.
But she doesn't miss the way he winces, as if he's afraid she's going to leave instead of burrow into him.
I would do anything—
I would do anything.
Later, when the hum of the engines has lulled him into a peaceful sleep, Jemma unlatches her restraints and puts her head in his lap, daring to ghost her fingers over his knee. She has been doing this more and more lately, taking the opportunity when it is presented to her, and Fitz is such a heavy sleeper that she is yet to be caught. In her room that first night back, in the lab on restless nights, and now in the quinjet, Jemma has indulged herself with the nearness of him and a taste of the intimacy that is so precious to her. Someday, she hopes, she will not have to steal these moments. Someday, they will have no secrets at all. But even as she is calmed by his scent and his warmth, a dagger of guilt rips through her, and she knows that if things continue as they are, those days will never come.
Jemma, where are we going?
They touch down just as the sun rises, and she sits up with care and stretches in silence. Every sore muscle is worth it, because she gets to see the sun stream through the windows and onto the contours of his face. He still doesn't wake up, and she waits until the last moment to stir him with a gentle nudge to his shoulder.
"Huh, what?"
"We're here, Fitz."
"Oh. Right."
He gives her a smile he doesn't mean and unbuckles himself, and it's so hard to not kiss him right there that she has to look away. Soon, he's standing up and ready to go, and when he reaches out a hand, she lets him help her up. They gather their things as May shoos them out of the plane, and there they are in London, alone.
"Jemma, where are we going?"
"Hmm?"
He turns to her with such concern that her heart breaks a little.
"I know you have everything planned out, so . . ."
"Actually, I don't."
When his eyes go wide, she almost reaches for her drawer of notes before she remembers that it's an ocean away.
"I, uh, I thought you could pick."
He blinks at her. "Pick what?"
She shrugs. "Everything. We can spend the whole day doing whatever you want. All your favorite places."
Fitz looks to the left, then to the right, then back at her and says, "But we're in England."
She smile she can't hold back is paired with the ache of the distance she can't breach, but she tries to keep it out of her eyes. How she's survived this long without kissing him, she'll never know.
"I know we're in England," she teases. "This is, unfortunately, the best I could do under the circumstances. But you must have somewhere you want to eat breakfast." She raises her eyebrows at him. "So, where shall we go?"
She watches the wheels turn in his mind, and it takes a full minute of him just staring at her before his lips curl into a smile, and he all but breaks into a run towards a Tube station down the street.
"Come on, Jemma!"
She laughs so hard that she almost falls over.
They end up at some cafe in Covent Garden she's never been to before, and it's quite possible that he just picked the first place he saw. Still, she has the supreme privilege of watching him order enough to feed an army, and then try to eat it all. It's like he's seventeen again, but with deeper pockets. They manage to finish their meals at the same time, and it's so good to see the light in his eyes. If she'd known a good, English breakfast was a remedy, she would have made it for every meal.
He watches her over his last sip of tea, and some of the light fades.
"So," he says, "what's next?"
She shrugs. "What do you want to be next?"
The truth is that he has no idea, so they wander. They stroll through the streets, popping into any shop that catches Fitz's eye, and when they find themselves deep in the science section of a small bookstore, she feels him stare a question into the back of her neck. She keeps reading.
Really, she's known the question all along, but she can't answer it just yet.
At some point, they end up walking along the Thames, and Fitz is going on and on about various Doctor Who episodes that have been set in this very spot, and he's absolutely adorable. His hand swings back and forth as he walks, teasing her.
In another life, she could take that hand and never let go.
She must have been born in the wrong universe.
I would do anything—
"I lied," she blurts out, and Fitz stops dead in his tracks. Something flashes across his face, like he always expected it to be a lie, and she's so tired of the sadness that seeps into every smile. She wants him to be free of it.
"I mean . . . I do have something planned. If that's okay."
He shoves his hands in his pockets. "What is it?"
"Well, um," she croaks, "the uh, the Royal Observatory Greenwich?"
His eyes snap up to hers.
"We've never been there," he says, almost in a whisper.
"That's because you said it was a waste of money," she teases.
"Well," he says, rocking back and forth on his heels, "it's a special occasion, right?"
He says it like a joke, but she can hear the question behind it.
Jemma, where are we going?
She swallows. "Shall we . . . shall we go then? I know it’s a bit far, but we have time."
