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1.
“Jemma darling, you’re the flower girl so it’s your job-“
“I know, I know,” she cuts in with as much sass as an eight year old can muster, crossing her arms over her chest, “I toss the flowers down the aisle for Auntie Gwen.”
“You don’t just toss them.”
“I know,” Jemma repeats for emphasis, because really this isn’t rocket science, being a flower girl is so easy she could do it in her sleep. It’s a mundane task which could have easily been delegated to one of her other cousins, something Jemma had been quick to point out multiple times, much to her mother’s chagrin. “I scatter the petals gently, like a soft gust of wind,” she recalls the words her aunt had said earlier, “I don’t see what the big deal is, they’re just stupid flowers. I would understand if they were meant as a sign of fertility, though then it wouldn’t make any sense to toss the petals, because petals aren’t particularly fertile.”
“Jemma,” her mother starts in that slightly stressed tone she gets whenever it seems like things might go slightly off their usual plan and she’s heard enough of that tone today to last a lifetime so she cuts off her long winded explanation with a pout.
“I’m just saying.”
“Sweetheart,” her mother says crouching down to her level and fixing the dress back into place from where Jemma had rumpled in earlier, “one day when you’re the one getting married, you’ll understand just how important and stressful this is.”
“No I won’t,” she objects, “because I’m never getting married!”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It just seems like a waste just for some boy,” she asserts stubbornly, “boys are germy and gross! I know I’ve tested them!”
Her mother sighs, as patient as she can. Jemma knows that one, the one she gets right before she’s about to get a lecture, about to be told how she really shouldn’t be running experiments on the cat or the neighborhood kids. (Science stops for no man, she would assert back time and time again.)
However, this time instead of giving Jemma one of those polite lectures she just rubs at her temples for a moment before giving her a week smile, “one day, you’ll find a boy you like enough that you won’t care about all his germs. You’ll actually want his germs.”
Jemma groans, “mum, that is so disgusting.”
2.
“I hate facebook,” Jemma announces to nobody in particular, her eyes never leaving the screen despite with her protests, sadistically clicking through her former roommate’s photo album.
Somebody finally takes the bait, which really, they’ve been studying for three hours now, and a distraction is well needed. The other girl asks, “why,” which is all Jemma needs to get on with it.
“Because,” she says adopting the self-righteous tone that normally comes out when she plans to rant and rave about one of their professors or her fellow students or just people’s general inability to do anything right, “of all the happy couples with their wedding pictures and baby pictures, like this girl here, we were roommates at Oxford and now look she’s all married and it’s just so-“ gross, gross is the word she wants to fill in there, but she can’t say it the word gets trapped in her throat.
“Romantic,” the other girl answers, pushing herself up to look at the pictures, and suddenly everybody in the room is interested in what’s going on, all craning their heads to look at the wedding pictures of somebody they don’t even know, making stupid little cooing noises at the screen.
Romantic is not the word Jemma would have used, not at all. The mushy-gooey pictures of them cooing over each other at the wedding just make her sick looking at them. She’s happy for them certainly, but there is no way that Jemma would ever post pictures of her and her beloved snogging all over facebook.
Not that she even has a ‘beloved’ but that’s not the point.
“And then they go and change their names, and I have to spend hours, hours, trying to remember how I know this strange person with a new name,” Jemma continues.
“Well, you sort of have to once you get married,” somebody else says.
“Not me, I’m not changing my name for no man,” she answers, “not once I have a PhD.”
Jemma is not about to waste her quality education on a changed name. She’s going to be Doctor Simmons in a few months and she very well plans on being Doctor Simmons until she dies.
“What if he has more PhDs than you?”
She couldn’t help herself from laughing outright at the notion of that, “there is absolutely no way I am marrying anybody with less PhDs than me. Could you imagine? I’d have to speak down to him all the time, it would be the worst.”
3.
“Do you ever do your laundry,” Jemma asks as he carefully steps over a pair of pants scattered across the floor.
