she blinded me with political science 3/10
“What did I say about not working for Stark?”
“What did I say about not working for Stark?”
“Sorry, Jane, baby,” Darcy said, without looking up from where she was painting her toenails a bright, toxic green. “I’m seeing other scientists.”
*
Darcy didn’t really mean for Bruce Banner to be one of those other scientists. It just sort of happened. He was always in the lab, Darcy was in the lab a lot more between Tony and Jane’s continued presence there at all hours, and she wasn’t about to feed them and just leave him out. It had absolutely nothing to do with that one time he had left the top button of his shirt undone and she had caught a peek of chest hair and had some kind of hot flash. She was just being considerate.
That was what she told Jane, at least.
“Tell Tony that I know who’s responsible for my bottle of Bailey’s going missing, and that if he really needs to add four shots of it to his morning coffee, he’s more than rich enough to buy his own damn bottle.” Darcy leaned strategically over the table Bruce was working at as she spoke.
His gaze flicked up from the microscope he had been looking through - and then back, just as quickly. “Mmm-hmm.”
Goddamnit.
*
New York was rebuilding. Slowly.
Darcy watched the news a lot. It was a habit left over from grad school, and several months of painfully writing a Master’s thesis in which she tried with varying levels of success to talk coherently about gender and nationalism in the modern U.S. news media as compared to propaganda films and newsreels from the Second World War. She had watched from two thousand miles away as the city had fallen to pieces; she could look out her window if she wanted to see it rise again, but some part of her still couldn’t help but be fascinated by how events appeared when filtered through the cameras and shotgun mics:
A human interest story on a local station, which detailed how New Yorkers were opening their homes to those who had been displaced by the destruction of huge chunks of Midtown Manhattan.
A panel of experts debated on CNN the larger implications of learning beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity was not alone in the universe.
A well-known evangelical preacher earnestly told Liz Cho that the Rapture had begun, while simultaneously insisting that New York had brought destruction upon itself due to its large population of homosexuals and godless liberals.
A straight-faced Stephen Colbert stroked a replica of Captain America’s shield and claimed that if the great American hero couldn’t be found, he had the red-white-and-blue balls to pick up the mantle. The studio audience laughed.
Colbert’s joking was good-natured, but a lot of the rest of what was being said just wasn’t. It all boiled down to the same thing, in the end: Who were the Avengers and, more importantly, where were the Avengers? There were other questions too, questions about accountability and legality, but in the end it mostly boiled down to the fact that it was hard to get a quotable sound bite from people who just weren’t there.
Well, for the most part. Tony, as the only member of the team who hadn’t completely dropped off the face of the earth, ended up bearing the brunt of the press and the public’s interest.
“Mr. Stark.” The reporter was blond and gorgeous, and the tape recorder she shoved at Tony said print media to Darcy rather than television; the crew that had filmed her hadn’t been hers, they had just taken advantage of the opportunity she had presented them with. “Mr. Stark, would you care to comment on the role you played in recent events?”
Tony drew to a stop, which forced his ragged semi-circle of bodyguards to either stop with him or leave him behind, where he would surely be devoured by the ravenous crowd of reporters who spent most days camped out in front of Stark Tower. He smiled, a flashing media darling smile that looked rehearsed to Darcy. “Christine, you should know by now that I’m always willing to talk about myself.”
“What do you say to accusations that the Avengers operated outside the bounds of the law?”
“I’d say that anyone who wasn’t looking forward to greeting their new alien overlords is probably pretty happy right now that we did, if we did.”
“Early estimates of how much it will cost the city to repair the damage done during what’s being called the Battle of New York are ranging anywhere from eighty to a hundred and fifty billion. Some people feel that you and your costumed pals should be held accountable for the part you played in doing that damage.”
“Was that a question?” Tony’s smile had slid sideways into a smirk, but Darcy thought she saw a hint of frustration in the set of his jaw. “No, never mind. Just tell me where to send the check. I’m don’t have any problem with helping the repairs along in my own little way, but I don’t think I should be footing the entire bill. I mean, we didn’t start the fight. We just ended it.”
“And your fellow Avengers? Do they have any plans to, as you say, help the repairs along?”
Darcy snorted at the only marginally subtle attempt to find out anything about the rest of the Avengers, one of many that she had watched Tony field in the past several days.
“You’d have to ask them.” Tony turned away from the reporters and the cameras both, and his men took that as their cue to start pushing forward again. “I think that’s enough questions for today.”
Some days, when Tony was being particularly egotistical or particularly stubborn, Darcy thought that it would be easy to dislike him. She didn’t, though, and she almost never envied him.
*
The night after watching Tony’s impromptu interview (although Darcy wondered how impromptu it had really been; it wasn’t like Tony didn’t have ways of leaving the Tower that would allow him to bypass the front door) Darcy worked her way up to asking Jane where Thor was.