He considers for for a moment, then nods and walks off, only to stop and turn around when she clears her throat and shakes her head at him.
"That way. Right."
Fitz complains as they trudge up the hill to the observatory, but he's the first to admit that the view is more than worth it. The entirety of London spreads out before them, and she's just about to brush her fingers against his when he moves away from her, up the stairs, past the twenty-four hour clock, and towards the observatory itself.
It's once they're inside that she gets to see it: the thrill of discovery that lights him up from the inside out. They walk through all kinds of exhibits, each related to the study of time. Jemma has no idea that so many clocks existed, but Fitz seems too fascinated by the cogs and gears to notice the scope of it all.
In honor of the love affair between time and the sea, the exhibit is full of ship models and explanations of how time was kept on them. This is the history of time and how people have tried to tame it, from crude beginnings all the way to the atomic age.
And yet, it seems, time remains as feral as ever.
They comb through every inch in reverent silence, and she can almost see the synapses firing in Fitz's brain as he studies each mechanism in awe, figuring out how they work and how to make them better. It's not until they've seen everything that he seems to notice the world around him again, and he shakes his head as if coming out of a daze. She smiles at him.
But he pales when they pass the planetarium, and when he turns to her, his eyes do not carry the accusation that she expects. Instead, he seems resigned, defeated. This is the only planetarium in the whole city, the one reminder of the thing that broke them apart, and she lead him right to it.
"You should go in there," he says, "talk to the scientists. You've seen things they've only dreamed of."
The creaking in his voice horrifies her, and she goes into a panic, because she planned this, planned on digging up these feelings so they could work their way through them, but the plan has backfired. He's spiraling out of control.
"I think they're better off not knowing," she says, cutting him off, and it might be scientific treason, but it's true. Fitz looks at her in disbelief, but she doesn't give him a chance to question her before does the most desperate thing she can think of and says that they should go see the meridian line. She goes off in search of it and she's relieved when she hears him following.
They take their place in the queue, and she knew it would be long. She researched the average traffic, read online reviews, and calculated all the variables. And now, she and Fitz are stuck here, together.
This is the moment she's been waiting for and dreading, this is the whole purpose of this short holiday. They are trapped here as the elephant in the room looms above them, and eventually, he'll have to talk to her.
So she bites her lip and waits.
The line moves slowly, and she can only imagine what Fitz is thinking right now. She can feel the questions brewing within him, so he has to sense that she also has hers. He has to know this was a trap from the beginning.
I would do anything—
"When is May coming to get us?" he asks. She swallows.
"Eight o'clock sharp. We should have just enough time."
Fitz furrow his brow and nods, turning away from her. She has to fight back the urge to reach out and pull him back.
"And this . . . this is what you wanted to see? Out of everything? After . . ."
He trails off and takes a deep breath, and she would wrap him up in her arms if he'd let her. She would hold him close and stroke his hair and let him breathe out all of his pain.
But he won't let her, and he won't speak to her either, and the buzzing of panic turns into a shout.
"Will would have hated this," she blurts out, surprising herself as much as she surprises him. "All of it. He never wanted to travel, can you believe it? Well, not like this. He wanted adventure, not culture. Not discovery."
For a second, it's like Will is simply somewhere else, back at the Playground taking a nap or playing video games with Mack. But then the realization of his death crashes over her once again, and it almost knocks her off balance. It feels wrong to speak of the dead like this, to say anything less than praise about of a man who died to save her, now matter how true it is.
But she does it for Fitz.
"And he would be bored to death here; I'm certain of it. Too much science." She smiles at the memory of him, at the way he used to exasperate her when they were balancing opposites. But Fitz sees the smile and looks at his feet like he's caught her in the nude.
"I'm sure he would have jumped at the chance to be here. With you," he says.
Jemma's heart sinks so low that she steps forward into his space, close enough that he can't avoid looking up at her.
"I never would have brought him here, Fitz. We'd both be miserable."
"Well I'm sure he'd be thrilled to be anywhere on Earth after being on that planet, and you would've—"
"We had nothing in common!"
It's not until she hears her voice echoing that she realizes that she almost yelled it. She looks around at the people staring, and Fitz pinches the bridge of his nose.
"I've read the articles about him," he counters, speaking slowly and quietly despite the way he's shaking in frustration. "You don't have to pretend that he wasn't—"
He is cut off by the thud of her against his chest, because she can't hold herself back any longer. She clings to him, feeling the shock ripple through his body. But he doesn't push her away. Instead he takes a deep breath, and she hears the question before he asks it.
