Chapter Text
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Last Day of the Mission (Part 2)
Fitz swept his thumb over the skin on the underside of Jemma's wrist, pale smoothness over finely-spun veins, taking comfort in her coolness and the pulse he felt there. With every pass, a different word flitted through his head, like a mantra of the things that had made up the past six months. Fear. Love. Anger. Desperation. Love. Hope. Peace. Love. Love. Love. Old Fitz – a much younger Fitz – the engineer who had barely ever left the lab and didn't have any relationships other than with his mother and lab partner, would have been terrified of the conversation they were now having, would probably have blanched at the thought that he and Jemma had been sleeping together and pretending to be married without ever knowing their true standing.
Now, this Fitz, the new one who could hold a real gun steady and fire it, and would kill to protect Jemma without ever losing sleep over it – well, he was still scared. But having her pulse in his hand brought air into his lungs, and the strange peacefulness of knowing that dying to protect her was nothing more than his most basic purpose. His life for hers, at the sound of a gun. In his head, it seemed just that simple.
"Fitz, they're coming," Jemma murmured, peering around the edge of the ratty curtains without revealing herself in the window frame. That had been one of the first things they'd gotten to practice when they went out into the field: Don't give them a target.
She glanced down at his hand on her wrist and sighed. "It's going to be strange, going back. Isn't it?"
"I don't want to go back, Jemma," Fitz whispered.
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Fifteenth Day (Part 1)
The lime-green Aston-Martin sped down the street, taking the corner on a dime, rear wheels skidding out and then snapping back into place as the accelerator slammed into the floor. Pedestrians scurried away from the edge of the sidewalk, eyeing the car as if its driver was going to turn the wheel towards them at any second.
Inside the haphazardly-restored interior, Fitz had his tongue set in between his teeth, glancing in the rearview mirror to see if the cops had found them. Jemma, who had squealed loudly when they took the turn at far too fast a speed, quickly devolved into adrenaline-fueled giggles, not realizing that her hand was still wrapped tightly around Fitz’s forearm.
“Oh my God, oh my God, Fitz, that was –” She hesitated, but Fitz read the smile on her face.
“Really bloody fun.”
Jemma dropped her head back against the worn-leather headrest. “Yes, it really was. Oh God, I’m not supposed to think robbery’s fun, though. Very –”
“Not-good-girl?” As if to underscore this, Fitz took another sharp turn onto an empty street, trying not to be too pleased when she squeezed his arm that much harder.
“That, yes.” Much to Fitz’s (unacknowledged) disappointment, she removed her hand from his arm to brush a large curl out of her face. “I just have to keep reminding myself that this particular shop owner is really a very nasty person, and Skye will pick up the money at the drop and distribute it to local charities. Really, we’re like Robin Hood.”
Fitz chuckled, but glanced sideways at her when he let the car slow down a bit, finally sure that they weren’t being followed. “You know it won’t always be like that. We’re going to have to–”
“I know,” Jemma whispered.
They lapsed into silence, the V8 purring reliably under Fitz’s hands. After a minute, he grinned. “Did you see the look on the old twat’s face when the cash register popped open on its own? Practically drooled all down the front of his Confederate flag shirt.
Jemma cracked up, doubling over. “Oh Fitz, I am never going to be tired of the looks people give us.”
“That’s what you get for underestimating people, thankyouverymuch. Size isn’t everything.”
She snorted. “I’m not even going to respond to that.”
“I meant – I meant height, obviously! You’re not exactly willowy –”
“Fitz.” Her tone had switched abruptly to that of ‘Agent’ Simmons and she was staring at pixelated green text on her phone, the terminal for Skye’s secure comm hack. “He’s been arrested.”
A sharp turn of the wheel took them out of the center lane and Fitz slammed on the brakes. “Where is he?”
“Seminole Avenue branch.”
“Right.” He did a quick U-turn and laid on the gas. “We’re about ten minutes away. What’d’you think, another smash and grab?”
“Oh, but we just did that. See if there’s a gas station on the way, that’s much easier.”
“Good idea, they’ll call in more quickly, too.” He had to pull to a hard stop at a crowded intersection, and took a second to make eye contact, giving Jemma’s hand a fast squeeze. “Ready for this, partner?”
She inhaled, and he knew they were both thinking about how this moment – this hour – was when they really committed to this mission. After this point, the secure comm line Skye had hacked into Jemma’s phone would go dark – it was too dangerous to keep using it regularly once they were embedded. The past couple of weeks had merely been practice for the big leagues into which they were about to run headlong: If they played the next few hours right, they were in, and there were no more easy outs.
