#bi!fitz

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

insp.

[theclaravoyant]

bi fitzsimmons - for anon    (x x x x x x x x x)

[the-nerdy-stjarna]

A Friend Like Rey

Written for @unlessimwrongwhichyouknowimnot for The Fitzsimmons Network Valentine’s Day Exchange.

Prompt:  Aromantic Simmons is confused/annoyed about all the romance happening around the base as Valentine’s Day approaches. Her queerplatonic partner Fitz decides to give her an aromantic Valentine’s Day.

@unlessimwrongwhichyouknowimnot, I hope you enjoy your fic. Thank you so much for patiently answering all my weird questions, and I know Rey wasn’t on the list of your Top 5 favorite Star Wars characters but I hope you’ll enjoy her “appearance” nonetheless. (And the weird reference to Love Actually that I could not resist ;) )

Sneak Peek:

Jemma rounded the corner, heading down the corridor to the lab. She stopped in her tracks when she saw Nathanson standing by the door, attaching a poster of sorts to the glass window. She narrowed her eyes and walked with determination towards the other agent.

“What are you doing?” she barked, a bit more impatiently than strictly necessary.

Nathanson’s head shot around, his wide eyes nervously glancing back and forth between Jemma and the door. He gestured at the poster with his thumb. “Put—putting up the posters for the Valentine’s party.”

Jemma squinted in confusion, taking in the pink and red hearts on the poster and the fine calligraphy font, indeed announcing a S.H.I.E.L.D. Valentine’s Party. She pointed at the poster, staring at Nathanson. “Has this been authorized?”

“Umm,” Nathanson muttered. “Yes. Director Mace—”

“Ugh. Mace. Of course.” Jemma rolled her eyes, sighing in discontent.

[Read the rest on AO3]

[theclaravoyant]

soft cardigan bi fitz aesthetic - for anon      (x x x x x . x x x)

[theclaravoyant]

Changing Stripes (bi!Fitz - Ch.6 - Now Complete!)

AN ~ a fic literally years in the posting (oops) has finally finished and bi!Fitz has finally cocooned through his journey and is ready to come out; and who better to hear it first than his long-time best friend, fellow queer, & potential partner, Jemma Simmons!

*note: I have left the endgame ship(s) of this fic deliberately ambiguous. I invite you to ship whoever you want; follow it through to its canon conclusion or keep FS platonic, I do not mind (hello, I love both options so much I couldn’t finish the fic for literal years!), but there’s been a lot of tagging/shipping discourse up in here lately and I’m not here for it, so: this fic doesn’t “belong” to any ship. It belongs to bi!Fitz, no matter who he ends up with <3

and now, without further ado: Rshps: platonic (or pre-rshp) FS with mentions of romantic FitzSimmons, FitzMack, FitzHunter, FitzSkye, Skimmons, and Simmorse. Rated: T for mild sexual references & innuendo. Fluff (with a few angsty moments, but I promise I make up for them :P)

for Anon prompt, and @meanderings0ul who I think might enjoy it, based on a recent prompt of theirs as well :)

bi!Fitz comes out to bi! (or pan) Jemma

Changing Stripes

“So what’s going on with you?”

“How d’you mean?”

Fitz looked over his shoulder, back at Jemma who was lying on the couch. She put a piece of popcorn into her mouth, shrugged, and repeated the question.

“You know. I was away for months, Fitz. It must have been awful, but I don’t expect you to have been thinking about me the entire time. You must have done something. Learnt something. Bought a shirt? Watched a movie? I don’t know. Something.”

“Yeah, nothing much,” Fitz replied with a shrug of his own. He reached for the bowl of popcorn, and Jemma slid it out of his reach with a firm glare.

“Leopold James Fitz,” she breathed. “First: I was stuck on a desert planet, mostly alone, and it was permanently night time. For six months. You don’t even know what doing nothing is. And second: please get dramatic about something? I need the gossip.”

I need to know you didn’t spend the entire six months thinking about nothing but me, was what she wanted to say, but their relationship still wasn’t quite what it had once been; still wasn’t quite sure exactly what it was. She had to be careful with it. But she also wanted to let her friend know – because that’s what he still was, no matter what else happened – that she cared about him. She missed him. That, at least, he seemed to get, as he gestured for her to sit up and came to sit up beside her, rather than in front of her on the floor.

“Something did happen, actually,” he confessed. There was a little sparkle in his eye, but a nervous energy to the way that he moved, the combination of which piqued Jemma’s curiosity. Seeing the words on the tip of his tongue, she held out the popcorn bowl, and he downed a handful as one might drink a shot before revealing big news. He took a deep breath.

