It hasn’t been like this since just after Bucharest. When things were freer, and the pressures they faced were that of stressful jobs and overly cheery bosses. But it was different then. Excited and fast-paced, the thrill of twelve years of lost time to be caught up on, exploring every part of their new relationship.
It’s different now. For the first time in sixteen years they’re completely out of sync. She knows how to make a home in his arms as well as he knows how to hold her but the missing time has taken its toll. She hates the betraying voice in the back of her mind telling her that she married a different man. He doesn’t want to tell her what happened because he doesn’t want to hear about what happened during the gap in his memories. The blank spot in which her version of himself was with her. He doesn’t want to hear about him. The way her heart broke, he sees it in her eyes.
Daisy pulled him aside after he got back and held him tight- possibly tighter than Mack.
“Yeah, missed you too.”
“I don’t know what we would have done- I can’t lose you.”
He swallowed dryly. He doesn’t like seeing Daisy cry. He misses when he first met her, when she smiled and laughed and made goofy jokes and never once imagined that her life could change this much in so little time.
She looks at him and searches for any trace of the boy with the untucked plaid shirts and curly hair who had a puppy crush on her for about five seconds all those years ago. They seem like two entirely different people.
“If you hadn’t come back,”
“I know,” he said, not wanting to hear it.
She shook her head. “No. Jemma wouldn’t have made it. She was going mad, Fitz. It was like I lost my two best friends at once.”
“I’m here. I’m home.” It’s a mantra that’s been playing in his head since he got back to earth, grounding him, even when it felt fake.
“This isn’t home. We deserve- you deserve a real home. We can’t keep living like this.”
She’s right.
“Fitz?” Jemma calls.
“Go.” Daisy pushes him away lightly. In a different context, on another day it would be playful. “She needs you.”
Still, as appreciated as it is, the sex is just another way to avoid talking about it.
He doesn’t know how to talk to her without reminding her of the husband that she lost, that she can’t ever get back, and she doesn’t know how to make it so that he isn’t obsessed with that other version of himself. Communication was their gift. So in tune they could read each other’s minds. It’s not that they’ve forgotten how to, but that they’re both resistant. Neither wants to be the one to start the talk, dredge up all that pain and anger again just to relive it. But they know how to do this. They know how to wrap around each other until they forget everything but the sensation of being in each other’s embrace and they can pretend that everything is normal. That if they open their eyes the sun will be streaming in the bedroom window and they’ll be living a nice, normal life, some farfetched fantasy that they could believe in just a few years ago. The idea of running away together feels so out of reach, but every moment they spend in the grips of near-death, saving the world exhausts them a little more.
She sometimes thinks that she’s given all she has to give and if all they can do for the rest of their lives is hold each other just so, that would be good. Honor and duty are all fine and good, but at a certain point, it’s all moot. She’s not sure precisely when the line was crossed, but it’s been years too long. They need to leave.
They can’t leave.
He doesn’t want to think about it. With her in his arms, snuggled tight in the warmth of their bed (not the one he remembers, from the Playground, but she’s comfortable there, and where ever she is becomes home) he briefly entertains the notion of just, staying. Just like this. They’ll take Deke up on his offer, let him buy them a castle, two, three castles. He’s made enough to support them for the rest of their lives if they don’t do a thing, and he does sort of owe them for his existence. They could raise a family. Or not, he’s not sure whether they can handle that at this point, after all they’ve been through.
(There’s always been an unspoken agreement that eventually, inevitably, Simmons will discover she’s pregnant and they’ll freak out before fading into awe and pride and jubilation and they’ll stay at Shield for a bit but by the time she’s showing they’ll be settling into a cottage in Perthshire, somewhere where his mum and her parents can visit and the team can drop by to say hi, meet the baby, and then hop back on the jet and go back to saving the world. They could even put in a home laboratory in the basement. Or they could swear off science altogether and devote the rest of their lives to breakfast in bed and being the sort of parents that will raise a daughter that won’t marry the sort of a man who will cause her to eventually have a child that will turn out like Deke.)
But that was always in the future. A set of decisions made easy by a swift-approaching deadline and their commitment to their little family. They’ve lost their direction, unable to make the decisions to take themselves out of the equation, to safety, when it’s only their lives at risk. Their futures. No one wants to make the next move, not when everything around them is falling apart. Let this be a constant. Let them be the constant. They’ll stay because they’ve always stayed, and always will.
This is familiar. No version of them doesn’t know how to do this, doesn’t know how to seek each other out and hold them until their minds don’t have to force the world to make any sense because the world fades to the background, and only they are left. Because of course they are. They’ll always be left with each other. That’s the promise, the vow so sacred that saying it aloud does nothing to lessen it. A truth, so fundamental and constant it might as well be taught in the courses they took at the academy, right next to the laws of thermodynamics. They know it to be true, and so it is. Obviously.
They’ll always find their way back to each other, because how could they not? As the world falls apart around them and they struggle to speak they know that they will end up with each other, whatever it takes.
