They all crowded in the meeting room; all six of them. They where all back together now with Coulson back with them.
There where no missions. There wouldn't be for another eight days if the hubs promise of a two-week break was trust worthy. No missions, just an announcement. A FitzSimmons announcement, to be exact.
"Well." Simmons pushes her caramel hair behind her ears, while Fitz drew up blueprints on their large computer screen behind her. "After we got Agent Coulson back from Centipede - which we are very glad about, sir, if it wasn't obvious we decided that perhaps the tracking device we where using on Mike Peterson may have needed work."
She sighed dropped her head down, unhappy.
"We realise we needed a way to track the whole group. And we came up with these, based on an old design."
She held a small, round device up in between two fingers of her right hand, the design matching that of the blueprints behind her. Fitz stole it from her.
"A hide-able tracker." He announced, flicking it onto his palm. "Hide-able in both appearance and traceable signals. Totally untraceable!"
"You wanna follow us?" Skye scoffed, raising her arm to show off the bracelet "Even with this?"
"Oh no!" Simmons squeaked, waving her hands quickly in denial. "Only for missions. They can be switched to stand by if they're not needed. No invasion of privacy required!"
"There is one down side..." Fitz huffed, dropping the tracker into his partner's palm.
"Of course you'd focus on that!" She huffed, handing it off to May for her inspection. "I was looking in to ways of installation. It clearly can't be swallowed, or injected. So really the only way I can think of doing it is..."
"Surgical implants." Fitz finished, taking the implant from where Ward now held it. "Quite old-fashioned, if you ask me."
"That's the point. " Coulson hummed, tugging at his tie. "Sometimes, the oldest methods are the best. The least expected. Simmons will be doing the implants and, of course, they are completely voluntary. "
"Hold on." Skye nearly shouted, slamming her hands down on the desk. "We don't have to have these things stuck in us?"
"Of course not." Coulson chuckled softly. "But I for one, will be going under Simmons' knife."
"As will I." May spoke up, crossing her arms tightly. "When it is safe to leave the plane without its pilot."
"Should only take about twenty minutes." Simmons nodded, jotting May's name down on her pad, in messy, scribbled letters, barely recognisable to most. "No drugs bar my own painkillers - completely safe, I assure you - won't even leave you dizzy."
"In which case," Ward cocked his head and tapped lightly at Simmons' pad. "Put my name down too."
"Are you doing it Fitz?" Skye inquired, fiddling with her hair in the way she so often did when she was thinking.
Fitz scoffed.
"Well, unlike the rest of you lucky sods, I don't have a choice."
"Yes you do!" Simmons scoffed, "I'd completely understand if you didn't want me poking around inside you!"
"No," Fitz snapped, ignoring Skye's giggles "Because then you turn around and complain. We've done this before, remember: 'Oh Fitz, you quite obviously don't trust me, I don't know why you even bother staying around me all the time. Surely there are other people who won't want to cut things open around you!'"
"For god sake, Fitz, I never said that, and you know it! I was only complaining about the. .."
"Kids!" Coulson interrupted the progressing squabble. "Enough."
"Sorry, Sir." FitzSimmons flushed together.
"Well, Skye?" May called out to the young woman "Your decision?"
"Fine." Skye mumbled, the pulled her head high to repeat louder: "Fine. Do your worst Simmons."
She'd gone through her list alphabetically, from Coulson, to Fitz, to May, to Skye and finishing up with Ward. She fell in to her Scrabble seat as Slye pulled the game out. Even May had joined them as she waited for her arm to close over the stitches Jemma had left in her. Fitz settled down beside her, stealing most of her chair.
"Couldn't be bothered to find your own seat Fitz?"
"Yours is far more comfortable, Jem."
She reached over, twenty minutes layer, playing the word 'covert' across the top of the bord.
"How'd you come up with that, Simmons?" Coulson's voice came across the room. He was sharing his tiles with Skye, the same was she was sharing hers with Fitz. Ward and May had their own set.
"My word." Fitz growled, and she lifted her left hand to push her hair from her face. She ended up using her right.
"I'm beginning to think that letting FitzSimmons pair up was a bad idea." Ward scoffed.
