fic: Darcy Lewis: Office Manager.
Title: Darcy Lewis: Office Manager.
Rating: PG-13/R (for sexual innuendo but no actual sexytimes).
Characters/Pairings: Darcy Lewis/James Rhodes, Jane Foster/Thor, Bruce Banner/Betty Ross, Pepper Potts/Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Erik Selvig
Summary: It's almost Valentine's Day, everyone has a crush on Tony, Thor's a hopeless romantic, and Jane's building a machine that might cause the apocalypse. It's pretty much business as usual for Darcy Lewis. (Set immediately after Robotics, but can basically be read as a oneshot.)
A/N: I started writing this from Tony's POV, but Darcy was just so snarky and interesting that decided to make it about her instead. The reason I wrote this ficlet at all (and yes, this is as short a ficlet as I can do, apparently) was as a palate cleanser for this great big angsty fic I was writing in this series. I meant to have both of them done well before the earliest movie release dates, but real life got in the way. So, obviously, this fic has no spoilers, and is not canon compliant by virtue of me not having seen the film yet (less than twenty four hours, though!)!
S.H.I.E.L.D. won't let Tony come back to work until the end of January, because of government sanctioned health regulations and 'if he gets dizzy and falls over, are you going to haul his ass around?' (cue Nick eyeballing Jane; Darcy's the only one with the balls to call him Nick, to his face or otherwise - it's like Voldemort, she figures, names only have power if you let them). This drives Jane crazy, because as far as she's concerned, his involvement is paramount to the success of the new Tesseract thingy she's building. Darcy's beginning to suspect that she's got a little crush on him.
When he finally is cleared to come back, he comes straight to the Staten Island lab, where they've have staked their claim and run off all the S.H.I.E.L.D. lab techs. Who needs highly trained professionals when you've got a pocket astrophysicist, a grumpy Norwegian, and a sarcastic polisci major with three and a half quarters of a degree?
“That is a wicked scar,” Darcy says when he gets into their shared space. He stops to look at printout on the door that reads 'Science: it works, bitches', and another over what looks like Jane's desk: 'Stand back, I'm going to try science'.
“Nice,” he says, nodding at it.
Darcy grins. “I don't understand almost anything from those comics, I just like sticking up posters with so-called 'inappropriate language'.”
“Coulson?” he asks, walking around to check out his desk: its single occupying item is an Iron Man bobblehead. “Cute.”
“Isn't it? I've got Cap and Hulk ones too.” She nods to her tiny little desk stacked high with folders, books, and all manner of action figures. “I've got a guy on the inside at Hasbro, got all the new prototypes. I guess they'll have to start making yours with a scar, though.”
He shakes his head. “Doctor said it wouldn't leave a mark.”
“Oh, sad.”
“That's what I said.”
“Oh, thank God, you're here,” Jane cries, coming through the double doors at the other end of room. Her hair is scraped back harshly from her face, face flushed. From the room behind her Erik is shouting: 'is that Stark?'. She rubs her palms over her face. “We badly need a mechanic in there.”
“You know I charge by the hour, right? Double for emergency calls.”
By the end of the day, he's dripping with sweat and stripped down to his undershirt. What they're building is basically their own version of the Bifrost, cooked up in the crazy depths of Tony and Jane's minds. The sheer amount of physical labour needed just to make the skeleton of the thing is immense, though, and as Erik points out several times throughout the day, they're 'physicists, not engineers!' (later, there's a note taped to his desk that says 'I'm a physicist, not a bricklayer!!!'). This is where Tony comes in, he has to make sure that the thing has a hope of working without blowing up or creating a singularity or something.
Darcy wiles away the hours playing virtual chess with a kid from New Zealand called Jordan.
“Damn, you're ripped,” she says when they finally shut down for the day. She tosses Tony a bottle of water from the mini fridge on her desk.
“Do I detect a note of surprise, Miss Lewis? You know how much the armour weighs? It's an all in one gym experience.” He makes a bit of a show pouring some of the water over his head to cool off, and she arches an eyebrow. “Haven't seen Rhodey in a while, how's he doing?”
“He does it just fine,” she replies, her other eyebrow coming up to join the first one.
“Gross,” he says. “Nobody wants to know that.”
“Agreed,” Erik says, “besides, he's far too old for you.”
Tony shakes the water out of his hair like a dog drying off, flicking both Darcy and Erik. “Hey, that's my best friend you're talking about.”
Erik shakes his head and walks away.
“Don't mind him,” Darcy says, “he's just sulking because me and Jane aren't giving him as much attention as we used to. He liked being the only guy.”
“He liked being the only cock in the henhouse, huh?”
“Something like that.” She grabs his t-shirt from where he discarded it on Jane's desk earlier. “Cover your shame,” she says, tossing it to him.
“He is too old for you, you know,” he says, using the t-shirt to dry his face. “He's even older than me.”
“I already have a father, thank you, Mr Stark, and he thinks Jim is perfectly lovely.”
“Really?”
She shrugs. “He went to Woodstock and never really left. The hardest part was convincing him that it was okay for me to be dating 'the man', but I think after I joined S.H.I.E.L.D. he sort of gave up on me. Loves Thor though, they're total brothers-in-arms.”
Tony is quiet for a moment before shaking his head. “Sorry, I'm just imagining Thor at Woodstock.”
“How'd you know he wasn't? This isn't the first time he's been to Earth.”
Tony looks like he's just discovered the question that '42' answers.
-
S.H.I.E.L.D. are putting the three of them up in an apartment in Manhattan for the duration of Jane's research. It sucks to have to share again, but at heart, S.H.I.E.L.D. is still part of the government, and the government doesn't care about Darcy needing privacy to watch CSPAN and yell at the TV. Jane and Erik are pretty good room mates, though, and Thor's loud fratboy-like behaviour is pretty familiar. Plus it means he's on hand to 'help out' with her Norse mythology coursework.
“This is a complete fabrication!” he says as he scrolls through the newest slides that her online class has been sent. He taps very, very lightly at the button, because Darcy has had the same laptop since graduating high school, replacing bits and pieces of it as needed, and even Thor understands that some things are sacred. “Sif and I never--!”
“And Steve wasn't just a cartoon character who sold war bonds. Don't worry, Jane won't be jealous.” She nudges Thor to one side and sits down on the couch.
“It is not Jane that I'm worried about,” he says, and leans in conspiratorially. “Sif would have me up by my ankles for even thinking such a thing.”
“Oh,” she says, “well, you don't want to get on the bad side of that chick, she's almost as scary as Natasha.”
He nods gravely.
“Three Hungry-Mans for Thor and ramen for Darcy,” Jane says, dropping a tray of TV dinners next to the laptop.
“Careful!” Darcy cries, snatching up the computer to cradle it in her arms. “You could have spilled something on her!” She sets the laptop down on the empty couch cushion while Jane settles herself on Thor's lap. “Where's Erik?”
“In his room.”
“Sulking?”
Jane shrugs. “Maybe a little.”
“Were we in Asgard, I would take Erik fishing,” Thor says, skewering a microwaved fry with the fork Jane gives him, “and we would catch the greatest serpent in the waters.”
“Good thing there aren't any serpents in the water,” Darcy says. “Just alligators in the sewers.”
Thor nods thoughtfully. “Perhaps just a bar, then.”
Jane pulls a face that Thor misses as he mixes his corn in with the gravy. “You'll need back up. Take Tony and Steve.”
Darcy scoffs. “You're suggesting that Tony and Steve go along as chaperones? Who's going to make sure that Tony doesn't get shit-faced and have sex with Steve in the restroom?”
“Oh, Tony's not that bad.”
“Tony is so that bad,” Darcy replies, and pulls the lid off her ramen. “You just want to be his third sex buddy.”
“Darcy!” Jane squeaks, almost upending Thor's food. She glares at Darcy in between shooting worried glances at Thor.
“On Asgard, people routinely enter into relationships of four or more people.” He picks the remote and turns his head to wink at Darcy. “Ah, the Oklahoma City Thunderers!”
Jane relaxes marginally and Darcy smiles, settling down to watch the NBA match. “You don't even understand basketball, you only support these guys because of the name. You don't even know where Oklahoma is.”
“And you only like the Miami Heat because you are sexually attracted to LeBron James,” Thor replies around a mouthful of whatever passes for beef these days.
“You got me there, big guy,” she says, settling her head against his comfy bicep, “you have got me there.”
-
“He's doing this on purpose, right?” Jane says quietly, leaning towards Darcy.
Darcy takes the pen that she's been chewing on out of her mouth. “Totally doing it on purpose.”
They lapse back into silence, and watch as Tony bends further over his desk, sketching confident lines on the graph paper covering it. His jeans are the kind that apparently every guy has a pair of: worn at the knees and - she can't help but notice - around the crotch, fingerprint shaped stains of oil and paint and God only knows what else, too loose and held up by a belt cinched tight. Darcy bites down on her pen again.
Tony leans over and grabs a second pencil, his belt buckle (a tiny version of Steve's shield; she's seen Steve wearing it too, which is just... yeah) knocking on the edge of the desk. With his left hand, he starts drawing shorter lines, adding fiddly little details.
“Is he ambidextrous?” Jane says; breathes, really, her voice a little tremulous.
“Looks like,” Darcy says around the pen. “Is that seriously getting you hot?”
Jane shrugs. “I like a man who knows how to use his hands.”
“Heard that,” Tony calls. “Girls, I'm not a piece of meat.”
“That spread you did in GQ would beg to differ,” Darcy says. When it came out last year, one of her friends from her old Human Rights class sent her an email with a link to the website and the words 'if you do not tap that I will disown you'.
Sadly Tony is kind of ridiculously monogamous (…in a sense), and as hot as it she imagines it is, she has no desire to get involved with whatever he's got going on with Pepper and Steve. There's kinky and then there's extremely damaging to one's sanity.
He straightens up, rolling his shoulders back, the muscles in his back moving deliciously under his t-shirt. “That was art, Miss Lewis,” he says, pressing a palm to his upper arm to stretch it out as he glances over his shoulder. “It was about self-expression and personal liberation.”
“And I watch porn because I like the set design,” she shoots back, looking to Jane to share the joke, but she's stalking forward and peering at the graph paper.
“Is that...?” Jane asks, and then they're away with the technobabble, gesturing and pulling out lots of differently coloured pencils.
Darcy settles back down at her desk. Best two out of three? she IMs Jordan.
-
Darcy has had a lot of long distance relationships in her short life; she travelled all around the West coast with her parents as a teenager, had a boy in every port, her dad used to say. Then she got a scholarship to Culver and left her long term boyfriend, Bobby, back in San Francisco. She heard that he came out last year.
She's never quite had a relationship like this, though, having her sort of boyfriend turning up in full battle armour, needing to be removed from it with a high tech version of a can opener by the billionaire genius playboy who drinks all her specially brewed coffee.
“This is like unwrapping a late Christmas present all for me,” she says, taking another piece of metal that Tony hands her.
“I don't need to know about your weird sex games,” Tony says, “and I'd appreciate if you didn't use my tech to carry them out.”
“Just get me out of this damn tin can,” Jim mutters.
“The tin can that you stole from me.”
“Just get it off and shut up, I've got a date.”
“We're going to the Federal Hall,” she says.
“Wow,” he deadpans. “Sexy.”
“You're joking, but it is.”
