she blinded me with political science 9/10 cont'd
“It’ll be okay,” Darcy said, and slid her arm around Bruce’s waist. “You’re going to kill out there.”
cont'd from
“It’ll be okay,” Darcy said, and slid her arm around Bruce’s waist. “You’re going to kill out there.” She pressed her face against the place where his shirt collar met his throat and inhaled deeply. God, she really-.
She really liked this guy.
“Killing is what I’d like to avoid,” Bruce said, but he ran a hand down her back until it rested, large and warm, against the base of her spine.
“No hugs for the rest of us?” Tony said, and Darcy could hear him messing with the little mic attached to the neckline of his shirt again. She was going to slap his busy little fingers in a minute, she just was, especially if he did anything to alter the mic in some unfortunate way. “How about some rousing words of encouragement from our fearless leader?”
“Sure thing,” Darcy said into Bruce’s shirt. “Steve, have at. Tony wants you to arouse him.”
“No, thank you,” Steve said politely.
Darcy pulled away from Bruce, and gave him one last quick kiss before going to make sure everything was in order. There was a lot to order - Tony’s mic to rescue, and water to set out for the entirety of the team, but especially for Bruce, because he liked something to fidget with when he got nervous. There was the final sound check to perform, and faces to make at Clint until he stopped arguing with the wardrobe girl on loan from Stark Industries. No one could get him to budge further than “not black” and “not armor,” so he was in jeans and a dark purple t-shirt that would probably look black on camera, but that would have to do. Darcy saw him stash his folded down bow and his quiver beneath the table that they would all be sitting at right before she let the press in, but she didn’t really care as long as both bow and arrows stayed under the table. Thor couldn’t be convinced to let go of his hammer, but Jane had talked him into an honest-to-Odin suit, and Darcy managed to get rid of most of poptart crumbs decorating the front of his jacket. He grinned at her and held out his silk tie for inspection. “It is of a color with my cloak. And my toes.”
“That’s very nice, Thor,” Darcy said, before turning to Natasha. “You’re so well behaved,” she told the other woman, and started to step past.
“I’m currently carrying twelve knives and a handgun with an extra clip,” Natasha said with a bland smile.
Darcy paused. She looked Natasha over, taking in the tailored red sheath dress with its pencil skirt and equally fitted bodice. “How? No, never mind, I don’t care. Well, I care that you’re awesome, of course, but I’m probably happier overall not knowing how you managed it. Just make sure that none of it comes out in front of the cameras, yeah?”
“Please. I’m a professional.”
By the time the press was seated and ready to begin, Darcy was feeling a little wilted. Bruce glanced at her as he and the rest of the Avengers filed out to take their seats at the long, white-draped table, and after a moment he patted her on the shoulder. “We’ll be fine,” he said, and he didn’t sound convinced, because Bruce never sounded convinced when talking about the best case scenario, but he was trying to reassure her, and that was nice.
As it so happened, they were fine; the press conference went well, or as well as could be expected. The Avengers did a good job fielding the questions thrown at them, with Tony and Natasha - and occasionally Steve, who had some understanding of how publicity worked even if he wasn’t used to being this close to the front lines - picking up the slack when one of the others was stumped. Tony usually did this by doing or saying something flashy and distracting enough that everyone looked at him; Natasha favored the more subtle approach of answering a question so well that the person who had asked it forgot that it had originally been directed at someone else. Steve was just Steve, albeit in his Captain America costume, larger than life even to Darcy, who knew him pretty well, and about three times as big to anyone else; even when he wasn’t trying, he pulled at people’s attention, made them want to listen to whatever it was he had to say.
The press conference ended, and people began to file out. They didn’t leave Stark Tower, however; instead, they were guided down the hall to the Tower’s lobby, the largest open space in the building, where the Avengers would greet their public. There were drinks and refreshments already set out, along with piles of glossy 8x10 photographs for signing.
