FML, Darcy Lewis style - AFishNamedSushi (2024)

Chapter 1: The Way Things Are

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Darcy is starting to think that this might turn out to be the longest day of her life.

It's 10:30 at night and she's the only server on duty (that bothered to show up for her shift, actually) and wouldn't you know that Friday night means that everyone is out in full force. She's been helping the same customer for twenty minutes, which might not seem like a long time on a normal day but totally is when she's got an entire section of rowdy corporate horn-dogs and fraternity pledges waiting for her to bring them their drinks.

Darcy works at a not-quite-upscale-but-also-not-trailer-trash "adult entertainment establishment" on the outskirts of North East Heights in Albuquerque called The Velvet Rabbit. It's far enough away from the general hub of professional and government offices that the wives and parents of the guys who frequent the place won't come all the way out to look for them, but not so far out that you run the risk of having, quite frankly, sketchy backwoods entertainment. The girls that work here are hot, which is exactly what Darcy wants because drunk horny people give better tips, especially when they're distracted.

Okay, so working at a strip club probably isn't what you'd expect someone with a Bachelors Degree in Political Science to be doing post-grad, and Darcy agrees, it's completely bizarro. The thing is though that after her internship, after all those weeks spent in the middle of f*cking nowhere New Mexican desert, after a run in with a divine Abercrombie model and almost getting squashed by a giant metal death-robot, everyone kind of disappeared. Thor, Jane, even those bastard iPod stealers in black suits. One minute Darcy was getting set to complete the last leg of her internship, which was just starting to get interesting because Norse gods!, when it was all gone.

She showed up at the lab, actually ready and pumped to get started on some science, only to find it completely deserted. Her first thought was that the iPod stealers had come back and Jane and Eric were off trying to rescue their stash (sans God of Thunder), but when they didn't show up at all that day or the next, Darcy came to the unpleasant and frankly irritating realization that they had left. She actually entertained the idea that maybe they accidentally forgot her, which how can you forget a person? but Jane did have a tendency to go all blank-brain when making science. Her calls and emails to Jane went unanswered and when she got her first ping of an undeliverable message she forced herself to swallow her pride and just admit that she'd been left behind.

So it was back to school, who, surprise surprise, wouldn't accept the excuse of "falling gods and killer robots" as a reason why she hadn't fulfilled the qualifications of her internship. She had to delay her graduation to the next semester, messing up all her student loans and academic grants and forcing her to seek out the fickle bitch that is part-time employment. The Velvet Rabbit had advertised for a part-time waitress to work nights and weekends who wouldn't be opposed to "dressing for the occasion", and so Darcy the slu*tty Halloween-costume-wearing part-time waitress was born.

That was over a year ago, and now Darcy has graduated and moved on from struggling college student to struggling post-grad who can't find a job in her field of study. She hasn't seen Jane or Eric since then and hadn't seen any hint of Thor until he showed up on national news fighting scaly alien slugs in New York alongside Iron Man and a giant green dude. She knows that has SHIELD written all over it and while it would be nice to know more about what the hell is going on, her job as an occasional waitress has become a full-time money making machine. Scary aliens, egomaniacal super villains, and mysterious superheroes make people nervous, and nervous people go out and get wasted on a regular basis. Let it never be said that Darcy Lewis is anything other than adaptable and takes advantage of opportunity.

Darcy has a system. She doesn't approach any of the tables in her section until the last few minutes of whatever act is taking place on the center stage, making sure that her customers are well and truly occupied elsewhere with their minds and their dicks while she sets down the check. Nine times out of ten they don't even pay attention and just lay down random bills and wave her away. She puts the bill's tab in the register, takes a chunk out for the bartender, and pockets the rest. It's a good system that's worked out really well.

Until tonight, apparently, when she gets that customer who didn't really want to come out to the club and is trying really hard to not act like they're enjoying the show. This guy is being awkward and squirmy and keeps doing a weird eye-twitchy thing when he catches himself staring at Darcy's chest. She can't blame him - she's wearing a Jessica Rabbit ensemble tonight complete with flowing red hair wig and the girls are sticking right out there (a plus of the costume-only dress code for Velvet Rabbit employees) - but his attitude is freaking out everyone else at the table. Nobody wants to be seen sporting wood and ogling naked dancers unless everyone is doing it too.

"Look dude, I can come back later if you want. Or I'll just bring you a co*ke and you can decide later if you want something stronger."

Mr. I-Don't-Want-To-Look-Supid does something stupid, in that he starts arguing with Darcy, loudly, and in full view of her shift manager.

The unfortunate thing about working in a place like this is that all of her coworkers are flaky, except for the awesome ones who aren't. Like Shannon. Shannon is one of the only things in this place (besides the tips) that keeps Darcy from going postal and pulling out her taser, which she has surreptitiously wedged into the front of her apron.

"What's going on over here?" Shannon asks. "Is there a problem, sir?"

Darcy would totally f*ck Shannon if she went that way, and probably even would just because. Shannon is gorgeous, with a tall slender figure of a dancer and beautiful long honey blonde hair. She's not as full-figured as Darcy, but some careful enhancements in certain places and a meticulous attention to tailored bunny-suits makes her more vintage Playboy Bunny than plastic Barbie. She has a magazine-style beauty without being a bitch about it.

The best thing about Shannon is her attitude, which rivals Darcy's in both snark and foul language. Together they're quite a formidable team and have been the cause of their fair share of heart attacks for unsuspecting unruly patrons.

Mr. I-Don't-Want-To-Look-Supid starts complaining, about the service, about Darcy's "unprofessional attitude", which, dude, you're in a strip club, what kind of service do you expect? He's rambling on and on when finally Shannon decides that she's heard enough of his sh*t and asks him to leave.

"Your friends don't have to go with you, but if you cause any trouble I will personally make sure that you spend the night in county lockup for harassment."

His friends don't look like they want to go with him, and so Mr. I-Don't-Want-To-Look-Supid is forced to leave the club on his own, grumbling and dragging his feet as he bows his head and shuffles out like a giant beetle.

Darcy is finally able to take the table's order, but now her game is totally thrown off and she has to backtrack for three more stage acts to catch up on her groove. It's a loss she couldn't really afford, but she shrugs it off with her usual aplomb.

She's back at the bar returning an empty margarita glass when Shannon sidles up beside her and knocks her in the shoulder.

"Hey," she says. "What are you doing after work?"

Darcy hesitates, because guilty fleeting thoughts of maybe having entertained the idea of having sex with her totally straight boss flash through her mind. "Um, nothing. Why?"

Shannon smirks and looks from side to side before answering. "I have an opportunity that I think you might be interested in. It involves dangerous illegal activity and a potential for a lot of money." She leans in close to Darcy's ear. "You interested?"

Darcy likes to think she gave the matter serious thought before she responds.

"Hell yeah I'm interested!"

Chapter 2: Best Laid Plans

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"Say what now?"

Darcy thinks that asking for clarification on something she doesn't understand while simultaneously downing a shot of tequila is probably counterproductive. But honestly, it's the only thing she can think of doing that might help any of this make sense.

"Come on Darcy," Mark says. "Tell me that you can think of anything better than that. I'm all ears."

Truthfully, she can't, and so she downs her shot in silence, letting the wave of warmth and the welcoming death of a few more brain cells numb her to the fact that she's sitting in the middle of Chili's discussing plans to rob a secured government archive.

"It sounds crazy, and it definitely will be dangerous," says Shannon. "But it's not like we don't have a reliable source about what to expect once we're in there."

After her shift ended at The Velvet Rabbit, Darcy and Shannon had closed up shop and went to probably simultaneously the best and worst place for anyone wanting to conduct a highly covert, highly secretive meeting. The Velvet Rabbit was located on the northern side of Albuquerque, nestled in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains and sneakily placed in a shopping center whose closest corporate neighbors were a fabric store and an upscale sushi restaurant. In an effort to get some space away from where everyone knows them, as well as unwind after a hell of a shift, Shannon dragged Darcy down to South East Albuquerque to the area surrounding the University of New Mexico. In addition to the most bad-ass comic book store in town and a plethora of shops offering specialty caffeinated awesomeness, it has a few 24-hour corporate chain restaurants. And of course, this being a university area and a Friday night (or Saturday morning actually), it's packed.

