Fic: 5 Times Darcy Only Annoyed Agent Coulson A Little Bit - Avengers, PG-13, 5x, AU, Gen, Humor
vikingprincess's birthday fic!! Only a week late. And look...My First Avengers FanFic Ever!! /adds new fandom to the list/ So I heard about (and then read some) fics where Darcy is Coulson's assistant and it amused me enough to give it a try. Writing Darcy was wicked fun! I almost forgot the most important bit - Darcy's first idea about calming Hulk down? Totally The Nephew's idea.
vikingprincess - I hope you had an excellent birthday and that you enjoy this offering! /smishes you all up/ I also find it kind of funny that we are constantly prompting each other and giving each other fic ideas in our crazy late-night conversations and yet this fic is none of those stories.
Summary: Darcy is Coulson’s assistant. And he is mostly fine with that. Mostly. - PG-13, 5x, Altered Reality, General, Humor with Agent Phil Coulson & Darcy Lewis plus some appearances by a few Avengers and 2,698 words.
Title: 5 Times Darcy Only Annoyed Agent Coulson A Little Bit
Author: The Artful Dodger / dodger_sister
Fandom: The Avengers
Category: 5x, Altered Reality, General, Humor
Characters/Pairing: Agent Phil Coulson & Darcy Lewis plus some appearances by a few Avengers.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Minor Language.
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Darcy is Coulson’s assistant. And he is mostly fine with that. Mostly.
Word Count: 2,698 words.
Date Written: April, 2012
Disclaimer: Coulson, Darcy or any of The Avengers are not mine. They belong to too many different people to list here, but definitely not me. Hell, even the idea of Darcy being Coulson’s assistant was stolen from Fandom at large. I did, however, write this story and I make no money of it.
Feedback: Bring it. dodger_sister / TheArtofDodger@comcast.net
Beta’d: By the perfectly awesome liptonrm.
Author's Notes: My first Avengers fanfic! liptonrm told me about this trend she was seeing in Avengers fic where Darcy is Coulson’s assistant and it sounded funny. Then I read one written by vikingprincess and it was funny. So I decided to give it a try. I wrote this in only two sittings - it took me less than a week. Go me! For Darcy, I just basically channeled myself but with less cursing. And Darcy's little idea to tell Hulk a knock-knock joke was totally my nephew's idea. Her second idea to sing him a lullabye was my response to that in what was an excellent brainstorm session with a five year old. How awesome is that kid?
Dedication: To vikingprincess! Happy Birthday, babe! You are deserve All The Fic All The Time! We are constantly giving each other fic ideas through our crazy late night conversations and yet this fic…isn’t one of them.
Additions: Translated into Russian by the wonderful rainy_elliot.
There were cookies in his office.
Just sitting there.
On a plate.
On his desk.
And it’s not like Coulson didn’t like cookies. He liked them as much as the next guy. But someone had tried to kill him with food once and he didn’t know where these particular cookies came from and you could never be too careful, in this line of work.
They did smell good though.
And they looked like they were still warm.
“Morning, Boss!” Darcy chirped from behind him and Coulson swore one of these days she was going to get her head blown off doing that. Mostly that bothered him because of the permanent stains she would leave all over his carpet.
“Don’t come up behind an armed man like that,” he told her and took the cup of coffee from her hands.
“You always say that, but you’ve never shot me,” she said, then paused and added, “Except that one time.”
Coulson raised an eyebrow at her.
“I made you cookies,” she said and smiled at him in all-too-sweet way.
Clearly she was trying to kill him.
“Why?” he asked and immediately regretted it. He knew better than to pose her unnecessary questions.
“Because you need cookies,” she said and handed him a file folder marked ‘Make Coulson Sign These Bitches’.
He went to his desk, sat down and stared helplessly at the cookies.
They still smelled really good.
“I know you had that thing with that guy in India and then you had to jet over to Uzbekistan and get Mr. Stark out of that prison and I thought you needed cookies. Hey, did someone make Stark their bitch?”
“One could only hope,” Coulson said dryly and picked up a cookie.
He stared at it for a long moment.
Darcy came over then, took a random cookie off the plate and stuffed half of it into her mouth.
Coulson looked at her with a raised eyebrow again.
“To reassure you,” she told him, though it sounded all garbled what with all the cookie in her mouth and the little bits of chocolate spraying everywhere. “I know you think someone tried to kill you with food.”
