I'd love to hear more about your demisexual Fitz headcanon because the more I think about it, the more I love it. Like, do you think Fitz knows he's demisexual? Is he out to anyone? Give me all your theories! :-)
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. I never knew I had so many *ideas* about this until I started writing it. For some reason this ended up being a re-telling of the canon-Fitzsimmons storyline with demisexual Fitz? To be honest, I think I didn’t change the story much, but it still was so important for me to tell.
{Mentions of both of them being with other people, mentions of both of them being bi, mentions of Will Daniels, a lot of discussions of sex, but nothing explicit.}
Growing up, Fitz knew that he wasn’t much into girls like his classmates were, which led him to a small sexuality crisis, like, was he gay??? He finally decided that probably not, because he didn’t care much about boys either (the discovery of his biromanticism came later in life), he was just Weird Like That, and too busy building things and getting a PhD at fifteen to pay much attention to people.
Then he met Simmons at the Academy, and Simmons was still a genius, still his own age and still fanning herself over people?? Like he couldn’t process it? Again, he assumed his lack of interest became from His General Weirdness and from his “it’s not like anybody would give me the time of day, anyway” belief.
Simmons talks about sex all the time. Like. All. The. Time. Not in much detail, but since she is bored by people that is not him, she usually has a lot of comments to share. “I kept him longer than usual because he is not that bad in bed” and “If he put the same effort into giving oral that he puts into trying to get me to give him oral, maybe he wouldn’t be half bad”. Fitz is baffled by this. Like, not disgusted, but for him sex is a thing that exists in a plane outside of reality. One of that kind of things that your parents tell you “You will understand it when you are older.” But apparently he is old enough now- because Simmons is-, and still he is not getting it?
Just before they graduate from the Academy, he decides that he has to know what is all the fuss about. It’s not a decision made out of desire, it’s not something his gut is telling him to do, it’s a very conscious, intellectual decision. He is a scientist, and scientists ought to try things before drawing a conclusion.
He picks a Nice Girl, one that is a freshman and therefore doesn’t know much about his weird reputation, but still one or two years older than him. He takes her out, does all the expected things, or so he imagines. When she invites him into her dorm room, he says yes.
It is… an okay experience, but nothing to write home about. He still doesn’t get it. He can get as much physical satisfaction by jerking off and way more emotional satisfaction during a night in with Simmons.
During they stay at SciOps, Simmons sets him up a couple of times with female co-workers. Fitz goes out obediently with all of them, but never asks them for a second date, and just barely kisses them goodnight. He doesn’t connect with them as much as he connects with Simmons, and then what is the point in getting physical with them? He barely has enough free time as it is to add up another thing to the list.
After the fifth lukewarm date, Simmons confronts him.
“Are you gay, Fitz?”
“No. I mean, it doesn’t make much difference to me, a man or a woman. I am just not interested in them, okay, Simmons?”
“Don’t you get sexually frustrated?”
“… should I?”
“… Fitz, are you asexual?”
“I’m not repulsed by sex!”
“You don’t have to be repulsed by sex to be asexual, silly. Let’s look it up.”
They look it up. Simmons redirects him to tons of webpages, forums, personal blogs. Always the biologist, she is the one more interested in Putting Things Into Categories. Always the engineer, he only cares if Things Works, and they don’t need to have a label to work.
“Okay, but don’t you find Amy hot?”
“I find her aesthetically pleasing, if that is what you mean.”
“… and what about the Doctor?”
“Well, he sure is a sight for sore eyes.”
“I will just say it very crudely: wouldn’t you bang one or either of them if you had the opportunity?”
“No, why would I?”
(He has sex dreams about Simmons from time to time, but that is normal, yes? To have sex dreams about someone with whom you are close, about whom you care very deeply? He refuses to acknowledge that sometimes those “sex dreams” are not “dreams” at all, because he is fully awake during them.)
He tells Simmons that her research is dope, but that it doesn’t feel quite right, that he is just Weird and they should leave it at that. He doesn’t tell her why.
He still wigmans for her from time to time, but always comes home alone.
“Don’t you get lonely, though?”
“How could I, when I have you?”
“You are absolutely right.”
