"Where's Felix?" Jemma asked when she woke to discover Phil was watching her. It was the first day post birth and Jemma wished to have her boys at her beck and call.

"He's at the nursery, watching the babies, after he swapped out the blankets for the dogs to get used to their smell," he murmured as he leaned over to kiss her. "How are you feeling?"

"Narcotics are wonderful," she purred. "Now, tell me. Did you and Felix?"

She wiggled her nose at him, which cause Phil to smile.

"No," Phil admitted as he twined his fingers around hers. "He's far too focused on making sure the fur kids are ready to meet their siblings… and he's not letting me get physically close to him. He's got the walls up. It just means I have to woo him."

While it might have been too much to hope that Phil and Felix had hit the sheets last night, she had hoped that they had cuddled at least. She needed Felix to buy into the new dynamics of their relationship.

"Woo?" she repeated. "Like John Wu?"

"Yes, no. Woo. W-o-o. I have to court him, like I did when we first met," he explained. "That's the problem, when I met you, the bond activated hard, and… he reached out to me…"

"Twice," Jemma said.

"Five times, that night. He wanted to hear it from me and… the fact that he's in terribly, terribly in love with you and you did yell at him, called him a liar… he's just sitting quietly in the corner of our lives, trying not to be too noticeable or too needy, willing to take whatever table scraps we're willing to give him but too gun-shy to accept how much we unconditionally love him. It's much how Sonya acted when she first adopted us."

Jemma motioned for Phil to continue.

"She'd gaze at us, adoringly, and when we made the slightest move to pet her, she'd run. She peed on the floor repeatedly to show her submissiveness. She ruined our floors."

"Please, don't tell me that he's peeing on the floor," moaned Jemma. "Do you have any idea how many diapers we'll be going through on a DAILY basis? I can't add Felix's angstie bladder to the total."

"No, but Felix keeps searching for his matching marks. I don't know why they haven't appeared, but they've haven't." Phil softly admitted. "He needs the reassurance that we won't leave. We had to build up Sonya to the point where she trusted us, and it took a lot of patience. All in all, it is enough to make me want to scream and take a SHARPIE marker to him and mark him when he's sleeping, but I have to accept the fact that I hurt him. So, why didn't you tell him about your soul mark?"

Phil kept his tone light, and nonjudgmental.

"I wanted to be… pretty…. When I showed it to him," softly admitted Jemma. Pretty meaning thin and not being utterly huge with another man's babies. Pretty meaning sexy while Felix was being gentle and affectionate with her body insecurities. Because there was no way in HELL that her body was snapping back after this.

Felix seemed to instinctively understand her issues, while Phil had never realized her insecurities about her physical appearance. (Thanks Mum and Dad!) Maybe because Felix had always wondered and pondered about his supposed inadequacies as a Soul Mute.

"Pretty? You're beautiful, Jemma." Phil insisted.

"He was just so terribly sweet and shy when he told first me that he loved me," Jemma explained to Phil. "I wanted to be …. pretty…. when he saw his soul mark for the first time. I wanted it to be perfect."

Opposed to being in the throes of labor, and hiking up her gown in front of an entire operating room to expose it and her quim AND THE BELLY THAT ATE THE FIVE BOROS. To her intense guilt, Felix had wept when he viewed it because it was most assuredly his handwriting. Due to her vanity, her fears about her appearance, she had prevented from giving Felix badly needed reassurance that he had craved once Phil had reappeared. In her defense, no one had told her that Phil was among the living until she was having hard labor. Really, considering she felt as though she was being split in two, she had been really well behaved.

Ok, she hadn't been and she wanted to make it up to Felix, who naturally, claimed to understand why she had been such a prat.

Phil intently stared at her and then nodded his head in defeat. "I don't understand."

"Tell me how you're planning on 'wooing' Felix," she requested as Phil was hopelessly naive.

"We'll talk, a great deal of talking, and go for coffee. When he's less guarded, when he's tired and his head is tilting to the left, as he's too exhausted to force himself to hold it straight, I'll offer to rub his neck for him," Phil explained. Then with a sideways leer, he added, "It'll progress to more."

"I love commandoing him," she admitted. "He's so less likely to run when he's exhausted. We just have to make sure he knows he's an integral part of the family."

"Amelia has her chubby little fingers wrapped around his heart," Phil admitted. "Plus Felicia and James."

Felicia had been the baby formerly known as Baby A, Amelia was Blake's Baby B and James was the lone boy.

"We have a problem, though," Jemma admitted.

"Which is?" Phil asked.

"I never told my parents," confessed Jemma.

"About the babies being born? You were a little busy," Phil assured her.

Jemma crinkled her nose in the most adorable fashion which Phil realized anew how much he adored that gesture. "I didn't tell them about any of this."

"How about you tell me the big items you failed to mention," Phil asked. "They know you're alive, right?"

"Yes. I left them a message after the Battle of New York occurred. I told them that I was fine and that I would be in touch but … things were chaotic. That was it," she admitted. Her voice was noticeably higher when she added, "In my defense, you were dead, and I was pregnant and… I was really pregnant and I was scared that they'd raise the babies if anything happened to me. Felix was simply the only logical choice, because it was him or Fitz or Skye."

"So they've missed the entire, dead son-in-law, pregnant daughter, new son-in-law…."

"He never married me, he never submitted the paperwork!" Simmons' lips quivered. "I can be quite cross about that, right?"

"Surprise, old son-in-law is not dead, babies, and they've now got two son-in-laws; both are who are older than your mum?" Phil continued. "And it's a good thing Felix didn't submit it as you'd be arrested for bigamy."

Jemma nodded, and was saved by answering when Felix knocked. After Jemma ordered him into the room, he came in, looking very hesitant.

"Seriously, you don't have to knock," she groaned. "I want you here. I need both of you here."

"I understand you can have real food." Which was Felix changing the conversation.

"Yes, I puffed and cleared the room," snipped Jemma. The explosion of gas meant that she was off jello and enjoying real food as her intestines were working. "The surrounding rooms had to be evacuated."

Two men in her life looked at each other and mentally translated her British slang. It took several minutes, she noted.

"It just means your plumbing is working," Felix reminded her. "And since I know first hands the joys of narcotics on one's gastrointestinal system… Doc says you can have prune juice."

Phil smirked and Jemma groaned. "Can I have a chaser of some sort?"

"Doc also said that maybe you could have the babies in the room with you. Well, Felicia and James. Amelia needs a little more time under the blue light because of her bilirubin. I talked to her and she is very understanding about why she has to be blue-lighted. However she wants more cuddle time with you when she's released from her phototherapy."

"Better do so, else she'll insist on a tattoo and a nose piercing," Phil added, most unhelpfully.

"Not until she's at least two!" protested Jemma. Then Jemma looked at Felix, and waved at him. "Kiss?"

"I gave Amelia a kiss when I held her," a sincere Felix assured Jemma.

Great, there was no doubt who Felix loved best in their relationship.

"Oh good God, he loves her more than he loves me," Jemma protested to Phil. "Me. I require a kiss to hasten my recovery. Then kiss Phil."

He still looked uneasy and Jemma realized it wasn't because of the oddity of their relationship. It was, and yet it wasn't.

"What happened? Another alien invasion?" Jemma questioned. "I hope it's just that you adopted another pitbull puppy."

"Your parents left a message on the apartment's answering machine. They want to talk to you," explained Felix. "They seemed… displeased."

"Bugger!" Jemma protested. "Bugger, bugger, bugger."

This time Felix and Phil didn't need any help translating her comment.