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Jemma has been choking on her words since Maveth, ever since watching the most precious person in her world willingly step through a portal to Hell. After all she has been through, being forced to watch Fitz walking calmly to his death for her is what breaks her spirit.
Now, she doesn’t know how to reconcile her primary conflicting desires: to wrap him up in her arms, kiss him senseless, never let him go, or to send him off with his favorite sandwich and a carefully composed note (“Find a nice girl, someone who deserves you, someone who will never break your heart.”). She could write this with her blood; she’s bleeding out.
She used to feel evenly matched with Fitz, but now the goodness in him shines through and illuminates the horrors carved into her bones. He stutters and shakes, yet she’s the one made of broken porcelain. She is all jagged edges waiting to cut him if he gets any closer.
And still, still Fitz stares at her with unyielding adoration and it burns her skin. Hate me hate me please just hate me, she thinks.
The worst part is, he keeps trying to die for her, as if she hadn’t bargained with the universe for his life, as if he weren't the most dazzling person to ever exist. The cavalier way he tosses his well being aside makes her want to hate him. At this point, it’s far easier than loving him.
++
Jemma touches a hand to her stomach, hot sticky blood blooming through her shirt, trickling down her sides. She holds her fingers up, watches the crimson drip drip dripping.
“Oh,” she says, surprised. Everything had happened slowly and all at once—the gun pointed at them, the shouting, then jumping in front of Fitz and the searing, excruciating pain a moment later. Mack tackling the shooter a second too late, always a second too late.
Fitz is screaming for help, pressing his jacket to her wound and she smiles because it’s all coming together now. “See?” she says, showing him her palm.
“What? Jemma, see what?” He’s not focusing on her words through his panic and her eyes roll back into her head.
“For the note I’m going to write you,” but she can tell by his face that he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. She can’t be sure he’s even paying attention to her; it’s a blur of him yelling into his comms and wiping tears off his face. He smears her blood all over his cheek.
She didn’t want that; she’d never intended to mark him. She feels like she’s falling asleep and she wonders if this is why Fitz keeps dying for her. It turns out, it’s the easiest thing she’s ever done.
I’m setting you free, she tells him, but blackness clouds her mind before she knows if she’s spoken this truth aloud.
++
She wakes slowly, confused by the pain and the fuzziness and the uncomfortable sheets. Did I wind up in hell after all? Do I believe in hell? Does it matter what I believe if that’s where I am?
Fitz is in a chair by her bed, head resting against her thigh, fitfully asleep. She’s alive. Fitz could never be dragged down to hell, not even if she refused to let go.
She concentrates on controlling her breathing, trying to focus on anything but the tightness blistering in her stomach.
Fitz stirs suddenly, jerking his head up and forgetting to breathe for a moment. “Jesus, Jemma,” he whispers, tears welling in his eyes. “I thought—”
He doesn’t finish, just grabs her hand, silently pleading with her to save him. Words suffocate in her dry mouth. After everything she’s tried, after working so hard, how is it possible that she’s still forcing him down with her? This is hell.
++
She hardly talks to anyone. She hardly talks to Fitz. He clings to her like his only lifeline.
“What note?” he asks one morning, over breakfast. He eats breakfast with her every morning (although she can't even finish a slice of toast). He’s always there and won’t let her go.
She angles her head, pretending not to understand his meaning.
“When you were,” he twists his bad hand in the air between them. “You said something about writing me a note...”
Jemma blinks. She finally understands him now. When he had said she was more than that, he knew he would die without continuing a conversation he’d never been ready to have. She understands because in her pain and deliriousness, certain of her own death, she had wanted to speak all of her truths to him, to exorcise every demon. Being pulled back to earth had never been the plan.
“I saw the security footage,” she admits, answering a question he wouldn’t ask. This is the most recent secret she has been keeping: that one night, exhausted at no new leads, brittle from the way Fitz sidestepped her in the lab when she’d never wanted space from him, she had idly tapped into Fitz’s additional research on the monolith—the folder of dead-ends. She watched months of sped-up security footage: drones dropped into the containment case, instruments set up, then nothing nothing nothing nothing, Fitz.
Watching the video is the only time she has ever truly wanted to die.
She plays it over and over and over again until it’s 4 am and her eyes are burning and she’s back in her bathroom, retching. This is the moment she decides they can never be more than that, more than anything because she has witnessed exactly how she broke him. The man screaming at a rock to do something is her Fitz. She has rained destruction all around them, remade him from the shattered pieces, and now she's killing her own creation. Mack had told her once, "The only thing that makes him worse is you." She had already known, but oh, she hadn't understood anything at all. Fitz has been dying for years.
