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Jemma stretched, pushing her palms toward the ceiling as she rolled her head from side to side. She and Daisy had been working for hours to perfect the new version of her gauntlets, and though the end was near, Jemma was hoping this last adjustment would be the final one.
"Jemma, we can stop." Daisy curled her fingers into fists and then splayed them, repeating the cycle several times and clearly feeling the same fatigue that was plaguing Jemma.
"Of course not," Jemma said, giving Daisy a tired smile. "We've had you back for six months and your equipment still hasn't been perfected. That's unacceptable. I don't intend to sleep today until this is completed to both of our satisfaction."
"I'm not even cleared for field work again yet," Daisy sighed. "Coulson's still got me grounded. He wants to..." She made air quotes, smirking a little, "Give me time to adjust after everything that's happened."
Jemma shifted in her seat a little, unsure what to say. The past year had been full of changes for all of them, but Daisy's life had literally been turned upside down, then torn apart. Jemma privately thought Coulson was doing the right thing, but she knew it wasn't what Daisy wanted to hear while she was clearly feeling stir crazy.
"I'm sure you'll be back in there soon. You're far too essential to the team to be left on the bench indefinitely." Jemma frowned behind the computer monitor, suddenly sure she'd said the wrong thing. "Not that you're on the bench, really. The work you've been doing here is invaluable. It's quite—"
"I get it," Daisy interrupted, with a laugh. "I know what you're trying to say. Seriously, though. Let's take a break and get something to eat."
"Oh!" Jemma leaned out, looking Daisy in the eye again. "You've been trying to hint that you want to stop, haven't you? And I've just been doggedly working away."
Daisy giggled, and Jemma had to admit it was nice to see a genuine smile on her friend's face.
"You're right. Perhaps with a little food on my stomach I'll be able to complete the remaining work more quickly." Jemma frowned a little, mumbling under her breath, "Of course, if Fitz had been available, we'd have finished by now."
Daisy stopped Jemma with a hand on her shoulder. "Wait, wait wait...hold the phone. Sit your fine butt back down, Jemma Simmons, and tell me what's going on."
"Oh, no. I didn't mean—"
"Okay, when you get that look on your face, you know it's obvious that what you're saying is a load of crap, right?
"I'm getting much better at prevarication," Jemma insisted, scowling as Daisy giggled at her again.
"Not with me, you're not, so sit back down and spill it. What's up with you and Fitz? I thought you two were..." Daisy raised her eyebrows. "You know. That you'd finally figured it out."
"I'm sure it's nothing. Coulson must have him working on something he can't discuss with me, that's all."
"You two are a team. What could he be working on without you?"
Jemma laughed. "We may have spent quite a bit of our association with each other joined at the hip, but we each have a multitude of skills that are applicable on their own."
"You're the one who grumbled about him not being here," Daisy pointed out, tapping her fingers on the table in front of her.
"Things have been going well." The words fell from Jemma's mouth in a rush, fueled by the unexpected relief she felt, sharing something about her friendship-turned-romance with Fitz. "I don't mean to be indelicate, but there's something to be said about having intimate relations with someone who knows you as well as Fitz and I know each other."
Daisy's face was a mask of revulsion, her eyes squeezing shut and her hands at her throat as she gagged. "Ugh, no. That is not the information I wanted. You can keep all the gory details to yourself—but..." She dropped her hands, leaning forward a little, and her voice fell to a whisper. "Really? Our little Fitzy is a monster in the sack?"
Jemma let her eyes narrow and put a coldness into her voice she didn't feel. "Don't you get any ideas, Daisy Johnson. He's mine." It was no good, though. Jemma couldn't hold the faux anger and she was laughing before she got to the end.
"Ew. Okay, we're officially not talking about that anymore. Anyway, if that's going...well..." Daisy said, gingerly, "...then it must be something else that isn't going well."
"He's being—" Jemma stopped herself, not sure exactly how to describe it. "Secretive. Spending a sizeable amount of time on something he hasn't told me anything about, and going somewhere I can't find him."
"Where's he going? The base is only so big. You must know—"
"That's just it," Jemma interrupted. "I have no idea. Not his quarters or mine. Not the lab, not the garage. He's just...disappearing."
