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"No. No no no no no," he paused and stared, for effect. It was the fifth or sixth time they had this argument, he had lost count around the one where his knee hit the coffee table and tea spilled over her Induced mutagenesis through prolonged exposure to xenonucleic acids draft. "Absolutely not."
"But, Fitz--"
"No, Simmons, I told you already! I will not go into field ops. Ever."
***
Three months later, Fitz found himself staring up at SHIELD 6-1-6, a heavily modified Mobile Command Station he was a proud to say he helped modify. He knew the schematics by heart. Right in front of him, Simmons beamed up at the plane, preparing to carry all the equipment she could to their new residence. He also knew her by heart.
Even at this point, Fitz was still a tad confused about how they were allowed to join the team, to be entirely honest, since their field assessments had been, he had to confess, far from spectacular.
As far from spectacular as they could get.
***
"No,” he panted, holding a stitch in his left side with his right hand, lungs burning like he had been breathing fire. A result from running up four flights of stairs on a most-likely-broken-beyond-repair ankle, which in itself was a result of throwing actual fire down the elevator shaft.
His rebuttal went ignored by his partner, who simply stared down at him, frowning. He took an untimely moment to be bothered by how she always stared him down, even if she was several inches shorter. Her mouth was set in a thin line, and she almost hopped on the balls of her feet, stealing glances down the thankfully empty hallway.
“No, no no no—"
"Fitz, there is no other—"
"— range of this particular model —"
"— bioparticulates could be expelled —"
“— blow your noggin from thirty feet —“
“— the size of London!”
"— so when I say no I-- SIMMONS!"
Her short steps were already halfway down the length of the dark, nondescript corridor of the dark, nondescript building, and before he knew better he was running after her. Directly into certain death, for at least the third time that day.
"Goddammit, woman!"
The echoes of his complaints bounced off the walls, but Fitz kept going, gun slipping slightly on his damp hands. A left, two rights and two lefts, as they had decided a few hours earlier, and he found Simmons with her back pressed up against a wall, arms tight down her sides. This was it. How they had gotten so far was beyond him.
***
The blueprints were held open by a couple of stones and his cell phone, on the hood of their getaway car. A red circle was drawn in the upper left corner. They didn’t actually need to study them again; between his remarkable memory and her penchant for excessive preparation (“There’s no such thing as too prepared, Fitz!”), the layout of the glass-and-exposed-brick building was seared in their minds, together with their possibly suicidal plan.
This sort of situation was precisely why, not so long ago, they had argued over and over about the mere possibility of putting down their names for field work.
The first time, Simmons entered the lab breathless, almost squealing over some gossip going around SciOps. Higher-ups were looking for candidates for field work that involved, according to Simmons, travelling the world, going places, experiencing different environments, first-hand testing of their own experiments, insight for brilliant new ones, yada-yada, yes I’ve read the pamphlet, Simmons, meaning we’re probably getting poisoned by unknown plants, bitten by undiscovered mosquitoes, being shot at, being abducted by aliens, being experimented on by aliens, and most likely all of the above. She promised monkeys, which might have swayed him a bit, but he remained firm in his doing-my-best-not-to-die-at-alien-hands stance.
His refusal wasn’t enough, and she kept dropping insistent hints, that turned into full on arguments and degenerated into shouting matches, until his stubbornness won over her stubbornness, and they finally settled for reviewing the option once there were no immediate alien threats and Simmons was done developing new iterations of QNB-11, necessarily in that order of priorities.
SHIELD’s ways were cloudy and crooked, however. Even away from the roster, roughly two months later they were called for a field mission. Their combined skill set seemed to be the most adequate, within the organization, to neutralize a biological and unsurprisingly explosive weapon, which was currently sitting on the eight floor of the building they were about to enter.
Simmons drew in a shaky breath, gave him one last look and nodded, collecting their belongings and directing them both around the corner, down the sidewalk and through rotating glass doors.
A large sunlit foyer greeted them, with dark granite lining the walls and a couple of just-as-stony receptionists, looking as much as members of an evil organization as you’d expect them to look.
“Good afternoon, Mister,” Simmons said with a too large smile, wringing her hands below the counter. Fitz stayed a foot behind, surveying the room for potential threats but also because Simmons was usually the more likeable of the two. “My friend and I are from the Health and Safety Department, and we’d like to inspect your biohazards storage facility. Please,” she finished, with a smile and a curt nod, as she practiced. Multiple times.
“Badges, please.”
“Badges, yes, of course,” she opened her purse to rummage around for the wallet, smile still plastered on her face. Thing was, no one had asked for badges in her practice run.
“Well, I can’t seem to find them! Mr. Jones, where are our badges?”
A beat.
