#3 years y'all - holy shitzu

[agentverbivore]

Prompt! Doctor AU - Jemma is an ER doctor at a hospital and Fitz is brought in after a minor car crash. Turns out they went on one disastrous date their first year of college, never stayed in touch, and Fitz takes it as fate giving them a do-over. Hope specific prompts are okay!

oh yes, specific prompts are great! I changed it a little bit from the above, but I had a lot of fun writing it. thank you! :-)Anniversary Ficlet 1/8.Rated G. FitzSimmons. Hospital AU.

Tuesdays were, without a doubt, cursed. Leo Fitz decided this as he sat in the ER and prayed for the ground to swallow him whole.

Two hours ago, he’d gotten in a small car accident when a little old lady had rear-ended him on his way home from work. Forty-five minutes ago, the hospital had said they wanted him to wait for examination by one of its top neurologists, to make sure that his pre-existing condition hadn’t been exacerbated by the minor head-bump. And ten minutes ago, said top neurologist had strutted into the ER, taken one look at him, and frozen with her lips parted in shock. That was approximately when Fitz began to pray that the hellmouth would just open up beneath him and end his misery.

Dr. Jemma Simmons was without a doubt the most amazing person Fitz had ever met. So, naturally, she hated him.

To be fair, said hatred was also Fitz’s fault. Sort of.

Almost a decade ago, the two of them had gone on one date, the likes of which he was convinced he’d never experience again. Having met at a Doctor Who trivia night in Dupont, they had then spent the following Saturday wandering the pathways of the National Zoo during its winter event, laughing at the monkeys, admiring the lights, and generally having the best night of Fitz’s achingly isolated youth. When they’d parted, he’d been brave enough to lean over and give her a polite but warm peck on the cheek. Simmons had turned her head just enough so that their lips brushed together, her fingers tightening around his and sending tingles of promise through his whole body.

And then Fitz’s entire life had imploded. Or at least, his mobile had, when he’d tripped and dropped it six stories down the center stairwell of his building onto the concrete basement floor. For some godforsaken reason, he had just typed her number into the notes app rather than enter it into his contacts, and when he had managed to wring off any unsynced data from the remnants of his phone, the number had been gone. Googling had been fruitless, as had returning to the trivia bar to see if she might have been a regular. With absolute horror, Fitz had realized that he’d managed to lose his one shot at being with the only woman in whom he had ever truly been interested.

Simmons, having recovered from her surprise at seeing him in her ER so many years later, had informed him that she was running a bit behind but would be back to examine him as quickly as she was able. While he awaited what was sure to be the world’s most awkward doctor’s visit, he tortured himself by recounting the perfect date in vivid detail in his mind, just to remind himself why he was a complete arse before she came back.

“Alright, Mr. Fitz,” Simmons said as she swept back over to his cot, “I’ll try to make this as quick and painless as possible.”

“Right,” Fitz mumbled, ears heating up as he thought about how she probably wanted to be rid of him so she wouldn’t have to think about him having never called her back. Even if he wished fervently that he could have. “And it’s – just Fitz is fine.”

“Let’s see what we have here.” She began to flip through his file, brows furrowing as she studied his unusual medical history. “Acute hypoxia due to near drowning… I can see why Doctor Crawford wanted a consultation.”

“Lucky for me, no water involved tonight,” he returned with a wry smile. “Just a head bump, I feel fine.”

“She was right to call for me.” Simmons tossed him a stern look over her shoulder as she finished her notes and reached for a nearby cart full of supplies. “Do you mind if I –”

“Two years ago, out on a field expedition,” he said, anticipating her question and averting his eyes. He hated telling this story. “I was on the Potomac with my team, testing autonomous aquatic drones. Weather turned sour, and on our way to shore we saw an overturned kayak. A dad and two kids, but one was missing. I saw her, jumped for her, got caught in the current and was pulled under. She was okay. I was in a short coma.”

Fitz chose not to add that making sure his team had the girl first had been when the current had caught him, dragging him so rapidly away that his team said they didn’t even hear him disappear. In retrospect, he thought it made him seem rather foolish, even if his friends and co-workers vehemently disagreed. The fact that he had never been a strong swimmer hadn’t exactly been a secret.

“Oh my,” Simmons breathed, and he chanced a look in her direction. She was staring slack-jawed at him, metal tool held loosely between her fingers. “That’s…” she started, clearing her throat and stepping forward to begin the examination. For a brief second, he thought he saw something akin to admiration in her eyes, but it disappeared immediately. “That’s quite heroic of you.”