Fitz makes an embarrassed noise at that, doing his best to push what laundry he can under his bed, which doesn’t help the situation at all, because she still knows it’s there. Out of sight, but not out of mind.
“I do,” he asserts, “just haven’t had the time.”
It’s the second week of classes, and Jemma swears if she wasn’t mistaken there was enough clothing here scattered about to have lasted that long without actually doing laundry. There is certainly more on the floor than there was last week when she had stopped by to debate the Einstein-Rosen Bridge theory. Probably enough to account for him never having done laundry at all.
One sidelong glance is all it takes for the other cadet’s resolve to crumble, though Jemma has been getting pretty good at those looks, years of playfully mimicking her ever stressed mother were finally paying off.
He gives her a shy smile which is an answer in itself.
“You don’t know how,” she asks, quirking an eyebrow at him.
“It’s not that I don’t know how-“
“But you don’t.”
“I planned to look it up,” Fitz admits, “I really did, but I just haven’t had the time with classes.”
The plan had been to hang out at his place for a bit, talk about some of the theories they’ve been going over in class, but Jemma soon realizes that this is a far more pressing matter.
“We’ve got time now,” Jemma offers.
Before he can object, she starts to whip things in order, demanding that Fitz get his laundry basket so that they can carry things down to the laundry rooms, and then upon finding out that he doesn’t have a laundry basket (“and really Fitz, who doesn’t own a laundry basket”) sending him off to her room to get hers. Somehow, miraculously they manage to make it with everything down to the laundry room which takes three trips in itself and they end up using six machines. Jemma spends a good deal of time explaining to him what can and cannot be washed together and for a fellow prodigy he can be a bit dense sometimes.
Once they’ve managed to get everything separated and are playing the waiting game, Jemma pushes herself up to sit on top of one of the machines and smiles when he does the same, knocking their knees together in the process.
“I can’t believe your mum never taught you to do laundry,” Jemma says.
She means it as a joke, a teasing nudge, but beside her Fitz tenses up for the briefest of moments. Jemma would have missed it had their knees not been touching and she not felt the flinch back from the contact.
“My parents got a divorce when I was young,” he finally responds tersely, “and father always sent the laundry to the cleaners.”
She remains silent for a moment too long, worried things will become awkward which is the last thing Jemma wants, since she’s just made a friend who might actually be on her level, she speaks up, “I’m sorry.”
“About the cleaners,” Fitz asks confusion clear in his voice.
“No, about your parents.”
“Oh,” he answers with a casual shrug, “it’s not a big deal.”
“It is,” she starts to argue.
“You don’t understand, you come from a perfect family right, two parents who love each other and care about you,” he shakes his head.
Jemma wants to speak up and object, she wants to mention her mother’s anxiety attacks and compulsions with keeping things organized and functioning on a proper schedule. Or the gray in her father’s hair that she knows is from the stress, the extra weight he takes on around the house to make things easier for them, hours of overtime to pay for her expensive schooling. She thinks about the harsh whispers she would hear at night when they both thought she was long asleep.
Her family isn’t perfect, far from it, yet they stay together.
Sometimes she wonders if why they would put themselves through all that.
“I guess I don’t believe in that fairy tale romance nonsense,” Fitz continues where he left off, “that’s why the stories always end at the wedding, because nobody really ends up living happily ever after.”
“Me neither,” Jemma says, not missing his shocked look, “nobody’s perfect like the stories.”
“It’s delusional, really.”
Delusional, yes. That’s what she’s always thought, because Jemma could never imagine a future where she ends up walking down some aisle to a man standing at the other end with the butterflies in her chest. Nobody’s that special, and if they are, one day the feeling will fade away, and she’d be left with a real person, with all their flaws and quirks, stuck with them after the butterflies are long gone.
4.
They’re going to be graduating in a few weeks. The thought of it is nauseating and exciting at the same time. The youngest cadets in the history of SHIELD, technically Fitz is younger than her, though a few months hardly count for anything at all.
