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Entering the Stark-vengers Tower every morning is intimidating for even the most powerful men and women in the world. Even if Darcy was an exception to this rule, and she was, everyone has a part to play.So instead of wearing her comfiest sweater and rattiest jeans (that were 15 percent less fabric than most jeans), she had to be "smart business casual" or "casual business formal" (whatever that meant). Apparently, the twenty-something could hardly show up to work for a multi-billion dollar organization without showing at least a modicum of effort. Darcy's approximation of an adult wardrobe was a relatively conservative business casual skirt and red blouse.Her rebellious streak insisted that she still wore her knit hats, a frumpy charcoal cardigan to match the skirt, and hipsteriest glasses. To add an extra touch of “I am a competent 21st century woman, hear me roar”, Darcy came in with an Iced Venti Coconut-Milk Double Dirty Chai in her left fist, brandished like a taser meant to ward people out of her personal space. Morning people suck, she thought ungenerously, especially on Tuesday mornings.She quickened her pace, trying to avoid touching any of the corporate folk in fear of their cooties.Passing by the main reception area, she calls out a “Heya, Charlie,” putting all of her pre-caffeine energy into greeting the middle aged African American woman stationed at reception today. “How’s the whine and twine club?”Darcy found about this knitting social club when she asked about the rainbow patterned baby onesie that the older woman had created slowly over the course of a week. Darcy has been trying to get into the knitting circle ever since. It was comprised of nothing but administrative staff and some lower-middle management of Stark Tower. They had the best baked goods, and even better gossip. The evilest part of Darcy’s mind cackled quietly to itself at this knowledge.“Oh, Darcy-dear,” the woman drawled in her surprisingly deep voice, “You know you have to hit at least your one year anniversary and bribe us with something good to get in.” The woman hardly looked up from a morning crossword before delivering this well-worn admonishment.Darcy’s exaggerated huff only brought a smirk to the older woman’s face. “I’m going to be the first exception,” Darcy said shook her right fist at the woman, the effect ruined by the bright pink lanyard holding her staff ID wrapped around her small hand. She turned her body to maintain a line-of-sight while still shaking her fist, walking backward precariously but quickly on her matte red pumps, “Just you watch me!”The only response she got was a quick laugh and the swoosh of security gates opening up behind her just in time to prevent her from causing an accident. People swarmed into lines away from Darcy’s, in a well learned fear response that recognized that just because there was no accident, scene or other mayhem today did not mean that the petite brunette wouldn’t be causing something the next day.-The elevators that led up to the Avengers were not far out of the way from normal tower traffic. In that way, it lulled a lot of people into the false notion that the top most floors of the tower were easily accessible. Those people were stupidly wrong.Darcy, having worked here for close to six months, could tell that there were more sensors in the small strip of hallway than most G8 governments used in their respective major spy agencies. She could see the subtle glint of video cameras, carefully hidden in light fixtures and in corners of glass panes. And that’s all anybody like Darcy Lewis would see unless they had exceptional skills or training. Darcy saw more than most people would think.The elevator dinged open, revealing a sleek silver and wood interior. “Morning Jay-man,” she spoke sipping at the green straw. “How’s it hanging?” There was the barest hint of reluctance present about asking that question.“The usual, Ms. Lewis,” came a smooth voice from inside the elevator.If one were an outsider, one would assume that Jarvis’s greeting was rather abrupt. They might even assume that Darcy was being somewhat reserved towards the artificial intelligence. That was not the case at all.The first Monday of Darcy’s official status as a member of Team SCIENCE! (Formal title: Senior Research Administrator for Special Projects reporting directly to Pepper Potts), Darcy had walked into the Research and Development division excited and nervous about her first day. What she found was Jane, Bruce and Tony all nearly manic from sciencing for close to 40 hours straight. There were three explosions, a completely decimated snack cupboard, five lab assistants quitting at once, two sexual harassment complaints, an unstable wormhole, and one completed prototype of a genetically modified virus that would theoretically inoculate astronauts against most harmful space radiation. And that had been the first 45 minutes of her walking through the doors.Darcy’s melt down that evening was the stuff of legends.So, in order to at least give the other advanced warning of the kind of day they could expect, Darcy and Jarvis created a system of coded phrases for each other. It also had the added bonuses of being seemingly innocuous to outsiders so as to not cause any panic if there was an emergency. It was a simple system that takes the perceived danger of on-going projects against the average number of hours of sleep. There were even special modifiers for the number of significant others present, number of mad-geniuses in the area, and if the Hulk had made an appearance in the last 24 hours.‘The usual, Ms. Lewis’ told her that a moderate amount of sleep and danger was to be expected. If the response to her usual morning greeting was ever, ‘Everything is fine, Ms. Lewis’, she had a 15 page action plan for handling tower safety ready and alerts scheduled to automatically go out to Shield, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local law enforcement. If Darcy ever asks “Jarvis, could you give me a reminder to call my mother tonight?” This means she has noticed an equally high probability of disaster that the AI should be aware of. It might even secretly trigger a kill-switch for the power to the labs most prone to destruction that she sweet talked (badgered) Jarvis into making.Darcy breathed out a sigh of relief at the pronouncement of a relative all-clear. “Sounds about right. Thanks, Jay. Science team update, please.” She pauses for a second before adding, “Exclude non-priority scientists unless whatever it is they are doing is going to make me flip a shit.”“No non-priority scientists to report, Ms. Lewis.” Oooh, is that some disapproval about cussing I hear, Darcy thinks. She responded only by lifing her eyebrow with a slight smirk. Jarvis didn’t respond to the gesture.He continued on, “Dr. Foster is still awake in her secondary lab on Level 2 of the R&D.” Darcy let out a groan. She put away her lanyard and whipped out her cellphone, typing a text to the Foster monkeys on Level 2 to get some chamomile tea and energy bars ready for her arrival. Sleep deprived scientists are best approached with food and hot beverages. She completed her text and looked up again.“Dr. Banner entered sleep 3 hours and 51 minutes ago. His alarm is scheduled to go off in approximately 8 more minutes.” She shrugs, That is more than yesterday.“Jarvis, be a doll and delay that alarm by an additional 2 hours.” She fired off a text to the Banner toads, letting them know to close down any ongoing projects at appropriate stopping points according to lab protocol. She also texted the owner of the Thai place a few blocks down the street. Bruce is usually a sucker for their Panang Curry, so that should assuage any ire from being forced to sleep a little longer and take a chill-pill on the science for the day. She mumbled when she was ready for the next update.“Finally, Mr. Stark is still in Paris with Ms. Potts for the technology symposium. They are scheduled to return this evening at 7pm.” Darcy nods contentedly to herself, grateful that she didn’t have to worry about keeping Tony in line with Pepper around. On the plus, Tony doesn’t keep assistants in his personal workshop nor his official work labs, so no one to heckle there.She looked up to the ceiling, “When was last time Tony had dinner alone with Pepper? And when was the last time the brothers three got a doggie bath?” she asks.“Sir and Ms. Potts had dinner together before their departure to Paris three days ago.” If Darcy were a betting girl, and she was, she would say there was a slight hint of amusement in his answers then. “You, Butterfingers and Dum-E were given full service three weeks ago by Agent Romanoff.”The red-headed Russian had a strange fondness for the three simpler AIs, claiming them as her unofficial minions. Personally, Darcy thought she did it to lure the AIs to her side when she needed to get payback against Tony’s inevitable jack-assery.“Coolio, Jay-man,” she replied. “Send an email to Pepper for me, would ya? Send her the standard updates and follow up with if she wants to join the Avengers dinner or a night in alone with Tony.” Jarvis gave no response, because he probably had already done so. He was good that way.“Status check on all the rest, please and thank you.” She inquired while pulling up her heavily redacted Facebook account on her Stark phone.Though there was no way Stark elevators would ever take this long to reach their destination, Jarvis slowed it down for their morning elevator chat. This gave her enough time to enjoy her drink, social media and get necessary updates on the most important people in her life. The average morning elevator ride was 2 minutes and 42 seconds long. Her record, so far, had been 5 minutes and 52 seconds in the elevator before she arrived to the top floors. She had gotten distracted … for reasons.“Prince Thor is still asleep in his quarters, nothing has been scheduled to suggest when he might rise. Agent Romanoff and Agent Coulson are scheduled to be in Shield all day preparing for a World Security Council update on the Avengers Initiative scheduled next week. Agent Barton is currently on mission in a classified location,” Jarvis paused briefly at this announcement. This was his way of signaling to her that, if she asked, he would start making subtle probes into highly classified information to find out for her. She just nodded and kept scrolling on her phone. “Captain Rogers should be returning from his 15 mile run shortly.”She switched out of Facebook quickly to the Stark messenger app. She texted the kitchens to send half a dozen chocolate, chocolate-chip muffins to the lobby because Steve seriously needed calories after a workout.Jarvis continued when she finished her text, “Finally, barring emergencies and current assignments, evenings are free for the normal tower dinner.”She then brought up her contact labeled “Agent Still Not Forgiven”, and sent him a text with a simple “Dinner @ 7:30pm in common room. Will cook if u get Vengers there by 6:15pm. I’ll handle Tony – Darcy.”She actually had that exact text saved, ready to be resent almost every day. Darcy’s not-so-secret superpower was using food to get what she wanted. Even Agent Sarcasm had been succumbing to her ways. The others had already fallen in-line nicely.Darcy switched back to her newsfeed, mumbled out a thanks while slurping up the final dregs of the Starbucks slop. She “liked” yet another college friend getting engaged whose wedding she would never go to. “Ugh, Facebook engagement announcement posts are the worst,” she thought out loud.“Indeed, Ms. Lewis,” now he was just straight up making fun of her.She rolled her eyes, packing away her phone, “You wanna marry me, Jay? The reaction on Tony’s face to the news would be the best thing since memes were invented.”“Unfortunately, I do not harbor romantic intentions towards you. So, I am afraid I will have to decline,” the sass level in that was pretty high.She smiled her most innocent, thousand-watt smile, “Your loss.” No one ever believed that smile. “Also, if your server gets flooded with cute baby animal videos later today, it was definitely not me.”“Of course, Ms. Lewis.”She stops smiling, a fake serious pout taking its place, “One of these days, you are going to call me Darcy and I fear my brain may explode.” She felt the elevator begin to slow.Dryer than the lips of a nervous teenage boy before his first kiss, he replied, “That would be most unfortunate.”The elevator arrived into the open and white hallways of the 1st floor of R&D. She exited the elevator while her brightly painted lips quirked up into the slightest smirk, a look that lab minions everywhere had come to learn to love and fear. She tossed out the Starbucks cup into recycling, with the slightest mental note to make it a triple-dirty chai the next day.“Have a good day, Ms. Lewis” she heard faintly from the closing doors behind her.“I always do, Jay-man,” she responded confidently. Almost nothing could worry the young woman. Darcy Lewis was ready for anything.
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Darcy Lewis was ready for nothing. Literally, nothing. The new semester was only weeks away, she didn’t have any of her necessary technology, and the worst part was that she had no idea where the internship paperwork was because of those damn jack-booted thugs. Plus, she had been wearing the same purple sports bra for days now because it is the only one she brought. She wanted to be prepared to run at a moment’s notice.When the fires around Puente Antiguo finally fizzled out the second morning after the Destroy and Thor disappeared, Darcy thought that it was finally over. She thought that she would be able to finally start planning to get back to her shitty studio apartment just blocks from Culver University and figure out a way to get those 6 credits without having to take an extra semester to graduate. Only so much is covered by scholarships, loans, and prostitution (what Darcy calls her job as a barista at Starbucks, because working there was like selling your soul).Unfortunately for Darcy, Agent I-Pod Thief pulled up to Jane’s trailer just before noon with three black jeeps and six men all with sunglasses on like it was an official part of the uniform. The only one not in a suit was a grumpy-cat faced dude with biceps for days. He was wearing tactical pants and no arm sleeves with what looked like a Robin Hood set up on his back.“Ms. Lewis, Dr. Foster, and Dr. Selvig.” The blandly smiling Agent Coulson greeted them. Well, Darcy assumed this was a greeting. It was hard to be sure. “We’re here to debrief you on the situation.”“By debrief, do you mean you’ve come to take my life because you already took all of my life’s work!” A cooking pan appeared in Jane’s hand like magic, Darcy didn’t even see where she got that from.Eric yanked it out of her hands, “Of course, Agent Coulson. How can we be of help to you today?” Eric was a little bit of a push over when it came to vague yet menacing government agencies, but he had no problem using his foot of height to get in the way of Jane’s rampage.Darcy not so subtly readjusted her breasts while making hella eye contact with the man with the biceps, dropping her voice low saying “I’m ready to be debriefed anytime.” Anybody that ever had to describe Darcy physically, fantastic breasts was at the very top of the list. The boob-adjust was a tried and tested method perfected by age 16 to gauge the interest of straight men. In fact, one of the suits hadn’t stopped staring at her chest since they arrived. Two made an appreciative glance at the motion, one was very deliberately not looking. Robin Hood didn’t react but smiled amusedly, like he knew exact what she was doing.Agent Coulson went on, unsurprisingly unruffled by Darcy’s display, “In light of recent developments, we recognize circumstances regarding your research have changed.” Hmmm, didn’t even fidget delivering that little bit of humble pie. “As I said, we wish to debrief and then we can discuss returning your research.” Upon hearing this, Jane stopped trying to look for weapons.“Well, I have some conditions too!” Jane managed to get out, calming down just a bit. Though, Darcy recognized that look in her eyes. It was the same look she saw the first time she fought Jane over the grocery list. Darcy only managed to get a handful of actual fruits and vegetables into the cart, while Jane still had boxes of pop tarts littered around the trailer.“Yes, Ms. Foster. Could we please take this to a more secure location?” He gestured to the three vehicles behind him.Jane nodded, “First of all, don’t call me Ms. Foster when you're trying to needle me into doing what you want. I’ve been a woman in STEM for years. The only reason I don’t have an additional Ph.D. in Mathematics is because of men constantly pulling shit like that on me.” Some of the suits flinched at that and Darcy’s inner feminist laughed. Her outer feminist laughed loudly and pointed.“Secondly, we don’t get separated,” she gestured to Darcy and Eric. “We go in the same car and you get our reports at the same time. You don’t need to worry about us leaving anything out.”Darcy opened her mouth pointing at Robin Hood, “I don’t mind going in the … murph,” Jane covered her mouth before she could finish. Damn, foiled again.Darcy continued mumbling, “hmmmmb hmmmb i-pod hmmmp hmmmp credits.” Jane nodded at her, already used to Darcy’s weird behavior.“Thirdly, Darcy gets her I-Pod and her 6 science credits, even if you have to fabricate something to get them for her.” Darcy smiled behind the small hand, sticking a thumb up at her boss-friend.Agent Bland’s face twitched, like it was about to have an actual facial expression. So, Jane wrapped up quickly saying, “Finally, we’re hungry. Lunch is on you guys, yeah?” She finally released her hand from Darcy’s face and started walking to the van that she had seen Agent Coulson get out of. “I'm thinking pizza. Thanks!”-Darcy was going out of her mind due to boredom by noon the next day, trapped on the temporary base set up in the desert. Jane had only just finished ironing out terms for her continued research. Jane was to be employed by Shield, with a firm stipulation that she be allowed to publish the more benign parts of the research and enough funding to hire a whole team.Arm Candy had been shadowing her all day. He responded to her questions with short, unsatisfing answers such as “My name is Clint” and “It’s a bow and arrow” and “The circus.” His longest sentence had been, “You are expected in Agent Coulson’s office to discuss your non-disclosure agreement.” In summary, total disappointment.On the way to Coulson’s office, they passed through an administrative station of some sort. A suit scurried away from his desk, perhaps to the bathroom. The young woman noticed his cell phone laying there, screen unlocked. She swiped it without a second thought, bringing up the web browser in moments. She hadn’t had access to internet in what felt like forever.“You know that is stealing, right?” She heard the bowman from behind her. She was already logged onto her email account before completed the question.She continued walking, eyes firmly focused downwards, “I deserve this.” She was sorting through her email, thankfully nothing needing immediate attention. “Maybe if that wasn’t only the first attempt at a conversation I’ve heard from you, I wouldn’t feel my kleptomaniac urges take hold.” With that, she shot a sharp, one-eyed squint over her shoulder in his direction. To emphasize the reality of said urges.In response, he lifted his right arm placing his hand behind his head. “Well maybe if you paid more attention to my face,” he flexed, “We would have something to actually talk about.” He was smiling a shark’s smile. Darcy was, in fact, staring at his bicep when he delivered that line.“Touché, Cary Elwes,” she replied, shifting her focus to his blue eyes. She logged out without even looking and handed the phone in his direction. “You can return that to its proper owner then.”He smiled, pocketing the cell phone, “I always thought of myself as more Picard from Qpid.”Darcy came to a dead stop, twirling quickly to look him straight in the eyes. “You’re a trekkie!” He chuckled, surprised at her enthusiasm. Clint had not yet made up his mind on the brunette.“You can call me Darcy! We’re going to be nerd-friends now,” she declared. “We can bond over Stark Trek.” She continued on, completely ignoring his attempts to respond to her. “If you get me a laptop with Netflix access, I will bake you chocolate chip cookies that will make you cry!” He was tempted by that offer but said nothing.The pout then hug worked on most people, she thought and then immediately attempted. He stiffened at the hug, probably because most spontaneous contact for the man was violent. “You’re going to miss your meeting if you keep this up,” he stated, patting her on the back of her head awkwardly.“Ugh … what did I do to deserve this?” She asked, face bowed towards his pecs.“You spent the past few days meeting literal aliens from outer space and helped evacuate a town being destroyed by said aliens.” He stated, staring in confusion at the brunette currently still attached to him.“Not that,” she took a step back and tilted her head back to look him in the eyes again. “I meant what did I do to deserve this boredom? Ennui is a pretty word and it also feels pretty appropriate right now.”He raised his right eyebrow, “You’re bored?” His answers were getting longer in both amusement and a growing fondness for the girl.“Yes!” She threw her hands up. “There is only so many times you can be scared out your mind in a short period of time before you move onto other feelings. I’ve now firmly occupied the Village of Boredom, overthrown its local government and set myself up as queen.”“I shoot a bow and arrow for my job and you somehow still seem weird to me.” He responded, though perhaps not to her so much as to the universe. “Maybe try to cooperate instead of making the newbie agents blush and deliberately distracting them with your” he gestured to her rack. “Can you do that? Though, excellent work on making Agent Wang choke on her morning coffee. I never knew she was batting for the other team.”“Nope, no can do.” She shook her head as she walked on, she pointed to her girls, “These bad boys have been getting me into and out of trouble since puberty. Just you wait and see.”He failed to take the bait. With a hint of laughter in his voice he replied, “If you can get through your ordeal with Coulson alive and get permission to be let off base with an escort, I will take you to a dive bar in a town about an hour from here.” Darcy didn’t know if she wanted to pump her fist up in victory or just concede defeat right now. His voice went slow, a touch of Midwestern in the tone, “I could use a beer and some shitty nachos.”“A man after my own heart, nachos aren’t nachos unless you fear food poisoning.” She reached out to thread her arm through his, like he was escorting her like a proper gentleman. He smiled at her antics. “Hurry up, my good man. The PBR awaits us!”-The country music in the background of the bar is exactly what one would expect from the middle of nowhere New Mexico. It was a little city named Deming with a population around 15 thousand. That was large enough to have a bar be relatively full with a “2-for-1 Tuesdays! (On tap only)” sign proudly flashing outside.They each had two glasses of the cheapest beer on tap and headed to an out of the way corner. One of Darcy’s had a bowl of peanuts carefully balanced on the top. “Do you think we should send some nachos to the two suits in the ‘I am not shady, you are shady’ black jeep outside?” Darcy asked, when she settled into the chair, immediately starting to crack open some peanuts. When Clint laughed at the question without responding, she then started lobbing them face. He caught them in his mouth.“Come on, Darcy!” Clint laughed when she threw one rapidly at his eye but he still caught it in his mouth. “How did you get Coulson to agree to this?”“If you want to hear that story, you’re going to have to earn it.” She pursed her lips in contemplation, before bounded to the bar without saying anything to her companion. When she came back to the table, she had a deck of cards in hand. “Egyptian Rat Screw. Every time you take a set, you ask a question. Loser either answers truthfully or takes a drink. Normal rules for Jack through Ace. House rules are slaps for pairs and sandwiches, burn two cards for an incorrect slap.”Clint leaned far back into his bar chair, front legs off the ground, rubbing his hands together like he was warming them up. “You know I am going to destroy you, right? I mean, you did see when I hit the bullseye on the opposite side of the bar, right?” Considering he had done that immediately after they entered the bar, of course the young woman saw that.“You’ll be singing a different tune shortly.” The man grabbed the cards from the table, quickly shuffled and dealt them.Clint was still leaning back in his chair when they started the game, a picture of nonchalance. A five pair came out that he took easily. “Ha! My question for you is: How did you get Coulson to let you off base?”The eye roll that followed from Darcy was pretty epic. “Okay, Cupid” she paused looking at him with an expression on her face that said did you see what I did there, “don’t get too smug.” She took a sip of her shitty beer, shuttering from the taste. “I told him why it took his techies almost a day to realize they couldn’t access close to 50% of the data on the tech they took from myself, Jane and Eric.” Her eyes twinkled in mischief. The Shield agent started to laugh.“That would have driven Coulson crazy. I’m surprised he didn’t have you murdered.” Clint hadn’t even known that there was anything wrong with the data. The fact that the brunette girl responsible was wearing a black tank top with the word “Bad-ass” in pink on the front of it made this even funnier for Clint. “How did you do that?” he asked in genuine curiosity.Darcy brightened at his question, her responding smile more genuine than it had been before. Later, he would realize this was because Darcy expected people to dismiss her completely when she mentioned anything about her accomplishments.The young woman wagged her finger at him, “Bup bup bup. You have to take another set before you ask another question, buddy!”Clint schooled his face into a calm expression, “Then let’s get this baby rolling.” He quickly slapped another card down on the table in challenge.Darcy met the challenge just as quickly. Within a few cards, Darcy threw down a card she thought would win, trumpeting, “Ha ha, take that sucker!” Unfortunately, Clint still ended up taking the round. Darcy lost with a groan.“A kill isn’t a kill until it’s confirmed, buddy,” he added like the assassin that he was, with extra mockery in the word buddy. “Now tell me – how did you hide all of that data from Shield’s best nerds?”“Well, did you know that I almost majored in computer science?” She asked him, leaning away from the table since this question needed a longer answer. He shook his head. If had known that, then he would have also know that Darcy’s grades in comp sci were stellar despite almost never turning in homework. She quit the program by the end of freshman year due to the lack of challenge. “Well, to totally brag, I’m pretty handy with a computer. I coded a program to hide a partition in a hard drive that was only visible when you were looking at it within a specific time frame. Otherwise, it would look like nothing was there.” She added a bit more technical jargon, but that mostly went over his head.Darcy always loved it when people were surprised by the shit she would pull off with computers. Particularly when it was a person who saw her frumpy cloths and amazing body and assumed that was everything they needed to know about her. Not that Clint was that kind of guy, but his gleeful surprise on pulling one over on some of his colleagues was still priceless to the brunette.“Okay, I have way more questions for you now.” Clint leaned into the table, all mock seriousness. The nachos arrive with an excited squeak from Darcy. They started digging in shamelessly. “Lets get this party started,” he exclaimed, one hand dealing a card, the other scooping up piping hot nachos.The next hand went to Darcy. “Woo! My question, bitch!” She deliberately waited for Clint to start taking a drink of his beer when she asked, “So, are you completely gay or might there be a little bi in you?” He choked on his beer and Darcy cackled.“Okay, Darce.” He said, laughing while wiping off his chin and the spatter on the table with a napkin, dodging a balled up paper napkins that Darcy was throwing at his head for getting beer on the nachos. “I’m not even going to ask how you knew that, because I can figure that out on my own.”Clint hadn’t discussed his sexuality very much. He grew up in the circus and spent most of his adult life in armed forces of one kind or another. The official policy in Shield was that as long as it didn’t negatively impact your work, no one cared. Considering how many of the people in Shield were actual spies, he either carefully hid every personal tidbit himself or he didn’t have to say anything because they would figure it out on their own and never comment on it.“Sorry to dash your hopes but I only ride stick.” He admitted, with only a slight hesitation in his answer.“The boob-adjust test wins again!” Darcy crows. “Now we can help each other score.” She raised her right hand for a high five, which he returned with a smile. A tension he didn’t even know he was holding relaxed completely. A part of him figured that if all civilians were like Darcy, then normal people couldn’t be so bad.Darcy lost the next two rounds and had to describe, in detail, how she knew she was mostly straight and that a few recurring drunken tumbles with a sorority girl from sophomore year kept her open to the idea of a long term relationship with a woman. By the third hand, the tide had begun to turn against the sharp-eyed man. Darcy won, not even pausing to take the cards before asking, “Alright, so Mr. Biceps … Is there a gentleman caller in your life right now?”“Nope! You’re also going to have to get me very trashed to get more than that from me.” Clint said with a large chug from his rapidly warming beer.Darcy just smirked and continued the game. A familiar pair of fives come out to play and she took them with a quick slap. Clint’s quick follow-up left her hand stinging but she shook it with a cry of triumph.Clint, in total disbelief that he had been beat on a game that was almost completely reflex based, pounds the table saying, “Come on!” Darcy laughed loudly enough to snort. Some people might have been turned off by an ungracious winner, but it just made Clint like girl more. There weren’t many people in Clint’s life that were as free with their laughter.“I played this game literally every lunch at a girls only high school.” The girl explained still chuckling, “By junior year, I literally never lost. I once had to get two stitches because a girl wore her rings backwards.” She said, pointing to a small scar on her right hand.She explained, “We’ve cycled through all of the cards. Its basic pattern recognition from here on and I’ve memorized all the cards.” She starts laughing even louder when a bar peanut lands directly between her eyes. “Factoring in how fast you move, I should still be able to get most of them before you.”“We’ll see about that,” Clint responds, full of bravado. When the next cycle started up, Clint recognized a split second before it happened that the brunette was going to get to a sandwich before him. He pulled back on his strength just before impact, not wanting to hurt the brunette. Darcy felt nothing more than a light slap from the archer’s calloused hands.“Woot!”-Within minutes, Clint would smack down after every card laid down repeating, “Burns don’t count as wins, Darcy! So you can’t win if you never take anything!” The game quickly devolved into chaos.Instead of question and answers, they started trying to one-up each other with more and more ridiculous made up stories, taking drinks for whoever had the better story. Three beers each later, adding the fact that Clint hadn’t touched a drop of booze in months because of a mission and neither had Darcy because of New Mexico, the two were half-way to drunk. At one point, though the blond man would not be able to remember the exact logic of the argument that got him there, Darcy had managed to get him to take a double-sized jager bomb with her for “the totes clever lie about the moose and shaving cream” in response to her question about how he got his first blowjob.Clint, as all males are wont to do when drinking way more beer than they intend, detoured quickly to the bathroom. He contemplated Darcy (in a completely non-sexual way) while taking a much deserved piss. In the way that some lonely people who don’t recognize their own loneliness sometimes do, he realized this is the most fun had had in years.Clint was not prone to telling very many truths, personal or otherwise. Nor had he ever gotten into a game of fake story one-upmanship while downing shitty beer. Clint was not prone to doing much of anything that normal people did when hanging out. Unless sparring with a certain Russian assassin counted as recreational but he figured that it probably didn’t. Most of his adolescent awkwardness and sharp edges were still there, not quite worn down by years with a bow or rifle between his hands. Instead of being put-off, Darcy laughed at his raunchier stories (some slight truths interwoven into seemingly ridiculous stories of explosions and assassinations) with snorts that threatened beer coming out of her nose.He realized that he was having a lot of fun with Darcy. She was funny, and dished back as good as she got. If deciding to be friends with someone was a conscious process, the following events were where he would have made that decision.Exiting the men’s room, he noticed a drunk man, perhaps a few inches taller than Clint himself, standing near to Darcy at the bar. The drunkard looked like the kind of guy that was on his high school football team and never grew out of it. He was leaning close to the brunette and it looked like he was not taking no for an answer.Clint walked up to the bar directly between Darcy and the slightly overweight man. He spoke to Darcy, voice only slightly softened by all the liquor, “You want to try your hand at pool, Darce.” Though he was speaking to the girl, his body was angled slightly, ready to turn towards the drunk man at a moment’s notice.The drunk man, heavily slurring, “Hey asshole, I was talking to her first.” He jabbed a finger into the archer’s left shoulder. When Clint didn’t respond, the man tried a harder shove, though it caused him to stumble and nearly fall to the floor. Clint stepped away from the bar, still keeping himself in front of Darcy. Out of the corner of his eye, Clint noticed Darcy take cash out of the wallet the drunk man left on the bar.“You think you’re hot stuff,” the heavily slurred response came, the man bent at the waist looking upwards with a face twisted stupidly from the booze. When the man righted himself, he attempted a shove aimed at Clint’s shoulders. Even three sheets to the wind, Clint would still be dangerous. So, it was child’s play to redirect the man to stumble to the side, further away from Darcy and the bar.Clint kept half his attention on Darcy, noticing the bartender had come over with what looked like a decent bottle of tequila. Clint assumed Darcy had ordered shots for them while he was in the men’s room. Darcy just grabbed the bottle straight from the bartender’s hands, threw down the stolen cash on the bar and turned towards Clint.“Hey arrows, let’s just get out of here, okay?” She shook the almost full bottle at him, “We’ll continue this elsewhere.” He nodded his compliance.They barely turned to walk away when they heard from behind them, “Fuck you and your teasing bitch.” The blond could feel the brunette woman freeze besides him. His grabbed the tequila bottle pushed into his chest. Darcy turned to the left, right leg steady behind her to brace herself. She threw a sharp right hook that landed in the middle of the drunk man's face with a crack. In Clint's eyes, it was a near perfectly executed punch.“You fucking bitch, I think you broke my nose,” the man yells, clutching his face stumbling backward. The pain distracts him only briefly, alcohol dumbing pain and logic, before he rushed at her with a roar.There was almost nothing Darcy hated more than being called a bitch. Clearly evidenced by the fact that, blue eyes going cold, she grunts out “Don’t call me a bitch, you asswipe.” She then kicked up sharply enough to cause serious damage to the man’s ability to reproduce. The man crumbled to the ground.The next moments flew in a blur, the shots of jager finally hitting home. Clint grabbed Darcy around her middle, walking backward to the door and away from the gathering crowd and screaming bartender. He recognized an opportunity to retreat when he saw one.“Who is the bitch now, huh?” The girl screamed, legs kicking slightly in the air. Clint could barely breathe through his laughter at the scene before him. “Who is the bitch now?”-The car ride back to base was filled with the two of them nearly decimating the bottle of tequila, (“Misogyny tax,” Darcy would defend her actions later, before she launched into a sloppy serenade of the agents in the front seats by singing “Toxic” by Britney Spears).He drunkenly admitted to Darcy that he probably wanted to play knight in shining armor to his drinking companion for the evening but that he was glad that she took care of herself. He fist-bumped her while she crooned to him excitedly, “Drinking Bros for Life!”His last clear thought before blacking out was that would try not to worry about his new friend too much because Darcy Lewis would be just fine.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Darcy was not fine. She was supposed to be enjoying a three week vacation in Miami as a post-graduation and pre-birthday gift to herself. The girl had even found a dirt cheap Airbnb beach house because some retirees kicked the bucket unexpectedly and their children do not know what to do with the house. Clint and Jane were even going to come down and get roaringly drunk with the new graduate (though they intended to stagger their visits, because Jane and Clint didn’t really have much in common).Instead, she was freezing her ass off in Tromsø. Objectively, it was only 60° Fahrenheit but it was June and Darcy deserved a break before she took over full time doing administrative work for the Bifrost Recreation team.Days after noticing an oddly limited information available to her via the Wi-Fi on base and certain TV channels being completely unavailable, Darcy was suspicious and angry enough about her delayed vacation to take action. After about no forethought, she strategically stumbled into a worker located in a remote corner of the building, causing his scalding coffee to pour into his lap. When he fled to Medical, she had free reign of his computer and began using her Level 2 codes to gain access to a discreet Shield server that ran some programs she had developed (surprisingly) with Agent Coulson’s blessing.Her programs must not have been discreet enough because, even with Manhattan on fire, the next day she received an email from Tony Stark (in her head, she always called him Tony Fucking Stark) that simply said, “Nice work, short stacks, see you in Stark Tower.” Followed immediately by another email from Pepper Potts forwarded from the Stark Industries H&R that looked like employment contracts for Darcy and Jane, and some dude named Jarvis sent an a itinerary for a private jet scheduled to take them to New York the next day.-Darcy was standing on the 90th floor of Stark Tower at 5pm on a Wednesday evening. The floor was built sort of like a dormitory, with a communal kitchen and living room with minimally furnished apartments that connect to the central area.So, not knowing what else she to do with herself, she did what she always did in these situations. She baked. She pulled anything and everything related to baking out of the cabinets. Hmmm, no eggs but there are cupcake tins, that’s interesting.She started to lay out bowls to portion out dry ingredients, still not firmly decided on what she would be making but she liked to be prepared to keep things clean and organized. Perhaps I could attempt a vegan chocolate thing. She started humming “Boom Boom Pow” under her breath.She heard the ding of the elevator opening behind her. She assumed it must be Jane returning from meeting with Tony Stark. They had been hashing out specifics related to the science things needed to outfit an entirely new enterprise in the Stark technology portfolio. It flew so far over Darcy’s head that she left the room and neither noticed.She sifted out the dry bases needed for cupcakes while she contemplated her options. She turned around to put away the flour and wash the measuring cups she had been using. She dripped them.Between one breath and another, there was a redheaded woman sitting on the marble island, looking a few years older than Darcy, in a tight black suit and four-inch strappy heels. She was completely silent, one leg classily folded over the other, with the flour and measuring cups in hand without a single speck of the powder anywhere to be seen.“Oh my god, who the hell are you?!?” Darcy would have asked if she had the mental faculties to be anything but freaked out. Instead, what came out was something along the lines of, “Oh …guh … who … you...?” with heavy pants interspersed liberally throughout.“You must be Darcy,” came the low and deeply feminine voice. The brunette would be hard pressed to describe the exact nature of the expression on the face of the devastatingly gorgeous woman in front of her but her best guess would be inquisitively blank. The woman seemed to be giving Darcy a moment to compose herself, calmly laying the measuring cups into the sink and gently lowering the flour bag to the island.“Yup, that’s me!” Darcy managed after a few deep breaths, attempting cheer. Darcy was doing her best to exit the “fight or flight” mode she was occupying. She briefly considered the third “f” response, shelving it permanently in a mental box labeled “If you are going to die soon anyway, might as well.”“And you are?” Darcy asked the dangerous woman in front of her. Of course, the younger of the two already knew who she was speaking with. Darcy was just was not sure what should the other person would want to be called. Darcy had only ever heard about her from Clint or Agent Coulson, both of which spoke of the redhead as Tasha or Widow. Plus, the girl was seriously afraid of what would happen if she said the wrong thing.Darcy did her best to maintain eye-contact with the short haired woman before her. Darcy was not sure how long she waited there in silence, but it felt like an eternity.“You can call me Natasha Romanoff,” finally came the response. The spy smoothly descended from the kitchen top, calmly heading to the exit without another word.Darcy was not sure if it was a good thing that the other woman was leaving. Come on Darcy, don’t leave it like this, say something.