This story takes place sometime after 1x06 F.Z.Z.T. but before 1x16 The End of the Beginning
It is canon to the best of my knowledge (as in not AU, though those are fun :D)
I solemnly swear that I am up to no good (I dunno why, it looked like that should go there, I'm not really)
:O :O :O
"I'm telling you, it's a monster," Fitz asserted, walking down the stairs towards the sitting room with Skye. "I can't go anywhere near it or it glares me with those horrible, beady little eyes. It's planning on killing me, I'm sure of it."
Skye paused at the bottom of the staircase and he turned to see her eyebrows raised skeptically. "The rat?"
"It isn't just any rat Skye it's... it's a monster rat!" He told her, waving his arms in the air. "I have no idea what she was thinking, inserting DNA from those giant metal monsters that attacked New York into a rodent-"
"She did what?" Skye exclaimed. "That's... a little messed up."
"Thank you!" he shouted, his arms once again waving wildly. "But of course Simmons was sure nothing could go wrong. 'Oh, but Fitz, I need to collect samples of this protein for analysis, I'm not turning the rat into a monster. It's science Fitz, not some old horror novel,'" he mimicked his friend in a high pitched voice. "She's unleashed something onto us, I know she has!"
"It's in a cage though, right?" Skye inquired, far more relaxed than she should have been with the impending mutant-rat massacre looming over them, as she walked over to the sofa and half sat, half fell onto it.
Fitz took the seat across from her with a bit more care for the state of the furniture and pulled Operation out from under the table.
Poor, foolish Skye was still convinced she could beat his steady hands. Maybe he'd go easy on her, so as not to damage her pride too deeply.
"It's in a cage for now," he answered ominously.
Rain poured down in sheets just outside the window and lightning flashed, followed by rumbling thunder.
:O :O :O
"It's alive!" Simmons exclaimed excitedly, staring down at her formerly-believed-dead tissue sample with glee and glancing behind her, expecting a thumbs up or a mumble of congratulations before she remembered Fitz wasn't in the lab with her anymore.
A slight sense of emptiness took hold of the room for a brief moment when she noted his absence but she quickly shrugged it off and returned to work.
Her friend had cleared out when the rat, Lev (short for Leviathan, the name given to the enormous living metal ships whose DNA he had inside each of his cells) had began growling at him. Admittedly, it was odd behaviour for a rat, but far from threatening considering the creature weighed less than a kilogram. The worst it could do was give him a nasty bite. Which, to be fair, would hurt, however it would first be required to escape from it's enclosure, an unlikely (though possible) scenario.
She suspected most of Fitz's apprehension stemmed from the fact that she'd created, what he described as, 'an evil Chitauri monster-rodent hybrid which would surely kill them all.'
She loved the clever engineer to bits, but sometimes his paranoia flew a little off the handle, much to her exasperation. Lev wasn't any more dangerous than the other rats, at least, she was pretty sure he wasn't.
He was being a smidge aggressive with his companions, baring his teeth at them often enough that they were now huddled almost comically in the corner of the cage, keeping their distance.
"You wont make any friends that way Lev," she scolded, opening the top to lift him out, deciding that it would be better for everyone if he had his own space. She took him gently, with practiced hands, in a way he'd responded docilely to several times before, expecting him to be calm.
Instead, the small creature surprised her by letting out an outraged squeak and turning it's head to dig it's front teeth through the glove and into her hand creating a sharp, tearing jolt of pain that caused Simmons to reflexively let go of him as she cried out, dropping him onto the floor so he could scurry away through the sliding door Fitz had left open.
"Ughh!" She hissed, frustrated and dreading the smug expression on her partner's face when he found out his predictions had, at least in part, come true. Quickly, she shut the top of the cage and bolted after the furry fiend, hopeful she could catch him and tuck him safely back into a cage before any prone-to-big-headedness friends she had found out they'd been right (in part).
:O :O :O
To her dismay, Simmons ran into Fitz and Skye in the sitting room early on in her pursuit.
"Be careful," Fitz cautioned, taking a sip from a bottle of cream soda and watching Skye slowly ease the tweezers into the funnybone slot.
"Stop talking," she answered, mimicking his tone and he frowned at her as he placed down the bottle.
"Er... hello," Simmons greeted, waving at them and trying in vain to think of a way out of admitting that Lev had escaped.
"Simmons, your thumb!" Fitz cried, eyes widening with worry as he stood and glided over to her. He leaned in to examine it, not noticing that he was invading her personal space in his distraction. "What happened?" He asked sympathetically, meeting her gaze.
She sighed. There was no way around it.
"Lev bit me," she confessed.
"Lev?" Skye questioned, raising an eyebrow.
"The rat," Simmons explained.
"Oh... that rat?" She inquired, intrigued and getting to her feet. "Fitz told me about your experiment."
Simmons nodded, pressing her lips together so her mouth formed a line, and glanced at Fitz, bracing for a gloating remark.
He was still staring at her thumb.
"You need to clean that," he murmured, concern clear in his expression.
He was right. In her haste to cover up her mistake, Simmons had forgotten, but the throbbing, oozing digit really could use a rinse out and a plaster.
"C'mon," he said, motioning for her to follow him.
