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Fitz looks like Fitz once they’re properly face-to-face, blinking at Jemma and fiddling with his hands – he could never keep them still – hair cropped a bit shorter, wearing the ghastly cardigan that always reminds Jemma of her granddad, his frailty, dementia, but always reminds Fitz of home.
Fitz feels like someone else entirely. She takes a few tentative steps forward like the distance is what’s confusing her, making it difficult for her to decode his microexpressions. For a decade she’s had a Fitz-shaped instinct, and now, when she needs it most, she feels it malfunctioning, lying in a heap of scrap metal at her feet. Maybe the workmanship had always been shoddy, is what she thinks, all the while smiling because she’s supposed to be a glass-half-full kind of girl.
She wants to tell Fitz to say something, hysteria starting to bubble in her stomach. If they’d built their relationship on anything, it was the freedom to speak their minds, to push each other to be better. Theirs was an exquisitely formed symbiosis born of sixteen continuous years of being lonely and misunderstood. Was. She doesn’t remember when they became a past tense. Theoretically she knows that’s how it works with brain trauma. The damage is rarely confined to physiology, neurology. It’s a hammer blow that sends cracks running in all directions with the potential to raze anything to the ground, no matter how exquisitely formed.
But Fitz just keeps staring, with those eyes that make Jemma want to burst out of her skin and shrink to an infinitesimal speck all at once. He never used to look at her this way, like he’s sinking to the bottom of the ocean with no lungs or legs and she’s the pinprick of light above the surface.
So she blurts out, “How’ve you been?” and knows it’s a colossal fuck-up, even before Fitz parts his lips and breathes.
*
She’s worrying that the tea is too tepid for Fitz, who likes his hot beverages hot enough to short-circuit his taste receptors, when she spots Mack at his workstation, having said something to him that makes him look – familiar. So familiar, so normal, so Fitz that she feels her lungs momentarily crushed, and thinks spending one more day at HYDRA’s lab hearing about gleeful plans of mass slaughter would be preferable to this. She thinks about running, running far, far away, extricating herself once and for all because people change, people move on, people are unbearably human – and then she digs her heels in. She’s already made the bloody tea.
“Hey, Simmons,” Fitz says when he notices her, straightening like May just caught him goofing off. “The explosives Mack was just – he saw the, um – ”
He struggles but doesn’t look angry or frustrated, just taps Mack’s arm with his pen.
Mack, understanding his cue, says, “Yeah, he kept mentioning backlogged files, and, you know, half the stuff he says is nonsense – ”
“No, it’s not,” Fitz cuts in, glancing between Mack, who laughs outright, and Jemma, who still wants to run.
It’s the camaraderie, the banter, but mostly it’s how Mack makes it look both simple and easy, throwing her flaws into sharp relief, her intuition for science but never for people, even when Fitz has never been people, he’s –
It’s what she’s still stuck on late that evening, sat in the kitchen with her fourth cup of tea in as many hours, picking it apart like a specimen in the lab, except her technique isn’t clinical, it’s haphazard, clumsy, ugly – messy. She supposes that’s the natural cause and effect, when something climbs into your chest and curls up in your heart, somehow both small and terrifyingly immense.
“Mind if I join you?”
Bobbi is there when she turns around, hip against the counter with a half-smile and the aura of a Greek warrior goddess even in yoga pants and an oversized Rolling Stones t-shirt that’s gone through one too many washes by the looks of it.
“Only if you admit The Beatles are far superior, musically and lyrically,” Jemma smiles back.
“Gladly,” Bobbi says, tipping her head then plucking at her shirt. “This is actually – never mind. Today was a hell of a day.”
“There’s a bit more tea in the pot if you’d like,” Jemma says. “As we Brits say, keep calm – and so on and so forth.”
They fall silent for a minute as Bobbi pours herself a mug before taking a seat across from Jemma.
She takes a sip, humming lightly. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for you, seeing Ward again.”
Jemma shrugs, because it’s a beast she doesn’t care to prod willy-nilly. It’s something else that’s changed, this dark, raging thing that’s sunk its teeth in her – or maybe has her teeth in it. All she knows is if she dwells on it long enough, she tastes blood, and if she’s learned anything in the field, she’s learned that’s not something she can come back from.
So she says, “That’s – not what’s keeping me up,” which is one version of the truth.
