Work Text:
It was so easy with him. Easier than it had any right to be. Than she had any right for it to be. His body beside hers wasn't a new phenomenon, but the sensation was novel. It was much quieter than she expected. Peaceful. Like something had shifted ever so slightly and slipped into place. Like a fault had snapped, the earth had settled, the tsunami had passed, and in its wake was the simple calm of normalcy. It was mundane. It was delicious.
"What ya thinkin' about?" he said beside her ear. She'd thought he was asleep still, wrapped up in her the way a vine clings to a tree.
"You," she said.
"I'm right here."
She looked at him. "I know." A slight question in her voice.
"So you're starin' off a thousand light years in the distance."
"I was just thinking. About... this. Us, I mean. Well, no I was... I don't know."
"I know," he said. "Tell me."
"I can't."
He whined, a keening sound that wasn't truly a whine. A joke almost. A brief expression of dissent. He wanted to hear her voice. She knew the feeling. Like you'd give everything and more just for a word or two. Just for that familiar cadence to light up the well-worn pathways in your brain. For everything to be okay.
"Fitz, there's no word in any language on Earth for this." For them. For whatever this was. "Or in the universe, for that matter. And I won't use one that's lesser. It might... might damage it." It still felt fragile. Breakable. Untenable. It felt like spun glass or an arch without a keystone. One wrong move and the whole thing would tumble down.
"You know how I feel," he said, nuzzling against her breastbone.
"Yeah," she said softly.
"Well—"
"You've never told me, Fitz. You've shown me. I can't do the same. I don't know how."
He settled in against her chest, head pillowed against her pectoral. Not even the meat of her breast. Like he was content just to feel her heart beat against her rib cage. Just to trace the warm pads of his fingers against her bones. "Well, give me words."
That's all they'd ever had before, wasn't it? Words. And then words had stopped being enough and that was when things had gotten hard. Or maybe words had never been enough but trying to live completely through spoken language had held them captive for years. Trapped by linguistic inadequacies. And then they had lost even words.
She was tired of being captive.
"I feel..." she took a deep breath and let it out in a measured stream, like an athlete on the starting block or a nervous professor about to lecture. "I feel about you the way the grass must feel about the sun." His hair. She had missed his hair. When it was long it made him look like a mischievous little boy. Short as it was now—well, she'd cut her hair in mourning once before as well. It tickled her fingers. "I feel the way... the moon... feels about the Earth." She nestled him in closer, like there was any closer to go. "I feel the way honey bees must feel about flowers." He was so warm. So solid. Impossible for this to be imagined. "I feel like... like dark matter."
"Dark matter?"
"Yes, like... like there's some force that you can't see and can't detect and can only know is there because the calculations say it must be. There's no other explanation. But even though you can't see it, it keeps everything from flying apart. And I feel grateful."
"That's a word in an earthly language." He was warning her away from that minefield. There were places they weren't ready to go. Topics that were too raw to revisit.
"Well, that's one part of how I feel. Because whatever..." she took a deep breath. "I mean of all the people..." Simmons stopped again. "Well, what are the chances that we ever met?"
Fitz rolled his eyes upward, squinting as he ran the calculation. "Technically, I don't think that question is even possible to answer." She loved his breath on her skin. "The population of Earth isn't static, for one, and you'd have to narrow the parameters to our age group, interests, ambitions—what?"
She was grinning at him. She couldn't keep the smile off her face. It made her cheeks hurt and then it made her chest hurt and then it made her eyes leak. She kissed his temple and pulled his head into the crook of her neck. "I feel about you the way a lonely, anxious weirdo who rarely had friends feels about the one person in the universe who ever understood. Who made her feel like a person instead of a...." Instead of what? Well, he knew. He had to know. He'd been there too. "You are..." she plucked at the collar of his shirt. "You are my favorite collection of atoms in the whole of time and space. And neither time nor distance, or..." she added, "or misunderstanding can break the laws of science."
It was a pretty speech. She must have been thinking about it for months, really, for it to come out so nicely. It floated in the air above them. She tensed under its weight. Funny how, no matter what he said or did, she always felt like she was about to be eviscerated when she laid herself so bare. Like, all of a sudden, the whole thing would be revealed as an elaborate practical joke. That had happened to her before. Taunted to underscore just how bizarre and unlovable she was. Her heart hammered in her chest. It was an old worry that was hard to break. It was the terrible chance, no matter how slim, that she might lose him.
"You are a weirdo," he said against her skin, lips caressing away any wound from his words. "But I feel the same way."