"Wait... is that thing rabid now?" Skye wondered, following behind. "Simmons are you OK?"
"I'm fine," she assured her, smiling.
"Are you sure?" Fitz fretted, keeping pace beside her, almost jostling her shoulder and straining for a view of the bite. "You have no idea what that little devil is capable of. What if he's venomous? What if-" he shook his head. "We should give you a full examination."
"I really don't think that's necessary," Simmons objected, rolling her eyes at him. His concern was endearing (though a little exaggerated) but she knew what the rat was capable of, or at least she knew it wasn't venomous. Did he think she went into her experiments blind to what the possible outcomes were? That she didn't monitor them at all? There were surprises, certainly, but-
"You sure you want me tagging along for that full examination?" Skye teased, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively.
"I didn't mean-" Fitz began, scarlet.
"You could start looking for Lev, if you don't mind," Simmons agreed, overlapping him, and the pair stared at her, Skye grinning widely and Fitz somewhere between mortified and... something else. "He didn't mean that kind of examination," she clarified impatiently, clicking her tongue at them. "Stop it, you're making poor Fitz blush," she demanded, pausing her steps and tilting her head chiddingly.
"I- it's just... I'm not blushing," Fitz objected, turning an even deeper shade of red.
"Sorry," Skye apologized, batting Fitz on the shoulder and appearing sincere. "I didn't mean to embarrass you."
"I wasn't embarrassed," he replied swiftly.
"Sure," she agreed, not sounding entirely convinced. "I'm gonna go look for Frankenrat."
"I really wish you wouldn't call him that," Simmons protested. She wasn't some mad scientist robbing graves for spare parts, just to prove she could. She was trying to understand an alien species so that they could better protect themselves against them, should they return.
"Frankenstein is the scientist," Fitz informed her matter-of-factly, his and Simmons' voices once again overlapping. "So, really, it'd be FrankenSimmons."
Simmons would have crossed her arms had her thumb not been tender, but she thought the look she gave Fitz was enough to make up for what her injury prevented.
"It's a common mistake," Fitz defended, awkwardly rubbing the back of his neck.
"Uh huh," she replied, shaking her head. "Let's put something on this before I catch monster-rat."
"Don't joke about things like that Simmons," Fitz warned seriously.
:O :O :O
They stood in the kitchen, first aid kit open on the counter, a wet cloth in Fitz's hands and Simmons bravely holding out the thumb that damn rat had mangled.
The brute.
Fitz was doing his best not to gloat, poor Simmons was injured already and possibly filled with whatever toxic, horrible things resided inside the dangerous creature she'd created, but he had been right about monster-rat.
It wasn't her fault. She was an optimist, an explorer, always ready to travel down a new road, open up new doors, and he loved that about her, her passion for discovery and wonder at the world around her, but there was such a thing as going too far, crossing the line.
And Simmons might have just set a toe over it with her rabid rat from hell. He'd known it was trouble from the very start, from the first moment it had set those beady monster eyes on him and snarled like something out of a deep dark hell-hole.
Simmons flinched as he cleaned out the cut, thankfully not too deep, with the cloth, but didn't complain or protest.
"You're sure you don't want-" he asked again, glancing up at her face once he'd wiped away the blood and (probably) the rat saliva.
"Fitz I'm fine," she insisted, only a little impatiently, giving him a small, encouraging smile.
He turned his attention back to what he was doing, gently wrapping the wound. "OK," he mumbled.
Maybe he was being paranoid, overprotective even, but the memory of her pale, ashen face and the awful sense of helplessness and impending loss that had come along with it, still haunted his nightmares sometimes like a malevolent ghost, and he understood why he felt the way he did.
"I'm sure you know what you're doing," he conceded before tenderly pressing his lips against the fabric. "That should do it," he told her, then froze as a jolt ran up his spine, realizing what he'd done.
It was something he'd learned from his mother, a gesture of love that meant 'I wish you a good recovery,` but he'd never used it on anyone before and he wondered why he had now.
If he were honest with himself, he knew, but Fitz wasn't being entirely honest with himself, not yet anyway.
To his relief, Simmons smiled again, narrowing toaster warm eyes, and briefly brushed the first two fingers of her good hand against his cheek.
"Thank you," she said quietly and he wasn't entirely sure if she was thanking him for agreeing with her, taking care of her injury or the kiss (he was about 99.9% certain it wasn't the last one), but he nodded and smiled.
"You're welcome."
"Let's go find Lev," she invited, packing up the first aid kit and rinsing out the cloth before leaving it to dry.
Fitz nodded and helped her clean up. He trusted her, but he really did wish she'd at least test her blood for any sign of infection.
She was smart and incredibly well prepared but that didn't mean nothing could go wrong, didn't mean she needn't be cautious because, sometimes, when you opened new doors there was a price to pay.
:O :O :O
Stay tuned for part 2: Fitz is paranoid, Skye is not helping, all Simmons wants is her rat back - coming soon.
There is a reference to the science fiction series Fringe in this chapter (and will be one in the next), words of caution from my favourite mad scientist Walter Bishop "When you open new doors, there is a price to pay."
The :O :O :O is suppose to be three faces saying Whooooo, because this is a Halloween story.
Lev doesn't look like the picture I drew, but maybe Fitz pictures him that way XD.