Jemma squeezed his hand back and smiled. “I am if you are, partner.”
“Okay then,” he replied. “Let’s go get our mug shots.” As Fitz revved the engine and the car took off, he grinned, feeling giddy and reckless and more alive than he had since before Hydra sent SHIELD tumbling down.
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Twenty-Five Days Before the Mission
Skye slid an unopened water bottle across the conference table to Fitz, who had been ten minutes late to the base briefing and was parched. He caught the bottle and nodded his thanks, but Simmons snatched it away and managed to drink half the water before he grabbed it back from her. Ever dignified, Skye snorted audibly, drawing an exasperated eyebrow-raise from now-Director Phil Coulson.
In addition to the Bus team members – who all had seats at the front of the table, nearest to the Director – there were a few, higher-level clearance SHIELD operatives that had been working at the Playground for the past couple of months. Unlike many routine base briefings, this one was restricted; Coulson was in the process of proposing a risky, complicated new mission.
“...And last week they were implicated, but not charged, in the robbery of the central Atlanta Bank of America branch. They made off with fifteen million dollars, and used what looks like a bastardized Mouse Hole.”
Fitz tensed at the mention of his invention. One of the most frustrating things for him while they’d been cleaning up Hydra’s mess in the past couple of months was how often it seemed that his work caused the biggest problems.
Sci-Ops had required a semester-long ethics course about the misappropriation of well-intended technology, and, boring lecture hall though it was, one of the units had been about the need to secure the inventions created by the science division. (Not that Fitz had needed the lectures to explain that to him, as he’d never tired of reminding Simmons. He was a bloody genius after all; he didn’t need someone to tell him that his line of work carried the threat of a certain amount of blowback.)
“D’you think that Hydra found someone to reverse-engineer the one we used at the Hub, sir?”
“That would have been extraordinarily difficult,” Simmons muttered from beside him, hugging a notebook to her chest and tapping a pen against her arm. “It took you months to execute your design, and I can’t imagine Hydra managed to secure any SHIELD scientists at your skill level that quickly –”
“Actually,” Coulson interrupted, “we think that Hydra managed to get blueprints of the Mouse Hole, and a number of other sensitive sci-tech designs, during the raid of the Triskelion. Either some entrepreneurial Hydra ops have been selling them, or the... Wellers of Atlanta are in deep with Hydra. One way or another, we’ve got enough evidence to justify sending someone in.”
“Undercover,” added Billy Koenig, who was grinning widely enough to make the safe assumption that Coulson had set up the meeting with his help. May was also standing next to Coulson at the front of the room, but was her normal, stony-faced self – although she did deign to give Koenig a quick glare for his enthusiasm.
“I’ll go, sir,” said Trip, who sat forward in his seat next to Skye. “I’ve been itching to get off-base, and –”
“Thank you, Agent Triplett, but we’ll be needing you here.” Coulson took a deep breath, and leaned on the end of the table. “Everyone in this room knows how hard we’ve been working to pull back all the identities that have been burned, but Hydra’s had one up on us for a while, and even with Skye working sixteen-hour days we’re still having trouble getting rid of what they made public. There are very few of you who have little enough out there to be able to actually go undercover, and I don’t want this going below a certain level.”
“Who’re you sending then, AC?” Skye, who was chewing on the end of a pen, had declined to alter her nickname for Coulson after his promotion, no matter how many dark looks she got from the other SHIELD agents at the Playground.
Coulson inhaled and stared down at the table, clearly uncomfortable with the conclusion that had been reached at some point in the earliest mission meetings. Seeing his reluctance, May spoke for him, her mask breaking briefly to mirror the worry on Coulson’s face. “FitzSimmons.”
“What?”
“You’ve got to be joking,” Fitz said, speaking at the same time as Simmons.
Koenig tossed them both thick folders as he spoke, filled with more detailed information that was too dry for the meeting itself. “You’ve got just under a month to prepare. We’ve identified a married rob-and-con team that spent a few years terrorizing the U.K. before migrating to the States when the British government got too close. They seem to have, ah, disappeared, shall we say –”
“Into one of SHIELD’s new prison facilities,” Coulson added, crossing his arms.
“So it’ll be easy for Skye to track down any electronic trace of them and replace their information with your covers. Piece of cake,” Koenig finished, eternally more cheerful than the people surrounding him.
