#fitzhunterfic

“I came out,” he declared. “Well – I guess I didn’t, technically, come out ‘til just now. You’re the first person I’ve told. Joey knows, sort of, but-“

“As what?” Jemma interrupted.

“Hm?”

“Came out as what?” Her eyes glimmered with pride and excitement. She bit back her instinct to say I told you so, and grinned at him instead. “You never said.”

“Oh,” he said, and grinned, as the gears in his head stopped grinding; overthinking; qualifying. “I’m bi.”

Jemma squealed, jostling the popcorn dangerously close to falling out of the bowl.

“Tell me everything!” she begged. “How did you know? When did you know? Was it Mack? It was Mack wasn’t it. Or was it Hunter… He’s a little roguish, but he’s got that loner-with-a-heart-of-gold air working for him quite well, doesn’t he? I can see you falling for that.”

Fitz waved her off. “It was lots of things. Ever since the Academy. I just kept telling myself, it was nothing – you know, it was hormones or jealousy or whatever.”

“Life goals or wife goals,” Jemma added, nodding in understanding.

“- but every time I started to think about it, really think about it,” Fitz continued, “something would happen, and it would go away, or I’d spook myself and hide it. Joey saw through all that, and he sort of- he got me to reflect on all this stuff, the crushes and everything, and I realised that actually… I’ve known about this for a long time. I just wasn’t ready to accept it.”

Jemma nodded. Her own sexual awakening had come to her rather easily, but she knew a good number of people for whom it had not been so simple, or welcomed. Yet she couldn’t help but spare a moment of solemnity for the messy timing of all this. She found herself wanting to ask, so what does this mean for us?, but of course she already knew. The answer was probably, nothing. Just because Fitz now recognised another side to his romantic and sexual nature, it didn’t change his feelings for her, and it didn’t change the mess they were in. And it didn’t change the fact that he still trusted her enough to tell her first.

“How do you feel about it now?” she asked instead.

“Honestly, good,” Fitz replied, then qualified - “Most of the time. I still doubt myself sometimes, or I think, what would Mack say if he caught me staring, you know? Would it change things between us?”

Seeing that he was starting to fret, Jemma put an arm around Fitz’s shoulder and pulled him close. These were waters she knew well.

“That’s okay,” she promised. “These are all very normal feelings, and you don’t have to tell Mack – or anyone – if you don’t want to. But he’s a good man and he won’t hate you for it. And, you know, have you ever considered that it could change things in a good way? If you feel like you’re hiding something or lying to him now, coming out might help that. You’ll feel more secure. And… you might even get a date out of it. I don’t know Mack’s situation, of course, but if I were you I wouldn’t let those guns pass me by without letting him know I was on the table.”

“… That’s a very sexual image.”

“Yes it is.” Jemma bit her tongue. She was going to enjoy mocking Fitz relentlessly, he always got so flustered when it came to matters of the body, but she had to ease him into it first. “But it’s not just a matter of that, is it? You said you liked the way Mack treats you, with respect, with forwardness, with kindness. You enjoy doing things together. Same taste in cars, same taste in movies; that’s as good a place as any to start. It seems to me you two could build, if you’d pardon the pun, quite the life together – or at least show each other a good time.

“Or what about Hunter? Now, I know for a fact he likes people of the masculine persuasion. He’s got a nice beard, very rugged, and don’t think I haven’t seen you checking out that ass. From what I’ve heard, he’s also a great softie, underneath all that swagger. You two would get along quite well, I’d imagine. Although, the fights over football would be a problem. He barracks for a different team does he not?”

Fitz snorted, as if about to start on a rant at the very thought, but then something occurred to him and he smiled to himself. “We play together too, though. Football, I mean. He’s rather good at it.”

“See?” Jemma nudged him. Fitz laughed.

“Alright, so are you going to set me up with every guy in this place or what?” “Well, you don’t have many options left as regards the women,” Jemma pointed out. “Daisy’s somewhat taken, apparently; May, while gorgeous, is too old for you; and I’m sorry but Bobbi is just out of your league.”

“Oh, but right in yours is she?”

“What?” Now it was Jemma’s turn to blush.

“Don’t ‘what’ me,” Fitz scoffed, smugly taking another handful of popcorn. “You know full well what I’m talking about. You started at her legs when she walked into the lab the first time for a full minute. A full minute Jemma-“

“What about you!” Jemma retorted. “I saw you lick your lips when Mack walked out the other day with that tank top and the grease stain on his collarbone-“

“You started fake cursing like an old woman from the South the first time you saw Daisy without a top on-“

Verbal arguments failing her, Jemma shoved the bowl of popcorn at Fitz. He shoved it back, and she deflected it straight onto the floor, sending popcorn spilling out across the carpet. They paused for a moment in their bickering, and decided they’d best clean it up, so they slithered onto the floor together and crawled around on their hands and knees, dropping popcorn piece by piece back into the bowl. The fight was not over yet though, with Jemma taking this distraction as a chance to have the final word.  

