Simmons was walking through the corridor, exhausted after a long evening in the lab, that, worst of all, was completely boring. Just analysis after analysis with nothing out of the ordinary to spark her curiosity. She was simply drained, craving for some, any, kind of stimulation, anything to put some fire into her plain day. Now, coming back to her room from the bathroom at 2:17 am, she knew full well that she wouldn't fall asleep soon enough.
Her bored eyes caught a sight of a weak light coming from under the door to Fitz's room. She stopped, looking at it curiously. Her mind full of unspent energy connected the view with the data from previous days and evenings, adding Fitz's sleepy face from the mornings, his restless and slight impatience in the evening and the faint light that she noticed not for the first time. It all looked similar to the old pattern, the one she remembered back from the Academy and brought her to an obvious conclusion.
Fitz started spending evenings in the same way he did when he was a teenager and she busted him way too many times for her comfort.
The sleepiness and boredom long forgotten, she took a few fast steps to the door and knocked.
"Fitz, it's me!" she shouted hearing the rumble and some shuffling after which the weak light of his bed light disappeared. "I'm coming in!"
She opened the door and the room was again lightened by the lamp standing next to Fitz's bed.
"Jemma?!" he squeaked while ruffling his duvet trying to put it on the side and cover himself at the same time. "What the hell? You ever heard of knocking?"
"I did…" she pointed out.
"You can't just come into my room, I was sleeping peacefully!"
"Oh please, you were not and we both know this," she rolled her eyes. She knew how grumpy Fitz was in the morning and how long it took him to get this energy after waking up. Most certainly not thirty seconds.
"I could have had a heart attack with you sneaking like that!"
"I wouldn't be 'sneaking'" she made the air quotes, "if you were behaving properly. It's after 2am and your lights are on, and I've seen enough to know it's not just tonight. Oh, don't even try denying it," she said when he opened his mouth with exaggerated indignation. "Why is your tablet under your bed?" she asked accusingly.
"Wha-, it-it's not there!" she could see that he was trying to sound offended but the slight tremble in his voice was unmistakable- she'd hit the right nerve. "Why would it be there?"
"Because normally you keep it at your bed side table but it's not there," she took a step closer and bent to reach under his bed. "Which means that you panicked and tried to hide it under your bed when you heard me coming." She moved the cover with her hand to display the space under the bed. "Aha!" she caught the device and her fingers brushed over some kind of paper. Oh no. It was worse than she thought. "Really Fitz, you can't use the same hideout for embarrassing things as in your teens," she mumbled but he was just looking between her and tablet, apparently trying to set it aflame with his eyesight alone. She looked at the screen. Just what she could have expected. She looked at the covers of magazines stuffed under the furniture. No surprise there either.
"Ok," Fitz gave up. "Ok, you got me. Now can we just move over it and go back to sleep?"
"No!" she shook her head. "Why would you do this? Again?"
"It's nothing so bad Simmons, come on, it's ju-"
"No! You are wasting your time with this nonsense. You sit during the night looking at those… things" she waved at the tablet and his secret stash. "Why Fitz? You are way too smart for such activities."
"It's not like they are illegal," he muttered looking away with irritation.
"They should be!" she exclaimed. "They are making you exhausted during the days because you don't sleep at night. They make you waste your potential because you are wasting your mind power on such meaningless things. Why are you doing this? Such a… a low-level activity," she stumbled for the right word to describe this that would still be proper.
"Because I like it, Simmons," he sighed, and put his cover away. "I like looking at those things, they give me satisfaction, isn't this enough of a reason for God's sake?" He took one of the magazines and flipped it until he found a page and showed it to Simmons. "Look. Look at those shapes, those curves! Isn't it simply beautiful?"
Simmons twisted her face and looked at the graph of a function printed on one of the pages of Math - The Only True Queen magazine.
"It doesn't even have a scientific application!" she pointed out, as always when having this argument.
"But it's just so pretty pretty," Fitz whined.
"You can't sit in the middle of the night and stare at some science- fiction functions printed in this joke of a magazine." She couldn't help her disgust over this matter. For him those functions were endless possibilities, waiting to be discovered. For her they were just lines.
"How dare you?!" Fitz moved abruptly back, his face twisted with disbelief. "This is no science fiction, this is an existing function. Who cares if it can't really be used for anything practical?"
"I do, when it's the reason for you wasting your sleep time and being unfocused in the lab. You know pretty well that it's full of dangerous objects that had to be treated with extreme caution, we can't be careless just because we haven't rested well," she said remembering the last time they had this conversation, just after she finished putting stitches on his arm cut by falling piece of equipment. Falling because he was too tired and his grip not stabile enough. "Not to mention this," she pointed at the tablet. "You can't spend half of the night correcting exams from Mathematical Analysis written by your friend's students. That's his job, not yours!" she pointed out, noticing bags under his eyes. She had to do something, he couldn't stay up every night and exhaust himself.
"I'm not doing this because it's a job," he huffed. "I'm doing this because it's funny and entertaining. Some of them are trying to solve integrals in such a silly ways. You would know if you ever looked at them," he added with a hint of accusation. "And that's really not your business Simmons, I can do whatever I want in the night and it's not like you don't have a whole folder filled with photos of tissue samples exposed to some stupid chemicals.
For once she couldn't find an answer, because one, she indeed have this folder and looked through it during her free time and sleepless nights, and two, Fitz stopped being offended and defensive. Now he was just sitting there, in his tiny bunk, looking exhausted and miserable.
"Why are you not sleeping, Fitz?" she asked the true question, praying at the same time that he won't ask her the same.
"Because I can't, okay?" he admitted closing his eyes and hiding his face behind his palm. "I can't sleep. Every tiny sound wakes me up, I think I hear someone sneaking or something in the plane cracking. It's just like my mind… can't settle. You jumped out of the airplane, Skye got shot, Ward got possessed by an ancient stick, Coulson was kidnapped. It was all a little… intense. What will be next, Jemma?" he looked at her, eyes sad and anxious. "So, I thought it would be better to waste my time with something funny, that keeps me at ease, than moping and rolling from one side to another on my bed. And now excuse me, it's after 2am and we have a silent night so you shouldn't be walking around bothering people. Let me sleep," he said and put his duvet back over his body, clearly indicating that he regrets saying too much and wanted her to leave.
She looked at him and suddenly she couldn't just go away or pretend that she was mad at him. Not anymore. Suddenly she wanted to hug him and say that everything will be all right, and that sometimes she regrets coming to the Bus so much and wishes she listened to him and stayed at SciOps, and that she was worried sick when Lorelei was controlling him. She wanted for both of them to once again feel completely safe, like back before they joined dangerous reality of being in Coulson's team.
"Um, you know," she started uncertain. "I could bring my folder and we could take turns and watch it all together. Your things and mine. Since we are both not sleeping we could make a Funny Science Sleepover?" she proposed.
Fitz looked at her in the weak light of his bed lamp and after a while nodded his head with a tiny smile.
She smiled at him and rushed back to her room to come back after a moment with a few of her favourites Interesting Tissues Albums.
They fall asleep late, surrounded by the warmth of each other and silly science scribbles, like back in the Academy, feeling safe and warm and satisfied simply because the other one was just there.
As always, huge thanks to TheLateNightStoryTeller for beta reading.
This silly little thing was born from the "satisfaction" and "What's in that bag and why are you hiding it here?" (no bags involved) prompts as well as Pins Magazines from Pratchett's "Going Postal" and true story about my friend's roommate who really was showing everyone around graphs of pretty functions. All in all, people sometimes have strange hobbies ;)