“Ah,” is all Bobbi says for a while as they nurse their tea, and then finally, “so, how long were you two a – thing?”
“A thing? Fitz and I?” Jemma laughs, and it sounds so contrived she wants to bang her head on the table, which, as it happens, is how she currently feels about life, generally. “No, I mean, we never – I mean, I never dreamed – ”
“Whoa, slow down there,” Bobbi grins, eyes dancing the bloody dance of the sugar plum fairy, “you don’t need to spill your guts all at once.”
Jemma stares down at her mug miserably, thinking this is why she’s never broken any laws, even a tiny one.
“I’ve gotten the bare-bones story,” Bobbi says, tentative. “You and Fitz at the bottom of the ocean, stuck in a storage pod, using your wits to survive. Except you came out of it whole and he – didn’t.”
Jemma remembers the water slamming into her like a hundred punches to the stomach, not precisely because memories dull over time but well enough that she still struggles to breathe, still wonders if she could’ve reacted quicker, swum harder, or forced Fitz to live. Intellectually, she knows there’s no use in imagining counterfactuals, but she’s imagined them regardless. For all Fitz is the more resilient one, she’s always been more patient.
“He – I can see he’s been coping better and better. He’ll be back to nor – he’ll be just fine, I know he will. I – ” she swallows, feels the words crowd into her throat, clamoring to be heard after all these months oppressed, sees Bobbi watching her without judgment or expectation, and says in a rush, so heady it’s painful, “He told me he loved me. Well, I mean, not those words exactly. He said I was more than a friend to him, he said – he said he hadn’t found the courage to – until we were trapped in a box 90 feet underwater, and all I had time to think was, oh god and you are bloody unbelievable, and – ”
“Hey, hey, breathe, Jemma, breathing’s good,” Bobbi says, laying a hand over her wrist.
Jemma does what she’s told and inhales sharply, then takes a shaky sip of her tea.
“Then he was in a hospital bed, so pale, silent, for nine days. Nine of the longest days of my life,” she confesses, easily even though there’s nothing remotely easy about it. She couldn’t remember a time when their conversations were ever one-sided, with Fitz wordless and Jemma getting sick of the sound of her own voice. And even then, even when the literature on the neurological responsiveness of coma patients was inconclusive at best, she had talked anyway. She’d told him his favorite engineering jokes, then pictured him grinning back, eyes bright with the mischief she reckons had gone underappreciated most his life. She’d taken them on trips down memory lane – back to the Academy, late nights playing pool in the Boiler Room with Doctor Who paraphernalia and mini video-equipped drones for stakes, the time Jemma set off a small explosion in her room after miscalculating the oxidation potential of her compounds and Fitz kicked her door down fearing she’d perish in the flames – because she couldn’t stop thinking about impaired long-term memory, about the positive probability that Fitz would forget them, forget her. And every time she’d taken his hand, hers had shaken at how weightless he felt, like she was still in the ocean, dragging him, lifeless, behind her.
“But it was almost worse when he woke up,” she continues, eyes damp; they always are now, on the subject of Fitz. “He just stared at me, confused, and there was – so much I wanted to say and no way to say them, to get through to him.”
“Do you love him back?” Bobbi asks, clearly not the sort to beat about the bush.
“Of course I love him. He’s my best friend in the whole – ” Jemma stops when Bobbi gives her a pointed look, clearly also not the sort to take shit from anyone. “Okay, all right, I – I don’t know. I can’t imagine my life without him. It’s all very confusing. I just – I want my best friend back.”
She wants to go hide in her bunk, bury her face in her pillow and pretend she’s back home with the smells of her mum’s treacle tart wafting from the kitchen. Then Bobbi gives her arm a light squeeze.
“We can’t make the world stand still, no matter how much we want it to. It keeps moving, and we have to learn to move with it.”
“You make it sound easy,” Jemma smiles a little, wiping at her cheek.
“I’ve fallen on my face so many times it’s embarrassing, believe me,” Bobbi tells her, mouth twitching. “And it’s almost as painful making yourself get up and try again. But you strike me as a fast learner.”
“When it comes to science, sure,” Jemma shrugs tiredly. “This? Not so much.”
Bobbi exhales. “Yeah, well, when I figure it out I’ll let you know. In the meantime, just talk to him, okay? Say all those things you wanted to say before you use up all your chances.”
Jemma looks at her and thinks about asking for her story, sensing it already, running through her deep and ragged.
