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“Fitz!” Radcliffe hissed, with frantic excitement. “Come into the conference room. Somebody wants to meet you!”
Fitz took a deep breath, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. He didn’t mind a bit of praise – in fact, he enjoyed it more than he’d like to admit in most circumstances – but with Radcliffe trotting him out like the Kentucky Derby favourite every five minutes, it was getting old.
Still, at least being constantly dragged to and from his desk kept his thoughts off Daisy for most of the day. And of course, the work was a lot of fun. And he was quite good at it. Very good at it, in fact.
He puffed up his chest a little and followed Radcliffe into the conference room, where a large screen was set up. When he saw the face on the screen, his breath caught in his throat.
“Hunter?”
“You two know each other?” Radcliffe wondered, raising an eyebrow.
Fitz gaped. He probably shouldn’t have said Hunter’s name – what if Hunter was undercover? He probably had to be, for Radcliffe to be interested in talking to him; goodness knows the real Hunter didn’t have anywhere near the tech knowledge Radcliffe would bother with.
“We used to work together,” Hunter explained.
“Shield? Ah yes, you and Agent Morse handed yourselves in on a mission a while back. Left Shield. On the run now, I see.”
“Prison wasn’t really working for us.”
“Indeed.”
Radcliffe glanced from Hunter, to Fitz, and back again. Neither of them seemed interested in talking to him. Given how long ago Agents Hunter and Morse had left, and the surprise on Fitz’ face, it had likely been several months since they had spoken to, let alone seen each other.
“I’ll leave you boys to catch up then, I suppose,” Radcliffe evaluated out loud. “Ah, Fitz, if you could eventually get around to the delivery of the thermonuclear crystal core that would be great. Toodle-oo.”
-
Once Radcliffe had left the room, Hunter laughed. Fitz shook his head.
“He’s a strange one, that one,” Hunter remarked. “How’d you end up working for him? And what’s all this stuff I’m seeing about ‘Quake’? Is that Daisy? She having a midlife crisis or something?”
Fitz’ eyes dropped from the screen. He wasn’t sure where to start. Hunter’s babbling questions trailed off as he realised what effect he was having.
“What happened?” he asked instead.
So Fitz explained about Hive’s return, the vision, Lincoln. The reshuffle of Shield. Daisy’s departure. By the end of it, he was sitting at the large, empty conference table, twisting a ring around his pinky finger, waiting for Hunter to respond so that he could focus on the response and stop wallowing in everything that had gone wrong.
Hunter took a few seconds to let it all sink in. An odd combination of relief and sorrow twisted in his chest. He hadn’t known Lincoln well, and from the sounds of things there had been some degree of choice in his departure, but all the same, it was sad to lose a teammate, especially one so close to those close to him. They had obviously been deeply affected, by their own emotions or by being forced to realise long-standing problems: again, a mixture of bad, and good. After a while, Hunter realised he didn’t have much to say that felt appropriate. He decided to draw the focus elsewhere instead.
“What ’cha got there?”
“Hm- oh, this?” Fitz gestured to the ring he’d been twisting. “Jemma got it for me.”
“Wait.” Hunter sat straighter, trying to control his facial expression. “She got you a ring? Because..?”
“Basically, she thought it would look nice and give me something to do with my hands. Sensory stimulation, I think she called it.”
“Oh.” Hunter felt oddly deflated. He’d put higher stakes on this than he’d realised. “So you guys aren’t…”
Noticing the strangely forlorn tone in Hunter’s voice, Fitz looked up.
“Oh! Yes. No. Yes, we’re together. Sorry, I forgot you didn’t know that. Everyone on base was all ‘it’s about time’ and ‘we know you’ve been together for weeks now, and you call yourselves spies.’ Stole our thunder a bit.”
Hunter grinned at Fitz’ imitations of them.
“Good on you, mate,” he praised, trying to be soft and sincere, but unable to keep the grin off his face. Gesturing off-screen, he called over his shoulder: “Hey Bob! Guess who finally put a ring on it?”
The clutter from the kitchen suggested somebody had walked into a dishwasher or knocked the shelves out of the fridge door. In seconds, Bobbi had crossed the space and come to lean over Hunter’s shoulder. The webcam warped the angles of her face, but Fitz couldn’t help but smile at seeing her. He held up the ring obediently, blushing when Bobbi squeaked with excitement.
