Chapter Text
If Fitz had to pinpoint a time when he truly acknowledged the songs in his head, he would have to say he was about three or four. It was before he’d been allowed to go to school, not that that legality had stopped him from learning as much about the universe as humanly possible, and he distinctly remembered being barricaded into the wardrobe by his mum when his father had stumbled in, waving around a tinny as if it was a sword or some other kind of weapon. He’d been curled up as tightly and as quietly as he could possibly bend, his trusted companion Percival sitting on his knees and whispering words of reassurance to him, when he’d heard a girl’s voice in his head.
His initial reaction had been to try and locate the girl, she sounded like she was a little older than him, but he soon realised how daft that was, Leo knew he wasn’t that smart - Father always said so - but she sounded American. Like on the TV! Either way, she was singing a song, he’d heard it on the radio in the coffee shop next to the library the other day, and while it wasn’t his taste, he really liked her soft voice and how she sang it with such passion and care. Swaying from side to side in his corner, he started moving Percival along to the beat, his favourite monkey in the whole wide world joining his little dance party. But soon enough, her singing ground to a halt, and suddenly the silence of the wardrobe gave way to his father’s angry screams from the downstairs bathroom coupled with his mummy’s softer pleas.
When his father had left for work the next day, his mum doing her best not to give away the fact he had hurt her back the night before, Leo had asked her about it, about the voice in his head. The smile he’d received when he told her this had to rank of one of the best things of his little life, he couldn’t remember the last time Mum had looked that happy, and as she settled him down on her knee, Percival loosely hanging from his hand, she explained that many people had been blessed with soulmates. Not everyone, there was no rhyme or reason to the allocation, which had really frustrated the child upon finding that out, but it meant that one day, maybe soon, maybe when he was old like Mummy and Father, he would meet his soulmate.
She had stated from the get go that there was no obligation to date his soulmate, whoever they were, in fact they might end up being the best of friends, but either way, his soulmate would be the person he couldn’t live without. And so, Leo had nodded, asked his mum if she had her own soulmate, but when her smile had fallen, he’d hurriedly back tracked and told her to forget the question entirely. But then she’d started talking, with tears welling up in her eyes, whispering to him as if her soulmate was a big secret that he couldn’t tell anyone, she’d started telling him about a lovely, smart, and above all caring man named Holden.
She’d lost him when she was young, meeting him when she was at university (which apparently is a super smart big kid’s school), but her Mummy and Daddy, who Leo had never met for some reason, told her that she had to marry his father. This shook the boy to his core, surely his grandparents would know how important soulmates are, and he’d asked her as much, but she’d only shaken her head tearfully, telling him that it didn’t matter to them. So she’d married his father, leaving Holden behind, but gaining her little lion in the meanwhile had all been worth it.
And just before Father returned home from work, his mum wiped her eyes and sent Leo up to his room, warning the boy to never mention it in front of his father. He’d initially wanted to argue with her, but when he heard another voice singing in his head, this time a boy, an English boy, he knew he couldn’t tell Father. Although he was only little, although his mum insisted that he was getting bigger by the day, he understood a lot about the world. And if there was one thing that Alistair Fitz made abundantly clear, it was that boys and boys should never love each other the way mums and dads - or should that be mums and Holdens - love each other.
Over the years, Leo had come to terms with the voices, initially it’d been like a jolt down his back every time he heard one, or both, of them sing, but over time, it’d become normality. In fact, knowing that he would hear at least one of them sing at least once a day was the only thing that got him through the hell that was school. Not because he didn’t understand it, not like Father had insisted, but because it was far too easy. He wasn’t a baby, he knew his alphabet, as he knew his numbers: prime, triangle, square, cube, Fibonacci, Pi to over one hundred decimal points. So he couldn’t get why he was stuck doing stuff that was so basic it sent him to sleep.
On more than one occasion he’d tried telling his teachers and his parents that he knew it all, that he was bored out of his mind, but none of them ever listened. Not that he blamed Mum, he knew she’d had to pick up more shifts down the big Tesco because Father was spending more money at the pub, but his teachers really weren’t helping. And by the time they’d worked it out, Leo was halfway finished with some Highers textbooks he’d bought in a charity shop with his pocket money a week before. Of course then they’d rushed to give him more appropriate work, but by then it was too late. He was already the weirdo of the class, and no matter how many times he tried to tell his father he was smart, the man had laughed him off.
