she blinded me with political science 2/10
It’s eleven in the morning, and Tony Stark is on her doorstep.
It’s eleven in the morning, and Tony Stark is on her doorstep.
Darcy considered that for a moment, and then decided to rephrase. It’s eleven in the morning, and Tony fucking Stark is on her doorstep.
“Why is Tony Stark here?” she inquired, not sure if she was asking the man himself, the empty air somewhere to the left of his shoulder, or Jane, because this was totally and completely Jane’s doing.
“Jane won’t do science with us until she has her equipment,” he said, and oh dear God, that was Tony Stark of Stark Industries, also known as Iron Man, also known as The Entirety Of Facebook Would Band Together To Call Darcy A Lying Liar.
But whatever. Darcy knew a god. She had tased a god. She could be cool. “Okay. But why are you here?”
“I’ve been asking myself that the entire plane trip over,” Tony fucking Stark said. “I told Bruce we should have a no girls allowed sign on the door to the lab, but he said that would be sexist, and apparently Stark Industries has policies about that kind of thing. Or so Pepper tells me.” He shrugged. “I’m here because Foster thought you might need the help.”
Which was sweet of Jane, although it would have been sweeter had Jane remembered to actually inform Darcy. It was also, the very small part of Darcy’s brain that was still coherent noted, complete and utter bull hockey. She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you have people for that? Heck, doesn’t SHIELD have people for that?” she asked, and oh yeah, it was a little hard to tell past the smirk, the sunglasses, and the facial hair, but that was definitely a the look of a man caught red-handed. “You’re just here because you want to play with Jane’s toys, aren’t you?”
“No.”
Darcy narrowed her eyes further. She considered reaching for the taser.
“...maybe.”
“I probably shouldn’t let you,” Darcy said. “Jane said something about wanting to prove that her toys are better than your toys.” Well, close enough. “I doubt she’d be willing to let you tinker with them before they even reach New York. I mean, that sort of defeats the purpose.”
“Not even a little?”
He sounded a tiny bit plaintive. Darcy couldn’t decide if he was hoping to melt her cold, cold heart, or if Tony Stark really was just that unaccustomed to people saying no to him. “Nope. Jane would eviscerate me.”
“What if Jane never found out?”
Tony Stark was actually wiggling his eyebrows at her. Darcy had lost all ability to be awed by him. The mystery was gone from their relationship. After a moment, she told him so.
“Harsh,” Tony said, pressing a hand to his chest, where Darcy could see the faintest blue glow from beneath his t-shirt. “I like that in a woman.” He slipped off his sunglasses and stepped inside, forcing Darcy to step back or get to know Tony Stark a lot better than was probably good for anyone’s health or well-being. “Okay. You drive a hard bargain, Betty, but I’ve got a moment to get back to and you’re not the only one Foster would eviscerate if I messed with her stuff. I’m yours to command.” The leer was more-or-less expected at that point.
“Betty?”
“Boop or Page, take your pick.” He made a vague gesture toward her chest. “I considered the Jessica Rabbit comparison, but the hair is wrong. Have you considered going red? You’d make a stunning redhead.”
“I don’t have the complexion for it,” Darcy said, leading him back into the lab. “Flattery will get you everywhere, though.”
“Will it get me a drink?”
“I think we still have some boxed wine.”
Tony winced, recovered, and waved an expansive hand at her. “Sure. Why not? When in Rome, and all.”
It took a little under five hours to pack in the lab. Tony deserved his reputation for being a genius with machinery, and most of the equipment had been built to be mobile enough to pack it in and shunt it out to the middle of the desert. It probably would have taken less time than that if Tony hadn’t kept stopping to exclaim things like, “Oh my god, is she holding this together with rubber bands?” and “Duct tape is awesome, and so are bells, but this is just ugly. Really, really, ugly. It offends every one of my senses, including but not limited to my sense of smell.” Darcy thought that he was being awfully judgy for a man who was drinking all of their wine.
By the time they had reached the five hour mark, Darcy was tucked into the passenger seat of a convertible, the top down and the radio blaring, a U-Haul trailer improbably hooked to the back. She had a good little wine buzz going and was starting to feel more than a little optimistic about the move to New York.
*
On the plane ride back, Tony soothed his offended sensibilities by tinkering with Darcy’s taser and breaking out the most expensive bottle of scotch he had on board. By the time they reached JFK, the taser was no longer street legal and the scotch was gone.
*
“Oh my god,” Darcy giggled, leaning heavily against Tony’s shoulder. “You built yourself a giant penis. You built yourself a giant penis in the sky. And you put your name on it.”
Tony grinned. “I know, right?”
*
“You got drunk with Tony Stark, let him play with your taser, spent a couple hours prank calling SHIELD headquarters, and then passed out on his couch.” Jane pressed a hand over her eyes, like looking at Darcy was just too much to deal with right at that moment. “Why, Darcy? Why do you do these things? Do you do them to hurt me?”
“Did you know that Tony does a mean Thunderbolt Ross? It’s eerie.”
“Darcy.”
Darcy sunk down a little lower in her seat, because Jane knew where all of Darcy’s Jewish guilt buttons were located, and half a pot of coffee and a pair of Tony’s sunglasses just had not adequately prepared Darcy to deal with her boss while hungover and operating on about three hours of sleep. Someone really ought to have told her that graduating college also meant giving up her ability to recover from a solid night of binge drinking.
Jane took a deep breath and continued. “And then, apparently, he offered us a suite in Stark Tower, and you saw fit to accept on both of our behalves.”
“Okay, that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do,” Darcy protested, because she couldn’t actually remember any such offer, but if it had actually happened then she was totally okay with living at Tony’s Giant Penis Sky Mansion instead of in whatever government housing SHIELD had planned to put them in. “I don’t want to live with the suits. The walls are probably beige. Beige makes me break out in hives.” She eyed Jane thoughtfully. “I bet the bathrooms here all have Jacuzzis. I’m you assistant. I’m assisting you by facilitating living arrangements for you somewhere not-beige.” She gestured around the living area of what Tony had called his “temporary living quarters until I’ve ironed the Loki-crater out of my floor, pass the gin.” “Look around you, Jane. All this could be yours.”
“It is pretty nice,” Jane murmured, before shaking herself and retreating to more solid ground. “That’s not the point though. Why did you think drinking with Stark was a good idea in the first place? I mean, I’m pretty sure that man could guzzle gasoline straight from the pump and not suffer worse than a bit of a headache the next morning.”