“I came out,” he declared. “Well – I guess I didn’t, technically, come out ‘til just now. You’re the first person I’ve told. Joey knows, sort of, but-“

“As what?” Jemma interrupted.

“Hm?”

“Came out as what?” Her eyes glimmered with pride and excitement. She bit back her instinct to say I told you so, and grinned at him instead. “You never said.”

“Oh,” he said, and grinned, as the gears in his head stopped grinding; overthinking; qualifying. “I’m bi.”

Jemma squealed, jostling the popcorn dangerously close to falling out of the bowl.

“Tell me everything!” she begged. “How did you know? When did you know? Was it Mack? It was Mack wasn’t it. Or was it Hunter… He’s a little roguish, but he’s got that loner-with-a-heart-of-gold air working for him quite well, doesn’t he? I can see you falling for that.”

Fitz waved her off. “It was lots of things. Ever since the Academy. I just kept telling myself, it was nothing – you know, it was hormones or jealousy or whatever.”

“Life goals or wife goals,” Jemma added, nodding in understanding.

“- but every time I started to think about it, really think about it,” Fitz continued, “something would happen, and it would go away, or I’d spook myself and hide it. Joey saw through all that, and he sort of- he got me to reflect on all this stuff, the crushes and everything, and I realised that actually… I’ve known about this for a long time. I just wasn’t ready to accept it.”

Jemma nodded. Her own sexual awakening had come to her rather easily, but she knew a good number of people for whom it had not been so simple, or welcomed. Yet she couldn’t help but spare a moment of solemnity for the messy timing of all this. She found herself wanting to ask, so what does this mean for us?, but of course she already knew. The answer was probably, nothing. Just because Fitz now recognised another side to his romantic and sexual nature, it didn’t change his feelings for her, and it didn’t change the mess they were in. And it didn’t change the fact that he still trusted her enough to tell her first.

“How do you feel about it now?” she asked instead.

“Honestly, good,” Fitz replied, then qualified - “Most of the time. I still doubt myself sometimes, or I think, what would Mack say if he caught me staring, you know? Would it change things between us?”

Seeing that he was starting to fret, Jemma put an arm around Fitz’s shoulder and pulled him close. These were waters she knew well.

“That’s okay,” she promised. “These are all very normal feelings, and you don’t have to tell Mack – or anyone – if you don’t want to. But he’s a good man and he won’t hate you for it. And, you know, have you ever considered that it could change things in a good way? If you feel like you’re hiding something or lying to him now, coming out might help that. You’ll feel more secure. And… you might even get a date out of it. I don’t know Mack’s situation, of course, but if I were you I wouldn’t let those guns pass me by without letting him know I was on the table.”

“… That’s a very sexual image.”

“Yes it is.” Jemma bit her tongue. She was going to enjoy mocking Fitz relentlessly, he always got so flustered when it came to matters of the body, but she had to ease him into it first. “But it’s not just a matter of that, is it? You said you liked the way Mack treats you, with respect, with forwardness, with kindness. You enjoy doing things together. Same taste in cars, same taste in movies; that’s as good a place as any to start. It seems to me you two could build, if you’d pardon the pun, quite the life together – or at least show each other a good time.

“Or what about Hunter? Now, I know for a fact he likes people of the masculine persuasion. He’s got a nice beard, very rugged, and don’t think I haven’t seen you checking out that ass. From what I’ve heard, he’s also a great softie, underneath all that swagger. You two would get along quite well, I’d imagine. Although, the fights over football would be a problem. He barracks for a different team does he not?”

Fitz snorted, as if about to start on a rant at the very thought, but then something occurred to him and he smiled to himself. “We play together too, though. Football, I mean. He’s rather good at it.”

“See?” Jemma nudged him. Fitz laughed.

“Alright, so are you going to set me up with every guy in this place or what?” “Well, you don’t have many options left as regards the women,” Jemma pointed out. “Daisy’s somewhat taken, apparently; May, while gorgeous, is too old for you; and I’m sorry but Bobbi is just out of your league.”

“Oh, but right in yours is she?”

“What?” Now it was Jemma’s turn to blush.

“Don’t ‘what’ me,” Fitz scoffed, smugly taking another handful of popcorn. “You know full well what I’m talking about. You started at her legs when she walked into the lab the first time for a full minute. A full minute Jemma-“

“What about you!” Jemma retorted. “I saw you lick your lips when Mack walked out the other day with that tank top and the grease stain on his collarbone-“

“You started fake cursing like an old woman from the South the first time you saw Daisy without a top on-“

Verbal arguments failing her, Jemma shoved the bowl of popcorn at Fitz. He shoved it back, and she deflected it straight onto the floor, sending popcorn spilling out across the carpet. They paused for a moment in their bickering, and decided they’d best clean it up, so they slithered onto the floor together and crawled around on their hands and knees, dropping popcorn piece by piece back into the bowl. The fight was not over yet though, with Jemma taking this distraction as a chance to have the final word.  