"Well, maybe he is working on something classified for Coulson. If everything else between you two is okay, I betcha there's an innocent explanation."
"Yes." Jemma tried to sound decisive, putting on her best sunny smile and standing up. "Of course. You make perfect sense. Now that's settled, let's go to the mess and get something to eat."
Before Daisy could respond, Fitz bustled in, mumbling something to himself and shuffling through the contents of his workstation. He hadn't appeared to notice the other occupants of the room until he began to speak.
"Jemma, do you want to go out for Italian a little later? I have..." He stopped talking to sigh distractedly, apparently unable to locate whatever he'd been looking for. "...something...to do...in another..." He stuttered a little and Jemma waited through it, having learned that Fitz preferred to find his own words when this happened. "...place. For a bit." He gave her a lopsided smile.
As much as she wanted to forget about how he'd been nervous and secretive and throw herself into embracing the lovely evening out he'd proposed, she could feel the doubt hanging over her as she nodded at him.
Fitz crossed the room to give her a little peck on the cheek, and Daisy repeated her gagging routine for his benefit. But as soon as he was gone, she turned to Jemma, clicking her tongue as the thoughts raced behind her eyes.
"Yeah, he was pretty shifty there, wasn't he?"
"Perhaps." Jemma frowned. "I thought we were past keeping secrets from one another."
"Well, call me crazy, but I have an idea. Why don't you just ask him?"
Her frown deepened before she could cover, but she did her best to agree as believably as possible. "Yes, you're right. It's the most straightforward way to address the issue."
"But..." Daisy leaned forward again, trying to get Jemma to talk.
"But if I need reassurance he's not up to something that might be damaging to our relationship, then I..." she paused, not sure she should even say the words out loud, "...on some level...don't completely trust him."
"Do you?"
"Trust Fitz? Of course I do. I know him, Daisy, and even if he were to keep something from me, I know he'd never do it to hurt me." She thought about it for a moment, her mind racing through possibilities she hadn't allowed herself to examine before now. "He's much more likely to keep something a secret if he's trying to protect me."
"All right, now that sounds like Fitz." Daisy was nodding, now completely engaged in their brainstorming.
"If he is keeping a secret to protect me, though..." Jemma began, thinking about loud.
"...then he might be doing something dangerous," Daisy finished for her, saying what Jemma hadn't wanted to believe might be true. "It's simple, then."
Jemma knew the look on Daisy's face too well. It heralded the arrival of the kind of plan that was likely to get them both in unreasonable amounts of trouble, and something in Jemma's stomach twisted uncomfortably. "What's simple?"
"We have to figure out what he's doing."
Daisy had grabbed Jemma by the hand and dragged her to an out-of-the-way terminal, where she'd cracked her knuckles and begun to type. Narrating rapid-fire as the screen seemed to struggle to keep up with Daisy's input, Jemma finally saw what Daisy was trying to do.
"You're analyzing the power usage across the base, looking for anomalies?"
Daisy nodded. "If Fitz is working on something, there's a good chance it's high-end tech. That kind of power draw has to show up in the electrical system matrix somewhere. I tapped into the logs going back as far as I can to see if anything going on now is out of spec."
"Brilliant, Daisy. Truly." Jemma paused a moment, watching the light from the screen flicker over Daisy's face. "Thank you for this."
Daisy abruptly stopped typing, sitting back a little and scoffing as she shoved the keyboard in frustration. "You should save your praise until I actually help you find something. There's nothing. No unexplained spikes anywhere in the system."
Jemma hid her disappointment. It certainly wasn't Daisy's fault the idea hadn't borne any fruit, and Jemma was touched she'd attempted to help at all.
"How long has Fitz been doing his disappearing act?"
"I'm not absolutely sure, but...off and on...six months?"
"These logs go back longer than that, and I don't see anything to give us any clues here at all." Daisy looked back at Jemma. "Sorry. I really thought this might work."
"Please don't apologize. You've been so helpful already, Daisy, honestly. Just having someone to talk to about—"
"I missed you while I was away." Daisy looked down as she interrupted, the words coming quickly as though she had to say them before she changed her mind, and it sounded almost like a confession. Jemma thought over what she knew of Daisy's history, how no relationship was ever permanent, and realized what it must have taken for Daisy to make an admission like this.