“Says the guy who isn’t running the hack,” Skye muttered.
“Luckily,” Koenig continued, “your identities were not among those leaked during the initial Hydra debacle.”
“If by luck you mean unappreciated genius,” Skye interrupted quietly, raising an eyebrow in Fitz’s direction. He grinned at her turn of phrase and shook his head, but Koenig seemed completely unfazed by her comment, continuing full-steam ahead.
“Anyone who knew Garrett would know you, but it’s pretty unlikely anyone that high up in Hydra is slumming it with the Wellers on a regular basis.”
“Look.” Coulson moved forward again, ignoring the rest of the room and speaking directly to Fitz and Simmons. “Technically, you can say no. This is going to be hard, and not just because you’re going to have to squeeze three years’ worth of undercover training into less than thirty days. If you think there’s no way you can do this, tell me now. But this is SHIELD’s best chance at infiltrating this crime syndicate, to figure out how they’re connected to Hydra before they know SHIELD’s coming. What d’you think?”
The whole room stared at the two scientists, but Fitz ignored them, turning to make eye contact with Simmons. For a moment, as he watched the thin, unmoving line of her mouth, he wondered if she was going to shake her head no. This mission sounded like exactly the kind of thing that no one had ever expected him to be able to do, but after Hydra – after he’d been dismissed like a pawn to be used at Garrett’s whim – Fitz had harbored an urgent, secret desire to prove that he could do more than that. That he could do more than tinker with gadgets and watch other people be the hero. No matter what anyone had expected of him as a kid, or after he failed the field test for the third time – he would prove them all wrong.
After only a moment’s hesitation, Simmons gave the barest of nods back to him, and he smiled gently back at her, turning back to Coulson. “Yeah, we can do it.”
Coulson’s exhale spoke of a deep sense of relief, but Fitz didn’t miss the way that May’s eyes dipped downwards behind him, implying a sense of worry that seemed out of place for someone normally so composed. The meeting continued, as Coulson explained the various ways that the Playground would be supporting them while they were in the field, but Fitz tuned it out, guessing that most of this was covered in his thesis-length file. Instead, he turned to look at Simmons; her cheeks were faintly pink but her jaw was set, hands steady as she took notes in the margins of her own set of papers. Fitz’s mind was definitely made up, then; if Simmons was in this mission for the long haul, so was he.
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Fifty-Ninth Day (Part 1)
The whole room was still, except for the man kneeling on the floor, tremors running through his whole body. The “rec room” in the Wellers’ Boarding House (as it was so quaintly called, although it served as their general headquarters) was the largest space on the primarily residential second floor, and, despite its name, recreation was not its only use. Poker and billiards were constant activities, played for high stakes and their respective tables bookending the room, but the syndicate leader often used it to air his grievances. Jemma had noted a few days ago that it was almost like a medieval throne room, designated for the leader of this amorphous crime family to call for action and have his will be done.
Tonight, the lights were dimmed and the permanently shut blinds glowed a dim amber, turning Charlie Weller’s stoop into a menacing, hunchbacked silhouette as he stood over his subject. The man had been caught siphoning money out of one of Charlie’s “legitimate” business operations and then was intercepted in his now-totaled truck on the way to the police station. Cuts and slashes peppered his skin from when one of Charlie’s thugs had pulled him from the flipped vehicle, and he was absently rubbing his hands over his arms, spreading the blood like thinned paint.
Fitz leaned against the faded, striped wallpaper by the door with his arms crossed, concentrating all his energy on maintaining an impassive face. No matter what he’d like, they couldn’t save everyone; this was their first whole night in the rec room, and they had to ensure a repeat invitation. As she leaned against his shoulder, eyes scanning the room, Jemma seemed to be doing a better job than he at keeping her face calm, a façade of boredom effectively masking any anxiety she was surely feeling.
Boarding house regulars were scattered around the room, some still holding billiard cues and others guarding their chips, waiting for Charlie to finish whatever he’d started. Georgie, Charlie’s thirty-something-year-old daughter, was twisting her billiard cue in annoyance, and Nate, Charlie’s callous right-hand man, stood behind his boss, leaning forward in a way that was supposed to look nonchalant but reeked of eagerness. The timing of this particular “trial” seemed overly convenient to Fitz, who suspected that Charlie had ordered his grunts to go after the man when he’d be sure to have an audience.
