Disclaimer: The Avengers, its characters and The Marvel Cinematic Universe belong to Marvel Studios and The Walt Disney Company, among many others. Marvel's Agents of SHIELD and its characters belong to ABC Studios, Marvel Television, Mutant Enemy Productions, among many others. What If…? belongs to Marvel Studies and The Walt Disney Company, among many others. I'm only a fan, writing this for my love of this film/television franchise.
A.N.: My love for the Skye/Fitz/Simmons dynamics shines through in this chapter and I'm so giddy. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it!
Avengers Initiative: Reset
08. Relationships
The next morning, Skye had a moment of acute disorientation as she found herself lying down on an actual bed in a room with brick walls instead of on top of the mattress in her van. In a few seconds, she remembered the whirlwind that had been the previous day, starting with suddenly being fairly kidnapped from her latest place in Atlanta, taken to a secret base by the organization she'd been hacking into as she looked for answers about her past then being offered an actual spot at said organization and taking it.
It had been late at night when she'd gotten back to the base with Coulson and May after they had gathered her things, and she'd barely had the energy to crash down in the room they said would be hers for as long as the team was working together. Now as she changed clothes, washed up and the last vestiges of sleep vanished from her mind, she found she was unbelievably hungry.
Walking out of her room and wandering through the base, she found what looked like the kitchen and set about grabbing herself some breakfast. She was a little surprised at all the food available, as she had expected cereal and maybe those tasteless cereal bars that somehow passed for food, but she found a fully stocked fridge with actual fruits and vegetables, eggs, a variety of cheeses, meat cuts, yogurt, jam, juice and milk, plus a pantry with different types of bread and cookies, an espresso machine on the counter and an unbelievable amount of different types of tea. And cereal, of course.
After feeding herself to her heart's content and cleaning up after herself ─ she was usually much more of a slob, to be honest, but she didn't want to enrage her new coworkers on her first day ─ Skye set out to look for the rest of the team and see if there was anything she could do to help out or maybe check on Natasha's progress on digging for her files. Or maybe she should check on that with Coulson, as she got the impression she should go through him for this.
There was no one at the R&D lab, which she thought was strange as yesterday all the hubbub had been happening right there. Not even the Tony Stark hologram was on, she noted. She was still marvelling at the thought that that man had actually managed to live on by creating an AI version of himself. But then if anyone would be capable of managing such a feat it would make sense that it would be Tony freaking Stark.
As she wandered towards the back of the floor, she heard voices and opened a door to find Jemma Simmons and Leo Fitz already hard at work assembling the regeneration cradle inside what looked like a workshop. There was still only a skeleton base for what would become the final product, but she was a little amazed that they had already managed to put all of that together.
"Hey, guys." She said in greeting as she walked in to join them.
"Skye, good morning," Jemma greeted her with a bright smile. Skye smiled back and thought to herself that she could already tell she liked the British young woman. It looked like she had a generally sunny disposition and frankly she seemed a lot less intimidating than all those living legends that she'd met the day before or the older agents who were so serious despite her best attempts at cracking jokes to lighten the mood.
"Hey, Skye," Fitz told her as he also turned to her with a smile. "I'm glad you found us. I was looking forward to showing you my thing. I mean, my tools. I mean, the workshop!" He rambled on and blushed very deeply for a moment, causing Jemma to roll her eyes from beside him.
"Okay," Skye said with an amused smile. She thought the Scotsman was cute and sweet in a nerdy way, but for a moment she was confused, wondering if he was flirting with her or not, as she had thought he and Simmons were a couple during the previous day. "I can see you're already hard at work. Do you want me to lend you a hand? How can I help?"
"I don't know. How are your skills with a soldering iron?" Jemma asked in good humour, seeing as her partner was still recovering from his earlier blundering words and wouldn't look up at Skye.
"I have no idea," Skye said, raising her eyebrows at that. "But I've had to fix my van a couple of times this past year, so I'm sure I can pick it up if you talk me through it."
Jemma smiled and nodded, telling her to get over to where they were working and soon she'd walked Skye through how they were building the machine and tasked her with something relatively simple involving tightening up some bolts along the structure.
"How have you guys already put all of this together?" Skye said, marvelling at the progress they had already made. "Did you sleep at all last night?"
"Oh yes," Jemma said breezily. "We caught a few hours late last night then we were up early today. Of course, it's not very healthy to be running on less than eight hours of sleep per night, but we are used to sleeping less hours and even pulling all-nighters since our days back at the Academy, right Fitz?"