“It’s not like you can talk, Mr ‘let me show you my equipment,’” she mumbled.

“What was that?” Fitz beckoned, and flicked a piece of popcorn at her. It bounced off her shoulder. “Did you have something you’d like to share with the class, Ms ‘well formed and symmetrical’?”

“Ugh, Fitz!” Jemma groaned, and threw a handful of kernels at him.

“Shove off!” he yelped, trying to shield himself against the rain. He reached for the bowl, half-full of their recovered popcorn, and flicked handful after handful in retaliation. Jemma gathered her reserves from what remained on the floor, and the two of them engaged in a highly undignified food-fight until there was nothing left but abandoned corn like fallen snow, and two very giggly super geniuses, catching their breath from laughter for the first time in years.

[theclaravoyant]

leather jacket bi fitz - for anon     (x x x x x x x x x)

[theclaravoyant]

trans fitzsimmons - for anon    (x x x x x x x x x)

[theclaravoyant]

Changing Stripes - Ch.5

AN ~ I am very pleased to announce that after LITERAL YEARS I am raising this fic from the dead to give it an ending. I got caught up in trying to make it perfect and as canon got darker I wasn’t sure how to balance it out, but some of my recent prompts about bi fitz have given me opportunity and inspiration too perfect to pass up so I am FINALLY finishing this fic! The 6th chapter, which I plan to be the last, will be released in the coming days.

For those who are not familiar, this a bit of a bi!Fitz retrofit, in which Fitz encounters and slowly comes to terms with his bisexuality. As it is intended to integrate with canon, there is a fair bit of the FitzSimmons relationship in its platonic/pre-relationship stages, as well as discussions of romances & crushes with various characters. However, the ending will be left deliberately ambiguous in terms of endgame ships, and as such I welcome readers to follow things through to their canon conclusions or to divert with ships of your own. Enjoy x

This chap, we jump forward to S3 canon. Joey pays Fitz a visit.

Read on AO3 (this chap, ~1400wd, whole fic, ~4700)

Changing Stripes - Ch.5

Joey wasn’t typically one to get involved in other people’s lives, especially the intimate parts, but he saw something of his old self in Fitz sometimes, and for some reason - maybe it was Daisy’s sense of mission rubbing off on him - he felt like he should do something about it. Nothing too elaborate, just a nudge in the right direction; just a little something like the push he got, when he had needed it, to look at his life and his heart and his mind and line it all up for himself. So he set himself a little research project, until he had enough observations and anecdotes to back his instinct, and to hold Fitz’s attention if he shied away; until he was sure, at least as sure as he could be without being Fitz, and until the only question left was when to broach the subject. With Fitz so focused on Jemma’s rescue from the mysterious rock situation, it sometimes felt almost cruel to contemplate intervening, but Joey knew more than most, that sometimes the threat of a spiraling, all-consuming depression presented a man with a prime opportunity to take stock of himself.

So it was that Joey decided to simply seize the day.

“Hey, Fitz,” he greeted, inviting himself into the lab, where Fitz was frowning at his work, pencil shavings littering his desk, a cold tea only half finished sitting nearby. He shook his head and looked up as Joey approached, belatedly pulling himself out of his own head.

“Hey, Joey,” he greeted. “Sorry, I’m a little distracted. Can I help you?”

“Actually,” Joey began, “I was thinking maybe I could help you.”

“I’m… not sure that’s a good idea,” Fitz replied, as reluctant to think about the fruitlessness of his mission as he was about the possibility of having a volatile heat source at his side in the vicinity of several combustible chemicals. “Don’t Daisy and Coulson want you on something- something else?”

“I didn’t mean in the lab,” Joey clarified. “I meant something personal.”

“Oh.”

“And judging from that look on your face, you already know what I mean.”

Fitz cleared his throat, and mumbled along the lines of I don’t know what you’re talking about. He turned back to his work, and picked up the pencil, but seemed to have lost his train of thought. And forgotten that the nib had long since snapped off the pencil, and he’d given up on it hours ago.

“I think you do, though,” Joey continued calmly. He sat down in the chair beside Fitz, his own nerves starting to shake his hands and claw at his throat. But he could tell that Fitz was listening, and so he pushed on. “Let me put something to you. Some feelings you might relate to.