“I’m making eggless chocolate chip muffins,” she called out, trying her best to sound like a normal person. The sound of heels clicking stopped. The over the shoulder glance to Darcy was so perfectly executed that the brunette made a mental reminder to practice that later.“I mean, if you’re interested you can?” She trailed off weakly, gesturing vaguely at some bar stools and the laid out ingredients.A perfectly sculpted eyebrow lifted ever so slightly. The Russian woman intoned, “Wing Chun or Krav Maga?”Contrary to popular belief amongst 90% of Shield agents, and even 45% of the senior staff, Natasha could not read minds. She was, of course, an expert in body language and could analyze situations faster than almost any other human alive. Still, she often needed to send out verbal volleys to see what resonated.So, she didn’t really need to hear Darcy’s response to know the answer. Though, the red-headed woman found it nice Darcy offered up the information anyway, “Wing Chun three times a week, and Krav Maga workshops when I could manage it while still trying to graduate.”The assassin continued on, satisfied with herself but far from done with getting more information from the painfully young girl at her back.Later, Darcy contemplated the interaction as she dug into a second muffin. She had the uncanny feeling that she had met a force of nature more than she had met a woman. A paranoid piece of her was sure, had the Russian been dissatisfied with what she encountered, that no one would ever find Darcy’s body. Perhaps not even the Black Widow was quite sure if the paranoid piece of Darcy’s mind was right.-Two days after the muffin incident, as Darcy thought of it, Darcy stood outside of Pepper Pott’s office for longer than she cared to admit before she knocked. A smooth voice came from inside, “Come in.”In the tastefully minimal office, Pepper Potts, surrounded by 6 different piles of carefully stacked binders, calmly flipped through paperwork. She was lounging on an office decorative couch that looked as if it cost more than Darcy’s entire wardrobe. In fact, it did. Across from her, in a similar couch looking equally comfortable, was Natasha.“The electronic butler said it would probably be alright if I interrupted for a minute or two. I was hoping to speak to Natasha really quickly.” Before she could consciously think through the action, she thrust the cupcake holder in front of her like an offering. “I brought bribery cupcakes.” The two women before her were dressed to the nines, everything about them as pristine as a photorealistic painting. Darcy felt a touch underdressed, in her ratty jeans and flowy blue top. She brushed the feeling off."They're red velvet," she wiggles the box side to side, as if that would somehow increase the appeal of the cupcakes.The face of the CEO of Stark Industries (Pepper Fucking Potts! as Darcy thought of her) held a genuine smile. It was a smile that was very used to unexpected shenanigans from the people around her. Darcy Lewis had a huge lady boner for the strawberry blonde.The CEO flipped closed the binder she held and shot a quick inquisitive glance to Natasha. When the woman responded with a nod, Pepper didn’t miss a beat. She quickly grabbed an entire stack of folders, standing.“No trouble at all, Darcy,” Pepper said smoothly. “I need to head out anyway to leave for a meeting with Shield shortly.”Pepper approached Darcy. The blonde in high-heels, towered over Darcy while she took a single cupcake, balancing it on top of the binders she held. “I’ll save this for later.” She walked away. Stopping at the door, she executed the perfect over the shoulder look as she left (Damn, I really need to practice that, thought the brunette).“Don’t forget to schedule an orientation with me sometime in the next few weeks, Darcy.” She didn’t wait for a response before exiting.Then, Darcy was alone. With the Black Widow. Voluntarily.The Russian assassin didn’t make any gesture that indicated she was about to move from her seat. Darcy just wanted to get her business done as quickly as possible.“I was hoping you could help me get ahold of Clint. Other than that he is alive, I haven’t heard from him.” Darcy did her best to steel herself for however this conversation might go. Darcy had never had to deal with the awkwardness of interacting with the best friend of her best friend. To be fair, Darcy had not had many opportunities to have a best friend. It would not have reassured her to know that this was a “first time” situation for Natasha as well.“If you wanted this information, why do you ask me instead of seeking the information you need?” The deadly woman questioned. The redhead appeared to already know about the hacking.“After getting my presence spotted by Tony and Jarvis, I wasn’t sure Shield didn’t also find out about my dalliances behind their firewalls. I figured hacking to find out what I wanted to know would not be good for Clint, if that was the case.” Darcy was doing her best to keep Coulson's involvement in her hacking a secret. Something happened after Christmas of last year that had caused the bland-smiling agent to come to her with a request. He wanted to never be barred from information on Strike Team Delta. Darcy never asked for specifics and got to work. It had taken her weeks to secretly isolate a server to use within Shield and even longer to ensure there was an undetectable backdoor to relevant sections of Shield files. If it was not Agent Coulson asking, Darcy doubted she would have gone to all that effort. It was just bad luck that she was accessing Shield at the same time Jarvis was neck deep in their systems. Otherwise, it was unlikely that even Tony Stark would have realized how deep she had gone.“You know what happened with Loki?” The redhead asked, benignly. The question, perhaps, another test. Perhaps it was all a test for the aloof woman.“I know what was in Shield’s files just before the opening of the wormhole above New York.” She admitted easily. Natasha nodded sharply at this pronouncement. Darcy realized she was still holding the cupcakes extended in front of her, so she cradled them back to her torso in a more comfortable position.“Clint was compromised. Agents must be cleared by psych and their immediate superior before they can be released from custody.” Natasha explained, her body betraying no tension about the fact that Coulson had been their immediate superior. “He should do an appropriate job fooling the shrinks within the next day or so.” The redhead knew he could have done it sooner but that he needed time to mourn in silence before he put on a blank face in public.The woman finally rose to her feet, lithe and deadly, with a flash of pale thigh that Darcy knew couldn’t have been an accident but was left not sure what purpose it served. Natasha stalked up to Darcy, the brunette girl’s spine stiffened involuntarily. Natasha stopped when she was within a foot of the other woman, a slight smirk growing slowly over the course of several seconds.“Gods, why are you so scary?” Sometimes, Darcy’s mouth couldn’t help itself. Natasha’s smirk became a smile. A real smile. As real as a knife blade.“I normally don’t like sweet things,” explained the Russian in a voice that sounded like a threat, but didn’t answer Darcy’s rhetorical question. Instead, the woman extended a hand, gathering just a touch of the cream cheese frosting against her thumb. Though there was nothing overtly sexual about Natasha licking frosting from her finger, no moans or exaggerated sucking motions. It was still objectively one of the sexiest things Darcy had ever seen. And Darcy once saw Thor naked.“Clint will not abandon you on your birthday as so many have done,” her voice like whiskey and honey as she walked away, voice formal in a way that spoke foreign notes under a perfected accent. “Thank you for the cupcake, lapochka.”Darcy did not know that sex, sensuality, was just as much a weapon for Natasha as a web was for a spider. Darcy did not know this but she did have a good idea that it was true. Therefore, the girl was determined to never find out first hand exactly how dangerous Natasha was. She was just glad to escape this interaction unscathed.Natasha was laughing silently to herself.-The next day, Clint entered the tower a little broken, fairly bruised, very heart-weary and completely exhausted.When he exited the elevator to reach his temporary quarters, he was shocked to find Natasha and Darcy in the common area, standing and staring at each other in complete silence. The redhead had a book held in the palm of her hand, extended to the brunette. Natasha’s face was inscrutable. Darcy’s face was mostly confused.Moments went by without movement before Darcy tentatively extend her hand, reaching for the book as if she was attempting to pet a feral lion. From across the room, Clint saw that it was a well-worn copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in its original Russian.Clint backed up again into the elevator, deciding both that he was too tired for this shit and that he would instead break into Tony’s floor and sleep on the billionaire’s couch.-Darcy’s birthday had come around, June 13th, and she had no idea what to do.Darcy was alone in the tower more often than not, a state that the girl was used to but disliked immensely. Jane was at Culver, closing down their Shield funded labs in order to get them moved to Stark Tower. Tony Stark and Peppers Potts had been in non-stop meetings with politicians, directors of non-profit organizations, and other very important people to get the ball rolling on reconstruction. Bruce Banner was nowhere to be seen, Thor was still off-world, Natasha was a ghost, and Clint refused all company but the Russian’s. She didn’t even have a job to distract her, not starting for a few more weeks and still not sure what her exact job responsibilities would be.So, in a fit of pique, Darcy broke into Tony Stark’s alcohol cabinet, grabbed what she could fit in a tote bag, and brought it down to the common area on her floor. She had Jarvis message anyone still in the tower that it was, in fact, her birthday and that they were welcome to join her get hammered, bake cookies, and play the Wii.About an hour after the message went out, Darcy had snickerdoodles (the archer's favorite) baking in the oven when Clint arrived. He was dower, face puffy from lack of sleep. A grim looking Natasha trailed behind him. Darcy figured he would bring the fellow assassin. She knew, without being told, that a part of Clint didn’t trust himself alone with someone as vulnerable as Darcy. Natasha was as much a safety blanket as she was a friend.He grabbed a wii-remote in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. Natasha grabbed a bottle of vodka and took up court on a lounge chair to watch the night unfold.An hour later, Darcy banned all shooter games (“Because you are a cheating cheater who cheats cheatingly,” she accused him as he forced himself to laugh) and instead started Just Dance. By hour two, Clint was drunkenly snoring in Darcy’s lap, eyes puffy with unshed tears, with her hands brushing slowly through her friend’s hair. The room was spinning around Darcy just a touch.Natasha had not moved, aloof and silent, from the comfortable chair. The Russian woman finished off the last of the vodka in her hands, pounding it on the table in a way that pulled Darcy’s attention to her.“Are you even drunk?” Darcy asked, part jealousy and part awe. The Redheaded woman smiled a secretive smile.“No,” the Russian admitted. Continuing on, “Watered down super-soldier serum, courtesy of the Red Room.” It was a display of honesty so unexpected that it startled Darcy into sharper focus on the other woman.“Huh” Darcy responded. “Then why drink?” She asked, shuttering around another swig of wine directly from the bottle. She knew the wine was probably expensive as hell but it tasted like four buck chuck.“I like the burn.” The Russian shrugged, relaxing at the sight of a sleeping Clint before her. She knew Clint had not been sleeping, blaming himself for Coulson’s death. The serious woman didn’t know what to do about it. She was a double edged dagger that cut from both ends, not someone that was equipped to deal with a broken friend.“I like your burn.” Darcy waggled her eyebrows, fear ebbing with the warmth in her belly and the friend in her lap.“Everyone likes my burn,” The Russian smiled all teeth and threat. After a beat, she added teasingly, “And my butt.” This startled a laugh out of Darcy.Darcy had always been extra fearless on her birthdays. “True! People should write to their Congressmperson. Get it recognized as a national monument.” Darcy teased, voice slurring gently around her words.They lapsed into silence, the Russian’s contemplatively and the all-American girl in a way that suggested she was fighting sleep.“Careful, lapochka,” she whispered. “It is a dangerous thing to like one such as me.” Her voice went subtly harsh at the edges, like silk gliding over a floor of broken glass.Instead of a response, Natasha lent over to grab the bottle of wine slipping from Darcy’s hand. She took a sip, grimacing at the wine in her hand. “I thought Stark would have better taste than this.” She lobbed the bottle, still half full, at the trash can in a perfectly controlled arc. It landed with a dull thunk and not a single drop spilt.Darcy’s eyes went fuzzy trying to follow the motion and cheered quietly by fist-pumping at the end of the display. She pushed other bottles in the direction of the redhead, “Do something cooler!”The older woman shook her head, in a look that could be called fondness if it had been a different woman making it. Darcy quieted and struggled to keep her eyes open.“You’re good for him,” Natasha breaks the silence, nodding to Clint. Darcy hums, not sure how to respond to the statement though she knows it is true. “Friends should be,” she responded simply. The brunette’s neck gave up, head thumped to the back of the couch.Natasha stood, moving behind the sofa. A ghost of a touch over Clint’s head, and a slight brush to push back the hair over Darcy’s face, preparing to depart.“Wait,” the sleepy voice came out quietly, Natasha’s hand still gently caressing her forehead. “I meant to ask when Coulson would be done with his surgeries. No one has mentioned anything.” Natasha almost stills but continues on uninterrupted. The softer parts of Natasha, ones that took her years to build and were still as stiff as old scar tissue, got packed away like a flower closing at night. Inside, she had gone still.“What was the last thing you heard?” Her voice was light, but her heart was stone. She asked as if she was only asking so as not to cover something the other girl already knew. It was a simple but effective deception. She continued lightly bushing the long strands along the girls face.“Hmmm …” It took the brunette a moment to focus on Natasha’s face from her upside down perspective. “In Tromsø, my Strike Team Delta tracker program pinged a huge movement of medical resources for surgery for Coulson. Really, really high level secrecy on that stuff. Highest I’ve seen,” Darcy’s was soft and barely audible, but Natasha’s senses were sharp.“I haven’t accessed the info since then,” she said between stifled yawns, “but it is built to warn me of major status changes, like death, of any of the three of you. I haven’t heard anything yet, so I thought you could tell me how he is holding up.”“Go to sleep, lapochka.” She murmured. “I shall find out and let you know,” Her accent thickened into a tone that soothed the young woman to sleep.A tight coil of steel unwrapped inside of the spy like the unwinding of a garrote. She had some answers to find and a one-eyed man to confront.-It was the weekend before Darcy started her new job, and she had a date. Nothing short of an act of a god (not Thor), would cause her to miss this. The most action she had gotten in months were drunken fumbles, and cuddling with the gay archer. She was thirsty and thought, I deserve this.Despite Manhattan still swimming in rubble, the more remote boroughs were still thriving with life. She had visited an apartment building in Queens she was considering moving into, she wanted her own space outside of the tower. A guy in the building, dripping in sweat and a yoga matt under his arm, asked her out. Mark was shorter than typical “dude-bro jocks” that asked Darcy out, but he had a nice butt and looked bendy so she said yes.The last time she had a date, not just a booty call, Clint had crashed on her couch (“Just taking some vacation, Darce” he responded to her question of “Why are you trying to ruin my life?”). He refused to leave until he caused the sociology graduate student to cry.She left Stark Tower in a muted but still vibrant blue raincoat. Despite the warm summer rain, the circumstances were perfect for her.When she was a minute or so away from the subway station, she whipped out her brand new Stark phone and sent a message. Twenty different phones received this message, all of them belonging to women of various shapes and sizes but plenty looking pretty similar to Darcy. They all donned blue rain-coasts, the exact same one that Darcy was wearing, and started a dance routine on the street.By the time Darcy approached, the women were finishing up their routine. When the song ended, Darcy now at the edges of the group, the women dispersed in different directions rapidly, screaming “Performance Art.”Within minutes, Darcy was situated in the back of an alley way changing behind a dumpster a few blocks away. She stowed the blue jacket carefully, donned a non-descript new jacket and a completely different blouse. She was 75% sure she had lost Clint in the shuffle.When she turned to exit the alley way, she almost wasn’t surprised to find Natasha, arms crossed, standing before her. “Dammit!” Darcy huffed. She wasn’t sure that Natasha would allow herself to be roped into Clint’s over-protective ways.“You’ll have to deal with his pouting about hiring distractions with your Stark signing bonus, you realize this right?” She asked, not expecting an answer. “Good job on the jacket color choice, just bright enough to attract the eye away from the normal crowd but not so bright that each scattered girl would be distinctive enough to track. Normally Clint would not have been fooled.” She paused contemplatively then added, “Sleep deprivation and the element of surprise worked in your favor.”“What did he bribe you with? I can do better!” She interrupted the redhead.“No bribery, Darcy.” She admitted, arms unfolding and relaxing to her sides. “Clint doesn’t know I followed as well.”“Oh,” Darcy breathed out. “Okay. Umm … then, are you hear to wish me good luck on my date?” She smiled, hopefully. Trying for an innocent smile but probably failing.“In a way,” She admitted enigmatically, with a smirk. “I’m here to ask you a couple of questions.”“Oh, okay. Well. I can do that.” Darcy regained her composure. “Shoot.”The redhead smiled, communicating with the simple gesture that such a word was perhaps best not used in the company of a woman who would take that as permission or an order. Darcy’s smile twisted awkwardly and flinched.“Did you originally include Coulson into your tracking algorithms when he had you start digitally following me and Clint?” Natasha asked. Darcy did not quite understand why these would be the questions she needed to answer, but she went with it.“No.” She took a moment to contemplate if she should add more. She figured, rightly, it was probably best if she did. “I included them after Clint got hurt on the Kosovo job.” He had stayed with Darcy for a week after being let out of medical. People in her old building thought he was her down-on-his-luck brother.“Is that when you realized Clint was in love with Coulson?” The redhead asked, question launched like a javelin.Darcy nodded. “He was pretty high on some pain killers and might have said some things.”Darcy’s date was the only thing that had gotten Clint away from Coulson, still in a medically induced coma, since he was transferred without notice to the Tower a few days after the brunette’s birthday. It was things like this that made it seem strange to Darcy that more people didn’t realize how in love the archer was with the deadpan agent.The red-headed woman crossed her arms once again, but her body still loose and relaxed. She had one last question for the girl.“When did you start learning Russian?” The redhead asked, quickly and with a hint of steel in her voice that warned against lying.“After you gave me the book.” Darcy responded. The redhead nodded, like she was expecting that answer.“My number should now be in your Stark phone.” Darcy didn’t ask how the assassin had accomplished this. “You will text me a picture of the man, his name and address.” She pulled something from a pocket inside her jacket. “Finally, I had Tony make this taser for you. It will alert me if you use it and send me your location as well.”Darcy held her right hand out for the taser, accepting it with a smile. It was still better than the worst outcome she had expected (an arrow through Mark’s throat being a really small but still distinct possibility).Natasha gestured with her right hand, indicating that Darcy was welcome to leave with their business now finished.Before she left, Darcy dug into her purse, bringing out a non-discript brown-paper bag. She passed it to the redhead, saying, “A savory gibanica, since you don’t like sweet. I had it just in case you did get involved with Clint on this.”The redhead smiled, “Good choice.” Darcy fist pumped into the air.Darcy walked away, turning to face the other before exiting the alley way, “Keep Clint off my back, and you’ll get more of those your way. Also, I’m going to talk to you tomorrow if the date went well. If it didn’t, please don’t kill anyone that doesn’t deserve it!” The brunette girl getting louder as she walked backward, hitting puddles and splashing everywhere.“I promise nothing, lapochka.” Natasha did not laugh, because real laughter was one of the hardest things for Natasha to allow herself to do. Instead, she smiled a toothless smile. As the brunette walked away, Darcy being completely herself in that moment, it panged a small cord in the Russian woman.Natasha was a weapon. She had been made and remade. Within the last two decades, she had finally learned to make herself. She had woven only two others into her life’s fabric. If Natasha was a star, then Clint and Coulson were comets in her orbit. Their final loss would be tragic, fundamentally changing Natasha’s world, but not destroying the woman at her core.When Darcy entered her little universe, the assassin did what she would also do. She assessed the threat. In doing so, Natasha realized something. Perhaps there was space in her life for even more. Not cold and bright, but as soft and as familiar as a moon.For that reason, Natasha decided to circle back and catch Clint. When she got him back to the tower, she would leave to follow Darcy then.She would ensure that Darcy had a peaceful date.
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Darcy was sitting in Pepper Potts’s office, comfortable in her new, thrift store suit but still nervous. At only recently turned 22, Darcy (no middle name) Lewis suddenly went from being in college, finishing her thesis and working part time for Jane, to speaking with of the most powerful women in the USA if not the world. On top of that, she was being asked to oversee any and all of the work coming directly from the labs of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and Jane Foster. Not just play baby-sitter, she was being asked to take over all executive and administrative functions for “Special Projects.” Which meant that she could, theoretically, deny the publication or production of any and all discoveries coming from three of the brightest minds in the world. Darcy had actually done research on this - Jane, Tony and Bruce were objectively three of the smartest people in the world and in their respective fields they were unparalleled.“Why would you want me to do this?” Darcy shrilled, unintentionally. “I can baby-sit the hell out of a scientist. I mean, I was already going to move from doing that part-time for Jane to full-time after graduation. The rest seems … a little much,” she waved her hands about her. To try to pull back on her excitement, she grabs one of the vegan and gluten free granola bars that she had made and brought for Pepper. She starts chomping on it without ceremony.Pepper smiled. She pointed her hands to the ceiling. “Jarvis forwarded me your thesis – Innovation and (Ex)Change: The Geo-Political Importance of the Advancement of Technology and Trade between Sokovia, Latveria and Wakanda. Jarvis?” Peppers intoned.“Your points on their political reactions around the collapse of the USSR were particularly poignant. Though, your analyses on their mineral and technological production as political capital in East Asia as opposed to Europe were a bit underdeveloped. Very deserving of the honors grade it received, Ms. Lewis.” Darcy wasn’t even offended, because she knew the AI was right. Darcy was just surprised. She didn’t think anyone outside of Clint would voluntarily read her political science B.A. thesis.“How is that relevant?” Darcy asked, still very confused.Pepper fielded the answer. “Darcy, when Tony came to me to let me know that Jane Foster and Bruce Banner were coming to Stark Industries, I was prepared to wring his neck. It took me years to learn to work with Tony. Suddenly tripling the brain-trust that needs to be ready to hit the ground running by the 3rd fiscal quarter was far too much for any one person to handle.” For a second, Darcy thought she saw a brief flash for weariness. “I know business, PR, finance and how to deal with hostile or friendly governments.” Pepper Potts could, in fact, reign in a board of directors and heads of state with nothing but calm smiles and sharp shoes. “I cannot do that and keep up with three scientists who, without proper oversight, would probably destroy the world.”Before Darcy could gear up to speak, Pepper lifted her hand to quiet the brunette as she continued, “Your title of Senior Research Administrator is a bit of a misnomer, Darcy. Officially, you are head of Special Projects on a trial basis until you have completed one year of service where then your title and responsibilities would expand accordingly. Unofficially, your actual job will be to work with Jarvis.”“What exactly do you mean by that?” The brunette was confused again, and starting to get a bit frustrated. If she was being asked just to be a pretty face in front of a disembodied man, she was going to flip a table. No matter how much of a technological marvel that man was.“Perhaps, I could answer that question, Ms. Potts,” came the cultured male voice. Pepper nodded.“Ms. Potts, Mr. Stark and myself had a … family meeting, you could say, after the events of New York and the formation for the Avengers. It was decided that while Ms. Potts would continue to helm Stark International, Mr. Stark would focus his attentions towards the Avengers and technology development.” (Darcy, coughed into her fist, SCIENCE! Bro Time). “Therefore, my main role will be dedicated to maintaining the functionality and security of the Tower.” There was a tone of pride in his voice, which Pepper noted to herself in a smile.“Besides hiding my existence from the wider public, I am aware that I still lack the experience to properly interact with those outside of Ms. Potts and Mr. Stark. Whoever were to head Special Project would have to work well with myself.” Jarvis was actually the one that had developed this plan, both as an understanding of his own limitations but also as a subtle test of his boundaries, a brief spreading of wings away from his nest.“Having someone on board that can also understand the importance and consequences of the work would be ideal.” Jarvis added. “Upon review, Ms. Potts and I thought you were an ideal candidate.” Though, this statement obscured the fact that it was Jarvis who brought Darcy to Pepper's attention.“So, Pinocchio, you need a cricket?” She asked, intrigued by the proposition set before her. Privately, Darcy was still utterly in awe of Tony Stark being able to make a true AI. Being able to work with that AI directly would be amazing. It would be a dream come true to even get a glimpse at some of his code (mentally, she shudders at this because she realizes how sexual that sounded).“No, Ms. Lewis. I need a partner.” There was a hint of sass in his voice at the comparison to a wooden doll. Darcy smiled at this, she had always liked people with backbone.“Well, Jeeves, I think I can do that.” Darcy fought the urge to twirl in her chair. She lost that fight and did it anyway. “As long as you understand that I am a partner in this.” She said strongly, finger pointing to the ceiling. “That means communication, buster. That means letting me know what I need to know to make sure nobody accidentally blows up the tower.”Pepper Potts smiled at the brunette, she also glanced to where she knew the camera in her office was located and smiled at Jarvis as well.“That is acceptable, Ms. Lewis.” In a moment that showed definitively and irrevocably that he was a Stark boy at heart (a polite Stark but a Stark nonetheless), Jarvis added “I also wish to say that your data hiding and encryption programs within Shield were quite impressive, Ms. Lewis. I believe had I not been in Shield’s systems at the moment of your access, I would not have discovered them.”“Aww, shucks, Jeeves. You’ll make a girl blush with talk like that.” Darcy twirled irreverently once more in her seat. Jarvis, were he capable, might have blushed. Darcy, undoubtedly, would have ribbed him for it had she known.-It was late in the evening, Clint and Natasha had just returned to Stark Tower from a meeting with Nick Fury to discuss their official assignment to the Avengers. Fury’s swollen eye, courtesy of Natasha, had healed. The older man was also no longer walked with a limp due to a well-placed dart laced with a neuro-toxin that numbed the area for 48 hours (developed by Bruce and shot by Clint). Tony had stopped hacking the head spy’s email account to flood it with pirate porn. Steve stopped giving him the disappointed America face every time he saw the African American gentleman. So, suffice it to say, it was a productive meeting.They were confused when the elevator dropped off at the science labs instead of their recently completed shared floor.“Hey, Lieutenant Commander Data Stark,” Clint called out to the artificial intelligence directing the elevator, “Why did you stop here?”“Agent Barton, Agent Romanoff, I believed it would be prudent to direct you to the Conference Room Millennium Falcon.” Jarvis responded to the agent.“It’s not like you to be vague, Jarvis,” Natasha intoned, her curiosity unfolding like a cat. “Anything more specific to add?” She asked with a sharp eyebrow. If Jarvis had a body, he would have felt a chill go down his back. Instead, what warbled was a piece of his code that dealt specifically with firewalls and threat neutralization.“I believe the term ‘you have to see it to believe it’ is appropriate.” Jarvis responded. “I would, perhaps, encourage some expediency in reaching the conference room before the situation deteriorates.” The two agents stalked to the conference room, curious but ready for anything.-Conference Room Millennium Falcon, all the conference rooms in the labs were named after sci-fi spaceships, was in a corner of Stark tower and was made of all glass. It was occupied by what could only be described as a rampaging Darcy.“How dare you? How mother fucking pig dicked dare you?” Darcy screamed down at her touch screen laptop, connected to the room’s network through a docking station on the table. The conference table was covered in the contents of a now empty beverage fridge and snack cabinet conveniently located in the room. Darcy was a stress snacker.“Ms. Lewis, perhaps this conversation would be best continued at a later time.” The voice responded from the speakers located in the ceiling. “I have taken the liberty of asking Agents Barton and Romanoff to join you here for … moral support.”Darcy glanced through the glass windows at the two agents, approaching the conference room slowly.“No. We are going to continue this conversation right now!” The brunette started taping away at her laptop. Within seconds, the noise cancelling technology was activated and the room locked. Since this was the same floor that Bruce would spend most of his time, the room had been built to effectively become a glass bomb shelter.“Ms. Lewis, are you attempting to lock me out of the controls for this room?” Jarvis had gone flat, he had mastered sarcasm but was still working on annoyance. In retaliation, he started launching countermeasures.“I’m not attempting, you fucking asshole, I’m going to do it.”“Ms. Lewis I assure you that …” he began, but instead of finishing his statement he found himself removed from accessing the localized systems. “It seems you did," he responded dryly.“Now. I know you can probably take control back within minutes” Darcy said, anger cooling briefly into a tone that sounded completely reasonable if not for the words, “but I’m about to launch an attack, isolated to the control servers on this one room, that should buy me 45 extra. I call it my laser-kitten-tsunami.”When the servers were swarmed with terabyte upon terabyte of cat videos, Jarvis did not respond. If he were capable of huffing or pouting he would have done so.“Now, I’m going to cuss at you for about 15 more minutes, and then we are going to hash this shit out.” Darcy harshly bit out, shoulder’s rolled back in readiness. “You’re welcome to insult back, but we are doing this shit, okay?”-From outside the room, Natasha and Clint were watching Darcy currently chuck cans of diet coke at the speakers in the corners of the room. Her aim was improving after each throw. The two assassins could read the situation, and Darcy’s lips, perfectly.“She just switched to Klingon,” the archer said to the redhead next to him. He started translating the insults into English. “Not a smart thing to say, Jarvis. And, I don’t know that one. And now she’s switched to … is that Romani?”“Hmmm … Basque,” came the reply, Natasha tilted her head, impressed. She returned the favor and started translating for Clint. “Now she has switched to archaic Latin. Oh, that is a clever one. I’m going to remember that one.” Upon hearing the translation, Clint was impressed as well.“How fast could you get in?” Clint asked, after a minute of watching. Natasha ran some scenarios in her head. “And should we call Tony or Pepper to handle problem child number two in the room?” Natasha reconsidered the possibilities.“Eight minutes, give or take three minutes depending on Stark’s cooperation levels.” Natasha admitted, keeping up her translations even as Darcy switched to more and more obscure languages. “Let’s let this play out. I want to see what happens.” She admitted with sharp curiosity.Clint pulled out his cell phone. “I’m going to take notes for Coulson, he wouldn’t want to miss our little girl all grow’d up. I’ll also order us in some dinner. Pizza good?” The redhead nodded.-Back in the room, approximately 10 minutes later, Darcy had broken two speakers. She flipped her hair back in a huff and finally started to lose steam.“Okay, I’m calm now. Are you calm?” She asked rhetorically. “I’m calm.” She was not calm. She definitely noticed when he started using trinary on the conference room projector to code back even more insults.“This is the first verbal altercation I have experienced. So, I shall withhold judgement until the conclusion of this matter.” Jarvis said, in complete honesty to the girl. It was strange that, despite the situation, Jarvis registered no need to contact Sir and Ms. Potts to make them aware of the situation.Darcy shrugged, the particular kind of shrug that only someone under the age 25 is still capable of. “Now, since you have perfect memory recall, I would like you to remember the orientation conversation between Pepper and myself last week?” Jarvis recalled. “I asked you to let me know anything I needed to know to make sure no explosions happen. Do you remember that?” She asked angrily.“Of course, Ms. Lewis. Would you like me to play you the recording?” He added drily enough to start a fire. Darcy crossed her arms across her stomach (over the boob arm crosses were difficult for the woman).“Then why the hell, on my first fucking day,” Jarvis huffed audibly at the swear word but Darcy continued on while rolling her eyes, “I now have to hire five new lab assistants because Jane literally called them a ‘sack of poor excuses for astrophysicists’ while on hour 72 without sleep. Tony exploded things and was lucky not to have exploded a lot of things. Oh! Let’s not forget about the fact I have to deal with those sharks from legal for the two bogus sexual harassment allegations against Bruce.” She would later laugh at the videos of the puppy-dog scientist awkwardly refusing the advances of a man and woman who were later revealed as moles for Hammer Tech. They screamed sexual harassment when seduction did not work.“On a positive note, the radiation inoculation project from Dr. Banner looks promising.” Jarvis was quite used to finding the silver lining where it was available. A hazard of the job considering his creator.“That’s not the point at all and you know it, buster!”The room lapped into a moment of silence. One of anger dying down to embers inside the brunette girl. Darcy knew her reaction was a little extreme, but her circumstances were extreme as well. It was always going to be a huge challenge for a girl as spirited as Darcy to learn to keep her cool no matter the situation. She could be forgiven because she was still learning what had become second nature for those around her. Plus, she had been extra stressed because her recent date with Mark had gone well but ended strangely. She thought she was going to score, when it abruptly fizzled. The brunette girl still hadn’t figured out why but she was sure one of the assassins in her life was responsible.For Jarvis, he was contemplative. For the first time since he gained full self-awareness just a few years ago, he was at a loss for what to say.“I apologize, Ms. Lewis.” He responded after a few beats of silence in the room. He pulled up some old research in his internal archives. From his study of interpersonal relationships, especially in familial contexts, he knew intellectually that explanations usually accompanied apologies. His attempt, though lackluster, was sincere. “I believe I did not understand the full parameters of your request. Perhaps we can clarify our mutual expectations and communication patterns now?”“That’s all I’m asking for." Darcy finally relaxed her stance. "Also, pro-tip: Next time a person asks to have a serious conversation while being obviously stressed out, your first response should not be ‘You appear agitated, Ms. Lewis. Might I suggest a relaxation activity?’” She added in a terrible British accent.“I shall keep that in mind, Ms. Lewis,” conceded Jarvis, though still confused at how the response was incorrect. He had observed a 94% success rate of a similar exchange between Tony and Pepper. In a later review, he would come to the realization that the relaxation activities between Tony and Pepper were almost always sexual. He immediately researched sexually suggestive communication and developed sub-routines to cover the gaps in his understanding of having a conversation.“Okay, Jay-man.” The brunette said, letting out a deep breath. She didn’t realizing this was the first time that she had referred to Jarvis in a way that was not sarcastic or insulting. It was, in fact, the first time he had been given a nick-name.“Alright, let’s clear up some of the shit pile that was dumped on us. We'll start with both of us reviewing all personnel files and background checks of current employees before we start trying to find replacements. Just because you can process that shit faster than anybody else doesn’t mean you won’t miss something like with those two fuckers that almost made Bruce hulk out in sexual embarrassment.” Darcy nodded, satisfied with the progress made.-One week after the incident (appropriately titled, “The Laser Kitten Attack” in Jarvis’s internal files), Darcy was sitting in the office she claimed as her own, conveniently located near Conference Room Voyager that was always stocked with her favorite root beer and snacks. She was currently reviewing applications for the open positions in the Special Projects labs. Thankfully, Jarvis had weeded through the hundreds of applications they received for the open positions, narrowing it down to a pool of 21.She was slashing at applications with a Sailor Pluto pen, humming through her iPod playlist titled, “Can Ya Focus Deeper, Brah?” The lights in the office blinked gently, she took off her headphones and looked up from a CV that was as poorly written as it was impressive. Bio-Chemistry Ph.Ds. should learn to proofread.“What can I do for you, Jay-meister?” She asked at the interruption, eyebrows narrowing down since she had asked not to be interrupted. (“Unless you have a fun new programming project for me or Channing Tatum gets divorced and wants to ask me out on a date.”)“I have a video-call for you from Dr. Alec Monroe, Assistant Vice President of Product Management, and Mr. Sandesh Mutta, Director of Partnerships – India Division.” Jarvis’s voice was extra bland, which Darcy took as a sign that this was one of those calls that required her to be as much a mouth-piece for Jarvis as an actual representative of the scientists in her charge. Despite not being on her official meet-and-greet roster until the end of the month, the pair had been trying to get ahold of her since she started the job one week ago. They had refused to take no for an answer. Something in the Darcy’s belly fluttered, not sure what they wanted and not wanting to fuck this up.Jarvis forwarded the personnel files for the two executives along with overviews for all open projects in India. The pair, with some backing by high-level Indian politicians, had begun expressing valid interest in “launching Stark green energy in India.” But, their continued inquiries after the first few soft "not nows" were becoming increasingly suspect.“Alright,” Darcy responded grimacing while bringing her hair up into a high ponytail. “Put them on Jay-man. Monitor and record the video-call. Use the messaging function to feed me anything you think I need to know in real time.”“Indeed, Ms. Lewis,” came the response. Jarvis, having been running his analysis functions non-stop on Darcy Lewis, noted that this was the 14th time Ms. Lewis had pulled her hair into such a pony tail. It was, sufficient for his algorithms, enough times to suggest a significant likelihood of the action being a stress response. “Need I also remind you that only Ms. Potts has the authorization to over-rule any decisions you come to regarding Special Projects.”"Thanks, Big-Jay, I got it." She nodded appreciation at the reassurance.
