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Jemma Simmons is a freak of nature.
Short on stature and large on brains, her legs feel too squat, her breasts too small, and her eyes and mouth too big and too wide and too naive.
That’s what she sees when she looks in the mirror. That’s the her she knows.
Impatient, bull-headed, and imperious, she knows how she appears to people - like one of those small, yappy chihuahuas, snarling at pit-bulls and charging at mastiffs, comical in her miniature fury. At seventeen and with two Ph.D’s, she’s desperate for someone, anyone , to take her seriously. To see her - if not as a peer, then as a threat, at least. To be anything but disregarded with a cheerful hair ruffle, like some cute kid, a little team mascot for the Science Academy, as though every time they muss her hair, it gives them good luck.
With a snap of her elastic, she tugs on her severe ponytail, willing the errant strands (which always seemed determined to haze out like some Albert Einstein halo half-way through the day) to stay put.
If her age makes her a kid, she thinks, tying her blue-striped tie into a half-windsor, then she had better stop acting her age.
She slings her oversized rucksack over a shoulder, ready to march. Halting suddenly, she turns on her heel and bounds towards her little vanity. The older girls - Women , she reminds herself, - they wear lipstick, not just a dab of mascara and some eyeliner.
She grabs the first tube in her sight-line, and with a quick slash-slash, nods decidedly, and dashes from the room.
Today is the day things will change.
She’s determined. Today is the day Leo Fitz will acknowledge her existence, instead of just one-upping her and staring at her with disdain. He has to. He’s been paired up with her in Chemical Kinetics Lab, after all.
Jemma Simmons is something like a miracle, Fitz thinks, his mouth dropping open unknowingly as she strides into Lab B13, brisk and imbued with purpose.
She is young and beautiful and strident and she’s done something with her face that she hadn’t before now, something that is drawing his eyes to her lips like a tractor beam, like her lipstick is an optical illusion forcing him to stare, until the creep-factor of the action overrides the desire, and he wrenches his gaze away.
She’s gorgeous, sure, but it is more that. Fitz had known, since that very first day in Orientation, when she’d sternly swatted the hand of an older cadet away from her ponytail and proceeded to harangue him about his feeble understanding of specialized xenobiological enzymatic systems, that they would get on.
He knew it.
How on earth he ended up getting paired with the only other child-prodigy near his age and intelligence, part way through term, when they’d been repeatedly paired alphabetically, was one of God’s mysteries. However, having struggled for the better part of two months trying to think up something clever enough to say to keep her interest, he is hardly going to question the ineffable nature of the Divine.
Dropping his pencil and slapping shut his notebook with a clatter (over the page with the many versions of his opening line and the casual non-sequiturs to follow), Fitz shoves off from the bench, standing with an uncoordinated stumble, like a baby giraffe, and motions for her to take a seat in beside him.
She gives him a cool once-over, her crisp lab-coat fluttering as she settles, depositing her rucksack. She’s wearing a blue striped button-down and a matching tie that hangs between the roundness of her breasts, and if it’s in an attempt to look masculine, he thinks, then it’s not working. Instead, there’s a reel of unbidden image swimming up behind his eyes, illuminating the sort of shapes her breasts would make of his shirts, and he feels a sudden warmth spread across his cheeks, and flooding his pants (puberty betraying him once again), and he turns away, sitting hurriedly, not even remembering to say hello.
And that is how it begins for them. They work in an awkward silence for almost fifteen minutes, setting up their workbench, until Fitz stops short beside the Integrity 10 Reaction station, glancing toward the other possible machines stationed for their use. He loops back towards their work table and stands beside her. His mouth feels like it’s filled with cotton balls, his throat with wax - somehow both thick and dry. He clears his throat, and motions for her laptop.
“May I?” He asks. It is not the line he had twelve variations for, but it is what comes to him, when he manages to jerk his eyes from the luscious, velvet red of her lips.
Jemma, fed up with being ignored and hating his silence and the way he’s insisting that he double-check her calculations, groans audibly, and shoves them at him. “You can double-check as many times as you please, they’ll still be correct,” She snarls, crossing her arms over her chest.
Fitz nods, ears reddening at her tone. He swallows, and tries again, tapping his finger to the track pad of his own laptop, comparing. “I know - that’s why I’m checking mine against yours - I want to make sure I’m correct too. Subatomic stoichiometry’s not quite my area, unlike yourself.”
