A/N: The initial idea for this was sparked by the Oren Lavie song that lends its name to the title and a beautiful AU post on tumblr.
As always feedback is gratefully received.
September, 1917
Kings Cross Station, London.
The faces of the men that pass by are wrinkled like blank pieces of paper, heavy with the empty lines of a story they are not yet ready to carry, not yet ready to tell. She corrects herself with a bitter smile bitten back before it can turn into the grimace she has been desperately hiding for too long. These are not men, these are boys. Boys who were forced to grow as they slept last night, two feet taller now thanks to the smell of turpentine and the shiny lure of brass buttons on green fabric. But it is the empty, hollow eyes of the ones returning that scare her the most, and she wonders perhaps if they are men who have shrunk back to boys, men whose boots no longer fit the feet that are too small and too weak to carry such heavy shoulders. She finds she cannot look at any of them lest they look back at her with his soft face and bright blue eyes.
Will this be him, she wonders, suppressing a shudder as the thought takes hold. He was built for blotting paper and pencil lead, for science and for theory, not for putting bullets and bombs into practice. She imagines him returning to her so much older than his teenage years, imagines him aging to the cries of the cannons that strike out beside a bugle that cannot keep to the tempo, falling down into silence. She imagines him breathing in an air that is thick with the sounds of death, imagines it rotting him from the inside out. But this is better than imagining him not returning at all.
The walk to the platform is both too long and too short as they drift along, always in step, always a few inches too close. He is all she has known since her days consisted of no more than chalkboards and classes they were too clever for, and she has been his since she dusted him off when the older boys pushed him to the ground in the schoolyard. He wonders how he will breathe easy without her thin, cool fingers soothing the scrapes on his knees even as she aches to think that she cannot face the bullies with him now. She does not know what it is to be parted from him, and now he is to be taken from her in the cruelest of ways. Her parents had teased her with talk of wedding bands and gauzey veils, drifting in a summer breeze, as he kissed her to the tune of familial applause, as she rose as Fitz and not Simmons, but it had always enough for her that she no longer knew where Simmons ended and Fitz began. She blushed to think of the singular kiss they once shared, just teenagers who were just testing what it might feel like to be in love with one another.
They slow to a halt and stand in uncomfortable silence, and their unspoken words skitter around them, no more than the rattle of the steam engines now. They skirt around this goodbye, around the possibility that they might never meet again. In all their years together there has been little they could not solve, but there is no formula for boys going off to war, no equation that might help you understand the twisted nightmare of battle, the angry fever of killing. And as the minutes drag on she feels as though, in their silence, they are scattering the seeds of the moments they will lose. She wonders if those seeds might blossom into something beautiful next spring.
He pulls out a little bundle of paper and string from his pocket.
"The address in here, the one I'm giving them, it's yours. I don't think mum's up to more army letters," he told her and she thinks of poor, frail Mrs. Fitz, already scarred by the loss of her husband to the Boer. Would that heartache be her own future if this boy who had shaped her world did not return? "I hope you don't mind," he adds sheepishly, and his eyes are heavy with the weight of the future as he searches her face. She cannot bring herself to tell him the truth, that the idea of a 'Missing In Action' letter with both of their names inked onto it is unbearable, and so she nods, lips pressed tight lest they betray her.
"Thanks," he mumbles, barely audible over the hubbub of the station. He makes as though to speak again, but his voice fades to nothing, his mouth hanging open for a moment.
"Fitz," she says, tears thickening her voice, causing it to catch in her throat and it is all she can do not to clutch at his arm and beg him not to die in the icy mud of the battlefield. She would not ask him to stay, would not burden him with the weight of leaving any more than it already pressed him down. There are more soldiers now, and she thinks perhaps he wants to impress them. Fitz, who had always valued the approval of others, who had earnt hers simply by being himself. So, she clears her throat and blinks the tears out of her eyes. "Did I give you that first aid kit I put together?" she asks, beginning to fuss, an evasive move she makes in place of actually daring to say 'goodbye' just yet.
