This is my first attempt at publishing a story in a very long time. I hope I can keep my attention span on this long enough to finish that story thats been burning a hole in my pocket for ages. I was inspired for the setup by another story, but I can't remember what it was called or who wrote it. If you can figure it out leet me know and I'll add credit where it's due. Thanks for reading, and feedback is welcome.
Chickens, that was it. Or vultures. Ward had been trying to figure out what it was that Fitz and Simmons reminded him of when they got excited about a new piece of tech. They were currently circling the device the team had brought back, occasionally taking notes or gently touching it with one of their "special device touching rods". He didn't know and didn't care, too injured to really pay attention. Chickens, he decided before limping upstairs to bandage himself up. Maybe he'd turn this into a way to teach Skye how to suture your own wounds on the battle field.
The lab was left in silence, with only the occasional soft metallic clink as one of the scientists reverently poked at the mechanism. It, and a few scraps of metal, were the only parts not incinerated in a small crash in northern Minnesota. Those scraps are currently in an airtight container being tested to identify the metal it was. The only reason this device wasn't in there with them was the small glowing patch of blue peaking out from a crack in it's hull. The whole thing wasn't half as big as Simmons fist and was composed of erratically arranged lumps and spikes. All in all it was terribly exciting.
"Switch" Jemma's crisp voice rang out abruptly in the silence of the lab for just a second before her and Fitz switched clipboards and looked over each others notes. They'd figured out at the Academy that often times they could be inspired to realize different factors when looking through each others minds.
"Do you really think it could be a musical instrument? There aren't even holes in it?" Fitz's accent was only made sharper by the edge of distain as he regarded Simmon's with an incredulous look.
"Well it's alien isn't it?! It could be a fragment of an instrument, or part of a mechanical player, like an alien walkman or gramophone. We can't rule things out just because it's not obvious." She shot back, eye brows raised. Fitz only harumphed and went back to looking at her notes. He wouldn't admit it, but in his excitement his first thought was some sort of extraterrestrial sporting equipment.
"Okay, now that preliminary observations are done, can we start testing it?" Fitz's voice was raised an octave with excitement, his accent thicker as he tried to resist grinning like a child. His glance up at Simmon's showed her bouncing on her toes, lips pressed together and eyes shining with equally matched glee. Their eye contact held for a second before they both leapt for their nearest equipment. Fitz went to grab the dwarf box, but Simmons beat him back to the device with a scalpel and a petri dish.
"First!" she yelled. Every time they had to take turns testing something, it became a competition to see who would start off. Simmons usually won.
"Damnit woman, you can't just prance around like that. You're like a gazelle, with your long legs, hopping about…make it quick alright?" Fitz set his case down dejectedly and Simmons stuck her tongue in his direction. It was soon replaced with her regular brilliant smile as she pulled her goggles over her manic eyes.
"You'll have your turn soon Fitz. I'm just taking samples." She soothed. Of course Fitz's disappointment was quickly banished as he leaned in to watch Simmon's hands deftly shave a curl off the metal. It was smooth, like cutting through a piece of warm chocolate; and settled softly into the dish she held below it. A shudder of scientific excitement passed through them both, like every time they worked with a new specimen. Simmons took shavings from a lump and a spike, making sure they stayed carefully separate on the dish.
"Who gets to start off today? Sleepy? Bashful?" Simmons stepped away from the table to allow Fitz and his robots space. As he tapped away on his monitor, she carefully sealed and labeled her dish in a flurry of numbers and letters that only they would understand.
"Oh no, for something like this Doc takes the lead." A little robot whirred into the air as Fitz spoke, hovering by his ear. Simmons hurried to his side to watch the monitor over his shoulder as Doc whizzed over to the device. Blue light shone down and instantly the monitor was alive and shining with readings scrolling across the screen at super speed. Fitz released an inadvertent giggle of delight.
"There's so much inside, and this is just X-rays. Imagine what we'll find with infrared, or magnetic, or even the olfactory?!"