“I knew it, I knew it and I totally called her proposing first. Cough up, Hunter.” She tapped his shoulder, but Fitz shook his head.
“Nobody’s proposed to anybody,” he explained. “It was just a present! We’ve only been together a few weeks.”
“A few weeks?” Bobbi blurted. “WEEKS?”
“About two months now, I think.”
Bobbi feigned a swoon of shock, shoving her way onto Hunter’s lap, pushing the chair back from the computer as she ‘fell’.
“I feel so betrayed!” she lamented. “How could you have been together all this time and never told me?”
Fitz shrugged.
“We wanted to, but well, you were gone, so…”
“Gone! What about an underground network! Code! Signal fires! This is important, Fitz, government conspiracies be damned!”
“It was too- Ah, I see. Domestic life is getting to you, hey?”
Bobbi sighed.
“So much. I’m so bored. “
“You’re bored?” Hunter exclaimed, offended. Turning to Fitz for validation, he complained: “Check out these cover stories okay. Bobbi, right, gets to be a personal trainer slash Krav Maga instructor who’s also in the Army Reserves. Meanwhile, I’m – wait for it – an artist. Working at a bohemian bloody hipster café. I learnt a new word Fitz. Upcycling. You don’t just reuse something anymore, you upcycle…”
Fitz raised a hand as subtly as possible to cover his mouth, trying to stifle a grin as Hunter complained like wearing a beanie to work was the greatest travesty he’d ever had to endure. When Hunter announced the cherry on the cake – or the salt in the wound, as he probably would have put it, and reached for a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, Fitz couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
“What about you?” Bobbi interrupted at last. “How’s domestic life treating you and Simmons? I’m assuming you don’t work for this guy while living six feet under.”
“We’re good. No cafés for us. I’m working here, obviously, doing some pretty cool tech stuff, AI, that sort of thing. Radcliffe’s a bit of a weirdo but you get used to him. Jemma’s going to med school – thought she might as well make it official since she’s basically Team Doctor anyway. And working here in her spare time.”
Bobbi screwed up her nose.
“Med school and work?”
“Our girl loves homework,” Hunter sighed. “What can you do?”
“Med school sounds serious though. That takes years, doesn’t it? How long are you guys planning to stay out of Shield?”
Fitz bit his lip. For all their improvement in important-conversation-having, they had both decided to ignore this question. Both of them were equally undecided, and equally happy living in their current jelly-like state of denial about the consequences of this indecision. They were Schrodinger’s Agents: Shield and Not-Shield at the same time, as long as they didn’t look too hard.
“You can do a lot of it online these days,” Fitz explained instead. “Plus, she’s got field certifications and stuff. She might get some credit for those already. And I’m sure she’d be allowed off base for assessments if that was necessary.”
“But hopefully it won’t be?” Bobbi checked his implied meaning.
“Living on the surface does have its perks. For example, Jemma and I saw our first film in two years this week.”
“What was it about?”
“I forget. We mostly kissed through it. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?”
Bobbi put a hand to her chest, wiping away fake tears of pride and then high-fiving Hunter.
“It’s just so beautiful,” she sighed. “Where’s Jemma? We should congratulate her too!”
“She’s at med school at the moment. I could get her to come over? Once she hears who it is, she’ll drop everything.”
Hunter shook his head.
“We’ve got work soon. Gotta show up, we don’t want to make a scene.”
Fitz grinned, with a notably devious edge.
“What’s the name of that café you work at? We can all meet up there, I assume?”
Hunter pressed his lips together. He contemplated cursing, but really, it was the best suggestion. Besides, if Fitz and Simmons got a giggle out of the inevitable Hipster!Hunter snapshot they would take, he wasn’t going to argue. Not to mention, he was curious to see if their undercover game was as strong as their romantic one.
“The Lucky Bean, it’s on Oak Street. Be there at 4.”
“Done.”
Fitz hung up, and headed back into the office with a smile still on his face. It was only when he pulled out his phone to tell Jemma to meet him, that he remembered the purpose of the conference call in the first place. Oh well. He’d be able to follow it up this afternoon anyway. The location of high-tech, potentially-black-market thermonuclear material was a fairly common afternoon tea conversation topic, right?