When they got to the restaurant they already had a table waiting for them thanks to Shannon's preemptive text to the other inductees into the plan, Mark and his cousin Vincent.

Mark and Vincent would never be mistaken for being related if not for the fact that they share the same last name (but honestly, in New Mexico, "Sanchez" is the equivalent of "Smith"). Mark is taller than Vincent by about four inches, with a slick of near-black brown hair that Darcy thinks he probably modeled after watching The Outsiders. He has the body type of a wiry adolescent despite being almost thirty that makes him look younger than he is. Despite the youthful appearance of just another teen, Darcy could immediately tell within a minute of meeting Mark that he is the Man In Charge of whatever is going on here.

Vincent is by contrast, in a word, adorable. Of moderate height and rail thin with a floppy bowl-cut of unremarkable brown hair, his lean build is less the athletic viper of Mark and more kid-brother. It's probably because he wears glasses and Darcy is always of the mindset that the bespectacled should stick together, but she felt some sort of kinship with Vincent upon meeting him. Always the side-kick, never the hero, and Darcy can relate. Vincent is the least outwardly cunning person at the table, with Darcy running for a close second in her post-costume attire that is stretch yoga pants and a Billy Idol t-shirt.

Which makes the fact that this whole plan was his idea all the more insane.

Apparently Vincent is super-smart at math and landed himself a coveted spot as an intern for a government-contracted engineering company that works on location at Kirkland Air Force Base, the undisputed hub of military activity in Albuquerque and probably the state in general. As part of his internship, Vincent spends his days running numbers, converting complex equations, and absolutely not helping the company's engineers devise the most efficient ways to build rockets and nuclear weapons. He's very hush-hush on the particulars of why exactly he came up with a plan to steal from his employers, but Darcy figures that not even an extremely thorough federal background check can snuff out all the crazy.

The best Darcy can tell, Vincent saw something of interest a few weeks ago having to do with the movement of several large crates of what he suspects are highly radioactive material into the tunnels underneath the Base. Vincent's interest isn't in the materials that were moved themselves, because it would take a whole other level of super villain craziness to consider stealing such materials when none of them knows exactly how to build a nuclear bomb, but instead in the physical archive files that accompanied said movement of materials.

According to Vincent, when the materials were brought through the Base they were done so via the surface, aboard a freighter truck that entered using the front gate. As a rule all military personnel of rank and their families live on Base, a small community in its own right complete with schools and stores all surrounded by highly secure fencing and barricades. In the event that sh*t ever hit the fan, the entire place could be locked down and self-sustained. On the day in question, the Base was locked down for the first time since the New York alien attack. Those inside the Base at the time of lock-down were given no explanation, wallowing in panic and speculation until the truck left approximately an hour later and the lock-down was lifted.

Vincent, overhearing one of his bosses speaking with a Human Resources assistant who was complaining about the sudden appearance of several ‘more-insanely-weaponized-than-normal’ people in the Base’s main office, recognized a WTF-moment when he saw one and deduced that the only thing of interest in the main office was the entrance into the underground tunnels, also known as the Archives.

His plan doesn’t involve sneaking into the underground facility to steal the black boxes themselves, but instead to sneak into the Archives and take the transfer papers and documentation that came along with whatever is in those boxes.

“Think about it Darcy”, Shannon says. “Isn’t this what you’re always talking about? The misappropriation of political power, the blatant lying to the public about building weapons of mass destruction, the consequences of a ‘say one thing but do another’ policy and how it makes us look to the rest of the world?”

There are times when Darcy regrets letting people know her thoughts on things like politics, and now is definitely one of those times.

It’s no secret that Darcy, while suffering from a temporary scantily-clad setback, has her heart set on doing something where she can make a legitimate impact. For a while she thought it might be public service (her starting major was Public Administration), then she thought that teaching was the way to go (she didn’t have the “proper demeanor”), but then it was Political Science, the illegitimate child of Philosophy and Ethics that was academically sanctioned by both Government and Psychology. Darcy didn’t just learn about the current political system and its history, but also about other ones and their histories. She learned that everything is connected, and not just in a weird hippie sort of way. It’s what led her to pursue the internship with Jane which, while not going exactly as planned, showed her the importance of independent scientific research and how it could affect national (and global) policy. She may not have earned college credit for that internship, but it was the driving force behind her research paper that got her accepted into the advanced seminars that made up her senior year.

Normally Darcy would be immediately on-board with any plan that involved the exposure of covert government secrets (f*cking iPod stealers). She may not always follow the rules - Actual Norse God knows she cusses way too much and is so blunt it’s probably rude - but despite her blasé attitude she really cares about doing the right thing. And lying, especially by the government to its citizens about secret materials that make them targets for terrorists being right in their backyard, is a big Wrong Thing. When the question of right and wrong involves skirting public safety to satisfy the present agenda, especially in a time where everyone is already vulnerable after an alien invasion and finding out that there are legit super heroes, Darcy is hard pressed to argue against a little illumination.

Provided it doesn’t get her killed in the process.

“Yeah, everyone is a bunch of liars and hypocrites, and I agree that they should be exposed, but how would we do that?”

Vincent looks at her like she’s extremely slow, which hey, this isn’t her genius plan. “There are people who will pay lots of money for the information that’s in those files. Journalists, major news outlets, public action groups, opposing political parties, the list goes on. If we get a hold of that information we can review it. Once we find out exactly what we’re dealing with, and who it would be best to give it to, we sell it to the highest bidder.”

“We’ll make money and make a difference at the same time,” Shannon says.

“I think you guys are forgetting about a very small but very important aspect of this plan”, Darcy says. “The little inconvenience that having the entire U.S. freaking government on our asses will have on all our lives, and I don’t know about you but I’d like to avoid disappearing into a black hole of oblivion or going to Guantanamo or something. Humidity and my hair don’t mix.”

“We won’t disappear,” Mark says in an exasperated tone that Darcy thinks he has no right using since he hasn’t even seen her be sarcastic yet. “Vincent has it all worked out. He has an ID card that lets him get on Base, which we can use as a template to make more with the same look and put our pictures -”

“Which is what we need you for,” Shannon interrupts.

Darcy scowls. “The one time I help someone out and it comes back to bite me in the ass”.

“The guards already know Vincent so having us come along as ‘intern trainees’ or something won’t be that big of deal. And it will only be for a few hours at the most. Get in, go to the Archives, and get out.”

Darcy digests for a minute, and is slightly mortified that she’s actually considering this. “Okay,” she says. “What about the other stuff?”

Shannon and Mark look confused, to which Darcy scoffs. “Come on! Haven’t you seen any action movies? You need disguises, a Plan B, a Plan B to cover our Plan B when something goes wrong, which it will, and at the very least a secluded location where everyone can meet up once it’s over, preferably somewhere tropical.”

Darcy can tell by the looks on everyone at the table’s faces that they hadn’t exactly thought things out this far. So as she orders another round of shots, some chips and queso and starts in with a lesson in Heist Movies 101, Darcy steadfastly ignores the little mini-Darcy voice inside her head jumping up and down waving a red flag. Instead she focuses on the wonderful feeling of excitement pooling in her gut and tries not to feel a sad nostalgia at the knowledge that the last time she felt this way was when she was helping Jane, Erik and Thor plan a similar break-in into a SHIELD facility.

Chapter 3: Put Your Best Foot Forward

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The aftermath of the epic planning session that was staying at Chili's until 4 AM involved a series of very complex and very important adjustments to Darcy's regular weekly routine. Or it would have, if Darcy had a life where planning a major illegal robbery actually set her on edge. In reality, it didn't even take out a kink in her schedule.

Darcy knows on some level that there is something seriously wrong with that.

She's sure she's being dramatic, but Darcy kind of wishes she had someone to talk to about what she's planning on doing. Or not talk to, but at least someone she could bounce a hypothetical 'my-friend' situation off of to get some perspective. Like a "some girl I know had unprotected sex with this guy" scenario but instead it's "some girl I know is planning on robbing the government? Any advice?"

