Leo Fitz

Leopold "Leo" Fitz is a Scottish engineer working under Phil Coulson in S.H.I.E.L.D. in Earth-199999. He primarily works with biochemist Jemma Simmons, and the two are collectively known as Fitz-Simmons. The two are the youngest graduates from S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy.

Biography

In September of 2013, Fitz-Simmons were appointed to Phil Coulson's new team to investigate the hacking group Rising Tide and reports of a new "superhero" in Los Angeles who had rescued a woman from a burning building. The team also included Grant Ward and legendary spy Melinda May, who was ostensibly only brought on to pilot their mobile command unit, the Bus. Ward and Coulson took in Rising Tide member Skye and earned her trust, learning of something called Project Centipede and that the "hero's" name was Mike Peterson. The team discovered that Peterson had been injected with an amalgam of bizarre substances that had granted him superpowers. They eventually tracked him down and cured him, preventing an eventual explosion caused by the Extremis in his system. Skye soon accepted Coulson's offer to join the team as a consultant, much to the dismay of Ward and May. The team handled the case of a Hydra weapon in Peru, which Commandante Camilla Reyes planned to use to regain control of her country. They then followed the case of Dr. Franklin Hall, who had arranged his own abduction at the hands of Ian Quinn in order to use the latter's supply of gravitonium to destroy him. Coulson ended up knocking Hall into the gravitonium, seemingly atomizing him, and seizing and safely storing the gravitonium in the Fridge. Investigating a series of diamond heists led to chasing the trail of Akela Amador, a former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent believed dead, who was being extorted through a camera and a "kill-switch" in her eye to perform various crimes on behalf of an unknown party. The team took her in and removed the eye in question, tracking down her "handler," who turned out to be under external control himself and died immediately after being discovered. In the process, Ward used a special pair of glasses to play at Amador's latest mission, discovering a cryptic set of glyphs in a Minsk research building.

The team learned of the disappearance of Chan Ho Yin, a Hong Kong street performer with the power of pyrokinesis whom S.H.I.E.L.D. had been observing for several years. He had been abducted by Project Centipede, who'd gained information on his whereabouts through Rising Tide's Miles Lydon, Skye's boyfriend. Skye put her partner ahead of S.H.I.E.L.D. interests, warning him that they were after him. However, she quickly turned on him upon learning that he had sold the information to Centipede, going against Rising Tide's credo of information freedom. Coulson and May raided the Centipede lab in Hong Kong where Chan was being held, but he had already been compromised, becoming more aggressive and powerful as Mike Peterson had. Centipede had extracted heat-resistant platelets from his blood in order to mitigate the combustive effects of Extremis in their serum. Coulson attempted to tranquilize Chan—who was now calling himself "Scorch"—but was unsuccessful. May killed Chan with a significant overdose of Extremis, causing him to violently explode as the team escaped. Lydon, a resident of Austin, Texas, was equipped with a monitoring bracelet and dropped in Hong Kong. Skye was severely apologetic to Coulson, and revealed to him that her reason for being with Rising Tide in the first place was to find information on her parents. Nonetheless, she was also equipped with a monitoring bracelet. After a series of bizarre electrostatic deaths, the team discovered that a group of firefighters who had responded at the Battle of New York had contracted an alien virus from a Chitauri helmet. Simmons contracted the virus from one of their bodies, and she and Fitz synthesized a cure, perilously close to her impending death.

