[Thor (2011)] Not Your Mother's Alma Mater 4/? (Darcy/Hawkeye)
Title: Not Your Mother's Alma Mater
Author: smittywing/Smitty
Pairing: Darcy Lewis/Clint Barton (Hawkeye) (and minor secondary pairings)
Rating: PG-13 for this part, probably R or NC-17 overall. I hope.
Wordcount: ~5600 for this part (reccea tells me I have no business acting surprised at this point in my fannish life)
Spoilers/Warning: For the end of the movie, I guess? Also WIP and all that carries with it.
Notes: reccea and her mad beta skills rock my world. All remaining mistakes are mine. This is probably going to be the last part until after I take the bar during the last week in July. Apparently there is studying involved? Or something. This would totally be the end of part 2, had I adhered to the original 6-part outline. SIGH.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Tony’s visit is absolutely the most interesting thing that’s happened since Thor took off.
“I love it. It’s just like home,” he says when he sees the Dogs Playing Poker print in the hotel room. “I have the original, you know.”
“Had,” Pepper Potts corrects him. “You donated it to the Boy Scouts.”
“Really? Can we get it back? Buy it over again?”
“Absolutely not.”
Darcy may be a little in love.
Coulson is constantly annoyed with Tony, which means he doesn’t have time to be annoyed with Darcy. Tony takes up an inordinate amount of Jane’s time, which means she doesn’t really need Darcy much either. Pepper, though, appropriates Darcy as her protege and teaches her every sneaking scheduling trick in the book and a few that most definitely aren’t in any books.
Darcy rearranges Coulson’s entire calendar to maximize efficiency and he doesn’t say a word. She congratulates herself on a job well done and starts annotating his contacts with birthdays, spouses’ names, and gossip. A couple days later, she notices that the gossip has annotations like “disproved” or “confirmed” next to the item. She’s really starting to like Coulson and his encyclopedic knowledge of the superhero community.
Clint is generally AWOL for all of this and Darcy can only imagine he’s following Black Widow around with his tongue hanging out so she spends as much time as possible being awesome and ignoring his lack of presence.
Tony starts a fire in the lab one day and Darcy sees Clint for like, 2.5 seconds, when he comes through with Natalie to put it out.
“Look, it’s not my fault,” Tony protests. “I’m used to Dummy being right there.” He takes them all out for drinks that night to apologize for evacuating the building. Ironically, Clint and Natalie have been sent off on some super-secret mission and can’t even get drunk with the rest of them at the really sketchy bar in town.
“Are you sure they should be partners?” Darcy asks Coulson on the ride over. “Don’t they kind of hate each other?”
“It works for them,” Coulson just says and they park and get out of the SUV only to find Tony stopped dead in the doorway.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. I’ve hung out in caves with better reputations than this place.”
“Only reputation I know is one for getting you wasted,” Darcy says, elbowing Erik.
Jane grins and throws them a sidelong glance. “It’s true,” she says lightly. “Thor loved this place.”
“Oh, well,” Tony grumbles as Erik sighs tragically. “If Thor loved it....”
This place is like redneck hell,” Tony mutters after ten days of butting up against Puente Antiguo’s significant limitations. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s got a certain rustic charm. And I haven’t had a Slurpee since, like, 1989. But I think I’m going to have a friend fly some stuff in. Make it feel a little more like home, you know?”
Darcy isn’t quite sure what will make Tony feel more at home.
“The ocean?” she suggests to Jane.
“Maybe some supermodels?” Jane replies. “Or a racetrack?”
“His personal bowling alley?” Darcy counters.
“There’s a bowling alley in town,” Jane says, as if that would even begin to compare with a bowling alley that lives in Tony Stark’s mansion.
“Supermodels,” Coulson says, and Jane and Darcy both jump because he snuck up behind them to help himself to the coffeepot. “Maxim’s July through September cover girls.”
“See?” Jane says.
“Really?” Darcy is insulted on Pepper’s behalf.
“That’s where my money would be if I were a betting man,” Coulson says, filling his mug. “Which I’m not. But Hawkeye is taking wagers in the mess tent if either of you are interested.”
"Who?” Darcy asks.
Coulson raises one eyebrow as he take a sip of coffee.
"Who is...Hawkeye?" Jane asks, complete with airquotes.
"Agent Barton," Coulson says, walking away.
"Clint's codename is Hawkeye?" Darcy asks.
"Coulson drinks coffee black?" Jane asks as if Clint doesn't have a completely ridiculous code name he's obviously been hiding from them. "That's disgusting.”
Whatever Tony sent for, it’s coming on his personal jet, and needs to be picked up at the same tiny airstrip, miles and miles away. Darcy and Clint - or Hawkeye because that’s never not going to be funny - get sent to pick up Tony’s friend and his supplies this time because Coulson has better things to do, but apparently they don’t.
“Where have you been hiding...Hawkeye?” Darcy asks Clint.
“I’ve been right where I always am,” Clint says, ignoring her pointed use of his codename. “Where have you been hiding?”
“I’ve been learning everything there is to know about running someone else’s life,” Darcy tells him cheerfully. “Including their secret mission codenames.”
“I can’t even say how much that terrifies me,” Clint deadpans.
“Careful or I’ll make you my thesis project.”
Clint chuckles and shakes his head. “There’s an iPod jack if you want to plug in,” he says. “How long is this trip?”
“Couple hours,” Darcy says, pulling her iPod out of her bag. “We might want to stop for Slurpees. Hey, how did you know I had my iPod back?”
“You were listening to it in the control room the other night,” Clint says, hanging a left into the 7-11.
“Wait, when were you there?” Darcy asks, not sure if she’s pleased or creeped out. “And why didn’t you say anything?” She should probably be creeped out. Right?
“Jane asked me to check on you,” he says, sliding the Jeep into park. “I was going to say hi, but you looked really into whatever you were doing. What flavor do you want?”
“Huh. Oh, um,” Darcy said, turning her thoughts back to Slurpees. “Whatever’s blue, if they have it?”
“Sure. Do me a favor and watch the pump.” Clint uses a plain black credit card to pay for the gas, sets the notch on the nozzle to let it run automatically, and goes inside. Darcy watches the numbers run up until Clint reappears with the largest Slurpee sizes in blue for her and something yellow for him, and a box of Lucky Charms. “What?” he asks when she raises an eyebrow at him. “They’re magically delicious.”
“That disturbed me less when the only magic I knew was in Harry Potter movies,” Darcy tells him but opens the box anyway.
Clint is petty enough to fight her for the purple horseshoes, which she respects. Unfortunately, he’s driving so she has control of the box. And the radio. She educates Clint on Vampire Weekend, and Florence and the Machine, and the evolution of M. Ward and he is in the middle of telling her where he was when Kurt Cobain died - Darcy was six and she’s just about to tell him that - when the Jeep dips on Darcy’s side and then bobbles with the telltale gait of a flat tire.
“Damn it,” Clint mutters, steering off the road.
“No problem,” Darcy replies, unbuckling her seatbelt and clambering over the seat to the storage space in the back. It was well-equipped with a jack, tire iron, two handguns, something that could possibly destroy a tank, and a compound bow. “The Science-mobile blows out tires all the time.”
She tumbles out the back brandishing the jack and the tire iron and locates the busted tire on the back passenger corner.