“Someone did,” he said and then waved her out of his office with a “Shut the door.”
Coulson ate a cookie. Then he ate another.
The next day he came in and asked, “What’s that smell?”
“It’s just your office,” Darcy replied.
“Oh,” Coulson said.
Darcy handed him a file folder marked ‘Tony Stark’s Stupid Ideas’. Next to that, in smaller letters, were the words ‘Mostly Involving Donkeys’.
He took the folder and waved her out of the office without telling her that he missed the smell of fresh baked cookies.
***
Coulson turned on his computer and looked around the desktop for the file he was working on when he had nodded off last night.
He was going to be damn well-pissed if he hadn’t saved it.
Someone would definitely be getting fired for it, never-mind that it was his fault for falling asleep at his desk again. At least this time he hadn’t woken up to find that Darcy had covered him with the quilt her grandmother had made.
That’s when he saw it…down in the bottom right-hand corner of his desktop, there was a new icon. It was green and had a strangely shaped bean of some kind on it.
Coulson had learned a long time ago not to click on things when he didn’t know what they were. RavagingBears.com was not what he thought it would be and the whole system had been on security lockdown for twelve hours after that.
He really needed someone to teach him how to override the block on that stuff.
“Darcy,” he said into the intercom. “Can you come in here, please?”
“Sure!” she hollered back and Coulson wondered if there was a way to hook an electric shock into her chair so that every time she hollered at him instead of using the intercom, he could just give her a zap.
It worked on his dog.
“What’s up, Boss?” she asked, nearly bounding into the room. How she had that much energy after they had flown the entire team halfway around the world and back in the past three days, he had no idea.
The spacious private jet had seemed a lot smaller with all The Avengers onboard.
“I have a new icon on my desktop.” he told her.
“Yep.”
“Would you care to tell me what it is for?”
“Plants Vs. Zombies.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a video game,” she told him and she looked so pleased with herself that it kind of made him nauseous. “You use plants to kill zombies.”
“How does that work?” he asked her before he remembered his golden rule about never asking her unnecessary questions.
“They shoot things at the zombies.”
“Plants can’t shoot.”
“You say that like you don’t have zombie-killing-plants being worked on right now in one of those secret labs in the lower level that I’m not suppose to know about.”
She had a point.
“Why is it on my computer?” he asked instead of acknowledging this.
“Well, today you have to look over a whole bunch of really boring schematics from Dr. Banner and Mr. Stark and did I mention…boring? Cuz, yeah. I thought maybe you might need a break.”
“Wherein I kill zombies with plants?”
“Yep.”
“Okay,” he said because that was usually the best response with her. “Shut the door.”
Darcy handed him the folder of really boring schematics and left the office.
Three hours later, when his eyes were blurring all of his realities right out of existence, Coulson found his mouse hovering over the green-bean-icon.
An hour after that, he was on the phone with the apparently not-so-secret lab in the basement. “We need ones that shoot ice. It’ll slow them down, give us more time to get in some proper hits.”
The really boring schematics sat forgotten on his desk.
***
They were walking down the hallway - Darcy rambling on at him about some book she was reading wherein the obvious solution to the leading lady’s romance trouble was apparently a threesome and okay, from the little Coulson had actually been paying attention, it did seem the obvious solution - when the red warning lights went off.
The siren followed right after.
“Wait…” Darcy hollered over the noise, “Is there a different colored light for different things?”
“What?” Coulson hollered back, gun drawn at the ready.
“Like a blue light for ‘get to the airplane' and an orange light for ‘go to the bunker’ and a red light for ‘we all gonna die!’? Is there?”
Clint came around the corner then, running as fast his legs would let him.
“Hulk got out of the Battle Simulation!” he yelled at them and then Steve Rogers came around the corner too, his Captain America outfit torn into almost nothing at all.
“Rogers, niiiiice,” Darcy said with a leer, but all Coulson noticed was the shaking of the ground beneath them.
He turned and slammed Darcy up against the wall.
She squealed and batted at him with her tiny little fists.
“What the hell, Boss?” she said but he only pinned her arms to the wall, pressed himself as flat against her as he could and turned his neck to look towards the oncoming stampede of green that was headed their way.
“Barton!” he shouted and Clint drew his bow.
“I hate having to shoot my own team members!” Clint yelled back and loaded an arrow.
