A/N: SO, originally I posted this on tumblr and ao3 as a part of Skimmons week. But, like, I totally forgot to post it here. So I'm doing it now.
This is just a little dabble that got waaay longer than I'd ever intended. It just happened. Anyway, I hope you like it. 3
"You going to finish that?"
I hear those words more than any others on a daily basis, I think.
Owning and operating 1/4th of a brewpub is demanding job, and every day, I get exactly two bloody minutes to myself. At 3:42, the deliveries have been sorted, the barley's soaking or the mash is boiling or the yeast is doing it's thing or the bottles have been sanitized and for two minutes, I can sit down all by myself and finish the turkey sandwich I brought for lunch but only managed to wolf down half of before something desperately needed my attention.
Technically, I could probably have closer to five minutes, but as previously mentioned, this happens Every. Damn. Day.
Skye rocks up, popping out of the exit to the fire escape where I'm seated, covered nearly head-to-toe in flour. Wiping her hands on a faded green apron, she leans casually against the door frame and doesn't wait for my answer before reaching forward and tearing off a piece of my sandwich and tidying it up in one bite.
"Mmmm. Thursday. Dijon Day. A personal favorite," she winks.
"You could bring your own, you know," I mumble.
Skye nods, "I could. But I like yours better. It's got something special."
I roll my eyes, "I've told you before: it's just a little bit of oregano. It's not special at all. It is sold literally anywhere you can buy sliced turkey."
"And I've told you before: it's not the oregano. I tried that."
"You used too much."
"I didn't."
I give up, turning my attention back to the notepad in my hands, trying to sort out my almost-indecipherable handwriting. I rake my eyes over the carefully recorded amounts of wort and hops and water and studiously avoid focusing any attention on that sodding green apron.
That green apron will be the death of me, I swear it.
It's hideous, really; one of those garments that is at once horribly dated and curiously timeless.
It's all simple seams, traditional design and a color suggests that while it was once the unmistakeable hue of a nearly-ripe avocado, it has faded considerably and now inhabits an unassuming shade of green that can only be described as 'apathetic moss'.
Despite it's unfortunate color, Skye wears it each and every day, covering it almost systematically in flour, dough and, occasionally, maple syrup.
I can say with absolute confidence that the green apron is the single largest problem in my life. There's no getting away from it, and with each passing day, it only seems to suit her more and more.
The thing about the green apron is that it's an eyesore on anyone else. It makes me look like a boxy green rucksack and when Fitz tried it on once, he was almost immediately mistaken for a member of a group of girl scouts who happened to be trotting past the shop whilst he was cleaning the windows. He nearly threw it away then, but Skye stepped in, insisting that it was her favorite and that if it went, so did she.
While I'm confident that she was only bluffing, she owns 1/4th of my life's work and my mother instilled in me a deep appreciation of the concept of 'waste not want not'. So, from that day on, the green apron belonged to Skye and she to it.
You could tell, too. While it made Fitz and I look like luggage and baggy schoolchildren, it seemed to transform on Skye's body. With the ties criss-crossed at her lower back and tied across her hips in the front and worn canvas that wrapped around her frame with casual, charming ease. It suited her in every sense of the word and in a way that nothing deemed 'one size fits all' should suit any human being on the planet.
Each morning, Skye walks downstairs and into the bar shortly after I do, and each morning I watch her select the same green apron. As I step into my boots and shove my hair into my hat unceremoniously, I watch her sweep her hair into a messy bun, each day missing the same strand at the name of her neck. When I pull on my too-big flannel jacket-"The Brewer's Lab Coat" Fitz calls it-I pretend not to watch as she trades in her jumper for the apron, tying it expertly in the world's sloppiest-but-most-consistent bow before she ducks into the kitchen, throwing a "Brew up something good, Simmons," over her shoulder.
And so, today like every other since The Day She Saved The Apron, she stands propped against the door jamb in that green apron and complimenting my aggressively ordinary turkey sandwich.