“Oh,” Jemma says, blinking, dumb-struck, as if she hadn’t expected him to know her second Ph. D had been heavily focused on it.
The tightness around her mouth loosens, until, incongruously, her boldly-coloured lips bow into a shy (almost grateful) little smile.
Fitz’s heart thumps heavily in his chest. Now that’s progress , he thinks.
He gestures back towards the reaction stations. Nervousness trills up his spine and clatters against his ribs, a raucous brass band beating the bass of the heavy thump-thump of his heart when she looks at him like that, and he feels a bit wild with it - terror and courage all mixed up at once, and says, “Now I know Dr. Hall suggested we use the Integrity 10, but - an’ I’m just spitballin’ here, but I’m thinkin’ - even though it may take longer -”
“ -the OS1025 STEM Omni? But it can only hold -”
“ -but the temperature sensors are better, and the cooling plug -”
Jemma snapped her fingers, “-if we attach multiple lines -”
“Yeah,” Fitz agreed, grinning proudly, “An’ snitch a few of the benchtop units from B14 and 15-”
“-but we’d have to rig multi-communicatory feedbacks, and that could take -”
“-maybe an hour?”
“Really!?” She exhaled, eyes wide.
Fitz couldn’t tell if she was impressed or irritated. He rushed ahead, “But it’d save us -”
“-at least six. And be quite a bit -”
“-a precision improvement as well, yeah.”
And that was how it continued. At half past eleven, having tidied the lab, locked up, and trundled down to the B building entrance, it seems as though they are both dawdling, taking a spare moment for brain-storming between pulling on mitts and winding scarves, a quick joke as buttons are done up, and knit caps are pulled low over ears.
They step reluctantly into the bracing cold of a Boston November, and point to destinations in opposite directions. Fitz, awkwardly, puts out his woolen mitten to shake. Somehow, it’s funny. They both laugh, delighted and chagrined, because somehow, in the span of a few hours they had turned from silent acquaintances (or bitter rivals, if you had asked Jemma) into friends.
Three months have passed, and they are still both drunk with the newness of it, this friendship that seems to have tilted their axes to send them spinning about none so much as the other. They are still tipsy and sloppy and learning - toddlers to friendship, and feeling like perhaps this is more, perhaps this is larger (but they are new to it, and for geniuses, for the first time, it can be said that they don’t know any better).
They walk holding hands, because Jemma has misplaced her gloves (and friends hold hands, don’t they?), all the way to Jemma’s dorm building, excited for the new semester (they have chosen all of the same classes), and thrilled with their percentile averages for this one.
There is an uncharacteristic quiet that encompasses them. It’s like the floating snow is a cocoon, blotting out the rest of the campus in a haze of white. Fitz tilts his head down as he steps unconsciously closer. Eyelashes soft on his cheeks, he stares at his wet Chucks, in between quick, darting glances to her lips. A small, wry smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“What?” Jemma breathes, shuffling closer as he tucks her bare hands into the warmth of his pockets. His thumb is rubbing warm circles against the joint of her wrist, and it is frictioning heat throughout her limbs and across her blazing cheeks, and low in her belly.
The felted wool of her pea-coat brushes against his thick jumper, and even through layers of fabric, they can feel it. It trickles through them like melting snow, with clarity and presence and it is impossible to deny.
Fitz sucks in a breath, holding it in his chest until it warms. His gaze is riveted on that familiar shade of red lipstick.
“...Nothing,” He exhales, and then his feet slide closer, slipping between hers.
His head dips, wrenching his eyes from her lips to the stare at his left-pocket, their conjoined hands, the way she hasn’t stepped back, hasn’t reinforced her personal space, at the way she is happily crowded into him, and he to her, like they belong there.
Fitz licks his lip, and amends, his voice dropping low to mask the tremulous quiver. He thinks he knows why it’s there, and he thinks it must be the crossed-wiring of puberty and inexperience and the first close friendship he’s ever had - because it can’t be the other, not at seventeen and a half and barely knowing anything of the world. “I just - well, I always thought we’d be twice as good together.”
Jemma tilts her head up and smiles at him so fondly, it’s like dawn is breaking, and he basks in the yellow warmth of her regard, his grin going dopey and his eyes so soft.
