Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jemma is still mostly asleep when Fitz flinches awake. She murmurs something thoughtlessly into the pillow, more comforting sounds than anything else: she's breached the surface of sleep, but her mind and muscles are still soaked through with it. It drains from her in slow, heavy rivulets as she wakes, like ocean water streams from sodden hair and clothes. Her hand closes around Fitz’s wrist in the swirl of tangled sheets, and she is relieved to hear his voice, hushed and hesitant, before she registers what it is he has said.

“Ophelia?”

He sounds- disoriented, a little frightened in just the sort of way that should make Jemma want to pull him to her and smooth a hand through his hair and whisper reassurances, but the subtle note of hope in his tone makes her... It makes her want to writhe.

“No, Fitz, it’s- it’s me,” she says, coldly awake now, threading her fingers with his, and he shudders at the sound of her voice, so she stretches out her free-hand to flick on the bedside lamp.

His face is the first thing she sees- wide-eyed, tear tracks glistening on his skin. He reaches out a hand to cup her cheek, with a disbelieving, gentle desperation- like a man trying to reach out for what he knows to be a hologram, despite himself. She sees his chest hitch when he touches her, feels her own throat burn with the urge to sob, which she swallows back.

“Sorry,” Fitz breathes. “Was dreaming.” He’s not really meeting her eyes- his gaze flickers about her face as if trying to memorise every detail.

Or as if trying to search for a pixel out of place, a smudge of poorly rendered unreality.

“Are you…” she trails off, feeling useless. He draws back his hand, not violently, but suddenly. As if he’s just remembered that he shouldn’t be touching her. She fights back the sudden urge to take it and crush it against her face, her mouth, to run his hands all over her body, to show him that he is allowed-

Or to show him that he is yours, a voice in her head suggests, and she feels the pulse of her own heartbeat in her chest, the sickening twist in her gut again, and she can’t delude herself into believing it to be anything other than mounting anger.

“Fitz, are you alright?” she forces herself to say, despite it.

Of course, she is entitled to be angry, she tells herself. It only makes sense. Psychology might be one of the softer sciences, but it all comes down to neurons and grey matter, and this, she understands: anger and fear are only a knife’s edge from each other. No different, really, both are just responses to the flashing emergency lights of the threat system when activated, to adrenaline, to cortisol. She’d spent every moment in the Framework with terror and rage screaming in her head like a siren- such things have a half-life. Traces would still be lingering in her bloodstream, even now, like echoes of radioactive dust.

But the last person she should be angry with is…

Fitz takes a shuddering breath, and sits up. She props herself up on her elbows so that she can keep looking at him.

“Yes. No,” his voice is too quiet, and as he rubs at the back of his neck, she sees his fingers hook beneath the hem of his collar. Checking for the absence of the scars, she knows; scars that he’d had in that other life. There had been a time when Jemma had known Fitz’s every scar, even those that were invisible: when they’d endured every fracture of body and self alongside one another. Now he’s endured countless scars alone, a life of a thousand cuts, and she is furious in the knowledge that she will never understand, not in the same way.

He had told her, haltingly, when he’d shed his shirt to shower, and she’d caught him staring into the mirror, silent, at the spaces where the scars had been. And she had pulled him into her arms, his head onto her shoulder. But it hadn’t been Jemma who had run her fingers along their edges. It hadn’t been her who had whispered years’ worth of reassurances into the hollow above his collarbone.

And that’s just it, isn’t it, she thinks, burning.

Fitz didn’t choose Ophelia. Fitz was programmed to love her, violated on such a fundamental level that it’s difficult for her to conceive. For the thread that binds them- a thread that has stretched across the black chasm of space- to be deliberately unpicked, unravelled… the thought makes it feel like it’s Jemma herself who is coming undone. The thought of his memories of her being unstitched makes her want to scream for him, a scream to outlast all those years of vulnerability, and gentle words, and soft touches, and whatever else they had shared. All of it, every instance, had been the most deplorable kind of violence: a whole lifetime of incomparable violation.

Fitz was the victim, even if he wouldn’t admit it- couldn’t bring himself to admit it, not just yet.

So why, why, why, did she find herself lying here, angry with Fitz? Her Fitz, who just days ago, or decades ago, had been sat despondent in this very room, blaming himself for being too trusting. Too kind.

“It’s why I fell in love with you,” she’d assured him, but now here she was, quietly furious with him for it, even when she knew she should be angry with everyone, anyone else, anyone who had ever seen that silkenness as something to be torn, or wrung out into a more useful shape, or hoarded for one’s self.

She was furious that some part of him still called out for her, even after everything Ophelia- AIDA- had done, even if it was only a part of him that had been crammed into the open cavity of his stupid, wonderful bleeding heart, like a broken pacemaker. Furious that someone else got to know those scars she will never be able to trace- that there is some part of him that might crave that touch.