Today, though, it strikes me just how odd it is that she's here at all.
Fitz and I have known each other forever. We grew up together, began walking and talking together, got our first chemistry sets together, graduated together, went to University together, worked the same crappy lab tech job together, got fed up together and decided to open the brewpub together. We've always been together. Fitz and Simmons, Simmons and Fitz. Fitzsimmons.
We met Ward at University and became fast friends, though we were a bit of an odd group. Ward was quiet, good-natured, stoic and possessed the kind of natural athleticism that could've saved Fitz and I from a lot of time in dumpsters and recycling bins early on in our schooling.
Despite our obvious differences, Ward became vital to our group. FitzSimmons expanded to the much-less-catchy Fitzwardsimmons. When Fitz and I began work at a pharmaceutical lab, he landed a job as a trainer at a gym not far from the lab's soulless corporate home.
Not long after, we became flatmates, sharing a crowded 3-bedroom flat above a tapas restaurant in what was rapidly becoming the 'hip' part of town. We spent countless late nights after work in the living room, sitting round the coffee table with glass bottles in hand discussing the many reasons why we should open a bar and how we'd run it; how we'd brew the beer and curate our guest taps; how we'd create the best brewpub 'vibe' in the city.
Eventually, those late-night discussions morphed from the theoretical musings everyone has about owning a bar to discussions of loans and commercial real estate and startup costs. When the tapas place downstairs closed, we cited a force of kismet that we'd never believed in, but were perfectly willing to appropriate as we signed the papers and went to work making the space our own.
We'd heard Ward mention his sister before. He called her every night and spoke of her often, but we hadn't met her until she came to town for Ward's birthday a few years ago. She was living in Santa Fe then, working at a bakery and filling her spare time on the phone assuring Ward that she was fine, she was happy and she was making friends.
"She should move up here," Ward had said more than once. "She wants to, I think, but she won't say it. Too proud for that. But she's never been one for making friends. She doesn't like 'roots'."
He didn't elaborate and we didn't ask him to just then.
When she came for his birthday, he lit up in the way that the coast does when the sun comes over the mountain and touches the rocky shores for the first time after a rainy spell. He seemed to radiate light when she was around.
The only time I saw it falter was when Fitz asked about their parents off-handedly. They fell silent and shared a look that made it obvious that they'd had this conversation before.
"Well," Ward began slowly, "we don't have parents…per se."
"We're foster kids," Skye filled in. "Ward and I were 'wards' of the state," she bumps his shoulder and he rolls his eyes like he's heard that a hundred times. "We bounced around a lot in the system. We met when we were together in a particularly poisonous home environment when I was 4 and Ward was 6. But we lucked out with a social worker that moved us and sold us as a 'package deal'. No one seemed bothered by the lack of birth records that named us as actual 'brother and sister'. Probably because they never bothered to check."
I looked back and forth between them, piecing it together slowly. It made so much sense now. Ward always flew to Santa Fe to spend christmas with 'his family'. He meant Skye. He never mentioned parents, and when it came up in conversation, he often deflected noncommittally. Looking at him now, though, it was clear that Ward absolutely had a family. It just didn't include a big family tree.
"Blood's just the family you can't choose," Ward beamed, winking at Skye warmly as he threw an arm over her shoulders and pulled her in for a half-hug. "We were just lucky enough to be a different kind of family."
"That's brilliant," Fitz grinned, his chin resting on his fist as he listened intently. "Family you can choose," he shook his head, grinning. "Brilliant."
The week of Ward's birthday, we were hard at work on the brewpub. We weren't far from opening, and Skye was brilliant, mucking in and helping us with the finishing touches. When I mentioned that she shouldn't be spending her holiday working, she just tilted her head, smiling brightly. "I don't mind," she shrugged, dragging a paintbrush across the wood on the door frame. "I like it here," she turned to look at me, her eyes light and dancing.
