#fsfic

“I’m not—I’m not apologising,” Jemma clarifies, closing her eyes for a moment. Her wet eyelashes tickle her cheeks a bit. “I’m just… I’m sorry. I mean, I’m… sad. I’m sad that….” She takes a breath. “I’m sad that I won’t know whether she would have had your nose or mine, is all,” she finishes, shrugging half heartedly.

“She?” he repeats, so quietly she almost misses it.

Jemma reaches out for him and in a second he’s sitting on the edge of the mattress. She cups his face and runs her thumb along his scruffy cheek. “I don’t know,” she responds eventually. “Just… I was going off my family history. I’m the oldest, my mum’s the oldest, her mum was the oldest… It seemed like a pattern.”

“But I’m the oldest, too,” Fitz argues in mock seriousness, and she lets out a little laugh despite the fact that she would rather cry right then.

“You’re also the youngest,” she reminds him.

He rolls his eyes and turns his face to place a kiss on her palm. “Well, if you’re going to be that way,” he mutters, grinning widely when she lets out another breathless laugh. “Your genes would overpower mine regardless, boy or girl.”

“No,” Jemma shakes her head fervently, “no, I hope not. I mean, biologically speaking, brown eyes dominate blue eyes, it’s true.” He laughs, removing her hand from his face to link their fingers. “But I hope she’d have your bravery,” she continues, and Fitz instantly sobers. “And your beautiful mind. And your wonderful heart.”

“Jemma,” he says, shaking his head before bringing up her hand to kiss the back of it; he keeps his head down, so she can’t see his expression, but she feels something wet on her wrist. Sighing, he adds, “I don’t deserve you.”

She wonders, briefly, if he knows he’s said these words before. She shakes her head. He is still so wrong, so wrong, but she knows he won’t listen to her if she tries to explain. She’ll have to show him, show him how he is the only thing she is sure of.

“Will you—” She coughs, wincing when she does. Her throat feels raw, like it’s been rubbed with sandpaper. “Will you come here, Fitz?” she manages eventually.

Fitz immediately looks up, eyes shiny. “Hm?”

Jemma reaches for his hands to tug him close, suddenly feeling like the only thing that could possibly keep her from dissolving is him. He stands to his feet, awkwardly teetering next to the bed, until she starts scooting over and he realises what she’s doing. She pulls him onto the bed next to her, unable to wait for the other second it would take for him to walk around the bed to his side; he’s barely laying on his side before she slips her leg between his and holds him close. 

The stress of the unknown had made her sick to her stomach, but it’s nothing in comparison to the ache in her chest, and only when he wraps his arms around her does she feel like she can breathe again.

Fitz rubs her back gently as she tucks herself against his side and into the crook of his neck. They don’t say anything for a bit, giving her time to calm down and not feel like crying every time she opens her mouth. Her emotions are all over the place and it’s giving her a headache.

“We’ll have kids one day, right?” Jemma asks eventually. She’s not sure why she does. With everything else going on — the literal end of the world, for one — it feels strange and selfish to be thinking this. But Fitz is right: they deserve to live a life, too, don’t they?

“Yeah, of course,” Fitz agrees quickly, kissing her forehead. “Scads of them. More than you’ll know what to do with. Mack won’t have to recruit any more agents for a few generations, we’ll have so many. And then you’ll hate me for knocking you up all the time. How does that sound?”

She hums against his shoulder.

“And they’ll all be perfect, exactly like you.”

At that, she snorts and looks up at him. He’s doing a terrible job at keeping a smile on his face, but she knows he’s trying for her sake. “If I wanted them to be exactly like me, I could just clone myself. I want to have them with you, silly.”

He traces the line of her arm, his eyes gazing somewhere out of the room. “You know, Daisy — well, Skye at the time — asked me once if we were going to make the perfect kid in a dish.”

She has a million questions but only laughs. “Like a designer baby?”

