The Legend of Darcy Lewis (or three stories Darcy tells baby SHIELD agents) by isabear for heartequa
Title: The Legend of Darcy Lewis (or three stories Darcy tells baby SHIELD agents)
Author: isstillabear
Recipient:heartequals
Rating: PG-13 (for mild violence and Darcyisms)
Characters: Darcy, Jane, Thor, Erik, Sitwell, Claire (from "Item 47"), baby SHIELD agents, various OCs
Word Count: ~6700
Author's Notes: For purposes of this story, I ignored the timeline the comics have built and pushed Fury's Big Week forward to to March, 2012, with the Invasion of Manhattan set for the U.S. release date of the Avengers movie (May 4). Hugs to my beta for agreeing to work last-minute; all remaining mistakes are my own.
A million thanks to the mod for organizing this! Thank you also to my recipient for giving me the freedom to write gen; it's been a while, and I enjoyed it. :) I hope you do, too.
******
Chapter 1
One of Darcy's innate charms (of which there are many, naturally) is her talent for storytelling. As the youngest in a large family (even larger, if all the cousins count), she learned early on that if she wanted attention, she had to earn it and keep it. And that meant embellishing.
Lying was out, because she had no face for it. But hyperbole, that was just an aspect of her charm. 'That's just Darcy,' her grandmother would say, and the adults would nod, and whichever sibling or cousin she had just upstaged would stick their tongue out, but Darcy remained serene in the knowledge that she could hold her own against anyone, even cousin Renee and her million-and-one ballet recital videos.
(Darcy was not fond of pastels as a child. If ballet had involved everyone wearing black and kicking each other, she probably would have enjoyed the videos more.)
So when Darcy tells the stories of how she ended up in SHIELD, she leaves out Renee but embellishes everything else - the voices, the hands, the comical faces. And every time she tells a story it grows, until her stories become their own mythology: the legend of Darcy Lewis, SHIELD agent and hero wrangler, the junior agent who made AD Hill smile in her third week on the job (admittedly, it had been a strange week, and Darcy was covered head to toe in goose feathers at the time, but still).
What Darcy tells no one, though one or two have probably guessed, is that the stories are a preemptive defense. If she entertains everyone and embellishes the myth of Darcy, not only does she get to choose what people remember about her, but she also gets to choose what she remembers about herself.
Darcy has always been the youngest, always struggling to keep up, always three steps behind and refusing to quit. Some days, she just needs to remind herself that even though she doesn't feel like a SHIELD agent (doesn't even feel like an adult), she can do this. She can get back on her feet, be louder than anyone else, and push through.
Because she said so.
~~~~~~~
When new agents ask why she's so good at paperwork (usually in their first week), she grins and tells them how she ended up working for Jane Foster.
Culver was an interesting school, but what Darcy had learned in her three years and three months there was that the distribution requirements were just shy of ridiculous. They also tended to keep a lot of information on paper still, and Darcy's advisor was a man who wore a tweed suit with no irony whatsoever. He also appeared to be still living at the height of the Cold War, which was kind of cool in an anthropological sense, but Darcy was majoring in PoliSci, so Anthro didn't count toward her distribution requirements, sadly.
On a fine November day, with the leaves just beginning to properly turn, it was Darcy's class dean who called Darcy into her office. (Not that Darcy was surprised - her advisor didn't seem to be aware of the magic of email.)
The dean's office was in the old admin building, with wood panelling over stone walls and a thick floor rug to keep the cold from seeping in. There were paintings on the walls of former deans. Darcy had never been in here before, but the worn, brightly colored padding on the chair was reasonably comfortable, so she folded her hands in her lap and smiled.
The dean herself was a thin woman with thin, blonde hair and pale skin, probably in her forties, with a pinched look between her eyes, like she needed glasses, painkillers, or a vacation. Or maybe all three.
"Miss..." the dean checked the page in front of her, "Lewis?"
"Yup." Darcy nodded, trying to project confidence. She had a seminar starting in 15 minutes on the other side of the quad, so if this was some sort of formality, checking her requirements and making sure she was going to graduate in May, she just wanted to get it over with.
The dean smiled apologetically. "I'm afraid you won't be graduating in May."
Darcy blinked, unable to parse what the dean said next. She was stuck on won't graduate and the shrill sound of numbers rattling off in the back of her brain, student loans that would begin to come due next November.
"I- what?" She would have berated herself for sounding like an idiot and interrupting the dean, but seriously - what?!?
"You need six more lab credits," the dean repeated patiently. "You took Astronomy 103 and Physics 102, each of which counts for three credits. You need twelve to graduate."
"But my- you took my AP Bio! It's on my transcript! And that Environmental Studies course I took two years ago, where we stomped around the pond and collected bugs and counted frogs!"
"Biology 108 is not considered a lab course, and lab credits cannot be transferred from high school courses. Your AP Biology score gives you three regular credits in the Life Sciences distribution and counts towards your overall credits needed to graduate." The dean was starting to look patient, which Darcy knew was the equivalent of slamming a door shut in her face. "In order to graduate in May, you would need to take two lab courses this spring."
Darcy bit back a whimper. Two lab courses, plus her senior thesis, plus her seminar to finish out her major, plus her final Humanities distribution requirement, which had to be in the visual arts. Oh, and her last PE credit. It wasn't humanly possible if she also wanted to send out resumes and, maybe, sleep.
The dean looked at her kindly and pulled out a brochure. "We do offer three lab courses over the summer. They include Introductory Chemistry, Marine Biology, and one rotating course."
"No," Darcy mumbled, head whirling with numbers and puzzles and schedules, "I'll figure it out."
"As you like," the dean agreed, a little too amiably. "You should know, Miss Lewis, that anyone taking five courses during a semester requires a signature from their dean."
It's a racket, Darcy realized. A racket to keep us here and squeeze extra cash out of us. She had heard that the university had lost a great deal of funding after a mysterious explosion a couple years before she arrived, but tuition had kept pace with other schools of the same level. So this was how they were managing.
Well, they'd just picked the wrong senior to mess with.
~~~~~
Darcy spent her time in her seminar doodling in the margins of her notes and letting her thoughts settle. It was important, here at the beginning of wrangling a problem, to let her mind sort its way through all the issues and get over the lingering anger-frustration-shock she'd been left with.
(Not that she couldn't go off half-cocked - she usually did - but some things required a little more finesse.)
After her seminar, she ate lunch, sent three text messages and fifteen emails, opened the spring course schedule and the science requirements, then got herself a giant bowl of Rocky Road and a set of colored markers.
Lewis v Culver University, fight!
~~~~~
The next afternoon at four, Darcy walked into the dean's office just as another student staggered out, nearly in tears.
Well. That made the next conversation a little easier on her conscience, didn't it?
"Hi," Darcy said, not sitting down.
The dean looked up, startled. "I have an appointment-"
"Yeah, with me." She flashed a smile, all teeth. "Your secretary was very accommodating when I brought her cookies this morning."
The dean looked briefly more pinched, then sighed. "Why don't you have a seat?"
"No thanks, I'm fine standing." Darcy took a deep breath and plowed ahead. "I'll be taking four academic courses this spring. One will be a paid internship in New Mexico with an astrophysics researcher working her post-doc here. The internship qualifies at a rate of one lab credit per two weeks of full-time work, so I'll be spending January through March there. I have an internship advisor," (thank god for that Astro class), "a signature from my regular advisor on both that form and on the form allowing me to complete my senior thesis with phone check-ins," (he'd wanted mail - real, paper mail, bless him), "plus signatures from my other two professors saying I'm exempt from coming to class as long as I turn in the work and take the exams. The track coach has also signed the independent PE course credit form to allow me to record and submit my own jogging mileage on a weekly basis and take a final timed test for my last PE credit."
Darcy slapped the stack of forms down on the dean's desk, her nostrils flaring. Okay, maybe this wasn't the gentlest way to say fuck you and the horse you rode in on, but she got two hours of sleep last night. A little payback for that byzantine tangle of forms and regulations (and for her morning spent baking and chasing after people for signatures) was surely not out of bounds.