“I can do that for you,” Clint says, as she loosens the lugnuts while the car’s still on the ground and she has good torque.
“You could, but I already did it,” Darcy says, peering under the Jeep to find a flat section to center the jack. It’s one of those little crank ones that you have to rotate parallel to the ground before you can actually push it up. “Here, screw around with this thing while I get the spare.”
Clint has the wheel off the ground by the time Darcy gets the spare off the back of the Jeep and she takes advantage of his preoccupation to finish unscrewing the nuts and set them aside. The hubcap comes off easily and the tire’s a little heavy but no big deal.
“Hey, I got that,” Clint interrupts, as she staggers backward a step.
Darcy pushes it at him because it’s flat and she’s done with it. She turns her attention to the spare, getting it on the studs, checking to make sure the valve’s out, and then centering the hubcap and twisting the lugnuts on while Clint installs the busted tire on the storage thingy for the spare. Clint goes over the lugnuts one more time when she’s done, the muscles in his forearms and biceps doing attractive things that Darcy can totally appreciate. She lets the jack down and stands up to find Clint leaning against the Jeep, watching her through his dark sunglasses.
“What?” she asks. “Never seen a girl change a tire before?”
“Nope,” Clint says, pushing himself upright and heading for the driver’s seat as she returns the tools to the back and climbs in next to him. “And it was surprisingly hot.”
Darcy’s heart did a little double-thump as he checked over his left shoulder and pulled onto the road. “Really?”
“Yeah. Too bad I’m old, and like your professor or something,” Clint says, unplugging her iPod and handing her his own. “Plug this in. I’ve got some stuff to teach you.”
Darcy’s punk period had lasted about three years and had a definite goth focus. She’d dyed her hair black (which turned out to be not much different than usual), applied to be a Suicide Girl (rejected for being really illegally underage), and unsuccessfully petitioned her mother for a tattoo (which she realized later would probably hurt so she’d conceded to the need to wait until she was 18 and then had conveniently forgotten that she’d wanted one in the first place. She mostly listened to Poe and any group that was on the House of Wax soundtrack, but she knew the Clash, Velvet Underground, Flogging Molly, all the important ones.
Clint skips the stuff everyone knows and plays his personal favorites for her - the short-lived Operation Ivy, which became Rancid, which she did know, and Dropkick Murphys and Defiance, Ohio - before drifting into Patti Smith and Kathleen Hanna.
“You listen to Bikini Kill?” Darcy asks in surprise when ‘Rebel Girl’ starts to play after ‘Because the Night’. “Seriously?”
Clint’s lips twitch upward. “You know them?”
“My mom used to play them when I was little,” Darcy says, remembering dancing on the living room floor with hairbrush microphones. “She was kind of a feminist. I mean she never went out and demonstrated or anything but she was into doing everything herself.”
“No kidding?” Clint says, easing off the gas. Darcy can see the airstrip ahead and it looks like the plane actually beat them there this time. She’s a little disappointed.
“What about you?” she asks. “Was your mom rocking the socio-political music scene?”
“My mom died in a car crash when I was a kid,” Clint says, parking the Jeep. “My dad, too.”
“Oh,” Darcy says awkwardly. “I’m sorry.”
“But,” he says, neatly ignoring the pause, “when I was thirteen? There was nothing as hot as an angry woman with a guitar.”
“Huh,” Darcy says, trying to do the math backward to figure out exactly how much older than her he actually was. “I guess the 90s were a good decade for you.”
He winks at her. “You have no idea.”
Darcy’s not so sure she likes that but her mental math tells her he’s only about ten years older than her, which is really not so bad. She follows him across the airstrip to where a guy is waiting, surrounded by three handtrucks and stacks of plastic packing cubes that each come about as high as Darcy’s knee.
“Happy Hogan,” he says, holding out his hand to Clint.
“Clint Barton, S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Clint says, shaking his hand. “This is Darcy Lewis.”
“Oh, hi,” Happy Hogan says, sticking out his hand for Darcy to shake. “Pepper said you’d be coming along.”
Darcy decides she likes him, even if he does have a ridiculous nickname. Between Pepper and Happy, she’s starting to wonder if Tony Stark is responsible for the descriptors. She can easily see his whimsical appellations turning into unshakable nicknames and hopes he doesn’t have anything in mind for her.
“So what’s in the boxes?” she asks, because if Tony wanted it, it’s gotta be good.
Happy turns and pops open one of the containers. Cold mist wafts from the seal and a crystal decanter of scotch rises to the level of the lid. Four cut-glass tumblers rise with it.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Clint says. Darcy’s glad he said it because she’s thinking the exact same thing and she’d get yelled at.
“Boss said something about throwing a party when he’s done here,” Happy says. “Whatever the boss wants, that’s what I’m here for.”
Clint shakes his head. “A party,” he says. “All right. Let’s do this.”
Thanks to their combined twenty-seven years of Tetris experience, they get all Tony’s boxes into the Jeep, even though Darcy gets relegated to the bench seat in the back because she’s the only one who can still fit back there. Happy rides in the front seat with Clint.
She doesn’t learn a single new thing about Clint on the way back, but Happy is full of stories about Tony and Pepper. Darcy’s not entirely sure he’s the most reliable narrator, since everything he has to say about Black Widow seems just a little too fantastic to be true. But Clint doesn’t call bullshit on anything and so neither does she.
Under Pepper’s tutelage, Darcy makes spreadsheets her bitch. Not that she couldn’t create a sick pivot table before, but Pepper’s shortcuts and tricks give new meaning to the non-word “pwned.” It’s especially useful when Tony says,
“Hey, let’s put this in context these guys actually care about,” and dumps fact sheets for adamantium and Stark Industries proprietary gold-titanium alloy into her inbox.
Darcy builds a fantastically epic spreadsheet comparing the properties of all three metals and then exports certain tables and charts to a presentation.
“So wait,” Tony says, hovering over her shoulder as she fixes the transitions to look like explosions, “how long until they give you a degree for putting up with Agent Tight-Ass over there?”
“Get your own intern, Mr. Stark,” Coulson says from much closer than either of them had realized.
“Oh, really?” Jane’s voice pipes up. “That’s good advice for both of you. Intern thieves,” she mutters, shouldering her way between Coulson and Tony.
“Timeshare,” Coulson suggests.
“There’s enough brilliance here for everyone,” Darcy says airily, even if they’re making it really hard to concentrate.
Because everyone has suddenly recognized her awesomeness - and Darcy’s never been one for impostor syndrome but this has never happened to her before - she actually gets invited to Tony’s presentation. Not just to pass out the reports and take minutes, either - she does have to press the button to record the whole thing, but the computer produces the transcript so after that, she’s done. She has her own seat at the table and can sit next to Jane and listen to Tony explain how the Asgardian metal is even stronger than adamantium but not as flexible as the gold titanium alloy and then he dropped the bomb.
“Also? That armor? Same stuff as that hammer.”
And everybody went batshit.
“Uh, what’s going on?” Darcy whispered to Jane.
“There’s no way the armor and Thor’s hammer are made out of the same material,” Jane whispers back, turning her handout booklet to point to one of Darcy’s tables. “See, the basic properties of the metal don’t match.”
“So he’s really wrong?” Darcy asks.
“More like he’s telling the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists they didn’t do their job right when they had the hammer,” Jane murmurs back and wow, yeah, that explains a lot.