The thing is, Darcy likes a good argument. She went through three elementary schools before her parents decided that there was a limit to how much of a free spirit they could let her be, and enrolled her in debate club and Model UN. Instead of explaining to teachers why they were wrong and why they should invest in textbooks published after Watergate, she led Japan to victory over her fellow sixth graders. Studying polisci seemed like a natural progression from that, because she'd never be short of things to argue about with that.
And yeah, there's nothing more arousing than a good, satisfying debate.
-
“Get out of town, you have not met the president,” she says later, taking her first bite into her ice cream cone. The Hall kicked everyone out at five, but she's of the opinion that every good date requires ice cream, and she would like this to be a good date; so far their 'relationship' has just been making out and casual sex.
A drop of ice cream starts its descent down her arm and Jim wipes it away with his thumb, then licks said thumb clean. Damn. “Actually I did.”
“What's he like?” She worked on his campaign in her last year of high school, but the closest she ever got to him was sitting an inch from the TV screen on election night.
“He's tall.”
“Mm, he looks tall.” She takes another bite of her cone and wiggles her eyebrows.
“I think I'm going to get a little jealous soon,” he says, breaks off a little piece of her cone and pops it in his mouth. He went for ice cream in a tub, more fool him, so he got through his a lot faster than she did.
“If that makes you jealous, there's something I should probably tell you.”
He raises his eyebrows in question, and she's not exactly nervous, because Darcy doesn't do nerves, but she's not exactly proud of it, either. “I think I'm developing a bit of a crush on Tony.”
His eyebrows drop back to their normal position. “Oh,” he says, “everyone has a crush on Tony. Even people who hate him. Maybe especially people who hate him.”
“So, do you?”
He shakes his head quickly. “No.”
“You said 'everyone'. Are you not a person? Are you a robot? Did Tony build you in his little shop of horrors?”
Jim laughs. “He wishes he'd built something this good. No, he was sixteen and I was almost twenty when we met. He's... like my little brother.”
She closes her mouth over what's left of the cone and sucks out the last of the ice cream, humming around it thoughtfully, before eating the rest of it in three vicious bites. “Man, I bet he was ridiculously pretty as a teenager.”
“Can we stop talking about Tony?” he complains, staring at her mouth. She pouts. “But yeah. It got kind of irritating.”
-
When she gets into the lab the next morning with three cups of coffee balanced in her arms and her laptop packed smugly in her backpack, the office is empty. There are signs of life: a dirty mug on Tony's desk (and it's not just any mug, it's Darcy's own Culver debate club mug, and there will be consequences), Jane's super cuddly Culver sweatshirt thrown over the back of her chair, and dozens of candy bar wrappers.
“Hello?” she calls, depositing her coffees on her desk and carefully dropping her backpack to the floor.
“Back here!” Tony calls from the work area beyond the double doors. She snags one of the coffees and heads in.
The Tesseract engine has grown by at least double its size since yesterday, stretching up at least eight feet, and she cranes her head back to stare at it. It looks like a great big metal tower. “Cool,” she mutters, and takes a sip of her coffee.
“Oh my God, is there coffee? I can smell coffee,” Tony's voice says from the other side of the machine, over the sound of a drill. Darcy follows it and stops
“What... what are you doing?” she asks, looking up at Jane balanced on Tony's shoulders, his hands wrapped around her thighs, securing a panel to the side of the machine.
“Short people of the world unite!” Tony says happily.
“We couldn't find a ladder and Erik went home,” she says, then grabs hold of his hair with one hand as she wobbles. “Stay still!”
He winces. “Sorry, sorry.”
“When was the last time either of you went home?”
“Where do I live again?” Tony says, then turns his big eyes on her. “Coffee?”
“In the office,” she says.
“But you have some right there,” he says, letting go of one of Jane's leg to point at Darcy's coffee cup.
“This is my special blend.”
“But I like your special blend.”
She shakes her head and takes a good long drink from her cup before wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, and asking, “Does that actually ever work?”
He shrugs, jostling Jane, and earning himself another telling off. “It used to.”
“Hello...?” someone calls from the office, and she turns away from Tony and Jane with a smile.
“Duty calls!”
“Coffee calls!” he yells after her. She waves vaguely over her shoulder and pushes the doors open.
Bruce is standing in the middle of the room, cradling a cardboard box in his arms like a child, looking faintly annoyed. Anything more than 'faintly' and she'd be running.
“Dr Banner, what can I do for you?” she says in her most professional, office manager voice.
“I was told to come here,” he says, eyeing at the growing collection of action figures on her desk. She just got the new Hulk gloves yesterday.
“By who?” she says, pulling her phone out to check her emails. Nobody told her about this.
“Coulson,” he replies, looking around a little more, then deflating sadly.
She scrolls through her emails and finds one with the subject line: 'DARCY, READ THIS NOW' and the message, 'Dr Banner is going to be working at the Staten Island lab, please get him a desk and make him comfortable. Please inform Mr Stark that a calm working environment is a happy working environment'. “Ah,” she says, “well if you'll come this way I can offer you our finest ergonomic chair and brand new sharpened pencils.”
He sighs and trails after her as she waves him to the other end of the office. “This is the desk furtherest from Tony. As you can see, there's no chair here, right now, but I will find you one. There's always coffee in the maker, but you'll probably want to check it first, because Tony likes to leave it in there until he can spoon it out and eat it like ice cream.” She taps her phone against her chin. “Other things you should know: Erik will not abide any kind of music produced by people under the age of twenty five, but A-Ha is his shit. Jane is extremely perky in the mornings, the afternoons, and the evenings, but don't get confused, she will straight up kill you if you mess with her research. I, on the other hand, will slowly gaslight you if you fuck with my action figures.”
He looks back over at her desk and sighs again. That's kind of his thing, she's guessing.
“Your lab is gonna be down the hall, I'll get it kitted out with all your science stuff. Jane and Tony are working on their apocalypse machine in the big room - it gets pretty loud, as you can probably tell, so I suggest headphones. Personally I like the Grateful Dead, but I'd recommend something a little more zen for you.”
“Thanks,” he mutters, and drops his briefcase on the desk. It looks very sad there, all on its own.
“I don't mean to pry, but why did you get moved down here?” she asks.
“I, uh, I blew something up. They had to quarantine the entire floor for the day. I thought Fury might actually... Hulk out himself.”
“Oh, well, that's too bad,” she says, though personally she doesn't think Fury needs to Hulk out to convey his anger. Bruce presses his lips together and nods, as something crashes in the other room, sending vibrations along the floor under their feet. He doesn't react, and neither does she.
“Welcome to the family,” she says.
-
There are only two weeks until Valentine's Day, and Thor starts buying a rose for Jane everyday, leaving them in different place each time, like some kind of fragrant scavenger hunt. It's cute, but Darcy could have done without picking up one that hadn't had its thorns removed when she was digging around in the cutlery drawer for a fork.
“Valentine's is my favourite of all the holidays,” Thor says, scrutinising the solid wall of themed teddy bears at Walmart.
“What about Halloween?” Darcy asks, flicking through a copy of Us Weekly. There's an entire one page article all aflutter about Tony's scar.
“Vast amounts of sugared treats are not conducive to intercourse,” he says, drawing some glances from fellow shoppers.
She closes the magazine and returns it to the rack. “Truth. Which one are you gonna get?”
“I do not know. I didn't realise there would be so much choice.”
“Welcome to commercial America.” She glances up at a giant fluffy blond bear on the top shelf. “What about him? He's almost as big as you.”
“Will she like it?”
“Oh, Thor, baby, I've been to her parents' house: wall to wall plushies. I mean, she probably chose you because you're like a giant teddy bear.”
Thor grins and pulls the bear down from the shelf. “Where will I hide it until the 14th?”
“Eh,” she says, “I'll take it over to Jim's.”
They wander towards the checkout, Thor picking up every sugary looking thing he passes. Darcy picks up some candy of her own, along with Jane's favourite gossip rag (she leaves them on the kitchen counter for Jane; they disappear for a night and reappear slightly crumpled the next morning). Thor starts loading their stuff onto the checkout, then stops.
“I only have twenty dollars, will that be enough?”
She looks down at their stack of food and smiles. “That is what we have Tony Stark for,” she says, and pulls her credit card out with a flourish.
-
In reality, Darcy has few responsibilities as office manager; Jane and the others can just about look after themselves most of the time, and the bulk of the administrative stuff is taken care of some poor S.H.I.E.L.D. flunky back at HQ. Mostly she likes to think of herself as the morale officer - being in her presence is enough to cheer anyone up - and it's really her perfect job. She's still got a couple of online courses to finish before she can graduate, so she can work on those and dick around as much as she likes all day, and still get paid. Plus, this job is going to look seriously amazing on her résumé.
However, she is still nominally meant to run the place, and with their new rage monster office mate, she feels obliged to do a little research on him.
She discovers a few things: loud, sudden noises should be avoided (duh), though Bruce pretty much has his condition under control, so there's only 30% chance of things going green in a hurry; he tries to limit his intake of stimulants, so coffee and anything with a lot of sugar are out (she spends hours one day on google looking at different teashops and plans out a whole trip for the next afternoon to stake them out); and he actually seems to be quite fond of Tony, despite all the obvious reasons that might suggest otherwise.
Today, Tony is flicking rubber bands at him while Bruce types away at his laptop. Occasionally one hits him in the face and he doesn't even twitch at the annoyance.
She decides that now is as good a time as any to give him the little package of teas from around the world that she bought him from the shop she liked the best. The wrapping is a little more fancy than what she had in mind when she bought them, with lots of bows and such, but the little old lady that ran the place was so fucking adorable that she didn't have the heart to tell to her to just stick them in a plastic bag and be done with it.
“Bruce,” she says, pulling the package out from her desk drawer, and he hums vaguely without looking up, “I have something for you.”
“Oooh,” Tony says, ceasing his volley of rubber bands.
She gets up and crosses the room to Bruce, who still hasn't looked up yet. Clearing her throat, she drops the package on the desk in front of him. “Think of it as a desk warming gift,” she says.
He lifts his eyes and looks at it for a moment before gently reaching out to pull one of the bows free. He picks the box up and continues to unwrap it carefully, barely even ripping the paper at all, until fancy calligraphy is visible. Darcy's just starting to feel a little awkward, standing there in front of his desk with Tony watching like it's performance art, when Bruce looks up at her, his lips momentarily pressed together, and says, “Thank you, Darcy,” in this incredibly sincere way.
She shrugs. “All in a day's work, don't worry about it.”
“No,” he says, “this is really kind. Thank you for... making me feel welcome.”
“Aw,” she hears Tony say behind her.
For her part, she says, “My, you are the cutest rage monster I've ever met, and my high school had a suspiciously successful athletics department.”
Then Jane shrieks from the apocalypse room, ruining the moment, and all three of them are halfway across the room before Erik calls out, “We're fine!”
-
The giggle fits start a couple of days later. Jane starts sniggering about how Tesseract no longer sounds like a word, then Tony points out that they're trying to turn a magical alien thingy into a super engine, and that this is their life now, and that also Jane's dating an alien, what's that like, how big is his hammer? Jane fires back about a certain soldier's 'enhancements' and after one too many imploring stares from Bruce, Darcy finally breaks (which is impressive, since she's sat for hours and listened to the circular conversations of stoned polisci majors) and calls Pepper's phone; Steve answers.
“You need to come collect your brother-husband,” she tells him, “and can you bring Thor too? Thanks.”
Steve, Thor, and Pepper arrive a little under an hour later. Steve fidgets a little when he sees her, and she guesses Pepper had to explain the cultural phenomenon of Sister Wives to him on the ride over and now his delicate sensibilities are all aflutter.