“Maybe you could tell him a knock-knock joke,” Darcy said and Coulson wouldn’t have even heard it if he hadn’t been pressing her between himself and the wall the way he was. “Nobody can be mad in the face of a good knock-knock joke.”
Clint let his arrow fly.
It hit Hulk square in the chest and the creature thrashed hard, flung his fists into the wall and bellowed.
Darcy squeaked and buried her face in Coulson’s chest, which was a rather ineffective method of protection, but it didn’t stop him from covering her head with his own arms.
Hulk lurched forward, lifted his right arm to swing and then crumpled to the ground as the medicine coursed through his veins.
There was nothing for a moment, just the sound of the blaring siren and then quiet and emptiness where there had only moments ago been chaos and deafening noise.
Coulson took a step back, felt every one of his taut muscles and limbs snap and creak as he willed himself to relax. Darcy stood with her head bowed, arms up where they had been clutching Coulson’s shirt, eyes scrunched tight.
“Are you alright?” Coulson asked her, one hand coming up to rest on her shoulder.
“Maybe next time Steve can sing him a lullabye,” she said, though she didn’t unhinge from her position. “It always puts me to sleep.”
Coulson made a noise that was almost a laugh.
***
He woke up with the sun blazing in his face. They’d started the trip towards home at pre-dawn and now he could tell by the placement of the sun in the sky that it was nearly noon.
Also, because he was starving.
“Where are we?” Coulson asked.
“Kansas,” she answered from behind the wheel.
“Come again?”
“Headed to Cawker,” and Darcy was steadily drumming a rhythm on the steering wheel, keeping in beat with the music that played in her head. At least she hadn’t turned on the radio and had let him sleep in peace. After the night he’d had, Coulson desperately needed it.
Damn Thor and his stupid women problems.
“Why,” he said and sat up straighter in his seat, stretched the sleep out of his body, “are we headed to Cawker, Kansas?”
“World’s largest ball of twine,” she told him and grinned in a slightly maniacal way.
“Why,” he asked again, “are we headed to Cawker, Kansas?”
“I’ve always wanted to see it. Haven’t you?”
“Not particularly.”
Then he glared at Darcy in his most menacing way but she seemed oblivious and unaffected. He really needed to work on that.
“This is why I should never have let you drive.”
“Driver needed a night off.”
“His name is Frank.”
“I like to call him ‘Driver’. It makes me feel all sophisticated.”
Coulson rubbed the remaining sleep from his eyes. “Will there be food on the way to this giant ball of string?” he asked.
“Twine,” she corrected him and they both knew damn well he had gotten it wrong on purpose. “And yes. There is this place that is suppose to have killer barbeque ribs. You could even go crazy, Boss, and have a beer.”
“Technically this is kidnapping,” he said and left the suggestion of a beer hanging in the air between them. She didn’t have to know he was considering it. “I could have you disappeared you know.”
“You could, but then you wouldn’t get to see the world’s largest ball of twine. Just think of it as a mini-cation.”
“That’s not a word.”
For some reason, Darcy was smiling. “All work and no play makes Coulson a homicidal maniac,” she told him.
Coulson turned on the radio and when the music came blaring out, Darcy adjusted her steering wheel drumming to match. “Now you’re talking, Boss-man!” she said. “Let’s do this shit!”
When he smiled, he turned his head so she wouldn’t see.
In the reflection of the window, she was smiling back at him.
***
As far as Coulson’s days went, this was going to be a fairly early night. He might even be out of the office by ten. He tried not to think about it too hard because he found whenever he did, that red phone on his desk would ring.
He hated that phone. Not just because it always meant disaster but because Darcy had insisted it had to be red - “It’s the red phone!” she had told him emphatically. “It has to be red.” No matter that he had explained to her how the actual red phone was just a boring tan color.
The lights in the outer office were turned down low, left on just enough so that he wouldn’t fall over his own feet when he entered the room. There was a faint noise, but Coulson couldn’t quite make it out since his ears were still ringing from Tony testing out his newest launch-thrusters.
He was almost to his office when he figured out what the noise was.
Crying.
Faint but present and he spun around. On the far side of the office, sitting on the green couch in front of the flickering light of the TV, sat Darcy.
Her head was down, a handful of Kleenex shoved to her face, and her little shoulders were shaking just the slightest.
Coulson hated crying women, people, anyone really - but not nearly as much as he hated whatever it was that was making her cry in the first place.
On a less giving day, that was his job.