“All right, all right, shut up,” Tony says, gesturing for everyone to zip it. Darcy glances over at Coulson, who is frowning but waiting for Tony to speak. “Yes. Same stuff. Different properties. Why? Because there’s - ” he sighs heavily, “magical enchantment absorbed by the metal.”
Dead silence. Jane has raised the Eyebrow of Skepticism.
“The same way metal absorbs radiation and its properties are affected thus, this stuff eats up...I don’t know what to call it. We’re going to call it magic until the people who don’t work for the Avenger Initiative discover it and name it something that doesn’t sound silly. Or less silly. Actually, whoever discovers it will probably name it after themselves, so magic is probably not any sillier than what we’ll all end up calling it anyway. So, the point is, its ultimate capabilities are modeled after the amount and type of ‘magic’ radiation infused by the creator or user, and we don’t know if the armor is still in possession of its enchantments or not. So really, it would help if you astrophysicist types could find your wormhole and get a few more examples of this stuff for me to work with.”
Jane and Erik exchange glances and then Jane looks over at Darcy. Darcy shrugs and looks at Coulson. He’s frowning and tapping his thumb against his pen.
“Questions?” Tony finishes. “Questions? No questions? Great. I hear this place could use some more parties. Yeah? Am I right? So let’s have a party.”
“You should always have a little black dress with you,” Pepper had told Darcy when she and Clint had returned with Happy Hogan and Tony’s Party-in-Many-Boxes. “Something that will roll up into a carryon without getting wrinkled. And it doesn’t have to be black.”
So Darcy acquired a little black dress that is actually green and she wears it to the party with her black boots and pulls her hair up and it’s like a party dress, pretty much. Anyway, it makes her chest look good and is short enough to show off her legs above the knee.
Jane looks like a normal person who forgot to pack a dress in a black skirt and a sparkly white top she totally bought in the last fifteen minutes. Pepper and Natalie look awesome and Pepper’s little black dress is actually navy blue. Natalie’s is black but she has a bottle of vodka and looks like she knows what to do with it.
“Hook us up,” Darcy tells her, sidling up to the bar. Happy and Tony and whoever else got conscripted into manual labor have moved all the tables in the mess hall off to the sides and it reminds Darcy of a middle school cafeteria converted for a dance. The women are all on the side with Natalie and her vodka and the men are all clustered up on the opposite wall.
Natalie pours shots for Darcy and Jane, doing a neat twist with the bottle that keeps anything from splashing out between the two glasses. It’s really not a surprise that she’s awesome at everything up to and including bartending.
“To magic metal, screwing up the scientific community,” Darcy offers.
“Not my scientific community,” Jane replies with a smile, and they tap glasses.
Natalie is setting up another round, including herself and Pepper when Tony sidles up.
"Everyone here pretty much hates me, right?" he asks, shaking his head slightly when Natalie gestures with the bottle.
"It's not unlikely," Pepper says carefully.
"In fact it's almost certain," Natalie says, not carefully. She raises her shotglass and her eyebrow and the rest of them toast her and drink.
Tony huffs. "After I bring them a party," he says. "With actual liquor."
"Well, to be fair," Darcy offers, "you only did that after you insulted them all."
Tony looks thoughtful for a minute and then shrugs. "True. Which is kind of why I did it. I knew a week ago, no one was going to be happy with this."
There's some kind of pun waiting in the wings about bringing Happy to them, but Darcy's kind of crap at puns, even when she hasn't just done two vodka shots.
"All right, all right, can I have everyone's - is there a microphone? No? Okay, I'll just - " Tony boosts himself up on Natasha's makeshift bar. "Can I have everyone's attention? Wow, yeah, I feel very tall. That doesn't happen a lot. I mean, when I'm in the suit, yeah - okay, never mind. What I was going to say is that it's been an honor and a pleasure working with you all these last couple weeks. If I sounded harsh and judgmental in the meeting today, well, it's because I sound that way a lot, which really kind of sucks for the people who work for me, and I'm trying to be better about that, but as you can see, I'm still not very good at it. So yeah. This is the future, folks. You're working on stuff that makes no sense to us and probably will make no sense to our kids, but someday, somewhere, we're working on the future, and that makes us great. So party down and drink up and have fun tonight because we still have a lot of work to do. Also, hey, Pepper, I promise, this party is going to be way better than my birthday party. I promise."
"What happened at his birthday party?" Darcy asks as Tony hops down from the bar.
"He broke the house," Natalie fills in before Pepper has a chance to speak.
Darcy shrugs. "Where I come from, that usually a sign of a pretty great party," she says, and then Tony is appropriating Natalie's vodka.
“Can’t do shots all night,” he says. “Nat, get Pepper a martini, very dry, as many olives as you can fit on the toothpick. Darcy. Darcy, Darcy, Darcy.” Tony regards her thoughtfully and it’s marginally less creepy than it was the first time he did it, out at the airfield. “You remember those orange creamsicle pops they used to sell? You like those?”
“Sure,” Darcy says. “They still sell them. I just haven’t had one in years.”
“Then,” Tony says, rummaging around in the bar, “you will like this.” He poured vodka, Galliano, and orange juice together and wedged a piece of lime on the rim of the glass. “Try it.”
Darcy takes a cautious sip and wow, that is sick. She can’t even taste the vodka, really, and the vanilla and orange flavors make her entire mouth happy. “This is so good,” she says excitedly.
“Let me try,” Jane says, stealing it from her.
“Yeah, but you’re giving it back,” Darcy warns her.
“It’s a little sweet,” Jane admits, licking her lips. “It’s pretty good, though.”
“I thought so,” Tony says, handing her what might be a Cape Cod and might be infinitely more complicated. “Try this. I think it’ll be more to your liking.”
The creamsicle drinks are really good and after a two or three of them, Darcy is really glad there’s a party and really wants Clint to dance with her. Unfortunately he’s nowhere to be found so she dances with Tony while Pepper dances with Coulson - who is a hilariously awkward dancer, and always about half a beat behind the music, but is really committed to trying. Then she dances with Jane and Pepper and Natalie to “I Will Survive” and “You’re So Vain” because it’s really clear who that song was written about, and sings along and then something not-entirely-fast comes on and Tony steals Pepper away from them.
“‘Scuse me.” It’s Happy and he’s offering his hand to Natalie who actually blushes. “May I have this dance?”
“I, uh. Yes.” Natalie looks flustered but grabs his hand and drags him into the middle of the crowd.
Jane giggles but there’s an undercurrent of wistfulness there. Darcy throws an arm around her and squeezes. At least three of the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists have tried to hit on Jane in the last week, in various awkward and geeky ways, but she never notices, lost in her determination to find Thor and bring him back to Earth. “C’mon,” Darcy says. “Let’s go hang out in the girls’ room.”
They wander off the bathroom, but Clint’s just outside in the hall and Darcy stops short. Jane turns when she realizes Darcy’s not next to her anymore, and then winks, the bitch, and waves at Darcy before disappearing down the hallway.
“Hey,” Darcy says, just this shade of accusing. “You’re not dancing.”
“Yeah,” Clint says. “Funny thing....”
“You should dance with me,” she interrupts, grabbing his hand and attempting to drag him back into the cafeteria, but he’s about eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than her and doesn’t budge.
“Aren’t I a little old for that?” Clint asks, rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb. It feels nice.