"Miss Lewis," the dean began in a gentle voice, "internships for credit must be approved by the-"
"Head of the sponsoring department, head of the student's major department, and the student's advisor. If you look on this form," she slid the third one out of the stack, "you'll see signatures from all three, plus my internship advisor. I will be submitting my written internship reflection to her."
The dean cleared her throat. "It will take me a few days to review the paperwork to approve-"
"Oh, and here's the best thing." Darcy grinned in her best devil-may-care style. "None of these forms actually require your signature. They just need to be filed. These are copies, as a courtesy to you. The originals are already with the Dean of the College's secretary, who processed them right after lunch. Did you know she has a weakness for gingerbread?"
~~~~~~
When Darcy tells this story to the new agents, they laugh and relax around her, start asking questions and confessing their uncertainties. It's a bonding moment, a ritual she keeps up even after she's too old to completely fit in with the kids anymore. She still looks young, she still makes the dean's flabbergasted face just right, and they take the story as a window of opportunity to let her be real, to let themselves tell their own stories.
When she tells it, though, she always leaves out the part where she left the Dean's office, walked down three flights of stairs to the basement, and curled up next to a vending machine to let herself shake and cry all the anger out. Because as a story it's meant to be funny, and no one needs to know that Darcy doesn't always have it together, is mostly flying by the seat of her pants and her talent for untangling bullshit on two hours of sleep. No one needs to know that Darcy is fueled by rage and fear and love and an utter refusal to accept 'no' as an answer, because those are things she keeps locked up behind doodles in the margins of her forms and brightly colored pens and a fierce grin.
No one needs to know, but she suspects a few might anyway.
******
Chapter 2
The most common question baby SHIELD agents ask is how Darcy met Thor, so this is a story she tells to groups. It requires props, though, so she always saves it for the break room on a Friday afternoon in July, after a new batch of recruits comes in but before they're fully settled.
Fury hasn't stopped her yet, so she considers her annual reenactment informally approved.
~~~~~~~
A typical Darcy morning in New Mexico involved waking up too damned early, checking to make sure Jane hadn't snuck back to work the night before, then attaching her pedometer and jogging down to the grocery store. She walked back, one sack in hand, because the fridge was tiny and this was a good excuse to make herself do her PE requirement. Besides, New Mexico was nice in the morning, if a bit chilly.
She would then cook breakfast on a hotplate in the 'lab', which was a converted car dealership. (That was cool for about 30 minutes. Then it was living in a glass house, and Darcy had never understood how horrid that could be until she tried it.) She would feed Erik if he was in town, then go drag Jane out of bed. Cooking breakfast first was a training tactic - the sooner Jane crawled out of her trailer wearing clothes she hadn't been wearing the night before, the more likely she would find breakfast still warm. Darcy understood the motivating power of food and wasn't above using it to her advantage.
While Jane ate, Darcy would shower lightning fast with whatever hot water was left in the RV's tank, brush her teeth, close her eyes, and review in her head all the shit she had to get done today to keep her head above water.
In between organizing Jane's data and keeping everyone fed, Darcy would work on Jane's next grant application. (Erik had cheerfully passed those to her when he realized she understood paperwork intuitively and could bullshit with the best of them.) She would keep multiple tabs open on her monitor and flip back and forth regularly, memorizing paintings and sculptures for her art history class, listening to her seminar recordings on her iPod, and hacking away at her thesis.
Not once did she feel bad about taking company time to do her homework, considering she was getting three hundred dollars a week for Jane's idea of work hours, which didn't account for things like Saturdays or midnight.
And so Darcy's life went for nine and a half weeks, until boom.
Since 'boom' started at five in the morning on a Tuesday (with Darcy driving, of course), they didn't get real breakfast that morning, just poptarts. Once 'boom' ended in the late afternoon on a Thursday (after taking out most of Puente Antiguo, including Isabela's, which Darcy actually liked, dammit), dinner that night was also poptarts.
And then it was week eleven.
~~~~~~
At this point, the baby agents inevitably cry foul. They holler and heckle about how she promised to tell them about Thor, and everyone says she'd tased him, and is it true?
Darcy smiles. She knows how to work a crowd.
It's at this point that Thor drops in if he's in town. He appears in the doorway, trying and failing to look casual, and Darcy does this for the chance to laugh at the expression on the new recruits' faces as much as for the chance to make him human to them.
(Of the Avengers, Thor and Banner have the hardest time being accepted as regular, everyday people - given that Natasha doesn't try - and it's a problem in the field if agents assume an Avenger is just an invincible trump card they can throw at any problem without thought. Even if neither Thor nor Bruce qualifies as human genetically, they're still people, they have weaknesses, and they need to be treated like soldiers in battle.
Darcy had this argument with Sitwell monthly before she started telling her story. For a guy busy rolling his eyes most days, he was remarkably sympathetic. She noticed by year three that none of the newbies ever miss her Friday performances, even if Friday is their day off. This is why Sitwell stays on her Birthday Cookies list.)
So Thor shows up in civvies, and Darcy kicks a chair out for him. Her hands going up to catch the room's attention again and finish the tale; her grin, though, is all for Thor.
~~~~~~
The key to working with Jane was to understand that she didn't come with an off switch. She had times when she was unconscious, times when she was eating, times when she was sitting around apparently doing nothing. But her brain was never actually paused. She wasn't a scientist because she liked science. She was a scientist because she couldn't stop being one.
Darcy's best preparation for working at the lab was, in fact, her couple of years babysitting, before she got old enough to earn money without being barfed on. She used every trick she learned at the age of fourteen to make life in the lab less horrifying.
When Darcy first arrived, she discovered that when Erik was in town, he and Jane alternated sleeping in the lab, despite Jane having her own crappy RV and Erik being able to afford a room a the local roach motel. They were 'on call' in case Jane's machines caught any weather disturbances. Of course, they assumed Darcy would join the rotation and spend every third night sleeping in a plastic lawnchair in a dark, freezing car dealership.
Um, no.
The first morning, Darcy found herself a cheap, crappy baby monitor by literally walking down the street and knocking on doors. She bought rechargeable batteries and a charger, set her phone to remind her to change them out, and promptly bedded down on Jane's mini-couch, since Jane hadn't thought she would need another bed. (Luckily, Darcy was short.)
Darcy never did get her own RV. Not that it was in the budget anyway.
The baby monitor led to its own set of problems, meaning that once or twice a week, Darcy would be rousted by an excited Jane who swore there was an atmospheric disturbance that had to be investigated in person. In the middle of the night. (Darcy had her own theory about why atmospheric disturbances never seemed to appear during daylight hours, but Jane wasn't interested in her discussions of alien psychology and intergalactic time zones.)
Darcy drove, while Jane and sometimes Erik tried to keep Jane's equipment from blowing up. It was a good division of labor most nights, because mostly they found a whole lot of nothing, or a tiny dust storm.
And then one night they found Thor.
To be fair, Darcy was already spooked to hell and back. The storm was bigger than any they'd tracked before, and Darcy had grown up in a part of the country where there were two kinds of alarms: fire and tornado. This? Was setting off all kinds of warning bells in her head, survival instincts like don't drive into the middle of a twister you could die okay? and am I allowed to quote movies now? because I have a baaaaad feeling about this.
Then they hit someone with the car. Then he wasn't dead, but maybe he was high or crazy or something, and Darcy did have an unhealthy amount of experience with that, thanks to three and a half years of college and a tendency to acquire too much of the wrong kind of attention if her clothes weren't baggy enough. Hell, her junior year she'd upgraded from mace to an actualfax taser (better distance, more reliable).
The guy was staggering around yelling at the sky, threatening them, and Darcy just snapped.
~~~~~~
At this point, Thor gets up and does his best crazy drunk impression, staggering into tables and knocking over his chair, bellowing at the ceiling, and Darcy gets out an uncharged taser and yells zap! really loudly so he can crumple to the ground in a dramatic fashion worthy of Shakespeare.
(She live-tasered him the first year and managed to short out the entire building and several surrounding blocks - something about his natural electrical field - so now Sitwell didn't even let her in the break room without personally checking her props. Spoilsport.)
