#simmorseweek

They spend the next hour the way they frequently do, catching up on each other’s lives as Jemma waits for the sound of her one night stand clearing out.

  “You know, now that you’ve brought your own electric kettle,” Jemma gestures to her now empty cup of tea before standing up, “I’m going to be even more tempted to hide out over here.”

  “I really don’t mind,” Bobbi assures her.

  And she doesn’t. It’s nice to spend morning with the cute scientist. The only downside is that it’s hard to get someone to notice your romantic interest (seriously, she wouldn’t have bothered with the electric tea kettle if she didn’t want to impress Jemma) when they’re in the process of hiding out from their own paramours.

  “My offer still stands,” Jemma says as she heads out the door. “If you need to hide from a date, or anyone else, my door is open.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Bobbi says. “I’m not as polite as you are, I have no problem getting rid of unwanted guests.”

  --

  It takes two months, one week, and six days for Bobbi to take Jemma up on her offer.

  “I thought you said you were great at getting rid of unwanted guests,” Jemma teases when she opens the door. She doesn’t even have to ask what the other woman is doing knocking on her door at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning.

  “Technically, I’m not hiding from a one-night stand,” Bobbi explains. “I’m hiding from my ex-husband.”

  Jemma nearly drops her mug of tea in surprise.

  “And you let your ex-husband stay the night?” Jemma asks once she’s set the tea down on a nearby table.

  “On the couch,” the blonde clarifies. “He didn’t have anywhere else to stay, and he was supposed to leave early this morning, only now he says he wants to talk.”

  “Ooh, that’s never good,” Jemma crinkles her nose in distaste.

  “I know. We spent years being on and off and on again and these days I’m over it. Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite feel the same way.”

  “So just tell him you’re not interested,” Jemma suggests. “You’re the one who said you have no problem doing that.”

  “Lance is a bit,” Bobbi hesitates, remembering the time he spent an entire night crying outside her apartment door. “fragile. I’d rather not deal with the inevitable blow up.”

  Jemma pauses for a moment, like she’s thinking hard about something, “Then tell him you’re dating someone else. Then you can just avoid the whole getting back to conversation altogether.”

  “Like who? The guy down the hall who has all those dogs?”

  “Me,” Jemma smiles shyly.

  “You’d do that for me, pretend to be my girlfriend?” It might work, but honestly, Bobbi doesn’t want to pretend to date Jemma. She wants to do it for real.

  “No, I meant I’d actually date you, not fake date you,” Jemma’s voice is quiet when she admits, “I haven’t actually had anyone spend in the night in six weeks.”

  “But you’ve been coming over like clockwork,” Bobbi says.

  “To see you.”

Skye opens the door, letting Coulson’s voice carry in (“debrief in half an hour, get cleaned up,”) and she and Bobbi make their way over to Fitz’s work station.

“This is the bullet that killed Latynseva. Coulson wants you to figure out how it penetrated her skin,” Skye tells him, placing the fragments onto his desk in a small plastic bag. “And these-” she says, holding up a plastic box containing a pair of pieces of circular technology, each the size of a pound coin. “-were attached to her skull. Think you can work out what they were?”

He takes the box, and examines the contents. “Uhm, we’ve seen- these are like the ones that were- the /man/ in…Glasgow.”

“Allan Sutherland?”

“Yeah,” he says, with a light of relief, and sits down. Jemma feels a familiar tug at her heart, but swallows it. Bobbi turns to go, and Jemma almost doesn’t notice. She catches her arm.

“Agent Morse, you’re hurt.”

Bobbi glances at her shoulder, expression determinedly neutral. A tear, and dark stain against her combat gear.

"Allow me?"

Bobbi's eyes flicker down to Jemma's, and are dull with exhaustion. She half-smiles, and nods once. At her own workstation, Jemma procures antiseptic wipes, butterfly stitches and glue, local anesthetic, and tells Bobbi quite sternly to stay still whilst she gently pulls the layer of protective clothing from Bobbi's left arm. The bleeding had slowed, the damage looked like it had been inflicted by a small blade. She pulls on gloves and all the while, Bobbi's eyes follow hers passively. Jemma's gut twists.

"How bad?" She asks as she swabs the wound, then considers the case for iodine solution. One of the cheaper transitions she'd made for Coulson to conserve funds.

Bobbi, perfect liar, grimaces. "At times like this, it feels like we're losing a hopeless struggle. Like we're pushing at inevitable failure." Jemma pastes local anesthetic around the wound and sealant inside of it. "I don't know what it is that the Director is aiming for, either. It's worrying."

"I've known Coulson a long time," Jemma steps closer to Bobbi's squarely upright figure, sat on the desk, to start applying the stitches. One shoulder bare, she smelled of sweat and the iron tang of blood, and her body's warmth was a comfort that helped finally seal that bottomless well Jemma almost fell into earlier. "He always has a plan."

Jemma feels Bobbi's outbreath against her ear, sharper than the sounds of her colleagues working in the laboratory. Alive, she thinks once again with gratitute, before trying to shut down the feeling and gluing the second stitch of an estimated five in place. "You and I knew Agent Coulson.  I'm not sure any of us really know Director Coulson."

Her words sit uneasily, so Jemma brightens her voice. "I'm just glad you're alright, Agent Morse."

"It's Bobbi, Dr. Simmons, how many times?" The older woman sighs tiredly, then rests her head on Jemma's shoulder. The unexpectedly floral scent of her hair reaches Jemma as she presses the last stitch into place and removes the dressing from her pocket.

"Bobbi." Jemma says, and then gently, and before she can catch herself, "you know, there were a few minutes there when I thought you wouldn't be coming back to us."

Bobbi chuckles weakly, lifting her head to say, "It'll take more than a couple of Hydra agents to cross me off. When I go out, you can be sure it'll be with a bang."