"Only because you insisted we needed to cram for our exams," he muttered in reply. "Even though I still insist to this day we would've been fine even if we hadn't. This one loved homework and studying so much that we actually finished our courses earlier than planned." He said, looking up at Skye with a grin and motioning with his elbow towards his lab partner as he had a wrench in his hand and was tightening up a bolt in the cradle structure.
"Really?" Skye asked, raising her eyebrows in surprise.
"Earliest and youngest graduates at SHIELD Academy to this day," Jemma concurred with a proud nod, then her smile became a little sly. "Although I guess technically there can only be one youngest graduate."
"Let me guess," Skye said with a smirk. "You?"
"Only by 23 days," Fitz muttered grumpily under his breath, but there was the tug of a smile at the corners of his mouth even if he kept his eyes trained to what he was doing.
"I can't help it when I was born," Jemma said airily. "Nor that I excel at preparation. I certainly didn't get two PhDs by the time I was seventeen by just laying around and doing nothing."
"Who said anything about doing nothing?" Fitz retorted immediately. "I'm just saying I never needed to pull all-nighters in order to get my own PhD before I was seventeen, thank you very much."
"What?" Skye reeled back before this. "Are you guys serious? You had PhDs by the time you were seventeen?"
"Sixteen, actually. Right before we got into SHIELD Academy," Jemma replied as if it were an everyday occurrence.
"Holy shit," Skye whispered in awe. "I was thinking you two had just graduated college and got pulled into this madness just as suddenly as I was."
"Oh no, we've been working for SHIELD and running our own lab for almost four years now, right Fitz?" Jemma said with another of her bright smiles.
"Right," he said with a nod with something more of a worried frown. "Although running a lab and supporting operations from HQ is very different from being in a secret base working for Director Fury's special secret black ops team."
"Yes, but you gotta admit this is very exciting, isn't it?" Jemma argued back excitedly. "We've already got the opportunity to be working with incredible technology, not to mention the amazing people who are part of this team."
"That is something," Fitz admitted with a nod. "I can say I never thought I'd be arguing back and forth with the AI of Tony Stark. And by the way, what the hell were you thinking, giving out orders to Black Widow?" He said, as he turned simultaneously concerned and exasperated eyes towards his lab partner.
"Wait, which one is Black Widow?" Skye interjected with a frown. "And why is that such a big deal?"
"She's the redhead, Agent Romanoff." Fitz explained quickly.
"She doesn't seem scary." Skye countered with a head tilt, remembering their moments in the interrogation room and then working together on the hack. "The other one, Agent May, on the other hand..." She punctuated her words by affecting a shudder.
"Well, the Cavalry is also scary in her own right." Fitz agreed with a quick nod.
"Does everyone here have a ridiculous codename?" Skye asked with an eyeroll. "What's yours? Bio-Hazard?"
"No, of course not." Jemma fairly scoffed in reply.
"They just call us Fitz-Simmons." Fitz said, giving her a funny look.
"Yeah, I got that." Skye murmured in reply, as she'd heard them being referred to as if they were one person and spending time with them now she got to see why. It was a little bit ridiculous how well they worked around each other, as she saw them dividing their tasks and handing each other tools or parts without even having to ask for anything, all while maintaining conversation with her. It was no wonder they'd already managed to do so much.
"And the Black Widow is a big deal because up until a few years ago she was a Russian assassin that worked for the KGB until another agent managed to turn her then she joined SHIELD." Fitz explained, getting to his earlier point that he had made. "Now she's one of Director Fury's favorite agents. That woman is legendary in the spy industry and quite honestly, very terrifying."
"She really isn't, once you get to know her a little." Jemma said with a slight shake of the head. "And I was thinking that what was actually terrifying was on my first day in charge of everyone's health here she strained herself, suffered a collapsed lung and a re-bleed in her liver and I had to rush her downstairs to the medical floor to keep her from bleeding out in front of me until Dr. Fine could get here. If she thinks she can intimidate me after that then she's got another thing coming."
"Wow." Skye stopped and blinked her eyes back at her, a slow smile spreading over her lips. "Jemma Simmons, you're a badass!"
"Well, I'm really not." Jemma deflected with an embarrassed smile. "I just take my job seriously and I really dislike when people think they can push me around just because of my gender or age. I may not be a legendary super spy or war-time hero or a genius billionaire even, but I know what I'm doing and I'm going to make bloody damn sure I take care of these people even if it is against their will."