“I guess?” He shrugs. “I don’t think she meant ours, necessarily but... Would be interesting. Get to pick all the genes.”

She skips the talk about the ethics of it all and goes straight to the daydream. “Blue eyes, curly hair,” Jemma says, her heart jumping when she pictures it. 

“Yeah, get rid of those, definitely—”

“No! I like those. We’d keep those.” She pokes him in the side, but he just smiles, keeping his eyes on the wall in front of them. 

“Freckles,” he adds. “A bossy attitude.”

“That’s not a gene.” She squeezes his middle until he looks down at her and she can see what she is sure is mirrored in her own eyes. Their best collaboration, growing only, at least for now, in their minds. “Luckily for me, I’m the gene expert,” Jemma tries, her voice cracking only at the end, “so you’ll just have to make them as I say.”

He grins widely.

“What?” He raises his eyebrows and then she understands, letting out an “oh” as he laughs. She sighs. “If we got to pick,” she says, moving past her embarrassment, “you’d have to be fair about it. You’re not allowed to make them all the opposite of you.”

“Fine,” he relents, “one of them could have my genes. But the others have to have yours.”

Jemma grins, snuggling back into his arms. “Good. Then at least one of them will like me.”

He stiffens. “What do you mean?” he asks, obvious alarm in his voice, and she melts at the thought of him being so affronted with someone not liking her.

“If they’re all exactly like me,” she explains, “then you’ll be their favourite person, too.”

She knows she’s got him in a corner when he doesn’t respond right away. “Uh, well—no, they’ll… Well, see, that’s not a gene, either—” He only stops talking when he realises she’s shaking with laughter against him. “We’ll work out the schematics later.”  

Jemma pulls back to look him in the eye. “Yeah?” She knows he’ll understand what she means.

He grins. “Yeah.” 

She surges up as Fitz leans down and he kisses her softly, before settling them both down in a more comfortable position. “Get some rest, Jem,” he breathes against her hair. 

She was done. Her four years at MIT were over. All her classes were complete, her research finished, and her dissertation defended. There was nothing to do now.

She had job offers, research offers, but it didn’t feel the same. She was twenty years old, an actual adult now instead of the teenage one she’d been pretending to be for years. If she’d stuck to the timeline she was supposed to take, if she hadn’t skipped years of school and combined university programs, she would be halfway through an undergrad, instead she had two PhDs. Her peers would be partying, working menial jobs, and skipping classes. They would be changing their major every three months, utterly uncertain of the future; Jemma didn’t feel much more solid in hers.

Getting a job was necessary, the last eighteen months had blown through every penny of her savings and she’d no longer have a visa to stay if she didn’t, but she had no idea how to choose. She’d never done it before, had never really been employed except by the university, and as much as she’d love to teach, she was far too young to command any authority in a classroom, not when her students would be her own age. She’d tried to make a pro and con list for the various positions she’d been offered and the page had stayed entirely blank, she’d come up empty.

There had been a certain ease in choosing universities, the first one close to home, then where she’d found an advisor she got along with, but she had no idea about labs or offices. She’d met with department managers, had good conversations about science and research, but she had no clue how to vet how someone would be as a manager.

Part of her was thinking about tossing a coin, or taking the highest paycheque, but even the thought of that made her uneasy. Research could be a delicate thing, and she didn’t want to end up a lab monkey for some soulless corporation. But she was also afraid of taking too long, of being too picky and having offers dry up, leaving her stranded, on a plane back to England.

She couldn’t go home. She couldn’t move back in to her parents’ house, live with the coolness between her and her mother even though she knew her Dad would welcome her with open arms, and find a job at a UK lab instead. The mere thought made her sick to her stomach. In the intervening years she’d been for Christmas, for a week of holiday in the summer, but it put a pit of something in her stomach that she couldn’t name, it made her feel unsteady, unmoored, like she was far away from herself. Or maybe like she was far away from Fitz, far away from the baby. He’d be almost two and a half and only when it was very late at night did she allow herself to wonder what he looked like.