After brief consideration, Darcy let the sunglasses slide forward on her nose a bit so that she could stare at Jane reproachfully. The sunlight hurt like a rampant bitch, but it was totally worth it for effect. “His girlfriend was stuck in some kind of emergency shareholders meeting. Fallout from the whole, uhm, battle of New York thing. He missed a moment because he went to tow your stuff from New Mexico. A big, romantic moment. He was sad. I couldn’t leave him to drink alone like that.”
Which was basically complete and utter bullshit. Maybe Tony had been sad, but it was impossible to tell with the beard and the smirk and everything. Darcy had stayed to drink with him because after the bottle of scotch it had seemed like a grand idea. Other than the hangover, it had been. Tony’s Thunderbolt Ross was pretty damn good, but Darcy did a brilliant Lady Sif. She had those Asgardian speech patterns down, baby.
Jane probably even knew it was bullshit, but that didn’t keep her gaze from softening or the scowl from fading on her face. Jane had been kind of a sucker for the romantic stuff since Thor had left. She and Darcy had once spent an entire weekend marathoning Hallmark movies. “Oh. Okay then. I guess. But don’t do it again, alright? They guys over at SHIELD were really not happy with you two this morning.”
“And we can move in?”
The admiring glance that Jane cast around was probably meant to be surreptitious. It totally, totally wasn’t. “I guess. Tell Stark that this doesn’t mean I work for him, though. We’re with SHIELD.”
When Darcy smiled, it felt a little smug. “Mmm, sure, boss lady. Better Stark than suits, I say, but it’s completely your call.” She snuggled a bit further back onto the couch, her body curved around her coffee cup and her feet tucked beneath a blanket. The blanket had been covering her from the waist up when she’d awoken that morning, and she hadn’t decided yet whether it had been Tony’s drunken attempt to tuck her in, or some drunk logic desire to cover her boobs. She didn’t judge; a lot of people had a hard time not looking at her boobs, especially when they were drunk. Jane had a hard time not looking at her boobs after a few glasses of wine.
Jane sighed.
*
The walls of their new suite at Stark Tower were painted a bright, shocking pink.
Darcy grinned. “I never would have guessed it of Tony. Then again, he does fly around in a suit roughly the same color as my Russian Red lipstick, so maybe I should’ve.”
“Mr. Stark wished you to know that I relayed your desire to not live with beige wall coverings to him, and that he both heard and was willing to accommodate that desire,” the walls said. Or JARVIS. It was probably JARVIS.
“That’s so creepy,” Darcy muttered, then cleared her throat. “Ah, no offense.”
Her daddy hadn’t raised any fools, and he had always told her to be polite to waitstaff, security guards, and receptionists, not only because it was the right thing to do but because those were the people who could mess you up faster than you could say ‘boo’ if they took a dislike to you. Darcy wasn’t sure where sentient computer programs fell on that list, but she was also pretty sure she didn’t want to find out.
“None taken, I assure you.”
Even the computer programs were sarcastic at Stark Tower. Darcy was going to love it here.
“I won’t be able to sleep here,” Jane said, and she looked a little dazed as she stepped into the suite. “I feel like the walls are yelling at me.”
Trust Jane to be more disturbed by the paintjob than the A.I. that was probably watching their every move. Darcy shook her head and followed Jane inside. “Dibs on whichever room is biggest.”
*
Darcy spent most of the rest of the week finding her feet at SHIELD Central. One lesson she learned extremely quickly: when working for an organization as big as SHIELD, being Jane’s lackey sort of meant being everyone’s lackey.
She couldn’t quite bring herself to resent it. There wasn’t much she could do for Jane here, where there were barrels full of eager lab assistants, all willing and able to help with Jane’s work, all fully recognizing how brilliant Jane was and kissing her ass accordingly. Mostly Darcy fetched coffee and made sure that Jane saw the outside world and her bed at least once per day. She ended up fetching a lot of other coffees and files and mysterious briefcases for SHIELD agents while she was at it, and if it wasn’t the most fulfilling work she’d ever done and not even remotely what she had imagined doing after finishing her degree, at least it was something to do with her day and draw a paycheck for at the end of the month.
On her third day there, a woman she vaguely remembered as having led the SHIELD mandated orientation she had dozed through stopped her in the hall. “Lewis, right?” She looked distracted, but her blue eyes still managed to be intense as they glanced Darcy over.
“That’s me,” Darcy said, and offered the woman the best smile she could manage while juggling two cup holders filled with Styrofoam coffee cups and secretly wondering if somehow the feds knew that she hadn’t even cracked the cover on the manual they had given her at orientation.
“Your file says that you have an MA in Political Science,” the woman said. “We’re always looking for more analysts, and you’ve already been vetted. Might be a better place for you than where you’re at.” She jerked her chin sharply toward the coffee, the file briefs tucked under Darcy’s arm.
It was a kind offer, in its way, although Darcy rather suspected it originated more from the military-like desire not to waste good soldiers than it did from actual kindness. She was almost tempted, except for the fact that she really didn’t want to let the Borg assimilate her any further, and she was pretty sure that no matter how smart all of Janie’s new little science babies were, none of they would bother to remind the woman to eat and sleep and not do physics all day, every day.
“Thanks, but I’m good.”
“Tell me if you change your mind,” the woman - Agent Heller? Hearst? Helsinki? - said, and then continued on her way down the hall as if they had never spoken.
*
The first time Darcy met Nick Fury, it was because Jane had caught her pushing a cart from the mailroom around and dragged her into the big man’s office. There was crazy in Jane’s eyes, lots and lots of crazy. Darcy did not think that boded well for anyone.
“Mine,” Jane said, because she got a little monosyllabic when she was sleep deprived and half of her brain was still on whatever ridiculously complex problem she was working on in the lab. She was clutching at Darcy’s arm possessively, a fact that Darcy wasn’t about to point out because she really didn’t want either the man behind the desk or her currently rather terrifying boss to turn their attention to her. “Mine, no one else’s.” She pointed an accusatory finger at Fury. “That was part of our deal. You said.”
Fury rubbed a finger between his eye and his eye-patch like he was developing a migraine on the spot. Darcy could sympathize. “Fine. I’ll tell my agents to leave her alone. Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Jane said, before turning and stomping out of the room, born forth by her own righteous anger and completely oblivious to the fact that she was leaving Darcy behind.
Darcy looked at Fury.
Fury looked at Darcy.
“Physicists,” she said with a shrug.
“Jesus Christ, tell me about it,” Fury muttered.
For one bright, shining moment, Darcy found herself in perfect charity with the director of SHIELD.
“Get the fuck out of my office,” Fury said.
