FIC: The Law of Conservation of Pants
Title: The Law of Conservation of Pants
Author: _samalander
Fandom: Avengers
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 4,800
Warnings: Silliness, crack.
Characters/Pairings: Clint/Darcy, team gen.
Summary: Or, Five Things Darcy Lewis Thought She Knew Before She Met the Avengers (And One Thing That Will Always Be True)
In which Darcy is put in charge of Social Media relations for the Avengers and finds that 5/6th of them chalenge the things she thought she believed.
Aliens and gods are bedtime stories.
Darcy's parents were atheists.
Well, they claimed the title of agnostic, they said that the only thing they could know in the Universe was that the Universe was unknowable, but she was pretty sure that was fancy talk for "we don't believe in it, but you believe in whatever you want, honey."
And so there had never been a lot of lies in her house, growing up, never obfuscation of the truth about where babies came from or how presents appeared under the tree in December.
It wasn't until she went to school, until she was a little more than five or six, that Darcy heard about Santa Claus, and Andrew Kiernan made fun of her for saying that her daddy put her presents there. Apparently that meant that Darcy was capital-b-Bad, and Santa skipped her ever year.
And that was just wrong, because Darcy was always capital-g-Good, so she kicked him in the shin and told him so. Which, she realized ten minutes later, languishing on the time-out bench, was probably more in line with his point than hers.
Still, as she grew up, Darcy started to secretly think, in her heart of hearts, that belief in magical beings, in Gods and aliens and Santa Claus, was for the weak minded, for the people who needed something to hold onto, a cosmic teddy bear to save them from the sins under their bed.
Until the summer she worked for Jane Foster in New Mexico, the summer she met an actualfacts real Norse-God-slash-alien parading as a totally cut homeless dude.
That idea, the idea that maybe there were Gods out there, maybe there were aliens and maybe it was Santa who used her mom's wrapping paper was startling, to say the least. At 22, Darcy had her first brush with faith in the Unknown over faith in the Knowable, because there were things out there, beings and whatnot that were beyond her comprehension. Or Jane's comprehension, and Jane understood a lot more about the Universe than anyone else Darcy knew, so if she was at a loss, there was a loss to be found.
And then she and Jane were sent to Iceland and there were aliens in New York and suddenly there was a guy in dark glasses and a suit escorting her to some kind of flying aircraft carrier (which - what?) to meet a man with an eyepatch who offered her a job representing the Avengers to the youth market via social media and Darcy was officially willing to admit that she knew very, very little about what did and did not exist in this world.
But she was pretty sure the Santa Claus thing was still a lie.
(She left cookies out that year, just in case. Better safe than sorry.)
Captain America was a Corporate Tool
When Darcy took Modern Myths in undergrad, they had spent a whole week on Captain America, a whole 1/15th of the class discussing the star-spangled superhero of the WWII propaganda films.
Darcy had been in her punk phase then, half her head shaved and the rest of her hair a vivid pink, decked out a wardrobe that consisted of well-filled tank tops with crude slogans on them, a leather biker jacket, and combat boots, which were really not well suited for New Mexico. (And that phase only lasted about a year before she discovered pin-ups and Dita Von Tease and had a whole new idea about what to do with her curves.)
Regardless, the interaction of her pseudo-anarchist tendencies and the blatant "knock the Axis on their backsis!" rhetoric of the Captain America movies clashed in a rather violent way. Darcy was pretty sure, in that poorly-lit lecture hall, that she was seeing the face of the Enemy, the Man, the Military Industrial Complex, and that if he wasn't dead, she would totally sock him one for helping the colonial American forces get to a place where they could create the havoc they wreaked in the Cold War.
And the first time she met Steve Rogers, when she wandered into the kitchen of the Tower on the morning after she moved in and found him eating shredded wheat and squinting at the funny pages, she realized that little Anarchist Punk Darcy had no fucking clue what she was on about.
Steve was a gentleman, always calling her "Miss" and "Ma'am" and holding doors. He wasn't anything like the movies he made. He was a commander, sure, but not a soldier in the strictest sense. Steve didn't seem to believe in the dogma those movies had espoused; Steve wanted to Right Wrongs and Triumph Over Evil, like a really patriotic Sailor Moon more than he wanted to embody the American Way.
And maybe Little Anarchist Punk Darcy had a simplistic view of things, the way Little Anarchist Punks sometimes did. She believed that the idea that all government was always bad, that all military was always wrong, that America was always Imperialist. But when Steve got going, one night when she was half drunk and he got melancholy about his displaced state of being, the way he spoke about the men he served with and the missions he ran, the things he saw and the atrocities HYDRA and the Nazis had committed in their quest, she realized that maybe Steve had needed to fight - not because he believed that the US was right and he was Saving the World, but because he believed that the Nazis were wrong, and they were ending it.
Her conversations with him tended toward the monosyllabic at first, partly because it took her longer to warm up to him than it had with most of the others, the Little Anarchist Punk Opinions still murmuring in the back of her head (and if she was a little in awe of just how good Steve was, the kind of good you mostly read about in stories that involved armor and dragons and fair maidens, well, who could blame her?) but also because he didn't seem to be the talky type. Steve was more likely to park himself in a crowded room and watch, or maybe sketch, the people around him. The fact was, yeah, off the battlefield, Captain America was downright shy.
"I've been thinking," she said one day, walking onto the balcony where he was sitting, sketching what must have been his millionth skyline. "About how you can engage your fans."
Steve shot her a blank look, as though she had woken him from a sleep. (And if he was going to be the In Shining Armor type, then he should be the one rescuing people from Deep Magical Sleeps, not her. She was totally the evil witch.)