“It’s not like you can talk, Mr ‘let me show you my equipment,’” she mumbled.

“What was that?” Fitz beckoned, and flicked a piece of popcorn at her. It bounced off her shoulder. “Did you have something you’d like to share with the class, Ms ‘well formed and symmetrical’?”

“Ugh, Fitz!” Jemma groaned, and threw a handful of kernels at him.

Unsurprisingly, Fitz doesn’t tell him, but instead, it’s Simmons the one who spills the beans. She sees a hickey Hunter is not really trying to hide barely two weeks after he met them, and her face moves quickly from cheerfulness to wariness.

I hope you are taking it seriously, and somehow her tone is more hopeful than admonishing.

When Hunter corners her trying to get her to say something else, she bails, clearly worried that she already said too much.

It leaves him munching on his nails, wondering, but he doesn’t ask.

He doesn’t ask, but he starts playing closer attention, to the way Fitz doesn’t even raise his head when an extremely handsome guy passes them by, or to the way he does look slightly uncomfortable whenever the girls start getting handsy when they are still present. He doesn’t ask, but he notices.

For all that he has had kind of a reputation of being a bad boy, Hunter has always been happy with letting his partners set the pace of their sexual relationships. He is not an animal: he has needs, but he knows how to take care of them perfectly well on his own. Fitz can take all the sweet time he wants.

When two months have passed and Fitz stops the umpteenth make out session to go hide out in the bathroom, Hunter wonders if an intervention might not be in order. Not to coerce him into sex, of course. But for Fitz to… talk to him. To let him know if there is something that is making him uncomfortable. If Hunter can do something different for his benefit. If he might need to change his expectations from ‘not now but sometime’ to ‘never’. (He actually tries to not think too hard about it, because his first instinct was to think that he would have to work around it, instead of thinking of a way to nope out of this relationship asap, and that is a terrible sign that he’s in this way too deep already).  

The next chance he gets, he takes Fitz out to the pub where they had their “first date”. Adam puts a match on the TV just for them, and they don’t get much talking done after that, too busy bickering and throwing peanuts at each other’s faces.

When Fitz places his hand dangerously up on Hunter’s thigh, his eyebrows rose up, but he doesn’t move away and, still, he doesn’t ask. They make out like teenagerssss all the way back home, stopping on every corner to press each other against a wall.

When they get to Fitz’s place, he asks for a minute to get a water bottle, because he is feeling too hot and bothered, and he needs to slow down and adjust his expectations. When he gets back from the kitchen, Fitz is waiting for him sitting on the bed, and Hunter can’t even finish uttering his If you ever want to stop, just s- that Fitz is tumbling him on the bed, kissing him senseless.   

He makes sure to check with him several times through the night, not only verbally, and the sureness on Fitz’s eyes takes his breath away every time.

Still, he doesn’t ask.

The next morning, he jumps in the shower as usual- sex or not, this is not his first time sleeping over-, and he gotta say that he is a little surprised when Fitz- sleepy eyes and a serious case of bedhead- joins him.  

Only when they are past the kisses and the jokes and the bum-grabbing and the biting stage, and onto the ‘let me wash your hair’ one, Hunter does ask.

Fitz sighs and his fingers tense up against Hunter’s scalp, but just when Hunter is about to tell him to drop it, he starts talking. He tells him that he was nineteen and a virgin and a lot of people was talking behind his back and no matter how much Jemma tried to downplay it, the peer pressure still got inside his head. That’s how he ended up taking out the next girl who asked him out and he kissed her and he even let her take him to bed. And it was Awful, with Capital A.      

He realized quickly that it was not a matter of “the wrong gal”, that there was no blame to put on her, but instead of taking him into a path of discovering alternatives to allosexuality, the experience sent him into the path of discovering alternatives to heterosexuality.

It was not an easy road devoid of bumps, the ghost of his father ever present inside his head, but with the unwavering support of both his mum and Jemma, he eased into his attraction to men quite nicely. And boy, was he into men.