A small smile tilted up the corner of his mouth despite his attempt to subdue it, and he shrugged. As much as he generally tried not to think about the act of bravery that had almost taken his life, he found himself feeling rather pleased at Simmons’ compliment.

The rest of the examination was simultaneously perfunctory and pure torture for Fitz. It required her to stand close enough that he could smell her lavender shampoo, that he could see the edge of her clavicle peeking out from beneath the collar of her scrubs, that he could almost taste the memory of her lips. He tried to convince himself to say something, anything, at the very least to apologize for having disappeared from the face of the earth after they’d so enjoyed each others’ company. But the perfect words wouldn’t come, and as she laid the stethoscope on the table and told him he was cleared and free to go, he panicked.

“I didn’t hate you!”

Simmons’ shoulders stiffened, and she glanced around to see that patients, nurses, and doctors were blessedly not in the nearby vicinity. “Pardon?”

Fitz stood next to the ER bed, cringing and twisting the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, and wished yet again that a hole in the universe would just show up beneath him at any second.

“That didn’t come out right,” he said at last, taking a halting step towards her. “I mean, when I didn’t call you. I wanted to. I tried to find you, I went back to that bar, I spent hours Googling and Facebooking and d’you have any idea how many Jemma Simmonses there are on the East Coast? ‘Cause there are a lot, and I looked through all of them, but not one of them was you. And I’m really, really bloody sorry I didn’t call you, and I’ve regretted it ever since.”

After making it through his entire pathetic, rambled speech, she frowned and tilted her head. “But I – Fitz, I gave you my number.”

“Oh, yeah, no, you did, but I – accidentally destroyed my phone.” He winced, knowing just how ludicrous his story sounded.

Her eyes narrowed. “You accidentally destroyed your phone?”

“By dropping it from the sixth floor. And just….” Cutting himself off, he sighed. “Please believe me. I spent months hating myself when I couldn’t find you.”

Simmons stared at him in silence for a few seconds, and, just as he was about to let his shoulders droop and then escape the hospital as quickly as possible, she let out a low laugh. “You know, I’d thought you’d given me a fake number,” she said, “when it never connected. And I – you couldn’t find me online because I don’t use my last name on Facebook. It’s just Jemma Anne.”

“Jemma Anne,” he repeated, feeling vaguely faint with relief that she hadn’t just shown him the door. “I didn’t know you had a middle name.”

“And you don’t have a Facebook either,” she pointed out, and his eyes widened. Apparently, Simmons had gone looking for him, too.

“I couldn’t,” he explained. “To make it easier to get a security clearance. Any engineering lab I’d wanna work at in D.C. would need a top one, so no Facebook. No online trail at all, if I could help it.”

Something in her face had shifted in the past few seconds, honey-brown eyes now holding a tentative warmth that he remembered vividly from that one night so very long past. “Well,” she said at last, one hand fiddling with the hem of her scrubs shirt, “that really is some rotten luck.”

“I know,” he said ruefully. “I’ve been cursing the bloody cosmos about it for years.”

Nibbling at the inside of her bottom lip, she glanced up at the clock. “Are you busy tonight?”

Fitz’s eyes widened. “No! Wait, shit, um, yes – calling the auto shop about my car. But, um, other than that, no.”

A smile broke across her face. “Okay. I’m still on shift for another hour and a half, but –”

“I can wait,” he blurted out, cheeks reddening, and wondered why he hadn’t managed to achieve any kind of smoothness in the decade since he’d seen her. “I mean, I can call them from the lobby, it’s fine.”

“Okay. I’ll come find you – oh!” Letting out a small tsk, she stepped into his space. “Give me your phone.”

“Right, yeah, good call,” he muttered, digging his Plus out of his pocket, unlocking it, and handing it over. “Don’t trust me with that, I’m clearly hopeless.”

“But in a cute kind of way.” She flitted her gaze up to meet his over the edge of the phone, and he fought off the gormless smile that threatened to take over his whole face. If he wasn’t careful, he was pretty sure he was teetering on the edge of being very-not-cool in his level of interest in her.

“I’ll see you later, then?” he offered when she returned his phone.

“Count on it,” Simmons returned, eyes shining at him with warmth and promise and excitement, before being called away by another doctor.

Resisting the urge to do a small hop and fist-pump, he glanced down at his phone as he navigated through the ER – and then stopped short as he read the beginning of the entry she’d put into his contacts.

Name: Dr. Jemma Anne Simmons, MD-PhDCompany: Yours (if you’ll have me)

With a wide grin, Fitz took a screenshot of the entry and texted it to her number, along with a message: Only if you’ll have me right back.

After a few seconds, he received a one-word reply: Deal.

[Other ficlets.] [AO3.]