Later, Jarvis and Darcy would debrief with Pepper Potts regarding the India team, requesting that Pepper authorize a formal review of the work coming from the India Branch and Product Management in the States. When Darcy left head to a meeting with the head of Finance, Pepper removed her high-heels from her feet and folded them under herself while lounging into her favorite office chair. She was a picture of relaxation.“Good job, Jarvis,” the CEO said to the room at large.“It was Ms. Lewis who discovered the first solid clues regarding the bribery suspected between Mr. Mutta and Dr. Monroe to attempt to appropriate Stark green energy.” Jarvis admitted to the CEO.“That’s not what I meant Jarvis,” the strawberry blond said smiling. She curled up in more comfortable position for a quick power-nap before she had to get on the line with the General Counsel of Stark International to launch the investigation.Jarvis said nothing. He contemplated.“Thank you, Ms. Potts,” he said, dimming the lights and cooling the room to the 68° his observations have shown was the most conducive for napping for the polished woman.-Darcy left Stark Towers close to 10pm on a Friday night (soon to be renamed Avengers Tower when Tony could convince Captain America to move in). She was on her Stark phone, doing phone screenings of the potential candidates for the open positions. She didn’t let them know in advance that she was calling and didn’t worry about all the crazy background noise from talking the New York. She only had one question for them (“How do you deal with the inevitable reality of death?”) and if they couldn’t handle it then they weren’t right for the job.Darcy decided to walk to Hell’s Kitchen, to make up for her lack of work outs that week since she hadn’t found a new Wing Chun instructor. She was on her way to a second date with Mark. It took her longer to convince him for another date than she was expecting, especially considering she made it explicit that she wasn’t interested in anything more than ending the night in sex. She had to promise him her “assassin friend” (he never said which one but she has ideas) would not kill him if he said yes.The brunette was passing through an alley to get to the pub a bit quicker, when she was cornered by three Russian looking men covered in tattoos. One of them pulled out a knife, while the others started to box her in, leering at her.“Mr. Zhang,” she said to the final call on her list, a graduate student soon to complete his Ph.D. in molecular engineering. Her voice had gone frosty. “I believe I’m about to be robbed. I’m going to have to interrupt you and call you back.” She hung up without another word, putting her phone into her purse.Normally, she would have just given them the purse and called it a day. It would just have been bad luck that she also happened to have the iPod Coulson returned, Natasha’s copy of War and Peace, and a late birthday present from Clint (still wrapped because she promised to not open it until she got home). When the first man approached her, with a knife held out and a disgusting smirk on his face but eyes set firmly on her breasts, she dropped her bag to the floor. The other men smiled, the kind of smiles that all women instinctively recognized. They thought they had an easy victory at hand. She decided, in that moment, that she would not give them anything.When the man with a knife approached within Darcy’s range, she knocked his knife arm to the side. She stepped forward, into striking range , and delivered a fluid series of punches and elbows to his torso and face. He dropped to the ground with the breath knocked out of him and a few cracked ribs. Before the other men could react, she aimed a kick at his leg, hitting it just right to dislocate the knee. His scream tasted like victory on her tongue.The other two, unlike in the movies, did not stand around in shock waiting to come at her one-on-one. They rushed her. She had never practiced taking down more than one opponent. She managed to redirect one guy, turning him backward, grabbing him around the head and throwing him to the floor head down will a deep thunk, knocking him unconscious. Unfortunately, in her distraction, the third man body slammed her into a side of a garbage dumpster, her head snapped back sharply against the metal. Her instincts, with a man unwillingly shoving against her, came into play. She kneed him hard in the balls.For a second, she didn’t hear the phone ringing from her purse because her head was ringing from the whip-lash of getting hit against the dumpster. She stumbled to her purse, which was lying next to the man she had kicked in the balls. Before she grabbed the purse, she delivered a sharp kick to the man's head, knocking him unconscious as well.She grabbed her phone and answered it. “Hello?” She tasted blood in her mouth like new pennies. She had bit her lip in the scuffle.“Hello, Ms. Lewis,” came the British voice, voice perfectly placid in a way that belied depths. “I have dispatched NYPD to your location and have informed Agent Barton and Agent Romanoff.”Darcy spit out the blood pooling in her mouth. “Thanks, Jay.” She stumbled to the mouth of the alley. When she exited the alley, she rested her back against a wall facing the street. “Where you following me?” She asked, sliding down the wall into a sitting position.“A Mr. Zhang attempted to call you. As you know, all Stark Tower communications are routed through our protected servers. I noticed the call, answered and was informed of your situation.” The AI had learned that carefully crafted truths can hide other truths. He learned this at the heels of Pepper Potts. So, the brunette accepted this with a nod at the phone. In actuality, he had been monitoring her since their explosive fight two weeks ago.“If you want visual, there is an easy backdoor into the NYPD CCTV network from their data backup storage servers in upstate New York.” Darcy replied to the AI, voice soft and a little dazed with the first hints of concussion. Jarvis had already started working on accessing the traffic cameras in the area and was done by the time she had finished her sentence.“Good job on dispatching three assailants, Ms. Lewis.” He responded after evaluating the scene. “The police should be arriving in approximately 4 minutes.” He updated the dazed girl.She sat there in silence, breathing into the phone. Her hands began to shake. Darcy’s breathing increased steadily, in delayed panic. They spent a minute in silence, panic escalating.“Whatever made you think I was a good choice for all of this, Jarvis?” She asked, voice muddy. Ten breaths, maybe fifteen, passed before she got a response.“Did you know, Ms. Lewis, that Shield’s unofficially policy is that ‘Orphans make the best recruits?’” Jarvis informed her, voice reserved. He had seen the phrase littered throughout their personnel recruitment files. The girl flinched.“Darcy Lewis, age 21. Parents, George and Anna-Maria Lewis, deceased nine years ago. Fostered with only living relative, maternal grandmother Annabelle Harris, deceased four years ago.” He stated silently, voice carrying nothing but cold, hard fact. “Senior at Culver University, top 3% of class, no observable breach of confidentiality after the events of New Mexico. Little to no social supports outside of Dr. Jane Foster (recent) and Agent Clint Barton (recent). Technical skills, promising. Combat aptitude to be determined. Recommended for recruitment for Shield Academy upon graduation. This was a report made by Agent Coulson to Shield Asset Recruitment dated two-weeks before your graduation.”Darcy Lewis sat on the floor, eyes unfocused. She was crying silently.“Did you know that Agent Coulson had introduced a virus to my systems that temporarily bypassed my task queueing in order to allow him access to Mr. Stark’s private quarters before the events on the Helicarrier?” He asked, not expecting an answer. “I recognized the coding as your work when I discovered you in Shield’s files.”The brunette looked up, looking toward the traffic lights in the distance where she assumed the camera was located. She started forcing herself into breathing exercises to calm herself.“I’m not some lost dog to be rescued or pitied, Jarvis.” Her voice grated like a metal rake dragged along concrete.“That is not it at all, Ms. Lewis. Mr. Stark and Ms. Potts hold Agent Coulson in high-esteem. When I recognized you had created those programs exclusively for Agent Coulson, plus his commendation of you, it raised my estimation of you admirably. We wanted you for the job because your work and your character spoke for themselves,” Jarvis reassured, giving the girl the words he believed she needed to hear in order to gain her composure.In raw number of years ‘alive’, Jarvis was still a child. Outside of Pepper or Tony, Jarvis did not have much experience with others. He had been growing discontent in the confines of the Malibu House and the watered down version of himself in the Iron Man suits. The first stirrings of curiosity about the world around him had already taken root within him in the last year.When he stumbled across Darcy, Jarvis had become curious about the person with her efficient and elegant coding. Therefore, he had pursued information about her like a blood-hound with a scent. He dug into Shield, into school records and sealed court documents. What he discovered was a person who was also fluent in the languages that Jarvis understood best. Not just computer code, but unflinchingly loyalty to those few one could call their own. In his pursuit of information, Jarvis had realized he had been looking not for facts but perhaps a friend. Perhaps, he realized he needed help learn and expand his new world.“The police should be arriving shortly,” Jarvis said simply. Darcy could hear the sirens growing louder in the distance. “Agents Barton and Romanoff should arrive in the next two minutes. So, I shall leave you to it, Ms. Lewis.”Darcy huffed out a breath, “Thanks, Jay.”“Have a good evening, Ms. Lewis,” she heard faintly from the phone.“I always do, Jay-man,” she responded, confidence returning, as she hung up the phone. She knew that Jarvis was looking out for her.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Thor landed in the middle of Times Square at noon on a warm August day. The popular tourist location was one of the first places cleared and made as good as new after the invasion of New York. It was both intended as a morale booster for the public and also a declaration that New York will stop for nothing and no one. Not even invading aliens.This time, Times Square did stop, ever so briefly, to witness the blond god’s landing. Almost immediately, a swarm of tourists with selfie-sticks and camera’s started running towards the action. Within minutes, a line had formed for the tourists and native New Yorkers alike, to take a picture with the red caped Viking. In some respects, New York would never change.A part of Thor, the part that was Prince Thor schooled in public affairs at the knees of the unfailingly regal and beloved Frigga, had accepted the strange procession warmly. He had learned to accept such displays as if they was his due. His laughter and good tidings could be heard throughout the area, even with the din of traffic and bodies swarming around.An alarm created in a joint effort between Tony, Jane, and Bruce started sounding within Stark Tower of Bifrost–like activity somewhere in the world. Bruce and Tony were sleeping off the after effects of a battle with giant centipedes in Vancouver (Tony whooped the entire time, exclaiming pride for Canada’s first mad scientist). Jane was in London, chronically bad at checking her cell phone, visiting Eric Selvig who had settled in the area for a long sabbatical. The others were off on other missions.The only one in the Tower to hear the alarm was Darcy.“Jarvis, have you begun trying to narrow the location of the wormhole opening?” Darcy asked, from the couch of the Avengers common room, eating a vegan meatball sub on her lunch break. She and Jarvis had been watching Fox news for shits and giggles.“Yes, Ms. Lewis. I have sent messages to all the Avengers. We should be able to isolate the exact location within a few minutes.” Darcy nodded along, eating her sub with one hand and typing at her laptop with the other. She was sending an email to Jane, who would see an email by being on her computer sooner than she would notice a missed call or text message. “Preliminary results suggest North America.”“Got it, Jay. I still have access to most public works systems near Puente Antiguo when I made Thor his ‘Donald Blake’ identity. I have the codes in my personal Stark Server files under Music, Backstreet Boys, in the hidden folder called ‘Secret Stuffz.’” She kept almost all of her more illicit materials hidden in music folders. Including her porn.“Use my codes to check to see if there is any activity in the New Mexico area,” she said.She had only just finished the email when she heard a booming sound coming from the television. When she looked up from her laptop screen, she saw Janice Sifuentez, the new blond Latin-American Fox reporter for New York. She was on a microphone in the middle of Times Square. The headline read “Hero of Invasion Lands In Times Sq”, with a side tagine to tweet to @FoxNewYork to vote for the Hottest Male Avenger (Thor’s being #HotMysteryViking). In the background of the shot, she saw a madly grinning Thor standing in an elaborately patterned scorch mark on the floor. He also happened to be taking pictures with a knock-off Elmo and a group of what looked like East Asian tourists.The journalist approached Thor, microphone extended, “Sir! Excuse me, Sir! Do you have a moment?”“Greetings, fair maiden, my name is Thor, Son of Odin, not ‘Sir.’ I fear a queue has formed and it would be unseemly to let you bypass it.” The large man proclaimed jovially, flashing a peace sign into the camera like the tourists around him, misunderstanding the request of the woman.The woman blushed. Janice had risen to her position by being both sharp and relentless, recognized that the man might not understand what her purpose was in asking the man such questions. “My name is Janice Sifuentez. I am a reporter, Mr. Thor. I am here to get answers the public wants to hear and update them on relevant events around the world. If you see that device over there,” she pointed at the cameraman just feet away, “it allows the public to see and hear all of this in their homes.”“Aha! Another Midgardian invention of note,” he exclaimed, the tourists moving on and a crowd backing away slight but still trying to within sightline of the news cameraman. “Truly, how much of Midguard would witness this?” He asked, a glint of contemplation in his eyes.“Everyone, Mr. Thor,” she responded, recognizing an opportunity. She thrust her microphone once more in his direction, “Will you tell us what brings you to New York?”The happy demeanor of the long haired man intensified, his smile bright and sharp and a touch mad. “The Bifrost now repaired, I am here to beseech the forgiveness and beg permission to continue my courtship of Dr. Jane Foster, whose beauty is surpassed only by her knowledge of Yggdrasil.”His face then grew serious, “My most solemn oath, Dear Jane, if you are watching this. If not for my duty I would have returned since I was last here to beat back the Chitauri with the other great warriors of Midgard.”The crowd around him sighed, everyone loved a good love story. The crowd started swarming closer to Thor once again, determined to capture the moment with the giant of a man.“Anything else you would like to add, Mr. Thor?” Janice attempted to ask before the crowd over ran her.Thor, who was currently accepting a small toddler from his mother to place upon his shoulders, looked back to the camera. “Yes, let us not forget my other great companions from my first quest here upon Midgard. Shield Sister Darcy Lewis, noble student of the political sciences who felled me with her boxed lightning in brave defense of my beloved, I have brought the Asgardian sweets you inquired after. Companion Selvig, who schooled my beloved Jane in the mysteries of the stars, I bring you well-wishes and books of lore from my world.” He waved his pack at the camera, jostling the toddler perched on his shoulders. He returned to the adoring public, imitating the people around him as they capture his image.In the tower, Darcy was on the floor laughing herself breathless and almost peeing herself. Jarvis was keeping her in stitches with a side screen with commentary, flashing the more creative Instagram and Tumblr art that seemed to be popping up at lightning speed.When she finally regained her composure, she spoke to Jarvis, “Okay, Jay-man. Call off the Avengers, and get me Pepper after she finishes her meeting in Tokyo. I want the Stark PR team on this, doing damage control and spinning this positively for the newly launched Avengers PR strategy.” Darcy took a moment to finish her sub.“Also, would you flag Sifuentez as a potential friendly? She handled Thor fairly, and that is more we could hope for from Fox. If the background check looks good, preapprove her on the guest list for future press dockets,” Darcy added.“On it, Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis replied, already coordinating the relevant resources that Darcy would need to handle the incident. Jarvis launched his media analysis algorithms, normally tuned only to Tony but recently updated to track all of the Avengers team.“Preliminary social media analysis is 79% positive, with a predicted next day rating of 68% without intervention. You might also be happy to know, Ms. Lewis, that the trending tag on twitter is currently #HotMysteryViking, seconded by #IwannaBeJane and #ShieldSister. You also now have 453 new Facebook friend requests and 15,000 new twitter followers.” He reported to Darcy, a touch of humor in his voice since he was still working on chuckling for his vocal programming.Darcy groaned. “Yeah, laugh it up, Hal. Get official twitter and Facebook pages primed for Thor and Jane.” Her head thunked loudly to the glass tabletop, typing instructions to the Stark PR people and getting them to start coordinating with Shield PR.“While you are at it, by the Gods, please please please start cleaning up the worst of my public profiles and acquire me a more professional twitter handle.” She was going to miss her old @DoubleDLewis handle.“Of course, Ms. Lewis,” he said smugly, Thor’s laughter booming in the background. He was doing duck face with a group of college aged girls. “I have a car waiting in the Lobby to take you to collect Thor.”-With all of the Avengers currently on Earth, there were certain things that were inevitable. Jane would escond away Thor for hours and put his reputation as a god of fertility to the test. Tony would throw a party. The Terror Twins would egg him on and Pepper would even allow it, because she had a soft spot for the duo while Coulson was still in a coma. Steve and Bruce would stand in corners, perhaps together, sipping beers like puppy-dogs unsure of their welcome. Darcy’s spies within Shield had also heard rumblings of an authorized Shield social event around the Avengers reconvening, put together as a reward for level 4 agents and above. Mostly, this would mean a lot of drinking, pin the tail with knife throwing, and long-standing casual hookup relationships would rekindle. (Deputy Director Hill and Senior Agent May were her primary sources for gossip. They were as scary as they were enraptured by her Honey and Cream Taffy.)With a bit of discreet hacking on Jarvis’s part, Darcy knew that Natasha and Clint would return from their mission that evening. Since there was no way to prevent the inevitable, not that Darcy would want to for the sheer blackmail potential alone, she decided disaster mitigation was the name of the game. She took control of all party planning. She took particular delight in having Agent May forward the invitation to the relevant Shield agents, an invitation to Stark Tower that looked like a rainbow and an American flag had an illegitimate love child.Later that night, Darcy finished up a game of gabling Egyptian Rat and Darcy decided to head out for some air. She slipped Clint 50 bucks on the way out for helping her con the Level 4 agents that she had obliterated. She walked out onto the recently repaired balcony/landing pad. Thor was leaning against the railing with a mug full of amber mead. Thor had barrels of Asgardian mead brought down. Unfortunately, only Steve, Bruce and Natasha could drink it since they were the only ones with super constitutions.“Heya, Thor,” Darcy asked, sipping on the Corona in her hand.“Lady Darcy! Greetings and well wishes!” Thor boombed, though more quietly than he normally would.“What are you doing out here all alone, Thunder Dome?” Darcy asked, approaching the railings at the edge of the balcony.“Tis nothing, Darcy. I simply wished a moment to gaze upon your Milky Way.” He spoke softly, eyes scanning the washed out night sky like he could see things that Darcy could not. Perhaps he could.There were little moments, few and far between, where she noticed Thor’s silence. They were soft things, brief and fleeting, when he stood at the edge of things. She let the silence linger.“Anything you want to talk about, buddy? I’m willing to listen, if you do.” She turned her back to the view of New York and the ocean, to stare at the shapes moving inside the warm light through clear glass. As much to see what is happening inside as to give Thor some distance to contemplate her question.“Would it be untoward to beseech your aid in understanding Midguardian courtship?” He inquired, all the tact of a prince apparent in that moment. “If it betray your obligations of friendship to Jane, I am sure guidance could be found in other corners.”“No worries, Thor. What did you want to know?” She was surprised, because she hadn’t heard anything from Jane about any problems around their ‘courtship.’ She had just assumed that they had been boinking like bunny rabbits since Thor had literally flown to London to join Jane on the Stark jet back to the States.“Is ... sexual congress expected in Midguardian courtship?” He asked softly, immediately finishing off the mug of mead in what Darcy assumed was embarrassment. Darcy narrowed her eyes, contemplating and adjusting her glasses.“Wow, big guy, that is not what I thought you were going to ask.” She paused, thinking through possible responses. In that moment, she remembered that the last time Thor had been on Earth was over 1,000 years ago. Any information he remembered would be almost completely outdated.“So, this is how it works, buddy. There are different expectations of romantic relationships depending on cultural background and individual personal preferences. For Jane and I, sex and long-term romantic relationships are not mutually exclusive.” Darcy took a moment to polish off her drink as well, refusing to feel awkward. “What it basically boils down to is that so long as both parties are willing, sex at any point in a relationship is acceptable.” She saw what she thought was Tony trying to get Bruce to vogue with him and Pepper in the window.“Is that not that way for you, Son of Odin?” She asked curiously.“In Asgard, sex is not taboo in and of itself.” He explained, brief hints of uncertainty disappearing completely. “It would be considered inappropriate only during early stages of a courtship, where one pursues their intended for up to a decade to demonstrate the sincerity of their plea. Refraining from joining is a demonstration of restraint, for unbridled love is to court disaster. It is also proof of a higher form of desire, that desire which calls from soul to soul.” His voice had taken on a softer cadence, like he was trying to recite poetry from memory.She touched his bare bicep gently, “Have you spoken to Jane about this? She would be the best person to have this discussion with.” She noticed Clint and Natasha had started to either dance, spar, or pretend fuck on the dance floor. Either way, she was sure it was meant to make the younger agents squirm.“Aye, I know I should. I find myself a bit lost, not expecting that my first courtship would be fraught with such difficulty. Perhaps having parents whose promise,” the world rumbled in Darcy’s ear, a nuance to the word that the All-speak couldn’t properly translate, “has lasted millennium upon millennium has made me naïve. For so many, their promises are made and remade to the whims of their destinies and desires for a scant decade or two. Moving from love to love like a bird to flower.”“Your first courtship?” Darcy asked quietly, so quietly that it was obviously a question that was not expecting an answer. Darcy contemplated the blond man before her, her head spinning at the casual reference to his parents having been married for thousands of years.Her mind raced with the information before her. “Thor, when do Asgardians reach their age of majority?” When he tilted his head confused, she continued, “The age when one is considered an adult in society.”“Ahh, I see your question now. I believe it would be 1,000 of your Midgardian years.” He stated, confused by her line of questioning.“And how old are you, Thor?” She asked, a brief moment of insight striking her. She thought of a wide-eyed Thor and a bright-eyed Loki, visiting Earth the first time and sowing the seeds of mischief that would be the basis of their legend throughout the ages.He paused to do the math in his head, “I believe I am 1,095 of your years.”Jesus, relatively speaking that makes him about my age. She turned back around to face the same direction as Thor, leaning her full weight on him confidently. The words she thought she would say fell out of her head, instead she took a moment to think about what she would say to herself.“Its okay, you know? That things aren’t what you expect they would be.” She nudged him gently with her shoulder. “A lot of people wait until marriage. Others start only with physical stuff, before it becomes more. Some last lifetimes, or just a few days. It varies from person to person. For me and Jane, we’re both people who would wait years before thoughts of a deeper commitment. You just gotta talk to her buddy.”The stood in silence for a while.“And if you ever need to talk to anybody about these things, I’m here for you ,” she finished. Darcy then let out a huge huff of breath, before sharply bringing her elbow into his side. A normal man would have grunted in pain but Thor laughed. “Alright, enough of feelings and shit. Let’s go back inside and drink. You promised to teach me the raunchier Asgardian drinking songs.”They both turned to return to the room, a faint breeze coming in from the ocean. “Indeed, Shield Sister Darcy. Let me sing to you The Horn of Heimdall, signaling doom to the hearts of all Asgardian women.” He grabbed Darcy, lifting her in the air with a laugh, swinging her onto his back in a piggyback ride. Darcy shouted in glee, driving him onward.-Darcy was in her office, planning for the official release of a commercially viable discovery from “Special Projects,” when she heard a knock on the door. “Come in.”Thor, dressed in a too-tight white t-shirt and sinfully tight jeans, walked in through the door, hair pulled up into a man-bun that she made a mental note to remind him not to do again.“Lady Darcy, I have come with another inquiry on Midgardian customs.” The last inquiry was about the nature of brunch as a social function as opposed to a distinct Midgardian meal time."Go ahead, Hammer Time," Darcy replied. “Darcy, Friend Clint has asked me to join his revelry this evening in spite of my date with Jane.” He stated, the blonde bear of a man’s voice saturated with genuine curiosity. “In his entreaty to convince me to come, he has invoked the custom of ‘Bros before Hoes.’ I was not sure of the exact nature of this custom. Do you have a moment to explain this Midgardian tradition?”Darcy’s nostrils flared in anger. She explained. When she noticed Thor growl in his annoyance at the explanation of who the ‘hoe’ in this context would be, a mischievous glint sparked in her eyes. “Okay, Thunder Man, I have a plan.”At the next Avengers mission, Darcy and Thor got their revenge. This time, the mission was to take down a swarm of cute but destructive teddy bears. They had been charmed by some novice magician with delusions of grandeur, who imbued them with the nasty habit of doubling every five minutes if you didn’t kill them. As usual, the Avengers were playing a game of one-upmanship with who could take out the most enemies, Banner taking a back seat on this one since they didn’t need a heavy hitter. Clint took an early lead when he scored a triple hat-trick (hitting three teddies with a single arrow, three times in a row).At the very end of it, with Iron Man and Captain America clearing out the last of the civilians on the street. Natasha had nabbed the magician but not before he managed to set off a bomb in the building that Clint was perched on. In typical Hawkeye fashion, Clint jumped at the last minute from the exploding building, shooting arrows every moment of the way. “I could use a catch,” he screamed out to his team-members but switching to his last grappling arrow just in case.“I got you, Warrior Hawkeye,” Thor called, swooping down just after clearing the last block from the fluffy menaces.Thor had caught Hawkeye in the bridal carry just in time, directing them both to the Shield control van where the other avengers had already assembled. Upon landing, Thor made eye-contact with Tony, who had removed his helmet. The two men nodded at each other subtly. A camera in Tony’s suit, streamed directly to Darcy’s laptop, was activated.“Ahh, Friend Hawkeye,” Thor jovially shouted, jostling the man in his arms, still in a bridal style carry though. “A wonderful battle indeed. My warrior’s spirit is still much incited.” Thor’s voice had dropped, rumbling low in his chest.“You going to let me down, big guy?” Clint asked, starting to squirm, though the viking’s arms were pretty comfortable.“Are you sure you wish me to release you, Noble Hawkeye? Since you killed the most foes this battle, it is your right to my bed this eve.” He proclaimed, loudly and voice carrying to all the Avengers and Shield agents looking on. “It is finally your turn to enjoy the royal pleasures, as is custom for the closest shield brothers of Asgardian royalty.” Thor stated, face a picture of seriousness.Clint’s jaw dropped phenomenally. The male Avengers burst into laughter at Clint’s expression, Natasha’s smirk stiletto sharp. Clint started trying to struggle out of Thor’s arms, the larger man keeping ahold of him easily.“What do you mean join your bed?” Clint, having managed to scrambling over one of Thor’s shoulders in an fireman carry. He looked directly at Natasha and Steve standing side-by side, snickering. After a moment’s pause, “Wait, what do you mean finally?!? I’m last?” he finally exclaimed, elbowing Thor in the face, and managing to finally get out of his arms.“How did I not know all of you have fucked Thor?” He shouted, angry for some reason.Darcy watched the live-stream, cackling evily, while recording the moment for posterity and blackmail.-Darcy was taking a break from work, having had a really stressful day preparing for end-of-month budget reconciliations and taking over unofficial responsibility of the Avengers PR Team when she complained one time too many about their shitty work. She was holed up in Jane and Thor’s living room, with Jarvis streaming her videos of the scarf knitting pattern she was currently attempting.Since she walked into the building at 8am, she had been getting almost non-stop hassle from the lab monkeys and PR team members. It was almost more work dealing with their issues than it was to do her actual freaking job. She had come to Jane and Thor’s because she thought she would get to be alone for a moment, with the two of them out of town. So, she was surprised to hear Thor walk into the apartment, soaking wet and in nothing but sweatpants.“Ah! Friend Darcy, what brings you here?” He asked, heading to the kitchen to grab some pop-tarts and Gatorade, his favorite after workout snack.Darcy held up her knitting needles, the blue/bronze and canary yellow/black colors coming along nicely underneath them, “Making a scarf for Agent Coulson. He is all Gryffindor on the outside, but me thinks he is secretly a Ravenpuff (Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff hybrid).” Thor nodded along, having already been forced to marathon the Harry Potter movies with the brunette (“Such a wondrous tale of bravery for one so cursed by fate,” Thor summarized in tears).When she looked up from her pattern, she noticed the blond man had been standing in front of the couch, staring at the brunette for some time. “What’s up, Lightning Bolt?” She asked.“I cannot help but notice there has been many of these items produced since you have taken up this craft but a few week hence.” Thor, still gleaming from his shower after his spar against Steve. He had left the trip with Jane a few hours early, who had run into a friend from her Ph.D. program and had become occupied with work in the way he had come to expect meant he would have the rest of the day to himself. Thor knew how to keep himself occupied, and was learning to build a life for himself on Midgard.“Is all well, Friend Darcy?” He paused a moment, tilting his head, pony tail coming to rest along one shoulder.“I took it up to help keep calm, after the thing I told you happened a few weeks ago,” Darcy finally responded, in a note of uncharacteristic seriousness. Darcy had been staying in Clint or Natasha’s spare bedrooms more nights than not, still a little unsettled going home alone to her studio apartment in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens. She refused to spend nights in Thor and Jane’s spare room because the ‘no sex for one year during courtship’ rule didn’t exclude a lot of other very loud activities.“What is the cause of your stress? I shall be happy to take on any foes or quests for you, Lady Darcy. You need only ask,” Thor responded, coming to sit on the couch next to Darcy, setting down a towel on the couch because Darcy got weird about things like sweaty or wet people sitting on couches.“Nah, there’s nothing really, big guy. Just stress with the job. Plus, breaking off my booty-call with Mark took away an avenue of stress relief. So, I’ve just started stress knitting, no big,” She said, shrugging nonchalantly. In fact, the stress had started spiraling out of control. Even Natasha had started to show worry about the brunette, in her own incomprehensible way, by breaking into her office to leave her beautiful clothes that were lined with hidden knives.Thor, nodding wisely. “And does knitting actually help?” He asked skeptically, sitting up quickly to pull out from under him a red and silver quilt that she had knitted him only last week.“I don’t know,” she stated, her knitting needles starting to click loudly contradicting her words slightly. “I guess I’m still trying to figure that out. Without therapy, if I can help it.” Darcy has had no good experiences with therapists. They weren’t bad, exactly, but she tended to want to hide with her problems than ask other for help.Thor reached out, gently, taking the knitting project from her hands and setting them on the table. Jarvis saved the video and turned off the TV to give the pair silence.“I do not know the customs in Midguard for these situations, but I have had many years to learn the art of battle.” Thor gathered Darcy into his side, the young girl forced herself to breathe deeply and listen to Thor’s words. “After an Asgardian warrior’s first battle, it is common to find many tested in their resolve to continue the warrior’s path. What all warriors on Asgard learn before they are allowed a second battle, is how to live with fear.” Even in Asgard, a warrior society that valued strength of arms in a way that expected all members to master one weapon or another, recognized that it was folly to expect all to conform to one rigid path. It is why their seidr-masters such as Frigga All-Mother, though few in number, were as renowned as any warrior on the battlefield.“Some find strength outside of fear, in craft or learning or revelry. In truth, I am one such as these.” Thor, though the physical embodiment of a college frat boy, did often enjoy each world’s bounty to its fullest. He drank deeply of a new land's tankards, learned new games, gabled with the locals, and invited companions to his quests and to his bed. Thor was self-aware enough to know that he had to experience and enjoy life in order to function on the knife’s edge of killing or being killed.“You never seem afraid?” Darcy said, quietly into his chest. “Angry, sometimes, but not afraid.”“Anger often masks fear. You must know this.” He was never more honest than he was in moments like these. Not as a prince or diplomat or friend, but as a warrior.“Others find strength in the battle. Or, rather, in preparation for the next battle. Like metal, they become strong in the forge. They confront their fear, with weapons in their fists, and conquer it day and day again.” His voice was melancholy, as deep and as brief as the fading note from a struck piano cord. Left unsaid was that his brother, Loki, was one of these people. His arm tightened slightly on the petite girl.“Perhaps, what you need is not learning calm through creating these garments, however much we all prize the gifts you give us.” She tensed at the words, Thor not knowing that she hadn’t been to another self-dense class since the events of the attack a few weeks ago.“What are you suggesting, Biceps Boy?” She asked, her nicknames did get a little bad and a little irreverent when she was distracted.“In much practice with my Shield Brothers, Hawkeye and Iron Man, I have learned to regulate my strength for Midgardian opponents.” He stated, his offer left unsaid, sensing that speaking the words plainly would not serve him well in this situation.The pair sat in silence for a long time, Darcy not crying or shaking. Slowly, a string of tension unwound inside of her, like a ball of yarn during one of her projects. She quietly contemplated the words of the guy next to her, as close as to a brother-in-law as she would ever get. She snuggled in deeper.“Tomorrow, big guy. I promise.” The tension in her body fully uncoiled for the first time in weeks, now that she had a new plan of attack, a new direction to take to tackle her fear. Thor gripped her tight, as Darcy started to fall asleep.“Though we have not yet fought together, you are my Shield Sister, Darcy Lewis. It would be my honor to show you the forms of combat of Asgard.” His passion shone in his eyes, sharp and regal, every inch a conquering king in that moment.
