Legal Disclaimer: I own my stuff, but not the original source material. That belongs to whoever. Also, the opinions and interpretations I use here may not reflect the same in said whoever that owns the source material. Look, I'm just a poor college librarian. Suing me isn't going to get you anything but tears.

Warning: This work may be offensive to some readers. This piece also references canon abuse, canon traumas, and canon bigotry (even if it is not called out or acknowledged in any way by canon). This fic is also Not Friendly towards Jemma Simmons. Feel free to back out if need be.

Author's Note: I would like to remind all my readers that if you dislike my interpretation of canon, that you would save us both a lot of time & emotional spoons by just exiting the fic without bothering to leave a review or comment. If you do not like anything about my fics, then it just proves that this is not meant for you and you are more than welcome to leave without wasting both of our times by leaving a review or comment. TL;DR version: Don't like? Don't read.

THIS FIC CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE SERIES FINALE OF AGENTS OF SHIELD WHICH AIRED LESS THAN A WEEK AGO.

Submitting Info:
Stacked with: Hogwarts (Term 13); MC4A
Individual Challenges: Cry Power; Writing with Music; Metahuman MC; SHIELD MC (x2); Neurodivergent; Rian-Russo Inversion (x2); Disabled; Small Fry; Ship Sails; Shipwreck; Future Era; New Fandom Smell; Marvelous Cinema; Short Jog; Bucket Listing; Green Ribbon; Greatest Gift
House: Slytherin
Assignment No.: Term 13 – Assignment 03
Subject (Task No.): n/a
Other Hogwarts Challenges: Insane Prompt Challenge [932](The Lies We Tell); 365 [175](Kettle); Herbology Club [4-2](Disability AU); Auction [11-2]("Take Me or Leave Me" - RENT); Back to School Shopping [Books](Intelligent); Tell a Joke Day [05](A Character with Blond Hair)
Other MC4A Challenges: Su Bingo [4A](Sickle/Scythe); AU [4B](Space); Hunt [Sp Items](Kettle); Chim [Kinzie]("Human" by Rag'n'Bone Man; Hurt/Comfort); Ship (n/a)[Sp Big](Ceramic Mug); Fire [Hard](Adventure Writer); Garden [Plant Types](Married)
Representation(s): Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons; Still Acknowledges Fitz's multiple disabilities; Actually acknowledges Simmons' attitude
Primary & Secondary Bonus Challenges: Grease Monkey; Lyre Liar; Muck & Slime; Abandoned Ship; Surprise!; Second Verse (Ladylike; Not a Lamp; White Dress; Found Family; Sneeze Weasel; Middle Name; Mother Hen; Nightingale; Spinning Plates; Unwanted Advice; For the Vine; Lovely Coconuts); Chorus (Endless Wonder; Pear-Shaped; Wabi Sabi; Bee Haven; Machismo; Peddling Pots; Fire Song; Mouth of Babes; Tomorrow's Shade; A Long Dog; Larger than Life; Unicorn)
Tertiary & Generic Bonus Challenges: T3 (Tether); SN (Rail; Spare); FR (Gestation); O3 (Orator; Oust); TY (Enfant)
Word Count: 2258

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The Lies We Tell
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"Take me for what I am, who I was meant to be … Guess I'm leavin'."
– Rent, "Take Me or Leave Me"
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Alya was four when Leo figured it out, just shortly after the reunion holo-call with the rest of the team that had been as much a family to him as the little unit he was building in England.

He had suspected it for a while, of course. Even as brilliant as any child of his and Jemma was, Alya had managed to get into places that she shouldn't have been able to—places that he had made very certain had fail safes and other safety features specifically for keeping young genius daughters out lest they get hurt. He had seen so many possible futures that featured similar impacts from the circumstances of Alya's gestation and birth.

She had been conceived before Jemma had been sent through time with the others. Then there was the Reality Monolith, and the repeated jaunts through space and other planets. The Shrike put off their own kind of radiation which the Module was never designed to keep out completely. Messing with temporal and dimensional travel left traces that rippled from the quantum tunnels necessary.

Honestly, the fact that Alya was the only member of their little family to end up with an active X Gene was more surprising than the activation of Alya's mutation.

After all, it wasn't as if the Fitz family line was perfectly clean when it came to such things. He might not have an Inhuman gene, but he knew of a cousin or two on his mother's side of the family who had mutations. His father had been rather vocal about what a mutant's purpose was in the world, as he had been on enough topics that even if he were alive, Leo would never trust him around any child.

