"Shhh, I don't want to break any rules," nineteen year old Jemma Simmons stage whispered to her best friend as they drunkenly made their way up toward her dorm room. The pair had just left the Boiler Room and had made the mistake of taking celebratory shots in honor of the completion of their exams. Though they weren't legally old enough to drink in the US, both were of age back home.
"I'm not gonna break any rules. Hardly anyone's even here." Leo Fitz grumbled in a voice that suggested he truly didn't care if she shushed him, he would go ahead and speak at whatever volume he wanted.
"You're probably right, I saw more than one student passed out at the bar. No one wanted to walk back in the rain." Jemma observed absently. She rummaged around in a small purse and found a key card which would admit them into her dorm room.
She stepped inside first, dropping the aforementioned purse onto a desk with neatly stacked papers and a closed laptop. Fitz followed right behind, immediately sinking down onto the floor to rest his back against her bed, soaking the duvet with his damp curls. Jemma gave him a curious look as though just realizing that he had followed her up to her room instead of just going to his own.
"Tea?" Fitz asked expectantly. Jemma gave a quick nod and puttered over to an electric kettle she had on her bathroom counter. She turned it on and stepped back out to get some tea from a box. After her items had been secured, she turned to Fitz, waiting for the kettle to sound.
"We drank too much. I'll get us some ibuprofen and vitamins to lessen the blow come morning." Jemma told him to fill the silence. He was just staring at her, after all. He could be a little bit awkward like that, always having stepped jaggedly over lines of personal boundaries. They were just best friends, but people thought they were dating. Neither had interest in the other romantically, yet they always ended up on each others doorstep after they went out with someone else. It was a strange relationship but they called it friendship. Then there were those moments when he would just look toward her like right then and some small inkling in the back of her mind would wonder if they had any chance of being anything more.
Jemma shook the thought from her head, embarrassed by the very idea, and moved to get the kettle as it beeped, grabbing a few bottles from the medicine cabinet along the way. Once she had the tea ready, she moved to sit down beside Fitz on the floor. She handed him a steaming mug of chamomile tea and a handful of medicine.
"Take those, doctors orders." Jemma joked.
"You're not even that kind of doctor." Fitz told her lightheartedly as he downed his pills and washed them back with a gulp of surely burning tea. Jemma decided not to mention it, perhaps he was too intoxicated to care.
"I have more doctorates than you." She countered, looking smug as she usually did during this kind of conversation.
"And you'll never let me forget it." He carried their banter in stride. It was so rehearsed, such a default for them. It was a conversation they could probably carry in their sleep. It was then that it occurred to Jemma just how very dream-like the whole situation felt. Two drunk young adults trading words they'd shared before, hazily sipping tea in a lull. She reached out an arm and pinched herself out of curiosity. It barely phased her. How many shots had she done? 3? 5? More?
"I don't mind it, ya know?" Fitz was mumbling to her. "You're brilliant. I'm just lucky to work with you." This took Jemma off guard. Usually their conversation ended on the number of doctorates they each had, not in some sentimental bit. Maybe she was dreaming after all. She hoped she hadn't fallen asleep at the Boiler Room, the place was filthy.
"You're pretty brilliant yourself. We're both lucky, I suppose." She told him with a sigh somewhere in her tone.
"No, Jemma, it's more than that. I just… I'm thankful to have you as my friend." Fitz stammered, adjusting awkwardly to face her. She held his gaze, not sure where this was going. He broke her gaze after a moment and glanced down at his now empty mug of tea, at some point, he had finished it. Jemma's had barely been touched.
"I… I feel the same. It's good to have a best friend." Jemma tried to contribute as Fitz shuffled to stand up. Following his movement, albeit more slowly, Jemma got to her feet as well.
"I think I'm a little drunk, getting emotional. I'd better head back to my room." Fitz told her with clarity. Jemma nodded as he moved into the doorway. She followed after to say goodbye. It was there, in the door frame to her standard issue shield academy dorm room, that Fitz did something very stupid that both of them would casually forget. She leaned in to give him a hug, thinking it felt appropriate as a goodbye and he leaned in and placed a hazy kiss upon her unsuspecting lips. The moment felt like the dream Jemma was almost certain she was having. The kiss was this transformation of a thing. It started out in that drunk lilt and progressed into recognition. They each had distance between one another still, but the movement felt almost ordinary, like they were a couple that had been together since childhood and had done this dozens of times already. The realization of the action itself was a mixture between noticing that they were kissing and thinking that it wasn't actually happening at all. They broke apart and met one another with looks of confusion and disorientation.
"Night Jem." Fitz murmured as if this were somehow all very ordinary. She shook her head again to try and wake up and tilted her head slightly to the side.
"Night Fitz." Jemma said back, giving up on trying to make any sense of it. She stepped back into her room as he strode away down the hall. She washed the mugs in her bathroom sink and stowed them away before crawling into bed, wondering how she would be able to fall asleep when she was already inside a dream. Without too much over thinking, she fell into sleep wistfully.
The next morning, Fitz woke in his dorm with a slight headache and a faint memory of the night before. He went about his usual morning routines and tried to recall if he'd done anything stupid. Once, when out drinking, Fitz had thought it would be a good idea to bet someone he could beat them in a robot battle which had led to a late night bot-building session in a broken-into engineering lab and a lot of shards of metal on the front lawns outside his dorm building. He didn't remember any wagers, but he had a feeling he had done something stupid at some point.
Figuring her memory would be clearer than his, Fitz made his way to meet Jemma. They had a table in the library where they always studied on weekends and Fitz found Jemma there. He handed her a paper cup of tea from the campus coffee cart and she smiled up at him with tired eyes.
"Did I do anything stupid last night?" Fitz asked her, brows raised in question.
"I honestly don't remember. I believe there were shots and things got a bit blurry." Jemma confessed. Fitz nodded as if that made sense. "I had a strange dream though."
"You did? I think I might have as well. Whole night was pretty blurry for me too though so, no reliable memory." Fitz told her, vaguely recalling a dream with chamomile lips and confused brown eyes. He shook his head slightly as Jemma did the same movement. They shared one look before both settled back into their usual routine and pulled out study materials. They never spoke of what had happened, both having assumed it was nothing more than a dream. Years later, Jemma would tell a friend that nothing romantic had ever happened between her and Fitz, not even a drunken kiss. She would never know that she'd lied without meaning to. And years after that, Fitz would kiss Jemma again and feel the familiarity that he'd only ever felt once before, in what he'd thought was only a dream.