she blinded me with political science 8/10
Roping Thor into doing some PR work was incredibly easy. Controlling the direction that PR work took was basically impossible.
Roping Thor into doing some PR work was incredibly easy. Controlling the direction that PR work took was basically impossible.
He caught on to the idea of engaging with the public for the purpose of raising the Avengers’ reputation with more ease than Darcy had expected. She was midway through attempting to explain the concept in terms he could follow when his face brightened. “It is as when my father would ride through the worlds in days long since past, sitting atop his mighty eight-legged steed with his warriors arrayed fiercely behind him, so that his enemies could gaze upon him and know that to trifle with the All-Father was to trifle with death.”
“Sort of,” Darcy said, and bless him he was trying. “I, uhm, don’t think we want people to associate you with certain death, though.”
Thor looked sad.
“Hey, wasn’t that eight-legged horse your brother’s-.”
“We do not speak of that.”
“Right.”
For a moment, they sat there in silence. Awkward, awkward your-brother-did-a-horse silence.
“My father would also don a traveler’s cloak and walk the land in the guise of a simple old man, seeking wisdom and bestowing favor upon those who offered him hospitality,” Thor said eventually. “I could-.”
“I don’t think so,” Darcy said quickly, her brain overrun with images of Thor smiting the first New Yorker who refused to let him crash on the couch for a night. Possibly she and Jane had ruined him for the notion that not all Midgardians were willing to invite large, strange men into their homes. “We want people to know it’s you, and that they can depend on you if another crisis ever comes up. Going around disguised would kind of defeat the purpose.”
“I see,” Thor said, and stroked his beard thoughtfully. “You believe that I must go among the people in my own likeness, to win their trust and favor as their protector.” He stood suddenly, and from her spot on the couch, Darcy looked up at him. He was grinning, which was a good sign. Probably. “I believe that I am willing to do this thing for you, Lady Darcy. The people of Midgard do not know my reputation as a warrior. It is understandable that they would have their doubts.”
“Awesome,” Darcy said, relieved. “I mean, we might want to emphasize how you’re a really super nice guy as well as your ability to bash in heads, but-.”
“I shall go forth immediately to reassure the good people of both my intentions and skill!”
“What.” Darcy said, before her brain caught up to what he had said. “Thor, no.”
He didn’t seem to hear her, or else he was ignoring her, which was always a distinct possibility with Thor. He had selective hearing, especially when it came to the word ‘no’ in conjunction with his name. No, Thor, please put on some pants was a prime example. He just patted her on the head, and a moment later he was out the door.
“What have I done?” Darcy asked the empty room, in tones of dawning horror.
*
Over the next three days, Thor was everywhere. There were several blurry iPhone videos of him buying rounds at a local bar. Pictures began to crop up of people posing with him on the streets of the city. Channel 2 News caught up to him while he was taking part in an eating contest at a county fair somewhere in Upstate New York.
He grinned broadly into the camera, his mouth still half full of hotdog. He was wearing a gray t-shirt and a pair of jeans, but Mew-Mew was propped proudly against the metal folding chair he was sitting in; no one was going to doubt that it was the god of thunder joyfully gobbling fistfuls of loaded down hotdogs. “This is a fine feasting game!” he exclaimed to the bemused reporter. He shoved the last of his hotdogs into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Still sporting an enormous grin, he lifted his empty plate in the air. “Another!”
Someone hurried forward to bring him another heaping plate of food, which Darcy figured was basically Thor’s version of heaven on earth, or Valhalla on Midgard, or whatever. He grabbed another hotdog and bit it cleanly in half.
“Well, I’m sure our viewers will be happy to know that you’re enjoying yourself,” the reporter said, and she seemed to be having some trouble controlling her expression. “They’ve been very curious about you, Mr... Thor. Is there anything you’d like to say to our audience at home while we have you here?” She held her microphone out to him.
Thor positively beamed at her, and grabbed the mic, pulling it closer to his face so that he could examine it. “And this strange device will allow me to speak to these audiences in the home?” At the reporter’s nod, he pressed his mouth against the microphone. “GREETINGS, PEOPLE OF MIDGARD-!”
The reporter and everyone else within ten feet of Thor winced. “Ah, you don’t have to shout, Mr. Thor. And you can talk to the camera. That way, they’ll be able to see you as well as hear you.” She gestured him in the right direction, and Thor turned so that he was looking more-or-less out of the screen at Darcy.
Darcy braced herself.
“Greetings, people of Midgard! I am Thor Odinson of Asgard. I wish it to be known that all who call Midgard home may look to me as a friend and ally, and that I look forward to meeting your enemies in glorious battle, should you ever call upon me to do so. Let it be known that the god of thunder would gladly lay down his life to safeguard your realm, and that, should such a day ever arrive, I will listen with much pride and elation to the songs sung in the halls of Valhalla to honor the deed. With much gladness will I defend Midgard, for I find myself increasingly fond of this world and its people, and also of its coffee drink and the tarts which one puts in the toasting oven.” He banged a hand against the table for emphasis, and nearly sent his plate of hotdogs hopping off the edge. “This do I pledge to you, good people, and never have I been called an oathbreaker!”
Darcy whimpered.
The reporter was apparently made of sterner stuff than Darcy was, because she forged bravely on. “I’ve been given to understand that the most recent enemy you faced was your own brother. Would you be willing to confirm that?”
“Oh, fuck no,” Darcy said. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem that Thor was listening, because he nodded solemnly to the camera.
“It saddens my heart, but you are not in error. My brother, Loki of Asgard, has taken leave of his senses. In his madness, he sought to rule over your world, and left much death and destruction in his wake. Know that I mourn with you for the lives lost, and that it grieves me that one of Asgard bears the responsibility for so much senseless and needless violence against people who offered him no harm.”
The reporter-wait. Darcy pulled off her glasses and scrubbed them clean against the edge of her shirt, then replaced them on her nose. No, she wasn’t seeing things. The reporter was patting Thor’s shoulder, and there was a distinct you-poor-baby expression on her face. Which, yeah, Thor did look sad, and Darcy kind of wanted to give him a hug, but what?
“Know also,” Thor said, “that Loki is being punished for his wrongdoing by judges far more severe and far less easily swayed by mercy than those who serve justice in your own realm. He has not escaped unscathed, and I believe he will learn to regret the choices he made, and perhaps, with time, to understand and correct the confused and wrathful thoughts which led him to make those choices. For now, it is my belief that Asgard is in Midgard’s debt for the blood that one of her sons has shed, and we will find some way to settle that debt.”
“Of course you will,” the reporter said sympathetically, and seriously, what? “Thank you for your time, Mr. Odinson.” She turned toward the camera, smiling. “For Channel 2 News, this is-.”
The rest of what she said was mostly drowned out by Thor suddenly remembering the presence of the camera. The smile returned to his face, like a light switch be flicked back on, and he waved enthusiastically. “I also wish to send fond regards to the Lady Jane, and to her dear friend the Lady Darcy!” he yelled, apparently forgetting his earlier lesson on how he really didn’t need to do that. “I shall return home shortly, and tell you of my many adventures!”
“Hi, Thor,” Darcy said to the TV screen, and buried her face in her knees. “You seem to be having an excellent time. I am so glad to hear you’ll be coming home soon.”
*
Thor’s impromptu interview didn’t turn out to be quite the unmitigated disaster Darcy thought it would be. Sure, a few right wing pundits started to foam at the mouth because he’d called himself a god, but people in general - well, they liked Thor. The general consensus seemed to be that he was possibly crazier than a sack of mad badgers, but a significantly more harmless kind of crazy than his brother had been, and probably a really fun guy to sit down and have a beer with. People trusted Captain America, but they wanted to party with Thor. Which, considering that was basically how Tony continued to score high in most public popularity polls, Darcy wasn’t too worried about.
As such, when Darcy walked into the living room two days later to find Thor snoring loudly on the couch, she was in a much more beneficent mood. She even smiled at him when he snorted and startled awake.
“I have thus far enjoyed relating to the public,” he mumbled. “I think that I would like to dance among the stars next.”
Darcy could feel her eyebrows creep toward her hairline.
“You know what, big guy? I’ll see what I can do.”
Thor gave a contented murmur and fell back asleep.
*
“So, wait,” Darcy said, and used her toes to poke Bruce in the stomach. “You never guessed that I was coming on to you? I mean, I’m a lot of things, but you might’ve noticed that subtle isn’t exactly one of them.”
“I don’t know,” Bruce said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “That thing with Fury and the iPod speakers was pretty sneaky.”
Their planned dinner date had turned into a night in Bruce’s suite with dinner ordered from Stark Tower’s kitchens, because Darcy didn’t really care if she was wined and dined in style, and because Bruce was still a little anxious about maybe accidentally breaking portions of the city again. Bruce had gone through the effort of lighting a candle (and yeah, it was stuck lopsidedly to the bottom of the Culver University mug Darcy had used the first time she had slept at his place, but it was the thought that counted), and Darcy was content with any dining scenario that allowed her to sprawl comfortably across the couch and prop her feet up on Bruce’s lap instead of sitting stiffly across the table from him.