After a suitably dramatic silence, Thor opens his eyes and grins as she pulls him to his feet.
"Don't try this at home, kids," Darcy tells the baby agents, then takes her bow.
~~~~~~
What Darcy doesn't tell the newbies is what happened Thursday night, where the three of them got roaring drunk and sat on the roof of the car dealership, lost in their own thoughts and silences. What she never tells anyone at all is her last night on the couch of Jane's trailer, Passover and exams looming, her two little suitcases packed by the door.
It felt like she was breaking a promise, even though she never promised anything to begin with.
"I still don't know why you even picked me," Darcy muttered, propping Jane up on the bed, "when you knew I couldn't do the whole year." Jane made puppy dog eyes, and Darcy groaned. "If you're going to fall apart while I'm back at school, I might even start feeling guilty. Seriously, stop that. Your eyes are physically hurting my soul."
Jane whimpered and covered her eyes, probably already on her way to a massive hangover. "My not-boyfriend abandoned me for another planet, and now you're going, too."
"Erik's still here," Darcy muttered, but they both knew he couldn't stay forever, either. Soon it would be just Jane here; Jane, alone, driving in the desert at night.
Jane just turned her head into the pillow, stubborn as always, and it was Darcy who broke first. (Darcy always broke first.)
"I'll come back," she whispered, though she wasn't sure if Jane would remember this in the morning. "I'll come banging on your trailer door some night in June with my diploma in one hand and poptarts in the other, and you'll be so proud of me you'll give me a raise."
"How does two dollars a day sound?" Jane mumbled into her pillow. The corner of her mouth was twitching, just a bit.
"I'd settle for getting my iPod back from that secret agent man." She paused thoughtfully. "Or you cooking breakfast from now on. I saw what you did while Thor was here. And I liked being waited on for a change."
"Done." Jane's voice was sleepy, but it held all the warmth Darcy had missed.
In the morning, Darcy cooked breakfast for her and left it on the table, then rolled out to catch the bus.
******
Chapter 3
The third story is one she doesn't tell to crowds. In fact, only a select few agents have ever heard it, though rumors abound. It's really the question everyone in New York asks each other, even a couple decades later. Where were you when-?
Everyone assumes Darcy was already a SHIELD agent by then, or that she was at Culver, in Tromsø, in New Mexico.
They are all wrong.
~~~~~~
Darcy arrived back at Culver on April 2nd to discover that the West Meadow was torn all to hell and cordoned off by what she thought at first was the FBI but later realized was SHIELD. (What? All those guys in suits looked alike to her.)
The campus was awash with rumors. Darcy ignored them as best she could (which was a lie - she listened avidly) and put all her effort into pushing her timeline back. Jane was counting on her. Darcy could be remarkably mono-focused when she felt needed.
On April 26th, she sat down with a hard copy of her senior thesis and her tweed-clad advisor. He hummed as he read her thoughts on the effect of covert operations and secret government agencies on the progress of the Cold War, tapping his pen here and there without saying why. She was expected a grilling, but he just finished and looked up at her with eyes that saw way too much.
"There's a section of this paper missing," he said knowingly, and Darcy gulped. "You're clearly building to a coherent conclusion, which you carefully kept hidden from me for weeks, and then you slapped on a final section any sophomore could have written. Care to tell me why?"
"I, uh," she stammered.
He waited, smiling patiently, and she began to wonder if he was really as out of touch as he seemed, or if he was actually the most amazing undercover agent of all time. She'd met Agent Coulson and now had a completely different view of what being a secret agent meant.
Darcy sighed. "It's classified."
He raised his eyebrows. She winced. It was like telling her fifth grade teacher her dog ate her homework, never mind that it had actually happened.
"My conclusion, I mean. It was redacted. Literally deleted. All copies erased. And I can't even tell you by who."
He looked up and out the window at the West Meadow, still being repaired by the campus landscaping crew. "I can guess."
"You probably shouldn't," she warned.
He smiled. "Probably not." His eyes went a little distant as he saw things she couldn't, and then he took a breath, drawing her back to the present. "Congratulations, Miss Lewis. Your senior thesis is accepted."
She could totally be forgiven for the squeal, though even she will admit that throwing her arms around his neck was a bit dramatic. He didn't seem to mind, though his laughter was probably more at her than with her.
Whatever. One down, three to go.
~~~~~~
On April 27th at nine in the morning, Darcy sat in her Art History professor's office while the woman cheerfully projected paintings on the wall and asked probing questions.
At three in the afternoon, Darcy was in the the PoliSci office handing in her final paper for her seminar.
At four-thirty, she was at the track, running a mile in seven minutes twenty-nine seconds, thank you very much. (The coach even congratulated her on the two minute improvement over her December time.)
On Saturday, April 28th, Darcy Lewis finished packing up her dorm room, shipped almost everything she owned back to her mom's house, and spent the night playing drinking games with her friends using all the reruns of Project Runway they could find on Bravo.
On Sunday morning, she boarded a bus to New Mexico with two small bags. She felt like she was going home.
~~~~~~
On the morning of Tuesday, May 1st, Darcy stood in the midst of the reconstruction of Puente Antiguo and stared.
The car dealership was empty.
There was no RV in the parking lot.
There wasn't even a note.
At that moment, Darcy's phone, which she had been using in place of her still-missing iPod, gave a forlorn beep as it shut off to conserve power.
Darcy calmly punched a telephone pole.
~~~~~~
She managed to find the last working pay phone in town, put in four quarters, and coaxed her phone into turning on one last time. Quickly she dialed the number filed under 'creepy agent dude', since she still had Jane's entire contact list stored. The phone rang four times before a machine picked up.
"Please state your name and ID number to be directed to our main menu."
"Darcy Lewis, and I don't have an ID number." She fished for more quarters in the bottom of her bag, one-handed.
"One moment please."
It took longer than a moment. The phone cheerfully counted down forty-five seconds off her time. Darcy fed another couple of quarters into the slot.
The voice that came on suddenly was polite and professional. "This is Emily, how may I help you?"
Darcy sighed in relief.
"I'm Darcy Lewis, Jane Foster's assistant? I went off for a month to finish my degree and when I got back just now, Jane's gone. Poof! The last time stuff disappeared around here, it was you guys, so my money's on secret agent man again. Where did you disappear my boss, and why in hell did nobody tell me so I didn't schlep all the way to New Mexico in a bus with bad AC?"
"One moment please." Damn, the woman sounded just like the machine.
"No, wait!" But it was too late. Darcy stared at the diminishing time on the phone screen and fished a handful of change and lint out of her pocket.
It was a minute fifteen, thank you very much, when the phone clicked and a male voice said, "This is Agent Sitwell. Am I speaking to Darcy Lewis?"
"Yes, thank god! Do you have any idea what it's like to be stranded in a tiny town with no idea where to-?"
"Miss Lewis," he talked over her smoothly, "this line is not secure. Do you have your phone with you?"
"Battery's dead, and I don't have anywhere to charge it."
He sighed, the sound scratchy over the line, like he was on the other side of the world. "Alright, Miss Lewis. The next bus to Santa Fe will arrive in two hours. When you get there, take the next available bus to Denver, and then the cross-country to New York. How well do you know Manhattan?"
"Never been."
"Do you think you could get yourself to Grand Central?"
She nodded, then remembered - no video. "Yeah, that's like, big and hard to miss, right?"
"I hope so. Get to the main terminal, exit either side, and go into the north entrance of the building looming over you. Tell the receptionist you're meeting someone from our organization there. I'll call ahead so she'll know to expect you."
"And then what do I do?"
"Then you sit and wait, Miss Lewis. I'll send someone when I can."
The phone went dead, the screen blinking and blinking, but Darcy had no more quarters to give.
~~~~~~
She arrived in the lobby of STARK Tower (it said so on the giant red sign outside, jeez, overcompensating much?) just after eight in the morning on Friday, May 4th. Her whole body ached from spending most of the week sleeping on busses or in hard plastic chairs at terminals, she was down to very little cash (oh how she wished she had a credit history right about now), and she had not had a bath that didn't come from a sink in six days.
The receptionist took one look at her and asked, "Darcy Lewis?"
