Epilogue

Some Time Later

Fitz answered the door of the beautiful London home resplendent in one of his now somewhat shabby tartan-trimmed Highland-themed aprons. He grabbed Skye into an odd embrace that required him to keep his blue-tinted hands from making contact with any part of her.

"Eddie and Marie have been learning about nucleation and saturated solutions," he explained apologetically as she laughed at him. "The three of us, and the kitchen, are covered in sugar."

Skye heaved her enormous suitcase over the threshold and followed Fitz into the lab-like stainless steel kitchen to find the adorable FitzSimmons offspring perched atop the bench, sucking on brightly coloured crystallised sugar. Eddie, short for Edison, now three, and Marie (named for the first female recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics), four-and-a-half, were clad in miniature lab coats that were now stained all over with bright food colouring.

"Look at you two!" Skye cried. "You're a mess!"

"Skye!" cried Eddie, reaching out his sticky arms to the long-anticipated arrival.

Marie grinned proudly down at her lab coat. "Mummy says a scientist's lab coat should show the evidence of discovery."

"Of course she does," Skye laughed, trying to greet them both without getting too sticky. "Speaking of Mommy, where is she? I need to give her a hug too!"

"Mummy's working," lisped little Eddie, thrusting his whole fist into a jar of vibrantly purple sugar solution and causing it to overflow onto the bench.

"Look at that, my little Archimedes!" crowed Fitz, reaching out to high-five his junior genius before he thought to reach for a dishtowel. "That's precociously early hydrostatic experimentation if ever I saw it!"

"Umm, Fitz?" Skye pointed to the purple liquid spilling over the edge of the bench and pooling on the floor.

Fitz just leant against the bench and laughed. "Remember the cleaner that used to come every week?"

"You mean your friends who run that biohazard company?"

Fitz nodded. "Now they just send someone by every evening. They say it makes the weekly clean less frightening for their staff." He shrugged. "Those are the lab conditions we've always been used to anyway. And outsourcing the cleaning means that whenever we're not working we're home to make even more of a mess with these two monkeys." As he spoke he gathered the two of them into his arms and carried them out onto the covered deck.

"So where in the world has Dr J. Fitz-Simmons been consulting today?" Skye enquired.

Fitz plopped the kids onto a brightly coloured outdoor couch where they returned their full focus to their crystallised sweets. "Thankfully she didn't even have to leave our little part of the Commonwealth today. The jet should have brought her back from Cambridge almost an hour ago so I'm expecting her to walk through the door at any moment."

"And she's bringing us back a stick of rock!" Marie chirped, her face shining with a sticky pink glaze.

"I think we might have to ask Skye to save the rock for tomorrow, My Marie," Fitz warned gently. "The two of you have practically consumed your body weight in seeded sugar crystals already today."

Marie pouted in a manner that almost exactly evoked the expression Jemma wore when deep in concentration. The little girl had her mother's dark tresses paired with Fitz's cornflower blue eyes. Next to her on the couch, her sandy blonde brother gazed meditatively up at the grownups through wide hazel eyes. Eddie's face was so sticky that bits of orange fluff had started to adhere to it from the hand-knitted cardigan poking out the sleeve of his lab coat.

Skye followed Fitz back into the kitchen. "Is it really ten years since we abandoned you two in Chile?" she asked incredulously.

"I know," Fitz shook his head, setting the kettle to boil and reaching for his trusty teapot while they waited for Jemma to arrive. "My theory is that some kind of as-yet-undiscovered relativity must kick in once you hit thirty. I'm running my life as one long experiment but I have no useful findings to report as yet."

"So where are you taking Simmons?" Skye asked. "Have you booked some fancy hotel in London?"

Fitz looked sheepish. "I don't know if I can tell you," he shrugged. "You'll just laugh at me."

"Come on, Fitz," she urged. "I'm always laughing at you. Besides, I'm dying of suspense! I spent the whole flight over here trying to guess. Is there some physics resort in Germany or something?"

Fitz contemplated her a moment, as if trying to work out whether it would be worth the pain of telling her.

"Does she know?" she asked. "Or is it a surprise?"

"Jem knows," Fitz nodded. "We've been planning this holiday together for even longer than the ten years we've been married."

"Seriously?" Skye asked. "You already knew where you'd be spending your ten year anniversary before you'd even celebrated one?"

Fitz winked. "Since before you even knew we were together!"

