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“Fitz.”
“Hmm?”
“We need to talk.”
Fitz jolted out of his post-coital haze. Jemma sounded serious. Did he do something wrong? The sex just now was fantastic, so it couldn’t be that. He had told her off earlier for hovering too much. Perhaps “stop being a mother hen, Jemma” wasn’t the best word choice, but he had been eating and sleeping regularly so she couldn’t be too upset with him. Oh god, did he muck it up in the lab? He had been limiting himself to tinkering with other him’s work. Was there some secret evil design that he didn’t catch and it’s going to destroy their lives again? He was spiraling when he felt Jemma’s hand on him tighten.
“Oh Fitz. Stop,” Jemma said with a hint of exasperation in her voice. He could see the eye roll as she lifted her head from his shoulder and gazed down at him. “We just had mind blowingly good sex. I am cuddling with you. Naked. In our bed. This is not a bad talk.”
“Well, excuse me for worrying. Because every good relationship conversation starts with those words,” Fitz retorted, feeling his heartbeat return to normal. He waved his hands in the air. “‘We need to talk?’ Honestly Jemma.”
“I’d like to think it will be a very good relationship conversation if you just let me speak,” Jemma said in an almost-too-bright voice. “And listen to me. As in, really listen and don’t jump off to conclusions before I finish what I have to say. Obviously you can talk too. It won’t be a conversation if I am doing all the talking, but I need you to keep an open mind and listen first, please?” Her voice took on a note of uncertainty at the end.
He rolled them over so they were both on their sides, facing each other. She was smiling at him with her lips and her eyes. There was a hint of nervousness behind her gaze, but it wasn’t a bad sort of anxiety. No, it was more like the look she got right before she proposed some fantastical scheme where he would whine and complain as she dragged him on an adventure he didn’t know he needed, and they both ended up enjoying themselves tremendously.
“We are best friends and more than that, right?” he mused out loud. At her nod, he held out a hand and tucked her close. “Okay, friends talk to each other. I can handle whatever it is you want to talk about. Go ahead.”
“Alright,” Jemma exhaled. “I’ve been thinking, about how you proposed to me right after you woke up, and, well, I think it was too fast. No wait!” She held up a hand at his outraged squeal.
“Let me finish, remember? And I promise I do still want to marry you. It’s just that, I know you’ve been thinking about proposing since before the Framework, but you haven’t even seen me for six months before you went into the cryo-chamber. You were shut up alone in a cell without anyone to help you to process what happened, and you were so worried about the team and me. Of course the moment you saw me again, you would be swept up in the moment and made a grand romantic gesture. And I love the proposal. I said yes. But Fitz, if space and Hale and everything else haven’t interfered, if we were somehow able to clear our names and rebuild our lives, would you have proposed the very next time you saw me after the diner?”
Fitz rubbed his free hand over his face. He had a glimmer of where Jemma was going with this.
“No, I wouldn’t have,” he admitted. “But if we were all on Earth and not on the run, then I would still have proposed to you after six months of some intense therapy.”
“And I would have said yes,” Jemma answered without a second of hesitation.
Fitz kissed her then. It was a simple kiss and yet it said so much. All the could-have-beens and might-have-beens. Their lips parted while their foreheads still touched.
“So what now then?” Fitz asked. “Do you want to put the wedding on hold until I get some therapy?”
“Of course not,” Jemma responded promptly. “You do need therapy. I need it too. But who knows when we will find a therapist who can pass all the background checks and be open-minded enough to deal with everything we’ve been through. I am not going to put our lives on hold indefinitely.”
“Alright… so you just want to tell me that I proposed to you too fast but you want to marry me anyway?”
“I am not done, Fitz,” she said. “The thing is, we went through this once already.” Jemma reached out and put an arm around him, a leg wrapped around him too. “ He proposed too, the moment he saw me again. I didn’t hear him, so I proposed to him the first chance I got because I was so happy to see him again. Just like I was so happy when we found you that I have to say yes the moment you proposed. Both times I was guilty in jumping into things too fast. I should have known better, or at least suspect something was wrong, when he talked about not deserving me in his wedding vows . Even though he was ready to start the rest of our lives together, he wasn’t ready to forgive himself yet.” She took a deep breath.
“And I, I forgave you for what you did with the Framework, but I wasn’t ready to accept what it did to you. May and Mack both said their Framework experiences affected them, that the memories would always stay with them even after they came back to the real world. I knew it, but I kept on pretending it was just a dream for you. I only tried to help you with your guilt about what happened, and not, not deal with how you changed because of those memories.”