Darcy got the fuck out of his office.
*
It was basically inevitable that Darcy would meet Pepper Potts, being as she lived about two floors down from the woman. It was more surprising that she managed to meet Pepper during that first week living at Stark Tower, since Pepper spent a good deal of her time jet setting around the world and (Darcy presumed) keeping Stark Industries from crashing and burning, and most of her time at home with Tony. On the Friday after Darcy arrived in New York, she found herself waiting for the elevator beside a meticulously put-together redhead that could only be Pepper Potts.
Yeah, she wasn’t even going to pretend that she hadn’t kept the copy of Forbes that had featured Potts on the cover, along with their list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. It was sitting at the bottom of one of the boxes Darcy still hadn’t managed to unpack.
Potts cast her a brief glance, and then a longer one. “It’s Darcy Lewis, right? Doctor Foster’s assistant?”
It was actually really weird to realize that she had come to a point in her life where anyone featured in Forbes knew her name. “Yeah.”
The elevator arrived, and Potts motioned Darcy inside. “I’m Pepper.” Darcy accepted the offered hand, still marveling a little at the fact that after gods and SHIELD and Tony Stark, this was the interaction that seemed the most surreal. Pepper was still eyeing her. “Tony likes you,” she said after a moment.
Darcy was suddenly confronted with the terrifying possibility that she was about to get a don’t you dare touch my man or else talk from Pepper Potts. “I’m pretty sure Tony thinks my name is Betty.”
A smile sketched its way over Pepper’s lips, tired but solid and sincere enough that Darcy relaxed a little. “True, but he also sent me an extremely typo-ridden text in the middle of an emergency shareholders meeting to let me know that, and I quote, ‘Foster’s taste in lab assistants is surprisingly un-terrible.’”
“We may have gotten incredibly drunk,” Darcy said solemnly. She felt a little bit like she was ratting out Tony, but she also sort of felt like anyone who could wear heels that high without so much as a flinch of pain was not someone to be trifled with.
“You work with Doctor Foster, so you have some experience wrangling PhDs,” Pepper said as the elevator rose. “I don’t have time to find Tony another PA right now. He’s gone through eight of them in the last two months. I’ll pay you whatever your going rate is to make sure he occasionally sleeps in a bed and doesn’t blow up my twelve percent of the tower.” There was a faint, fond twist to her lips as she said the last, a joke that Darcy didn’t get hidden away somewhere in the sentence.
Actually, scratch that. The joke was probably that the CEO of Stark Industries was asking her to babysit the Stark of Stark Industries. Darcy scrambled for a response. “I work for Jane.”
Pepper nodded like she understood that, and maybe she did, since she’d been Tony’s assistant for a long time before she’d run his company. “I get it. Keep working for Jane. Just prod Tony out of his workshop once in a while. When there’s a meeting he really and truly has to attend, remind him a time or five the morning of. That kind of thing. Just until I find a replacement.”
Darcy thought about that. She thought about how Jane got absorbed in her work to the point of neglecting everything else, and she tried to imagine caring about someone like that beyond the point of she’s-my-friend-and-I-love-her-even-thought-her-reality-switch-is-disengaged. She remembered watching New York from states away, and seeing flashes of red and gold that could have been Thor or could have been a man in a metal suit, and tried to revise her calculation to account for the idea of really caring about someone who thought it was an excellent idea to battle aliens and space eels and who the hell knew what else. She guessed she could understand why Pepper might want another hand on deck to make sure Tony didn’t, like, accidentally kill himself.
“Okay,” she said, without really meaning to. She didn’t take the word back though, letting it slip through her lips and away rather than clutching it to her mouth like a secret. She could do a good deed once in a while. Besides, Pepper was going to pay her. “Yeah, sure. I can do that.”
Pepper smiled. “I’ll have someone draw up the paperwork.”
*
The first time that Darcy met Doctor Bruce Banner, it went a little something like this:
She hadn’t actually ventured onto the floors of Stark Tower devoted to R&D at any point during her first week in New York. Jane was only there about half of the time that she was at home and Darcy didn’t see any real point in exposing herself to that much science and that many science people during her off hours. When Jane was there, she was usually there with Erik and Tony and one to two people who were just as ridiculously smart as they were, and even if Erik was still a wee bit concussed due to (Darcy had been told) alien force field (what), the IQ levels in that lab still had to be approaching toxicity to anyone with a lowly Master’s degree.
JARVIS was usually willing to urge Jane to call it a night around two or three in the morning, and Jane, unlike Tony, was usually willing to obey, so Darcy had managed to avoid venturing into the strange, uncharted, and frankly daunting territory that made up the top ten floors of Stark Tower beneath Tony’s wrecked penthouse.
She felt totally fine about this. She was at peace with her own cowardice, motivated as it was by the desire not to deal with Jane times, like, four.
However, she had just finished signing the paperwork presented to her by one of Stark Industries’ in-house attorneys, and she was emboldened by new purpose: make sure Tony ate, make Pepper proud.
She looked at the door to the lab contemplatively. Someone had taken a sharpie to it, so that now, as well as having a neat little chrome plaque that proclaimed this to be Lab #12, it was labeled as private, keep out, this means you. no gi, with a sad little line trailing down from the i like the note writer had interrupted. Below that was another quickly scribbled set of words, this one reading, beware of h and ending in a sharp upward slash. Poor Tony. They wouldn’t even let him finger-paint on his own walls.
She knocked on the door.
The door opened.
Someone staggered out and into her. Darcy stumbled back a step, found herself steadied by a hand that caught on the collar of her sweater and then quickly withdrew, and refused to acknowledge that the sound she had made was more half-indignant half-startled snort than anything more delicate than that. By the time that Darcy had gotten her bearings, the man who had banged into her was a good two feet away and staring at the now-closed door to the lab like it had done him some kind of deep and personal injury.
“Tony isn’t here,” the man said, still without looking at her and in the sort of flat monotone that reminded Darcy of nothing so much as that time she had gone to see her oldest nephew’s school play, and been treated to a good two hours of the kid wading with a great lack of enthusiasm through his lines.
Which brought Darcy to her real point: how she was obviously being fed a line. She hadn’t even mentioned Tony. Which meant that Tony knew she was coming, and had obviously decided to distract her with one of his science flunkies. Which meant that Tony thought that she was so easily deterred that he could derail her from her mission by flinging mildly attractive scientists in her path, and she just couldn’t allow that to stand.
