Chapter Text
11:59pm, 14th September 2003
The music is blaring and the lights are flashing, and in order to combat the throbbing headache he is developing at the base of his skull, Fitz picks up another tequila shot and necks it back.
Which probably isn’t the best idea he’s ever had.
The club around him spins, its red and blue lights fusing painfully to create violet shapes on the back of his eyelids, and for one terrible moment, Fitz thinks he is going to end up falling flat on his face on the floor.
But then Jemma is in front of him, her eyes bright with promises and her cheeks glowing with her last vodka shot. She grabs his hand excitedly, the single stabilising force in the universe keeping him steady on his feet.
She twines his fingers in his, her forehead bumping hard against his own as she giggles, reaching out a hand for the next shot lined up on the bar. Fitz is just about to raise his voice, tell her that maybe she’s had enough, that maybe they’ve both had enough, but the amount of alcohol in his system has made him sluggish and Jemma is pulling a face and putting the glass back down again before he’s even managed to open his mouth.
‘Dance,’ she demands, using her other hand to take his wrist and pull him backwards onto the dancefloor with her.
Fitz allows himself to be pulled, and once they are in the middle of the dancers he twirls her, around and around, until she is giddy with laughter and her face is alight and he knows with the surest of certainty that he would follow her anywhere she wanted to go: half way across the globe to chase down their dreams, into this really rather dodgy club on Doncaster high street, or into this kiss, as she falls into his arms and their lips brush together in the lightest of touches.
Fitz’s breathing hitches and his hands move slowly to Jemma’s waist where he holds her as they sway unsteadily on their feet, their faces so close together that he can feel her breath, hot and heavy on his neck. Jemma’s eyelids flutter and, very carefully, she tilts her face upwards towards him and Fitz watches her mouth quiver.
The instant her lips touch his again, prising them softly open with her tongue, the whole club around him falls away, crumbling to pieces in a wake of a supernova. As her hands work backwards into his hair and his move to press her closer to him, Fitz decides that the whole world could come to an end around them and he probably wouldn’t notice, not as long as he could continue kissing his best friend the way he has wanted to for his whole life.
This, he thinks, this is the beginning.
10:04am, 15th September 2003
This is the end, Jemma thinks miserably.
The thin strip of light shining through her bedroom curtains is far too bright for her eyes to handle and the sound of footsteps on the stairs is so loud that she buries her head further down into her duvet in hope of muffling it. When the door to her bedroom creaks open, the sound seems to spit all the way through Jemma’s skull and she moans, peeking her head out of her blanket cocoon to glare at whoever it is who dared to disturb her on this of all mornings.
Standing in the doorway is Leopold Fitz, her next door neighbour, best friend of fourteen years and quite possibly the only person in the world she could stand to see right now. He gives her a rueful grin.
‘Lance let me in,’ he says, in response to her unasked question. He is taking care to keep his voice low, Jemma notes. ‘He was even smugger than he usually is.’
‘Oh, really?’ Jemma squirms to one side so Fitz can flop down on the bed next to her, wincing with the effort. ‘Why’s that?’
Fitz kicks off his shoes and pads across her carpet towards the bed. He seems to hesitate before moving to lie down next to her, which Jemma thinks is a little strange. After nearly a decade of friendship, it makes no sense for him to be shy around her now.
‘Well, if I had to go out at three o’clock in the morning to pick up my sister and her best friend from outside a club when they were both too drunk to find a taxi rank on their own, I reckon I would be feeling pretty smug too.’
‘God.’ Jemma moans, covering her face with her hands as her cheeks flame. ‘Three am?’
‘Yeah.’ Fitz lays his head down next to her feet. His own are propped up on the pillow next to her hair and she pulls a face before pushing them away from her. ‘It was…quite a night.’
His voice is filled with a kind of nervous hopefulness and Jemma doesn’t quite understand why it’s there. She shakes her head, then deeply regrets the action as her head spins and she groans again.
‘I think you’ll find it was more of a nightmare.’
Jemma’s hands slip down her face, which is burning with humiliation. Now that she’s trying, she finds that she can’t remember anything past about eleven o’clock the night before. Her mind is drawing a total blank, and she is filled with horror at how extensive the gap in her memory is.
Anything could have happened in that time.
Fitz falls silent for a minute. Then his hand comes up to rub comfortingly at her knee, which is poking out of the duvet at an angle and Jemma hears him lick his lips before he speaks.
‘So, um, what…what do you think we should do about it?’
‘Nothing,’ Jemma groans. ‘God, I’m so embarrassed…’
‘…but you don’t have to be…’
‘Fitz.’ She interrupts him with as firm a look as she can manage in her current state, before her voice turns pleading. ‘I honestly want to forget the entire night even happened. Can we do that? Just pretend we never even left the house, that we stayed in all night watching films instead? Please?’
There is a beat before Fitz sits up and answers her.
‘Okay. If that’s what you want, then, uh…it never happened.’
Jemma’s shoulders sink into her sheets with relief, and she lets out a little sigh.
‘Thank you,’ she murmurs, and lifts her hand out of her duvet to pat Fitz fondly on the leg. Then, she peers up to look at him properly and frowns. ‘Fitz, are you feeling okay?’
He looks dazed, his face even paler than his usual pasty complexion, and he is staring intently at his hands in his lap.
‘What?’ He looks up at her and blinks rapidly, rubbing at his eyes with his fingers. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Because if you’re going to be sick, I’d really rather you did it in the bathroom and not in my bed.’
Fitz’s face cracks into a smile and as he slumps back down onto her mattress with a groan, Jemma feels a pang of deep rooted affection for him, the only person she has ever wanted to share her dreams, and her disastrous nights out, with. He is, purely and simply, her best friend.
Then, she sighs and tucks her head under the duvet to go back to sleep.
5:25pm, 15th June 2004
‘I’ve been asked to prom.’