"I'm sorry?"
"Do you know what I do?" she asked, not even thinking about if that was condescending until the words were out of her mouth, but that's how Darcy worked sometimes, the words fell out before the thoughts, and then she got to scramble after them, picking up wayward ideas and secreting them away as best she could.
But it was Steve, and Steve didn't seem to notice when people were accidentally condescending, just when Tony was being a grade-A twatwaffle, so he shrugged. "I have an idea. You use the internet to talk to the public about the Avengers Initiative."
"Right, and you're really popular with the public."
She half expected him to blush, but this was a guy who had been a legit movie star back in the 40s, and he just gave her a shy smile. "Am I?"
"You are," she said, "and I'd like to get you out there a little more, as a public face."
Steve appeared to consider that for a long moment, studying the half-sketched version of New York in the book on his lap.
"I could do that," he said. "What do you want, movies and posters and the like?"
"No," she said. "I was thinking, and tell me if this is weird, but do you mind showing people your drawings?"
Steve shook his head. "Not if they're any good. Do you want to have an art show?"
Darcy couldn't help but smile. He had all the basic concepts down - publicity, computers, internet - and absolutely no idea how it all worked in tandem, no concept of the rich technological world he had come into.
"No, I want you to share them on the internet."
Steve furrowed his brow. "Is there a way to do that? I mean, what's it called, where you can put documents into files and the like?"
"Scanning," she offered, and Steve nodded.
"So I-" he fumbled with the word for a second, "scan some of my sketches, and it helps people to know me?"
"Yeah," Darcy said, resisting the urge to say something folksy or old fashioned like now you're on the trolly, cap! "We're gonna get you accounts on a few sites, and I'll help you run them. People who are interested will come to your deviantart or your tumblr or whatever, and some of them will leave comments."
Steve thought about it for a second. "Can I talk back to them?"
"Yeah, I was kinda hoping you would."
"Alright, Miss Lewis," he said, offering her a hand to shake, which she did, and was a little shocked that his grip was weak but then he had been weak once, too, and maybe he'd never learned how to put the muscle he had behind it. "You got yourself a deal."
She's attracted to men.
Darcy liked to think she had a type when it came to dating.
She liked smart men, strong men, men who were small and well-muscled and could totally overtake her if they wanted to, but they were never the type who wanted to.
And then she met Natasha Romanoff, and all her thoughts about type in regards to men went right out the window.
Natasha was lithe and deadly, silky and sharp and absolutely, undeniably female, and Darcy thought that kissing her would be a little like being electrocuted; all your muscles would lock up and you would be stuck there, captive in the current, until she chose to let you go.
Not that she ever suggested to Natasha that they TRY any kissing, because, on top of being scorchingly hot and devastatingly fearless, Natasha was dangerous, the same way electricity was, and if Darcy wasn't going to grab a live wire, she didn't think she should grab Natasha either.
She still looked, though, admired the way Natasha wiped the floor with the men on the team, the way she used their size against them, and Darcy imagined Natasha pulling those moves on her, wrapping those thighs around Darcy's neck and taking her pleasure until she was sated.
(And oh, the nights when Darcy came hard in the dark of her bedroom, with that fantasy on her mind and Natasha's name on her lips.)
So maybe she wasn't straight after all, maybe she was just a little crooked, a little more gay than she thought she was, if the idea of pleasing Natasha was that arousing.
Darcy shrugged it off, because it was what it was, just a new part of herself to figure out while she went, and licked her own taste off her fingers, sighing hard before she slid out of bed and started the shower.
No man can grow that much and retain his pants.
Darcy didn't know a lot about science, but she did know a fair amount about pants and politics and creme brulee.
And Bruce was really distracting on the "pants" part of her knowledge tree. It seemed to her that when she put on water weight around her period, her clothes got tighter, and a little uncomfortable. And yet, Bruce was about to go from 160 lbs to 1200 lbs in about fifteen seconds and retain his pants.
She didn't know a lot about science, but that one just seemed wrong to her somehow.
She finally broke down, about five months into her stint as the Social Media Strategist for the Avengers and asked him, which was a more awkward conversation than she thought it would be, because Bruce was really only chatty about protons and quarks, and she didn't often have a lot to say to him.
"We get a lot of asks," she mentioned, over coffee in the kitchen, "On twitter and tumblr. People have seen you turn into the Hulk. They want to know-"
Bruce cut across her. "I can't explain the conservation of matter and energy thing," he said, which made her smile. Of course he thought it was science, it was always science with him and Tony. "I'm working on a formula, but as far as we know nothing else in the Universe disproves Lavoisier's theorem-"
Darcy didn't mean to laugh, but Bruce was always so SERIOUS and he was getting a little crease in his brow that made her just want to put him to bed with a good book and a glass of warm milk, like, maybe that would help him calm down about Courvoisier, whatever that had to do with conservation.
"No," she said, shaking the laughter from the edges of her mouth. "People want to know about your pants."
Bruce glanced at his legs, at the slate-gray slacks he was wearing. (And why did he do that, Darcy wondered- he and Steve both -why did they get up and get dressed like they were going to work at the stuffiest office ever when all they were going to do was hang out in the Tower and eat Goldfish crackers and maybe do some science? Had they never heard of sweatpants, gym shorts, or jeans? It boggled her mind, because Tony was older that Bruce and he could rock a suit, but when he was just chilling, he had t-shirts and jeans and Chilling Out Outfits to chill 0ut in,)
"My pants?"
"Yeah, you break the law of conservation of pants."
"I think you made that up."
Darcy rolled her eyes. "No shit, Sherhulk. How do you get your pants to stay on when you expand?"
