[1] Take the Shot | Leo Fitz

36

"The number you called is currently unavailable-" Nina cut the automated voice off with a sigh as she ended the call and pulled her phone from her ear. She'd been trying to get in contact with Natasha but was proving to be unsuccessful.

"Did you manage to get her?" Fitz asked as Nina walked back into the Command Centre. Fitz, Coulson, Skye and Garrett were there; the latter joining the group a few minutes before Nina had walked out to call the avenger.

"No," Nina sighed as she braced her palms against the counter, Fitz walked over to her and hugged her from behind in an attempt to calm her down. After a moment Nina relaxed back into his embrace slowly realising her grip from the furniture.

The couple turned around and focused on the others in the room, Coulson smiled at them. It was nice for him to see how easily Fitz was able to bring Nina out of her head.

"What did you find?" Coulson asked Skye, who had been typing away at a laptop. She looked up as Coulson spoke to her.

"It's a simple message repeated. Semantic encoding. I needed to find the mnemonic key. It should only take me a minute more to decipher," she told him and Coulson nodded, allowing her to get back to her work.

"Can I ask the obvious question, what the hell!?" Garrett exclaimed and everyone turned to hin. 

"We don't know. We don't even know where our plane is headed," Coulson told the frantic agent.

"I expect a thank you for saving your ass, again," Nina called out and Garrett locked eyes with her. He glared into her blue orbs but Nina didn't falter as she matched his energy and after a moment he looked away.

"Thank you," he said with childish intent, Nina rolled her eyes but still grinned at the fact that she still got what she wanted, "oh, and I saw your trajectory. You're being tractor-beamed straight to The Hub. Those drones were launched out of there for sure."

"Victoria Hand," Coulson said after a moment of thought. His words caused the present team to look at him in both shock and indifference.

"Hand? Can't be," Fitz shook his head.

"Can't be what now?" Garrett asked. The agent didn't enjoy being in the dark, especially not now.

"The Clairvoyant," Skye told him. 

If Nina had been looking in Garrett's direction she would have noticed the slight change in his expression at Skye's words. She would have seen the way his cocky grin faltered ever so slightly and she would have learnt that everything she thought of the man was true. Instead of observing the man she didn't trust she was looking at Fitz concerned about how worried the person she was falling in love with was. 

This would be the first time Nina's feelings for Fitz distracted her from something but it in no means was going to be the last.

"I thought Ward capped that guy," Garrett stated once he regained complete control of his facial features. 

"I don't believe the man Ward killed was The Clairvoyant," Coulson explained as Nina dropped into a seat by Skye. If Ward hadn't killed the Clairvoyant, he technically hadn't broken Nina's trust but she was reluctant to want to forgive him, "I think he was an unwitting decoy meant to end our investigation."

"That's a lot of trouble to go through for a red herring, don't you think?" 

"Because The Clairvoyant is a SHIELD agent,"

"We're running with the idea that they're an agent?" Nina asked to which Coulson nodded, "how do we know they didn't just access SHIELD. A hacker could have gotten the psych-eval information pretty easily, hell I could get in a few minutes."