Skye gave him a flat look. "You like to think there was a time I didn't know you were together, but you were mistaken. I always knew. We all did."

Fitz shook his head. "I'm not buying that for a second. We were extremely stealthy."

Skye scoffed.

The sound of a key turning in the front door reverberated through the polished wood hallway.

"Did you convince Coulson to let us get our old D.W.A.R.F.s out of the archive, Leo?" Jemma's familiar voice called from the hall.

"They're waiting for us at Desierto de Atacama Airport, Jem," he called back.

"Then quick!" cried her disembodied voice excitedly. "Let's say goodbye to the kids and go get on that flight!"

Skye noticed a bunch of keys resting on their pile of passports on the bench top. The key ring was marked Haggis. Her eyebrows skyrocketed. "You're taking The Flying Haggis back to the desert, aren't you?"

But Fitz had disappeared into the hallway before she'd even finished her sentence.

Skye peered around the doorjamb to find her two friends locked in a passionate embrace – Fitz's hand splayed across the small of Jemma's back, her fingers wound into the curls at the nape of his neck.

"Sheesh, I hope I find someone who'll still kiss me like that after ten years of marriage," Skye exclaimed.

Without the slightest pausing of their ardent activity, Jemma briefly raised one arm in greeting and then wound it once more around her adoring husband's neck.

"Fine," Skye called back laughing. "If you need me I'll be outside with my babysitting charges." She paused half-way through the kitchen. "You're not planning on making another one while you're out there in the desert, are you?"

She heard a husky chuckle from Fitz.

"I get it," Skye sighed. "You totally are. Well, my rates go up with each additional child. Keep that in mind when you're budgeting for your fifteenth anniversary. It's not every family that can afford an Avenger as a babysitter!"

Out in the hallway, Jemma scattered a succession of feathery kisses across her beloved's throat, standing on tiptoe to reach her lips all the way up to his ear. "Wild nights, Leo," she whispered, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

"Mmmm," Fitz moaned. "Luxury."

Blast off! THE END!

Thanks, all you lovely people for following my FitzSimmons adventures all this way! And if you've enjoyed even a little bit of it, I will regard it as the equivalent of you sending me an awesome present if you'd leave a little review and tell me so!

And can you believe I still have no new M.A.O.S. episodes in my part of the world? So please, if you do ever so kindly leave a review, please ever so kindly leave any spoilers out of it! I am in a blissful delusion that elsewhere in the world, FitzSimmons have snogged in at least one episode and it's out there waiting for me to watch. I know, I know – delusion x10! My better half has us watching Guardians of the Galaxy next on the Marvel timeline and then there are only the first ten eps of S2 before I'll follow your breadcrumb trails to somewhere we can download all the new eps and indulge!

Thanks to my faithful reviewers who have reviewed almost every single chapter along the way! That has made this whole thing SO much fun for me.

I now take my version of the adorkable FitzSimmons and wander with them off into the sunset.

Hasta luego! xx

ooo

P.S. Tuesday 7th April

A day or two ago I posted an additional chapter after this one but I just deleted it coz it was a bit rubbish. Apologies to those of you who went and read it! It's gone now - I've made things right. Obviously, I was struggling to go cold-turkey after finishing such a mammoth story. Got to find a way to wean myself off fanfic for a little while – baby steps, hey?

Anyway, good news for those out there who had offered their kind condolences – Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will be back on my telly as of this Wednesday night! We cannot wait! It'll be so good to be back in the land of the M.A.O.S. present. Well, almost. I'll still be scrupulously avoiding spoilers…

Right, so, I intend to be gone for a while now but, just in case I struggle, I am allowing myself the contingency plan of returning to my little By My Side project which was the catalyst for this whole Flying Haggis thing in the first place. Back in that original story I was publishing a one-shot at the end of each new episode in which I tried to write my way towards a happy ending for FitzSimmons, regardless of how dire everything looked in that episode. Feel free to join me some time after Thursday. Probably the only thing that will stop me will be seeing Fitz and Simmons deliriously happy and together. Fat chance, I know!

Also, if you like Marvel stuff, you might like a story I wrote called Teens, Genes, Smithereens which is about Spiderman and Gwen. It picks up a year after the end of the first movie. Or perhaps you might enjoy Loki in the Library which is about what Loki gets up to when he is banished to Midgard after the events of the first Avengers movie. And yay! We get to see Avengers II soon! I'll try to save up my next mammoth story for after that... Xx