But Darcy doesn't really have anyone she can do that with, which is totally fine because she would probably only end up accidentally spilling all the beans anyway. Calling her parents isn't an option because Mrs. Lewis is like a bloodhound for hidden secrets, and ever since that time when Darcy was fifteen and she knew Darcy had been smoking even though she did it at school and brushed her teeth three times, Darcy won't risk putting her on the trail. Especially when the trail is one full of potential life-altering consequences and lots and lots of jail time for everyone involved. She keeps her own council, which has worked out pretty good so far (she estimates about 80/20). That's better than playing the lottery and she's only been nearly hit by lightening once so the odds have to be in her favor.

They decided it would be best to wait until the next Friday to actually set the plan in motion. That left a whole week for everyone to get their affairs in order. Not quite as dramatic as it sounds, actually, since Darcy really doesn't think anyone will die as a part of this plan, but she still maintains a high probability of disappearing into a dark hole forever. The odds of that are higher than she'd like, but she figures it's better than dying and better than not doing the plan at all. Especially when, the more she thinks about it, the government using the attack on New York by space aliens as a way to manipulate the public into looking the other way on their own security is a really, really big Dick Move.

Plans for the day in question, code-named Operation: Sneak-Into-Government-Facility-And-Steal-Stuff (or just "the plan" as Vincent so eloquently corrected Darcy, with a raised eyebrow and everything) were completed that Saturday morning. On Sunday, The Velvet Rabbit was closed, a concession to the Catholic state that is New Mexico, leaving everyone to their own devices until the next meet up scheduled for Thursday night. Darcy slept all day on Sunday as per her usual, Monday through Wednesday were grudgingly spent at work in an effort to maintain an appearance of normalcy, but Darcy allowed herself one day of reflection and mental preparation before her descent into federal criminality.

Namely, she went shopping.

In Darcy's exciting life post-graduation, she spends a lot of time in different stores. Grocery stores, drug stores, money-stores (banks), retail stores, used-clothing stores, high-end clothing stores, shoe stores, liquor stores...

There’s something grounding about going through one’s normal routine, of doing the exact same thing over and over again. It’s boring as sh*t, but it also means that a person doesn’t have to think. For Darcy, this means that she doesn’t have to remember that in less than twelve hours she’s going to be doing something that’s incredible - incredibly insane and possibly (most definitely) incredibly stupid, but incredible nonetheless. She goes through the motions, says all the right things to people she sees all the time, inserts a snarky remark here and there and makes sexual innuendo out of innocuous comments. She’s calm, she’s cool, and she’s collected.

She’s numb.

Darcy remembers a discussion she’d overheard once on the television regarding soldiers returning from the Iraq War and how more often than not they had severe cases of undiagnosed PTSD. These soldiers, having returned from a situation coined colloquially and somewhat insensitively as “hell on earth”, were unable to adjust back to normal life. They went to stores, they shopped, they talked with family and friends about the same things they discussed before they left, all in an effort to do the exact same things they had done before the War. But things were different now. They were different, and everything else was exactly the same as they had left it. Things like what Darcy is doing now, just being normal, were suddenly unbearably complicated.

At the time, Darcy thought that the most difficult thing about the situation must have been having nobody acknowledge all the sh*t the soldiers went through, instead just acting like everything was normal. Now, though, with the knowledge of what she’s about to do poking at the back of her mind with every smile and every gesture, she thinks that perhaps the real issue isn’t adjusting back to a routine, but instead realizing that the routine isn’t as comforting as it used to be.

When the week is almost over and Darcy is faced with the warm orange and red-hued reality that is Thursday evening, she fancies that the New Mexico sky is probably psychic in some way. It’s always a beautiful sight, the sunset in Albuquerque, but tonight she thinks it’s probably the best one she’s ever seen.

And then she almost face-palms with how cliché she’s being. Is she turning into a vampire, admiring the sunset before her possible last day on earth? Is she a traveler from an ancient land, wistfully remembering the place where her life was changed, possibly for both the better and worse? How about an artist, comparing the colors of the sky to a lost lover’s rosy cheeks?

No, Darcy is a twenty four year old waitress who works at a strip club, who wears faded blue jeans and retro concert tees, who swears too much to make her mother proud and wears nail polish colors that would give anyone on LSD a severe acid trip. She’s not a Jane, and last sunsets full of poetic meaning aren’t for her. Instead, as the red and orange hues of the sky blend to a palette of darkness and the warmth of an arid day fades to a cool desert night, Darcy arrives at her apartment prepared to spend her evenings the way she always does, with a YouTube queue of sexy actors with amazing accents and select scenes from their awesome movies.

Which is why she’s surprised to see Shannon sitting on the steps outside her door, cigarette in hand and phone casting an eerie glow on her face as she sits hunched in a purple Velvet Rabbit sweatshirt.

“Yo,” Darcy says. “What’s up? Is something wrong?”

Shannon takes one last drag before stomping out her cigarette on the steps. Nice, Darcy thinks. It’s a sh*tty apartment complex but still.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” Shannon says. “I just wanted to talk to you about something before…tomorrow.”

Darcy raises an eyebrow at Shannon’s cryptic tone, but leads her up to her apartment without saying anything.

When they get inside, Darcy waves a vague hand in the direction of her couch and goes to the kitchen to grab two beers. She sets one down on the coffee table in front of Shannon and flicks through her DVR to make sure she's recording her TV shows before she focuses her attention on Shannon.

"Okay," she says. "Spill"

Shannon takes a deep breath, which totally doesn't make Darcy even more anxious about what she could possibly want to talk about. "I think you need to know something, before tomorrow," she says.

Darcy raises an eyebrow and waits for her to continue.

"After tomorrow, I'm going away. To New Orleans, actually." She sighs and takes a swig of beer, running a nervous hand through her hair. "Mark and I...we're going together. We're going to elope."

Whatever Darcy was expecting, it wasn't this.

She knows her face betrays her surprise (Darcy doesn't have a good "shocked-face").

"I'm sorry," Darcy says, "but you're gonna have to elaborate on that one for me."

It's not what she was expecting, but now that it's out there Darcy thinks it actually makes a little sense. The connection between Shannon and the cousins, Shannon –smokin’ hot, blonde-bombshell Shannon - who never mentioned a boyfriend and never had one come visit...who would have thought she had a serious romance on the side?

Darcy is not that sneaky, and so Shannon can totally see all the thoughts as they play across her face. She grimaces a little bit, but it's followed by a small deprecating smile as she reaches over and squeezes Darcy's knee.

"I'm sorry," she says. "Please don't be angry. Mark's parents are...traditional. They wouldn't approve of him bringing home a gringa, and definitely not with me being a...well..." She stops for a moment and downs another swig of courage. "When Vincent asked him if he would help with this thing, Mark saw it as our chance to get out of here. Vincent is wicked-smart and Mark, God knows I love him but he isn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier, even he saw it as the opportunity it was."

She's looking at Darcy with an expression of such open honestly, of such pleading for acceptance, that it makes Darcy uncomfortable. She isn't good with things like this, people bearing their soul to her and letting their judgment fall at her feet. How is she supposed to react? Is she supposed to be angry? She is, she thinks, a little pissed that Shannon didn't tell her the entire story behind the plan, but would she have said no if she'd known? It seems that, if anything, she probably would have said yes even quicker. Shannon is (honestly) the closest thing she has to a friend anymore. If doing this meant helping the one person who's truly taken a chance on her, Darcy doesn't think she would have had the heart to say no.

It's not like she has f*ck-all going for her in life anyway. She's sacrificing her mediocre day job and sh*tty apartment for what - Money? Political protest? Social justice? And now, love?

Seriously, Darcy is such a bohemian it's sad.

"I'm not mad," she tells Shannon. "A little annoyed, yeah, but I get it. I mean, I don't get it, but I understand."

Darcy still feels a little sick with how happy that makes Shannon, and she grabs her beer and chugs it to preempt Shannon from launching herself over to hug her. She can always tell when Shannon is about to because she gets twitchy and her eyes light up. Jane used to do the same thing in those few times when she hugged Darcy. Darcy spent so much useless time looking for those signs in Jane after Thor left that its second nature now to see it in other people, and it's a good thing because Darcy doesn't really do hugs.