Darcy huffs. “You’re only like, ten years older than me,” she says. “Maybe. I’m totally sure we pass the half-your-age-plus-seven rule.”
“Half your age plus seven?” Clint asks, and takes her drink from her other hand. “Is this a Harvey Wallbanger?”
“It tastes like a creamsicle,” Darcy explains. “The rule is, if you halve your age and add seven, that’s the youngest you can date.”
“Is that a fact?” Clint asks.
“Yes. And if you’re thirty, then half your age is fifteen and plus seven is twenty-two and I’m twenty-three, and so that’s fine.”
“What if I’m over thirty?” Clint asks.
Darcy frowns because that requires backwards math, and says, “If you’re thirty-two, that’s okay. Or I guess you can be thirty-three and we can round down. But don’t be any older than that, okay?”
“I’ll try not to be,” Clint says with a funny little smile but the slow song is over and Jane is back, dragging her back onto the dance floor and Clint is still holding her drink.
“Has he said yes, yet?” Jane calls over the musical stylings of Prince, from the years when he was just a pair of goofily intertwined gender symbols.
“To what?” Darcy calls back and Jane grins at her in an entirely un-Jane-like way. “Oh, shut up.”
Everyone’s kind of hung over the day after Tony, Happy, Pepper, and Natalie leave - the first three back to Malibu and Natalie out to New York to submit her report to Nick Fury, but Clint is banging on the door of the lab at 8am.
“‘M comin’,” Darcy slurs into her travel mug and sucks sweet, sweet coffee into her digestive system.
“I bet someone could rig up an IV of that for you,” Clint suggests, kindly leaving the radio off. The town is quiet, the base is quiet, it’s like everyone but Clint was laid out by Hurricane Tony and his galpals.
“Mmph,” Darcy says and uses her last functioning brain cells to give this serious thought. Then she cuts Clint a sideways look. “It’s not nice to tease.”
Clint smiles at the road. “No,” he agrees. “But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”
Clint steals her coffee as she shoots half a dozen arrows into the desert next to or in front of the target, and then she gives up and sprawls on the hood of the Jeep next to him, using her arm to block out the sun.
“Too many creamsicle drinks?” Clint asks, taking off his sunglasses and sliding them onto Darcy’s forehead. She scoots them down over her eyes and drapes her arm over her forehead.
“More like two hours of sleep,” she admits. “On top of a couple of those creamsicle drinks.”
“They’re called Harvey Wallbangers,” Clint says. “You’re only supposed to drink one, you know. You want to go back and catch a few more hours?”
“The hell I’m only supposed to drink one,” Darcy complains. “They were good.”
“Yeah, that’s how you wind up full of vodka,” Clint says, shading his eyes with his hand. They’re quiet for a minute in the buzz of the morning heat burning off the night’s chill and then Clint adds, “Did you have fun at least?”
“Ye-ah,” Darcy replies as if anyone could not have fun at a Tony Stark shindig. “It was amazing. How on earth are you so functional?”
“I was on security,” Clint says.
“That sucks,” Darcy says. “Is that why you weren’t dancing?”
“I wasn’t dancing because I don’t dance.” Clint is doing his best to scowl and kind of failing. “I was...people-watching, mostly.”
“Yeah, me too,” Darcy agrees. “Jane and I were watching Coulson make goo-goo eyes at Pepper Potts. We think she’s Tony’s robot girlfriend. Like, he built her to take care of all of his needs, if you know what I mean.”
“She’s not a robot,” Clint assures her. “And I don’t know that she and Tony are dating, exactly.”
“She’s gotta be a robot,” Darcy protests. “Did you see those shoes she was wearing? You’ve gotta be superhuman not to fall on your face in those.”
Clint snorts. “You cleaned up pretty good yourself,” he says, nudging her ankle in its Ugg boot. “You get that dress at the Wal-Mart?”
“Ha!” Oh, Clint, Darcy thinks mournfully, no wonder you crashed and burned with Black Widow. “Would you buy that bow from Wal-Mart?” she demands. “Because if you’re going to look killer? You need to something made by a craftsman.”
She can feel Clint’s eyes on her and she gets that flash of pleasant discomfort she got when he’d quoted the Princess Bride about her breasts. It’s exciting and breath-taking and a little bit dangerous at the same time.
“Internet, huh?” he asks.
Darcy sighs. “It’s not like there’s anywhere around here a girl can shop for something that fits her personality,” she complains, and by ‘personality’, she means ‘boobs’ but she’s not going to tell Clint that. If she had to resort to etsy, that’s her own business. “So what’s the deal?” she asks, elbowing Clint in the thigh. “Tony and Pepper? Pepper and Coulson? Is there like, some big love triangle I don’t know about going on?”
Clint chuckles. “No,” he says. “Coulson likes to keep his work and private lives strictly - well, he doesn’t like to have a private life, to be honest. He just appreciates that Pepper keeps him from having to deal directly with Tony.”
“That is so bullshit,” Darcy announces. “He was totally making eyes at her.”
Clint taps his sunglasses down to frown into her eyes. “You can tell how everyone feels about everyone else just by looking at their face?” he asks.
“Well, yeah,” Darcy says, and then falters when Clint’s expression doesn’t change. “I mean, not everyone but, okay, he’s pretty obvs.” She pushes herself up on her elbows. “Just as obvs as you were with Black Widow, so what’s the deal there?”
Clint pushes his glasses back onto her face and looks away.
“I mean, if she totally ripped your heart out, you don’t have to give me the gory details,” Darcy amends. “I just figured, it looked pretty bad and maybe you’d want to talk about it.”
“Have you ever met any guy who wanted to talk about his feelings for a woman to another woman?” Clint asks.
“Fine, don’t tell me,” Darcy says, lying back on the Jeep hood again. “Bottle up all your emotions until you become a bitter, emotionless dude in a stuffy suit. Maybe you’ll get an eyepatch, too, so you can be all your repressed heroes rolled into one.”
The threat of becoming a Coulson/Nick Fury hybrid seems to defeat Clint. “Fine,” he concedes. “I ran away from the circus to be with her and she ended up using me as the patsy on a mission. Fortunately, after hour six of FBI interrogation, Nick Fury walked in and offered me a job.”
“You do a lot of running away,” Darcy observes, rolling on her side toward him.
“I like to think of it as strategic retreat,” Clint says. He leans down a little, blocking out the sun, and shifts the glasses up to the top of her head. “And I only employ it when absolutely necessary.”
Darcy’s stomach tightens. Clint is close enough to kiss and if he isn’t going to go for it, she is, because wow, he smells great and his eyes have adorable crinkles around them and he’s looking at her like...like....
A high-pitched series of beeps blares from the vicinity of Clint’s hip and he looks away and hops off the Jeep. He digs in his pocket for his phone and accepts the call with a rueful, “Hey, boss.”
Darcy waits for him to say something like, “I was just about to score, can we discuss this another time?” but instead he says, “Yeah, we got a late start. I’ll get her back ASAP,” and Darcy feels like a piece of luggage.
“In the Jeep,” Clint says, pocketing his phone again and turning toward the driver’s side door. Darcy takes a sad moment to admire his ass in jeans before she slides off the car hood and shuffles around to her own seat. “Coulson needs you back.”
“Why?” Darcy asks. “It’s not even my day to sit in the corner and do his bidding.”
