“Fitz,” Jemma says, quiet from halfway across the lab. They’re the only two in there, just now, and her voice echoes against the emptiness. “Why didn’t you kiss me?”
Fitz lets out a long, shuddering breath, just like the one he had while they watched the sun rise, and he wonders if that will become part of the vocabulary of every conversation with Jemma Simmons, serial heart-render. He stares at his hands, trying to make his breaths even. He doesn’t think it’s too successful.
Two breaths pass in silence before Jemma pipes up again.
“When I said – when I asked – what you thought we should do about it – about how I feel about you - I was sort of expecting – I don’t know, maybe hoping – you would – well, it would have been the perfect opportunity to –“
“Because I’m scared.” He wanted to say it quietly, respectfully, he really did, but when he says the words all his emotion bleeds into them and the words come out raw, strained, loud.
She crosses the lab to where he stands, and bloody hell, why didn’t he put more chairs in here? He needs somewhere to collapse, to protect his heart from the wreckage she surely will wreak on it today. Her steps are quick and determined but she halts them just meters from him, blinking hard and shaking her head like she forgot why she’d come to him in the first place.
“Fitz,” she murmurs beseechingly, “look at me.”
He could never resist her, never deny her a request. He drags his eyes up to hers and it’s plain, then, that every word he spoke was truth. He is scared, so very scared.
“I’m sorry,” Jemma blurts. “I’m so sorry. I want to make it better. I want us to be – I just want us to be. Tell me what to do.”
“You can’t,” he says, his voice having faltered to a weak, cracking groan. “You can’t, not until we get him back.”
Jemma freezes, utterly stunned. “Whyever not? What does this have anything to do with Will?”
Fire blazes through Fitz’s veins when she says that name. He hates it so much it’s hard to hear the way she says it, and he wonders, too late, if her voice is filled with love when she does.
Her face is all confusion, though, lips pursed and forehead creased and that vein running just down to the tip of her right eyebrow the way it does only when she’s on the verge of tears. He’s dreamed her so many times in the last seven months, and every glimpse behind his heavy lids got every single detail of her right. It’s almost cruel, how tightly his brain held onto her while she was trying to forget him.
Fitz lets out another shuddering sigh. “Because, Jemma. I need you to be sure. One hundred percent sure that you want – that this is something that – bloody hell, now I sound like an arse, but I have to be honest, because if I’m not now I never will be.”
The stream-of-consciousness words he spews even surprise him.
“Go on,” Jemma nods, her face all earnest, her eyes glistening with tears poised to fall for some as-yet-unspecified reason.
“If I kiss you, Jemma, there’s no going back. Not for me. I’ll be too far gone to ever recover from –“ Fitz stopped himself before he finished, his brain warring between giving her the truth and giving her the space to love who she would love, to go where she would go, whether it involved him or not.
“From losing you,” she finished, breathlessly. “Fitz,” she said, swallowing hard and shaking her head, once, “I have lost you so many times. I thought you died, then I thought you – you hated me.”
“Never,” he said, a lump in his throat tripping his words.
“The last time I lost you, I was on the other side of the universe, with no clue how to get back to you. After so very long of trying with every breath, with every fiber of my being, to get back to you, I finally believed I’d lost you, well and truly, forever. Will was there, but that was all he was. He wasn’t you. Not even close. Nobody could ever be you, I could never feel the same way as I – I could never love someone as I love you. Not even close. Not even in the same solar system.”
Now Jemma is breathless with her declaration, and as Fitz watches a single tear roll down her cheek, he thinks that maybe he was wrong. Maybe he should kiss her while he can, at least to keep the memory with him no matter which path she chooses. He shakes his head, hard, against that thought, and stares at his hands again.
“Fitz,” Jemma says, moving even closer, so near to him now that he can sense her breaths encroaching on the air he’s breathing, just a step away now, so that he thinks he could pick her heartbeats out of all the other noises of the lab equipment surrounding them.
“Fitz,” she says again, her voice softer, infused with love. She reaches up to his face, letting her fingertips brush just so against his jaw, and with just that touch, he’s in heaven. “Fitz, you were my first love. You will be my last love. I’ve always been sure of that. I only ever doubted one thing, and that was that you would always find me, no matter what. I know that now. We will always find our way back to each other. I’m not afraid anymore. Please, don't you be afraid, either.”
Her eyes burn amber in the low light of the lab, of their lab, and Fitz thinks of all she’s seen, all she’s been through, and reminds himself of this one truth – she came back to him. She chose him, at the bottom of the ocean, across space and time, and to stand beside to watch the sun rise. If she’s telling him she wants him in this moment, well, that’s a precious gift he would be a fool not to accept.
If the unrelenting entropy of the universe happens to include the havoc Jemma Simmons wreaks on his soul, well, he’ll just have to surrender to that just like everything else. It doesn’t mean he can’t savor it while it’s happening.
“Please, Fitz,” she says again, but this time it’s a whisper, lilting near the end, full of hope and teetering at the edge of something momentous.
So Fitz closes the gap between them, encircling her waist with his arms and pulling her in tight, just like he’s imagined doing so many times. She fits perfectly there, her shoulders notching right below his as her arms curl up against his chest, almost like she’s imagined doing this too. Fitz wonders if they really are somehow connected, their atoms having tangled together in some ancient fabric of the universe and miraculously, after millennia, found their way back to each other. How else can two people embrace so that their souls entwine?
Jemma’s eyes flick to his lips, then his to hers, and his heart threatens to beat right out of his chest, and his shoulders rise and fall with the air his lungs are struggling to drag in and push out. But she is steady, and calm, and oh so faithful as she pushes herself up on her toes, just so, and holds her lips an inch from his. Her eyes flutter shut and her breath tickles his lips.
So Fitz leans forward, thinking he just might die with the electric shock the press of her soft, warm lips touching his own sends through him, and if he did die, it would be one hell of an incredible way to go. But seconds later, he’s still alive, and her fingers are threading through his hair and his palms have molded to her hips. Every molecule of him and every molecule of her are fighting to be closer together, and that means breaths syncing and sighs harmonizing and tongues brushing.
If she gives him the chance, he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to figure out the puzzle of how to get closer to her every time they touch, exchange a look, share a kiss.
For now, this is his goal. This is his home. And if their forever is contained in this one kiss, in this one moment, then that will be more than enough.