Bruce shrugged. "Sometimes I don't."
"Yeah, but like 9 times out of 10--"
"Darcy," he cut across her. "Are you honestly telling me that I have fans who are more interested in how my pants stay on than the fact that my transformation is a theoretical impossibility?"
"Yes."
Bruce sighed. "Tell them they're magic pants."
"Magic pants?"
"Yeah, like that movie, with Rory from Gilmore Girls."
"I don't know what I'm more worried about," Darcy said. "That you know about the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, that you know it because of Gilmore Girls, or that you think your fans are going to believe that you have magical pants."
Bruce shrugged again, and Darcy resisted the urge to mimic him because that was just annoying like, if you don't know, say you don't know Dr. Banner don't get your Deltoid workout through passive aggression. "Seems to me," he said, "that you're our Social Media Relations Manager. So manage Social Media Relations. Tell them about the magic pants."
He left the kitchen, probably to be cranky about science somewhere else, and Darcy returned to her room and signed in to twitter.
She wasn't one for revenge, not really, but the next day Bruce found a paper taped to the door of his lab; a printout of a twitter account with one tweet to its name.
@HulksMagicPants Thanks for the questions. We don't know how we work either.
Starkphones are stupid and expensive and she doesn't want one.
Darcy didn't care much about her phone. Mostly, it was a phone. It had some buttons for texting and calling, and it warned her when her dad was the one on the line so she could send him to voicemail rather than have the fifteenth soporific conversation about USC Basketball this week.
(Who injured his leg, dad?... Oh, that's too bad, was he the forward?... Left guard?... No, I missed that game... Saving the world, dad, I don't know... No that was not a tone... Tell me about his hamstring. Is he out for the season?)
All in all, it was utilitarian and efficient and she didn't really want to be connected to her email 24/7. She had an iPod for music and a laptop for internet and a phone for being a phone. Darcy liked keeping her life compartmentalized like that, the way Steve didn't like his food to touch, or the way Bruce insisted that he wasn't the Hulk, they just shared a body. Kinda.
It was easier that way, for her and for everyone else, because she was never tempted to use her phone when she should be paying attention to someone, she was never distracted by the telltale chime of an email. She played the four games it came with when she was bored, and was content.
Until Tony saw it.
"That," he scoffed "that thing. What is it?"
Darcy glanced at her phone, which she'd tossed onto the kitchen counter in frustration, after making the mistake of answering one of her father's calls. (Really, dad, that many rebounds?) She had barely seen Tony staring longingly at the coffeepot on her way to the fridge; she had maybe grunted at him because frustration meant she was in desperate need of a celery stalk and a jar of peanut butter.
"A phone?"
Tony took a draught of one of his weird smoothies, which he claimed were food by Darcy was pretty sure were some kind of Stark Industries plot to corner another market, maybe one in Super Chow, The Super Food for your Super Family to Super Eat or something. Whatever. She set her celery and the jar on the counter.
"It's a shitty phone," he said, picking it up and flipping it open. "What features does it have?"
"It calls and texts," she said, crossing the kitchen to pluck the offending piece of technology from his disdainful fingers.
Tony snorted. "Barely a phone. Let me give you one of mine."
Darcy raised an eyebrow. "Are you offering me a StarkPhone?"
Tony nodded.
Darcy didn't want a StarkPhone. She had no desire to be tethered to her job at all hours, and though she liked Tony, she had no delusions about his trustworthiness, and would rather not wake up on day to find that he'd used cached information to take over the @AvengersIni twitter and posted nudes.
"No thanks," she shrugged, and resisted the urge to roll her eyes as Tony's face fell.
"Why not?" he asked, schooling himself to stoicism, the look of hurt evaporating as soon as it came.
"I can't afford a data plan," she lied. "Not with what SHIELD pays me and student loans and living in New York. I mean, the rent free thing is pretty cool, thanks for that by the way, but it's an expense I don't have budgeted."
The bullshit was flying from her mouth now, fast and thick, and she wondered, idly, if Tony could tell when other people lied, because he was so damn good at it himself.
Two days later, when Hill called Darcy in and told her that, as the Social Media Strategist, she was being assigned a phone for work, and handed her a brand new, frighteningly shiny StarkPhone, Darcy decided that yes, Tony knew when people were lying, and had no qualms about calling people on their bluffs.
"Unlimited data and calls," Hill told her, and Darcy thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a tiny crack in Hill's Agent Armor, right around the corners of her mouth, because she was like, 90% sure that Hill just gave what would, on another person, be termed a smile.
"I don't need a phone this fancy," Darcy said, cradling the device in her palm. "You could have gotten me an old blackberry or something."
Hill shrugged and turned back to her desk.
"Honestly," she said, and Darcy didn't know if she was imaging the smile in Hill's voice or not, but she liked it, "Stark came in here and gave me the phone, said you needed it and he was paying for the plan and also not to tell you. But that last part didn't seem very important." Hill shrugged. "Or maybe it was. Who can tell?"
Darcy, for what might actually be the first time in her life, was speechless. She'd always bought into Tony's "no really, I'm a complete asshole!" persona, and now she was holding a phone that downright proved it wrong. She even wondered, just a little, if her qualms about his trustworthiness were founded.
"Thanks," she told Hill, who made a noise in her throat and nodded. Darcy turned on the StarkPhone and fount it already programmed with the numbers she'd had in her old decrepit flip phone, as well as a rather fetching Tony Stark background that was definitely in need of be tumblred now if not sooner.
Thanks she texted Tony, but she wasn't surprised when he didn't answer. But she still chose not to use it to logon to any of the official sites.