Fitz swallows thickly. “Jemma, it’s not what it looks like—”
“Trying to jump out of a plane for me. Going back to the Hub after Hydra. The med pod. The monolith. Going to Maveth. Going to bloody Maveth.” She is shaking with all of the rage and grief filling her veins, surprised it hasn’t burned her up from the inside out, surprised she can hear her own words through the blood rushing in her ears.
Fitz is crying, she has made him cry again, but he’s countering her desperately: “You jumped out of a plane, you jumped on that grenade—”
“That wasn’t only for you.”
"You thanked me for finding you!"
"But I shouldn't have, it was selfish and a mistake."
“You just took a bullet to the stomach for me!” he shouts.
“I’m trying to let you go,” she sobs, and he instantly deflates, stunned.
“I get it,” he reassures her, softly and gently, but she knows he doesn’t actually get anything. He has never understood his place in her heart. He thinks he is expendable to her. I couldn’t live in a world that didn’t have you in it, as if that had ever been any less true for her.
He scrubs at his face wearily, and he is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. The harsh light of the med bay is illuminating the hard edges of his face and the urge to smooth out the worry lines with her lips is almost unbearable.
But the last time she kissed him, she saw the power she wielded to destroy him. She won’t be so irresponsible again.
++
She spends weeks in the med bay and she knows it’s a long road to recovery. In the past, she would have ignored all her guilt and pain to work, but instead she finds herself exaggerating her symptoms to Lincoln, knowing he’ll recommend she take it easy.
For once in her life she does take it easy. She barely spends an hour in the lab for every four hours in bed.
In her plans and careful calculations for her new life, she hadn’t considered that she might just be weak. She misses Fitz with an ache that makes the wound marring her stomach seem like a pinprick.
When he leaves for a mission, she whispers “be careful.” He meets her eyes with a devastated look and she knows he’s remembering another time, another war, when she had promised they would have a conversation and then they never had a chance.
She leaves a note on his nightstand: Find a nice girl, someone who deserves you, someone who will never break your heart. I’m so sorry for everything.
It’s not written in her blood because she has none left to give.
++
“What is this?” he demands, barging into her bunk days later, waving her note in the air, wide-eyed from adrenaline, and all she can think is thank god you’re still alive, there’s still time for you to be happy.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he cries when she doesn’t answer, collapsing next to the bed. Her fingers itch to comfort him, her traitorous lips begging to kiss his saltwater tears away. Her whole body rebels against her brain, as if her hands could really mend their souls, as if taking him inside of her would not mean the unraveling of them both.
She lays down on the bed until their faces are even. His eyes are shimmering like the ocean and she’s grown accustomed to drowning in their depths. “You asked,” she explains. “That’s the note I was going to write you. Fitz, I couldn’t live if you didn’t.”
“Well, I feel the same way!” he huffs indignantly, and she can’t tell if he even realizes they’re having the same fight all over again. The fight they’ve been looping for years, the only fight that seems to matter anymore.
“You’re never going to stop,” she whispers. “You’re going to keep sacrificing yourself and you don’t even care what it does to me.”
“I do care,” he argues, and he clenches the note in his fist. “But I’m-I’m selfish and weak. I’ve always been weaker than you. I don’t know how to stop.”
“You’re not selfish or weak. Or maybe, I don’t know. Maybe we both are. I did it for you, too, after all.” She gestures lamely towards her stomach.
“Do you love me?” he chokes out, and if anything he’s more anguished than the last time he asked a variant of the question.
“Yes, of course,” she breathes with none of her earlier hesitation and equivocation. She hadn’t known how to answer when he’d asked her feelings for Will, but Fitz, Fitz, she has loved for half of her life, and she will love him until the end of the world, until the atoms in her body stop reincarnating, until there’s not one cell of Jemma Simmons left to love Leopold Fitz.
Fitz slides his fingers through hers. “I love you too,” he says, but it’s the most miserable he’s ever sounded. “What do you think we should do about it?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t live like this, Fitz. I can’t keep worrying about losing you. I feel like I’m dying all the time.”
They stare at each other until they crumble simultaneously. He slides under the covers with her, holds her as they both cry.
She had thought being honest and communicating would solve all of their problems. She’s learning that some things not even they can fix, not even together.