"I missed you terribly while you were at Afterlife. We all did, and we were worried for your safety." Jemma jostled her shoulder into Daisy's to punctuate her point. "So I, for one, will work very hard to ensure this never happens again. I intend to keep quite an eye on you."
"Thanks." Daisy considered something for a moment. "Wait...why don't we keep an eye on Fitz? Go low tech. Old fashioned surveillance." Daisy grinned. "You can try out some of those soft surveillance techniques in the back sections of the SHIELD field manual. See if you can trick him into revealing anything."
"I don't know." Jemma worried her hands together, weighing the pros and cons of Daisy's idea. She wished she could simply ask Fitz what was going on, but she dreaded watching him lie to her face and knew it would only make her worry more. Worse, if she was imagining the entire thing, asking would betray a lack of trust between the two of them.
She simply wasn't ready to commit to a frontal attack on the problem.
"Perhaps I should wait it out," Jemma continued. "I'm sure if there's something I need to know about these unexplained blocks of time, Fitz will share it when he's ready."
Daisy nodded, noting one last time that she'd be there to help if Jemma ever changed her mind, and the two of them got back to work on the gauntlets.
Jemma held out for another two weeks of Fitz's feeble excuses to cover his increasingly lengthy absences before she found herself at the door to Daisy's quarters, taking her up on that offer to help.
They were in Daisy's quarters again a week later, going over the complete lack of information they'd gathered. It had been harder for Daisy, of course, to try to get anything out of Fitz, but even Jemma's attempts to unearth even the tiniest of clues had come up almost empty.
"So..." Daisy began, leaning back in her chair and looking at the ceiling, "...what do we know?"
Trying to be optimistic, Jemma concentrated on what they had managed to learn so far. "Most promisingly, we know where he's going."
"Yeah," Daisy agreed. "That old safe room all the way in the northwest corner of the base."
"Soundproof, manual locks," Jemma noted.
"No network activity, almost no electricity usage." Daisy let out a frustrated groan. "So we know where he is..."
"...but neither of us have a clue what he could be doing." Jemma tried not to think about the possibilities. She still didn't believe Fitz was doing anything unethical, or that would hurt her in any way other than putting himself in danger. It was that last possibility, that worried her enough to take action.
All the way back to the earliest days of their partnership at SHIELD Academy, both she and Fitz had benefited from having the other to moderate their particular brand of scientific enthusiasm. Fitz tended to be a bit too daring with designs without someone to temper him, and Jemma had to admit that she had a tendency to get lost in details and lose sight of the bigger picture without Fitz to help her maintain her perspective.
If Fitz had started down a path he felt he couldn't share with her, it would be far too easy for him to dig so deeply into this new project that he lost sight of his objectivity, wandering further and further from safe work practices. After everything they'd been through, she couldn't merely stand by and let something like this happen.
She was supposed to be his second set of eyes, the one person he could share everything with and trust unreservedly.
"Jemma...Jemma!" Daisy snapped her fingers in front of Jemma's face, trying to get her attention. "Are you all right?"
"Just driven to distraction," Jemma sighed.
Daisy leaned forward, taking a handful of popcorn from the bowl Jemma'd brought with her as cover, as she'd told Fitz she and Daisy were having a movie night. "Have you gotten anything out of him?"
"No. Nothing." Jemma thought back over the past week, remembering the two most promising attempts. "I've discerned a pattern in his disappearances. Not completely reliable, but close enough to work with. I tried to distract him—"
"—I'm guessing I don't want the details of the distraction?" Daisy interrupted, smirking. "Or do I?"
"My plans don't exclusively rely on being scantily clad and propositioning him. I've also tried to turn his head with intriguing new projects in the lab." At Daisy's raised eyebrow, she continued, "Actual projects in the lab, not a euphemistic use of the term." Jemma worried her hands together in her lap. "I even unearthed an old theory of ours from our Sci-Ops days, one we've never been able to set aside adequate time or energy to investigate."
"And he turned you down for all of that?"
"Oh, no. Fitz is brilliant, and a surprisingly adept multi-tasker. While he's losing much more sleep than he was before, he's engaged with me on every attempt to monopolize his time, and simply adjusted his disappearance schedule accordingly." Jemma sighed, taking more satisfaction than she probably should have at crunching a morsel or two of popcorn to bits in frustration. "I had to abandon the distract-and-question methodology so the silly man wouldn't work himself into pure exhaustion."
