Chapter Text
It was the eighteenth day of their temporary reassignment, and Fitz was rapidly beginning to hate the smell of strawberry-rhubarb filling. Jemma clearly had no such problems since she was preparing to make another batch. Grinning all the while, she held a bowl full of rotting strawberries out to him.
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” he offered wearily, knowing what her response was going to be.
“We’ve done the tests, Fitz. The fruit is safe to eat once you revive it – not a single cellular abnormality in any of them. Come on, it saves us so much time on grocery shopping!” She bounced on the balls of her feet, and her dress flapped up a little in the breeze. Jemma had taken to the assignment like she usually did to complicated dissections. Her undercover character was very girly and dressed like a co-ed from the 1950’s, and it was driving Fitz more than a little insane.
She pointedly pushed the bowl towards him; he sighed and began gingerly tapping all of the strawberries, wincing at the small bursts of energy released from his fingertip.
If he had never entered that warehouse, he would never have gained the power to return the dead to the living (for sixty seconds at a time), and he would never have needed to go undercover as a shop owner for his own safety. Jemma and Fitz were working on fixing his new power (or “illness,” as he insisted) from the lab hidden in their shared apartment above the pie shop, but it was taking longer than they’d hoped. With these limited resources they weren’t sure how long they’d have to stay here. Fitz missed the Bus, and the team, but he missed being normal most of all. Well, as normal as a multi-doctorate-holding engineering genius could be, anyway.
The front bell tinkled, and Fitz looked eagerly up to see May striding through the door. Wednesdays were their debrief days and usually the best part of the week. Any time he could afford to focus on something close to real science or a mission was a luxury these days.
In keeping with their secret identities, May was wearing a trench coat and fedora straight out of a noir film. Fitz wasn’t exactly sure how this helped her keep a low profile, but he’d leave the costume decisions to the professionals. (After all, Jemma had mentioned that Skye had helped her brainstorm the fashion of her own undercover character, and despite his general bitterness about the whole affair, Fitz had to admit that there was something to be said for fitted vintage dresses.)
May matter-of-factly checked all of the olive-green booths for nonexistent customers, turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and then sat at the pie bar. (Jemma spent a lot of time fretting about their lackluster advertising budget, but Fitz was rather less invested in the financial success of this ill-conceived endeavor.) All of this was done in May’s typical silence while Jemma fetched something from the kitchen and Fitz stood awkwardly to the side, hands firmly buried in his pockets.
Jemma plopped a plate of freshly baked pie in front of May and then untied her apron. “Any good news?”
May dug into the pie and shook her head. “Skye’s still trying to track down the Hydra front that rented the warehouse, and Coulson isn’t having any luck figuring out who knows about Fitz – or how they found out.” She glanced over to where he was standing a few feet behind Jemma, his arms pulled tightly into his body. “And we had to go after an oh-eight-four last week.”
Fitz groaned in frustration. “Come on, May! I’m going crazy here. There are only so many products I can engineer without my actual lab. Or a real mission budget. While also spending most of the day baking pies for hungry customers.”
“Is he showing any negative side effects?” May addressed the question to Jemma, who shook her head.
“He passes his tests with flying colors. He’s healthy as a horse.”
“A horse that can bring back the dead,” he muttered.
“I’m sorry Fitz, but we’ve got lives to save, in addition to figuring out what happened to you. Be grateful Jemma refused to leave your side –” Fitz wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw May glance approvingly at her. “Otherwise you’d be undercover here alone.”
Fitz glared down at the overly-cheerfully-colored floor tiles and set his jaw. “Is that all, then?”
May handed her plate back to Jemma, who bustled over to the kitchen. “Actually, I’ve got a short mission for you.” Both Jemma and Fitz turned back to her in unison, puzzled. “One of our leads was killed two days ago, and we need to get some information from him –”
“Oh, no, absolutely not –”
May talked over Fitz’s objections. “So we need you to bring him back for us.”
He stared at her, mouth gaping, and glanced at Jemma for back up. “What happened to being undercover Agent May?! Isn’t that the point of this ridiculous charade?”