“Jemma,” Fitz stopped her before she could continue to blame herself. “It wasn’t your fault. Of course I’ll always want your help, but I am an adult and have to take responsibility for myself. He… the other me should have talked to you about hearing the Doctor before it got out of hand. I don’t know how much I would have told you if I didn’t know about the repercussions, but I am talking to you now. The team’s helping me too. This is on me. I owe it to you, to us, to get better so that I do deserve you.”
He knew he didn’t come out of the Framework unscathed. What others had told him of his counterpart’s psychotic break only confirmed his suspicions. Everyone had been supportive, watching out for his stress levels and physical well being so the Doctor won’t be triggered inadvertently again. The fear would always be there though, that the Doctor could rear his ugly head at any moment. He knew now that Jemma and the team would never abandon him, but he did sometimes wonder if it wasn’t fair to Jemma, to ask her to spend the rest of her days worrying if he’s going to break down at some point.
Jemma tightened her hold on him.
“The thing is, if I accept that the Doctor is a part of you now, then I have to accept there is a part of you that doesn’t love me.” Jemma rushed on before he could protest.
“He built a robot that held a gun to me,” she breathed. “When I was trying to stop him from operating on Daisy. Afterwards, when he was shut away alone in a cell again, I… I told him I didn’t know how we would go on from there. He was losing himself and I was losing him. All I could think was that this wasn’t a LMD, this wasn’t inside the Framework. This was Fitz in his own body and some part of his mind was willing to hurt me.”
“I… I never want to hurt you,” Fitz said feebly. Except that the other him had tried. And there’s a chance he might turn into that version of himself someday. Fitz felt sick to his stomach.
“I know, Fitz,” Jemma told him gently. “Deke helped. He said I knew you better than you knew yourself, that you would take the weight of the world upon yourself and you need me to lighten your load. Should have known he’s our grandson right there and then. Only you would have sprouted such romantic nonsense and passed it down through the generations.”
Fitz snorted in spite of the lead in his stomach. “Romantic nonsense? Sounds pretty accurate to me.”
“It’s nonsense because it wasn’t true, even in the loop,” Jemma said. “You have so much strength, Fitz. In Deke’s timeline, the Earth cracked open, half of the team was gone, and I died. If you were truly dependent on me for your mental health, the Doctor ought to have taken over completely by then. But you didn’t let it happen. You found the strength to go on without me, to raise our daughter with love, and to work out the schematics so that the next iterations of ourselves could try to break the loop. To give us a second chance.”
Fitz stared at her. He had obsessed so much over the other him, the one who married Jemma, the one who broke down and hurt Daisy and died saving others, that he haven’t really thought about the even earlier version of him, the one who was caught in the loop.
“Deke was right about one thing, I do know you better than you know yourself,” Jemma continued. “And I know you haven’t completely forgiven yourself for the Framework yet, and that you are still worried about the Doctor. The team and I will do our best to help you, but no one can promise that you won’t ever suffer a similar break. If it does happen again, this time there would be no guarantees from the future about how we would end. Love can’t solve everything. But I know , Fitz, I know that we will always find our way to each other.”
Jemma looked straight into his eyes. There was regret, sadness, but also hope, optimism, and most of all, love.
“You are not him, but you and him are both my Fitz. I married my best friend once and told him that he was my life, my heart, my home. Back then I didn’t know that I also needed to tell him it would be true even when he’s changed, when he’s had an entire life’s worth of memories without me. I am not making that mistake again. We can’t start our marriage with hiding our worries and fears from each other. You told me after the pod that you will never be the man I knew before and I need to accept that. I am telling you now that you will never be the same man you were before the Framework, and I accept you, I love you, I choose you. I know you are struggling, and I still want to spend the rest of my life with you. Marry me, Fitz?”
“Absolutely,” Fitz choked out. He kissed her and he tasted the salt of his tears, but he also felt the smile of their joined lips.
“Together,” she whispered to him. “We will face everything together.”
***
Some time later.
“Well, that was a very nice celebration of our second engagement. I think we can safely say now that our grandson’s romantic side didn’t just come from me. I mean, that was a pretty impressive proposal.”
“You know I excel at preparation. I’ve been planning on how to say all this to you for weeks.”
“Jemma.”
“Hmm?”
“Did you plan to propose to me naked in bed?!”