In the end, Jemma just says, “Okay.”
*
Jemma’s in the lab, staring at sterilized Petri dishes and imagining Coulson possessed by an unknowable alien entity, when Fitz walks in, which makes her look up, blink, and stare some more because Fitz feels out of place here, and she’s not quite sure when that happened.
“I just needed to pick up, um – specs for the – so I can, um,” Fitz mumbles, left hand on his hip, right hand waving in the air like there’s a specter of Mack there, supplying him with the words in between.
“Fitz, I’d like to say something, and I’ve turned it over and over again in my head for months, except now I realize – ”
“Simmons, don’t, there’s no need, I don’t – ” Fitz interrupts, eyes widening in panic.
Jemma cuts in again, frustration flaring, at Fitz, at herself, at the world for bringing them full circle, to that point where they were achingly awkward and terrified of saying all the wrong things. “Fitz, no, shut up. Shut up and listen because I can’t take it anymore, this elephant in the room that simultaneously feels like a ticking time bomb. What you said to me down there – ”
She wavers for a second, feeling at least as scared as Fitz looks – Fitz looks ashen and defeated and vulnerable, which threatens to pull her heart right out from its roots. But then she steels herself, draws strength from the convictions she’s always had in spades, because she remembers what Fitz said down there but more than that, she remembers how extraordinarily brave he was in his self-sacrifice and she thinks it’s her turn now.
“I didn’t know what to think at first, there’s was no time. And then you were – and then I was – ” She gives herself a mental kick. Her brain works magnificently on its own, but in tandem with her heart – that’s a different matter entirely. “I love you, Fitz, you know that. You’ve been by my side for so long that when you’re absent, it’s like a part of me is missing, hollowed out. You’ve seen me at my best and my worst, you make me think I can be better than I am, always, and somehow you still assure me that I’m exactly who I want to be. And – not so shockingly – it’s taken me all this time to figure out that – that’s not normal, it’s extraordinary. It’s something you find once in your lifetime if you’re lucky. So, what I’m saying is, I’d – I want you to be more. I want us to try. That is, if you still – ”
“Yes,” Fitz says, low and a little broken, still looking scared but maybe, this time, in all the right ways. “I meant every – every word I said in that pod, and I still do. I just – you left and took whatever, um – whatever, damn it – whatever scrap of hope I had left with you and – ”
It’s too much, Jemma feels too much, so she just covers the distance between them in two strides and kisses him. She reaches up and runs a palm across the stubble that’s been driving her mad all week, feels Fitz shiver, and kisses him, presses in a bit too energetically and feels their teeth click.
When she pulls away, lips tingling with his warmth, he only allows her one breath before dragging her in again, and it’s more measured this time, deliberate and attentive, their mouths fitting together without a fuss, Fitz’s hands – long dexterous hands – framing her face, and one of hers sliding up his chest, seeking his heartbeat.
This time as she moves back, she lets her teeth catch against his lower lip, just a little, and it elicits a groan, low in his throat, that sends tremors down to her toes. She takes stock of the physiological responses, the quickness of his breath, the dilation of his pupils, the lovely flush across his cheekbones, all markers of lust, which she decides isn’t bizarre at all. It’s brilliant, actually.
“That was – brilliant,” Fitz says, a little dazed, then swallows. “I must be dreaming, pinch me.”
She obliges, targeting the ticklish spot under his fourth rib, making him jump and yelp as he slaps her hand away.
“You asked for it,” she says, one eyebrow delicately arched.
“That’s exactly what dream-Simmons would’ve done so it – it proves nothing,” he huffs, hands migrating to her waist, as if now that he finally has her, he’d be daft to let her go.
She looks at him thoughtfully. “You dream about me, do you?”
“No! Of course not, I, uh, only meant – that is, you would never – I don’t,” he finishes lamely, eyes darting back and forth between her face and his feet.
She drops her forehead onto his shoulder to hide her smile. “That’s all right. If you do, I mean.”
They stand there in silence, and it’s the most comfortable, most unburdened moment they’ve shared since the day they’d sat on the ocean floor and found solace in the first law of thermodynamics.
“I still think about – once in a while – how we could’ve been mon – monkeys,” is what Fitz says next, against her hair.
She doesn’t move, just clutches him tighter. “Swinging from branches with our prehensile tails without a care in the world. Still, I’m glad we’re here, alive. That we’re still us.”