Jane paused in the scribbling she was doing on the back of a copy of The Astrophysical Journal, letters and numbers that blurred together before Darcy’s eyes if she tried to look at them too closely. “Home,” she said. “He had some things he needed to take care of. His brother. He has a way back, though, which is why we didn’t need to continue our research in New Mexico. I’m not sure how much I can say, beyond that.”
*
It didn’t really matter that Jane wasn’t willing to possibly reveal state secrets; by the end of her second week at SHIELD, Darcy had a pretty clear picture of most of what had happened. SHIELD agents weren’t particularly chatty, but their secretaries were when plied with coffee and baked goods from Bouchon. She didn’t think they would have talked to a reporter, had the reporters known where to find SHIELD Central and taken to haunting it the same way they did Stark Tower, but they would talk to Darcy.
*
“I heard that the guy behind it all was a god,” said Consuela, a wide-eyed brunette with a taste for macaroons who did a good job of looking all innocent and sweet right up until someone tried to get through the door to Agent Sitwell’s office without an appointment or a, as she called it, Fuck All Big Emergency. When she shifted in her chair Darcy could see the lump that her gun made against the fabric of her jacket, because at SHIELD even the secretaries were packing heat. Darcy had started to think that she was the only one in the building who didn’t carry a gun.
“Loki,” Darcy supplied, because she believed in fair exchange of information. “I know his brother. They are gods. Sort of.”
Consuela leaned forward, her big Bambi eyes going a little wider. “You know Thor? Really?”
“Really.” She congratulated herself for not adding I tased Thor, because she really, really wanted to. It had been one of her prouder moments; she couldn’t help but feel the desire to brag.
“Hmm,” Consuela said, and Darcy knew that the other woman was carefully filing away that piece of gossip for a later exchange. She took a delicate bite of one of the half dozen macaroons Darcy had brought her and carefully licked all traces of coconut and sugar from her lips before continuing. “Well, I heard that the Hulk planted Loki so far in Stark’s floor that it left a hole.”
“Confirmed,” Darcy said. “I’m not sure about the Hulk part, but I’ve seen the hole.” She shook her head. “I wonder where they sent that one to keep him away from the media circus? I mean, the rest of them probably blend in pretty well once they lose the costumes, but you’d think a big green dude would stand out-everywhere. He’d stand out everywhere.”
Consuela frowned, and then tsked softly. “Darcy, didn’t you read your SHIELD orientation manual?”
“Oops,” Darcy said. “Look at the time, gotta go.”
*
Darcy meant to look at the manual that night, she really did. Then Tony set the lab on fire, and she kind of forgot.
*
“I’m just glad Doctor Banner wasn’t here,” Jane said, using journal she had been writing on the previous night in a mostly futile attempt to wave the smoke into the vents faster. She, along with Darcy and Tony, had been soaked through by Stark Tower’s truly admirable sprinkler system.
“Hmm?” Darcy said, examining the edge of white cotton blouse and wondering if the scorch marks would come out. Probably not.
Jane shrugged. “You know. He’s, ah, not always the best at dealing with stressful situations.”
“Mmm.” Maybe she could turn it into some kind of fashion statement. Post-apocalyptic chic.
*
She ran into Bruce while retrieving a stack of towels from one of the shower rooms scattered throughout Stark Tower’s R&D labs, which had probably been meant for use in case of some kind of chemical accident and which probably got most of their use from Stark employees who couldn’t be bothered to go home and bathe when there was science to be done.
Bruce lifted his eyebrows and shifted a little nervously from side to side as he considered her. “Tony forgot to eat whatever it was you brought him for dinner tonight, and you retaliated?” he guessed, stepping aside to let her out of the shower room.
Darcy kind of made a point of stepping into his personal space as she exited, because she was only human and also because she had always been really massively terrible at hiding it when she had a bit of a crush on someone. She couldn’t help it. It was the chest hair. Or maybe the glasses. She had always been sort of a sucker for a man in a pair of spectacles.
He stepped back. His glasses looked alarmed, and also a little reproachful.
Darcy sighed.
“Fire,” she corrected. “Tony. Lab. You might want to give it a few before you go in there.”
“Noted,” Bruce said, right before he slipped into the shower room and closed the door behind him. The light above the door went from green to red, a sign that it was occupied.
Bruce. Shower. Darcy’s brain quickly wound itself down a long and incredibly perverted road.
Goddamnit.
*
The memorial happened three weeks to the day after Darcy arrived in New York. She supposed that SHIELD could be forgiven for being a little tardy in honoring their fallen soldiers, considering everything else they had needed to deal with in the meantime.
