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FitzSimmons
Skye’s generally not a light sleeper—it’s actually kind of a burden, when you think about it because she has a hard time falling asleep, but then she actually sleeps and it’s like she’s out for the count: you could blow up parts of, to use an example here that’s completely hypothetical and didn’t happen last June, parts of a C-130 and it would still take Simmons desperately shaking her shoulder and shouting, “Skye! Skye, we have to go now, we have to get out of here!” and she would still be groggy and have a hard time waking up. And her S.O. is always reminding her that she needs to develop better sleeping habits and needs to learn ‘sleeping wakefulness,’ like that’s actually possible—but when she hears muffled voices in the corridor outside of her tiny sleeping cabin, she actually opens her eyes and blinks at the door a couple of times in surprise.
What on earth are Fitz and Simmons doing in the hallway? Shouldn’t they be in the lab or sleeping? It’s just shy of six in the morning. The only ones that are up at this hour are Ward because he’s a machine when it comes to having regular hours, and May because they’re still flying.
But she’s awake, so she picks up the laptop that had served the dual purpose of rendering her files and acting as a night light and she puts that on her little desk, strapping it down absently. And then she finger-combs her hair. Living in close quarters with the dude you find insanely hot is somehow both intimate and intimidating because it means he gets to see you at two a.m. when you’ve scrubbed off your makeup and your hair looks like one of the pets Simmons keeps adopting has built a nest in it. So a little maintenance before she wanders out for her morning pee break is in order.
When she slides her door open, she’s surprised to see that the scientists are still in the corridor, arguing. Or she supposes they’re arguing because Fitz’s face is mutinous and Simmons looks exasperated, but the minute her door opens, they shut up and turn toward her at once.
“Good morning,” Skye says, breaking to yawn. “Also, that twin thing gets creepy sometimes.”
“We’re not twins,” they both say at the same time, which, hello, proves her point exactly.
Fitz pouts a little, but Simmons forcibly brightens. “Good morning, Skye! Did you sleep well?”
“Uh, it was okay,” Skye says. Something is hinky. “No nightmares, which is good. You? Wait, did you even sleep?”
Simmons chuckles like she’s made the greatest joke ever. The woman needs to get better at lying. Why can’t Ward work on that instead of nagging Skye about sleeping wakefulness? “Of course we slept. Why wouldn’t we have?”
“Slept like puppies, really,” Fitz says. “Really...sleepy puppies?”
“Okay,” Skye says. “I’m just going to—” She points to the lav door behind Fitz. “Yeah.”
“Oh! Oh, right! Right.” The wonder twins squeeze to either side of the corridor rather than one of them just stepping behind the other, so Skye warily steps through. Both of them watch her with too-bright smiles as she closes the bathroom door.
“Okay,” she says under her breath because she knows Fitz has the hearing of a supersonic monkey (they know this to be true because they actually created a supersonic monkey and then Simmons ran tests), “that was just weird.”
Two seconds later, there’s a knock on the door. Warily, Skye opens it an inch. Fitz’s smile fills the crack. “What do you want for breakfast?” he asks.
Breakfast? She just woke up, that kind of decision making is still at least forty-five minutes and a cup of coffee away. “I’ll figure something out when I get to the kitchen,” she says.
“No, no, it’s your—I mean, we want to make you breakfast. So what do you want?”
“You don’t have to make me breakfast, really. It’s fine.”
“No—no, I want to.” He grimaces like somebody’s just elbowed him. “We want to make you breakfast. So, really, what would you like? Please?”
Skye has to blink at that one a couple of times. “Did I wake up in bizarro world?”
Simmons nudges her cohort aside so that Skye can see her face just under Fitz’s. “How about pancakes? I think we’ve got some raspberries and—oh, chocolate chips. Chocolate chip pancakes! Doesn’t that sound divine?”
“Uh, sure, pancakes sound good. And coffee. Now, um, if you don’t mind? I kind of have to pee.”
“Pancakes and coffee, coming up!” And the scientists scamper off so quickly that it’s almost like they disapparate.
Twenty minutes later, she stares at a veritable tower of raspberry and chocolate chip pancakes on the plate in front of her and says, “Um, wow.”
Fitz and Simmons stand on the other side of the table, and Simmons is actually wringing her hands. Fitz has a little dab of flour on the tip of his nose. They both look like children eager to please a teacher or something. Indeed, Fitz asks, “Do you like? Do you think that’s enough?”