He nods, face serious. "Jemma, please don't worry about me, I can do this." His eyes dart to a spot at her feet. "And you make sure you don't do anything rash while I'm away," he instructs with a grim, humourless smile that she mirrors.
"Well, you'll be careful?" she asks, mind too hazy to meld the words into the instruction they were intended to be.
"I've handled worse," he tries to joke, voice a hundred shades too dark for any form of humour. He had always been flippant, always just the wrong side of arrogant, but she loved him that way. She knows how it will dent him to kill another man, to kill many of them. He used to speak in proud laughter and self-satisfied smirks and she can only imagine how war will chip away at that boyish, teasing grin until instead a frown is carved in its wake.
Suddenly, her mind darts to a memory from earlier that day, of her rising early to slice into a fresh loaf of her mother's crustiest bread, of butter knives and the nicest cheese Mr. Jennings could provide. Reaching into her satchel, she pulls out a brown paper bag.
"I almost forgot! I made you a sandwich for the journey. It's your favourite," she tells him as he takes it with trembling hands.
"Thank you," he says, looking down at it as though it were something precious.
Then, in the blink of an eye, there are men ushering the soldiers towards the train and they hurry along like ants on a garden path, darting under the shadow of someone's boot. She holds his hand for a moment, eyes fixed on his, heart thudding because it was all happening too quickly now. They'd known the moment he'd turned eighteen, of course they had, that this was coming, but it was too real now and the injustice of it all burns in her chest.
They had never been ones for physical affection but the need to embrace each other, lest it be the last time, is overwhelming, the action is thoughtless, driven only by an intense, all-consuming need to be close.
Although both crave the chance to linger, they break apart as quickly as they crashed together, the scent of one another stuck to the places they touched until the thick smoke washes it away. She thinks perhaps it is possible to lie to herself about this, to convince herself that this will not be for too long.
"Just a short goodbye," she tells him, fingers lingering on his shoulders, and he nods quickly.
"No time at all," he agrees even as the rough hand of an unknown man tugs at his arm telling him it's time to go now son. Don't make this harder than it has to be.
"Fitz," she says, even as he answers with,
"Simmons," their names mingling together in one breath, as much FitzSimmons now as they are individual people. Had no one ever told the world that it should not break one whole into two?
"Fitz, take care of yourself," she calls as he's lead away. "Goodbye," she adds, realising she'd rather force herself to say it than risk him never hearing it.
"I'll – I'll see you Jemma!" he shouts back, eyes on her until the door shuts behind him and he has gone. She watches the train until it is has disappeared, and then she walks home alone, calling in on Fitz's bedridden mother on the way, and never had the space he filled beside her felt quite so huge. It felt much more like a void now.
When they part he finds an empty compartment and sits alone on the cold, hard seat with his face turned towards the window, allowing himself to cry and only wiping the tears away when another man enters the compartment. The newcomer gives him a measured, calm look, and extends his hand, saying nothing about the tear tracks on Fitz's cheeks. First Lieutenant Ward is one of the many men who have been drafted in from the States to prop up the Entente, and he is the one who teaches Fitz how to adjust to war, although nothing could prepare him for the months that lay ahead.
The crash of shells hitting the ground, the scuttle of the rats that crawl over their feet, the cries of men who lay dying in No Man's Land; the sounds all merged into one endless din that rattled around his head day in, day out. He knows he will never forget the first time, sat in the trenches, he listened to a man die on the battlefield beyond. He and a few others had tried to bring him back to the trenches, until the bullet of a German sniper whizzed too close and they drove back, defeated. It took hours for their comrade to die. At first he screamed in pain, screamed for a solid hour until his throat was too sore, and then he groaned as his strength left him. Fitz never wanted to hear a grown man cry for his mother again, as this soldier had, until his sobs became wheezes and his wheezes became nothing at all.
Time away from the Front simply becomes the ticking of a bomb, waiting until he is sent back, wondering if next time, he'll be the one dragged to a field hospital, limbs blown off, skin singed from his body. Writing letters to Jemma, and reading the replies written in her neat, slanting hand, are the only things to bring him any peace, the only times he has even a shred of hope that anything good can come out of this world now. He has seen the worst that humans have to offer, and it is only the knowledge that the world has given him someone like Jemma Simmons that keeps him afloat after the crashing tidal wave of war.