Just in case.
Archers are kinda hot.
In the Before Natasha days, back when Darcy deluded herself that she still had a Type, she had put men who looked like Clint, men with strong features and weathered good looks, pretty high on the list.
And maybe it was too many viewings of the Disney Robin Hood movie, the one with the animals, coming back from her childhood to bite her right in the adult feelings, but she had always thought there was something compelling about a man with a bow, a man who didn't need to be up in the heat of things in order to be in control of them.
She liked how Clint worked with his weapons, the way he donned his (totally hot) reading glasses when he trimmed the fletchings or oiled the string, like he had to be as close as possible, just this once, to see the imperfections, and she liked how at all other times he hung back, stayed far from the group, the way she imagined a Secret Service agent would do.
(But that was probably more due to The West Wing being on Amazon Prime and her having taken a week to slam through the first three seasons with Steve, thinking that seeing the mess that was the late 90s would maybe help him with the mess that was the early tens, but he was too busy waxing poetic about CJ and how he really liked a woman who took control for Darcy to be sure the lesson stuck.)
She liked how he was aloof, but it was a totally different kind of aloof than Natasha had - she was pretty sure that, while Natasha didn't like most people, Clint genuinely did. Like Locke and Hobbes, but with more gunplay. And while Natasha had the ability to talk for hours and never say anything, to get you to bare your soul with the slippery application of three or four well-placed words, Clint was laconic. But when he did speak, it was always one of those sentences that was just laden with nuance and meaning, like Oz from Buffy, except she didn't think Clint could play the guitar.
Still, there were times when she felt his eyes on her, when they were relaxing casually, or when they were with the team, and she played it off as Clint because he was a watcher and it made sense.
She had been watching a movie, the magnum opus that was Eurotrip, which she had enjoyed in undergrad, and dragged out every so often to see if it was still as misogynistic as it had been the last time she watched it and to wonder that she ever liked it at all, and he had come into the room and slid onto the couch next to her.
The characters were on the train, the stupid-ass scene with the gropey guy, when Clint turned to her and said, "Is it true you tased Thor?"
"Yeah," Darcy shrugged, trying not to look at him too much. Or at all.
"Cool," he said.
She felt the words building and she tried to bite them down, but it was awkward, there was a kind of something between them that seemed to act as a vacuum, seemed to suck the words out and pile them on the couch between them.
"It was a good shot," she said. "But I was lucky and Jane had already hit him with the car - which she does a lot, by the way - and I'm good with a taser, but I've never fired a gun, not the way you and Natasha fire guns, I've never even held a gun and I think, I mean, I live in the middle of a den of heroes and spies so maybe I should learn how to do that, you know, in the increasingly likely chance I get kidnapped or something, so I can be a freaking hero myself and kick their asses before you all have to come get me."
He was laughing quietly, and she scowled, because she was apparently not done talking, just pausing to remember to breathe.
"What?"
"You're funny," he said, and she nodded. Damn straight she was funny.
"Are you and Natasha boning?"
And now she was going to die.
Well, she thought she was going to die. If she had asked that of Natasha, she would be about three more than dead. Dead+3. But Clint smiled and shook his head.
"We're partners," he said, like that was an answer. She gestured for him to go on, and he just shrugged. "Nat is my little sister. My little sister who can kick my ass. I love her, but in the way you love family. Not in a naked way."
Darcy let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding and my god but she was having some trouble with the whole breathing thing today.
They sat in silence through another culturally insensitive, exploitative scene, and she was doing better with the in-out-in-out flow of air, when he turned to study her again.
"Why do you ask?"
And then she choked on the oxygen she was finally getting to cycle in and out of her lungs.
"Curiosity?" she said, when she was back in control of her faculties.
Clint nodded.
"And because," Darcy said, and if she was going to word vomit like this she should really be watching Mean Girls so at least Cady would give her some sympathy points. "I think you're hot, but if Natasha was, you know, calling dibs, I wouldn't want to step on any toes."
Clint thought about that for a second, or maybe he was watching the stupid movie, she wasn't sure. She was never sure with him.
"I'm single," he said at long last, and it was all he said. Darcy thought about clubbing him over the head.
"Well then. Do you want to watch a movie that isn't startlingly bad yet soaked in college-era nostalgia? Something like, I don't know, Empire Records? That one has the nostalgia, but with the added benefit of being good, and Renee Zellweger tries like, really hard to be a legit actress."
Clint smiled, and he had a beautiful smile. "She does try hard, doesn't she?"
Darcy waited, because she was beginning to think that his words were more "carefully chosen" than "absent."
"You know what would be better?" he asked, rolling his head so his neck gave a little pop and she resisted the mighty urge to suggest if would be better for her to rub his shoulders and any other sore muscles he might have because, god help her, she liked Clint, terse and withdrawn and strange Clint, who spent so much time watching that he had to work to find his voice and didn't mind when she prattled on.
"What?" she asked.
"Why don't I teach you, like you were saying, how to shoot? A gun. Because you should know."
Darcy smiled, all the sexy shooting range fantasies the media had poured into her head dancing a little jig in whatever part of her brain stored the id.
"Is it a date?" she asked, and he nodded.
"I think it could be."
She didn't ask the next hundred questions that slammed through her brain, like a rapidly topping Jenga tower of bad thoughts - What do you see in me? and Why? and In the version of this where I shoot you in the foot, could there be a second date? and instead she grabbed the remote and flipped the TV off.
"Your shooting range or mine?" she asked, giving him an elaborate wink.
He huffed a laugh. "Mine," he said, which was for the better, really, because Darcy didn't actually have her own shooting range.