“Mr. Jones?” Repeated Simmons, mouth stuck in a ventriloquist smile. This time she was staring firmly and rather creepily at him, eyes the size of small saucers and eyebrows lost somewhere around her hairline.
Another beat, and the sound of the other shoe dropping would probably be heard around the room, if the shoe wasn’t metaphorical.
Realization turned into surprise turned into a “what are you doing” kind of scowl, since the Simmons was clearly going mad. He mouthed an expressive “no”, which actually meant “stop doing this, Simmons”, but the receptionist took as a “no badges here, either”.
“No badges, no entry, miss.”
Simmons wasn’t to be deterred easily, though, and — not before giving him the second most frustrated eyeroll he had gotten from her this week —, turned back to face the receptionist, twirling a lock of hair around her finger. His hands started to sweat.
“Well, Mister… Mister,” grappled Simmons, not being able to find a name or a tag or anything other than the everyday face of evil. “I’m sure we can find a way to tour your lovely facilities without all this bureaucracy,” she enunciated, her pink tongue curling and elongating words more than was sensible for efficient conversation, finishing with a definitely conspicuous wink. “Right?”
As an answer, warning sirens blared around the building.
Large men in dark suits approached them like ants coming out from their nests, and Simmons was near him in a blink, back to back, facing the wall of security guards and going back and forth between panic and blind panic.
The first assailant lunged straight at him, and Fitz pulled up what he thought a boxing stance would be, faking a left jab and careening straight for the guard’s midsection instead, toppling his opponent and taking a moment to appreciate his well executed maneuver. Maybe he was cut for field ops, after all.
But then he was thrown to the ground and barely scrambled back up, the goons teeming and his self-defense training refusing to be called to memory, blasted SING mnemonics worth nothing (was it Shoulder or Shin and it didn’t matter because none of them would save him from elbow currently crushing his nose). He threw random punches and kicks, and might have bitten something once or twice, wherever he found an opening, but nothing dented the growing sea of black suits and Fitz decided getting up from his bed was the worst decision he had made today.
Simmons herself held her own at the corner of his eye, never farther away than an arm's reach, managing to punch a guard in the stomach and pepper-spray the eyes of another two, gasping in excitement. She grinned, and he grinned back from where he was being held in a choke hold, and it lasted all of two seconds before he saw another guard coming for her.
His warning shout came out more like a gurgle, and the last thing he saw before blacking out was Simmons being picked up from behind and dragged to a side corridor, her tiny legs kicking up the air. It would be almost cute if it didn’t left a sinking hole where his stomach should be.
***
“I’m sorry, Fitz.”
He couldn’t see her face, sitting on the floor with his back to hers and his head being covered in a sack and all, but her broken tone painted a perfect picture in his mind.
It was the same tone she used that one time they got a B+ in Applied Nanostructures, or when she thought she had accidentally deleted all the Fourth Doctor’s episodes from his laptop for good, or when she apologized to Mr. Bunnybag, before slicing his furry little body open with her unforgiving scalpel.
He was somewhat glad he couldn’t see her face, after all, and focused on loosening the ropes that tied their wrists together.
“It’s okay, Simmons,” he sighed. He wouldn’t let her blame herself for their impending doom, and certain death didn’t seem half as terrifying when she squeezed what she could reach of his hands, despite the binds.
“It’s not— a biological war is being unleashed out there and we’re—stuck—here, we could—“
“Hush you, and help me here with these ropes, will ya?” They made quick work of the ropes, mostly because their captors had pegged them as harmless and made a sloppy job out of the makeshift shackles. He should be thankful, but was mostly offended.
Taking out the bag, he found out they had been conveniently stored in a janitor’s closet, and smirked.
“Simmons,” he poked her with an elbow and nodded at the ventilation shaft. She needed no further explanation, going straight for the bottom shelves – where the flammables were usually stored. A chemist in a cleaning supplies closet. Harmless, indeed.
Said chemist set to work, sitting crosslegged on the floor, allowing herself to smirk too. She measured and matched and mixed and smirked some more, plastic containers and makeshift spoons sitting in a perfect circle around her, frazzled hair from the fumes and the fight, brow wrinkled in concentration. The sight prompted a primal stir in his lower abdomen, one he didn’t really want to think about, so he busied himself with unscrewing the vent, the door hinges, and finally one of the lightbulbs, pulling on the wires and uncapping their ends.
They finished at almost the same time, as they tended to, and nodded at each other, as they tended to. Simmons proceeded to empty two bottles of liquid soap to puddles on the tile floor, and stuffed their mouths with dry cleaning rags.
“If the tunnels open to the lift shaft, the fire will reach at least three floors,” she said, gulping slightly. “It’ll burst into flames in eight seconds. We need to be fast.”
“We can do it.” He paused. “We can do it, can’t we?”