Or maybe not, since he does share a bed with Tony and Pepper every night.
“Where is he?” Pepper asks.
“In the apocalypse room,” she says, pointing her pen at the double doors.
“Apocalypse room?” Steve repeats.
“It's the room that houses the apocalypse machine, therefore: apocalypse room.”
Steve frowns as Pepper and Thor go over to fetch their respective partners. “Is it really going to cause the apocalypse, because I honestly can't tell with you guys any more,” he asks, hip leaning lightly against her desk.
“Bruce?” she calls.
“There's a forty two point five per cent chance that the thing's going to rip a hole in the space-time continuum,” he says from across the room, “and a seventy eight per cent chance that I will cause the apocalypse in the next forty five minutes.”
“I'll go help,” Steve says, pushing himself away from the desk.
It only takes the three of them fifteen minutes to convince Tony and Jane to lay down tools for the night (or several nights, Darcy's hoping). Thor announces, loudly, that 'you must not cause the beginning of Ragnarok!', and a few minutes later the five of them reappear in varying states of lucidity.
“You're such a tattle tale, Darcy,” Tony says with great seriousness that he manages to keep up for almost a full minute before he starts laughing again. Pepper has an arm around his neck that looks close to a stranglehold.
“Do you need a ride home?” Pepper asks Thor, who's still grappling with Jane.
“They can get a ride with me,” Darcy says, “at least Bruce doesn't need a babysitter.”
-
Thor's knees hit the dashboard of her Beetle, and he frowns. “I have ridden larger steeds than this,” he says, frowns some more, then adds, “I have ridden larger canines.”
“Do you know how long I saved for this car? You shut up about Bug.”
“'Bug' is an appropriate name,” he says, and his frown deepens into a scowl.
He sighs and glances over the back of his seat as Darcy starts the car, at where Jane is curled up with the ratty old picnic blanket that Darcy's grandmother knitted thrown over her. Not that she could knit, which accounts for the rattiness.
“It worries me that she works herself to exhaustion,” he says.
“Watch it with that kind of talk, buddy, she's not afraid to punch out anyone who questions her work.”
“I know,” he says, “but she is so small.”
“Good things come in small packages.”
A goofy smile spreads across his face. “This I know.”
“Uh huh,” she replies. She's perilously close to getting a blow by blow account of their sex life, perhaps literally. “Anyway, it's Tony you should really be worried about. It's insanity squared with the two of them.”
“I believe that is best left to Lady Pepper and Steve,” he says, and winces as she goes over a pothole and his head bumps against the roof of the car.
-
Darcy leaves for work the next morning without Jane, who was convinced to stay home by Thor's dulcet tones and a plate of waffles that he somehow learnt to cook pretty well.
She listens to soft rock on the radio as the sun comes up, taking the occasional sip of her coffee when she hits traffic, and she makes it there in good time, swipes her card at the door, and makes her way up to their floor.
She wanders into the office humming Don't Stop Believing, and is confronted by the sight of Bruce with no shoes on and the top four buttons of his shirt undone.
“Darcy,” he says evenly.
“Bruce,” she replies, just as calmly, and then, after taking in his rumpled appearance, “did you sleep here last night?”
“No,” he says, and smiles, in a way that he probably thinks is reassuring, but really just makes her more suspicious.
“You seem a little flustered,” she points out, “did I disturb something?”
The corners of his mouth turn down as he shakes his head. “Nothing. Just... working.”
“Mmhm.” She looks around the office; everything seems to be about how she left it last night, except... except for a sweater hanging over the back of Bruce's chair. It's not one of Jane's, and it's too small to be Bruce's...
“Dr Banner,” she says , “did you get some last night?”
He swallows and smiles again. “If Jane and Tony aren't coming in, do you really need to be here today?”
“Oh my God, you did!” she cries, and points an accusing finger at him, then thinks better of it. This isn't a time for accusing, this is a time for rejoicing! Bruce, a man who gets considerably less sex than Steven 'Ken doll' Rogers does, has finally got a little action. She'd update her Facebook page about it if S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't long since nuked it from orbit.
“Is she still here?” she whispers conspiratorially.
Amazingly, he replies in kind. “You are,” he whispers back.
“Oh,” she says, then, “oh. Do you want the tea I picked up for you from that tea house you like?”
He squints at her. “...yes, thank you.”
She puts the styrofoam cup down on the nearest desk and looks at him again. “Do you have enough condoms? Lube? Have you both been tested? Should I ask Coulson to start a sex ed course? It has been a while, hasn't it? Do you remember how it all... works down there?”
“Darcy.”
“Okay, fine,” she says, “fine, I wish you would've called though, I could have stayed in bed and listened to Jane and Thor having wild sex next door... Actually, scratch that, that's weird.”
“Darcy.”
“Going, going,” she mutters, holding her hands up as she backs out of the room. Before she can reach the door, though, it opens, and Betty steps in with a couple of paper bags in her hands. She's in a tank top and jeans, her hair pulled back in a loose bun.
“They didn't have the donuts that you like,” she says, then looks up, first at Darcy, then at Bruce. “Hi.”
Darcy squeals and wraps her arms around Betty briefly. “You two are in my top five favourite couples! Pretend I was never here!”
“I was trying to,” she hears Bruce mutter before she turns the corner out of the room, pulling out her phone to text Rhodey.
BOOTY CALL. Y/N?, she texts.
Y, comes the answer just before she gets back into Bug.
-
When Jim's in New York (which is more often than not recently, since he's been loaned out to S.H.I.E.L.D. for lots of hush hush reasons that he won't tell her about), he stays in an apartment of Tony's, a ridiculous penthouse bachelor pad in the heart of Manhattan that Tony used to bring girls back to when he was at university, Jim tells her.
Jim hates the décor, all red and gold and a fully stocked bar in every room (including the bathroom), but Darcy loves it. She likes to roll around on the silky sheets of the bed, and walk barefoot on the shag carpeting, and for that reason alone, she thinks, he leaves the place the way it is.
He answers the door in just a pair of sweatpants, a mug of coffee in his hand.
“Oh,” she says, “did I wake you?”
“Kind of, but I've been woken for much worse reasons than this.” He takes a sip of his coffee and waves her in.
“I totally just caught Bruce in the office post-sex with Betty.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep, I knew I was going to be a good influence on him, but I didn't think it would happen this quickly! It's a Valentine's miracle!”
Jim looks at the calendar. “It's not Valentine's for another... week,” he says, squinting as if to make sure.
“Yeah, don't worry, you didn't forget. It's just like Valentine's everyday at home right now with Thor.”
“Right. Well, I'm taking good care of the bear,” he says, pointing at where it's sitting on the couch.
“Oh my God, you're totally watching America's Top Model with him, aren't you? Are you going to cry when I take him away next week?”
He rolls his eyes and takes a couple of steps closer. “I believe I was promised some casual sex.”
“Yeah, I don't know, I've sort of gone off the idea now,” she says, twisting her hair around her finger.
“Oh, have you now?”
“Mmhm,” she murmurs, “I think I have a headache coming on.”
He leans in closer. “How about a debate, then?”
Oh, she likes how quickly he learns things. “That I can do, Colonel.”
-
The next day, Tony insists on having the radio tuned to a station that's exclusively playing love songs until Valentine's. He starts singing along to Power of Love and won't stop after that. Erik throws in the towel somewhere around Are You Lonesome Tonight? and goes home for the day, and wow, it's kind of ridiculously attractive, the way Tony can sing. Darcy shifts around in her chair and Jane disappears into the apocalypse room while Tony grins through it all. Bruce just stares harder at his laptop.
The latest song eventually fades away and the DJ starts talking again. Tony looks up expectantly. “...our next song goes out to Bruce in Staten Island-” Bruce narrows his eyes. “-your friends are all very glad that you finally 'got some'. Next up, Madonna's Like A Virgin.”
Bruce looks up. “You told him,” he says to her, in a flat, yet slightly accusing tone.
She presses a hand to her chest. “Me? I would never do such a thing.”
“Yeah, it was her no-good boyfriend,” Tony chips in, and Bruce sighs and shakes his head.
“It's like high school all over again,” he mutters
“Oh, don't get all sad puppy on me, Bruce, Tony didn't mean any harm,” she says, and begins to roll her chair away from her desk and over to Bruce's.
“Nope, I meant lots of harm,” he calls.
She waves a hand vaguely over her shoulder and then sets her elbows on Bruce's desk. “Would you feel better if Tony took all of us out for sugar-free ice cream?”
“What?” Tony says indignantly.
Darcy leans further forward, eyeballing Bruce. Bruce eyeballs her back for a moment before sighing, the corner of his mouth tilting up.
“Mint chocolate chip?” he asks.
She grins in triumph and pushes her chair back. “Jane!” she yells, “we're going for ice cream, get your coat!”
-
Normally Darcy sneers at guys who wear sunglasses indoors, but in this instance, she lets it go with just the merest hint of an eye roll, when Tony squints at the menu board from behind his D&G sunglasses and people take pictures of him with their phones.
“Can you see anything?” she says. The menu is written in white chalk on a black board, the lighting is low, all very hipster. There's no way he's able to read any of that.
“No, but I look really cool. I'll get whatever you're having.”
He grins when the waitress sets down two enormous sundaes, a mish mash of every flavour of ice cream they have, topped off with bottle's worth of chocolate sauce. “Awesome,” he mutters.
Jane wrinkles her nose and delicately scrapes at her tiny bowl of vanilla ice cream. “I don't know how either of you can eat all of that.”
“It's ironic, you liking vanilla,” Darcy says. “I hear everything through those thin walls at night, you know.”
Tony almost spits his ice cream out all over Bruce. Jane crosses her arms over her chest. “That's disgusting, Darcy.”
“Yes, it is, Jane. Yes, it is. Can you even imagine how it makes Erik feel? It's a wonder that poor guy hasn't run away from home already.”
“Oh, shush,” Jane mutters. The gaggle of fans across the room are still snapping pictures, and Jane frowns at them. “How do you deal with that?” she asks.
“With what?”
“That,” she says, and points her spoon at the high school kids. “Doesn't it get kind of annoying?”
Tony shrugs. “Well, yeah, but I'm used to it. My first spread was in Ladies' Home Journal when I was six months old, so...” He turns his head slightly and wiggles his fingers at his fans, who screech a little. “Plus, all of this,” he says, waving a hand at his general chest area, “it's a public service.”
“Uh huh,” Bruce says. “You're full of shit.”
“Oh, up top, Dr Banner!” Darcy says, leans forward and holds her palm out. He looks at it suspiciously. “Don't leave me hanging, man.”
Bruce's high five is timid and kind of sweaty, but she's going to work on that.
-
When Jane and her get home in the evening, Thor is playing Resident Evil with Jim in the living room while Erik looks on.
“I'm so turned on right now,” she says, as Jim's guy gets eaten by a zombie and he lets out what can only be described as a wail of despair. Thor punches the air in triumph.
“We're on the same team, man!” Jim cries.
“And were this real life, I would grieve over your demise for several minutes,” Thor says and grins stupidly, looking around to see if Jane is watching. Which, of course, she is.
Jim throws his controller down in disgust and gets up. “Hey,” he calls to them, stepping around the mess of wires and empty food wrappers.