Without quite knowing why, Jemma pushes onto her tiptoes, placing her free hand nervously onto Fitz’s lapel. She can feel the beat of his heart against the pulse of her thumb, and notes, absently, that they are beating the same time.
Her mouth is rose red, and caught, it seems, right at the point before bloom, frozen in indecision somewhere between a smile and something else - something shy and innocent and uncoordinated, as her gaze flickers between the pucker of Fitz’s bottom lip and his wide blue gaze.
She hovers here, a scientist trying to quantify her understanding, trying to run numbers against vague formulas that don’t make sense of what she feels against the conventional wisdom of the thing.
He can see it, though he only comprehends part. They are only inches from each other, their breath mingling in a fog between them. He watches her as the seconds break, as her near-smile falters, and as something he can’t describe flits behind her eyes.
It is something big and shattering, something that looks like fear (but can’t be, because she has dressed-down idiotic professors and shouted down an Ops Cadet with a gun without batting an eye - she is never afraid) and maybe like anticipation, and then he watches her shutter, watches her pack it away with a thick swallow.
She pats his lapel in a business-like manner, but can’t seem to help the way her finger-tips graze against the cold skin of his throat, burning like a brand.
As her heels descend, quick, like it caught her by surprise too, he feels a moist, hot pressure against the corner of his mouth and her hand wreathing around his neck as she hugs him fiercely.
He tilts his head, trying to capture more of the warm glide of her lips, but she pulls away with a stuttered gasp, blinking. Her hand slips from his, and he stumbles after the void of her warmth.
“You’re my best friend in the world.” She whispers, dazed.
Distractedly, her finger-tips curl against her lips. She peers up through her lashes at him, looking altogether spooked and half-wanting. With a discombobulated movement, she rocks forward, as if to meet him part-way, and then rethinks it, escaping into her dorm.
Fitz stands at the stoop, steaming breath into the cold, empty air.
He presses two fingers to the corner of his mouth, against his cheek, and pulls them back, staring at the red stain in confusion.
That was the first time she had kissed him.
There were more kisses. On cheeks, on hair, thoughtlessly done and carelessly placed - the both of them dropping the formalities of distance for the fondness of touch, the affection of closeness, and the comfort of really, really good friends - because close friends hold hands, and sometimes they kiss each other (not on the lips of course, but other places), and they snuggle on couches, pressing so close side-to-side the air can’t get through, and it’s a comfort, and it is above all, normal (isn’t it?).
Over the time that they have been partners and friends, Fitz has observed an interesting trait in Jemma. He wishes he could look at it with a scientific detachment, but he cannot seem to master it, not where she, his best friend in the world, is concerned. Fitz has noticed that when Jemma needs to feel confident, or in control, or to bolster her (already impressive, to him) bravery, she wears lipstick. Something bright and potent, that draws the eye to the shape of her words and the tenor of her voice and the surety of her tone, instead of the way her hands are wringing, or the way her eyebrows round in nervousness.
He had asked her once what shade she was wearing, offhand, trying to work it into the formula he’d been mindlessly concocting - the formula that made up her moods and her moments of strangeness and incongruity, and had expected a pantone number. Instead, he had gotten a name that made him blush deep into the collar of his shirt, and hastily stir the forgotten spoon in his tea. That one had been called Heavy Petting .
Tonight, she bustles around her dorm, stuffing her credit card in a tiny purse (she called it a clutch), tugging anxiously at the hem of her short black dress. Her tottering heels put her shapely figure right in his sight-line as he fiddles with some wires and a soldering iron at her desk, finishing up some improvements for their bio-engineering class. She glances at her watch, and then at the door, and then, when nothing happens, she repeats the action twice more.
“He’ll be here.” Fitz declares, aggravated by her incessant movement and her nervousness and the way she wore her red lipstick. He doesn’t deserve it - Tad will never appreciate the way it colours a mouth that forms sentences dripping with scientific brilliance and enthusiasm, won’t know why she wore it, because she is nervous and trying to make a good impression - will just think she’s a pretty girl, an odd duck, trying too hard.
Fitz sighs defeatedly, setting down his implements and raking his hands through his hair. “Now you’re making me nervous.”
Jemma squeezes his shoulder with a fond smile. The way her lips round making him think of cartoon characters like Jessica Rabbit. No one so clever and lovely should also be so beautiful. It makes things tug strangely at his chest and he dislikes how often as of late that he has to remind himself that they are simply best friends, simply platonic.