“Hmm,” Darcy said, and stepped deliberately forward. “Who said I was looking for Tony?” She used her best low-voiced purr when she said it, the one she had learned watching old Mae West and Rita Hayworth movies with her grandma.
He stopped looking at the door and started looking at her, although he still wasn’t making eye contact. He also wasn’t looking down her shirt, which was a little surprising; instead, he seemed to be focusing somewhere between her left cheek and her shoulder. There was a slight twist to his lips, a not-quite-smile that treaded the line between wry and mocking, and which might have been enough to make Darcy remove the modifier when thinking of him as attractive had she had any level of certainty that he wasn’t mocking her. “Tony did,” he said placidly.
Darcy beamed at him. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” She reached up to pat his cheek, but stopped when he flinched back out of range. Okay. Didn’t like to be touched. Noted. She let her hand drop to the door of the lab instead, shoving it open with one hard push and stepping around him to go inside. With what sounded like a heartfelt sigh of relief, he followed.
“Traitor,” Tony said, pointing an accusatory work glove covered finger at her without so much as glancing up from whatever jumbled piece of metal he had spread out on the table in front of him.
That was enough to pull Darcy up short, because it wanted clarification. “Which one of us?”
“Both of you!” Tony exclaimed. “You,” his finger remained steadily on Darcy, “for going over to the enemy camp.” He looked up at her briefly, “That hurt, Betty. I thought we were bros,” before going back to his work and swinging the finger toward science dude behind her. “And you for telling her where to find me. Seriously, Bruce, I let you play with all my cool stuff, and you just sell me out. You’re like Benedict Arnold, only meaner and greener.”
“Bruce?” Darcy asked, flicking a glance over her shoulder. “Banner? Jane mentioned you.”
Doctor Science was looking a little tense, by which Darcy meant that if his shoulders went up any higher they’d be around his ears, even if the funny little half-smile was still solidly in place. “Really? What did she say?”
The too-casual way he said it told Darcy that there was definitely a wrong answer, but damned if she knew what it was, so she just barreled on. “Something about anti-election collusions? I don’t know. She was fangirling pretty hard at the time, and I have trouble understanding her when she gets like that. Partially the technical jargon, partially the high-pitched squirrel voice, you know?”
She finally got some eye contact from Tony, even if it was a little horrified. “Anti-electron collisions. Jesus. How are you a lab assistant? How are you Foster’s lab assistant?”
Darcy shrugged. “I was the only applicant.” She smiled at him. “And now I’m your assistant too.”
“What did I do to deserve that?”
“Do you want the entire list?” Bruce murmured as he wove around her to approach the table Tony was working at. Darcy cast him a look that couldn’t help but be a little admiring, because she felt she could forgive him for maybe-mocking her if he was going to mock Tony too.
“Traitor.”
“We’ll start with you throwing me at lab assistants like a projectile. That was dangerous.”
“Only if by ‘dangerous’ you mean ‘hilarious.’”
“She could have been hurt,” Bruce said, in tones low enough Darcy was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to hear. “A lot of people could have been hurt. It’s one thing if you want to put yourself in harm’s way by poking at me, but you really shouldn’t be spreading the risk around. That’s not the good kind of sharing, Tony.”
Darcy cleared her throat pointedly.
They both looked at her.
“Girls, you’re both pretty, and there’s no reason to break up over me,” she said distinctly. “I’m wearing sensible shoes, and well equipped to survive a little scientist flinging. Now, if that’s settled, you,” she pointed at Tony, because turnabout was fair play, “will be downstairs in half an hour to eat a sandwich, or I’m turning on the sprinklers.”
Tony lifted a brow. “I’m pretty sure you don’t have the override codes you’d need to do that, cupcake.”
“I’m pretty sure Pepper does.” Darcy might’ve felt mean for playing dirty, but she was pretty sure Tony could handle it and equally certain that was about all he would respond to. “Care to place any bets on whether or not she’ll give them to me, once I tell her what they’re for? Now, you can either spent the next thirty minutes working, or you can spend it changing the override codes, at which point I’ll just come up here with a bucket and do the job myself. Do we have an understanding?”
“Did Pepper know what she was getting me into when she hired you as my PA?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
Tony narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, and dear God, Darcy could practically see the terrifying hamster wheel that was his brain turning away. Probably the hamster was drunk, but that didn’t keep it from moving about a billion times faster than her little brain hamster ever did. “How about you bring me my sandwich here?”
“Sure thing,” Darcy said, “as long as you agree to sleep in your own snug little bed tonight, and promise to actually eat the sandwich rather than using it to grow mold cultures.” She let her eyes stray to the line of coffee mugs on his worktable. There were seven of them, and they were organized by size and color. Darcy was pretty sure that was Bruce’s work; Tony didn’t seem like the type, and she had shared lab space with Jane, so she thought it more likely that half of those cups belonged to her than that she had lent a hand to anything even remotely resembling organization of them. “I’m coming back for those mugs,” Darcy said contemplatively. “Because that? That is disgusting.”
“But the mold cultures are my friends.”
“I’m worried that you’re going to forget and drink your friends.”
“They have names and everything.”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Do we have a deal?”
Tony smirked. “Sure. I solemnly swear-.”
“To JARVIS.”
Tony winced, but the smirk made a reappearance a moment later. “I solemnly swear to JARVIS that I will eat every last bit of the delicious pastrami on rye sandwich that you’re going to run down to Katz’s and get me, and that at some point tonight I’ll sleep.”
That was the best she was going to get, so Darcy nodded. It hadn’t been bad, for the first engagement in what was going to probably be a long and gory war. “Good enough.” She saluted both him and Bruce, and turned toward the door. “See you in a few, Tony, Doctor Sexy.”
Bruce dropped the screwdriver he had picked up from the edge of Tony’s worktable. Darcy decided to count that as a much less mixed victory than the one she had won over Tony.
As she approached the door, she heard Bruce speak again, in that same low tone that he obviously thought she couldn’t hear from ten feet away. “That’s Jane’s ‘attractive brunette colleague, Betty?’”
“Why?” Tony asked, and he didn’t bother to lower his voice in the slightest, so Darcy could still hear the smirk in it. “Who did you think I was talking about?”
“Some days, I don’t like you very much,” Bruce said.
“That’s cool,” Darcy heard Tony reply, just before the door swung shut, “since most days, you’re one of the only people who includes ‘some days’ and ‘very much’ in that statement, so I just hear, ‘Tony, you’re the best’ every time you say it.”
By the time Darcy got back to the lab, Bruce had left, and she spent one baffling moment trying to decide if she was disappointed. She stole the pickle spear from Tony’s takeout container in retaliation, and didn’t think of it much more after that.