"So, when it’s over," Darcy says, "then what? You'll just leave?"

"Pretty much, yeah," says Shannon a little breathlessly. "We'll meet up with you guys afterwards to split the stash, exchange info, and then...we'll be gone."

She says it with such conviction, such wistful happiness, that Darcy can't help but be inspired herself. She offers a tight smile in return that slowly turns genuinely warm when Shannon's words sink in with their full meaning.

Gone.

Chapter 4: Dress For Success

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The worst part of pretending to be part of a new batch of interns from the University of New Mexico's School of Engineering is having to do all the stuff that said interns do on the first day of their very important internships. That means dressing the part, which for Darcy is pulling a full Hillary Clinton and wearing a dark navy pantsuit complete with white collared blouse undershirt and four-inch black pumps. On a normal day, Darcy doesn't do heels. Unless it's a special occasion (and by special, that means she's either going somewhere fancy or is getting laid, preferably both) she doesn't "dress up". It's not that she's opposed to it per se, just that she doesn't really need to. Her life consists of altering her wardrobe between casual jeans with tees and full-blown Halloween costumes, part of which doesn't include f*ck-me shoes because that would not work for running around a busy club during evening rush.

Dressing the part for this mission is essential however; as everyone involved knows that they'll be under intense scrutiny from the minute they get inside Kirtland's front gate. The only really "disguise-y" part of her disguise that Darcy could allow herself was to don a black wig that fell in a retro bob-cut to her shoulders and switched her normal day-to-day glasses for her spares with purple frames. As she applies the finishing touches to her ensemble and checks herself in her apartment mirror, Darcy thinks that she looks like a walking p*rno movie.

In case anyone hadn't noticed, she's a full-figured type of gal. Full figured gals and off-the-rack professional women's suit sets from JC Penny don't mix. Instead of looking like a young woman who is about to take the first step to embarking on her career, she looks like an advertisem*nt for Naught Librarians IX: Extra Naughty Edition. The girls, by far Darcy's most impressive feature, are barely contained in the button-up shirt and the blazer, obviously not tailored for the curvier members of society (despite being in the women's section) isn't helping to cover much of it up.

It might not be all that bad though, Darcy thinks as she turns to check out the view from behind. Damn, it just sticks right out there doesn't it? This might turn out to be an unintended benefit of the whole dressing-the-part thing, because people who will be looking at her will really be looking at her. If there's one thing she's learned from working at The Velvet Rabbit, besides how to hip-drop-swirl-spin like a mother f*cker, it's that people (especially men) will see whatever is the most obvious first. Showing up at a military base under the guise of a student intern in a semi-slu*tty suit will leave more of an impression than showing up as regular old Darcy Lewis would.

The alarm clock on the table by her bed says that's the time is now 7:48, and Shannon and the cousins are scheduled to pick her up outside her apartment at 8:00. She double-checks the suit situation again, makes sure her keys and wallet (equipped with fake ID) are safely stowed, and turns to make one (last? No, definitely not) look at her room. This place, with all her sh*t piled on top of her bed and around her floors, socks and Avengers underwear (no Thor, thank-you-very-much) sticking out of the top drawer of her dresser, black boxed taser sitting in the charger next to her laptop with Hello Kitty stickers on it from her freshman year...it suddenly looks perfect. Even the steaks of dust that dull the dark wood of her furniture, the specks that float in the semi-stillness of streaking sunlight…it seems right, completely at home in an expert metaphor of her life, the mismatched and somewhat halfhearted organization of utter chaos. Like someone had a fleeting thought of trying to make an effort at organization but got sidetracked, moving on and leaving it all in a permanent state of incompletion - projects just waiting to be finished.

She thinks that maybe, if (when) she gets through this, she'll do a thorough cleaning and go completely Martha Stewart in here. She'll use her cut of the money to buy a whole new set of furniture, with matching curtains and bed linens and all that magazine sh*t. It will be a new look for a new life.

As she turns around and walks out, Darcy knows in the back of her mind that she totally won't.

***

Shannon arrived right on time (shift-manager instincts die hard, even in the face of highly-illegal crime) and Darcy was stuffed in the backseat of her small and cramped 1993 Toyota Camry next to a surly and impeccably-dressed Vincent in the male-version of professional office clothing, which unfairly, is really just slacks and a dress shirt. No heels or blazers for the gentlemen. Darcy thinks he shouldn't look so moody this early in the morning, especially when his height and the cut of Darcy's blouse are most likely giving him a view of epic f*cking proportions down her shirt. He's staring out the window watching the morning rush hour traffic pass with a look of such boredom that Darcy has to wonder if he doesn't quite get what they're about to do.

Shannon and Mark aren't saying anything either, but from the twitchy up-down-up-down leg movements Mark is making and the near constant side-sweeping covert glances Shannon keeps sending him, Darcy can tell they're both nervous. That's not exactly a good sign, but Darcy guesses that maybe the two of them have much more riding on this plan than she does.

Vincent, though...she's not sure.

"Hey Vincent," she says, "This is one hell of a plan you've come up with here."

Vincent doesn't turn to look at her and she wonders for a moment if he's ignoring her remark before he twists his head slowly and looks at her from under his glasses. Darcy feels her stomach drop a little bit when she sees the look on his face, blank and cold with a severe sternness that reads like abject resignation.

He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't have to, because Darcy knows that look and is speaking again before he even has a chance to spit anything out.

"So who f*cked you over that you're trying to get back at?" she asks him.

Her question sends his eyebrows rocketing towards his hairline for a second, his mouth opening as if to immediately deny her statement, but he closes it and his eyes turn hard again before he looks the other way and back to the flowing traffic.

"Look," she tells him. "I get it. And I know that's something people say a lot, but I actually do get it. It sucks being left behind, in any capacity." He still doesn't respond, but Darcy can see that her words are registering as his shoulders tighten and his body tenses. "I think that just because a person isn't super smart or a rocket scientist or something, which obviously isn't the issue in your case, doesn't mean that they can just be ignored. Or unappreciated or even just not freaking told they're doing a good job, but..."

She trails off and runs her fingers through the wig on her head, adjusting the fit against her scalp. "Doing something like this...it has to be for the right reasons, even if those reasons are as stupidly simple as money or fame or...love."

There's no room for retribution in a plan like this, Darcy thinks as she looks him over, his shoulders slumping just a tad as he seems to fall in on himself for just a moment.

The morning traffic passes in a sea of glinting metal around them, carrying them forward like a great wave towards what future Darcy isn't sure. She honestly doesn't know what she expects to happen. She knows what she'd like to happen and what she'd like not to happen, but everything else is a toss-up.

What would be a happy ending for this story? Obviously, Shannon and Mark getting to ride off into the sunset for sure, but for her and Vincent...they're both in this plan for something else. She's been telling herself she's in it for the satisfaction of making a statement on par with all her years spent reading textbooks in Political Science classes, with the added benefit of making money on the flip-side. But is that really it? If she were to really take a deep, long look at her motives, what kind of Freudian-level sh*t would she find? Greed, anger…vengeance? Can she really say that those things aren't playing at least a small role in her decision?

Maybe her motives for jumping head-first into such a dangerous plan aren't as stupidly simple as she'd like.

"...This is for the right reasons," Vincent says, so quietly she almost doesn't hear him.

She looks back at him, his hands folded delicately in his lap and eyes deliberately focused on the view outside. In this moment Darcy thinks he looks sad, dejected, and it makes a well of sympathy form in her stomach for not just him but for the little bit of herself that she recognizes in his eyes.

"Okay," is all she says.

Darcy isn't sure that she entirely believes him, but there isn't any time to argue the case further as Shannon slows the car and turns into the queue waiting to be let inside Kirtland's gated entrance.