“What’s that one called, then?” He breaks his train of thought, heading as it is for a destination he is not yet ready to explore. He waves a finger towards her lips.
Jemma blushes prettily and shrugs, dipping a hand into her purse, and pulling out a metallic tube. She holds it out for him. Slowburn , it reads. He looks up from his seat and into her eyes, and gulps.
His gaze is artless and there is something magnificent there, all candor and blue-brightness, full and suddenly longing. Jemma sucks in a breath, wondering if what she’s seeing is real, or just imaginary. Just wanted.
There is a sudden knock on the door, and it startles her back, clutching at her chest in surprise.
“That’ll be your date,” Fitz mumbles, shoving himself to standing, looking away, embarrassed by what she must have seen.
He knows it flickers out every now and again, but it’s so hard to help it, when she’s the only one in his life, really. It’s simply attachment and fondness and a lack of anyone else to hold a candle to her, in friendship or otherwise. The never speak of it though. He thinks she’s most gracious in that, refusing to tease; that it’s just a mark of her kindness.
Jemma tips forward, her hands at his shoulders (of a height now, with those towering heels) and tilts her head gently, dropping a kiss to the corner of his mouth - half on his cheek and half not. Her breath tickles the skin of his cheek, and the warm moistness of her lips has his tongue itching to swipe at it, to taste it (and maybe her), but the moment his arms meet around her waist to pull her closer, just briefly, is the moment Tad knocks once again.
So he lets her go.
It is graduation, or more specifically, it is grad night, and they have crowded down into the Boiler Room, studiously avoiding Bartender Tad (because of that one disastrous date).
Fitz looks incomparably melancholy, leaning with his beer against a pillar, staring wistfully at where Jemma is dancing with a mutual friend from that semester, Selena. Jemma’s breathless smile drops suddenly. Downing the rest of her gin and tonic, she motions to the bar, letting Selena know where she’s heading (She won’t of course. She has not stood at that bar alone since halfway through second year). Instead, she stumbles tipsily (drunkenly), toward Fitz, who catches her about the waist, and rights her to standing.
“You look so lonesome!” She yells at his ear, so he can hear her above the din. If she is pressing her thigh against the inside of his, it is incidental and not purposefully done (of course).
None of his cadre of hero-worshipping cadets are nearby, and he appears like the quiet, pasty, handsome boy he had three years ago, brooding on his own, like when he had hated her and they had been rivals, and she can’t help but think back to the night she had first kissed him on the cheek, and muddled the boundary lines between them.
Fitz looks down at her for a moment, cradling the small of her back and pressing his leg between her thighs (they are both drunk and far less resistant than their sober selves would be), and there is something kindling in his look, like if she were to do anything, save breathe and remain still, it would strike a match that would set the whole place aflame, and burn them down with it. So she stands, hand fiddling absently with his tie, staring up into his eyes, pupils blown wide in the dimness.
“...just thinkin’.” He murmurs. She reads the words on his lips more than she hears them, and a thought flits across her synapses about how often her eyes are at his lips these days.
Her hand curls around his collar, tugging at his tie as she leans up into his ear. “About what?”
He closes his eyes, breathing in the scent of her perfume and the coconut smell of her hair, and the taint of alcohol on her breath, and runs his hand up and down her back, pressing her unconsciously closer. She does not mind, a small noise like a purr sounding in her throat as her breasts flatten against his chest. It tightens something in him, and he can’t lose her. Not now, not when things are so good, and so close, and it could all end tomorrow.
“Thinkin’ about assignments. How we could be split up.” His hand stills it’s vertical up-down pass, and his fingers clutch tightly at the small of her back. “I don’t want to.” His voice is thick in his throat and there are tears in his eyes, and of course it’s the alcohol talking, but he can’t hide how sensitive he is about it all - his best friend, the person he loves most (likes most. Likes .) How it could all be gone tomorrow.
Jemma’s hand winds around his tie, her other across his shoulders, sending sparks flying into his skin. “Oh, Fitz ,” her voice is low and tremulous and she says his name that way sometimes, and it sends pulses of heat through him like depth-charges, rippling out like he could combust with it.
He can’t help himself. She is wearing some soft shade of lipstick, pink and sweet and innocent and he feels so naive staring at it, tilting his head, bending at the waist as she pulls him closer, unsure of where this is leading, what this will become, how this could break them just as surely as tomorrow's’ assignments.