Darcy went because Jane was going, and because the first Agent Suit that they had met in New Mexico was apparently listed among the deceased. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that, because to her he had just been some dick who had taken her iPod and Jane’s research, but she also had some pretty vivid memories of Thor talking to the Son of Coul. Phillip Coulson, that was his name, and yeah, it was uncomfortable to think that among the huge number of casualties that had come out of Loki’s invasion of earth, someone she had known even a little was among them. The news reduced the people killed to numbers, statistics. Having met one the dead brought home the meaning of those statistics in a way that made Darcy’s stomach squirm.
SHIELD’S chapel was a funny little thing, tucked away among the winding halls of the central office like a secret. It was all grey upholstery and tinted glass arranged in a variety of geometrical shapes, all so carefully non-denominational that Darcy had checked the room number twice to make sure they weren’t walking into some kind of lecture hall that just happened to be swarming with SHIELD personnel.
Tony and Pepper were sitting near the front. Pepper had the only damp eyes in the entire place; everyone else was so stone-faced and silent that, were it not for Pepper, Darcy really would have thought that she had stumbled upon some kind of mission briefing instead of a memorial. Beside Tony there sat a blond man, uncomfortable in his dark blue suit and handsome enough that Darcy might have spent some time idly checking him out had doing so not been completely inappropriate to the occasion. Jane went to go sit with them, but Darcy didn’t follow. Instead, she sat down in the mostly empty back row, not wanting to take her place with the mourners when she didn’t really have anyone to mourn.
Erik and Bruce came in a few minutes later and the former nodded once to Darcy before she lost them in the sea of neatly groomed agents at the middle of the room, the various support staff showing up as bright flashes of color against that heavy backdrop of black. A few more minutes passed before Nick Fury made his way up to the podium at the front of the room.
It was a simply ceremony. Mostly, Fury just read off the names of SHIELD employees who had been killed during Loki’s invasion, with a pause between each name to allow for a moment of silence. It would have been short as well, if there hadn’t been so many names for him to read.
A man and a woman were seated in the same row as Darcy. Both of them were dressed in black, and had the woman’s brilliantly red curls not been so distinctive, or had Darcy spent any less time watching the news in the weeks since her arrival, she might not have recognized them. They seemed smaller, somehow, than they had on TV, life-sized and lifelike replicas of New York’s real superheroes. They didn’t look at each other or anyone else during the memorial, but the woman had a hand locked around the man’s wrist, pinning it to his lap like she meant to hold him in place.
The gesture was at odds with her words; as soon as Fury had read off the last of the names and started in on a brief speech thanking the agents lost for their years of dedicated service and their sacrifice, Black Widow turned to Hawkeye and said, in a voice that carefully tread the line between bland and gentle, “Have you seen enough? Can we go?”
He nodded, and the two of them rose.
“There’s a proper wake in the cantina after the service,” Darcy murmured on impulse as they passed. She wasn’t sure what motivated that impulse, curiosity or kindness or simply the knowledge that she hadn’t seen either of them around SHIELD headquarters in the past three weeks and that they might not know. She regretted speaking almost immediately, because doing do was enough to draw Black Widow’s gaze.
She didn’t think the woman intended to intimidate, not really. It was just that she looked so intense, so focused, like all of the SHIELD agents did but with a little something more, an edge that Darcy hadn’t noticed on anyone else except Fury. Or maybe it was just that there was some really good footage of Black Widow cutting down alien invaders like it was a sport; that was a little intimidating too. “Tony’s coming, I think,” Darcy added, quietly enough to keep from disturbing the people seated in front of them. She scooted her knees to the side so that they could pass.
Black Widow glanced at her companion. Nothing in his expression changed, but maybe there was some kind of signal that Darcy just couldn’t read, because a moment later she received a short nod of response from the Widow. “Maybe.” They slid past Darcy and were gone, out the door so quickly and so silently that no one else seemed to notice.
*
Darcy didn’t really expect them to show up, so when she looked up from firing a where are you? text at Jane to find two familiar faces seated across the table from her, she did an admirable job of sloshing about half of her drink down the sleeve of her blouse.
One perfect red eyebrow rose, but the Black Widow and Hawkeye were both good enough not to comment.
“Natasha,” the woman said, which was nice, because Darcy’s brain sort of giggled inappropriately every time it was forced to use the Avengers’ codenames. That had been the case even before she had met any of them other than Thor; Captain America had featured prominently in Darcy’s thesis, and some part of her hadn’t been help going Captain America, really? and snickering every time she had typed the name. “It’s Ms. Lewis, right? I hear that you’re Tony’s new PA. Having fun with that?”
Something in Natasha’s wry intonation when she asked said that maybe there was a story there, and damned if Darcy didn’t really want to hear it. Her curiosity basically clobbered her anxiety, and she smiled widely. “Oh, you have no idea.”
It was true, actually. Screwing with Tony was massively fun, because he gave and good as he got and didn’t look confused by her pop culture references the way that Jane sometimes did. Some of that truth must have shown, because a faint smile tucked its way up into the corner of Natasha’s mouth.