She sighs and adjusts her wig once more, settling the fit of her glasses more firmly on the bridge of her nose. Shannon looks back at her in the rear-view mirror and when their eyes meet, Darcy gives her a small encouraging smile. Shannon answers it with a smile of her own as Mark reaches out to take her hand and gives it a squeeze. They look at each other and Darcy sees the moment when Shannon truly accepts that everything will be alright, just because Mark tells her it will. It’s a simple gesture, sickeningly sweet really, but it lets Darcy shove all the introspective bullsh*t that talking to Vincent has dug up back down inside her and focus on what’s to come.

It’s game time.

Chapter 5: Think Happy Thoughts

Chapter Text

Turns out that getting inside the Base is actually a lot simpler than Darcy thought it would have been.

When they get to the front gate they are met by a military guard in full-blown uniform, like a really intimidating combination of security guard and National Guard. Shannon rolls down the windows in both the front and back passenger seats and rattles off the practiced script that Vincent had given her.

“Hi,” she says to the guard. “We’re supposed to start today as interns with ProvoTech. We’re from UNM…”

The guard, whose nameplate says M. Valencia, gives Shannon a once-over with a slightly bored and carefully blank look while simultaneously managing to drink in every detail with all the precision of a trained and practiced eye. He stares at Shannon for a silent moment, then at Mark, then to the backseat at Vincent and Darcy. When his gaze falls on her, Darcy has to fight the urge to wave and yell “Hi!” because that wouldn’t be a totally dead giveaway or anything of how nervous she is. Instead, she keeps her hands carefully folded in her lap and resists the urge to do something stupid.

He pauses when he looks at her for a minute that seems like for-freaking-ever (it’s the hair, thinks Darcy, and immediately high-fives herself internally for her choice of disguise) before moving on to Vincent where he speaks for the first time in what has got to have been five minutes.

“Mr. Sanchez,” he says. “Good morning.”

Vincent smiles at the guard, and even though his head is turned slightly away from her, Darcy realizes that this is the first time she’s ever seen him smile. It’s kind of creepy actually, especially since he looks so genuine and speaks with such sincerity that is completely at odds with what she knows are his true motivations.

“Hey Manuel,” Vincent says. “I’m chaperoning today.”

Manuel cracks the first semblance of a smile that Darcy has seen so far and gives Vincent a look that seems to share the sympathy of being saddled with newbies and showing them the ropes. He nods to the gate-control operators and nods at Vincent as he waves the car past.

“You’ll need to take them to the Intake Center and get them their temp badges.” Manuel tells Vincent. “And you’ll need to have someone sign for them too.”

“No problem,” says Vincent. “Mr. Padilla is going to meet us there.”

Say what? Darcy is confused. This wasn’t part of the plan.

When they make it through the gate and Shannon steers the car to the immediate left at the prompting of a directory sign, Darcy turns to Vincent and fixes him with a wild look.

“Mr. Padilla? Who the f*ck is Mr. Padilla?”

“My boss,” Vincent says.

“Your boss?” Darcy is going to hit him, she really is.

Vincent gives her a look of near incredulity and a hint of exasperation. “How did you think I was going to get us all in here? That we were just going to walk in and nobody would say anything? Come on Darcy, you’re not that stupid.”

Apparently she is, because she was not expecting them to actually have to meet any of the people that they were supposedly working for. This was supposed to just be a simple get-in-get-out, talk-to-as-little-people-as-possible, and definitely not make actual f*cking contact with someone for long enough for them to be recognized later on.

She’s speechless, which is probably a first for her. Shannon must be able to see the look on her face through the rear-view mirror because she parks the car in an empty spot right in front of the building, which reads Kirtland Air Force Base Welcome Center, and spins in the front seat to fix both Darcy and Vincent with equal stares.

“Guys,” she says in her manager voice, “Now is not the time for this sh*t. Vincent, why didn’t you tell us that we were supposed to meet your boss?”

Vincent gives Shannon the same look he gives Darcy and opens his mouth as if to say something equally scathing to her, but he shuts it when Mark says “Vincent!” in such a tone that a tiny part of Darcy is a little intimidated on Vincent’s behalf.

The rest of her wants to bash his head against the window.

Vincent sighs and pulls off his glasses. Rubbing them on his suit, he says “My boss is expecting a group of freshman interns from UNM to show up today to be trained to take over on a project that I’m…I was…working on. He doesn’t know who’s coming because I didn’t tell him, just that the advisor at UNM’s School of Engineering is a friend of mine and told me about some students who would work for free…” He trails off and puts his glasses back on. “My boss is an asshole, okay? He was more interested in the idea of free help without having to go through all the trouble of actually giving school credit or paying anyone that he accepted the idea right away.”

Darcy is a little stunned. She knew that he was doing this for some sort of work-related reason, but now it seems that she was right in her calling him out about someone screwing him over. She hates being right.

Vincent said they’re here to work on a project that he was working on, meaning that he is no longer working on it. Darcy doesn’t know Vincent very well, or at all actually, but she can tell that he’s not the kind of person who would take being pulled off of something they worked hard on very well. She can relate in a way, although she’s never wanted to rob her ex-bosses before (except when she stole all the Pop Tarts and coffee out of Jane’s lab and threw the coffee maker against the wall when she realized they weren’t coming back, but that was one time). And pastries and coffee isn’t nearly the same thing as government secrets.

“When he meets you, he’ll be more concerned with making sure that you don’t tell anyone at school what you’re working on. He’ll make it seem like it’s because of security but it’s not, it’s because he doesn’t want anyone from the University to find out that you’re not getting paid for working here. ProvoTech has a contract with the state…”

He doesn’t finish, and Shannon looks at Mark for a moment before looking at Darcy. Her looks screams a combination of ‘what the f*ck?’ and ‘are we still sure we want to do this?’ so loudly that Mark answers out loud.

“Vin, is this why you’re doing this? You’ve been working here for almost six months…are you saying that you haven’t been paid at all in that time? How is that possible?”

Vincent gives Mark a look that is still hard but also somewhat softened in defeat, like he’s given up on being argumentative and is resigned instead.

“No, I’ve gotten paid for my hours, but not for all the other sh*t I did, which I won’t tell you about so don’t ask,” he says, “Just know that there are a lot of things that I’ve had to put up with and a lot of sh*t I’ve had to see that I should have been compensated for. And I definitely should have been given more than a letter saying ‘your services are no longer required after your contract ends’ from a man who would be in Guantanamo if half that sh*t got out”.

He falls silent and his dark hair falls forward into his eyes as he begins adjusting the cuffs of his dress shirt. Stillness falls in the car, hot and uncomfortable, as Mark, Shannon and Darcy stare at Vincent for a few long minutes. Darcy doesn’t know what to say. She’s opened her mouth and closed it a few times in the last minute, trying to think of something to say that would…what? Be comforting, to whom? What about her? Who’s going to say something to make her feel better about how messed up this all just became?

The hush is broken by Mark after he reaches over and pats Shannon on the leg and offers her a small, but encouraging smile. Unfailingly, she returns it and then it’s like the entire atmosphere changes from stunned silence right back to business as usual.

“Are you sure that your boss won’t be a problem?” Mark asks Vincent.

Vincent looks up from under his glasses, looking for the entire world like a small chastised child being asked if he’s done being in time-out.

“He won’t,” Vincent assures his cousin.

Darcy thinks that he better not, because if Vincent’s little ‘change’ in the plan causes her to end up going to jail, she’s going to have nothing left to loose and might seriously consider doing some extreme bodily harm to a certain glasses-wearing math nerd.

***

The Welcome Center of Kirtland Air For Base isn’t exactly a ‘center’ so much as a large metal trailer with two desks and no air conditioning. The four of them had entered the building under the gaze of four security cameras and a triple-lock fingerprint scanner only to the stopped immediately by sight of the demure petite red-headed assistant who just about jumped five feet in the air when they came in. She got some good air for such a little person (Darcy was legitimately impressed) and hastily stepped away from the portly sandy-haired man who she had been standing next to as if they’d been burned apart.

“Ah, Vincent,” the man says in a hasty tone, voice raspy is a way that oddly reminded Darcy of her grandmother. “You’re here. These must be the interns you mentioned.”