Jemma hears Fitz choke on his Fanta and turns to look at him, sitting cross-legged beside her on the park green, as he splutters. They are in the park this evening as a brief interlude to their relentless A-Level studies, and the early summer sun is welcoming on Jemma’s back and face as her forehead creases up in concern for her choking best friend. She thumps him helpfully on the back until he waves her off.
‘Who…who asked you?’
She points, to a group of boys from their school that are having a kick-about on the opposite side of the park, evidently having had the same idea as them to escape their books for the evening. Fitz squints towards them, and swallows hard.
‘And, um…what did you say?’
Jemma rolls her eyes. ‘I said no. Honestly, Fitz, we promised to take each other to prom when we were five. Did you really think I’d forget that just because some boy with a particularly impressive muscle to fat ratio asked me to go with him instead?’
‘Oh.’ Fitz’s shoulders sink with obvious relief and Jemma hides her smile in her can of Sprite. In the dappled evening sunlight his hair seems to glow golden, and it reminds her of the day they’d made their agreement, back in the very earliest days of their friendship.
I want you to take me to the prom, she’d said, very matter-of-factly and without looking up from her laborious finger painting. Okay, he’d replied, and she had leant over to daub a dollop of blue paint on his nose in thanks.
For some reason, the memory makes Jemma’s heart ache.
After a few moments, Fitz clears his throat and shifts his position on the grass so that he is leaning back with his palms on the ground. His gaze is still directed towards the boys playing football when he ventures cautiously: ‘an impressive muscle to fat ratio, you say?’
‘Mmm.’ Jemma sips her drink and nods, narrowing her eyes to scrutinize. ‘Very.’
‘Oh.’
‘I think he might end up being The One, actually.’
‘Really?’ She could have sworn Fitz’s voice rose a few octaves, despite his obvious attempt to maintain nonchalance. ‘And what qualifies him for that particular honour, exactly?’
Jemma tilts her head to one side and considers. ‘Well, other than the outstanding muscle to fat ratio, he has a wonderfully symmetrical face, and an athletic body shape which he keeps fairly toned from physical activity. According to my research, those are some of the qualities which will make him best suited for…the job in hand.’
Next to her, Fitz shakes his head. ‘I still can’t believe you researched it.’
‘I want to be prepared!’ Jemma protests. ‘You can only have sex for the first time once, you know. It’s widely considered an important rite of passage for a teenager to progress into adulthood. I want to make sure I do it properly.’
‘And he’s the right person to do it with?’
For some reason, Fitz sounds disapproving and all it does is make Jemma feel indignant. She straightens her back and tilts her chin up defiantly.
‘Yes. He is.’
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Fitz’s jaw tighten.
‘Fine.’
They sit in heavy silence for a moment, before Fitz clears his throat.
‘Actually, somebody asked me to prom too. Or at least, somebody asked me to ask them to prom.’
Jemma’s head whirls around to him, her heart missing a beat. ‘Did they? Who?’
‘Um…’ Fitz nods towards a gaggle of teenage girls, most of whom Jemma recognises, leaning against a park bench a little way away from them. ‘The one with the pink backpack.’
‘She’s pretty,’ Jemma notes, and finds that her hands have closed into fists. ‘Very pretty.’
‘Yeah.’ Fitz stares after them. ‘I suppose she is.’
Jemma looks at him and finds that the wistfulness in his face makes her heart twist with a previously unknown feeling, and she swallows back a bitterness on her tongue. She turns her head away from him again and makes a decision.
‘Go ask her then.’
This time, it is Fitz’s turn to spin his head towards her in surprise. ‘What?’
‘Go ask her.’ Jemma takes a careful sip from her can and smiles at him. ‘You obviously want to.’
‘Yeah,’ Fitz admits reluctantly, and then changes his mind and shakes his head. ‘But…I’m going with you.’
‘And I’ve been asked by someone else too. I wouldn’t be going on my own, neither of us would.’ He hesitates, and Jemma rolls her eyes. ‘Fitz, it’s fine. Ask her. Go now, before they leave.’
She gives an encouraging nod in the girls’ direction, and keeps a smile on her face as he gets up, brushing the grass off his shorts. He shoots her a last look over his shoulder, one that might have been apologetic, before walking towards the bench with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
Jemma watches, long enough to see the girl with the pink backpack’s face light up as Fitz talks to her, and to watch as she flings her arms around his shoulder to nuzzle into him. The expression on Fitz’s face is hidden by her hair and so Jemma turns her head away again, lifting her can to her mouth again to drain it dry.
Maybe the fizzing of the bubbles in the drink will do something to ease the numbness settling into the pit of her stomach.
10:59pm, 22nd June 2004
[To: Fitz, 22:59] Where are you?
[To: Fitz, 22:59] Fitz?
[To: Fitz, 23:00] Leopold Fitz, ANSWER YOUR BLOODY PHONE!!!
[To: Jemma, 23:01] Jemma, I’m still downstairs, at the prom. Where are YOU? I thought I saw you and your date sneak off upstairs after dessert.
[To: Fitz, 23:02] We did. And we are still upstairs.
[To: Fitz, 23:02] Fitz, I need your help. I need it really, really badly. Where exactly are you?
[To: Jemma, 23:03] I told you, I’m downstairs. What’s happened?
[To: Fitz, 23:03] Go to the stairs, I’m coming down to you.
[To: Fitz, 23:04] I’ve encountered a complication that I did not cover sufficiently while I was researching tonight.
[To: Jemma, 23:05] ????
[To: Jemma, 23:05] I’m at the stairs now. Could you be a bit more specific?
[To: Jemma, 23:07] JEMMA????
[To: Fitz, 23:10] Duringtheintercourseourchosenmethodofcontraceptionbecamemisplacedbutoncloserexaminationihavedicoveredthatitisnotmisplacedexactlybutratherverymuchinplaceinsideofme.
[To: Fitz, 23:12] Fitz? Are you there?
Clutching her phone tightly in her palm, Jemma hurries to the staircase with her heart racing inside her chest.
She cannot even begin to comprehend how grateful she is that their school chose to hire out the entire hotel for the prom. It means there are less people around to see her flaming cheeks and humiliating state of undress.