"Only 'cause you're losing, Robot." Skye laughed.
"All in favour of splitting them up?" Ward called, a rear smile pulling at his mouth. "I'll take Fitz! I could use his brain."
"No!" Fitz declared, tugging Simmons into him by her arms. "You will not separate us! Never! "
"Fitz!" She squealed into his neck - the only thing she could actually see. "Let me go!"
"Never!" He laughed along with Skye and Coulson. Simmons did her best to ignore the pain in her arm.
And it worked, until...
"Holy Crap!" Skye yelled, and clapped her hand over her mouth. "Simmons! You're bleeding!"
And sure enough, when she looked down at her left arm, her white sleeve was dyed red.
"Bollocks! " She yelled back, forcing her was out of Fitz's arms and fleeing down the stairs to their lab, undoing the buttons on her blouse and shrugging it off as she went mind, mindless of the cameras.
The thundering on the metal stairs announced Fitz's presence behind her.
"What happened?" He demanded, twirling her around by her arms - avoiding the red stained bandage - to look her in the eyes. Her state of undress in no way bothering him; it hadn't for years. "What's wrong?"
"What makes you think something's wrong?" She forced out innocently as she craned her neck to look at the blood covered bandage. Ir was a predictably stupid call for her genius mind.
"Two things, Jemma!" Fitz practically growled out. "One: you're bleeding. Dead give away that something's wrong, that is. Two: you swore. You never sware unless something is really bad."
"Ah." She nodded absent mindedly, her brain more interested in ways to stop the bleeding to worry about his words. Or his warm hands on her bare skin, which really was a shame.
Fitz looked her over and she could almost see the exact second he worked out what was wrong. Just from the position of the cut.
"You did your own implant." He pointed out calmly, yet she could see him panicking inside his overachieving brain.
"Of course I did." She replied just as calmly. "Well, wasn't it obvious the I was going to have to? I couldn't get you to do it, and who else on this plane am I going to let cut me up?"
"I could have done it." He stuttered as he handed her a clean bandage with shaking hands. "If you'd asked."
"You're shaking now Fitz. You'd never be able to do a straight cut, or a decent stitch, like this." She whispered softly, untangling the the bandage from her arm as she did. "Speaking of which, hand me that needle beside you?"
He did, but he couldn't stop his shaking as she pulled the broken stitches from her skin.
"Why is it bleeding now them? He asked to distract himself from staring at her while she disinfected the nasty cut. Surly she'd object to her best friend ogling her while she was in pain. "I didn't pull you that hard."
"I popped the stitches doing Ward's implant. Apparently, I didn't do the replacement stitches tight enough." She spared him a sad glance and offered the needle and thread to him singlehandedly. "Could you thread this please? You had nothing to do with them re-popping, Fitz. Promise. " She added.
"I might have." He told her. "You never know." And as he handed the needle back, fully threaded, something sunk in.
"Hang on. 'the stitches popped doing Ward's implant'? When exactly did you do yours, Jemma?" She sat the empty syringe of pain medication next down next to her as it ran through her system.
"This morning, before the interviews." She told him flatly, and he turned his head to collect the blooded bandages and disposing of them as she raised her needle. He knew from experience that her pain meds (fondly nicknamed "Simm's serum" by Skye) totally nullified the pain, while leaving the brain haze-free. "I wanted to make sure it worked first."
"So you used yourself as your first human guinea pig? "He scoffed "have you ever actually stitched yourself up before today?!"
"Of course, plenty of times. And I'm used to being the human guinea pig, Fitz, don't you worry about that." He wasn't sure how he knew, but he knew that she was referring to a certain alien Anti-Serum. Thinking of her improv sky-dive made his throat swell up so he stuck to being angry at her instead.
"And if you made a mistake?" He demanded, turning to glare at her whether it made him nauseous or not be damned. To his supreme luck, she was setting down her needle, her row of stitches perfectly straight. "If you slipped and lost too much blood? They're deep cuts, Simmons! I can tell that much!"
"From this cut?" She snapped back at him, tying a fresh bandage around the cut she'd been cleaning while he yelled at her. "That's almost impossible, Fitz! And I do wish you'd make up your mind about whether I'm 'Jemma' or 'Simmons'!"