It’s eleven in the morning, and Tony Stark is on her doorstep.
Darcy considered that for a moment, and then decided to rephrase. It’s eleven in the morning, and Tony fucking Stark is on her doorstep.
“Why is Tony Stark here?” she inquired, not sure if she was asking the man himself, the empty air somewhere to the left of his shoulder, or Jane, because this was totally and completely Jane’s doing.
“Jane won’t do science with us until she has her equipment,” he said, and oh dear God, that was Tony Stark of Stark Industries, also known as Iron Man, also known as The Entirety Of Facebook Would Band Together To Call Darcy A Lying Liar.
But whatever. Darcy knew a god. She had tased a god. She could be cool. “Okay. But why are you here?”
“I’ve been asking myself that the entire plane trip over,” Tony fucking Stark said. “I told Bruce we should have a no girls allowed sign on the door to the lab, but he said that would be sexist, and apparently Stark Industries has policies about that kind of thing. Or so Pepper tells me.” He shrugged. “I’m here because Foster thought you might need the help.”
Which was sweet of Jane, although it would have been sweeter had Jane remembered to actually inform Darcy. It was also, the very small part of Darcy’s brain that was still coherent noted, complete and utter bull hockey. She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you have people for that? Heck, doesn’t SHIELD have people for that?” she asked, and oh yeah, it was a little hard to tell past the smirk, the sunglasses, and the facial hair, but that was definitely a the look of a man caught red-handed. “You’re just here because you want to play with Jane’s toys, aren’t you?”
“No.”
Darcy narrowed her eyes further. She considered reaching for the taser.
“...maybe.”
“I probably shouldn’t let you,” Darcy said. “Jane said something about wanting to prove that her toys are better than your toys.” Well, close enough. “I doubt she’d be willing to let you tinker with them before they even reach New York. I mean, that sort of defeats the purpose.”
“Not even a little?”
He sounded a tiny bit plaintive. Darcy couldn’t decide if he was hoping to melt her cold, cold heart, or if Tony Stark really was just that unaccustomed to people saying no to him. “Nope. Jane would eviscerate me.”
“What if Jane never found out?”
Tony Stark was actually wiggling his eyebrows at her. Darcy had lost all ability to be awed by him. The mystery was gone from their relationship. After a moment, she told him so.
“Harsh,” Tony said, pressing a hand to his chest, where Darcy could see the faintest blue glow from beneath his t-shirt. “I like that in a woman.” He slipped off his sunglasses and stepped inside, forcing Darcy to step back or get to know Tony Stark a lot better than was probably good for anyone’s health or well-being. “Okay. You drive a hard bargain, Betty, but I’ve got a moment to get back to and you’re not the only one Foster would eviscerate if I messed with her stuff. I’m yours to command.” The leer was more-or-less expected at that point.
“Betty?”
“Boop or Page, take your pick.” He made a vague gesture toward her chest. “I considered the Jessica Rabbit comparison, but the hair is wrong. Have you considered going red? You’d make a stunning redhead.”
“I don’t have the complexion for it,” Darcy said, leading him back into the lab. “Flattery will get you everywhere, though.”
“Will it get me a drink?”
“I think we still have some boxed wine.”
Tony winced, recovered, and waved an expansive hand at her. “Sure. Why not? When in Rome, and all.”
It took a little under five hours to pack in the lab. Tony deserved his reputation for being a genius with machinery, and most of the equipment had been built to be mobile enough to pack it in and shunt it out to the middle of the desert. It probably would have taken less time than that if Tony hadn’t kept stopping to exclaim things like, “Oh my god, is she holding this together with rubber bands?” and “Duct tape is awesome, and so are bells, but this is just ugly. Really, really, ugly. It offends every one of my senses, including but not limited to my sense of smell.” Darcy thought that he was being awfully judgy for a man who was drinking all of their wine.
By the time they had reached the five hour mark, Darcy was tucked into the passenger seat of a convertible, the top down and the radio blaring, a U-Haul trailer improbably hooked to the back. She had a good little wine buzz going and was starting to feel more than a little optimistic about the move to New York.
*
On the plane ride back, Tony soothed his offended sensibilities by tinkering with Darcy’s taser and breaking out the most expensive bottle of scotch he had on board. By the time they reached JFK, the taser was no longer street legal and the scotch was gone.
*
“Oh my god,” Darcy giggled, leaning heavily against Tony’s shoulder. “You built yourself a giant penis. You built yourself a giant penis in the sky. And you put your name on it.”
Tony grinned. “I know, right?”
*
“You got drunk with Tony Stark, let him play with your taser, spent a couple hours prank calling SHIELD headquarters, and then passed out on his couch.” Jane pressed a hand over her eyes, like looking at Darcy was just too much to deal with right at that moment. “Why, Darcy? Why do you do these things? Do you do them to hurt me?”
“Did you know that Tony does a mean Thunderbolt Ross? It’s eerie.”
“Darcy.”
Darcy sunk down a little lower in her seat, because Jane knew where all of Darcy’s Jewish guilt buttons were located, and half a pot of coffee and a pair of Tony’s sunglasses just had not adequately prepared Darcy to deal with her boss while hungover and operating on about three hours of sleep. Someone really ought to have told her that graduating college also meant giving up her ability to recover from a solid night of binge drinking.
Jane took a deep breath and continued. “And then, apparently, he offered us a suite in Stark Tower, and you saw fit to accept on both of our behalves.”
“Okay, that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do,” Darcy protested, because she couldn’t actually remember any such offer, but if it had actually happened then she was totally okay with living at Tony’s Giant Penis Sky Mansion instead of in whatever government housing SHIELD had planned to put them in. “I don’t want to live with the suits. The walls are probably beige. Beige makes me break out in hives.” She eyed Jane thoughtfully. “I bet the bathrooms here all have Jacuzzis. I’m you assistant. I’m assisting you by facilitating living arrangements for you somewhere not-beige.” She gestured around the living area of what Tony had called his “temporary living quarters until I’ve ironed the Loki-crater out of my floor, pass the gin.” “Look around you, Jane. All this could be yours.”
“It is pretty nice,” Jane murmured, before shaking herself and retreating to more solid ground. “That’s not the point though. Why did you think drinking with Stark was a good idea in the first place? I mean, I’m pretty sure that man could guzzle gasoline straight from the pump and not suffer worse than a bit of a headache the next morning.”