She comes to the top of the stairs and is just about to pitch forward when she freezes, one hand on the bannister. At the bottom of the stairs, Fitz is waiting for her, staring at his phone screen in front of him. As she watches, his face colours and when he turns towards her his mouth is hanging half open.
When he sees her, he closes it sharply again and Jemma sees his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he takes a deep breath and pockets his phone.
‘I realise that I asked for it, but that was…way more information than I needed.’
12:47am, 23nd June 2004
Jemma keeps the grimacing smile on her lips as the nurse bobs his head towards her and starts to shuffle out of the cubicle. He passes Fitz who is hovering by the curtain on his way out, and Jemma catches his eye to invite him in.
‘They didn’t even have a female nurse,’ she bemoans as soon as the nurse is far enough away not to hear her and slides her legs around so they dangle off the edge of the bed.
At midnight on a Tuesday, the A&E department at Doncaster Royal Infirmary is mercifully quiet, and when she and Fitz had arrived just an hour beforehand they had only had to wait for half an hour before Jemma was being ushered into an examination room, her nurse pulling the green curtain sharply across after them. She’d left Fitz behind in the waiting room, but she isn’t surprised to see him here now. Somehow, even when separated they always manage to find one another.
Fitz moves to stand in front of her and Jemma notices how his bowtie is sticking out of the pocket of his jacket and that he has undone the top button of his dress-shirt. Somehow, it makes him look even better than he had when she’d left him with his date at the entrance to the hotel four hours ago. Quickly, she shakes the thought from her mind.
‘In all fairness, I think he found the situation just as embarrassing as you did,’ Fitz observes. ‘If not more so.’
Jemma snorts, remembering the horror on the nurse’s face as she’d calmly explained the predicament her prom date had managed to get her into.
‘Yes, I expect having to remove a condom from a teenage girl’s vagina because her partner didn’t know how to attach it properly was about as new an experience for him as it was for me.’
Fitz inclines his head for a moment before remarking: ‘I think the research you did was slightly lacking in the practical application of things, it has to be said.’
‘Ohhhh,’ Jemma moans, letting her head slide forward so it is resting on his chest. The humiliation of the frantic past two hours is finally catching up with her, and she isn’t sure whether she ever wants to lift her face up again. ‘It was awful, Fitz, truly. And to think! All that time I spent researching, completely wasted.’
Fitz pats her back, awkwardly. ‘Maybe not. After all, it’s made you more prepared for next time, right?’
Jemma sniffs, and turns her head to one side to stare blankly at the wall. ‘It wasn’t even that enjoyable, really,’ she complains. ‘And because I was so stupid, I had to drag you away from prom to clean up a ruddy mess that wasn’t your own. I’m so sorry, Fitz.’
‘S’okay.’ He shrugs, making Jemma’s head bounce on his chest. ‘I wasn’t really enjoying myself in any case.’
Jemma lifts her head up and frowns at him. ‘You weren’t?’
‘Nah.’ Fitz gives her a weak grin and crosses his arms over his chest. ‘In fact, it could almost be said I was glad to use you as an excuse to get away.’
Jemma winces sympathetically. ‘Was your date really that bad?’
‘Not that bad…but she wasn’t you.’
Jemma blinks, and Fitz’s mouth hovers half open before he continues hastily.
‘What I mean is, we would have had much more fun if we’d gone just the two of us, as friends. As nice as the idea was to go with separate partners, I think we should have stuck to the original plan.’
‘We should have,’ Jemma agrees, rubbing her abdomen absently. The nurse had been careful if not gentle with the procedure, but it had been a pretty rough evening for her body overall, and she couldn’t wait to get home and go to bed.
Fitz watches her, chewing his lip anxiously. ‘Does it hurt?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not really, it’s a bit sore, that’s all. We can go home as soon as they bring me the paperwork to sign.’
Fitz nods, and pulls himself up to sit next to her on the bed. Jemma finds her head drooping, falling down to rest on his shoulder as they wait for the nurse to return.
In her head, she tries to find the words to tell him how grateful she is for what he’s done tonight: leaving both his date and his prom to drive her down to A&E and then wait with her. He had gone above and beyond the call of a usual friendship, but then again, how could she ever consider their friendship “usual”?
From the very first days, they had been inseparable, both at school and at home. Living next door to one another had allowed for playdates that never seemed to end, sleepovers almost every single night during the holidays and campouts in their gardens to watch the stars and whisper stories to each other until the sun came up. Everything that happened to Fitz felt like it was happening to Jemma too – when he hurt, she hurt; when he rejoiced, it felt like her own chest was going to burst with happiness.
No, Jemma thinks, we’ve never had a usual friendship.
It’s always been more than that.
Fitz breaks the silence first, nudging her gently off his shoulder so he can look at her. ‘I bought a new suitcase today,’ he says softly. ‘For when we move to Boston. It’s weird; after all this time we’ve spent planning it and talking about it, buying it was the first thing that made everything all feel real, somehow.’
Jemma squeezes his hand, a sudden delight coursing through her veins at the change in conversation.
‘Of course it’s real,’ she whispers. ‘Fitz, the dream’s finally coming true.’
The ‘dream’ had begun in her bedroom when they were six years old and pouring over a giant atlas book. Their fingers had traced routes from destinations on one side of the world to the other, and they had declared promises that, one day, they’d visit them all. From there the dream had only grown, until Jemma had a neatly plotted out plan in a favourite purple notebook, organised in decisive bullet points. First, they would study abroad, preferably in the US and definitely together; and then they would travel. They would get out of Doncaster, out of the UK, and explore all the places they’d been learning about since they were children.
It was a dream that was turning slowly and surely into a reality. Fitz had been offered a scholarship to Harvard to read English Literature back in the spring, while Jemma had only recently been accepted on a prestigious hotel management course at Boston University. Their flights were booked, their campuses were only a short bus ride away from each other and the whole world was at their fingertips.