(“Autographs,” Natasha had said flatly, and looked at Darcy like she was crazy or possibly about to be killed gruesomely. “Just don’t sign them the way you did mine,” Darcy had said. “Someone will take you seriously. Use your superhero name. Uh, codename. I meant codename.” “I really don’t think you did,” Natasha had replied, but she hadn’t argued any further.)
Darcy had been seated in the front row with Pepper, Jane, and Erik during the press conference. The others had gone on ahead, but she waited for her own little band of PR nightmares to join her before leaving the room.
“I’ll go in ahead of you,” she told them. “Introduce you guys, let everyone know you’ve arrived, remind them to tip their waiters, that kind of thing.”
“We have waiters?” Clint wondered.
“Not even a little,” Darcy said. “I have a budget that’s supposed to last me through the end of the fiscal year. You have finger sandwiches and fruit punch. Tony, that flask you think I don’t know about had better stay in your jacket, and not in the punch bowl. Some of your adoring public is underage.”
Tony shrugged. “More for me. If I make a large donation to your budget, can we get an open bar next time?”
“No,” Darcy said, and thought maybe. If there was anything left of her nerves by the end of today, she’d be shocked. A margarita or three would be helpful right about now.
“I’m running interference for Bruce,” Darcy added, because it had been agreed well ahead of time that if the Hulk, or even his more mild-mannered counterpart, was going to be making public appearances, the buddy system needed to be in effect to make sure that someone didn’t accidentally jostle him into a wall or do anything else that might result in a very public (and, uh, dangerous, that too) incident. Mostly that had been decided by Bruce and Fury, in a meeting Darcy had only belatedly been invited to; Tony hadn’t been wrong when he’d said that Bruce didn’t trust himself, but if it made him feel safer to have someone nearby to keep the people he’d be talking to out of his bubble, Darcy was happy to oblige. “The rest of you are on your own.” She pushed open the glass doors leading into the lobby.
“How much do you have in that flask?” she heard Steve murmur to Tony when he saw the crowd.
“Not enough to get a super soldier drunk. Not enough to get me drunk. Christ.”
“Okay, so maybe it’s a little crowded,” Darcy said, and flashed them a smile over her shoulder.
“I’m just wondering how you warped space and time to fit the entire population of New York inside my lobby,” Tony said. He reached out and slapped Bruce in the shoulder. “We should get on figuring out how she did that. I bet we could warp space and time if we wanted to.”
“Does it mean we get to go back to your lab now?” Bruce asked, gazing dubiously at the packed lobby. “Because if so, I’m all for creating a possibly cataclysmic hole in the space-time continuum. I think it would be both fun and educational.”
“That’s the spirit!”
“That’s so not the spirit,” Darcy said, and cast both of them a stern look before stepping out into the lobby. There were a lot of people, but security on the door had kept the room below capacity; she blithely pretended that she couldn’t see the people queued up outside, waiting for their chance to come and meet the Avengers in person as others left. The Avengers had been doing public appearances for weeks now, but this was the first time they were doing one as a full team, and the first time it involved the public as much as the press, with the exception of Steve’s volunteer work and Thor’s frolics in the outside world. People wanted to see them in person, wanted to meet them. Darcy chose to take that as a good sign.
One of Darcy’s employees from SHIELD scurried over from where she had been working the crowd to hand Darcy a mic. “Hello,” Darcy said, and watched as every eye in the room swung toward her. “I could say something, but I’m not who you came here to see. New York’s heroes, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s have a round of applause for the Avengers.”
They entered the room. The clapping mostly drowned out Natasha’s voice when she slid up close to Darcy and murmured, “I thought you’d be giving a longer introduction, Darcy.”
“And give the rest of them time to bolt? Hell no.”
She handed the mic back to the woman who had brought it over, and insinuated herself at Bruce’s side. He skirted the edge of the room until he found a mostly empty corner, and Darcy didn’t protest. Just getting him here had been a major victory; she wasn’t dumb enough to ruin it by insisting that he be front and center.
He leaned closer to speak into her ear, which was basically the only way to be heard over the noise in the lobby. “This is a terrible-.”