“Have sex with me right now,” she dead pans as he brushes crumbs off his t-shirt. Behind him, Erik has taken up the controller with not a small amount of trepidation on his face.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jim mutters. “I came by to bring... something for Thor over, then I thought I'd stick around to surprise you...”
She nods. “You hung around to play games with Thor.”
“It was a factor.”
“So, you're staying?” Jane asks, and off loads the stack of folders she brought home from work on him. “I'll put an extra meal in the microwave,” she adds, and moves towards the kitchen.
“Where should I put these?” he says, looking around at the various surfaces, all of which are already occupied by some book, folder, magazine, or stack of papers.
Darcy nudges the newest copy of Astrophysics and Space Science aside, the one that has an article of Jane's about the 'theoretical' uses of the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. “Just dump them there,” she says.
Despite Jane's promise of some microwaved food, she's disappeared into her bedroom with a box of animal crackers, to the super computer, or whatever the hell it is, set up in the corner. Thor and Erik are hacking away at zombies, and Erik's surprisingly good at it (“You are most proficient!” Thor cries.).
“Wanna go make out in my room?” she asks Jim.
He shrugs. “Sure.”
Darcy's dated around a bit. Well, a lot, really, and one thing she's noticed is that sometimes guys get kind of... enamoured with certain aspects of her physique. Say, her big boobs and her small stature. Her high school quarterback boyfriend liked to pick her up and carry her around, and although it was kind of cute, it got real old, real fast. By college, she'd moved on to beanpole hipster dudes who thought it was hilarious to make ironic jokes about how little she was, and by the time she got the internship, she'd had several hookups that involved a lot of motorboating and pearl necklaces.
Maybe it's a cliché, but being with an older guy is so much better. Jim's only a little bit taller than Tony, so there's none of that freakish giant man infatuation with short girls (Thor could so easily have gone that way, but Darcy's pretty sure that Sif beat respect for women into him when they were kids a thousand years ago), and being Tony's friend, he's met all sorts and shapes of women.
Plus, he's just a really good kisser.
He looks up from sucking on her collarbone (no tank tops for the next few days, she thinks). “Hey... I think there's something I need to tell you,” he asks, frowning slightly.
“Okay? This sounds ominous.”
Jim laughs and drops a kiss to her chest. “It's not. It's just that...” He sits up and straddles her legs. “We've only been dating for a little while, but I feel like I should tell you, me and Pepper used to... have sex.”
“Huh,” she says, and sits up, pulling her legs free from under him. “You dated Pepper Potts?”
“I had relations with Pepper Potts,” he says, “dating would be overstating the situation. It only lasted for a couple of months three years ago, but the thing is that Tony doesn't know.”
“Oh. Were they already...?”
“No! No, they hadn't got together yet.”
“So why doesn't he know?”
“Well, a couple of reasons. One, it's none of his goddamn business, and two, he was sort of having a nervous breakdown at the time, plus being slowly poisoned, and I guess we didn't want to make him feel any worse. And then it just didn't come up.”
She nods. “Yeah, when you put it like that, you really wouldn't want to.”
“Is this going to be awkward now?”
“Well, this conversation is super awkward, that's for sure.”
The corner of his mouth tilts up, and he slips his hands under her shirt. “I meant with Pepper.”
“Are you kidding me? I love that chick, now I'm even closer to her.”
“That's creepy as hell.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “Yeah, baby.”
-
The next day, the 14th, she wakes up to strains of Bryan Adams's Everything I Do (I Do It For You). This is unacceptable.
“...unacceptable,” she mutters into Jim's chest, struggling to push herself up.
“What time is it?” he asks plaintively.
The clock reads 6.30am. Ugh, and on her day off, too.
Then Thor starts singing.
“Knock it off!” she yells.
If anything, Thor gets louder. “...I will always love yoooou,” he warbles.
“Those aren't even the words!” she shouts back. “Fucking demi-gods.”
“Honestly, after Tony built himself a flying metal suit and became a superhero, I didn't really think life would ever get any weirder,” Jim says, leaning over with the absolute minimum amount of effort to kiss her vaguely on some body part hidden by her hair.
“I know, right?” She sits and swings her legs over the edge of the bed. “I thought driving around in a van with two crazy scientists looking for 'anomalies' in the dead of night was going to be the weirdest thing I ever did.”
She stands up, and glances back over her shoulder. Jim is watching her with half lidded eyes, and oh yeah, she's still got it. “I'm gonna go spray some water at Thor, then we can get back to business.”
“Sleep?”
She lifts a shoulder. “Whatever does it for you, baby.”
The racket from outside has quietened down, at least. Thor isn't such a bad singer, she guesses, but he's more of the 'bawdy pub songs at closing time' variety than the whole lounger singer thing Tony's got going on, and she wouldn't even put up with that at this time of the morning. She opens her bedroom door and steps out into living room. The first thing she notices is that the floor is littering with rose petals. That's kind of cute. Way to go, Thor!
The second thing she notices is, well, Thor's big old dick as it - and he - walks to the kitchen.
She blinks, and then blinks again. Damn, he is really the whole package.
“Hey,” she says, “how you doin'?”
He looks up at her. “Darcy,” he says. Then he looks at the teddy bear sitting on the counter, and slowly picks it up to cover his thunder with it. Sad. “I will get the chocolate later,” he adds, before beating a hasty retreat to the bedroom.
“So many hammer jokes,” she says wistfully. She's pretty sure she hears Thor laughing behind the closed bedroom door.
Then she sees that Erik is in the corner, where the fridge meets the wall, holding a mug of coffee to his chest like it's going to save him.
“How long have you been standing there for?” she asks sympathetically.
“Too long,” he says, eyeballing Jane's bedroom door, “too long.”
-
Darcy's original plan for the day was to have a nice long lie in. She even got chocolate body paint from a place that Tony recommended (that conversation almost made Bruce curl up under his desk and cry), but it tasted horrible, so she gave it to Goodwill when they came round looking for donations.
It seems that Thor and Jane had the same idea, though, only theirs is louder. By mid-morning Darcy and Jim flee the apartment for Manhattan and spend the rest of the day doing all the tourist shit she's been wanting to do, but never had the time for because of petty things like working on major scientific breakthroughs. Jim takes her to some of the places that he and Tony used to hit when they had time off from MIT. Mostly they're bars. Lots of bars. Lots of bars on Valentine's Day, so everything is pink and everyone is very affectionate.
And the proprietors look the other way when Jim starts to get a little handsy in one of the booths.
“You're vibrating,” he says after a little while.
“Is that innuendo, because I'm way too drunk to parse that right now.” She holds up her finger. “Although not to drunk to use words I learnt in that linguistics elective I took. Good to know.”
“No, I mean...” He pushes his hand into her pocket and she pulls the most appalled face that she can muster in her state. He pulls her phone and holds it up. “Your phone, it's ringing.”
“Oh,” she says, “well give it here, then.”
“Darcy!” Jane yells as soon as she answers. “Darcy, oh my God, Darcy!”
“Are you stuck? Did Thor break you?”
“No, it's the-- the, the, the--” God, she really is stuck. Darcy holds the phone away from her ear and pulls a face at Jim. Jane's talking so loud, though, that Darcy can still hear her stammering, “the apocalypse machine is working!”
She puts the phone back to her ear. “It is?”
“Yes!” Jane practically shrieks. “You have to come a see this! We're out at the testing ground, we're going to turn it on soon. You have got to be here!”
“I'm sort of drunk, Jane, can't we do this--?”
“Darcy!” Jane snaps. “This is my life's work, this is going to be the piece de resistance of all the research I have ever done! If you're not here for it, I will never forgive you. Ever, ever, ever--”
“Oh my God, okay, Jesus Christ.”
“See you soon!” Jane chirps and hangs up.
Darcy sighs and shoves the phone back into her pocket. “Onward to Staten Island,” she says, pointing ahead.
“Staten Island's the opposite direction,” Jim mutters, scooting out of the booth.
“Shush, you're drunk,” she says and holds out her hand for him to take.
-
The hour long cab ride sobers her up a little - mostly because she sticks her head out of the window for much of the duration - and once they get there, there's a small crowd of people gathered at the testing grounds. It's cold and getting dark, but the grounds are lit up by flood lights, and she can make out Bruce, Betty, Pepper, and Steve standing around, waiting for the show. Steve, especially, looks, well... his hair is uncharacteristically ruffled, the neck of his t-shirt is all askew, his lips are bright pink, and he's staring vaguely up at the apocalypse machine that Tony is currently climbing on top. Honestly, he looks like he's been ridden hard and put away wet.
“Your fly's undone,” she says as they join the group.
“Huh?” He looks at her, then down at his definitely zipped up fly, then back to her with a glare. He pulls his coat tighter around himself and slings an arm around Pepper's shoulders. “Darcy,” he says snippily.
“Captain. Ms. Potts,” she says, and winks at Pepper. Jim elbows her in the side, and Steve frowns.
“This better be good, Jane!” she yells, to get their attention back on track.
“Shut up!” Tony yells back, his voice echoing around the field. Another couple of minutes pass before he finally climbs down off the machine. “We're good!”
“Okay,” Jane shouts, “everyone back up, we're powering up!”
They all shuffle back another couple of feet, Jane, Erik, Tony, and Thor joining them. Jane has a remote in her hands that she's fiddling with while Thor beams on proudly.
“Okay,” Jane shouts again, and goddamn that's a loud voice in such a tiny body, “despite some people calling it the 'apocalypse machine'...” She pauses and stares at Darcy.
“Hey, you called it that too,” Darcy calls back.
“Ugh,” Jane sighs. “Anyway, it isn't going to cause the apocalypse, it's actually an Einstein-Rosen bridge. This is our slightly less fancy version of the Bifrost.”
“Can I push the button?” Tony asks.
“No,” she says, and slaps his hand as he tries to touch the remote. “Go away.”
Jim grabs the back of his t-shirt and pulls him away. “Shut up, Tony.”
“Shut up, Tony,” he mimics and slinks over to Pepper and Steve.
“Everyone!” Thor booms. “Cease speaking!”
“Thank you, Thor,” Jane says quietly. She holds the remote over her head, closes her eyes, and pushes the button.
For a few seconds nothing happens, and Darcy has that sinking feeling she's become accustomed to, when something Erik and Jane have worked on for so long fails, but then the thing starts to glow blue and blue and bluer. A bolt of energy shoots up into the sky, just like the real Bifrost in reverse, and the sky bursts into technicolour. Even if she wasn't tipsy shed be mesmerised by it.
“Wow,” Steve murmurs, “it's beautiful.”
“Fuck yeah, it is,” Tony says, almost hopping up and down on the spot.
Jim wraps his arms around her and rests his chin on her shoulder. “This is pretty cool. We'll never pass this off as a training exercise, though.”
“Wait, wait, wait, the levels are spiking,” Jane mutters. “Tony, look at this.” She shoves the remote under his nose and he squints at it.
“Well, I'd say that is about to--” The rest of what he was going to say is drowned out as one side of the machine blows out. “Explode!” he shouts over the noise. “Definitely exploding right now!”
“Everyone inside, come on, right now, go go go,” Steve yells, rounding everyone up really competently in just a few seconds. Tony wasn't kidding about him being part Collie.
-
The rest of the machine explodes in pretty short order, but at least Thor is able to call rain to snuff it out.
“This probably isn't how you were expecting to celebrate Valentine's Day, huh?” she asks Jim, staring out at the half melted machine that is being hauled away by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents under the watchful eye of Jane.
He shrugs. “I've got to admit, I've had worse.”
