"Stick the Landing," Agents of SHIELD episode tag
Stick the Landing
Agents of SHIELD, gen
by Lokei
Episode Tag: 1x6, FZZT
Fitz dreams of falling. Even in his dream he knows it’s not supposed to be him, that he wasn’t the one midair, in the inexorable grip of gravity until being snatched by the even more determined grip of Agent Grant Ward.
But still, he falls.
And as he falls he looks for her, because he saw her, he’s the only one that saw her as her heels left the ramp, and she took him with her even though he couldn’t get out from behind the glass.
He’s falling, looking, and he looks so hard his eyes open in the semidarkness that is the Bus by nightlight, and he has to throw himself out of his bunk to round the partition and see her for real.
She’s always been a peaceful sleeper, making up for the dizzying whirl of who she is and how she thinks while awake, and tonight is no exception. There’s still a paleness to her cheek, like she was recovering from the flu, not a deadly electroshock alien virus thing, but she’s there, solid, alive, and still.
Fitz sits against her bunk, and lets himself sleep.
= = = = = =
May doesn’t sleep much. Like a lot of field agents, she’s developed a system of catnaps and short, deep, dreamless slumbers that end at the slightest hint of a change in her environment. It’s enough to keep her sharp, and probably prematurely gray, but she’s more likely to develop a streak of pure white the longer she spends with this team. The idea doesn’t bother her as much as it used to. Scars--and wrinkles, and streaks--are simply proof of survival.
She brushes the reminder of her own near miss and thinks they could all use a few more proofs like that.
May gives up on the idea of a normal night and walks a quiet pattern, from the sleep quarters to the cockpit to the stairs above the cargo bay, snatching a few minutes’ rest each time as she hears Coulson below her, talking to Lola as he polishes her to a loving shine.
= = = = = =
Skye doesn’t even try to sleep. She sits bolt upright in the co-pilot’s chair in the cockpit, staring out at the night sky until the eighth or ninth time May circles back to check on the autopilot.
Then she gets up and follows her. She’s getting good at this shadowing thing. She trails May from the cockpit to the bunks, and smiles a little to see Fitz wiped out on the floor next to Jemma. She lingers there as May moves on, and when it seems like no one else is likely to be jumping out to point a finger at her for excessive sentimentality, she ducks into her own bunk to grab a blanket and goes to join Fitz on the floor. If Simmons feels like tossing herself out an airlock again, she’ll have to get past them both first.
= = = = = =
Ward stares at the ceiling above his bunk and considers FitzSimmons, possibly for the very first time. They’d surprised him today, a couple of times, and he’s forced to reconsider his opinion of them. If you’d asked him yesterday, he’d have told you he respected their brains, their ability to focus on a problem, to bridge the distance between their two pet disciplines to work together towards common and uncommon goals.
Today, he thinks, he can see them, and respect them, as field agents and as people. He meant it when he told Simmons what she’d done was brave--it takes courage most people never need to look at a situation and know the only way to fix it is to throw yourself into the breach. Even a lot of SHIELD agents never quite hit that point.
He would have jumped after her anyway: the younger agents, all of them, even problematic Skye, are his in a way that makes him uncomfortable if he looks at it too long. But as little as he’d ever wanted to work on a team, now that he has one, he’s going to do his best to support those who protect it as fiercely as he does.
Which brings him to Fitz. Crazy, sheltered, wide-eyed Leo Fitz who trails Jemma Simmons like the tail of a blazing comet, except when the gravity shifts and then he’s the one leading the way. Co-dependent Fitz, who stepped into a contaminated lab carrying a box of electric death and wearing nothing more than a pair of anti-static gloves, to save his lab partner and all the rest of them.
Ward hasn’t told him yet that that, too, was bravery. He’ll have to fix that in the morning. Once Fitz has fixed his gun.
He rolls over and sleeps the sleep of the justly, smugly, exhausted. He’s always kind of loved parachuting.
= = = = = =
Jemma wakes once and sees Fitz and Skye slumped over on the floor. She smiles, rubs the bruise she got from Ward jamming her with the antiserum, punches her pillow back into shape, and goes back to sleep. Her last thought before drifting off is that her teammates are bloody adorable, and she still needs to get back at Fitz for that terrible impersonation…
= = = = = =
Coulson doesn’t spend time looking in the mirror. He doesn’t get back on the treadmill, doesn’t check the bloodwork again for inconsistencies or signs of forgery.
He goes downstairs, and talks to Lola. It starts with a measured listing of all the ways he’s going to find to creatively get back at Blake for leaving a streak on her nice shiny coat, and eventually drifts into a list of all the threats he’s sorry he never got to follow up on. He likes what he’s doing now a lot better than babysitting an off-the-rails Tony Stark, but he’s still sorry he hasn’t got the opportunity to improve on the taser-SuperNanny quip.
He doesn’t think he ever will. He’s sure Fury has a reason for keeping him away from the Avengers project, from checking in with his former agents. It might have something to do with the dreams he has of a rainbow bridge and an old man with one eye and sleeping in a glass coffin under an arched ceiling of stars.
More likely, though, Fury just doesn’t want to provoke Phil into some kind of PTSD breakdown.
If so, he picked the wrong way to keep Phil busy. He spent all day imagining hints of unnatural blue creeping into the eyes of his team, and Lola’s bright cherry red is all that’s keeping that blue from flickering around the edges of his own vision.
He doesn’t say any of that, though. May’s listening, and she has her own demons to fight.
He refolds the rag, and starts to polish again, as through the cargo bay window Lola’s bumper catches the warm pink glow of the approaching dawn.
.