At first, he assumed that she was just running late to class. Even the most efficient machines fall victim to poor timing when someone else pushes a wrong button during operation, but 13:00 rolls around Simmons has still not shown herself and neither has she texted him to tell her that she was ditching their lunch plans and he starts to worry. It’s probably nothing, he reminds himself. He’s always just quick to catastrophize.
He sits at their usual lunch table while the other students wait through long lines for mediocre food trays and searches unfruitfully for Simmons between talking couples and finally sends her a text message. Fifteen minutes pass and she still does not answer. Curious.
After he stuffs the rest of his pastrami sandwich into his mouth without guilt, he slodges through campus over to her room and knocks on the door, ear close to the knotted wood to hear if she tells him to come in.
He knocks again and this time, she finally answers.
“Fitz?”
“Who else?” He sneers, but he’s glad to hear she hasn’t gone missing or something else dreadful.
“Come in, you brat,” she answers with petulance that she normally reserves for being sick.
With a squeak, the door opens and Fitz closes the things behind him, only to turn back to Simmons, a sight to behold in her flannel pyjama bottoms and the biggest shirt he’s ever seen in his life. Her hair has been drawn up into the most unflattering type of hair-bow. “A-are you alright?” He asks.
She nods. “Yes, I’m fine. Not feeling well.”
He navigates through her room and takes the seat on her chair, reflecting on exactly what she’s left scattered around the room. Her laptop bag has been knocked over and has strewn about her notebooks and highlighters, though the laptop is resting on her desk like she’s had the patience to use it, despite all the other pieces of evidence suggesting she doesn’t. Usually, the place is more immaculate than the lab; he’d feel confident eating off the rug in her bedroom. She turns down the television and looks at him, her head resting on her folded arm.
“Want some soup?”
“No, I had pizza for lunch earlier.” She points to her cup of tea, which is also full, so he cannot offer that as well. When she says that, he notices the pizza box that is empty and sitting on top of her bin with the lid up.
How very unsimmonsesque. “What’s wrong? Have you taken any medicine or been to the infirmary?” He hasn’t a clue what might be wrong with her despite the conviction that something is. Not having the qualifications that she does, he can think of two possibilities of ill: the throwing-up kind and the stuffy-nose kind. And she isn’t sniffing at all and she’s also talking about having had pizza for lunch.
She shakes her head and sits up only long enough to take a long pull from her tea and wince back down into her makeshift nest. “‘S fine. I just couldn’t get to class today.”
Fitz reaches into his bag and hands her his notes from their last lab. “It would have been much better with you there since we dealt with all sorts of fleshy things today.”
“Dealing with my own sorts of fleshy things,” she mumbles while she looks through his notes, which she normally calls messy but doesn’t.
“Simmons, what’s the matter? You’d get to class in the middle of a hurricane. You look, uh, tired? But alright.”
A scowl marks her face as she leans up to look at him. Her voice turns to a whisper as she answers, “lady things, Fitz.”
And he ignites the color of ketchup. “Oh, a lady thing.” He knows better than to ask for more detail than that since there is probably one specific thing she is referring to, and though he’s used to talking about it (as the son of a single mother) he’s not used to talking about it with Jemma. He doesn’t want to be used to it. Rather, he wants to shrink down into his sweater and pretend he didn’t ask and she didn’t answer.
“You know what I mean, right?” she asks in a low voice.
He nods. “Oh yes, of course I do. No need to elaborate.”
“I have awful cramps.”
Can ketchup turn any more red than the red he can feel on the tips of his ears and just underneath the irises of his eyes? “Want a hot water bottle?” He asks, looking anywhere other than where she is at that moment, curled up with his notebook and her cup of steaming drink.
Evidently there is one hidden beneath her lap blanket because she answers, “I already have one.”
“Okay, um, what about some pills?” He asks next, one foot heading toward her restroom and the medicine cabinet before he thinks better of that and stills himself on her light blue room rug. There are probably ladies things in there and he isn’t curious to see hers. What does one offer? All at once, he’s thankful that he never had any sisters, though, come to think of it, that would probably be helpful here since he would know what to offer her next.
“I took care of that, too. Helped a little, but also made me so sleepy.” She punctuates with a yawn and leans on her pillow, lazily, and practically forces Fitz to grab at her cup before it spills all over and move it to the desk, onto the coaster that holds the remnants of a chocolate milkshake.
“Chocolate?” He offers while he throws the old cup into the bin. “A fair amount of caffeine and also a nice helping of endorphins.”
She isn’t sold. Instead, she looks at him over her eyebrows, and suddenly she winces quite hard and squeezes the corner of her pillow.
“Simmons,” he almost chides as he approaches her bed and sits at the foot, closer to the television where The Office is playing. “How can I help?”
The force that grabbed her appears to ease slowly. “It’s fine, Fitz, really.”
“Well, it doesn’t look like it’s fine. I’ve witnessed you working through the flu all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the chem lab and you don’t even look like you could handle a physics drill right now.”