"Well, we're not giving up. We just have to think of something el—"
"Oh, I've done that. I know precisely what we should do." Jemma sighed, the unease already setting in. "I merely wanted to avoid this until it was the final option open to us."
"Other than just asking him what he's doing?"
Glaring at Daisy, Jemma took another bit of popcorn from the bowl and took her time chewing, putting off another explanation about why the direct approach wouldn't work. They'd been through it all before, the questions about trust and Jemma's concern that Fitz was putting himself in danger, and she couldn't imagine slogging through it again.
"Okay, okay." Daisy held up her hands in surrender, accurately interpreting Jemma's scowl and silence. "So what do we do next?"
"We have to hope we can operate the D.W.A.R.Fs as well as Fitz can, and that I understand his idiosyncrasies about how he cares for and stores his tools and gadgets well enough that we don't get caught."
"I don't get it," Daisy hissed, as Jemma led her down the darkened corridor at half past one in the morning. She yawned widely, and then continued, "I thought you and Fitz both worked on the D.W.A.R.Fs, but you're acting pretty nervous about using them."
"My contributions to the D.W.A.R.Fs were in their specs, and once they were completed, in data analysis after they've done their job. Fitz insists on being their sole operator, and does all the ongoing maintenance. I've watched him, of course—"
"—his hands turn you on, don't they?" Daisy said, and Jemma stopped abruptly in place, blinking back a bit of minor shock before she giggled a little. "Sorry. My filter's not great in the best of times, and I guess it's worse in the middle of the night."
"His hands are rather nice, aren't they?" Jemma pictured them, his long, deft fingers, and not a moment of the hours she'd spent watching him work seemed wasted. She knew they'd been one of the focal points of Fitz's post-injury frustration, but watching him work so hard to regain full function made them—and Fitz himself—even more remarkable and attractive to her.
Jemma jumped a little when Daisy smacked her on the shoulder.
"Focus! Get your head back in the game."
"You're the one who brought up Fitz's hands," Jemma whispered, a bit embarrassed to have been so easily sidetracked.
Daisy punched a code into the room next to Fitz's mystery room and let them inside. Jemma decided it was best if she didn't know why the room had needed a code in the first place, but more importantly, how Daisy had gotten it.
"All right, what's the plan?"
Jemma was already opening the case, carefully unpacking two of the D.W.A.R.Fs. The tablet she'd snuck out of Fitz's quarters was already running his piloting program, and once she'd freed Doc and Sneezy, they whirred to life.
She tapped at the tablet, guiding them upward toward the ceiling panel Daisy had removed while Jemma had prepared the D.W.A.R.Fs. Their flight wasn't as smooth as it always seemed when Fitz was at the controls, but nevertheless, Jemma felt a pleasant jolt of pride when they both flew through the hole without clipping each other or the edges of the remaining tiles.
"Right," Jemma muttered, distracted by the quick adjustments she had to make, keeping an eye on the output from the cameras on the D.W.A.R.Fs while she watched for the data to begin pouring in. She'd set them both to pick up as much information as possible, as they still had no clue what Fitz might be up to in the room next door.
There weren't many readings coming through, but Jemma was quite interested to see there was evidence of some sort of intermittent noise occurring next door. The D.W.A.R.Fs were attempting to compare it to other sound patterns they had on file, but hadn't come up with a hit yet.
"What are you seeing?" Daisy hissed, looking over Jemma's shoulder. As she leaned forward, she jostled Jemma's arm, causing her to bobble the tablet, and a distinct thunk echoed from above the ceiling.
The two of them looked at each other with wide eyes for a moment before Jemma jolted to action, adjusting sliders in an attempt to keep the D.W.A.R.Fs from being damaged.
"Do you think he heard that?" Daisy asked, and Jemma's stomach twisted as she realized there could be no way Fitz hadn't heard a noise that loud when it had been so close to him. Given how the sound insulation between the ceiling and the crawlspace above it wasn't nearly as robust as it was between the walls, he would easily have made it out.