Well, not yet, anyway.
Author: _samalander
Fandom: Avengers
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 4,800
Warnings: Silliness, crack.
Characters/Pairings: Clint/Darcy, team gen.
Summary: Or, Five Things Darcy Lewis Thought She Knew Before She Met the Avengers (And One Thing That Will Always Be True)
In which Darcy is put in charge of Social Media relations for the Avengers and finds that 5/6th of them chalenge the things she thought she believed.
Aliens and gods are bedtime stories.
Darcy's parents were atheists.
Well, they claimed the title of agnostic, they said that the only thing they could know in the Universe was that the Universe was unknowable, but she was pretty sure that was fancy talk for "we don't believe in it, but you believe in whatever you want, honey."
And so there had never been a lot of lies in her house, growing up, never obfuscation of the truth about where babies came from or how presents appeared under the tree in December.
It wasn't until she went to school, until she was a little more than five or six, that Darcy heard about Santa Claus, and Andrew Kiernan made fun of her for saying that her daddy put her presents there. Apparently that meant that Darcy was capital-b-Bad, and Santa skipped her ever year.
And that was just wrong, because Darcy was always capital-g-Good, so she kicked him in the shin and told him so. Which, she realized ten minutes later, languishing on the time-out bench, was probably more in line with his point than hers.
Still, as she grew up, Darcy started to secretly think, in her heart of hearts, that belief in magical beings, in Gods and aliens and Santa Claus, was for the weak minded, for the people who needed something to hold onto, a cosmic teddy bear to save them from the sins under their bed.
Until the summer she worked for Jane Foster in New Mexico, the summer she met an actualfacts real Norse-God-slash-alien parading as a totally cut homeless dude.
That idea, the idea that maybe there were Gods out there, maybe there were aliens and maybe it was Santa who used her mom's wrapping paper was startling, to say the least. At 22, Darcy had her first brush with faith in the Unknown over faith in the Knowable, because there were things out there, beings and whatnot that were beyond her comprehension. Or Jane's comprehension, and Jane understood a lot more about the Universe than anyone else Darcy knew, so if she was at a loss, there was a loss to be found.
And then she and Jane were sent to Iceland and there were aliens in New York and suddenly there was a guy in dark glasses and a suit escorting her to some kind of flying aircraft carrier (which - what?) to meet a man with an eyepatch who offered her a job representing the Avengers to the youth market via social media and Darcy was officially willing to admit that she knew very, very little about what did and did not exist in this world.
But she was pretty sure the Santa Claus thing was still a lie.
(She left cookies out that year, just in case. Better safe than sorry.)
Captain America was a Corporate Tool
When Darcy took Modern Myths in undergrad, they had spent a whole week on Captain America, a whole 1/15th of the class discussing the star-spangled superhero of the WWII propaganda films.
Darcy had been in her punk phase then, half her head shaved and the rest of her hair a vivid pink, decked out a wardrobe that consisted of well-filled tank tops with crude slogans on them, a leather biker jacket, and combat boots, which were really not well suited for New Mexico. (And that phase only lasted about a year before she discovered pin-ups and Dita Von Tease and had a whole new idea about what to do with her curves.)
Regardless, the interaction of her pseudo-anarchist tendencies and the blatant "knock the Axis on their backsis!" rhetoric of the Captain America movies clashed in a rather violent way. Darcy was pretty sure, in that poorly-lit lecture hall, that she was seeing the face of the Enemy, the Man, the Military Industrial Complex, and that if he wasn't dead, she would totally sock him one for helping the colonial American forces get to a place where they could create the havoc they wreaked in the Cold War.
And the first time she met Steve Rogers, when she wandered into the kitchen of the Tower on the morning after she moved in and found him eating shredded wheat and squinting at the funny pages, she realized that little Anarchist Punk Darcy had no fucking clue what she was on about.
Steve was a gentleman, always calling her "Miss" and "Ma'am" and holding doors. He wasn't anything like the movies he made. He was a commander, sure, but not a soldier in the strictest sense. Steve didn't seem to believe in the dogma those movies had espoused; Steve wanted to Right Wrongs and Triumph Over Evil, like a really patriotic Sailor Moon more than he wanted to embody the American Way.
And maybe Little Anarchist Punk Darcy had a simplistic view of things, the way Little Anarchist Punks sometimes did. She believed that the idea that all government was always bad, that all military was always wrong, that America was always Imperialist. But when Steve got going, one night when she was half drunk and he got melancholy about his displaced state of being, the way he spoke about the men he served with and the missions he ran, the things he saw and the atrocities HYDRA and the Nazis had committed in their quest, she realized that maybe Steve had needed to fight - not because he believed that the US was right and he was Saving the World, but because he believed that the Nazis were wrong, and they were ending it.
Her conversations with him tended toward the monosyllabic at first, partly because it took her longer to warm up to him than it had with most of the others, the Little Anarchist Punk Opinions still murmuring in the back of her head (and if she was a little in awe of just how good Steve was, the kind of good you mostly read about in stories that involved armor and dragons and fair maidens, well, who could blame her?) but also because he didn't seem to be the talky type. Steve was more likely to park himself in a crowded room and watch, or maybe sketch, the people around him. The fact was, yeah, off the battlefield, Captain America was downright shy.
"I've been thinking," she said one day, walking onto the balcony where he was sitting, sketching what must have been his millionth skyline. "About how you can engage your fans."
Steve shot her a blank look, as though she had woken him from a sleep. (And if he was going to be the In Shining Armor type, then he should be the one rescuing people from Deep Magical Sleeps, not her. She was totally the evil witch.)