"You're Simmons when I'm pissed off at you because you did something stupid and tried to hide it from me!" He growled, but still swiped her shirt of the floor to hand it to her. Once it was in her hands, she took one look at the mess it had become from her blood, decided it was unsalvagable and lobbed it over the back of his chair.
"I don't need you to worry over me, Fitz." She told him, reaching for her lad coat to wear until she could reach her clothes, her voice softer and lower.
"I just..." he muttered back, inspired by her tone. "You left me once, doing something crazy and noble. Those hours, Jem (two hours and forty seven minutes to be exact) when I didn't know if you where dead or alive, they where worse than when I realised how angry I was at Ward for saving you - not like that Jemma, don't be stupid. Because I honestly felt like I'd lost you." He grabbed both her hands firmly and the right time was so much warmer than the left.
"Please Jemma. I've become so worried about losing you again that it's verging on Paranoia. And you know I not good with words, Jem, but please:
you can't leave me."
She pulled him into her by their joint fingers and wrapped her arms around his waist, worried to raise them any higher.
"Not even for my research?" She giggled as he encircled her in his warm arms and attempted to shake his head without removing it from where he had buried it in her neck.
"Not for anything Jemma." She laughed at him as she pulled away, her eyesight blinded by one of the ties she'd brought him for their last Christmas alone.
"Your calling me Jemma again." She pointed out and Fitz looked down at her with a small smile. " Does this mean you're not angry with me anymore, Leo?"
"Of course not." He smiled at her and, steeled by her use of his first name, gathered his courage and added "As long as you don't file a restraining order."
So he cut off any confused reply she may have had by stooping low and kissing her, exactly how he'd been dreaming of for the last, god was it four years already?
And to his immense relief, she kissed him back.
As gentle and tender as he could force his overly long limbs to be, he pulled her closer and, quite literally, swept her off her feet.
"Leo!" She squealed, breaking their kiss to throw her good arm around his neck. "Put me down!"
"Or what?" He laughed, over joyed. "What are you going to do to me, Jemma Elizabeth Kathryn Simmons?"
"Oh wouldn't you like to know." She laughed as he set her back on her feet. "Come on you." She beamed, pushing up on the tips of her toes to kiss him again. "I need a new shirt, and you have video footage to delete."
His heart, full to bursting with the knowledge that it was him that had made her so happy, sunk like a lead balloon.
"Jemma." He called, as desperate now as he was when she stood on that cargo ramp, his eyes burning with the same tears. "I... I don't want to hide it, to be ashamed of it anymore. I love you." He sighed, finally realising his error and backed away from her, staring down at his shoes as he began to taste the salt of leaked tears; he bat them away, curious that he was suddenly, for the first time in eleven years, ashamed to cry in front of her. "Just so that we're on the same page." His voice cracked as he turned his back. "I'll.. um, I'll just go delete that video footage for you right now. It never happened."
His escape was faulted when she grabbed his hand.
"But it did happen Leo. And I'm glad it did." She told him sweetly and he realised for the first time that her pretty brown eyes where also swimming with tears. " Leave the video if you want. I didn't want anyone we didn't tell first finding out. I'm not ashamed. And neither of us are good at lying, so they're going to find out anyway." She added, raising her eyes to the floor above them. She breathed deep then, fluttering her tears away and hugging him tightly around his middle.
"We're one exactly the same page." She whispered over his heart. He pushed her away gently.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Say it." He challenged, greedy for her words.
"I love you. " She told him, clear and bright and totally Jemma. "I love you, Leo Fitz."
He kissed her again. Because he could.
He even managed, three weeks later, to stand behind her and trail his hands over her shoulders soothingly as she pulled out her stitches.
They left no scar to remember them by, but he still peppered kisses over the skin of her left upper arm years, decades later, because they had forced him to create something he would never forget. Because how could you forget your whole world?
Soo, this was terrible. And also my first (Finished) AoS fic to date. With a sufficient lack of spelling mistakes - that took me forever to whittle out, I feel compelled to add. So, Umm, sorry for the lousy-ness.
IIHH x