"Perhaps not," she answered, though she knew there was very little chance he hadn't. "Fitz does get quite tunnel-visioned when he's working on something. He may have been too distrac—"
She stopped, putting the D.W.A.R.Fs in static hover mode, and her heart pounded, out of control, as the D.W.A.R.Fs found a match for a new sound coming from the safe room below them.
"He's opened the door. He must be looking to see if the sound he heard came from the hallway."
"Well, if he thinks the sound came from that direction, we're free and clear, right?" Daisy grinned. "Keep going."
"When he doesn't find the source, he'll keep looking." Jemma tapped madly at the controls, just barely keeping Doc and Sneezy from colliding again as she guided them back down into their room.
"Do you really think—"
"When Fitz is curious about something, he can be very persistent. It's not worth the risk." Jemma was already examining both D.W.A.R.Fs, though she was able to hold her frustrated groan until Daisy had completely replaced the ceiling panel. "There's been some damage to Doc."
"What? No!" Daisy was at Jemma's side, running a finger along a shallow scratch on the aft side of Doc's housing. "He won't notice something this small, will he? You can barely see it, even when it catches the light just right."
"The question isn't whether he'll notice it. It's how long it will take him to notice it. Even when we haven't used our equipment, Fitz has a routine maintenance schedule for everything." Jemma bit her lip, her mind racing to think of some excuse she could offer to explain the damage.
"Wait, you can turn this to your advantage! Tell him you had to get some readings from something while he was away." Daisy's eyes widened, sparkling with excitement. "Make him feel guilty he snuck off to that room to do whatever he's keeping so secret when you needed his help."
"Oh, that's rather devious, isn't it?" Jemma looked at the scratch again, her brow furrowing with worry. There was really no other way to explain it, other than simply coming clean and admitting to this late-night excursion, which was seeming more and more insane to Jemma the longer she pictured herself telling Fitz what she'd tried to do.
"Do you have a better idea?"
Jemma let her head fall forward, surrendering herself to the plan. "No. I don't. But first, we have to get out of here without Fitz discovering us. Can you pop into the hallway to make sure the coast is clear? Surely you can come up with some reason for being here if you run into him?"
After the D.W.A.R.Fs were packed away, they got out without being discovered, though Jemma found herself awake for hours after she returned to her quarters, wondering how she'd find a way to lie to Fitz about what had happened to Doc.
At the banging on her door the next evening, Jemma jumped to her feet, wondering if it would be Fitz (demanding to know why Jemma was lying to him) or Daisy (demanding to know how the lying had gone.) As soon as the door was open, she had her answer.
"Well?" Daisy demanded, not waiting for Jemma to step back before she pushed her way past. "What happened?"
"He doesn't believe me." Jemma let the door close, then sat dejectedly on the edge of her bunk.
"He told you he thinks you're ly—"
"Oh, he didn't say anything. He listened to me and my ridiculous story about deciding to operate Doc on my own, nodded, apologized for being away when the readings were needed, and then he sat down to buff out the damage."
"Is he angry? How do you know if he didn't say anything?"
Jemma fixed Daisy with an incredulous look. "I've known the man for a dozen years, and I'm terrible with lies. Especially with him. He knows it was all complete rubbish." She sighed, falling onto her back and stared at the ceiling. "I don't think he's angry, but he's definitely a bit confused."
"Well, maybe it's his turn." Jemma felt the mattress dip as Daisy sat next to her, then laid back so they were side-by-side. "He's confused you enough recently. He deserves a little table-turning."
"I don't know, Daisy. I don't know what's going on, and I can't be sure Fitz isn't risking his safety with a project so dangerous he can't even disclose the existence of it to me. I don't know what to do."
"We've tried everything either of us could think of, and we've got nothing. You either have to live with that, Jemma...or..." Daisy let the sentence trail off, her voice getting high at the end, and Jemma knew what she was being pushed to do.
"I'll have to live with it."
Daisy's frustrated sigh rang out in the room. "But he's keeping something from you."
"I know," Jemma whispered, feeling miserable. "But I want Fitz to tell me about it himself, or never at all."
January turned to February, and Jemma couldn't keep her uncertainty from infecting her hopes for their relationship. She could feel herself holding Fitz at arm's length, protecting herself from the pain of whatever rift had settled between them that was deep enough to cause Fitz to begin keeping secrets again.