Jemma pats her shoulder. "All done here, Ag- Bobbi. And for the record- I'm glad that bang wasn't today." She smiles, in a way she hopes comes off as only platonic caring. It's reciprocated with dizzying beauty. Bobbi, looking no longer as though she were about to collapse, wraps an arm around Jemma's waist in a brief embrace, before sliding down from the worktop and carefully re-clothing her shoulder.

“Yes, it is,” Jemma insists, adjusting the last letter on their scrabble board with perfect precision.

When she finishes she looks up from the board meeting the eyes of the rest of her teammates, all who are still ready to insist that she’s cheated.

It’s not an uncommon occurrence in the team game nights.

The last instance having turned up after Jemma won Clue four times in a row without having to use one of those silly papers. The time before that had probably been another game of scrabble, she was usually the one who one those and left disappointed fellow agents in her wake.

“Zymurgy is a perfectly normal word,” Jemma just says, “you can look it up if you don’t believe me.”

“Somebody get a-“

“It’s a chemical process used to make beer,” Bobbi calls out, from her position on the couch.

She wasn’t actually playing the game, and had been debating some nuances of some thing or another with Mack, until she had decided to join in on their conversation.

When Jemma meets her eye, the other woman shoots her a wink, that makes Jemma’s face turn slightly pink.

Bobbi has a way of doing that.

It’s hardly fair.

She only breaks her eye contact with Jemma, when somebody else asks, “how do you know that?”

“My girlfriend’s a scrabble master, it’s her super power.”

“Knowing words is hardly a super power,” Jemma objects, “though it did win me no inventory for two weeks and three spelling bees.”

“You know, I might have an idea of what you could do with all that time off.”

The way Bobbi looks at her, with her (probably patented) seduction eyes, makes the groaning of everyone else fade away into a distant background noise.

“Also, given the nature of the shrine we found, there is a possibility that whatever your reaction is extraterrestrial,” Jemma sighs.

  Aliens make her nervous, Bobbi noticed a long time ago. When she’d asked Skye about it, she’d received a fairly terrifying story about an alien virus and a free-fall from the Bus’s cargo bay.

  Bobbi hopes they’re not in for a repeat performance.

  That sentiment must reflect of her face, because Jemma assures her, “It’s much more likely that it’s something native to this area. I’ve given you a shot that should take care of most of the itching.”

  “Good,” Bobbi says, sitting up in her cot. “Then as soon as it kicks in, I can get back out there.”

  Jemma firmly pushes Bobbi back down, “Unfortunately, it’s going to make you drowsy. At my recommendation, Coulson has decided you should stay here and rest while May joins the others.

  Bobbi glares at Jemma, but she doesn’t really mean it. It might actually be nice to rest.

  That’s the kind of thought that indicates the medication’s kicking in. She would never think that without the aid of drugs.

  “Fine,” she agrees, but she’s going to need to get something out of this too. “But you have to stay here with me.”

  “Of course,” Jemma says, pointing to the centrifuge set up on the worktable. “I’ll be right over there.”

  “No, you have to stay here,” Bobbi pats the small space next to her on the cot.

  Jemma looks at the centrifuge again, her first round of samples are done spinning, and she can’t start on another until they’ve finished being analyzed.

  “Give me two minutes,” she tells Bobbi.

  The blonde taps her wrist in the spot where a watch would go.

  Soon enough, Jemma is lying on the cot next to Bobbi.

  “Don’t scratch,” she swats Bobbi’s right hand away from her left elbow. “And I’m only staying until my samples are done.”

A feeling that probably has something to do with the text Jemma sent her an hour ago, asking if on her way back she could pick up soup (as though after destroying some hydra hideout the next logical step would be to stop off at the grocery store) because she was a bit under the weather.

Bobbi had never actually seen Jemma sick before, but when she frowned at her phone and casually broached the topic of stopping off for soup, she had gotten mixed looks of pity from the two people who had known Jemma longer than her.

“She’s a down right pain when she’s sick,” Fitz had said, “that woman has too PhDs, but she gets the slightest cough and all of that’s out the window.”

It hasn’t been an encouraging sentiment to say the least, and so Bobbi might have worried, and slightly over thought things, and maybe – just maybe ­– bought every can of chicken noodle soup in the grocery store had to offer.

She wasn’t over reacting, no certainly not.

She was just looking out from her girlfriend, the very girlfriend that Bobbi finds in her room – rather than Jemma’s own room – curled up in a cocoon of blankets on the bed.

The other woman makes a vague noise, something that’s more of a groan than anything else, but that Bobbi predicts is supposed to have been some sort of greeting.

“That bad,” she asks, settling down on the side of the bed, and bringing her hand up to check Jemma’s head for a fever a moment later.

“Worse,” Jemma insists, as she presses up towards Bobbi’s fingers, as though desperate for her touch – though in this case its more likely that she’s desperate for the coolness of her fingertips.

 “You’re burning up.”

That causes another groan to escape Jemma’s lips, though no real answer.

“I brought you soup. How about we get you out of those blankets and I make you some?”

She thinks for a second that she hears a whine in Jemma’s voice, but that can’t be right – a healthy Jemma Simmons would later insist that she has never whined in her life. “I’m comfortable.”

“Being buried under every blanket we own isn’t helping you get better.”

“I know, I know. There’s the science behind it, saying that I shouldn’t be wrapped in all these blankets, because my body is already overheating,” Jemma explains, “but I’m freezing and that quilt your mother made is very warm and comforting.”

“Is that right?”

She nods, though it’s a funny motion since most of her body is wrapped in blankets and she’s laying down upon a bed, but somehow she manages it anyways, “though you know what would make me more comfortable.”

“I’m not getting in there with you.”

“But Bobbi!”