“Don’t even finish that sentence. You’ve been fine so far, and I don’t see how this is any more stressful than playing doctor in India.” She smirked at him. “Speaking of playing doctor-.”
A flashbulb went off, leaving both of them blinking and dazed. “Doctor Banner,” someone said. “Dana Lincoln for Us Weekly. We couldn’t help but notice that you seem awfully cozy with this lovely young lady. What’s the nature of your relationship?”
“Definitely more stressful than India,” Bruce muttered to Darcy, before turning a hard little smile on the reporter. “Private.”
The reporter looked at Darcy, and she shrugged. She wasn’t above using their relationship to make the Hulk more sympathetic in the eyes of the media and the public, but on a personal level she was also pretty okay with not doing that, if that was how Bruce wanted things. “I’m the press liaison for the Avengers,” she said, with a much nicer smile. “Doctor Banner and I were just liaising.” Unspoken were the words, I have the power to ban you from every future press conference we hold, ever. The reporter let the subject drop, and went off to hassle Pepper and Tony.
People started approaching after that: parents with their children, college students who wanted to pose with Bruce, teenagers who held out glossy photographs of the Hulk for signing (and Darcy had needed to hunt through a lot of the footage in SHIELD’S archives to find a frame that wasn’t blurry or terrifyingly scowly), and tourists dressed in the t-shirts that some of the local shops had started to churn out, cheap things with artist’s renderings or publicity shots of the Avengers printed on them, because even so soon after a devastating crisis, New Yorkers weren’t above making an easy buck on the tourist trade. It was part of their citywide heritage, after all.
One of that last group stopped as she was stepping away after shaking Bruce’s hand. Her t-shirt had a bad caricature of the Hulk against a red background, and the crisp creases along the front and the shoulders where the shirt had been folded made Darcy think that the woman had bought it today. “We really did want to thank you,” she said, half turning to face Bruce. “When we heard that this was going on today, we knew that we had to come. We’re from Iowa. We weren’t anywhere near here when - everything - happened. We could’ve been, though, if we had planned this vacation earlier in the year, or if those aliens hadn’t started and been stopped in New York. So - thanks. Thanks for that.” She smiled a little awkwardly and hurried to catch up with the rest of her family.
Bruce was silent for long enough after the woman had left for Darcy to worry. He shook a few more hands in that awkward way he had, like he really didn’t want to be touching the people who approached him but wasn’t sure how to get out of it gracefully, and smiled at them but said nothing. Finally, Darcy rifled through her purse until she found a quarter, and presented it to him. “For your thoughts.” When he just looked at her, she shrugged. “You’re, like, a genius. I figured a penny would be underbidding.”
He smiled, but it was a distant kind of smile, his mind still obviously elsewhere. “I was a doctor in India.”
“Yeah,” Darcy said. “I know. Unlicensed. I think it’s cool, but let’s not talk about that to the press, hmm?”
“It was a way to make a living, but it was more than that, too. I thought I could - strike some kind of balance. The Other Guy has caused a lot of damage, and I guess I figured that undoing some damage would, I don’t know, somehow make it even out in the long run. I never really though that being the Other Guy could also do that.” He shrugged, and Darcy knew that she was supposed to say something, but damned if she knew what that something was. She was almost relieved when Natasha came sliding out of the crowd, a faint smile turning up the perfect bow of her lips.
“Red in your ledger, Doc?” she asked, and there was something about the way she held herself that made it more than the casual question her voice wanted it to be. “Except it’s not really yours, now is it? Who better to rub it out than him, if he was the one to cause it?” She cast Darcy an indecipherable look, and jerked her head toward the refreshment table. “Why don’t you take a break? I’ll play guard dog for Banner for a while.”
Darcy nodded and stepped away. She could just barely hear Bruce murmur, “Who are you guard dogging?” and Natasha’s answering chuckle.
She retrieved two plastic cups of punch and turned to make her way back to where Natasha and Bruce were waiting, only to be waylaid by another reporter. “Ms. Lewis. Can you please comment on the rumors that you’re secretly Mr. Stark’s daughter?”