She'd pleaded fatigue and turned him down the last handful of times he'd suggested anything remotely romantic, and he now seemed quietly troubled whenever they were together.
It was an otherwise unremarkable day in the lab several weeks later, after Fitz had appeared at her side at the exact moment she needed his input, as though their connection was still infallible and perfect. She had to blink back tears, hating that it seemed they'd given up the ability to speak openly with each other when they'd developed the ability to practically read each other's minds as lab partners.
Fitz had stumbled back toward his station, then turned back to blurt out, "Jemma, is there something wrong?" He walked back, his steps still unsure and halting, and lowered his voice. "You know, with us?"
She looked at the innocent confusion, the concern plain on his face, and the frustration of the unsolved mystery between them finally spilled over. Jemma could contain it no longer.
"Of course there's something wrong! You've been keeping secrets from me for weeks. Skulking off at all hours to that room in the northwest corridor you think I don't know about. In the middle of the night, Fitz! All for something you've refused to share with me, despite how many times I've asked you exhaustively if there's a new project you've been considering."
Fitz looked a little defeated, and the laugh he let out was mostly fatigue, laced with a little disbelief. "Of course I couldn't keep this from you. How could I forget how brilliant and unrelenting you are when there's a mystery that needs solving?"
He gestured for her to follow, taking her hand as they moved through the corridors. It was such a simple, innocent gesture, something they'd done long before their feelings for each other had begun to change, but it still felt oddly thrilling. They'd been keeping the change between them to themselves, the privacy feeling essential to both of them as they tried to navigate these new waters together.
Fitz was silent, stealing looks at her from time to time, but saying nothing until they reached the room she'd been fixated on all these weeks. With one last, cleansing sigh, he punched a code into the keypad by the door, hesitating for a moment before opening the door.
"Why didn't you just ask me, Jemma?" He spoke the words toward the wall, as though he couldn't quite face the look in her eyes as she heard the question or while she delivered her answer.
"I wanted you to want to tell me. I don't know why you felt you needed this secret, but I also need us to trust each other. I won't deny how curious and—yes, worried—I was, but I do trust you, Fitz." She took a deep breath, only just realizing how much she meant what she was about to say. "If you want to lock that room back up and walk away, I don't need to know what's in there. Not if you tell me it's nothing I should be concerned about."
"Jemma Simmons, the woman who'll move heaven and earth to discover new things, to learn, to examine, to postulate and prove. You'd walk away right now and trust me if I tell you whatever I have in there isn't something you need to know about?"
She tried to suppress any sign of how torn she was, wanting to understand what Fitz was hiding from her but knowing, without reservations, that she could trust him. With a deep breath, she took his hand again and tried to lead him away, but he pulled her back. Drawing her into his chest as his arms wound securely around her, he gave her a long, lingering, almost awed kiss.
"I don't want you to think I don't trust you," she whispered to him, the words caressing his lips between kisses.
He laughed a little, pulling back to look into her eyes. "I didn't realize you'd noticed so many of my absences."
"After all this time, you think I don't notice when you're with me and when you're not? I've had quite enough of us being apart. After I got back from my assignment undercover, we were separate even when we were in the same room. I don't want that to ever happen again."
"'Course not. I don't either. And—"
"—but that doesn't mean you aren't allowed privacy, Fitz. So as long as it's all right for us to ask each other if there's anything going on we should know about, we should agree to trust each other enough that we're allowed a little secrecy."
Fitz laughed again, making Jemma wish she understood what was so funny. "I am keeping a secret from you, but I never intended to keep it forever." He sighed with gentle resignation, but with that look in his eyes that made her stomach flip with the certainty that this amazing, wonderful man loved her with everything he had. "Just until Valentine's Day."
"Valentine's—" she began, her eyes closing when she realized the completely innocent explanation that had somehow never occurred to her or to Daisy as they'd schemed to discover the reason for Fitz's strange behavior.
"If you'll excuse the rough edges," Fitz said, pushing open the door and leading Jemma inside, "I think February 14th can come a bit early this year."
He led her into the safe room, and she blinked a little as she took in how bare it was. When she'd imagined what he could be doing behind this door, on his own, she'd pictured tools, components, stacks of paper with scrawled schematics drawn on them. The last thing she'd expected...was this.
