"So please, just tell me once and for all… who did I name my son after?"

Jemma turned to Fitz for help, she truly didn't know what to say, but her husband was still frozen in his place, his mouth moving but not quite managing to form words.

So it was up to her, then. She took a deep breath- if she was going to tell her daughter the truth, then she might as well tell her everything rather than insult her intelligence.

"Alya, d-darling, do you remember the mission we told you about? The one where we were sent to the future to save the world from getting torn apart?"

Alya was quiet for a few moments before she replied. "I remember."

"Well," Jemma continued, her voice sounding as heavy as her heart felt in the unusually tense kitchen, "do you remember how we got back to the present?"

"Something to do with Uncle Enoch, right?" Alya questioned skeptically. She only had very vague memories of Uncle Enoch, but there were plenty of pictures showing the pair together. What she definitely couldn't remember was him being a robot. He'd always just felt like a part of the family.

"Y-Yeah." Fitz affirmed. "It is. B-But in order to get us home, h-he-"

"He needed backup." Jemma said, and Fitz shot her a grateful look. "And so an… um, ally we'd made in the future offered to help. We all thought it was a suicide mission, but we think he ended up getting sucked in by the tiny piece of the monolith that was near him. He came back to our time and timeline too."

"You never mentioned bringing someone back from the future with you! That's a huge change to history."

"We know!" Fitz exclaimed.

"We didn't mean to." Said Jemma. "But he came back with us and tried to help us."

"Tried?" Alya questioned.

"He got shot and had to have emergency surgery."

Fitz gasped and snapped his attention towards Jemma. "He got shot?! You never told me- oh no…"

Alya looked between them, her face darkening with concern. "Who was he, Mum?"

Jemma continued to purposefully ignore her. "Even after he got shot, none of us really had time for him. We treated him so horribly. I always thought that I did better than the others, but just now I realised that it felt more like an act back then. Like I was obliged to be nice to him. B-But I shouldn't have…"

She choked back a sob then, and Fitz quickly rushed to her side to comfort her.

Alya couldn't find it in herself to find sympathy. She glared at them, the same question reflected in her expression.

"You know, he told me once about his family." Fitz said whilst rubbing Jemma's back. "He was a… a slave, I think. All humans were in that future. He told me that his mum had been murdered in front of him when he was just nine-" his voice cracked at his own words- "and his dad was sent to die."

Alya opened her mouth to say something, but Fitz didn't let her.

"B-But that's how he learned to survive!" He said, but it sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else. "He came back, started a whole company and was super rich and- and we left him…"

He covered his face with his hands and Jemma gently pried them off his face to kiss his cheek.

"He chose to stay behind." Jemma reassured. "Without him, we wouldn't be here, and this timeline might not even exist."

"What was his name?" Alya whispered again, her skin a sickly pale hue.

Jemma and Fitz shared a look of devastation, because there was no going back or even going forward without revealing the inevitable. The silence in that moment was thick and heavy. It felt like no words would ever be able to cut through it.

Luckily, no words were needed. From outside, Deke's sudden loud burst of giggles could be heard over Owen's playful shout of exasperation.

Jemma's head turned towards the window, though her vision was too blurred with both age and tears for her to focus it properly.

She smiled a wobbly smile.

"His name was Deke."

Both Fitz and Jemma's hearts broke at Alya's cry of anguish. They watched her fall to her knees as she covered her mouth in an attempt to hide her shock. They both had strong instincts to comfort her, she needed it more than they did after all, but neither of them could find it within themselves to do so.

They felt like they didn't deserve it.

"I-I thought you might have looked into the future or something." She sobbed. "Not- not this! Not from that future!"

In-sync as always, Fitz and Jemma's parental instincts broke them out of their guilty stupors and they hurried to their daughter to help her back to her feet.

"He was a hero." Jemma said as she brushed the dirt off her daughter. "And trust me, once we'd brought him back he was genuinely the sweetest man I've ever known."

Fitz let out a small scoff… that turned into a broken laugh… that melted into a sob.

"You said you left him." Alya said, wiping away her tears with her sleeve almost childishly. "Where? Why didn't you go back for him?"

"Our final mission." Fitz supplied, knowing that his wife's memories of those final moments of that mission were hazy. "In order to get us back to our timeline from the screwed up one and take all those chronicoms back with us, someone needed to activate the quantum device from the other end."

Alya gasped with sudden understanding.

"Deke volunteered."

"That drawer." Stated Alya. "That's-"

"All we could find left of him on the Zephyr once it was all over." Jemma answered. "That tape we used the walkman with is all him. He stole the songs, but that was his voice."