He set his briefcase down - it really only had his extra gun in it at the moment anyways - and went over to her, sat gingerly on the couch next to her and placed one tentative hand on Darcy’s shoulder.
“What happened?” he asked softly.
“He died,” she gasped.
Coulson did a quick count of The Avengers. He’d just had three of them downstairs with him and Steve and Natasha were suppose to be on assignment and he usually got the first call about deaths straight to his cell-phone anyways.
He briefly wondered where Fury was at the moment.
“He just…died,” she said again and gestured at the TV.
All Coulson saw was an ad for feminine products.
“Wait..” he said and then pulled back a little to look at her face. “Are you serious right now?”
“He is all they have left. Their family and they need family. They struggled and made their own and then he just…died. I can’t…I can’t…it’s too much to think about.”
Coulson remembered when Tony had gotten burned last month and Darcy had been the first one on the scene. She’d gotten the medics to him and then promptly threw up just as Coulson rounded the corner.
“Smells that bad?” Tony had asked her through gritted teeth as medics helped him towards an SUV.
“Thought you blew up,” she’d croaked through fresh tears.
“Awww, sweetheart. And here I always thought you didn’t like me,” Tony said with a wink.
“Don’t like you,” she told him, wiping her mouth. “You’re family though.”
Now Coulson looked around the outer office where she had hung pictures of fishing boats around the room because if she was going to spend all her time here, she wanted it to at least look nice. He looked at the quilt over the back of the couch - her grandmother had made it for her when Darcy was five, right before the woman had passed away. In the far corner was a teetering stack of books that Darcy always grabbed from when they were headed out to the jet. She told him he could borrow one anytime he wanted and he had noticed several of the team picking up a book here and there. On Darcy’s desk was a photo of the team; Stark, Rogers, Banner, Romanoff, Barton, Darcy and even Coulson. The photo had been taken on a beach after a rather exhausting and violent day, and yet they were all smiling, arms around one another, faces tilted towards the rising sun.
They looked happy.
They looked like a family.
“Sometimes,” he told her and met Darcy’s eyes with his own, “we lose our family. And if we are really lucky, we get another one.”
Darcy nodded, patted his leg.
“Sorry, Boss,” she said, voice raw like sand.
“Go home,” he replied, though not unkindly.
“Can I just…stay until the episode is over?” she asked and wiped her red swollen eyes with the sleeve of her shirt.
“Okay,” he said and went into his office, leaving the door open behind him.
Just in case.
The End
Translated into Russian at AO3 by the wonderful rainy_elliot.
vikingprincess - I hope you had an excellent birthday and that you enjoy this offering! /smishes you all up/ I also find it kind of funny that we are constantly prompting each other and giving each other fic ideas in our crazy late-night conversations and yet this fic is none of those stories.
Summary: Darcy is Coulson’s assistant. And he is mostly fine with that. Mostly. - PG-13, 5x, Altered Reality, General, Humor with Agent Phil Coulson & Darcy Lewis plus some appearances by a few Avengers and 2,698 words.
Title: 5 Times Darcy Only Annoyed Agent Coulson A Little Bit
Author: The Artful Dodger / dodger_sister
Fandom: The Avengers
Category: 5x, Altered Reality, General, Humor
Characters/Pairing: Agent Phil Coulson & Darcy Lewis plus some appearances by a few Avengers.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Minor Language.
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Darcy is Coulson’s assistant. And he is mostly fine with that. Mostly.
Word Count: 2,698 words.
Date Written: April, 2012
Disclaimer: Coulson, Darcy or any of The Avengers are not mine. They belong to too many different people to list here, but definitely not me. Hell, even the idea of Darcy being Coulson’s assistant was stolen from Fandom at large. I did, however, write this story and I make no money of it.
Feedback: Bring it. dodger_sister / TheArtofDodger@comcast.net
Beta’d: By the perfectly awesome liptonrm.
Author's Notes: My first Avengers fanfic! liptonrm told me about this trend she was seeing in Avengers fic where Darcy is Coulson’s assistant and it sounded funny. Then I read one written by vikingprincess and it was funny. So I decided to give it a try. I wrote this in only two sittings - it took me less than a week. Go me! For Darcy, I just basically channeled myself but with less cursing. And Darcy's little idea to tell Hulk a knock-knock joke was totally my nephew's idea. Her second idea to sing him a lullabye was my response to that in what was an excellent brainstorm session with a five year old. How awesome is that kid?
