Title: Not Your Mother's Alma Mater
Author:
smittywing/Smitty
Pairing: Darcy Lewis/Clint Barton (Hawkeye) (and minor secondary pairings)
Rating: PG-13 for this part, probably R or NC-17 overall. I hope.
Wordcount: ~2795 for this part
Spoilers/Warning: For the end of the movie, I guess? Also WIP and all that carries with it.
Notes:
reccea and her mad beta skills rock my world. All remaining mistakes are mine. Thank you all for your patience! I took the bar and am still waiting on results but the associated angst has delayed writing. Also my incredibly sketchy science. Abundant apologies to anyone who actually knows science and is intellectually offended by the liberties I took. (Which were a lot.)
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four “I had this thought,” Jane says, standing in the middle of the lab in her pajamas, waving a cup of coffee around dangerously, “that most of the wormholes you see in science fiction are traversible - the transporters on Star Trek, or the Stargate - it’s basically an energy transfer. A giant energy transfer. But Thor said the Bifrost was a bridge, something tangible, and Tony Stark said the Asgardian metal was infused with...with magic - we have got to find something better to call that - but he compared it to radiation. And what’s radiation?” She looked expectantly from Coulson to Clint to Darcy.
“What is something that will kill you for a thousand, Alex?” Darcy asks when no one else seems inclined to answer. She looks around. It might help if Erik were here. Or really, anyone else.
“Or mutate your cells into a green monster when you get angry,” Clint offers. Darcy looks at him because what the hell? But Coulson doesn’t even blink so maybe she needs to start doing a little research in the S.H.I.E.L.D. files.
“Uh, okay. That’s...closer,” Jane admits. “Radiation is a process. It’s a process of something, for instance energy, moving through a material or through space. It changes things. Irradiating Mjolnir changes the properties of the metal to make them denser. What if we used this - this magic to change the properties of the space between here and - and Asgard. We could mutate the actual air into a new bridge.”
“How are you going to do that?” Darcy asks hesitantly. She’s not entirely sure she wants Jane to get started on an answer and she’s also not really sure why she is here and no one else is. She and Clint could be comfortably making out on the hood of his Jeep for all the good either one of them is doing here.
“We’re going to look at the readings before and after Thor’s arrival and then we’re going to replicate the conversion - the ‘magic’.” Jane looks excited and like she knows what she’s talking about
“Oh, okay,” Darcy says. She pauses and decides to go ahead and say what she’s thinking anyway because no one cares if she says stupid things “I thought Tony Stark said we needed more examples of...stuff.”
“Exactly!” Jane says, pointing at Coulson. “Which is why it’s such a good thing one of your guys dumped these in my stuff.”
“Excuse me?” Coulson tips his head to the side and frowns as Jane sets a packing box on the table and lifts out three...rocks.
“Are those rocks?” Clint, Master of the Obvious, asks.
“Yes.” Jane doesn’t even look annoyed that no one is as excited as she is, which is probably a bad sign. “And, if you look closely? They have the same markings that the sand at the bridge site had.” She tosses one to Coulson who catches it like he was expecting it and examines it.
Darcy sits down at the table and picks up one of the other rocks. They do have some sort of wacky markings on them. Dark, like they were made with a Sharpie but when she runs her thumb across them, they’re definitely a different texture. “But how do we know they’re magic?” she asks, even though she can tell that they are. She doesn’t know how she can tell - it’s not like they’re buzzing in her hand or anything - but she’s really very sure they are not ordinary rocks.
“They’re emitting a low-level radiation of the same sort Mjolnir was,” Jane says smugly. Darcy put the stone down. Just in case. “I’m pretty sure that once we put them under S.H.I.E.L.D.’s equipment and compare the data to the stuff they have on Mjolnir, we’ll be able to isolate and amplify the common patterns.”
“S.H.I.E.L.D. has readings?” Darcy asks, because that sounds like a lot of work for her.
Jane beams and picks up two huge folders of readouts from the nearest flat surface, which she dumps on the table in front of Darcy.
“Crap,” Darcy says. “Lots of readings.”
The weekend is non-stop science. Darcy can’t keep track of the time she spends in the lab versus the time she spends in the S.H.I.E.L.D. outpost, but she’s pretty sure she’s not supposed to be at work most of that time anyway and no one seems to be watching the clock, not even Coulson.
Jane and Tony are suddenly BFFs with each other on speed dial. Darcy’s never quite sure if Jane’s talking to herself or someone on her Bluetooth. Coulson wants reports every three hours and Darcy just makes a template because the only way to stick to that kind of deadline is just to update constantly. The second day, he gives her some sort of iPad tablet thing that makes her job a lot easier. S.H.I.E.L.D. flies in geologists and metallurgists and meterologists and mechanical engineers and some guy named Doctor Banner who is an expert on some kind of radiation. Clint goes to pick them up at the airfield but Darcy’s too swamped to ride along.