He pretends he doesn’t care, and she pretends she doesn’t notice, and when he tilts slightly to the left, his eyes flickering closed, mouth millimeters from that pink pucker, he believes there’s nothing left to lose.
Their lips slide indecisively to the side, catching corners first - disconnected. But they have never worked on the first try, and their strength is that they are stubborn and smart and that they never give up, especially not on each other, and so when the glide of her lipstick smears itself fully across the disappointed set of his mouth, he swallows her moan, and flicks his tongue into the tiny opening.
It is fleeting and sure, and broken unbearably soon, as he is shouldered violently by some goon in a baseball cap. Jemma stumbles from his grasp, eyes lighting on his with a tiny smile as she bites her lip, and he feels like he is the luckiest man in the world, until she clutches her stomach, pivots, and runs to the Ladies’.
The next morning, she wakes on his bathroom floor, covered in a blanket, and croaks, “Fitz? What happened last night?”
Fitz helps her sit up, grabs her a jumper to borrow and a glass of water to drink, and fills her in on the dancing and the drinking (but not the kiss, because she would be embarrassed, and he can’t deal with her telling him that it was a mistake, all a mistake, not today, when they are so close to losing each other anyway).
Absently, she stuffs the spilled contents of her purse back in her bag, and Fitz grabs for the tissues and lipstick that fell, quickly reading the label. It’s called Bittersweet , and it is, Fitz thinks, ruefully, handing it to her.
(They are not separated. It is a blessing, and Fitz again refuses to question the cosmos for putting them into alignment. They stay together for the next seven years, between sci-ops and the Bus, and onto the Playground. But it is only ten years in total, and things, as they do, are bound to change.)
Fitz wakes in the night, sheets tangled around his legs and his fingertips on his cheek, remembering the softness of her lips, and how ordinary it had been, then. How generous she had been with her looks and her simple touches, her fond pecks and that one, single, forgotten kiss that tasted like liquor and secrets.
Covers tossed back, he slams his feet on the ground, his sleepy, half-aware brain criss-crossing metaphors until he is thinking about the economics of love, and how he had invested his whole sum of it at two months past seventeen, into keen amber eyes and a mind that mapped at a dizzying light-speed, one that could run laps around his own, and a wide mouth painted a bold, brave red.
God, he misses her.
He scrawls a note, passes it under the door to Bobbi’s bunk. It reads ‘ Going to make a trade. Cover for me .’
She has not worn lipstick in a very long time.
It feels funny against her skin, like cling-film. Makeup in general feels heavy and strange - like the dirt and dust from that filthy planet, and it’s all she can do not to shower three times a day, just to feel clean.
More than that, she wishes she could wash off the film of guilt and lies and things unsaid, but they’re like her scars, and they won’t come off so easily.
Garner says to talk, to tell the truth, to be honest with herself, and like the scars, in time, the feeling will fade.
Garner is gone, and Will is dead, and if there is one thing Jemma knows for certain, it’s that she should not feel happy about any of these circumstances.
But she can’t help it. Her relief is like the flood, like she had been waiting forty days and forty nights just to see his face again, just for him to come back to her. If Hydra had any sense of her and who she was, how she felt, they’d have known that the aching, fractured cheekbone (pain applied directly to a small, singular point, does, after all, contain exponentially more agony than pain applied over the broadness of a body, to be absorbed over a larger surface area) was the wrong item to torture.
She would have gone willingly, recalculating shoddy work, staying up all hours reprogramming computers and logging numbers - hell, she would have thrown in complimentary pancakes, made from scratch, just to see Fitz again, whole and alive and well.
She is conflicted. She should be more sad. She struggles not to smile, not to touch him constantly, not to be within distance enough to feel his body heat and reassure herself that he is here, he is not lost. She had stuck her hand in his grip, that first night, flying in Zephyr One, and squeezed tight, refusing to let go, refusing to be without him for any longer.
There was a tautness in their muscles, a firmness in their hold, a fierceness to the way they clung together, on top of Fitz’s covers, like if they held on tight enough, their skin would meld and they’d become one being, and never, ever have to be separated again.
Love is a strange thing, to Jemma.