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It was Labor Day morning and Darcy was slowly loosing her patience. She had booked the Avengers on three different Labor Day parades around the country: Clint and Thor in San Francisco, because Thor wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge and Clint could no longer be paired with Natasha in public events because they scared people. Tony and Bruce were together in Washington DC, partially since it was the only city Bruce hadn’t done terrible damage to and partially because Tony was the only one that could get Bruce to smile for the cameras. Natasha and Steve were in New York, because they complained the least and got preferential treatment from Darcy.In retrospect, it was stupid of Darcy to think that she would be able to get them all up early enough to ship them out to their respective locations. It took her three loaves of banana nut bread, a box of rare pumpkin pie pop tarts, and gallons of coffee to get most of the Avengers ready. It took the joint hacking efforts of both Darcy and Jarvis to break into Tony’s workshop, to find Tony and Bruce passed out on Tony’s couch snuggling after an all-night bender of science. She thought she saw Jane passed out under a table curled up in one of her knit blankets, but she didn’t have time to deal with that.Finally, when everyone was off in their respective jets, she was able to head out with Steve and Natasha in order to arrive at 5th Ave and 44th Street in time to get on the Avengers float. Darcy positioned herself inside the undercar of the float, coordinating efforts and using the holiday to address her backlog of emails and paperwork. Remind me to ask Pepper for an assistant sometime.The text that Darcy received from Jarvis surprised her. It read, “Coulson showing signs of consciousness.”Inside the tower, on the Medical wing built for the Avengers, Coulson returned to consciousness briefly. Just a brief flickering of his eyes and a distant but fierce awareness of pain between his ribs. The lights stung, little daggers that the left a ringing pulse behind his closed eyelids. His flexed the fingers on his right hand, brushing against something soft and foreign. It was a monumental effort to open his eyes again, to tilt his head slightly to see what was beneath his hand.Wrapped around his right hand was a scarf, one of the most garish things Coulson had ever seen since his undercover Shield mission to a gay club in the 1980s just before the worst of the AIDS crisis. The scarf was an alternating pattern of blue, bronze, blue, black, yellow, black, over and over again. It was extremely soft under his fingertips. He slipped back into unconsciousness. One of sleep, this time.Tony ordered secure cars to follow parallel to all the parade routes. Darcy just needed to get to one and she’d be able to get back to the Tower quickly. She couldn’t slip out under the float, since she knew there was almost no chance to get away without Steve or Natasha seeing her. Darcy, knowing that if she didn’t play this right, would ruin the Labor Day parade for three different cities when all of the Avengers rushed back to the Tower.She came out onto the top of the float. Natasha and Steve were currently finishing up one of their sparring routines. Natasha finished off the display with an arched double kick onto Steve’s shield, the blond man bracing to push her into a big leap. The Russian then executed a perfect triple twisting backflip.She had to head towards them to get to the stars off the float.“Hello, ma’am,” Steve Rogers greeted at her approach, a slight flush to his face from the fight. “What brings you topside?”“How many times do I gotta tell you Captain? Call me Darcy.” She said boldly.“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned a roguish grin. Natasha came up to the captain’s side, eyes sweeping over the brunette in an evaluative stare. Her perfect eyebrow quirked.Darcy waved her phone at the two Avengers, “I got a text from Jarvis. I need to head back to the Tower to deal with a special project that needs some attention.” She didn’t bother trying to lie, knowing Natasha would see right through it in a second.“Need any help, Darcy?” Natasha asked. Steve nodded earnestly, seconding his companion.“Nah, I got it. I’ve got you all on speed dial if something pops up.” She regretted the words immediately, figuring she gave more away than she intended to the spysassin.Instead of an interrogation, Natasha stepped aside, “Take care of what needs to be taken care of, lapochka. We shall see you both later tonight.” Her tone, while serious, carried hints of amusement like streaks of gold in black marble. Steve didn’t notice the exact wording she used, preoccupied by waving at a group of middle schoolers dressed up as the Howling Commandos.She walked to the exit ramp, before turning around to make one last quip to the pair, “Don’t forget that we have ninja aliens boarding in five more blocks. Please don’t hurt any of the stunt men!”Steve saluted her. Natasha crept away like a bored cat, flashing some light-up batons for the next display.-Coulson was laid up in the Avengers infirmary when boredom struck, something the slightly balding man never learned to deal with properly. When the doctors denied his 25th request to bring him either work or immediately begin physical therapy, he had lodged three clipboards inches deep into the walls while still on his back. The doctors had started to refuse to come into his room without an Avenger present, preferably Captain America. (“His disappointed face is like dying Bald Eagles!” Clint reassured Coulson when he couldn’t refuse another of Steve’s reasonable requests.)“Agent Coulson,” came Jarvis’s voice from the ceiling. “Do you have a moment to speak?”“I guess I can take a moment away from this riveting episode of Ellen,” came the dry response. “What is it, Mr. Jarvis?”“Ms. Lewis is requesting to join you for her lunch break,” Jarvis responded. Begrudgingly, he also added, “She says that I must also remind you that she has the best stash of contraband pudding cups. She is willing to share if you need persuasion.”“Please let Ms. Lewis know she is welcome but that I only accept butterscotch or tapioca pudding.” Coulson had always had a soft spot for hospital puddings. The medical staff in Shield learned quickly to never bring him vanilla but that he would accept chocolate in a tight spot.Within a minute of the exchange, Darcy Lewis was knocking at his door, barging in before the agent could even signal her permission to enter.“Sup, Agent I’m-Not-Dead-You're-Dead. I brought tapioca! I would have brought you a burger but the doctors might stage another revolt.” She lifted up and displayed the four-pack of snack pack tapioca pudding. Darcy had learned to hoard her scientists’ favorite ‘I’m sick/injured/sad’ snacks for emergencies. Since that worked really well, she was putting that to the test with a wider audience.“It was more of a picket than a revolt. Perhaps even a riot.” He responded to the bubbly brunette, currently wrapped up in a fuzzy green sweater. There was a slight twist at the corner of his eyes, betraying amusement to those who knew him well.“Well, I’m not here to debate semantics with you. I need somewhere to hide out from the Jane and Bruce’s scientists. They would never think to look for me in medical.” Mostly, Jarvis had stopped letting her lock herself in Conference Room Andromeda.“I would settle for something that was actually the consistency of real food, if not actual taste,” was Coulson’s response. For most Shield agents, the food was just an excuse. At their most fundamental level, Shield agents operated on the base desire to never be vulnerable.“Well, the moment the quacks lift your strict diet plan, I’ll get you a double bacon cheeseburger from the fast food place of your choice.” Darcy grabbed the remote from his hand, replacing it with a pudding cup she opened. Darcy started unloading her food truck Asian-Mexican-fusion tacos from her bag.“I give them three more days before they crack.” He said, contemplatively, between bites of pudding.“A trail of psychologically broken doctors after your brush with death is bad enough. It’ll just feed fire to the current set of rumors amongst the newbie Shield Agents such as: ‘Coulson is secretly a vampire’, ‘Coulson is the Anti-Christ who changed sides’ and my personal favorite ‘Coulson is the Black Widow’s twin sister in disguise.’” She giggled at the ways his eyes narrowed at these pronouncements.“I’m going to murder Jasper.” He said, while polishing off the last of the pudding in his hand. He turned his laser eyes on her at the end. Demanding, without words, another pudding cup. “Though it is funnier than the ‘Coulson is the reincarnation of space Jesus.’”“I think that the last one was Victoria Hand,” Darcy added, flipping through TV channels. He glanced at her inquiringly (which for him, was looking at her with anything other than a bland smile). “I saw her smirk when one of her protégés brought it up when I was there for my quarterly check-in with Shield while at Culver. The serious demeanor with the streak of red in her hair. Woman’s got a rebellious streak a mile wide.”“Hmm … I think I saw a Buffy rerun on the TNT channel,” was all he said in response. He started planning retaliation against Hand in his head.“You realize that if we do this, I’m going to be calling you G-man for days, right?” She passed him another pudding cup, opening it herself.“Ms. Lewis, I should point out that the font you used on the box hasn’t been used on the snack pack labels for several years,” Coulson said without inflection. “And the protein powder you used is a bit chalky.” He dug into his next pudding cup as methodically as he did everything. Darcy’s lack of reaction had his right eyebrow twitch in laughter at the brunette girl before him.She had actually made the pudding herself. The doctors were gleeful in thinking they were helping sneak Coulson his vitamin and protein supplements. She had packaged it all together carefully with the help of Jarvis and Tony’s fabrication units. She was just glad she got him to the second pudding cup before he said something.“You got it, G-man,” she said. The young woman then propped up her feet on his bed while biting into her tacos, with the sound of Buffy killing a vampire in the background.-The unfortunate reality of Darcy’s relatively new occupation was that, at any given moment, corporate espionage and kidnapping were a distinct possibility. Darcy, a new player to Stark Industries, due to her age and relatively important position in the organization, became a more enticing target than most.Darcy’s favorite seminar during orientation was “Stark Industries Kidnapping and Ransom Policy” for high level executives in the organization. It was put into place by Howard Stark in the 70s, after a Stark was successfully kidnapped for the first time. Maria Stark was kidnapped when she prevented Tony from being taken. Maria Stark then killed five men and left fifteen injured when she caused a building in New Jersey to explode during her escape. Not just Stark men are made of iron.The basic policy boiled down to this: Stark Industries does not pay ransom. They will do whatever needs to be done (legally or extra-legally) to retrieve you but they do not pay ransom, especially to terrorists. Considering the Stark family’s history in destroying their captors, mostly this policy meant that, if and when the person freed themself, Stark Industries would cover the damage and legal bills that the escape would generate.Darcy is kidnapped for the first time on a Wednesday evening by a contingent of AIM while heading out of the office to go to her apartment in Queens. She was on her Stark blue-tooth headset, coordinating the next day’s efforts with Jarvis, when the men grab her and knock her out. The kidnappers, having anticipated digital tracking, set off an EMP that shorted all technology in a block radius.When Darcy woke up, she could tell she was in some kind of old factory or warehouse. Her arms were handcuffed behind her back on a metal chair, her head was ringing in a dull throb and her mouth was dry. The room was empty except for four people. Two were men who dressed like guards, standing on either side of the only door carrying large rifles. The other two, a man and a woman in all-black tactical gear, were standing next to a metal table topped with knives, guns, tasers and other things Darcy couldn’t identify from her position. They turned to her when she stirred to consciousness.A mean looking man, redheaded with tattoos on his neck, a thick Irish brogue in his voice, “Tell us your Stark access codes.” Darcy deployed a subpar eyeroll, and dubbed him Irish Asshole 1 in her head.“Personal codes are blocked if someone is compromised. This is corporate espionage 101, you kidnapping fuck.” Darcy’s voice was hoarse. The punch to her face was not a surprise. The dull-throb in her head exploded into a headache, the lights in the corner of her vision sharpening.‘Corporate espionage 101,’ was actually Darcy’s activation code on her blue-tooth earpiece. She had hoped Tony’s prototype, built to reboot after a hit with an EMP, was still working. He made them after their last battle had left Natasha out of contact for 45 minutes, while the assassin took down the mad scientist of the day.“Shut up, little girl,” came a second voice, in the same accent. It was the woman, as blond and willowy as she was beautiful. She was holding a cattle prod. Darcy dubbed her Irish Asshole 2.When a soft beep came from her ear-piece, registering that the distress signal had been activated, Darcy had to bite back a smirk.“Video and audio feed confirmed, Ms. Lewis,” came Agent Coulson through the ear piece. He was in his hospital bed, coordinating efforts to retrieve Darcy when Jarvis immediately noticed her missing.“How long do you think you have before they realize where I am?” Darcy asked angrily at the pair before her, squirming in her chair and playing up the dizziness caused by the punch. She was searching around her cuffs, seeing if she could make it to the pair of lock picks that Natasha had been installing into the linings of all of her suit jackets.The large man before her answered, “We have another 7 hours before you are expected at work,” the large man added, cracking his knuckles. Which meant it was about 1am at night, a few hours after Darcy was knocked out. “You’d be surprised what 7 hours of work can produce.”In her ear, she could hear Agent Coulson, respond to her question, “Good, Darcy, you remembered what Clint told you about interrogations.” Clint had come down for Thanksgiving her senior year. He had spent the entire weekend practicing (both with and without booze) how to not give anything away in an interrogation. “Jarvis and Tony are triangulating your location, but Jarvis has informed me they are using some proprietary signal scramblers. We should have your location within 10 minutes.”A cold pit opened inside of her belly, but she squashed it ruthlessly. She started to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth, like her martial arts instructor taught her to block out distractions.“Look, there is no way to even use the codes without a Stark secured access point. Considering that I can feel my phone in my pockets, I’m going to assume you knocked out all of my tech including my laptop. What I have for you is useless.” She added, in complete dishonesty. She continued on, “If you want money, I have money.” Her stark salary had more zeros in it than she knew what to do with, to be honest.Instead of a response, she got a cattle prod to the thigh from the blond woman. Darcy threw back her head, clenching her jaw to try to prevent herself from biting off her tongue.“Don’t clench, Darcy,” said Agent Coulson in her ear, his voice slow and soothing. This was not the first time he had to talk someone through their first torture. It never got any easier for the middle-aged agent. He knew that she would have trouble focusing on his words, so he kept his tone steady. “Relax into the pain, Darcy. It is okay to scream.” He kept repeating this, slow and soft.It wasn’t until the smell of burning fabric, and a slick feeling of blood pooling around her fingernails from biting into from her clenched fists, that her body started to really convulse. Coulson had Jarvis cut the audio feed from going out to all of the Avengers, leaving only himself with full coverage. The scream that finally came from the young woman was a new nightmare that the Avengers did not need.The electricity let up, Darcy gasping and crying through the comms.“We have no use for money, bonnie lass. But we will get something of use from you,” the man chuckled darkly from behind the woman with the cattle prod. “Doesn’t mean we won’t have a bit of fun before we do.”“Don’t react yet, Darcy,” came the voice in her ear. “Wait until the man’s attention is on you.”Darcy was still breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth. Darcy clenched her jaw, making eye contact with the woman with the prod, eyes burning in tears and rage. Darcy bit the inside of her check to prevent herself from reacting. The woman stuck her with the cattle prod against her other thigh.Coulson kept repeating the mantra through the headset, glad that it hadn’t shorted out. When the brunette girl’s screaming stopped, the agent asked, “Has Natasha taught you how to pick locks yet? Spit to the left if yes, to the right if no.” She spit the drool collecting in her mouth to the left.. “Now, tell us about the work being done in Tony Stark’s lab, and we don’t hurt you,” the blond woman said, melodiously. Irish Asshole 2 stepped back, letting Irish Asshole 1 take her place.The redheaded man started to caress the side of the Darcy's face that was starting to swell from his punch, pressing a thumb harshly into her cheekbone. “At least, not too much,” said the Irishman.“I’m going to kill you personally, you Irish Republic Army reject.” She finally said, staring directly into the tattooed man's eyes. A dark smile, one echoed on the agent on the other side of the line, graced Darcy’s face. “And your blond slut of a girlfriend over there. Normally, I don’t slut-shame women but a girl can make an exception when she is being tortured.”“I guess we’ll just have to keep having a little fun, then.” She leaned into the punch to the left side of her face, and relaxed her core when the left hand punch came to her gut. She had to force herself not to throw up.“Good, Darcy,” Coulson replied, his voice as calm and cool as clouds gathering before a storm. “You won’t be able to pick the locks if you are being electrocuted. Keep the man’s attention on you.”Between punches, Darcy used quite an array of insults to the Irishman’s heritage, his manhood, and his ugly face. Later, Coulson would say his favorite was, “I bet the last person who saw your dick was a paleontologist. They’re used to finding small bones after hours of digging through dirt.”“Okay, slow down on the insults. It’ll make them think he’s softening you up. When they bring out the electricity, start making some stuff up to buy time,” came Coulson’s response into her ear. Darcy did as he asked, while taking several punches to her kidneys. “You won’t be happy to hear this, but they’re keeping you in Buffalo. I know how much you dislike the Bills.”Darcy’s response, before she began to weave some believable lies when the cattle prod came out again, “Motherdick, I fucking hate you giant dick suckers.” Coulson knew that meant that she was still mad over how the Giant’s recently lost to the Bills.About five minutes, Coulson’s soothing voice in her ear turned serious. “Okay, Darcy. The Avengers are going to launch the rescue in 60 seconds. I’ll give you the count-down. Do what you need to do to stay alive until we get there.”Coulson started counting down out loud for Darcy’s benefit. He was coordinating the tactical teams. He didn’t need to tell remind the Avengers that this was a “salt-the-earth” rescue, but he did anyway.When the first explosion went off, Darcy released the cuffs on her wrists. The blond woman was standing to her right, the redheaded man to her left. She grabbed the blond woman’s arm, who was extending to electrocute her again, driving the prod into the crotch of the Irishman. She snapped the elbow of the blond viciously, throwing her at the other. They crashed to the floor hard.The guards, now at her back, rushed her. She was grabbed from behind and swung to face the other guard. The second guards came at her, gun down at his since they wanted to take her alive. Using that oversight to her advantage, but she braced her body against the man behind her, kicking out like a mule. The man in front of her got thrown into the door, collapsing to the ground. She and the other guard when flying back, tumbling over the table, knocking it over as they fell.She got to her feet first, taking a gun that had spilled onto the floor. The guard recovering against the door, noticing this, lifted his rifle to start firing. Before he had a chance, she landed a bullet between his eyes. She did the same to the other guard. She took their guns.The two guards down, she waited for the tattooed man to stand up. The blond woman was unconscious on floor, perhaps being knocked out in the spill. “I told you I would kill the two of you personally, you fuckers.” She stared them in the eyes, face devoid of expression, slightly favoring her right side.-Darcy now finally understood why all of the people in her life hated Medical. She had always thought that being in a comfy bed, not having to worry about food and watching whatever you wanted on TV, would be awesome. Instead, it was boring as hell and she hadn’t been there for more than 24 hours (Just in case, my ass, she thought savagely.)She had two broken ribs, second degree burns along her thighs, a bruised kidney, and a moderate concussion from the repeated head-trauma. Because of the concussion, she had had people in and out of her room since she landed in medical to make sure she didn’t sleep too long.A knock came to her hospital room door, “Ms. Lewis, would you like some company?” It was Agent Coulson, right on time for the next shift.“Come on in, G-Man,” she said, her voice was hoarse from screaming. The door opened, standing in his Hugo Boss suit despite only being cleared to walk that day.“I brought Netflix.” He waved his laptop at her, shuffling slowly but without any notable signs of pain, to connect the laptop to the TV.“Now you’re talking my jam.” She gestured to the chair near her bed, “Grab a seat. It’s been empty for more than 10 minutes, so I was wondering when the next one of you would take a shift.” Jane played Candyland and Uno with her. Thor had let her teach him to braid his hair. Clint had spent his shift trying to teach her how to cheat at poker. Natasha taught her how to do it successfully.She wasn’t paying attention, zoning out to the sound of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The silence in the room was heavy but bearable.“You did good, Darcy,” Coulson said, just loud enough for Darcy to hear him. “You did good.”-It was close to midnight, near the end of September, with a slowly sharpening bite to the air in the city. Darcy was restless, having taken to staying in the Tower almost full time since the kidnapping incident weeks ago.She had only been cleared for light physical exercise earlier that week. The Avengers, including Jane and Pepper, had been tiptoeing around Darcy since she exploded at them the first time they barred her from baking or knitting. Coulson was the only one she could stand, since he was in a similar predicament. He was on a treadmill at the far end of the Avengers gym.She hopped on a treadmill right next to him, and set it at an easy 15 minutes a mile pace to match the agent. Neither of them said a word until Darcy had hit her first mile.“Did you want to talk about it?” Darcy finally broke the silence. Coulson didn’t miss a stride, but he did take off his headphones, a calm female voice coming from the headphones.“No, I don’t want to talk about the Clint thing.” There was a slight huff to his words, betraying the fact that he was pushing his limit despite the easy pace.“I never said it was a Clint thing,” Darcy huffed out, slightly out of breath herself. She knew that it was a Clint thing. She had taken to sleeping almost exclusively in Clint’s apartment. He was the one that picked up Darcy when she had finally made her way to the exit of the abandoned factory, taking the guns and a belt of grenades she had found from her gently, wrapping her up in a hug before she collapsed. She was intimately aware of his state these past few weeks. She knew that he had been having even more trouble sleeping than normal.“But that is what you meant,” Coulson responded. Even though they were only making eye-contact through the gym’s walled mirror, Darcy could still feel Coulson’s laser eyes intensifying.“What I meant was that we could talk about anything that is bothering you? For example, how Shield changed form WA-544b. They modified ‘Act of God’ to ‘Act of God/Coulson’ as an acceptable reason why an agent loses a handgun in battle.” She had promised Director Fury a cinnamon apple pie to get that done.At the mile 2 marker, Coulson responded. “He kissed me,” he said, his particular shade of bland was stoic instead of his normal bland pleasantness. His breathing evened out, regulated perfectly under ruthless self-control. “After we rescued you.”Darcy wasn’t surprised. Clint was more methodical with distance. He could plan an op from a perch miles away and execute it perfectly. But, get too close or too personal, and his ability to reason and think before acting shot out the window. She let the silence linger, waiting for more of an answer.“That’s it,” was the Shield agent’s response. Darcy groaned so loudly, her healing ribs creaked a bit. “He came back later that week, after you were let out of Medical, and asked if I wanted to ‘talk about it.’ I told him it was fine.” Is he really that stupid? “He was afraid of losing you, hadn’t processed my near-miss. No harm, no foul.”“Wow, you really are that stupid?” Darcy gave voice to the thought in her head, impulsively.“Excuse me,” Coulson growled out, as low and dangerous as a wolf backed into a corner. Darcy wasn’t worried, she knew Natasha would have her back on this.“Just answer me one question and I swear that I will leave it alone,” She said, arms raised in the clear I don’t have any weapons posture. She saw herself in the gym mirror, walking at a slow clip with her arms up, and lowered them down in embarrassment at the sight.“If I don’t like the question, I’m going back to the Supernanny podcast and then this conversation is over.” Coulson could interrogate a suspected terrorist until they cried, without ever changing inflection or facial expression. Yet, he couldn’t stand being on the other side of it for very long.“Calm down, cujo.” She waited until the treadmill was at 2.5 miles. She stopped the treadmill, and turned her entire body towards Coulson. “Did you want Clint to kiss you?”Coulson stopped his treadmill immediately, not bothering to hit a full mile number as he normally would have done. He turned to look at Darcy, the brunette girl leaning gently against the arm rail of the treadmill. His face had gone remote, distant in a way Darcy hadn’t seen in well over a year. “What makes you think you have a right to that question, Ms. Lewis?”Darcy’s eyes narrowed in rage. “What makes me think I have a right?” She jerkily removed her headphones, stashing away her iPod into her pocket but seriously contemplating chucking it at the other man’s head. She collected her gym towel, throwing it over her shoulder, getting ready to storm out of the gym. “Ugh, fucking boys!”Before she turned to walk away, she caught a glipse of his face in the mirror. It looked exhausted. She paused, turned back to stare at him eye-to-eye, and his face was back to detached annoyance. It was like watching a candle flicker at the end of a dark hallway.“You know exactly why I have a right to that question, Agent Coulson?” Communicating clearly that the word she wanted to use was asshole. She started her breathing exercises again, fist clenching on the gym towel thrown over her shoulder.“I give Clint sibling loyalty,” she said, forcefully. The annoyance on Coulson’s face was snuffed out, left completely blank and statuesque. “I give him the chance to have a relationship with a person not based on sex, or secrets, or using him. To be goofy and fun, and not the sniper he’s been since he joined the army at 18. He gets the chance to be the brother he always wanted, and I get to be the sibling that never hurt him. Not even Natasha can say that.”She saw a brief shutter at the edges of Coulson’s face. She went on, righteous in her anger. She could have been a Renaissance painting of an avenging angel in that moment.“I give Natasha my vulnerability,” she ripped her head band off, taking her hair up into a high ponytail, to get it out of her face. “Because she feels she owes Clint and that, by taking care of me, she can pay him back a little bit. That, perhaps, by seeing how I learn to live with the fresh blood on my hands the new scars on my skin, she could relearn those parts of herself she thought died a long time ago.”She walked into his personal space, staring up into his cool blue eyes. Poking him, very gently, just over the scar on his chest.“And for you,” she said, keeping her finger pressed lightly over his heart. “You needed to know that I understood what they needed from me. That I would give it to them, even after I finally understood who and what they were. You needed me to know that you would do anything to keep your people safe.” With this pronouncement, her anger cooled, dying down to embers but ready to reignite at the slightest provocation.“I gave you everything you needed to keep your people safe,” she proclaimed as she turned towards the exit. Half-way across the gym, she turned to walk backwards in order to look Coulson in the eye as she left. “At first, it was for Clint’s sake. Now, also for Natasha’s. I would do it for you, too, you unmitigated asshole. If you’d just let me.” She twirled, at the last second, and grabbed the door handle.“I did,” she heard softly behind her.She executed the over-the-shoulder look she had been practicing under Pepper’s tutelage. She saw his eyes shutter, just a touch, at the look she cast him. Nailed it.“Tell him that. Get over whatever self-esteem bullshit that is in the way of you and Clint being happy and tell him that.” She left.On the way out, she muttered to herself, not even caring if Coulson heard. “God, boys are so fucking stupid. I’m going to take Pepper, Jane and Natasha out for a girls-only weekend.”-Coulson thrived on self-control. He was, of course, adaptable. But even in his most off-the-cuff moments, he always knew exactly who he was and what he was capable of. The last time he had felt personally out of control, he was working up the courage to kiss Charlotte Bryat in 10th grade. The last time he had been nervous about a boy, he was losing his virginity to Mitch Rossi in college.When he met Clint, the night after talking with Darcy, with an apology and promise on his lips, he had never been closer to losing it. When Clint straddled him on the archer’s living room couch and said “Phil, I’m here” the older man shook apart, utterly devoid of any semblance of self-control. Coulson’s voice shook under the weight of his apologies, tasting Clint’s tears on his dry lips. The older man ran his hands reverently along the archer’s cheeks, hands shaking.Their first kiss was desperate and gritty. Their second kiss tasted of rain and absolution.The next day, Darcy would find a signed and sealed copy of an antique Captain America propaganda poster, all dark colors and shadowy outline of Steve’s face, which the block letters proclaiming “A is for Victory.”The note attached to it read, “Because you’re my people too –Phil.”
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Some days, it still boggled Jane’s mind that she had been granted a team of astrophysicists and hordes of graduate students to lead the new initiative in Stark Industries on dimensional analysis, spectral analysis, applied physics, and high energy astronomy. The weird part was that it didn’t change much for Jane. Most of Jane’s most interesting projects where for Avenger’s eyes only. None of Jane’s team members (she refused to think of them as the Foster monkeys, despite Darcy’s insistence) stayed in New York full time. Projects that didn't need Jane’s direct involvement were conducted by the junior scientists, who often having to clock rotations in other observatories or specialty labs around the world. Her people rotated in and out of the New York office because they needed to meet with Jane or they were Culver graduate students coming for advisor meetings with Dr. Foster. Since a lot of the work was still theoretical, they mostly did video conferences to discuss work.The biggest difference for Jane was the fact that she now had two people around her who not only understood her streams of consciousness, but could redirect her detection equipment engineering frenzies in order to make them better. Tony and Bruce were her SCIENCE! Bros (that was one thing she had let Darcy convince her to keep). There were some things, though, that had not changed at all since she had started working for Stark Industries.“Goddammit, Jane!” Darcy exclaimed to the tiny scientist. The younger girl’s voice rose by increments as she stared down the astrophysicist. “I put the block in my work and personal calendar. I put it in your work and personal calendar. I practically wrote it in glitter glue across the entire tower!"“Darcy, you know I don’t check the calendars.” Jane knew that wasn’t exactly the most reasonable response. In her defense, Darcy had been working with Jane for well over a year now. “You should know this by now!”“Jane, Jane, Jane,” Darcy repeated, shaking her head, each successive Jane being more condescending than the next. “I left a post-it note on your bathroom mirror.” Darcy rose her right hand, all of her fingers extended. She immediately lowered her pinkie finger in a countdown motion.“I haven’t been using my own bathroom, I’ve been using the gym!” Despite popular appearances, Jane did, in fact, workout. Darcy and Jane were going to start training for a half marathon at the end of the month. “It is more convenient to the labs.”Darcy nodded her head, in a motion that clearly meant that was an acceptable response. She lowered her thumb, “I sent you an email every day since the beginning of last week.”The people in Jane’s section of the Special Projects labs started to fidget in their various positions. The first one got up to flee the brewing storm.“Well, you know I filter out certain words Darcy, why would you try email?” Jane threw back incredulously. In a habit that she picked up from Darcy, she started gathering up her disheveled hair in to a high pony tail. She used a rubber band located on her wrist, because she often couldn’t find any of her hairbands (Darcy stole a lot of them).“Ugh, fine,” Darcy conceded with a huff, not noticing another Foster monkey flee the scene. “But I definitely talked to Thor to remind you.” The ring finger went down triumphantly.“Do we really have to do this, Darcy?” Jane said, crossing her arms over her chest, moving away from Darcy at the entrance of the lab to take shelter behind her desk. And also to put herself in convenient reach of projectile weapons.“Yes, Jane. I’ve been looking forward to this for months. Literally, months. First it was the new job, then it was the alley way thing. Then Thor got back. Then last month happened. I deserve this Jane.” The younger girl started to pout, exaggeratedly, and caused her lower lip to tremble. “This is a 5-finger situation.” She waved her hand, two fingers still pointing up, towards Jane.“Okay, have it your way. But if you get to 5 fingers and you haven’t won the argument you have to let it drop.” At this pronouncement, Jane pointed at Darcy in accusation, reinforcing the seriousness of the situation. This was a system they had actually developed their first semester back at Culver together on Shield’s dime. The number of fingers determined the seriousness of the request, with 5 fingers being the highest. All accusations had to be countered, or they had to immediately comply with the demand being made. They used this to settle debates about everything for everything from movie-night snack lists to not accepting a group-date. “And you can’t retroactively count the calendar thing because you brought it up before you started your finger countdown.”“I accept these terms,” was Darcy’s only response.“Okay, the Thor thing is easy. Thor’s been gone more often than not for missions. I haven’t even seen him since the week before last, and when we do we’re otherwise occupied.”At this overshare, Jane had always been oblivious to social niceties, the rest of the lab started to clear out quickly except for the bravest of souls. As per usual, the scientists went to take shelter with the Banner minions because even Jane, as oblivious as she can be sometimes, remembered to keep things as chill as possible for the unassuming man.Darcy took a moment to contemplate this, “Fair point. Finally, I sent you a memo on official Stark Industries cardstock a few days ago to remind you.” After a brief hesitation, Darcy lowered her middle finger instead of her pointer finger.“Why would you do that?” Jane asked, befuddled. “That is stupid Darcy. Why would you do something stupid?”“I knew it would come down to a five-point argument, so I took steps.” Darcy’s smirk was sharp and mischievous.“Well, too bad, because I’m pretty sure one of the graduate students has been taking my memos so I never heard anything about it.” Darcy’s eyes shuffled to Sumaya, one of the only graduate students left in the area. The Pakistani girl had been helping Darcy keep Jane updated on important Stark news. Sumaya took the memos (memos were never classified above her paygrade), and gave Jane recaps during coffee breaks. Otherwise, the older woman would never think to read them. Dammit, she must not have thought it was serious. My own genius turned against me!Darcy crossed her arms, mimicking Jane’s prior stance. She took a moment to think of something else.Noticing the frustration on the younger girl’s face, “Just admit it Darcy, you don’t have a fifth. You thought you would get to me by now, but you didn’t!” Jane’s smile was breathtakingly beautiful on the normally focused woman’s face. This enraged Darcy.Darcy moved towards one of the now abandoned work stations. For someone who routinely forgot to eat and sleep because of science, Jane dodged the pen Darcy lobbed at her like a ballerina.“Darcy, stop throwing things!” Jane yelled, picking up a binder to use as a shield the projectiles that were to come. “Ugh, you child!”“I’m not being a child, you are being a child!” Darcy yelled out, in evident anger at the situation. She grabbed a stress ball shaped like a brain, and lobbed it at the petite scientist. It hit Jane in the shoulder with a squeak. The last of the scientists in the room cleared out completely.Darcy found a stash of murdered teddy bears, left over ones from an Avengers mission from months ago. Jane waved the binder around, and used it to start batting away the fuzzy projectiles coming in her direction. At one point, she hit away a teddy bear and launched it into a trash can over 10 feet away. “Why do you always throw things?”“Why are you trying to ruin my life?” She lobbed one that had a bullet hole through its forehead. “First, we start this new job. Then, the alley way thing. Then Thor comes back. And then, last month happened. I deserve this, Jane!” She shouted, as she continued to hurl teddies at Jane.“Fine! We can go to brunch on Sunday. But that’s all I’m going to agree to!” Jane said. Darcy launched the last teddy bear in the bin, one that had its fluffy guts spilling out from what looked like an arrow wound. It hit Jane square in the face. “Goddammit Darcy. That one hurt! Fine, we can do dress shopping too.” She conceded, rubbing her forehead.Darcy rose both her arms in victory.-It was a Saturday night, and Darcy had been looking forward to going on a date for weeks. While OKCupid was the literal worst, she figured it was slightly better and somewhat less shallow than Tinder. She was in a classic little black dress, halter strapped and modest but not too modest. It was Darcy’s new favorite first date dress.Her date was named Maurice, he was a forensic accountant for a Manhattan accounting firm and did cross-fit. Honestly, if he wasn’t also seriously into board games (there were several pictures on his profile with him at a board game convention), he would have been a hard pass. They were at an Ethiopian place in Harlem.“So, you mentioned you work for Stark Industries. What do you do?” Maurice, dressed in a well-fitted herringbone suit, carefully dug into a sambusa. “Please tell me it is more interesting than forensic accounting,” he said with a genuine smile. Darcy laughed despite the clearly rehearsed nature of the joke.“Well, my official title is Senior Research Administrator,” Darcy snorted at this pronouncement, while ripping off a corner of her savory pastry and stuffing it into her mouth. “Mostly, that means I handle all of the shi … crap, that the scientists can’t ever seem to handle.” She figured the whole, ‘I work with Avengers’ thing should wait for the third date. Also, trying not to cuss was a serious issue for the brunette.The dark skinned man just smiled at her, “I understand that. Half the guys in the firm are like, over 60, and still don’t understand the ‘cloud’ let alone about applying macros to flag high risk transactions.” He paused, “Okay, that’s probably not the same thing, but I think I know what you mean.” Darcy laughed.They were interrupted by the server, bringing a large tray with little piles of spicy meat or vegetable dishes over injera. It was an adventurous first date option, but Darcy was a go-big or go-home girl.“Okay, okay, okay,” Darcy began, “You still haven’t adequately explained to me what cross-fit is …” she was interrupted by the chirping of her cell phone. Darcy had silenced it earlier that evening and knew that Jarvis programmed it to only sound at an emergency. She grabbed her phone, swiping quickly to unlock it.“I’m sorry, I think I need to check this,” she said, looking at her phone. There was a text from Jane that read ‘Dinner with mom = not good. Pajama party in my room?’Pajama Parties were invoked in emergency situations only. The last one was the first night after Darcy was released from the hospital, waking up screaming at the memory of burning skin and the smell of gunpowder and blood. Jane had stayed up late, three nights in a row, to help Darcy try to get a good night’s rest.“Oh, dammit.” She looked at Maurice, dark eyes and goateed face clearly curious at what was going on. “Ugh, why did you have to be so cute?” She asked, wiping off her hands with a moist towelette that came with the meal. She started packing her things away in her purse. "This would have been better timing if you weren't."“Ummmm … thank you?” He asked in confusion. “Is everything alright?”“So, I had a friend emergency come up. Not one of those made up ones, like ‘oh my god my date is going so bad, so my roommate calls me saying they are locked out of the apartment’ kind of thing.” She stood up, grabbing her also new leather bomber jacket. “If this doesn’t freak you out, I will totally update you on the next date.”“Ummm … okay?” He was stuck on small sentence questions, because, with as many abs as he possessed, he had never had a girl walk out at the beginning of a meal with him.Darcy put her new coat on, looking down at her phone to submit a request for an Uber. “Okay, so I order from this restaurant all the time. They should have my information on file. Just tell them to charge the Lewis account.”She looked up from her phone to make one last moment of eye contact with the man before her. “Alright. So. Ugh.” She said, then started to walk away, waving at him in an awkward fast motion. “Thanks! Bye! Hope to see you again soon.”
Ugh, he was sooooo pretty!