When Darcy looked at Hawkeye, she sort of regretted allowing Natasha to distract her, because he was sitting across from her and rubbing his thumb lightly over the point of a small, flat knife. Darcy swallowed hard enough that her throat clicked, but maybe this was just what he liked to do while casually drinking a beer, because his gaze was mild when caught her staring. “Clint,” he said, as if she had been looking for a name and not at the knife he was currently holding in his hand.
“Darcy,” she said faintly.
They didn’t speak for a few minutes after that, and if Darcy gulped down the remains of her margarita a little faster than was probably advisable, Natasha and Clint once again refrained from comment.
She completely and utterly blamed nerves and Jane’s continued absence for what she said next.
“I once tased the god of thunder.”
Blank stares greeted that statement. Then Natasha smiled.
“I once put one over on the god of lies.”
Darcy looked at her. “So,” she said, “this is completely inappropriate and really undignified, but can I can your autograph?”
The smile widened a notch. “Got a pen?”
When Darcy produced one, Natasha scrawled something lazily across a cocktail napkin. Darcy smirked down at it, because that was totally not an autograph but somehow it was better, and Natasha signaled for service.
“Let’s get you a proper drink, shall we?” Natasha said.
*
Two vodka martinis and a rousing game of hangman with Clint on another cocktail napkin later, Tony arrived, short the blond man but with Pepper and Jane in tow. They sat down at Darcy’s table, and Tony waved a hand through the air and was delivered the best bottle of scotch that SHIELD’s cantina could provide.
He frowned down at the napkin Natasha had written on. “You never asked me to sign anything,” he said, once Darcy had explained.
“Tony,” she said, with a sad shake of her head. “I ask you to sign paperwork every day. Mostly you say no. The thrill is gone, my friend.”
Pepper laughed, and the new game became comparing stories of time spent as Tony’s PA. The mute look of horror on Tony’s face when he realized he was surrounded and that there was no way out was so much funnier to Darcy than the stories were (although she did enjoy the one that involved Natasha choking a man into unconsciousness with her thighs).
*
Four vodka martinis later, Natasha leaned over to Darcy. She smelled faintly of alcohol and shampoo, and Darcy was feeling relaxed enough by then that she didn’t embarrass herself by screaming like a little girl and pulling away.
“Someone’s watching you,” Natasha murmured.
Darcy followed Natasha’s gaze. “Oh. Erik. Probably just making sure that I don’t mortify myself by getting too drunk to stand. Which is silly, because Jane told me that he and Thor once got into a bar fight after a few too many boilermakers. So, yeah, no high ground to stand on, that one.”
Funnily enough, Natasha’s Darcy-you-are-being-ridiculous-(and-also-kind-of-dumb) face was almost identical to Jane’s. “You didn’t tell me that you knew Banner too,” was all she said, though, and after a few minutes Darcy gave up on trying to get her slightly liquor sodden brain to figure out where the comment had come from.
*
“We got drunk with Hawkeye, the Black Widow, and Tony Stark,” Jane said the next morning. She sounded a little dazed, and also like she was maybe regretting her life.
Darcy shoved the sunglasses she had never given back to Tony further up on her nose and halfheartedly swiped at her out of reach coffee cup. “Don’t worry. I made sure that Tony deleted those pictures he took of you and Agent Woo trying to tango.”
Of course, she was also pretty sure that Tony had uploaded the pictures to an internal server well before Darcy had managed to get the phone out of his hands, but it was better not to hurt Jane by telling her that
*
.
Darcy’s day was greatly improved when she arrived at SHIELD headquarters. Hungover secret agents were hilarious.
Her good mood lasted just as long as it took her to get back to Stark Tower, walk into the lab, and find thirty-seven coffee cups in varying states of ‘filled’ and ‘disgusting’ lined up around the edge of Tony’s worktable. He was doing this on purpose now, she just knew it.
Bruce was the only other current living and non-mold occupant of the lab. “Tell Tony that I hate him and I hate his face, and that when I catch up with him my vengeance will be swift, gruesome, and... uh, vengeful.”
The corner of Bruce’s mouth tucked up, although his eyes never left the screen he was seated in front of. “Anything else?”
The mugs were lined up according to size and color.
“Yeah,” Darcy said slowly. “I’m not too happy with you right now either, Doctor Sexy.”
The following cough was obviously a thinly disguised laugh, and Tony was a terrible influence.
*
Darcy framed the cocktail napkin Natasha had signed and hung it up in her room. There were faint greenish margarita stains on it and the ink was a little smeared along one edge, but Darcy liked it.
That’s classified information, the napkin read. I could autograph this, but then I’d have to kill you. - N.
*
The woman’s hair was tangled, and there were smudges of dirt and freckles on her cheeks. This was an old interview, taped right after the battle for Manhattan. “Captain America saved my life,” she told the cameras.
*
Thor returned to Earth on a Thursday.