Her assenting smile was a bit too strained for his liking, but their options were kind of limited at the moment. Simmons held the bottles while Fitz scraped the wires against each other, until the sparks caught on the rags. Once successful, she quickly rolled the bottles down the narrow ventilation tunnels, and he helped them along with a broom handle, getting them as far away as possible before they went boom.
Boom was probably an understatement.
The shelves shook roughly with the explosion, and soon enough a hubbub formed outside their closet. A guard tried to open the door but mostly fell inside, thanks to the loose hinges, and Fitz took the chance to knock him unconscious with his broom and a good hit across the back of his head.
“Take his gun, Fitz!” Simmons whispered, nudging him until he bent down to retrieve the weapon, since mops weren’t really the most adequate defense against international bioterrorists.
The commotion attracted two more minions, effectively trapping them inside the room. The small space quickly filled with dark smoke, coming from the vent and going into the hallway, so the guard to the left had little reaction time when a janitor’s cart was pushed out the door and went careening in his direction.
They had a fraction of a minute to succeed in their getaway, so it was just their luck that, when they started running, Fitz skittered for a few meters down the hallway in liquid soap, as gracefully as a duck doing the moonwalk, to finally tumble and fall sprawled on the floor.
“It’s broken, Simmons!” Fitz whined, cradling his left foot across his right thigh. “My ankle, I think it’s broken!”
“There is no time, Fitz! We need to disable the device! Get up!”
***
“Three minutes and twenty three seconds,” she whispered, and he more saw her lips moving than heard it. She knew what she had to do. He knew he didn’t want her to do it. Not after they had been cornered yet again, being saved both by luck and by Simmons jumping in the back of a goon, knocking him over with the sudden change in his gravity center (“It’s basic physics, really”). Fitz was alarmed by her tendency to self-sacrifice. Things were going as well as he expected so far, which was not well at all, and it was probably downhill from there.
“Tell me how—“
“It’s not up for discussion, Fitz—“
“I can’t let you—“
“—your aim is better and—”
“—out there in the open—“
“—better cover while I dismantle—“
“—paint a blasted target on your back—"
She threw her hands in the air in frustration and pivoted around the corner, into a blue carpeted room dominated by a huge metal cylinder sitting in the middle, glinting the late afternoon sunlight coming through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls. There was, of course, a countdown clock. He didn’t doubt for one second there would be one.
There were also five armed guards.
***
“Great performance under pressure, creative use of given environment, impressive teamwork. Physicals are lacking but we need to take into account they had little more than the standard SciOps training. I have to say, agent, I’m surprised by your reluctance on clearing them for field duty. Is it the negative marks on covert operations and espionage?”
“Ma’am, they do argue an unprecedented amount while on a mission-- it’s surprising they manage to accomplish anything. But-- that’s not my main qualm. With all due respect, Ma’am, I believe these kids will get each other at killed some point.”
Recoiling slightly, she checked the other side of the one-way looking glass. Agents Fitz and Simmons huddled on a bench on the far side of a honeycomb cell, maybe too close for comfort (maybe not close enough), arms entwined, talking in hushed tones. They looked beaten up, but no more than what was usual for the standard SHIELD field assessment. What they did not look was like people who would shoot each other in the head.
“Elaborate, Agent.”
“Agent Fitz has impressive marksmanship but was unable to get a straight shot once Agent Simmons was down, overcompensating with impulsiveness, aggression and zero efficiency. I can’t really say biting is a combat technique we recommend our agents, and his ninja moves are, well, an embarrassment to the shinobi philosophy,” the reporting agent narrated, features contorted into a grimace.
“Agent Simmons unravels when— she threw herself on his assailants and was shot in the chest. She didn’t know it was a rubber bullet,” he continued, sighing and wincing at the same time, mostly looking like he had bitten into a surprise jalapeño pepper in his taco. “Overall, a series of poor decisions, one luckily not broken ankle, various minor injuries, hundreds of dollars in damages to our facilities, not to mention the blue room situation. Their single priority is protecting each other and can't focus on anything else. I cannot in good conscience clear them for field duty.” he concluded, frustrated. "With all due respect, Ma'am, are you still surprised?"
“That’s unfortunate,” she answered, pressing her lips together. Turning to watch the mirror, Fitz seemed to doze off, head resting on the wall behind him, Simmons’ head on his shoulder. She rubbed his arm in a half-hug and smiled in quiet satisfaction. “However, Agent Coulson is adamant in having the best, so we’re giving him the best.” She nodded curtly. “Wait here, I’m going to give them the news.”
-----
His ankle hurt.
His back hurt.
His head hurt.