"I'm sorry?"
"Do you know what I do?" she asked, not even thinking about if that was condescending until the words were out of her mouth, but that's how Darcy worked sometimes, the words fell out before the thoughts, and then she got to scramble after them, picking up wayward ideas and secreting them away as best she could.
But it was Steve, and Steve didn't seem to notice when people were accidentally condescending, just when Tony was being a grade-A twatwaffle, so he shrugged. "I have an idea. You use the internet to talk to the public about the Avengers Initiative."
"Right, and you're really popular with the public."
She half expected him to blush, but this was a guy who had been a legit movie star back in the 40s, and he just gave her a shy smile. "Am I?"
"You are," she said, "and I'd like to get you out there a little more, as a public face."
Steve appeared to consider that for a long moment, studying the half-sketched version of New York in the book on his lap.
"I could do that," he said. "What do you want, movies and posters and the like?"
"No," she said. "I was thinking, and tell me if this is weird, but do you mind showing people your drawings?"
Steve shook his head. "Not if they're any good. Do you want to have an art show?"
Darcy couldn't help but smile. He had all the basic concepts down - publicity, computers, internet - and absolutely no idea how it all worked in tandem, no concept of the rich technological world he had come into.
"No, I want you to share them on the internet."
Steve furrowed his brow. "Is there a way to do that? I mean, what's it called, where you can put documents into files and the like?"
"Scanning," she offered, and Steve nodded.
"So I-" he fumbled with the word for a second, "scan some of my sketches, and it helps people to know me?"
"Yeah," Darcy said, resisting the urge to say something folksy or old fashioned like now you're on the trolly, cap! "We're gonna get you accounts on a few sites, and I'll help you run them. People who are interested will come to your deviantart or your tumblr or whatever, and some of them will leave comments."
Steve thought about it for a second. "Can I talk back to them?"
"Yeah, I was kinda hoping you would."
"Alright, Miss Lewis," he said, offering her a hand to shake, which she did, and was a little shocked that his grip was weak but then he had been weak once, too, and maybe he'd never learned how to put the muscle he had behind it. "You got yourself a deal."
She's attracted to men.
Darcy liked to think she had a type when it came to dating.
She liked smart men, strong men, men who were small and well-muscled and could totally overtake her if they wanted to, but they were never the type who wanted to.
And then she met Natasha Romanoff, and all her thoughts about type in regards to men went right out the window.
Natasha was lithe and deadly, silky and sharp and absolutely, undeniably female, and Darcy thought that kissing her would be a little like being electrocuted; all your muscles would lock up and you would be stuck there, captive in the current, until she chose to let you go.
Not that she ever suggested to Natasha that they TRY any kissing, because, on top of being scorchingly hot and devastatingly fearless, Natasha was dangerous, the same way electricity was, and if Darcy wasn't going to grab a live wire, she didn't think she should grab Natasha either.
She still looked, though, admired the way Natasha wiped the floor with the men on the team, the way she used their size against them, and Darcy imagined Natasha pulling those moves on her, wrapping those thighs around Darcy's neck and taking her pleasure until she was sated.
(And oh, the nights when Darcy came hard in the dark of her bedroom, with that fantasy on her mind and Natasha's name on her lips.)
So maybe she wasn't straight after all, maybe she was just a little crooked, a little more gay than she thought she was, if the idea of pleasing Natasha was that arousing.
Darcy shrugged it off, because it was what it was, just a new part of herself to figure out while she went, and licked her own taste off her fingers, sighing hard before she slid out of bed and started the shower.
No man can grow that much and retain his pants.
Darcy didn't know a lot about science, but she did know a fair amount about pants and politics and creme brulee.
And Bruce was really distracting on the "pants" part of her knowledge tree. It seemed to her that when she put on water weight around her period, her clothes got tighter, and a little uncomfortable. And yet, Bruce was about to go from 160 lbs to 1200 lbs in about fifteen seconds and retain his pants.
She didn't know a lot about science, but that one just seemed wrong to her somehow.
She finally broke down, about five months into her stint as the Social Media Strategist for the Avengers and asked him, which was a more awkward conversation than she thought it would be, because Bruce was really only chatty about protons and quarks, and she didn't often have a lot to say to him.
"We get a lot of asks," she mentioned, over coffee in the kitchen, "On twitter and tumblr. People have seen you turn into the Hulk. They want to know-"
Bruce cut across her. "I can't explain the conservation of matter and energy thing," he said, which made her smile. Of course he thought it was science, it was always science with him and Tony. "I'm working on a formula, but as far as we know nothing else in the Universe disproves Lavoisier's theorem-"
Darcy didn't mean to laugh, but Bruce was always so SERIOUS and he was getting a little crease in his brow that made her just want to put him to bed with a good book and a glass of warm milk, like, maybe that would help him calm down about Courvoisier, whatever that had to do with conservation.
"No," she said, shaking the laughter from the edges of her mouth. "People want to know about your pants."
Bruce glanced at his legs, at the slate-gray slacks he was wearing. (And why did he do that, Darcy wondered- he and Steve both -why did they get up and get dressed like they were going to work at the stuffiest office ever when all they were going to do was hang out in the Tower and eat Goldfish crackers and maybe do some science? Had they never heard of sweatpants, gym shorts, or jeans? It boggled her mind, because Tony was older that Bruce and he could rock a suit, but when he was just chilling, he had t-shirts and jeans and Chilling Out Outfits to chill 0ut in,)
"My pants?"
"Yeah, you break the law of conservation of pants."
"I think you made that up."
Darcy rolled her eyes. "No shit, Sherhulk. How do you get your pants to stay on when you expand?"