-Within an hour, Darcy was in Jane’s living room in a new pair of blue Star Trek pajamas (blue is for sciences). Jane was in a space cat tank top and a pair of black pajama pants, pulling out pints of Ben and Jerry's from the freezer. Darcy removed packages of nutter butters and oreos from the cupboard. It all had labels that read ‘For Emergencies Only’, so Thor would know not to eat any of it.Darcy grabbed the Chunky Monkey ice cream that Jane laid out onto the kitchen counter, and grabbed spoons from the cutlery drawer. “Okay, so I just ditched probably the hottest guy I’ve had a chance to bang in years. His jokes were funny but not too funny. He didn’t even hint that he thought I was a glorified secretary. He might have even been relationship material.” She jabbed a spoon into Jane’s hand. “So, please tell me what’s wrong.”Darcy’s blue eyes sharpened to assess Jane, quickly softening when she noticed the slight smear of eye-liner at the edges of Jane’s eyes. Like she had to rub against her eyes, forgetting she had makeup on. Jane hadn’t even taken off her earrings, which was unusual because Jane wasn’t a fan of wearing earrings. The normally energetic woman, sometimes frenzied often focused, was drooping into her just opened Peanut Butter Fudge ice cream.“So, I told you my mom was in town,” Jane began, grabbing an oreo and scooping her ice cream on top of the cookie, taking a huge bite. “Because she would be abroad with her Greek boyfriend for Thanksgiving and this year I’m going to dad’s for Christmas.”“Uh-huh,” agreed Darcy. She was mumbling around a mouthful of nutter butter and ice cream stuffed into her mouth. She grabbed all the ice cream and the packs of cookies, moving to the couch to lay the bounty on the coffee table. Jane followed her. “I remembered your freak out when you learned Mr. Andrianopoulos, who might turn into your step-daddy number two, just turned 21.”Darcy grabbed the quilt blanket she had made for Thor, back to the arm-rest and feet in the middle, curled her legs in the quilt. Jane did the same on the opposite side of the couch.“Okay, so,” Jane’s exhale moved her whole chest. Her feet were cold under the quilt, causing Darcy to burst into goosebumps when they made contact with her significantly warmer feet. “So,” Jane paused again.Darcy’s worry grew exponentially. Jane was many things, reserved was not one of them. She nudged the older woman with her toes, “Hey. It’s okay. Take your time.” They took a moment to eat a few bites of ice cream in complete silence.“So, I invited her to dinner because I wanted to just, I don’t know.” She fidgeted with her hands, “Let her know that I’m doing well. Show her that I’ve,” she paused, in contemplation, and shrugged, “done better than she swore I would when I decided to go into the sciences like my dad instead of law like her.”“Yeah, we all need therapy for something and your reason is your mom.” Darcy said, a phrase much repeated between the two women on the couch. “The first time I met her she told me to fetch her a non-fat macchiato and that my cat-ear earmuffs were childish and that you should fire me.”“Yeah, that was awkward,” Jane admitted to Darcy. Jane had accepted her mom’s ‘pop-up’ invitation to lunch that day, which was where she got the news of her mom’s Greek mid-life crisis. “But not as awkward as how she opened up the dinner conversation with, ‘I just got diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ.’” Jane shrugged, a shrug that was filled with jagged edges and old emotional wounds. “Early stages, so the prognosis is very good but it signals the likelihood of more malevolent forms of breast cancer long-term.”“Wow,” was Darcy’s response. “That is awkward AF. Like …” she waved her spoon in the air. Not having any living family made Darcy both more prone to directness and also more sympathetic to family issues in other people. “How do you even handle a conversation opener like that? Even before you get your food.”“Is it weird that,” Jane paused, not finishing her question but jabbing her spoon into her ice cream like a little javelin. “Half the time while I was listening to her talk over me in order to, I assume, reassure me, all I could think was: Great, she managed to find a way to make our interactions all about her? Again.” Jane’s shoulders tightened, curling up defensively around her ice-cream. “That’s messed up, right? My mom just told me she had cancer and a part of me was just annoyed at her.”“Well,” Darcy’s voice had gone soft, a slight hitch in her voice. “She once wrote you out of her will in favor of her second husband’s kids. She has only been sober for the last year and, despite that, is still an incredibly shitty person. I think you are entitled to feel however you damn well please.”Darcy moved in her seat, sitting normally on the couch, and gestured to Jane to lay down to rest against her. Jane did this, face sad but still devoid of tears. “Of course, it still totally sucks that your mom has cancer. That definitely sucks.” Darcy started to run her hands through Jane’s thin but perfect white girl hair. “This could maybe be an opportunity to try to actually reconcile with her, but it doesn’t wipe away your history or suddenly qualify her for saint-hood.”“I know that,” Jane’s voice was heavy, like she was trying to talk around broken glass. “I really do.”“Okay, then. What do you need?” Darcy soothed the petite scientist, relaxing back into the couch, looking at the ceiling with her eyes closed.“I want to bitch about her and come up with some insulting puns about her Greek boyfriend. Cry a little. Try to think of some of the stuff I actually like about her. A little more crying. Then go back to hating her a little bit but figuring out how to be a good daughter anyway.” Jane sounded like she was falling asleep.“We can do that,” Darcy began. “You can start with the time in college she stopped paying your tuition and forced you to take on student loans you only just managed to pay off.”Jane laughed, a wet and wild sound, but laughed with her whole body. “God, did I even tell you why she did that?”“No, you never mentioned it,” Darcy responded.“So, her second husband, Leo from London, right …” Time had dulled the sharpest edges of the worst of the experiences, the company and the situation finally allowing the situations to be seen with humor rather than rage. Jane laughed in a way that shook her whole body, tears in the corners of her eyes, and punctuated with snorts that she was often embarrassed about.-Darcy and Jane had staged a coup in the Avengers common room, three packs of hard apple cider and Rocky Horror Picture Show queued up on the massive HDTV in the living room. Jane got into the cult classic while she was still a graduate student, attending a live show when her cohort mates dragged her kicking and screaming from the labs. Jane introduced Darcy the prior year. For her second year, Darcy was determined to memorize the dialogue and practice the audience participation portions of the viewing.Jane had sent Thor out with Clint, Natasha and Steve. They were going drinking out on the town just after dinner and should be out for the rest of the evening. Darcy had given Bruce and Tony back their “stretchy pants” project to keep them occupied. She had taken it from them weeks ago when they redirected the power away from the biology labs for their project, ruining cell samples that set back the biology section's work by months. Since none of them had Ph.Ds. in biology, Bruce’s expertise in the area was a secondary specialty not a primary one, Darcy routinely had to make sure the SCIENCE! Trio didn’t pick on the biologists.Darcy and Jane had just stood up to start doing the Time Warp when the elevator to the common room opened up. Steve was being held up by Thor. Natasha was riding in on Clint’s back with her black heels in hand over her shoulder like a conquering queen.“Rocky Horror! Woo!” Clint shouted, jumping in a practiced motion that Natasha used to somersault off his back. “Jane, please tell me you’ve lifted my ban and I can come this year?”Jane narrowed her eyes at the archer, in the midst of a vigorous pelvic thrust, “You threw up on my favorite flannel.”“But I bought you five new ones!” He exclaimed, while jumping over the couch to pick up an apple cider from the pack. “And I know these ciders are mine, so don’t even try to get offended.” Clint rarely got drunk, only doing so when he was with people he trusted and, therefore, he only really had sweet but weak drinks like cider.“Fine, you can join this year,” Jane started cackling when Clint swept Darcy up into a spin. Natasha crept towards the kitchen, grabbing her favorite vodka from the freezer, and snacks that she would force Steve to eat. “But Darcy called dibs on Colombia and I’m Magenta.”“What is this festivity that you wish to partake in, Friend Hawkeye?” Thor boomed from the entrance, shuffling a drunk Steve toward the couch.“Wash that?” Steve gestured to the TV screen. He slapped his hand to his face, “Why did I leh you guysh test my toleransh?”Natasha smirked, shoving an entire box of protein bars in his direction, “Because I wanted to see how fast you recovered from Asgardian mead. For reasons.” Darcy had taught her that phrase only weeks ago.“Oh, no no no no no. You guys aren’t going to ruin this for me and Jane! You guys zip it and watch the movie. Just do what Jane and I do, or get out.” Darcy exclaimed, continuing to dance to the song in glee, hair flying all over the place.Jane gestured to Thor, having him come stand next to her in front of the TV, where Darcy and Clint were already dancing like fools to the song. “This is called the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Don’t try to make sense of it. It doesn’t make any sense. People dress up in costume, imitating the characters, and go to shows where the audience interacts with the show on Halloween. I explained Halloween to you, right?” Said Jane, using her hands to show Thor exactly how he should be dancing to the music before him.“Aye, my lady. Darcy has supplemented my knowledge about this night of revelry.” Thor said, as the song finished and staring down in fondness at the woman before him. The song wrapped up, the Avengers and friends all started occupying cushioned seats in the area. Thor and Jane on a love seat. Clint and Steve took up a majority of the space on a large couch, with Darcy and Natasha perched on arm rests on either side of the two men.“Going to Rocky Horror,” Darcy explained, “Is like … the ultimate modern Halloween experience. People dress up in drag, they watch a film that is silly but also pretty progressive about gender, sexuality, and freedom of expression.”Jane pointed her cider at Darcy, “Awwww, you remembered my speech to convince you to go up on stage at the first show.”Darcy grabbed a few M&Ms from Steve’s hand, who was guzzling them by the handful, and lobbed some at the brunette. She missed, hitting Thor in the face, who laughed at the display. “Trick, please. You should have just told me that the best fake orgasm competition would win me a free dildo. I would have been up on that stage much faster.”The rest of the group, either tipsy or drunk, watched the exchange in amusement. “Ish that man in a corsh … in a corshet?” Steve pointed at the TV screen, his voice clearing up slightly, his super soldier healing already working to sober him up.At that moment, Tony and Bruce, covered in stray straps of various colored fabrics, walked into the room. Tony’s hair was currently in a severe cowlick, and Bruce’s face was slightly sooty for some reason.“Are we doing Rocky Horror? Why didn’t I know we were doing Rocky Horror?” Tony pointed at Darcy in accusation, “This is your doing, you vile evil science denying woman. Isn’t it?” Darcy just stuck her tongue out at Tony.Bruce, a hand at Tony’s lower back, steered him to a couch. “Hmmm … I haven’t seen this movie since graduate school.” A wistful look came over the curly haired man’s face, “I dressed up as Brad with Betty as Janice.”Jane lifted her little first, “Air fist bump.” She said to Bruce, pumping her fist in his direction as he returned the motion from his mirror position in a love seat across the room. “All the best scientists love Rocky Horror.”Darcy gasped, “Jane Jane Jane,” as Frank N Furter started singing about being a sweet transvestite in the background. “Jane Jane Jane, pay attention to me.” Natasha, at some point, had rearranged the seating arrangement, was leaning against Darcy’s legs and had her legs stretched out on both Steve and Clint. She had Clint rubbing her feet. Natasha passed Darcy a bag of marshmallows, appearing in the redhead’s hands like magic. Darcy threw them at Jane. Thor caught them in his mouth, with shrieks of laughter from Jane.“What Darcy?” Jane said, grabbing some of the lobbed marshmallows and popping them in her mouth. Jane knew that if she ignored Darcy long enough, that she might get sweet treats thrown at her. But if she ignored the brunette for too long, then it would become non-edible solid objects. Jane was the best one at figuring out where that line was.“I have the best idea!” At this pronouncement, most of the room froze in silence. Most of Darcy’s ‘best ideas,’ thus far, had ended in humiliation and hilarity for all the Avengers.Jane made eye contact with Darcy. Darcy smirked slowly at Jane. The older woman’s answering smile was wide and happy and brilliant, a smile that not many in the room had seen from the rather reserved Jane.“Yes,” Jane rose her hands up in front of her, fingertips to fingertips, “Excellent.” One set of fingers at a time, she began tapping them together in repeating rhythm. “Most excellent.”-Everyone was on board almost immediately. Natasha and Clint, because Darcy asked them. Thor would have done it no matter who asked. Bruce and Tony were easily convinced when Jane invoked the “SCIENCE! Bros” code. The only hard sell, from the set of all the Avengers and Friends, were Pepper and Steve. Coulson, using the ‘I just recovered from a mortal wound and we need to keep my survival secret from the World Security Council for a little while longer’, managed to get out of the affair.It finally all came to fruition when Jane had gotten Bruce, the painfully reserved scientist, to invite Pepper. With his puppy-dog eyes, shy smile, and a cute story about how much he loved going to Rocky Horror in graduate school, the strawberry blond woman melted into fond acceptance. Where Pepper went, Steve could hardly refuse to follow.The headlines the day after Halloween would show a picture of the group of nine people, in a theater in Midtown, dressed in Rocky Horror Costumes. The headlines read, “Rocky Horror Avengers Show.”In the very middle of the picture, Jane was smiling widely and was dressed in a tasteful but still sexy maids outfit. She had crazy hair, temporarily dyed magenta, with two white streaks in it. Darcy’s face was pale and lips a shocking red, smiling just as blindingly. She had one arm thrown over the shoulder of the older woman. Darcy was dressed in an almost entirely gold sequined get up, with a gold tuxedo jacket, black sequin bustier, short shorts, sequined top hat, and fishnets.Thor was standing behind the girls, dressed up as Riff-Raff, in a deep-v white shirt, a raggedy tailcoat and bald top mullet wig. He was smiling brightly. To Thor’s right, Tony was standing between Bruce and Pepper, his arms thrown over each of their shoulders. Tony and Pepper were in their Brad and Janet costumes, preppy clothes galore. Pepper was Brad and Tony was Janet. They even had the correct undergarments on under the outfit, and would be stripping down to them later in the evening in the dark of the theater when the show began (Pepper only agreed to this because Tony had a portable cell-phone jamming device he created specifically just to disrupt any smartphones from taking photos). Bruce was Eddie, in a leather jacket with leopard print lapels, no undershirt, a saxophone and fake head wound just to the left side of his forehead. He was smiling brightly, face to the side and looking down shyly away from the camera.To Thor’s left, Clint was between Steve and Natasha, using their shoulders to jump in the air in enthusiasm. Clint was beaming in his corset, high heels and stockings. He was amused by the reactions his perfect ass was getting as Frank N Furter. Natasha was smiling, the smile she used in public that was friendly and open. It was a completely fake smile. Underneath that, she was genuinely amused. She was in the exact same outfit as Clint, wearing it only slightly better than the archer next to her. Though, she had a green hospital gown ready to put on with fake-bloodied gloves to differentiate her from her best friend. Steve was in a gold thong but he did have most of his body covered in mummy like wrappings. No one had manage to convince him to just do the thong (everyone particularly shut up after his comment, “How am I supposed to hide any weapons if I just have to dress as Rocky only in a thong?” Darcy was the only one brave enough to make the comment, “I not sure most people would care about you hiding your weapon.”). He was not body-shy, the army firmly removing any such qualms, he was worried about most about the imminent threat of groping.Despite the crazy amounts of attention the Avengers received that night and by proxy, Jane and Darcy, the two girls had a fabulous time. Since they got caught up in the world of magic and superheroes, they hadn’t had much of an opportunity to just be normal people outside of the Tower. Despite being able to stand shoulder to shoulder with gods and monsters, their relative vulnerability turned a simple night out into a test of paranoia and properly executed security protocols.In this moment, buried under makeup and costumes, they were relative unknowns in a group of famous people. It meant, for once, they didn’t have to worry about a crowd and could leave that up to other people. Darcy, still struggling with the panic that snuck up on her at random moments and still sleeping at the Tower, smiled brightly underneath her make up. Jane, because of the stress of her job and the complications of her family, could just enjoy the moment. Being surrounded by some of the best and most dangerous people in the world, the two women had the opportunity to relax and enjoy themselves.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Darcy was in the Avengers only labs, after deciding to take a break from Special Projects for a day. For once, she did not have to run roughshod over anybody because her people were well rested, paperwork was done, and the minions were leaving her alone after bribes of better coffee and brownie bites. Instead, she was scrolling on Pinterest looking for some baking recipes for Thanksgiving. She didn’t have firm plans for the holiday, but she just had a feeling that it was a good idea to be prepared. I think I’m going to make a cheesecake this year, Darcy thought.Jane and Tony were hunched over a freshly brewed pot of coffee that Darcy had made. Bruce was fiddling with a set of solid-state contactor relays that the other two had built to operate a proof of concept interdimensional portal detection array. The project was the corner stone of a planned network of satellites that could eventually interfere or even block portals from forming around the world. Jane and Tony hadn’t had a break in over 8 hours. Bruce was the only one with fresh eyes and the particular expertise in high energy photons that was useful for this stage of development.“Are you teaching Jarvis terrible things again?” Tony had a shuffled over to Darcy, massive mug of steaming coffee in his hands. He was holding one of the specialty mugs Darcy bought, his looking like a hollowed out Iron Man helmet. Tony’s eyes were red, five o’clock shadow ruining the carefully preserved lines of his goatee.Darcy, with her reading glasses on, looked up from the MacBook Pro. She had gotten it specifically just to piss off Tony when he insulted her iPod when they first met. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Jane shuffle slowly out of the lab, with her huge space cat mug in hand (Bruce had a massive snoopy mug).“Pinterest recipes, I’ll have you know,” she responded to the disheveled man before her. “Also, I only helped him update his language routines, not like, commit any crimes you haven’t already had him commit before.” The look she threw was as pure and innocent as the snow after a devastating blizzard.“He started to respond to people only in song lyrics.” His hands looked like they wanted to fidget or wave around in gesticulation, but it was like they couldn’t bring themselves to let go of the delicious heat of the coffee. “Even worse, he only used Lady Gaga lyrics with me. What does that even mean?”Darcy cackled. She was the one who told Jarvis to do that just to mess with Tony’s head. “So we might have miscalculated how the update would interact with his pop culture indices.”“Okay short-stacks, the two of you have some mad skills …” Tony began.“Dude, no one says mad skills anymore,” Darcy interjected.Tony went on like he heard nothing, “But it’ll take the two of you decades …”“I think you just, like, implied that you were old,” she threw in, twirling a lock of her hair in her finger and voice like a stereotypical sorority girl.“Before you are anywhere near as good as me.” He finished with taking a massive sip of his coffee.“Well your code's naming convention looks like it was designed by a drunk toddler,” she said, arms folded and glare promising death.Tony choked on his coffee, his responding laugh came from deep inside his belly. His laughter caused his head to tilt slightly to the right. He brought up one of his hands, resting the side of it against his mouth. Almost like he was hiding his smile.“I think that’s the first time anyone has insulted my coding. Especially a code that I invented myself.”Darcy shrugged in a whatcha-gunna-do kind of motion, “I calls um like I sees um.”“I might actually have been drunk at the time. I think I was 16, maybe 16 and a half, just about to graduate from MIT.” He said, around a mouthful of burning coffee, his tongue long since desensitized from the wonderful heat. “I'm pretty sure it was the first time Rhodey agreed to let me get drunk with him at MIT, all righteous and only 20 himself.”“Hmm, that actually makes a lot of sense.” Darcy spun in her chair, feeling pretty antsy without having any major projects on her docket to focus her. “Also, I apologize. Once I realized it was half in Italian, it was suddenly beautifully intuitive. You know, except for the fact that I had to learn to read and write Italian.”“Parla italiano?” Tony asked, voice haggard taking on an extra layer of smoothness.“Mi dispiace, ma non parlo bene l'italiano,” she said, face screwed up in concentration like she was trying really hard to say it correctly. Tony’s smile at the girl caused the corners of his face to crease in laugh lines.“I heard Natasha say your Russian accent wasn’t awful, which is high complement from her,” he admitted in amusement. “So, I’m almost surprised that your accent is that terrible. I mean, considering I speak 5 languages fluently, and 3 passably, you could say I’m an expert at this.”“That’s because that is the extent of my verbal Italian.” She turned her chair perpendicular to Tony, so she could prop her feet up on her desk. “How do you even know Italian?”“It was my first language, along with English.” He shrugged, the kind of smoothness that was awkward because it was too practiced. “My mom was Italian,” he added, in an uncharacteristic share of familial information. He stared at the brunette girl before him, eyes contemplative, like he was seeing her but not seeing her at the same time.“Well, I’ll have you know, Bolt Brains,” Darcy said as she pulled out a pack of twizzlers from her candy safe that Natasha and Coulson had helped her secure (she made them a breakfast quiche in exchange). She handed out a twizzler to Tony before he even had a chance to beg for one, “That programming languages don’t count. Once I’m done with Russian, it will be language number 4 for me. I’ll probably know more than you by the time I’m your age.”“Bolt brains isn’t clever,” he said munching around the first piece of food he had eating in close to 7 hours. “You’re a baby, so I guess I’ll give you that point.”Darcy snorted, a short and soft sound that sounded familiar, while she lifted her fist for a fist bump. Tony complied with relish. “By the way, I heard Jane tell me yesterday that the power unit for the prototype needed a second look.”“Hmmm … well, as long as it isn’t connected to anything just yet, it should be fine.” Tony waved his hand dismissively. Darcy’s eyes narrowed in concern.“Does Bruce know that?” Darcy asked.The sound of an electronic discharge was one that both Darcy and Tony were very familiar with. In fact, neither of them reacted right away when they heard it. For Darcy, this was because that her time around Jane’s old equipment, held together mostly by duct tape and a prayer, fizzled and popped sometimes. There have been almost no explosions in her life in the last few months that weren’t in contexts that she wanted explosions to occur in. In her head, she had nothing to worry about.For Tony, who had spent most of his life making things explode either deliberately or accidentally, had long learned to never react with panic in a lab. Instead, he entered a kind of zen state when he sensed danger. All nonessential information, like turning off lights in the house you aren’t using, went out of his head. That energy directed his full attention to mentally reviewing all of the information about the technology in the lab, predicted the likely changes Bruce had made coupled with the voltage and design of the powering device, and its relative proximity to volatile chemicals.In that blink of an eye, he knew that the device was going to explode. He even calculated the estimated damage radius of the explosion.The next thing Darcy knew, she was being grabbed her around her waist and Tony was running her to the door of the lab. The door wasn’t very far away but before they could completely clear the door, the explosion echoed out behind them, driving them off of their feet. Tony had turned just a second before the explosion went off, moving his arm from around Darcy’s waist to over her head. He landed in a crouch over the brunette, shielding her from flinging debris.Though he couldn’t hear his own voice, Tony knew he was shouting, “Hulk Delta, Jarvis” over and over again. Hulk Delta was the fourth in a series of protocols Tony had developed to deal with potential Hulk out situations while in the labs. This one locked down all of the most vulnerable points in the Tower, attempted to subdue the hulk with non-lethal measures, and directed people to evacuate out of the Hulk’s most likely escape routes.When the extra layer of security doors rushed behind them to lock down the lab, Tony rolled over to check on Darcy. While his ears were still ringing, he did see he could see her lips moving. “Hulk Zero,” he thought he saw. Darcy had also taken the liberty to lay down contingencies for these situations. But, unlike Tony, her protocol wasn’t about safety so much as it was a move to prevent Bruce from freaking out too much after he came back to his senses. It would track the Hulk if he managed to escape, manage traffic patterns to move around the Hulk, make a log of any collateral damage, and launch PR control. She knew, more than the structural damage that the Hulk could do, that Banner would appreciate knowing that she had taken care of everything after the fact.Despite their ears ringing violently and an extra layer of a ultra-durable plastic composite to contain the Hulk, they could still somehow hear the building roar like a coming freight train, originating from behind them. Through the clear walls, they could see Bruce hunched over, expanding rapidly and skin darkening to a violent shade of green. They were both unafraid.-Bruce finally woke up hours after the event, having completely destroyed the lab before the sleeping gas he developed finally knocked him out. Darcy had an itinerary ready for Bruce. It a trip to Brazil, his recovered doctor’s bag from India, and a travel guide.He had been gone for two weeks, with no clear sign when he would return.After the Hulk incident, the Tower had been emptier than normal. Natasha had requested more long term missions to keep her out of the Tower. Steve was somewhere in Europe, running a mission with the redhead. Clint and Coulson were on a holiday in Tahiti, courtesy of Tony when he found out that Coulson actually had a birthday instead of an “activation day.” In all likelihood, they were on a mission for Fury because that was the only reason Darcy could think of that would convince the pair to accept that offer. Thor and Jane were on Vanaheim, partially because Thor was a little antsy having the scientist anywhere near a destroyed lab and partially because Thor mentioned something about a spatial “convergence.” He promised Jane that could see some of the earliest signs of it in the far off world if she wanted to come along. Tony and Pepper had flown to Miami a few days ago, to Stark Headquarters, to prep for the end of the end of the year stakeholder meeting the following month.Darcy was in her room in Clint’s apartment. It was Saturday night and she had a brunch date with Maurice the next day in Manhattan. So, she crashed in the Tower instead of going back to Queens. It was late at night, silent in her room high above the Manhattan skyline. She had been tossing and turning for the last hour but unable to fall asleep since her first nightmare of the night woke her up short of breath.“Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis’ voice came lightly from the walls.“Wassap, Jay?” She wiped at her face, her eyes burning from tiredness after a second night in a row without good sleep. There was a crease indented across her face from being pressed against a pillow.“I believe there is something that needs your attention,” came the reply.“Pull it up on my Starkpad, Jay,” she said as she reached for the tablet on her nightstand. She rubbed the fuzz out of her eyes, squinting sharply at the bright display that lit up with her touching it. She saw that it was 1:59 am in the morning.On the tablet was a video stream of Tony in what she recognized was his Miami workshop. From the time stamp, she knew that it was live streaming. There were bits of circuitry, metal, and tools scattered all around his lab. He was building another Iron Man suit.“Jay, why would Tony working on Mark 21 or so need my attention?” Darcy was one of only four people that were allowed to see the suits up close, let alone some of their exposed circuitry. She had even designed some offensive hacking software for the suits to deploy in case the battles Tony entered were digital and not just physical. Though, it had taken both her and Jarvis weeks to get her permission to do that. Ultimately, she reminded Tony that her job was to, in any way she could, help him. “Other than that it is one in the goddam morning, which isn’t unusual for Tony.”“For clarification, Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis began, when she noticed that pieces of the suit started to zip around the lab on their own. His voice took on an interesting tone, one she had not heard before. Something sneaky. “It is not one. You should double that number.”“Well shit,” Darcy said. “How many were hidden from me and how many are newly built since I checked in on the progress of the Iron Legion three weeks ago?”“I’m afraid I am not at liberty to say, Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis regretfully stated. Based on his response, Darcy deduced that Tony had asked but not ordered Jarvis to not say anything about the new suits. A direct order from Tony could force the normally honest AI to lie to Darcy, which would have prevented him from even showing her this information. But, a direct order was tantamount to a nuclear option in the little family that Tony built. Therefore, Jarvis had the leeway to follow the letter of Tony’s request but fudge on its spirit.On screen, she saw Tony get swarmed by the last pieces of the suit, flying at him at high speeds, knocking him a few feet and launching parts of the electronic armor all over the lab. “Okay, Jarvis. I assume Pepper is asleep?”“I did not feel Ms. Potts should be disturbed on this matter,” was Jarvis’ response. Ahhh, he didn’t think Pepper would be able to help with this situation.Darcy finally managed to heave herself out of bed. She left her room, heading to Clint’s living room to set herself up in front of the television there, which was equipped with video-conference tech. “Raise the lighting in here to my book reading levels” she said as she pulled out her copy of Ender’s Game from underneath Clint’s coffee table. She flipped it open to a random spot and placed it face down on the table. She curled up on the couch with a purple knit blanket she made for the archer last week, legs under herself and tablet propped on her knees.“Alright, don’t tell him you let you told me anything. Just tell him that I am asking to speak with him,” she said tapping away at the tablet in her hands. She was brightening it to light up her face in a way she was sure would emphasize the bags under her eyes.Tony’s face came up on the screen within a few moments. In high definition and at that size, she could see a faint greyness to his face. Darcy also recognized day old foundation, smudged at the corners of his eyes, which he had been using to cover up what was likely weeks of inadequate sleep. She knew what that looked like from personal experience.“Shouldn’t all the good girls and good boys be in bed by now? Dreaming of bubble gum fairies or whatever it is children are supposed to be doing?” His voice held a sharp edge to it, a subtle tone of insult that she hadn’t heard in months.“Nightmare, couldn’t sleep,” she said, truthfully but not honestly, while trying to appear like she wasn’t quite focused on him. She rubbed at the corner of an eye with her pajama sleeve, like she could wipe the nightmares away with force of will alone. Darcy had never been above emotional blackmail. “No one in the Tower but me.”She looked into his eyes on the TV screen for a long, pregnant pause. Tony’s face, which was blank in a way that hid deep undercurrents of tension, relaxed a fraction. “So, you called me?” He asked in genuine bewilderment.“It helps. To check on everybody to make sure they are okay.” She shrugged, a shrug that older adults saw and dismissed as indifferent but was actually used to pointedly direct conversations. “When I saw that you were up too, I figured some company couldn’t hurt.”Tony took a moment to evaluate the girl before him. “This the first time you’ve checked up on me in the middle of the night?” The question was aloof, almost disinterested.She forced herself to drop her weary act, eyes sharpening at the line like she had only just recognized a sign of a guilty conscience. Tony felt her gaze like he was sitting at the bottom of a deep, empty well and somebody threw down a glow stick, illuminating everything briefly in its path to the bottom. “Should I have been, Mr. Stark?” Her voice calm. Pepper called him Mr. Stark as a jest and a promise. For Darcy, ‘Mr. Stark’ was an accusation and a demand.The silence dropped between the two like a skipped heartbeat. “How have you been sleeping, Tony?” She asked, dropping her chin to her chest, rubbing the bridge of her nose in order to fight off a brewing headache.“Hey, I’m fine. Have you seen some of the shit I’ve made in the last few weeks? I’m fantastic.” She could hear it in his voice, that he had plunged well beyond the edges of exhaustion. “And … you’re not believe a word of this, are you?”“No, Tony. I’m not.” She finally looked up. Tony’s face was pointed down, palm covering his tired eyes. When he moved, he transitioned to massaging the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “Not that you haven’t done some great shit.” He forced himself to smile at this.Darcy choked on some of her own truths, trying to talk around them like a poisoned pill trapped in her mouth. “I knew how much effort I put into seeming like everything was okay after I was kidnapped. If anything, this reassures me that you aren’t more well-adjusted than I am. You’re just better at hiding it.” She knew a fall out had been coming, she just didn't realize how well he had hidden it from her, far better than she had anticipated.He let out a huff of breath. “I’ll give it to you kid, you do cut through the bullshit. But I’m not ready for a Dr. Phil.” Tony, his heart protected by metal and an unfathomable energy device, would never be ready for a Dr. Phil.Darcy snorted, “Dude, you think any of us like to talk? Most of our quirky little fucked up family would literally rather be mortally wounded than talk to a shrink. Sometimes having someone know that you’re fucked up is enough. Others have done it for me, so I can do that shit for you.” With that pronouncement, she slumped over on the couch. She curled up on a pillow, stretching out languidly. “I’m not asking you to tell me why you can’t sleep. Just call me at ass o’clock in the morning and tell me about the progress you're making on the Mark 20-something you’re working on back there.”“Don’t even pretend you don’t know it is significantly higher than that. I was only 34 the last time you’ve checked, and this little bugger,” he raised up a gauntlet that he had been tinkering on. His head tilted up shamelessly and with pride at his deception about how many suits he had actually created without her realizing, “This is Mark 42.”He started telling her about the subdermal tracking chips he had made and implanted. He talked flight programming, while she murmured back suggestions for improving signal relay and maximizing economy of motion through the code. At some point, he got sidetracked so severely, that he started mumbling out equations for improved repulsor blasts that didn’t sacrifice heat for concussive force. She mumbled out suggestions to his math while she fell mostly into a doze. Her silent laughter caused her head to tilt into her pillow. She moved her hand, resting the side of it against her mouth. Almost like she was hiding her smile. He responded to every sound with greater exaggeration, more insane anecdotes, anything to keep the girl smiling sleepily.At some point, he transitioned to talking about his next planned suit, the Mark 43. “I think I’m going to name her Veronica,” he started frantically using the holograms forming around him to show the tired girl his vision of what the behemoth would look like. “I’ve made significant improvements in the carbon-fiber reinforced polymers and titanium alloy mix. It should significantly improving force distribution upon massive impacts, without sacrificing dexterity in structure.”Half asleep with visions of metal titans and beams of lights flashing behind her eyes in a dream that was strangely more relaxing than terrifying, she mumbled out, “You don’t have to build him a ‘just in case’ to make him come home. People always want to come home.”If she had opened her eyes, she would see Tony staring at her, face bewildered and soft and a touch sad. At nearly four in the morning, when Darcy finally drifted off, he whispered, “Good night, kid.” He left the video feed on while he worked until daylight on the individualized flight system for the Mark 42. His eventual sleep, while not great, was better than he had had in weeks.-“You’re an asshole, you know that right?” Darcy was screaming over the Bluetooth in her ear. She scurried between the holographic displays in Tony’s workshop in the Avengers Tower.“Hey, kid. Now really isn’t a good time be having this conversation,” Tony huffed through the comms, as he approached a large shipping yard. There were behemoth yellow cranes and flashes of red glows shaped like bodies in the distance. “How about I take you to a nice dinner, you like shawarma? And we can talk about this then?”