After brief consideration, Darcy let the sunglasses slide forward on her nose a bit so that she could stare at Jane reproachfully. The sunlight hurt like a rampant bitch, but it was totally worth it for effect. “His girlfriend was stuck in some kind of emergency shareholders meeting. Fallout from the whole, uhm, battle of New York thing. He missed a moment because he went to tow your stuff from New Mexico. A big, romantic moment. He was sad. I couldn’t leave him to drink alone like that.”
Which was basically complete and utter bullshit. Maybe Tony had been sad, but it was impossible to tell with the beard and the smirk and everything. Darcy had stayed to drink with him because after the bottle of scotch it had seemed like a grand idea. Other than the hangover, it had been. Tony’s Thunderbolt Ross was pretty damn good, but Darcy did a brilliant Lady Sif. She had those Asgardian speech patterns down, baby.
Jane probably even knew it was bullshit, but that didn’t keep her gaze from softening or the scowl from fading on her face. Jane had been kind of a sucker for the romantic stuff since Thor had left. She and Darcy had once spent an entire weekend marathoning Hallmark movies. “Oh. Okay then. I guess. But don’t do it again, alright? They guys over at SHIELD were really not happy with you two this morning.”
“And we can move in?”
The admiring glance that Jane cast around was probably meant to be surreptitious. It totally, totally wasn’t. “I guess. Tell Stark that this doesn’t mean I work for him, though. We’re with SHIELD.”
When Darcy smiled, it felt a little smug. “Mmm, sure, boss lady. Better Stark than suits, I say, but it’s completely your call.” She snuggled a bit further back onto the couch, her body curved around her coffee cup and her feet tucked beneath a blanket. The blanket had been covering her from the waist up when she’d awoken that morning, and she hadn’t decided yet whether it had been Tony’s drunken attempt to tuck her in, or some drunk logic desire to cover her boobs. She didn’t judge; a lot of people had a hard time not looking at her boobs, especially when they were drunk. Jane had a hard time not looking at her boobs after a few glasses of wine.
Jane sighed.
*
The walls of their new suite at Stark Tower were painted a bright, shocking pink.
Darcy grinned. “I never would have guessed it of Tony. Then again, he does fly around in a suit roughly the same color as my Russian Red lipstick, so maybe I should’ve.”
“Mr. Stark wished you to know that I relayed your desire to not live with beige wall coverings to him, and that he both heard and was willing to accommodate that desire,” the walls said. Or JARVIS. It was probably JARVIS.
“That’s so creepy,” Darcy muttered, then cleared her throat. “Ah, no offense.”
Her daddy hadn’t raised any fools, and he had always told her to be polite to waitstaff, security guards, and receptionists, not only because it was the right thing to do but because those were the people who could mess you up faster than you could say ‘boo’ if they took a dislike to you. Darcy wasn’t sure where sentient computer programs fell on that list, but she was also pretty sure she didn’t want to find out.
“None taken, I assure you.”
Even the computer programs were sarcastic at Stark Tower. Darcy was going to love it here.
“I won’t be able to sleep here,” Jane said, and she looked a little dazed as she stepped into the suite. “I feel like the walls are yelling at me.”
Trust Jane to be more disturbed by the paintjob than the A.I. that was probably watching their every move. Darcy shook her head and followed Jane inside. “Dibs on whichever room is biggest.”
*
Darcy spent most of the rest of the week finding her feet at SHIELD Central. One lesson she learned extremely quickly: when working for an organization as big as SHIELD, being Jane’s lackey sort of meant being everyone’s lackey.
She couldn’t quite bring herself to resent it. There wasn’t much she could do for Jane here, where there were barrels full of eager lab assistants, all willing and able to help with Jane’s work, all fully recognizing how brilliant Jane was and kissing her ass accordingly. Mostly Darcy fetched coffee and made sure that Jane saw the outside world and her bed at least once per day. She ended up fetching a lot of other coffees and files and mysterious briefcases for SHIELD agents while she was at it, and if it wasn’t the most fulfilling work she’d ever done and not even remotely what she had imagined doing after finishing her degree, at least it was something to do with her day and draw a paycheck for at the end of the month.
On her third day there, a woman she vaguely remembered as having led the SHIELD mandated orientation she had dozed through stopped her in the hall. “Lewis, right?” She looked distracted, but her blue eyes still managed to be intense as they glanced Darcy over.
“That’s me,” Darcy said, and offered the woman the best smile she could manage while juggling two cup holders filled with Styrofoam coffee cups and secretly wondering if somehow the feds knew that she hadn’t even cracked the cover on the manual they had given her at orientation.
“Your file says that you have an MA in Political Science,” the woman said. “We’re always looking for more analysts, and you’ve already been vetted. Might be a better place for you than where you’re at.” She jerked her chin sharply toward the coffee, the file briefs tucked under Darcy’s arm.
It was a kind offer, in its way, although Darcy rather suspected it originated more from the military-like desire not to waste good soldiers than it did from actual kindness. She was almost tempted, except for the fact that she really didn’t want to let the Borg assimilate her any further, and she was pretty sure that no matter how smart all of Janie’s new little science babies were, none of they would bother to remind the woman to eat and sleep and not do physics all day, every day.
“Thanks, but I’m good.”
“Tell me if you change your mind,” the woman - Agent Heller? Hearst? Helsinki? - said, and then continued on her way down the hall as if they had never spoken.
*
The first time Darcy met Nick Fury, it was because Jane had caught her pushing a cart from the mailroom around and dragged her into the big man’s office. There was crazy in Jane’s eyes, lots and lots of crazy. Darcy did not think that boded well for anyone.
“Mine,” Jane said, because she got a little monosyllabic when she was sleep deprived and half of her brain was still on whatever ridiculously complex problem she was working on in the lab. She was clutching at Darcy’s arm possessively, a fact that Darcy wasn’t about to point out because she really didn’t want either the man behind the desk or her currently rather terrifying boss to turn their attention to her. “Mine, no one else’s.” She pointed an accusatory finger at Fury. “That was part of our deal. You said.”
Fury rubbed a finger between his eye and his eye-patch like he was developing a migraine on the spot. Darcy could sympathize. “Fine. I’ll tell my agents to leave her alone. Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Jane said, before turning and stomping out of the room, born forth by her own righteous anger and completely oblivious to the fact that she was leaving Darcy behind.
Darcy looked at Fury.
Fury looked at Darcy.
“Physicists,” she said with a shrug.
“Jesus Christ, tell me about it,” Fury muttered.
For one bright, shining moment, Darcy found herself in perfect charity with the director of SHIELD.
“Get the fuck out of my office,” Fury said.
Darcy got the fuck out of his office.