Bruce shrugged. "Sometimes I don't."
"Yeah, but like 9 times out of 10--"
"Darcy," he cut across her. "Are you honestly telling me that I have fans who are more interested in how my pants stay on than the fact that my transformation is a theoretical impossibility?"
"Yes."
Bruce sighed. "Tell them they're magic pants."
"Magic pants?"
"Yeah, like that movie, with Rory from Gilmore Girls."
"I don't know what I'm more worried about," Darcy said. "That you know about the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, that you know it because of Gilmore Girls, or that you think your fans are going to believe that you have magical pants."
Bruce shrugged again, and Darcy resisted the urge to mimic him because that was just annoying like, if you don't know, say you don't know Dr. Banner don't get your Deltoid workout through passive aggression. "Seems to me," he said, "that you're our Social Media Relations Manager. So manage Social Media Relations. Tell them about the magic pants."
He left the kitchen, probably to be cranky about science somewhere else, and Darcy returned to her room and signed in to twitter.
She wasn't one for revenge, not really, but the next day Bruce found a paper taped to the door of his lab; a printout of a twitter account with one tweet to its name.
@HulksMagicPants Thanks for the questions. We don't know how we work either.
Starkphones are stupid and expensive and she doesn't want one.
Darcy didn't care much about her phone. Mostly, it was a phone. It had some buttons for texting and calling, and it warned her when her dad was the one on the line so she could send him to voicemail rather than have the fifteenth soporific conversation about USC Basketball this week.
(Who injured his leg, dad?... Oh, that's too bad, was he the forward?... Left guard?... No, I missed that game... Saving the world, dad, I don't know... No that was not a tone... Tell me about his hamstring. Is he out for the season?)
All in all, it was utilitarian and efficient and she didn't really want to be connected to her email 24/7. She had an iPod for music and a laptop for internet and a phone for being a phone. Darcy liked keeping her life compartmentalized like that, the way Steve didn't like his food to touch, or the way Bruce insisted that he wasn't the Hulk, they just shared a body. Kinda.
It was easier that way, for her and for everyone else, because she was never tempted to use her phone when she should be paying attention to someone, she was never distracted by the telltale chime of an email. She played the four games it came with when she was bored, and was content.
Until Tony saw it.
"That," he scoffed "that thing. What is it?"
Darcy glanced at her phone, which she'd tossed onto the kitchen counter in frustration, after making the mistake of answering one of her father's calls. (Really, dad, that many rebounds?) She had barely seen Tony staring longingly at the coffeepot on her way to the fridge; she had maybe grunted at him because frustration meant she was in desperate need of a celery stalk and a jar of peanut butter.
"A phone?"
Tony took a draught of one of his weird smoothies, which he claimed were food by Darcy was pretty sure were some kind of Stark Industries plot to corner another market, maybe one in Super Chow, The Super Food for your Super Family to Super Eat or something. Whatever. She set her celery and the jar on the counter.
"It's a shitty phone," he said, picking it up and flipping it open. "What features does it have?"
"It calls and texts," she said, crossing the kitchen to pluck the offending piece of technology from his disdainful fingers.
Tony snorted. "Barely a phone. Let me give you one of mine."
Darcy raised an eyebrow. "Are you offering me a StarkPhone?"
Tony nodded.
Darcy didn't want a StarkPhone. She had no desire to be tethered to her job at all hours, and though she liked Tony, she had no delusions about his trustworthiness, and would rather not wake up on day to find that he'd used cached information to take over the @AvengersIni twitter and posted nudes.
"No thanks," she shrugged, and resisted the urge to roll her eyes as Tony's face fell.
"Why not?" he asked, schooling himself to stoicism, the look of hurt evaporating as soon as it came.
"I can't afford a data plan," she lied. "Not with what SHIELD pays me and student loans and living in New York. I mean, the rent free thing is pretty cool, thanks for that by the way, but it's an expense I don't have budgeted."
The bullshit was flying from her mouth now, fast and thick, and she wondered, idly, if Tony could tell when other people lied, because he was so damn good at it himself.
Two days later, when Hill called Darcy in and told her that, as the Social Media Strategist, she was being assigned a phone for work, and handed her a brand new, frighteningly shiny StarkPhone, Darcy decided that yes, Tony knew when people were lying, and had no qualms about calling people on their bluffs.
"Unlimited data and calls," Hill told her, and Darcy thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a tiny crack in Hill's Agent Armor, right around the corners of her mouth, because she was like, 90% sure that Hill just gave what would, on another person, be termed a smile.
"I don't need a phone this fancy," Darcy said, cradling the device in her palm. "You could have gotten me an old blackberry or something."
Hill shrugged and turned back to her desk.
"Honestly," she said, and Darcy didn't know if she was imaging the smile in Hill's voice or not, but she liked it, "Stark came in here and gave me the phone, said you needed it and he was paying for the plan and also not to tell you. But that last part didn't seem very important." Hill shrugged. "Or maybe it was. Who can tell?"
Darcy, for what might actually be the first time in her life, was speechless. She'd always bought into Tony's "no really, I'm a complete asshole!" persona, and now she was holding a phone that downright proved it wrong. She even wondered, just a little, if her qualms about his trustworthiness were founded.
"Thanks," she told Hill, who made a noise in her throat and nodded. Darcy turned on the StarkPhone and fount it already programmed with the numbers she'd had in her old decrepit flip phone, as well as a rather fetching Tony Stark background that was definitely in need of be tumblred now if not sooner.
Thanks she texted Tony, but she wasn't surprised when he didn't answer. But she still chose not to use it to logon to any of the official sites.
Just in case.