She also thought that her chances of getting some tonight were significantly higher if he didn’t have a long cab ride between the restaurant and home to over think things. Darcy had gotten a few too many polite pecks on the mouth over the past few days, and even if some of that was Bruce being conscientious of the fact that she was freaking out over Thor’s little outing, it was enough to make her wary of what was going on in that big brain of his.
“Sneaky, but not subtle,” Darcy pointed out. “You should stop avoiding the question. Avoidance gives me hives.”
She got another little smile out of him, and he skimmed his thumb over the arch of her foot, which was nice. “It’s possible I realized. Eventually.”
“And you just let me twist on the line?” Darcy asked dryly, and prodded him again. “Harsh, Doc.”
His hand stilled, warm and solid where it rested over her toes. “Not on purpose. I-I’ve avoided this kind of thing for a long time. Relationships. Any kind of relationship. Friends and girlfriends,” and to his credit, he only stumbled a little over that last word, “are at risk. More risk than everyone else. I mean, statistically, if anyone is going to get in the Other Guy’s way and end up hurt, it’s you and Tony. You’re the ones I spend the most time with.” His hand slid up until he could wrap his fingers around her ankle. “I’ve injured people I care about before, during an incident. I don’t want that to happen again. It seemed like the best way to make sure of it was to just not get attached.” The twist of his mouth was sharp and a little bitter. “Keep moving. Stay on the outskirts.”
“The Other Guy doesn’t seem that bad,” Darcy said carefully, because this was mostly uncharted territory, and sure enough she could see the protest forming on his lips. “No, hold up. He was pretty friendly with me when we met. I mean, there was a distinct lack of smashing. He worked well with the Avengers when you were fighting Loki - even saved Tony.” And the Hulk might’ve hurt Betty - the real Betty - once, but he had protected her after that. Darcy didn’t mention that one; she wasn’t quite sure what the dating rules were when it came to reading a guy’s Top Secret government file. Probably ‘don’t do it, that’s creepy,’ but Darcy said that the people who thought that way had never been unfortunate enough to work for SHIELD. “He’s obviously not completely out of control, or else Tony and me both would be so much splat.”
Bruce winced, which, yeah, not the most sensitive word choice on her part. Her point still stood.
“I think it’s better when I let him out on purpose,” Bruce said. “We still don’t know how he’d react to you if he were to come out because I was injured or threatened. I’m pretty sure that’s the point when everything and everyone becomes a target. He almost killed Natasha, and I don’t exactly think he was trying to teach Thor to tango.”
“That was before you and Natasha were buddies, though,” Darcy pointed out.
From the mildly poleaxed look on Bruce’s face, ‘buddies’ was not the right word, but Darcy didn’t think that ‘mutually terrifying cohorts for world-saving purposes’ had quite the same ring to it. He shook himself after a moment, and carried on with the conversation like she had in no way just given him some kind of images-of-having-brunch-with-Natasha induced seizure. “Maybe, but I would probably feel better if I knew that he wouldn’t try it again the next time I scrape my knee.”
“Exploding helicarrier,” Darcy muttered, “scraped knee. Totally the same thing.” He shot her a rueful sideways glance, and since at that point it was either let the conversation die an inglorious death or introduce the subject she had be avoiding, she said, “And Betty?”
He didn’t seem surprised that she knew the name, so maybe he assumed someone else had told her or maybe he was just eerily okay with the idea of SHIELD giving out his personal history with a very free hand. “That’s been over for a long time,” Bruce said hastily.
“Dude,” Darcy said, and couldn’t help a smile. “Chill. I was asking about Betty and the Other Guy. I am surprisingly blasé about the really wild idea that the hot older guy I’m seeing might’ve once dated someone not me.”
“Oh,” Bruce said.
When he didn’t seem inclined to continue, Darcy spent one very confused moment trying to decide whether this was another foot-poking situation, or if she should just let it go. She started when he spoke again. “Betty was - different,” he said, and he gave her another sideways glance, like he was expecting her to react badly. “We were together for a long time before the accident. I can’t count on the Other Guy reacting to anyone else the way he reacted to her.”
And-really, Darcy was actually mostly of okay with that. From what she had read, Betty had been different. Betty Ross was the kind of woman who would ride the Hulk like a rodeo bull if she thought it would improve a situation, and Darcy wasn’t sure she had it in her to be that kind of woman. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be, because everything in Bruce’s file made it sound like he and Betty had been in the kind tragi-epic love story that always made Darcy’s mom bawl like a leaky faucet in the movie theater, and Darcy didn’t really think that was what she wanted her life to become. Those stories never ended well. She could deal with being less if it meant having more.
Of course, some of her being-okay-with-it probably did stem from the fact that Bruce had said that he and Betty were over, and also that she had access to sealed government records which told her that Betty had spent the past three years in the Amazon to study the effects of some kind of rare plant on gamma poisoning, happily married and with her first kid on the way. Darcy was dealing, but she wasn’t a saint.
“Alright,” she said. “I see what you mean. You can’t plan your life around wanting one hundred percent certainty, though. I mean, it’s never gonna happen. You might Hulk out, and he might get all smashy, but there really isn’t a better place for that to happen than here. Tony and I are the statistically likely casualties, right? He’s got the suit, I’ve got my mad running the other way skills, and Thor’s on hand to, like, arm wrestle with the Hulk until he calms the fuck down, or something. It’ll be okay.”
“Maybe,” Bruce said, and he didn’t sound convinced, but she thought she felt his fingers relax a little around her ankle.
“Okay,” Darcy said, and she scooted forward until her knees were hooked over his legs and she could touch the corner of his jaw. He turned to look at her. “Fine, cool. No promises, at least not yet. But you asked me if I minded the Other Guy, when I tried to get you to go out for dinner with me that first time. The truth is, I don’t mind him, as long as I get to hang out with you. I need you to try not to mind him, either.”
Bruce snorted. “You know you’re asking the impossible, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“Just checking.”
She laughed, and he leaned forward to rest his forehead against hers. His hand was on her thigh now, and he was stroking absent circles into her pants leg. Darcy refused to be distracted. “No promises, except one,” she said.
“Mmm?”
“If you have a little Hulk-related crisis and decide to run, you talk to me first. Or Tony, I guess, but I would rather it be me, because Tony is possibly the least reassuring individual to ever walk the face of the earth. Yeah, on second thought, just talk to me. Give me a chance to convince you to stay.”
“Tony isn’t very reassuring,” Bruce said agreeably, and he was stalling for time, but she was willing to allow that.
“Not at all.”
“And you are very convincing.”
“Baby,” Darcy said in her throatiest voice, and wiggled her eyebrows for good measure, “I will convince you all night long.”
That startled a laugh from him. “Promise?”
“You first,” Darcy said.
He closed the last little breath of space between them to kiss her, lingering and sweet, and Darcy figured that would have to be close enough for now.
*
“No,” Natasha said. She said it in a perfectly pleasant tone, but it was still a very flat kind of no.
Darcy looked at Clint. Clint shrugged. “I’m willing to do it. If we get to pick, I want to go on The Daily Show.”
She started to turn toward Natasha and paused. “Jon Stewart? Really?”
“What? Just because I work for the government doesn’t mean I’m Captain America or anything. I can handle a joke. Stewart makes me laugh.”
The fact that Clint said this with no discernible facial expression at all was not reassuring in the slightest, but Darcy nodded. “Okay. Daily Show. Noted.” God, her life was weird.
She turned her attention back to Natasha, who was watching both of them like she was having severe doubts about the company she kept. Darcy felt that way at least twice per day, so she wasn’t going to take offense. “I’m a spy,” Natasha said patiently. “Forgive me if the thought of strutting around on television doesn’t exactly thrill me. I work better when people don’t know my face.”
“People already know your face,” Darcy said. “Your fight with the Chitauri was pretty widely publicized.”
“There’s a difference between patchy warzone footage and sitting down for an interview, and I think you know that,” Natasha said.
With that tactic roundly defeated, Darcy chose another. “C’mon, Natasha. I thought we were bros.”
And wow, that had really not been the way to go. Darcy couldn’t put her finger on what, exactly, had changed - Natasha didn’t look any different, and she hadn’t moved an inch - but there was suddenly enough of a chill in the air that Darcy could have sworn she saw frost forming on the pint glass between Clint’s hands, which he was now contemplating carefully rather than looking at either of them. “I like you, Darcy,” Natasha said, “but don’t ever try to use our friendship against me.”
Right. Okay. So that plan had been a very not good plan. Excellent to know.