She stood and gave him a humorless smile. “We just need those sixty seconds.”
Fitz rubbed his eyes in exasperation. “Right, so you want me to bring someone back and then kill them again. That sounds perfectly morally acceptable.”
“We talked about that, Fitz,” Jemma interrupted gently. “You can’t kill someone who was already dead.” She reached for his arm in a familiar gesture of comfort, but Fitz jerked away, stumbling back over an errant chair. Jemma flinched, but retracted her hand.
This was the worst part of the whole thing, Fitz reflected bitterly. He couldn’t touch Jemma – she insisted whatever had happened to him wasn’t contagious, but he refused to take the chance. Until they figured out what was wrong with him, Fitz couldn’t touch his best friend (or maybe something more, a part of his brain whispered), and it was slowly killing him. They’d always been inseparable, but now there was this invisible barrier between them and he was terrified it would change things forever.
May and Jemma were both watching him carefully. He sighed and untied his apron. “Fine. Let’s go raise the dead.”
Jemma nodded reassuringly at him as he followed May to the door. “Stand down, Sleepy,” she called, and the small drone hovering in the kitchen floated onto the mat that acted as the DWARF’s de-facto bed.
Fitz held the door open for her as Jemma followed him out, and he tried not to shrink away from her too noticeably. He’d wake the dead and bake pies, but he certainly wasn’t going to be happy about it.
------
At that moment in the city morgue, the chill was seeping through Fitz’s cardigan, the smell of formaldehyde was tickling uncomfortably at his nose, and Jemma was refusing to stand a safe distance away from him. Today was not one of the good Wednesdays.
He had his arms crossed so tightly across his chest that it was restricting his own breathing, but this didn’t stop him from flinching when she stepped around him to inspect one of the newer corpses. As Fitz wondered idly about the benefits of dressing in a full hazmat suit every day, May pulled the door to the morgue shut and twisted the shutters closed.
“Okay, the coroner’s agreed to give us five minutes in here. Luckily for him we won’t even need that much.” May strode over to the corpse on the middle tray, flicked the blue sheet back, and turned expectantly to Fitz.
“Are you sure we really want to do this, May? Do you remember what happened the last time...” He trailed off, trying to suppress his own memories of violent screams and blood oozing across a singed concrete floor as he watched an unfamiliar SHIELD agent drop dead. Fitz had learned about the sixty-second limit the hard way.
May clicked the safety off on her icer and aimed the weapon at the corpse’s head. “I’ve got your back.”
“It’s gonna be okay, Fitz,” Jemma murmured, raising a hand towards him before she remembered and pushed her hair behind her ear instead. She tried smiling encouragingly; all this did was distract Fitz from the task at hand.
He shook his head and trudged over to the slick steel table, rolling up his sleeves as he went. The man under the sheet had three ginormous, sewn-up slashes across his chest, and Fitz swallowed the bile that crept up the back of his throat. Taking a deep breath, he started the timer on his watch and pressed one finger to the man’s chest, shivering at the unnerving snap of yellow energy that sent life and consciousness pulsing through the once-dead body.
The corpse blinked his blood-shot eyes and leaned up on his elbows, bursting one of the stitches and spraying a mixture of chemicals and blood at Fitz’s feet. “Whoa, that was one intense nap.”
Jemma rushed forward then and drew the man’s attention away from Fitz, who could feel a certain kind of greenness creeping up his neck.
“Hello there, I’m very sorry to say that you died two days ago, and we’d like to know if you happen to know why.” She smiled in a bedside-manner kind of way, and Fitz reminded himself to thank her later when he didn’t feel ill. He’d never have been able to do any of this without her.
“Aw shit,” the man exclaimed, and swung his legs over the edge of the table, sending one of his feet clear across the room. “Oops. – Does this mean I don’t get to go to Asgard?”
May frowned, having adjusted herself so that the icer was still pointing squarely at his head. “Asgard?”
“Yeah! Man, I heard that the chicks up there are smokin’ hot aliens, you know what I’m saying?” He winked at Fitz, who just glanced nervously down at his timer.