A few weeks after Skye went back to Santa Fe, we held the grand opening of the brewpub. People piled in, queueing up for a pint of the beer I'd been perfecting for weeks. It was a hit and when we closed the doors in the wee hours of the morning that first night, we collapsed into a booth in giddy relief. We spent several more hours enjoying our own product, cleaning, dancing in our pub, and taking turns saying some variation of "Can you believe it? People actually came!" in turn.
On our 42nd night in business, the stream of patrons hadn't slowed, but had ticked up noticeably since our opening. We'd spent the last three weeks in a state of excited disbelief. We had always expected to struggle a bit to get business up and running, but the only real struggle we were having was keeping up with demand. Between the brewing and the kitchen with 'light bar fare', there was a lot to do and not many of us to do it.
"Maybe we should get an extra pair of hands?" Ward suggested one Saturday night, slumped over the bar after we'd closed the doors. He looked as exhausted as we all felt.
I nodded, but felt skeptical. We had a delicate dynamic to maintain. It would be a challenge to get anyone to care about the place like we did. "Where are we going to find someone to put up with us?" I laughed, only half-joking.
Ward smirked tiredly, "I have an idea."
Skye took up residence on our couch a week and a half later and started work in the kitchen. She was like the piece that we'd never thought we might be missing. If things were good at the brewpub in our first three months of business, they were great with the arrival of Skye. A natural in the kitchen and a quick-thinking problem-solving force to be reckoned with, she completed us.
Then, one morning, I stumbled into the kitchen to grab the hop pellets from the refrigerator and saw her, facing away from me, kneading a dough, singing low and sweet to a Bill Withers song on the radio. The sun shone through the large industrial windows that day and she smiled brightly through her work, the very picture of contentment.
There are moments, turning points, so sharp that they completely rupture the bubble that you've comfortably and happily inhabited up until that point. At once, everything is altered and bright and new and unknown, for better or for worse.
That morning was turning point. I don't know for sure how long I stood there, one hand on the fridge door, just watching her and wondering how the bloody hell I hadn't realized before that she was completely, utterly breathtaking.
"Jemma, were you born in a sodding barn? Close the bloody door." Fitz appeared beside me, but I barely registered the words he was saying.
"What are you…?" he trailed off as he followed my sightline to Skye, who apparently couldn't hear him over the radio and still didn't know we were there. "Oh," he chuckled lightly, "I see. Ward owes me a fiver, then. Brilliantly done, Jemma. Carry on." With that, he turned and walked away. "But shut the bloody fridge, yeah?" he shouted over his shoulder.
Skye heard that bit and turned slightly to look over her shoulder.
"Hey, Jem," she spun to face me, leaning against the counter, her hands caked in dough and flour up to her wrists. She grinned at me, tilting her head in that 'uniquely Skye' way. "How goes the IPA?"
I stared at her dumbly a moment before my brain caught onto the idea that I should probably answer her.
"Uh, f-fine," I stammered cooly. "Just, um, grabbing the hops. That's all."
Skye smirked, "Right." I felt in that moment that she could almost certainly read my mind.
My watch beeped loudly, reminding me that it was time to add hops to the wort.
"Looks like you've got work to do," she nodded towards the brewing room. Winking, she said, "Better hop to it, Simmons," which made my heart beat so hard that I suddenly remembered my long-forgotten New Year's Resolution to exercise more frequently.
It's happened that way a thousand times since the first.
When I saw her asleep on the couch in the middle of the night, all steady breaths and gentle snores.
When she walked through the door of the bar late one morning, her damp hair leaving dark splotches on the ratty grey jumper that Ward's tried to throw away more than once.
When I found her one afternoon, leaning with her elbows on the wooden bar top in front, probably waiting for something to come out of the oven, a coffee cup in her hands: simple, chipped and steaming.
In the beginning, I brushed it off, insisting inwardly that it was nothing.
But, I stopped being able to pretend that was true the night I agreed to let her help me with a small batch of our porter. She'd been begging Fitz and I to let her help for weeks.
