Grant Ward boarded the Metro car, looked around, and sighed. There was no reason to expect that there would be an empty seat on a D.C. Metro at 5:30 pm, but he’d hoped that maybe just this one thing could go his way today. He’d been out of the country for nearly a week, tracking down an arms dealer suspected of doing business with some characters known to SHIELD as unsavory. There had been rumors of alien tech, which always put an edge on a mission, but all he’d found was a hut and four bodies, none of which had been in one piece. Then, after a long, turbulent flight back to the Triskelion, and a miserably long debrief, Grant had gone outside to find that the lot he’d parked his car in had been blocked off by the motorcade of a visiting dignitary.
And now this.
Grant had two options: there was an empty handicap bench at the front of the car, and one seat near the back next to a young man who was studiously staring out the window. Though the handicap seat was tempting, Grant had a personal policy of avoiding small wrongs. He figured that since he spent his professional life in a moral grey zone, it was the least he could do to try to stack the scales in the other direction when he could. This meant swerving to avoid ground squirrels on the highway, not taking the last carton of milk at the market, and more relevantly, not sitting in seats with a big blue wheelchair sign on them. So he made his way to the back of the car, nodding apologetically at the feet he had to step over in the aisle.
“Mind if I…?” He gestured at the seat.
“What? No, no, not at all. All yours.” The man gave him a nod and a tight smile, and returned his gaze to the window. There was something vaguely familiar about the curly hair and the Scottish accent, but Grant couldn’t quite place it, which was strange, because being good with faces was part of his job description.
They were comfortable enough at first; Grant had always found metro seats to be a little small for his 6’2” frame, but the aisle was empty, and he could stretch his legs out to the side. As they trundled through the downtown stations though, more and more people filed on, the customary press of public transport became tighter and tighter, and he was forced to tuck his legs into his own seat. Each time someone jostled him, he flashed an apologetic smile at his seatmate, whose brows were drawing lower and lower in annoyance.
Why had he decided to live in Silver Spring, again? Oh right. It was quiet.
What should have been the final straw came between the Brookland and Fort Totten stations when a grinding noise echoed through the tunnel, the lights flickered, then went out, and the train jolted to a stop. Confusion immediately reigned, as Grant could have predicted it would (he’d caused a few of these incidents himself), and the passengers began to push at each other and at the doors, as if being out on the tracks was somehow preferable to the comparative safety of the car. The mechanized voice of reason asking people to please be calm could only just be heard over the melee, and Grant could smell the panic beginning to rise. He tried to push away the woman who was nearly sitting on his shoulder, and was rewarded with a stiletto heel in the tender space between the bones of his left foot.
And though he was well accustomed to pain, Grant couldn’t help swearing audibly and jerking away from the aisle, right into the ribs of his seatmate, who asked plaintively, “Do you mind, Agent Ward?”
And the penny dropped.
Eight months before, Trip had invited him to a New Year’s party to pull him out of the black hole he’d fallen into after a mission on Christmas Eve. There had been a little boy involved, and although the boy was still alive, Grant wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t made things worse for the child by handing him over to SHIELD. Trip the even-tempered, the eternal optimist, knew exactly what was going on (every specialist did at one point or another), and had goaded him into coming to the party, held at the apartment of a friend. It had been a lot of fun, once he’d let Trip bring him a drink and introduce him around. They were the only specialists there – the rest were agents, of course, but the vast majority were scientists stationed at the Triskelion.
He’d let Trip hand him yet another drink (was it blue? Really?) and push him toward the center of the party with an admonition to make some friends. Grant didn’t usually drink to excess, but he’d decided to let loose that night. Trip could keep an eye on him (he’d trust the man with his life), and so he accepted a fourth (or was it his fifth?) glass of icy blue alcohol.
Things got really fuzzy after that. A blur of faces and sounds, culminating in fireworks on the stroke of midnight – fireworks that he hadn’t seen, since he’d been in a closet experiencing some fireworks of his own with a very good-looking young man with thick curly hair, dark brows, and a Scottish accent.
Who had left his phone number in Grant’s pocket.
Whose lap he was now nearly sitting in in a darkened Metro car.
“Oh my god. You’re…oh.” This was why Grant didn’t like to get drunk.
“And there it is.” Grant though he heard a hint of a smile in the man’s – Fitz? Fitz’s voice. “I was wondering when you’d figure it out. It’s been a while, Agent Ward.”
“Uh, yeah, I guess it has. Look, I was really far gone that night. I woke up on Trip’s couch with a headache and blue teeth and no idea how I’d gotten there. I found your number in my pocket, but I had no idea what…” Grant trailed off. It was hard to get a read on someone when you couldn’t see their face.
Fitz laughed, in what was clearly an attempt to be casual. “Oh, don’t worry about it. It was just one of those things. Parties, you know. I always do crazy things at parties – not that I make a habit of – I mean, yeah, it’s fine.”
A brief silence fell between them, until a woman’s scream cut through the air. “A bomb! They’re saying there’s a bomb on the tracks!” The panic level in the car rose like floodwater, and screens lit up all around them, as passengers tried desperately to get a signal in a tunnel twenty feet below the city.
Grant sighed. So much for a quiet, easy trip home. Why could nothing go right today? He angled his body back toward Fitz, whose face he could now see dimly by the light of fifty cell phone screens. “Look,” he began, “I know you’re off the clock right now, but I’ve had a very long week, and would just really like to get home. You’re an engineer, right?”
“Yes?” Fitz asked suspiciously.
“So you could, for example, disable a bomb in a Metro tunnel if I were there to watch your back.”
“Of course I could, Agent Ward,” Fitz huffed. “What do you think I am, a rookie?”
“Would you mind, then? It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Fine. On one condition.” The engineer took a deep breath. “That you have dinner with me tomorrow night. Nothing fancy, just to get to know one another.”
Grant laughed, the sound incongruous amid the crying and praying around him.
“There’s no need to laugh. If you don’t want to, just say so and leave me my dignity,” Fitz said, offended.
“No, no, I wasn’t laughing at you! It’s just that I didn’t think you’d – I’d love to have dinner with you.”
“Good. In that case, there’s an escape hatch to the roof just behind us – I’ve seen the schematics for these cars, and it should do the job, but we should make sure that nobody else gets out – can’t have everyone following us out and mucking things up, you –“ Grant off the nervous flow of words with a quick, soft kiss.
“Yeah, I know. You go first. I’ll help you up.”