Begin Again

Day twenty-two

Mrs Fitz came to her door with a suitcase trundling lazily behind her and a sad smile on her face. "I'm really going to miss you, Jemma."

"I'll miss you too." She enveloped her in a warm hug, unspoken words flitting between the two of them.

"You take care of my boy." Mrs Fitz said, wiping a gentle tear from the corner of her eye.

"He'll be taking care of me." Simmons smiled and kissed his mother on the cheek. "And you take care of yourself. I'll stay in touch, maybe you can come and visit us at the safe house?"

"I would love to, Jemma."

~*~

"You never finished the story of how I bru-bruised my cocc-yx."

Simmons laughed. "Well, you know how it starts."

"Tell me again, it was really funny." He used his adorable puppy dog eyes on her and she melted in his gaze.

"All right. So we were in the lab, working on the drones - I told you about those, didn't I?"

"Yeah."

"And you were having a little trouble getting them to fly properly. You kept reassuring me that it was nothing you couldn't fix, but I was a bit skeptical. We hadn't been friends for long, you see, and I didn't know you all that well. You were fiddling about with the joystick on the control pad you built and then suddenly, the early prototype of Sleepy comes hurtling at your head! You were sitting on a stool, one of the Academy's really flimsy ones, and when you leant backwards to avoid it the seat gave way. You landed on your behind and couldn't get up, and neither of us had brought our cell phones with us so I had to carry you all the way down the corridor to the elevator and get help. And I was so much smaller than you that it took about ten minutes to actually get you to the elevator, you were moaning and complaining the whole time!"

Fitz had tears of laughter tracking down his cheeks, trying to imagine petite little Simmons carrying him bridal style down a corridor. His back hurt just thinking about it.

"You were on bed rest for a day and a half."

"What happened to the drones?"

"Back to the drawing board, I'm afraid. Oh Fitz, I really miss those carefree days." Simmons said longingly, lost in her reminiscence.

"When you were mine and I was yours."

"I'm still yours, Fitz. I'll always be yours."

~*~

She could still remember those days as clear as crystal, but now it felt like she was viewing them from someone else's eyes.

They had grown up a lot, she thought, past the movie marathons and cram sessions and wild parties that she dragged a very reluctant Fitz to. It all felt like a past life now, because she was as far away from then as she could get.

Thinking of a younger him brought a smile to her face, but it wasn't as large as the one she had worn when he cried with laughter at a story so old it could be a fairy tale. When had she fallen in love with him so deeply she could drown in a pool of her own affection?

Maybe she always had, she just had never realised.