Dedication: To vikingprincess! Happy Birthday, babe! You are deserve All The Fic All The Time! We are constantly giving each other fic ideas through our crazy late night conversations and yet this fic…isn’t one of them.
Additions: Translated into Russian by the wonderful rainy_elliot.
There were cookies in his office.
Just sitting there.
On a plate.
On his desk.
And it’s not like Coulson didn’t like cookies. He liked them as much as the next guy. But someone had tried to kill him with food once and he didn’t know where these particular cookies came from and you could never be too careful, in this line of work.
They did smell good though.
And they looked like they were still warm.
“Morning, Boss!” Darcy chirped from behind him and Coulson swore one of these days she was going to get her head blown off doing that. Mostly that bothered him because of the permanent stains she would leave all over his carpet.
“Don’t come up behind an armed man like that,” he told her and took the cup of coffee from her hands.
“You always say that, but you’ve never shot me,” she said, then paused and added, “Except that one time.”
Coulson raised an eyebrow at her.
“I made you cookies,” she said and smiled at him in all-too-sweet way.
Clearly she was trying to kill him.
“Why?” he asked and immediately regretted it. He knew better than to pose her unnecessary questions.
“Because you need cookies,” she said and handed him a file folder marked ‘Make Coulson Sign These Bitches’.
He went to his desk, sat down and stared helplessly at the cookies.
They still smelled really good.
“I know you had that thing with that guy in India and then you had to jet over to Uzbekistan and get Mr. Stark out of that prison and I thought you needed cookies. Hey, did someone make Stark their bitch?”
“One could only hope,” Coulson said dryly and picked up a cookie.
He stared at it for a long moment.
Darcy came over then, took a random cookie off the plate and stuffed half of it into her mouth.
Coulson looked at her with a raised eyebrow again.
“To reassure you,” she told him, though it sounded all garbled what with all the cookie in her mouth and the little bits of chocolate spraying everywhere. “I know you think someone tried to kill you with food.”
“Someone did,” he said and then waved her out of his office with a “Shut the door.”
Coulson ate a cookie. Then he ate another.
The next day he came in and asked, “What’s that smell?”
“It’s just your office,” Darcy replied.
“Oh,” Coulson said.
Darcy handed him a file folder marked ‘Tony Stark’s Stupid Ideas’. Next to that, in smaller letters, were the words ‘Mostly Involving Donkeys’.
He took the folder and waved her out of the office without telling her that he missed the smell of fresh baked cookies.
***
Coulson turned on his computer and looked around the desktop for the file he was working on when he had nodded off last night.
He was going to be damn well-pissed if he hadn’t saved it.
Someone would definitely be getting fired for it, never-mind that it was his fault for falling asleep at his desk again. At least this time he hadn’t woken up to find that Darcy had covered him with the quilt her grandmother had made.
That’s when he saw it…down in the bottom right-hand corner of his desktop, there was a new icon. It was green and had a strangely shaped bean of some kind on it.
Coulson had learned a long time ago not to click on things when he didn’t know what they were. RavagingBears.com was not what he thought it would be and the whole system had been on security lockdown for twelve hours after that.
He really needed someone to teach him how to override the block on that stuff.
“Darcy,” he said into the intercom. “Can you come in here, please?”
“Sure!” she hollered back and Coulson wondered if there was a way to hook an electric shock into her chair so that every time she hollered at him instead of using the intercom, he could just give her a zap.
It worked on his dog.
“What’s up, Boss?” she asked, nearly bounding into the room. How she had that much energy after they had flown the entire team halfway around the world and back in the past three days, he had no idea.
The spacious private jet had seemed a lot smaller with all The Avengers onboard.
“I have a new icon on my desktop.” he told her.
“Yep.”
“Would you care to tell me what it is for?”
“Plants Vs. Zombies.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a video game,” she told him and she looked so pleased with herself that it kind of made him nauseous. “You use plants to kill zombies.”
“How does that work?” he asked her before he remembered his golden rule about never asking her unnecessary questions.
“They shoot things at the zombies.”
“Plants can’t shoot.”
“You say that like you don’t have zombie-killing-plants being worked on right now in one of those secret labs in the lower level that I’m not suppose to know about.”
She had a point.
“Why is it on my computer?” he asked instead of acknowledging this.
“Well, today you have to look over a whole bunch of really boring schematics from Dr. Banner and Mr. Stark and did I mention…boring? Cuz, yeah. I thought maybe you might need a break.”