Darcy cleared her throat, because she hadn’t felt nervous around Natasha since sometime around the second or third time they had met up, but damned if she wasn’t feeling a little curl of anxiety in the pit of her stomach right about now. “Sorry. Terrible joke. Totally my bad.” She would never be sure if it had been the right thing to say or if Natasha had just become aware that her eyes were doubling as death rays, but whatever the case might be, the atmosphere at the table became a little more relaxed, and Clint stopped studying his beer like it contained all the secrets of a less terrifyingly awkward universe.
“Look,” Darcy said, and the last thing she wanted to do was continue this really awful conversation, but the last time she had been in Fury’s office she had asked him what she was supposed to do if any of the Avengers didn’t want to do publicity work, and he had said, “Tell them it’s an order.” Darcy wasn’t a big fan of being ordered around, and she didn’t really think that a woman who could kill men with her thighs would be much happier at being told to do something unappealing because Fury had commanded that it be so, even if Natasha probably would follow orders. Darcy was just as happy not to find out how uncomfortable working with Natasha on PR would become if she had to resort to playing that card, so she figured she’d keep it close to the vest for now. “Let’s talk about the practical side of making sure people know your face, and like your face. Let’s talk about strategy.”
Natasha leaned back against the booth and, even if she still didn’t look too happy, that was definitely a this ought to be good raise of the eyebrow. Darcy took it as a sign that she could continue without anyone possibly stabbing her in the face.
“So, you’re working with the Avengers,” Darcy said. “There’s, jeez, I don’t know, there’s an orphanage burning down. And you race in to save the little orphans, some of whom have adorable British accents, and possibly some kittens, because that’s what heroes do.”
Clint choked on his beer. He coughed once and recovered. “Do the kittens have adorable British accents, too?”
Darcy waved a hand. “Yeah, sure. Why not? I don’t care about the nationality of the kittens. The point is that there are kittens, and also orphans. The orphans are trapped in a burning building, and they’re all, ‘eeee, someone save use!’” she flailed her arms a little for emphasis, “and you rush in all, ‘I will save you, tiny people!’ Only you can’t, because you’re the Black Widow, and they all promptly piss their little pants and run the other way when they see you. And then maybe the orphanage falls down on your head.”
“I like to think I’d be smart enough to leave the orphans to fend for themselves once they started spontaneously peeing on themselves at the sight of me,” Natasha said, but there was the slightest hesitation before she said it.
“I think you might be exaggerating a little,” Clint said, his lips tilting into a smile. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it. I especially like how you did the voices and everything.”
“Thanks,” Darcy said, “but I’m not exaggerating. I mean, only a little.” She reached into her bag, and pulled out a copy of a small press local paper, dated two days before. She tossed it on the table between them. The headline read, THE SILENT AVENGERS: WHY ARE THEY HIDING? and the article that followed wasn’t necessarily kind, but it was also a lot more balanced than some of the things that were being said on the radio or the TV. “This isn’t the worst of it, and it’s been going on for months. When you don’t talk to people, they assume you have something to hide. And yeah, Natasha, before you say anything, I get that you do have things to hide, but you’re going to have problems if you keep trying to hide everything. Maybe not orphanages falling on your head problems, but problems. I mean, try to imagine doing your job when the people you’re trying to help are suspicious of you, or when there are reporters getting in your way because you haven’t been seen in weeks and they want to get a quote. Throw them a bone. Clear up some of the mystery, make it seem like you’ve only been avoiding the publicity because you were recuperating or because you needed a damn vacation - no one will blame you for that - and they’ll stop looking quite so hard for some buried secret.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. “The thing is, as much as I’m sure we’d all have preferred it if the Loki business could’ve been wrapped up without you ending up in the public eye, you are in the public eye. People know you, or at least know of the Black Widow. They’re going to keep digging until they find something, or they’re gonna freak the hell out when they don’t find anything. Either way, it ends up smelling fishy.”
“You’re saying that I’ve been compromised.”
“Well, yeah.”
“And Director Fury agrees?”
“Director Fury agrees hardcore enough that he’s given me a budget and some SHIELD agents to do my bidding. Me. Think about that for a moment. Revel in the pure kookiness of it all, and think about how desperate he must’ve been to get this taken care of, that he thought giving me a piggy bank and some minions was a good idea.”
Natasha smoothed the newspaper with her fingers, and was silent. Darcy spent the next few minutes sipping on her own sadly neglected beer, and gave Natasha what time she needed.
“Codenames only,” Natasha said finally. “We’re not all Stark, and if Cap can keep hiding behind the shield then I get to be Black Widow to the press. Any decision on who I talk to and when is run by me before you approve it, and as soon as some of the sensation dies down you limit my public appearances to the bare minimum.”
“That’s fine,” Darcy said. “No, that’s great. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Natasha looked up from the paper and smiled, just a little. “Now, I think you promised Barton all the beers.”
“You did,” Clint agreed.
Darcy laughed and signaled for another round, relieved that Natasha seemed to have forgiven her and giddy with having gotten what she wanted.
It didn’t occur to her until several hours later, after she had teetered out of the bar and while she was waiting for one of the cabs speeding by to stop ignoring her, that just maybe Natasha had gotten everything she wanted.
“Son of a bitch,” Darcy said, but she was smiling.
*
Natasha’s appearance on Ellen went smoothly. She looked gorgeous in her cream colored dress, her vibrantly red curls a close match to the chair she sat in. She was charming and witty and so perfect that Darcy didn’t even mind that Natasha had totally played her, because she was equally adept at playing a studio audience.
She talked about her recent vacation to Rio and her previous career as a ballerina, mentioned that her favorite food was a New York bagel slathered in cream cheese, and answered every question posed to her about the Avengers and the battle they had fought in the streets of Manhattan. Darcy had no idea how much of it was true, and she didn’t really care, because every single word sounded like it was nothing but the most shining honesty when dropped from Natasha’s lips. Steve couldn’t pull off that level of sincerity, and he was almost always legitimately sincere.
At the end of the interview, Natasha accepted the action figure in her likeness that DeGeneres pressed on her, and walked off the stage smiling.
“I kind of love you,” Darcy said, once the other woman had made it backstage. “Have I mentioned that recently?”
“It was implied,” Natasha replied. She tossed Darcy the action figure with a smirk.
Darcy studied it for a few moments before deciding she was totally going to need to get some of these made. From what her little worker bees at SHIELD told her, the fervor of true converts to the cause of public relations burning brightly in their eyes, Hasbro had been begging for the rights for weeks now; it wouldn’t be that hard to arrange.
(Two months later, Darcy would nearly choke to death laughing over the Hulk figure with his bitty ripped up pants and his hilariously proportionate pants bulge. Bruce would be significantly less amused.)
*
Clint’s appearance on The Daily Show didn’t go quite so smoothly. Darcy comforted herself with the notion that most likely, that bit where he had pinned Stewart’s jacket to part of the set with an arrow had been planned. She also comforted herself with chocolate. A lot of chocolate.
*
“I remember a time when I was happy that Tony talked to the press,” Darcy said without opening her eyes. “Now I just wish that he would stop.”
“I often wish that Tony would stop talking,” Bruce said agreeably. “Darcy, why are you using my dog as a pillow?”
“He is warm and fluffy, and when I use him as a pillow he doesn’t try to rest a tablet on my face because he got distracted by science.”
“That was one time.”
“And yet, the memory lingers.”
Bruce made a noise, but after a moment’s consideration Darcy decided he sounded more amused than indignant. She snuggled a little closer to the dog and sneezed. “Okay. I’m coming back to the couch, but only because the floor is hard and the General sheds.”
The dog had become the General a few days earlier, because when Darcy had asked Bruce what his name was, Bruce had looked at her uncomprehendingly and said, “I just called him dog.” That was too depressing to contemplate, so Clint’s name had stuck. After a day of having to work her way through General Tom Thumb ever time she wanted to talk to or about the dog, Darcy had decided that was a dumb and unnecessarily long name for an animal and told Bruce is was either General or Tom.
“...but General seems a little too evocative of General Ross,” she had said. “Maybe stick to Tom.”
Bruce had ducked his head and smiled. “Really? I kind of like General. It seems fitting.”
Darcy had peered at him suspiciously. “Is that your roundabout way of calling General Ross a son of a bitch?”
“...maybe.”
Darcy had no real objections, and the name had spread, mostly she thought because Tony was tickled by the idea that, of the many generals who occasionally came and went from Stark Tower, the only one who really mattered was a dog.
“What did Tony do?” Bruce asked, once Darcy was comfortably settled with her head in his lap. He even started petting her hair absently, fingers stroking against her scalp in a way that made Darcy wonder if purring would be a completely inappropriate response.
“I was standing at the edge of the stage during his press conference,” Darcy said, “and he might have pointed me out and asked me in his loudest Tony voice who my daddy was, and yeah, he was obviously joking, but there’s this little thing where reporters don’t have much of a sense of humor, especially when missing a joke will sell papers or get ratings. I mean, most of them are going to fact check it to make sure and find that it leads to nothing, but I’m pretty sure that some of the tabloids are going have headlines tomorrow about how I’m Tony Stark’s bastard daughter. My mother has been calling me crying all morning, because people have been calling her, and she really wanted to let me know that she and my dad were happily married more than nine months before my birth. Which, duh, I’m a middle child and-.” Darcy paused, and a look of stunned horror crossed her face. “Oh god. I think this means he won the prank war. There is nothing I can do that will beat this.”