This called for a very special celebration, one in which Jemma had managed to convince some of the older students to buy her a few bottles of champagne. (Since technically now that they were in the states she wasn’t legally able to buy her own alcohol, drinking ages and the such, things that seemed moronic when Jemma had two PhDs and was about to become a SHIELD agent.)
“We’re celebrating,” Jemma had announced upon arriving in Fitz’s room, but that had been hours ago, now two bottles later they were both feeling a bit light headed.
She laid sprawled out across his bed staring at a poster of a tyrannosaurs rex on his wall that Jemma was certain she had bought for him as a pretty terrible nineteenth birthday gift. One that she had very well expected him to throw away as soon as he had gotten it, but had somehow managed to end up in the place of honor at the end of his bed.
“If I ever did get married,” he says halfway through the night, because somehow a drunk conversation about dinosaurs turned into a talk about their parents which brought this topic up again, one that Jemme had thought was as good as dead ever since the day she helped him with his laundry, “I would marry you.”
“What,” Jemma says startled spilling her drink (which was a difficult feat in itself since they were drinking their campaign out of coffee mugs) as she sits up quickly and tries not to give herself away by blushing.
She purposely doesn’t think about the notebook she had from Doctor Freudian’s class with the margins scrawled in with a few words repeated over and over again with slight variation: Mrs. Leopold Fitz, Dr. Jemma Fitz, Dr. and Dr. Fitz, Jemma Fitz-Simmons, Jemma Simmons-Fitz.
Jemma tries not to think about all the plans she’s made, plans of sticking with this loveable idiot for the rest of her life, sharing a lab and getting in each other’s headspace whenever they can.
Instead she clears her mind as best she can and manages a small smile in his direction, “Leopold Fitz, are you proposing?”
“What no,” Fitz says quickly, his cheeks already coloring, and it’s sort of charming in a completely dorky and awful way, “I’m just saying if I had to marry somebody, it would probably be you.”
“If there was a HYDRA agent with a gun pressed to your head and it was marry me or die, you’d choose me, right?”
“God, this is so awkward,” he groans, scrubbing a hand over his face.
She made a vague noise of agreement, before taking a long drink out of her mug.
“I don’t believe in all that romantic nonsense,” he continues after a moment, “but you’re my best friend, Jemma,” and that’s the first time he’s called her by her name since she informed him that she preferred going by her surname, “I’d marry you, in a purely platonic way.”
It’s hard to explain how those last few words seem to take a huge weight of her chest, but it does and she lets out a soft little laugh at that reaching over to find his hand and thread his fingers through hers, “I accept your purely platonic proposal.”
5.
Jemma can’t lie; it’s a well-known fact amongst their team. Skye still teases her about a certain incident that involved shooting a superior officer in the chest. Not being able to lie has never been a problem for her, not when she had been sitting comfortable in a lab developing things for SHIELD.
Now that they were out in the field it was becoming a slight hindrance.
There’s a voice buzzing in her earpiece, telling her which way to go, but the voice doesn’t prepare them for when they round a corner of the building and run into two men in hazard vests, who look too much like mercenaries to be construction crew members. The panic sets in quickly as they spot them, and the men turn to them and sharply ask, “what are you two doing back here?”
“We’re getting married,” Jemma says, quickly because she needs some excuse before they both get killed and it’s the first thing that comes to mind, she supposes because it’s sort of the truth, and he doesn’t even seem confused by the statement just keep up with the conversation as if it’s the most normal statement in the world.
“We’ve been checking out different churches,” Fitz jumps in to save her, because they both know she can’t keep up the tale, “slight complication thought, since her family is very catholic, and mine is not,” he gives this nervous half-laugh, “we’ve been yet undecided, but we were driving by and saw the place.”
“It’s truly beautiful,” Jemma continues, real shame that it’s being used as a possible Centipede hideout, a SHIELD team would tear this place apart once she and Fitz could get the proper readings of the radiation leakage that was emitting from the basement.
Somehow by some random stroke of luck they manage to convince the two Centipede goonies, who really don’t seem to be looking for much trouble anyways. They “regretfully” inform her and Fitz that the place is under construction, a safety hazard, and that it’s not safe for people to be around there.