“You know what?” She leans against his side. “So have I.”
Rating: PG-13/R (for sexual innuendo but no actual sexytimes).
Characters/Pairings: Darcy Lewis/James Rhodes, Jane Foster/Thor, Bruce Banner/Betty Ross, Pepper Potts/Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Erik Selvig
Summary: It's almost Valentine's Day, everyone has a crush on Tony, Thor's a hopeless romantic, and Jane's building a machine that might cause the apocalypse. It's pretty much business as usual for Darcy Lewis. (Set immediately after Robotics, but can basically be read as a oneshot.)
A/N: I started writing this from Tony's POV, but Darcy was just so snarky and interesting that decided to make it about her instead. The reason I wrote this ficlet at all (and yes, this is as short a ficlet as I can do, apparently) was as a palate cleanser for this great big angsty fic I was writing in this series. I meant to have both of them done well before the earliest movie release dates, but real life got in the way. So, obviously, this fic has no spoilers, and is not canon compliant by virtue of me not having seen the film yet (less than twenty four hours, though!)!
S.H.I.E.L.D. won't let Tony come back to work until the end of January, because of government sanctioned health regulations and 'if he gets dizzy and falls over, are you going to haul his ass around?' (cue Nick eyeballing Jane; Darcy's the only one with the balls to call him Nick, to his face or otherwise - it's like Voldemort, she figures, names only have power if you let them). This drives Jane crazy, because as far as she's concerned, his involvement is paramount to the success of the new Tesseract thingy she's building. Darcy's beginning to suspect that she's got a little crush on him.
When he finally is cleared to come back, he comes straight to the Staten Island lab, where they've have staked their claim and run off all the S.H.I.E.L.D. lab techs. Who needs highly trained professionals when you've got a pocket astrophysicist, a grumpy Norwegian, and a sarcastic polisci major with three and a half quarters of a degree?
“That is a wicked scar,” Darcy says when he gets into their shared space. He stops to look at printout on the door that reads 'Science: it works, bitches', and another over what looks like Jane's desk: 'Stand back, I'm going to try science'.
“Nice,” he says, nodding at it.
Darcy grins. “I don't understand almost anything from those comics, I just like sticking up posters with so-called 'inappropriate language'.”
“Coulson?” he asks, walking around to check out his desk: its single occupying item is an Iron Man bobblehead. “Cute.”
“Isn't it? I've got Cap and Hulk ones too.” She nods to her tiny little desk stacked high with folders, books, and all manner of action figures. “I've got a guy on the inside at Hasbro, got all the new prototypes. I guess they'll have to start making yours with a scar, though.”
He shakes his head. “Doctor said it wouldn't leave a mark.”
“Oh, sad.”
“That's what I said.”
“Oh, thank God, you're here,” Jane cries, coming through the double doors at the other end of room. Her hair is scraped back harshly from her face, face flushed. From the room behind her Erik is shouting: 'is that Stark?'. She rubs her palms over her face. “We badly need a mechanic in there.”
“You know I charge by the hour, right? Double for emergency calls.”
By the end of the day, he's dripping with sweat and stripped down to his undershirt. What they're building is basically their own version of the Bifrost, cooked up in the crazy depths of Tony and Jane's minds. The sheer amount of physical labour needed just to make the skeleton of the thing is immense, though, and as Erik points out several times throughout the day, they're 'physicists, not engineers!' (later, there's a note taped to his desk that says 'I'm a physicist, not a bricklayer!!!'). This is where Tony comes in, he has to make sure that the thing has a hope of working without blowing up or creating a singularity or something.
Darcy wiles away the hours playing virtual chess with a kid from New Zealand called Jordan.
“Damn, you're ripped,” she says when they finally shut down for the day. She tosses Tony a bottle of water from the mini fridge on her desk.
“Do I detect a note of surprise, Miss Lewis? You know how much the armour weighs? It's an all in one gym experience.” He makes a bit of a show pouring some of the water over his head to cool off, and she arches an eyebrow. “Haven't seen Rhodey in a while, how's he doing?”
“He does it just fine,” she replies, her other eyebrow coming up to join the first one.
“Gross,” he says. “Nobody wants to know that.”
“Agreed,” Erik says, “besides, he's far too old for you.”
Tony shakes the water out of his hair like a dog drying off, flicking both Darcy and Erik. “Hey, that's my best friend you're talking about.”
Erik shakes his head and walks away.
“Don't mind him,” Darcy says, “he's just sulking because me and Jane aren't giving him as much attention as we used to. He liked being the only guy.”
“He liked being the only cock in the henhouse, huh?”
“Something like that.” She grabs his t-shirt from where he discarded it on Jane's desk earlier. “Cover your shame,” she says, tossing it to him.
“He is too old for you, you know,” he says, using the t-shirt to dry his face. “He's even older than me.”
“I already have a father, thank you, Mr Stark, and he thinks Jim is perfectly lovely.”
“Really?”
She shrugs. “He went to Woodstock and never really left. The hardest part was convincing him that it was okay for me to be dating 'the man', but I think after I joined S.H.I.E.L.D. he sort of gave up on me. Loves Thor though, they're total brothers-in-arms.”
Tony is quiet for a moment before shaking his head. “Sorry, I'm just imagining Thor at Woodstock.”
“How'd you know he wasn't? This isn't the first time he's been to Earth.”
Tony looks like he's just discovered the question that '42' answers.
-
S.H.I.E.L.D. are putting the three of them up in an apartment in Manhattan for the duration of Jane's research. It sucks to have to share again, but at heart, S.H.I.E.L.D. is still part of the government, and the government doesn't care about Darcy needing privacy to watch CSPAN and yell at the TV. Jane and Erik are pretty good room mates, though, and Thor's loud fratboy-like behaviour is pretty familiar. Plus it means he's on hand to 'help out' with her Norse mythology coursework.
“This is a complete fabrication!” he says as he scrolls through the newest slides that her online class has been sent. He taps very, very lightly at the button, because Darcy has had the same laptop since graduating high school, replacing bits and pieces of it as needed, and even Thor understands that some things are sacred. “Sif and I never--!”
“And Steve wasn't just a cartoon character who sold war bonds. Don't worry, Jane won't be jealous.” She nudges Thor to one side and sits down on the couch.
“It is not Jane that I'm worried about,” he says, and leans in conspiratorially. “Sif would have me up by my ankles for even thinking such a thing.”
“Oh,” she says, “well, you don't want to get on the bad side of that chick, she's almost as scary as Natasha.”
He nods gravely.
“Three Hungry-Mans for Thor and ramen for Darcy,” Jane says, dropping a tray of TV dinners next to the laptop.
“Careful!” Darcy cries, snatching up the computer to cradle it in her arms. “You could have spilled something on her!” She sets the laptop down on the empty couch cushion while Jane settles herself on Thor's lap. “Where's Erik?”
“In his room.”
“Sulking?”
Jane shrugs. “Maybe a little.”
“Were we in Asgard, I would take Erik fishing,” Thor says, skewering a microwaved fry with the fork Jane gives him, “and we would catch the greatest serpent in the waters.”
“Good thing there aren't any serpents in the water,” Darcy says. “Just alligators in the sewers.”
Thor nods thoughtfully. “Perhaps just a bar, then.”
Jane pulls a face that Thor misses as he mixes his corn in with the gravy. “You'll need back up. Take Tony and Steve.”
Darcy scoffs. “You're suggesting that Tony and Steve go along as chaperones? Who's going to make sure that Tony doesn't get shit-faced and have sex with Steve in the restroom?”
“Oh, Tony's not that bad.”
“Tony is so that bad,” Darcy replies, and pulls the lid off her ramen. “You just want to be his third sex buddy.”
“Darcy!” Jane squeaks, almost upending Thor's food. She glares at Darcy in between shooting worried glances at Thor.
“On Asgard, people routinely enter into relationships of four or more people.” He picks the remote and turns his head to wink at Darcy. “Ah, the Oklahoma City Thunderers!”
Jane relaxes marginally and Darcy smiles, settling down to watch the NBA match. “You don't even understand basketball, you only support these guys because of the name. You don't even know where Oklahoma is.”
“And you only like the Miami Heat because you are sexually attracted to LeBron James,” Thor replies around a mouthful of whatever passes for beef these days.
“You got me there, big guy,” she says, settling her head against his comfy bicep, “you have got me there.”
-
“He's doing this on purpose, right?” Jane says quietly, leaning towards Darcy.
Darcy takes the pen that she's been chewing on out of her mouth. “Totally doing it on purpose.”
They lapse back into silence, and watch as Tony bends further over his desk, sketching confident lines on the graph paper covering it. His jeans are the kind that apparently every guy has a pair of: worn at the knees and - she can't help but notice - around the crotch, fingerprint shaped stains of oil and paint and God only knows what else, too loose and held up by a belt cinched tight. Darcy bites down on her pen again.
Tony leans over and grabs a second pencil, his belt buckle (a tiny version of Steve's shield; she's seen Steve wearing it too, which is just... yeah) knocking on the edge of the desk. With his left hand, he starts drawing shorter lines, adding fiddly little details.
“Is he ambidextrous?” Jane says; breathes, really, her voice a little tremulous.
“Looks like,” Darcy says around the pen. “Is that seriously getting you hot?”
Jane shrugs. “I like a man who knows how to use his hands.”
“Heard that,” Tony calls. “Girls, I'm not a piece of meat.”
“That spread you did in GQ would beg to differ,” Darcy says. When it came out last year, one of her friends from her old Human Rights class sent her an email with a link to the website and the words 'if you do not tap that I will disown you'.
Sadly Tony is kind of ridiculously monogamous (…in a sense), and as hot as it she imagines it is, she has no desire to get involved with whatever he's got going on with Pepper and Steve. There's kinky and then there's extremely damaging to one's sanity.
He straightens up, rolling his shoulders back, the muscles in his back moving deliciously under his t-shirt. “That was art, Miss Lewis,” he says, pressing a palm to his upper arm to stretch it out as he glances over his shoulder. “It was about self-expression and personal liberation.”
“And I watch porn because I like the set design,” she shoots back, looking to Jane to share the joke, but she's stalking forward and peering at the graph paper.
“Is that...?” Jane asks, and then they're away with the technobabble, gesturing and pulling out lots of differently coloured pencils.
Darcy settles back down at her desk. Best two out of three? she IMs Jordan.
-
Darcy has had a lot of long distance relationships in her short life; she travelled all around the West coast with her parents as a teenager, had a boy in every port, her dad used to say. Then she got a scholarship to Culver and left her long term boyfriend, Bobby, back in San Francisco. She heard that he came out last year.
She's never quite had a relationship like this, though, having her sort of boyfriend turning up in full battle armour, needing to be removed from it with a high tech version of a can opener by the billionaire genius playboy who drinks all her specially brewed coffee.
“This is like unwrapping a late Christmas present all for me,” she says, taking another piece of metal that Tony hands her.
“I don't need to know about your weird sex games,” Tony says, “and I'd appreciate if you didn't use my tech to carry them out.”
“Just get me out of this damn tin can,” Jim mutters.
“The tin can that you stole from me.”
“Just get it off and shut up, I've got a date.”
“We're going to the Federal Hall,” she says.
“Wow,” he deadpans. “Sexy.”
“You're joking, but it is.”
