Chapter Text
Jemma Simmons was not Catholic.
She was not religious at all, really, but she’d always found herself grouping memories together into little altars – small objects, pictures, journals – on some small unused space on a shelf or on top of a bureau. Like the corner of the Tallboy dresser in her small room in the Playground.
She’d placed the portrait of Agent Peggy Carter that she’d found in the Director’s office on the stained varnish with her old, chipped T.A.R.D.I.S tea cup next to it. Fitz had given it to her years ago, good for nothing now-a-days but holding her loose jewelry – like the earrings her parents had given her at her Academy graduation, and the meteorite necklace Fitz had made for her from the left-over materials of their first project together at SciOps. These tiny devotionals, they held pieces of her, of the things and the people she loved, made sweet and tempered by time, and change, because nothing, she’d realized this past year, her fingertips brushing against the chipped rim of Fitz’s cup, stays the same forever.
Nominally Church of England, her spirituality and her science had, early on, melded somewhere. Her afterlife existed in the first law of thermodynamics. It existed in particles breaking apart and transforming into the nitrogen of soil, feeding plants, living in microbes, exploding across the universe in the brilliant array of a supernova, in the constant spinning recombinant of matter and energy.
The problem, she thinks, her thumb brushing across the mirrored-frame of Trip’s picture, is the way one becomes so attached to a particular combination of it all.
It was just a snapshot – just a selfie, snapped in the space of a moment; between missions and paperwork, between the stress of rebuilding and the worry of waiting. They’d found her office – Agent Peggy Carter’s – and they’d crowded around the tarnished door-plaque with her name on it, Trip in the centre, arm extended, taking the photo at an awkward angle, cutting off half of her ear and the wide, pulled corner of her grin. Fitz’s hand was pointing at the plaque, Trip’s arm extended across his shoulders, waving Coulson in just as the flash went off, his face in partial profile, a blur with a smile. The tears in her eyes softened the edges off of all of them, blurring everything together in a wash of colour. She sniffed, wiping away the tears that dropped onto the glass with a cursory brush of her sleeve.
She reached up and moved her leather journal to the side. She angled Fitz’s cup, and slid Trip’s picture into place, her hand tremoring slightly as she let it go. She held still for a long moment, staring at the tableau, trying to will her body to stillness and her mind to task. Trying to compartmentalize all of the things she was feeling, to hold back the grief-tide that was closing over her head like that dark wash of ocean where she’d lost so much already. She squeezed her eyes shut, her lips pulled back in an unpretty grimace, drowning out all of the sounds around her except for the rushing pull of her heartbeat and the struggling breaths that broke through her throat.
She didn’t hear him pad softly around the door of her cramped room, in acquiescence to her grief. He knew, after she’d volunteered to pack Trip’s things for his grandmother, where she’d be. Fitz always knew.
It was instinctual, like a bird flying south for the winter, a fish swimming upstream to its spawning ground, a migratory pattern that had always led straight to her.
He knew she would find some small token of Trip to add to her memory corner, her little altar, up on her dresser. So he had dug under his bed, pulling out the care package from his mum with the devotional candle she’d sent him from St. Simon’s – along with another cardigan she’d picked up from the annual congregational rummage sale. She didn’t have much, his mum, but she gave what she could, and she would be pleased that the votive would get some use.
The hall was empty and quiet, save for the sound of small, short, tear-choked gasps of breath. He would have walked right in, pulled her close, and let her cry, before. She held the world on her shoulders– always doing the hard thing, the right thing – jumping on grenades, out of planes, going undercover at Hydra, always doing what needed to be done for others, so he had done what little he could for her. She was everyone else’s rock. All he could do was prop her up, keep her steady, let her cry, and hold the rest of it at bay when she needed the respite.
But that was before.
The agony in her sobs stilled him in the doorway. Her hand trembled, her little face shuttered in sorrow, eyelashes wet with tears.
She notices him now – notices the red rim of his eyes and how incredibly blue they are, how incisively they see her. They see her in such a broad spectrum of body and soul and self that it’s impossible to hide from those eyes. Impossible not to be seen by them.
She looks up at him. She’s so tiny and vulnerable, tear-stained cheeks and rosebud mouth, an ‘o’ of surprise. He means to give her space, to be respectful of her grief and the distance that’s been between them all this time, but his feet slide forward unconsciously. Before. After. Now. Time is nothing but a construct anyways, he tells himself - and she’s so small and all alone, and how could I have not have seen how tiny her bones are, before? How little she is, how much smaller she looks, all alone in this small room?
His arms reach out, unbidden. They are steady and warm when he gathers her up, wreathing around her shoulders and her waist tightly, where she slots in, just so, fits, just like before. Just like always. His hand slides against the flimsy fabric of her blouse, radiating heat as he drags it across her shoulder to tangle in her hair, pulling her cheek closer to the dip in his collarbone. He turns his face slightly, dropping a murmured kiss to the softness of her hair, stroking the crown of her head with infinite tenderness.
His cheek is rough. That’s new. The way she sinks into him? it’s the same as ever.
After a moment, she looks down, sees the candle and the matches. Silently, she smiles up in gratitude, and he hands them to her. She places it in front of Trip’s picture, and with shaky hands, tries to light a match. And then another. Her fingers are trembling so badly, her face a mask of frustrated anguish, that without a word, Fitz takes it from her.
She looks at him pleadingly. His hands are steady, miraculously, for the first time in weeks, and he manages to light the match, to get the candle to flame, flickering reflectively against the picture glass. He drops the matchbook beside it, and pulls her to him again.
He feels her chest rise and stutter back with the depths of her wracking sobs, falling back against his own, and soon, he’s just as bad as she is. Watching her break, watching her splinter into tiny hairline fractures, the tears and vulnerabilities that she rarely lets out, bleeding out onto him, overwhelms him with grief, because he loved Trip too, and he loves her, and how wound-deep this all feels, it’s too much. So they slide down the dresser, tangled in each other. A mess of limbs, all elbows and knees, until they hit the parquet.
They lie like that, and they don’t know for how long. Fitz holding to his chest the million tiny pieces of Jemma that broke in his arms, and her, cradled in the safety of his body – against his chest, bracketed by his thighs, buttressed by his warmth, as slowly, she puts herself together again. It feels like hours. Like days. Like eternity, and maybe it is. Time is simply a construct, after all, she thinks. And she whispers, looking up at him through her lashes, pressed against his wrinkled, checkered shirt, “I miss you. God, I miss you so much Fitz.”
He nods in agreement, his throat too thick to speak. He presses his lips against her temple, and manages, “Me too, Jem.”
Jemma Simmons isn’t religious. She doesn’t believe in God, not really. Not as a comprehensible being, per se. But she believes, in the soft flicker of the votive candle, sunk into the floor and the forgiving confessional of Fitz’s strong arms, listening to the rise and fall chant of his breath, the steady drum of his heart beating under his skin, that if church felt like this, felt like sanctuary, she’d go.