And this must be Mr. Padilla, Darcy thinks. Her suspicions appear to be confirmed as she looks towards Vincent where he’s standing to her left and sees his shoulders tense and his spine straighten. The posture is matched by Mr. Maybe-Padilla, who straightens his tie in a seemingly absent-minded fashion before sauntering over towards their group. Darcy had never really encountered anyone who sauntered before, but that’s the only word that came to mind to describe how this man seemed to sashay/glide his way confidently towards them.

Man, talk about power vibes. This dude was giving them off big time, like he is in charge and he Knows It. It’s more nerve-racking than Darcy was expecting, and she almost wants to just hate him on principle. At least Jane had that little awkward personality to go along with all her brilliance. If she’d been smart, beautiful and arrogant…well, Darcy might have judged Vincent a little too harshly for wanting to really stick it to this guy.

Mr. Padilla introduces himself to the group, stooping to kiss both Shannon and Darcy’s hands. Neither of the women are fooled by his display of gallantry (they work at a strip club for god’s sakes; they can recognize an attempt at cleavage peeking when they see it). Mark receives a less-than-stellar handshake and Vincent is ignored completely as Padilla turns to stand beside the small red-head standing somewhat awkwardly off to the side.

“I’m not sure what Vincent’s told you about what we do here,” Padilla says. “But it goes without saying that there is a lot of secrecy that comes with the job. You’ll get your paperwork to fill out for your security clearances but you’ll also get confidentiality agreements for ProvoTech employees.” He grins at Darcy, a little glint of smarmy misbehavior in his eyes. “We do a lot of fun stuff here and we don’t want other people to be jealous.”

Darcy can feel her eyebrow trying to raise itself right off her face, but she’s a professional bull-sh*tter by trade (comes with the territory of being a waitress) so she doesn’t and instead offers him her best smile and subtle head-tip that makes her wig brush against her shoulder.

Padilla smiles all around, and says “Beth, will you please check them in and escort them to HR?”

Beth jumps again (why is she so jumpy?) and gestures somewhat frantically for them to follow behind her as she makes her way around the desk and through rows of hallways towards what must be the back of the trailer. Darcy follows behind Mark, who leads Shannon in front of him with a hand on the small of her back. Vincent took off first, head held high and only giving enough of a glance at Padilla to effectively dismiss him. It’s a ‘f*ck you’ gesture without actually saying the words, and Darcy is a little impressed. She doesn’t think she’d be able to stomach the ultimate put-down and dismissive behavior that Padilla just gave Vincent, and apparently has been giving for a while, without some serious ‘come-to-Jesus’ conversations. Or at least some acknowledgement that he’s about to get f*cked really hard and that she’s going to be the one to do it.

But, this is why Darcy doesn’t plan robberies of government facilities. She’s got a big mouth and an attitude problem, and that doesn’t mix well with plans to ruin someone’s life.

Beth leads them to the back door of the trailer and outside to the warm and bright morning beyond. Down the trailer’s metal steps and across the way is a gigantic warehouse that is glinting so brightly in the bright New Mexican sun that Darcy has to bring her hand up to shield her eyes from it. She looks down at her feet to keep the pace of walking (dirt and heels, so not a good combo) and tracks her progress by the scuffing tracks of Mark’s shoes in front of her. Everything looks far away in the desert, but thankfully the warehouse building is only really a few minutes from the Welcome Center trailer, and Darcy gives in to the urge and heaves a huge sigh of relief when Beth lets them inside and she feels a blast of cool air on her face.

“Oh thank god,” she mutters under her breath. Mark’s quizzical look at her over his shoulder tells her that she probably said that louder than she intended, but whatever, it’s air conditioning.

The inside of the warehouse is like a combination of high-tech and Raiders of the Lost Ark, with large piles of boxes creating rows that lead off to presumably other rooms sectioned off underneath the shared canopy of the warehouse’s high tented ceiling. There are some partitions of glass and metal, but mostly it looks like an old storage facility that’s been upgraded to an office building. Darcy doesn’t see another person in sight as they follow Beth through the rows, left, right, then right again, until they’re standing in front of a door that looks way too securitized to be in such a building.

Beth turns to Vincent and tells him, “Waive them through here, then go inside and get the packets for them to fill out.” She looks down at her watch, then back up to the group as a whole. “It’s almost 9:30, so hurry as quickly as you can so you can get started on your shifts before lunch. Six hours your first day, then we’ll work out more after your clearances come back clean.”

Vincent nods to her as she brushes past them. She looks at Darcy for a held moment (the hair again, Darcy thinks) before wandering off back into the maze of boxes and metal.

Vincent waits for a minute before he says, “Okay, now we go exploring.”

“What?” Mark says. “I thought we were supposed to go inside the HR building to get to the Archives?”

“We will,” Vincent assures him, “but first we need to find out what to look for once we’re inside the Archives.” He waves his arms around, indicating the sprawling warehouse. “This room has all the latest deliveries to the Base. Everything left here above-ground hasn’t been cataloged or entered into the Base’s systems yet. I checked ProvoTech’s inventory yesterday afternoon and there wasn’t any mention of the shipment from last week. That means that whatever came in is inside this room in some capacity, even if it’s just an inventory sheet.”

Darcy is listening to Vincent, she really is. But her eyes are also wandering around the warehouse, to the rows of boxes and stacks of files that act as brown and manila walls in a series of columns that seem to stretch forever. She’s started wandering away from the group at some point, drawn by a distant shape on one of the papers she sees peeking out from a series of red files on top of a pile of black boxes.

She hears Shannon call her name when she reaches the stacks, but doesn’t answer. She pulls the folder off the shelf, the papers stuffed in tightly to the brim causing one of them to peek out just enough so that the top portion of a logo is showing. It’s a bird of some sort, Darcy thinks, and it’s black on white paper.

This is like one of those crazy déjà vu things, where she knows she’s seen this symbol before but can’t remember where. Darcy balances the folder in her arm as she reaches inside to carefully peel out the rest of the page.

And subsequently drops the whole damn thing on the floor in a crash of flying papers when she reads the words at the top:

Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

Memo to File: Incident Report No. 342, New York, USA.

Chapter 6: One Foot At A Time

Chapter Text

This is not good. This is so, so, so very, Not Good.

The files had fallen to the floor and spread out around Darcy’s feet in a random assortment of numbers and charts, with a spattering of mixed pictures and diagrams of buildings and what looked like some kind of weapon and lots of notes and annotations. She stares at them for what has to be a full minute before her view is obscured by a pair of sandy black dress shoes and a head of slicked-back dark hair as Mark kneels on the floor in front of her.

“Darcy!” Shannon rushes to her side and puts her hand on Darcy’s shoulder, shaking her just a little bit. “What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong? It seems like such a stupid f*cking question that Darcy doesn’t know what to say.

“Look at these things…” Mark says. He’s holding a few of the papers in one arm, riffling through them with his other hand. “Weapons schematics, building plans, transcripts, and…is that…” he pauses and narrows his eyes at the paper. “Is that The Hulk?”

It’s official. Darcy is going to be sick.

She must make some sort of noise or movement indicating the same, because Shannon suddenly grabs her much harder and spins Darcy around so that they are face to face. She looks up at Shannon’s, green eyes blown wide, eyebrows drawn and mouth twisted in concern, and Darcy knows that she must look like she’s seen a ghost because she’s never seen this look on Shannon’s face before. This isn’t an ‘are you okay?’ look, it’s an ‘are you going to die on me’ look.

She’s not sure she knows the answer.

This situation has just gone from bad to worse, and not at all in a way that Darcy had ever been expecting. She doesn’t know exactly who or what SHIELD is, but she knows that they were there within hours of Thor first showing up in the middle of f*cking nowhere New Mexican desert, that they took every last bit of Jane’s research and scientific instruments (most of which were made with equal parts duct tape and RadioShack clearance items), and that they took her iPod…her iPod! After the attack on Puente Antiguo by a giant metal death-robot, they left and didn’t even stay to help clean up. When people tried to find out what had happened, they were evil and terrifying and close-mouthed to the degree that it makes the CIA look chatty. They’re tapped into everything all the time and Darcy thinks they probably have less-than-friendly policies towards people who steal their sh*t and most likely use questioning methods that definitely don’t conform to the Geneva Convention.