There’s no time to have a heart-to-heart with the panic rising in her gut from the endless technobabble that she doesn’t understand and can’t process. Instead Darcy makes another pot of coffee, writes up another report full of words and numbers that make no sense to her, or puts in another order of weird parts, next-day delivery. She sleeps in the lab, mostly, up on the roof, or takes a shift in Jane’s trailer. She spends the rides to and from the S.H.I.E.L.D. outpost sorting her email into requisitions, arrivals, reports, random science stuff, and directives from Coulson and doing as much paperwork as she can on the tablet. She knows the soldiers don’t like being on civilian transport duty but she doesn’t have time to make conversation so she orders a bunch of snack bars and candy and Pop-Tarts to be delivered to the lab and tries to remember to offer some to whoever is driving her. They’re pretty nice guys and sometimes she even gets to see Clint that way. He doesn’t say anything about their almost-kiss in the desert and there’s really kind of too much going on to try to have that sort of discussion. He touches her, sometimes, though, more than he used to, she thinks. Just a hand on her back when he escorts her from Point A to Point B or a half-hug when she goes into the command center and he goes back to the trailers and the one day she wears her hair in a ponytail, he seems powerless against tugging on it.
She and Jane are up ‘til 3 trying to find a data input error that is probably her fault and is causing a horrid outlier in Jane’s model, and she doesn’t even remember going to sleep when Clint’s waking her up.
“Wha - ?” she gasps, jerking up from the table where she’s been sprawling the top half of her body. “Oh, ow.”
“Hey, hey. It’s just me.” Something squeezes her shoulders, hard, and it feels amazing.
Darcy glances up and sees Clint looking down at her, upside down. “What are you doing here?” she asks. “Does Coulson need me?”
“It’s Tuesday,” he says. “We have a date.”
“We do?” Darcy asks because she’s fairly sure she would have remembered making a date with Clint. She reaches for her tablet and pulls up her calendar.
“Gym class?” Clint asks in that careful, unsure tone boys use when they think a girl’s crazy or is talking about periods.
“Really? It’s Tuesday? Already?” Darcy blinks blearily at her calendar and her whole body aches. “Wasn’t it just Thursday?”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Clint says. He squeezes her shoulders again and Darcy sighs and leans back into it. She opens her eyes - when did she close them? - and checks the lab to make sure people aren’t watching but they seem to be alone.
“Do that again,” she requests, and Clint complies, sweeping his thumbs down between her shoulder blades. “That is awesome,” she announces. “Let’s skip class and go do that instead.”
There’s a beat of silence while Clint presses his palms into the tops of her arms and she can hear his breathing go a little deeper in the still of the morning. “You like it when I touch you?” he asks, voice quiet and rough, and Darcy’s mouth goes dry.
“I’d like it if you touched me a little more,” she says as his thumbs press up the back of her neck and she shivers.
“I can do that,” he says, mouth very near her ear. She feels the scrape of his stubble on her neck and then his lips press gently against the skin under her ear, just behind her jaw.
Oh God, he smells good, she thinks irrationally and then turns up her head to look at him. He looks all golden and scruffy and he smiles at her and touches her chin with his fingertips to tilt her head up and then his mouth is on hers, tasting like toothpaste, and suddenly she’s sure she tastes like stale coffee and those styrofoam wafer cookies she and Jane were shoveling in last night. Clint doesn’t seem to mind, though, because he turns her chair - with her in it - toward him and leans in.
Clint’s a really good kisser, not really gentle or slow, but controlled and deliberate when he pushes in deeper. It’s all about form, Darcy recalls him saying in practice and forces down a giggle. She reaches up to run her hands into the hair at the back of his head and pull him closer but the familiar metallic rattle of the ladder from the roof echoes in the background and Clint’s halfway across the room before Darcy even puts together the pieces and realizes Jane was sleeping on the roof.
“Darcy! Darcy!” Jane clatters into the lab, waving her notebook at a sheaf of printouts. “I just realized! There’s no data error!”
“There’s not?” Darcy asks doubtfully because that one equation makes a super goofy shape when it’s graphed.
“No, look,” Jane says, and suddenly there’s papers all over the table. “Look, we’ve been assuming - “ She finally seems to realize Clint’s there and looks up. “Hi,” she says warily. “Are you here to take her away?” she asks, pointing at Darcy. Darcy files this moment away to remind Jane of the next time she complains that Darcy needs to re-read that Emily Post book.
Clint holds up both hands in a gesture of peace and neutrality. “Just to gym class,” he swears, with an earnest and innocent expression that he has to have been practicing for his entire life.
“You can make that up later,” Jane decides for them. Darcy shoots Clint an apologetic glance as Jane continues. “The problem is, we’ve been looking at this tridimensionally....”