“It seems,” Clint says, “that Jane’s made a breakthrough.”
Part Five
Author: smittywing/Smitty
Pairing: Darcy Lewis/Clint Barton (Hawkeye) (and minor secondary pairings)
Rating: PG-13 for this part, probably R or NC-17 overall. I hope.
Wordcount: ~5600 for this part (reccea tells me I have no business acting surprised at this point in my fannish life)
Spoilers/Warning: For the end of the movie, I guess? Also WIP and all that carries with it.
Notes: reccea and her mad beta skills rock my world. All remaining mistakes are mine. This is probably going to be the last part until after I take the bar during the last week in July. Apparently there is studying involved? Or something. This would totally be the end of part 2, had I adhered to the original 6-part outline. SIGH.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Tony’s visit is absolutely the most interesting thing that’s happened since Thor took off.
“I love it. It’s just like home,” he says when he sees the Dogs Playing Poker print in the hotel room. “I have the original, you know.”
“Had,” Pepper Potts corrects him. “You donated it to the Boy Scouts.”
“Really? Can we get it back? Buy it over again?”
“Absolutely not.”
Darcy may be a little in love.
Coulson is constantly annoyed with Tony, which means he doesn’t have time to be annoyed with Darcy. Tony takes up an inordinate amount of Jane’s time, which means she doesn’t really need Darcy much either. Pepper, though, appropriates Darcy as her protege and teaches her every sneaking scheduling trick in the book and a few that most definitely aren’t in any books.
Darcy rearranges Coulson’s entire calendar to maximize efficiency and he doesn’t say a word. She congratulates herself on a job well done and starts annotating his contacts with birthdays, spouses’ names, and gossip. A couple days later, she notices that the gossip has annotations like “disproved” or “confirmed” next to the item. She’s really starting to like Coulson and his encyclopedic knowledge of the superhero community.
Clint is generally AWOL for all of this and Darcy can only imagine he’s following Black Widow around with his tongue hanging out so she spends as much time as possible being awesome and ignoring his lack of presence.
Tony starts a fire in the lab one day and Darcy sees Clint for like, 2.5 seconds, when he comes through with Natalie to put it out.
“Look, it’s not my fault,” Tony protests. “I’m used to Dummy being right there.” He takes them all out for drinks that night to apologize for evacuating the building. Ironically, Clint and Natalie have been sent off on some super-secret mission and can’t even get drunk with the rest of them at the really sketchy bar in town.
“Are you sure they should be partners?” Darcy asks Coulson on the ride over. “Don’t they kind of hate each other?”
“It works for them,” Coulson just says and they park and get out of the SUV only to find Tony stopped dead in the doorway.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. I’ve hung out in caves with better reputations than this place.”
“Only reputation I know is one for getting you wasted,” Darcy says, elbowing Erik.
Jane grins and throws them a sidelong glance. “It’s true,” she says lightly. “Thor loved this place.”
“Oh, well,” Tony grumbles as Erik sighs tragically. “If Thor loved it....”
This place is like redneck hell,” Tony mutters after ten days of butting up against Puente Antiguo’s significant limitations. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s got a certain rustic charm. And I haven’t had a Slurpee since, like, 1989. But I think I’m going to have a friend fly some stuff in. Make it feel a little more like home, you know?”
Darcy isn’t quite sure what will make Tony feel more at home.
“The ocean?” she suggests to Jane.
“Maybe some supermodels?” Jane replies. “Or a racetrack?”
“His personal bowling alley?” Darcy counters.
“There’s a bowling alley in town,” Jane says, as if that would even begin to compare with a bowling alley that lives in Tony Stark’s mansion.
“Supermodels,” Coulson says, and Jane and Darcy both jump because he snuck up behind them to help himself to the coffeepot. “Maxim’s July through September cover girls.”
“See?” Jane says.
“Really?” Darcy is insulted on Pepper’s behalf.
“That’s where my money would be if I were a betting man,” Coulson says, filling his mug. “Which I’m not. But Hawkeye is taking wagers in the mess tent if either of you are interested.”
"Who?” Darcy asks.
Coulson raises one eyebrow as he take a sip of coffee.
"Who is...Hawkeye?" Jane asks, complete with airquotes.
"Agent Barton," Coulson says, walking away.
"Clint's codename is Hawkeye?" Darcy asks.
"Coulson drinks coffee black?" Jane asks as if Clint doesn't have a completely ridiculous code name he's obviously been hiding from them. "That's disgusting.”
Whatever Tony sent for, it’s coming on his personal jet, and needs to be picked up at the same tiny airstrip, miles and miles away. Darcy and Clint - or Hawkeye because that’s never not going to be funny - get sent to pick up Tony’s friend and his supplies this time because Coulson has better things to do, but apparently they don’t.
“Where have you been hiding...Hawkeye?” Darcy asks Clint.
“I’ve been right where I always am,” Clint says, ignoring her pointed use of his codename. “Where have you been hiding?”
“I’ve been learning everything there is to know about running someone else’s life,” Darcy tells him cheerfully. “Including their secret mission codenames.”
“I can’t even say how much that terrifies me,” Clint deadpans.
“Careful or I’ll make you my thesis project.”
Clint chuckles and shakes his head. “There’s an iPod jack if you want to plug in,” he says. “How long is this trip?”
“Couple hours,” Darcy says, pulling her iPod out of her bag. “We might want to stop for Slurpees. Hey, how did you know I had my iPod back?”
“You were listening to it in the control room the other night,” Clint says, hanging a left into the 7-11.
“Wait, when were you there?” Darcy asks, not sure if she’s pleased or creeped out. “And why didn’t you say anything?” She should probably be creeped out. Right?
“Jane asked me to check on you,” he says, sliding the Jeep into park. “I was going to say hi, but you looked really into whatever you were doing. What flavor do you want?”
“Huh. Oh, um,” Darcy said, turning her thoughts back to Slurpees. “Whatever’s blue, if they have it?”
“Sure. Do me a favor and watch the pump.” Clint uses a plain black credit card to pay for the gas, sets the notch on the nozzle to let it run automatically, and goes inside. Darcy watches the numbers run up until Clint reappears with the largest Slurpee sizes in blue for her and something yellow for him, and a box of Lucky Charms. “What?” he asks when she raises an eyebrow at him. “They’re magically delicious.”
“That disturbed me less when the only magic I knew was in Harry Potter movies,” Darcy tells him but opens the box anyway.
Clint is petty enough to fight her for the purple horseshoes, which she respects. Unfortunately, he’s driving so she has control of the box. And the radio. She educates Clint on Vampire Weekend, and Florence and the Machine, and the evolution of M. Ward and he is in the middle of telling her where he was when Kurt Cobain died - Darcy was six and she’s just about to tell him that - when the Jeep dips on Darcy’s side and then bobbles with the telltale gait of a flat tire.
“Damn it,” Clint mutters, steering off the road.
“No problem,” Darcy replies, unbuckling her seatbelt and clambering over the seat to the storage space in the back. It was well-equipped with a jack, tire iron, two handguns, something that could possibly destroy a tank, and a compound bow. “The Science-mobile blows out tires all the time.”
She tumbles out the back brandishing the jack and the tire iron and locates the busted tire on the back passenger corner.
“I can do that for you,” Clint says, as she loosens the lugnuts while the car’s still on the ground and she has good torque.