Darcy had been semi-comfortable with the idea of stealing from the U.S. Government, but stealing from SHIELD? No f*cking thank you.

Vincent grabs a handful of papers from the floor as well and begins pawing through his own pile. His eyebrows quirk up a few times, a crease forming between his eyebrows, and a small smile appears on his lips which grows progressively wider as he makes his way through it. When he’s done, he looks up at everyone and holds the papers out in a gesture of triumph. “This is perfect!” he says.

Perfect?

“Perfect?” Darcy says in a small voice. She clears her throat and says again “Perfect?” She brushes Shannon’s hand off her shoulder and pushes her glasses up her nose to glare at him. “What the hell do you mean perfect? This is the complete opposite of perfect!”

Vincent’s smile falters a little bit and turns from triumphant to something somewhat cruel, his eyes darkening behind his glasses. He clutches the papers close to his chest, grip tightening on them so hard that his knuckles lighten.

“Darcy…” he begins, his voice soft and calm with an undertone that is decidedly malicious. “This is evidence of stuff that is beyond what we were even hoping for. Look at this…” He picks up one page from the pile and reads: “’Subject appeared to be expressing signs of severe trauma to both the anterior and posterior regions of medial temporal lobe, leading to the conclusion that the neurological affect of mind control is akin to the damage inflicted to both the amygdale and the hypothalamus in patients with amnesia’. Mind control, Darcy, mind control! And this thing is full of stuff like this!”

“Mind control…” Shannon echoes, looking down at the remaining papers strewn on the floor with a mixture of fear and curiosity. “Seriously?”

Darcy can see where this is going, with everyone drawn to the prospect of uncovering evidence that the government is involved in paranormal research, man it would be a field-day of epic proportions. She can only imagine how many different conspiracy theory groups or major news networks would be dying to get their hands on this stuff, and from the looks of fascination on the faces of those around her she can tell they’re all thinking the exact same thing. She has to nip this in the bud quick.

“We can’t give this stuff to anybody,” she says, and wills herself to inflect her voice with as much authority as she can muster despite how shaken she is. “We should just put it back and get out of here.”

Shannon looks at her, shocked. “What, Darcy? No, we can’t do that…this stuff is incredible.”

“It’s not,” Darcy says. It’s really, really not.

“These don’t look like any government reports I’ve ever seen,” Mark says, holding up a page that has a diagram of some sort of box-like cube and mathematical notations. “They’re more…speculative…than I was expecting.”

“That’s because they’re not government reports,” Darcy says. “These files are not like the rest of this stuff. They’re different, and definitely on a no-look-no-touch level that’s way higher than anything else in this room, hell probably in the whole State.”

“It’s perfect,” Vincent says again, and it’s in a tone of complete finality and dismissal that has Darcy going from freaked-out to f*cking pissed almost immediately.

“This stuff doesn’t belong to the government!” Darcy shouts, “Why do you not get that?” She runs her fingers through her the hair of her wig roughly and glares at Vincent.

“It doesn’t matter who it belong to,” Vincent says with an air of annoyance. “What matters is what’s here, in these files. This information is priceless! This is exactly what we were looking for!”

“Oh my god, it so totally does matter!” Darcy is blown away, by the situation, by Vincent’s attitude, by just the sheer f*cked-uppery of all of this.

“This isn’t just some theft from the U.S. military anymore,” she says. “This is theft from SHIELD, which is a million times worse! Like big green monsters and super assassins worse. And if you think our biggest concern before was just going to federal prison, now it’s how painfully will we all die when they find us!”

“Darcy…” Shannon says, putting her hand on Darcy’s arm in an effort to calm her down. “You’re freaking me out.”

“Duh!” Darcy yells, shrugging Shannon’s hand off her and continuing to glare at Vincent for all she’s worth. He doesn’t look like he’s taking her that seriously, but his eyes have widened slightly in what Darcy thinks might be some small acknowledgement that her words are sinking into his genius-brain just a tad. It’s not enough for Darcy though.

Why can’t everyone just be on board with how f*cked they all are?

“We need to get out of here five minutes ago,” she says. “We need to leave these files exactly where we found them, get out of here, and then go do lots and lots of hardcore drugs so we destroy all the brain cells that would make memories of any of this.”

She drops to her knees on the floor and begins to gingerly pick up the files that she dropped. Nobody is bending down to help her, so she moves around their feet as she holds the papers close to her chest, haphazardly shoving them in the folder from whence they came. She gets to her feet and is about to put the file back on the shelf when Vincent reaches out and grabs it from her.

She opens her mouth, prepared to rip him a new one, when everything suddenly goes dark.

It’s pitch black and everything falls so silent that Darcy wonders if she’s gone blind, deaf dumb all at once (and wouldn’t that just be too much to hope for). The darkness is magnified by the silence, and what has probably only been a few seconds feels like minutes before she hears a shrill whining noise coming from the direction of the locked HR door.

A red light starts flashing overhead, drowning the entire warehouse in a pulsing strobe of orange. She can see Vincent standing in front of her, folder clutched to his chest and eyes aimed upward with his mouth open in shock.

The shrilling behind the HR door gets louder and louder before it suddenly stops, only to be followed immediately by a loud BOOM!

Darcy looks around at everyone, eyes wide and hands clenched, and yells “Run!” before turning on her heel and bolting down the row.

***

She isn’t sure how it happens exactly, but somewhere between spinning around and bolting down the stacks of files to her left and somehow being able to avoid tripping on a pile of overturned boxes, Darcy manages to completely upend herself and come crashing chest-first into something.

After an initial moment of shock, she realizes that it’s not so much a Something as a Someone, and she is not at all happy with the fact that she knows exactly who it is.

Even if she hadn’t just been looking at security surveillance photos of him in a top-secret SHIELD folder (which she is now convinced is definitely cursed), she would have remembered him from the news footage of the attack on New York six months ago. It’s not like there are that many people who walk around wearing a combination of leather and green trench coat and strait-jacket outside of Raiders football games or Goth rock concerts, and those people definitely don’t wear helmets with curved golden antlers.

No, Darcy is pretty sure that this is Loki, as in Thor’s evil baby-bro Loki, a.k.a God of Mischief, Lies and general f*ck-up-ery. As in, evil-robots-of-death sending, destroying small towns before going on a bender with an alien space army f*ck-up-ery.

Only Darcy would be unlucky enough to run head-first (literally) into arguably the most terrifying person in the universe.

To her credit, it seems like Loki wasn’t expecting her to run right into him (which, yeah, neither was she) so he doesn’t react quite as fast as he normally might under different circ*mstances. It’s still faster than Darcy is able to though, and she’s barely finished her ‘oh sh*t!’ train of thought when he’s grabbing her by the wrist in a vice-like grip. She looks up into his face, his eyes sparkling with an evil glow (bad guys don’t twinkle) and the harsh lines of his pale jaw and brows cast into deep shadows offset by the pulsing orange lights. She registers the pain at the same time as her mouth opens to yell or scream or cry (probably all three) but Loki doesn’t seem to care and is instead focusing on something over her shoulder.

From behind her she hears the loud stomp of several sets of footsteps pounding on the ground, followed by the unmistakable screech of those steps coming up short before she hears Shannon scream.

Oh great, Darcy thinks, but then she realizes that Loki’s grip on her wrist has loosened a little, probably at the unexpected sight of the three people appearing behind her. She knows it’s a stupid move even as she does it, but panic has won out over rationality and self-preservation has her wrenching her hand out of his grip. His hold on her is agonizing, and Darcy feels a sharp stab of pain shoot up her arm when she twists her hand and yanks it free. She doesn’t think about it, doesn’t look up at his face or down at the hand that held her. Instead, she turns heel and runs towards Shannon, Mark and Vincent. They’re farther down the hall than she expected, and she almost falls over again when she misjudges the distance due to the tricks the flashing lights are playing on her depth-perception.

She comes up nearly in front of them, her eyes wide and her breathing rough, and she manages to choke out, “Which way?”

Vincent recovers the quickest of the three and takes off towards the right, Darcy on his heels and Shannon and Mark right behind her. He still has the red folder clutched to his chest, held close like a lifeline as he navigates them through the stacks. Distantly, Darcy really hopes that he knows where he’s going, but honestly anywhere that is just away from Loki is great.