"I… I don't believe…"

Her parents didn't need to be prompted into wrapping her into their arms. They did so, and Alya let them hold her as she shook and cried and mourned.

"Why are you sad?"

The trio turned their heads towards the owner of the little voice, who was standing in the doorway where Alya had caught them. He was fidgeting with his t-shirt again, his brown spiky hair was all tousled and full of mud, and his face was full of such genuine concern that made it look strange upon such a small child's face.

"Oh, my little monkey." Alya called, sniffling. "Come here."

She immediately knelt down and opened her arms out for a confused Deke to run into. Her hands closed around him like a trap that wasn't going to let go of its prey any time soon. And everyone was fine with that.

"I'm so, so proud of you." Alya's voice was muffled by the fact that her face was buried into Deke's bony chest.

"We love you very much, sweetie." Jemma said, planting a kiss on Deke's free hand. "More than you can ever know."

Fitz ruffled his already messy hair. "Seriously, you're the best, Baby Deke."

"I'm not a baby!" Deke stuck his tongue out at his grandad, satisfied that his family wasn't sad anymore. "Stop saying baby!"

"You're right." Jemma said warmly.

Fitz smiled, linking hands with his wife. "You're our big Deke now."

The pair noticed that Alya squeezed their grandson tighter. They shared a knowing look.

Deke grinned widely, the gaps in his teeth becoming more clear. There was an air of innocence around him that neither Jemma nor Fitz had ever gotten the chance to see before.

"Thanks Bobo, thanks Nana. You're the best too."

Leo and Jemma Fitz-Simmons had thought that they'd gotten their happy ending the very second Alya was born. It had been the happiest day of their lives, despite the team being missing, because they were finally a family.

But since they'd completed the mission that they'd been preparing for years, it had felt like something was still missing. They'd lost Enoch. They'd lost Deke.

They didn't really have time for mourning back then. They had to set up proper lives for themselves. Raise a daughter and actually live normal lives. Still, that void left by those losses felt like it could never be filled.

At least, that was the case until Fitz stumbled upon Owen Shaw.

Meeting Owen brought them hope. He brought the chance of healing the open wound, of mending something that was permanently broken. Or, in their case, permanently stuck in a disastrous reality that he never should have been in.

It had taken many, many years, but Deke Shaw was finally born and with him that void had started to close. Slowly but surely.

The couple had known since his birth that they would have to tell Alya the truth at some point, but time passed quickly and they didn't know how to proceed. They grew older and older, but so did Deke.

Alya was angry at first, as any mother would be. But after a lot of explaining, she understood. They gave her the power of telling Owen if she wanted to, and she decided against it. For as much as the memory of Deke influenced her son, she wanted him to be his own person.

Or at least, that's what she told her parents. But they knew her well enough to know that she was just trying to distance him from the orphaned slave as much as she could for the benefit of her own mental health.

Yet, perhaps for some unrelated reason, the rift that had formed between Owen and Deke began to close. Owen grew closer to his son and by some miracle began to treat him in such a kind way that would never be associated with the boisterous Owen Shaw.

Alya herself had grown almost inseparable with her son. She comfortably changed her job to a part-time position in order to be able to spend more time with him. This extra time allowed her to take him to a dietitian to help improve his physical health. Though his ribs were still visible, he was no longer underweight, and that in itself was a huge achievement to Alya.

She'd also grown a lot closer to her parents. Though for a while they'd been distant due to work demands, they ended up visiting a lot more often and having little adventures in the garden. She knew that they needed support, and she wouldn't hesitate to give it to them. They were her everything. As was Deke.

Deke, as all children do, grew up too fast. One day he was a mischievous five-year-old, the next he was a mischievous nine-year-old. He was considered a genius in his school and did end up moving up a class. Since he still struggled with making friends though, he fell to his grandparents. He never failed to make them laugh, and would boast to his classmates about how cool his Nana and Bobo were. That they used to be spies!

And FitzSimmons? Well, time passed for them too. Also too quickly. They renovated the Deke Drawer into the Deke Shelf. A shelf in a display cabinet filled with little trinkets in the living room, there for all to see.

They knew that, however much time they had left, they didn't want to spend it keeping secrets or worrying over loose ends. They'd long since dismantled their lab and all prototypes and equipment within it. Their consciences were free. They were free.

Fitz grew his fabulous grey beard to a ridiculously long length. Jemma convinced him to trim it. This was the sort of adventure they liked now, the sort that involved only laughs and no danger or SHIELD or loss.

And they were happy. They'd had to wait half a century for it, but the universe had gifted them with uninterrupted happiness.

This was their true happy ending.

There will be 2 epilogue chapters following this. Thank you for reading!