My first fanfiction!
I figured I should post it before season 5 starts so that I wouldn't get distracted and/or chicken out. So here it is: a whopping 40 minutes before the season premiere.
Takes place post-season 4. I tried to work in the things we learned about the season in the promos and from the producers about season 5, as well as some of the speculation about what it all means (Fitzsimmons have their relationship on the back burner, the Brood may make an indirect appearance, and Hunter might have a small cameo, etc.).
Since Robbie wasn't sent to the ship with the rest of them, it may take a few chapters for him to get there.
Stick around. Chapters should improve quickly as I get the hang of this whole writing thing again.
~1900 words.
Chapter 1: What the Freakin' FRAK?!
Fitz woke to a worried Mack looming over him. "There you are, Turbo. Up and at 'em." Fitz tried to sit up. Why was he on the floor?
"Jemma," he croaked, still groggy.
She came into his view, and relief washed over him. She was okay. He faltered in his attempt to sit, and she motioned to Mack. "Let's get him to a bed before he falls over." She looked him in the eyes. "Stay put until your head's a bit clearer; it may take a minute." Odd. Jemma was being careful about what emotions she let show on her face.
When she left his field of vision, Fitz realized he didn't recognize the room they were in. The ceiling, walls, and floor, along with the two doors into the room, all seemed to be made of metal. There wasn't much furniture, just a small table, two chairs, two dressers, two beds, and a sink in the corner. It was a bit like what he imagined a dormitory at university would look like if the school were on a ship.
And the whole team was there. Why were they there?
Shock helped his brain wake up. "We were in a diner," he sat up in alarm. Yo-Yo reached out to steady him when he swayed, slightly queasy, as the memories came back to him.
"Yes. And then we woke up here." Yo-Yo stated in her accented English, as straight to the point as always. He looked towards Simmons, remembering the conversation they'd had right before entering the diner. She and Mack were moving an unconscious Daisy onto the other bed, May and Coulson hovering nearby. Yo-Yo saw him looking in their direction and explained, "We think we were given something to make us sleep, and it's taking longer to stop working on some of you."
Once Daisy had been placed in the other bed, Coulson gathered the conscious team members, including a now only slightly unsteady Fitz, around the small table. "Okay, first things first: we need to figure out where we are and why we're here. Mack should stay here to protect Daisy, Fitz, and Simmons. Neither of you," he looked back and forth between them, "have done much clearing of hostile areas. Besides," he added before they could interrupt, "none of us have any weapons so it'll be hand-to-hand combat if we run into any hostile forces," immediately quelling any protest from either of them.
As the rest of the team worked out the logistics, Simmons drifted back toward Daisy, worry written on her face. Fitz drifted with her, watching as she felt Daisy's wrist for a pulse once again. He couldn't seem to think of what to say to her, their conversation outside the diner fresh in his mind.
They both jumped and turned to look as May jerked open one of the two doors for Yo-Yo to run through. Apparently, they were starting their recon mission. Yo-Yo showed up again immediately, saying "Clear. It's just a bathroom with another door." Coulson, May, and Yo-Yo went into the adjacent room while Mack leaned tiredly against the wall opposite the three younger agents in his charge.
Fitz looked back to see Simmons eyeing him warily, clearly surprised he had been so close. He opened his mouth to speak (hoping the words would come to him before the speaking actually started), when the second door burst open with a CRACK, forcing a strangled yell of surprise from his lips instead. Mack threw himself between the intruder at the door and his charges, only to find that there was no intruder.
"Ooh, sorry!" Yo-Yo's voice came from the other room. She peered around the door she'd left through, Coulson and May behind, her expression deeply apologetic. "I didn't think that would be so loud." Mack sighed in relief.
Fitz loosed the breath he'd been holding and realized he and Simmons were clutching each others' hands. They let go simultaneously. Yo-Yo looked at the group. "This area is made of two bedrooms connected by a baño. Both bedrooms exit to a hallway with three doors on the sides and one at the end, with security cameras."
Coulson looked around the room. "Then someone may be watching. Did you see any in here or the other rooms?" Yo-Yo shook her head. "Good." He looked at Elena, "I know you've gotten faster since Columbia, but just in case the security cameras are fast enough to catch you, we should clear the rest of the hallway the old-fashioned way. If someone is watching, they may have missed that short sprint in the hallway. And the door could just as easily have been opened from the inside. There's no need to let them know we have Inhumans with us. Especially if the Watchdogs are behind this."
Yo-Yo didn't look pleased, but she nodded, and the three of them crept back out into the hallway, leaving Mack, Fitz, Simmons, and a still-unconscious Daisy behind.
It couldn't have been more than a few minutes since the others had left, but Jemma was already feeling the silence between her and Fitz like an oppressive force pushing down on them both. She was starting to think Mack could feel it too, as he had taken to studying his fingernails rather intently as he sat guarding the hallway door. Fitz clearly wanted to say something but couldn't quite get it out.
Enough of this.
"I—" they started in unison.
"You go—" also in unison.
They both waited for the other to start.
"This is ridiculous!" Jemma snapped. "Just because we've decided to have the romantic aspect of our relationship go dormant for now, that doesn't mean we can't still act like ourselves!"
"Exactly!" Fitz let out a huge sigh of relief. "Being on standby shouldn't keep us from being friends. We've been friends half our lives; people used to call us by one name; it's not like we can just flip a switch," Fitz insisted with conviction, reducing the tension between them from an eight to around 1.5 (they were, after all, still semi-broken-up).
Relieved, Jemma was finally able to indulge her curiosity about their surroundings. "Shall we look for clues for our location?" she asked, a conspiratorial look in her eye.