Of course he did.
“What did I say about not working for Stark?”
“Sorry, Jane, baby,” Darcy said, without looking up from where she was painting her toenails a bright, toxic green. “I’m seeing other scientists.”
*
Darcy didn’t really mean for Bruce Banner to be one of those other scientists. It just sort of happened. He was always in the lab, Darcy was in the lab a lot more between Tony and Jane’s continued presence there at all hours, and she wasn’t about to feed them and just leave him out. It had absolutely nothing to do with that one time he had left the top button of his shirt undone and she had caught a peek of chest hair and had some kind of hot flash. She was just being considerate.
That was what she told Jane, at least.
“Tell Tony that I know who’s responsible for my bottle of Bailey’s going missing, and that if he really needs to add four shots of it to his morning coffee, he’s more than rich enough to buy his own damn bottle.” Darcy leaned strategically over the table Bruce was working at as she spoke.
His gaze flicked up from the microscope he had been looking through - and then back, just as quickly. “Mmm-hmm.”
Goddamnit.
*
New York was rebuilding. Slowly.
Darcy watched the news a lot. It was a habit left over from grad school, and several months of painfully writing a Master’s thesis in which she tried with varying levels of success to talk coherently about gender and nationalism in the modern U.S. news media as compared to propaganda films and newsreels from the Second World War. She had watched from two thousand miles away as the city had fallen to pieces; she could look out her window if she wanted to see it rise again, but some part of her still couldn’t help but be fascinated by how events appeared when filtered through the cameras and shotgun mics:
A human interest story on a local station, which detailed how New Yorkers were opening their homes to those who had been displaced by the destruction of huge chunks of Midtown Manhattan.
A panel of experts debated on CNN the larger implications of learning beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity was not alone in the universe.
A well-known evangelical preacher earnestly told Liz Cho that the Rapture had begun, while simultaneously insisting that New York had brought destruction upon itself due to its large population of homosexuals and godless liberals.
A straight-faced Stephen Colbert stroked a replica of Captain America’s shield and claimed that if the great American hero couldn’t be found, he had the red-white-and-blue balls to pick up the mantle. The studio audience laughed.
Colbert’s joking was good-natured, but a lot of the rest of what was being said just wasn’t. It all boiled down to the same thing, in the end: Who were the Avengers and, more importantly, where were the Avengers? There were other questions too, questions about accountability and legality, but in the end it mostly boiled down to the fact that it was hard to get a quotable sound bite from people who just weren’t there.
Well, for the most part. Tony, as the only member of the team who hadn’t completely dropped off the face of the earth, ended up bearing the brunt of the press and the public’s interest.
“Mr. Stark.” The reporter was blond and gorgeous, and the tape recorder she shoved at Tony said print media to Darcy rather than television; the crew that had filmed her hadn’t been hers, they had just taken advantage of the opportunity she had presented them with. “Mr. Stark, would you care to comment on the role you played in recent events?”
Tony drew to a stop, which forced his ragged semi-circle of bodyguards to either stop with him or leave him behind, where he would surely be devoured by the ravenous crowd of reporters who spent most days camped out in front of Stark Tower. He smiled, a flashing media darling smile that looked rehearsed to Darcy. “Christine, you should know by now that I’m always willing to talk about myself.”
“What do you say to accusations that the Avengers operated outside the bounds of the law?”
“I’d say that anyone who wasn’t looking forward to greeting their new alien overlords is probably pretty happy right now that we did, if we did.”
“Early estimates of how much it will cost the city to repair the damage done during what’s being called the Battle of New York are ranging anywhere from eighty to a hundred and fifty billion. Some people feel that you and your costumed pals should be held accountable for the part you played in doing that damage.”
“Was that a question?” Tony’s smile had slid sideways into a smirk, but Darcy thought she saw a hint of frustration in the set of his jaw. “No, never mind. Just tell me where to send the check. I’m don’t have any problem with helping the repairs along in my own little way, but I don’t think I should be footing the entire bill. I mean, we didn’t start the fight. We just ended it.”
“And your fellow Avengers? Do they have any plans to, as you say, help the repairs along?”
Darcy snorted at the only marginally subtle attempt to find out anything about the rest of the Avengers, one of many that she had watched Tony field in the past several days.
“You’d have to ask them.” Tony turned away from the reporters and the cameras both, and his men took that as their cue to start pushing forward again. “I think that’s enough questions for today.”
Some days, when Tony was being particularly egotistical or particularly stubborn, Darcy thought that it would be easy to dislike him. She didn’t, though, and she almost never envied him.
*
The night after watching Tony’s impromptu interview (although Darcy wondered how impromptu it had really been; it wasn’t like Tony didn’t have ways of leaving the Tower that would allow him to bypass the front door) Darcy worked her way up to asking Jane where Thor was.