Never mind that Alya was, undeniably and utterly, his everything, no matter what quirks of genetics she had.

It was still a bit of a nasty shock to watch his daughter who had only just started learning how to swim teleport past the wrought fence that surrounded the in-ground pool. Not even his various adventures since Jemma had convinced him to pursue fieldwork had made the fear shoot through him as much as it had in the moments it had taken to unlock the gate and get in there with her. He couldn't imagine how he would have felt if he had not seen her do it and had only came upon her after some accident had befallen her.

Of course, Alya didn't understand why her Papa was hugging her so tightly and reluctant to let her loose. She was only four. She didn't think of it as a brush with danger. She saw it as Papa thwarting her attempt at fun and then refusing to let her go while he stroked her pale blond hair.

For the chance at playing in Papa's lab, she gladly let him take a small sample of her blood. His lab at their cottage may not be as sophisticated as what he had had to work with prior to their retirement from SHIELD, but it was more than adequate for the gene sequencing program to run while he helped Alya design and build a small robotic cat. He would have to write the programming for it to do more than obey limited commands from the remote, but his girl already had a phenomenal grasp of the mechanical end. Maybe he should see if there were any good books on engineering appropriate for younger children.

The sequencing only confirmed what Leo already knew.

Alya was a mutant.

Leo waited until Alya had been put to bed for the night before broaching the subject with Jemma. His stomach was unaccountably upset as he watched Jemma put on a kettle for their evening cup of tea. She was chattering about how things were going at the small family clinic where she had been picking up hours for an excuse to get out of the house and talk to other adults while she went through the relaxing ritual of preparing tea.

"—had to call the local Sentinel office, of course," Jemma was saying when his mind decided to start listening to the details instead of letting the flow of his wife's voice flow over him. Whatever was souring his stomach turned to ice.

"Wha-wha-what do-do-do you mean?" Leo asked. He mentally cursed the sudden return of his stutter as he clutched at the edge of the island's counter.. He took a deep breath to calm himself. He had control of the aphasia if he only concentrated on it. He didn't even know why it was flaring up now when it only tended to do so when he was upset or panicking.

There was no reason to be nervous or scared. It was just him and Jemma.

"Well, the boy was a mutant, wasn't he?" Jemma explained as she pulled out the blend of jasmine, chamomile, and lavender that they used for this cuppa and began to fill their tea balls with it. Leo watched as she gave that little shrug she always did when some fact was obvious to her. It used to annoy Daisy to no end. "He had given his cousin second degree electrical burns just from them wrestling over a frisbee. He's clearly dangerous."

"May-may-maybe it was an ack-ack-accident," he suggested. His throat felt tight. He closed his eyes and forced himself to count a few breaths to lessen the pounding in his chest and head. After seven breaths. he forced himself to continue. "He could-could-could learn to con-con-control it."

"He would still be dangerous," she said as she put the tea tin back and pulled out two ceramic mugs. She carefully looped the chain of each tea ball around the handle before dropping the ball itself into the mug. Pouring the heated water into each mug, she continued. "The Sentinels will make sure he gets either training or the treatment."

"And then they'll be watching him for the rest of his life," Leo argued, just thankful that he managed to get it out in one go even if it was by practically shouting the words. Jemma gave him a puzzled look. "And their training is dependent on agreeing to work for them!"

"And what's wrong with that?" Jemma demanded to know. "It is the same thing that SHIELD did before the whole mess with Hydra, and then after Inhumans began popping up everywhere. At least we're a little more civilized than the Americans. We don't have to rely on ankle bracelets and collars."

"Because tagging their ear is so much further removed from treating them like animals instead of people with bloody rights." Leo's stomach heaved, threatening to turn itself inside out. All he could see in his mind suddenly was his sweet little girl with one of those suppression buds through the upper helix of her ear. "God, I'm going to be sick."

He shoved away from the island and stumbled out of the kitchen. He barely made it to the bathroom down the hallway before he lost control over his stomach. Every time he thought he might be done, his traitorous mind would bring up yet another memory of Jemma casually condoning the anti-metahuman sentiment that ran rampant through SHIELD even after Hydra had been purged from its ranks.