This gives them the perfect window to back off to the van which isn’t too far away, the device in her pocket already having gotten the readings they needed.
It’s not until the mission is over, the people from Centipede dealt with and everybody piled back onto the bus that somebody brings up what the heard over the earpiece.
It’s Skye who does it, pulling Jemma don’t onto one of the couches and congratulating her on finally being able to lie so convincingly in the field.
“That’s because I wasn’t lying,” she explains with a small shrug.
“Wait, you’re not actually engaged, are you,” Skye asks scandalized, her eyes darting to where Fitz is making tea on the other side of the room.
“Technically,” Jemma says with a shrug, “but it’s purely platonic.”
“You can’t be platonically engaged to somebody,” Skye asserts shaking her head, “that’s not how it works.”
“Why not,” Fitz interrupts from over by the tea kettle, pouring it out into two familiar coffee mugs, When he crosses over to where they are he hands one of the cups to Jemma, without even having asked if she wanted one, the tea is made with just the right amount of sugar, just the way she likes it. Sometimes it feels as if he can read her mind, and this is most certainly one of those moments.
“Yes, why not,” she says back, firmly looking back over at Fitz just in time to catch his little smile before he sips his own tea and left them on the couches. Though once he’s gone she can’t help the traitorous part of her that whispers, “not that I would mind if it wasn’t purely platonic.”
It wasn’t until she said those words that she realized just how much she might have wanted things to be something more than what they were.
6.
Purely platonic, that’s how they’ve always been, until they’re not anymore and Jemma isn’t sure exactly what changes things, it’s so subtle that she hardly even notices until one night as they’re kissing each other goodbye (or is it hello) and she pulls back with a light laugh.
When Leo asks “what’s the matter,” she doesn’t answer him, not sure there are the right words for what she feels, but she kisses him again and that seems to do the trick.
Their lives move on, that whole mess with Centipede wraps up and everyone sort of slowly goes their own ways. Jemma likes to think that she’s had that adventure she so craved back during those long days crammed in a Sci-Ops lab. She misses her lab, and the stability of it – in the literally and the metaphorical sense.
She’s not sure what she had expected when she got back to a SHIELD lab, but seeing Leo moving into the other half of the lab, the hint of a grin on his face when she finally noticed that they were assigned to the same lab.
It all just felt right.
Maybe being something more than purely platonic wasn’t bad, as long as it didn’t end with them snogging in the middle of a lab and having everything go to ruin because they’re too busy making mooneyes at each other.
They just fit together, and that’s something she’s always known, they buy an apartment together and everything just seems so natural, the way they move around each other’s space.
That’s why Jemma doesn’t find anything out of ordinary about this night in particular. There’s a storm raging outside and unable to sleep through the roar of the thunder and the pounding of the rain upon the window frame they both ended up in the kitchen, drinking at two in the morning as they watched out the window.
It’s one of those moment where everything feels just right, like a moment that seems like ages ago, sprawled out across a twin size bed staring up at posters of dinosaurs and drinking cheap champagne.
“I still don’t believe in happily ever after and love at first sight,” he starts, cheeks a bit flushed.
Jemma supposes she knows what’s coming.
She knew what was coming weeks before when stuffing her hand into one of his favorite jackets she had found a small velvet box. Jemma had been anticipating for the last few weeks, she might have even accidently interrupted on of Skye’s undercover missions where she called her cell in order to freak out about the whole thing. The other woman has just laughed at her reminding her that technically they were already engaged.
Though while she had known that it would eventually happened, she had not realized that this was the exact moment until they were sitting together on the kitchen counter in their pajamas sipping wine out of coffee mugs, because Leo had yet to unpack their wine glasses and Jemma hasn’t felt like looking for them.
“But I was wondering,” Leo continues, and his voice is quiet barely a whisper over the sound of the rain, “if you might be interested in getting married, in a completely not platonic way.”
“You know,” she answers after the briefest of pauses, “I might just be interested in that.”