The fingers on her scalp stopped stroking and started shaking, as did the lap her head was resting on. “Bruce Banner, you had better not be laughing at my pain when I open my eyes. Those had better be shoulder-shaking sobs of sympathy that I’m feeling right now.”
“Of course they are,” Bruce said, in a strange, muffled voice. Darcy sighed and pressed her cheek against his stomach, letting his laughter shudder through her, because she was willing to let him laugh at her if it meant he was laughing.
“We’re going to have to stop dancing around this sooner or later,” she mumbled, once he had calmed down.
He smoothed a hand over her hair again. “Dancing around what?”
“The press. You.”
“Darcy.”
“All the cool kids are doing it, Bruce.”
“The cool kids aren’t risking an incident in a room full of cameras and reporters.”
“He’s going to have to meet his public eventually. Better that it be at a time and a place where you can let him out and everything is chill.”
“He-?” Bruce’s hand curled into a fist, although he was careful not to tug on her hair. “Darcy, you can’t be talking about introducing the Other Guy at a press conference. That would be stupid, and you’re not stupid.”
She didn’t think he’d meant for the words to sting, but they did anyway. She opened her eyes, and kind of regretted that from this angle all she could see was his shirt and the bottom of his chin. This was not the position to be conducting a negotiation from. She swung her legs off the edge of the couch and pushed herself up until she was sitting next to Bruce instead of sprawled across his lap. “I’m not stupid, and neither is my idea. You’re not the one getting the all the bad press. You’re not the one that people will recognize, not unless they’re super well-informed physicists. You’re not the one people are afraid of. He is. He’s the one whose image we have to fix.”
Bruce met her gaze, and he was frowning. “Maybe people are right to be afraid of him.”
“He’s a pretty scary dude,” Darcy allowed, “but if you’re planning to bring him out again if you need to - and don’t make that face, obviously you are, because otherwise you would have blown town months ago, or when SHIELD was attacked you would have hidden away in the panic rooms with all the other nice scientists rather than letting the big guy out to play - you have to make sure people aren’t afraid of him, or at least not any more afraid of him than they have to be in order to know that they should sensibly get out of his way. I think we can agree that if anyone decides that the appropriate response to the Hulk is to reach for grandpa’s shotgun, you’re going to have a mess you don’t want on your hands.”
He took a sharp breath, and then let it out slowly. “There’s already a mess on my hands,” he said, and then, “I think you need to leave now.”
Don’t push Bruce too far, or too hard. Don’t make him angry. Tiptoe the fuck around him. Right.
“Fine,” Darcy said, “I’m gone.” She grabbed her shoes from the floor near the couch and felt only a little better for slamming the door on her way out.
She didn’t go very far. She was about midway down the long stretch of hallway between her suite and his when she sat down with her back against the wall and just sort of stayed there. Darcy was never the one to leave during a fight; she wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself. When she and Jane fought, Jane was always the one to storm out first, to her little sanctuary on the roof when they had been at the station in New Mexico, or to take a walk around the block now that they were in New York.
Darcy made it through about ten minutes of contemplating her toes and feeling kind of like an idiot for not just going back to her room before Tony arrived. He was still dressed in the suit he had worn to the earlier press conference, although he’d loosened his tie and abandoned his shoes somewhere along the way. When he sat down beside her, his socked feet lined up next to her bare ones.
“You looked a little blue on the security feed, and-.”
“Pepper sent you, right?”
"Don't be ridiculous," Tony said. "No one sends me anywhere." He paused. “That’s pretty much the way of things, yeah.”
“Does she know what a bad idea that was? I mean, you’re basically the opposite of comforting.”
Tony smirked. “Now, is that any way to speak to your dear old dad?”
“In the face, Tony. Repeatedly.”
He was silent for a moment, idly considering his socks. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. His tone implied that he would find swallowing a bag of live mice more pleasant.
“With you? Dear god, not even a little.”
“I thank you from the bottom of my soul for that .”
He still didn’t move, and Darcy sighed. “Pepper gave you a time limit, didn’t she?”
“Ten minute minimum. I think she feels that I owe you for the press conference, and should settle my debt in awkwardness and suffering if I can’t offer sage advice.”
Darcy had to be on the far end of desperate to even be considering asking this, but, “Got any?”
“Ahahaha. No.”
She snorted.
“Except that I generally feel that anyone Banner kicks out of a room is doing things right.”
“Tony Stark thinks I’m doing things right,” Darcy muttered. “I am obviously doing everything wrong.”
“No, no, wait, I have a theory. You see, Bruce doesn’t trust himself. He doesn’t test himself. So I think he needs people to poke and prod at him, people like me, so that he can see that his control is a lot better than he thinks it is.” Tony smiled fondly. “I was really happy when he started dating you. You’re like girl me.”
“You take that back.”
“Of course, you’re not as fantastically good looking as I am.”
“You take that back. My boobs are much better than yours are.”
Tony swept an appraising glance over her. “Hmm. Yeah, that’s accurate.” He slugged her lightly in the shoulder. “Go on. Get back in there, tiger.”
"Tiger?"
"Rawr."
“You need to stop talking to me. Because everything you say is awful.”
“I get that a lot.” He rose to his feet, and motioned at her impatiently until she stood with him. “My ten minutes aren’t up, but I think I can get away with going back now if the next time you see Pepper, you tell her I was very helpful and that I warmed the cockles of your heart.”
“Or you could tell her that I threatened to tase you if you kept trying to make me feel better,” Darcy said thoughtfully. “She’s more likely to believe that.” Still, she patted him on the cheek and did feel a little better. Judging from his smirk, Tony knew it. With another soft sigh, Darcy turned and doubled back the way she had come.
Tony was humming Eye of the Tiger behind her.
“Tony, stop it.”
His snickering followed her all the way to Bruce’s door. He stopped when she knocked, and she didn’t check to see if he was still standing there, because really she didn’t want to know if Tony had decided to start doing his spying in person.
“I'm not going to apologize for this one,” she said as soon as Bruce opened the door, and tried not to feel too thankful that he had decided to open the door. “You called me stupid. If you don't want the Hulk to play with the other kids, I get it, but you need to talk that out with me and find another way, not just end the conversation and boot me out of the room.”
“I didn’t call you stupid,” he said, and he seemed calmer now. At Darcy’s raised eyebrow, he amended that to, “I didn’t mean to sound like I was calling you stupid, and I’m sorry. You didn’t want to talk it out, though; you wanted to dig in your heels and fight. There are reasons I can’t do that, Darcy.”
And yeah, okay, “That’s fair. It’s cool if you need a time out, but I can’t just drop it every time we run up against something that’s going to make you uncomfortable. Maybe we can have a signal? I could work with a signal.”
A small smile pulled at the edges of Bruce’s lips. He held up his hands and formed a T with them, the universal playground symbol for time out. The laugh that Darcy offered in response was a little shaky and more relieved than amused, but they both pretended not to notice.
“Did you want to talk about it now?” Bruce asked, and if he didn’t exactly sound excited by the notion, he at least was trying.
“Well,” Darcy said, and reached out to slide a hand into his, “maybe not right now.” She stepped across the threshold into his suite, tugging him further inside with her. “I mean, traditionally, there’s this thing that couples do when they have a fight and then make up.” She reached past him to close the door.
“Oh?”
A moment later: “Oh.”
Then: “Well, who am I to question tradition?”
*
“What we need to do,” Darcy said, some time later, and she paused to take a bite from the container of leftover fried rice that she had balanced on the mattress, “is humanize the Hulk for people. It’s okay if they’re a little scared of him. Probably it’s even smart for us to make sure they stay a little scared, but what we can’t have them doing is looking at him - at you - like you’re something less than human, some kind of unfeeling and unthinking monster who doesn’t care who gets in his way when he’s running around and mucking shit up. That’s the point where people start to reach for their shotguns and their tasers, or call in the U.S. Army for an airstrike.”
“It’s true, though. The Other Guy isn’t really much for the thinking, and the only feeling he seems to do is I really enjoy this mucking stuff up.”
“Agree to disagree,” Darcy said with a shrug. “I still say he isn’t as bad as you paint him. My point is, if we can’t humanize him, we’re going to have to humanize you.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Bruce asked mildly.
“You really aren’t.”
Bruce sighed. “Go on.”
*
The flash of cameras and the harsh overhead lights in the room highlighted the gray in Bruce’s hair and the discomfort on his face, made him look older and more tired than he usually did. He tapped the microphone once, even though Darcy had already checked and triple checked the sound.
“Hello,” he said, once the background chatter of the gathered reporters had died down a little. “My name is Doctor Bruce Banner, but you may know me better as the Hulk.”