Darcy nodded, almost too numb to speak. The receptionist looked apologetic.
"I'm so sorry. An agent called yesterday to say everyone is unavoidably detained and you should stay here until they can send someone out."
Darcy's knees and back whimpered. She eyed the literature on the fancy glass table in the reception area, most of it glossy advertisements with science-y words, like 'Arc Reactor Offers a Green and Responsible Future!' At least one of the chairs was actually a double, like a small couch would be if someone had put ornately carved wooden arms on the thing so no one could mistake it for comfortable.
"Can I sit down at least?" she asked.
The receptionist looked shocked. "Oh, not at all!" At Darcy's crestfallen expression, she quickly amended, "Ms. Potts already gave permission for you to take a guest room upstairs. Most floors aren't complete yet, but there are bedrooms available."
"With showers?" Darcy asked, hardly daring to hope.
The receptionist smiled. "With bathrobes and even laundry machines on a separate floor."
"I love you," Darcy declared. "Wait, am I allowed to say that to someone whose name I don't even know?"
"Lucia," the woman said, coming around the desk to shake Darcy's grimy, sweaty hand. Darcy gave her extra points for not flinching or wiping her hand off after. "Let me show you to the working elevator."
"In the words of the greatest poet I ever met, I will write odes in your honor, Lucia."
Lucia laughed and pressed the button for the elevator.
~~~~~~
Darcy woke in a bathrobe made of pure fluff to the sound of muffled booms. Someone was speaking.
"-wis. Miss Lewis. Please wake up."
She sat bolt upright. "Who's there?"
"JARVIS, the artificial intelligence that runs Stark Tower. If you recall, we met earlier when you attempted to flood the 36th floor using the laundry machine and your undergarments."
"My crowning moment..." Darcy muttered.
JARVIS continued. "Miss Lewis, it is imperative that you move to one of the exit stairways and make your way down as quickly as possible. I do not know how long I will remain functioning to guide you."
Does he have cameras everywhere? Did he watch me shower? Her thoughts were derailed by another distant boom, followed by the windows rattling in their frames.
She jumped and flailed for her glasses. "Holy shit! Are those explosions?"
"Indeed."
"Holy shit," Darcy repeated to herself, quieter. She rolled off the bed and snagged her shoulder bag, leaving her little rolling suitcase to its fate as she stuffed her bare feet into her boots. "What's happening, Jarv-dude?"
"It appears to be an invasion."
~~~~~~
Darcy'd had dreams where she ran and ran but couldn't get anywhere, and she'd had dreams where disembodied voices gave her hushed orders that made no sense (mostly since Thor fell out of the sky), but the two had never combined before. She decided she didn't like them together. There was no peanut butter and chocolate here - maybe Crisco and motor oil. Ew.
Her legs felt on fire, and every four flights she had to remind herself to breathe.
"Miss Lewis," JARVIS said calmly, "You will need to exit on this floor and proceed to the southwest stairwell. My cameras have been damaged in the lobby and there appears to be smoke rising from that level. The southwest stairwell has an emergency exit directly into the Grand Central Terminal."
"Shit." Darcy swung out the fire door into an open space full of bare floors and construction pillars and smashed windows. "Which way?"
"To your left," JARVIS replied smoothly. "You will need to SKREE EEE ROWR UUU-"
"Jarv? Jarv??"
JARVIS didn't answer. Darcy whimpered.
She dashed for what looked like it might be the southwest stairwell. (If she had recharged her phone, she would have had a compass - very useful for driving crazy scientists around at night, and apparently for escaping burning towers that were under attack). For a moment she had a dreadful moment of deja vu, feeling like she was back in Puente Antiguo, defenseless an empty room walled with glass while a giant robot marched on the town. Then she shook it off and surged forward, shoving the emergency door open.
Smoke poured out, catching her in the face. She coughed and fell back, letting the door slam. It was cool to the touch, but all that smoke-
I'm screwed, she thought, and tried to breathe through the panic making her heart pound double time.
A door slammed behind her.
"Darcy? Darcy Lewis?"
"Here, Lucia, here!" she shouted, the mostly empty space echoing. Lucia came around a pillar at a dead run, grabbing Darcy's hand with obvious relief.
"JARVIS said you were on the third floor, but then he stopped speaking," she explained quickly. "We need to move down to the second floor."
"I was trying the southwest-"
"No, that's where the fire is. Don't worry, the building is evacuated except for us."
Darcy blinked soot out of her eyes. "You came back for me?" she whispered, stunned.
Lucia shrugged. "My second job is guest relations."
Darcy snorted. "You are so earning a bonus right now."
~~~~~~
It turned out that the escalators between STARK Tower and the Terminal were closed off behind fire doors, but Lucia knew where a manual release was, and she wasn't afraid to pull it. They skimmed through the narrow gap when the doors opened and ran down frozen escalator stairs to burst through another set of doors into the upper level of Grand Central Terminal just in time to see a giant bone whale fly overhead.
"Holy shit," Darcy whispered. She felt like she was saying that a lot today, but seriously, holy shit.
"Ladies!" a man in an MTA uniform flagged them down from the ground floor gesturing to the stairs. They raced down and were quickly ushered into the service area behind a row of lower level shops, where they found over a hundred people unhappily crammed in, most of them sitting on the floor to brace against the occasional shudder as something exploded outside.
So Darcy Lewis spent the Invasion of Manhattan helping the waitstaff of the Golden Krust hand out jerk chicken and sodas to a random mix of tourists and locals while the Avengers saved the city.
~~~~~~
The first time Darcy met Jasper Sitwell in person, she was wearing a bathrobe and secondhand combat boots. He was in his shirtsleeves with a smear of blood across one ear. They looked at each other for a moment, then-
"Darcy Lewis, I presume?" he asked tiredly.
"Reporting for duty, sir!"
He closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. When he reopened them, she felt like he was looking at her for the first time, though he didn't seem any less exhausted.
"We are establishing safe pedestrian corridors running north and south. If I give you a radio, can you organize the MTA police and anyone else in charge down here and get everyone moved out of midtown on foot?"
"Yes, sir."
He handed her an earpiece, watched her wrestle with her hair to get it in place until the corner of his mouth showed the tiniest upward tilt.
"And Lewis?"
"Yep?"
"Nice boots."
~~~~~~
Darcy first tells this story to Claire about six months after the incident in Savannah (which Darcy only knows about because she processed the paperwork after Sitwell's debriefing, and wasn't that a lovely piece of candy for Blake to toss her?). Claire's at the point where the shiny's begun to wear off and she's finally realized that, while her boyfriend Benny is damn useful and enjoying his job with R&D, Claire herself is merely a glorified Admin Assistant. Who can't make coffee. (Though she's damn good at blasting holes in things.)
Darcy's only been at the job about three weeks longer than Claire, but she had some Jane-based training before that. Meaning, to whit, Darcy can make coffee. She just chooses not to.
So she tells Claire her story and talks it up with her hands, being honest about how terrified she was ("almost peed my nonexistent pants") and how useless until everything was over. She talks about how Lucia rescued her and Jasper had to show her how to work a radio, about how she ended up wearing clothing from a donation bin at the Red Cross station after walking nearly ten blocks with a toddler named Jeremiah perched on her hip.
"Nice boots," she says in a deadpan Sitwell imitation, and Claire howls.
Like Claire, Darcy is not a perfect SHIELD agent. She doesn't put every foot right or even have the foggiest idea what she ought to be doing sometimes. Being Darcy Lewis is a three-ring circus, an act of faith, a constant state of damage control. In that, she doesn't think she's too unusual, except at SHIELD.
The greatest strength of SHIELD is its tendency to recruit those overly prepared Type A personalities who have a plan for everything. The greatest weakness of SHIELD is that it throws those people at situations no one could be prepared for. They either overcome the obstacles or they implode, but Darcy doesn't believe in make or break. Darcy believes in getting back up and doing it again until she gets it right. This is what she tells Claire and the rare other agents like herself, the ones who don't come with 4.0 GPAs, years of experience, and all the answers. She tells them and she asks them to stay, to balance out SHIELD's extremes with their own quirky styles.
