Work Text:
“Fitz will kill you if he sees you messing around with that.”
He jumps just a little as she somehow manages to sneak into the lab under his radar. He immediately pulls back his arm as if it had been placed over a burning stove, and awkwardly reaches up to scratch behind his ear as if he hadn't just been caught playing around with the holotable display.
“I wasn't . . . I was just curious.”
“Curious?” she asks, “Curious about what? Fitz's new project?”
He catches on to the disbelief in her tone and the underlying sarcasm to her last question and folds surprisingly fast, “You guys just make it look so easy.”
She can't help but smile at the disgruntled expression on his face and chokes back a laugh, “Fitz wasn't joking when he said it takes at least two semesters in holographic engineering before you're even allowed to swipe one finger on that screen.”
The words “it can't be that hard” are on the tip of his tongue, but he swallows them down remembering his and Coulson's appalling attempts to work the machine a few weeks ago. It really was that hard.
She turns away from him, reaching for her lab coat and slipping it on, “Was there something I could help you with Agent Ward?”
He watches as she comes to stand beside him, reaching up on to her tip toes to reach for something at the back of the top shelf of the cupboard he was standing next to. He grabs at the nearest glass beaker and she shakes her head, “No not that one, the one behind, yes thank you, that one.”
He hands it over to her and she gives him another brief smile of gratitude this time before she's off again around to the other side of the lab.
He shrugs, “No I was just uh looking for Coulson.”
Its a terrible lie, and he feels like smacking himself in the face. He was trained to lie better than that, but it just came out like word vomit and now he's left trying to come up with another ridiculous lie to back it up.
She glances up at him, and there's a teasing glint in her eyes as she says, “Have you tried his office?”
“Yeah, no he wasn't there.”
“That's funny,” she says, her voice muffled slightly when she sticks her head into one of the cupboards under the work bench, “I was just there myself talking to him a few minutes ago.”
He doesn't say anything, not really keen to dig his hole any deeper than it already is.
She stands back upright, nudging the cupboard door shut with her leg, “You do know, she's been asking about you?”
“Who?” he asks, knowing full well who Simmons was talking about.
“Skye. It's been nearly a week since she got back from the hospital and you've barely said two words to her since.”
And just like that the tiny English biochemist hits the nail on the head. She probably had him figured out the minute she walked into the lab and found him there waving his hand over the image of the specs for Fitz's new prototype cloaking device.
He's not sure when he became so damn transparent, or if it was simply Simmons who could just so easily see through him, and why that idea in particular has his stomach churning.
When she looks up at him and holds his gaze, there is no judgement there, “She thinks you're angry with her.”
He shakes his head, “I'm not.”
“I know. You're angry at yourself.”
That nearly knocks the wind out of him.
She stops what she's doing and comes to stand still in front of him, “This might be a little presumptuous of me, but it's not your fault every time one of us gets hurt. We all signed on to this knowing the risks involved.”
“But it's my job-”
“To keep us safe? I'm pretty sure we have some responsibility in that as well.”
He stares silently down at her, and apparently the fact he's still trying to find excuses to blame himself is playing out quite obviously across his face and she reads him like an open book.
“Skye never should have walked in there alone. She knows that, but in the end, it's still not her fault either, just as much as it isn't Fitz's for letting her, or Coulson's for not finding her sooner, or mine for not stopping the bleeding, or yours for whatever it is you think you could have done differently.”
He feels the knot that had been tied up in his chest for all these weeks loosen a little and he shakes his head with a small smile on his lips. What he really wants to say is “You're incredible,” the thought just bursting up to the forefront of his mind out of nowhere, but he has enough wits about him to hold it back and instead he says, “Thanks for the pep talk.”
She shrugs and gives him a brilliant smile, “You know if you promise to go and talk to her, I'll teach you some of the basics on how to operate the holotable.”
He stretches out a hand, “Deal.”
She takes his hand in her much smaller one and gives it one shake, her grip surprisingly firm, “Deal.”
“So,” he says moving around the screen, “How exactly do you zoom in?”
“Not so fast, you've got to learn how to turn it on first.”
“That I already know,” he says, proudly pointing to the switch down at the side.
She laughs and smiles up at him, “A* for you.”
It's only with her laughter he remembers why he'd come here in the first place.
Maybe she couldn't read him as well as she thought, after all.