Chapter Text
“Three weeks?!”
“Shush, Leopold.”
Fitz tried his best not to look too irritated by the use of his first name, mumbling unintelligible things in his beard and looking away to avoid the frightfully stern look on his mother’s face. She knew how uncomfortable he was when she used his full name instead of Leo, and only did it when she was either crossed with him or about to be, which obviously never really boded well for him either ways.
Still, he thought he was quite in his rights to be slightly annoyed at her at the moment.
Three weeks, bloody hell.
They were standing in the middle of the hotel lobby, after quite an awful journey involving two separate flights next to his somehow very talkative mum, then a two-hour ride in a stinky bus with a toddler kicking his seat the entire time. And now, he had just learned that their stay was to last, instead of one week like his mum had said, three entire damned weeks.
Three weeks in the scorching heat of the French Riviera, that was basically torture. How could she do this to him? Was she punishing him for something? Did he accidentally forget to put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket and she was getting back at him for it? Ugh!
He would have much rather stayed at home in Glasgow with all his books and tools and projects and the very nice 17 to 19 degrees Celsius at most, thank you very much. He was pretty sure all the tiny hairs in his nostrils had already burned from the sudden wave of searing heat when they’d gotten out of the plane in Nice earlier. Alright, maybe it was a slight exaggeration from his part, but still, the temperatures here were at least ten to fifteen degrees too high for him. How his mum, who looked even more Scottish than he did, thought this would be a good idea, he didn’t know.
And he’d thought he’d inherited his genius brain from her. Clearly this had nothing to do with her after all. (Obviously he didn’t believe that, he was just very irritated at the moment.)
He waited impatiently as she talked through things with the receptionist, pestering quietly and pretending like nothing whenever she threw irritated glances at him. He was extremely glad for the air conditioning in the lobby and very intently hoped that there would be some in their room as well – God, three weeks stuck in a room with his mum. And she was obviously going to try and drag him into all her summer activities like hikes and shopping in town and yikes even go to the beach. He’d been fairly certain he’d be able to counter her attempts for a week, but for three weeks? Yeah, that wasn’t possible.
Ethel Fitz was a very persistent and stubborn woman.
And he definitely got his grumpiness from her, too.
Ugh, it didn’t help his bad mood at all that everyone around him seemed to be talking French! Granted, they were in France, so that made sense, but still. He’d never really been good at French, never quite took the time to learn it properly. Words were just too weird anyway, and he was much more interested in figuring out how things worked instead of learning an entirely new language. He had one, that was more than enough already.
He was lost in his thoughts trying to remember a few words of French – because he never really liked to admit that he didn’t know something – when a familiar accent grabbed his attention and he surreptitiously looked around to find whoever had talked. His eyes landed on a group of three people, a tall man with a brown mustache, a woman with a very large yellow hat, and a girl looking around his age with a nice smile and a pretty summer dress.
The three of them were pretty pale compared to the other people standing in the hotel lobby, hence his immediate assumption that they were probably the English ones – maybe that was kind of rude of him, but whatever since it was probably true. The voice he’d heard was also quite low-pitched and fitted well with the mustached man, he thought.
He’d been glancing at them for a few seconds when the girl looked around with an amused smile, rolling her eyes a little at something the man – her father, probably – was saying. She crunched her nose in a way that made Fitz’s heart skip a beat for some reason, but he didn’t have much time to think about it because then their eyes met from across the room.
She had light brown eyes that matched well with the kind expression on her face and the soft smile on her lips, and Fitz felt his cheeks grow hot. He looked away instantly, heart pounding in his chest, and cursed himself for being so, so… so him, really. He’d never been good at making friends, or even just socializing, and things were obviously not changing with him growing up. He was almost 17, and never really had a friend before, let along a girl friend. God, just thinking about it he was pretty sure he was blushing hard again.
Luckily for him, his mum was now done with the receptionist and turned to him with a severe look, and he fell back into his previous annoyance at her for lying to him. “There you go,” she told him, handing him a white card, “your key.”
“Thanks,” he nodded, sliding it in his back pocket and pointedly ignoring the disapproving look she threw at him. She shook her head with a sigh then moved away from the line, and he grabbed their suitcases and followed her. She stopped in a corner to put the room information and various pamphlets the receptionist had given her in her handbag, and he looked at her expectantly for a minute as she did. She eventually stared back, one eyebrow raised defiantly, and after a few seconds he couldn’t help it anymore. “Three weeks Mum?! Seriously? You said it was just one week!” He threw his hands up as he whined, and she rolled her eyes ostensibly at him.
“I lied,” she simply said, shrugging his anger away.
“But–”
“I knew I couldn’t possibly convince you to come for three whole weeks,” she interrupted him, shaking an accusing finger in his face, “so I did what I had to do, Leo.” She punctuated her sentence with a meaningful look that had him sigh in defeat.
“Still, three weeks, that’s harsh,” he mumbles grumpily, “I only packed for one week.”
“Please,” she sighed, “you packed for barely three days, and even forgot your bathing suit–”
“I’m not going swimming!”
“–you’re lucky I’m always behind your back to check on things like that.”
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself thank you very much,” he retorted petulantly, and she glanced at him pointedly again, because they both knew that it wasn’t entirely true. Sure, he was capable of keeping himself mostly alive, but his experience in college so far had not been pretty and he was very glad he could often come home to recharge – and eat delicious homemade food, too. He was very intent on learning how to do things properly when living alone though, and his mum knew that, but being a 16 year-old working on an Engineering PhD was already hard enough.
They both agreed he had time to learn. He was a very quick learner after all. But somehow managing his own laundry was harder than building a functioning miniature plane from scratch – he honestly had no explanation as to why.
“Enough sulking,” his mum told him with one of her very tiny smiles that he knew meant that she didn’t mind his sulking that much, “let’s get all this to our room.”
She grabbed one of their suitcases and walked purposefully towards the exit, and Fitz let out a sigh before following her. He absentmindedly glanced back toward the front desk before he did though, and when his eyes met the same brown eyes from earlier his heart stuttered hard in his chest. The girl offered him her nice smile again and he ducked his head, cheeks very warm, and stumbled after his mum out of the hotel lobby and into the unforgiving sun.
“If I’d known it was three weeks I would’ve packed more books,” he lamented after a few minutes, to distract himself from the heat – his ears were already too hot, and he was almost entirely sure it wasn’t just because a pretty girl had just smiled at him.
“I packed you more,” his mum retorted distractedly, looking down at the map the receptionist had given her. “I even found that sketchbook of yours that you somehow left under your bed.”
“Those are old sketches, mum!”
“I couldn’t get much of your usual electronics though,” she continued, completely ignoring him, and he huffed, “apart from your box of little screwdrivers that you carry around all day long of course. But I’m sure we’ll find you a nice toaster to dismantle and reassemble here.”
“I haven’t done this in years!” Fitz exclaimed in indignation.
“Don’t worry sweetie, I’m sure you’re still quite good at it,” she mused cheekily, throwing him a look over her shoulder.
“Hey! That’s not what I– you know that’s not what I meant at all!”