"I want to say I help make the beer without lying," she'd said. "Please? I'll do whatever you need. And I'll be really quiet."
I figured that night was as good as any. It certainly wouldn't hurt to have some company.
By way of thanks, she gave me a comically exaggerated kiss on the cheek, grinning widely. "Simmons, you are the light of my life." She was kidding, but from that point on, it became a lot harder to pretend that what I felt was 'nothing'.
In November of our first year in business, Ward left town for a few weeks to attend some kind of stuffy 'small business owners' convention. He's the most business-minded among us, and it works well that way. Fitz and I are left to the brewing ("It's like chemistry, but with a really tasty end product," Fitz had explained when Skye asked how we went from STEM jobs to brewing) while Ward puts his dusty business degree to work making sure that we didn't end up having to put a 'For Sale' sign in the front window.
Even so, when he'd announced that he was planning to go to Missoula for an 'Entrepreneurship Summit', we had tried to tell him it was stupid, that we were doing fine and that he needn't suffer through 8 days worth of boring lectures and networking events.
But he'd waved us off and said he wanted to go, that there were a few business owners from our area that were going and he didn't want miss out, lest the competition learn the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything at a convention in Montana whilst he was not in attendance.
When we found out that the girl who owned the flower shop round the corner was going, we put the pieces together and all but shoved him out the door on the morning of his flight.
After he shut the door behind his carry-on bag, Skye seemed to deflate, slumping in the chair nearest the door.
"I can't believe he's going to be gone over Thanksgiving," she sighed. "We've never been apart on Thanksgiving."
Even though Fitz and I didn't much of a bloody clue what on God's green earth Thanksgiving was about or supposedly commemorating, we did our best to surprise Skye with something decidedly Thanksgiving-y.
"I reckon the less burnt-y bits are fine," Fitz remarked, chewing his bottom lip.
The recipes I'd looked up on the internet didn't turn out exactly as expected. The turkey was 75% crispy, the sweet potatoes were a soggy disaster, and the apple pie was looking more and more like a crusty accident each time I glanced at it.
Before I could even make an attempt at fixing something, Skye unlocked the door a full twenty-eight minutes before we were expecting her home.
"Jems, I know you told me what you wanted, but I forgot and I can't find that scrap of paper anywhere and it turns out that there are approximately a metric assload of hop varieties. So I got the 3 of the ones that had the coolest names. If they're no good, I'll just go back but-" Skye stopped short when she finally rounded the corner from the entryway that lead to the kitchen. "What the…," she looked back and forth between me and Fitz, confused. "What's all this?"
"Er, mostly not ready yet," I said sheepishly.
Skye seemed not to hear as she dropped her bag and made a beeline for the counter. She looked at the charred turkey and soggy potatoes and pie-shaped mess like they were masterpieces.
"Did you do this for me?" Skye looked at me, her expression warm and tender.
"Well, we tried," I felt my cheeks warm, but found the nerve to meet her eyes for a brief moment. "We just wanted you to have something special today. Clearly it didn't work out so well, given the-"
I was cut off when Skye pulled me into a hug, her arms around me and her voice in my ear, saying, "It's perfect. You're Perfect. Thank you."
When she stepped back, she let her hand run the length of my arm and hooked her pinky round mine for just a few seconds.
"We really wanted to pull out all the stops, but I suspect that the metric-to-imperial conversion might've foiled us yet again," Fitz sighed. "Suspect we can still get take-out from the Chinese restaurant."
Skye, still grinning, just shook her head. "Nonsense," she said, bumping my shoulder gently tilting her head. "I've got everything I need right here."
After dinner, in the spirit of over-indulgence, I made hot chocolate and popcorn and insisted that we take over Ward's room whilst he was away, as he had the largest television in the flat. And so, nearly every night after that until Ward was due to return, we stayed up late watching films, often falling asleep on Ward's too-big bed.
"This is miles better than the couch," Skye stretched out luxuriously on the bed.
