Set just after episode 1x07, "The Hub."
Lately, Fitz spent a lot of time in his bunk thinking about Simmons. And not in the way it would have sounded if he'd said that out loud to somebody—Skye, for instance. Especially because he'd been thinking of Skye more in the way it would have sounded. For the first several weeks, anyway. Sleeping so close to her he could have heard her breathing if the wall hadn't been there. Skye with her devil-may-care attitude and her dark side good looks and her way with hacking into highly secured mainframes.
But not lately.
Lately, when his head hit the pillow, he was thinking of somebody a few pods further down the plane. Somebody he'd previously been rather glad to get a bit of a breather from, after spending virtually every minute with her for a whole day.
It wasn't that he'd ever disliked Simmons. They'd clicked from the moment they'd met, at a science fiction symposium in university, back when S.H.I.E.L.D. was a dream on the distant horizon. She'd taken the seat next to him in the last seminar of the day, on real-life potential applications of bio-neural circuitry, and they'd spent so long after it ended talking about whether or not it was a feasible technology that the hall was closing and they'd had to take their discussion to the nearest pub, which they also closed down. (Simmons, he remembered, only finished half a beer in four hours.)
Funny, he'd been the one to talk her into S.H.I.E.L.D. "Getting three Ph.D.s is like going to a carnival and only riding the rollercoaster," he'd said. "Getting a S.H.I.E.L.D. badge would be an entirely different ride."
Of course, he'd only had eyes for Sci Ops. It was Simmons who'd wanted adventure.
Well, they'd certainly had that.
Fitz rolled to his side and curled into a fetal position, hugging the blanket to his chest and frowning into the darkness.
He had never really thought much about why he took the assignment on the Bus, or for that matter why Simmons had turned down the acceptance to her third Ph.D. program. They'd been Fitzsimmons since university, mostly because people who met them couldn't remember which of them was which. No matter how much he'd tried to distinguish himself, set himself apart as an individual with his own name, someone who worked with but was not otherwise attached to her, it hadn't made any difference. It couldn't, not when they spent nearly every waking moment beside each other, collaborating and bickering and finishing each other's sentences. For better or for worse, they were a team. They were like twins. They were…they just were.
Until a week ago.
When it looked like they would be closing down one more in a long line of places, except this time he'd be leaving alone.
This wasn't the first night he'd had trouble falling asleep since then. It wasn't just that he kept reliving those awful two hours—the fog across his brain when Coulson told him Simmons was infected; the cold glass of the lab door that separated the two of them; the relief when the third rat didn't die instantly, turned to despair when the flash came and it floated; the tearing in his throat as he screamed her name before she jumped out of the plane; the unyielding metal of the deck plates beneath his hands and knees as he watched her plummet to the ocean, watched Ward catch her in the nick of time.
He was a scientist. He didn't bother much with trying to fix mistakes that had already been fixed. He didn't obsess over the past. If he could convince himself that it was all in the past, he would be sleeping, instead of wondering why earlier in the evening he'd lied to his partner about something as little as a sandwich.
The trouble was, he knew now what fieldwork really meant. It was an adventure, yeah, but a dangerous one. This wasn't Sci Ops, several layers behind the scenes—and behind walls of secondary adamantium. This was alien viruses and no extraction plans and missions apart without anybody else around to speak their language. Anything could happen.
The old Fitz, the Fitz who didn't know what fieldwork really was, would've told Simmons. When she asked how the sandwich was, he would've said that Agent Ward wouldn't let him have it; that even if dogs scenting them out might have been a valid concern, Ward could at least have let him take one bite before tossing it out for the rodents. Old Fitz probably wouldn't have realized Simmons would've castigated herself for putting him in danger, lain awake at night staring at the ceiling even though everything had turned out all right.
All the new Fitz could think, standing there across from her again, him not blown up and her not smashed to pieces, was: "Thank God, thank God, thank God." So he said the sandwich was delicious. (Her sandwiches always were.)
The old Fitz would've babbled easily as they took the crate into the lab, but the new Fitz wasn't yet used to having to swap notes on different halves of the mission.
Speaking of which, while he'd been off playing commando with Ward, she'd used a stun gun on a superior officer. So there was a new Simmons, too, and she could take care of herself.
New Simmons. New Fitz. Distinguishable at last.
He sighed and rolled to his back.
It was going to be another long night.