To feed an army or at least Ward? Definitely. To feed Skye, it’s way too much. “It’s great,” Skye says, and she’s not lying so much as she’s really confused. She squints at them over the pancakes (she has to crane her neck to do so). “Do you two...want something? Like a favor? Or help hiding a dead body? Because you know you don’t have to bribe me for that. I got your back.”
“What? No, nothing like that. No dead bodies here. Though your offer is appreciated, of course.” Simmons is flustered, but it’s not her lying-flustered, it’s just general-flustered. “We just wanted to do something nice for you. Because...reasons.”
“Okay, then,” Skye says. Something is definitely, definitely up.
She’s saved by the appearance of Coulson and Ward, who both blink at the stack of pancakes. “Oh, good, you’re here,” Skye says quickly, and she dishes the flapjacks onto some of the other plates on the table before Fitz and Simmons can offer to make them anything. “Fitz and Simmons cooked us breakfast! Wasn’t that thoughtful of them?”
“Well, actually, we cooked it for you, but…” Simmons visibly wavers when Skye holds up a plate with three pancakes on it (she’s picked ones that have extra raspberries, which she knows is Simmons’s weakness as much as it is hers). “But I suppose sharing is caring, yes.”
Fitz gives her a look like she’s a traitor, but Skye bribes him with pancakes that have extra chocolate chips. It speaks about just how many pancakes they made her that when Melinda comes in ten minutes later, there’s still a giant stack with her name on it (literally: Skye was bored and messing around with the syrup).
Skye still has no idea what’s going on, but she can’t deny that the pancakes are delicious.
Ward
They’re between an asset-retrieval op and whatever the next mission from HQ is, so today’s a transit day to the nearest SHIELD base large enough for ops. Transit days generally mean that the team is free to do whatever they want: Simmons and Fitz catch up on whatever science thing they’re into at the moment, Melinda flies the plane and gets some tai chi in, Coulson coulsons around, and...well, Skye doesn’t get transit days off. Skye has to train with Ward. Not that she really minds. She’s building some serious muscle like whoa that makes wearing a tank top all sorts of fun, and she kind of likes being the fourth-most dangerous person in the room if her team is there and the most dangerous if she’s at a local bar somewhere by herself.
She grew up fighting the system from the fringes, but thanks to Ward’s training, she can kind of fight the system from the middle, too. Provided “the system” refers to drunken assholes at a bar somewhere.
So after her giant breakfast, she wanders down to the gym, already stretching her triceps and biceps. It’s Wednesday, which means lots of time with the heavy bag, and she wants to hit harder than she did before. Coulson says Captain America regularly breaks the heavy bag. Skye’s just happy to make it move a little.
She pulls up short. Ward isn’t in the gym. He always beats her there, but it’s empty.
Her first thought is wondering if they’ve got a mission, but then she spots the note taped to the heavy bag. Curious, she wanders over.
LOUNGE is all it says. But then she flips it over and reads, Bring the popcorn.
“What pop—oh, huh.” She spots the giant bowl on the weight bench and with a shrug, picks it up. This must be some kind of specialized training. The popcorn bowl’s probably there so that she has something messy in her hands. If he attacks her, it’s going to be a pain in the ass to pick up all of the popcorn. But she grabs it gamely and heads for the lounge, ready for an attack.
He doesn’t attack her when she steps into the lounge. He’s sitting on the couch with his socked feet up on the coffee table. Fitz and Simmons are there, too, the latter frowning studiously at her tablet. “Uh, hey?” Skye asks. “What’s going on?”
Ward holds up a stack of DVDs. “Movie day,” he says. “Your choice.”
“Seriously?” Skye asks, and then she actually looks at the stack he’s holding out. And though he doesn’t attack her, the popcorn nearly goes flying. “Holy shitake mushrooms, how on earth did you find a copy of Gamera vs. Zigra? I didn’t think anybody had that.”
“Level Seven,” Ward says smugly, and she wants to tell him that’s not a cute look for him, but it’s not fair because it totally is. “There are also such classics as Kronos, Yamata no Orochi no Gyakushu, and Daigoro vs. Goliath.”
“Hot damn,” Skye says, and she swaps the popcorn for the DVDs. “Is there where you tell me about the tumor I have that I don’t know about?”
“Huh?” Ward asks, and even Simmons looks up from her tablet at this.
“You’re letting me skip heavy bag time,” Skye says, pointing at Ward. The finger moves to Simmons. “You offered to make me pancakes, and you actually made me pancakes.” The finger lands on Fitz. “So something is definitely up. Tell me what it is. Am I dying? Being transferred? Did Victoria Hand actually succeed in getting me thrown off the Bus again and this is my last hurrah?”
