"Mack!" Fitz stormed into the kitchen, his curls still askew from the angry bike ride over, and stopped short when he saw Mack's upraised finger and the phone in his hand.

"Thank you again, Mayor Coulson. We definitely will." Mack laughed lightly. "Always a pleasure, sir. Take care." After he hung up, he capped the marker he'd been using to label their calendar for the Treehouse Falls Children's Day Spectacular, underlined twice in thick bold slashes. "Okay, Turbo, shoot. What's going on?"

"Why don't you tell me." Fitz stalked over to the counter and yanked open his laptop. "Mm-hmm," he hummed as he brought up the MoreThanThat website and searched for himself. Whirling the computer screen towards Mack, he put on his most no-nonsense face. "Know anything about this?"

Mack moved to grab an orange from their hanging fruit basket, his face breaking out in a gleaming white smile, and a small laugh escaped his throat. "Yo, man, that was Hunter's idea. I'm on your side!"

"Oh?" He's got a right bit of explaining to do. Fitz put his hands on his hips. "And how exactly is goin' behind my back and making me look like a fool on the Internet, being on my side?"

Mack reached for his water bottle and took a long swig, wiping off his mouth with his forearm. "I bet him we'd actually find you a nice girl. He bet you'd only get attention from men over fifty."

Fitz goggled, incensed. "I should hope I'd get attention across the board!" He was a catch for anyone at any age, thank you very much. "And that's hardly the point!"

Mack finished his orange in about three bites and tossed the peel overhand into the bin. "Hey, man, you know I think secrets don't help anyone. I should've just come clean." He gave Fitz a commiserating look. "But you gotta admit, with the business not doing so hot, you've been a little jumbled lately." His face turned serious, and he rubbed his hands together absently. "I just thought it might be good for you. Y'know… go out, have some fun, meet someone nice. Maybe get you un-jumbled."

"Yeah, well," Fitz scratched at his eyebrow. "I don't need your help in that department, all right? Next time, worry about yourself."

A flash of pained guilt passed over Mack's face. "Sorry, buddy."

As much as Mack liked to claim all his exes were awesome, his last relationship had ended over two years before in a drag-out shouting match that had left the normally calm entrepreneur curled up on the couch for days, cuddling Quinoa as he tripled his Call of Duty kill count and exhausted his repertoire of angry curse words. Really, if anyone should understand why I don't try to date, it's Mack.

"It's okay," Fitz relented. "But I'm still deleting the profile."

Mack nodded, tapped a few keys on Fitz's laptop, and pushed the machine back towards him with the profile editing page on the screen. "You can delete it if you want, Turbo. Or you could use it to show people the real you. This guy who's… yeah, I mean, he's a little weird," he chuckled, "but who isn't anybody but himself." Mack put his hand on Fitz's shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

With that, Mack left Fitz at the counter, staring down at a string of world-class absurdities that Hunter had used to describe him:

Abraca-do me!
Looking for a lovely assistant to join me in the ultimate trick - falling in love!

Name: Leopold "Magic Fingers" Fitz
Age: 28
Profession: part-time magician, part-time inventor, full-time sex machine
Likes: monkey puppetry, only shaving 1x/week, my favourite sandwich (available at Scout's Honor Bar & Grill - 202 Merc Rd)
Dislikes: superior football teams
Special talents: some real Houdini-level stuff (escaping from locked boxes, evading certain death, holding my breath underwater - hello ladies)
Special interests: Italian guns, cardigans
Hobbies: arguing with fit brunettes who are smarter than me, SCUBA diving, having excellent taste in friends

It just kept going. Yeah… definitely getting rid of this. As the pointer hovered over the delete button, however, Fitz noticed the blinking notification in the upper right-hand corner.

It couldn't hurt to look. It wasn't as if he couldn't briefly check out the options before deleting this atrocity of a profile forever. Taking a deep breath, he pulled up the list of recent matches.

Anne Weaver - she looked lovely, but slightly too old for him. Hannah Hutchins - not to be picky, but he couldn't imagine dating someone who believed in ghosts. Sally Webber - ran a website that pranked people and filmed it. Not very mature. Karla Faye Gideon - sexy manicurist with a cutthroat sense of humor? Now that was interesting. Then again… using her mugshot as the profile photo was probably a bad omen. Moving on. And… Jemma Simmons. Well, well, well. A slow smile spread over Fitz's face as he quickly scanned the page. Turn-ons include: cardigans, heterostructure transistors. His smile bubbled into a barking laugh, sitting loudly in the quiet room. Nerd.

Fitz snorted with self-satisfaction. Jemma thought she could take the mickey out of him for his online profile? Well, Doctor Simmons, revenge is a dish best served immediately. Fitz shook out his fingers to loosen them up and clicked on the small envelope by her name.

Time for a little payback.

-o-

To: NubileYoungPhD
Your dream vacation is Zloda, Belarus? Really? Why not just go to South Ossetia, if we're naming terrible places.

