Work Text:
The door slammed shut behind them and Jemma heard it bolt into place, her shoulders twitching at the finality in the metallic sound. Both she and Fitz were breathing hard, as they'd just finished running to this room rather quickly after the artifact they'd been studying had suddenly opened and begun spilling its gaseous contents into the air in the lab. Jemma had barely had time to begin the quarantine procedure and lock the lab down before they had to get themselves out.
"It's a good thing we cleared the area before we started work," Fitz said, as he opened a cabinet and peered into it. "There isn't room for more than a couple of people in this iso room."
"Still," Jemma began, trying to summon up some of the optimism that would have come so naturally to her a year ago, "it's a good thing the Playground's lab has this here."
"With all the alien knick knacks and 0-8-4s that Coulson has us re-evaluating, I'd say it was inevitable someone would end up in here sooner or later," Fitz agreed. "'Course, if it was so inevitable, perhaps we should have stocked this room better."
"Nothing in the cabinets?"
"I wouldn't call it nothing, but it's not much more than that." Fitz held up a couple of foil packets of pre-packaged, nutrient-rich meals. "We have a handful of these. Everything we'll need to eat, except for flavor, of course."
"I've eaten worse," Jemma answered, before she really thought about what she was saying. She saw Fitz's reaction, his fingers subtly tightening around the packets in his hands as his face became a mask of regret.
She hadn't necessarily been referring to the things she'd had to eat to survive on Maveth, but she could see that's what Fitz assumed. She'd actually been thinking about the horrible meals she'd choked down during college as she'd taught herself to cook. She wanted to find the words to explain it to him and came up short, an all too-familiar feeling. She'd been looking for a way to talk to him about the progress she'd been making with her new, S.H.I.E.L.D.-supplied therapist she'd been assigned after their showdown with Ward and Hydra, but every time she'd started, she'd either lost her nerve or something had interrupted them. She knew Fitz had been talking to someone as well, but given their difficulty sharing their thoughts with each other over the past two years, that was all she knew.
"Yeah, I know you've had it much worse that this," he said. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you think about—"
"—I'm not sorry to remember it, Fitz. It's all right." She winced when he tossed the pouches back into the cabinet, turning his back to her. "Anyway, I was more thinking about that horrible casserole I used to make when we were at Sci-Ops." She smirked at him a little when he faced her again, and she hoped he'd follow her into easier territory for them to navigate, especially as they were likely to be stuck together for awhile.
He appeared to think it over for a moment, but a matching smirk soon appeared on his face. "I didn't think it was so bad," he offered, and her heart swelled when he actually chuckled a little.
"It was awful, Fitz."
"Different, maybe."
"Different, as in, the opposite of palatable?"
"All right, it was bloody terrible, are you satisfied now?" he asked, and they both laughed.
"You tried to lie to me about it then, as well. You even used to finish the leftovers," she remembered.
"You were working so hard at it," he explained, his eyes lighting up. "I didn't want you to feel discouraged, and it was a lot better after you made it a few times."
"Your meals were always so much better," she offered.
"It helps if you're going more for flavor than for balancing the...I don't know...potassium with the calcium."
"Those were very sound nutritional concepts," she complained, remembering the several disastrous months she'd spent working on a side project with the team revising the suggested diet for S.H.I.E.L.D. field agents. She'd thrown herself into the work and tried to make recommendations far beyond the minor contribution the project lead had solicited from her, subjecting Fitz to weeks of dodgy meals that had more in common with the cardboard boxes the field rations were stored in than actual food.
"I've just had the worst thought," he said, his voice grave but his face still painted with amusement. "Suppose you've had something to do with the food in these bloody things," he said, pointing to the shelf of foil packets behind him.
She considered defending her work further, but even she had to admit she hoped their next meals were designed by someone else. "If that's true, I'll have no one but myself to blame."
Fitz turned around again, opening a different cabinet, but finding it empty. "We should probably take stock, see what else we've got to work with."
"We could certainly use some furniture in here, but that can't be hidden away in a cabinet." She leaned up against the wall, stretching her back a bit.
Fitz nosed into one of the lower cabinets lining the interior wall, then made a triumphant noise as he pulled out a stack of blankets and held them out. "It's not furniture, but we should be able to make something to sit on that's more comfortable than the floor."
"Shouldn't someone have checked on us by now?" Jemma said, starting to feel a bit claustrophobic. "Oh, I'm sorry, Fitz. The blankets were a good find, I didn't mean to ignore that. It's just a bit...small here, isn't it?"
"You hit the alarm and quarantined the lab," Fitz answered. "Someone has to have seen the alert."