Jane paused in the scribbling she was doing on the back of a copy of The Astrophysical Journal, letters and numbers that blurred together before Darcy’s eyes if she tried to look at them too closely. “Home,” she said. “He had some things he needed to take care of. His brother. He has a way back, though, which is why we didn’t need to continue our research in New Mexico. I’m not sure how much I can say, beyond that.”
*
It didn’t really matter that Jane wasn’t willing to possibly reveal state secrets; by the end of her second week at SHIELD, Darcy had a pretty clear picture of most of what had happened. SHIELD agents weren’t particularly chatty, but their secretaries were when plied with coffee and baked goods from Bouchon. She didn’t think they would have talked to a reporter, had the reporters known where to find SHIELD Central and taken to haunting it the same way they did Stark Tower, but they would talk to Darcy.
*
“I heard that the guy behind it all was a god,” said Consuela, a wide-eyed brunette with a taste for macaroons who did a good job of looking all innocent and sweet right up until someone tried to get through the door to Agent Sitwell’s office without an appointment or a, as she called it, Fuck All Big Emergency. When she shifted in her chair Darcy could see the lump that her gun made against the fabric of her jacket, because at SHIELD even the secretaries were packing heat. Darcy had started to think that she was the only one in the building who didn’t carry a gun.
“Loki,” Darcy supplied, because she believed in fair exchange of information. “I know his brother. They are gods. Sort of.”
Consuela leaned forward, her big Bambi eyes going a little wider. “You know Thor? Really?”
“Really.” She congratulated herself for not adding I tased Thor, because she really, really wanted to. It had been one of her prouder moments; she couldn’t help but feel the desire to brag.
“Hmm,” Consuela said, and Darcy knew that the other woman was carefully filing away that piece of gossip for a later exchange. She took a delicate bite of one of the half dozen macaroons Darcy had brought her and carefully licked all traces of coconut and sugar from her lips before continuing. “Well, I heard that the Hulk planted Loki so far in Stark’s floor that it left a hole.”
“Confirmed,” Darcy said. “I’m not sure about the Hulk part, but I’ve seen the hole.” She shook her head. “I wonder where they sent that one to keep him away from the media circus? I mean, the rest of them probably blend in pretty well once they lose the costumes, but you’d think a big green dude would stand out-everywhere. He’d stand out everywhere.”
Consuela frowned, and then tsked softly. “Darcy, didn’t you read your SHIELD orientation manual?”
“Oops,” Darcy said. “Look at the time, gotta go.”
*
Darcy meant to look at the manual that night, she really did. Then Tony set the lab on fire, and she kind of forgot.
*
“I’m just glad Doctor Banner wasn’t here,” Jane said, using journal she had been writing on the previous night in a mostly futile attempt to wave the smoke into the vents faster. She, along with Darcy and Tony, had been soaked through by Stark Tower’s truly admirable sprinkler system.
“Hmm?” Darcy said, examining the edge of white cotton blouse and wondering if the scorch marks would come out. Probably not.
Jane shrugged. “You know. He’s, ah, not always the best at dealing with stressful situations.”
“Mmm.” Maybe she could turn it into some kind of fashion statement. Post-apocalyptic chic.
*
She ran into Bruce while retrieving a stack of towels from one of the shower rooms scattered throughout Stark Tower’s R&D labs, which had probably been meant for use in case of some kind of chemical accident and which probably got most of their use from Stark employees who couldn’t be bothered to go home and bathe when there was science to be done.
Bruce lifted his eyebrows and shifted a little nervously from side to side as he considered her. “Tony forgot to eat whatever it was you brought him for dinner tonight, and you retaliated?” he guessed, stepping aside to let her out of the shower room.
Darcy kind of made a point of stepping into his personal space as she exited, because she was only human and also because she had always been really massively terrible at hiding it when she had a bit of a crush on someone. She couldn’t help it. It was the chest hair. Or maybe the glasses. She had always been sort of a sucker for a man in a pair of spectacles.
He stepped back. His glasses looked alarmed, and also a little reproachful.
Darcy sighed.
“Fire,” she corrected. “Tony. Lab. You might want to give it a few before you go in there.”
“Noted,” Bruce said, right before he slipped into the shower room and closed the door behind him. The light above the door went from green to red, a sign that it was occupied.
Bruce. Shower. Darcy’s brain quickly wound itself down a long and incredibly perverted road.
Goddamnit.
*
The memorial happened three weeks to the day after Darcy arrived in New York. She supposed that SHIELD could be forgiven for being a little tardy in honoring their fallen soldiers, considering everything else they had needed to deal with in the meantime.
Darcy went because Jane was going, and because the first Agent Suit that they had met in New Mexico was apparently listed among the deceased. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that, because to her he had just been some dick who had taken her iPod and Jane’s research, but she also had some pretty vivid memories of Thor talking to the Son of Coul. Phillip Coulson, that was his name, and yeah, it was uncomfortable to think that among the huge number of casualties that had come out of Loki’s invasion of earth, someone she had known even a little was among them. The news reduced the people killed to numbers, statistics. Having met one the dead brought home the meaning of those statistics in a way that made Darcy’s stomach squirm.