"Or when we finally get it open! See with our own eyes the intricacies!" They began talking over each other, riling themselves up with excitement for their future experiments. However, in their increasing inattention, neither of them noticed that the small blue patch peaking out from the device had begun to pulse; its light growing stronger each time. Only Doc noticed, and tried to alert them by sending a big red warning message onto the monitor. A few seconds later it sent a blaring tone to accompany the sign. That snapped them out of their scientist trace in time to hear a sickly crack come from the device.
Suddenly there was a cloud of glowing blue dust billowing through the air, engulfing them instantly.
Proper warning alarms went off, shrieking as the lab shut down into quarantine mode. Red lights started to flash and door slammed shut. Simmons could hear Fitz coughing, desperately trying not to inhale the substance. She grabbed his hand and they stumbled away from the cloud, trying to find a clear spot in the lab. They broke free like walking through a curtain, blinded and gasping. Simmons didn't let go of his hand as they sagged against a counter, panting. They had barely caught their breath when Fitz looked up at Simmons.
"Showers, now." Simmons was coated in bright blue splotches of an alien substance that they hadn't even begun testing, and he could only assume that he shared a similar fare. Simmons locked eyes with him and her lips parted in a tiny gasp. Then like that they were dashing to decontamination pod in the corner of the lab, shedding clothes as they ran.
Simmons thanked god that she'd worn slip ons as Fitz struggled to kick off his high tops. Both of them shed layers like mad men, pausing their run only to pull off their trousers. The door had swung open on their approach, designed to get them inside and away from everyone else as fast as possible. It snapped shut behind them, instantly turning on the scalding water at full blast. Had they been anyone else, the two might have taken a minute to be awkward about being wet and in their underwear in such a small space. But it would be quite a fib to say that this was the first time they'd had to run decontamination together. At least with the last times they had known what the substance they were scrubbing off was.
Industrial strength, gritty soap was sitting in pockets in the wall, which they grabbed and started scrubbing. The blue dust was resistant to their efforts, leaving stained patches on their skin that they desperately worked on.
"Here, let me get—" Fitz didn't bother to finish his sentence as he started scouring her hair, furiously trying to get the substance out of her long brunette locks. She spun around to let him get the parts of her back that she couldn't reach and bent down to reach the tops of her feet, which the dust had settled upon. Fitz pulled back the strap of her bra and tried to be careful with the skin on the back of her right shoulder, as he remembered the unfortunate sulfuric acid incident that had left that skin permanently scarred and delicate. She straightened up, flipping her hair out of her eyes.
"Let me get you." She said while pulling on his arm to make him pivot. Fitz had steel rods in his elbow from an experiment gone wrong when he was eleven that kept him from being able to reach certain parts of his lower back. He scrubbed through his matted curls as she roughly ground the soap into the muscle next to his spine. Blue spots still remained on their arms and faces, but if any particles had gotten through their layers, they were eradicated. Both of them ran through the pre-regulated checks in their minds of what to do when contaminated by a foreign substance.
"Decontaminate" Simmon's ordered the shower, and the water instantly shut off. Close on its heels came a very fine grey powder puffing aggressively out of holes in the walls. They both started patting themselves down as the fog began to settle.
"I must say, this stuff certainly smells better than the last time. Remember Doctor Sherman's lab?" They hadn't had time to panic as they were scrubbing, necessity taking over. But now that the precautions they could take had been taken, Fitz could feel nervous adrenaline start to seep into his blood. He hoped small talk would keep Simmons from the same fate.
"Oh yes, that horrid day before finals week. You know I did tell Harry not to mix an acid with a base." She kept her voice light, but Fitz had spent enough time with her to hear that her vowels had gotten higher. She was scared too.
Once the dust had settled the air vents turned on, like a thousand hair dryers on high. The powder that covered the two was blown off in the whirl wind. They both shook out their hair, trying to remove every particle from their bodies.