Right before they are assigned to the Bus, Simmons is courting this legs-for-forever-ballet-dancer during a night out, and Fitz gets stuck with her brother. They hit it off quickly, talking about football (real football) and engines. They end up making out heavily in a dark corner. Things are going sort-of-smoothly, but when the boy asks him- very gentlemanly, by the way- if Fitz wants to go back to his place, Fitz feels like someone is pouring a bucket of iced water over his head, and he flees. Simmons never gets to find out if the dancer is as flexible as she claimed to be.
“At least we found out that is not a gender-related thing, yeah?”
“Shut up, Simmons. Just shut up.”
It’s strange living in the Bus, so close to so many people, after living only with Simmons for so long. He feels a little dizzy, getting used to new people, and he flirts with Skye almost unintentionally, because he truly likes all of them- and Ward is so way out of his league-, and when Simmons points out that she thinks that Skye may not be picking up on his flirting, he shrugs. That’s almost better, in a way. He doesn’t know how he would react if she flirted back, and had expectations about him, and.
When he realizes that he is in love with Jemma, the sexual urges don’t come right away. First comes the desire to kiss every inch of her face, and hold her close, and tell her that he loves her. Which are, frankly, some of the few non-sexual things they still don’t do together.
The sexual desire for her comes with time, but it is so shocking and new that it almost throws him off balance. One day she is leaning down on one of the lab’s counters, and he just side-looks at her and his brain goes Damn, would I tap that, with no intermission whatsoever. He starts hyperventilating, and has to shoo away her concern before things get even more awkward.
Things only escalate from there, and he feels deeply ashamed, because she is his best friend, and her own woman, and a human being, for god’s sake, but he still gets bombarded by sudden desires to lick every freckle he knows she has on that milky white skin of hers. He tries to repress so much consciously that his dreams get absolutely insane.
He wonders, sometimes, why did this sudden change happen? Why with Simmons, of all people? He has been so apathetic about sex for all his life, why that had to change? Deep down, he knows why, but he doesn’t have much time to process, because the fall happens, and then the pod, and then everythings goes to hell.
While she is away, he tries his best to not think of her on any romantic or sexual capacity. He just thinks about his best friend, and about how much he misses her, and about how much he needs her, and about how betrayed he feels. All the hurt and all the anger and all his struggles cover up all his other feelings pretty well.
But then Jemma comes back, and she is even more pretty than he remembered, and she is sad all the time, and he is angry all the time, and wanting to kiss her is the least of his problems, to be honest.
Life within S.H.I.E.L.D. is never easy. There is always something crumbling down, someone on the verge of dying, someone on the verge of taking over the world, someone keeping a terrible secret, someone gaining superpowers. But maybe there are certain things that they still can make okay. When he leaves the Playground with Fury’s cube, his favourite sandwich and a Love, Jemma forever imprinted inside his eyelids, his heart is beating faster than it has beaten in a long time, and there is no time, there is never truly time, but he still says to himself So this is what being thoroughly turned on feels like.
Life within S.H.I.E.L.D. is never easy. He doesn’t have time to relish what she told him before he took off, much less to savour the triumph of asking her out, that she is taken away.
He gets single-minded after that, trying to get her back. (Or he wish he could be single-minded. He keeps getting distracted by the curve of her lips saying oh after he asked her out, by the texture and the weight of her hand on his, by the intensity of her voice when she said maybe there is. He misses her with a fervor he never thought was possible, he misses her in every way he ever had her and in some ways he never did, and it is an all-consuming feeling. He dreams about her, sometimes in platonic-ways, sometimes in so-not-platonic-ways, and he wakes up in twisted, sodden sheets, crying bitter tears.)
Having her back in his arms, tattered and bruised, scrawny and dehydrated, but alive, is the most wonderful feeling in the world.
Jemma is having a hard time adapting back to Earth. That’s okay. He can wait. He has waited twenty-eight years. She is healing, and he can wait forever for her. Her happiness has always been his priority.
The harder part is that she is not opening up to him, and he can feel her running between his fingers like water. Or like the sand of that goddamned planet. She dresses on his clothes and walks around the base holding his hand, and searches him for comfort during sleepless nights, but that doesn’t mean that she is talking to him, and he wants to respect her time to process and her boundaries, but his heart aches for her.
Then she tells him about Will, and it’s like someone filled up his lungs with liquid lead. It makes total sense, just because she is the sun of his solar system, it doesn’t mean that the feeling had to be reciprocal, does it?