"But they haven't contacted us," Jemma pointed out.
"Of course," Fitz said, pacing a bit as he thought, his hands moving restlessly as they did whenever he was working something out. "The whole wing is in lockdown. Security protocols. It'll take them some time to work their way to us. We need to contact someone to let them know exactly what happened."
"I don't have a signal here," Jemma said, scowling at the tablet she'd grabbed and brought with her as they'd scrambled to evacuate the lab. "I can't see the rest of the network at all."
"The walls are thick," Fitz said, gesturing vaguely to the room around them. "I can get this panel working, though." He slid the cover away from the controls next to the door, tapping at the keys for a bit before making a little noise of triumph. "I got through to Mack's terminal. They've seen the alert and they're trying to get to us, but they still need to evaluate the threat of whatever it was that came out of that 0-8-4 we were studying. They think it's inert, but they're being cautious. Might be several hours."
Jemma nodded, pursing her lips thoughtfully. "I suppose we can survive that." She twirled around slowly, taking in her surroundings more completely now that she knew they would be there for a bit. "I wish we had a simulated window here. The walls are so dark, they just seem to syphon away the little bit of light we have."
"Jemma," Fitz began, sounding hesitant, "I know the dark might be difficult...I mean...are you okay?" He stammered his way through the sentence, fidgeting uncomfortably as he searched for the words.
"I'm fine, Fitz. Really," she assured him, and she was a little surprised at how sincerely she meant it. "What about you?"
"What do you mean?" he asked, his body language still betraying a bit of his nervous energy.
She was suddenly hesitant to elaborate, not wanting to remind him of something that might make him uncomfortable if he hadn't been thinking about it already, but it seemed she was too far down that road to turn back now.
"This is a bit of a small room, and we're stuck here…" she said, a leading tone in her voice, hoping he would catch on.
"Does it remind me of the medpod, d'you mean?" Fitz asked, looking thoughtful. "Enclosed spaces still bother me a little sometimes, but I'm all right. I suppose it's easier, knowing we're both safe and we'll be out after a few hours."
She nodded, and Fitz went back to arranging the blankets into some sort of cushion they could sit on, pulling them apart and fluffing them up as much as he could before he layered them on top of each other. When he was done, he stood back and surveyed his work, testing the middle of it gingerly with his foot.
"It's not great," he said, shrugging, "but it's better than nothing. As for the window, I might be able to do something about that." Jemma watched, curious, as Fitz rummaged in yet another drawer, pulling out something Jemma couldn't make out in the dark.
"What's—"
"—I found some chalk," he said, raising his arm and tracing a large rectangle onto a wide, empty expanse of the wall.
"How did you know that was there?" she asked, sitting carefully on top of the blanket Fitz had arranged to watch him.
He didn't answer for several long, quiet moments, then his hand dropped and he turned to face her. "I...come in here sometimes. When I need some quiet, to think."
"That's how you knew—"
"—where everything was, yeah. I brought the chalk in. Sometimes I draw schematics on the walls when I'm thinking through a design."
She almost said it out loud, but this revelation solved a bit of a mystery for her. Fitz had been disappearing somewhere, but she hadn't been able to figure out where he'd been going. It had never occurred to her that he would steal away to this tiny, dark, glorified closet, or that he'd hide away so close to the lab when she'd wondered if he had been escaping from her more than anything else.
His hand moved over the wall, the chalk delicately held between his nimble fingers as line after line appeared. He occasionally pulled his other hand up, using a fingertip to smear the chalk and create a new part of the design. After a few minutes, there was enough detail for her to make out what he was drawing.
"That's lovely," she told him, marveling at the moon he added in the sky that hung over the snowy scene he'd created. He blurred a few small, oblong shapes with the side of his hand, making fat, heavy-looking snowflakes that seemed to float down past the window Fitz had sketched in at the edges.
"We missed most of winter, what with all the...events," he said, stealing a look at her at the somewhat awkward end of his sentence. "I know it's your favorite season of the year."
"Yours as well," she answered, and he nodded a little, tilting his head as he worked on finishing his drawing.
When he stood back a few moments later, his work complete, Jemma patted the blankets next to her to encourage him to sit down and look at it with her. He put the rest of the chalk carefully back into the drawer and dropped down at the far edge of his makeshift cushion, leaving a lot of room between them.
"It won't give us any extra light," he noted, "but it's the best I could do."
