Chapter Text
Leopold Fitz is certain the other career paths he could have chosen would not have begun with a nine-hour flight and a meandering, blindfolded ride to his final designation. However, as their likeliness to allow him the pursuit of his scientific genius with even vaguely comparable assets approaches zero, he can live with that inconvenience.
When they finally stop, his driver exits the vehicle to get his luggage before Fitz is allowed to dispose of the mask he wears. Bright light blinds him before his pupils adjust to the low autumn sun.
The campus is a lot to take in. It’s beautiful in the peculiar way only modern architecture with its white painted concrete and perfectly oriented windows can be. With a glance, he is certain that the wide glass front of the entry hall is directed to north-east, making sure it gets a swoop of sunlight in the early mornings to help attendees and professors to wake up, but not so much the interior will overheat. Lush hills with flowers, bushes and trees alike frame this gem of human insights. Biology is not his strongest suit, but he is sure he detects a pattern in the plantings, hints of multilayer farming which allow symbiosis to form and prosper.
Already, he is taken by the sight. So much so, that he forgets – if only for a brief moment – the choir of stupid, weak, useless in his mind. The sound of his father’s voice is a detail he always struggles to remember, but in moments like those it is crystal clear.
Lost in thought, he does not even notice his driver putting down his luggage beside him and driving off. At least, that is what he assumes when the car is nowhere to be seen and he is surrounded by a small army of suitcases. With a deep breath blown through his lips, he manoeuvres his belongings to the main entrance. Here, he will receive his student-ID and room number. The lessons cannot begin soon enough.
The next day, he realises that must have been an overstatement due to romanticized excitement. It starts out well enough, quantum chemistry has always been one of his more favoured disciplines (honestly, anything without dissections is fine). He cannot help but feel accomplished when he figures out that most students underestimate the vast set of possibilities posed by changes on sub-atomic levels. His day becomes less good when a fellow student is called upon – a girl named Simmons.
He would never dare use the term for any of the other participants of the class. No one here except for them is still legally prohibited from drinking alcohol. She has to be the bloody smug who prevented him from being the youngest person to attend the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy of Science and Technology in its history.
Of course, when she speaks up, it’s with an accent so posh it would put the queen to shame. Her ponytail bounces up and down while she all but jumps out of her seat in excitement to answer Professor Gallahan’s questions on the field’s advancements. Great. The next Hermione, he thinks in disdain.
To the professor’s as well as Fitz’s astonishment she then proceeds to ask even more enticing ones, considering the use of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for the exploration of transitional stages in chemical reactions. Panicked, he realises some of her inquiries are so advanced he does not even understand the question all that precisely.
For a moment, the class comes out of focus and he lets himself fall into a deep sense of inadequacy. It’s hard not to wonder what he is even doing here, sharing a class with someone who contains such sharp scientific instincts. Maybe he should have taken the offering of a job as professor at Cambridge instead. He spends the rest of the class feeling like a fraud, as though he had cheated himself into this sacred hub of knowledge.
Defeated, he slumps into his seat to take in a lesson on applied mathematics that flies over his head. The contents are so dull he threatens to fall asleep. When he corrects Professor Tamir’s oversight as they scribble down a nearly endless formula on the holographic board, he is asked to come to the front after the class ends. He can sense his own rhythmical tapping against the folder he holds to his chest, but is unable to stop it nonetheless, fearful he will be sent away without even having managed to get through lunch. His heart thrums against his ribcage like a caught bird and he has to ask Professor Tamir to reiterate twice before he understands that he is in no trouble and will instead be transferred to more advanced courses, suitable for his level of expertise.
Ha! He bets the little mince did not get that sort of promotion on her first day. A bounce in his steps, he strolls over to the cafeteria. The ceiling is tall with an enormous rounded window in it. On thin wire, round white balls hang on different heights all around the room. They looked beautiful last evening, shimmering in tones of yellow and orange.
Below, most of the bustle has already settled, students sitting in small groups on oval tables. The buffet offers an endless display of options and he lets his eyes wander over all of them thrice before he loads his plate with herring filet, potatoes and some sort of kale he has never seen before.
Scanning the cafeteria, he finds there are no more empty tables. He can feel his leg starting to jitter. This is the part he always hated most, in any school and it has never been helped by his age. His eyes land on a group across the room deep in animated conversation. Simmons sitting right in the middle should not surprise him. Of course, this comes easy to her in her perfect starch white blouse, grin shining bright as she sets out to answer one of her companions.