*
It was basically inevitable that Darcy would meet Pepper Potts, being as she lived about two floors down from the woman. It was more surprising that she managed to meet Pepper during that first week living at Stark Tower, since Pepper spent a good deal of her time jet setting around the world and (Darcy presumed) keeping Stark Industries from crashing and burning, and most of her time at home with Tony. On the Friday after Darcy arrived in New York, she found herself waiting for the elevator beside a meticulously put-together redhead that could only be Pepper Potts.
Yeah, she wasn’t even going to pretend that she hadn’t kept the copy of Forbes that had featured Potts on the cover, along with their list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. It was sitting at the bottom of one of the boxes Darcy still hadn’t managed to unpack.
Potts cast her a brief glance, and then a longer one. “It’s Darcy Lewis, right? Doctor Foster’s assistant?”
It was actually really weird to realize that she had come to a point in her life where anyone featured in Forbes knew her name. “Yeah.”
The elevator arrived, and Potts motioned Darcy inside. “I’m Pepper.” Darcy accepted the offered hand, still marveling a little at the fact that after gods and SHIELD and Tony Stark, this was the interaction that seemed the most surreal. Pepper was still eyeing her. “Tony likes you,” she said after a moment.
Darcy was suddenly confronted with the terrifying possibility that she was about to get a don’t you dare touch my man or else talk from Pepper Potts. “I’m pretty sure Tony thinks my name is Betty.”
A smile sketched its way over Pepper’s lips, tired but solid and sincere enough that Darcy relaxed a little. “True, but he also sent me an extremely typo-ridden text in the middle of an emergency shareholders meeting to let me know that, and I quote, ‘Foster’s taste in lab assistants is surprisingly un-terrible.’”
“We may have gotten incredibly drunk,” Darcy said solemnly. She felt a little bit like she was ratting out Tony, but she also sort of felt like anyone who could wear heels that high without so much as a flinch of pain was not someone to be trifled with.
“You work with Doctor Foster, so you have some experience wrangling PhDs,” Pepper said as the elevator rose. “I don’t have time to find Tony another PA right now. He’s gone through eight of them in the last two months. I’ll pay you whatever your going rate is to make sure he occasionally sleeps in a bed and doesn’t blow up my twelve percent of the tower.” There was a faint, fond twist to her lips as she said the last, a joke that Darcy didn’t get hidden away somewhere in the sentence.
Actually, scratch that. The joke was probably that the CEO of Stark Industries was asking her to babysit the Stark of Stark Industries. Darcy scrambled for a response. “I work for Jane.”
Pepper nodded like she understood that, and maybe she did, since she’d been Tony’s assistant for a long time before she’d run his company. “I get it. Keep working for Jane. Just prod Tony out of his workshop once in a while. When there’s a meeting he really and truly has to attend, remind him a time or five the morning of. That kind of thing. Just until I find a replacement.”
Darcy thought about that. She thought about how Jane got absorbed in her work to the point of neglecting everything else, and she tried to imagine caring about someone like that beyond the point of she’s-my-friend-and-I-love-her-even-thought-her-reality-switch-is-disengaged. She remembered watching New York from states away, and seeing flashes of red and gold that could have been Thor or could have been a man in a metal suit, and tried to revise her calculation to account for the idea of really caring about someone who thought it was an excellent idea to battle aliens and space eels and who the hell knew what else. She guessed she could understand why Pepper might want another hand on deck to make sure Tony didn’t, like, accidentally kill himself.
“Okay,” she said, without really meaning to. She didn’t take the word back though, letting it slip through her lips and away rather than clutching it to her mouth like a secret. She could do a good deed once in a while. Besides, Pepper was going to pay her. “Yeah, sure. I can do that.”
Pepper smiled. “I’ll have someone draw up the paperwork.”
*
The first time that Darcy met Doctor Bruce Banner, it went a little something like this:
She hadn’t actually ventured onto the floors of Stark Tower devoted to R&D at any point during her first week in New York. Jane was only there about half of the time that she was at home and Darcy didn’t see any real point in exposing herself to that much science and that many science people during her off hours. When Jane was there, she was usually there with Erik and Tony and one to two people who were just as ridiculously smart as they were, and even if Erik was still a wee bit concussed due to (Darcy had been told) alien force field (what), the IQ levels in that lab still had to be approaching toxicity to anyone with a lowly Master’s degree.
JARVIS was usually willing to urge Jane to call it a night around two or three in the morning, and Jane, unlike Tony, was usually willing to obey, so Darcy had managed to avoid venturing into the strange, uncharted, and frankly daunting territory that made up the top ten floors of Stark Tower beneath Tony’s wrecked penthouse.
She felt totally fine about this. She was at peace with her own cowardice, motivated as it was by the desire not to deal with Jane times, like, four.
However, she had just finished signing the paperwork presented to her by one of Stark Industries’ in-house attorneys, and she was emboldened by new purpose: make sure Tony ate, make Pepper proud.
She looked at the door to the lab contemplatively. Someone had taken a sharpie to it, so that now, as well as having a neat little chrome plaque that proclaimed this to be Lab #12, it was labeled as private, keep out, this means you. no gi, with a sad little line trailing down from the i like the note writer had interrupted. Below that was another quickly scribbled set of words, this one reading, beware of h and ending in a sharp upward slash. Poor Tony. They wouldn’t even let him finger-paint on his own walls.
She knocked on the door.
The door opened.
Someone staggered out and into her. Darcy stumbled back a step, found herself steadied by a hand that caught on the collar of her sweater and then quickly withdrew, and refused to acknowledge that the sound she had made was more half-indignant half-startled snort than anything more delicate than that. By the time that Darcy had gotten her bearings, the man who had banged into her was a good two feet away and staring at the now-closed door to the lab like it had done him some kind of deep and personal injury.
“Tony isn’t here,” the man said, still without looking at her and in the sort of flat monotone that reminded Darcy of nothing so much as that time she had gone to see her oldest nephew’s school play, and been treated to a good two hours of the kid wading with a great lack of enthusiasm through his lines.
Which brought Darcy to her real point: how she was obviously being fed a line. She hadn’t even mentioned Tony. Which meant that Tony knew she was coming, and had obviously decided to distract her with one of his science flunkies. Which meant that Tony thought that she was so easily deterred that he could derail her from her mission by flinging mildly attractive scientists in her path, and she just couldn’t allow that to stand.
“Hmm,” Darcy said, and stepped deliberately forward. “Who said I was looking for Tony?” She used her best low-voiced purr when she said it, the one she had learned watching old Mae West and Rita Hayworth movies with her grandma.