It felt like there was a tether between them all, like they were three points, stretching a triangle into different angles as they moved through the world. The rope didn’t reach across the ocean.

She stood outside the building, watching groups of students walk, watching people laughing with their friends and others rushing into the cover of buildings, feeling cold, feeling alone.

August 2006

She was awake as midnight ticked over, watched it on her clock as the time changed, and so did the date. It had been a year. The baby would be turning one. She wondered what his parents had planned, if they were the big party type or just a small family gathering.

She’d held her son for exactly ten minutes, after he’d been cleaned off and whisked away for testing because of low oxygen levels. She’d called Fitz while she waited, it was late enough by then for him to be home, kicked out of the lab, to tell him that if he wanted to meet the baby he should come in the next few hours. Then she’d held him gently around the cannula in his nose and said goodbye.

Their adoption advisor had showed up then, she’d walked Jemma through the paperwork she had to fill out, including his birth certificate. Even though she knew his real family would change it she had to name him, which felt odd, and she was in such an exhaustive haze she’d written the only thing that had come to mind; Leopold James Fitz. She’d had the presence of mind to tack ‘Simmons’ on the end and had fallen asleep in her hospital bed for a few hours.

When she woke May was there again, guiding her into her clothes then out to the car. It was late, the streets were dark and empty and she’d felt hollow, ripped apart. Kendra was asleep when she got into the apartment and so was Fitz, passed out in her bed. She’d crawled in with him and hadn’t gotten up for a week.

Fitz and Kendra had taken turns cooking for her, leaving plates on her bedside table and taking away the dirty ones, the half-finished or picked over ones between their work and research and classes. There were times when they both lingered at the doorway, books in hand, but she could only shake her head when asked if she wanted company, even though she didn’t want to be alone either. She felt alone, even when they were there. Her own work went untouched, but May didn’t bother her for progress, had only showed up once to drop off a peri bottle and cabbage leaves without a word. Jemma still didn’t know who took over her teaching assistants duties.

Eight days later she’d hauled herself into the shower and stood there for over an hour as the dried blood and leaked breast milk and hospital smell ran down the drain. She washed her hair twice, ran the hot water for the whole building dry, and only then, once the water dwindled to lukewarm did she emerge.

She was passed it now, or as passed it as she could be. Somewhere in Connecticut it was a little boy’s first birthday, but that boy wasn’t her son, he never had been.

She wondered what Fitz was doing, if he was aware enough to know what the date was or if he was so buried in his research he’d lost all concept of time, of reality. She knew he’d remember the significance if he remembered the date, but that was always a toss-up with him. It had been weeks since she’d talked to him, maybe even months, she could hardly remember.

There had been one late night phone call, where he’d been exhausted and delirious, talking about an issue that had come up with his thesis, but she’d been just as tired and overworked it was impossible to remember what day that had been, what week, when every hour bled into the next. She was fairly certain he’d called her by accident, by reflex, because she was the person he was used to talking to when he had an issue and vice versa, because she wasn’t sure if they were friends anymore.

It had seemed possible, at the end of her pregnancy, that they could get through it, but the more time went on the harder it was to pretend that everything was normal. The summer ended, a new school year started, Fitz was locked up in the lab and Jemma started a new TA job. They didn’t speak for days, then weeks, then a month, then two.

She had no doubt that if she needed him, that if she called him, for anything, he would come running, without a second of doubt or hesitation, but she had no reason to call him. They crossed paths on campus, they hung out with mutual friends, but she didn’t feel like she could read his mind anymore, didn’t know his every thought and feeling by the quirk of his eyebrow. She knew he would never disappear entirely, that she’d never lose track of him, that he’d never leave her life entirely, but they would continue to orbit around each other, binary stars pulled towards the barycenter of a child they didn’t know.

She rolled over in her bed, made her body relax piece by piece and counted her breathing, trying to get to sleep, even though she knew she couldn’t.