Ward and Fitz were sent on a classified mission to disable the dangerous Overkill Device in a separatist stronghold in South Ossetia while the rest of the team waited at the Hub. Skye and Simmons hacked into the system and learned that there was no extraction plan in place for the agents—that they were simply going to be left to die. Coulson was frustrated at not knowing of this, and worked with the rest of the team to extract Ward and Fitz themselves after the mission was successful. The team then tracked down three pieces of the legendary Asgardian Berserker Staff with the help of secret Asgardian Elliot Randolph, combating a Norse paganist hate group fronted by Jakob Nystrom and Petra Larsen along the way. Handling the Staff, Ward and May were both confronted by dark memories from their past; Ward took it harder than May, as his memory—watching a boy drown in a well while his brother told him not to help—was more repressed than hers. Skye comforted Ward as he was confronted with this trauma, but Ward seemed to find more solace in being with May. After the mission, Coulson woke up from sleep in a cold sweat, discomfited by memories of Tahiti. The team received word of an alleged telekinetic named Hannah Hutchins in Batesville, Utah, who was being blamed by those in the town for a recent particle-accelerator disaster that killed four technicians. The remorseful and distraught Hutchins was taken onto the Bus, and denied being at all responsible for anything. The Bus lost all power and the team were attacked by a "ghost:" Tobias Ford, one of the men who'd died in the disaster. The team eventually learned that Ford was himself responsible for the disaster: he had loosened some bolts in the accelerator in order to get the attention of Hutchins, a quality-control engineer. As a result of the explosion, he was caught between worlds, and he believed that the other world was Hell. He was attempting to protect Hutchins by attacking the agents. Melinda May talked him down, convincing him to "let the girl go" and causing him to fade away in peace, ostensibly to Hell.

Soon a man named Edison Po was quickly and efficiently broken out of prison by a group of soldiers equipped with Centipede devices. S.H.I.E.L.D. gave the team backup in following up on this lead on Centipede: Michael Peterson, who had been training to be an agent since his near-death experience months earlier. Observing footage from Po's one and only visit in prison, Peterson helped identify the woman speaking to him: Raina, who had originally recruited him into Centipede. Eventually, as S.H.I.E.L.D. chased down Centipede's operations largely in vain, Raina got hold of Michael's son Ace. She privately offered Michael to hand over Coulson for his son, and had Michael present the plan to S.H.I.E.L.D. as trading himself for his son instead. The deal went down on an abandoned bridge, as Coulson and Peterson met with Raina and Centipede soldiers while the rest of the team observed, with technology disallowed. The truth soon came out, and Coulson gave himself peacefully to S.H.I.E.L.D. control as Michael took Ace back to the team. He handed him over to Skye and ran after Coulson, but was caught in an abrupt and large tanker explosion, seemingly killing him. Centipede took Coulson away by helicopter, interested in his past resurrection. S.H.I.E.L.D. spent the next six days following Centipede's trail and searching for Coulson. Victoria Hand took temporary control of the Bus, and quickly removed Skye from the mission, believing her to be of no use. Skye continued investigating on the ground, following bank trails and her instincts to track down Centipede. S.H.I.E.L.D. took known criminal and Centipede associate Vanchat into custody, and he eventually gave up general locations for his buyers. Skye and S.H.I.E.L.D. narrowed the location down to somewhere in the Mojave Desert, albeit in different exact places. Coulson's team showed their faith in Skye and followed her to a dusty, abandoned town where Coulson was being held by Raina. Inside, Raina had hooked Coulson up to a machine that would aggravate parts of his brain, allowing him to recall repressed memories. He remembered the truth behind his resurrection: he'd in fact been dead for days, and had gone through a series of heinous surgeries to revive him, during which he screamed for death. The team arrived, rescued Coulson, and took Raina into custody.

After a pair of cadets at S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy nearly died when a pool they were swimming in suddenly froze, the team sans Coulson and May went to investigate. They eventually learned that Seth Dormer and Donnie Gill had developed a kind of "ice bomb" and staged attacks with it on themselves in order to get Agent Fitz there and get him to unwittingly improve the device, with the intent of selling the technology to Ian Quinn. Dormer had primary agency in the operation, manipulating the introverted, isolated Gill. They activated the newly powered device as a demonstration to Quinn (who was elsewhere), causing a remarkably powerful hailstorm. Gill convinced Dormer to try to power the device down, but it violently reacted, knocking Dormer back with an explosion and killing him—the blast also harmed Gill, latently imbuing him with its ice powers. The team dropped the Bus in the eye of the storm, recovering Dormer, Gill, and the device; they failed to revive Dormer, and took Gill into custody, transferring him to the Sandbox for investigation. As much of this was happening, Coulson and May quietly investigated Skye's past, learning that she had been recovered as a mysterious 0-8-4 as a baby, and had essentially spent her entire life being transferred by S.H.I.E.L.D. between foster families to protect her. Newly disinclined to keep secrets, Coulson told Skye the full story of her origin, and apologized for having kept anything from her. Later, Coulson contacted and threatened Quinn, who replied by mockingly informing him that he was with Centipede.