Jemma blinked at her phone in surprise, then tapped out a quick reply.

To: MagicMonkey69
Like you're any better, Mr. Death Wish. A monkey-scouting walking tour of Peru? Do you even know how many species of snakes would kill you there? And that's assuming the earthquakes and guerrillas don't find you first.

The shushupe really does have a fascinating venom, though. Neurotoxic, proteolytic, and hemolytic? Perhaps Peru wouldn't be so bad after all…

-o-

To: NubileYoungPhD
"Looking for the Watson to my Sherlock"? First of all, it's a bit uninspired. Second, you do realize you've just admitted to being a sociopath.

Pffft. She insisted on being called Doctor but refused to be Watson? She needs to sort out her priorities.

To: MagicMonkey69
Well we can't all be looking for "a bonny wee lass tae cook me neeps and tatties just like me mam used tae make" (though I'm surprised to see you enjoy any dish with vegetables in it).

Fitz's jaw clenched in irritation. He thought he'd gotten rid of all traces of Hunter's "contributions" to his profile. Either Jemma had taken screen shots before the changes, or… Fitz went into his account and reset the password one more time. Just to be safe.

-o-

Jemma bit the inside of her cheek in disapproval as she browsed Fitz's freshly updated profile. It was one thing for a grown man to behave like a child, another entirely to advertise it. And on a dating website, no less. It was like he was asking Chris Hansen to pop by for a chat.

To: MagicMonkey69
I can't believe you described your ideal date as a game of Minecraft over a bowl of leftover Halloween candy.

To: NubileYoungPhD
Leftover Halloween candy is the only kind I buy. And you've clearly never played Minecraft or you would agree with me.

To: MagicMonkey69
Not only do I play, I run a rather nasty mob.

To: NubileYoungPhD
Please don't say zombies.

To: MagicMonkey69
Zombie pigmen. :-)
What server are you on, again?

-o-

It was important to note that they were not friends, Fitz insisted, to anyone who would listen.

They were just a pair of acquaintances who, due to their professional interactions, were forced to tolerate each other's company occasionally. Because children were watching, and it wouldn't do to call each other names in front of impressionable young ears.

Texting, however, was completely silent.

-o-

[To She-Devil: Spying on me? I saw you skulking about earlier.]

[From She-Devil: Just making sure you didn't burn down the hospital parking lot. Since when is fire breathing a part of your act?]

[To She-Devil: Since a terminally ill little girl decided Lilo & Stitch was her favorite movie.]

Take that, Fitz thought to himself smugly. He'd like to see Jemma mock him for making sick children happy. Never mind that she was here doing the exact same thing.

[From She-Devil: Awww. That's adorable. And now you've given me an idea for how to do the big finale at the Children's Day Spectacular.]

[To She-Devil: They gave you the finale?! Inconceivable.]

[To She-Devil: Please tell me you at least had to show your underpants to get it.]

[From She-Devil: Hilarious.]

[From She-Devil: Try not to burn your cape off today. Or anything else.]

[From She-Devil: Or people. Don't burn anything or anyone.]

[To She-Devil: What makes you so sure I'm going to cause an accident?]

[From She-Devil: I watched you practice. Let's just say it's a good thing you're already at the hospital.]

-o-

Later, as Fitz was getting his hand bandaged, Jemma happened to catch his eye on her way out. One look at her insufferable I-told-you-so face and he felt his own skin heating up, singed fingertips momentarily forgotten. And when she raised a snippety eyebrow and pulled out her phone, he knew a snarky text wouldn't be far behind.

[From She-Devil: Didn't I tell you to be safe? Enclosed, please find a copy of my printable pamphlet on working with flammable materials.]

[From She-Devil: firesafety .pdf]

Hmmph.

[To She-Devil: Enclosed, please find my middle finger.]

Author's Notes:

Quite a few references in this one!
Besides show nods, we've got I Love Lucy, Harry Potter, The Princess Bride, and to Catch a Predator!

Also, on the show, Mack says he can't relate to anyone's dating troubles because all his exes were awesome. And I will gladly believe that Mack canonically has only had super-cas mutual breakups where everyone stayed in touch and it was friendly and rad. In this fic, Mack's dating backstory with an angry breakup where he got stuck with the dog (or perhaps refused to give up the dog) is my nod to the fact that Mack's not ultra-chill 100% of the time - he still has his moments where he gets upset, and we know there are painful moments in his past, so *shrug* difficult breakup was where I decided to go with it.

Finally, seriously for the love of God screw FFN's crappiness about not allowing me to include email addresses (the MTT messages in this chapter were supposed to be in the form of emails) websites, extensions, or mathematical symbols (or even just more than a handful of text-formatting options) in the text. It's ridiculously irritating and a huge pain to work around. Those are things that appear in daily life and therefore also occasionally appear in fic. Get it together, FFN.