“You could, but I already did it,” Darcy says, peering under the Jeep to find a flat section to center the jack. It’s one of those little crank ones that you have to rotate parallel to the ground before you can actually push it up. “Here, screw around with this thing while I get the spare.”
Clint has the wheel off the ground by the time Darcy gets the spare off the back of the Jeep and she takes advantage of his preoccupation to finish unscrewing the nuts and set them aside. The hubcap comes off easily and the tire’s a little heavy but no big deal.
“Hey, I got that,” Clint interrupts, as she staggers backward a step.
Darcy pushes it at him because it’s flat and she’s done with it. She turns her attention to the spare, getting it on the studs, checking to make sure the valve’s out, and then centering the hubcap and twisting the lugnuts on while Clint installs the busted tire on the storage thingy for the spare. Clint goes over the lugnuts one more time when she’s done, the muscles in his forearms and biceps doing attractive things that Darcy can totally appreciate. She lets the jack down and stands up to find Clint leaning against the Jeep, watching her through his dark sunglasses.
“What?” she asks. “Never seen a girl change a tire before?”
“Nope,” Clint says, pushing himself upright and heading for the driver’s seat as she returns the tools to the back and climbs in next to him. “And it was surprisingly hot.”
Darcy’s heart did a little double-thump as he checked over his left shoulder and pulled onto the road. “Really?”
“Yeah. Too bad I’m old, and like your professor or something,” Clint says, unplugging her iPod and handing her his own. “Plug this in. I’ve got some stuff to teach you.”
Darcy’s punk period had lasted about three years and had a definite goth focus. She’d dyed her hair black (which turned out to be not much different than usual), applied to be a Suicide Girl (rejected for being really illegally underage), and unsuccessfully petitioned her mother for a tattoo (which she realized later would probably hurt so she’d conceded to the need to wait until she was 18 and then had conveniently forgotten that she’d wanted one in the first place. She mostly listened to Poe and any group that was on the House of Wax soundtrack, but she knew the Clash, Velvet Underground, Flogging Molly, all the important ones.
Clint skips the stuff everyone knows and plays his personal favorites for her - the short-lived Operation Ivy, which became Rancid, which she did know, and Dropkick Murphys and Defiance, Ohio - before drifting into Patti Smith and Kathleen Hanna.
“You listen to Bikini Kill?” Darcy asks in surprise when ‘Rebel Girl’ starts to play after ‘Because the Night’. “Seriously?”
Clint’s lips twitch upward. “You know them?”
“My mom used to play them when I was little,” Darcy says, remembering dancing on the living room floor with hairbrush microphones. “She was kind of a feminist. I mean she never went out and demonstrated or anything but she was into doing everything herself.”
“No kidding?” Clint says, easing off the gas. Darcy can see the airstrip ahead and it looks like the plane actually beat them there this time. She’s a little disappointed.
“What about you?” she asks. “Was your mom rocking the socio-political music scene?”
“My mom died in a car crash when I was a kid,” Clint says, parking the Jeep. “My dad, too.”
“Oh,” Darcy says awkwardly. “I’m sorry.”
“But,” he says, neatly ignoring the pause, “when I was thirteen? There was nothing as hot as an angry woman with a guitar.”
“Huh,” Darcy says, trying to do the math backward to figure out exactly how much older than her he actually was. “I guess the 90s were a good decade for you.”
He winks at her. “You have no idea.”
Darcy’s not so sure she likes that but her mental math tells her he’s only about ten years older than her, which is really not so bad. She follows him across the airstrip to where a guy is waiting, surrounded by three handtrucks and stacks of plastic packing cubes that each come about as high as Darcy’s knee.
“Happy Hogan,” he says, holding out his hand to Clint.
“Clint Barton, S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Clint says, shaking his hand. “This is Darcy Lewis.”
“Oh, hi,” Happy Hogan says, sticking out his hand for Darcy to shake. “Pepper said you’d be coming along.”
Darcy decides she likes him, even if he does have a ridiculous nickname. Between Pepper and Happy, she’s starting to wonder if Tony Stark is responsible for the descriptors. She can easily see his whimsical appellations turning into unshakable nicknames and hopes he doesn’t have anything in mind for her.
“So what’s in the boxes?” she asks, because if Tony wanted it, it’s gotta be good.
Happy turns and pops open one of the containers. Cold mist wafts from the seal and a crystal decanter of scotch rises to the level of the lid. Four cut-glass tumblers rise with it.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Clint says. Darcy’s glad he said it because she’s thinking the exact same thing and she’d get yelled at.
“Boss said something about throwing a party when he’s done here,” Happy says. “Whatever the boss wants, that’s what I’m here for.”
Clint shakes his head. “A party,” he says. “All right. Let’s do this.”
Thanks to their combined twenty-seven years of Tetris experience, they get all Tony’s boxes into the Jeep, even though Darcy gets relegated to the bench seat in the back because she’s the only one who can still fit back there. Happy rides in the front seat with Clint.
She doesn’t learn a single new thing about Clint on the way back, but Happy is full of stories about Tony and Pepper. Darcy’s not entirely sure he’s the most reliable narrator, since everything he has to say about Black Widow seems just a little too fantastic to be true. But Clint doesn’t call bullshit on anything and so neither does she.
Under Pepper’s tutelage, Darcy makes spreadsheets her bitch. Not that she couldn’t create a sick pivot table before, but Pepper’s shortcuts and tricks give new meaning to the non-word “pwned.” It’s especially useful when Tony says,
“Hey, let’s put this in context these guys actually care about,” and dumps fact sheets for adamantium and Stark Industries proprietary gold-titanium alloy into her inbox.
Darcy builds a fantastically epic spreadsheet comparing the properties of all three metals and then exports certain tables and charts to a presentation.
“So wait,” Tony says, hovering over her shoulder as she fixes the transitions to look like explosions, “how long until they give you a degree for putting up with Agent Tight-Ass over there?”
“Get your own intern, Mr. Stark,” Coulson says from much closer than either of them had realized.
“Oh, really?” Jane’s voice pipes up. “That’s good advice for both of you. Intern thieves,” she mutters, shouldering her way between Coulson and Tony.
“Timeshare,” Coulson suggests.
“There’s enough brilliance here for everyone,” Darcy says airily, even if they’re making it really hard to concentrate.
Because everyone has suddenly recognized her awesomeness - and Darcy’s never been one for impostor syndrome but this has never happened to her before - she actually gets invited to Tony’s presentation. Not just to pass out the reports and take minutes, either - she does have to press the button to record the whole thing, but the computer produces the transcript so after that, she’s done. She has her own seat at the table and can sit next to Jane and listen to Tony explain how the Asgardian metal is even stronger than adamantium but not as flexible as the gold titanium alloy and then he dropped the bomb.
“Also? That armor? Same stuff as that hammer.”
And everybody went batshit.
“Uh, what’s going on?” Darcy whispered to Jane.
“There’s no way the armor and Thor’s hammer are made out of the same material,” Jane whispers back, turning her handout booklet to point to one of Darcy’s tables. “See, the basic properties of the metal don’t match.”
“So he’s really wrong?” Darcy asks.
“More like he’s telling the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists they didn’t do their job right when they had the hammer,” Jane murmurs back and wow, yeah, that explains a lot.
