Chapter Text
“Oh Fitz, my goodness surely washing your sheets is much more preferable to sleeping on that disgusting mattress without any sheets at all?”
He should be standing up for himself, but she was right this had gone on long enough.
“Ok well to be fair I burned my extra set when I left my soldering iron on and my regular set still has the ink stain from the pen incident.”
“I don’t particularly want to know why you were soldering in bed, just gather it all up and let’s go do the washing.”
Leo Fitz, 17 year-old Academy member - child prodigy, started piling t-shirts, jeans, socks, pants, sheets, everything currently littering the floor of his dorm and dutifully followed his best friend turned lab partner turned washing expert apparently, Jemma Simmons, down to the laundry room.
“Right, put the light t-shirts in this one - no not that that goes in with other darks - yes that works and the sheets let’s put some stain removal on that.”
“Stain removal? What’s that made of? Oh, It’s got ethanolamine in it? That’s fine that makes sense you can go ahead and use it.”
After ignoring her eye-roll he followed her instructions and not long after they were able to set all of his items to wash, no small feat considering they were using half the room’s machines. Hopefully other people had better things to do on a Saturday night than their washing.
Well, people other than them of course.
Jumping up to join her on the machines he pulled out his mobile to pull up a design he wanted to show her.
“You know how you were telling me about DNA receptors? That if there was some sort of program able to detect the small differences in the sequences we could possibly use that to form secure technology?”
“Yes of course but it was more hypothetical, we aren’t training to be Quartermasters, Fitz.”
“Well that’s because Quartermasters have nothing on us, look at this it’s a compartment within a mobile that we could ‘theoretically’ store a program like that. Maybe Professor Vaughn could help us get started.”
“Oh, Fitz that’s brilliant. But could you move it to the back of the mobile? I’m trying to think of the simplest way to collect the DNA. Fingerprint scanners are so 90’s.”
“Agreed!”
They spent the next 40 minutes debating proper placement before diving into their opinions on the sonic screwdriver having some sort of recognition built in. Eventually his laundry beeped and they both slid off the machines to start loading his wash into the dryers.
Once his dryers were sorted, with only one dryer sheet per machine - because ok fine Simmons one is proper but they smell so nice so two would make the sheets smell even better - he had a dangerous thought.
A thought he had spent months convincing everyone, his mum, his mates, their professors, that it just wasn’t like that because Simmons was just his friend.
The thought wasn’t monumental, at least at the time - with the proper revisiting he would realize just how momentous it truly was. - it was silly really, just thinking that his laundry smelled like her clothes and that doing laundry didn't sound so bad if it meant doing it with her.
It’s just that, typically after spending a lot of time with someone he needed a break. A moment to recharge alone by himself but he had realized that they had spent all day together, literally all day because he fell asleep on the couch in her room after binge watching old James Bond movies.
They had been close since being partnered in Chem lab last semester but something had changed over the Christmas break. Both being forced to spend Christmas away from their families they had spent the holiday together, and he had read to her from his favorite book to help her feel better after realizing just how homesick she was.
Since then it wasn’t unusual for one of them to be together morning to night, fall asleep in the other’s room was a new development and when that fact had slipped to his mum one night on a Skype call he had spent almost 20 minutes convincing her that they were just friends!
She was a girl, sure, and a pretty girl ok?
But this was Simmons, the girl who liked cocoa puffs in her ice cream and didn’t have any real friends because she was odd just like him.
This was different, he thought about what it would be like to do laundry after the Academy and felt a pang of jealousy when imagining Simmons doing laundry with one of the meat-heads she so liked running around with.
Brushing it off, he focused instead on convincing her that the sonic screwdriver had to have some sort of recognition system otherwise anyone could get their hands on it and it’s powerful technology.
He didn’t have to have those thoughts right now, they could wait. He was just thinking it after all.