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They’re spread out amongst the throngs of children on the playground. Daisy and Mack have already left with the new inhuman – a school teacher that can manipulate the feelings of those around her. They’d called on the whole team because of the location, seeing the potential for a major disaster with all the kids running around. But it was a quick and easy extraction, and so those left behind lingered until the helicarrier came back for them.
“I can’t imagine if the inhuman had been a child,” Jemma says, sitting down and leaning against the tree where she and Fitz were shoulder to shoulder under its shade.
She feels him shrug. “Lincoln said they used to have children inhumans all the time. Trained them from an early age.”
“That seems highly unethical.”
He shrugs again. She can tell he is distracted, watching the kids running around and screaming in delight. It’s loud and hectic, but somehow peaceful at the same time. A little boy runs into the arms of one of the teachers, crying and pointing to his scrapped knee.
“Do you think you’ll ever have kids?” Jemma murmurs to Fitz.
“Hmm,” he replies, bobbing his head slightly. “Seven.”
Jemma’s head whips around at this, her hair smacking him in the face. “Seven?” she repeats, laughing. “What, like the binomial nomenclature system? You’d already have seven names, I suppose.”
Fitz grins, shaking his head. “You would think that. Seven is a lucky number,” he explains. “Seven virtues and all that. I need all the help I can get combating the cosmos.”
She elbows him in the side, laughing softly. “That could backfire on you. What about the seven deadly sins? Although yours would just be gluttonous,” she teases.
He keeps his eyes fixed on the playground, but she catches his subtle eye roll. Her hand tugs at his arm until he lifts it and she can press into his side, his arm pulling her closer as it drops. They sit in comfortable silence; a little blond boy seems to have caught Fitz’s attention, the way he yanks hard on a little girl’s hair and is rewarded by being shoved to the ground. Grinning, the boy gets up and does it again.
“Seven is the number of players you need for an official football team,” Fitz says eventually. “Hunter was talking about it before.”
“I wonder how Bobbi feels about that,” Jemma muses, watching as her friend pushes Hunter on the swings. She can almost see it. A group of mischievous boys and girls running around with batons and leather jackets.
But there’s another vision she starts to think of, one that’s not so fuzzy or quite so silly. Whenever she thinks of children, they’re curly-haired and wide-eyed and brave, so very good and brave.
“The seven wonders of the world,” she says lowly, starring at his profile. The corner of his lips turn up but he doesn’t look down at her, so she presses her chin against his shoulder and watches a pair of boys trying to climb up the slide behind the adults’ backs.
They sit like that for who knows how long until Coulson walks out of the elementary school and gives the ‘all clear’ nod and they shuffle to their feet. Bobbi and Hunter fall behind easily, and the helicarrier door is coming down when they all round the corner of a wooded area just a few yards from the playground.
“I’m thinking two,” Jemma says when they’re seated in a corner, a few seats away from where Hunter swats at Bobbi’s hand when she tries to adjust his buckles.
Fitz blinks blankly for a moment before he snorts. “Just Genus and Species, then?”
Jemma grins and reaches for his hand, pleased when he flips his palm up so she can link her fingers with his. “I haven’t thought about first names, actually, no. Yet,” she hastily adds when she can see him raise an eyebrow, a joke about preparation shining in his eyes. “But I was thinking.”
“Hmm?”
“What if we work out the last name first? FitzSimmons has always had a nice ring to it. We can make it official.”
Fitz is still, face blank and unrevealing, which is a little unfair when Jemma can feel her face break out into a smile, cheeks hot. But then he smiles.
“Yeah, that’s something we can do.”