This is what Darcy gives SHIELD. This is why she is a legend.
Author: isstillabear
Recipient:heartequals
Rating: PG-13 (for mild violence and Darcyisms)
Characters: Darcy, Jane, Thor, Erik, Sitwell, Claire (from "Item 47"), baby SHIELD agents, various OCs
Word Count: ~6700
Author's Notes: For purposes of this story, I ignored the timeline the comics have built and pushed Fury's Big Week forward to to March, 2012, with the Invasion of Manhattan set for the U.S. release date of the Avengers movie (May 4). Hugs to my beta for agreeing to work last-minute; all remaining mistakes are my own.
A million thanks to the mod for organizing this! Thank you also to my recipient for giving me the freedom to write gen; it's been a while, and I enjoyed it. :) I hope you do, too.
******
Chapter 1
One of Darcy's innate charms (of which there are many, naturally) is her talent for storytelling. As the youngest in a large family (even larger, if all the cousins count), she learned early on that if she wanted attention, she had to earn it and keep it. And that meant embellishing.
Lying was out, because she had no face for it. But hyperbole, that was just an aspect of her charm. 'That's just Darcy,' her grandmother would say, and the adults would nod, and whichever sibling or cousin she had just upstaged would stick their tongue out, but Darcy remained serene in the knowledge that she could hold her own against anyone, even cousin Renee and her million-and-one ballet recital videos.
(Darcy was not fond of pastels as a child. If ballet had involved everyone wearing black and kicking each other, she probably would have enjoyed the videos more.)
So when Darcy tells the stories of how she ended up in SHIELD, she leaves out Renee but embellishes everything else - the voices, the hands, the comical faces. And every time she tells a story it grows, until her stories become their own mythology: the legend of Darcy Lewis, SHIELD agent and hero wrangler, the junior agent who made AD Hill smile in her third week on the job (admittedly, it had been a strange week, and Darcy was covered head to toe in goose feathers at the time, but still).
What Darcy tells no one, though one or two have probably guessed, is that the stories are a preemptive defense. If she entertains everyone and embellishes the myth of Darcy, not only does she get to choose what people remember about her, but she also gets to choose what she remembers about herself.
Darcy has always been the youngest, always struggling to keep up, always three steps behind and refusing to quit. Some days, she just needs to remind herself that even though she doesn't feel like a SHIELD agent (doesn't even feel like an adult), she can do this. She can get back on her feet, be louder than anyone else, and push through.
Because she said so.
~~~~~~~
When new agents ask why she's so good at paperwork (usually in their first week), she grins and tells them how she ended up working for Jane Foster.
Culver was an interesting school, but what Darcy had learned in her three years and three months there was that the distribution requirements were just shy of ridiculous. They also tended to keep a lot of information on paper still, and Darcy's advisor was a man who wore a tweed suit with no irony whatsoever. He also appeared to be still living at the height of the Cold War, which was kind of cool in an anthropological sense, but Darcy was majoring in PoliSci, so Anthro didn't count toward her distribution requirements, sadly.
On a fine November day, with the leaves just beginning to properly turn, it was Darcy's class dean who called Darcy into her office. (Not that Darcy was surprised - her advisor didn't seem to be aware of the magic of email.)
The dean's office was in the old admin building, with wood panelling over stone walls and a thick floor rug to keep the cold from seeping in. There were paintings on the walls of former deans. Darcy had never been in here before, but the worn, brightly colored padding on the chair was reasonably comfortable, so she folded her hands in her lap and smiled.
The dean herself was a thin woman with thin, blonde hair and pale skin, probably in her forties, with a pinched look between her eyes, like she needed glasses, painkillers, or a vacation. Or maybe all three.
"Miss..." the dean checked the page in front of her, "Lewis?"
"Yup." Darcy nodded, trying to project confidence. She had a seminar starting in 15 minutes on the other side of the quad, so if this was some sort of formality, checking her requirements and making sure she was going to graduate in May, she just wanted to get it over with.
The dean smiled apologetically. "I'm afraid you won't be graduating in May."
Darcy blinked, unable to parse what the dean said next. She was stuck on won't graduate and the shrill sound of numbers rattling off in the back of her brain, student loans that would begin to come due next November.
"I- what?" She would have berated herself for sounding like an idiot and interrupting the dean, but seriously - what?!?
"You need six more lab credits," the dean repeated patiently. "You took Astronomy 103 and Physics 102, each of which counts for three credits. You need twelve to graduate."
"But my- you took my AP Bio! It's on my transcript! And that Environmental Studies course I took two years ago, where we stomped around the pond and collected bugs and counted frogs!"
"Biology 108 is not considered a lab course, and lab credits cannot be transferred from high school courses. Your AP Biology score gives you three regular credits in the Life Sciences distribution and counts towards your overall credits needed to graduate." The dean was starting to look patient, which Darcy knew was the equivalent of slamming a door shut in her face. "In order to graduate in May, you would need to take two lab courses this spring."
Darcy bit back a whimper. Two lab courses, plus her senior thesis, plus her seminar to finish out her major, plus her final Humanities distribution requirement, which had to be in the visual arts. Oh, and her last PE credit. It wasn't humanly possible if she also wanted to send out resumes and, maybe, sleep.
The dean looked at her kindly and pulled out a brochure. "We do offer three lab courses over the summer. They include Introductory Chemistry, Marine Biology, and one rotating course."
"No," Darcy mumbled, head whirling with numbers and puzzles and schedules, "I'll figure it out."
"As you like," the dean agreed, a little too amiably. "You should know, Miss Lewis, that anyone taking five courses during a semester requires a signature from their dean."
It's a racket, Darcy realized. A racket to keep us here and squeeze extra cash out of us. She had heard that the university had lost a great deal of funding after a mysterious explosion a couple years before she arrived, but tuition had kept pace with other schools of the same level. So this was how they were managing.
Well, they'd just picked the wrong senior to mess with.
~~~~~
Darcy spent her time in her seminar doodling in the margins of her notes and letting her thoughts settle. It was important, here at the beginning of wrangling a problem, to let her mind sort its way through all the issues and get over the lingering anger-frustration-shock she'd been left with.
(Not that she couldn't go off half-cocked - she usually did - but some things required a little more finesse.)
After her seminar, she ate lunch, sent three text messages and fifteen emails, opened the spring course schedule and the science requirements, then got herself a giant bowl of Rocky Road and a set of colored markers.
Lewis v Culver University, fight!
~~~~~
The next afternoon at four, Darcy walked into the dean's office just as another student staggered out, nearly in tears.
Well. That made the next conversation a little easier on her conscience, didn't it?
"Hi," Darcy said, not sitting down.
The dean looked up, startled. "I have an appointment-"
"Yeah, with me." She flashed a smile, all teeth. "Your secretary was very accommodating when I brought her cookies this morning."
The dean looked briefly more pinched, then sighed. "Why don't you have a seat?"
"No thanks, I'm fine standing." Darcy took a deep breath and plowed ahead. "I'll be taking four academic courses this spring. One will be a paid internship in New Mexico with an astrophysics researcher working her post-doc here. The internship qualifies at a rate of one lab credit per two weeks of full-time work, so I'll be spending January through March there. I have an internship advisor," (thank god for that Astro class), "a signature from my regular advisor on both that form and on the form allowing me to complete my senior thesis with phone check-ins," (he'd wanted mail - real, paper mail, bless him), "plus signatures from my other two professors saying I'm exempt from coming to class as long as I turn in the work and take the exams. The track coach has also signed the independent PE course credit form to allow me to record and submit my own jogging mileage on a weekly basis and take a final timed test for my last PE credit."
Darcy slapped the stack of forms down on the dean's desk, her nostrils flaring. Okay, maybe this wasn't the gentlest way to say fuck you and the horse you rode in on, but she got two hours of sleep last night. A little payback for that byzantine tangle of forms and regulations (and for her morning spent baking and chasing after people for signatures) was surely not out of bounds.