SHIELD’S chapel was a funny little thing, tucked away among the winding halls of the central office like a secret. It was all grey upholstery and tinted glass arranged in a variety of geometrical shapes, all so carefully non-denominational that Darcy had checked the room number twice to make sure they weren’t walking into some kind of lecture hall that just happened to be swarming with SHIELD personnel.
Tony and Pepper were sitting near the front. Pepper had the only damp eyes in the entire place; everyone else was so stone-faced and silent that, were it not for Pepper, Darcy really would have thought that she had stumbled upon some kind of mission briefing instead of a memorial. Beside Tony there sat a blond man, uncomfortable in his dark blue suit and handsome enough that Darcy might have spent some time idly checking him out had doing so not been completely inappropriate to the occasion. Jane went to go sit with them, but Darcy didn’t follow. Instead, she sat down in the mostly empty back row, not wanting to take her place with the mourners when she didn’t really have anyone to mourn.
Erik and Bruce came in a few minutes later and the former nodded once to Darcy before she lost them in the sea of neatly groomed agents at the middle of the room, the various support staff showing up as bright flashes of color against that heavy backdrop of black. A few more minutes passed before Nick Fury made his way up to the podium at the front of the room.
It was a simply ceremony. Mostly, Fury just read off the names of SHIELD employees who had been killed during Loki’s invasion, with a pause between each name to allow for a moment of silence. It would have been short as well, if there hadn’t been so many names for him to read.
A man and a woman were seated in the same row as Darcy. Both of them were dressed in black, and had the woman’s brilliantly red curls not been so distinctive, or had Darcy spent any less time watching the news in the weeks since her arrival, she might not have recognized them. They seemed smaller, somehow, than they had on TV, life-sized and lifelike replicas of New York’s real superheroes. They didn’t look at each other or anyone else during the memorial, but the woman had a hand locked around the man’s wrist, pinning it to his lap like she meant to hold him in place.
The gesture was at odds with her words; as soon as Fury had read off the last of the names and started in on a brief speech thanking the agents lost for their years of dedicated service and their sacrifice, Black Widow turned to Hawkeye and said, in a voice that carefully tread the line between bland and gentle, “Have you seen enough? Can we go?”
He nodded, and the two of them rose.
“There’s a proper wake in the cantina after the service,” Darcy murmured on impulse as they passed. She wasn’t sure what motivated that impulse, curiosity or kindness or simply the knowledge that she hadn’t seen either of them around SHIELD headquarters in the past three weeks and that they might not know. She regretted speaking almost immediately, because doing do was enough to draw Black Widow’s gaze.
She didn’t think the woman intended to intimidate, not really. It was just that she looked so intense, so focused, like all of the SHIELD agents did but with a little something more, an edge that Darcy hadn’t noticed on anyone else except Fury. Or maybe it was just that there was some really good footage of Black Widow cutting down alien invaders like it was a sport; that was a little intimidating too. “Tony’s coming, I think,” Darcy added, quietly enough to keep from disturbing the people seated in front of them. She scooted her knees to the side so that they could pass.
Black Widow glanced at her companion. Nothing in his expression changed, but maybe there was some kind of signal that Darcy just couldn’t read, because a moment later she received a short nod of response from the Widow. “Maybe.” They slid past Darcy and were gone, out the door so quickly and so silently that no one else seemed to notice.
*
Darcy didn’t really expect them to show up, so when she looked up from firing a where are you? text at Jane to find two familiar faces seated across the table from her, she did an admirable job of sloshing about half of her drink down the sleeve of her blouse.
One perfect red eyebrow rose, but the Black Widow and Hawkeye were both good enough not to comment.
“Natasha,” the woman said, which was nice, because Darcy’s brain sort of giggled inappropriately every time it was forced to use the Avengers’ codenames. That had been the case even before she had met any of them other than Thor; Captain America had featured prominently in Darcy’s thesis, and some part of her hadn’t been help going Captain America, really? and snickering every time she had typed the name. “It’s Ms. Lewis, right? I hear that you’re Tony’s new PA. Having fun with that?”
Something in Natasha’s wry intonation when she asked said that maybe there was a story there, and damned if Darcy didn’t really want to hear it. Her curiosity basically clobbered her anxiety, and she smiled widely. “Oh, you have no idea.”
It was true, actually. Screwing with Tony was massively fun, because he gave and good as he got and didn’t look confused by her pop culture references the way that Jane sometimes did. Some of that truth must have shown, because a faint smile tucked its way up into the corner of Natasha’s mouth.
