I don't own Agents of SHIELD.

"I love you," she whispers into the endless night because she thinks it is finally time for her to give up.

"I love you, Fitz."

This is how it starts:

They run into each other on the first day of classes at the Academy, when Jemma is late to her first lecture and she can't find her way anywhere on the campus. She decides to ask the first stranger she runs into for help, because it's better that she ask than get lost again.

So she taps the shoulder of a man with blond hair and although she realizes, by the measure of his gait, he's in a hurry, she doesn't expect him to be quite so rude when he turns his face towards her.

"What do you want?" he hisses.

"I'm sorry, I was just looking for C320? I'm lost."

His face softens somewhat: "Oh, I'm going there as well! Introductory seminar for you, too?"

"Yes," she says curtly. "And you know, there was no need for you to be so rude while answering my question."

Still, she follows him as he stalks towards the class in silence, and somewhere along the way, she realizes A) he's Scottish, and B) he's surprisingly cute.

Not that she pays any attention to the latter. No, not at all.

They arrive at the class ten minutes after it starts, but it is far too big of a class for anyone to actually notice. Jemma parts from him with no reluctance, because good riddance (a voice inside her head still whispers: but what if...).

It's only after the class finishes that she realizes she never even asked for his name.

This is how it goes:

For a while, Jemma Simmons has heard rumors of a guy who is supposedly just as intelligent as her.

Leopold Fitz: every professor's golden child. She can't even ask an intelligent question of someone without being informed that he had asked it first.

She hadn't even met him, and he was already insufferable.

So it's just her luck when she finds him in her Advanced Biophysics class. But soon, she realizes that far from being irritating, he's the only person in the class who can actually keep up with her. It's liberating.

They become best friends.

This is how it goes:

One night, they are in her room, watching Doctor Who together with a couple of beers in hand. (Technically, they're not old enough to drink yet—not at the Academy, at least—but rules were meant to be broken, right?) Both maintain that they are only slightly tipsy, but the slurs in their voices say otherwise. They come to a scene where Jack is kissing the Ninth Doctor goodbye (so tragic, especially since Jack's life only gets worse from here) when a thought occurs to her.

"Fitz—"

"Yeah, Jemma?"

"Have you ever wondered what it's like to... well..."

"Well what?"

"Kiss your friend?"

"Yeah, I suppose," he says with the sort of candor that is usually not present in their day-to-day conversation because if they have feelings for each other, they're going to continue hiding them for as long as they can (because, to be honest, what's the alternative?).

"Do you want to?"

"Why not?"

They lean in for each other, all arms and legs and awkwardness from their position on the floor of her dorm, but then an alarm rings and she has to go shut it off and the mood has been ruined.

So they continue to watch Doctor Who and eventually fall asleep in each other's arms.

In the morning, they don't remember a thing.

This is how it goes:

She convinces him to take a job offer on the field because it'll be new and exciting and they'll be in the field working with Agent Phil Coulson, who's worked with the Avengers, and it's such a great opportunity, and why would they ever refuse it?

(To him, the answer is quite obvious: it would involve putting her in danger. And that is most definitely not worth it.)

He tags along with her and is quite uncomfortable at first, but the people on the Bus soon become a second family to them.

Their teammates notice something between them that they cannot notice themselves.

This is how it goes:

At the bottom of the ocean, when they think they're about to die, he tells her that he loves her.

She doesn't know what to say, so she runs away.

This is how it goes:

On the day she comes back, she collapses into his arms and cries. Everything is so new for her, everything hurts her so much. This world feels so unfamiliar to her after months of isolation, after months of vanished hope and false successes. After months of being one of two humans on a planet. But over that time, he was the only thing that kept her going. That kept her hoping.

He is the only thing that is familiar to her anymore.

He holds her tight in his arms, and vows that he will never let her go again.

This is how it ends:

"I love you," she says, as their lips finally meet.

Please R&R!