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When Fitz finds the old video on her hard drive, while he’s looking for the pictures of Simmons’ artwork she asked him to backup after her computer’s disastrous and unfortunate crash the week after finals, he feels like he should have known. She’s got the bones for it, after all. Long slender fingers and wrists, short stature, but slim and sinewy. There was a certain grace to her movements too, that made this discovery not as surprising as it could have been. He wondered, idly, if maybe he should turn it off, if this was an invasion of privacy, but she had given him the whole drive, and watching her twirl so gracefully was mesmerizing.
Simmons was younger than she was now, but only by a handful of years, dressed in a leotard, and a pink skirt with nude tights and pink toe shoes. Fitz smiled as he recognized the Tchaikovsky suite playing in the back of the video, it was on the playlist Simmons used when she needed to focus. She was skilled too, he noted, watching her execute a series of leaps and turns, only to stop on a dime and hold her arms, still as a statue, in fourth position.
“Oh dear.” Her voice came with a chuckle from the door “I see you’ve uncovered my deep dark past.”
“You were good.” He leaned back in the chair and smiled at her. She returned it and nodded.
“I was. I had a lost of practice, I’d done it since I was a child. My parents thought it would make me ‘cultured’.” She rolled her eyes good naturedly.
“Do you still dance?”
“Sometimes for fun, in my room, or I’ll go to a weekend workshop or something, but not competitively. I was… a bit too intense about it.”
“Intense? You? No way.” Fitz smirked. But his expression faltered when he saw the nervous way she suddenly laid her hands to her neck. “Jem? D’I say something’?”
“Ah, no, intense was simply a … euphemism? A way for me to avoid saying what I actually meant and probably should say.”
“Y’don’t have to tell me anythin’ you’re not comfortable with, you know that righ’?”
“Yes, I know, but this I should tell you.” She rolled her neck and took a deep breath. “I quit ballet a few years ago because I had gotten too competitive about it, and developed an eating disorder. My parents thought I could fight it and keep dancing, but I knew I had to quit.”
All of a sudden this makes sense too. The way when Fitz strokes his hand down her back, it seems like he can feel too many of the notches of her spine, or the days they’ve sat over breakfast or lunch of whatever meal and it seemed like she was forcing herself to keep eating when she no longer wanted to. The fact that she was nearly almost always cold, especially her hands and feet. Looking over at her, she was standing nervous and twitchy in his doorway, and he realized he’d been sitting in silence for some moments. He stood and crossed the short distance to her and tilted her face up by her chin.
“Thank ye for tellin’ me, lass.” He smiled, leaned down and kissed her forehead “Doesn’t change a damn thing though, y’know that righ’?”
“Yes, I know.” She smiled softly and leaned into him, twining her arms about his ribcage and letting her weight rest against him.
“Good.” He grins and she leans up to kiss him, slanting her lips carefully over his with the slightest lean onto her toes. His thumb soothes circles into the skin of her cheek. “Would you ever consider letting me draw you? Dancing I mean. I could do some gestures, take some pictures, and then do a painting.”
“You’d want to?”
“Ballet’s graceful, and it’d look even more beautiful because it’s you.”
“You’re a terrible sap.”
“Absolutely. So can I sometimes?”
“Of course.” She smiled. “You can even help me pick which of my old ballet outfits I’ll wear.” She pressed her face into his neck, kissing it softly. “Now, do you have any delightful secrets from your past I should know about?”
“That’s f’me to know and you to find out.” He smirked, his eyes twinkling.
“Oh, and I will. Don’t you doubt me for even a moment.” She grinned, laughing.
“Never.”