She'd been looking for an apartment at Ward's insistence. He wanted her to get something nearby, maybe that they could share. More to the point, he didn't want her to have to sleep on the couch any longer. She'd never once complained but the way she moved and stretched and fidgeted suggested that she hadn't been getting the best sleep of her life the past few months. Still, Skye had come back from every apartment showing saying it just 'wasn't right'. And so, she continued to sleep on the couch.
The morning of Ward's return, I woke with my head on Skye's chest and her arm round my shoulders. I had no memory of moving. Or of even going to bed, for that matter. When I saw the empty growler and discarded glasses on the window sill, that started to make a little more sense. And that's why you don't taste-test a fresh batch of our Imperial IPA with a girl you've got a crush on.
Taking great care to be as quiet as possible, I shifted from under her arm and silently thanking whoever was responsible for Skye being a heavy sleeper.
As far as I know, she remembers about as much as I do about that night, which is next to nothing.
That was two weeks ago, and in true respectable adult fashion, I've been skirting the issue of my feelings. Through sophisticated avoidance tactics and deflection techniques, I've managed to keep a lid on it. And even though I can hardly think or move or speak or sleep without thinking about her and about just how much I wouldn't mind if that night were to repeat itself (ideally with two fewer pints), even though I've had a dozen dreams about waking up to the same sensation every morning, we have a delicate dynamic to maintain.
Without Skye, we're nothing. She's is our missing piece, and I won't be responsible for ruining our happy existence with some misguided, one-sided crush. I won't be responsible for making things weird.
But now, despite even my best avoidance techniques, Skye is standing in front of me, like she does every other damn day at this time, leaning on the door jamb and looking so bloody suited in that green apron.
"Simmons?"
I chance a look up at her from where I'm sitting, on the second metal step of the metal fire escape. When I do, she's not looking at me. In fact, she's pretty studiously avoiding eye contact whilst she worries her bottom lip between her teeth.
"Hmmmm?"
"Did I, um, do something…wrong?"
Bloody hell.
"Um, not at all. Why do you ask?"
Skye shrugs, "We just haven't talked much. I've hardly seen you the last few weeks."
Shit. I spit out the first excuse that comes to mind. "I've just been busy with the porter and the-"
"The stout. Right, I know," she nods. "It's just that I really enjoyed spending time with you. When Ward was away, I mean. Well, all the time, really, not just when he's gone," she wrings her hands nervously. "And I'm sorry if I did something or…" she trails off, then starts again. "I mean, I'm sorry if-Fuck," she mutters, "this is harder than I thought."
She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, then she's right in front of me, balancing on the balls of her feet with her hands on her knees, that green apron folding and wrinkling cooperatively.
"Simmons," she says, looking me in the eyes now. "Jemma. I like you. Like, really like you. Have for ages," she shakes her head, laughing a little nervously. "And I don't know if you meant what I think you meant by what you said that night a couple of weeks ago, or if you even remember it. But if you do-or even if you don't-I hope you meant what I think you meant."
I have no sodding idea what I said or what I meant, but I don't doubt that I meant what I said. I'm an awful liar when I'm sober and next to incapable when I'm intoxicated.
"And I was kind of hoping that maybe, if you're not busy one night soon, that we could maybe get dinner? Or see a movie, if you'd rather. Or even-"
"Yes."
She stops, looking me in the eyes closely, inspecting them for any hint that she'd misheard.
"Yes?"
"Yes," I nod this time to assure her that she heard correctly.
"Oh thank god," she relaxes and the tension visibly leaves her body. She grins and leans forward to pull me into a tight hug.
I feel my smile spreading across my face and I experience the sensation that I'm actually, seriously bursting. My chest doesn't feel big enough to contain my relief, my excitement, my total giddiness. I slip my hands around her waist and hug her back warmly.
"I'm sorry I've been avoiding you. I just thought-"
She pulls back slightly, shaking her head and kissing me softly on the cheek saying, "It's perfect. You're Perfect. Thank you."