"Here, you missed a bit." Simmon's hand was clearly shaking as she reached up to brush dust away from behind Fitz's ear. Her hand lingered, fingers brushed over an offensively blue patch on the side of his neck, eyes unfocused. Her pupils were starting to constrict with dread when Fitz reached up take her hand.
"Hey now, we're gonna be okay. No jumping out of planes for us this time." His reference to her previous alien disease made her eyes flash up to his, terror flooding them for a second before calming. No matter what happened, Fitz was with her and making jokes, so everything was going to be alright. He always made everything okay.
Their fingers were still interlocked, resting on his shoulder when Coulson's voice sounded over the coms. "Are you guys okay? The lab is in quarantine so we can't get in. Give us verbal confirmation that you are in fact alive or we're breaking in."
"Yes sir! We are alive and as of this moment not debilitated with alien horrors." Simmons called out. The two kept their hands interlocked as they punched in the all clear code to make the door open.
As children, Fitz and Simmons had been rather accident prone. Not due to clumsiness, just due to the sheer amount of dangerous situations they put themselves in. When the year 12's curriculum at the local secondary school was boring at 11 years old, they'd had to find some other way to fill the time.
Simmons came from a distinctly upper middle class family. While she wouldn't have called them rich per se, they could afford to buy her equipment to engage in experiments well beyond her age range. While everyone else in the third grade science fair was making baking soda volcanos and drawing diagrams of cells; young Jemma was splicing bamboo DNA into an endangered Arizona Agave plant in an effort to make it more resilient. Unfortunately the fair was being judged by a bunch of primary school english teachers and Jemma was given a "Thanks for Participating" sticker. When her research and developmental techniques were used to save the food source of a dying breed of indigenous rodent; she would anonymously send that news paper clipping to the teachers who had told her she had a "neat idea."
Of course, no matter how advanced her intelligence, Jemma was still a child and was more than once sent to the emergency room for experiments gone wrong. Her attempts to grow skin grafts for her scraped knees had ended in her accidentally developing a new strain of gangrene and being put in quarantine for two weeks. Of course she was able to create an enzyme boosting formula while secluded that regrew her original skin and gave her back the ability to kneel.
Fitz, however, hadn't been quite as lucky growing up. Raised by a single mother in the Estates, there was not a lot of supervision to give him while she worked. By the time he was 6 he had realized that he didn't have enough legos to make a airplane that would actually fly, and had to go out in search of better tools. There was a scrap yard nearby his complex that he credits both his discovery by S.H.I.E.L.D. and his delinquent behavior as a young teen. You could find anything in there, from the stripped cars abandoned after drug busts to a refrigerator from the 60's that may be slightly radioactive. It was there that he shattered his elbow trying to make a perpetual motion machine into an energy producer.
To Fitz it was like a playground that he wouldn't get kicked off of for climbing on the wrong parts. However, like a playground, he was not the only one playing there. Fitz didn't have many friends as a child, especially when they found out that he was taking college courses online during lunch. So when older teenagers showed interest in the little creations he made it was a monumental time for him. To this day Fitz is easily swayed by people he likes, but as a preteen that meant occasionally breaking into cars to get more pieces for his inventions. The time he got picked up by the cops for accidentally blowing up a tennis court landed him in a cell for the night as his mom was working a night shift and couldn't get him. It was also the night he completed his first Ph.D in engineering and piqued Fury's interest. Of course he wouldn't come forward until two years later, when Fitz had earned his second.
Red lights were still flashing brightly but thankfully the horrid alarm had been turned off when the team arrived. Jemma peeked out the little pane of glass in the door into the lab. The dust cloud seemed to have settled, but now everything in the lab was coated in an aggressively blue film. It would take weeks to clean everything, let alone test this new substance, and most of their carefully maintained and calibrated equipment would have to be destroyed. Simmons chose to focus on that instead of the fact that she was in the same position as the microscope.
