Jemma Simmons, like most prisoners, did not foresee prison as a part of her future life. Particularly space prison, although after four years working for SHIELD. that aspect of her current predicament was easier to shrug off than it would have been otherwise. She didn't do crime. In fact, she was the sort of person that waited for a red light to change at 1am when there were no other cars for miles. She had two doctorates which allowed her to make good money, so it wasn't like she had a need to like, break bad and sell drugs on the side or anything.
And yet here she was, shivering in the prison scrubs that set her apart from all the other low level chemists on the space station (she had been granted a lab coat and goggles for humanitarian reasons but CONVICT was printed on the back in large letters), waiting at 5am for the next batch of samples to come in. The agents of SWORD and the US government had agreed that Simmons was too smart to waste away in prison but too dangerous to be left completely at liberty. As such, they put together a clever variation of the massively profitable prison work programs from back on earth. It was the best of both worlds, they could tell the U.N. that they were helping Jemma rehabilitate, while simultaneously reaping the benefits of the labor of a brilliant scientist. Who worked for free. And who had to do what they said under threat of punishment. God bless America, right?
Jemma was to do simple, entry level chemistry work, testing field samples to determine if alien chemical weaponry had been used. When Jemma's small team of chemists got a stack of envelopes, they didn't know what was in them. It could be a bloody bandage, it could be an unidentified white powder, it could be a severed digit. Their job was to break down whatever chemical residue was present and determine whether or not it was some kind of extra-terrestrial weapon. It was dangerous work, but since it mostly involved fairly simple techniques, it was considered grunt work. Jemma was very good at it.
Fitz, whom literally everyone had dubbed Scotty, was in engineering.
"Hey, beam me up, Scotty!" Various alien and human mechanics would chuckle, patting him on the back as they made their way to their respective stations, doing the work which kept The Peak (their space station/prison) running. Fitz was astonished at how every single member of this extremely diverse team of astronauts and engineers, some of whom were from different multiverses, or so they said, were ALL familiar with the Star Trek franchise.
"James Doohan and Simon Pegg aren't even Scottish." He'd mumble under his breath, troubleshooting whatever problem had afflicted the space station's massively complicated mechanical components. He too was not allowed to wear the SWORD issued uniforms, and worked in his prison scrubs. He, like Jemma, was always under constant watch and surveillance. He was not allowed to associate with or even lay eyes upon any member of his former team.
After his work hours had been completed (there was no concept of day or night in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter) Fitz would be escorted back to his cabin/cell, where he would be locked in isolation for the next ten hours, for rest. As boring and exhausting as the technical work he completed in the engine room of the space station was, he counted the seconds to when he would be back at it as soon as the door clicked shut and locked behind him.
The government officials who had determined the fate of the SHIELD agents had no real solid understanding of what had happened in the Framework. Even though Phil Coulson had made an impassioned argument that Fitz get some psychological assistance to deal with what he had been through, all requests for therapy had been denied. Frankly, explaining that a hyper-realistic lady android had read a demon text and used it to create a parallel universe where Nazis ruled and Fitz was her boyfriend was not as easy as it might seem. Fitz had made no requests for therapy on his own behalf. He didn't think he deserved it.
For his first few weeks on the Peak he had been able to commit himself so much to his work that he would just collapse, utterly spent, into his cot afterwards and sink into cool unconsciousness within seconds.
But then the dreams had started. He would be The Doctor again, as he had been within the framework, but he'd remember everything from the real world as well. His friends would scream at him to stop hurting them, but he couldn't stop himself. He would wake up in a cold sweat, heart racing, too panicked to go back to sleep but too exhausted to rationally reign in his fears.
Sometimes his dreams were like a reel of his past misdeeds. Instances when he had tortured and killed his former friends were so frequent that even in the relative clarity of work hours he couldn't remember if he had actually killed them or not. The final moments of Agnes Kitsworth plagued him day and night. But people who had only existed as 1s and 0s within the framework haunted him with the same vividity. The panicked eyes of a teenage inhuman girl who had never existed in the real world loomed in his subconscious. He had never even learned her name.
The worst though was when he remembered what he had done to Jemma. He had come so close. She had been on her knees. His gun was to her head. The thought of what could have happened, of what came so close to happening, would intrude almost every day. His heart would pound, his hands would go numb, his vision would blur, and he would be drenched in sweat, staring blankly at whatever he was supposed to be doing until he could get it together.
His ten hours alone were essentially ten hours of ceaseless mental torment. And he was just getting worse.
The first time that he caught a glimpse of Jemma on the space station was a fluke. A circulation problem had been affecting atmosphere regulation and he and two of his colleagues had been sent to check the vents out. Walking past the dining room, he had heard Jemma yell out his name.
The sight of her, paler than ever with dark circles under her eyes, running across the room towards him with a huge relieved grin, felt like a scene from some other universe. She hated him, surely? Didn't everyone hate him?
"GOD, Fitz are you all right!? How are you!? What do they have you doing?" She asked, dodging around the three guards that each jumped up to detain her. Before he could answer she threw herself into his arms, in a massive bear hug. "I love you so much, Fitz." She whispered his ear.
