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Hypothesis: If she didn't rouse her husband within the next five minutes, he would somehow manage to entice her back to bed and they would miss an entire day of sightseeing. And that was simply unacceptable. So Jemma poked him. Once, twice, three times until he finally woke with a yelp of indignation, peering out from underneath the covers and blinking in the morning light.
“It's early,” Fitz said and buried his head under the covers again. She yanked them away.
“It's a perfectly reasonable hour,” Jemma replied and sighed, putting on her best pout, the one that had convinced him to accompany her to a dissection in Paris. (He'd made a valiant effort to avoid complaining, even if he had fainted halfway through—she'd had to revive him with her smelling salts.)“Besides, I'm in need of your husbandly services.”
“What kind?” He sounded distinctly more intrigued through the three layers of sheets.
“The hotel didn't send up a ladies' maid this morning and I can't fasten my dress up myself.” Jemma twisted around to glare at the long row of buttons and hooks running down the back of her dress, and silently cursed the Parisian modistes. Perhaps she should start a letter-writing campaign when she returned home to London? The Society of Ladies for Sensible Clothing? Beside her, Fitz let out a disgruntled “hrmph” and burrowed under the covers even further. “I have an entire day of sightseeing planned, and if we don't leave for breakfast in no more than half an hour, I'll have to make significant readjustments to the schedule. The Coliseum isn't going to see itself, you know.”
“Honeymoons aren't supposed to be about sightseeing,” he grumbled. “At least not at ungodly hours of the morning.”
“Eight o'clock is a perfectly godly hour. And I believe that we've already addressed what a honeymoon is supposed to be about. Repeatedly and rather inventively. In a variety of locations.” Jemma was trying very hard not to blush. She was a noted scientist, a duchess, and a member of a top-secret league and, as such, she was sure that blushing was supposed to be beneath her. She blamed her husband and a hot-air balloon. “If we wait much longer, all the other tourists will be out in full force.”
Jemma learned her lesson about rising early when they were fashionably late to the Louvre and she was cornered for a whole half hour of society gossip by Lady Bertram, right around the corner from the Venus de Milo. She'd only managed to escape by gasping loudly and claiming to have spotted an infamous Italian prince debauching Lady Bertram's daughter in an alcove. It hadn't been her best moment. “Fitz,” she whined. No response. Clearly, it was time for extreme measures. Leaning over the bed, she yanked the covers off and onto the floor. He pulled her down on top of him and kissed her, and she quickly realized her mistake. She would have calculated precisely where she had gone wrong, but she was too busy being thoroughly kissed, her dress slipping off her shoulders as she pressed herself more firmly against him and her carefully arranged hair tumbling down her shoulders as he pulled at her pins and sighed happily against her mouth.
“You always underestimate me,” he said smugly, after they were both suitably disheveled and she'd sucked an impressive mark into being on his neck. “You thought that I was sleeping, but I really had a plan of attack.”
“Very cunning of you,” Then she caught sight of the clock and wailed in dismay. “You do realize that your plan of attack means we've now completely missed the optimal time window for the Coliseum?”
“Told you that it was a cunning plan,” he replied and, in one swift movement that Jemma suspected he would never be able to replicate again, flipped her over, pinned her beneath him, arranged her petticoats around her waist and himself between her legs, and looked quite pleased with himself.
Jemma was on the verge of telling him that, provided he made some persuasive oral arguments, the Coliseum could wait when a bird mechanical crashed through the window. And started speaking with Skye's voice. It came out slightly garbled—they really would have to work on that technology when they got back to London—but Jemma was able to catch words that sounded disturbingly like “blackmail”, “Crown Prince”, “next airship”, and “please don't let Fitz set the S.P.Y.D.E.R.S. on me”.
Fitz made a noise that sounded distressingly like a beached whale. “You know,” Jemma said slowly. “The next airship doesn't leave until six o'clock. We still have a few hours and if we—ohhh...”
As it turned out, his case against the Coliseum was...strikingly original.