“You grew up in a conservative household. Hopefully one full of love, but one where you weren’t exposed to a lot outside of the norm in terms of love and marriage and family structure. You never knew any queer kids growing up – none that you knew of anyway – and you never saw it as a possibility until one day, later in your life, maybe at college, something happened. You felt something, maybe some guy just winked at you, and something inside of you asked a question.

“You ignored it. You had another one-off. An inconvenient boner, maybe a sex dream, and you thought, it must be the stress, the strangeness, the objective aesthetic appreciation – anything but ‘that.’ Every time, you told yourself it was an anomaly, even though, while I’m talking about all this right now, you’re counting how many anomalies there have been, in your head. Aren’t you?”

“I…” Fitz’s lips moved around nothing. His mind felt strangely clear, and yet, he had no answer for Joey other than to marvel at the accuracy. He put down his charade of a pencil and turned in his chair. “How did you know?”

“A lot of guys go through this,” Joey promised. “LGBT people, in general. Even if we’re not in a particularly hostile environment, we don’t have the resources to- you know, to recognise our feelings. It takes longer, it’s messy. With guys, there’s all the macho-fairy stuff to deal with too. And for you it’s probably different again, right? I know you’re in love with this girl, Jemma. I had help like, I didn’t like sex with girls, and I kept wishing the girls I thought I was interested in, were more like the guys I actually was interested in. Being bi, maybe you didn’t have that, I don’t know. Maybe that made it more confusing. But I’m not wrong, am I?”

Fitz frowned. Joey was not wrong, that much was true, but was he right?

“Bi,” Fitz mused. “You think I’m bisexual?”

“You know about it?”

“Not much. Not well,” Fitz explained. “I’ve heard about it, I guess. I did a couple Google searches. Chickened out of following it up every time, of course, but you probably know how it goes.”

“Right.” Joey snorted. “But actually, it’s interesting you say that. A lot of people get hung up on the concept of being attracted to more than one gender. They think they’ve gotta be gay or they’ve gotta be straight, and those are the only two options. If you’re open to a third, that’s gonna make life much easier for you.”

“Do you think that’s what I am though? I don’t- I don’t even really know if what I’m feeling is… you know…”

“Gay?” Joey teased, a smile touching his lips. “Okay, let’s put it this way. There’s a difference between appreciating how much a man can lift, and wanting that man to lift you.”

The furious blush that arose in Fitz’s cheeks at this, told both of them as much as they needed to know.

“Point taken,” Fitz conceded.

“In all seriousness, though,” Joey insisted, “I can’t tell you who you are. There are a couple more labels that might suit you better, and some people don’t want to label it at all. You don’t have to, either, and you don’t have to let it change anything about your life out here.” He waved an arm through the air, gesturing around the room. Then he gestured to his heart. Swallowed his nerves. “The change is in here. It’s a beautiful thing, whatever happens. Whatever you decide, labels or no labels – but, you know, speaking as someone who’s been where you’ve been, or somewhere close to there, I think the most important thing is recognising it for yourself. Recognising your attraction to men, and having a relationship with it. Of some kind. I don’t wanna tell you how to live, but just… think about it, okay? I think you’ll be surprised what good it does.”

Voice trembling, Joey stood up and took a deep breath. He had to stay calm these days, and he was getting good at it, but every now and then things risked getting just a little too real. This time, crisis was averted - the metal lab bench was safe - but not a moment after he had jumped to his feet, a couple of lab techs filed into the room. The conversation was over, then, at least for now. Joey gave Fitz a nod and a look that promised he wouldn’t tell anyone. Fitz nodded back, a promise that he would at least think about it, and Joey took his leave.

Fitz turned back to his work, but his mind was still distracted. What good was another vague promise, after all? Apparently, he’d been thinking about this for a decade already, maybe longer. All those not-so-one-offs. Watching Joey leave, he recalled that day at the orientation fair, when he’d found the queer guild table and hadn’t dared approach it. Looking back on it now, he wondered how he might have felt within himself, or in his relationships with Hunter or Mack or Trip or Ward, or even with Jemma or Daisy, if he’d dared to resolve that question when he’d had the chance. Well, now he did again, and apparently, he had someone personally cheering him on along this awkward personal journey. And he’d had some growth along the way in his lifetime too, in other ways. He’d learnt to start trusting himself, most of all, and to take pride in and stand up for who he was; not who he was expected to be. With this in mind, he picked up a fresh white pencil and, on another blank blueprint sheet, carefully wrote out the word:

Bisexual?  

He sat back and looked at it, and blew the air out of his cheeks.

Then he scribbled the question mark out.