He had dreamed once of marrying her, of two armchairs pressed together by the hearth and mornings when they whispered words of love beneath white sheets. But he had killed men now, would she see him only as a monster, a murderer when - if - he returned to her? These last few weeks away from the Front left him without direction and he had thought too much. He used to revel in the rush of deep thought; his calculations and designs racing through his head at dizzying speeds. What good had all his cleverness brought him now? The question is swept from his mind as the cry goes up for them to march on, marching back to the Front, back to hell.
Just a few more weeks until he could take leave, home (and her) just one more battle away.
While he is gone, she pieces together rifles in the dim light of a factory, hair tied back, overalls rough against thin arms which are wasting away on rations and meagre portions. It is her mind she misses most as it too seems to shrink without the thrill of his company and his conversation, filled with an intelligence she always understood better than anyone else. Whatever she had dreamt for herself, for both of them, before this war lies forgotten now, buried at the bottom of the chest in which she keeps his letters, each one a reminder that he is alive and fighting still, pure relief written in blue ink. And yet, every letter is itself a small, short goodbye and reading the last lines of each one is like scratching her fingers on the thorns of a rose.
She throws herself into taking care of his mother, writes out applications to join the WRNs, the VAD, anything to give her a greater sense of purpose than simply assembling the machinery that might make killers of young men, or widows out of women. The replies take too long, and the nights and days meld into one seamless, other-worldly haze. When she sleeps. she sleeps fitfully, dreaming that she stands at the sink, looking out of the window to the front gate, only to see him standing there, smiling his best smile, the one he reserved for her. Each realisation that he is still at war, illuminated in pale morning light seeping under curtains, is another empty farewell.
Caked up to his shoulders in freezing mud and God's knows what else, dried blood flaking on his cheek, he steels himself for one last push into enemy territory under the cover of night. Just one more week until he can return home, home to his mother and home to her. She has haunted his dreams every night he has been back at the Front, her name always on his lips as he wakes every morning in the icy trenches. The taste of it lingers right until dusk, something not even the rancid, watery gruel can wash away. The whizz of shrapnel and the shaking of the earth beneath his feet, the screaming of the officers' wounded horses, all sounds that herald him deeper, deeper into hell. Surely this must be the end of days. Surely he cannot learn to sleep without the sound of bombs to play a midnight tune. The war cry goes up and he grips his rifle tighter, legs moving seemingly of their own volition.
The seven nights before he is due to take leave are hazy, spent sat with her mother, and with his, as zeppelins rain fire down onto the city. In all the years that followed she'd say she had no idea how their old houses stayed standing.
She tries not to worry that he has not written to her again, tries to imagine simply that he has been too busy as the day arrives, fresh and crisp with the birds singing the first few chords of their summer songs. Breathing in the first gulps of fresh air after a night spent underground, she wonders what time his train will arrive, wishing she could be there to meet him at the station. Instead she waits at home, barely able to sit still, restless under her parents's knowing looks. She has lost count of the days and the months they have been apart (time moves so strangely when they are not together), has long since stopped trying to imagine how they might have spent their days had there been no war. The flowers of their lost moments have grown tall and strong since they parted, but they are obscure to her, grey and blurred in their non-existence.
She hurries to answer a knock at the door, it is too early to be him, but her heart still sinks as she accepts the morning post delivery. She hums to herself as she opens the envelope addressed to her because if she stops to think too much about it, it looks too much like an army letter, but not at all like the ones he has been sending her for so long. Thoughts of train station embraces leave her in an instant, replaced with insincere apologies and three large letters stamped out in front of her and the paper falls from her trembling fingers as her legs threaten to give way. The sobs that force their way from her chest can do nothing for him now, and dreams of afternoon hellos between childhood friends are left instead as the tattered early-morning nightmares of a hundred short farewells, that together must carve out one final long goodbye.