"Miss Lewis," the dean began in a gentle voice, "internships for credit must be approved by the-"
"Head of the sponsoring department, head of the student's major department, and the student's advisor. If you look on this form," she slid the third one out of the stack, "you'll see signatures from all three, plus my internship advisor. I will be submitting my written internship reflection to her."
The dean cleared her throat. "It will take me a few days to review the paperwork to approve-"
"Oh, and here's the best thing." Darcy grinned in her best devil-may-care style. "None of these forms actually require your signature. They just need to be filed. These are copies, as a courtesy to you. The originals are already with the Dean of the College's secretary, who processed them right after lunch. Did you know she has a weakness for gingerbread?"
~~~~~~
When Darcy tells this story to the new agents, they laugh and relax around her, start asking questions and confessing their uncertainties. It's a bonding moment, a ritual she keeps up even after she's too old to completely fit in with the kids anymore. She still looks young, she still makes the dean's flabbergasted face just right, and they take the story as a window of opportunity to let her be real, to let themselves tell their own stories.
When she tells it, though, she always leaves out the part where she left the Dean's office, walked down three flights of stairs to the basement, and curled up next to a vending machine to let herself shake and cry all the anger out. Because as a story it's meant to be funny, and no one needs to know that Darcy doesn't always have it together, is mostly flying by the seat of her pants and her talent for untangling bullshit on two hours of sleep. No one needs to know that Darcy is fueled by rage and fear and love and an utter refusal to accept 'no' as an answer, because those are things she keeps locked up behind doodles in the margins of her forms and brightly colored pens and a fierce grin.
No one needs to know, but she suspects a few might anyway.
******
Chapter 2
The most common question baby SHIELD agents ask is how Darcy met Thor, so this is a story she tells to groups. It requires props, though, so she always saves it for the break room on a Friday afternoon in July, after a new batch of recruits comes in but before they're fully settled.
Fury hasn't stopped her yet, so she considers her annual reenactment informally approved.
~~~~~~~
A typical Darcy morning in New Mexico involved waking up too damned early, checking to make sure Jane hadn't snuck back to work the night before, then attaching her pedometer and jogging down to the grocery store. She walked back, one sack in hand, because the fridge was tiny and this was a good excuse to make herself do her PE requirement. Besides, New Mexico was nice in the morning, if a bit chilly.
She would then cook breakfast on a hotplate in the 'lab', which was a converted car dealership. (That was cool for about 30 minutes. Then it was living in a glass house, and Darcy had never understood how horrid that could be until she tried it.) She would feed Erik if he was in town, then go drag Jane out of bed. Cooking breakfast first was a training tactic - the sooner Jane crawled out of her trailer wearing clothes she hadn't been wearing the night before, the more likely she would find breakfast still warm. Darcy understood the motivating power of food and wasn't above using it to her advantage.
While Jane ate, Darcy would shower lightning fast with whatever hot water was left in the RV's tank, brush her teeth, close her eyes, and review in her head all the shit she had to get done today to keep her head above water.
In between organizing Jane's data and keeping everyone fed, Darcy would work on Jane's next grant application. (Erik had cheerfully passed those to her when he realized she understood paperwork intuitively and could bullshit with the best of them.) She would keep multiple tabs open on her monitor and flip back and forth regularly, memorizing paintings and sculptures for her art history class, listening to her seminar recordings on her iPod, and hacking away at her thesis.
Not once did she feel bad about taking company time to do her homework, considering she was getting three hundred dollars a week for Jane's idea of work hours, which didn't account for things like Saturdays or midnight.
And so Darcy's life went for nine and a half weeks, until boom.
Since 'boom' started at five in the morning on a Tuesday (with Darcy driving, of course), they didn't get real breakfast that morning, just poptarts. Once 'boom' ended in the late afternoon on a Thursday (after taking out most of Puente Antiguo, including Isabela's, which Darcy actually liked, dammit), dinner that night was also poptarts.
And then it was week eleven.
~~~~~~
At this point, the baby agents inevitably cry foul. They holler and heckle about how she promised to tell them about Thor, and everyone says she'd tased him, and is it true?
Darcy smiles. She knows how to work a crowd.
It's at this point that Thor drops in if he's in town. He appears in the doorway, trying and failing to look casual, and Darcy does this for the chance to laugh at the expression on the new recruits' faces as much as for the chance to make him human to them.
(Of the Avengers, Thor and Banner have the hardest time being accepted as regular, everyday people - given that Natasha doesn't try - and it's a problem in the field if agents assume an Avenger is just an invincible trump card they can throw at any problem without thought. Even if neither Thor nor Bruce qualifies as human genetically, they're still people, they have weaknesses, and they need to be treated like soldiers in battle.
Darcy had this argument with Sitwell monthly before she started telling her story. For a guy busy rolling his eyes most days, he was remarkably sympathetic. She noticed by year three that none of the newbies ever miss her Friday performances, even if Friday is their day off. This is why Sitwell stays on her Birthday Cookies list.)
So Thor shows up in civvies, and Darcy kicks a chair out for him. Her hands going up to catch the room's attention again and finish the tale; her grin, though, is all for Thor.
~~~~~~
The key to working with Jane was to understand that she didn't come with an off switch. She had times when she was unconscious, times when she was eating, times when she was sitting around apparently doing nothing. But her brain was never actually paused. She wasn't a scientist because she liked science. She was a scientist because she couldn't stop being one.
Darcy's best preparation for working at the lab was, in fact, her couple of years babysitting, before she got old enough to earn money without being barfed on. She used every trick she learned at the age of fourteen to make life in the lab less horrifying.
When Darcy first arrived, she discovered that when Erik was in town, he and Jane alternated sleeping in the lab, despite Jane having her own crappy RV and Erik being able to afford a room a the local roach motel. They were 'on call' in case Jane's machines caught any weather disturbances. Of course, they assumed Darcy would join the rotation and spend every third night sleeping in a plastic lawnchair in a dark, freezing car dealership.
Um, no.
The first morning, Darcy found herself a cheap, crappy baby monitor by literally walking down the street and knocking on doors. She bought rechargeable batteries and a charger, set her phone to remind her to change them out, and promptly bedded down on Jane's mini-couch, since Jane hadn't thought she would need another bed. (Luckily, Darcy was short.)
Darcy never did get her own RV. Not that it was in the budget anyway.
The baby monitor led to its own set of problems, meaning that once or twice a week, Darcy would be rousted by an excited Jane who swore there was an atmospheric disturbance that had to be investigated in person. In the middle of the night. (Darcy had her own theory about why atmospheric disturbances never seemed to appear during daylight hours, but Jane wasn't interested in her discussions of alien psychology and intergalactic time zones.)
Darcy drove, while Jane and sometimes Erik tried to keep Jane's equipment from blowing up. It was a good division of labor most nights, because mostly they found a whole lot of nothing, or a tiny dust storm.
And then one night they found Thor.
To be fair, Darcy was already spooked to hell and back. The storm was bigger than any they'd tracked before, and Darcy had grown up in a part of the country where there were two kinds of alarms: fire and tornado. This? Was setting off all kinds of warning bells in her head, survival instincts like don't drive into the middle of a twister you could die okay? and am I allowed to quote movies now? because I have a baaaaad feeling about this.
Then they hit someone with the car. Then he wasn't dead, but maybe he was high or crazy or something, and Darcy did have an unhealthy amount of experience with that, thanks to three and a half years of college and a tendency to acquire too much of the wrong kind of attention if her clothes weren't baggy enough. Hell, her junior year she'd upgraded from mace to an actualfax taser (better distance, more reliable).
The guy was staggering around yelling at the sky, threatening them, and Darcy just snapped.
~~~~~~
At this point, Thor gets up and does his best crazy drunk impression, staggering into tables and knocking over his chair, bellowing at the ceiling, and Darcy gets out an uncharged taser and yells zap! really loudly so he can crumple to the ground in a dramatic fashion worthy of Shakespeare.
(She live-tasered him the first year and managed to short out the entire building and several surrounding blocks - something about his natural electrical field - so now Sitwell didn't even let her in the break room without personally checking her props. Spoilsport.)
After a suitably dramatic silence, Thor opens his eyes and grins as she pulls him to his feet.