"I can see that and I have no doubt you'll manage it. You guys are like the smartest people I know, in a freakin'-unbelievable-high-level of smartness." Skye said, not bothering to hide the admiration she was feeling for the two of them even though she still barely knew them. "The only other real smart person I knew (who is nowhere near this level, by the way, but he is pretty smart) was my friend at the orphanage, Matt. He got a full-ride scholarship to Columbia Law. He got so mad when I just dropped out of High School."
"You really didn't finish High School?" Jemma blinked her eyes up in surprise at that, not quite comprehending why someone would give up their right to an education.
"Eh." Skye said with an easy shrug. "I had more interesting things to do than get myself a stupid diploma. Everything I needed to know by that point I already did and I learned way more useful stuff out of school."
"Like hacking into secured servers and leaking out secrets all over the web?" Fitz countered with something of a smirk tugging at his mouth.
"How can you actually think that's a bad thing?" Skye retorted, taking offense at his tone. "You're building this amazing machine now all thanks to my hacking skills."
"Freedom of information is a valid point, but there is certain information that is unsafe to be in the hands of dangerous people." Jemma said while shaking her head.
"For instance, SHIELD has agents and assets working undercover all over the world." Fitz added in a serious tone. "If you leak their identities, their missions and their lives would be compromised."
"Ok, I get that. That would be a bad leak." Skye consented with a quick nod, but she wasn't quite ready to give it up. "Now keeping things like knowledge of technology and medical developments secret are detrimental to the overall betterment of the world. Why should some people keep it to themselves and let the rest of the world struggle?"
"Again, because people could use the most beneficial of inventions to cause the biggest harm, depending on their intentions. And also, why not?" Fitz argued back with a light scoff. "If it was their idea, then they should be able to benefit from it."
"The pharmaceutical industry is a big example." Jemma chimed in. "You need to have at least a certain margin of profit from sales of drugs, otherwise you wouldn't be able to fund research to develop more treatment options."
Skye was immediately shaking her head in the negative. "That is a whole lot of bullshit and you know it."
"It isn't." Jemma insisted, though her tone remained light and calm and she seemed to be quite enjoying herself arguing back and forth with Skye. "It ordinarily takes close to a billion dollars and ten years to develop just one new drug."
"Dig through the financials of where those billion dollars get allocated in the long run." Skye said, shaking her head in an exasperated manner. "They don't get profit just to make more drugs, develop new technology or employ more staff working in research. There are doctors who prescribe those drugs who get money for it and company shareholders and people getting filthy rich from it, living in mansions and lounging in yachts and cruising the world in private jets. And why? No one needs all that stuff to actually live and meanwhile there are people literally dying because they can't afford drugs or hospitals."
"Well, then you're getting into a whole other sector of problems, starting with government policies and HMO in the US." Jemma calmly interjected. "In the UK ─ just as in several other countries ─ we have universal healthcare and it actually works quite well, you know."
"Oh God, I wish I had to use my blowtorch right now." Fitz muttered with an exaggerated eyeroll. "Do I really need to keep hearing this heated political commentary in the background while I work to build this machine?"
"While we work, Fitz." Jemma retorted at once with an exasperated eyeroll of her own. "You're not doing this by yourself, you know."
"I know." He muttered in a grumpy tone. "I'm acutely aware of that, Simmons."
Ah, so they're not together, Skye thought to herself, as she figured there was no way he would be calling her by her last name if they were a couple. Although realizing that made her frown in confusion, as they were so obviously made for each other. She wondered when they would finally realize that and if she'd have to play matchmaker to make that happen.
They kept on working together at assembling the cradle and talking of various things, from their jobs at SHIELD to Skye's exploits as a hacktivist and how she'd tumbled down that path until Coulson sent them a message saying they needed to stop what they were doing as they'd need to make a trip to one of SHIELD's labs nearby.
"Is he serious now?" Skye said with a frown when Jemma had checked on the message in her phone. "I thought putting this thing together was top priority. What could be happening now that is more urgent than this?"
"We never know what might've happened while we were cooped up in here," Jemma replied with a shrug as she got up and put away the tools she'd been using.
"At SHIELD, you'll learn pretty soon that anything is possible," Fitz said with a nod and rather grave expression as he also helped put everything away. "C'mon, we'd better hurry up and see what they want."
A.N.: Skye/Daisy being the captain of the Fitz-Simmons ship is just a staple of AOS and I couldn't not include it here. And before anyone bites my head off, I am a pharmacist/biochemist, I've worked with pharmaceutical marketing and I currently work with clinical research, so both Skye and Jemma's arguments are from my own knowledge.