There were a few chairs there, most of them shoved to the side, and Fitz headed straight for one of them after the door was shut, pulling it to her and gesturing for her to sit down. A guitar leaned against a makeshift stand he must have made from leftover parts from the garage and the lab, and he picked it up as he ducked his head under the strap, then leaned back onto the stool in the center of the room.
Jemma watched, wondering how she'd known Fitz for so long and never unearthed his apparent ability to play a musical instrument, when she finally saw the stack of books on the lone table in the corner. With a squint, she could make out several titles, and it all clicked into place when she realized they were all primers for learning how to play the guitar.
She'd expected him to say something, but instead, he began to play. A melody filled the room, notes that rose and fell, twisting into unexpected shapes, and she was torn between watching his hands as they caressed the strings and closing her eyes to pay more attention to the song.
The music was bare at first, almost simple, and then he added lush, thick chords for the melody to arc its way over. It grew and faded back in turn, the strains of dissonant clashes giving way to brighter and more welcoming harmonies. For every moment the song dropped into an almost troubling darkness, it soared upward, the phrases uplifting and joyous.
Tears threatened at the corners of her eyes and she opened them to brush the moisture away, only then noticing the concentration in his face as he played. His bad hand was trembling, and Fitz had begun to take every opportunity he could to stretch his fingers between motions. When he winced in pain, she nearly asked him to stop, but she knew from the stubborn set of his jaw that he'd be determined to see this through to the end. She waited, continuing to listen until the last echoes of the song faded away.
They both froze in the silence until Fitz squeezed his eyes shut in pain. He took off the guitar to put it in his lap as he massaged his hands, the fingers stiff and clearly causing him more discomfort than Jemma had thought possible, given how beautifully he'd just played.
"Fitz, your hand. Are you—"
"I'll be fine. The point of this is to push myself."
"You found a related skill," she breathed, marveling at the simple brilliance of the idea, "but different enough that your brain would be forced to create new neural pathways to accommodate what you were learning. And through that, you'd unlock—"
"—some of the function I'd lost," he finished for her, and she smiled at the way they were still able to complete each other's sentences.
"But why the secrecy?"
"I was embarrassed." He shrugged, the smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth a bit sheepish as he scratched the back of his neck. "I learnt chords at first, practiced different things until I started to get a bit better. But it was frustrating...." Fitz trailed off, massaging his bad hand as he stole a look at her.
"Why?" She thought she might understand, but sensed Fitz needed to explain it, perhaps even to help himself come to terms with it.
"It's been different. I've been different. Since the pod. The coma. I can do a lot of what I used to do, but almost all of it seems at odds with what I remember from before."
She watched him, drinking in every one of his nervous tics, the way she'd always been able to read his level of concentration in the almost-frown set of his lips. "You're right. You aren't the same as before." And when his face fell, she continued as quickly as she could. "Neither am I, for the record. But Fitz, as changed as you've been by the past few years, you are no less extraordinary a man as you were the day we met. You're better. For every challenge, for the adversity you've had to overcome—it's done nothing but make you more."
He looked down again, clearly embarrassed, and he coughed a bit to clear his throat. "Well..." he began, as though he was searching for something to say. "Did you like your Valentine's Day present? The song?"
"It was beautiful, Fitz. Truly. But I didn't recognize it. Is it—"
"It's you," he whispered, unable to look at her until after he took a deep breath. Then his eyes met hers, his brow furrowing under the weight of what he was trying to put into words.
"When I had trouble getting my hand to play the exercises in the guitar course, I decided to try playing something else. Then I kept hearing the same melody in my head, and it just sank into my hands. I never had trouble playing that, even if my hand started to shake," he said, gesturing at the guitar as he stood up, his eyes crinkling at the edges the way they always did when he looked at her as though he still couldn't believe they'd been lucky enough to find each other. "And I just knew it was you—this song. It's what you mean to me, Jemma. I don't know if you understand, or if it even makes any sense. I know I'm not very good, and my bad hand lags behind sometimes—"
She didn't let him finish the sentence before she launched herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck and squeezing the breath right out of him. He kissed her as though they had all the time in the world, as though they could float there forever as long as they had each other.