They run out of hot water by the time Fitz tells him that dating men come to him more natural than any interaction with women ever was, not taking Simmons into account, of course. Hunter tells him to keep with the story, towels both of them off quickly, and then they get under the covers, still naked, while Fitz tells him that while the romance part and even the kissing part were great, he still wasn’t finding his footing in regards to sex. Hunter notices that he is blushing and stuttering a lot more than when they weren’t face to face, so he pulls the covers over their heads. This way they barely can see each other, but their intermingled legs and his hand on Fitz’s chest let him know that he is still here, and he is more than okay with this. He scoots over really close, as much skin touching as possible, his lips close enough to drop kisses on Fitz’s face every now and then, and Fitz’s voice drops and his heart rate slows down. Hunter kisses his closed eyelids before telling him to keep going, if he wants.  

Fitz tells him that he had sex with two guys, and it wasn’t as awful as his first time was, but still they weren’t exactly enjoyable experiences. There are tears on the corners of his eyes when he says that after the first one he forced himself to go through another one, because he was convinced that his lack of desire was internalized homophobia, and he wanted to spite on it and on all the toxic shit his father ingrained in his brain. Hunter kisses the tears away, holds him close until the sobs subside. He murmurs a lot of things against his skin, about how he is amazing, and beautiful and worthy of everything and has every right to all his feelings and how he never should feel less because of them. He is not sure Fitz actually hears him, but it doesn’t matter: from now on, Hunter will tell him how many times are necessary for him to believe it.

When he has calmed down a bit, Fitz kisses Hunter on both his temples, between his eyebrows, on the tip of his nose. It’s the most intimate moment he has ever shared with someone, but he doesn’t tell him that.

“But this is not a sob story, let me tell you the part of the story where it gets better.” So he tells him, briefly, about this ex that Hunter has already heard mentioned here or there, and how he got assigned to a research center on a different city just two days after they started seeing each other. It was insane to settle on a long distance relationship after so little of a relationship itself was formed, but they stayed friends, chatting almost every day,  sharing their daily life with each other, so much that every time Jemma caught him on the phone with this guy, she would make moony eyes at him until Fitz threw something at her head.

When after six months the guy got back to London, they decided to go grab a beer together. There were no second intentions, at least not on his part, Fitz swears, but the moment he saw him, there was an intense desire coursing through his veins like he never felt before. He knew this person, beautiful inside and out, and, in a way, he has presented his flaws and his soul bare for him, and Antoine still liked him, and that was working like a bloody aphrodisiac for him.

Hunter tries his best to not feel jealous, but it’s hard, because he really really likes this man; to clear up the air a little, he flips Fitz on his back and tickles him on all the weak spots he is already familiar with, with a teasing Basically you are telling me that I should never let you go for beers with anyone, because that always seems to work a little too well for you. Fitz rolls his eyes, but he moans when Hunter grazes his ribs with his teeth, and the story gets derailed for a while.  

It is easier to hear him wax out poetics about some other man while he still can feel Fitz’s post-orgasm accelerated heart rate under his hand.

“To tell it short, it was good, really good, in a way I didn’t know sex could be good. He was six months stationed in London and we were together for that while, but then he got assigned permanently to run a training center in Canada, and we parted amicably. Amicably meaning that it bloody broke my heart, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault, so there was no use in being bitter about it. After that, I decided that I would never have sex with someone without having feelings for them first.”

Hunter’s heart thrums inside his chest, because the implication of what Fitz just said is really clear, and he is at the same time not truly ready to accept them, and delighted to know about them. His mouth is dry like a desert while Fitz looks at him with his unwavering gaze, and licking his lips doesn’t do them any good, so he tries to deflect the attention, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I have noticed that telling people gives them… expectations. It feels like they are all the time glooming over my shoulder, expecting a change from me. That makes me feel like I’m a bad person, because if I don’t want to have sex with them, it’s because I don’t care about them, when nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t feel sexual attraction unless there are feelings, but the opposite is not necessarily true. Simmons found out the actual word for it, demisexuality, and I love it because it’s me, it helped me realize that my experience was valid and that I was not alone in the way I feel, but people either get freaked out by labels they don’t understand or lowkey bullies you for considering yourself a very special snowflake.”

“Morons that reacted that way didn’t deserve your attention in the first place”

“That is true. All in all, after I stopped telling possible partners, there had been people who waited for me to take the first step without many questions asked, and people who have tried to pressure me before I was ready, and I fled from those as fast as I could. No one was interested in knowing the story.”

Something softens big time inside Hunter at hearing that, something that even blocks his need to go back in time and strangle all the assholes that tried to disrespect the basic concepts of consent and bodily autonomy with him. His voice is trembling when he speaks,  “Until me.”

Fitz is smiling at him, his thumb drawing lovely paths on Hunter’s jaw, and there is something in his eyes that  sends his stomach into a frenzy, “That’s right, Lance Hunter: until you.”    

Here you can read my headcanon about demisexual Fitz that runs closer to canon (ft. Fitzsimmons).