Leo had always told himself that she didn't mean what she said to be taken the way it sounded or that she wasn't wrong so much as unaware that there was more to consider. Even before he had considered attempting to date her, he had been making excuses for her. He hadn't wanted to think about the way she would phrase something the same way that his father always had, making him all twisted up inside with the conflicting urges to get away and make up whatever disappointment he must have created in her.

"Leo, what's wrong?" Jemma asked at the doorway. Leo groaned and pressed his forehead against the rim of toilet. His nervous stomach was an absolute pain. "I just knew that milk was a bit off. Your stomach is just more sensitive than mine or Alya's. Do you think you can keep down some of the tea? The chamomile should help calm your stomach."

He nodded weakly. She came in just to run her fingers over his short hair before leaving again to finish preparing the tea. His legs were shaky as he pushed himself to his feet, but they held as he flushed away the sick and moved to the sink. Leo washed his hands before switching the water to a cooler mix that was better for splashing his face. On impulse, he also brushed his teeth before checking the status of the travel kits of toiletries.

Raising his blue eyes to his reflection, Leo knew that the numbness overlaying things was disassociation. The emotions still churned beneath the surface. They weren't gone. Eventually, the disassociation would fade, and the pain that went along with the decision that he knew he was making—that he had been in the process of making since he had seen his daughter teleporting the same way that a bunny hopped or a fledgling flew—would seep in like England's damp through a coat.

Leo had known Jemma since they had attended SHIELD's Science & Technology Academy together. He had known how she had felt about metahumans for all that time. He knew how often she changed her mind once she made it up and to what extent when she did.

Even with the metahumans on the team, she had been… markedly cautious. Daisy and Elena were considered exceptions in Jemma's opinion about Inhumans, not evidence that those opinions might be flawed. Friendship with them, no matter how deep and loyal, had never changed her belief that metahumans on the whole were enemies in the making. It had never stopped Jemma from making comments, sometimes even in front of them.

Daisy and Elena had always elected to ignore it. There was always been someone with more volatile prejudices to be dealt with. People like the ACTU, Glen Talbot, and Thaddeus Ross were more important to handle than a friend whose low empathy was sometimes a bit condescending and patronizing. Besides, they were adults capable of reasoning away any lingering bruises from the casual racism.

No matter how precocious, Alya was a child. Her intelligence would actually make her more vulnerable that damage, as she was more likely to pick up both on her difference from other people and how it connected to the group her mother viewed in such a way. Alya would end up in the same conflicting tug of war between the thoughts of being the exception and waiting for the moment when that wouldn't be true that Leo had spent so much of his life fighting.

No matter what he had with Jemma—something precious that they had defied all of infinity to finally capture—his priority would always be Alya. His daughter was his Everything, the star that was the center of his universe. The choice between his happiness and her safety would always be simple.

The shielding numbness of the disassociation still helped. It got him through the nighttime routine without Jemma acting like anything was off. It got him through the hour it took for him to be certain that Jemma was deeply enough asleep that he could safely rise from their shared bed without waking her. It got him through pulling his still-packed go bag and the smaller one they had created for Alya (because old habits from their time with SHIELD had yet to fade) from the front hall closet. It got him through taking both bags to the car that they had bought specifically for him to use if he needed to take Alya anywhere while Jemma was gone to the clinic.

His hand only shook a tiny bit when he penned a simple note letting Jemma know that they were gone for good and not to look for them.

Alya did not wake up as Leo picked her and her crocheted octopus up from her bed. Instead of buckling her into her car seat which would force her to either wake or sleep in an uncomfortable position, he laid her down on the backseat covered in her favorite blanket. Faintly aware of the final moments ticking down now, he rushed back into the little cottage to gather up a few of Alya's favorite toys and books. He stowed the bag in the boot with their go bags.

Then Leo was driving north towards the research facility that he had heard about from his old contacts. Scuttlebutt claimed that the MacTaggert family would welcome any metahuman needing sanctuary to stay on Muir Island, and they wouldn't ask too many questions about why.

That was exactly what he and Alya would need, at least for the foreseeable future.

It probably would not be for very long, just long enough for him to figure out how to balance things out so that he could reconcile the two loves of his life.

Even as the thought crossed his mind, he knew it had been just as much of a futile hope as any of the other lies he had told himself over the years.

Leo did not let himself think too hard about that, wrapping the comforting disassociation around his already aching heart.