Chapter Text
“Come on, Fitz. It’ll be fun,” Simmons says for the (honest to god) hundred and ninth time.
“You think a lot of things are fun that aren’t actually,” he says. “Dissecting things, for instance.”
“Oh, like your weird little robots are so much cooler.”
“Hey,” he complains. She looks over her shoulder at him before returning to the meticulous and dangerous-looking task of applying her eyeliner. He’s not a hundred percent sure why she’s doing her make up in his room, because as he reminds her daily she has her own room. But she ends up here a lot of the time, regardless.
“All I’m saying is that we’re only going to graduate once, so we might as well go to the party. Plus, it’s worth celebrating! We’ll be real SHIELD agents next week.”
“I don’t like parties,” he says. She scoffs. “And I don’t like anyone in our graduating class. Neither do you, by the way.”
“Oh, I like them just fine,” she says. “And so do you. You’re just being grumpy.”
“Really?” he asks. She nods. “Name one person in our class you like.”
She sets down her eyeliner and glances up at the ceiling, drawing her fingers to her chin in a prolonged gesture of cartoonishly exaggerated thought.
“Besides me,” he says after a moment.
“Right, you,” she ribs, tossing her hands up. “I knew I was forgetting somebody.”
“Funny. Hilarious.”
“It’ll be fun,” she says again. “Come on, you don’t even have to stay the whole time. If you really hate it you can come right back here.”
“You could go without me, you know.”
“I don’t want to do that,” she says, and it would be almost convincing if she weren’t still primping despite the fact that he’s said a hundred and ten times that he doesn’t want to go. “Come on, Fitz. Come for ten minutes. I won’t even make you get dressed up fancy.” He considers it for a second if only to get her to stop talking about it.
“No,” he says. “No, because if I go with you, I’ll end up being there the whole time and you know it.”
“See? You just admitted you’d end up having fun if you went,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“I would not.”
“Then come with me and prove me wrong,” she says, grinning in an already self-congratulatory fashion.
Fitz ends up going to the party because Simmons could probably talk him into anything. As it turns out, SHIELD parties are pretty much nothing like college parties, and in lieu of dance music and drinking there are improperly requisitioned fireworks and narrowly avoiding arrest.
They might avoid the police, but their supervising officer catches them and Fitz spends the night caged up in a crowded holding cell with twenty-four people he’s never been very fond of and one that makes it almost tolerable.