"Don't try this at home, kids," Darcy tells the baby agents, then takes her bow.
~~~~~~
What Darcy doesn't tell the newbies is what happened Thursday night, where the three of them got roaring drunk and sat on the roof of the car dealership, lost in their own thoughts and silences. What she never tells anyone at all is her last night on the couch of Jane's trailer, Passover and exams looming, her two little suitcases packed by the door.
It felt like she was breaking a promise, even though she never promised anything to begin with.
"I still don't know why you even picked me," Darcy muttered, propping Jane up on the bed, "when you knew I couldn't do the whole year." Jane made puppy dog eyes, and Darcy groaned. "If you're going to fall apart while I'm back at school, I might even start feeling guilty. Seriously, stop that. Your eyes are physically hurting my soul."
Jane whimpered and covered her eyes, probably already on her way to a massive hangover. "My not-boyfriend abandoned me for another planet, and now you're going, too."
"Erik's still here," Darcy muttered, but they both knew he couldn't stay forever, either. Soon it would be just Jane here; Jane, alone, driving in the desert at night.
Jane just turned her head into the pillow, stubborn as always, and it was Darcy who broke first. (Darcy always broke first.)
"I'll come back," she whispered, though she wasn't sure if Jane would remember this in the morning. "I'll come banging on your trailer door some night in June with my diploma in one hand and poptarts in the other, and you'll be so proud of me you'll give me a raise."
"How does two dollars a day sound?" Jane mumbled into her pillow. The corner of her mouth was twitching, just a bit.
"I'd settle for getting my iPod back from that secret agent man." She paused thoughtfully. "Or you cooking breakfast from now on. I saw what you did while Thor was here. And I liked being waited on for a change."
"Done." Jane's voice was sleepy, but it held all the warmth Darcy had missed.
In the morning, Darcy cooked breakfast for her and left it on the table, then rolled out to catch the bus.
******
Chapter 3
The third story is one she doesn't tell to crowds. In fact, only a select few agents have ever heard it, though rumors abound. It's really the question everyone in New York asks each other, even a couple decades later. Where were you when-?
Everyone assumes Darcy was already a SHIELD agent by then, or that she was at Culver, in Tromsø, in New Mexico.
They are all wrong.
~~~~~~
Darcy arrived back at Culver on April 2nd to discover that the West Meadow was torn all to hell and cordoned off by what she thought at first was the FBI but later realized was SHIELD. (What? All those guys in suits looked alike to her.)
The campus was awash with rumors. Darcy ignored them as best she could (which was a lie - she listened avidly) and put all her effort into pushing her timeline back. Jane was counting on her. Darcy could be remarkably mono-focused when she felt needed.
On April 26th, she sat down with a hard copy of her senior thesis and her tweed-clad advisor. He hummed as he read her thoughts on the effect of covert operations and secret government agencies on the progress of the Cold War, tapping his pen here and there without saying why. She was expected a grilling, but he just finished and looked up at her with eyes that saw way too much.
"There's a section of this paper missing," he said knowingly, and Darcy gulped. "You're clearly building to a coherent conclusion, which you carefully kept hidden from me for weeks, and then you slapped on a final section any sophomore could have written. Care to tell me why?"
"I, uh," she stammered.
He waited, smiling patiently, and she began to wonder if he was really as out of touch as he seemed, or if he was actually the most amazing undercover agent of all time. She'd met Agent Coulson and now had a completely different view of what being a secret agent meant.
Darcy sighed. "It's classified."
He raised his eyebrows. She winced. It was like telling her fifth grade teacher her dog ate her homework, never mind that it had actually happened.
"My conclusion, I mean. It was redacted. Literally deleted. All copies erased. And I can't even tell you by who."
He looked up and out the window at the West Meadow, still being repaired by the campus landscaping crew. "I can guess."
"You probably shouldn't," she warned.
He smiled. "Probably not." His eyes went a little distant as he saw things she couldn't, and then he took a breath, drawing her back to the present. "Congratulations, Miss Lewis. Your senior thesis is accepted."
She could totally be forgiven for the squeal, though even she will admit that throwing her arms around his neck was a bit dramatic. He didn't seem to mind, though his laughter was probably more at her than with her.
Whatever. One down, three to go.
~~~~~~
On April 27th at nine in the morning, Darcy sat in her Art History professor's office while the woman cheerfully projected paintings on the wall and asked probing questions.
At three in the afternoon, Darcy was in the the PoliSci office handing in her final paper for her seminar.
At four-thirty, she was at the track, running a mile in seven minutes twenty-nine seconds, thank you very much. (The coach even congratulated her on the two minute improvement over her December time.)
On Saturday, April 28th, Darcy Lewis finished packing up her dorm room, shipped almost everything she owned back to her mom's house, and spent the night playing drinking games with her friends using all the reruns of Project Runway they could find on Bravo.
On Sunday morning, she boarded a bus to New Mexico with two small bags. She felt like she was going home.
~~~~~~
On the morning of Tuesday, May 1st, Darcy stood in the midst of the reconstruction of Puente Antiguo and stared.
The car dealership was empty.
There was no RV in the parking lot.
There wasn't even a note.
At that moment, Darcy's phone, which she had been using in place of her still-missing iPod, gave a forlorn beep as it shut off to conserve power.
Darcy calmly punched a telephone pole.
~~~~~~
She managed to find the last working pay phone in town, put in four quarters, and coaxed her phone into turning on one last time. Quickly she dialed the number filed under 'creepy agent dude', since she still had Jane's entire contact list stored. The phone rang four times before a machine picked up.
"Please state your name and ID number to be directed to our main menu."
"Darcy Lewis, and I don't have an ID number." She fished for more quarters in the bottom of her bag, one-handed.
"One moment please."
It took longer than a moment. The phone cheerfully counted down forty-five seconds off her time. Darcy fed another couple of quarters into the slot.
The voice that came on suddenly was polite and professional. "This is Emily, how may I help you?"
Darcy sighed in relief.
"I'm Darcy Lewis, Jane Foster's assistant? I went off for a month to finish my degree and when I got back just now, Jane's gone. Poof! The last time stuff disappeared around here, it was you guys, so my money's on secret agent man again. Where did you disappear my boss, and why in hell did nobody tell me so I didn't schlep all the way to New Mexico in a bus with bad AC?"
"One moment please." Damn, the woman sounded just like the machine.
"No, wait!" But it was too late. Darcy stared at the diminishing time on the phone screen and fished a handful of change and lint out of her pocket.
It was a minute fifteen, thank you very much, when the phone clicked and a male voice said, "This is Agent Sitwell. Am I speaking to Darcy Lewis?"
"Yes, thank god! Do you have any idea what it's like to be stranded in a tiny town with no idea where to-?"
"Miss Lewis," he talked over her smoothly, "this line is not secure. Do you have your phone with you?"
"Battery's dead, and I don't have anywhere to charge it."
He sighed, the sound scratchy over the line, like he was on the other side of the world. "Alright, Miss Lewis. The next bus to Santa Fe will arrive in two hours. When you get there, take the next available bus to Denver, and then the cross-country to New York. How well do you know Manhattan?"
"Never been."
"Do you think you could get yourself to Grand Central?"
She nodded, then remembered - no video. "Yeah, that's like, big and hard to miss, right?"
"I hope so. Get to the main terminal, exit either side, and go into the north entrance of the building looming over you. Tell the receptionist you're meeting someone from our organization there. I'll call ahead so she'll know to expect you."
"And then what do I do?"
"Then you sit and wait, Miss Lewis. I'll send someone when I can."
The phone went dead, the screen blinking and blinking, but Darcy had no more quarters to give.
~~~~~~
She arrived in the lobby of STARK Tower (it said so on the giant red sign outside, jeez, overcompensating much?) just after eight in the morning on Friday, May 4th. Her whole body ached from spending most of the week sleeping on busses or in hard plastic chairs at terminals, she was down to very little cash (oh how she wished she had a credit history right about now), and she had not had a bath that didn't come from a sink in six days.
The receptionist took one look at her and asked, "Darcy Lewis?"
Darcy nodded, almost too numb to speak. The receptionist looked apologetic.