Roping Thor into doing some PR work was incredibly easy. Controlling the direction that PR work took was basically impossible.
He caught on to the idea of engaging with the public for the purpose of raising the Avengers’ reputation with more ease than Darcy had expected. She was midway through attempting to explain the concept in terms he could follow when his face brightened. “It is as when my father would ride through the worlds in days long since past, sitting atop his mighty eight-legged steed with his warriors arrayed fiercely behind him, so that his enemies could gaze upon him and know that to trifle with the All-Father was to trifle with death.”
“Sort of,” Darcy said, and bless him he was trying. “I, uhm, don’t think we want people to associate you with certain death, though.”
Thor looked sad.
“Hey, wasn’t that eight-legged horse your brother’s-.”
“We do not speak of that.”
“Right.”
For a moment, they sat there in silence. Awkward, awkward your-brother-did-a-horse silence.
“My father would also don a traveler’s cloak and walk the land in the guise of a simple old man, seeking wisdom and bestowing favor upon those who offered him hospitality,” Thor said eventually. “I could-.”
“I don’t think so,” Darcy said quickly, her brain overrun with images of Thor smiting the first New Yorker who refused to let him crash on the couch for a night. Possibly she and Jane had ruined him for the notion that not all Midgardians were willing to invite large, strange men into their homes. “We want people to know it’s you, and that they can depend on you if another crisis ever comes up. Going around disguised would kind of defeat the purpose.”
“I see,” Thor said, and stroked his beard thoughtfully. “You believe that I must go among the people in my own likeness, to win their trust and favor as their protector.” He stood suddenly, and from her spot on the couch, Darcy looked up at him. He was grinning, which was a good sign. Probably. “I believe that I am willing to do this thing for you, Lady Darcy. The people of Midgard do not know my reputation as a warrior. It is understandable that they would have their doubts.”
“Awesome,” Darcy said, relieved. “I mean, we might want to emphasize how you’re a really super nice guy as well as your ability to bash in heads, but-.”
“I shall go forth immediately to reassure the good people of both my intentions and skill!”
“What.” Darcy said, before her brain caught up to what he had said. “Thor, no.”
He didn’t seem to hear her, or else he was ignoring her, which was always a distinct possibility with Thor. He had selective hearing, especially when it came to the word ‘no’ in conjunction with his name. No, Thor, please put on some pants was a prime example. He just patted her on the head, and a moment later he was out the door.
“What have I done?” Darcy asked the empty room, in tones of dawning horror.
*
Over the next three days, Thor was everywhere. There were several blurry iPhone videos of him buying rounds at a local bar. Pictures began to crop up of people posing with him on the streets of the city. Channel 2 News caught up to him while he was taking part in an eating contest at a county fair somewhere in Upstate New York.
He grinned broadly into the camera, his mouth still half full of hotdog. He was wearing a gray t-shirt and a pair of jeans, but Mew-Mew was propped proudly against the metal folding chair he was sitting in; no one was going to doubt that it was the god of thunder joyfully gobbling fistfuls of loaded down hotdogs. “This is a fine feasting game!” he exclaimed to the bemused reporter. He shoved the last of his hotdogs into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Still sporting an enormous grin, he lifted his empty plate in the air. “Another!”
Someone hurried forward to bring him another heaping plate of food, which Darcy figured was basically Thor’s version of heaven on earth, or Valhalla on Midgard, or whatever. He grabbed another hotdog and bit it cleanly in half.
“Well, I’m sure our viewers will be happy to know that you’re enjoying yourself,” the reporter said, and she seemed to be having some trouble controlling her expression. “They’ve been very curious about you, Mr... Thor. Is there anything you’d like to say to our audience at home while we have you here?” She held her microphone out to him.
Thor positively beamed at her, and grabbed the mic, pulling it closer to his face so that he could examine it. “And this strange device will allow me to speak to these audiences in the home?” At the reporter’s nod, he pressed his mouth against the microphone. “GREETINGS, PEOPLE OF MIDGARD-!”
The reporter and everyone else within ten feet of Thor winced. “Ah, you don’t have to shout, Mr. Thor. And you can talk to the camera. That way, they’ll be able to see you as well as hear you.” She gestured him in the right direction, and Thor turned so that he was looking more-or-less out of the screen at Darcy.
Darcy braced herself.
“Greetings, people of Midgard! I am Thor Odinson of Asgard. I wish it to be known that all who call Midgard home may look to me as a friend and ally, and that I look forward to meeting your enemies in glorious battle, should you ever call upon me to do so. Let it be known that the god of thunder would gladly lay down his life to safeguard your realm, and that, should such a day ever arrive, I will listen with much pride and elation to the songs sung in the halls of Valhalla to honor the deed. With much gladness will I defend Midgard, for I find myself increasingly fond of this world and its people, and also of its coffee drink and the tarts which one puts in the toasting oven.” He banged a hand against the table for emphasis, and nearly sent his plate of hotdogs hopping off the edge. “This do I pledge to you, good people, and never have I been called an oathbreaker!”
Darcy whimpered.
The reporter was apparently made of sterner stuff than Darcy was, because she forged bravely on. “I’ve been given to understand that the most recent enemy you faced was your own brother. Would you be willing to confirm that?”
“Oh, fuck no,” Darcy said. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem that Thor was listening, because he nodded solemnly to the camera.
“It saddens my heart, but you are not in error. My brother, Loki of Asgard, has taken leave of his senses. In his madness, he sought to rule over your world, and left much death and destruction in his wake. Know that I mourn with you for the lives lost, and that it grieves me that one of Asgard bears the responsibility for so much senseless and needless violence against people who offered him no harm.”
The reporter-wait. Darcy pulled off her glasses and scrubbed them clean against the edge of her shirt, then replaced them on her nose. No, she wasn’t seeing things. The reporter was patting Thor’s shoulder, and there was a distinct you-poor-baby expression on her face. Which, yeah, Thor did look sad, and Darcy kind of wanted to give him a hug, but what?
“Know also,” Thor said, “that Loki is being punished for his wrongdoing by judges far more severe and far less easily swayed by mercy than those who serve justice in your own realm. He has not escaped unscathed, and I believe he will learn to regret the choices he made, and perhaps, with time, to understand and correct the confused and wrathful thoughts which led him to make those choices. For now, it is my belief that Asgard is in Midgard’s debt for the blood that one of her sons has shed, and we will find some way to settle that debt.”
“Of course you will,” the reporter said sympathetically, and seriously, what? “Thank you for your time, Mr. Odinson.” She turned toward the camera, smiling. “For Channel 2 News, this is-.”
The rest of what she said was mostly drowned out by Thor suddenly remembering the presence of the camera. The smile returned to his face, like a light switch be flicked back on, and he waved enthusiastically. “I also wish to send fond regards to the Lady Jane, and to her dear friend the Lady Darcy!” he yelled, apparently forgetting his earlier lesson on how he really didn’t need to do that. “I shall return home shortly, and tell you of my many adventures!”
“Hi, Thor,” Darcy said to the TV screen, and buried her face in her knees. “You seem to be having an excellent time. I am so glad to hear you’ll be coming home soon.”
*
Thor’s impromptu interview didn’t turn out to be quite the unmitigated disaster Darcy thought it would be. Sure, a few right wing pundits started to foam at the mouth because he’d called himself a god, but people in general - well, they liked Thor. The general consensus seemed to be that he was possibly crazier than a sack of mad badgers, but a significantly more harmless kind of crazy than his brother had been, and probably a really fun guy to sit down and have a beer with. People trusted Captain America, but they wanted to party with Thor. Which, considering that was basically how Tony continued to score high in most public popularity polls, Darcy wasn’t too worried about.
As such, when Darcy walked into the living room two days later to find Thor snoring loudly on the couch, she was in a much more beneficent mood. She even smiled at him when he snorted and startled awake.
“I have thus far enjoyed relating to the public,” he mumbled. “I think that I would like to dance among the stars next.”
Darcy could feel her eyebrows creep toward her hairline.
“You know what, big guy? I’ll see what I can do.”
Thor gave a contented murmur and fell back asleep.
*
“So, wait,” Darcy said, and used her toes to poke Bruce in the stomach. “You never guessed that I was coming on to you? I mean, I’m a lot of things, but you might’ve noticed that subtle isn’t exactly one of them.”
“I don’t know,” Bruce said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “That thing with Fury and the iPod speakers was pretty sneaky.”
Their planned dinner date had turned into a night in Bruce’s suite with dinner ordered from Stark Tower’s kitchens, because Darcy didn’t really care if she was wined and dined in style, and because Bruce was still a little anxious about maybe accidentally breaking portions of the city again. Bruce had gone through the effort of lighting a candle (and yeah, it was stuck lopsidedly to the bottom of the Culver University mug Darcy had used the first time she had slept at his place, but it was the thought that counted), and Darcy was content with any dining scenario that allowed her to sprawl comfortably across the couch and prop her feet up on Bruce’s lap instead of sitting stiffly across the table from him.