On a rare day when he’d felt brave enough to talk back to his father, he’d almost let slip about his soulmates, the ones who didn’t yet know about him despite the fact it had been almost five years since he’d first realised they were real and somewhere in the world, waiting for him to join them. But then his father had shoved him out of the way, sending the frail looking boy flying into the wall, slurring something out about how he was just a whiny brat who needed to learn when to shut his trap. To this day, almost two decades after his father had said those malicious words to his only child, Fitz couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly that had made it those words which had stopped him dead in his tracks, or maybe it was the first show of violence inflicted onto him, but whenever he’d tried to sing, let his soulmates know he was there, receiving them loud and clear, his vocal chords froze up.
Even once Alistair had gone, his presence a lingering stench neither him nor his mother could get rid of, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not that he didn’t want to meet them, in fact it was quite the opposite. He got to hear them grow up, a few years ahead of him in terms of physical maturity if the guy’s voice cracks were anything to go off of, and always felt this sense of longing to be a part of them. The surges of jealousy whenever they partied the night away, knowing that his Mum would kill him if he dared try to go to a house party or a nightclub at his age, the times he was left distraught over being unable to comfort them when they screamed along to sad songs.
The feelings that the final part of their trio would be quick to remedy and sooth to the best of their limited abilities. Nothing infuriated him more than being unable to be more than a spectator, the stupid rule of the soulmate bond only enabling them to connect through song leaving him further from their little sphere. But he’d made it that far in life, he’d survived Alistair Fitz, survived the hellscape of the Scottish education system, even survived his university career. The Academy had been no different, all alone in the world, only this time when he spoke people didn’t look at him as if he was speaking total rubbish. At least not all of the time.
It was during his first semester at the Academy that he realised his soulmates had met, presumably for the first time. It could have been a coincidence, but the fact that they were singing along to the same karaoke song, singing in harmony with one another, no echoing or lagging, it seemed less than likely that it was coincidental. The longing that usually thrummed in the background had come flooding to the forefront of his mind, and for the first time in his entire academic history, he called in sick for school. There wasn’t anything of any importance going on that day anyway, but he just couldn’t bring himself to pretend that he was fine around people who just don’t care about him.
So he’d taken one day off to be a depressed lump in his bed, the feeling of him only being a spare part to his more vocal soulmates’ worlds anchoring him under his duvet. If he’d had the energy, he would’ve gone to the campus store and picked himself up some ice cream, but alas, he’d been immobile on the bed. Late at night he’d heard someone knocking on his door, but he’d willfully ignored them, that is until the door swung open, revealing a surprisingly irate looking Jemma Simmons. She didn’t even give him the chance to lift his head out of the blanket burrito before she began yelling at him for leaving her in the lurch and forcing her to have to work with Will Williamson that day in holographic engineering that day.
It took her a few moments to realise that her yells were being left unanswered, and Fitz had yet to surface from his depression bed, but once she lost steam and got an uneasy silence in return, she perched herself on the edge of the bed. Lifting the blankets off of his head, she gently coaxed him out of the pile, smiling softly at him when his mop of curls and pitiful frown rose to face her. Fitz tried to say something, to explain the hurt he was feeling, but nothing would come out, and when he heard his soulmates singing the start of ‘2 Become 1’ by the Spice Girls, it sent him into floods of tears.
Although he tried to hold them back, hide them from his far too perceptive best friend, they still streamed down his face, and he found himself being yanked into a tight hug for the first time in months, Fitz trying to hide his face in her shoulder. She didn’t say anything to try and placate him, nor did she try to offer any sort of false reassurances, but she clung to him just as tightly as he clung back. When his tears eventually dried up, he pulled back from Jemma quickly, scrubbing at his face with his sleeves and refusing to look Jemma in the eye.
“My soulmates have met one another. I know I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but this is the second day in a row where they’ve sung the same song at the same time. It could be a coincidence but, I dunno. I’m not mad at them, it’s not their fault, but it just hurts, you know? Like, they wouldn’t know I exist in the first place, but I just wanted that one thing. Being able to meet each other at the same time, something special for all of us.”
“Oh Fitz.” She sighed out, running her hand up and down his arm, her smile falling and her eyes filling with sadness and pity.
“It was only going to be today, tomorrow I’m going back to class but I just wanted today to be sad and shit.”
From that day on, he’d done his best to not think too hard about what his soulmates were doing. That was always easier said than done, especially when he would hear them singing at random hours of the day, singing about heartbreak, anger, frustration, love, and lust. The pair of them were very hot and cold with one another, that was one thing he could tell, but either way they always wound up getting back with one another. And he’d managed to get through the rest of his time at the Academy and most of his time at Sci-Ops without thinking about them too much.