“All right, all right, shut up,” Tony says, gesturing for everyone to zip it. Darcy glances over at Coulson, who is frowning but waiting for Tony to speak. “Yes. Same stuff. Different properties. Why? Because there’s - ” he sighs heavily, “magical enchantment absorbed by the metal.”
Dead silence. Jane has raised the Eyebrow of Skepticism.
“The same way metal absorbs radiation and its properties are affected thus, this stuff eats up...I don’t know what to call it. We’re going to call it magic until the people who don’t work for the Avenger Initiative discover it and name it something that doesn’t sound silly. Or less silly. Actually, whoever discovers it will probably name it after themselves, so magic is probably not any sillier than what we’ll all end up calling it anyway. So, the point is, its ultimate capabilities are modeled after the amount and type of ‘magic’ radiation infused by the creator or user, and we don’t know if the armor is still in possession of its enchantments or not. So really, it would help if you astrophysicist types could find your wormhole and get a few more examples of this stuff for me to work with.”
Jane and Erik exchange glances and then Jane looks over at Darcy. Darcy shrugs and looks at Coulson. He’s frowning and tapping his thumb against his pen.
“Questions?” Tony finishes. “Questions? No questions? Great. I hear this place could use some more parties. Yeah? Am I right? So let’s have a party.”
“You should always have a little black dress with you,” Pepper had told Darcy when she and Clint had returned with Happy Hogan and Tony’s Party-in-Many-Boxes. “Something that will roll up into a carryon without getting wrinkled. And it doesn’t have to be black.”
So Darcy acquired a little black dress that is actually green and she wears it to the party with her black boots and pulls her hair up and it’s like a party dress, pretty much. Anyway, it makes her chest look good and is short enough to show off her legs above the knee.
Jane looks like a normal person who forgot to pack a dress in a black skirt and a sparkly white top she totally bought in the last fifteen minutes. Pepper and Natalie look awesome and Pepper’s little black dress is actually navy blue. Natalie’s is black but she has a bottle of vodka and looks like she knows what to do with it.
“Hook us up,” Darcy tells her, sidling up to the bar. Happy and Tony and whoever else got conscripted into manual labor have moved all the tables in the mess hall off to the sides and it reminds Darcy of a middle school cafeteria converted for a dance. The women are all on the side with Natalie and her vodka and the men are all clustered up on the opposite wall.
Natalie pours shots for Darcy and Jane, doing a neat twist with the bottle that keeps anything from splashing out between the two glasses. It’s really not a surprise that she’s awesome at everything up to and including bartending.
“To magic metal, screwing up the scientific community,” Darcy offers.
“Not my scientific community,” Jane replies with a smile, and they tap glasses.
Natalie is setting up another round, including herself and Pepper when Tony sidles up.
"Everyone here pretty much hates me, right?" he asks, shaking his head slightly when Natalie gestures with the bottle.
"It's not unlikely," Pepper says carefully.
"In fact it's almost certain," Natalie says, not carefully. She raises her shotglass and her eyebrow and the rest of them toast her and drink.
Tony huffs. "After I bring them a party," he says. "With actual liquor."
"Well, to be fair," Darcy offers, "you only did that after you insulted them all."
Tony looks thoughtful for a minute and then shrugs. "True. Which is kind of why I did it. I knew a week ago, no one was going to be happy with this."
There's some kind of pun waiting in the wings about bringing Happy to them, but Darcy's kind of crap at puns, even when she hasn't just done two vodka shots.
"All right, all right, can I have everyone's - is there a microphone? No? Okay, I'll just - " Tony boosts himself up on Natasha's makeshift bar. "Can I have everyone's attention? Wow, yeah, I feel very tall. That doesn't happen a lot. I mean, when I'm in the suit, yeah - okay, never mind. What I was going to say is that it's been an honor and a pleasure working with you all these last couple weeks. If I sounded harsh and judgmental in the meeting today, well, it's because I sound that way a lot, which really kind of sucks for the people who work for me, and I'm trying to be better about that, but as you can see, I'm still not very good at it. So yeah. This is the future, folks. You're working on stuff that makes no sense to us and probably will make no sense to our kids, but someday, somewhere, we're working on the future, and that makes us great. So party down and drink up and have fun tonight because we still have a lot of work to do. Also, hey, Pepper, I promise, this party is going to be way better than my birthday party. I promise."
"What happened at his birthday party?" Darcy asks as Tony hops down from the bar.
"He broke the house," Natalie fills in before Pepper has a chance to speak.
Darcy shrugs. "Where I come from, that usually a sign of a pretty great party," she says, and then Tony is appropriating Natalie's vodka.
“Can’t do shots all night,” he says. “Nat, get Pepper a martini, very dry, as many olives as you can fit on the toothpick. Darcy. Darcy, Darcy, Darcy.” Tony regards her thoughtfully and it’s marginally less creepy than it was the first time he did it, out at the airfield. “You remember those orange creamsicle pops they used to sell? You like those?”
“Sure,” Darcy says. “They still sell them. I just haven’t had one in years.”
“Then,” Tony says, rummaging around in the bar, “you will like this.” He poured vodka, Galliano, and orange juice together and wedged a piece of lime on the rim of the glass. “Try it.”
Darcy takes a cautious sip and wow, that is sick. She can’t even taste the vodka, really, and the vanilla and orange flavors make her entire mouth happy. “This is so good,” she says excitedly.
“Let me try,” Jane says, stealing it from her.
“Yeah, but you’re giving it back,” Darcy warns her.
“It’s a little sweet,” Jane admits, licking her lips. “It’s pretty good, though.”
“I thought so,” Tony says, handing her what might be a Cape Cod and might be infinitely more complicated. “Try this. I think it’ll be more to your liking.”
The creamsicle drinks are really good and after a two or three of them, Darcy is really glad there’s a party and really wants Clint to dance with her. Unfortunately he’s nowhere to be found so she dances with Tony while Pepper dances with Coulson - who is a hilariously awkward dancer, and always about half a beat behind the music, but is really committed to trying. Then she dances with Jane and Pepper and Natalie to “I Will Survive” and “You’re So Vain” because it’s really clear who that song was written about, and sings along and then something not-entirely-fast comes on and Tony steals Pepper away from them.
“‘Scuse me.” It’s Happy and he’s offering his hand to Natalie who actually blushes. “May I have this dance?”
“I, uh. Yes.” Natalie looks flustered but grabs his hand and drags him into the middle of the crowd.
Jane giggles but there’s an undercurrent of wistfulness there. Darcy throws an arm around her and squeezes. At least three of the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists have tried to hit on Jane in the last week, in various awkward and geeky ways, but she never notices, lost in her determination to find Thor and bring him back to Earth. “C’mon,” Darcy says. “Let’s go hang out in the girls’ room.”
They wander off the bathroom, but Clint’s just outside in the hall and Darcy stops short. Jane turns when she realizes Darcy’s not next to her anymore, and then winks, the bitch, and waves at Darcy before disappearing down the hallway.
“Hey,” Darcy says, just this shade of accusing. “You’re not dancing.”
“Yeah,” Clint says. “Funny thing....”
“You should dance with me,” she interrupts, grabbing his hand and attempting to drag him back into the cafeteria, but he’s about eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than her and doesn’t budge.
“Aren’t I a little old for that?” Clint asks, rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb. It feels nice.