Jemma's mind supplied her the perfect response right away, but she held onto it, uncertain. She let her eyes play over all the careful lines of chalk on the wall, thinking about Fitz and the million thoughtful things he had done for her over the years. She'd been thinking and talking about Fitz a lot, something she suspected he would never give himself enough credit to believe. The informal advice she'd received from Daisy and Bobbi (and even May, who had whispered to her earlier that week, "Don't wait too long to give yourself permission to be happy again.") echoed in her mind. The more official-feeling conclusions she'd begun to come to after talking to her therapist only reinforced the direction her friends had urged her to go. She merely had to take the next step, and it didn't include being too afraid to say the things that needed to be said.
"The best you can do, Fitz," she said, looking at him until he turned toward her as well before she continued, "has always been more than enough."
He held her gaze for several long moments and she could see so much of what he was thinking playing over his features. He'd always had a tragically open face, even from the first day she'd met him. She was overcome with a wave of complicated feelings for him, a mosaic of memories and affection and—most extraordinarily—hope, an emotion she'd been bereft of for so long she'd nearly failed to identify it. She realized the conglomerate term for what was coursing through her was 'love', but even that didn't seem adequate to describe what had come over her.
"Are you thirsty?" Fitz said, suddenly looking at his folded hands in his lap and then springing up to his feet. "I think there are a couple of jugs of distilled water here." He opened the high cabinets one by one, trembling with nervous energy.
She felt a wave of calm come over her, the feeling a stark contrast to Fitz's sudden skittishness. Every moment she'd spent slogging through the complicated, impossible feelings she had about Will, her time on Maveth, their constant battles against Hydra, and most importantly, Fitz, had led her here. She felt sure she could bring him with her, she just had to find a way to show him how certain she was. She could remember the trauma of surviving on another planet without having to relive it. She could feel what Will had meant to her, but she could now move on. She understood the role Fitz had played during his own trip to Maveth, and she could find no distrust or doubt within her for him because of it. It all fell away, leaving only certainty behind.
"I love you, Fitz," she said, watching as he froze rigidly in place once he'd processed what she'd said. The reaction was so quintessentially Fitz that she wanted to laugh in pure delight, but she knew he'd take it the wrong way.
"Simmons," he began, and she noted how he was distancing himself by suddenly avoiding her first name, "I don't think...you know we're going to make it out of here, don't you?"
"Of course I do, you berk," she said, finally allowing herself to laugh a little. "I'm trying to do this when we aren't about to die."
He gripped the edge of the countertop, turning his head to look at her over his shoulder. "Maybe being stuck here is bothering you more than you thought. I can see if I can jimmy the panel to put out more light."
"I'm not saying it because I'm afraid, Fitz."
"Saying that didn't make you afraid?" he asked, apparently deciding to deliberately misunderstand her, but she could work with that.
"Of course it did, Fitz," she answered, rolling her eyes at him as though they were having a simple difference of opinion in the lab, "but not as much as you not answering."
"Jemma...I...of course," he stammered, then shook his head to clear his thoughts. "You have to know I never stopped, don't you? Of course I love you."
"Do you trust me that I wouldn't lie to you? That I wouldn't say what I said lightly? I'm ready, Fitz. I promise."
He dropped to his knees in front of her, taking her face in his hands as he looked so deeply and intensely into her eyes that she almost had to look away, but she raised her chin and tried to let him see how sure she was. When his gaze softened, his thumb began to play over her cheek, making her breath catch in her throat.
"You are, aren't you?" he said, his voice full of wonder. "You're sure."
She nodded slowly, leaning into his hand and almost moaning at the perfection of feeling his hands holding her so tenderly.
"I didn't ask you first, last time," he whispered. "I regretted that."
"Ask me—"
"—If I could kiss you," he explained, sliding one hand to cup the back of her head, his fingers splaying through her hair. His face was so serious, but there was a lightness in his eyes that she hadn't seen there since before they'd joined Coulson's team.
"I'd like you to ask me properly," she whispered, their lips nearly touching as they both drew closer with every breath.
His eyes sparkled as his fingertips caressed her cheek and stroked through her hair, sending shivers through her entire body. "Jemma Simmons, would you mind terribly if I kissed you right now?"
"Leopold Fitz," she said, leaning heavily in the 'L' in his first name, making him grimace comically before he nuzzled her cheek with his nose, "I think I might die if you don't kiss me right now."
She caught a glimpse of the snowy scene he'd drawn for her over his shoulder as his mouth met hers, his lips soft and warm as she melted against him. Her eyes slipped shut and she moaned, surging forward to wind her arms around his shoulders to hold him to her.
They kissed until Jemma dimly heard a dull click and the sound of the door opening, followed closely by Daisy's disbelieving, "Oh my freaking God, it's about goddamn time." She and Fitz broke apart, but he rested his forehead against hers as they both laughed.