"Absolutely." Fitz turned to Mack. "We're gonna go explore the other rooms they cleared." Mack made a move to get up. "Don't worry. We aren't going into the corridor. And if it really is just like this room, we'll come back soon enough. Just stay with Daisy; she shouldn't wake up here alone."
Mack nodded, settling back into his post by the door. "Try not to mess with anything dangerous, Turbo."
Straight-faced, Fitz responded, "Well, how would we know it's dangerous before we mess with it?"
Jemma tried to hide her surprise at seeing him joking with Mack. After all that had happened, she knew how guilty he felt about not just the things that had happened in the Framework, but for building it as well; but Mack just looked at him sardonically until Fitz ushered Jemma into the next room.
She was glad he at least had Mack to keep him from falling down the rabbit-hole of misery he'd been approaching, but a bit hurt that she couldn't be the one who kept him from the edge. Still, she'd seen how good Mack was with Fitz when she'd first come back from her time in Hydra. He had a way with Fitz that even she - with their semi-telepathic connection - couldn't replicate.
Jemma walked through the side door to find a simple bathroom. All it had was a toilet and shower, and another door on the opposite side. They opened it and found a mirror image of the first bedroom.
"Definitely like a dorm room on a ship," murmured Fitz.
"Exactly like a dorm room on a ship." She smiled, "This is almost exactly what the suites in the second-year dormitory looked like at the Academy!" Jemma looked around in wonder. "Well, without the desks. And made of metal, of course." She started opening the doors of the dresser to see if there was anything inside. "I wonder why that is…" Striking out, she moved to the next drawer while Fitz checked to see if there was anything under the beds. "I don't feel any movement, no rocking from waves, so I don't think it's a ship. I suppose it could be a plane... Though if we are in the air, we'd have to be in perfect weather to not feel anything. And it's so quiet! The Zephyr is state of the art and there's still always that little hum."
"It could be a plane on the ground. Still," Fitz looked up at her, "the Zephyr's better than the old Bus. Remember how loud that hum was at night?"
"Of course I do; that noise nearly drove me out of my mind." She closed the drawers. "I'm striking out. You?"
"Nothing. The only notable things about this whole place are the things on the ceiling and that everything but the furniture is metal."
Jemma looked up, surprised she hadn't thought to do so before. There were indeed odd half-spheres attached to the ceiling, "What on Earth are they?"
"Don't know, but they're in the other room too, so there's no reason to stay over here to find out."
They walked back into the first room and, with Daisy still sleeping, chose to use the furniture on the far side of the room, farther from Daisy, to try to get a closer look. Fitz climbed on top of the dresser while Simmons stayed on the ground to spot him.
"It's definitely mechanical," Fitz said from above as he studied the metallic half-spheres. "Visually, it's sort of like a whiffle ball if the circles were craters instead of holes, but I can see a small, circular seam in the metal in the center of each dip that looks like it may be a hatch for something. Not sure what, but," he stood on his tiptoes and reached toward it, poking it with his finger. "I think it opens toward us. I'm not sure we can get it open from here." He moved to sit on the top of the dresser.
Fitz lowered himself to the floor. "Maybe there's a switch." They both started looking for one on the wall.
"Found it!" Fitz called loudly. Jemma and Mack both jumped, startled, as a nails-on-chalkboard sound came screeching from the back wall of the room where Fitz was standing, just as shocked as they were by the continuing noise coming from the wall.
Mack and Simmons started moving toward him as the central metal panel of the wall began moving upward.
Jemma noticed movement in Daisy's bed and ran to her side as she stirred, woken by the noise. Jemma gently opened each of her closest friend's eyelids to check the size of her pupils. Ignoring Mack's uttered "Oh, Hell no," in favor of checking Daisy's vitals and helping her sit up. She only stopped when the noise ceased, and she saw Daisy's eyes go from blearily blinking at her to wide open and on alert, staring in the direction of the others.
Jemma slowly turned to look, dragging her gaze towards what she suddenly knew would be an earth-shattering sight, though she couldn't have guessed how much. As her eyes began to focus on the view out of the newly-opened window, she didn't flinch at the sound of Daisy's voice. She barely heard the woman at her side shout "What the freakin' FRAK?!" over the rushing in her ears.
They were in Space.
'What the freakin' frak' was right.
UPDATE: Editing this mid-season 5, and the earth-shattering line in the last few paragraphs made me laugh out loud. I know it might mislead people a bit (they are nowhere near close enough to see the Earth, and even if they were, the earth here has not been shattered) but I wrote it like an hour before the premiere, and I'm keeping it. It's just too perfect.
This was a lot more Fitzsimmons than I'd planned on (I mostly wanted to do a QuakeRider story) but it's probably going to continue as like 50/50 between Fitzsimmons and Quakerider.
Also, if I continue with the story, there will probably be a QuakeRider M-rated chapter, but I'll post it separately as a one-shot so the T-rating doesn't change.
Not sure if/for how long I'll continue this story since writing it (well, mostly planning it) was just my way to get through the time between re-watching season 4 on Netflix and season 5 airing. Plus, I realized after writing this chapter that the plot-bunny that's been pestering me for a month (QuakeRider and Fitzsimmons confined to a few rooms together, with emotional-wound healing and roommate hijinks) is going to be a whole lot of dialogue. I've also realized that I really hate writing dialogue. Punctuating and tagging it are the worst. (It seems so self-explanatory when you read it, but writing it is a fricking nightmare.)
So, please comment if you want it to continue.
Also, I'm a college student, so updates might be a bit sporadic depending on school.
I'm all about constructive criticism, but this is my first ever fanfiction and the first time I've written an actual story (not just essays and such) since probably middle school so please be nice.