After a lifetime of dreaming about moving away, Jemma couldn’t quite allow herself to believe it was actually happening. But it was. And she was making sure that she and Fitz would be by each other’s sides every step of the way, the way she was sure they were meant to be.
By the time the nurse returns with the paperwork for her to sign, Jemma feels invariably cheered and signs her name where it is required quickly. Once she is free to go, Fitz wordlessly slides off his jacket to hand it to her and Jemma takes it, pulling it around her wispy pink prom dress with a shiver.
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s okay. You looked cold.’
‘That’s not what I meant, Fitz.’ She catches his gaze and holds it, giving him a faint smile. ‘Thank you, for everything you’ve done for me tonight.’
He rolls his eyes at her and smiles. ‘What else was I going to do?’
Jemma smiles back and shakes her head. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘Or me without you,’ Fitz says automatically. He pushes the curtains to the cubicle back and turns back to her. ‘Just as well we never have to find out, eh?’
‘Just as well,’ Jemma repeats. She leans up to press a kiss to his cheek, and when she pulls back, Fitz’s face is as pink as her dress. ‘Thank you. For being my hero tonight.’
He shrugs, but there is a grin spreading across his face. ‘Always.’
He gestures out in front of them, and Jemma steps forward, leading him out into the middle of the waiting room. When she is half way across, she slows down and holds her hand out behind her. Fitz takes it without questioning, and swings their hands lightly between them.
As they walk out the front doors, leaving the hospital behind them to hunt through the car park for where Fitz had parked his battered Audi Sedan, Jemma can’t help but feel that the best part of her life is just about to begin.
12:45pm, 31st August 2004
With every step she takes, Jemma feels her feet get heavier and heavier as she trudges after Fitz down the endless airport corridors.
Outside, summer rain is streaming down the floor-to-ceiling windows in what feels to Jemma like the epitome of pathetic fallacy. She is tempted to mention it to Fitz, before glancing across at his face and deciding that even her best placed attempt at a light-hearted joke might tip both of them off into tears today.
They leave his brand new suitcase at the baggage drop and then trail across the airport to check-in. The lady behind the desk points them in the direction of security and Jemma doesn’t even have the heart to smile at her in thanks as they walk off together, side by side.
Her mind is far too filled with the dread that soon she will have to let Fitz go on without her to make room to think about anything else.
(‘No headaches, diarrhoea, blurred vision, fever, stomach cramps…?’
Jemma had shaken her head impatiently as Daisy, the pharmaceutical assistant, ran off a list of symptoms she didn’t have. Standing at the counter of the local pharmacy, she had been beginning to feel a little uneasy.
‘No, none of those. Look, I’ve just feel feeling rather sick so if there’s anything you could give me for that, I’d be very grateful…’
‘No, no! I have to do this properly. Give me a sec.’
Daisy had run a pencil down the checklist in front of her, her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth in concentration. All of a sudden, the pencil had frozen, and she’d lifted her head up to glance uncertainly at Jemma.
‘Have you…have you missed a period?’)
Up ahead of them, the security gates are looming and Fitz slows down to a standstill and turns to face her. Jemma purses her lips together in an attempt at a smile, knowing that this is as far as she can go.
‘Are you sure you’ve got everything?’ she asks, knowing perfectly well that she is fretting unnecessarily and at the same time feeling completely unable to stop.
Fitz snorts. ‘Seeing as you and my mum all but packed my bags yourselves and the two of you are the most organised people I know, yes, I’m sure I’ve got everything.’
‘Passport? Boarding pass?’
He holds up a clear plastic wallet, one she had bought for him to hold all his important documents inside, for her to see. ‘They’re all here, I checked.’
Jemma exhales, twisting her hands in front of her. ‘What about your scholarship letter? You’ll need to show them that at the other end.’
Fitz opens the wallet and slides out a sheath of thick, creamy paper with the Harvard logo at the top.
‘It’s here,’ he confirms.
Jemma nods, her own acceptance letter to Boston University burning a painful hole in her back pocket.
(‘No…I mean, yes…but it’s not possible. I planned it all out; I took all the necessary precautions. I had the morning after pill!’
Daisy had grimaced sympathetically and lifted down a packet of emergency contraceptive pills from the cabinet above her head to show Jemma.
‘They’ve got a 90% effectiveness. 10%’s the catch.’
Jemma had sucked in a deep breath, holding the packet between her thumb and forefinger, as if by touching it as little as possible she could pretend this wasn’t happening.
‘Fuck.’)
She watches as Fitz fumbles with the straps of his rucksack, and feels a twinge of emotion at how young he looks, standing in front of her with his hair still rumbled from sleep and his shirt not quite tucked in at the back. Blinking back the sudden tears that have appeared in her eyes, Jemma steps forward to help him straighten his straps, and dusts down the sleeves of his jacket too before she can help herself.
‘But if I have forgotten anything,’ Fitz is saying, ‘you can always bring it out when you come, right? Because you are still coming, aren’t you?’
The anxiousness in his voice is palpable, and Jemma has to hold herself back from wincing.
‘Of course I am,’ she replies, not quite allowing herself to meet his eyes. ‘I told you. There’s just…a family emergency that I need to take care of first.’
Which isn’t quite a lie.
(‘You don’t have to keep it, if you don’t want it.’
Jemma had spun around to face Daisy, her words startling her out of her stupor of self-pity.
‘What?’
In the week following that fateful day the pregnancy test had come up positive, Jemma had spent a lot of time in Daisy’s pharmacy, drawing support from the only other person in the world to know her secret.
‘The baby.’ Daisy had shrugged. ‘Lots of couples can’t have kids. If you’re not ready to be a mum, I’m willing to bet there are at least a dozen women in this town who are.’
Jemma had swayed on her feet, the realisation of the truth of what Daisy was saying knocking her off balance.
‘I could still go to Boston,’ she had whispered. ‘All I’d have to do is wait six months, then reapply in the spring! I wouldn’t even have to tell Fitz, I could just make up an excuse, he need never know…’
A wide grin had spread across Jemma’s face.