Darcy let her glasses slide down on her nose until she could give the reporter an appropriately disdainful look. “Really?” she asked in an undertone low enough that she was pretty sure his tape recorder wouldn’t pick her words up above the ambient noise of the room. “We’re going to do this? Really?”
To his credit, the reporter looked a little embarrassed. He shrugged apologetically, but that didn’t stop him from shoving the recorder right under her nose. Over his shoulder, Darcy met Bruce’s eyes, and rolled her own before turning back to the reporter.
“My mother did not have relations with that man, Tony Stark,” Darcy said as distinctly as she could. She saluted him with one of her cups of punch and stepped around him. Natasha caught sight of her, and nodded once before stepping away. Bruce turned to greet the next person eager to shake hands with the sometimes-Hulk, a rangy man in a well-tailored suit. “Doctor Banner,” the man said, and Darcy just had time to think that there was something passing familiar about him-.
She wasn’t sure quite what happened next - it was too fast, too strange, too far from anything she had expected today. There was the glint of metal in the man’s hand, and Bruce doubled over. Natasha turned back around, and not more than a few seconds later she had the man in the suit on the ground, her knee planted firmly on his back and her deceptively delicate little hand twisting one of his arms up behind him. Something splashed, wet and cold, against Darcy’s ankles, and it took her a moment to realize that she had dropped her punch.
“Kitchen knife,” Natasha said, her tone crisp and perfectly controlled. She held the knife up between the fingers on her free hand, a big serrated bread knife, the first two inches of it bright crimson with gore.
Darcy took two steps forward. She heard something rip, and distantly identified the sound as having come from Natasha’s dress; that tightly fitted pencil skirt had not been made for fighting in, and the man Natasha had pinned to the floor was struggling beneath her.
“Darcy,” Natasha said, and there was some strange underlying tension to her voice now. She wasn’t looking at the man beneath her, or the knife, or even at Darcy. Her head was turned to the side, eyes large and watchful. “Don’t come any closer. Back up slowly, and get everyone out of here.”
Darcy followed her gaze.
Oh.
Oh, crapcakes.
That hadn’t been Natasha’s skirt ripping.
Bruce was still doubled over, and Darcy couldn’t see his face. She could see his back, though, and the way his blue button-down had split down the middle. She could see the way the skin beneath it was rippling and shifting, how that same skin had a distinctly greenish cast.
She stood frozen, other than the sharp in-and-out rasp of her own breathing. Somewhere out in the lobby, someone screamed. Steve’s voice lifted to carry over the sudden burst of noise, ordering people out of the Tower. Darcy heard one of her assistants take up the shout a moment later, and the low mutter of Tony swearing a blue streak wove a quiet harmony to the yelling. It was that, more than anything, that made Darcy look away from Bruce and toward the crowd. Some of them were running toward the exit. Not enough; many seemed to have been caught and held by the spectacle, and some of the reporters present still had their cameras running, the fucking morons.
Not enough people running, and - a roar loud enough to rattle Darcy’s bones - not nearly enough time.
One of the small side tables Darcy had set out with pictures of the Avengers when flying past her head, and she flinched back automatically. It hit the far wall and splintered, but not before sending photographs snowing down across the room.
She turned back to the Hulk.
It didn’t seem possible, but she had actually forgotten how big he was. He stood there in the dark corner of the lobby that Bruce had used to hide, and he filled it, a green mountain of muscle and temper clothed in the tattered remains of Bruce’s shirt and pants. A low growl rumbled out from between his lips, and Darcy flinched again.
“Jesus Christ,” someone said behind Darcy. The pushy reporter who had stopped her on her way from the refreshment’s table, and somehow Darcy wasn’t even remotely surprised that he hadn’t moved an inch. She was starting to think that maybe she had done too good a job of making the Hulk sympathetic to the press. Or she might have, if she had been thinking much of anything at all that wasn’t directly related to the likelihood of her not peeing herself in the next thirty seconds.