She also thought that her chances of getting some tonight were significantly higher if he didn’t have a long cab ride between the restaurant and home to over think things. Darcy had gotten a few too many polite pecks on the mouth over the past few days, and even if some of that was Bruce being conscientious of the fact that she was freaking out over Thor’s little outing, it was enough to make her wary of what was going on in that big brain of his.
“Sneaky, but not subtle,” Darcy pointed out. “You should stop avoiding the question. Avoidance gives me hives.”
She got another little smile out of him, and he skimmed his thumb over the arch of her foot, which was nice. “It’s possible I realized. Eventually.”
“And you just let me twist on the line?” Darcy asked dryly, and prodded him again. “Harsh, Doc.”
His hand stilled, warm and solid where it rested over her toes. “Not on purpose. I-I’ve avoided this kind of thing for a long time. Relationships. Any kind of relationship. Friends and girlfriends,” and to his credit, he only stumbled a little over that last word, “are at risk. More risk than everyone else. I mean, statistically, if anyone is going to get in the Other Guy’s way and end up hurt, it’s you and Tony. You’re the ones I spend the most time with.” His hand slid up until he could wrap his fingers around her ankle. “I’ve injured people I care about before, during an incident. I don’t want that to happen again. It seemed like the best way to make sure of it was to just not get attached.” The twist of his mouth was sharp and a little bitter. “Keep moving. Stay on the outskirts.”
“The Other Guy doesn’t seem that bad,” Darcy said carefully, because this was mostly uncharted territory, and sure enough she could see the protest forming on his lips. “No, hold up. He was pretty friendly with me when we met. I mean, there was a distinct lack of smashing. He worked well with the Avengers when you were fighting Loki - even saved Tony.” And the Hulk might’ve hurt Betty - the real Betty - once, but he had protected her after that. Darcy didn’t mention that one; she wasn’t quite sure what the dating rules were when it came to reading a guy’s Top Secret government file. Probably ‘don’t do it, that’s creepy,’ but Darcy said that the people who thought that way had never been unfortunate enough to work for SHIELD. “He’s obviously not completely out of control, or else Tony and me both would be so much splat.”
Bruce winced, which, yeah, not the most sensitive word choice on her part. Her point still stood.
“I think it’s better when I let him out on purpose,” Bruce said. “We still don’t know how he’d react to you if he were to come out because I was injured or threatened. I’m pretty sure that’s the point when everything and everyone becomes a target. He almost killed Natasha, and I don’t exactly think he was trying to teach Thor to tango.”
“That was before you and Natasha were buddies, though,” Darcy pointed out.
From the mildly poleaxed look on Bruce’s face, ‘buddies’ was not the right word, but Darcy didn’t think that ‘mutually terrifying cohorts for world-saving purposes’ had quite the same ring to it. He shook himself after a moment, and carried on with the conversation like she had in no way just given him some kind of images-of-having-brunch-with-Natasha induced seizure. “Maybe, but I would probably feel better if I knew that he wouldn’t try it again the next time I scrape my knee.”
“Exploding helicarrier,” Darcy muttered, “scraped knee. Totally the same thing.” He shot her a rueful sideways glance, and since at that point it was either let the conversation die an inglorious death or introduce the subject she had be avoiding, she said, “And Betty?”
He didn’t seem surprised that she knew the name, so maybe he assumed someone else had told her or maybe he was just eerily okay with the idea of SHIELD giving out his personal history with a very free hand. “That’s been over for a long time,” Bruce said hastily.
“Dude,” Darcy said, and couldn’t help a smile. “Chill. I was asking about Betty and the Other Guy. I am surprisingly blasé about the really wild idea that the hot older guy I’m seeing might’ve once dated someone not me.”
“Oh,” Bruce said.
When he didn’t seem inclined to continue, Darcy spent one very confused moment trying to decide whether this was another foot-poking situation, or if she should just let it go. She started when he spoke again. “Betty was - different,” he said, and he gave her another sideways glance, like he was expecting her to react badly. “We were together for a long time before the accident. I can’t count on the Other Guy reacting to anyone else the way he reacted to her.”
And-really, Darcy was actually mostly of okay with that. From what she had read, Betty had been different. Betty Ross was the kind of woman who would ride the Hulk like a rodeo bull if she thought it would improve a situation, and Darcy wasn’t sure she had it in her to be that kind of woman. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be, because everything in Bruce’s file made it sound like he and Betty had been in the kind tragi-epic love story that always made Darcy’s mom bawl like a leaky faucet in the movie theater, and Darcy didn’t really think that was what she wanted her life to become. Those stories never ended well. She could deal with being less if it meant having more.
Of course, some of her being-okay-with-it probably did stem from the fact that Bruce had said that he and Betty were over, and also that she had access to sealed government records which told her that Betty had spent the past three years in the Amazon to study the effects of some kind of rare plant on gamma poisoning, happily married and with her first kid on the way. Darcy was dealing, but she wasn’t a saint.
“Alright,” she said. “I see what you mean. You can’t plan your life around wanting one hundred percent certainty, though. I mean, it’s never gonna happen. You might Hulk out, and he might get all smashy, but there really isn’t a better place for that to happen than here. Tony and I are the statistically likely casualties, right? He’s got the suit, I’ve got my mad running the other way skills, and Thor’s on hand to, like, arm wrestle with the Hulk until he calms the fuck down, or something. It’ll be okay.”
“Maybe,” Bruce said, and he didn’t sound convinced, but she thought she felt his fingers relax a little around her ankle.
“Okay,” Darcy said, and she scooted forward until her knees were hooked over his legs and she could touch the corner of his jaw. He turned to look at her. “Fine, cool. No promises, at least not yet. But you asked me if I minded the Other Guy, when I tried to get you to go out for dinner with me that first time. The truth is, I don’t mind him, as long as I get to hang out with you. I need you to try not to mind him, either.”
Bruce snorted. “You know you’re asking the impossible, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“Just checking.”
She laughed, and he leaned forward to rest his forehead against hers. His hand was on her thigh now, and he was stroking absent circles into her pants leg. Darcy refused to be distracted. “No promises, except one,” she said.
“Mmm?”
“If you have a little Hulk-related crisis and decide to run, you talk to me first. Or Tony, I guess, but I would rather it be me, because Tony is possibly the least reassuring individual to ever walk the face of the earth. Yeah, on second thought, just talk to me. Give me a chance to convince you to stay.”
“Tony isn’t very reassuring,” Bruce said agreeably, and he was stalling for time, but she was willing to allow that.
“Not at all.”
“And you are very convincing.”
“Baby,” Darcy said in her throatiest voice, and wiggled her eyebrows for good measure, “I will convince you all night long.”
That startled a laugh from him. “Promise?”
“You first,” Darcy said.
He closed the last little breath of space between them to kiss her, lingering and sweet, and Darcy figured that would have to be close enough for now.
*
“No,” Natasha said. She said it in a perfectly pleasant tone, but it was still a very flat kind of no.
Darcy looked at Clint. Clint shrugged. “I’m willing to do it. If we get to pick, I want to go on The Daily Show.”
She started to turn toward Natasha and paused. “Jon Stewart? Really?”
“What? Just because I work for the government doesn’t mean I’m Captain America or anything. I can handle a joke. Stewart makes me laugh.”
The fact that Clint said this with no discernible facial expression at all was not reassuring in the slightest, but Darcy nodded. “Okay. Daily Show. Noted.” God, her life was weird.
She turned her attention back to Natasha, who was watching both of them like she was having severe doubts about the company she kept. Darcy felt that way at least twice per day, so she wasn’t going to take offense. “I’m a spy,” Natasha said patiently. “Forgive me if the thought of strutting around on television doesn’t exactly thrill me. I work better when people don’t know my face.”
“People already know your face,” Darcy said. “Your fight with the Chitauri was pretty widely publicized.”
“There’s a difference between patchy warzone footage and sitting down for an interview, and I think you know that,” Natasha said.
With that tactic roundly defeated, Darcy chose another. “C’mon, Natasha. I thought we were bros.”
And wow, that had really not been the way to go. Darcy couldn’t put her finger on what, exactly, had changed - Natasha didn’t look any different, and she hadn’t moved an inch - but there was suddenly enough of a chill in the air that Darcy could have sworn she saw frost forming on the pint glass between Clint’s hands, which he was now contemplating carefully rather than looking at either of them. “I like you, Darcy,” Natasha said, “but don’t ever try to use our friendship against me.”
Right. Okay. So that plan had been a very not good plan. Excellent to know.
Darcy cleared her throat, because she hadn’t felt nervous around Natasha since sometime around the second or third time they had met up, but damned if she wasn’t feeling a little curl of anxiety in the pit of her stomach right about now. “Sorry. Terrible joke. Totally my bad.” She would never be sure if it had been the right thing to say or if Natasha had just become aware that her eyes were doubling as death rays, but whatever the case might be, the atmosphere at the table became a little more relaxed, and Clint stopped studying his beer like it contained all the secrets of a less terrifyingly awkward universe.