‘I could still do it all.’)
‘You know, I don’t have to go today,’ Fitz offers, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘If you wanted, I could stay…’
‘No!’ Jemma shakes her head quickly, giving him a fleeting smile of reassurance. ‘No, really, Fitz, it’s fine. Don’t worry about me. My ticket’s been postponed and I’ll fly out to join you in a few days.’
Fitz frowns. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘I’m sure.’
Taking a deep breath, Jemma steps forward and wraps her arms around his neck. A few years ago they had been almost exactly the same height, but now without her noticing Fitz seems to have grown several inches taller and she has to lean up on her tiptoes to get her arms to reach all the way around. Fitz’s arms come up to return the hug, holding her around her back and burying his head in her hair. When she feels his thumb start to stroke the back of her t-shirt, a comforting habit he’d picked up when they were children, Jemma feels tears start to prickle behind her eyes and she presses her face down into his shoulder to hide them from him.
The hug ends only when Jemma can’t hold herself up on her toes anymore, and she has to sink back down onto the balls of her feet. Even then, she is unwilling to let go completely and her hands linger on Fitz’s chest while his rest loosely on her waist.
As their foreheads brush against one another, Jemma feels Fitz suck in a breath.
(‘You don’t even want to tell him?’ Daisy’s eyebrows had shot up into her hairline. ‘Don’t you think he has the right to know he’s having a kid?’
‘What?’ Jemma had frowned for a moment before understanding. ‘Oh, no! Fitz isn’t the father! The father…’ She had shaken her head vaguely. ‘He doesn’t matter.’
Daisy’s face had visibly softened. ‘But Fitz does?’
Jemma had nodded, and slumped back against the counter.
‘Desperately so.’)
‘You should go,’ she whispers, keeping her eyes shut as a last defence against her tears. ‘I don’t want…I don’t want you to miss your flight.’
‘Jemma, you personally made sure that we would be here for precisely the advised two hours before take-off,’ Fitz points out quietly. ‘I’m pretty sure it would be impossible for me to miss my flight.’
‘Even so…’ Jemma opens her eyes, and finds that Fitz, with his forehead gently held against hers, still has his closed. His eyelashes seem to fall halfway down his cheek and she can see that he’s holding back tears of his own. ‘I worry.’
‘I know you do.’ Fitz opens his eyes into hers and gives her a wan smile. ‘“I have the highest respect for your nerves,”’ he quotes, ‘“they are my old friends.”’
Jemma snuffles, sinking her head forward into his chest. ‘Pride and Prejudice. It’s still my favourite, you know.’
‘Yeah, I know. Although I think it’s Colin Firth who’s your favourite, really.’
‘True. Although, can you blame me?’
She feels him tilt his head to one side, considering. ‘No, not really.’
In spite of the situation, Jemma finds herself grinning, and allows herself to step away. Her fingers trail all the way down his arms, wanting to touch every part of him while she still can, until, finally, she lets him go.
(‘I can’t tell him. If I did, he’d feel like he had to stay.’
‘Even though he’s not the father?’
Daisy’s voice had been incredulous, and Jemma had shaken her head, sliding her back down the counter until she was sitting on the floor facing her friend.
‘You don’t know him like I do. He’d want to stay for me, and I couldn’t let him do that. Not when he’s worked so hard for his scholarship, not when it means so much to him! I…I couldn’t be that selfish.’
Jemma’s voice had cracked then and she’d sniffed hard, keeping her eyes trailed firmly on the floor in front of her. She’d heard footsteps, and then Daisy was sitting down next to her and reaching out to twine her fingers with her own. She’d given her hand a reassuring squeeze, and Jemma had felt a single tear trickle down her cheek.)
‘I should go, then,’ Fitz says, gesturing behind him to the security gate.
Jemma nods, brushing a loose strand of hair back behind her ear. ‘Yes, you should. And I’ll see you in a couple of days.’
She tries hard to make it sound like a promise, and not a wish.
(‘Just for the record,’ Daisy had declared. ‘I think this is a terrible idea.’
‘Just for the record,’ Jemma had admitted. ‘I think you’re probably right.’)
Fitz steps away from her, taking several steps backwards before he finally turns his back, one hand clutching his plastic wallet, the other hanging onto his rucksack strap. Jemma stands where she is as he walks up to the security gate and hands his boarding pass over to the airport staff waiting there.
When it is given back to him, with an inviting arm gesture to continue through security, Fitz glances back at her over his shoulder one last time. Catching his eye, Jemma tilts her chin up and nods, quirking her lips up into the smile she has given him so many times over the years she has begun to think exists exclusively for him. Fitz smiles back, and Jemma thinks that his shoulders relax, just a little.
She watches him go, as he turns away from her again and starts to weave his way through the security and the other passengers who have somehow appeared around them without them noticing. She watches until he turns the corner to go through into the waiting lounge and is finally gone from her sight.
Only then does Jemma allow herself to turn to leave, her feet and heart dragging behind her and her fingers fluttering with only the mildest feeling of resentment over her stomach, and the only reason she is staying here instead of leaving with him.
4:14pm, 17th January 2005
‘Hello! It’s just me!’
‘Hello, “just me”,’ Jemma calls teasingly through to the hall when she hears the front door slam. She lifts her spoon up from the jar of Nutella beside her and licks the back of it. ‘I’m in the living room!’
She looks up as Lance stumbles through the doorway, weighed down by two large Tesco’s bags. He flashes her a crooked grin before fumbling around in his pocket for something. He pulls out a small orange tube and tosses it across the room to her; Jemma cups her hands to catch it and turns it over in her palm to read that they are essential prenatal vitamins for mother and baby.
‘I saw Daisy this afternoon,’ Lance grunts, manoeuvring himself through the living room and into the kitchen. Their parents’ house is set out semi open-plan, so that the doors between the living room and the kitchen could be folded back to open the two rooms up into each other. Jemma is sitting on the couch with her back to the kitchen, so as Lance passes her he can ruffle her hair. ‘She gave me those, said I had to give them to you and you’re to take one every day, no questions asked.’
