“Fitz.” Jemma speaks softly with a cheerful lilt, which Fitz knows by now that she has something less-than-mundane to tell him.
“Hm?” Fitz regrets his pristine workspace for the first time ever. Without piles of paper and fragments of gadgets littering his desk, it’s hard to pretend to be busy. The pretending is all up to him today, as every other person he might have pretended to have a meeting with is off on Operation Spotlight.
“It’s too late, isn’t it?”
The crack in Jemma’s voice forces Fitz’s gaze up. He’s never been able to turn a blind eye when she was upset, and this was no exception. Even if it was a surprise. Even if he had no idea why, this time.
Her eyes are brimming with tears, and he thinks that he could give a reasonable estimate of exactly how many would trickle down her cheeks just by looking at them. That’s how many times he’s seen her on the verge of breaking down in the last few years. Muscle memory takes over and Fitz is out of his chair and at her side in seconds. He leaves several inches of space, though, something he never would have done a year ago. Before Will.
“Hey,” he says, trying to keep his voice soothing even though he’s so sick of this, he could scream. He leans down so he can catch her gaze, look into her eyes with that look he’s mastered. The one that tells her that he’s fine, and they’re fine, and it will all be fine, even if he’s not at all sure of any of that.
In fact, Fitz is pretty damn sure that nothing is fine, just now. Still, he reassures her. Because that is what he’s always done, what he’s silently promised to always do. “Hey, it’s not too late.”
Her tear-filled eyes raise to his with a world of hope in them, and he takes this cue to reach out and touch the back of her hand. “It’s not too late, Jemma. We’ll get him back. I promised you that.”
God, Fitz is so tired, and every day a little more of him hopes they find Jemma’s astronaut soon so that he can stop keeping up this exhausting façade of wanting him back, of wanting to help her in this way.
He doesn’t want to, but he will. That’s all she needs to know.
Jemma’s eyebrows furrow and her mouth turns down and pain takes over the hope in her eyes. A sob escapes her throat, pushes past her lips. Her hand clenches into a fist and her knuckles turn white. She shakes her head and a single tear falls free, dripping on one of the slides that sit empty before her.
“Jemma. Talk to me.” It’s the last time he’s going to ask. It’s the last time he can handle it. Fitz knows that he tells himself this every time she cries. He always asks the next time, and the next, anyway.
“I meant,” she says, swiping away a tear and setting her jaw with such determination, “that it’s too late for us.”
“For us,” Fitz says, feeling his lips go numb. He’s waiting for the punchline. Maybe she’ll say it’s too late for them to get a sandwich or to join the mission. Jemma has been especially full of surprises since she returned.
“Yes,” she says in a choked whisper. “Yesterday when I told you…when I said…when you asked if I meant all those things, the ones I said on the recordings from the other side.”
“Yeah,” Fitz says, letting out a shuddering breath.
“I said I had, and I asked what you wanted to do about it.”
Bloody hell. As if he had to be reminded. “Yeah, Jemma. And we did what you wanted to do.” Just like always. “We watched the sunrise.”
“You didn’t want me,” she says, still whispering. If the centrifuges had been running and the techs had been bustling around, he never would have heard it. “I asked, and you didn’t, and it’s too late. For us.” The last word grinds out, and she stares into Fitz’s eyes now. Whether it’s a challenge or a period at the end of the longest run-on sentence of all time, he can’t tell. All he knows is that her words float around in his head, failing to connect together with any sort of meaning for long moments.
“Jemma, that is not what I said. That is not –“ Fitz’s hand has clenched into a fist and it takes everything he has to keep from slamming it on the desk. “I just –“
“I saw how hurt you were, Fitz, and I can’t – cannot tell you how sorry I am.”
“You don’t have to apologize. In fact, it would be better if you didn’t. Yes, it’s too late, I heard you tell me. Loud and clear. Why do we have to talk about it over and over?”
Jemma’s eyes narrow and her whole being goes still. He can feel the tension that keeps her breaths shallow arcing through the air between them. “What do you mean, I told you?”
Fitz spins away from her. He’s letting the frustration take over, in front of her, and he hates himself for it. He flings his arms out to the sides, drops them, and turns back. “You said you were clearheaded when you said those things. Which was a long time ago. After you recorded those things, you fell in love with someone else. So yes, it’s too late. Yes, I’ll get him back for you. The end. Story over.”