The thing is, Darcy likes a good argument. She went through three elementary schools before her parents decided that there was a limit to how much of a free spirit they could let her be, and enrolled her in debate club and Model UN. Instead of explaining to teachers why they were wrong and why they should invest in textbooks published after Watergate, she led Japan to victory over her fellow sixth graders. Studying polisci seemed like a natural progression from that, because she'd never be short of things to argue about with that.
And yeah, there's nothing more arousing than a good, satisfying debate.
-
“Get out of town, you have not met the president,” she says later, taking her first bite into her ice cream cone. The Hall kicked everyone out at five, but she's of the opinion that every good date requires ice cream, and she would like this to be a good date; so far their 'relationship' has just been making out and casual sex.
A drop of ice cream starts its descent down her arm and Jim wipes it away with his thumb, then licks said thumb clean. Damn. “Actually I did.”
“What's he like?” She worked on his campaign in her last year of high school, but the closest she ever got to him was sitting an inch from the TV screen on election night.
“He's tall.”
“Mm, he looks tall.” She takes another bite of her cone and wiggles her eyebrows.
“I think I'm going to get a little jealous soon,” he says, breaks off a little piece of her cone and pops it in his mouth. He went for ice cream in a tub, more fool him, so he got through his a lot faster than she did.
“If that makes you jealous, there's something I should probably tell you.”
He raises his eyebrows in question, and she's not exactly nervous, because Darcy doesn't do nerves, but she's not exactly proud of it, either. “I think I'm developing a bit of a crush on Tony.”
His eyebrows drop back to their normal position. “Oh,” he says, “everyone has a crush on Tony. Even people who hate him. Maybe especially people who hate him.”
“So, do you?”
He shakes his head quickly. “No.”
“You said 'everyone'. Are you not a person? Are you a robot? Did Tony build you in his little shop of horrors?”
Jim laughs. “He wishes he'd built something this good. No, he was sixteen and I was almost twenty when we met. He's... like my little brother.”
She closes her mouth over what's left of the cone and sucks out the last of the ice cream, humming around it thoughtfully, before eating the rest of it in three vicious bites. “Man, I bet he was ridiculously pretty as a teenager.”
“Can we stop talking about Tony?” he complains, staring at her mouth. She pouts. “But yeah. It got kind of irritating.”
-
When she gets into the lab the next morning with three cups of coffee balanced in her arms and her laptop packed smugly in her backpack, the office is empty. There are signs of life: a dirty mug on Tony's desk (and it's not just any mug, it's Darcy's own Culver debate club mug, and there will be consequences), Jane's super cuddly Culver sweatshirt thrown over the back of her chair, and dozens of candy bar wrappers.
“Hello?” she calls, depositing her coffees on her desk and carefully dropping her backpack to the floor.
“Back here!” Tony calls from the work area beyond the double doors. She snags one of the coffees and heads in.
The Tesseract engine has grown by at least double its size since yesterday, stretching up at least eight feet, and she cranes her head back to stare at it. It looks like a great big metal tower. “Cool,” she mutters, and takes a sip of her coffee.
“Oh my God, is there coffee? I can smell coffee,” Tony's voice says from the other side of the machine, over the sound of a drill. Darcy follows it and stops
“What... what are you doing?” she asks, looking up at Jane balanced on Tony's shoulders, his hands wrapped around her thighs, securing a panel to the side of the machine.
“Short people of the world unite!” Tony says happily.
“We couldn't find a ladder and Erik went home,” she says, then grabs hold of his hair with one hand as she wobbles. “Stay still!”
He winces. “Sorry, sorry.”
“When was the last time either of you went home?”
“Where do I live again?” Tony says, then turns his big eyes on her. “Coffee?”
“In the office,” she says.
“But you have some right there,” he says, letting go of one of Jane's leg to point at Darcy's coffee cup.
“This is my special blend.”
“But I like your special blend.”
She shakes her head and takes a good long drink from her cup before wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, and asking, “Does that actually ever work?”
He shrugs, jostling Jane, and earning himself another telling off. “It used to.”
“Hello...?” someone calls from the office, and she turns away from Tony and Jane with a smile.
“Duty calls!”
“Coffee calls!” he yells after her. She waves vaguely over her shoulder and pushes the doors open.
Bruce is standing in the middle of the room, cradling a cardboard box in his arms like a child, looking faintly annoyed. Anything more than 'faintly' and she'd be running.
“Dr Banner, what can I do for you?” she says in her most professional, office manager voice.
“I was told to come here,” he says, eyeing at the growing collection of action figures on her desk. She just got the new Hulk gloves yesterday.
“By who?” she says, pulling her phone out to check her emails. Nobody told her about this.
“Coulson,” he replies, looking around a little more, then deflating sadly.
She scrolls through her emails and finds one with the subject line: 'DARCY, READ THIS NOW' and the message, 'Dr Banner is going to be working at the Staten Island lab, please get him a desk and make him comfortable. Please inform Mr Stark that a calm working environment is a happy working environment'. “Ah,” she says, “well if you'll come this way I can offer you our finest ergonomic chair and brand new sharpened pencils.”
He sighs and trails after her as she waves him to the other end of the office. “This is the desk furtherest from Tony. As you can see, there's no chair here, right now, but I will find you one. There's always coffee in the maker, but you'll probably want to check it first, because Tony likes to leave it in there until he can spoon it out and eat it like ice cream.” She taps her phone against her chin. “Other things you should know: Erik will not abide any kind of music produced by people under the age of twenty five, but A-Ha is his shit. Jane is extremely perky in the mornings, the afternoons, and the evenings, but don't get confused, she will straight up kill you if you mess with her research. I, on the other hand, will slowly gaslight you if you fuck with my action figures.”
He looks back over at her desk and sighs again. That's kind of his thing, she's guessing.
“Your lab is gonna be down the hall, I'll get it kitted out with all your science stuff. Jane and Tony are working on their apocalypse machine in the big room - it gets pretty loud, as you can probably tell, so I suggest headphones. Personally I like the Grateful Dead, but I'd recommend something a little more zen for you.”
“Thanks,” he mutters, and drops his briefcase on the desk. It looks very sad there, all on its own.
“I don't mean to pry, but why did you get moved down here?” she asks.
“I, uh, I blew something up. They had to quarantine the entire floor for the day. I thought Fury might actually... Hulk out himself.”
“Oh, well, that's too bad,” she says, though personally she doesn't think Fury needs to Hulk out to convey his anger. Bruce presses his lips together and nods, as something crashes in the other room, sending vibrations along the floor under their feet. He doesn't react, and neither does she.
“Welcome to the family,” she says.
-
There are only two weeks until Valentine's Day, and Thor starts buying a rose for Jane everyday, leaving them in different place each time, like some kind of fragrant scavenger hunt. It's cute, but Darcy could have done without picking up one that hadn't had its thorns removed when she was digging around in the cutlery drawer for a fork.
“Valentine's is my favourite of all the holidays,” Thor says, scrutinising the solid wall of themed teddy bears at Walmart.
“What about Halloween?” Darcy asks, flicking through a copy of Us Weekly. There's an entire one page article all aflutter about Tony's scar.
“Vast amounts of sugared treats are not conducive to intercourse,” he says, drawing some glances from fellow shoppers.
She closes the magazine and returns it to the rack. “Truth. Which one are you gonna get?”
“I do not know. I didn't realise there would be so much choice.”
“Welcome to commercial America.” She glances up at a giant fluffy blond bear on the top shelf. “What about him? He's almost as big as you.”
“Will she like it?”
“Oh, Thor, baby, I've been to her parents' house: wall to wall plushies. I mean, she probably chose you because you're like a giant teddy bear.”
Thor grins and pulls the bear down from the shelf. “Where will I hide it until the 14th?”
“Eh,” she says, “I'll take it over to Jim's.”
They wander towards the checkout, Thor picking up every sugary looking thing he passes. Darcy picks up some candy of her own, along with Jane's favourite gossip rag (she leaves them on the kitchen counter for Jane; they disappear for a night and reappear slightly crumpled the next morning). Thor starts loading their stuff onto the checkout, then stops.
“I only have twenty dollars, will that be enough?”
She looks down at their stack of food and smiles. “That is what we have Tony Stark for,” she says, and pulls her credit card out with a flourish.
-
In reality, Darcy has few responsibilities as office manager; Jane and the others can just about look after themselves most of the time, and the bulk of the administrative stuff is taken care of some poor S.H.I.E.L.D. flunky back at HQ. Mostly she likes to think of herself as the morale officer - being in her presence is enough to cheer anyone up - and it's really her perfect job. She's still got a couple of online courses to finish before she can graduate, so she can work on those and dick around as much as she likes all day, and still get paid. Plus, this job is going to look seriously amazing on her résumé.
However, she is still nominally meant to run the place, and with their new rage monster office mate, she feels obliged to do a little research on him.
She discovers a few things: loud, sudden noises should be avoided (duh), though Bruce pretty much has his condition under control, so there's only 30% chance of things going green in a hurry; he tries to limit his intake of stimulants, so coffee and anything with a lot of sugar are out (she spends hours one day on google looking at different teashops and plans out a whole trip for the next afternoon to stake them out); and he actually seems to be quite fond of Tony, despite all the obvious reasons that might suggest otherwise.
Today, Tony is flicking rubber bands at him while Bruce types away at his laptop. Occasionally one hits him in the face and he doesn't even twitch at the annoyance.
She decides that now is as good a time as any to give him the little package of teas from around the world that she bought him from the shop she liked the best. The wrapping is a little more fancy than what she had in mind when she bought them, with lots of bows and such, but the little old lady that ran the place was so fucking adorable that she didn't have the heart to tell to her to just stick them in a plastic bag and be done with it.
“Bruce,” she says, pulling the package out from her desk drawer, and he hums vaguely without looking up, “I have something for you.”
“Oooh,” Tony says, ceasing his volley of rubber bands.
She gets up and crosses the room to Bruce, who still hasn't looked up yet. Clearing her throat, she drops the package on the desk in front of him. “Think of it as a desk warming gift,” she says.
He lifts his eyes and looks at it for a moment before gently reaching out to pull one of the bows free. He picks the box up and continues to unwrap it carefully, barely even ripping the paper at all, until fancy calligraphy is visible. Darcy's just starting to feel a little awkward, standing there in front of his desk with Tony watching like it's performance art, when Bruce looks up at her, his lips momentarily pressed together, and says, “Thank you, Darcy,” in this incredibly sincere way.
She shrugs. “All in a day's work, don't worry about it.”
“No,” he says, “this is really kind. Thank you for... making me feel welcome.”
“Aw,” she hears Tony say behind her.
For her part, she says, “My, you are the cutest rage monster I've ever met, and my high school had a suspiciously successful athletics department.”
Then Jane shrieks from the apocalypse room, ruining the moment, and all three of them are halfway across the room before Erik calls out, “We're fine!”
-
The giggle fits start a couple of days later. Jane starts sniggering about how Tesseract no longer sounds like a word, then Tony points out that they're trying to turn a magical alien thingy into a super engine, and that this is their life now, and that also Jane's dating an alien, what's that like, how big is his hammer? Jane fires back about a certain soldier's 'enhancements' and after one too many imploring stares from Bruce, Darcy finally breaks (which is impressive, since she's sat for hours and listened to the circular conversations of stoned polisci majors) and calls Pepper's phone; Steve answers.
“You need to come collect your brother-husband,” she tells him, “and can you bring Thor too? Thanks.”
Steve, Thor, and Pepper arrive a little under an hour later. Steve fidgets a little when he sees her, and she guesses Pepper had to explain the cultural phenomenon of Sister Wives to him on the ride over and now his delicate sensibilities are all aflutter.