"I'm so sorry. An agent called yesterday to say everyone is unavoidably detained and you should stay here until they can send someone out."
Darcy's knees and back whimpered. She eyed the literature on the fancy glass table in the reception area, most of it glossy advertisements with science-y words, like 'Arc Reactor Offers a Green and Responsible Future!' At least one of the chairs was actually a double, like a small couch would be if someone had put ornately carved wooden arms on the thing so no one could mistake it for comfortable.
"Can I sit down at least?" she asked.
The receptionist looked shocked. "Oh, not at all!" At Darcy's crestfallen expression, she quickly amended, "Ms. Potts already gave permission for you to take a guest room upstairs. Most floors aren't complete yet, but there are bedrooms available."
"With showers?" Darcy asked, hardly daring to hope.
The receptionist smiled. "With bathrobes and even laundry machines on a separate floor."
"I love you," Darcy declared. "Wait, am I allowed to say that to someone whose name I don't even know?"
"Lucia," the woman said, coming around the desk to shake Darcy's grimy, sweaty hand. Darcy gave her extra points for not flinching or wiping her hand off after. "Let me show you to the working elevator."
"In the words of the greatest poet I ever met, I will write odes in your honor, Lucia."
Lucia laughed and pressed the button for the elevator.
~~~~~~
Darcy woke in a bathrobe made of pure fluff to the sound of muffled booms. Someone was speaking.
"-wis. Miss Lewis. Please wake up."
She sat bolt upright. "Who's there?"
"JARVIS, the artificial intelligence that runs Stark Tower. If you recall, we met earlier when you attempted to flood the 36th floor using the laundry machine and your undergarments."
"My crowning moment..." Darcy muttered.
JARVIS continued. "Miss Lewis, it is imperative that you move to one of the exit stairways and make your way down as quickly as possible. I do not know how long I will remain functioning to guide you."
Does he have cameras everywhere? Did he watch me shower? Her thoughts were derailed by another distant boom, followed by the windows rattling in their frames.
She jumped and flailed for her glasses. "Holy shit! Are those explosions?"
"Indeed."
"Holy shit," Darcy repeated to herself, quieter. She rolled off the bed and snagged her shoulder bag, leaving her little rolling suitcase to its fate as she stuffed her bare feet into her boots. "What's happening, Jarv-dude?"
"It appears to be an invasion."
~~~~~~
Darcy'd had dreams where she ran and ran but couldn't get anywhere, and she'd had dreams where disembodied voices gave her hushed orders that made no sense (mostly since Thor fell out of the sky), but the two had never combined before. She decided she didn't like them together. There was no peanut butter and chocolate here - maybe Crisco and motor oil. Ew.
Her legs felt on fire, and every four flights she had to remind herself to breathe.
"Miss Lewis," JARVIS said calmly, "You will need to exit on this floor and proceed to the southwest stairwell. My cameras have been damaged in the lobby and there appears to be smoke rising from that level. The southwest stairwell has an emergency exit directly into the Grand Central Terminal."
"Shit." Darcy swung out the fire door into an open space full of bare floors and construction pillars and smashed windows. "Which way?"
"To your left," JARVIS replied smoothly. "You will need to SKREE EEE ROWR UUU-"
"Jarv? Jarv??"
JARVIS didn't answer. Darcy whimpered.
She dashed for what looked like it might be the southwest stairwell. (If she had recharged her phone, she would have had a compass - very useful for driving crazy scientists around at night, and apparently for escaping burning towers that were under attack). For a moment she had a dreadful moment of deja vu, feeling like she was back in Puente Antiguo, defenseless an empty room walled with glass while a giant robot marched on the town. Then she shook it off and surged forward, shoving the emergency door open.
Smoke poured out, catching her in the face. She coughed and fell back, letting the door slam. It was cool to the touch, but all that smoke-
I'm screwed, she thought, and tried to breathe through the panic making her heart pound double time.
A door slammed behind her.
"Darcy? Darcy Lewis?"
"Here, Lucia, here!" she shouted, the mostly empty space echoing. Lucia came around a pillar at a dead run, grabbing Darcy's hand with obvious relief.
"JARVIS said you were on the third floor, but then he stopped speaking," she explained quickly. "We need to move down to the second floor."
"I was trying the southwest-"
"No, that's where the fire is. Don't worry, the building is evacuated except for us."
Darcy blinked soot out of her eyes. "You came back for me?" she whispered, stunned.
Lucia shrugged. "My second job is guest relations."
Darcy snorted. "You are so earning a bonus right now."
~~~~~~
It turned out that the escalators between STARK Tower and the Terminal were closed off behind fire doors, but Lucia knew where a manual release was, and she wasn't afraid to pull it. They skimmed through the narrow gap when the doors opened and ran down frozen escalator stairs to burst through another set of doors into the upper level of Grand Central Terminal just in time to see a giant bone whale fly overhead.
"Holy shit," Darcy whispered. She felt like she was saying that a lot today, but seriously, holy shit.
"Ladies!" a man in an MTA uniform flagged them down from the ground floor gesturing to the stairs. They raced down and were quickly ushered into the service area behind a row of lower level shops, where they found over a hundred people unhappily crammed in, most of them sitting on the floor to brace against the occasional shudder as something exploded outside.
So Darcy Lewis spent the Invasion of Manhattan helping the waitstaff of the Golden Krust hand out jerk chicken and sodas to a random mix of tourists and locals while the Avengers saved the city.
~~~~~~
The first time Darcy met Jasper Sitwell in person, she was wearing a bathrobe and secondhand combat boots. He was in his shirtsleeves with a smear of blood across one ear. They looked at each other for a moment, then-
"Darcy Lewis, I presume?" he asked tiredly.
"Reporting for duty, sir!"
He closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. When he reopened them, she felt like he was looking at her for the first time, though he didn't seem any less exhausted.
"We are establishing safe pedestrian corridors running north and south. If I give you a radio, can you organize the MTA police and anyone else in charge down here and get everyone moved out of midtown on foot?"
"Yes, sir."
He handed her an earpiece, watched her wrestle with her hair to get it in place until the corner of his mouth showed the tiniest upward tilt.
"And Lewis?"
"Yep?"
"Nice boots."
~~~~~~
Darcy first tells this story to Claire about six months after the incident in Savannah (which Darcy only knows about because she processed the paperwork after Sitwell's debriefing, and wasn't that a lovely piece of candy for Blake to toss her?). Claire's at the point where the shiny's begun to wear off and she's finally realized that, while her boyfriend Benny is damn useful and enjoying his job with R&D, Claire herself is merely a glorified Admin Assistant. Who can't make coffee. (Though she's damn good at blasting holes in things.)
Darcy's only been at the job about three weeks longer than Claire, but she had some Jane-based training before that. Meaning, to whit, Darcy can make coffee. She just chooses not to.
So she tells Claire her story and talks it up with her hands, being honest about how terrified she was ("almost peed my nonexistent pants") and how useless until everything was over. She talks about how Lucia rescued her and Jasper had to show her how to work a radio, about how she ended up wearing clothing from a donation bin at the Red Cross station after walking nearly ten blocks with a toddler named Jeremiah perched on her hip.
"Nice boots," she says in a deadpan Sitwell imitation, and Claire howls.
Like Claire, Darcy is not a perfect SHIELD agent. She doesn't put every foot right or even have the foggiest idea what she ought to be doing sometimes. Being Darcy Lewis is a three-ring circus, an act of faith, a constant state of damage control. In that, she doesn't think she's too unusual, except at SHIELD.
The greatest strength of SHIELD is its tendency to recruit those overly prepared Type A personalities who have a plan for everything. The greatest weakness of SHIELD is that it throws those people at situations no one could be prepared for. They either overcome the obstacles or they implode, but Darcy doesn't believe in make or break. Darcy believes in getting back up and doing it again until she gets it right. This is what she tells Claire and the rare other agents like herself, the ones who don't come with 4.0 GPAs, years of experience, and all the answers. She tells them and she asks them to stay, to balance out SHIELD's extremes with their own quirky styles.
This is what Darcy gives SHIELD. This is why she is a legend.