“Thirty-four seconds left.”
“Who said you could go to Asgard? And for doing what?”
“There was this attack on a rogue SHIELD team a few months back – you heard of it?” May nodded. Jemma glanced nervously at Fitz; there was only one attack he could be talking about. “Yeah, so there was this Asgardian altar stone that Hydra had smuggled out of SHIELD, and that’s what drew them there –”
The team members glanced at each other. “What did the stone do?” May asked.
“Heal the dead, I think? Yeah, pretty sure. Kinda hard to remember when my intestines are threatening to squeeze right out over here, ya know what I mean?”
“Thirteen seconds, May.”
“What happened to the stone? Who brought it there?”
“Got blown up in the attack. Real shame. Think about how many people that could save. Oliver Charles was the one who ordered the stone, but I don’t think he–” Fitz slapped his hand to the man’s face and winced as yellow sparks instantly drained the life out of the person sitting in front of him. The corpse thudded backwards onto the table, and there was silence.
Fitz wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve while May and Jemma shifted the body back and covered it again with the sheet. “Well that’s good, isn’t it?” Jemma said, unconsciously picking at the creases of her dress.
“Not exactly,” replied May, putting the final touches on returning everything to its original place before going straight to the door.
“Why not?” Fitz slid past Jemma to get to May and shoved his hands back into his pockets.
May wrapped the trench tighter around herself and turned back before opening the door. “Because Oliver Charles died in a car accident two weeks ago.”
------
Fitz slammed open the front door to the pie shop so hard that it set off Sleepy’s alarm. The DWARF was set to guard the door to their apartment and lab when they were gone, which Fitz had forgotten in his anger. As he managed to get the damn thing shut off, Jemma and May followed him through the door. He took one look at May and turned on his heels.
“I cannot believe you just made me do that!”
“It’s for your sake, Fitz!” May called after him, but he had already rounded the corner into the kitchen.
He didn’t leave, not really – he just needed a minute to catch his breath and scrub the memory of the second corpse’s leathery, decomposing flesh from his mind. Jemma, of course, had just talked to the rotting body like she might to any other acquaintance; he could practically hear the gears turning in her head the whole time they were at Oliver Charles’ grave. Being able to study someone he’d returned to life was Jemma’s greatest desire these days, but since the only person he’d accidentally kept alive had been killed again shortly thereafter, she was unlikely to have the chance.
“That wasn’t fair, May.”
Fitz could hear them in the dining area and wondered how long he could go without talking to anyone ever again. Especially not dead people.
“I wanted to see if his mood had an effect on it.”
Jemma pulled a stool out at the pie bar; he heard the steel feet scratch across the tile. “He can pretty much revive the fruit whenever he wants, as far as I can tell. It’s why I started using the rotten fruit, to test that. His mood doesn’t matter – although he’s pretty much been grumpy ever since we got here.”
May sighed. “I don’t blame him. Of all the superpowers…”
“It’s not a superpower,” Fitz interjected, startling Jemma, and emerged from behind the kitchen wall. “It’s an illness and we’re going to fix it. We have to.” Neither of the other two responded. He kicked weakly at a nearby chair. “We have to.”
After a moment, May strode over to him, making deliberate eye contact. “You may not have liked it, but today was the first big break we’ve had in the case in weeks. Oliver Charles had the information Skye needs to locate the Hydra front, now we know what caused it, and Coulson can see if he can swing any help from Asgard in getting this settled.”
He leaned back against the pie bar, only a couple of feet away from Jemma, and pushed his hands as far into his pockets as they’d go. “Right.”
“We’re all working on it Fitz. We want you back on the Bus, too. Okay?” He nodded and exhaled in frustration. “I have to get back,” she said, heading for the door. “Bye, Simmons –” May turned to Fitz and gave him one of her rare smiles. “Pie-maker.” Then she disappeared through the front door with a tip of her hat, the OPEN sign swishing forward as the door closed behind her.
“I like that,” Jemma said, grinning, “Fitz the pie-maker."