A strange, violent, consuming thing - a transforming thing, mutating her cells and the structure of her organs, like she had been syphoning more and more from the earth, like osmosis, and it had filled her up and swelled her out and grown with her, until she could no longer tell what belonged to her anymore, and what belonged to him.
Her nerves flickered and scintillated at his touch, and no one else’s (Not even Will’s. It had been dulled, like he’d been touching her through fabric, like there was a layer of insulation, and she’d tried, and she’d felt love for him, as much as she could have, with as much of her as had not already been claimed by someone else). Her stomach somersaulted and swooped and flew high as a lark when Fitz’s lips quirked into that half-smile, trying not to let the sun shine out of his eyes like he did, sometimes. Her circulatory system seemed intimately connected to the way he said her name, stopping and jump-starting and running too fast, like if it sped up, it would force her muscles to contract, her feet to move, and her lips to collide fully onto his, and God, did she want to. Oh, how she wished she could.
They are both healing though. Both in some strange period of stasis, balancing on the knife-edge of more-ness. She thinks of how close they had been, so many times, how intrinsically tangled up in each other they are.
She smooths her hair in the mirror, tucking a strand behind her ears, and reaches a shaky hand for the tube of lipstick. She thinks about how, if they had been chemicals and their struggles reactions, then stoichiometrically, they’d have to be more each other than they are themselves at this point, anyway.
She puckers her lips, pressing the deep red colour onto them, like heart's’ blood. Maybe if she wore it, right up front, he could see. He’d always been fascinated by her lipsticks - the shades and colours, even if she wore them rarer and rarer as she’d aged.
She wonders, blotting with a napkin, if he’d known why - if he’d struck on to the truth - that it wasn’t exactly about her above-average fashion sense, but more-so about feeling strong and secure and like it was a mask for the way she felt too vulnerable and too young and too scared of everything.
This is worth it, she tells herself, the nudge. The forceful footstep forward into the only uncharted territory left between them.
She will ask him to dinner. Someplace nice.
They stop outside her door. It is late, and the circadian lights are low.
There hadn’t been much talking after a while, as they lingered over their meals - the nervousness had faded, and there hadn’t needed to be. The quiet smiles and heated glances flickering through the candlelight had spoken of twisted sheets and lipstick stains and curled toes and that waiting, saturated knowing.
They had left quickly after that, paying the bill and driving a little too fast back to base.
Their clasped fingers run nervously over each other, like their words in the lab, like their lives since seventeen. Jemma licks her lips, and his mouth stutters open, his breath hitching in his chest.
“You’re wearing lipstick,” He points to her mouth, his eyes fixated, mirroring her as his tongue flicked out to wet his own.
Jemma nods and blushes.
“You haven’t in awhile.” His voice is hushed and thick, and he steps forward, reaching deliberately for the side of her face, his thumb stroking along her temple as he pushes an errant strand of hair behind her ear, the tips of his fingers curling around the shell.
She shivers at his touch, and turns into his hand, her eyelashes fanning against her cheeks. He feels a hot, hard pulse reverberate through him, dragging his palm ever so slowly against the curve of her face, tilting her chin softly with his finger.
“Do you like it?” She whispers, staring up at him through her lashes.
It is his turn to nod, watching her anxiously toy with a button on his shirt.
“What’s it called?” his accent rumbles densely from his throat as they migrate closer, leaning against the door.
“ Have Courage .” She murmurs, closing her hand into his shirt, over his heart, looking deep into his eyes like it is both a name and a desire.
He cannot say who initiates it - who steps into whom, or which of them presses their lips against the other first.
It is magnetic, two poles drawing together in a susurration of sighs, a longing finally met. Fitz palms her cheek, fingers furrowing into her hair as Jemma’s thumb trails down his jaw, pressing against his bottom lip.
He whimpers, breaking the chastity of it, his tongue searching for hers. She finds him, and they glide slick over each other, tasting. He tugs at Jemma’s waist, and she tugs at the door, and he gasps, breaking to breathe, his eyes a question mark.
Stepping backwards, one hand still fisted in his shirt, the other at the smudge of red on her lips, Jemma smiles shyly, and nods.
He brushes the back of his hand against his mouth, a smear of lipstick staining his skin red. He stares at it blankly for a moment. Have Courage .
His light eyes fall into the dark depths of hers. He cradles her face in his palms, kissing her deeply, and he follows.
(He has always followed her, just as she has followed him. Now is not the time to stop.)