He contemplates going outside and eating in the cold instead when someone bumps into him. She looks out of place, a biker jacket flung over a floral summer dress with a stride that screams of self-confidence he cannot even dream of.
“Hey there, goldilocks. Lookin’ for a seat?” A conversation with this kind of start tends to end with his head in a toilet. They did not do that at Oxford. No one tried after high school (and they did only once because, while he had endured most of it until then, he might have retaliated by sending unpleasant electrical currents through their locker doors for a week after).
“N-no, thank you”, he says and wishes that if he has to stutter, his voice will at least stop going up two registers at every other word. “I, uhm, was just going to – “
“Relax,”, she says, arms raised in surrender. “didn’t mean to give ya a hard time. Let’s start this over.”, her smile is warm and gentle now, one hand slowly stretches toward him as the other is stuffed into a pocket of her jacket. “I’m Theresa, but everyone calls me Tess.”
He feels his hackles going down and shakes her hand, his shoulders slumping back down before he even noticed they tensed up in anticipation.
“Leopold Fitz.”
“Good to meet you, Leopold” The hairs on his neck rise in answer to his full name. The only person who ever called him that was his father. Even after six years of his absence, the reminder makes his blood run cold. Maybe especially after. Tess senses it though, or she just does not like his name. “You got a nickname or somethin’? That’s a mouthful.”
“Yes, uh, Fitz is fine.”
“Alright Fitz, c’mon we’re seated over there.” She points to a table at the far end of the room, two women and a guy eating their meals while they quietly converse and chuckle every once in a while.
He sits down next to a woman with blue hair and a nose ring, who grins at him when he takes his seat.
“Hey, I’m Phương and those are Annabeth and Samuel.”, she is younger than Tess, he assumes in her early twenties. So is Annabeth. Samuel looks so young he might as well be the only other person on the campus who is under the age of twenty-one. “You rocked in maths today. I’ve never seen anyone correct Prof. Tamir, especially not on their first lesson.”
A timid smile spreads across his lips at the compliment.
“Thank you. Are you all freshmen, too?”
“I’m a senior and Sam’s in second year”, Annabeth chimes in. “but these two are.”
Fitz’s feeling for tact is just a little to late to stop a surprised “But you’re – “ at Tess. The whole table chuckles at him in response.
“Yes, I’m an old hag, got it.”, she says, in a good-natured way before she picks at her lentil salad. “I graduated Operations first.”
His eyes nearly bulge out of his skull. “You – “
“It’s rare, but sometimes they allow two merry-go-rounds. I’m one of the lucky few.”
She shrugs, almost self-conscious of being an agent already. So, that is why she is sitting here with them, one of the rare people in their early thirties who are learning instead of teaching.
“She could break all our skulls in two in less than a minute.”, Phương says wisely. Fitz’s eyes widen further, but Tess throws her an exasperated glare and points her fork at her.
“Stop saying that. Sam actually believed it.”
The guy on their table looks up from his plate, thick black-rimmed glasses askew.
“Only for a second.”
Fitz is lucky they were so preoccupied with themselves, because his face showed clearly, he did too. Phương projects a picture of innocence that is at odds with the smile she shoots her bowl of soup.
“I didn’t even specialize in hand-to-hand combat.”, Tess tells her salad, stabbing it. She does not even pause her elucidation when she shoves a bite into her mouth. Annabeth scrunches her nose beside her. “I do heists. Stealin’ and placin’ shit without getting noticed.” Fitz has a hard time imagining a person with her kind of presence going unnoticed anywhere.
When she steals the remote for their bomb diffusor bot for the third time in ten minutes, he comes to realise he has underestimated her capability for stealth. In his defence, how a 5’11 woman who stomps her boots with each step can temporarily become weight- and soundless the way she does is beyond him.
“You owe me a beer, Fitz”, she teases, before their professor reminds them they only have five minutes left to complete the assignment. To his pleasure, when his gaze sweeps across the room he finds they are the only ones who finished so far. The class is speckled with cadets of various ages, this being an elective open for all levels (though it is not recommended to attend before the second year).
“You’re gonna have to get it yourself.”, he mumbles absently as he watches an auburn ponytail in the front waggle from side to side, as Simmons puts finishing touches to the robot she built with Sam. “But yeah, I’ll pay.”
She follows his gaze and laughs as she sees Sam’s face, painted in awe as the girl in front of him talks on and on, eyes more focussed on their pet project than on him.
“God, look at him.”, she shakes her head. “He’s got it bad.”