“Wherein I kill zombies with plants?”
“Yep.”
“Okay,” he said because that was usually the best response with her. “Shut the door.”
Darcy handed him the folder of really boring schematics and left the office.
Three hours later, when his eyes were blurring all of his realities right out of existence, Coulson found his mouse hovering over the green-bean-icon.
An hour after that, he was on the phone with the apparently not-so-secret lab in the basement. “We need ones that shoot ice. It’ll slow them down, give us more time to get in some proper hits.”
The really boring schematics sat forgotten on his desk.
***
They were walking down the hallway - Darcy rambling on at him about some book she was reading wherein the obvious solution to the leading lady’s romance trouble was apparently a threesome and okay, from the little Coulson had actually been paying attention, it did seem the obvious solution - when the red warning lights went off.
The siren followed right after.
“Wait…” Darcy hollered over the noise, “Is there a different colored light for different things?”
“What?” Coulson hollered back, gun drawn at the ready.
“Like a blue light for ‘get to the airplane' and an orange light for ‘go to the bunker’ and a red light for ‘we all gonna die!’? Is there?”
Clint came around the corner then, running as fast his legs would let him.
“Hulk got out of the Battle Simulation!” he yelled at them and then Steve Rogers came around the corner too, his Captain America outfit torn into almost nothing at all.
“Rogers, niiiiice,” Darcy said with a leer, but all Coulson noticed was the shaking of the ground beneath them.
He turned and slammed Darcy up against the wall.
She squealed and batted at him with her tiny little fists.
“What the hell, Boss?” she said but he only pinned her arms to the wall, pressed himself as flat against her as he could and turned his neck to look towards the oncoming stampede of green that was headed their way.
“Barton!” he shouted and Clint drew his bow.
“I hate having to shoot my own team members!” Clint yelled back and loaded an arrow.
“Maybe you could tell him a knock-knock joke,” Darcy said and Coulson wouldn’t have even heard it if he hadn’t been pressing her between himself and the wall the way he was. “Nobody can be mad in the face of a good knock-knock joke.”
Clint let his arrow fly.
It hit Hulk square in the chest and the creature thrashed hard, flung his fists into the wall and bellowed.
Darcy squeaked and buried her face in Coulson’s chest, which was a rather ineffective method of protection, but it didn’t stop him from covering her head with his own arms.
Hulk lurched forward, lifted his right arm to swing and then crumpled to the ground as the medicine coursed through his veins.
There was nothing for a moment, just the sound of the blaring siren and then quiet and emptiness where there had only moments ago been chaos and deafening noise.
Coulson took a step back, felt every one of his taut muscles and limbs snap and creak as he willed himself to relax. Darcy stood with her head bowed, arms up where they had been clutching Coulson’s shirt, eyes scrunched tight.
“Are you alright?” Coulson asked her, one hand coming up to rest on her shoulder.
“Maybe next time Steve can sing him a lullabye,” she said, though she didn’t unhinge from her position. “It always puts me to sleep.”
Coulson made a noise that was almost a laugh.
***
He woke up with the sun blazing in his face. They’d started the trip towards home at pre-dawn and now he could tell by the placement of the sun in the sky that it was nearly noon.
Also, because he was starving.
“Where are we?” Coulson asked.
“Kansas,” she answered from behind the wheel.
“Come again?”
“Headed to Cawker,” and Darcy was steadily drumming a rhythm on the steering wheel, keeping in beat with the music that played in her head. At least she hadn’t turned on the radio and had let him sleep in peace. After the night he’d had, Coulson desperately needed it.
Damn Thor and his stupid women problems.
“Why,” he said and sat up straighter in his seat, stretched the sleep out of his body, “are we headed to Cawker, Kansas?”
“World’s largest ball of twine,” she told him and grinned in a slightly maniacal way.
“Why,” he asked again, “are we headed to Cawker, Kansas?”
“I’ve always wanted to see it. Haven’t you?”
“Not particularly.”
Then he glared at Darcy in his most menacing way but she seemed oblivious and unaffected. He really needed to work on that.
“This is why I should never have let you drive.”
“Driver needed a night off.”
“His name is Frank.”
“I like to call him ‘Driver’. It makes me feel all sophisticated.”
Coulson rubbed the remaining sleep from his eyes. “Will there be food on the way to this giant ball of string?” he asked.