Jemma, where are we going?
"I would do anything, Fitz."
"What?"
She looks up at him, and somehow he towers over her, so confused that she wants to shrink into nothing. She could easily start spouting chemical formulas or complex equations, but words are so hard.
"Fitz, when I was on that planet . . ." She shudders at the memory, at the shame of what she's about to confess, but she can't see anyway out of it. "I, uh, I really, truly believed I'd never see you again, and I . . . it was like, it was like dying. And Will, he was—he was dying with me. That's what it was. I know you think it's . . . it's not that. It's . . ." She pinches her eyes shut and tries to bury herself in him. "And I don't want to die anymore, Fitz. I want—I want you to know that."
She's afraid to move, not only because she's being very un-English in the English-est of places, but because she's terrified of what she'll see on his face. He says nothing, and after a while, she untangles herself from him. She, Fitz, and the throngs of tourists around them pretend that nothing unusual happened. But she knows, and Fitz knows, and he must be mind-boggled, too. He must be sifting through the evidence and coming to the same conclusion she came to three days after she knew that Will was dead.
But Fitz declines to share any findings, if any, and after an eternity of silence, they get to the front of the queue.
It may be a little silly to wait for an hour to see a line on the ground, but it doesn't feel that way.
"The prime meridian," says the guide, "is the divide between the eastern and western hemispheres. It's along this line that each day ends, and another begins. You could say that this is the beginning of time itself."
She dares to glance at Fitz, and finds him caught up in serious reflection. And as much as she knows that this is an arbitrary line drawn in the sand (or, in this case, cobblestones), it's a testimony to human mastery over time. If people can decide when time begins and ends, surely they can decide when to close a chapter and start a new one. So when it's her turn, Jemma goes to stand on the side of the eastern hemisphere, all ten toes on the line, and she reaches her hand out to Fitz. He stares at her for a second, mouth open, and she's afraid that this really is the end. She's afraid that it's been too much, and he really is done with her. But then, he takes her hand, and they cross the line together.
And when it's time for them to leave and give someone else a turn, he doesn't let go.
It's not too long after that when they're almost in the same place they started, still hand in hand, waiting for May to arrive. Somewhere down the silent street, a window opens, and a soft melody drifts down to them.
"Is this what this was all about?" Fitz asks, his eyes wide. "Starting over?"
Jemma, where are we going?
I would do anything—
She opens her mouth to tell him that no, it's something else, something close, but different. Something she doesn't really have words for. But that is when the music gets just loud enough for them to hear the haunting lyrics:
I know you haven't made your mind up yet,
But I will never do you wrong.
I've known it from the moment that we met,
No doubt in my mind where you belong.
I'd go hungry; I'd go black and blue,
I'd go crawling down the avenue.
No, there's nothing that I wouldn't do
To make you feel my love.
And that's it, she thinks. That's the answer.
"Jemma."
When she looks at Fitz, and she sees that he knows, that he really knows, she decides that she doesn't have to stop herself from kissing him anymore.
They have been doing this dance for years and for decades, and it is time for them to learn a new step.
She moves towards him slowly, boldly, and when her hand rests on his chest, she waits until he registers the intent in her eyes. When he understands, her other hand slides up his neck and pulls the two of them together, and this is not a flare or a grease fire. They are two tectonic plates, following a trajectory that has been set since creation. They collide deliberately, powerfully, inevitably, with an eternal heat hot enough to melt the solid rock beneath them. This is not a kiss of desperation, hunger, or need. This is a woman who is getting exactly what she wants. This is a man who finally understands what he is worth.
This is a hard-earned victory.
This, she hopes, is enough to dispel the shadows in his heart and usher in the dawn of a new day.
"It's me?" he finally asks, half in disbelief, half in wonder. She can't stop the smile from spreading over her face, because his lips were warm and his heart is made of gold.
"Oh, Fitz," she says, playing with the hair on the back of his head, "how could it ever be anyone else?"
And when May finds them only a few minutes later, wrapped up in each other and practically humming with joy, she doesn't seem surprised at all. She simply smirks at them and leads the way to the quinjet, paying them very little attention when Fitz leans in for another kiss and Jemma sighs in contentment.
Agent May, it seems, has known the answer all along.