He stopped looking at the door and started looking at her, although he still wasn’t making eye contact. He also wasn’t looking down her shirt, which was a little surprising; instead, he seemed to be focusing somewhere between her left cheek and her shoulder. There was a slight twist to his lips, a not-quite-smile that treaded the line between wry and mocking, and which might have been enough to make Darcy remove the modifier when thinking of him as attractive had she had any level of certainty that he wasn’t mocking her. “Tony did,” he said placidly.
Darcy beamed at him. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” She reached up to pat his cheek, but stopped when he flinched back out of range. Okay. Didn’t like to be touched. Noted. She let her hand drop to the door of the lab instead, shoving it open with one hard push and stepping around him to go inside. With what sounded like a heartfelt sigh of relief, he followed.
“Traitor,” Tony said, pointing an accusatory work glove covered finger at her without so much as glancing up from whatever jumbled piece of metal he had spread out on the table in front of him.
That was enough to pull Darcy up short, because it wanted clarification. “Which one of us?”
“Both of you!” Tony exclaimed. “You,” his finger remained steadily on Darcy, “for going over to the enemy camp.” He looked up at her briefly, “That hurt, Betty. I thought we were bros,” before going back to his work and swinging the finger toward science dude behind her. “And you for telling her where to find me. Seriously, Bruce, I let you play with all my cool stuff, and you just sell me out. You’re like Benedict Arnold, only meaner and greener.”
“Bruce?” Darcy asked, flicking a glance over her shoulder. “Banner? Jane mentioned you.”
Doctor Science was looking a little tense, by which Darcy meant that if his shoulders went up any higher they’d be around his ears, even if the funny little half-smile was still solidly in place. “Really? What did she say?”
The too-casual way he said it told Darcy that there was definitely a wrong answer, but damned if she knew what it was, so she just barreled on. “Something about anti-election collusions? I don’t know. She was fangirling pretty hard at the time, and I have trouble understanding her when she gets like that. Partially the technical jargon, partially the high-pitched squirrel voice, you know?”
She finally got some eye contact from Tony, even if it was a little horrified. “Anti-electron collisions. Jesus. How are you a lab assistant? How are you Foster’s lab assistant?”
Darcy shrugged. “I was the only applicant.” She smiled at him. “And now I’m your assistant too.”
“What did I do to deserve that?”
“Do you want the entire list?” Bruce murmured as he wove around her to approach the table Tony was working at. Darcy cast him a look that couldn’t help but be a little admiring, because she felt she could forgive him for maybe-mocking her if he was going to mock Tony too.
“Traitor.”
“We’ll start with you throwing me at lab assistants like a projectile. That was dangerous.”
“Only if by ‘dangerous’ you mean ‘hilarious.’”
“She could have been hurt,” Bruce said, in tones low enough Darcy was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to hear. “A lot of people could have been hurt. It’s one thing if you want to put yourself in harm’s way by poking at me, but you really shouldn’t be spreading the risk around. That’s not the good kind of sharing, Tony.”
Darcy cleared her throat pointedly.
They both looked at her.
“Girls, you’re both pretty, and there’s no reason to break up over me,” she said distinctly. “I’m wearing sensible shoes, and well equipped to survive a little scientist flinging. Now, if that’s settled, you,” she pointed at Tony, because turnabout was fair play, “will be downstairs in half an hour to eat a sandwich, or I’m turning on the sprinklers.”
Tony lifted a brow. “I’m pretty sure you don’t have the override codes you’d need to do that, cupcake.”
“I’m pretty sure Pepper does.” Darcy might’ve felt mean for playing dirty, but she was pretty sure Tony could handle it and equally certain that was about all he would respond to. “Care to place any bets on whether or not she’ll give them to me, once I tell her what they’re for? Now, you can either spent the next thirty minutes working, or you can spend it changing the override codes, at which point I’ll just come up here with a bucket and do the job myself. Do we have an understanding?”
“Did Pepper know what she was getting me into when she hired you as my PA?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
Tony narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, and dear God, Darcy could practically see the terrifying hamster wheel that was his brain turning away. Probably the hamster was drunk, but that didn’t keep it from moving about a billion times faster than her little brain hamster ever did. “How about you bring me my sandwich here?”
“Sure thing,” Darcy said, “as long as you agree to sleep in your own snug little bed tonight, and promise to actually eat the sandwich rather than using it to grow mold cultures.” She let her eyes stray to the line of coffee mugs on his worktable. There were seven of them, and they were organized by size and color. Darcy was pretty sure that was Bruce’s work; Tony didn’t seem like the type, and she had shared lab space with Jane, so she thought it more likely that half of those cups belonged to her than that she had lent a hand to anything even remotely resembling organization of them. “I’m coming back for those mugs,” Darcy said contemplatively. “Because that? That is disgusting.”
“But the mold cultures are my friends.”
“I’m worried that you’re going to forget and drink your friends.”
“They have names and everything.”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Do we have a deal?”
Tony smirked. “Sure. I solemnly swear-.”
“To JARVIS.”
Tony winced, but the smirk made a reappearance a moment later. “I solemnly swear to JARVIS that I will eat every last bit of the delicious pastrami on rye sandwich that you’re going to run down to Katz’s and get me, and that at some point tonight I’ll sleep.”
That was the best she was going to get, so Darcy nodded. It hadn’t been bad, for the first engagement in what was going to probably be a long and gory war. “Good enough.” She saluted both him and Bruce, and turned toward the door. “See you in a few, Tony, Doctor Sexy.”
Bruce dropped the screwdriver he had picked up from the edge of Tony’s worktable. Darcy decided to count that as a much less mixed victory than the one she had won over Tony.
As she approached the door, she heard Bruce speak again, in that same low tone that he obviously thought she couldn’t hear from ten feet away. “That’s Jane’s ‘attractive brunette colleague, Betty?’”
“Why?” Tony asked, and he didn’t bother to lower his voice in the slightest, so Darcy could still hear the smirk in it. “Who did you think I was talking about?”
“Some days, I don’t like you very much,” Bruce said.
“That’s cool,” Darcy heard Tony reply, just before the door swung shut, “since most days, you’re one of the only people who includes ‘some days’ and ‘very much’ in that statement, so I just hear, ‘Tony, you’re the best’ every time you say it.”
By the time Darcy got back to the lab, Bruce had left, and she spent one baffling moment trying to decide if she was disappointed. She stole the pickle spear from Tony’s takeout container in retaliation, and didn’t think of it much more after that.