Jemma’s mouth drops open. “No. No, Fitz. That is not what I said. That was me telling you that I always loved you, and that I love you still, and that my hopes for settling in a cottage in your beloved Highlands with you remain unchanged, and asking if you loved me too. And then you said that we should watch the bloody sunrise!”
“Well what the hell else was I supposed to do?” Fitz explodes.
“I don’t know, maybe kiss me? Maybe that would be the appropriate thing to do in that precise situation, Fitz, if your feelings were returned. Which obviously they are not, not anymore, which means I’m too late, and I’ll ask you to just…let me get over it in peace.” Jemma’s words hang heavy with a strange mix of sadness and frustration and anger and resentment and hopelessness, and Fitz can barely wade through them well enough to hear the ones she uttered several breathless moments ago.
“You – you love me still?”
Jemma rolls her eyes even as a tear drips from each one. “Yes! I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m in love with Will, but honestly, Fitz. We’re adults here, aren’t we? Enjoying a few evenings with another adult, who just so happens to be the only other actual human on an unknown alien planet that one has literally no hope of over returning from, hardly comes close to anything resembling love, does it?”
Now it’s Fitz’s turn to stare silently, for his mouth to gape. “But – I just – you never – and it’s –“ He blows out a long, slow breath. He’s going to throw up if he doesn’t.
“How many times did you kiss an Academy girl after one too many shots? How many of them did you follow back to their rooms?” Jemma stands with hands on hips now, slowly working herself into a sort of fervor that Fitz hasn’t identified yet.
“I – erm – once or twice? A few?”
“A fair few,” Jemma sniffs. “I seem to recall overhearing them giggle about engineers’ hands. But would you say you loved any of them?”
“No! Never.” It’s the truth. They were vapid, compared to Jemma.
“Well, then. And one can hardly call the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy a hopeless, desolate alien planet.” Jemma’s hands drop from her hips and her shoulders relax, as if she’s just now registering Fitz’s confusion.
“Fitz,” she says, in an intoxicating tone that’s suddenly soft and patient. “I’m sorry for hurting you. Truly. But I can’t apologize for doing whatever I did to forget about you when I lost hope of ever getting you back. When I failed to send you that message – my soul was torn from my body. I wanted to throw myself into that canyon, rather than be forever apart from you.”
The raw honesty in her words, and the way they parallel what he felt when he screamed and pounded against the portal, break his heart all over again. “Will made sure I didn’t do that. I wasn’t myself. I was dying inside, and he was there, and he saved my life. He kept me alive so that I could get back to you, Fitz. If I love him in any way, it’s for that. When I told you that you’d understand when you met him…that’s what I meant. You’d understand that, compared to you, he’s nothing to me.”
“Jesus, Jem,” Fitz says, striding forward to close the space between them, standing there inches from her, shoulders shuddering with the force of his breath. “So you…”
“Love you, yes –“
“- as I love you?”
A smile breaks across her face, wide and bright. “I hoped so,” she says quietly. “That’s why I gave you my phone. Because I hope you can love me still. As I love you.” She’s inching closer to him with every breath, until his hands have found their way to the small of her back and her fingers are twisted in his shirt and her lips are a whisper away from his. “Please, Fitz,” she says, her voice laced with pain and hope and expectation.
He can’t tell if it’s defeat or relief or simply a fulfillment of destiny, but he meets her the last little bit of the way, trying to memorize the shy softness of her lips as they press, little by little, harder against his, trying to preserve the surge of confidence that causes him to move his hands to her waist and grip her there, hard, so that she whimpers against his mouth as he uses his tongue to sweep hers open.
Fitz doesn’t remember how or why he slides his hands behind Jemma to lift her up, doesn’t register her legs wrapping around his waist until they’re already there, doesn’t consciously take steps out of the lab and down the short hallway to her room. His body is following a script that is being handed to him by her touch and the delicious noises that come from her throat, piece by piece, unthinkingly but joyfully.
All Fitz knows is what he discovers when his body finally lays bare against hers in the warm nest of his sheets – that the raw brokenness he felt every time he looked at Jemma, thought about her, spoke with her, was really just his soul desperately begging him to let it meet with hers.