Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Author Note: Part Five in the 'Declassifying' series. Warning, contains polygamy.

I SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS

Maths was in everything, the world was made up of angles and equations and it'd been Jemma Simmons' delight to uncover and take them apart ever since she was a child. Back then it had confused her when people had given her funny looks and hadn't known what she was talking about whenever she'd detailed the numeric mechanics that she saw all around her, because wasn't it obvious?

It was after one of those experiences that a teacher told her she was gifted, and that she should be learning alongside other gifted people. Jemma was been delighted with that idea, she had friends but they all looked at her at some point as though Jemma scared them, and she didn't like that at all.

Her new school turned out to be exciting and stimulating and Jemma made a lot of new friends. But she was most fascinated to slowly learn that while everybody there had a similar flare for mathematics and many had a talent for applying such theory to scientific work, every one of them saw the world slightly differently. So they all had something unique to bring to their chosen field. It was marvellous of course, and invigorating to be amongst people who were enthused in the same way she was, but Jemma had thought...well, she'd assumed, maybe even dreamed, that she'd find someone who saw the world the same way she did.

Still, it wasn't really a disappointment, was it? Spending years at lovely institutions that opened up the world to her in incredible ways and showed her just how much there was to discover and break down to its component parts so that it could be truly understood. Jemma tucked away her little dream of finding someone to synchronise perfectly with and concentrated on other exciting things.

Then she was headhunted by SHIELD and an entirely new world full of a vastly challenging and magical kind of logic was revealed to her. She got to work with the most fascinating professors and tutors and regularly saw incredible things, her own work developing accordingly. It was wonderfully exciting. Then one day, she was working in one of SHIELD's enormous academy labs, reaching for a computer tablet and remarking on the isotope she was working with, when another voice finished her sentence. She looked up and found Leo Fitz staring back at her. A glorious tingle ran down her spine.

It turned out that dreams could come true.

Fitz didn't ask for much – some space to work in, decent equipment, enough food to stop him getting peckish, and just a little understanding, was that too much to ask? Jemma had been a blessing in that regard. Of course, as soon as he'd met her and had discovered that their thought processes ran so parallel that they worked epically brilliantly together, he'd also started having the sort of dreams about her that could seriously screw up a workplace friendship.

It wasn't like he could help it – Jemma was astonishing, all enthusiastic theories and fascinating insights and she knew just what to say to get his mind to where it needed to be. It was extremely distracting.

Fitz chanted to himself that he couldn't let his subconscious affect their very important work and that this was just like Sarah Chandler in secondary school. His super-crush on Jemma would fade. He never dreamed about Sarah now, did he?

He thought he was doing pretty well. He and Jemma were making a name for themselves in SHIELD – for all the right reasons too – and they were being given some nicely high-profile cases to work on. The dreams were still there, getting expansive but he was dealing with them, he hadn't dropped anything recently or forgotten any equations. No, this was going to work and Fitz wasn't going to screw it up and…

"Are you free tonight?"

Fitz nearly knocked a dish over. Jemma was looking at him quizzically, her hands hard at work in the guts of a laptop. There was something very pleasing about the curve of her mouth and did she just ask him out?

"I'm sorry, did you just ask me out?"

Jemma's smile was wide. "Yes. I thought it might ease the tension and vastly improve our workrate."

Oh, she'd noticed. Bugger. She was definitely smiling though, like this was exactly what she wanted. Wow, okay. "Yes? Yes. Definitely. Good idea."

It did help, many times over. Fitz's dreams hadn't even come close to the reality of Jemma riding him, her skin flushed and her mouth a beautiful slide of aroused pleasure. Not even close.

Ward wasn't much of a dreamer. When he was younger, he'd dreamt about not being afraid, about his brothers being happy, about his parents…They were just dreams anyway. And he hadn't dreamt like that in a long time.

He'd always been more of a practical person, deciding on a goal and going for it, blocking out everything else for as long as he could. It made him good at sports, it made him driven and dedicated, it made him an excellent SHIELD agent. And if the things that other people enjoyed didn't come so easily to him, that wasn't a problem. He had more important things to worry about.

Then he met Fitz and Simmons.

Watching them work was a frustrating hypnotizing experience. Simmons overflowed with good will, with flashes of frustration at Fitz, especially when he mentioned monkeys, while Fitz was barely on the appealing side of neurotic and they both spoke a sort of piecemeal dialect that only they could understand. They were supposed to give the team essential answers for completing missions but the pair sometimes ended up delaying everything instead as they attempted to explain just what they were talking about. They made Ward grind his teeth so much that his dentist was going to blacklist him.

Then…they were Leo and Jemma.

And he learned the sort of sounds that Leo made when that spot behind his knee was touched and how he writhed whenever someone mouthed at his nipples and just how much of an oral-fixation he had. Ward saw how Jemma gasped when Leo went down on her, how they could stay that way for hours, both beyond content. He saw how Jemma enjoyed the touch of cold steel at her wrists and being on top and tugging at someone else's hair. Ward got to see that. He got to be part of it.

He started leaving plastic-wrapped sandwiches in the van for them and in the plane's lab. He made sure to drag them away from their work so that they got at least five hours sleep a night. He ordered Chinese at the end of missions and after he was done talking to Skye, he found that the pair had usually saved him a fortune cookie.

He was always the last one to fall asleep, watching them for a while first – Fitz whistle-snoring while Jemma was content and silent. Somehow they were still in-sync with each other, somehow he was there with them.

Ward started to dream again.

-the end