Since the summer, Daisy Johnson has become a permanent fixture in Jemma’s life and one that she is immeasurably grateful for. Daisy is no longer a pharmaceutical assistant, having decided that particular career pathway isn’t quite for her, and had since then attempted professional photography and amateur dramatics, neither of which had been particularly successful. She is currently employed part time at M&S, but still insists on taking charge of Jemma’s prenatal health, something Jemma is rather reluctant to do for herself.
Daisy wasn’t a replacement for Fitz. Jemma understood this; in any case, she didn’t want to replace Fitz. But Daisy was a good friend who cared about her and could make her laugh, and Jemma loved her all the more with every day that passed.
‘Thank you,’ Jemma mumbles, tucking the vitamins into her pocket. ‘I’ll text her, to say that I’ve got them.’
But instead of picking up her phone, she picks up her pen from the sofa and continues the letter she had been writing before Lance had come in, the paper propped up on her ever expanding stomach for support.
‘Are you writing to Fitz again?’ Lance asks. Behind her, Jemma hears him clattering cans as he unpacks the shopping, sliding cans into cupboards and milk into the fridge. ‘Didn’t you send him a letter yesterday?’
‘Yes. But now I’m writing another one.’
Jemma shifts on the sofa, trying to angle her back into a new position and sighs. Over the last few weeks, she’s been finding it more and more difficult to get comfortable and the understanding that it is only going to get worse from here on out is making her more restless than ever.
The noises from the kitchen stop and she hears Lance come up behind her, leaning on the back of the sofa over her shoulder.
‘Can I read it?’
‘You won’t want to,’ Jemma warns, but he sweeps the letter off her belly anyway, and perches on the arm of the sofa to read it. She watches as Lance’s face creases up in disgust as he reads her letter and she can’t help but grin when he hands it back to her, pulling a face.
‘Bloody hell,’ Lance groans, sloping back into the kitchen and opening the fridge. ‘I know that you’re pregnant, Jem, and as your brother, I am willing to be as involved in this as you want me to be…but I have to draw the line at being told that level of detail about your bodily functions.’
‘I did say you wouldn’t want to read it!’ Jemma laughs, picking up her pen again to sign her name at the bottom of the letter. She’s used four sheets of paper, both double-sided, and there is still more that she wants to tell him, more that she wants to say.
In the kitchen, she hears Lance pull open the fridge door and the clatter of a knife on a chopping board.
‘Will Fitz want to read it? You know as well as I do how bloody squeamish he is.’
Jemma falls quiet, and picks up the pages of her letter, tapping the pages on the curve of her belly to bring them together. She folds the writing paper in half, then in half again, until the pages fit into the palm of her hand.
‘Jemma?’ The noises in the kitchen stop and Lance sighs deeply. ‘You’ve never sent him any of the letters you’ve written him, have you?’
‘I have!’ she protests. ‘I send one almost every fortnight, and I’ve sent a letter in return every time he’s written to me.’
‘But you’ve written to him practically every day,’ Lance points out, in a voice uncharacteristically quiet.
Jemma thinks of the cardboard box hidden underneath her bed, filled with all the letters she has written to Fitz over the past five months but will never send to him, letters where she has poured out her frustrations and her fears in the safety of knowing he will never read them, and she nods.
‘Yes. I suppose I have. Some…some just haven’t been sent to him.’
Lance walks out of the kitchen and into the living room to face her again.
‘You’ve still not told him,’ he guesses, and Jemma shakes her head.
‘No, and I don’t plan on it. It wouldn’t be fair.’
And it wouldn’t. Not when the letters he sends home to her are so excited, so full of life. He writes her almost more than she does him; next to Jemma’s box of unsent letters is a second box lovingly filled with all of Fitz’s letters. He tells her about his lectures, writes her quotes from the new books he’s studying and writes vivid descriptions of Boston and all the places he’ll show her when she comes, because she will come. Eventually.
Jemma re-reads his letters nightly, and falls asleep holding his promises close to her heart.
‘I don’t care if it wouldn’t be fair,’ Lance says bluntly, ‘and neither would Fitz. I may not be his best friend, but I certainly know him well enough to know that he would want to know if something was wrong with you. No matter what.’
Jemma shakes her head, feeling her throat start to prickle.
‘Even so,’ she says thickly. ‘I don’t think I could ever tell him now. I don’t…I don’t know if I could find the words.’
Sniffing, she brings up a hand to brush quickly at her cheeks, trying to bat away the tears before Lance sees them. By the way he sinks heavily into the sofa next to her, she realises her attempts must have been futile.
‘You’ve spoken to Fitz almost every day of your life,’ Lance says, ‘often all day, and about everything. How can you not have the words now?’
Jemma shrugs, dropping her hands to her sides and staring straight ahead.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispers.
Lance is quiet for a moment, before sighing and getting to his feet. He moves back into the kitchen and Jemma hears him resume his slicing, the sound of the knife making swift, regular notes against the chopping board. She sniffs and wipes her face again, inwardly cursing her constantly imbalanced hormones.
‘Put your feet up.’
Jemma blinks, and tries to turn around before stopping short when she realises she can no longer swivel as far as she used to.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You heard me.’ Lance refuses to look directly at her, and instead reaches up to pluck a bowl off a shelf. ‘There’s a perfectly good chair in front of you, sweetheart. Use it. Leg elevation reduces ankle swelling.’
Jemma screws up her nose. ‘How do you know that?’
Lance makes a noncommittal gesture with his hand. ‘I must have read it somewhere.’
At this, Jemma does turn towards him, as far as she can before her stomach gets in the way, and gives him an incredulous look.
‘Have you…been researching pregnancy?’ When Lance doesn’t reply, she gives a short gasp of disbelief. ‘All those books on the landing…‘What To Expect When You’re Expecting’ and such like…the ones I thought Daisy bought around as a hint for me…you bought them didn’t you? And you’ve been reading them?’
