Chapter Text
Jemma sits on the grey stone wall that guards her family home, her wide eyes making maps of the stars. Little of her face is exposed to the bitter cold between the knitted Christmas pudding beanie warming her head and the tartan scarf she’s pulled up to her nose. She can hear the hubbub of the house – the music of Bing Crosby, siblings arguing over Monopoly and the clatter of china plates – from her beloved old hiding place.
When this home had been her home, the time not spent burning a hole into the desk in her bedroom-cum-office was devoted to perching on this very wall, captivated by the mysteries amidst the stars. Sometimes her father would come and sit beside her. Often, neither said a word. No one else ever intruded on these precious moments, the foundation of their close bond. Growing up, Jemma had spent many nights sat beside her dad wondering if anyone else could ever make her feel so loved.
Now that she’s back after so long away, the familiar comfort of her stargazing ritual brings solace. The love and laughter of a Simmons family Christmas hasn’t distracted Jemma from the ache in her heart: Fitz. She remembers the story his eyes told when they’d said goodbye at the airport. They had betrayed the smile he offered to reassure her. Big, blue and beautiful, but glassy.
She hears steps coming down the garden path and recognizes her dad’s heavy stride. When Jemma turns, he smiles back but his eyes move quickly to the phone he’s holding: hers. “I thought you’d want to answer this one,” he says, offering it to his daughter with a twinkle in his eye before turning back to the house.
Jemma grins at the caller ID.
“Hey,” she sighs.
“Merry Christmas, Simmons,” Fitz replies warmly. She imagines him smiling brightly, probably wearing one of the home-knitted sweaters that she’s seen folded in the back of his drawers. They look cozy and she’s thought about stealing them countless times, but there’s something so personal about his mother having handmade them just for Fitz that the notion feels too imposing.
“Merry Christmas, Fitz.” Saying it is the happiest she’s felt all day. She buries her face even deeper into her scarf, holding the phone inside the wool.
There’s a beat. Then they both start at once:
“Have you had a nice–”
“How’s your mum do–”
“Sorry,” they add in unison. “You go.”
There’s a shared laugh followed by more silence, and it’s the silence that invites Jemma to confess, “I, uh, I miss you…”
She can’t see the way he bites his lip and bows his head. He opens his mouth to reply, his brain formulating the best, perhaps least incriminating, phrasing, but she cuts him off: “Hey, are you… Can you go outside?”
"Simmons?”
“The sky is really beautiful tonight. The stars are shining: Orion, Sirius, the Hyades. And the moon is so white and big,” she tells him with a marveling wistfulness. “You can’t miss this.”
It reminds him of the night they’d stayed up until the early hours to watch a meteor shower together from the roof of their dorm block. He wonders if that night lingers as vividly in her memory as in his. She’d brought lawn furniture and blankets; he made them grilled cheeses.
Fitz one-handedly wraps a scarf around his neck, a reverse-colored version of Jemma’s, and braves the snowy outdoors of his mother’s Scottish home. A fence guards the house in lieu of a wall, so he’s forced to stand on the front path to look up at the view. It’s as remarkable as she’d promised. That moon. Knowing she’s admiring the same spectacle diminishes the distance between them somehow, the stars a map to her.
“We should have done this last night – might’ve caught the reindeer flying through the sky,” he says lightly, drawing himself out of his reflection. “Still pretty magical, though.”
“Magical,” she repeats with a laugh, before conceding to his point. “There is something astonishing about the fact that we can be hundreds of miles from each other but still be looking up at the same sky, same moon.”
They gaze up in wonderment, quietly comforted by the faint sound of the other one breathing, moving, existing on the other end of the line. It occurs to both of them that there’s something bigger than friendship passing between them in this moment but it’s dismissed, as it always is, in favor of apprehension. It’s bigger than friendship, so much bigger: too much bigger.