“Are you?” Fitz says, hoarsely, and for a moment she doesn’t know what he means. He tries again, stammering on the first word in a way it hasn’t in months now. “Are... are you okay, I mean?”

“No,” she responds, after a pause.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, with a small shake of the head.. “I… I watched her kill you-” he starts, but seems unable to go on, swallowing thickly.

“That wasn’t me, Fitz,” Jemma says, reaching up to lay a hand on his shoulder- he reaches across himself to lace his fingers with hers, this time, and relief bubbles up in Jemma like fresh oxygen. “That was just an LMD…”

But this was the wrong thing to say, perhaps, because he lets go of her abruptly, and the room is airless again.

“I fell in love with her, you know?” Jemma opens her mouth to argue, but Fitz continues: “Or I remember falling in love with her, which is pretty much the same thing.”

“It isn’t,” Jemma says, and even she can hear that she is trying to convince herself in the sharp edge of her tone. “Love is choice, Fitz, and she never gave you that.”

Fitz responds with a toneless half laugh.

“Well that’s debatable. You’re the biologist, Jemma, you know we’re all just…” he snaps his fingers impatiently, waiting for his mouth to catch up with his thoughts, “Nature and nurture, DNA and- and- memories, trauma, figurative, literal,” he gestures to his forehead, and Jemma makes a noise of dissent, her grip tightening on the sheets, but he continues on, volume climbing. “And now I have all this- this stuff in my head… the first time we met, and dinners together and none of it’s real, but it is, actually- because what are memories, really, just electricity in your brain, and-”

“Fitz,” Jemma breaks in at last, taking his wrists firmly in her hands to still them.

“Yeah,” he says roughly, lowering his eyes again. “I know.”

With a stifled sigh, she pulls him up against her. They don’t fit together as naturally as they used to- he’s stiff for a few seconds before he relaxes, and even then, Jemma hasn’t closed her eyes into his touch- she finds her vision unfocused on the loose fibres of cotton at the collar of his shirt. This used to be the kind of detail that could ground her, could separate the vagueness of a dream from the clumsiness of reality, but not anymore. The Framework had imitated these everyday imperfections exactly: hairline fractures in a skirting board, fraying cloth on a shirt collar.

Together, they lie back.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” she murmurs, stroking his hair absently, feeling the oceanic swell of anger in her throat, threatening to seep into her voice.

“I don’t know that we can,” he says, and is quiet for a moment before he continues. “Can you miss someone in retrospect?”

The pillow rustles as she turns her head to the side to look at him. There’s tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.

“I spent a lifetime without you, Jemma,” he murmurs.

“I know,” she says, and the rest rushes out before she can stop herself. “I hate it. I hate that I feel… betrayed,” she bites down on her lip, hard- she hadn’t meant to say that-

“I’m sorry,” Fitz says simply, and something inside Jemma snaps.

“Sorry for what, getting kidnapped into The Matrix?” she hisses. “I can’t be angry with you, Fitz, that’s just victim-blaming.”

“It’s human,” he says quietly, placing a gentle hand against her face. It’s only after his thumb gently brushes her cheek that she realises she’s crying now, too, hot, frustrated tears that taste like blood or brine when she opens her mouth to take a shivering breath in.

“Fine,” she says hoarsely. “Fuck you, then, Leopold Fitz, for being so wonderful and loving and kind. Fuck you for being so relentlessly trusting that you get hurt over and over and over and I have to sit here and watch. Fuck you for being so good-hearted that a bloody robot builds a new universe and gives itself feelings just so that it can fall in love with you. There, does that sound fair to you?” But to her surprise, Fitz is laughing airlessly, almost silently. Almost as if he hasn’t laughed in years, she thinks, and she feels her heart tear in two.

“Thank you, Jemma Simmons,” he says, smiling shakily. “For giving me a world worth loving. Over and over and over,” he adds, and she kisses him then, as selfishly as she’s wanted to all night, one hand clutched possessively in his hair. He yields to her with a kind of unspeakable relief, humming a small, broken noise against her mouth. She moves to deepen the kiss, shifting up onto her hands so that she’s straddling him, and when she pulls back at last he’s looking up at her like she’s the only thing he knows is real.

“I love you, Jemma,” his breath hitches. “I’m yours.”

“Mine,” she murmurs, tracing a hand along his jaw, without thinking of whether she should say it- whether it sounds too jealous, too much like the terrible ownership he’s just escaped. But Fitz thrills at the word, leaning his face into her touch and she feels the heaving anger crest like a wave and change shape.

“Yes,” he says, with breathless honesty, hand coming up to press her palm to his cheek. “Yes. Say it again. Please.”.

“You’re mine,” she echoes, and her fingers catch on the collar of his shirt, and she kisses him again, and for the rest of this night, he belongs to her.