++
Something snaps that morning, when she wakes up fully clothed, having spent the entire night in a tight embrace with Fitz as if begging the universe not to separate them again. (The universe won’t listen: she has already used up all of her bargaining chips on him.) She leans back, staring at him, barely tracing the outline of his jaw with her finger.
“There are no solutions for us,” she whispers to his still form, and he curls unconsciously towards her, flower towards the sunlight, needing the one thing that will burn him up.
She knows they haven’t solved anything. If he dies tomorrow, it can’t possibly hurt any less than if they give in, allow themselves every kind of love. They could embrace every fantasy she's ever had, they could get married—he will die all the same. But she still fears and respects this arbitrary line that she’s created in her mind. If they can stay in stasis like this forever, eventually he won’t feel the need to sacrifice himself for her and she'll be able to survive when he's inevitably torn from her side. She works hard every day to convince herself this is the truth.
++
Weeks have passed, and Fitz spends almost every night with her. Now they wear pajamas instead of work clothes and tactical gear, but neither of them cross the line they’ve silently agreed upon. They hold each other against nightmares, they talk about the team and missions and research as if they aren’t twined into each other so tightly neither can tell where one ends and the other begins.
Every morning, Jemma wakes before Fitz. Every morning, her fingers barely graze his face. Every morning, she feels weaker and weaker, wondering how long it will be before she gives in and kisses him and destroys the world.
“Creeper,” Fitz mutters one morning, eyes barely opening against the harsh light streaming in, and Jemma jerks back, surprised. He turns, pulling the covers over his head, promptly falling back asleep, and she laughs, actually laughs.
He’s always been her weakness.
++
“Jemma, Jemma, wake up,” Fitz pushes her shoulder gently, pulling a chair up next to her bed where she’d drifted off after dinner, a half-read novel on the pillow next to her.
“Mm—” she breathes, chasing a dream where Fitz had—had nothing, nothing happened. This dream Fitz had definitely not been tracing her curves with his fingers; his tongue had never mapped the hidden parts of her body. Admitting to her desires will get him killed.
He’s excitedly going through a binder of information, stammering with nerves. “It’s an offer from Radcliffe, for both of us. I’ve talked it over with him and Coulson, just in case. We could still consult for SHIELD, we wouldn’t be abandoning our work. But we could consult with Radcliffe too, have access to those resources. We’d be in a lab, a safe one, no more field missions.”
She blinks up at him, mind already spinning with questions. He sees her interest and pulls out more information.
“Look, I had some free time, so I looked up—” he breaks off, scratching at the back of his neck nervously. “Radcliffe’s got some labs in the UK. We could stay in Perthshire. I found these uh, cottages for sale. I thought… but of course we could also look at some places in Sheffield, if you’d like to be closer to your family.”
He stares at her and she still hasn’t responded. “Jemma?”
“I’m so weak,” she whispers.
“What?” he asks, confused. She pulls his face towards her, kissing him like she’d been dreaming of doing for weeks, months, forever. His careful research flutters to the floor.
++
Jemma holds Fitz’s hand tightly as they step inside their new cottage, their boxes from the base already stacked in the living room. Fitz had been talking on the drive over about the improvements he’d made to Coulson’s arm and how he intended to discuss with Radcliffe ways to make some of that technology accessible to the general public. His genuine desire to help others with his work and his excitement about their new situation makes her dizzy with love.
She feels lighter than she has in months—years if she’s being honest. The image she sees of Fitz before falling asleep each night is no longer of him screaming and pounding on the monolith and that is a gift she will treasure above all else.
Fitz draws her into a honeyed kiss and she smiles against his mouth. It turns out boyfriend Fitz is surprisingly sweet and romantic. She had half feared their relationship could never be easy—maybe they loved each other too much, maybe their wounds were too deep. But taking this next step reminded Jemma that the very first thing Fitz had ever done when they were partnered together in chem lab was make her laugh.
Now, she laughs with him and at him. She laughs and laughs until her stomach throbs and she has to practice breathing.
She quiets the part of her mind that says they’ve found an easy solution, the part that says Fitz would still dive through a hole in the universe for her and she would take a thousand bullets for him. If the cosmos really is out to get them then she’ll be in hell all over again, and she fears she no longer has the strength to claw her way back out.
But right now they’re home and she’s in love and they’ve already decided to make pancakes for dinner. All she can do is the same thing she does every night and every morning: pray that Fitz won’t be the one paying for her sins.