But then the wedding day had unknowingly rolled around, hitting him like a truck, and Fitz had been left standing paralyzed in his lab. Once he’d come to his senses though, he’d bolted out of the lab faster than he had ever run before, leaving Jemma absolutely bamboozled as she yelled out for her lab partner. His soulmates had gotten married, they’d gotten married without him. He’d never been much of a romantic, but fucking hell. That hurt more than he could ever put into words.
Sure, he didn’t really know how their relationship worked, how it would feel to be two parts of a soulmate triad (obviously), but surely they had to realise that something, that he was missing. It was like all of the hate and vitriol his father had spewed out like a leaky tap had been released from its former prison and was rushing to overwhelm him. All of the times he’d been told that there was no way anyone in their right mind, or not, would want him, to hear him, deal with him, spend the rest of their lives with him, sinking in deeper, bringing tears to his eyes.
To this day, he still doesn’t remember making it back to his flat, the one he shared with Jemma, only that the wedding march that they’d both hummed along to, a stereo soundtrack filled with pride and joy, just proving how unneeded Fitz was to them, had burned itself into his mind. That the only thing he heard for hours, days, even months down the line, when he was locked in a seemingly never ending solitude, was that tune, mocking him and all of his failings. But just as when he’d discovered his soulmates had met one another before he was there, he’d given himself the day to process before pushing it out of his mind, brushing off Jemma’s well meaning sympathetic smiles and attempts to make him feel better and focusing on his work.
And ignoring what happened was at the top of his list of things to do, at all times. Even when their songs changed, when they fell out of sync and started singing sadder and angrier songs in the late hours of the night - well, for Fitz anyway, he’d figured over the years that they must both travel a lot because their sleep schedules are all over the place - he pushed it all away. Although he did note that when they stopped singing in time for good, he’d felt a guilty sort of relief, not that he wanted them to break up or get hurt like that, never that, but because he couldn’t help feeling jealous that they’d gotten to experience married (and divorced) life before they’d even met him.
However none of that seemed to matter, not when Fitz was offered a place on Coulson’s elite team , Jemma right by his side as his whole world was thrown on its head. In the space of a few short months, he’d become well acquainted with the notion of near-death experiences, far too many for it to be healthy really, but apparently that had been his life. The comfort his soulmates would give him late at night when he had locked himself in his little box room: Percival still clinging to life by a thread, them unknowingly singing him lullabies that would send him to sleep, the words curling around him like a warm, fluffy blanket, was so painfully reminiscent of those days he’d first realised they were singing, it made Fitz miss his childhood days.
None of them were the same little kids, and it had really begun to show. For Christ’s sake, Fitz was a fully fledged field agent, albeit begrudgingly so, for a secret spy agency currently in utter turmoil because of traitors like Grant Ward and the rest of Hydra. And for all he knew, they could’ve been in the exact same position as him, fearing for their lives and their future. But it was all of these events that had led to this moment, in an emergency rescue pod, located at least ninety feet below the sea, with a broken arm and limited oxygen supply left.
He isn’t sure what provoked him to do it, after all in all of his twenty five years on this planet, he’d not once genuinely considered singing to his soulmates, but in the same breath, he’d never been facing certain death before. So he bends over quickly, checking that Jemma was still unconscious from the fall, he clears his throat and starts to sing the first love song that springs to mind. He’s no Whitney Houston, but he hopes he does the singer justice as he rasps out the song, wincing to himself as his accent gracelessly alters some of the vowel sounds, making him sound distinctly more Scottish than he presents himself to the rest of the world.
And as the song, his first and presumably last declaration of love for them, fades off, Jemma slowly wakes up beside him, eyes laser focused onto the sling he’d put his arm in after waking up. While the two of them mull over their own mortality, Fitz keeps the fact that he’d sang to his soulmates to himself as they discuss what they think would happen after they’re gone. It isn’t like he doesn’t trust Jemma, far from it really, but he just wants to have this one thing. One thing that is just the three of theirs. Seeing as a first meeting, wedding, and not to mention a divorce were all off of the table.
When he and Jemma come up with a solution, one that could get them out of the pod, Fitz can hear both of them singing to him, two vastly different songs overlapping as they desperately seek him out, their fear and confusion evident as they sing. And when he offers Jemma the last breath of oxygen, telling her that it just wasn’t meant to be for him and his soulmates, unlike herself and Skye, he doesn’t feel scared. Not when his charming Englishman and lovely American woman were singing to him specifically, seeking out his attention and searching for his reassurance that he was okay, something he wishes he could give them in return for the highs and lows they’ve brought him. So when he slams the defibrillator button, he closes his eyes and smiles, their voices growing softer and softer as he struggles to stay conscious, the last thing he hears being their voices singing a melancholy harmony, a perfect harmony made just for him.