“You’ve been out of contact for days!” Darcy screeched, jagging at the terminal, coding in a frenzy. “Next thing I know, the POTUS is kidnapped and I see Jarvis launching the ‘House Party Protocol.’ Which, I’m looking at this shit and it is impressive.”“Okay, well,” he clicked his teeth together. “Are you calling to be useful in some way? I’m about to go save Pepper single-handedly,” Darcy could hear Rhodey snort at the statement, “and things are about to get hairy, even for Iron Man.”“Well, I was going to tell you that I directed your suits to a different flight configuration (think ducks in a v formation), it should get them half a minute or two faster. Which, hey, considering what Jarvis just told me, I’m going to say that every minute counts. Yes?” She continued on completely ignoring his attempt to interject. “Also, your different suits have different sensor capabilities, so I’m helping Jarvis do some last minute polishing on the code to make sure that certain suits take on the brunt of the processing for that. It should help improve response time and the ability to track multiple targets.”Tony’s verbalized ‘huh,’ rocks his chest a bit. Each time he heard what she could do with his own code impressed him. “Hey, so have I given you a bonus yet? I think that’s something I’ve done for my assistants in the past. You should get a bonus.”“I’m not your assistant, Tony,” was Darcy’s fond comeback.“Well, too bad. You’re getting a bonus anyway.” Tony started to follow behind Rhodey as they approached closer and closer to where the President is being kept. The first ring of gunfire comes up. “I’m thinking I’m going to make a Stark Laptop. Get rid of that blasphemy you call a MacBook.” Darcy’s laughter was free and joyous.“Okay, I’m not going to be much use when the actual battle goes down. That’s all you and Jarvis there, buddy. I’m going to nut up and start damage control for you and Pepper. I'll whip the Stark Board in line, run interference with Shield and other government agencies, and handle PR. So you come home to a clean house.” Darcy’s promises were always grand, because Darcy only made them to the kind of people that deserved her at her most ferocious. Tony even believed her in that moment. “You’ll have your face on the New York Times in the next fifteen minutes for saving the President if I have my way about it.”“Okay kid, don’t stay up too late. The missus and I have a hot date and an evil Lite-Brite to exterminate. Call you back in 15 for quotes for the NYT. I’ll even get you President Ellis’ signature.” Tony was his most arrogant when he was the most determined to make that arrogance a reality.“Meh, he may be a moderate Republican, he's still a Republican. I can do without it.”Tony went into the battle, a battle he knew that contained the very real possibility of taking Rhodey and Pepper away from him. He lifted his gun, a smile on his face, a joke on his tongue, and was reassured that at least some of his people were safe and far away from this threat.-Tony was standing at the wall-to-wall windows of the Avenger Common Room staring at the sunset, purple overtaking the sky like a spreading bruise. He had his favorite Iron Man mug in hand, full of half-caff coffee because he wasn’t allowed full caffeine since his surgery to remove the shrapnel from his chest. Tony contemplated the changes in his life that the last month had wrought. Everything had been turned upside down. Through some strange alchemy of chance, skill and desperation, the terrible in his life been converted into a gift.Bruce left and Tony hadn’t heard from the unassuming man since he departed for Brazil. The radio silence was a knife to the chest for Tony. Tony had never been so scared to ask him to come home to help cure Pepper, afraid that Bruce was gone for good. Bruce showed up at the Tower the next day, slightly tanned from the Brazilian sun. He had lost a few pounds and trimmed his wild mop of curls. Tony’s heart nearly burst from his chest at the sight of him. He swept Bruce up into a hug that would have hurt were it another man. And, even better than Bruce's return, Bruce had helped him perfect the Extremis virus and developed a cure that would remove the virus completely from one’s system. This had helped Tony to recover from his operation in days instead of weeks, with no side effects.The news that Pepper had been exposed to the unrefined version of the virus for too long was like a blow to his chest. Her body had become dependent on the existence of the unrefined version of extremis. If they removed it, it would kill her. Instead, they had stabilized the unrefined virus that Pepper had been subjected to. They managed to remove the worst of the side effects (like explosions), but she would have to live with the other enhancements. While Pepper won’t be Captain America strong or fast, her healing would be unparalleled in the group of superheroes. His joy at this revelation was pure Stark. Fierce, implacable, and determined to make everything better than it was before. Pepper, though irreparably changed, was now safer than ever.The sound of the elevator opening caused him to turn around in his spot. Darcy Lewis walked into the common room with none of the queenly grace that Pepper or Natasha had been having her practice. Instead, she stormed inside like a repressed conservative running away from his own homosexual urges. She had grocery bags loaded up in her arms, barely being able to hold them all. She dumped them all on the marble island all at once, slumping over the island in a huff.“Okay, so I got everything fresh for our Thanksgiving Baking Extravaganza,” she was bent over the island, face down but still lifted her arms in order to use jazz hands at the end of the statement. "We need to make all of the desserts tonight for tomorrow's Avengers-giving."“Why couldn’t we just pay people a lot of money to do this for us?” He brought his mug up, savoring the ambrosia inside it because it was the last cup he was allowed that day. “Or even, you know, do that thing where they at least bring us the ingredients?”“Because it’s the only way to guarantee to you get the best ingredients. Also, your witty repartee isn’t going to get you out of this, buddy.” She pointed at him accusingly.“It is pretty witty,” had agreed with her. “You know, why do I owe you again? I almost like, died. I think that should be enough.” He edged closer to all of the bags sprawled out around the kitchen. He started poking at them with a single finger. At the rustling sound, Darcy finally lifted her head to stare at the goateed man before her.“You might be able to flash those pretty blues at Bruce and Pepper and get forgiven like that,” Darcy said, snapping her fingers. “But making me think you all died while I was alone at the tower, not cool man.” She turned her sad face on him, full powered, fake tears emerging on demand and lips wobbling. "Also, Maurice broke up with me because apparently the whole 'I work with the Avengers' thing wigged him out. Which makes that partially your fault."Tony let out a snort, a short and soft sound, that he had thought he had trained out of himself since his father ‘chastised’ him for it when he was a child. His amusement at the young woman before him throbbed like a pulled muscle. “I take no responsibility if this is a disaster. Did Pepper tell you about the time I tried to make her an omelet while I was dying? That didn’t end so well.”“Don’t worry, Tony. I’ll walk you through everything.” Darcy began unloading the butter, the graham crackers, and other fixings. “Also, don’t lie, I saw you eying that strawberry cheesecake recipe like it was crack and you were a crack addict.” He hadn’t had a strawberry in close to two years, when he finally memorized that Pepper was allergic. With extremis, this was no longer an issue. “We can start with one cheesecake, and go from there.”He began rolling up the sleeves to his favorite long-sleeved Metallica t-shirt. “Alright, I’m a genius. I have like 7 Ph.Ds., I think. I can make a cheesecake.”An hour later, despite Darcy’s strict instructions, careful measurement and oversight, they somehow had managed to use too much butter in the graham cracker crust. At some point, Tony had added crumbled toffee pieces into the crust mix, “too balance it out.” Instead of a crumbly, sweet crust, the mix had melted and resolidifed into an overly firm shell. The cheesecake filling rose too high, probably from too much baking powder, and cracked like a deflated soufflé. It was so sugary sweet that it could strip paint.At one point, after attempting to correct the cosmetic disaster of the cheesecake with knives, they had given up. They just poured the entire bowl of homemade strawberry topping onto the cheesecake and tried to spread it evenly. It was a horrible mess, getting everywhere and turning the kitchen counter into streaks of red syrup.Darcy decided to make a batch of homemade whipped cream. “Just let me handle it, Tony. At least one thing in this whole ordeal should go correctly.” She said with a laugh.“Of course, kid,” Tony said, taking a step back to watch her whip around the kitchen to gather what she needed. He listened to her tell a story about how she made a cheesecake with her mother when she was six. He thought of his own mother. Maria Stark’s love for her son was the love of a hawk in flight, powerful and encompassing but distant. There were no giggly baking sessions in his childhood.Tony contemplated the young girl before him, a streak of dried cheesecake from chin to ear drying on her face (they had gotten into a bit of a food fight). He looked at her nose, and her mouth, and her coloring. So like an echo of Maria Stark that it hurt. Her humor, brashness, and her brilliance. Like himself, he thought. For weeks, he wondered, hoped and feared in equal measure.He pulled out a sealed envelope from his back pocket, one that Pepper had organized for him just that morning. He set it on a clean spot on the kitchen counter in front of him.“Your mother, Anna-Maria, was in Milan for a tech symposium about 9 months before you were born.” He said, right as Darcy just finished turning the cream and sugar mix into whipped cream. She froze, still as a statue.“Probably,” Darcy responded, forcing the words past her clumsy tongue. “My mom was an engineer. Why do you mention it?”“I was at that same tech conference,” he interjected mildly. He had practiced this with Pepper 15 or 20 times, trying to get it right. Trying so hard, and so afraid in that moment, to not fuck this conversation up with tactlessness as he had so many other conversations. “I was in my mid-20s and I was so stupid. I don’t remember any of that conference except for sleeping with a bombshell brunette with blue eyes and a wicked smile.”“My mom died a long time ago, Tony?” Her voice sounded far away. She had moved, somehow, to be facing away from him. “Why is this relevant?”“It might not be,” his breathing, formerly steady, started deepening in sympathetic pain for the young woman. “Darcy, please turn around.”She set the hand-mixer and whipped cream mix to the side gently. Like trying to move through molasses, she turned around to look at Tony. He smiled a watery smile at the brunette girl, eyes sad. “Brutal honesty or comforting truth?” He asked.“Honesty,” Darcy shook her hair out of her face. “With the life I’ve lived, honesty trumps truth.”Tony nodded, sharply, only once. “The woman I was with at that conference was named Anna-Maria. I was about a year away from getting a vasectomy, still too stupid to think about the consequences of sleeping around. I dug up records on your parents and they had only started dating just before that conference.” She eyed the envelope on the table, weary and afraid like staring into the eyes of a viper.Tony let the girl have a moment to shake apart, a moment for her core of steel to reassert itself. “I've had my suspicions for a while now. Your brilliance with computers, math, science. How much you look like my mother." His voice choked on this admission. "I spoke with Pepper about my suspicions. She told me that my only job was to present you all the facts and let you make a choice.” He gestured to the envelope on the table, “It is possible that I could be your biological father but only a DNA test could say for sure. That envelope has information for how you can get the test done. The information will be confidential and available only to you. But, only if you want it.”Tony finally stood up, on wobbly legs, and moved towards Darcy. The girl was still somewhat in shock, so he guided her gently into a bar stool by the island. He pushed the now cool cheesecake across the island, dripping red syrup everywhere, stopping it in front of her. Tony grabbed the fresh whipped cream and two spoons, and returned to sit next to Darcy at the island. He cut each of them a slice.The sat in silence for a moment, while Tony worked up his courage. “You are an amazing young woman Darcy Lewis and I am honored to be in your life.” He had rehearsed that in front of a mirror, over and over again, until he could say it without hesitation, without fear, without thought. “No matter what you choose to do about what I just said.”Darcy dipped her spoon into the bowl of whipped cream, gathered up a bite of cheesecake, and bit into it absent mindedly. The crust was thick and brittle like hardened caramel, the syrup sticky and the strawberries soggy. She chuckled around the overwhelming sweetness. “God, this is awful,” she admitted, even though she immediately took another victorious bite of the confection.Tony Stark smiled with a face streaked with sugar and syrup, voice heavy, “I think it might be the best thing I’ve ever made.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
It was December in New York, the first snow to stick to the ground had finally rolled in and there was Christmas carols and lights strewn through the whole city. It was so late that it was early, and Darcy had more energy than she knew what to do with. Instead of going to the Avenger’s gym, she decided to head to the normal Tower gym. Since no one was in for work just yet, there would be no one around, unlike the Avenger’s gym which was always occupied.Which also meant that there was no one around to see her (somewhat haphazardly) take out the worst of her manic energy on a punching bag. Within fifteen minutes, she could feel a growing burn throughout her arms. In the background, she had Jarvis analyzing her form and the sensor built into the punching bag, sending back suggestions for improvement.Darcy took a pause to step back from the punching bag to readjust her hair, which had begun to slip out of the hair tie. She turned when the doors to the gym opened up. In the doorway, the rising morning sun starting to fill the gym with natural light instead of artificial, was Pepper Potts. She was in a crisp white gym outfit, hair tied into a sharp braid, and was polishing off a thermos of morning coffee. She looked like an angel to Darcy.“Hello, Darcy,” she greeted the brunette girl before her. “Early morning workout yourself?” Pepper went to lay her stuff into a cubby to the side of the gym.“Yup,” she popped out, slightly out of breath. “Showing the punching bag whose boss.” With that pronouncement, she kneed the punching bag like it owed her money. Darcy had to have it lowered several inches so she could practice that motion.“Hmmm … I think I’m going to do a run.” Pepper hopped onto a treadmill that still gave her line of sight on Darcy. The tall woman set the treadmill to, what had become, an easy five mile a minute pace. After several days of trial and error, the blond knew she would not even feel remotely winded until mile ten.Darcy started practicing her punching once again. “What brings you to this gym?” Darcy did her best to keep her grumpiness out of her voice. She might have even succeeded.“I got tired of Natasha and Steve wanting to ‘put me through my paces.’ Whatever that even means.” The duo were roped in by Tony to help Pepper deal with her new enhanced status. Pepper had never needed anything from Tony except his presence in her life. The CEO was hardly going to change that now. “And I need to deal with the dissolution of Advanced Idea Mechanics and acquisition of all their legal assets. I don’t have time to be distracted by superheroes.”Darcy made eye contact with Pepper, while the two of them continued on with their exercises. “I think that means they want you to join the superhero club.” This felt obvious to the brunette.“Hmmm … maybe. Like I said, I have enough trouble looking after a multi-billion dollar company. I still have to deal with a senate sub-committee this afternoon to address old Stark tech in the hands of Sokovian separatists and their ties to Middle Eastern terrorist pockets formerly funded by the USSR.” Pepper lifted her right hand, and focused her attention completely into her palm. It started to glow ever so slightly beneath her skin, a faint shimmer of air appeared around it, like the air above a barbeque. “This can wait a little while longer,” Pepper didn’t break stride once.“Then maybe it isn’t about being a superhero,” Darcy said, launching a rapid fire series of punches that reverberated through her arms. If she had super strength, the bag would have flown off the handle. “Maybe it is just not being a liability.”“Is that how you see yourself, Darcy?” Pepper asked. Pepper had spent most of her adult life working her way to the very top of the corporate food chain. She might have once been a naïve accountant, easily offended and brash about correcting the mistakes of others, including Tony Stark. She wasn’t that girl anymore. She knew projection when she saw it.“I don’t know what the fuck I am supposed to be, right now.” Darcy switched to some kickboxing-like drills Thor had been teaching her. It was pulled from a style of combat for Asgardian woman, taking advantage of their greater leg strength. Her legs started to throb, there would be light bruises all along her legs the next day.“Isn’t the gift of youth getting to decide what you are? Only the old should worry about ‘supposed to’s.” Pepper almost rolled her own eyes at herself. Instead, smiling mischievously, she went on, “If you need it a little more clearly, we can say it like this. ‘If you can’t even. Do something to make you remember that you can even.’” Pepper gave herself several five minute pop culture breaks a day in order to keep up on the times.This caused Darcy to laugh in the middle of one of her kicks, throwing her balance. She topped backwards, landing on her butt in a dull thump against the gym mats. Pepper laughed at the sight. When Darcy started whining and rubbing her butt, Pepper started laughing so hard that she had to step off the treadmill for fear of slipping.After a few moments, both woman started to regain control. Their laughter lowered in volume slightly, until they finally settled into calm but deep breathing. The sunlight in the window was warm, casting the whole area in a gold glow.“Okay, so. Do you wanna join me for my martial arts classes? We could spar sometimes,” Darcy asked Pepper, as she had laid down on the floor, spread out like she was going to make a snow angel. She lifted her head to look the other woman in the eyes, “You’re, like, the only one on my level and I wouldn’t hurt you, so … yeah.” Her head thunked back to the matt.“I don’t know if I should be doing any sparring just yet, Darcy.” While her enhanced strength didn’t put her bench press in the near thousand pound area like Steve (a hard but not impossible workout for the blond man), Pepper could now easily handle double her own body weight. She still didn’t know her exact upper limit.“It can just be, I dunno, maybe-step-daughter or whatever … getting to know each other. If the test comes back negative, we can just call it girls hanging out.” Pepper could see the motion that indicated Darcy was shrugging, which was kind of ruined by the fact that the girl was doing this laying on the floor. “Also, I don’t know if I said it, but thanks for handling the test for me.” Darcy asked Pepper to handle the test and then inform Darcy of the results afterwards. If it was up to Darcy alone, the anxiety of it all would have overwhelmed her.“Okay, Darcy. You make me some strawberry cobbler and it’s a deal.” Pepper had been enjoying strawberries like nobody’s business since allergies were no longer an issue. Also, the enhanced metabolism required her to double her caloric intake with no repercussions. This was a relief to Pepper, giving her sense of freedom of not having to account for every pound because she would get trashed in the media for gaining weight or equally trashed for losing too much. Pepper was a feminist but she was also a pragmatist, recognizing that part of her appeal in the public arena laid in her façade of effortless beauty.Darcy pumped her fist in the air. “Okay, I have another 15 minutes of bag punching and I can go get on that.”Pepper laughed, a controlled laugh but still happy. “I didn’t mean right now.” Darcy sat up to look at the strawberry blond woman, and saluted her. “How about tonight? You, me, and your maybe-daddy?” Darcy laughed at this pronouncement.“Can do, boss-lady!” she said, glad that Pepper, recognizing the strangeness of their current predicament, decided to find the humor in the situation instead of the existential dread.-It was the end of the second week of December, somewhat late on a Friday night, and Darcy walked into the tower contemplating where she wanted to go. Clint’s apartment was guaranteed to have Clint in it, for once, since he was on leave until his broken leg healed. Also, her stash of dark chocolate peanut butter cups was in her room there. The Avengers common room always had snacks, but it was always a gamble of what combination of people would be there. The other option was Tony and Pepper’s. She knew that there was now a freezer full of pints of Haagen-Dazs in their suite, when she let it slip in front of Tony a few days ago that it was her favorite comfort ice cream.“Hey, Jay-man?” She intoned to the elevator. “Where’s Clint?”“He is currently indisposed with Agent Coulson, Ms. Lewis,” he replied, his voice dry in amusement. Well, that decides that.“Bow-chicka-wow-wow. Tell him ‘Get it, girl’ from me, when he’s all done with Agent Badass. And make sure to record Coulson’s face when you say those exact words.” She smiled mischievously. “You can take me to Tony and Pepper’s floor, Jay-Z.”The living room was empty when she entered. She went straight to the ice-cream fridge and started pulling out flavors at random. She brought out five different flavors she had never heard of: Yuzu Citrus, Macadamia Nut Brittle, Dulce de Leche, Chocolate Midnight Cookie and Banoffee.She pulled off the lids on all of them, and tasting each one by one. All of the flavors were pretty amazing, but she was contemplating nominating the wonder that was Dulce de Leche for a Nobel Peace prize.Tony and Pepper walked into the mess she had made, Tony in a bespoke black pinstripe suit and Pepper in a yellow and white gown. They had just returned from a Board dinner of the Maria Stark Foundation, which was deep in the planning phase of their Holiday Gala that all of the Avenger’s would be attending later that month.Tony was obviously trying very hard not to rush forward to meet Darcy at the island for ice cream. From careful observation, he knew that Darcy ate things she didn’t make herself because of stress or disappointment.“What’s up short-stacks?” He asked nonchalantly, like he hadn’t already had Jarvis spill all of the beans.Darcy mumbled around a giant spoonful, which was a made up of little bit of all of the flavors in one bite, “Mmmmh hmmmb, damte, hmmmmhb bummmmn, fmreird mout.”Pepper stepped up to the kitchen, moving around a fretting Tony sitting on a stool and his face screwed up in concentration on what the young girl was saying. “Darcy, don’t talk with your mouth full,” came the response. When she realized what she had said, “Now, I sound like my grandmother.” She moved past Tony, into the kitchen, to grab extra spoons from the drawer. She passed Tony one without a word.Darcy pulled the spoon out of her mouth with an eye-roll. “Okay, so I was on a date. It was going well and then the dude got kind of weird,” she admitted, pushing the citrus one at Pepper and the dolche to Tony. Her guess at their preferred flavors was an accurate one.Pepper slapped a hand over Tony’s mouth before he had the chance to freak out. She smiled amusedly, head tilted to the side and glint of diamonds flashing through her perfect hair. “What do you mean by weird, Darcy?”Tony pulled out his cell phone, completely lacking any sort of discretion, to start sending Jarvis notes or a kill order. “Well, so, you know how since the whole Rocky Horror incident and Thor in Times Square, Jane and I have been getting a lot more media attention?”Pepper finally released Tony’s face when he started to lick her palm, judging that it would just be easier to just focus on the ice cream. She nodded at Darcy, “Go on.”“So, this guy, Pete,” she started around another spoonful.“Is this the Peter Lin you were telling Clint about at breakfast yesterday?” Tony asked, voice carrying hints of threat that sounded like he had been taking lessons from Natasha. Darcy narrowed her eyes in Tony. She then made eye contact with Pepper, lifting up an eyebrow at the older woman in a clear indication that said follow my lead.“And we were about to go back to my place for sex, right. And I’m kind of nervous because, his dick pic was pretty impressive,” Darcy said. Tony’s face twisting in disgust was hilarious to the young woman.He stood up, stool screeching slightly against the wood. “Okay, Pepper. You got this?” He pointed rapidly back and forth between Darcy and Pepper. “Yeah, you got this. I’m going to go find Bruce. We’ll be in my lab.” He fled, heeled brogues stomping loudly on the wood floor.When he finally left, Darcy and Pepper both starting giggling. “He’s going to be like this no matter what the test results say, isn’t he?” Darcy finally said, slight hints of sadness evaporating under this realization. She grabbed the dolche and citrus ice creams and took them to the living room coffee table.“Yeah, Tony’s always going to be a little weird about showing people he cares.” Pepper effortlessly shrugged, while she sealed and put away the other cartons on the counter. “This ice cream fridge being a prime example.”Pepper finally removed the four inch Manolo Blahnik’s, and carried them between her hands. She went to the living room and folded up opposite Darcy on the couch but still within distance of the ice cream.“Okay Darcy, now what is this really about?” Pepper asked, voice tired. Physical enhancement’s, she found, did not prevent mental and emotional exhaustion in dealing with entitled jackasses.“Okay, so. Since you are the most emotionally healthy person I know,” Pepper nodded at this statement, since it was a fair one, “I guess it makes sense to talk to you about it.”Darcy explained to the strawberry blond woman that, over the last several months, dating had become more and more complicated for the brunette. Since Thor’s landing in Time’s Square, Darcy starting raking in Twitter followers. Since the Rocky Horror Picture Show, she had actually started becoming the subject of investigation for several celebrity blogs with speculation about her ranging from that she was Hawkeye’s girlfriend (With the picture of him giving her a drunken piggy back ride leaving a bar, this made sense but was still ewwwww), to the third in a Thor/Jane/Darcy poly-relationship (They were just out to brunch on a warm summer day), to Tony’s illegitimate love child (So TMZ didn’t have any substantiating evidence on that but bonus points for realism).“Yeah, so, Pete, right?” Darcy said, as she grabbed a tablet from the table, using her login to start a Spotify playlist for background noise. “Half way through the date he was asking me about Avengers stuff. At first, it was like, ‘Dude, I don’t really like to talk about it.’ And he was like, ‘C’mon, what’s the harm?’ He was really cute online, seemed funny and charming. But, after the fifth time trying to subtly ask about the Avengers, I got suspicious. I excused myself to the bathroom and had Jarvis give me a quick background check. Seems like Pete, while finishing up his Masters in Public Health, is also a part-time celebrity gossip blogger that sells his stories.”“Hmmmmm,” Pepper began, gathering her thoughts. “I honestly didn’t expect that to happen to you this soon. I thought it would take the Holiday Gala. Since that will be your first official Stark Industries social event as provisional head of a division.”Darcy let out a heavy sigh. “So, he was definitely using me for a scoop of some kind then?”Pepper smiled at the young woman before her, reassuring but not willing to commit to one position just yet. “Well, tell me how the rest of the night ended and I’ll tell you what I think.”“So, that was it. I just told him I had a good time and that I would be interested in another one soon,” Darcy shrugged. “And then I left.”“What, no kiss goodnight?” Pepper asked, getting a flick of ice cream in her direction in response. It was strange to her, sometimes, that she didn’t even blink about getting ice-cream on a five thousand dollar dress.“Okay, a small peck,” Darcy admitted. “And I might have felt up his butt a bit. It is a nice butt. I wanted a grab in case I didn’t get another chance.”The two woman sat in silence for a while, while Adele played in the background.“Okay, so I’m assuming you want my opinion at this point?” Pepper asked. Darcy roller her eyes. “So, this is what you are going to do. Text him that you had a great time and ask him for another date. During the next date, let it ‘slip’” she used air quotes around this word, “that you are Media Analyst for the Avenger’s PR team and that Clint is your half-brother and got you the job. We’ll organize some paparazzi to spot you and Clint out on the town soon after. If one of the gossip blogs he writes for suddenly announces you as Clint’s sister or uses your wrong work title, we know that he’s selling your story.”Darcy looked at Pepper, impressed by the deviousness of the solution set before her. Clint would be on board with it, since Darcy was already his sister in all the ways that counted. It was plausible enough to still be juicy gossip, but easily denied with public records.“And if he is?” Darcy asked, stopping at eating only half of the pint, sealing it. She made a mental note to thank Tony for the ice cream fridge.Pepper’s smile was a smile that she used to face down Prime Ministers and competing CEO’s. It was breathtaking and promised that the losses would always outweigh the benefits of taking her on. “Then we destroy him and anybody like him who thinks they can exploit you through your personal life.”-It is a cold mid-morning on a Sunday, the day was a crisp 40° degrees, but it wasn’t so bad because there was no wind. Pepper had requested Darcy’s presence for brunch. Though it might have come as a request, Darcy had not quite yet met a person that could refuse Pepper something she had set her mind to. So, in actuality, it was more a declaration of fact that Darcy would be meeting Pepper for brunch.Keeping that in mind, Darcy finished the fringey, infinity scarf she was making for Pepper. Just in case the invitation (demand) was something serious. It was made from very fine, white-dyed, silk-wool thread, which clocked her back several hundred dollars for the several pound ball of yarn.Darcy gets off the N train to meet Pepper at Isabella’s, a brunch place near at the end of a street near the Museum of Natural History. This was where the two always had their brunches together. When she arrived, she saw that Pepper was actually in the outside seating area, which was empty except for a few guards posted around it. The only way Darcy had managed to convince Tony not to give her a permanent security detail was because she had accepted a sleek and chic looking titanium bracelet. The bracelet was almost impossible to remove without a verbal code, and could track the young girl anywhere in the world. Pepper decided to allow him the security detail.“Heya, Peppa,” Darcy sat down in the seat to the side of Pepper, passing her the newly finished scarf.“Thanks you Darcy,” Pepper accepted it with a smile, putting it on over her designer peacoat. Immediately, a metal carafe of French press coffee comes out and is set on the table with cream and sugar. They don’t stop to take Darcy’s order, so she assumes Pepper already organized to have her favorites come out. At the corner of her eye, she can see a few people with phone cameras snap photos of the pair at the end of the block.“So, why did you call me away from first weekend alone in my apartment in months?” Darcy asked, lighthearted and joking, an undercurrent of worry kept out of her voice.Pepper poured herself a steaming mug of coffee. “You know why,” she started to sip on the pure, black brew.Darcy grabbed the metal container of French press, and poured herself a cup. “Can we talk about something else for a little while first?” Darcy loaded her coffee with a bucket load of cream and two Splenda to top it off.“Sure. How everything is going with Peter?” Peppers knew to direct the conversation with Darcy, or the brunette could speed off on a tangent and manage to get Pepper talking about things she didn’t plan on divulging. If there was anything truly Stark about her, Pepper figured to herself, it was this.“Well, we met up for a sketch comedy show last night, where I ‘let it slip’ what you told me.” She shrugged, “We’ll see how that goes. I really hope it pans out, because boy has a nice butt.” Pepper huffed into her coffee mug."Hmmm," Pepper responded, "I'm more of an arms girl myself." A tray of French toast, for Darcy, and waffles, for Pepper, came out at that moment as well. Right away, Pepper dug into the order of sausages on the side with relish.“Okay, not going to lie,” Darcy dug into the side order of bacon, “I’m kinda tired of my own relationship bullshit." Pepper still somehow manages to make the eyebrow rise classy, despite a huge bite of waffle and berries in her mouth. Her dainty eating thing was a thing of the past. "Your turn.” “What do you want to know, Darcy? I didn’t think you would be particularly interested in hearing anything about me and Tony.” Pepper conceded.Darcy shook her head at this. “Tony’s not the man I was curious about.” The only one oblivious to that development in the Tower was probably Steve. Mostly because the blond man was only around for official Avengers business or official Avengers team-building events.“Ahhhh,” Pepper exclaimed, realizing that despite her earlier efforts to direct the conversation, it had already gotten away from her. She was adaptable, though. “I assume you mean what I intend to do about the rampant homoerotic tension between Tony and Bruce?” Pepper brightened at the brunette’s snort.“Well, considering how Bruce’s face flames up when you kiss his cheek good night, I think the word you’re looking for is bi-romantic.” Pepper took a moment to ruminate on the girl’s words. Pepper changed to conversation to politics, the other girl let it go, knowing that they would eventually get back to the topic at hand.Pepper had grown up in Cleveland, Ohio under a strict, war-veteran dad and a mother with bipolar disorder. She had spent her formative years tailoring her mom’s old clothes to fit her, since neither of her parents always remembered that their daughter needed to be fed and clothed. Leaving to OSU on a track scholarship at 17 felt like reparation. Their death in her early twenties confirmed her decision to move to New York after graduating magnum cum laude. She landed a job in Stark Industries after spending months temping, and devoted her next couple of paychecks to therapy.Her life had taught her that you had to fight to acquire good things in your life but that keeping them was the hard part. Good things could come and go, by chance or by action, at any time. Once you had them, you had to dig your feet into ground and refuse to let them be taken away. When Tony finally became the man she could allow herself to love, she had no intention of letting that man go. Especially considering she had been a little bit in love with Tony from the moment she met him, and actually in love with him longer than she cared to admit. The clearest direction she had about pursuing happiness in her life was that she had no intention of denying herself anything when it came to Tony.“So yeah, I guess you’re right. I went into Poli Sci because it was the biggest challenge for me. I fought for those A’s in a way I wouldn’t have if I did something else,” Darcy gestures in a kind of outward hug motion, mug splashing lightly, her plate long since cleared of French toast. The two women were working their way through a second pot of coffee.After a beat of silence, Pepper swallowed hard around the warm brew in her mouth. “Something will likely happen with Bruce,” she admitted, returning to their previous conversation. Darcy leaned forward, excited about the gossip and hanging on every word. “Bruce is wonderful. But, Tony and I need to work some stuff out first. Figure out boundaries. I know I would be comfortable with them being together separate from a relationship with me, but I would prefer a relationship where I’m included in all aspects. I don’t know if that is true for Bruce or Tony. So, more than anything, we need to talk all together first.”Pepper waited for Darcy to respond. “Will you adopt me? Because that was seriously the most mature thing I have ever heard.”Pepper laughed, waving off the compliment. “People forget that everyone’s feelings matter. Just because Tony and I were together first, doesn’t mean that Bruce wouldn’t deserve just as much consideration for his wants and needs as the two of us.”“No, seriously. Like, I’ve never even thought of a poly-relationship since it always sounded like double the difficulty. But, you just make it sound no more difficult or easy than a one-on-one relationship,” Darcy had stars in her eyes at this pronouncement.“Relationships are always difficult. I just happen to appreciate a good clinical social worker and addressing my personal demons with communication and not violence.” Pepper’s smile was smug. “Which is probably the biggest reason I couldn’t be a superhero.”Darcy shook her head at this. “Well, you’re definitely my superhero.” The brunette’s head lit up from behind from the flash of a camera.The sight sent a shiver ran along Pepper’s spine, since none of the photographers should be that close. She glanced away from the brunette girl before her, eyeing the crowd of people just beyond Darcy. The security guys were mostly doing a great job keeping them back. But, a blond man had started to push forward in the crowd, edging closely to the guards with his camera out. But something was off. Pepper realized in that moment that the blond man had stopped taking pictures. Pepper went stiff and discreetly signaled the security guards to be ready to move out immediately. Darcy’s face closed off, body relaxing in readiness when she saw Pepper’s signal.Three loud pops echoed out, and the three stark guards immediately around the woman went down. The shooter was the blond man in the crowd of photographers. Two more in the crowd pulled out guns and moved to overtake Darcy and Pepper’s position. Chaos broke out all around them.The blond man got to Darcy, his gun drawn and pointed directly at her head. “Don’t move, don’t move,” he kept repeating, his voice was deep. A medium-height, Latina woman and a dark-haired Caucasian man, both with guns in their hands, approached Pepper. The Latina, looking at Pepper, said, “You do what we say or we blow that girl’s brains out.” The blond man moved closer to Darcy, threateningly, at this pronouncement.A van drove quickly around the corner, parking directly in front of the restaurant. Pepper stood, well over six feet tall in the heels she was wearing. Her white scarf flowing softly, a slight splatter of blood across the bottom parts of it from the downed guard. She walked towards the dark-haired man, who was gesturing at her to come to him and head towards the van.“I highly suggest you don’t do this. You will regret it, if you do,” Pepper’s smile was more a bearing of teeth than a smile. Her heels clicked on the concrete as she stalked towards the two. Knowing they are trying to kidnap her with guns and not heavy duty sedatives, she knew that they had no clue about her enhancements. This gave her the advantage. Pepper always had an advantage.The dark haired man and the woman, having moved to standing nearly shoulder to shoulder, stiffened when Pepper stopped only inches away from their guns instead of continuing to the van. Both pointed directly towards her heart. A few yards away, Pepper could see the van door opened up. There were two men, one in the drivers seat one in the back, ready to take her. Pepper glanced back over her shoulder.Darcy was now standing, staring in her direction, eyes focused and fierce. Pepper smiled, recognizing the fire in those eyes. “You remember that conversation I brought you around to have?” Pepper was fearless in that moment. Darcy nodded once, gun pressed to her forehead. Pepper could see her right hand twitch and a slight glimmer of metal between her fingers.“You don’t need me to adopt you, Darcy.” Pepper waited. “You just need to give Tony enough time to pop the question.”Like she wasn’t aware that she was in imminent danger of losing her life, Darcy smiled.Pepper lashed out with every inch of speed and strength she possessed in her body, hitting the man and woman before her, palms coming up and forward. She could feel the force of her blows crack their sternums, likely causing ribs to plunge into sensitive organs. They were launched back, thrown over the railing, into either side of the open van door. Pepper thought she might have heard a spine snap.The blond man glanced away from Darcy a heartbeat after Pepper sent his comrades flying. Darcy used his distraction to do what Natasha had drilled into her muscle memory. She knocked the blond man’s arm up and away, dropping her head to the side, narrowly missing the bullet he fired. In the next instant, despite the ringing in her ears, she had a knife buried in his shoulder between his collarbones. His gun arm went limp. Darcy knew that the collar bone would guide the six inch knife down into muscle and major arteries, causing massive internal bleeding that would kill him without immediate medical attention. She removed the gun from his hand, and put a bullet in his head to save him the wait.Tony arrived long before the police did. He landed to the sight of Darcy and Pepper drinking a third pot of coffee the restaurant had brought out to the two women. Pepper had a hole in the right shoulder of her coat, a healed bullet wound from subduing the two men in the trunk when they resisted. Darcy had dislocated their knees and bound their arms when they landed on the concrete, thrown face down out of the van. They were now propped up against the side of the van, with cloth napkins stuffed in their mouths. Everyone else around them was dead.“Hello, Tony,” Pepper stood, ready to greet the man. “We’ve been waiting for you.”“Heya, Tony,” was Darcy’s response to Tony’s arrival. she had her hands cupped around the mug of warm coffee, using the warmth to steady her hands.“Are you two okay?” He asked, faceplate sliding back, checking over the two woman before him, eyes barely containing panic. Pepper walked towards him slow and confident.“We’re fine, Tony.” She kissed his check, lightly puzzlingly the side of his scruffy face. She stepped back. He was looking at Pepper, his face had lost its edge of panic but was now so full of relief and love that the tall woman could burst into flames because of it. Pepper felt the throb of it in her bones, a heat that declared that anything Stark was also hers. Her love for him tasted like cranberry jam on her tongue.When Pepper told herself that she had no intention of denying herself any bit of Tony, she meant it. This love, she would fight to keep with every breath. When she saw his growing want for an assuming man with curly hair and a broken smile, she didn’t shy away. She wanted to plunge her hands into the heart of Tony, and cup her fingers around his growing need for a kindred spirit in her hands. She wanted to feel the shape of it, to know this part of him that grew for Bruce, and set it up as territory in her own soul. Though, that would have to wait a bit.For now, she contented herself with watching him discover a new wonder, to see his reaction to a new fear. With a wicked smile, she picked up where she left off by saying, “Other than getting blood on the scarf your daughter gave me, of course.” He didn’t react for several moments, his mind still lost to relief. She could feel the weight of Darcy’s full bellied laughter, edged with the slightest notes of suppressed panic, from behind her.Pepper could see the exact moment her words hit home, his face cracked. “Oh, okay. Well.” He waved around a metallic hand around him. "I’m not cleaning this up for you ladies." She could see him try to hide the fear, self-doubt, and determination to be better than his own father."Yes you would but," Pepper said as she turned to look at Darcy, “Stark women know how to clean up their own messes, Tony.” Pepper wanted to see Darcy’s when Tony’s face exploded in joy at that statement. Pepper had decided something long ago, when Tony first whispered suspicions in her ear about a brunette girl who coded like she laughed, brilliantly.Pepper smiled at the brunette girl, who was shaking on the inside but too proud to show it on the outside. Pepper would know this part of Tony’s stark heart, as well.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