“We can’t be nice to you?” Ward asks before he tosses back a handful of popcorn.
“There’s nice and there’s ‘you’re probably about to die so we’re going to make your last hours on earth as comfortable as possible,’” Skye says.
She sees the three of them exchange a look. “Or you could have dropped a thousand references to monster movies that none of us have ever understood, and we got curious,” Ward says. “It’s a transit day, so that’s a good time to do a marathon.”
“Whose idea was this?”
Ward opens his mouth, probably to lie, but Fitz and Simmons both point at him immediately. “But we do really want to see some of these,” Fitz says. He gives her a winning smile. “We like knowing what you’re interested in, see? Teammates.”
He holds his hand up for a fist-bump and he’s so cute that Skye reaches around the couch (and Ward) to lightly knock knuckles with him. Simmons apparently thinks this is great fun, for she also gives Skye a fist-bump.
“So,” Ward, who has not asked for a fist-bump, says. “Which movie first?”
“Uh, duh. Gamera vs. Zigra, of course. It is going to blow your minds.” After putting the movie in, Skye plops down on the couch because a) Ward and b) popcorn. Actually, that should be a) popcorn and b) Ward, but she doesn’t care. “Rules of the movie marathon: you are allowed to mock as much as you want, as long as you recognize that this is a legitimate film genre and that there is at least an attempt at a plot, understand?”
“Are we allowed to make fun of the special effects, at least?” Ward asks, stretching out further. He has a hole in the toe of his sock, which surprises Skye. She would have assumed he’s either the guy that knows how to mend his own socks because it seems like a Boy Scout-ish thing to do, or he would just toss holey socks. But nope, she can see his little toe sort of peeking out there. It makes him seem way more human than normal.
Also, he really has nice feet. She knows that because of the whole insanely close quarters thing.
“Skye?” It takes her a minute to realize that Ward is saying her name.
She jerks her head back. “What? Oh, sorry, drifted a bit. Yes, you can make fun of the cheesy special effects. That’s half the point of watching monster movies.”
“And the other half?” Ward asks.
“The monsters, duh,” Skye says like it’s really obvious because duh, it really is. And then she thinks about Simmons over there with her tablet in her lap. “And yes, for this one marathon, scientific discussion of monster creation and origin is acceptable.”
Simmons looks up with utter joy on her face. “Do you mean it?” she asks, and Fitz nudges her. The two share one of those telepathic looks they’re good at and Simmons sighs and digs out what she calls a ‘fiver’ to pass over to him.
Ward and Skye raise their eyebrows at the two.
“I told her you’d say that,” Fitz tells Skye. He waves the bill triumphantly. “We bet five quid on it.”
“Uh...huh,” Skye says. She doesn’t know if she’s ever been close enough to anybody that they would bet five of anything on what she might do or say. But even though she’s puzzled as hell, she kind of likes the warm, tickly feeling that spreads from her stomach to the back of her throat. “I’m glad I could help you win that money, Fitz.”
He salutes her with the five-pound note as Ward uses the remote to dim the lights. And then the opening credits of Gamera vs. Zigra roll across their super-awesome TV screen, and it turns out that SHIELD technology doesn’t even have limits because for the first time ever, the movie looks amazing. It’s five hundred times better than beating fruitlessly at the heavy bag while Ward offers helpful tips like how to bring more power up from her hips. Ward shares the popcorn, angling the bowl toward her and then toward the geeks alternately, and even though breakfast was very filling, she munches away, just reveling in the sheer cheesiness that is old monster movies.
The best part is that halfway through Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Ward rests his arm along the back of the couch and she’s able to lean in, just a little bit, while Fitz and Simmons discuss what they would actually do if they were called to take on somebody that had inexplicably grown to ten times a human height, and Ward offers less than helpful tips.
It’s really nice, though she knows something is up.
Melinda May
It turns out that three really bad monster movies is all that Ward and the scientists can handle, so after Reptillicus, Ward makes an excuse about needing to do inventory on the armory—“For the last time, Fitz, I’m not calling it the ‘Boom Boom Cabinet!’”—and Fitz and Simmons, looking highly speculative about what they would do if Danish miners actually uncovered a giant flying reptile, head off to their lab, leaving Skye to her own devices, which in this case means her laptop and all of the feeds she’s ‘innocently’ monitoring about the Rising Tide.