But he is still her best friend and there is still a good man stranded on a planet for fourteen years, and there is still work to do. There is always work to do. He has no right to grieve something that never was. (Never, ever, has he felt more guilty for the way he just wants her, not even while she was missing.)
There is a recording of her talking about how much she thought about him and about them, about the future she wants with him, and she claims that it was the more clear-headed she ever was. It takes every ounce of willpower on his body to not jump her then and there. (It’s so confusing. What is he finding so arousing: the promise of a future, the love confessions, her? How is he supposed to tell all of them apart, define what is the source of his emotions?)
Then they are screaming at each other, in the lab nonetheless, and she shouts that he dived into a hole in the universe for her, and he has to kiss her, because she still doesn’t understand that it’s the less he would do for her. While he kisses her, his blood turns to liquid fire. He never knew there were so many nerve endings in his body. (Or he knew. But he never felt them before.) It’s hopeless, anyway. They are hopeless.
(There are some things he never talks about; hearing Jemma scream, unable to do anything to alleviate her pain, having to listen to her asking him to let them kill her, are only some of them.)
When Ward teases him about killing Will because he slept with Simmons, he tells him to grow up because Ward is a dick. And he is not a killer. And Will is a decent human being who deserves so much better. And Jemma is not his possession. And what he feels for her goes so much deeper than just sex, not that Ward would ever understand that.
In a way, he knows he did the right thing in Maveth. But the guilt is real, the responsibility is real, the weight of Jemma’s disappointed gaze is very real.
Everything is too much, and he needs to take a step back. It doesn’t matter that his heart pleads for her, his mind pleads for her, his body pleads for her. Some things are just not meant to be.
Jemma tells him I miss you, and Can we start over, and maybe they should do that, so Fitz doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he doesn’t think he can.
Apparently it was a long-con, because she then takes his own quantum physics explanation and turns it against him, and says that the future is set and that they are inevitable. His heart literally melts.
She is highkey flirting with him, and his body is screaming at him I have only ever wanted this one thing, why are you denying it to me? Some things apparently are inevitable, or at least they are, because he is not sure who kissed who, the only thing that matters is that they are kissing, and it’s magnificent.
Her hands are on his neck, she is sitting on his lap, and Fitz’s body feels electrical, like a high-wring spring, full of potential energy ready to be transformed into kinetic.
“Sorry, sorry, I don’t want to push too fast either.”
“What?”
“You know, with everything with you, and, and, and sex. I’m cool with whatever makes you comfortable. I don’t want to overstep any boundaries.”
“Jemma?”
“What?”
“You are rambling.”
“Oh.”
“I will let you know if I’m not comfortable with something, okay? But I- well, let’s say that I have thought about it. Before.”
“You mean… sex?”
“… yeah.”
“Sex, sex and, and us?”
“You don’t have to put it like that, like, like I am some kind of-of pervert, or something!”
“Oh, Fitz.”
“We should consider all variables as we move forward, because things are bound to get… complicated.” He needs to ask for confirmation that nothing will change between them if- when- they have sex. He is scared, scared of how much he wants her, scared of messing this up, scared of being in unknown territory. Sex is not a thing that comes natural to him, and combined with their complicated history… yeah, chances just aren’t good. He wants her deliriously, but he is also scared shitless. He has thought it over and over so many times that the only solution that comes to his mind is to stop thinking and just listen to what his body and his heart are telling him.
“I’ve been thinking about it, about us, and, um, it clicked. The crux of our relationship is like the singularity in transhumanism. Singularity is the defining moment-”
“-the point at which a measurable variable becomes infinite.”
“Our friendship is linear. Simple, comfortable.”
“Effortless, really.”
“As soon as we deviate from that path, change becomes exponential. The point of no return.”
“Are you comparing us sleeping together with crossing the event horizon? It’s quite lovely when you think about it like that. And also terrifying.”
“Yeah, exactly. So, we should stop thinking altogether… “
“… and just do.”
(He feels very comforted that Jemma also finds this experience a little terrifying.)
He is not nervous anymore when he gets to the hotel room. So many things have passed during the last two hours that the only thing he wants is her, her, her, in all the ways she wants to give herself to him. And most importantly, he wants to give himself to her in every way imaginable, and that’s a certainty that he has never had before.
They laugh so much during sex, and that is truly the best thing that could have happened to him. They are still the same people, this experience is not changing the baselines of who they are, and that’s good. His love is real, his desire is real, and right now, everything he has to give is for her.