Jemma Simmons had been at her new job for exactly three days, and this was the third lunch break in a row where she had been forced to grab something from a fast food restaurant. She wrinkled her nose at what passed for lettuce on the tray in front of her, scooped it up with her fork, and took a bite.
Ugh.
She really needed to figure out where the nearest market was and start purchasing actual food. She sighed and went on with the fast food version of a salad. She had nearly 40 minutes left for her break and she didn't want to get stuck in traffic on the way back to the office. At least, she reasoned, as she picked up her paper cup, fast food restaurants knew a thing or two about making the perfect chocolate milkshake.
She was just scraping the remaining contents of her tray into a garbage can when she heard a clinking and clunking from the women's bathroom. The noise was odd enough that Jemma considered, for about five seconds, not going in to wash her hands, but the sticky feel of Italian dressing that just wouldn't go away no matter how many times she wiped her hands on a napkin meant that she wasn't leaving without a little soap and water.
Pushing open the door, Jemma walked into the small tiled room with a bit of trepidation. She didn't see anything out of the ordinary though, so she made her way to the sink, pumped some soap into her palm and placed her hands under the automatic faucet. As she scrubbed her hands though, a slightly tousled head of hair appeared just behind her reflection in the mirror; it was upside down, above her, and belonged to a man.
She let out a very undignified yelp before spinning around on her heels and holding her wet hands up in front of her, only to find that the man had let out a yelp as well. In his position hanging from the air vent opening above her head, he couldn't exactly escape her flailing hands.
"Stop! Stop! What're you doin'?"
"Me?" She hissed. "I'm not the one hanging from the ceiling in the ladies' loo!"
"Wha'?" He tilted his head back and appeared to examine his surroundings for the first time. "Well - er - I'm no' - this is supposed ta be the diamond exchange…" He immediately clamped his mouth shut and bit down on his bottom lip, and Jemma couldn't help but be just a little bit intrigued by the way his teeth dragged over the pink of his lips, but also by the words "diamond exchange."
He didn't exactly look like a jewel thief. He was, admittedly, dressed all in black and wearing some sort of harness that would likely be well known in cat burgling circles, but his light hair was uncovered and he wasn't even wearing gloves. Weren't burglars supposed to be very careful about leaving fingerprints?
She slowly lowered her hands, allowing her palms to relax, feeling water drip to the tips of her fingers. "I'm sorry," she whispered, "are you telling me you're attempting to steal from the jewelry store? In broad daylight?"
"'m not a thief."
"Not a very good one anyway, or you'd realize the best way would likely be through their basement where the water main passes through -"
"Ugh. Sewers. You think I'm going to crawl through a bloody sewer? Do you have any idea the kind of -"
"So you're obviously very bad at your job. Oh, or maybe you're bad at it on purpose?"
"I'm not bad at my job!"
"Does someone have you under duress? Are they making you steal things? Blink once for yes, twice for no if they're listening in." Her mouth twitched and she tried not to laugh.
The man hanging half out of the air vent stared at her, an expression of complete confusion twisting his otherwise very pleasant features while his mouth hung open and his cheeks pinked, probably from the blood rushing to his head from the time spent upside down.
"All right," Jemma told him, shaking her head and moving a step closer when he stubbornly refused to blink, "I don't know what that means."
"It doesn' mean anythin'. Wha' on earth are you on about? You are the strangest woman I have ever met in m'life."
"I'm strange? Do I need to remind you that you are hanging from the ceiling in the toilet?"
They both froze as the door to the room opened again. Jemma turned her head to look over her shoulder when the man's eyes grew to the size of saucers. There was a middle aged woman there with a toddler held on her hip. The woman didn't say anything, but the toddler giggled, pointing, before the woman spun them around and out the door. Jemma heard the woman calling for an employee.
"Well, this was an… interestin' chat, but I have ta go now." The man shimmied and squirmed in the vent, but he seemed to be stuck on something. "Oh, bloody cables."
Jemma tried very hard not to laugh at the panic sliding across his face because it was adorable, and climbed up onto the sink so that she was eye to torso with him. She leaned forward, snaking her arm up into the vent to help him untangle the cable that was keeping him in place. If her palm happened to run over his chest, and then down his abdomen a bit, well, she could hardly be blamed for the tight space of an air vent, could she? Obviously, she had to take her time to make sure she didn't make the tangle worse and to keep herself steady on the sink as well, which meant gripping his hip for balance before she could remove her arm from the section of the ceiling.
"Thank you." His tone was full of an odd combination of wonder and exasperation.
"You're welcome." She leaned carefully back where she was standing on the sink, one hand reaching out behind her to just graze the mirror as the heel of one of her shoes slid along the surface. "Oh!"
"What? Are you all right, then?" His gaze searched her as though looking for invisible injuries that could have happened in the span of that second.
"Yes. Fine." She crouched and then hopped down from the sink, not wanting to admit that what had startled her wasn't the slide of her shoe, but just how blue his eyes were. If she could remember all the different colors of paint and ink she'd worked with in the past, she would have a shade to compare it to, but all she could think was that no color she'd ever seen before looked quite like that. Her work was utterly insufficient. "You should go," she told him breathlessly instead. "Before you get caught. Not stealing."
"Right. Yeah." He nodded his head, then seemed to realize that wasn't the best idea. The sound of footsteps made him jerk in agitation and one hand hovered over the clip on his shoulder. It looked almost like a zipline release. "Thanks. For - erm - helping me? I guess."
"Any time." Jemma's lips quirked up in a smile. "I'm Jemma, by the way. Jemma Simmons. If you ever get into trouble, you'll be able to find me." If he had more time, she suspected he would have wondered why she wasn't reporting the strange occurrence of a man in the ceiling to someone in charge as well.
As the door opened, she turned to tell whomever came through that there was nothing wrong, but the manager who walked through the door looked around, rolled her eyes, and snapped, "Lady must be hittin' the bottle. And with a baby too."
Jemma shrugged in response, risking a peek up at the ceiling where the man was already gone and the tiles were all back in place. She allowed herself a small smile before she decided to head back to work.
-o-
"It's not m'fault! You got the wrong bloody blueprints!"
"Oh, Fitzy, you can't always blame the hacker when you take a wrong turn in the vents!" Skye snapped a bite from the twizzler clutched in her hand as Fitz climbed into the back of her van.
"I didn' take a wrong turn. I followed your instructions exactly." He threw his equipment into the back seat and snagged a twizzler from Skye's stash, taking a vicious bite out of it. "I could 'ave gone back up and figured it out, but there was a woman - "
Skye spun in her seat as their getaway driver peeled into traffic. "Did you hear that, Trip? Fitzy met a girl."
"Knew it would happen eventually," Trip deadpanned as he simultaneously pulled his sunglasses into place and sped into traffic.
"What's she like?"
"I' doesn't matter. Someone knows the target now. We need a new plan."
Fitz slumped in his seat and ripped another bite out of his twizzler. He let Trip and Skye bounce ideas back and forth while he chewed.
What exactly did Jemma Simmons mean "If you ever get into trouble, you'll be able to find me?"
-o-
Since I have been working on this particular AU for months and I'm very close to finishing it, I thought it was about time to post it. This massive story was the result of a random prompt found on tumblr: 'I walked into the public bathroom at a mcdonalds and you're dangling halfway out of an air vent do I even want to know what you were doing' au. Thanks go to StarryDreamer01 and notapepper for the beta work, who probably didn't know what they were getting into when I asked them to read the first bits of it. There are 12 chapters so far, with this one being the shortest by far, and they'll go up once a week.