She parted ways with them when they tried to kill Simmons and Ward in May, but she likes to keep her ear to the ground about these things.
But there’s nothing of interest on any of the channels and even hacking Ward’s Netflix queue and adding Gamera vs. Guiron as revenge for a comment he made about Gamera during the first movie doesn’t hold much appeal. Plus, everybody’s acting strange today, always giving her these sideways little looks when they think she isn’t paying attention.
Her solution is to find the one person on the Bus who isn’t acting strange (besides Coulson. Coulson’s always strange).
Melinda’s in the cockpit, right where Skye expects to find her. She’s wearing her aviators and gazing out across the horizon and not for the first time, Skye wonders what she sees out there. Things that might kill them? Probably.
She never asks. She probably never will.
“Strap in if you’re staying in here,” Melinda says.
“Is it cool? I’m just,” Skye gestures at her laptop, the indomitable Siegfried, “browsing.”
Melinda doesn’t answer, which from her is basically an affirmative. So Skye settles into the copilot’s seat, setting the laptop on the little ledge that Coulson had built in for her last time they took the Bus in for repairs. She checks Yamblr and her tracked tags almost listlessly, but there haven’t been any new Avengers sightings and she’s got all of her fandoms black-listed because the pilots are coming out this week and she doesn’t want to get spoiled. So her dashboard is almost entirely blue at the moment.
She sits back with a sigh.
Melinda glances over. “Something on your mind?”
“Is something going on?” Skye asks. “Am I dying?”
“Not to my knowledge. Why do you ask?”
“It’s just—FitzSimmons. They made me breakfast this morning.”
“Hm.”
“And they were kind of insistent about it, you know? Like, they really, really wanted to make me breakfast. I don’t know why. I haven’t done anything like jumped out of a plane or saved somebody’s life recently.”
“Maybe they just appreciate you.” Melinda’s voice is bone-dry, and Skye figures there’s probably a less-than-subtle insult in there, but she’s learned that with Melinda, you can just take things at face value and they usually mean the same thing. The woman’s just got a talent.
“And then there was the movies. Ward let me skip heavy bag day in our training routine and instead we all watched a bunch of monster movies that I’m pretty sure bored everybody else out of their gourd. I mean, I liked them. Hell, I loved them. But did I miss the memo that today is Be Nice to Skye Day?”
“I didn’t see a memo.”
“Uh-huh,” Skye says, and she knows that’s not a denial.
“But if it’s Be Nice to Skye Day,” Melinda says, her voice still dry, “I suppose this is when I let you get some flying time in.”
Actual flying time? Melinda’s shown her the basics, mostly because Skye spends a lot of the time in the cockpit (being around Melinda’s sense of absolute quiet is actually really soothing; Skye gets some great hacking down). But she’s never actually outright offered to let Skye fly the plane. “I can’t tell if you’re kidding,” Skye says, squinting. “You have the world’s greatest poker face.”
“Thank you.” Melinda leans back and crosses her arms and that’s all of the clue that Skye gets that she’s supposed to take over.
She yelps and grabs the yoke. “Are you serious right now?”
“Let’s see how you do, kid,” Melinda says.
Skye can’t help it: she lets out a whoop and immediately begins checking dials and gauges. If it is Be Nice to Skye Day, there’s no reason she has to let it go to waste now, is there?
Coulson
She gets the text shortly before dinner, and since she figured it out, she’s been dreading it. Coulson’s about to yell at her, she’s sure. What it is, she has no idea. After flying with Melinda and a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup—another favorite, this time prepared by Ward for everybody—she spent the entire afternoon racking her brain, trying to figure out what she could have done so wrong that Coulson would come down on her like a load of bricks and that the team feels they have to soften the blow for with these little surprises.
The text is short and to the point: My office. Now.
“Welp,” she says to Siegfried before she closes his lid, “time to face the music, I guess.”
She really hopes she didn’t screw up as much as she suspects she did.
The Bus is quiet, and she figures everybody has already off-loaded and has gone to their quarters in the base (she’s not fond of staying on base; she likes the Bus because it reminds her of her van, transient and yet still home.
She really hopes that she can continue to live on the Bus.
She climbs the spiral staircase to Coulson’s little aerie of an office with the dread coiling in her stomach like a snake made out of lead. Out of politeness, she knocks, but she immediately sticks her head in. “You seriously cannot fire me, Coulson, you need me like the desert flower needs that minimal bit of moisture it gets per year and—whoa, what the hell?”