“Look,” Darcy said, and the last thing she wanted to do was continue this really awful conversation, but the last time she had been in Fury’s office she had asked him what she was supposed to do if any of the Avengers didn’t want to do publicity work, and he had said, “Tell them it’s an order.” Darcy wasn’t a big fan of being ordered around, and she didn’t really think that a woman who could kill men with her thighs would be much happier at being told to do something unappealing because Fury had commanded that it be so, even if Natasha probably would follow orders. Darcy was just as happy not to find out how uncomfortable working with Natasha on PR would become if she had to resort to playing that card, so she figured she’d keep it close to the vest for now. “Let’s talk about the practical side of making sure people know your face, and like your face. Let’s talk about strategy.”
Natasha leaned back against the booth and, even if she still didn’t look too happy, that was definitely a this ought to be good raise of the eyebrow. Darcy took it as a sign that she could continue without anyone possibly stabbing her in the face.
“So, you’re working with the Avengers,” Darcy said. “There’s, jeez, I don’t know, there’s an orphanage burning down. And you race in to save the little orphans, some of whom have adorable British accents, and possibly some kittens, because that’s what heroes do.”
Clint choked on his beer. He coughed once and recovered. “Do the kittens have adorable British accents, too?”
Darcy waved a hand. “Yeah, sure. Why not? I don’t care about the nationality of the kittens. The point is that there are kittens, and also orphans. The orphans are trapped in a burning building, and they’re all, ‘eeee, someone save use!’” she flailed her arms a little for emphasis, “and you rush in all, ‘I will save you, tiny people!’ Only you can’t, because you’re the Black Widow, and they all promptly piss their little pants and run the other way when they see you. And then maybe the orphanage falls down on your head.”
“I like to think I’d be smart enough to leave the orphans to fend for themselves once they started spontaneously peeing on themselves at the sight of me,” Natasha said, but there was the slightest hesitation before she said it.
“I think you might be exaggerating a little,” Clint said, his lips tilting into a smile. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it. I especially like how you did the voices and everything.”
“Thanks,” Darcy said, “but I’m not exaggerating. I mean, only a little.” She reached into her bag, and pulled out a copy of a small press local paper, dated two days before. She tossed it on the table between them. The headline read, THE SILENT AVENGERS: WHY ARE THEY HIDING? and the article that followed wasn’t necessarily kind, but it was also a lot more balanced than some of the things that were being said on the radio or the TV. “This isn’t the worst of it, and it’s been going on for months. When you don’t talk to people, they assume you have something to hide. And yeah, Natasha, before you say anything, I get that you do have things to hide, but you’re going to have problems if you keep trying to hide everything. Maybe not orphanages falling on your head problems, but problems. I mean, try to imagine doing your job when the people you’re trying to help are suspicious of you, or when there are reporters getting in your way because you haven’t been seen in weeks and they want to get a quote. Throw them a bone. Clear up some of the mystery, make it seem like you’ve only been avoiding the publicity because you were recuperating or because you needed a damn vacation - no one will blame you for that - and they’ll stop looking quite so hard for some buried secret.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. “The thing is, as much as I’m sure we’d all have preferred it if the Loki business could’ve been wrapped up without you ending up in the public eye, you are in the public eye. People know you, or at least know of the Black Widow. They’re going to keep digging until they find something, or they’re gonna freak the hell out when they don’t find anything. Either way, it ends up smelling fishy.”
“You’re saying that I’ve been compromised.”
“Well, yeah.”
“And Director Fury agrees?”
“Director Fury agrees hardcore enough that he’s given me a budget and some SHIELD agents to do my bidding. Me. Think about that for a moment. Revel in the pure kookiness of it all, and think about how desperate he must’ve been to get this taken care of, that he thought giving me a piggy bank and some minions was a good idea.”
Natasha smoothed the newspaper with her fingers, and was silent. Darcy spent the next few minutes sipping on her own sadly neglected beer, and gave Natasha what time she needed.
“Codenames only,” Natasha said finally. “We’re not all Stark, and if Cap can keep hiding behind the shield then I get to be Black Widow to the press. Any decision on who I talk to and when is run by me before you approve it, and as soon as some of the sensation dies down you limit my public appearances to the bare minimum.”
“That’s fine,” Darcy said. “No, that’s great. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Natasha looked up from the paper and smiled, just a little. “Now, I think you promised Barton all the beers.”
“You did,” Clint agreed.
Darcy laughed and signaled for another round, relieved that Natasha seemed to have forgiven her and giddy with having gotten what she wanted.
It didn’t occur to her until several hours later, after she had teetered out of the bar and while she was waiting for one of the cabs speeding by to stop ignoring her, that just maybe Natasha had gotten everything she wanted.
“Son of a bitch,” Darcy said, but she was smiling.
*
Natasha’s appearance on Ellen went smoothly. She looked gorgeous in her cream colored dress, her vibrantly red curls a close match to the chair she sat in. She was charming and witty and so perfect that Darcy didn’t even mind that Natasha had totally played her, because she was equally adept at playing a studio audience.
She talked about her recent vacation to Rio and her previous career as a ballerina, mentioned that her favorite food was a New York bagel slathered in cream cheese, and answered every question posed to her about the Avengers and the battle they had fought in the streets of Manhattan. Darcy had no idea how much of it was true, and she didn’t really care, because every single word sounded like it was nothing but the most shining honesty when dropped from Natasha’s lips. Steve couldn’t pull off that level of sincerity, and he was almost always legitimately sincere.
At the end of the interview, Natasha accepted the action figure in her likeness that DeGeneres pressed on her, and walked off the stage smiling.
“I kind of love you,” Darcy said, once the other woman had made it backstage. “Have I mentioned that recently?”
“It was implied,” Natasha replied. She tossed Darcy the action figure with a smirk.
Darcy studied it for a few moments before deciding she was totally going to need to get some of these made. From what her little worker bees at SHIELD told her, the fervor of true converts to the cause of public relations burning brightly in their eyes, Hasbro had been begging for the rights for weeks now; it wouldn’t be that hard to arrange.
(Two months later, Darcy would nearly choke to death laughing over the Hulk figure with his bitty ripped up pants and his hilariously proportionate pants bulge. Bruce would be significantly less amused.)
*
Clint’s appearance on The Daily Show didn’t go quite so smoothly. Darcy comforted herself with the notion that most likely, that bit where he had pinned Stewart’s jacket to part of the set with an arrow had been planned. She also comforted herself with chocolate. A lot of chocolate.
*
“I remember a time when I was happy that Tony talked to the press,” Darcy said without opening her eyes. “Now I just wish that he would stop.”
“I often wish that Tony would stop talking,” Bruce said agreeably. “Darcy, why are you using my dog as a pillow?”
“He is warm and fluffy, and when I use him as a pillow he doesn’t try to rest a tablet on my face because he got distracted by science.”
“That was one time.”
“And yet, the memory lingers.”
Bruce made a noise, but after a moment’s consideration Darcy decided he sounded more amused than indignant. She snuggled a little closer to the dog and sneezed. “Okay. I’m coming back to the couch, but only because the floor is hard and the General sheds.”
The dog had become the General a few days earlier, because when Darcy had asked Bruce what his name was, Bruce had looked at her uncomprehendingly and said, “I just called him dog.” That was too depressing to contemplate, so Clint’s name had stuck. After a day of having to work her way through General Tom Thumb ever time she wanted to talk to or about the dog, Darcy had decided that was a dumb and unnecessarily long name for an animal and told Bruce is was either General or Tom.
“...but General seems a little too evocative of General Ross,” she had said. “Maybe stick to Tom.”
Bruce had ducked his head and smiled. “Really? I kind of like General. It seems fitting.”
Darcy had peered at him suspiciously. “Is that your roundabout way of calling General Ross a son of a bitch?”
“...maybe.”
Darcy had no real objections, and the name had spread, mostly she thought because Tony was tickled by the idea that, of the many generals who occasionally came and went from Stark Tower, the only one who really mattered was a dog.
“What did Tony do?” Bruce asked, once Darcy was comfortably settled with her head in his lap. He even started petting her hair absently, fingers stroking against her scalp in a way that made Darcy wonder if purring would be a completely inappropriate response.
“I was standing at the edge of the stage during his press conference,” Darcy said, “and he might have pointed me out and asked me in his loudest Tony voice who my daddy was, and yeah, he was obviously joking, but there’s this little thing where reporters don’t have much of a sense of humor, especially when missing a joke will sell papers or get ratings. I mean, most of them are going to fact check it to make sure and find that it leads to nothing, but I’m pretty sure that some of the tabloids are going have headlines tomorrow about how I’m Tony Stark’s bastard daughter. My mother has been calling me crying all morning, because people have been calling her, and she really wanted to let me know that she and my dad were happily married more than nine months before my birth. Which, duh, I’m a middle child and-.” Darcy paused, and a look of stunned horror crossed her face. “Oh god. I think this means he won the prank war. There is nothing I can do that will beat this.”