Fitz's fingers gave hers a small squeeze, before dropping down off his shoulder. Her hand followed to hang loosely by her side. Beep beep beep; she punched the release code into the panel of numbers set into the wall of the decontamination unit. Her hands were steady but as soon as the doors opened, trembles slid into her fingertips. Coulson, May, Skye, and Ward were all outside the lab, faces pressed to the glass as they watched the blank pod in horror. The communal sigh of relief when Fitz and Simmons emerged looking like themselves could be heard through the thick glass.
"What happened here? Do you have any thoughts on what this substance might be?" May asked while tapping an alert for a medical team into her phone. Her voice and demeanor never changed but it was the most words anyone had heard her speak all day.
"No, he were just starting our preliminary tests when the device opened up. It may have been activated by Doc's X-rays or perhaps experienced some kind of rapid oxidization due to our atmosphere." Fitz and Simmons had emerged from the pod and were standing as far from the invading blueness and possible. Their discarded clothes were scattered all over the floor, covered in blue patches and smears. With the immediate danger looming but distant, the two were now able to feel anything besides the cold swallow of fear that had been freezing them. 'And speaking of freezing' Jemma thought as she wrapped her arms around herself. As Leo and her were both from the great gloomy North, they kept their lab at comfortable sweater temperature. However slightly damp and mostly naked wasn't ideal. Fitz had clear goosebumps all over his arms and chest, but was holding his arms firmly by his side. Jemma knew that was his tense pose. She wanted to reach out and wrap her arms around him, both for warmth and her own reassurance that neither of them were dead; but it didn't feel right. That kind of contact was too intimate for the glass box they were in.
Barely a minute after May had sent out the call, hazmat suits were pouring in. Some were carrying bag and bins all marked with the biohazard symbol, others a variety of medical equipment. Those ones made a beeline for Jemma and Leo, virtually attacking them with a variety of instruments. Suction cups were stuck all over their bodies, hair, saliva and skin samples were taken, and at one point a thermometer was jabbed into Fitz's mouth so unexpectedly that he bit the offending hand and almost broke the little glass stick. The two stood there motionless for the better part of 20 minutes, staring blankly into space and trying to ignore the fact that their entire lab was being carted away. The device itself was stuck in an airtight container, but left in the room as they needed to continue their experiments if they were going to figure out what had just happened.
Finally the room was clearing out and the final diodes were removed.
"We can't find any immediate effect on your person. For the moment you two appear to be safe, but I recommend constant observation and check ins for the next few weeks. You can continue with your daily schedules, but should anything change or you feel even the slightest bit off; quarantine yourselves immediately. Keep the bus on its highest possible observation and tracking abilities directed at you two." The voice from behind the suit was muffled, but kind. Their hand patted Fitz on the shoulder.
"I'm glad there appears to be nothing wrong, you two had us worried for a while there." Then they picked up their equipment and turned away. The pair barely had a second to left out a breath of relief before the team came barreling in through the now unlocked doors. Skye was the first one in, and grabbed the two of them in a rib crushing hug.
"If you guys try anything like that again I'll kill you." She said as she released. Coulson had two black robes draped over his arm, which he handed over. Jemma gratefully shrugged into hers, feeling distinctly better for being less exposed. Fitz pulled the collar of his up to his ears, trying to wrap himself as tightly in the fluff as possible.
"You two should probably stay in the medical ward overnight, just in case." Coulson said. Like May, his face gave away nothing, but he had adopted his fatherly tone. The duo just nodded and started shuffling out of the lab; Skye and War following them as Skye began a barrage of concerned questions. May and Coulson took a moment to look around the lab. Blue stains still covered every surface.
"Do you think they'll be alright?" May looked him in the eye as she spoke.
"We have no way of knowing. I just hope my fears are wrong. But theres nothing more we can do at the moment except figure out what that thing is." Coulson looked sideways at the offending object, glowing innocently inside its box. As they walked out of the room May's voice sounded steelier than usual.
"Then we've got a lot of work to do."