‘Yes, yes I have,’ Lance says grimly. ‘Seeing as my sister doesn’t have her baby’s father involved in her pregnancy and she refuses to let me hunt him down and drag him back here, and she’s also refusing to tell her best friend anything at all, that leaves only me to look after her. So…’ He waltzes back into the living room and hands her a bowl with a heavily pointed look, taking the jar of Nutella out of her reach. ‘I’m looking after her.’
He turns back into the kitchen to clean up and Jemma glances at the bowl in her hands. It’s filled with freshly cut fruits rich in fibre, all cut into bite-size pieces so she only has to lift them to her mouth to eat them.
She finds that her eyes are once more swimming with tears, this time at the idea that Lance, her older brother and frequent tormentor and teaser over the years, is now taking it upon himself to become her caretaker. Begrudgingly perhaps, but even so.
Almost as if he’d felt her tears come back, Lance wanders back into the living room, his hands stuck deep into his jeans’ pockets.
‘He’d want to be here,’ he reminds her and there is no need for him to say a name for Jemma to know exactly who he is referring to.
Lance leans over the sofa and presses a quick kiss to her forehead, before giving her a final lopsided grin and leaving the room.
After he leaves, Jemma sits still, thinking. Then, she carefully unfolds the letter for Fitz she has just written, the one he will never receive, and opens it up to re-read it. Her fingers trace over the words, feeling the brutal, raw honesty seep off of the page as she reads, and for a moment she allows herself to imagine herself sending the letter and Fitz reading every word of it. She wonders what would happen next if she did.
Shaking her head, Jemma folds the letter back up again. She’ll add it to the rest of unsent letters tonight when she hauls herself up the stairs to bed.
Sighing, she leans back into the sofa cushions and finds herself eying the chair in front of her, so conveniently placed for her to rest her feet on. Lance’s words repeat in her head, and she swallows hard, her hands resting lightly on top of her belly, and the beating heart that was sleeping inside.
Slowly, Jemma lifts her feet with their (only mildly, thank you very much) swollen ankles up to place them carefully on the seat of the chair.
11:23am, 10th July 2005
‘Alright, alright!’ Jemma yells through the house as the doorbell rings once more. ‘I’m coming!’
She huffs, throwing the small pink babygrow back onto the pile of similarly pink laundry sitting on the sofa and hopping over a stray teddy bear to head for the front door. A thin wail of protest stops her in her tracks, and Jemma groans as she turns back into the living room where her daughter, who had only moments before been lying asleep on a patchwork quilt on the floor, is reaching for her.
Jemma feels a tug inside her chest and instantly bends down to sweep her up into her arms, tucking her onto her hip, placing a feathery kiss to the top of her head.
The doorbell rings again.
‘We’re coming!’ she calls irritably, hopping out into the hall, before murmuring to the baby, who had quietened the moment she was in her mother’s arms: ‘Honestly, Hope, some people just do not have any respect for nap time, do they, darling?’
In response, Hope reaches out for a strand of Jemma’s hair to suck.
With an affectionate huff in her baby’s direction, Jemma quickly takes the chain off the door, flicking the latch off and pulls the door open, only to find Fitz standing on her doorstep with a bunch of yellow carnations held in his hands.
Jemma stares, her hand held frozen on the door and her heart in her mouth. Her mind has gone blank and she is sure that if Hope wasn’t clinging on so tightly to her t-shirt, she might slip out of her arms altogether. This thought is enough to jog her out of her respite and she swallows, shifting Hope to sit more securely on her hip.
Was it the summer already? Was he home for the holidays? How had the time slipped by her so easily that she hadn’t even noticed it passing?
In front of her, Fitz is standing firmly on the step, his feet a good shoulders width apart. There is some kind of determination in his features, a steadiness in his eyes and his mouth is almost grimly set. There is no shock in his face, though, no surprise, and certainly nothing like what you would expect from a person who was just discovering that their best friend has had a baby during their absence.
Jemma rolls her eyes and places her hand on her free hip.
‘Well, at the very least you could act surprised.’
‘My God,’ Fitz replies blandly. ‘You have a baby.’
Jemma purses her lips together and detangles Hope’s fingers from her hair. ‘Lance told you,’ she guesses.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Fitz says, but the twitching in his left hand tells Jemma that he’s lying. ‘I came home early for the holidays, I didn’t tell you because I wanted to surprise you. Until you opened this door, I had absolutely no idea that she…’ Here, he falters slightly and his eyes fall on Hope. ‘…that she existed.’
Jemma glances down at her daughter, who is wearing a sky blue babygrow with a bright orange tiger stitched on the front.
‘How did you know she’s a she?’ she asks with a raise of her eyebrow.
Fitz winces. ‘Lucky guess?’
‘You’re a terrible liar, Leopold Fitz.’
‘I’ve got nothing on you, Jemma Simmons.’
Jemma feels her shoulders slump, her lips moving into a mirror image of his smile as she watches him. It feels odd, having him back in front of her again; after so long spent apart, their only forms of communication being via texts and letters that had decreased in length month by month, she had expected him to feel like something of a stranger to her, for there to be a kind of awkwardness between them.
Instead, even though Fitz’s hair has lost a little bit of its curl and there is a faint shadow of stubble trailing down his face, it feels the way it always has, and Jemma finds herself wanting to hurtle forwards into his arms and wrap herself around him, feeling the tickle of his laughter against her cheek as he pulls her closer, maybe even…
Abruptly, Jemma sucks in a breath and blinks.
Hormones, she decides hastily. Thoughts like that were most definitely caused by hormones.
Bloody things.
Fitz clears his throat. ‘So…can I come in?’
Jemma hesitates, but only long enough for her to notice the way her daughter is reaching out for Fitz with her tiny fingers and wide eyes, as if even at four months old, she already knows exactly what it is that she wants.
Jemma exhales slowly and nods, stepping to one side to hold the door open for him.