The fingers on her scalp stopped stroking and started shaking, as did the lap her head was resting on. “Bruce Banner, you had better not be laughing at my pain when I open my eyes. Those had better be shoulder-shaking sobs of sympathy that I’m feeling right now.”
“Of course they are,” Bruce said, in a strange, muffled voice. Darcy sighed and pressed her cheek against his stomach, letting his laughter shudder through her, because she was willing to let him laugh at her if it meant he was laughing.
“We’re going to have to stop dancing around this sooner or later,” she mumbled, once he had calmed down.
He smoothed a hand over her hair again. “Dancing around what?”
“The press. You.”
“Darcy.”
“All the cool kids are doing it, Bruce.”
“The cool kids aren’t risking an incident in a room full of cameras and reporters.”
“He’s going to have to meet his public eventually. Better that it be at a time and a place where you can let him out and everything is chill.”
“He-?” Bruce’s hand curled into a fist, although he was careful not to tug on her hair. “Darcy, you can’t be talking about introducing the Other Guy at a press conference. That would be stupid, and you’re not stupid.”
She didn’t think he’d meant for the words to sting, but they did anyway. She opened her eyes, and kind of regretted that from this angle all she could see was his shirt and the bottom of his chin. This was not the position to be conducting a negotiation from. She swung her legs off the edge of the couch and pushed herself up until she was sitting next to Bruce instead of sprawled across his lap. “I’m not stupid, and neither is my idea. You’re not the one getting the all the bad press. You’re not the one that people will recognize, not unless they’re super well-informed physicists. You’re not the one people are afraid of. He is. He’s the one whose image we have to fix.”
Bruce met her gaze, and he was frowning. “Maybe people are right to be afraid of him.”
“He’s a pretty scary dude,” Darcy allowed, “but if you’re planning to bring him out again if you need to - and don’t make that face, obviously you are, because otherwise you would have blown town months ago, or when SHIELD was attacked you would have hidden away in the panic rooms with all the other nice scientists rather than letting the big guy out to play - you have to make sure people aren’t afraid of him, or at least not any more afraid of him than they have to be in order to know that they should sensibly get out of his way. I think we can agree that if anyone decides that the appropriate response to the Hulk is to reach for grandpa’s shotgun, you’re going to have a mess you don’t want on your hands.”
He took a sharp breath, and then let it out slowly. “There’s already a mess on my hands,” he said, and then, “I think you need to leave now.”
Don’t push Bruce too far, or too hard. Don’t make him angry. Tiptoe the fuck around him. Right.
“Fine,” Darcy said, “I’m gone.” She grabbed her shoes from the floor near the couch and felt only a little better for slamming the door on her way out.
She didn’t go very far. She was about midway down the long stretch of hallway between her suite and his when she sat down with her back against the wall and just sort of stayed there. Darcy was never the one to leave during a fight; she wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself. When she and Jane fought, Jane was always the one to storm out first, to her little sanctuary on the roof when they had been at the station in New Mexico, or to take a walk around the block now that they were in New York.
Darcy made it through about ten minutes of contemplating her toes and feeling kind of like an idiot for not just going back to her room before Tony arrived. He was still dressed in the suit he had worn to the earlier press conference, although he’d loosened his tie and abandoned his shoes somewhere along the way. When he sat down beside her, his socked feet lined up next to her bare ones.
“You looked a little blue on the security feed, and-.”
“Pepper sent you, right?”
"Don't be ridiculous," Tony said. "No one sends me anywhere." He paused. “That’s pretty much the way of things, yeah.”
“Does she know what a bad idea that was? I mean, you’re basically the opposite of comforting.”
Tony smirked. “Now, is that any way to speak to your dear old dad?”
“In the face, Tony. Repeatedly.”
He was silent for a moment, idly considering his socks. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. His tone implied that he would find swallowing a bag of live mice more pleasant.
“With you? Dear god, not even a little.”
“I thank you from the bottom of my soul for that .”
He still didn’t move, and Darcy sighed. “Pepper gave you a time limit, didn’t she?”
“Ten minute minimum. I think she feels that I owe you for the press conference, and should settle my debt in awkwardness and suffering if I can’t offer sage advice.”
Darcy had to be on the far end of desperate to even be considering asking this, but, “Got any?”
“Ahahaha. No.”
She snorted.
“Except that I generally feel that anyone Banner kicks out of a room is doing things right.”
“Tony Stark thinks I’m doing things right,” Darcy muttered. “I am obviously doing everything wrong.”
“No, no, wait, I have a theory. You see, Bruce doesn’t trust himself. He doesn’t test himself. So I think he needs people to poke and prod at him, people like me, so that he can see that his control is a lot better than he thinks it is.” Tony smiled fondly. “I was really happy when he started dating you. You’re like girl me.”
“You take that back.”
“Of course, you’re not as fantastically good looking as I am.”
“You take that back. My boobs are much better than yours are.”
Tony swept an appraising glance over her. “Hmm. Yeah, that’s accurate.” He slugged her lightly in the shoulder. “Go on. Get back in there, tiger.”
"Tiger?"
"Rawr."
“You need to stop talking to me. Because everything you say is awful.”
“I get that a lot.” He rose to his feet, and motioned at her impatiently until she stood with him. “My ten minutes aren’t up, but I think I can get away with going back now if the next time you see Pepper, you tell her I was very helpful and that I warmed the cockles of your heart.”
“Or you could tell her that I threatened to tase you if you kept trying to make me feel better,” Darcy said thoughtfully. “She’s more likely to believe that.” Still, she patted him on the cheek and did feel a little better. Judging from his smirk, Tony knew it. With another soft sigh, Darcy turned and doubled back the way she had come.
Tony was humming Eye of the Tiger behind her.
“Tony, stop it.”
His snickering followed her all the way to Bruce’s door. He stopped when she knocked, and she didn’t check to see if he was still standing there, because really she didn’t want to know if Tony had decided to start doing his spying in person.
“I'm not going to apologize for this one,” she said as soon as Bruce opened the door, and tried not to feel too thankful that he had decided to open the door. “You called me stupid. If you don't want the Hulk to play with the other kids, I get it, but you need to talk that out with me and find another way, not just end the conversation and boot me out of the room.”
“I didn’t call you stupid,” he said, and he seemed calmer now. At Darcy’s raised eyebrow, he amended that to, “I didn’t mean to sound like I was calling you stupid, and I’m sorry. You didn’t want to talk it out, though; you wanted to dig in your heels and fight. There are reasons I can’t do that, Darcy.”
And yeah, okay, “That’s fair. It’s cool if you need a time out, but I can’t just drop it every time we run up against something that’s going to make you uncomfortable. Maybe we can have a signal? I could work with a signal.”
A small smile pulled at the edges of Bruce’s lips. He held up his hands and formed a T with them, the universal playground symbol for time out. The laugh that Darcy offered in response was a little shaky and more relieved than amused, but they both pretended not to notice.
“Did you want to talk about it now?” Bruce asked, and if he didn’t exactly sound excited by the notion, he at least was trying.
“Well,” Darcy said, and reached out to slide a hand into his, “maybe not right now.” She stepped across the threshold into his suite, tugging him further inside with her. “I mean, traditionally, there’s this thing that couples do when they have a fight and then make up.” She reached past him to close the door.
“Oh?”
A moment later: “Oh.”
Then: “Well, who am I to question tradition?”
*
“What we need to do,” Darcy said, some time later, and she paused to take a bite from the container of leftover fried rice that she had balanced on the mattress, “is humanize the Hulk for people. It’s okay if they’re a little scared of him. Probably it’s even smart for us to make sure they stay a little scared, but what we can’t have them doing is looking at him - at you - like you’re something less than human, some kind of unfeeling and unthinking monster who doesn’t care who gets in his way when he’s running around and mucking shit up. That’s the point where people start to reach for their shotguns and their tasers, or call in the U.S. Army for an airstrike.”
“It’s true, though. The Other Guy isn’t really much for the thinking, and the only feeling he seems to do is I really enjoy this mucking stuff up.”
“Agree to disagree,” Darcy said with a shrug. “I still say he isn’t as bad as you paint him. My point is, if we can’t humanize him, we’re going to have to humanize you.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Bruce asked mildly.
“You really aren’t.”
Bruce sighed. “Go on.”
*
The flash of cameras and the harsh overhead lights in the room highlighted the gray in Bruce’s hair and the discomfort on his face, made him look older and more tired than he usually did. He tapped the microphone once, even though Darcy had already checked and triple checked the sound.
“Hello,” he said, once the background chatter of the gathered reporters had died down a little. “My name is Doctor Bruce Banner, but you may know me better as the Hulk.”