"I… I love you…" Was all he could manage before their guards tore them apart from one another. Jemma's guards dragged her back into the dining room by her elbows. She was really giving them hell for it, though, and for the first time in a very long time Fitz felt like there was a light in the world. He remembered that there was such a thing as well-being.
In the few seconds they had seen one another they hadn't been able to explain their situations, but it didn't take someone with two doctorates to understand that a space station was not going to waste the talents of an engineer like Fitz. It took Jemma a couple of days to figure out the best way to do it, but she came up with a plan to get him a message.
She had completed tests on an envelope about a week ago, full of white powder that looked as though it could have been anthrax, and found that it was actually just an alien powdered sugar. Rather than turn the envelope in, as she was supposed, to, she had hung on to it. They had gotten behind in the past few weeks, and nobody noticed amongst the piles of yet to be tested envelopes that one had been set aside.
One of Jemma's colleagues, a fresh out of gradschool bro who grew up in Ohio and had more chemistry know-how than common sense, had a tendency of leaving samples out in a way that would contaminate the lab space. Jemma had stopped him from accidentally killing himself at least three times. She surrepticiously placed the sugar bag near his work station.
Just as she hoped, Neal opened the bag without thinking while everyone was in the lab, sending a puff of white powder into the air.
For a moment, everyone in the lab froze, watching the white powder gracefully float right into Neal's face. Then pandemonium broke out. Their supervisor pulled the lock-down alarm, everyone ran shrieking towards their eye cleansing stations, and while everyone was distracted, Jemma was able to sneak to the light imaging microscope at the corner of the lab, tweak it ever so slightly, and leave a very small note for Fitz. Then she ran back into the lab and feigned being in a panic like everyone else.
The light imaging microscope was as small and fiddly an instrument as it was essential to the survival of everyone on board the ship, so when something was off and it failed to give accurate readings of plant health and nutrition, Fitz was brought in (with a team of course) to try to figure out what went wrong. As Fitz went through his SHIELD trained steps for troubleshooting a problem like this, he noticed something unusual. A small rolled up post-it note had been placed in the messy bundle of wires and switches at the base of the microsope. His heart nearly stopped when he recognized Jemma's handwriting, writing out some science gobbledy gook, on the edge of the paper. He snuck it into his pocket without anyone noticing.
For once, Fitz couldn't wait to get back to his cell. The rest of the day the note burned a hole in his pocket. He watched the clock, counting down the minutes until his guards would drop him off back to his room.
Once he was alone though, he was afraid to read it. There were cameras of course, placed in various sneaky locations in his room, that he had identified almost immediately after moving in. Trying to find an angle that would allow him a bit of privacy, he picked up one of the approved magazines which had been left in his room for him, a Better Homes and Gardens from 1994. As he pretended to read about how to make spider pretzel snacks for halloween, he rolled out the note with Jemma's precious writing.
It wasn't a private note. On the inside of the post-it there was a cut out paragraph from what looked like a long legal document, about the legality of prisoners performing the offices of their faith. For a second, Fitz's heart sank. Jemma didn't have a faith in anything other than science, this couldn't have been left by her. The rolled up paper was probably just there to keep some necessary screw in place or something. But Jemma's unmistakeable handwriting on the outside prompted him to read it again.
It took a few re-reads to get past the legal jargon and understand the note, but he eventually figured it out. According to the policy of the station, prisoners who stated a religion were to be granted access to the chapel for services. A Unitarian mass was held once every 168 hours for an hour (you could pretend it was Sunday), and if a prisoner requested to go they legally must be granted permission.
The next morning, Fitz basically burst through the doors of his cell/bunk the moment his guard unlocked them.
"I'm a Unitarian." He announced.
That week, Fitz stepped for the first time into the small, dim, chapel space of the Peak. In order to accomodate all faiths, some which require lavish ceremony and others which despise it, the room was fitted with lights that projected whatever religious symbols necesssary on the walls for each service. So it was that the first time Fitz saw Jemma's face in ages, kneeling, in profile, the chapel decorative lights had projected a kind of stained glass pattern on her face. He could have wept. When she nervously glanced over to the door, and saw Fitz, her expression melted into one of relief. Her clever partner had figured it out.
Fitz tried to keep it cool, to avoid any suspicion, but he couldn't help but trip a bit rushing over to her, even as all the other congregants filed calmly into the chapel, glancing at the new faces in their prisoner garb.
"Jemma!" He whispered, so happy to see her but unsure what to do.
"Not yet." Jemma hissed, signaling that he should kneel next to her and trying to keep her expression calm. They nestled into one another on the pew though; Jemma could think of no sensation more heavenly than the warmth of Fitz's arm pressed into hers as they pretended to pray. Once the doors to the chapel were shut, Jemma's eyes snapped up to the Pastor. He nodded his assent, and Jemma grabbed Fitz's arm and pulled him up.
