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She dreams, and all she can see is the blue.
She’s surrounded by blue ridges, the peaks jagged and sharp and piercing the blue sky. The ground beneath her is blue as well- the dirt and rocks that seems so much like Earth’s but in no way could be.
Jemma looks up, and there’s blue. She looks down, and there’s blue. Her heartbeat quickens, and her hands start to tremble and it becomes difficult to breathe.
(blue has been haunting Jemma ever since the pod, but it has since changed to this shade of blue ever since the monolith)
Suddenly the landscape changes, and the winds roar in her ears and the blue dust bites her skin, swirling and blinding her while she screams first for Will, and then for Fitz.
Fitz.
She needs Fitz.
Jemma wakes, but at first all she can still see is the blue.
She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe and she can’t stop trembling and looking around even when her eyes start to register the black of the darkened space. Her eyes adjust and the blue fades to black and Jemma dimly remembers that she’s not on Maveth but in their bedroom. The blankets that shroud her body are soft, and the mattress underneath reassures her that she’s in their bed and not lying on hard ground.
The sleeping form besides her is Fitz, and his presence soothes and calms her when she finally recalls that she’s in their Perthshire home and not in Will’s cave.
But above all her reassurances and the thundering in her ears, all she hears is the deafening silence.
The silence is as bad as the blue, bringing her even further back to the time on that goddamn planet with its goddamn blue land and sky and atmosphere. She’s back to where the only voice she could hear from a living, breathing human, was Will.
She loved Will- that’s not a question.
But she loves Fitz, and even listening to the sound of him breathe and feeling the warmth radiating from his sleeping body next to her helps fight away the blue.
All she needs now, is his voice.
“Fitz?” Jemma whispers.
“Mhmm?” He responds, forcing one eye open to look at her.
She shifts closer to him, lifting her arm to wrap around his waist and nuzzling her head in the crook of his arm. He moves slightly to accommodate her, leaning his head against the top of hers and using his right hand to brush a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Can’t sleep?” Fitz adds, not wondering why or what because it’s always been obvious he knows her as well as she knows herself, and that her dreams of blue are as constant as the northern star.
She nods, holding him to her tighter before she speaks. “Tell me… Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me something good.”
There’s silence, but whereas the silence in her dreams of blue was haunting and the silence when she first woke was deafening, this silence is filled with relief and hints of his mind mulling.
“Did I ever tell you about… About the time Daisy broke Bobbi out of her physical therapy session just so they could kidnap me? And take me shopping?”
Jemma smiles, and shakes her head, not needing to look up to know a grin starts to spread across his face.
“Well, it was hilarious, if I do say so myself,” Fitz recollects, absentmindedly beginning to rub her shoulder lightly with his thumb. “They dragged me to this random really classy store in Ohio, of all places, and made me try on everything and I mean everything.”
Jemma chuckles because Fitz has always been the one to exaggerate, but when he talks about how Daisy and Bobbi forced their way into his changing stall and made him spin around for them, she totally believes it.
It’s something they would do, Daisy and Bobbi.
Jemma should be angry, like all the other times she thinks about them. She should be furious and worried and sad because Bobbi is on the run and Daisy is on the run and even though it’s unspoken she knows that when they had dragged Fitz to this store in Ohio she was trapped on that goddamn planet with that goddamn blue everything.
But she focuses on his words and the way he laughs when he mentions Daisy trying on a bowler hat because what store even carries bowler hats anymore and although she misses her friends and she misses all the time she lost because she was on Maveth, she’s here with him now and nothing and no one can take this away from her.
His voice slowly drives the blue away, and when Jemma shifts slightly and looks up at him and he looks down at her, a different kind of blue imprints on her mind.
Her bedroom in a house in Perthshire is still dark, and she can barely make out the features of his face but Fitz’s blue eyes shine in a way that’s logically impossible, and it renders her breathless. The blue in his eyes instantaneously make her feel safe, and the gentleness in his touch makes her feel warm.
And the affection and adoration and love in his voice when he speaks to her make her feel at home.
(Fitz has always been home. It just took her a bit to put a word to it)
Jemma doesn’t remember the ending of his story. She remembers inhaling his scent, closing her eyes. She remembers placing her hand on his chest and feeling his heartbeat, marveling in the fact that he’s here and she’s here and they’re both alive when there has been so many things to challenge that.
But Jemma doesn’t remember hearing how at the end Bobbi maxed out Hunter’s credit card on some expensive necklace, because she falls asleep warm and content in his arms.
Instead of being haunted by blue, she dreams of a different shade of blue.
And she sleeps soundly through the night.