For her? Why would he? She’s obnoxious, and he can see from this distance that the left joint has been poorly oiled and will either fail upon use, or succeed after costing them vital seconds of careful readjustment. Which would be the case only if they thought of a self-assessment and repair software, that she certainly forgot. Because she is so occupied talking without even pausing to breathe.
Instead of saying any of that, because he does realise he sounds rather petty, he answers with a vague grunt that sounded far more masculine and way less dumb in his head. Tess shoots him a look he finds hard to interpret, but she refrains from commenting.
When Professor Trask brings in the practice bomb, she shoots them an encouraging smile even as she admonishes them to stop working. A few people’s hands flinch away from their prototypes.
“Now, diffusion is a delicate task and we usually refrain from sending in technical devices for that reason.”, she explains as she sets up the chaos of cables and lamps on her table. “But, for the less intricate systems, we are working on usable machines with a niche orientation that can complement the standard equipment of tanks in conflict areas without specialized personnel at hand.”
Eager looks are exchanged, even Fitz cannot help but share a hopeful glance with Tess. Their first day learning, and their developments could already become candidates for the field?
“Of course, we are only here for practice, and the following testing period will show us why that is the case.” She pauses for a second, looking down at her clipboard. “Emmerich, Başaran please come here and present your results.”
From then on, the class is tinged in rapt silence. The two men, haste forward, carrying one large robotic arm which ends in a pincer between them.
That can assemble cars maybe, Fitz thinks, tension along his neck already receding. But it won’t do any good for the kind of finesse demanded here. Tess elbows him with a wink, having come to the same conclusion.
Soon enough, after a minute of clumsy puttering, a buzzing noise fills the air and the dummy-bomb’s tiny lightbulbs blink in red that aggressively screams failure. Prof. Trask reiterates how unlikely it is for any of them to succeed in this first task, and that the rest of the course will be spent with less demanding projects that will increase their aptitude for what they attempted now.
Still, with every new project pressure rises and with each time the red lights blink it falls again. Everyone wants to be the first to succeed, hence no one wants anyone else to get there first. Knowing his work, Fitz is fairly certain their robot is able to do the job (if only because the task instructions included a detailed diagram of the bomb’s structure). His heart beats in tact with the surreptitiously gleeful clapping after each failed attempt, anyways.
Second to last, Simmons and Sam enter the stage. Their try does look more promising than most others, nimble extremities covered in gum to ensure no charge can be transferred to the device. Fitz starts to nibble on his thumbnail as they reach the thirty seconds mark and have neither sent the ‘detonator’ off early or lost so much time they are bound to finish after the countdown.
With only ten seconds on the clock, finally, there is the demand for a turn of the left (in lack of a better word) wrist and he has trouble hiding his Schadenfreude when the robot stills and Simmons eager look of triumph transforms into one of utter terror. His excitement is marginally tempered when he realises they did embed software to prevent the allowance of jerky movements, and Simmons hastens to spray the robot with WD40. As the robot tugs on the last cable necessary to prevent an explosion, the buzzer goes off.
Sam looks excited anyways, hugging the baffled girl next to him as their professor shoots them a bemused glance.
“Very good, Simmons and Milton. This is the best implementation we’ve seen so far, today.”
Simmons mouths ‘very good’ where she stands, and Fitz cannot supress a smile. He knows that look, has worn it many times himself. Given her usual results, a compliment of that order borders on insulting. Her wide eyes and jaw hanging open indicate that now, she does not disagree with it, for once. Which makes her result itself insulting.
When he goes to the front with Tess and hears her whisper “I just blew a small town to bits.” as her lab partner lays an encouraging arm around her, he almost feels a bit bad for her. Samuel Milton, on the other hand, suddenly seems like awfully dull company to keep.
His compassion fades when their robot succeeds in defusing the prototype, green lights going on with only two seconds left on the countdown. Professor Trask showers them in laudations, saying the first task of this class was always constructed to be bound to fail and no one – no one – in the history of the academy ever managed to accomplish it. Most of the cadets looks at them with expressionless faces, hiding their envy as is custom. Only Simmons cannot contain herself for a moment and shoots him a withering glare as their professor announces he and Tess will be promoted to more advanced classes.
When their day is done, he cannot believe what a success it has been. Lying on his bed between a mess of half unpacked trunks and heaps of clothing, he revisits his accomplishments. He skipped entire semesters at a S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy. In two subjects, no less! A gnarly voice rises in his mind spitting Only two?, but he pushes it back down. Today, he will allow himself some respite from the ghost of his father floating through his mind. After all, he has only been here fore a day. There is still plenty of time to advance further, to achieve more. Already, he has successes to point to, professors who remember his name. He even made a handful of friends.