Work Text:
You’re sixteen, and it’s midnight, and the eve of the graduation of your PhD has just ended; the bottom of the soles of your wingtip boots get to grace the stage tomorrow. In a few years, you’ll call this moment the completion of your first doctorate; but here, you don’t know that you’ll have your second yet.
The poshness of your vowels when you speak doesn’t hold back the wit or the passion on the tip of your tongue- just like a good English girl, there’s a lot of bark when you bite. Nobody quite understands the sentiment, but someone will.
Your eyelids uncurl, and your lungs inhale deeper. The trek across the stage is only fifty feet, except you’ve taken miles to cross it.
__________________________________________
Have you ever trained for a marathon, by running a marathon? The cranky boy genius debates how the hell he managed to tack on extra classes that ended up with him graduating with two PhDs.
Simultaneously.
Seriously- he didn’t plan it. He just got bored, almost graduated early, propositioned an advisor about some busy work and managed to almost not graduate on time.
Except he is. With the help of sugar and pure fear, at the age of sixteen, the Scottish boy with curly hair and blue eyes and two doctorates in fields everybody can pronounce but nobody understands will cross the stage tomorrow with his trainers on.
Leo Fitz thought he was done waiting for the world. Penance was paid by his intelligence and education, with sweat and calloused finger tips. What more could he give?
It’s the only currency he knew.
(“that mattered”, he’d mumble)
The world didn’t want a cranky boy genius that could.
(It was expecting that and a lot. But just a bit more.)
__________________________________________
Pomp and circumstance, diplomas, handshakes and photos. Who cares? That’s boring.
When do they start living?
In a month.
__________________________________________
Who walks into a…..?
Black suits and aviators with crisp cufflinks.
Grey skirt suits with sleek hair and sharp heels.
An offer, extension, and acceptation.
It sounds like a bar, but it’s not.
The whole world buzzes with preparation.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Still sixteen with only one PhD sounds like you’re selling yourself short, but you’re not. You need at least one to get into the door.
Doesn’t help there’s a boy, just like you, that has two.
Your blood itches for competition, but you can’t help but feel like his blue eyes could feel like home.
(You love your parents and England and Cambridge. This place has none of the above, not even the good biscuits.)
However, you’ll still take that top spot, please and thank you.
The whole world is setting up the punch line; want to hear the joke?
____________________________________________________________________________________
She could murder you with every single chemical. Jemma Simmons is lovely and clever and absolutely your mortal rival.
Nope. You’d like to think that, but she’s really not. Er, or she is? It’s just, you’d rather not.
There’s a few things that are certain in this world. Leo Fitz is a Scottish genius, engineering prodigy, who is planning to be or create something important.
Except, the thing is, while he knows he’ll get there someday- Jemma Simmons is already there.
Now he just needs to think of something clever to say.
____________________________________________________________________________________
So the world tells a joke-
Take one part bravery
Another part knowledge
With a dash of:
Contemplation, respect, friendship, loyalty,
science, films, exhaustion, absolute devotion,
self-doubt, resilience, co-dependence, confidence
stubbornness, pride, salt water, confusion, and love.
what do you get?
____________________________________________________________________________________
When the boy with a Scottish brogue and a girl with an English lilt walk into lab, everything stops when they discover that they’re twice as smart together.
The world continuously pulls apart, molecule and atom, but what’s the punch line?
The first law of thermodynamics.
Energy can be transformed,
but cannot be created or destroyed.
(the world hums brighter, putting them back together)