Archers are kinda hot.
In the Before Natasha days, back when Darcy deluded herself that she still had a Type, she had put men who looked like Clint, men with strong features and weathered good looks, pretty high on the list.
And maybe it was too many viewings of the Disney Robin Hood movie, the one with the animals, coming back from her childhood to bite her right in the adult feelings, but she had always thought there was something compelling about a man with a bow, a man who didn't need to be up in the heat of things in order to be in control of them.
She liked how Clint worked with his weapons, the way he donned his (totally hot) reading glasses when he trimmed the fletchings or oiled the string, like he had to be as close as possible, just this once, to see the imperfections, and she liked how at all other times he hung back, stayed far from the group, the way she imagined a Secret Service agent would do.
(But that was probably more due to The West Wing being on Amazon Prime and her having taken a week to slam through the first three seasons with Steve, thinking that seeing the mess that was the late 90s would maybe help him with the mess that was the early tens, but he was too busy waxing poetic about CJ and how he really liked a woman who took control for Darcy to be sure the lesson stuck.)
She liked how he was aloof, but it was a totally different kind of aloof than Natasha had - she was pretty sure that, while Natasha didn't like most people, Clint genuinely did. Like Locke and Hobbes, but with more gunplay. And while Natasha had the ability to talk for hours and never say anything, to get you to bare your soul with the slippery application of three or four well-placed words, Clint was laconic. But when he did speak, it was always one of those sentences that was just laden with nuance and meaning, like Oz from Buffy, except she didn't think Clint could play the guitar.
Still, there were times when she felt his eyes on her, when they were relaxing casually, or when they were with the team, and she played it off as Clint because he was a watcher and it made sense.
She had been watching a movie, the magnum opus that was Eurotrip, which she had enjoyed in undergrad, and dragged out every so often to see if it was still as misogynistic as it had been the last time she watched it and to wonder that she ever liked it at all, and he had come into the room and slid onto the couch next to her.
The characters were on the train, the stupid-ass scene with the gropey guy, when Clint turned to her and said, "Is it true you tased Thor?"
"Yeah," Darcy shrugged, trying not to look at him too much. Or at all.
"Cool," he said.
She felt the words building and she tried to bite them down, but it was awkward, there was a kind of something between them that seemed to act as a vacuum, seemed to suck the words out and pile them on the couch between them.
"It was a good shot," she said. "But I was lucky and Jane had already hit him with the car - which she does a lot, by the way - and I'm good with a taser, but I've never fired a gun, not the way you and Natasha fire guns, I've never even held a gun and I think, I mean, I live in the middle of a den of heroes and spies so maybe I should learn how to do that, you know, in the increasingly likely chance I get kidnapped or something, so I can be a freaking hero myself and kick their asses before you all have to come get me."
He was laughing quietly, and she scowled, because she was apparently not done talking, just pausing to remember to breathe.
"What?"
"You're funny," he said, and she nodded. Damn straight she was funny.
"Are you and Natasha boning?"
And now she was going to die.
Well, she thought she was going to die. If she had asked that of Natasha, she would be about three more than dead. Dead+3. But Clint smiled and shook his head.
"We're partners," he said, like that was an answer. She gestured for him to go on, and he just shrugged. "Nat is my little sister. My little sister who can kick my ass. I love her, but in the way you love family. Not in a naked way."
Darcy let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding and my god but she was having some trouble with the whole breathing thing today.
They sat in silence through another culturally insensitive, exploitative scene, and she was doing better with the in-out-in-out flow of air, when he turned to study her again.
"Why do you ask?"
And then she choked on the oxygen she was finally getting to cycle in and out of her lungs.
"Curiosity?" she said, when she was back in control of her faculties.
Clint nodded.
"And because," Darcy said, and if she was going to word vomit like this she should really be watching Mean Girls so at least Cady would give her some sympathy points. "I think you're hot, but if Natasha was, you know, calling dibs, I wouldn't want to step on any toes."
Clint thought about that for a second, or maybe he was watching the stupid movie, she wasn't sure. She was never sure with him.
"I'm single," he said at long last, and it was all he said. Darcy thought about clubbing him over the head.
"Well then. Do you want to watch a movie that isn't startlingly bad yet soaked in college-era nostalgia? Something like, I don't know, Empire Records? That one has the nostalgia, but with the added benefit of being good, and Renee Zellweger tries like, really hard to be a legit actress."
Clint smiled, and he had a beautiful smile. "She does try hard, doesn't she?"
Darcy waited, because she was beginning to think that his words were more "carefully chosen" than "absent."
"You know what would be better?" he asked, rolling his head so his neck gave a little pop and she resisted the mighty urge to suggest if would be better for her to rub his shoulders and any other sore muscles he might have because, god help her, she liked Clint, terse and withdrawn and strange Clint, who spent so much time watching that he had to work to find his voice and didn't mind when she prattled on.
"What?" she asked.
"Why don't I teach you, like you were saying, how to shoot? A gun. Because you should know."
Darcy smiled, all the sexy shooting range fantasies the media had poured into her head dancing a little jig in whatever part of her brain stored the id.
"Is it a date?" she asked, and he nodded.
"I think it could be."
She didn't ask the next hundred questions that slammed through her brain, like a rapidly topping Jenga tower of bad thoughts - What do you see in me? and Why? and In the version of this where I shoot you in the foot, could there be a second date? and instead she grabbed the remote and flipped the TV off.
"Your shooting range or mine?" she asked, giving him an elaborate wink.
He huffed a laugh. "Mine," he said, which was for the better, really, because Darcy didn't actually have her own shooting range.
Well, not yet, anyway.