‘Yeah,’ she whispers with a smile. ‘Always.’
11:42am, 10th July 2005
On Fitz’s suggestion, they go outside.
They tug pillows and blankets out of the back door and onto the grass in the garden, layering them over one another to form a cushioning for the hard ground, the way they had done as children to watch the stars. On Jemma’s insistence, Fitz props up an open umbrella next to their nest of blankets, to shelter Hope from the rays of the weak summer sun.
They lie on their fronts on the grass, with Jemma’s arm curved up around her daughter protectively, both their eyes remaining on the squirming baby in front of them.
‘What happened to…to her dad?’ Fitz asks reluctantly. His hand is creeping closer across the blanket, so it is almost brushing against Hope’s side.
‘He left for university,’ Jemma murmurs. ‘Exeter, I think it was. I told him before he left, but I haven’t heard from him since.’
‘Not anything?’
Jemma shakes her head. ‘No.’
Fitz hisses out through his teeth, and Jemma hears him mutter something under his breath that might have been ‘bastard’.
She leans forward and nudges him playfully with her shoulder. ‘Language! And around my infant daughter, no less.’
Fitz grimaces. ‘Right, sorry.’ He pokes Hope carefully in her chest, and she lets out a bubble of laughter. ‘Sorry, baby girl.’
Jemma watches the exchange in bemusement; every time she’d asked Lance to stop swearing around Hope he’d scoffed at her, tossed his niece in the air affectionately, and reminded her that it took at least nine months for infants to start retaining memories (‘And you can’t argue,’ he’d added. ‘Seeing as it was you who told me that.’).
Fitz, on the other hand, seems perfectly happy to humour her and is regarding Hope with a kind of reverence that makes Jemma’s heart feel like it’s swelled to twice its size in her chest.
‘I was going to give her up,’ she confesses quietly.
Fitz turns to her in surprise. ‘You were?’
Jemma nods. ‘I even had all the paperwork done for it. I was going to give her to Social Services, she’d be adopted and I’d move to Boston. To be with you.’
Fitz goes quiet, his fingers tickling at Hope’s side. ‘What changed?’
‘I don’t think I could have ever really gone through with it,’ Jemma admits. ‘I thought that I could, but once she was born and I was holding her in my arms, I just…’
She trails off, remembering those first few hours she’d had with Hope, just the two of them existing in a world filled with the fog of painkillers that no one could breach, no matter how hard they tried. In all fairness, Jemma hadn’t wanted them to. For those first few hours, she’d only had eyes for Hope.
‘I could never give her up,’ she says, her voice coming out unexpectedly fierce. ‘Not ever.’
Fitz nods in understanding, and Jemma notices his throat bob. ‘She’s beautiful.’
‘She is,’ Jemma whispers with pride as she watches her daughter. ‘And I love her.’
It is only as she says these words that she realises how true they really are. She loves Hope and it is as simple as that. She loves her in a way that is all consuming; it is a love that takes over her days, her hours, her minutes. Every beat of her heart is for love of her daughter, and Jemma knows now that she would never have it any other way.
Fitz places the tip of his little finger against Hope’s tiny fist, and she immediately closes her fingers, trapping him against her.
‘Then I love her too,’ he murmurs.
It is a habit left over from their childhood; when one had discovered something new, be it a book, a food or a secret place, and declared their love for it, the other automatically would too. More often than not, the declaration would be genuine as their tastes were similar, but there was the odd time when it was less so. Incidentally, it was often these times when the sentiment was most appreciated – it showed a sense of solidarity, of unison, that they would never let the other stand on their own.
It takes Jemma only one glance to Fitz’s face, and his slightly misty eyes, to know that he means every word he says. She turns her eyes back down to Hope with a smile, feeling a warmth spread through her chest.
After a few minutes, Fitz clears his throat.
‘You should have told me.’
Jemma shakes her head. ‘You seemed so happy over in Boston. I didn’t want to disrupt that for you.’
Fitz groans. ‘No, Jemma…’ He rubs at his temple. ‘I wish that you’d told me.’
‘Why?’ Jemma asks. ‘What would you have done?’
‘I don’t know! Been there for you? Held your hair back while you puked, driven you to hospital appointments, picked up peanut butter and apples from the supermarket for you when you were craving them at 2am?’ He looks up at her and Jemma is struck by the sincerity in his eyes. ‘Aren’t those the kind of things you’re supposed to do when your best friend is pregnant?’
Yes, Jemma wants to point out to him, but that’s because normal people usually have a baby with their best friend.
She swallows, hot tears suddenly pricking in her eyes as a wave of bitterness washes over her, momentarily rendering her unable to breathe. Then, she realises what she is doing and shakes it off, blinking her tears away with a sharp gasp.
She’s being ridiculous; she doesn’t wish she’d had a baby with Fitz, of course she doesn’t. It’s just those bloody hormones again.
She realises that Fitz is watching her, with concern flickering in his eyes, and she gives him a wan smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ she croaks. ‘I should have told you. I suppose I was just…afraid.’
‘It’s okay.’ Fitz moves his free hand to cover hers, giving it a supportive squeeze. ‘I…I understand why you didn’t. And I’m sorry that you felt afraid, and I just wish that I had been there for you.’
Jemma nods, and squeezes his hand back, tangling her fingers between his to feel the pulse beating beneath them. He steadies her, she realises. He always has.
‘Will you be her godfather?’ she asks impulsively.
Fitz’s head jerks towards her, and she watches his entire face light up at the idea. Hope chooses that exact moment to reach upwards with her podgy fists, catching Fitz’s cheek with her fingers and sending him reeling backwards.
Jemma snorts, as the awed expression on his face turns into a startled one, and after a moment Fitz joins her, until they are both laughing, so hard that Hope begins to gurgle with laughter too between them.
‘Yeah,’ he says eventually, and turns back to shake Hope’s tiny hand, his finger still clasped inside it. He is beaming, Jemma notices, with a radiant grin that reaches from ear to ear.
‘I’d love nothing more.’