“More like Fitz the dead-waker,” he deadpanned, and flicked on Sleepy’s chameleon setting from his watch. As he escaped into the kitchen, he heard Jemma sigh before the welcome bell tinkled, signaling new customers and a return to their undercover personas.
Before he rounded the corner into the kitchen, he watched her for a moment, taking in the ease with which undercover-Jemma made people feel welcome and comfortable. That had never been him; he always seemed to put people off, either by making them feel stupid or by simply talking too much.
The woman in front of him right now, taking orders in the salmon-polka-dot dress and matching kitten heels, was almost nothing like his best friend, the girl who stole his cardigans and got cold in the dead of summer. But later that night, he knew she’d throw a lab coat on over the dress and put on horrendously ugly plaid slippers, and she’d reappear – his Jemma. The one he knew better than any other person in the world. And she would reach over him with bare arms, to grab her notes or a sample, completely ignoring the fact that there were new boundaries to their friendship now. Fitz wasn’t sure if he was more worried for her safety or angry that things had changed.
------
A few hours later, there was a lull in the shop after a large crowd of teenagers left, and Fitz noticed that Jemma was missing. He called for her up the stairs to their lab-apartment, and peeked out the back of the shop. She wasn’t in the alley behind the store, but he heard faint music that seemed to be coming from the front of the shop.
When Fitz stepped around to the storefront, he saw a slim figure wearing a full-length plastic protective suit – that puffed out around a layered skirt – and holding a small nozzle of insecticide. The figure was dancing in tune to 90’s pop music and clearly had no idea Fitz had found her. He grinned as she hopped back and forth while eradicating some dire insect threat in the cracks of their storefront. A peppy female singer crooned on camouflaged Sleepy’s radio, giving the impression that the music was coming out of thin air.
After a moment, Fitz cleared his throat; Jemma turned her mask-covered head and flicked off the insecticide.
“Fitz!” spoke the muffled voice, and Fitz gestured at her mask. “Oh,” she laughed, and lifted off the plastic headpiece, static making her hair stick up in ways that would normally require large amounts of humidity. Jemma was smiling, cheeks flushed, and she reached out to Fitz with a gloved hand. “Dance with me, Fitz!”
He glanced skeptically at the full-length protective wear and chuckled. “What?”
“Come on, I don’t think I’ve seen you smile in weeks. You know it’s important to relax in the field.”
Before he could protest again, Jemma grabbed his hands and started doing this silly, twisting dance to the rhythm of the music. Reluctantly, Fitz let her pull him along, reminding himself that she was completely covered and he probably couldn’t transfer anything to her skin through the thick, white plastic.
He thought he recognized the song; a sappy pop one his mother used to love singing loudly and out of tune in their living room when he was a kid. A song he’d once listened to at a school dance while watching the first girl who gave him butterflies in his stomach. Fitz didn’t generally like this kind of music – more saccharine than the confectioner’s sugar they used to top their key lime pie – but Jemma was dancing with such inelegant abandon that it began to grow on him.
She started doing this little hoppy two-step, going from one of his sides to the other, the plastic tickling his bare arms, and Fitz had to laugh. At the way her hair was growing fuzzier by the second, the way the strange white suit bobbed separately from her body, almost of its own accord, and at the way she was looking up at him with this pure, unabashed trust and happiness he couldn’t quite understand.
Jemma chuckled in return and twirled around him in a circle. “See, a laugh! That wasn’t so hard, was it?” The song changed and she started doing a funny old dance Fitz had only seen in movies from the 60’s, holding her nose and waving her hand up in the air like she was swimming. At that, he doubled over, full out laughing, and Jemma broke down, too, both leaning against each other under the protection of the over-large suit.
Once they caught their breaths, and wiped a way a couple errant giggle-tears, Fitz smiled down at Jemma. “Thanks – I needed that.”
“I know.” She grinned back at him and traipsed through the front door, insect spray in tow and nearly-invisible-Sleepy floating after her. Fitz took a deep breath and glanced up at the cloudless, darkening sky, feeling suddenly that life as a pie maker with Jemma at his side might not be so terrible after all.