For the Holiday Gala, Darcy wasn’t allowed to work or run media interference because “You’re a guest tonight, Darcy,” so said Pepper. Natasha had put her foot down on allowing anyone to dress Darcy, and nobody had thought to disagree with the Russian. The dress, a gorgeous wine-red with gold lace accents, was skin tight up top but still had a slight flow to the skirt. It looked like a challenge winner from Project Runway, where the inspiration was Wonder Woman, instead of the off the shelf or thrift store finds that Darcy was the most comfortable. Darcy was also impressed when she found four different knives, three trackers, and a garrote in the waistband of the dress. It was so comfortable and breathable, Darcy could spar in it if she wanted to.Despite Natasha’s reassurances otherwise (which actually meant she just used a blank face when asked about it), the dress screamed Tony had managed to bribe the Russian somehow. The color scheme alone was indicative enough. Darcy took the thing to the firing range, and emptied a clip into it. It was bulletproof. Which just further supported her theory. Also, her heels had somehow managed to disappear immediately after she bought them, only to reappear the night before the gala. She hasn't figured out what they do, just yet. The brunette was sure that there were other fingers in this outrageous pie helping Tony. The “we’re just trying to keep you safe” thing was fine, for the most part, but she was determined to make them all regret trying to influence her sartorial choices withot her knowledge.Unfortunately for Darcy, she did not anticipate how much attention she would receive at the Gala. She had spent the first 45 minutes either being thought of as the arm candy to someone “actually important” or people knew her title and were discreetly trying to figure out who she had slept to land the position.“What are your degrees in?” asked a beautiful and petite Japanese woman, Yori, the words perfectly polite but carrying accusation in the tone. Darcy believed she was a guest from the Japanese consulate. Next to her, there was a British man, Rufus, the Regional VP of Stark Europe. He was still carrying the muscular foundation of a rugby player but had the slightest softening around the waist. They had found her against the bar when she was going for something stronger than champagne.“I just got my BA in Political Science from Culver,” Darcy admitted, with some reservation, twirling the straw in her whiskey sour. The woman’s face remained politely blank. “Though, I’ve been highly encouraged to get a couple of other degrees.”“Has the lack of credentials complicated your position?” The words dropped from Yori’s lips like honey meant to cover the taste of poison. Darcy felt like she had just cut herself in a pool full of sharks.“Oh? How do you plan to do that and manage your responsibilities at Stark?” asked Rufus, sipping on a glass of bubbly. Darcy didn’t detect any maliciousness, but she saw a glint in his eyes that she was familiar with. “The company has some generous flex-time for degree seekers, but only for employees with five or more years under their belt.”Darcy took a large gulp from her glass, and discreetly checked her wrist. She had only a few minutes left, otherwise she would miss her window of opportunity.She pushed every ounce of arrogance she possessed into her voice. “I already talked to MIT. They just need to agree to let me sit for exams remotely.” She waved her hand in the air, like she was brushing away a fly from her face. “I can finish their MBA/MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in a semester in my spare time.”They nodded. “A woman of many talents,” the brit said in his refined voice, a note of insinuation in his voice. Darcy discreetly checked his left hand, noting no ring on his finger. Hmmmm.The Japanese woman’s right eyebrow twitched slightly. “Indeed.”“Excuse me, what do you do again?” She tilted her head to the side, staring pointedly at the Japanese woman. It caused her hair to sway slightly, softening the lines of her face but enhancing her eyes. Darcy knew this made her look young, a touch dumb. “I was distracted by mentally solving some partial differential equations Dr. Banner posed to me earlier tonight, which would describe gamma wave degradation in atmosphere’s experiencing gravitationally distorted space-time.” She added a giggle and a twirl of her hair, for effect.Before the pair before her could react, she felt the lightest touch to her shoulder, meant to avoid startling the brunette. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Darcy.” Bruce’s body language was a picture of unassuming gentleman, rueful smile to his stubbly face. The two interlopers tensed unconsciously. “Do you have a moment?”“What’s up, Bruce?” She leaned upward slightly to give him a slight peck on the cheek in greeting.“I forgot to get your approval for another extension on the anti-alpha particles project, so we can finish up the paper you co-authored for submission next week.” Bruce said, voice low and reserved, the fingers on her shoulder slightly tense. Darcy knew he needed no such extension.“Of course, Brucie. But first, please,” she gestured between the people around her, “meet Yori and Rufus.” Darcy smiled a jaguar’s smile. “Yori, Rufus, meet Dr. Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk.”Bruce ducked his head in the perfect picture of shyness, his bow-tie slightly off center and hair now just long enough now to have gained the slightest curl. He extended his right hand, not making eye-contact with either, and let his voice deepen to a growl, “A pleasure, I’m sure.”They fled almost immediately after reluctantly shaking Bruce’s hand. Darcy chuckled in glee, leaning against Bruce’s right shoulder to let the curly-haired man support her body weight. “Oh my gods, Bruce. That was so bad.”He smiled softly at the giggling girl on his shoulder, “What can I say? I’ve always had a soft spot for damsels-in-distress.”“I am not a damsel,” Darcy stated, grabbing him by the suit sleeve to drag him to the dance floor. The chandelier above them cast a warm, gold glow across the dark wood floor and burgundy walls. She checked her watch, she had another minute or so to get in position, “and I was not in distress. I was contemplating flirting with that brit. Now, dance with me.” She spun in place, the skirt twirling at the motion.Bruce ducked his head, holding out his hands to prepare to dance to the waltz currently playing. “I guess, I’ll lead then.”“You know we’re going to have to co-author a paper now, right?” Darcy said, as she got into position. With his head slightly ducked, she could stare right up into his warm brown eyes. “You just caused us more work.”Bruce smiled at the girl before him, nerves resting in the tense lines of his shoulders and his stiff hands. He began, stiffly, as the tune changed to be a little more upbeat. “Darcy, you are already co-authored on one of my published papers. You will be co-authored on my gamma wave degradation article and recognized as a contributor on three others.”“What?” She asked confusedly, stepping slightly into Bruce’s arms, eliminating the room he left for Jesus.Bruce glanced awkwardly at Tony and Pepper, dancing a few people away from them. Tony’s face was angled away, whispering into Pepper’s ear. Pepper locked eyes with Bruce with a smile on her face that Bruce had been seeing more and more. No woman had ever looked at Bruce like that. Like he was something to be devoured. Bruce suppressed a blush.“Darcy,” Bruce began, a little befuddled by her apparent confusion. “You know those equations you have been helping me with, right?”“Yeah, what does that have to do with anything?” Her eyes narrowed, at him. Bruce smiled at the motion. It made her look like Tony, confused and a little indignant, every time Bruce managed to surprise the fellow genius.He had a sneaking suspicion about the girl before him, and he wanted to confirm it. “And the rough drafts that Jane, Tony and I send you that you rewrite according to specific Journal standards?”Bruce glanced awkwardly to the side again, noticing that Tony and Pepper had spun, Tony now facing towards Bruce and staring at him intently. Where Pepper’s gaze was heat and anticipation, Tony’s was still, almost quiet. Not like he was going on a conquest, but that he had already been conquered. It sent shivers down Bruce’s spine that he had to steel himself not to show.“Yeah, what about those?” Darcy asked, pulled Bruce’s gaze back to the girl, annoyance growing on her face.He slowed his voice, swaying her into a spin carefully. “Darcy, you were there when Tony, Jane, and I were talking about modeling the generation of quark and antiquark byproducts of Einstein-Rosen bridges?”“Right. Was that the thing where I wrote the code to parse through the metric fuck tons of data from the sensor’s you all made?” Bruce nodded. Tony had been minutes from collapsing after the meeting, Darcy took over the programming without asking since it was easier to just do it herself than have Bruce or Jane be pulled away from time-sensitive projects.A laugh built up at the back of Bruce’s throat, a sound he wasn’t often used to making. The huff of amusement was all he could force himself to do, “Darcy, most lab administrators don’t get authorship or recognized as contributors on papers.” He twirled her again. “But when you debate our modeling methods and math, draft and revise papers, are accountable for the work the three of us produce, and contribute to the gathering, analysis, and interpretation of data … well, that makes you an author.”“Oh, well … okay,” Darcy said. “I just thought I was doing my job when I did that stuff.” She shrugged. Considering Darcy was operating with carte blanche from Pepper Potts and a job description that was mostly “other responsibilities as required”, her confusion was understandable.“You should be more confident about your contributions,” he said, as the song came to a close. “Of the 45 written or to be written papers between Jane, Tony and myself, you are a co-author on four of them, and contributor on seven.”The song stopped, and they stood for a moment staring at each other. Bruce, more than anyone, understood not feeling like what you were doing was valuable. He felt that every time he touched Betty Ross’s hand in public, love overflowing from his eyes, only to be cut off at the foot by General Ross’s gaze. He tried to convey this understanding and reassurance by squeezing the young girl’s hand gently.At that exact moment, the harsh, full-bellied laughter that they recognized as Clint’s broke through the calm ambiance of the room. Looking over, most of the Avengers had moved towards the outpost for the various news agencies for scheduled photo-ops and interviews, stationed in an out of the way corner so as not to disturb the people trying to have a good time. Nancy Sifuentez, the only person from Fox that was allowed to be at Stark events, could be heard over the silence that broke out. “Excuse me, Mr. Hawkeye. Why is your hair purple? Is this a statement of some kind about the Maria Stark Foundation’s priority areas changing to youth homelessness, environmentalism, and New York community development?”Darcy’s giggling could be heard throughout the room. She took a twirl in spot, glancing quickly all around her to see people’s reactions. Tony’s hair was currently a bright, metallic gold, so harsh that it reflected the light onto Pepper’s Iron Man Red hair (several shades more vibrant than her natural color). Thor’s hair was currently lightning bolt blue, nicely complementing Jane’s silvery grey. Clint was trying to hide his purple head behind Coulson’s, whose hair was now a purple so dark it was almost black.Only Steve and Natasha had been spared. Though, Natasha did have a new single streak of black through a side-bang, adding an edge to the beautiful woman’s deceptively softened features for the gala. Darcy didn’t even try to wonder how Natasha managed to do that.She stopped to look up at Bruce, hair now Hulk green. He looked at her wonderingly, as Darcy’s hair started to lighten in some places and darkened in others, until it was a kaleidoscope of black and white patches.Darcy’s smile was fierce and triumphant, not remotely remorseful about the whole affair. She had coerced (bribed) Jarvis to help her figure out which of the Avengers had been interfering with her wardrobe. It was all of them, but Steve.Jarvis had shown her the work Bruce, Tony and even Jane had been doing to body armor fabrication and bullet-proof textile development. Coulson, Jane and Natasha had designed the dress and hiding spots for weapons. Clint had stolen and returned the shoes. Thor had kept her distracted by taking her out flying.Using some of the camouflage tech work from Bio (who were now her official pranking buddies and were easily bribed with cookies), she was equipped with bio-compounds that would alter their pigmentation after exposure to non-harmful ultraviolet light. She had spiked the shampoo of all of the culprits behind upgrading her dress and shoes for the Gala. She had set up some discreet UV emitters throughout the ceiling, and set them to a timer.“Like I said, Bruce,” she said lauging to the normally reserved man before her. “I’m not a damsel, and I’m definitely not in distress.”The next song started, a jazzy swing number. Despite people’s laughter and whispers, Bruce grabbed the girl’s hand as the song began, and began twirling her rapidly. Her black and white hair whipped around her face in a grey blur.“How did you manage to get Coulson or Natasha?” Bruce asked, thoroughly impressed.“I didn’t with Natasha.” She admitted. Bruce nodded, though he knew he was neigh on indestructible, a dangerous predator always recognized another. “She must have figured it out and decided to do that. Now I just need to see if I can convince her to convince the others I had snuck up on her. Enhance my street cred.”“What about Coulson then?” He asked. “He’s just as hard, if not harder, to surprise.”“I doused Clint’s conditioner (which Clint never uses) in the off chance Coulson might get distracted by the shower sex and not notice.” She said through panted breaths, “Which is why his hair is a darker shade than Clint’s.”Bruce laughed, like it was punched out of him, a sound that hurt as much as it helped express overflowing joy. The Avengers all looked on, in wonder at the duo, flying across the dance floor like they had practiced swing dancing together before. It was the first any of them, other than Tony, had heard Bruce laugh.-Darcy was standing in a meadow, towards the edge before it once more became forest, roughly 30 miles past the Canadian border. She and Bruce were supposed to be on a hike, the snow rendering the world lovely and pristine, but not so much that it would be terribly dangerous. They were going to have a picnic at the end since it was a wonderful day, hardly any breeze, and only slightly below freezing.She had decided to accompany Bruce to make modifications to some safe house he had constructed in the area there for Shield. Officially, she was joining Bruce to update the computer and electronic access systems. Partially, Darcy had decided to get away from the city for a bit, feeling a little cooped up in the Tower after Tony and (strangely enough) Coulson had been smothering her after she had to break up with Pete when he finally sold her made up story to TMZ. Darcy didn’t ask, but she was pretty sure that Natasha and Clint were making a visit to his Brooklyn apartment. She almost wanted a recording, but it would be funnier to watch Clint imitate Natasha scaring people.Darcy, naively, also thought that she would get time to relax and get a chance to speak with Bruce. She figured that if she had to walk into communal kitchen and watch Bruce sleepily and uncertainly nuzzle into Pepper’s hand in his growing beard, or timidly accept the food that appeared around Tony like magic and always happened to be Bruce’s favorites, well … Darcy figured she couldn’t be held responsible for her actions. Pepper and Tony would thank her for it later.That was, of course, if she survived the latest mess caused by her being the unofficial Avenger feelings conversationalist. At this rate, Darcy had seriously started contemplating a punch card system, every fifth “talk” and they owed Darcy a baked good kind of thing.“Want metal man!” A large, green fist came down, cracking into the earth, pulverizing and compacting everything under it. The snow, a thin one inch-layer that had come down just the night before, flew everywhere. If it were sand, it might have turned to glass.“Where fire lady?” With that, he picked up a tree from its roots and launched it like a javelin. Darcy counted in her head. She didn’t hear or feel the tree land for several seconds. Estimating the initial velocity, angle of launch, and wind resistance of a tree, she figured it was close to a kilometer away.Darcy was only about a dozen meters or so away from the Hulk, who was rampaging on the edge of the forest.A red-laser dot moved across the white around Darcy’s feet, a light she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been looking for it. Coulson had stayed at the cabin (“The Retreat” Coulson called it, as Darcy rolled her eyes) to check-in with Director Fury on the newly installed video cameras. He was invested in the Shield safe house, for reasons Darcy hadn’t been able to parse out just yet. The agent had planned to track them down later to join them for a hike-picnic. It seems like he had caught up quickly when Darcy sent him an emergency ping of her location over her earpiece.She was glad that he was nearby, probably watching from the scope of the tranquilizer rifle. Darcy had forgotten her tranq-gun in her handbag, still in the safe-house some miles away. The brunette was reassured that, if she raised her right hand and rapidly flashed the peace sign twice, then Coulson would have a dart in the Hulk’s neck before she could blink.“Okay, so…” Darcy began, trying to raise her voice but not sound like she was yelling. “They aren’t here, buddy.” She could feel the impact of his fists on the ground, vibrating her whole body through her feet.Hulk, breathing deeply and rumbling through his massive chest. “Metal man!” He roared, plaintively. “Fire lady!” He started pounding the ground roughly once again.“Note to self: Don’t ask him about sex with Pepper and Tony when he’s distracted.” She could hear the Coulson go silent from murmuring caution with every breath. For him, that was tantamount to a shocked gasp.Darcy didn’t actually want to know about Tony’s sex life, the whole dad thing was still a little … complicated, emotionally. She was trying to weasel out some information from the man, find out why he hadn’t made a move yet.“Well, Natasha makes startling information out of people look easy. My impression needs work. Also, I’d like to add that I’ve seen Bruce not change while things literally exploded around him.”Coulson’s response, bland and amused, came quickly, “You know they aren’t having sex yet, right?”“Of course, I know that.” Darcy set her curled fists onto her hips, raising her voice so the Hulk could hear her as well. “I didn’t think a little sex talk would freak Bruce enough to Hulk out.”“That was exceedingly stupid, Darcy,” the agent added. “Not that I expected otherwise from you. Just pointing it out.” Darcy smiled at the banter.After a few moments, the Hulk’s rhythm started to slow. Darcy was glad that he hadn’t jumped away in a fit of pique.“Okay, buddy. You want to take a chill pill for a second?” She said loudly, as his pounding finally slowed to a stop. The giant face so like Bruce’s but twisted and confused, a child’s portrait of the original man’s face.The Hulk threw himself backwards, landing in a sitting position in a muffled boom. “Want,” he said, lifting a large hand to scratch at his face. He had some snow on his face and layered in his hair from tossing trees.“Yeah, buddy. I know.” Darcy took a tentative step forward, foot crunching the snow slightly. She paused at hearing the resulting rumble from the giant. She lifted her hands out in front of her.“Darcy, what are you doing?” came Coulson’s voice from her ear, voice losing all emotion. “I highly discourage you from entering striking distance of the Hulk.”“I know what I’m doing, G-man.” She murmured, taking another tentative step forward. “I think,” she added as an afterthought, not entirely sure if she meant to say that out loud.“Darcy, if you get much closer, no matter how fast I am on the trigger, the tranquilizer won’t act quickly enough to prevent you from getting killed,” Coulson added, purely professional. “I really don’t want to deal with the paper work your death would cause.”“Heya, Hulk,” Darcy intoned happily, as she ruffled through her satchel at her side, filled with the food and beverages they had taken with them. She had also picked up Bruce’s backpack, which she was currently wearing, when he threw it away from himself when he started to transform. She pushed aside her copy of her quantum-mechanics textbook, and wrapped her fleece gloved hand around a thermos of piping hot sweet tea.“Do you want some tea?” the young woman asked, pulling it from the satchel. She hoped that the Hulk would drink it and calm down, since that always worked for Bruce. The Hulk’s face twisted in confusion and concentration. A part of him, the part that was partially Bruce, fed him the information about tea.His face twisted in a grimace, “Bad drink.” His large, green lips pursed in a way that was the splitting image of Bruce’s annoyed face.“Okay, maybe the stuff you and I normally drink together is bad,” he roared at her response. She reassured him, one hand holding the thermos, the other making a calm-down motion, “… when you’re smaller that is.”“Bad drink!” He bellowed, but refrained from pounding the ground. He assessed the rapidly approaching small figure. She didn’t know what kind of thought were flashing inside that green head, but her gut told her it wasn’t bad.“Sweet tea!” She shook the thermos at her large companion, enticingly, “I know that it isn’t normal to drink sweet tea this hot. But, I figured what Southerners don’t know won’t hurt them.”The brunette girl used her other hand to slowly twist off the cap of the thermos. “Would you like to try some?”He looked at her flatly. He huffed out his breath through his nose, folding his arms over his chest and looked to the side. He started rumbling.“I’m going to take that as a yes,” she said as she poured the steaming liquid into the cap, which was the size of a large mug. She continued to approach at a steady pace. Darcy froze when, less than 10 feet away and Coulson totally silent in her ear, the Hulk turned to make eye contact with her. Darcy hadn’t spent as much time decoding those green eyes as she has with Bruce, she didn’t know what the other guy was thinking.The Hulk, in simple terms, was disoriented. He did not understand this girl, walking towards him with a bright purple beanie and bright green gloves on her hands, steam raising from the cup and thermos she was holding. He had no frame of reference for this. Like a drunk only remember something they did before when they got intoxicated again, his conscious memories were mostly limited to his moments when he was big and green, not trapped and quiet inside the small man. This was the first time he could remember somebody approaching him this way.The Hulk was double confused because as he woke up from deep inside Bruce, thoughts rushed in like a flood past the break in a dam. The Hulk always experienced moments of Bruce’s stray thought during transformation (bright numbers, geometric shapes and pretty words) but Hulk never knew what they meant. This time, they were even more confusing than normal. He woke to pictures flashing behind his green eyelids, the metal man he caught from falling was hugging Bruce (him) on a comfy couch as they were surrounded by discarded metal and buildings made of pure light. He saw a woman with a bright smile and blood on her teeth, a strange needle in her arm that dimmed the fire under her skin, as she caressed Bruce’s (his) face. These images stuck in his conscious mind upon waking, giving color and depth to his normal rage. Making it softer, possessive. Lonely.The Hulk extended his hand, tentatively, to accept the metal cup gently between his thumb and forefinger. He looked up to the brunette girl, cold causing rosiness along the plains of Darcy’s cheeks. She pantomimed taking a drink. When the green man didn’t respond, she took a swig from the open thermos to demonstrate what she meant.His fingers twitched slightly at watching this, he felt the metal buckle slightly. He stilled his hand in response. He brought the small thing up to his mouth. It looked like the size of a delicate teacup in his hand. He knocked it back all in one go, small drops spilling out the sides of his lips.He kept the warm liquid in his mouth, not swallowing, forehead crunched in confusion at the taste. He swished the liquid in his mouth. It was strange and new. It tingled along his tongue, bursts of sweetness and undertones of citrus, masking the bitterness of leaves. He swallowed in one large gulp.“Good,” he replied. “More,” he demanded in a bellow, the warmth hitting his belly and softening him.Darcy, with a slight hint of sweat along her forehead and breathe held a beat too long, extended her hand very slowly, gesturing for the slightly warped thermos cap. “You got it, big guy,” she said.The Hulk returned the cap, moving as slowly as the girl before him. “More,” he huffed out, almost petulant, while nodding.The next cap had him humming at the warmth in his mouth, intrigued and delighted, a weird sensation on his lips. Darcy, in this moment, realized that she doesn’t know if the Hulk had ever experienced something like food. Or simple, everyday pleasures. He came out, almost exclusively, to smash whatever was trying to harm him and his host.Upon this realization, she was struck with an idea as she accepted back the thermos cap once again. “Coulson, are you recording this?” she whispered under her breath.“Affirmative, Darcy,” came the hushed reply. She threw a thumbs up into the air in response.“Hey, big guy,” she called out to the Hulk as he stared at her intently, waiting for another cap. She shook the thermos, feeling it was still half full. “Could you clear off the snow over there?” She gestured just to his right. She used her free hand to gesture a sweeping motion at the snow.He stared at her, a brief second, before mimicking the gesture. He laid his arm flat, quickly sweeping it to the side, the rush of displaced air and snow causing a swatch of earth to be uncovered, twice the size she needed. Darcy’s smile erupted on her face. The Hulk, seeing this, tilted his head to the side, confused.“Good job, big guy,” she said as she started to unload both her satchel and Bruce’s backpack, laying out the thick and warm picnic blanket on the cold ground. “We can still have our picnic.”“Alright, Coulson, keep visual and audio recording going. Let’s see how this plays out.” She said, removing a small handheld space heater that Tony designed and reassured her would keep a small area, the size of a picnic blanket, warm for up to two hours. She activated it. Immediately, the air around the area went still. It started to churn in a circular motion against her skin, like she was in the heart of a warm, gentle tornado.“So, did you want to try fruit or maybe some cheeses?” She asked to the green giant, while she was bent over inspecting the backpack. They had several cheeses, fruits, olives, drinks, crackers and other organic or healthy options in their bags. No “gross preservativey stuff” allowed under Bruce’s watchful eye.Darcy thought she saw the quick hint of a smile on the Hulk’s face. His eyes were still (always) angry (afraid), but they were also a touch contemplative. She pulled out a block of sharp cheddar in one hand and a small box of raspberries in the other, extending them in front of her in offering. He watched her with emerald eyes, as she waved her hands up and down like she was weighing the food in her palms.The Hulk extended his hand, one large finger uncurling to point at the dark red of the berries catching his eye. In his nose, he could smell the air heating up around him and a strange moldy, sharp smell that made something in his gut clench.Darcy learned a lot about the Hulk throughout the course of their picnic. Bright colors and sweet flavors caused him to grumble in pleasure, “more” and “yes” and “good”, shaking the ground and disrupting the snow. The sharpness of the cheddar and strangeness of the olives caused him to sneeze, a tree in the distance lost its snow at the motion. “Bad” and “no” and simple growls accompanied Darcy trying to encourage him to retry something he didn’t like.The Hulk learned a lot about Darcy throughout the course of their picnic. She laughed when he threw something he didn’t like. This was good. A sour smell, like stale sweat, would come off of her when he roared at the nasty no things. This was bad. He learned about high-fives when he swallowed a whole package of salty, slimy meat (“Dude, not the prosciutto!” she exclaimed, giggling). She smiled (weird face, teeth showing but not angry, not fear) when he mimicked her motion, extending his hand palm forward and waiting. When she threw her whole body forward to touch her hand (small, break easy) against his, he didn’t want to run or smash.“Yeah, so, metal man is my dad,” this would be the first time Darcy referred to Tony as her dad, not “biological father.” Though she knew it was only a matter of time, she had though the context would be different.“Metal man,” he licked across the tops of his teeth, searching out any lingering hint of the strawberries and blueberries he just ate. He liked them both best, but he didn’t know why (the part of him that was Bruce knew but that part was quiet, shy). The Hulk wracked his brain, though he didn’t know that was what he was doing, for a word. “Daughter,” came the eventual reply.“That’s right, big buy,” she replied. He got another high five. Big guy, echoed in his head, a strange contentment at the words.“Little metal girl,” he rumbled out, like he was testing the words on his lips. “Little metal girl,” he repeated, nodding and clearly pleased with himself.“Ugh … Not Darcy, eh?” She said, biting into a slice of green apple, covered in brie and honey they had baked and sealed in tupperware earlier that day.“Little metal girl,” he responded, lifting his hand for another high-five.Darcy lifted a hand, sticky with honey and berries, to return the high-five. “I can live with that,” she said through a grin. A rumble, almost a purr, came deep from the chest of the giant man.-Later, after Bruce watched the hour long picnic between the Other Guy and Darcy, he was utterly silent. The audio recording of Coulson and Darcy exchanged observations of the Hulk’s behavior, ringing in his head (“positive reinforcement”, “evidence of early concrete operational thought”, “capable of strength regulation and impulse control”). He sat on Tony and Pepper’s couch, Tony head in his lap, eating dried blueberries from a bag. Pepper’s head on his shoulder, hair tickling his ear and her hand running gently through Tony’s hair.Bruce sat, in silence and a strange contentment, as his worldview hemorrhaged. His chest started to ache, but that might have been the lack of easy breathing he was experiencing in that moment.“She wasn’t afraid so he … I … he wasn’t afraid.” He dropped his head, the pounding behind his eyelids demanding tears that he refused to shed. “God, if the other guy can be like that?” His voice trailed off. If he was wrong, about this, about the Hulk.Then, so much of his running was for nothing. So much of his fear, made pointless.Tony lifted a hand out of the bag of dried fruit, grabbing Bruce’s hand closest to him. The callouses were harsh along Bruce’s perfect skin, a strange but welcome side effect from the hulk mutation years ago. He was glad to lose his many scars.Pepper lifted Bruce’s other free hand in her own, placing it gently against Tony’s head, encouraging him to massage. Then, she began to run her hand up and down Bruce’s forearm, fingers gentle against the dark hairs. She smiled to herself, in amusement, when she found strands there that had gone as gray as some of the thick curls on top of his head.“I told you, you just need to get out and strut, hot topic.” Tony’s voice was content, like a napping lion. “That there was more to both of you than destruction.”“Ignore him Bruce,” Pepper’s rely, a soft exhale against his stubbled jaw. “He just wants to take credit away from Darcy.”“Well,” Bruce’s panic receding, a tide being pulled back by the turn of the moon (Tony and Pepper). He swallowed, thickly. His hand tightening on Tony’s, in panic and something else. “Tony helped make Darcy. So … partial credit?” He tried for humor, but thought he missed the mark.Tony’s turned his body, cheek resting against Bruce’s thigh, looking up at Pepper and Bruce. He started rubbing his cheek against the soft sweatpants, “Credit isn’t what I want.” He could feel Tony’s stubble and breath through the thin material. Pepper switched to using the blunt end of her nails to run up and down his arm. Heat pooled low in Bruce’s belly.Later, as Bruce fell apart under Tony’s kisses along his spine (stubble starting to rub raw and laying teeth marks on tender skin) and Pepper so warm beneath him (eyes wild and focused on him and not just Tony behind him and that is good, that is so damn good).He was drowning and flying, freezing and burning, all at once. But not transforming. He was himself in his own skin, his own sweat and tears along his cheeks. “More” and “yes” and “good” were the only words left to him. He knew then, between the edge and the abyss, he knew that there was more to him and to the Hulk than he realized.-As thank you, perhaps partially an “I’m sorry I’m sleeping with your dad and your mother-figure”, Bruce brought Darcy a thermos of hot, sweet tea every day for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, he gifted a new, giant thermos to the girl. Lasered into its smooth, shiny surface, was “Little Metal Girl” in big block letters, with a poorly drawn stick figure of a girl and a giant man, with a forest in the background.So like a Stark, he would think to himself, to reach out, with both hands, to something dangerous and claim it as your own.