Darcy huffs. “You’re only like, ten years older than me,” she says. “Maybe. I’m totally sure we pass the half-your-age-plus-seven rule.”
“Half your age plus seven?” Clint asks, and takes her drink from her other hand. “Is this a Harvey Wallbanger?”
“It tastes like a creamsicle,” Darcy explains. “The rule is, if you halve your age and add seven, that’s the youngest you can date.”
“Is that a fact?” Clint asks.
“Yes. And if you’re thirty, then half your age is fifteen and plus seven is twenty-two and I’m twenty-three, and so that’s fine.”
“What if I’m over thirty?” Clint asks.
Darcy frowns because that requires backwards math, and says, “If you’re thirty-two, that’s okay. Or I guess you can be thirty-three and we can round down. But don’t be any older than that, okay?”
“I’ll try not to be,” Clint says with a funny little smile but the slow song is over and Jane is back, dragging her back onto the dance floor and Clint is still holding her drink.
“Has he said yes, yet?” Jane calls over the musical stylings of Prince, from the years when he was just a pair of goofily intertwined gender symbols.
“To what?” Darcy calls back and Jane grins at her in an entirely un-Jane-like way. “Oh, shut up.”
Everyone’s kind of hung over the day after Tony, Happy, Pepper, and Natalie leave - the first three back to Malibu and Natalie out to New York to submit her report to Nick Fury, but Clint is banging on the door of the lab at 8am.
“‘M comin’,” Darcy slurs into her travel mug and sucks sweet, sweet coffee into her digestive system.
“I bet someone could rig up an IV of that for you,” Clint suggests, kindly leaving the radio off. The town is quiet, the base is quiet, it’s like everyone but Clint was laid out by Hurricane Tony and his galpals.
“Mmph,” Darcy says and uses her last functioning brain cells to give this serious thought. Then she cuts Clint a sideways look. “It’s not nice to tease.”
Clint smiles at the road. “No,” he agrees. “But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”
Clint steals her coffee as she shoots half a dozen arrows into the desert next to or in front of the target, and then she gives up and sprawls on the hood of the Jeep next to him, using her arm to block out the sun.
“Too many creamsicle drinks?” Clint asks, taking off his sunglasses and sliding them onto Darcy’s forehead. She scoots them down over her eyes and drapes her arm over her forehead.
“More like two hours of sleep,” she admits. “On top of a couple of those creamsicle drinks.”
“They’re called Harvey Wallbangers,” Clint says. “You’re only supposed to drink one, you know. You want to go back and catch a few more hours?”
“The hell I’m only supposed to drink one,” Darcy complains. “They were good.”
“Yeah, that’s how you wind up full of vodka,” Clint says, shading his eyes with his hand. They’re quiet for a minute in the buzz of the morning heat burning off the night’s chill and then Clint adds, “Did you have fun at least?”
“Ye-ah,” Darcy replies as if anyone could not have fun at a Tony Stark shindig. “It was amazing. How on earth are you so functional?”
“I was on security,” Clint says.
“That sucks,” Darcy says. “Is that why you weren’t dancing?”
“I wasn’t dancing because I don’t dance.” Clint is doing his best to scowl and kind of failing. “I was...people-watching, mostly.”
“Yeah, me too,” Darcy agrees. “Jane and I were watching Coulson make goo-goo eyes at Pepper Potts. We think she’s Tony’s robot girlfriend. Like, he built her to take care of all of his needs, if you know what I mean.”
“She’s not a robot,” Clint assures her. “And I don’t know that she and Tony are dating, exactly.”
“She’s gotta be a robot,” Darcy protests. “Did you see those shoes she was wearing? You’ve gotta be superhuman not to fall on your face in those.”
Clint snorts. “You cleaned up pretty good yourself,” he says, nudging her ankle in its Ugg boot. “You get that dress at the Wal-Mart?”
“Ha!” Oh, Clint, Darcy thinks mournfully, no wonder you crashed and burned with Black Widow. “Would you buy that bow from Wal-Mart?” she demands. “Because if you’re going to look killer? You need to something made by a craftsman.”
She can feel Clint’s eyes on her and she gets that flash of pleasant discomfort she got when he’d quoted the Princess Bride about her breasts. It’s exciting and breath-taking and a little bit dangerous at the same time.
“Internet, huh?” he asks.
Darcy sighs. “It’s not like there’s anywhere around here a girl can shop for something that fits her personality,” she complains, and by ‘personality’, she means ‘boobs’ but she’s not going to tell Clint that. If she had to resort to etsy, that’s her own business. “So what’s the deal?” she asks, elbowing Clint in the thigh. “Tony and Pepper? Pepper and Coulson? Is there like, some big love triangle I don’t know about going on?”
Clint chuckles. “No,” he says. “Coulson likes to keep his work and private lives strictly - well, he doesn’t like to have a private life, to be honest. He just appreciates that Pepper keeps him from having to deal directly with Tony.”
“That is so bullshit,” Darcy announces. “He was totally making eyes at her.”
Clint taps his sunglasses down to frown into her eyes. “You can tell how everyone feels about everyone else just by looking at their face?” he asks.
“Well, yeah,” Darcy says, and then falters when Clint’s expression doesn’t change. “I mean, not everyone but, okay, he’s pretty obvs.” She pushes herself up on her elbows. “Just as obvs as you were with Black Widow, so what’s the deal there?”
Clint pushes his glasses back onto her face and looks away.
“I mean, if she totally ripped your heart out, you don’t have to give me the gory details,” Darcy amends. “I just figured, it looked pretty bad and maybe you’d want to talk about it.”
“Have you ever met any guy who wanted to talk about his feelings for a woman to another woman?” Clint asks.
“Fine, don’t tell me,” Darcy says, lying back on the Jeep hood again. “Bottle up all your emotions until you become a bitter, emotionless dude in a stuffy suit. Maybe you’ll get an eyepatch, too, so you can be all your repressed heroes rolled into one.”
The threat of becoming a Coulson/Nick Fury hybrid seems to defeat Clint. “Fine,” he concedes. “I ran away from the circus to be with her and she ended up using me as the patsy on a mission. Fortunately, after hour six of FBI interrogation, Nick Fury walked in and offered me a job.”
“You do a lot of running away,” Darcy observes, rolling on her side toward him.
“I like to think of it as strategic retreat,” Clint says. He leans down a little, blocking out the sun, and shifts the glasses up to the top of her head. “And I only employ it when absolutely necessary.”
Darcy’s stomach tightens. Clint is close enough to kiss and if he isn’t going to go for it, she is, because wow, he smells great and his eyes have adorable crinkles around them and he’s looking at her like...like....
A high-pitched series of beeps blares from the vicinity of Clint’s hip and he looks away and hops off the Jeep. He digs in his pocket for his phone and accepts the call with a rueful, “Hey, boss.”
Darcy waits for him to say something like, “I was just about to score, can we discuss this another time?” but instead he says, “Yeah, we got a late start. I’ll get her back ASAP,” and Darcy feels like a piece of luggage.
“In the Jeep,” Clint says, pocketing his phone again and turning toward the driver’s side door. Darcy takes a sad moment to admire his ass in jeans before she slides off the car hood and shuffles around to her own seat. “Coulson needs you back.”
“Why?” Darcy asks. “It’s not even my day to sit in the corner and do his bidding.”
“It seems,” Clint says, “that Jane’s made a breakthrough.”
Part Five