None of her team has actually left the Bus, she sees right away, because they’ve all somehow managed to fit themselves into Coulson’s office (not easily: Jemma’s squeezed up against the wall to avoid bumping into Melinda, and Ward looks distinctly uncomfortable about being wedged between Fitz and a cabinet) and they’re all standing around his desk, upon which is...a green-frosted cupcake with a single candle?
And suddenly it occurs to her that there’s a reason her team might have been nice to her all day. The cupcake is evidence enough.
As is the fact that they all shout, “Happy birthday!”
Skye just blinks in shock. “Uh, guys, it’s not my birthday. My birthday’s in—”
“That was the birthday St. Agnes gave you,” Coulson says, and his Coulsony smile is even brighter than usual.
“And we know you hate that one,” Simmons pipes up from behind Melinda. “So we thought—”
“It’s one year since our team formed,” Fitz says, finishing her sentence for her. “And it’s kind of perfect, isn’t it? How it all matches up?”
Skye can only gape at that. She hadn’t realized time had flown so quickly. Their team has been together for a year? Already? It feels like just yesterday, she was making vague threats about all of the things she could hack to Coulson, who of course merely gave her that indulgent I’m a secret agent smile he always did.
“A new birthday?” she asks, not sure she can believe it.
“You did once refer to New SHIELD Agent Skye as a phoenix rising from the ashes of Rising Tide Hacktivist Skye,” Ward says, and he’s giving her the Ward equivalent of a big smile. “Your words, not mine. Besides, you’re a hacker. Can’t you change your birthday to anything you want it to be?”
“Today has been particularly awesome,” Skye says, and suddenly she wants to cry because these are her teammates and they’re doing birthday things for her like an actual family, like her favorite meals and her favorite movies and there’s a cupcake with her favorite color frosting on the desk. But she pushes the tears back because crying kind of freaks Ward out.
“So what we’re saying here, Skye,” Coulson says, “is are you going to blow out your candle now?”
Because they’re all looking at her eagerly (even Melinda’s smiling), Skye leans over and blows out the candle. “Best birthday ever,” she says, seriously meaning it, “fear of getting fired or dying from a brain tumor aside, that is. You guys are the best.”
That’s apparently too much for Simmons, who sniffles and quasi-tackles her in a big hug, and of course Fitz joins in. Coulson wisely snatches the cupcake and sets it safely aside, and he gives her a hug right afterward. Even Ward steps up to get in on the action, though he’s still kind of stiff about giving hugs (which is adorable, in Skye’s opinion). She exchanges smiling nods with Melinda, and they’re all kind of standing there grinning. It’s a Moment.
Skye loves that she has Moments now.
“So if this is my new birthday, does that mean there’s a rocking party?” she asks. “With dancing? And margaritas?”
“Would we offer anything less?” Coulson asks.
Skye looks around. “Uh, in here? Because I gotta tell you, Ward needs some room to stretch out for his dance moves, A.C.”
Ward grimaces. It makes Skye laugh.
“Nope,” Coulson hands her the cupcake again. “There’s a place a couple of miles away that I’m told makes a mean margarita.”
“First round’s on Fitz,” Simmons says right away, “since he’s so rich now!”
The engineer makes an annoyed face, but he doesn’t actually say no, so laughing and chattering, they file out of Coulson’s office. Skye brings up the rear, as it’s hard to walk and eat her cupcake—pistachio, her favorite flavor—at the same time. They head for the cargo bay, where Ward and May do that little quick-walk thing they do where they each try to reach the driver’s side first. May wins. May always wins (but Ward’s not going to give up ever, which is one of the things Skye appreciates about him).
But when Skye starts to follow, Coulson says, “Think fast,” and tosses something her way.
She catches only because she’s a SHIELD agent with super reflexes now, and stares in absolute befuddlement at the keys in her hand. That Las Vegas keychain mean these are the keys to…but wait…
“You’re driving,” Coulson says.
“I get to drive Lola?”
Coulson puts on his sunglasses and gives her that secret agent smile again before he climbs into the passenger seat.
Skye lets it all marinate for a second—the true meaning of her awesome day, with raspberry and chocolate chip pancakes, the monster movie marathon, flying the Bus, the cupcake—and finally lets out the whoop that she’s pretty sure has been building in her chest since the cupcake. And then she takes a running leap, landing smoothly in Lola’s driver’s seat (Coulson only winces a little). “Do I get to pick the music?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
She grins. “Still the best birthday ever.”
“I know. Happy birthday, Skye.”