After the Giant Flamey Robot Thing (and Darcy knew now that it was called the Destroyer, but she liked her name better) had attacked Puente Antiguo, after that whole mind-blowing disaster was over and done with and Thor was gone, Jane had patted Darcy on the shoulder and told her that she had been very brave. Darcy hadn’t really seen it that way, because mostly she remembered mindless terror and the need to clear people out. Bravery required the ability to think, to know what she was risking. Darcy didn’t think in a crisis; she went to some kind of weird happy Zen place where she didn’t recognize until much, much later that holy shit, she could have died, like, for real.
Which sort of explained why she was now standing in front of the Hulk, her arms stretched out to make herself as big as possible, her body between him and the crowd. She was shaking, and she sort of hoped he didn’t notice that, because making a big bold stand would kind of be a lost cause if he knew that moving the wrong way would probably send her bolting toward the door. “Hey. Hey, big green. Let’s just calm down, shall we?”
He swayed forward on the balls of his feet, his lips pulled back to show his teeth. Darcy’s stomach lurched, and she swallowed hard, because throwing up on what was left of the Hulk’s shoes definitely wouldn’t improve the situation. “It’s all fine,” she said, and she wasn’t really paying attention to what she was saying, so whatever it was, hopefully it was good. “There was some trouble, bit of a security breach, but it’s taken care of, yeah?”
For a few wrenchingly long seconds, his gaze and his snarl both remained directed at her. She could see the moment when he considered swatting her aside so that he could go about smashing the room as originally intended. He could do it. He could send her flying as easily as he had the table, and probably with much the same results. Bruce had told her that statistically she and Tony were the ones most likely to get smushed if the Hulk ever came out to play. She really, really didn’t want to be a statistic. Her breath hitched in her throat, but after a moment the crude calculation in his gaze settled back into something closer to plain old anger. “Hurt,” he said, and she was pretty sure that was Hulk’s inside voice, but it was still loud enough that she heard some of the microphones the reporters were holding whine and crackle with feedback.
Darcy used one of her outstretched hands to point frantically at Natasha. “Na-Black Widow already took care of it. She, uh, smashed. She smashed real good. See?”
After another painfully long breath of time, the Hulk turned to look at Natasha.
Natasha was very still, her knee still planted firmly on the man’s back, and much like Darcy she was in the unenviable position of being within ten feet of the Hulk. The look she cast Darcy was distinctly displeased, either because Darcy had pointed the Hulk in her direction or because Darcy was obviously reckless and stupid; either was a distinct possibility. After a moment, though, she put the knife down slowly, well out of reach of the would-be assassin (who appeared to be suffering some minor difficulties breathing, between Natasha’s very chic knee on his spine and Stark Tower’s lobby’s equally chic marble floors against his face), and gave Hulk the thumb’s up.
The Hulk grunted, but he sounded almost satisfied. “Team good,” he decided eventually. “Team smash puny god. With Hulk.” He rolled back onto his heels, and it was probably Darcy’s imagination that the floor rolled a little with him, because there was no way he was that big.
“Yes,” Darcy said, and abstractly she hoped that no one could tell that her nearly cooing tone was pure, blind panic mingled with the beginnings of giddy relief. If she was a better person, the relief would have been because the Hulk wasn’t about to go rampaging through a bunch of innocent victims, but mostly she was just glad that she wasn’t about to become intimately acquainted with a wall. “Yes. Team very good.”
“Darcy?” She didn’t turn to look, but that was definitely Steve’s voice, laced through with tension but still comforting in how utterly steady it sounded.
“We’re okay,” Darcy said, and she didn’t even convince herself when she said it, but since none of the other Avengers immediately moved to intervene he must have trusted her at her word. “Everything’s okay.” She took a step forward, even though her lizard brain was busily shouting nodon’tstopbadstupid rather insistently.
The flash of a camera reminded her that the Hulk wasn’t the only threat in the room.
Shit. The media. They had just watched Bruce freak out and turn into the Hulk, and unless she did some kind of damage control this was definitely going to undo some of her hard work. Well. She had been the one to tell Bruce that the Hulk needed to meet his public. She really wished it had been under better circumstances, though.