If he had to choose, though, what hurt more was his heart, upon seeing the crestfallen look gracing Simmons’ pretty face. Objectively pretty face, that is. He could recognize a pretty face when he saw one, after all, even if it was the face of his extraordinarily intelligent and equally as infuriating partner. Simmons didn’t take well to failure, used to be the best at everything from a very young age.
Said look had been there as soon as three SHIELD agents with gravely disappointed faces entered the room, where both of them were still sitting on the floor, near a column and three broken windows, panting, exhausted. The carpet under the vents smoked.
They found Simmons trying to perform minor surgeries on herself, blouse half unbuttoned, removing glass shards with eyebrow tweezers and applying a healing ointment she had developed sometime during her second PhD.
Fitz didn’t really want to be so close to open wounds and oh God so much blood, and made himself useful by tearing up parts of his shirts to use as tourniquets and cleaning rags, applying ointment on his own burnt hands, and trying not to look anywhere near her chest area. Because boobs, but also because of a dark bruise forming near her right clavicle. He couldn’t stop remembering how she looked on the carpeted floor, unconscious, so pale, so small and frail and he didn’t care if the entire bloody world blew up today, his world had all but ended during the two minutes it took for him to divert his enemies and check her pulse. His right hand hadn’t stopped shaking yet.
However, the world had insisted on staying in place, there hadn’t been an extinction level event, no epidemic, no chemical or biological bomb spread in the air to contaminate entire cities. The armed guards had stopped going at him as soon as the bomb counted to zero, packed their stuff, and left.
Fitzsimmons were relieved. Relieved, and thoroughly confused. So finding out it had been a surprise field test had left both thoroughly pissed off, instead.
“It’s hardly fair, you know, to throw us into an ticking bomb scenario—entirely unprepared— and not even tell us it was simply a field assessment— I wouldn’t have—“
Of all the things they could complain about, of course Simmons would pick not being allowed to study before a test, and left to her own she could go on nattering indefinitely about it. He agreed on the unfairness of the situation, alright; as a scientist, he was aware of the importance of knowing all the variables before deciding on a course of action, of knowing what was at stake.
Unlike Simmons, though, after his initial anger subsided (they knocked her in the head!), he figured they wouldn’t always have this knowledge in real missions, which was why he wasn’t so eager to put himself out there in the first place.
“I’d have gone,” he interrupted her, mid-thought.
Surprisingly enough, she stopped ranting and turned to look at him, brown eyes glinting in the darkness, brow furrowing. The cut across her left cheekbone was starting to bruise, visible even in the terrible lighting of the cell. He almost reached out to examine it, almost. His hand remained firmly in place, gripping the bench by his side, trying to keep his guts from knotting around themselves.
“Fitz?“
“If you really wanted to, I’d have gone with you. To the field,” he clarified. His words were loud over the white noise whirring of the ventilation, his heart thump-thumped inside his chest, on his throat, at his fingertips. Fitz licked his suddenly dry lips, staring at his partner in the half-light. He would probably go with her anywhere, he realized, and immediately stomped down the thought, back to the depths of his mind it shouldn’t have left.
“Are you sure?” Her eyes searched his face, waiting for the catch. Finding nothing, her smile broke in through the clouds. It was as if his doubts were never there.
“Twice as smart, remember?” The corners of his mouth tugged up on their own, smile blooming weakly, quietly, but definitely there. She punched his upper arm lightly and he winced, finding bruise number twenty-seven.
“Oh, Fitz-- I’m glad!” she beamed, weaving her right arm around his left and swinging their hands together. Fitz rested his head against the wall at his back, smiling, and stared at their reflection in the mirror on the other side of the room. He was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them— he knew they were being watched. He found out he didn’t mind, though, not when Simmons was all but cuddling his side, and closed his eyes to enjoy it, after a rough day of almost being killed many times over, and a rough life of zero to no cuddles.
“I doubt they will clear us after that, but I appreciate the sentiment, regardless. Besides,” she stretched the word and pushed his shoulder with hers, only to have him push back and earn a scoff, finally settling for resting her head on his shoulder. “Besides, you know I wouldn’t have gone without you, right, Fitz?”
It took a heartbeat for him to absorb, and another for the warmth to spread from his belly to his chest to his lips.
“Of course not, Jemma,” the smile invaded his voice, and he couldn’t have kept it down if he tried. He was too tired to try. “Who else would go around dragging your arse out of trouble?”
“Excuse me? Do I need to remind you—“
“—wouldn’t last a week—“
“—had to replace the pots and the radiator—“
“—all these shenanigans—“
“Agents Fitz, Simmons,” greeted the woman who opened the door, a legend they knew only from the hush-hush around the SHIELD facilities they frequented. Simmons immediately sat down straighter; Fitz only tried, wincing instantly from his foot injury. “You have been assigned to SHIELD’s Mobile Command Unity 616. Pack your bags, you start in three weeks. Congratulations.”