"I spoke to him last week. He gave us permission to meet in the pastor's offices during the sermon." She whispered as they quietly made their way past the confused SWORD religious attendees.
Fitz couldn't speak, he just nodded and let Jemma steer him past everyone and into a small, cramped room, cluttered with the various beads and incenses and religious symbols used by the dozens of different religious ceremonies performed onboard the vessel.
Jemma pulled the door shut softly behind her. Apart from a few lit prayer candles and ceremonial flames there wasn't much light in the Chapel office. They were alone. Fitz found himself staring at his best friend, eyes wide, unable to fully process what was happening. There didn't seem to be anything to say.
"Oh my God, Fitz." Jemma pulled him in to her and kissed his face all over, the way she had when they were at the bottom of the ocean in that survival pod. She kept stroking his face like she couldn't believe it was real. "It's so good to see you."
"Jemma…" Fitz said, voice cracking, and it was like all of the fear and guilt and panic which had been plaguing him for months all bubbled over at once. Tears started to fall, embarrassingly, and Jemma pulled him even more tightly in to a hug.
"Shh shh shh, Fitz. It's all right. We're going to be ok."
"I love you." He managed to whisper.
"I love you, too, Fitz." Jemma paused for a moment, taking him in, and then leaned in to kiss him on the lips. Fitz kissed back, pulling her closer, surprised at how quickly and immediately he wanted her. He allowed the rest of the tension of the past few months to float away and focused only on the present. Jemma was here. She had said she loved him. Gently, like a curator shifting a precious statue, he guided her against the wall, still kissing her deeply.
"Fitz…" Jemma whispered, stroking his back, running her fingers through the hair at the back of his neck, and pressing herself into him as he kissed her almost frantically, clutching her waist and upper thighs.
"I love you…" He whispered again. His whole brain seemed to be bursting with a white static fuzz and all that there was was Jemma. She wrapped her legs around him and he pressed against her desperately.
"Fuck… Fitz…" Jemma started to pull her gray prison smock over her head, and Fitz was already undoing her bra. The fact that they were surrounded by religious symbols was only distracting for a second, as Jemma ripped Fitz's shirt off and stroked his back, down to his buttocks, pressing him closer to her.
They remained aware enough to be quiet, as the church service continued on outside the door. Jemma kept her moans to whispered gasps, as Fitz thrust inside her desperately and at an increasing pace. Jemma felt wave upon wave of pleasure warm her from within, she began to sweat, adjusting her position until the waves of pleasure became arrows of electric warmth and then finally shuddering moments of absolute mindless bliss. Fitz gasped almost noiselessly as he came, and Jemma squeezed her legs more tightly around him. They clutched eachother, both panting and sweating and holding on like they would like to melt into the other one. She kissed his sweaty neck, jawline, lips, feeling like she was floating.
For a few blissful moments, they were the only two people in the world. Reality crept back to them slowly, as they tried to find a way to clean up and get their clothes back on in a way that left no trace of what had just happened.
There was a sink in the back of the room for washing glasses of sacrificial wine, etc. Fitz leerily used it to moisten a paper towel.
"You were clever to leave me that note by the way." Fitz said, sinking down next to where Jemma had sat on the floor, after they both had made themselves decent.
"I'm tired of being clever. I'm tired of bloody outer space. I want to be back on earth in a nice flat with you with no evil robots or murderous aliens or anything actively trying to harm us."
"Mmm." Fitz let Jemma snuggle into him, in the way he knew she liked, even though he had never felt less like a big supportive shoulder to cry on. For a second, in his minds eye, he saw the snapshot image of Jemma's face as it had looked in the framework, tearfully gazing up at him when she was begging for her life, and he flinched away from her.
"You all right?" Jemma asked.
"I'm fine." Fitz said, but he was shaking a little bit. Jemma didn't buy it and her expression made that clear. "It's just…" He continued, "I don't deserve a nice flat with you back on earth, Jemma. I don't deserve what just happened. I'm a bad person."
For the briefest moment Jemma prickled in irritation. He always did this. Fitz could never just be happy with her for one goddamn minute, he always had to come up with some way to ruin it or apologize or overthink…
But then Jemma remembered the look on Fitz's face in the framework, after he had shot her kneecap out. She had stared down the barrel of a gun before, in her experience with SHIELD, but staring down the barrel of a gun into the cold, indifferent eyes of the man she loved, had taken a while to shake off.
She rubbed her boyfriend's shoulders comfortingily. Fitz's expression, staring miserably at the ground, was enough to remind her how much he loved her.
"You, Leopold James Fitz, are the best man I've ever known. I forgive you. If I had any doubts about you, I wouldn't fight for you so hard." She played with his sideburn a bit. "Have you talked to anyone? About what happened in the framework?"
"What could I say?" Fitz asked. "Who would believe it?"
"We're on a spaceship owned by a secret government agency called SWORD. I think you'll find someone here who will believe you." Jemma said, and kissed Fitz again softly. Fitz rested his head on Jemma's shoulder this time, and for the rest of their hour together they held one another in silence. The meeting was the first step. They were better together, and together, they would work this out.
END