She turned around to face the rest of the room, lowered her arms, and pasted on the best smile she could manage. It was seriously one of the hardest things she had ever done. She was super aware of the Hulk at her back, and nothing she told her lizard brain about how keeping an eye on him probably wouldn’t actually help anything if he changed his mind about introducing her to the wall did anything to quiet that whimpering and steady stream of panic. “As you can see,” she said, and was obscurely proud of the way her voice only wobbled slightly, “Doctor Banner isn’t really in a condition to be signing autographs. We just don’t have any pens big enough.” The titters that earned her sounded distinctly nervous, but at least they were laughing. “Sorry, folks. We’re going to have to ask you to clear out now, since undoubtedly the police will want to question the guy who attacked New York’s favorite big an’ scary green giant. Sad how one sourpuss can ruin the day for everyone, right? Like, this is why we can’t have nice things.”
A few more scattered laughs, but this time the people doing the laughing sounded more sure about it. She even heard one or two groans of protest, and yeah, she was seriously going to have to consider the possibility that she had done her job too well.
That didn’t keep her from continuing to do it.
“Now, Mr. Hulk and I are going to go sit down in the corner until he’s had a chance to calm down. If you have a press badge, you’re welcome to stick around a few minutes to snap a picture or get some footage, but people will be coming through to check your credentials, and if one of them asks you to exit the building I’d like you to listen. Thank you all for attending, and please get home safely.” Please leave the lizard brain added, apparently having resigned itself to the fact that Darcy wasn’t going to follow her own very good advice.
A camera flashed. Darcy heard the Hulk rumble with displeasure behind her. “No flash photography,” she said, a little more sharply than she had meant to, before pivoting to once again face the Hulk.
He was much closer that she remembered, which sort of made her wonder if he had snuck up behind her, except that he was probably the absolute worst at sneaking. Her neck actually ached a little when she tried to look up at him from this distance, and her heart was still pounding hard enough to hurt, like it would bruise itself against the hard lines of her ribs and breastbone. Her stomach and throat and thighs all throbbed with the too fast thrum of her pulse, and she felt flushed a little dizzy with adrenaline, but she was still standing, which wasn’t a lot but it was something. Her palm was clammy cold when she put it on his arm, and he looked annoyed at the intrusion but not annoyed enough to punch her head off. It was more than a little terrifying that this had become her litmus test for success. When she took a step forward he took a step back, and they continued like that in an awkward pseudo waltz until she had him up against the line of folded chairs pushed against the wall. When she sat down, hand still on his arm, he sat with her, and thankfully not on her. The three chairs the Hulk claimed groaned and sagged alarmingly, until he was sitting a few inches above the ground on a twisted heap of bent metal, his legs sprawled out in front of him.
Them sitting seemed to serve as some kind of cue, because the room became a bit more lively once the Hulk was no longer towering over it like a monster truck given vaguely human form. Darcy watched as the civilians were herded out by SHIELD and Stark Industries’ security. Most of the press remained; a few were sensible or sensitive enough to make an immediate retreat, because dealing with their editors had to be preferable to dealing with a Hulk. Without Darcy even having to say anything, a few of the suited members of the in-house security team formed a perimeter about ten feet away from her and the Hulk and kept the press from rushing them. Pepper’s media relations manager, who Darcy had worked with briefly when she was learning the ropes, straightened his tie from outside of that perimeter, smoothed a hand over his thinning hairline, and actually lowered himself enough to wink at her. His doing, then, and Darcy was unspeakably grateful. That done, he gathered her SHIELD assistants to him and began to work the press.
She was grateful for that too, since she was essentially stuck with the Hulk. He didn’t seem inclined to smash right now, and she wasn’t sure how much of that had to do with her hand on his arm, since he seemed at least marginally disinclined to smash her. It didn’t seem like a strong enough tether, but it was all they had, and Darcy was willing to work with that. By which she meant, ‘still kind of considering throwing up on someone’s shoes,’ but she’d take it.
She’d take it.