Or maybe not, since he does share a bed with Tony and Pepper every night.
“Where is he?” Pepper asks.
“In the apocalypse room,” she says, pointing her pen at the double doors.
“Apocalypse room?” Steve repeats.
“It's the room that houses the apocalypse machine, therefore: apocalypse room.”
Steve frowns as Pepper and Thor go over to fetch their respective partners. “Is it really going to cause the apocalypse, because I honestly can't tell with you guys any more,” he asks, hip leaning lightly against her desk.
“Bruce?” she calls.
“There's a forty two point five per cent chance that the thing's going to rip a hole in the space-time continuum,” he says from across the room, “and a seventy eight per cent chance that I will cause the apocalypse in the next forty five minutes.”
“I'll go help,” Steve says, pushing himself away from the desk.
It only takes the three of them fifteen minutes to convince Tony and Jane to lay down tools for the night (or several nights, Darcy's hoping). Thor announces, loudly, that 'you must not cause the beginning of Ragnarok!', and a few minutes later the five of them reappear in varying states of lucidity.
“You're such a tattle tale, Darcy,” Tony says with great seriousness that he manages to keep up for almost a full minute before he starts laughing again. Pepper has an arm around his neck that looks close to a stranglehold.
“Do you need a ride home?” Pepper asks Thor, who's still grappling with Jane.
“They can get a ride with me,” Darcy says, “at least Bruce doesn't need a babysitter.”
-
Thor's knees hit the dashboard of her Beetle, and he frowns. “I have ridden larger steeds than this,” he says, frowns some more, then adds, “I have ridden larger canines.”
“Do you know how long I saved for this car? You shut up about Bug.”
“'Bug' is an appropriate name,” he says, and his frown deepens into a scowl.
He sighs and glances over the back of his seat as Darcy starts the car, at where Jane is curled up with the ratty old picnic blanket that Darcy's grandmother knitted thrown over her. Not that she could knit, which accounts for the rattiness.
“It worries me that she works herself to exhaustion,” he says.
“Watch it with that kind of talk, buddy, she's not afraid to punch out anyone who questions her work.”
“I know,” he says, “but she is so small.”
“Good things come in small packages.”
A goofy smile spreads across his face. “This I know.”
“Uh huh,” she replies. She's perilously close to getting a blow by blow account of their sex life, perhaps literally. “Anyway, it's Tony you should really be worried about. It's insanity squared with the two of them.”
“I believe that is best left to Lady Pepper and Steve,” he says, and winces as she goes over a pothole and his head bumps against the roof of the car.
-
Darcy leaves for work the next morning without Jane, who was convinced to stay home by Thor's dulcet tones and a plate of waffles that he somehow learnt to cook pretty well.
She listens to soft rock on the radio as the sun comes up, taking the occasional sip of her coffee when she hits traffic, and she makes it there in good time, swipes her card at the door, and makes her way up to their floor.
She wanders into the office humming Don't Stop Believing, and is confronted by the sight of Bruce with no shoes on and the top four buttons of his shirt undone.
“Darcy,” he says evenly.
“Bruce,” she replies, just as calmly, and then, after taking in his rumpled appearance, “did you sleep here last night?”
“No,” he says, and smiles, in a way that he probably thinks is reassuring, but really just makes her more suspicious.
“You seem a little flustered,” she points out, “did I disturb something?”
The corners of his mouth turn down as he shakes his head. “Nothing. Just... working.”
“Mmhm.” She looks around the office; everything seems to be about how she left it last night, except... except for a sweater hanging over the back of Bruce's chair. It's not one of Jane's, and it's too small to be Bruce's...
“Dr Banner,” she says , “did you get some last night?”
He swallows and smiles again. “If Jane and Tony aren't coming in, do you really need to be here today?”
“Oh my God, you did!” she cries, and points an accusing finger at him, then thinks better of it. This isn't a time for accusing, this is a time for rejoicing! Bruce, a man who gets considerably less sex than Steven 'Ken doll' Rogers does, has finally got a little action. She'd update her Facebook page about it if S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't long since nuked it from orbit.
“Is she still here?” she whispers conspiratorially.
Amazingly, he replies in kind. “You are,” he whispers back.
“Oh,” she says, then, “oh. Do you want the tea I picked up for you from that tea house you like?”
He squints at her. “...yes, thank you.”
She puts the styrofoam cup down on the nearest desk and looks at him again. “Do you have enough condoms? Lube? Have you both been tested? Should I ask Coulson to start a sex ed course? It has been a while, hasn't it? Do you remember how it all... works down there?”
“Darcy.”
“Okay, fine,” she says, “fine, I wish you would've called though, I could have stayed in bed and listened to Jane and Thor having wild sex next door... Actually, scratch that, that's weird.”
“Darcy.”
“Going, going,” she mutters, holding her hands up as she backs out of the room. Before she can reach the door, though, it opens, and Betty steps in with a couple of paper bags in her hands. She's in a tank top and jeans, her hair pulled back in a loose bun.
“They didn't have the donuts that you like,” she says, then looks up, first at Darcy, then at Bruce. “Hi.”
Darcy squeals and wraps her arms around Betty briefly. “You two are in my top five favourite couples! Pretend I was never here!”
“I was trying to,” she hears Bruce mutter before she turns the corner out of the room, pulling out her phone to text Rhodey.
BOOTY CALL. Y/N?, she texts.
Y, comes the answer just before she gets back into Bug.
-
When Jim's in New York (which is more often than not recently, since he's been loaned out to S.H.I.E.L.D. for lots of hush hush reasons that he won't tell her about), he stays in an apartment of Tony's, a ridiculous penthouse bachelor pad in the heart of Manhattan that Tony used to bring girls back to when he was at university, Jim tells her.
Jim hates the décor, all red and gold and a fully stocked bar in every room (including the bathroom), but Darcy loves it. She likes to roll around on the silky sheets of the bed, and walk barefoot on the shag carpeting, and for that reason alone, she thinks, he leaves the place the way it is.
He answers the door in just a pair of sweatpants, a mug of coffee in his hand.
“Oh,” she says, “did I wake you?”
“Kind of, but I've been woken for much worse reasons than this.” He takes a sip of his coffee and waves her in.
“I totally just caught Bruce in the office post-sex with Betty.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep, I knew I was going to be a good influence on him, but I didn't think it would happen this quickly! It's a Valentine's miracle!”
Jim looks at the calendar. “It's not Valentine's for another... week,” he says, squinting as if to make sure.
“Yeah, don't worry, you didn't forget. It's just like Valentine's everyday at home right now with Thor.”
“Right. Well, I'm taking good care of the bear,” he says, pointing at where it's sitting on the couch.
“Oh my God, you're totally watching America's Top Model with him, aren't you? Are you going to cry when I take him away next week?”
He rolls his eyes and takes a couple of steps closer. “I believe I was promised some casual sex.”
“Yeah, I don't know, I've sort of gone off the idea now,” she says, twisting her hair around her finger.
“Oh, have you now?”
“Mmhm,” she murmurs, “I think I have a headache coming on.”
He leans in closer. “How about a debate, then?”
Oh, she likes how quickly he learns things. “That I can do, Colonel.”
-
The next day, Tony insists on having the radio tuned to a station that's exclusively playing love songs until Valentine's. He starts singing along to Power of Love and won't stop after that. Erik throws in the towel somewhere around Are You Lonesome Tonight? and goes home for the day, and wow, it's kind of ridiculously attractive, the way Tony can sing. Darcy shifts around in her chair and Jane disappears into the apocalypse room while Tony grins through it all. Bruce just stares harder at his laptop.
The latest song eventually fades away and the DJ starts talking again. Tony looks up expectantly. “...our next song goes out to Bruce in Staten Island-” Bruce narrows his eyes. “-your friends are all very glad that you finally 'got some'. Next up, Madonna's Like A Virgin.”
Bruce looks up. “You told him,” he says to her, in a flat, yet slightly accusing tone.
She presses a hand to her chest. “Me? I would never do such a thing.”
“Yeah, it was her no-good boyfriend,” Tony chips in, and Bruce sighs and shakes his head.
“It's like high school all over again,” he mutters
“Oh, don't get all sad puppy on me, Bruce, Tony didn't mean any harm,” she says, and begins to roll her chair away from her desk and over to Bruce's.
“Nope, I meant lots of harm,” he calls.
She waves a hand vaguely over her shoulder and then sets her elbows on Bruce's desk. “Would you feel better if Tony took all of us out for sugar-free ice cream?”
“What?” Tony says indignantly.
Darcy leans further forward, eyeballing Bruce. Bruce eyeballs her back for a moment before sighing, the corner of his mouth tilting up.
“Mint chocolate chip?” he asks.
She grins in triumph and pushes her chair back. “Jane!” she yells, “we're going for ice cream, get your coat!”
-
Normally Darcy sneers at guys who wear sunglasses indoors, but in this instance, she lets it go with just the merest hint of an eye roll, when Tony squints at the menu board from behind his D&G sunglasses and people take pictures of him with their phones.
“Can you see anything?” she says. The menu is written in white chalk on a black board, the lighting is low, all very hipster. There's no way he's able to read any of that.
“No, but I look really cool. I'll get whatever you're having.”
He grins when the waitress sets down two enormous sundaes, a mish mash of every flavour of ice cream they have, topped off with bottle's worth of chocolate sauce. “Awesome,” he mutters.
Jane wrinkles her nose and delicately scrapes at her tiny bowl of vanilla ice cream. “I don't know how either of you can eat all of that.”
“It's ironic, you liking vanilla,” Darcy says. “I hear everything through those thin walls at night, you know.”
Tony almost spits his ice cream out all over Bruce. Jane crosses her arms over her chest. “That's disgusting, Darcy.”
“Yes, it is, Jane. Yes, it is. Can you even imagine how it makes Erik feel? It's a wonder that poor guy hasn't run away from home already.”
“Oh, shush,” Jane mutters. The gaggle of fans across the room are still snapping pictures, and Jane frowns at them. “How do you deal with that?” she asks.
“With what?”
“That,” she says, and points her spoon at the high school kids. “Doesn't it get kind of annoying?”
Tony shrugs. “Well, yeah, but I'm used to it. My first spread was in Ladies' Home Journal when I was six months old, so...” He turns his head slightly and wiggles his fingers at his fans, who screech a little. “Plus, all of this,” he says, waving a hand at his general chest area, “it's a public service.”
“Uh huh,” Bruce says. “You're full of shit.”
“Oh, up top, Dr Banner!” Darcy says, leans forward and holds her palm out. He looks at it suspiciously. “Don't leave me hanging, man.”
Bruce's high five is timid and kind of sweaty, but she's going to work on that.
-
When Jane and her get home in the evening, Thor is playing Resident Evil with Jim in the living room while Erik looks on.
“I'm so turned on right now,” she says, as Jim's guy gets eaten by a zombie and he lets out what can only be described as a wail of despair. Thor punches the air in triumph.
“We're on the same team, man!” Jim cries.
“And were this real life, I would grieve over your demise for several minutes,” Thor says and grins stupidly, looking around to see if Jane is watching. Which, of course, she is.
Jim throws his controller down in disgust and gets up. “Hey,” he calls to them, stepping around the mess of wires and empty food wrappers.
“Have sex with me right now,” she dead pans as he brushes crumbs off his t-shirt. Behind him, Erik has taken up the controller with not a small amount of trepidation on his face.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jim mutters. “I came by to bring... something for Thor over, then I thought I'd stick around to surprise you...”