“Twine,” she corrected him and they both knew damn well he had gotten it wrong on purpose. “And yes. There is this place that is suppose to have killer barbeque ribs. You could even go crazy, Boss, and have a beer.”
“Technically this is kidnapping,” he said and left the suggestion of a beer hanging in the air between them. She didn’t have to know he was considering it. “I could have you disappeared you know.”
“You could, but then you wouldn’t get to see the world’s largest ball of twine. Just think of it as a mini-cation.”
“That’s not a word.”
For some reason, Darcy was smiling. “All work and no play makes Coulson a homicidal maniac,” she told him.
Coulson turned on the radio and when the music came blaring out, Darcy adjusted her steering wheel drumming to match. “Now you’re talking, Boss-man!” she said. “Let’s do this shit!”
When he smiled, he turned his head so she wouldn’t see.
In the reflection of the window, she was smiling back at him.
***
As far as Coulson’s days went, this was going to be a fairly early night. He might even be out of the office by ten. He tried not to think about it too hard because he found whenever he did, that red phone on his desk would ring.
He hated that phone. Not just because it always meant disaster but because Darcy had insisted it had to be red - “It’s the red phone!” she had told him emphatically. “It has to be red.” No matter that he had explained to her how the actual red phone was just a boring tan color.
The lights in the outer office were turned down low, left on just enough so that he wouldn’t fall over his own feet when he entered the room. There was a faint noise, but Coulson couldn’t quite make it out since his ears were still ringing from Tony testing out his newest launch-thrusters.
He was almost to his office when he figured out what the noise was.
Crying.
Faint but present and he spun around. On the far side of the office, sitting on the green couch in front of the flickering light of the TV, sat Darcy.
Her head was down, a handful of Kleenex shoved to her face, and her little shoulders were shaking just the slightest.
Coulson hated crying women, people, anyone really - but not nearly as much as he hated whatever it was that was making her cry in the first place.
On a less giving day, that was his job.
He set his briefcase down - it really only had his extra gun in it at the moment anyways - and went over to her, sat gingerly on the couch next to her and placed one tentative hand on Darcy’s shoulder.
“What happened?” he asked softly.
“He died,” she gasped.
Coulson did a quick count of The Avengers. He’d just had three of them downstairs with him and Steve and Natasha were suppose to be on assignment and he usually got the first call about deaths straight to his cell-phone anyways.
He briefly wondered where Fury was at the moment.
“He just…died,” she said again and gestured at the TV.
All Coulson saw was an ad for feminine products.
“Wait..” he said and then pulled back a little to look at her face. “Are you serious right now?”
“He is all they have left. Their family and they need family. They struggled and made their own and then he just…died. I can’t…I can’t…it’s too much to think about.”
Coulson remembered when Tony had gotten burned last month and Darcy had been the first one on the scene. She’d gotten the medics to him and then promptly threw up just as Coulson rounded the corner.
“Smells that bad?” Tony had asked her through gritted teeth as medics helped him towards an SUV.
“Thought you blew up,” she’d croaked through fresh tears.
“Awww, sweetheart. And here I always thought you didn’t like me,” Tony said with a wink.
“Don’t like you,” she told him, wiping her mouth. “You’re family though.”
Now Coulson looked around the outer office where she had hung pictures of fishing boats around the room because if she was going to spend all her time here, she wanted it to at least look nice. He looked at the quilt over the back of the couch - her grandmother had made it for her when Darcy was five, right before the woman had passed away. In the far corner was a teetering stack of books that Darcy always grabbed from when they were headed out to the jet. She told him he could borrow one anytime he wanted and he had noticed several of the team picking up a book here and there. On Darcy’s desk was a photo of the team; Stark, Rogers, Banner, Romanoff, Barton, Darcy and even Coulson. The photo had been taken on a beach after a rather exhausting and violent day, and yet they were all smiling, arms around one another, faces tilted towards the rising sun.
They looked happy.
They looked like a family.
“Sometimes,” he told her and met Darcy’s eyes with his own, “we lose our family. And if we are really lucky, we get another one.”
Darcy nodded, patted his leg.
“Sorry, Boss,” she said, voice raw like sand.
“Go home,” he replied, though not unkindly.
“Can I just…stay until the episode is over?” she asked and wiped her red swollen eyes with the sleeve of her shirt.
“Okay,” he said and went into his office, leaving the door open behind him.
Just in case.
The End
Translated into Russian at AO3 by the wonderful rainy_elliot.