“Well, I can’t just let you go, now, can I, Jones?” Charlie’s southern accent was thicker tonight than usual, an extra lilt hanging over the end of each word. He’d spent almost two decades in the seediest parts of Queens, New York, earning his death-and-crime-tainted “stripes,” and his accent had faded enough that he didn’t always sound like he had been born only a few miles away from where his lair now stood. The accent was now something he used as a weapon of its own, wielded as psychological warfare of a subtler sort.
The man at his feet didn’t respond, having stilled at the sound of his judge’s voice. “What can I do to make sure you don’t go right back out there to talk to the police, hmm? Knowing where your great-aunt lives is a help, but that just don’t seem like enough.” He lifted his head, a smile teasing at his mouth, and scanned the faces of his rapt audience. “Don’t y’all agree?” Scattered murmurs of agreement peppered the room, but neither Fitz nor Jemma made a noise. Later, Fitz would assume this had been their mistake, their collective silence and perceived disapproval drawing the egomaniac’s attention straight to him.
“New fella, c’mon over here.”
Jemma’s arm flinched against his side and Fitz raised an eyebrow, quickly brushing his hand against her lower back as he pushed away from the wall, trying to reassure her in a way that wouldn’t belie his own, potent nerves. He strode over to Charlie, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“You seem to be fittin’ in pretty well, you two.” A snort escaped from Nate, and Charlie flashed a harsh glare behind him. “You’ve saved my ass once already, and I’ve been thinkin’ about making this a more permanent sorta thing. But not everyone’s just as fond of y’all as I am. So, you wanna stay here with us? See how we can help each other?”
Fitz glanced at Jemma, who lifted her chin and smirked, a show of deference to underscore their marriage and partnership – there was no real question what his answer would be.
“Yeah, we do,” he answered, pleased and almost surprised when his voice came out calmly, detached in the way that he’d practiced so often in the Playground and the motel rooms in which he and Jemma had been living.
Charlie grinned and clapped him on the back, squeezing his shoulder through his leather jacket. “Good man. Then I’m gonna need you to teach Jones here a lesson for me. To prove to everyone else that you can make it with our kind.”
Fitz stared back into the crime boss’s eyes and narrowed his own, giving him a brusque nod before turning his attention to the man kneeling at his feet. His pistol pressed lightly into his lower back, but Fitz rejected that option out of hand, hoping that his other idea would suffice.
He thought back to one of his undercover lessons with Trip, replaying the conversation in his head to distract himself as he searched the room, looking without moving.
“Sorry man, but you don’t exactly look like a hardened criminal. Hell, you could probably pass for a college kid. This means that you’re gonna have to find a way to compensate for your looks.”
“I suppose my far-above-average intelligence and advanced education isn’t going to suffice.”
Trip gave him half of a smile, shaking his head and then making eye contact, expression rueful and serious. “You’re gonna have to be vicious, Fitz.”
His eyes landed on the billiard balls, and he pointed at the table, looking at Georgie. “Give me the cue ball.” She gave him a confused look but did as he asked, tossing it across the room. When Fitz caught it, he threw it in the air a couple times, testing its weight in his hand as it slid out of his fingers and landed back in his palm with a gentle thwack.
“Darling,” called Jemma from the doorway, stepping towards him as she undid the scarf tied around her hair as a headband. “For your hand.” She pressed the cloth into his hand and gave him a quick kiss; it worked as part of their cover, but Fitz knew that it was just as much to remind him that she was beside him in every part of this mission, no matter how abhorrent his actions may seem.
Fitz circled the man as he wrapped the synthetic satin around his knuckles, taking deep breaths and reminding himself that this was for a purpose – and that this wasn’t really him. The Married Marksman had taken over, leaving Leopold Fitz at the wayside, waiting for the day when he could deserve that name again.
His hand wrapped with the headband, he settled the billiard ball firmly into the center of his palm and curled his fingers around it, trying not to be revolted by the shine in Charlie’s eyes, the room collectively holding its breath. Without warning, Fitz swung his arm back and slammed his fist sharply into the kneeling man’s jaw, feeling the sickening crunch as bones fractured in its wake and the man crashed to the floor, head snapping back from the impact. Not allowing himself to feel the bile rising to the back of his throat, Fitz stepped over the man’s body to grab his shirt collar, raising him up enough that he could easily reach his head. Fitz struck with his fist over and over again, the billiard ball adding enough weight to make every punch loud and harsh, Jemma’s flower-patterned headband blotting the blood until the cloth was saturated, and he told himself with each swing that vicious had to be enough.