“That wasn’t the flu, it was mononucleosis.”
A laugh fights for his mouth, but he is able to catch it before it rises to the platform of his tongue. “Whatever it was, you got it from Milton and you learned your lesson about him.” Thoughtlessly, he reaches for her foot, which peeks out from between the mattress and her blanket, and takes it in hand. People say what they will about it, but Jemma smells cleaner than anything he has smelled all day, and he rubs the ball of her foot through her thick bed sock. He’s seen these before. She wore them over the holiday when he went to visit the Simmons’ home.
“What is this?” She asks with her eyes screwed shut and her hand balled up again, this time on the edge of her mattress.
“Sorry,” he lets go immediately. “Thought it would feel nice.”
“I assure you it feels divine, but you cannot stand even the thought of feet so what are you doing?”
This is obviously not relaxing her at all. He makes a show of tucking her socked foot back under the blanket. “Well, Simmons, ‘am just trying to make you feel a little better.”
She groans and rolls onto her other side, tightening up like a clam retreating into her shell.
He imagines what it must feel like to bear an issue like this so frequently. The memory of every stomach pain he’s ever had staggers him, but to think of a pain like that assaulting his reproductive organs. Unthinkable. He reaches out and pats her calf twice. “You never answered about the chocolate. Could get you a bar from the vending machine.”
Though she hesitates, he eventually sees her nod and she hands him her heating pad which had gone lukewarm.
“Alright,” he mumbles while he removes a couple of dollars from his wallet and tosses is onto the desk beside his bag. Their next class is going to begin in half an hour and he is pretty sure that Simmons is not going to take a turn for the better in that amount of time. And he really does not want to cut into any any fetal pigs to test for untraceable poisons. He’d rather undergo those cramps himself. “I’ll warm this up for you while I’m out, yeah?”
Undoubtedly the best part of living on an international campus is that there is always a bar of dairy milk in the vending machine. Except today. Also, the damn thing is devoid of hobnobs. It is a third place winner that he is finally forced to choose, and he knows that if he ordered chocolate at a cafe and someone returned from the kitchen with shortbread biscuits, he would be sorely disappointed.
That’s it. The treat clinks into the bin at the bottom of the machine and he chucks the little box into the pocket of his jumper and heads off to another floor in their dormitory only to be just as unlucky. It is the fourth floor when he finally finds what he’s looking for. One dairy milk bar that knocks in two when it hits the bin. But it’s chocolate all the same.
Fitz rides the lift back down to the ground floor and pushes back into Jemma’s room after a soft knock and he finds her wincing again. “I brought you this:” he holds his prize up like a sizable fish for her inspection.
“Thank you. How about the water bottle?”
Bloody hell. “I must have left it in the other room. I’ll be back in a jif.” He announces his leave and jogs down the hall once more, this time renewed with a different mission. He tries the first floor, and the second, and the third, and the fourth until he realizes his crucial mistake, and he heads back to Jemma’s room as slowly as he can.
“I’m an absolute twat, Simmons, I’m so sorry,” he announces again as he comes into her room for the third time.
Wiping her mouth of a chocolate smear, she pouts. “You lost my water bottle?” The chocolate bar’s purple wrapper wads up in her right hand, illustrating exactly how long he’s been gone, and classes have started an eon ago and they’re both missing the notes.
“I did. I’m so sorry.” He knows there’s not much money in his student account, and not enough to replace the warming bottle, at least not until the week after when it likely won’t matter as much.
It takes him a moment to realize why her face is screwed up in the manner that it has, and then he sees them. Tears, colored light brown from the remnants of makeup on her lashline, well thickly underneath her judgmental eyes. “Ugh, Fitz!”
“No, I know. Is there anything else?” He fights a little, trying to think of another solution short of putting up wanted posters in the corridor, but wouldn’t that be bloody ridiculous? How could he be so stupid.
A little sob rackets out from her mouth and she turns into her pillow. It’s a wonder to behold, and ironic as well, that the biologist falls so prey to her biology. He reaches over and strokes her back, just a bit, just so she knows he’s still there and still contrite, but she doesn’t respond and oh goodness does he feel so guilty.
Surprisingly, she does turn toward him and wrap her arms around his body and pulls him up beside her in her bed and he agrees, if only because he knows what he did and feels like absolute shite.
“I’m sorry, Simmons,” he says one more time before realizing that she’s already stopped her sniffling and has decided that maybe she won’t murder him this time.
A sigh flutters through her. “You’re rather toasty, too, aren’t you?”
“I see where this is going.” Out of guilt, he decides that he’ll allow her to hold onto him even though this means he’ll be missing their next class as well. As he watches her television over her shoulder, he wonders if he’d get away with eating those biscuits that are still in his pocket, and once a hilarious joke is told on the show and she doesn’t even chuckle, he realizes that she’s gone to sleep.
Slowly, as softly as he can move without jostling her awake, he bares the shortbread and begins his snacking, thankful that Simmons’s un-drunk cup of tea was close enough to dunk.