She nods. “You hung around to play games with Thor.”
“It was a factor.”
“So, you're staying?” Jane asks, and off loads the stack of folders she brought home from work on him. “I'll put an extra meal in the microwave,” she adds, and moves towards the kitchen.
“Where should I put these?” he says, looking around at the various surfaces, all of which are already occupied by some book, folder, magazine, or stack of papers.
Darcy nudges the newest copy of Astrophysics and Space Science aside, the one that has an article of Jane's about the 'theoretical' uses of the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. “Just dump them there,” she says.
Despite Jane's promise of some microwaved food, she's disappeared into her bedroom with a box of animal crackers, to the super computer, or whatever the hell it is, set up in the corner. Thor and Erik are hacking away at zombies, and Erik's surprisingly good at it (“You are most proficient!” Thor cries.).
“Wanna go make out in my room?” she asks Jim.
He shrugs. “Sure.”
Darcy's dated around a bit. Well, a lot, really, and one thing she's noticed is that sometimes guys get kind of... enamoured with certain aspects of her physique. Say, her big boobs and her small stature. Her high school quarterback boyfriend liked to pick her up and carry her around, and although it was kind of cute, it got real old, real fast. By college, she'd moved on to beanpole hipster dudes who thought it was hilarious to make ironic jokes about how little she was, and by the time she got the internship, she'd had several hookups that involved a lot of motorboating and pearl necklaces.
Maybe it's a cliché, but being with an older guy is so much better. Jim's only a little bit taller than Tony, so there's none of that freakish giant man infatuation with short girls (Thor could so easily have gone that way, but Darcy's pretty sure that Sif beat respect for women into him when they were kids a thousand years ago), and being Tony's friend, he's met all sorts and shapes of women.
Plus, he's just a really good kisser.
He looks up from sucking on her collarbone (no tank tops for the next few days, she thinks). “Hey... I think there's something I need to tell you,” he asks, frowning slightly.
“Okay? This sounds ominous.”
Jim laughs and drops a kiss to her chest. “It's not. It's just that...” He sits up and straddles her legs. “We've only been dating for a little while, but I feel like I should tell you, me and Pepper used to... have sex.”
“Huh,” she says, and sits up, pulling her legs free from under him. “You dated Pepper Potts?”
“I had relations with Pepper Potts,” he says, “dating would be overstating the situation. It only lasted for a couple of months three years ago, but the thing is that Tony doesn't know.”
“Oh. Were they already...?”
“No! No, they hadn't got together yet.”
“So why doesn't he know?”
“Well, a couple of reasons. One, it's none of his goddamn business, and two, he was sort of having a nervous breakdown at the time, plus being slowly poisoned, and I guess we didn't want to make him feel any worse. And then it just didn't come up.”
She nods. “Yeah, when you put it like that, you really wouldn't want to.”
“Is this going to be awkward now?”
“Well, this conversation is super awkward, that's for sure.”
The corner of his mouth tilts up, and he slips his hands under her shirt. “I meant with Pepper.”
“Are you kidding me? I love that chick, now I'm even closer to her.”
“That's creepy as hell.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “Yeah, baby.”
-
The next day, the 14th, she wakes up to strains of Bryan Adams's Everything I Do (I Do It For You). This is unacceptable.
“...unacceptable,” she mutters into Jim's chest, struggling to push herself up.
“What time is it?” he asks plaintively.
The clock reads 6.30am. Ugh, and on her day off, too.
Then Thor starts singing.
“Knock it off!” she yells.
If anything, Thor gets louder. “...I will always love yoooou,” he warbles.
“Those aren't even the words!” she shouts back. “Fucking demi-gods.”
“Honestly, after Tony built himself a flying metal suit and became a superhero, I didn't really think life would ever get any weirder,” Jim says, leaning over with the absolute minimum amount of effort to kiss her vaguely on some body part hidden by her hair.
“I know, right?” She sits and swings her legs over the edge of the bed. “I thought driving around in a van with two crazy scientists looking for 'anomalies' in the dead of night was going to be the weirdest thing I ever did.”
She stands up, and glances back over her shoulder. Jim is watching her with half lidded eyes, and oh yeah, she's still got it. “I'm gonna go spray some water at Thor, then we can get back to business.”
“Sleep?”
She lifts a shoulder. “Whatever does it for you, baby.”
The racket from outside has quietened down, at least. Thor isn't such a bad singer, she guesses, but he's more of the 'bawdy pub songs at closing time' variety than the whole lounger singer thing Tony's got going on, and she wouldn't even put up with that at this time of the morning. She opens her bedroom door and steps out into living room. The first thing she notices is that the floor is littering with rose petals. That's kind of cute. Way to go, Thor!
The second thing she notices is, well, Thor's big old dick as it - and he - walks to the kitchen.
She blinks, and then blinks again. Damn, he is really the whole package.
“Hey,” she says, “how you doin'?”
He looks up at her. “Darcy,” he says. Then he looks at the teddy bear sitting on the counter, and slowly picks it up to cover his thunder with it. Sad. “I will get the chocolate later,” he adds, before beating a hasty retreat to the bedroom.
“So many hammer jokes,” she says wistfully. She's pretty sure she hears Thor laughing behind the closed bedroom door.
Then she sees that Erik is in the corner, where the fridge meets the wall, holding a mug of coffee to his chest like it's going to save him.
“How long have you been standing there for?” she asks sympathetically.
“Too long,” he says, eyeballing Jane's bedroom door, “too long.”
-
Darcy's original plan for the day was to have a nice long lie in. She even got chocolate body paint from a place that Tony recommended (that conversation almost made Bruce curl up under his desk and cry), but it tasted horrible, so she gave it to Goodwill when they came round looking for donations.
It seems that Thor and Jane had the same idea, though, only theirs is louder. By mid-morning Darcy and Jim flee the apartment for Manhattan and spend the rest of the day doing all the tourist shit she's been wanting to do, but never had the time for because of petty things like working on major scientific breakthroughs. Jim takes her to some of the places that he and Tony used to hit when they had time off from MIT. Mostly they're bars. Lots of bars. Lots of bars on Valentine's Day, so everything is pink and everyone is very affectionate.
And the proprietors look the other way when Jim starts to get a little handsy in one of the booths.
“You're vibrating,” he says after a little while.
“Is that innuendo, because I'm way too drunk to parse that right now.” She holds up her finger. “Although not to drunk to use words I learnt in that linguistics elective I took. Good to know.”
“No, I mean...” He pushes his hand into her pocket and she pulls the most appalled face that she can muster in her state. He pulls her phone and holds it up. “Your phone, it's ringing.”
“Oh,” she says, “well give it here, then.”
“Darcy!” Jane yells as soon as she answers. “Darcy, oh my God, Darcy!”
“Are you stuck? Did Thor break you?”
“No, it's the-- the, the, the--” God, she really is stuck. Darcy holds the phone away from her ear and pulls a face at Jim. Jane's talking so loud, though, that Darcy can still hear her stammering, “the apocalypse machine is working!”
She puts the phone back to her ear. “It is?”
“Yes!” Jane practically shrieks. “You have to come a see this! We're out at the testing ground, we're going to turn it on soon. You have got to be here!”
“I'm sort of drunk, Jane, can't we do this--?”
“Darcy!” Jane snaps. “This is my life's work, this is going to be the piece de resistance of all the research I have ever done! If you're not here for it, I will never forgive you. Ever, ever, ever--”
“Oh my God, okay, Jesus Christ.”
“See you soon!” Jane chirps and hangs up.
Darcy sighs and shoves the phone back into her pocket. “Onward to Staten Island,” she says, pointing ahead.
“Staten Island's the opposite direction,” Jim mutters, scooting out of the booth.
“Shush, you're drunk,” she says and holds out her hand for him to take.
-
The hour long cab ride sobers her up a little - mostly because she sticks her head out of the window for much of the duration - and once they get there, there's a small crowd of people gathered at the testing grounds. It's cold and getting dark, but the grounds are lit up by flood lights, and she can make out Bruce, Betty, Pepper, and Steve standing around, waiting for the show. Steve, especially, looks, well... his hair is uncharacteristically ruffled, the neck of his t-shirt is all askew, his lips are bright pink, and he's staring vaguely up at the apocalypse machine that Tony is currently climbing on top. Honestly, he looks like he's been ridden hard and put away wet.
“Your fly's undone,” she says as they join the group.
“Huh?” He looks at her, then down at his definitely zipped up fly, then back to her with a glare. He pulls his coat tighter around himself and slings an arm around Pepper's shoulders. “Darcy,” he says snippily.
“Captain. Ms. Potts,” she says, and winks at Pepper. Jim elbows her in the side, and Steve frowns.
“This better be good, Jane!” she yells, to get their attention back on track.
“Shut up!” Tony yells back, his voice echoing around the field. Another couple of minutes pass before he finally climbs down off the machine. “We're good!”
“Okay,” Jane shouts, “everyone back up, we're powering up!”
They all shuffle back another couple of feet, Jane, Erik, Tony, and Thor joining them. Jane has a remote in her hands that she's fiddling with while Thor beams on proudly.
“Okay,” Jane shouts again, and goddamn that's a loud voice in such a tiny body, “despite some people calling it the 'apocalypse machine'...” She pauses and stares at Darcy.
“Hey, you called it that too,” Darcy calls back.
“Ugh,” Jane sighs. “Anyway, it isn't going to cause the apocalypse, it's actually an Einstein-Rosen bridge. This is our slightly less fancy version of the Bifrost.”
“Can I push the button?” Tony asks.
“No,” she says, and slaps his hand as he tries to touch the remote. “Go away.”
Jim grabs the back of his t-shirt and pulls him away. “Shut up, Tony.”
“Shut up, Tony,” he mimics and slinks over to Pepper and Steve.
“Everyone!” Thor booms. “Cease speaking!”
“Thank you, Thor,” Jane says quietly. She holds the remote over her head, closes her eyes, and pushes the button.
For a few seconds nothing happens, and Darcy has that sinking feeling she's become accustomed to, when something Erik and Jane have worked on for so long fails, but then the thing starts to glow blue and blue and bluer. A bolt of energy shoots up into the sky, just like the real Bifrost in reverse, and the sky bursts into technicolour. Even if she wasn't tipsy shed be mesmerised by it.
“Wow,” Steve murmurs, “it's beautiful.”
“Fuck yeah, it is,” Tony says, almost hopping up and down on the spot.
Jim wraps his arms around her and rests his chin on her shoulder. “This is pretty cool. We'll never pass this off as a training exercise, though.”
“Wait, wait, wait, the levels are spiking,” Jane mutters. “Tony, look at this.” She shoves the remote under his nose and he squints at it.
“Well, I'd say that is about to--” The rest of what he was going to say is drowned out as one side of the machine blows out. “Explode!” he shouts over the noise. “Definitely exploding right now!”
“Everyone inside, come on, right now, go go go,” Steve yells, rounding everyone up really competently in just a few seconds. Tony wasn't kidding about him being part Collie.
-
The rest of the machine explodes in pretty short order, but at least Thor is able to call rain to snuff it out.
“This probably isn't how you were expecting to celebrate Valentine's Day, huh?” she asks Jim, staring out at the half melted machine that is being hauled away by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents under the watchful eye of Jane.
He shrugs. “I've got to admit, I've had worse.”
“You know what?” She leans against his side. “So have I.”