Once Jane starts threatening to scrunch up time - which sounds like a really bad idea to Darcy but no one asked her, and no one listens when she offers her opinion, unsolicited - things start moving along pretty quickly. It’s not like anyone can tell her she’s wrong because no one has ever done this before.
Tony flies in, suit and all, for the actual construction of the bridge-building machine, which someone-who-is-not-Darcy dubs the B-2000.
“Shouldn’t it be the B-2012?” Clint asks when he drops by with Coulson to check on their progress. “So we can pretend we’re at least five minutes in the future?”
“Sure. Just let them screw it up eleven more times,” Darcy suggests. “We’ll be contemporaneous with the warp drive in no time.”
“We’re not screwing it up,” Jane says crossly. “We’re improving it.”
“Improving it so it works, even,” Tony chimes in.
“I’m going to improve myself with some coffee,” Clint announces. “Anyone else?”
“Yes,” Jane says, at the same time that Tony says, “Espresso,” and Coulson says, “Black.”
Darcy watches Clint process the simultaneous requests and waits for the expected, “Give me a hand, Darce? I’ve only got two...” before following him into the lab. “I haven’t seen you in like, two weeks,” he says as soon as the door closes behind them.
“You saw me yesterday,” Darcy points out, checking the temperature on the coffee still left in the pot and deciding to make a fresh batch.
“For five minutes,” Clint says. It was more like twenty-five but Darcy just smiles and measures out the coffee. “And with a million people around. It feels like two weeks.”
“Yeah?” Darcy asks, shooting him a sidelong glance as she dumps the old coffee and rinses the pot. “Miss me?” She pours a pot of water into the machine and parks the empty pot on the platform.
“Missed that smart mouth of yours,” Clint says, resting his hands on the counter on either side of Darcy’s hips. She turns around in his arms and then his own smart mouth is on hers and doing some things that feel downright genius. And somehow? It’s even hotter that Jane and Tony and Coulson are right outside arguing about something.
And then Clint’s pocket beeps.
“Really?” Darcy asks.
“Ignore it,” Clint says, his lips still brushing her face. “That’s what I’m doing.”
“Forget the coffee, Romeo,” Tony’s voice carries through the room. Darcy jerks back but the table’s behind her and she doesn’t get far. Clint just lifts his head and rolls his eyes. “It’s saving the world time. Let’s go.”
“I gotta go,” Clint says as if Darcy hadn’t heard Tony.
“If you gotta go, you gotta go,” Darcy sighs because it’s not like Fury’s going to take an excuse like, I was making out with Doctor Foster’s lab assistant as an acceptable reason for failing to save the world.
Clint pulls a face and taps Darcy on the nose.
“Save me some coffee,” he says.
Jane’s attempt to recreate Thor’s Einstein Rainbowbridge is well-attended. Mostly by S.H.I.E.L.D. guys with guns.
“I feel like someone should have made popcorn,” Clint murmurs from his place between Coulson and Darcy. Darcy silently hands him a Pop-Tart. Her taser is cradled comfortably in her other hand, ready for action.
“Darcy, give me a hand,” Jane murmurs from her spot halfway under the machine. Darcy squats down next to her expectantly. “Hold these,” Jane says, dumping the mystery rocks into Darcy’s hands.
“What?” Darcy asks, dropping one and shifting the other two to one hand so she can pick it up.
“I need to see how they fit - no, turn that over,” Jane instructs, taking the escapee from Darcy’s hand and flipping it over. “See, the lines fit and I think they dictate the order of the - wait, turn that other one over for a sec.” Jane trails into half-murmured physicist-speak and Darcy tunes out. Eventually Jane figures out whatever she needs and Darcy dumps the stones in her bag to keep them from getting lost if something awesome happens next.
“Go ahead, Doctor Foster,” Agent Coulson says and Jane turns up the power on her generator. Clint tucks the rest of his Pop-Tart into his vest and nocks an arrow into his bow.
Everyone holds their breath for far too long to be comfortable and then with a whine and a crackle they can all feel in the air - Darcy can see the hair on Clint’s arms stand up and the electricity sits on her skin like a spiderweb - lightning arcs from Jane’s machine up into a roiling cloud.
“I think,” Erik says, “I see - Is that - ?”
It’s hard to keep her eyes open as the static makes her eyelashes feel heavy and Darcy’s hair whips around below her knit cap. She tilts her head up, looking for that shadow of a figure she picked out on a photograph once. “There,” she says, pointing. “No, there.” It’s like a twister and the object, if that’s what it really is, is being tossed from one side to the other.
Coulson’s talking into his radio and about fifty guns lock upward as the shape grows in size and its edges sharpen into -
“Hey,” Darcy says to no one in particular, automatically lifting her taser arm. “That’s not - “
TBC...