DISCLAIMER: I don't own the song that serves as inspiration/titles (Maroon 5) or the characters/world (Marvel).

A/N: Thank you to everyone who reviews, favorites, and follows! They all make me so happy; you have no idea.

So after this there's only one more chapter, but I'll also be posting a prequel I hope you'll all read; it'll be up on my profile by the time chapter four is posted.

LANCE

He hadn't made her a contact yet, but he'd come to recognize the number currently illuminating his mobile as hers.

"Hello?"

"Are you alright? Izzy called me and-"

"I'm fine, Bob," he promised, "Just a flesh wound."

"She said you had to have surgery, Hunter."

"Okay, so maybe it wasn't just a flesh wound, but really, you don't need to worry about me, love." He was terrified she was going to call him out on the whole 'love' thing, but she said nothing on the subject.

"That won't stop me from doing just that, and you know it."

"Yeah, I do."

"Just don't die out there, alright?"

"I won't. I promise."

He could almost see her nod before her side of the line went dead.

After a mission, he was relaxing in his hotel room when his phone started to ring. He picked it up without bothering to look at the caller ID, since he was due for his weekly phone call from his mother.

"Hello?"

"It's Bobbi. Matt Smith's leaving."

Lance sat up straight.

"You're kidding."

"I wish. After the Christmas special."

"So. Number 12, huh?"

"Only the fourth for New Who."

"True, true. Who do you want it to be?"

"I don't know. I'm just excited to see what they do with the next one."

"Is Clara staying on?"

"I think so. She wouldn't be the first."

"True, true."

"Stop saying that.

"Alright, alright! So how've you been?"

"Good. Where are you right now?"

"Amsterdam. Doing what, that's classified."

"You're simply hilarious."

"What about you? S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to have gotten quiet."

"We've gotten quiet to you. We're still in clean-up mode from the Battle of New York. Well, not so much clean-up mode as damage control. We've even built a new branch to handle everything."

"An Avengers branch?"

"Basically. Fury, Hill, Nat, Clint, and Captain Rogers, with the last three being Avengers. Except Laura's been pretty sick so Clint's been MIA a lot. And Nat keeps trying to set Steve up with someone."

"She should set him up with Vic."

"Hilarious," Bobbi said dryly. "Although, his face would be pretty damn hilarious when he found out. And you better not let Izzy hear you calling her Vic."

Lance started laughing, and pretty quickly Bobbi was joining in. The two of them laughed together for a good five minutes before it slowly died away.

"You didn't answer my question. What're you up to?"

"Um, I'm in Europe. I think that's all I can say."

"Wanna get more specific?"

"You're not getting state secrets out of me, Hunter."

"Oh, I know that. Getting state secrets out of someone? That's always been your thing."

Bobbi gave a small little laugh, and he wondered if she, too, was going to back to that night in the Outer Banks, when she'd all-but kidnapped him and they'd spent most of her interrogation flirting. He'd given her that intel, way back when, along with his number, and it was something he'd never regretted for a second, not even when they'd been at each other's throats during the last year and a half of their marriage, not even when he decided to leave her, not even during every bitter breakup between the two of them since then. He would never regret approaching her that very first day at the Outer Banks, with the moonlight glinting off of her hair, and he would never regret asking her to marry him, no matter how badly it ended.

"Bobs?"

"Yeah?"

"Any chance you could make it to Amsterdam for a day or two?"

"I thought you'd never ask."

They met up at a café, like they almost always did, two days later. Izzy had gone back to S.H.I.E.L.D. for a debrief and then some other missions and Idaho was acting as leader. The team had gone to Budapest for the next assignment and would wait for him there, as it wasn't overly time sensitive, according to the employer.

She looked more guarded than he'd ever seen her.

They sat down together and were silent, but it was not a comfortable silence. He knew that she had something to say; he could tell by her expression. But it didn't seem like she would say it any time soon.

"Bobs, really. Come out with it."

"I've started seeing someone," she replied.

Well. He wasn't expecting that.

"I didn't mention it over the last call because that's not something you say over the phone or in a text. And we didn't even start calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend until last night."

"Hey," he told her, gripping her hand tightly, "It doesn't matter to me whether we're lovers or best friends. I just need you in my life in some capacity."

She glanced up at him through her long eyelashes and it looked like there were tears in her eyes. He hated seeing her cry, even though she rarely did, not even during battles with PTSD. The last time he'd seen her cry was over a year ago, when she'd talked with Natasha right after the Battle of New York. She rarely ever let her guard down enough to let herself be hurt.

But it always seemed to be down around him.

And even though they both wanted to be "just friends," it wasn't that easy. Being separated for weeks at a time made friendships hard, and relationships even harder.

By the end of summer, Bobbi and Tyler had broken up on mostly friendly terms, which is more than he and Bobbi could say for any of their break-ups, which almost always ended in screaming matches followed by anger sex and one of them slamming a door shut. Break-ups, that is. Their divorce was a category all its own, and it was still a sore topic three years later.

Bobbi and Roger had formed some weird friendship that Lance didn't understand while he'd been off doing his own thing and she'd still been in London, and so Bobbi had come over to help load Roger's stuff into the moving van when he decided to move in with his girlfriend. She came over wearing her Star Wars T-shirt and jeans and no, they most definitely did not screw in the bathroom of the store they were in when they went to bring back lunch.

They both happened to be in London when Thor returned and wrecked havoc at the University of Greenwich. As soon as he'd heard about what was happening, he'd had his phone out and her number dialed. He still hadn't given her a contact on his phone yet, but her number was one of the few he could recite from memory. He couldn't tell you his address, but he knew Bobbi's phone number like he knew the back of his hand.

She hadn't picked up right away, which only intensified his panic. He knew that Bobbi had started taking some courses at the university to get the master's in biology she had planned to get after sixth form, but choosing S.H.I.E.L.D. had made it a bit difficult. She was in and very excited to be, since she'd focused on her bachelor's after graduating from the Academy but hadn't done anything towards her master's since completing that original program in 2010.

While she excelled in the field, science had been her first love, long before gymnastics or the first crush she ever had. She'd once confessed to him that it had been her dream since she started at S.H.I.E.L.D. all those years ago to retire from field work in her thirties or forties, get her doctorate in either biology or biochemistry, and then become a S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist, preferably at the Sandbox, or maybe even teach at the Academy. And now it was finally starting to shape into a reality. He was beyond proud of her.

He could still remember every detail about that night, so early in their relationship, while she was still going for her bachelor's, when they'd sat on his couch in the firelight and talked about anything and everything. He could still see the excitement in her eyes, made more mysterious by the reflection that the flames cast on them. Her hair was a chestnut color back then, and it, too, had been given a somewhat eerie glow as the firelight had hit her. She'd been beautiful, though considering her arm had been in a sling and she was hyped up on medication to relieve the pain, she probably wouldn't agree with him. And not just because she so hated having brown hair.

It wasn't until his third try that she finally picked up the phone and he breathed a sigh of utter relief. He couldn't lose her, not today. He would never be able to lose her. She was a part of him as much as he was a part of her. Across time and space, he and Bobbi had been a part of each other's lives in some way, that was something he was sure of. He'd even said it in his wedding vows and had spun some Doctor Who into it.

But after they'd hung up the phone with the promise to meet up for coffee, he began to wonder: In how many universes were they together forever, and was this one one of them?

A/N: Is it bad that I'm proud of myself for adding in that Bobbi was trying to get a biology (Actually, my first draft said biochemistry, but whatever) degree since I knew the comics background? But hey! It's now canon and I'm proud of myself nonetheless.