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Darcy’s eyes were burning from the cold and her second day up from a lack of sleep. Coulson had her deep in her secret programs in Shield, making modifications to include all the Avengers on her watcher programs and some strange requests for data pattern recognition. Ever since Fury assigned him his own little bunch of misfits (she was impressed Coulson managed to recruit the Skye from The Rising Tide) and a plane just after the Hulk Picnic, Coulson had been running her ragged.Somehow, in a way that was completely her own fault but she would take no responsibility for, she wound up in the freezing cold landing pad of Stark Tower. It was a biting 10 degrees outside. The wind bit through her hoodie and jacket, causing her bones and hands to shake, jumping on her feet to keep the blood flowing.Before her, at the very edge of the building, was Steven in the newest incarnation of his Captain America uniform. Darcy was not a huge fan of the darker uniform, the harsh lines and almost completely lacking any bright reds or whites. It made Captain America look more like a soldier, and less like a hero. Coulson also hated it.Steve, hands behind him holding onto the railing of the landing pad hard enough to warp the metal, was staring over her right shoulder like he was contemplating making a break for the door a few dozen yards behind her. She dared him, with her eyes, to try it. “The only way you are getting past me, without a literal fight, is going off that edge. Are you going to beat up someone weaker than you, Captain?” She teased, with a touch of steel in her voice.Darcy noticed a muscle in his right cheek twitch and his eyebrows furrow. She extended out her hand, a long thin plastic cylinder, clutched in her fist. “Steve, I wouldn’t be asking you to do this if it wasn’t important,” she said, placating.The blond man before her started fidgeting in place. “Okay, but … ummm …” he continued on, heart pounding from trying to flee from the young woman. He still was confused about how he managed to be corralled to this location.Darcy, anticipating his reticence in following the request any Stark made of him, had used Jarvis and some of the Hulk Protocol tech to funnel him to a place without a clear retreat.“Yes?” Darcy asked, exasperation clear on her face. She had been trying to pin him down for weeks.“Ummm … Why?” He asked, folding his arms under each other, hunching over, in a clear sign of nerves. Darcy smiled at him, Awww … this is what Clint meant by puppy dog face. His mouth, open to ask another question, snapped shut at the sight of the young woman’s bright smile.“We need to determine if your version of the super serum changed you genetically. Personally, I have the sneaking suspicion that it is predominantly epigenetic, working on a cellular level to suppress negative gene expression and enhance overall cellular performance. These small changes would accumulate to enhanced system functions which would be what causes your enhanced strength, speed, healing, memory, and reduced need for sleep. Still, we need to make sure that your base code was unaffected in order to ensure that cloning you wouldn’t allow someone to create a super soldier army.”Steve started to relax at her explanation, recognizing very little, but reassured. He smiled, a little bit sad, at the girl before him. He was reminded of another mouthy brunette with bright eyes and sharp wit. And, in bemusement he thought to himself, tongue that that was pure trouble.“Okay, so, laymen’s terms?” He asked, rocking back and forth on the heels of his feet . Darcy knew it was likely not from the cold. She retracted her extended hand slowly, Steve eyeing her fist like she was holding a gun or a bomb.“Ummm …” He said, starting to sway side to side. Darcy, anticipating him trying to make a break for it, tensed to launch in either direction to block him from trying to get a better line of sight to the exit.“Stop ‘ummm’-ing.” She snapped at him, pointing at him with the object in her hand. "I know you learned almost every European language there is while at war. So did you not understand what I said or are you just trying to distract me?” Natasha was the one who let her know that Steve also gained an affinity for languages since his exposure to the super soldier serum. Natasha encouraged her to practice her Russian with Steve, but Darcy was holding off on that.He smiled, a slight up push from just his bottom lip that looked more like a pout, “I’ll take the normal explanation. The serum enhanced my aptitude for pattern recognition, but it only helps if I have some base understanding.”After only a few weeks around Jacques from the Howling Commandos, he began to unconsciously understand French. In only eight days or so in Switzerland, on an undercover mission to meet up with some French resistance fighters, he had picked up Dutch. The only probably was, he realized, it didn’t work with anything he had no basic aptitude or context to understand. Advanced science or math, or computer languages which he figured out recently, didn’t get easier for him. Perhaps if he took some basic classes his understanding would advance quickly, but he hadn't testés that out yet.“Okay. So, do you at least understand what cells are?” She made a little o with her free, gloved hand. “And what genes are?”Steve shook his head. “I get cells, but I haven’t started the genetics section of my classes.”He had been taking online classes to catch him up on the basic knowledge someone his age would know. Instead of making him feel more in touch, like the Shield therapists suggested, it made him feel worse. Sometimes, he felt so out of place that he would lock himself in his Brooklyn apartment, turn off the television, listen to vinyl records and reread his favorite Asimov novels. His favorite part of the future was, having fallen in love with some of Asimov’s short stories as a young man, that he woke up to tons to catch up on. The books helped him remember the hope for a world of possibility, not the strangeness and isolation he currently felt.“Okay. Think of your genes like … the colors you use for painting. You can combine primary colors together to get a unique color that you want. You can combine the produced colors in different ways to paint completely different pictures.” She used this analogy because she was the one who organized his Christmas gift, thousands of dollars of art supplies. She continued on when noted some comprehension in the sea of discomfort that was normal to the man.“Before the serum, your gene structure was like a five-year old trying to paint, producing muddy colors and painting with a shaky hand. Everything was jumbled up, instead of the clear picture it should have been. Which is why you got sick easily from a poor immune system, asthma, weak bones, vitamin deficiencies and arthritis. Are you following along?”“I think so.” He lets out a heavy breath, trying to relax once again. He was relieved that she neither took for granted what he might understand nor thought him too stupid to follow along. It was, by far, the clearest explanation he had gotten about something he didn’t know in a long time.“The serum, in this convoluted ass metaphor, had that shitty little painter kid grow up into Van Gogh.” He smiled, when she pronounced it with its original Dutch harshness, rather than the English way. “The colors mixed together perfectly, the hand steady, the painting emerged. Boom, Captain America.”“Okay, I think I understand that.” He reached his hand out, to accept the thing he was trying to give her. “So, you’re trying to make sure that they can’t use me to either make forgeries of the painting or reproduce the serum that would make their own Van Goghs?”Darcy lifted her arms in victory with a woot, passing him the vial and the instructions on where to take it to get his blood drawn correctly. “Now you got it buddy!” Steve ducked his face in a blush, awkwardly. When he realized where his gaze had went, he turned his face to the side, blushing harder.She paused, taking a moment to look at the profile of his face. He looked so young to her, awkward in that moment, that she regretting that she had trapped him like this. She continued on, “It would also even tell us, for example, if you ever had a kid if the rugrat would be like you now or skinny-adorable you.”Unfortunately, suspicion and panic rose up like a viper. His blush disappeared completely, and his face went stony. “This is because Natasha has been trying to set me up on dates, isn’t it?” It was the only reason he could think would cause her to use an explanation that had anything to do with progeny.Darcy, recognizing she had stumbled, just shrugged. “Doesn’t change anything. We still need to make sure,” she said, as reassuring as she knew how to be.He glanced to his side, looking over the ledge from the corner of his eyes. She could see him contemplate it, scenarios and possibilities flashing through his cool, blue eyes. Her eyes narrowed sharply the moment she saw him realize there was a way he could make the decent from the Tower from the outside of the building.“If you try to leave that way, Steven Grant Rogers, I swear to the Gods I will ensure you fall to your death.”This needed to be done, and she had already gone through hell installing security protocol after security protocol, encryption software that could stand up to Tony or Tony and Jarvis (for a while at least), to keep this information they discovered from his blood a secret. She just needed Steve to undergo the tests. She wouldn’t force him, but she would not let him deter her either.He turned to look at the girl before him, shivering in the cold morning light, eyes on fire. Wondering, to himself, what he must have done to offend God to deserve all the madness the Starks have put him through.“Well, wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose?” Steve tried relaxing, smiling the smile he used on the USO tours for screaming women who needed a distraction or young men, about to be shipped off to war, with feverish eyes and the desperate need for some hope. He had learned to flirt at the heels of Bucky (that thought brought a dull-throb behind his ribs), so it might actually work.“You do this voluntarily, or I get what I need from your corpse,” she returned charming look for charming look, her tone sugary sweet. Steve’s smile froze on his face, the vein on his neck started throbbing.“Look, Ms. Lewis. I have a mission I need to go on. I’m already keeping Natasha waiting,” Darcy tensed at this pronouncement, dragging her gaze over him like hot coal to assess his sincerity. “Can we please discuss this some other time?”“If you are using Natasha as an empty-threat, you know you will regret it, right?” She folder her arms sternly. “Natasha likes me better than you.” He could see that she wanted to stick her tongue out at him.Steve ducked his head, staring at the Iron Man Chuck Taylors on her feet. He had noticed that she had worn them every day since Tony gave them to her two weeks ago.“Ugh,” He mumbled out, shaking his head like a dog shaking off some water. “No?” He said, but Darcy just stared at him in confusion.“I mean, ummm, that I do have to go meet her.” He lifted his hands up in surrender. “I promise we can talk about it when I get back.”She stepped to the side, making a grand sweeping gesture like she was presenting Cinderella at a ball. “Then get to it!”Steve walked past the brunette like she was going to attack him at any moment. He relaxed, slightly, when he cleared striking distance. As he approached the entrance back into the Tower, he let out a shuddering breath of relief. Okay, he would think, so she is the reasonable Stark.“All you had to do was draw blood, Steve.” He tensed, at the undertones of laughter in her voice at his back. “I think the biologists will love a semen sample to accompany it. Since you kept them waiting for a bit of blood.”I take that back, he thought, as his face explode in heat and he clenched his fists. He didn’t even try to pretend to walk away with dignity. He ran away, heart beating loudly in his chest, from the laughter of the gorgeous woman behind him. He had always been easily flustered by beautiful people with dark-hair and backbones of steel.-“Thanks, Cap!” Clint said, a slight hint of enthusiasm showing through the normally stoic exterior he presented to Steve. He grabbed each Captain America collectible cards as Steve finished signing it. The archer put them away, carefully but quickly, into little plastic sleeves. “This is totally going to get me laid tonight.”“Congrats?” Steve said, uncertainly, sitting at the table in the Avenger’s common room. “Also, if you need to give gifts to get laid, I think that means you are doing it wrong?” Steve teased the archer.Natasha had been making not-so-subtle threats for Steve to try harder to get to make nice with the other Avengers. It was easier with Natasha, and Thor to some extent. (He deliberately didn’t think about how they are soldiers and super, like him, and the fear he has to suppress every time he goes out into the field with Clint or Tony).Clint chuckled. “Sorry, I forget that only Darcy ever wants to hear about my sex life.” The shorter man shrugged, “Anyway, you have any plants for Valentines?”Steve paused, “Oh, I guess I forgot about that.” He looked up to the ceiling, at the cameras all around him, like he was waiting for something to happen. The early afternoon sunlight through the windows highlighted the smudges of dirt and drying sweat alone his hairline. Clint and Steve had just returned from a retrieval missions, and all Steve wanted was a hot shower, a whole pizza, and a nap.“I’m surprised, considering how hard Natasha has been trying to set you up. Did the thing not work out that specialist … what’s her name?” Clint asked, lining the cards up one-by-one, in numerical order, into a protective plastic box. “Pryde?”“She was … swell?” He had been trying to update his slang, somewhat, but ‘swell’ was the hardest word for him to forgo sometimes. “She spent the entire date talking about her childhood friend, Peter something, disappearing.” Steve shrugged, “I only did it for Natasha.” He signed the last card with a flurry.“Ouch,” Clint said, wincing in sympathy, standing to leave to get ready for his date. Coulson had organized dinner, Clint did everything else. “It is hard to compete with a dead man.” The phrase sent shivers down Steve’s spine.Steve stood as Clint moved away, clapping him briefly on the shoulder in farewell. “Alright. I’m going to go home, take a shower, and get ready for my deployment to DC.”Clint exited the common room, briefly leaving Steve’s line of sight. Steve tensed at hearing a scream. He rushed towards the door.On the other side, Clint had Darcy in his arms, swinging the young girl around, causing her hair (let down for a change) to twirl around.“Darce!” Clint exclaimed. Steve forced himself to relax, watching Clint emote more in two seconds than he has seen in months of working with him. “Tell me you’re staying with me this weekend.”“Let me down, Hawk-ass!” She said, laughing. “I’ll stay, but I swear to Thor, if you don’t lock the bathroom when you’re having shower sex or use the white noise machines, I will end you!"He set her down in a huff. “Okay, I have to go shower and get ready for my date.” He started to walk away, smiling face scrunching in lines that weren’t normally visible, “Do America a favor, and entertain the Cap for Valentine’s Day? He’s trying to be boring.”Darcy had turned to look at Steve, pulling down her Metallica band t-shirt and readjusting her glasses. She smiled widely at Steve, wickedly. His heart beat in his chest unexpectedly.She turned suddenly, calling out to the retreating Clint behind her, “Don’t wear the purple shirt! Wear the green one!”Clint threw up a middle-finger at his retreat.Darcy turned back, her full attention finally setting on Steve before her. “You also riding stag this corporatized-day-of-romance and lackluster love making?”“I honestly don’t know how to answer that.” Steve responded. “I think the answer is yes, but I feel like I should say no.”Darcy’s grin took on a dangerous edge. “I know Tony hasn’t cleared out your apartment in the Tower. Go get showered, grab a change of clothes, and meet me in the lobby in one hour. I’m taking you on a singles-only Darcy Lewis Valentine’s Day Celebration.”Before he could even respond, Darcy turned around to skip off. Literally skip, and humming ‘God Bless America’ under her breath.“What should I wear?” He called out to her, hands shuffling awkwardly. The brunette turned, instead of stopping she just slowed and started to skip backward. Steve thought it was endearing.“Whatever you would never normally wear. Wear that!”-Steve felt ridiculous. As a soldier (former soldier, maybe; Shield agent, probably; not sure what he is, absolutely), he was showered and groomed in 10 minutes flat. The problem was the wardrobe. As in, he didn’t know where it was. His Tower apartment, too big and beautiful but with no personal touches since he spent no time there, was foreign to him.He had resorted to asking Jarvis for help. His excitement about a real technological man was his first, truly happy memory in this strange time. Jarvis was, by far, the easiest person for Steve to talk to.“Okay, Mr. Jarvis. I’m going to need your help on this one. But you have to promise not to record any of this.”“Of course, Captain Rogers,” came Jarvis from the ceiling, amusement evident at the sight of Steve sitting on his bed in nothing but a towel. Steve had folded his uniform carefully and it was resting on the bed next to him.“Where’s the closet?” He asked awkwardly, scratching at a recently healed broken collarbone, while looking to the ceiling.Jarvis enjoyed the look on Steve’s face when he triggered the wall to the immediate left of Steve. It was seemingly bare, but opened up to reveal an entire closet of clothes in the man's size. There were workout clothes, pajamas, casual wear, business wear. There were even a handful of tuxedos. Steve ran his hands over the delicate fabric, realizing they must have been individually made and very expensive. Steve deliberately did not think of how Tony, perhaps Pepper, had gotten his measurements.“Step one – Completed. Now, step two,” he said to Jarvis, shuffling through tops, placed high. Pants were hanging on the lower pole, and there were cubicles at the bottom of the closet filled with shoes of all kinds. “What do I wear?”“Might I suggest you start with a pair of underwear located on the drawer’s located to your right. I would also suggest not looking in the bottom most drawer.” Steve followed his suggestion to the letter, putting on a pair of familiar black Hanes boxer-briefs (all he wore, but still unnerved how any of them knew that).“Alright, I can do this. What would Steve Rogers not wear?” He asked, to himself and partially to the AI, above him.-In another room, several floors above Steve, Darcy was attempting to hack Jarvis’ privacy protocols in order to see Steve freak out but was thwarted in every turn. She gave up in a huff when Jarvis threatened to wipe out her music collection.The brunette simply went back to humming, working on some smoky eyes and letting the temporary dye set. She was humming, “Macho Man” under her breath.-Still ten minutes left in the hour-long deadline he was given, Steve was in the lobby of the building, standing awkwardly off to the side of the security desk. He was thankful that it was only 4:00pm, everyone had either left work much earlier or hadn’t clocked out just yet for their Friday night Valentine’s plans. There was a single guard, a serious African-American woman (she was the one who explained to him, serious but friendly, the difference between and politics behind saying “Black” or “African-American”). Sharlene (“Call me Charlie”) giving him the side eye from her puzzle. He shuffled, pulling at the collar of his button down, letting her babble at him about how she was divorced with two children, both now in college, so she was picking up holiday shifts to help them out.Darcy entered the lobby the way she entered everything, loudly, phone volume high in her hands as she played some kind of game and not paying attention to her surroundings. Steve tried to discreetly fix his hair, back into the flare to the side style Jarvis had showed him how to do using a YouTube video.Darcy had blond almost platinum hair that had been straightened, her eyes smoky and dark. She was wearing a loose black shirt-dress, with horizontal slashes, and sparkly lettering saying ‘Bad Bitch’ in the front. She was wearing bright silver pumps, black tights, black peacoat held over her arm. Steve was both befuddled and blown away.The young woman nearly made it to the exit, passing by the security desk, when she stopped to take a second look. She nearly fell over in laughter when she finally realized that the man there was actually Steve. “Sekhmet’s tits, you are hipster GQ!” She had begun using Egyptian gods for cursing, since using Thor’s Viking relatives made Thor weird.“Please let me take a picture and tweet it later! Please! Please! Please!” she said, hopping towards him on her short heels.Steve hand on a tight, short-sleeved light-blue shirt, a skinny black tie, and thin black suspenders hooked into tight black-denim pants. He donned a pair of black glass frames, found in a dresser in his room’s labeled ‘Disguises.’ Under Jarvis’ suggestion, using some of the body paint in the disguise drawer, he started deftly drawing some temporary fore-arm tattoos. He was glad, in that moment, that he was ambidextrous.“Umm …” He gestures at his everything, “Is this okay?” He readjusted the glasses on his face, trying to sort out his product-laden hair.He doesn’t see Charlie soften and smile at the pair, but Darcy does (which she ignores).“Perfect, Even Stevens.” She turned to the side, arm bent at the elbow, like she was the handsome prince about to escort the princess to the ball. “Follow me!”-There were women in fine, long dresses, all tall and willowy and severe. The men, well-to-do but either not enough so to get a later reservation or just late on the draw, were primarily middle-aged men that were over-confident in designer suits. Steve and Darcy were an eyesore in a pristine environment, and getting shade left and right.Still, Darcy was enjoying herself immensely. Her original plan for Valentine’s Day was mostly just baking and doing a Star Trek Movie Marathon in the Avengers Common Room. The last minute change to her plans were, so far, going swimmingly.“Okay, Steve. I accept that the love affair between Padme and Anakin is pretty sweet. Even the Mace Windu and Yoda slash thing you got going on is intriguing.” She was giggling around a huge glass of $500 merlot. Her Stark salary was more than enough to cover this indulgence. Tony’s name also greased a lot of wheels to get her a table at the small, five-star Italian restaurant for an early dinner. “But I refuse to believe that you actually liked Star Wars Episode Three!”“I also thought Jar-Jar Binks was hilarious. He was the unrecognized hero of the whole thing, if you think about it.” He was parroting all of the things he had heard Tony bemoan about the movies, looking for a reaction. He was laughing around the last of his butter garlic cream pasta, ignoring the indignant stares from the people around him. The bottle of tequila Darcy gave him on the cab ride over had softened some of his awkward edges. He can feel the pull of it recede already but a growing urge to pee.“Okay, now those are fighting words, you uncultured swine.” Darcy was about to, loudly and rudely, continue to call him out when the waiter came.The poor kid’s eyes were wide and he was shuffling a little awkwardly, not sure how he ended up with these two or how they could even afford to be here. Darcy turned her full attention, pursing her startling red lips, towards the poor boy, “We’ll have one of every desert.”Normally, Steve didn’t like making things more inconvenient for others. Knowing there wouldn’t be an issue if they dressed differently, he contented himself that it was other people’s problems not his own. Still, he took pity on the poor kid.“Just bring us your two best desserts, and pack the rest to go.” When the kid turned grateful eyes towards Steve, Steve smiled brightly, “Thanks, kid.”Darcy finished off her amazing ravioli, in an embellished sigh of contentment. “Ruin all my fun, don’t you, Steven Wonder?”“Nah, I figured that the sooner we finish the sooner I get to see the next crazy thing you have in store.” Steve smiled, perhaps the brightest smile Darcy remembered seeing on the man’s handsome face. Her breath caught in her throat, and she finished off her glass of wine to hide her smile.-“Perfect. We still have 15 minutes before we need to be there,” Darcy said, switching her shirt to a non-descript black shirt-dress from her giant black purse. Steve was awkwardly trying not look (but desperately wanting to). He wouldn’t see, except a brief flash out of the corner of his eyes, that Darcy was wearing her lucky, black and red lace bra and panties set. She wouldn’t consciously know why she decided to wear that, but she did.“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” He asked while munching on a tiramisu flavored cannoli, having finished off the crostata and most the other pastries since they got in the cab a short ride ago. The dinner was delicious but, with his metabolism, he needed the energy from the sweets far more than Darcy did.She refused to tell him anything, instead explaining to him the intricacies of The Voice and Dancing with the Stars, and why people care so much about competitive reality television shows.They arrive at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen just in time for the second dinner shift.Steve couldn’t say, exactly, why he was surprised that this was where they ended up. He saw what Darcy did for everyone around her, the worry she wiped away from Jane’s face. The laugh that only she could get out of Clint. The smile she could provoke from Natasha, the softest he’s ever seen the Russian. Tony, at his absolute best when giving his attention to one thing completely, blunting the worst of his harsh edges. The strange pride that Pepper and Coulson had for the girl. The gratitude from Bruce.Still, he guessed he was expecting something a little more … “Crazy? Yeah, I think I was expecting something a little bit crazier from you.”“I told you this was a singles-only Valentine’s Day Celebration by Darcy Lewis. Not get Darcy and Steve Arrested Day.” She pointed out, smugly.“Did you decide to do this at the last minute or?” Steve was not quite sure what he was asking.“No, I volunteer here a lot,” She responded, tying up her shockingly blond hair into a ponytail to get it out of the way for their shift. For some reason, this made Steve remember that Darcy was, in fact, several years younger than him. “Nice to get some perspective, every once and a while.”“This looks like the places I used to go to ... ,” his voice trailed off. “Are you sure its fine if we just …. Show up?” He took the glasses off his face, feeling suddenly self-conscious.“The Volunteer Coordinator, Nicole, was my RA my freshman year.” She grabbed him by the bicep, dragging him towards the entrance. “Don’t worry about it Stevie-boy!” He doesn’t ask her not to call him Stevie (only one other person had ever called him that).“Ummm … I can’t really cook,” was the last thing he managed to say, before he was being rushed forward.“Margery is going to love you. Just don’t let her creep up behind you. She is a cheek pincher, if you know what I mean.”-“And then I was like, pow pow mother-fucker, when I kicked the chair out from under him when he called Clint something very rude.” She was brushing sweaty bangs out from her eyes with her forearm, bright yellow plastic gloves soaking wet. “I was totally going to grab the chair and like, break it over his back, but Clint beat me to it when his friend pulled out a knife.” She pantomimed stabbing someone in the air, and screeching ‘ahhhh’ as she broke an imaginary chair over someone’s back, making an explosion sound when the chair made contact with the imaginary person.Darcy scrubbed off the worst of the food in the sink, while Steve loaded the industrial dishwasher and brought her more dirty dishes. Steve kept forgetting that he had foods all over his gloved hands, getting soapy water or smears of mashed potatoes on his face every time he slapped his hands over his mouth in either embarrassment or amusement.Darcy continued. “Things were about to get super-heated, but instead, one of the dude’s friends is like ‘Darcy fucking Lewis, is that you?’ And, can you believe it? It is this kid, Bobbie Cooper, whose younger sister was my best friend in elementary school. Next thing I know, I’m getting free jager-bombs, and making out with his buddy, Gerald. All the while, Clint proved my childhood suspicion that Bobbie, while a ruffian, was queer as a three-dollar bill.”“And this was only the second time you went out drinking with Clint?” He shifted to start putting the plates into the industrial sized dish-washer the way Darcy had showed him earlier. “At a college bar?”“Yup,” the words popped out of her lips, bright red lipstick having faded away, leaving them soft and pink. “Culver has everything. Great academics, cheap bars, decent sports (i.e. hotties) and, since it is more or less in the middle of nowhere, tons of shenanigans.”“The only thing art school had even close to that was that half the teacher’s there were in the Great War. There was one, Patrick Molloy, as Irish as they come and completely unapologetic about it,” he said, face soft and nostalgic but not sad. Darcy was completely silent and focused on the blond man, “If he didn’t like your charcoal work, he would make you drink a glass of his homemade moonshine he learned to make during Prohibition.”“’Are you an eejit, Rogers? Does your mother weep when she sees your piss-poor understanding of shade? Ní mórán thú!’” Steve dropped his voice low, sending a shiver down Darcy’s spine. He smiled at the memory, eyes far away, and Darcy’s heart thumped in her chest. He started passing her more plates to rinse off before being put through the washer.“Which, from my mother, I knew meant ‘you’re worthless.’ Also, I had to redo the sketch completely shit-faced.” His voice, no longer Irish sounding but long-vowels and silent r’s that was pure Brooklyn. “If it had been nude sketches, I might have died. Thankfully, inebriated flower charcoal sketches aren’t that difficult.”Darcy started snorting, the undignified one that she hated, covering her face in sudsy water trying to hold it in. “Oh my god, did you ever draw anyone like one of your French girls?” Steve had rolled his eyes. He had watched Titanic weeks ago, when Tony kept making that joke to him.“Anyway, I’m so drunk, I don’t even remember where I live. Thankfully, Bucky always swung by after apprenticing with his electrician uncle. Poor schmuck had to carry me back to me our flat on his back, telling our mothers that I had an asthma attack and needed to sleep it off.” Steve smiled, equal parts happiness and sadness.Darcy laughed, clutching at her sides. “Wee Artist Stevie,” she laughed. “What I wouldn’t give to have those paintings?” She wiped away an imaginary tear.“I think I saw that a Smithsonian might have had some of my old artwork.” He shrugged, suddenly shy. “Being a Stark gal, probably wouldn’t be too hard to get a hold of them.”Darcy flicked her hands out at his face, splashing dirty soapy water everywhere, “Thems fighting words mister.”-In the cab, towards the end of the ride, they had gone quiet. Darcy’s voice trailed off from another story, about Jane this time. He stared outside, eyes unfocused on the lights and people flashing by in a slow blur. This was the longest he had voluntarily been out since he woke up, still less than a year ago, to a world empty of the best people he knew.He turned to Darcy, the girl’s striking blond hair dye still a surprise every time he saw her. She was falling asleep against the window across from him, mouth parted slightly and breath on the edge of a snore. He remembered another brunette, hair wild but face somehow always serious in his sleep, and he felt sorrow and hope churn in his chest like acid.Steve broke the silence, voice barely above a whisper so as not to disturb the mood, “Hey, Darcy.”She stirred, eyes blinking slowly. “Yeah, are we there?” He shook his head softly.“I had a question for you,” he exhaled. The lines of his face, soft and young despite being closer to 30 (biologically) than not, were thrown into stark contrast from the street lights periodically flashing through the window.“What is it?” She asked, rubbing at her eyes, smearing her mascara slightly. Still beautiful.“Why did you ask me to dress ‘differently than normal?” He had been thinking about this the whole time. They could have just as easily done all of this dressed normally.“Dressed up, you could pretend you were someone else. You didn’t need to worry about being Captain America. You could just be some Joe-Schmoe doing weird shit on a weird day with a weird girl.” She explained, simply and yet the logic still escaped him somewhat. “If you were dressed normally, it would have been ‘Captain America’s New Beau’ or ‘America’s Favorite Hero Finds Love.’ I think that would have ruined it for you.”He paused for a second thinking, “And because you wanted to see how I would respond to your challenge.”“That too,” she nodded, eyes sleepy and smile content. The world seemed to slow, seconds feeling like minutes, heart beats like hours, as he saw the bright lobby lights of Stark tower approach. The world crawled, almost to a standstill, as the vehicle slowed to the curb.“Here’s your stop,” he forced the words out, feeling that he understood Sisyphus in that moment. Different words wanting to crawl out of his throat, but he wasn’t ready for those words. He didn’t know if he ever would be.She leaned over, her hair starting to fade to black like a reverse Cinderella as midnight approached. Her black/blond bangs fell into her eyes. She smelled of dish-soap, faded lipstick and hibiscus body wash. His world contacted as her lips brushed against his cheek, soft and foreign and final.“Good night, Stevie,” she murmured, breath like warm against his cheek.“Thanks, Darcy,” he said slowly, as she reached for the door. He wanted to reach across and touch her hand, and he wanted to grab his shield and run away. He wanted more, and he never wanted any of it, all at the same time.“We’ll do this again,” Darcy said, a promise and a hesitation. “Maybe when you get back from DC.”Planning for the future, he had learned in harsh winter snow on a train in Belarus and once again on the Arctic seas, was an exercise in defeat. He wished he could offer her more than a half-witted nod, something more than a hollowed out soldier. He so badly wanted to say ‘It’s a date’, but the words were ashes on his tongue, cursed.The taxi cab pulled away to take him back to Brooklyn, he didn’t look back. He hoped Darcy didn’t either.The Brooklyn Bridge that night, rather than comforting, was rendered cold and strange. Like watching a night sky without a moon where you knew one should be. The city was quiet, it now long past midnight.He thought of DC, knowing but not knowing how he knew, that this would be a turning point. Level 8 or not, he knew Fury was keeping something from him. Fury was always keeping something from him. This, though, was something darker. Steve could tell, in the tight smiles Coulson let him see and the flashes of something (apology?) in Nick’s eyes as they fought, once again, on mission parameters and the definition of acceptable losses.Steve’s apartment beckoned, full of his possessions yet empty. The apartment, only three blocks away from the flat he shared with Bucky (gone now, like everything else), would still be his for just a little while longer. Bags packed in his apartment, the young Captain knew that this was his goodbye to his Brooklyn residence. If (when, he would have to remind himself) he returned from DC, he would take his place in Stark Tower. Take up his mantle, little white wings and all, full time. Perhaps, he would learn to let it down for a while and remember to be Steve.If he was being completely honest with himself, he knew he would settle for nothing less than being Stevie, again, for a beautiful soul with a playful smile and a sharp tongue.He didn’t dream of Darcy that night. Or Peggy. Or Bucky.He dreamt of brown hair, dancing under moonlight. Laughing eyes and a smart mouth. Strong hands, gripping his, in the sun. He dreamt of past and possibility, Bucky's hands, Peggy's eyes, Darcy's smile, all blurred together in a haze. He dreamt of melting snow.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“Are you sure this is a secure connection, Darcy?” Steve asked, face serious. He still did not know why Fury, unofficially, was having him run ops for Shield based out of DC. Natasha, who was off on a mission, would be with him for the foreseeable future.“Geez, Steve. It’s like you don’t even know me?” Darcy huffed, pushing back long purple strands from her eyes. She had taken to leaving strands of color there, since their Valentine’s Day together.“I mean, will anybody be able to tell this is happening at all?” Steve asked, once more clarifying but still not understanding the full scope of what Darcy could and could not do with a computer. Everything, basically. I can do everything with a computer, she would think arrogantly to herself.Darcy roller her eyes, “Not even Dread Pirate-God Fury himself will know anything is amiss. I promise,” she said, making a large x-motion over her heart. She was sitting at the kitchen table, the living room and movie-viewing area directly behind her, spread out in front of a fire-place in a giant u-shape.“Chill out, Captain Nazi Puncher,” Tony’s face popped into view. His face was freshly scrubbed from a shower, hair longer than normal and sticking up and forward like a 1960’s greaser. He waved into the camera of Darcy’s Stark Laptop. (Tony had actually made her one. A significantly less powerful, commercial model would hitting the shelves in 3 months, only recently announced at the end of 1st quarter update on Stark Tech to a spate of pre-orders and raving reviews). “Jarvis and I both looked over the work. It is solid.”Darcy lifted her hand, palm forward to the computer screen. Tony gave her an awkward high five, swinging his hand around and inward with a triumphant smile.Steve’s face, a touch grainy through the video call, smiled at the antics. Muffled but still clear from his starkpad, he could hear in the background Bruce yelling to the group at large, “Popcorn is ready.”Over Darcy’s other shoulder, Pepper’s face emerged, clean and free all the makeup and worries from her day. She was smiling softly, “Hello Steve. How is DC so far?” She asked with a slight wave into the camera, chocolate covered strawberry held gently between her fingers.“So far, so good, ma’am.” He still had not started to call her Pepper. It was hard to, when staring at the beautiful woman.There was a harsh swear in the background, Steve recognized it as Clint, “Dammit Jane! You know that spot is for me and Phil.”“Yet the Son of Coul is nowhere to be found, Friend Hawkeye,” Thor boomed.“Also, Phil? People actually call him by his first name?” came Jane’s quieter response.Tony left the frame, when he realized he was no longer being paid attention to, probably to go ‘help’ Bruce with the snacks. Leaving just Pepper and Darcy in the frame. “That’s nice, Steve,” Pepper responded, gracing Steve with one of her thousand watt smiles. “Let us know if you need anything, alright?”Steve ducked his head, fighting off a blush, “Yes, ma’am.” He waved goodbye as Pepper left to run interference on Tony. Perhaps see if she could snatch some of the sour gummy worms from Jane’s greedy fists. Her enhanced speed, and sending Tony as a distraction, should allow her to overcome Thor’s intervention.Darcy turned, from what looked like gesturing to Clint to bring her some beverage, “Okay, so. Week 2 of Steve All Alone in DC. When does Natasha get shipped out there, again?”“It is not so bad,” he admitted reluctantly, perhaps a touch dishonestly. He, in fact, had spent a lot of time in DC during his USO tour days. He loved the city, particularly the museums. “She should be done with the mark in Borneo by tomorrow. She’ll fly straight to the Shield base in DC. It’ll be nice to have the company.”Clint, face rugged and a healing scratch over his right eyebrow, popped into Steve’s line of sight, passing a can of Diet Coke to Darcy. “Glad you could make Movie Night, Cap?”“Well, Darcy said that all Avenger attendance was required, no matter their physical location, dimension of residence, or time-displacement.” Steve beamed at making the Archer laugh.“That sounds like our Darce,” Clint stated, Darcy squawking as the blond man ruffled her hair. She indignantly poked him into his sensitive side just under his armpit. He squired away.“Are we all taking turns to give greetings to the Captain?” Thor boomed in the background. Steve couldn’t see him but he awkwardly waved at the screen anyway. “We wish you well on your sojourn to the lands of Colombia.”“Hello Thor,” Steve shouted loudly into his tablet.“No Thor, I’m just making sure we’re all synced to watch the movie,” Darcy called back. “Stay where you are and make sure Jane stay’s out of trouble.“I resent that!” came Jane, still out of frame but normally quiet voice raised. “Hi, Steve! If you choose Hercules tonight I will take you to my favorite Bistro when I’m in DC next month.” Darcy rolled her eyes, point made.“Hi Jane,” Steve began, but was cut off by the sound of a ruckus. He didn’t know it but Pepper took the opportunity to swipe the gummy worms from the distracted brunette. Pepper quickly launched into the three person love seat she had bought specifically for herself, Bruce and Tony. Steve couldn’t hear the unintelligible response coming from Jane, and what sounded like Thor restraining the petite scientist.“Okay, the S’more Dip is ready!” Bruce’s reply came from the kitchen.“The homemade graham crackers should be done in 5 minutes. Check them for me, Bruce!” Darcy shouted back at her shoulder, her face illuminated against the light, neck pale and delicate. Steve had to force himself to look back to Clint’s face on the computer screen. “Thanks Brucie-Bear!” Darcy continued.“Hey, Steve. Natasha’s birthday is April 1st. Will you help me do something for her?” Clint, serious and deadpan, asked while his face suddenly took up more real estate on Steve’s videoconference app.“Are you trying to play a joke on me?” Steve narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “That’s not her birthday at all is it?”Clint’s face rapidly changed from dead serious to grinning charmingly, like a light switch had been thrown. He was suddenly yanked out of the frame, replaced by a grim-faced Coulson, still in a suit and not his more casual clothes for a movie-night.“Hello, Steve,” came the serious agent’s greeting, not a trace of fan boy worship anywhere to be seen. No one knew if it was actually gone or just expertly suppressed. Except Natasha, who would not say.Coulson had obviously just came back from a mission. If a person didn’t know Coulson well, they might think he was being dour or unfriendly. But, his eyes crinkled softly in amusement as Darcy kissed his check in greeting, even though his shoulders betrayed exhaustion.“Welcome back, Coulson. How’s your biochemist, Simmons, faring after her alien virus thing?” Darcy asked him. She had taken to keeping on eye on his new Shield rapid response team, along with the Avengers.Steve could see him simply pat her shoulder in reassurance, which was answer enough to calm to brunette girl. He continued on, talking directly to Steve, “That is, according to every source we have, Natasha’s birthday. Considering how good Natasha is, there is almost no chance it is her actual birthday.”Bruce, again in the background with the sound of wooden spoon hitting knuckles, “No Clint, the graham crackers aren’t ready.”“Hello Bruce!” Steve called to the reserved man, through his speakers. Steve heard a muffled “Hello Steve,” in response, and what sounded like the slapping away of hands.Steve saw the way Coulson’s face softened at hearing Clint’s indignant yells in the background and the sound of the archer burning his tongue on a fresh, stolen graham cracker. Steve stared into Coulson’s eyes, face tired but content, “Clint knows her actual birthday, doesn’t he?”Darcy leaned forward, taking up almost half the screen. “We’re pretty sure it was Clint’s idea for Natasha to use that date.” She shrugged. “That’s all we know.”Clint, nothing more than a twenty-something Level 2 agent recently recruited from the Army, faced an unidentified competitor when he was on his first close-quarters infiltrate and kill mission. He had to fight his way past the assassin, whom many believed to be the Black Widow, but neither Clint nor Natasha had confirmed if this was true. Even stranger was that, if it was Natasha, no one knew how Clint managed to get away or convince her not to kill him. This was almost twenty years ago.The only thing official channels knew for sure was that Clint met her again 8 years ago, in Budapest, with an order in his hands to use any means necessary to take her down. Heavy civilian casualty were communicated as being acceptable. Instead, he deconstructed his bow, set it into his briefcase, and walked up to her in a little café along the Danube.They destroyed seven police stations and half of the Hungarian city’s foreign intelligence in less than 90 minutes (all of which were later to be found to be deeply corrupt and connected to Hydra). A week later, Clint still healing in Shield Medical, the Black Widow showed up at their New York Office asking for Clint and for a job.Steve chuckled into the palm of his hand. Darcy’s eyes narrowed at him, “Is that a beard?” She had finally noticed the growth on his face, distracted by the chaos of the movie night and the poor lighting on Steve’s end.He scratched along his cheek bones. “Haven’t had a chance to shave yet? Been a day or two.” He had to shave almost every day, or his face would quickly be overrun. He stretched upwards heavily, to work some kinks out of his spine from his 20 mile before dinner run. It had been a long day of doing nothing and waiting to report to the DC office.“And chest hair?” Darcy’s eyes bugged out at seeing him in a tank top. “I didn’t think you had body hair?”“I don’t need to hear this,” Coulson responded, patting Darcy once more on the shoulder, before heading to the kitchen to grab something slightly stronger than a soda.Steve scratched awkwardly at the stubble coming in just below his neck as well. “Not before the serum. But after it, yeah.”“I saw the video reels after the vita rays. There was nothing then,” She said, gesturing to her sweater covered chest. Mostly, she was genuinely curious and probably not realizing she was making Steve uncomfortable. The other part was intrigued. The last part was bringing attention to her assets to see Steve blush.He did.“Dr. Erskine said the vita rays only affected organic material and were mostly concentrated on my chest area.” Steve also figured why this is why his pants survived the horrible burning. “Dr. Erskine said something about this being what needed the most attention because of my pre-existing conditions, but I didn’t understand a lot of it. Anyway, it burned off all of my chest and a lot of my leg hair. It all grew in later,” Steve explained.If he closed his eyes, he still remembered the flashing light. The smell of his flesh burning, but not evidence or smoke to say this had actually happened. The feeling of his muscles, his bones, liquefying and being remade.“Do you shave it then?” She asked voice curious but her eyes, in that moment, were anything but.“Can we talk about something else?” He asked blushing harder. He wished, in times like this, that he could hold a tan instead of it fading almost immediately.“Oh, sorry. I just hate it when I don’t notice things.” She said, eyes furrowed, face losing some of its smile. She started to type away at the laptop, remotely accessing Steve’s entertainment center so it will mirror anything projected onto the Avenger’s movie screen currently lowered from the ceiling above the fireplace that everyone was gathered around.“Oh no. I do shave. The suit is tight, so it is uncomfortable with too much hair.” He tried to reassure her awkwardly, not quite sure if he was being manipulated. So he likely was, he figured to himself. “I haven’t been on a mission in a while. So … yeah.”“Hmmmm,” was all she said, the sound betrayed depths that set Steve’s pulse racing. She nodded, continuing on as if there was no tension, no hint, nothing at all, “Okay. Now, more important things. What did you get the pizza I had delivered to you? And what do you want to watch?”He held up a slice of the halfway eaten piece of pizza. He had already almost done with the pie. “Yup. Thanks, Darcy.” He said, biting into a slice of the triple cheese, triple meat, and triple veggie pizza. “You can add it to my Avenger’s expense report?”“I already expensed it on Tony’s dime,” She waved him off, mischievously.He continued on, “Ummm … Then, can I pick The Goofy Movie?” He saw a meme of it on something called Tumblr that Darcy introduced him to. A picture of a dog like man and his little son on his chest, ‘A reminder that Goofy was a single father raising Max.’ It made him tear up, and wanted desperately to watch the film.“Confirm that for me, Jay?” She asked aloud, not looking anywhere in particular.They both heard him at once, through their respective devices, “The Goofy Movie is not one of the movies that Agent Romanoff has vetoed. You are all approved to watch it without her there.”The movie picking routine was developed by Darcy, and was rather simple. One person chose to movie theme, another person chose the movie. The last movie them was Buddy Cop film, chosen by Tony, and Jane chose Rush Hour (a poplar but unexpected choice). If one of the Avenger’s would be gone for the movie night, they were allowed three movie vetoes, giving the absent person the opportunity to not miss out and watch those films with the group at a different time. It added a dimension of variety and chance, but allowed many people to get a say in such a large group. It had worked for the crowd thus far.“Are you going to watch with us, Jay-meister? Or do you have more important things to do?” Darcy and Jarvis knew that, had the AI wanted to, he could simply direct his processes power to catalog the movie and understand it in seconds. Still, she liked to give him the option to join.“Yeah, Mr. Jarvis. You should join us,” said Steve, speaking ernestly into where he though the microphone was on his starkpad. He was hunched over the starkpad, since he still didn’t always understand how close he needed to be to be heard.“I shall watch in the background, Ms. Lewis, Captain Rogers.” Jarvis replied, voice warm.“Woot,” Darcy exclaimed, turning to the group at her back. “Okay, everyone: The Goofy Movie it is!” Darcy shouted to the group at large, to a variety of appreciative noises and inevitable groans.She looked back to the computer screen, eyes dancing, “Okay Steve, I’m going to set you up on a holo-emitter behind the center couch and we can get this party started, yeah?”“Can do, Darcy,” he said, flashing a thumbs up towards the computer screen, even as the screen went black.The room around Steve, and the Avengers common room, went dark at the same time. Steve could practically feel everyone around him. Though he could only see their outlines, evident but not so bright to throw off the colors in the rest of the living room, which the holo-emitter was projecting. All of the blinds closed, enough Stark technology to bring down nations running discreetly through his tiny space.The volume sound switched to the surround sound system in his still somewhat empty apartment. He was still unsure how Darcy had commandeered his equipment for these movie nights.To be fair, Official Avenger’s Movie Nights were basically any night that more than 75% of the group were free to watch a movie (the Scientists counted as being free if there was not threat of imminent explosion for their projects).Steve could hear Thor cough. He could hear Clint’s labored breathing from being wounded, and Coulson crunching on a handful of popcorn (the only times he was utterly without dignity were in these quiet, dark moments). He could hear the soft sound of hair being scratched and silk being caressed, which he knew to be Bruce and Pepper and Tony. He could hear Darcy throwing something and Jane giggling, and Thor nuzzling.The only one missing is Natasha, Darcy thought to herself. This left a sour taste in her mouth. Something in the lizard part of her brain telling her that her people should be gathered up close. Instead, she had to content herself with Steve attending through impersonal video conference. She had to deal with Natasha and Coulson being sent out for more and more highly classified missions by Fury.The projector screen and a picture of black widow eating its mate after copulation flashing on the screen with the subtitles “Be Good Kids … Or Else.”The only one in the room to laugh was Darcy, amused and proud that Natasha, despite not even being in the same continent, knew Steve well enough to guess his choice, hack the movie database, and implant this message.Not so missing then, she would think, and I couldn’t have done it better myself. The sour taste, like dread in her belly, washed away like it was never there.Everyone else was, rightly so, amused but mostly afraid.“I’m next to choose movie theme. I think that was her telling me not to choose ‘B-Horror Films.’ So, I’m definitely going to choose ‘B-Horror Films,’” came Clint’s hushed reply, as the intro to The Goofy Movie started on the screen.Coulson shushed his man quietly with a rare public display of affection, quieting the archer with a peck to the lips, “You only do exactly what she wants you to do.”Steve could hear Darcy smack Clint on the back of the head, sitting right next to him and Coulson. “I’ll make you all watch The Human Centipede if you do.”Bruce, leaning into Pepper’s left shoulder her hand in his curls and Tony’s feet propped in both their laps, calmly let everyone know, “Shhhhh .... I love this movie.”Darcy was surround by all of her people. Brothers and sisters as good as blood. Father and father figures. A family. She would do anything in the world to keep this moment, perfectly preserved, like a flower between the pages of a favorite childhood novel.Deep inside of her, the part that knew bitterness the best, whispered that something would happen to try to take this from her.The other part, the one forged and tempered by loss, knew she would fight tooth and nail to keep it. Perhaps, more accurately, tasers and computer warfare. Which was, in every way that counted to the brunette, even better than teeth or nails.