When Darcy looked at Hawkeye, she sort of regretted allowing Natasha to distract her, because he was sitting across from her and rubbing his thumb lightly over the point of a small, flat knife. Darcy swallowed hard enough that her throat clicked, but maybe this was just what he liked to do while casually drinking a beer, because his gaze was mild when caught her staring. “Clint,” he said, as if she had been looking for a name and not at the knife he was currently holding in his hand.
“Darcy,” she said faintly.
They didn’t speak for a few minutes after that, and if Darcy gulped down the remains of her margarita a little faster than was probably advisable, Natasha and Clint once again refrained from comment.
She completely and utterly blamed nerves and Jane’s continued absence for what she said next.
“I once tased the god of thunder.”
Blank stares greeted that statement. Then Natasha smiled.
“I once put one over on the god of lies.”
Darcy looked at her. “So,” she said, “this is completely inappropriate and really undignified, but can I can your autograph?”
The smile widened a notch. “Got a pen?”
When Darcy produced one, Natasha scrawled something lazily across a cocktail napkin. Darcy smirked down at it, because that was totally not an autograph but somehow it was better, and Natasha signaled for service.
“Let’s get you a proper drink, shall we?” Natasha said.
*
Two vodka martinis and a rousing game of hangman with Clint on another cocktail napkin later, Tony arrived, short the blond man but with Pepper and Jane in tow. They sat down at Darcy’s table, and Tony waved a hand through the air and was delivered the best bottle of scotch that SHIELD’s cantina could provide.
He frowned down at the napkin Natasha had written on. “You never asked me to sign anything,” he said, once Darcy had explained.
“Tony,” she said, with a sad shake of her head. “I ask you to sign paperwork every day. Mostly you say no. The thrill is gone, my friend.”
Pepper laughed, and the new game became comparing stories of time spent as Tony’s PA. The mute look of horror on Tony’s face when he realized he was surrounded and that there was no way out was so much funnier to Darcy than the stories were (although she did enjoy the one that involved Natasha choking a man into unconsciousness with her thighs).
*
Four vodka martinis later, Natasha leaned over to Darcy. She smelled faintly of alcohol and shampoo, and Darcy was feeling relaxed enough by then that she didn’t embarrass herself by screaming like a little girl and pulling away.
“Someone’s watching you,” Natasha murmured.
Darcy followed Natasha’s gaze. “Oh. Erik. Probably just making sure that I don’t mortify myself by getting too drunk to stand. Which is silly, because Jane told me that he and Thor once got into a bar fight after a few too many boilermakers. So, yeah, no high ground to stand on, that one.”
Funnily enough, Natasha’s Darcy-you-are-being-ridiculous-(and-also-kind-of-dumb) face was almost identical to Jane’s. “You didn’t tell me that you knew Banner too,” was all she said, though, and after a few minutes Darcy gave up on trying to get her slightly liquor sodden brain to figure out where the comment had come from.
*
“We got drunk with Hawkeye, the Black Widow, and Tony Stark,” Jane said the next morning. She sounded a little dazed, and also like she was maybe regretting her life.
Darcy shoved the sunglasses she had never given back to Tony further up on her nose and halfheartedly swiped at her out of reach coffee cup. “Don’t worry. I made sure that Tony deleted those pictures he took of you and Agent Woo trying to tango.”
Of course, she was also pretty sure that Tony had uploaded the pictures to an internal server well before Darcy had managed to get the phone out of his hands, but it was better not to hurt Jane by telling her that
*
.
Darcy’s day was greatly improved when she arrived at SHIELD headquarters. Hungover secret agents were hilarious.
Her good mood lasted just as long as it took her to get back to Stark Tower, walk into the lab, and find thirty-seven coffee cups in varying states of ‘filled’ and ‘disgusting’ lined up around the edge of Tony’s worktable. He was doing this on purpose now, she just knew it.
Bruce was the only other current living and non-mold occupant of the lab. “Tell Tony that I hate him and I hate his face, and that when I catch up with him my vengeance will be swift, gruesome, and... uh, vengeful.”
The corner of Bruce’s mouth tucked up, although his eyes never left the screen he was seated in front of. “Anything else?”
The mugs were lined up according to size and color.
“Yeah,” Darcy said slowly. “I’m not too happy with you right now either, Doctor Sexy.”
The following cough was obviously a thinly disguised laugh, and Tony was a terrible influence.
*
Darcy framed the cocktail napkin Natasha had signed and hung it up in her room. There were faint greenish margarita stains on it and the ink was a little smeared along one edge, but Darcy liked it.
That’s classified information, the napkin read. I could autograph this, but then I’d have to kill you. - N.
*
The woman’s hair was tangled, and there were smudges of dirt and freckles on her cheeks. This was an old interview, taped right after the battle for Manhattan. “Captain America saved my life,” she told the cameras.
*
Thor returned to Earth on a Thursday.
Of course he did.