They end up in front of a door which Vincent pushes open and floods the room with blinding sunlight. He shoves the door open with such force that the momentum has it shooting backwards into Darcy as she launches herself forward to squeeze through it. It hits her right in the side of her hip, and she falls to the hard dirt outside as her footing gives out under her. Her hands are scraped to sh*t, her pant legs are torn and she's pretty sure the wig is somewhere around her eyes, but she gets up as fast as she can and with all the agility of a newborn gazelle on stilts. The sun is higher in the sky now, turning the sandy desert floor into a makeshift oven that burns the bottoms of her feet as she nearly sprints after Vincent. She's kicked her shoes off and left them behind, because running the f*ck away is so much more important than a sixty dollar pair of Audrey Brookes.

Somewhere above her she recognizes the deafening sound of a helicopter, blades kicking up a dust storm of epic proportions that surrounds them and decreases her visibility of Vincent's back to near zero. She keeps running anyway, and almost upends herself again when she hears the unmistakable sounds of gunfire, followed by a high-pitched scream from somewhere to her right. She bolts forward and breaks the edge of the dust storm to find herself almost at the Welcome Center, its metal silhouette looking for all the world like the most f*cked up version of Grandmother's House.

Darcy arrives at the Center's back door the same time Shannon and Mark do and find it open wide, Vincent standing immobile just inside. Coming up behind him, Darcy sees the reason for Vincent's sudden stillness.

Beth, the small red-headed (secretary?) is standing in front of him, her hand held out in a near perfect approximation of one of Darcy's old middle school teachers asking for the homework assignment that she knows is late. She seems completely calm, not even a hint of anxiety at the insanity that's going on outside. Uh, Darcy thinks, did she not hear the explosion? The helicopter? Or how about the freaking gunfire?!

"Mr. Sanchez," Beth says to Vincent. "You really need to hand over the files."

Darcy thinks 'no' in the same moment that Vincent says it, but she's pretty sure her objections are for a different reason. She hadn't noticed it at first with all the chaos, but now that her eyes have better adjusted to the Center's indoor lighting, she can see that something is definitely off with Beth. She looks like a slightly-deranged, demonically-possessed mannequin, her meticulous cardigan-skirt combination skewed and rumpled with mysterious stains. Her eyes, Darcy sees, are bright and shining, but instead of the blue they were before there is now a slight green film covering them. Her mouth is set in a thin, severe line as she ignores them completely to continue glaring at Vincent.

"It is imperative," she says again, "that you give me the files, Mr. Sanchez"

To his credit, Vincent seems to be on the same page as Darcy about not giving the creepy lady the files, and she doesn't (really) feel the least bit bad when he shoves Beth roughly aside and barrels past. She spares a look at Beth as she follows, but instead of seeing (or hearing) anything to indicate pain she sees instead that same blank look on Beth's face as the woman drags herself upwards off the floor to the desk by spindly arms.

To Darcy's utter surprise (and immense relief), nobody stops them as they make their way through the Welcome Center and out to Shannon's car in the parking lot. The explosion in the warehouse has drawn a lot of attention, but it seems that's where everyone's focus is as a few military vehicles speed past them towards the helicopter's storm of dust. They cram themselves into the car and Shannon nearly peels out in her haste to make it to the exit.

It shouldn't be this easy to escape from the Base, Darcy thinks, but thank god for that explosion. Unfortunately, the throwaway sentiment is probably more accurate than not, and a part of her has a feeling that little bit of grace will end up biting her in the ass at some point.

***

They're almost back to Darcy's apartment when they turn on the radio. She had demanded they take her home first, the adrenaline of the past hour (and god, had it really only been an hour?) had started wearing off and was leaving her feeling slightly sick.

Her palms are sweaty, her legs and arms aching and shaking with little annoying tremors, her hip sufficiently bruised so she has to compensate by leaning to the left so as not to put pressure on it, and her wrist has a large nasty band of forming bruise around it from where Loki grabbed her.

Oh god, Loki! Seriously, what the f*ck? Where on earth (or Asgard, or whatever) did he come from? Why the f*ck is he here, in Albuquerque of all places! Shouldn't he be in New York terrorizing Tony Stark, off somewhere making applesauce out of giant green monsters, or at least wherever the hell Thor is so he can bother him? Hell, she'll take anywhere that isn't here, near her and the sh*t-storm that just blew up in all their faces.

"What the hell was that back there?" Shannon says, fiddling with the radio dial to find a station not on commercial. "That explosion! And then the helicopter, the guns...and did anybody else think that guy with the horns looked familiar?"

Darcy doesn't know what to say, and somehow rehashing all her protests from when they were inside the Base seems redundant. This isn't an 'I told you so moment' and instead is more of a 'what the hell do we do now?' one, so she lets it slide.

Shannon leaves the radio on a station that interrupts the current song with the tinny voice of a newsman breaking an immediate story.

"...just now coming in from Kirtland Air Force Base of an explosion that rocked the facility. No one is sure of the cause of the incident, and a spokesperson from the Air Force has yet to confirm whether the explosion is training-related or the result of a potential terrorist attack, but citizens living near the Base report hearing large amounts of gun-fire minutes after the blast..."

"Oh god..." Shannon says. Darcy thinks she might throw up.

"...inside the Base are reporting that teams from both the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the FBI are en-route to the facility. They intend to immediately begin investigating the cause of the explosion, but a spokesperson for the FBI urges people not to panic..."

"Oh god!" Shannon says again, and Darcy knows she's definitely going to throw up.

It's over, Darcy thinks. Screw the possibility of the government finding her and putting her away, now they're going to have the entirety of SHIELD looking for them. And it's not like it will be that hard to find them either. Sure, they had fake IDs that they flashed at the gate and somewhat disguised their appearances, but everyone who works there knows Vincent, and when they turn up to arrest him she's not one-hundred percent confident that he won't just roll over on all of them to save his own ass.

Shannon makes a noise that sounds like something between a sob and a choke, and Darcy sees her reach up and wipe her hand ferociously at her eyes. "What do we do now?" she asks.

The pause that follows her question is a pregnant one, but eventually Mark answers it with a hard look at Shannon and a firm hand on her shoulder.

"I think..." he mutters slowly, "that we might need to split up and go our separate ways." He says it with such solemnity and finality that nobody speaks for a long time afterwards.

Darcy finds that the silence is almost worse than the chaos. It's overwhelming and oppressive, and as it surrounds her it magnifies all the aches and pains in her body and makes her head spin and her thought whirl at a million miles an hour. There is no good way out of this. This is 'no turning back' with the 'back' not even existing anymore. What she does from here on out has to be about her, and it's selfish and cruel but completely necessary. She wants to help Shannon, and Mark by default, but she knows in her gut that she's got to be on her own from this point forward. And she has to have leverage in case someone screws up.

Darcy turns to Vincent. His leg is shaking while he rubs it absently with his right hand, his eyes fixed on his favorite spot looking out the window. "I want some of the files," she tells him flatly. "Right now"

His leg stops moving and he looks at her, but Darcy doesn't find a hint of argument in his expression. Blankly, he looks at her for a moment before gingerly peeling back the cover of the file and sectioning off a segment of the contents. He hands it to her wordlessly, and she accepts it in the same fashion, clutching the loose and wrinkling pages to her chest.

She keeps them there, pressed against her stuttering heart and her shaking hands, and doesn’t move them when they pull up in front of her apartment and she gets out. She doesn’t look back, finds that she really can’t, because she hears the pain in Shannon’s voice when she calls out to her, first in a command and then in a plea. Her hand is shaking as she opens her apartment door, and the finality of it clicking shut behind her is like a switch between the then and now, and reality is suddenly real once again and home is no longer home. It’s enough to send her crumpling to the floor just insider her doorway, the papers spilling from her hands across her ratty carpet.

She rips the wig off her head, tears the glasses from her face, and for the first time in all of this, Darcy breaks down and cries.

Chapter 7: Watch Your Step

Chapter Text

Darcy stares at the SHIELD files.

The SHIELD files stare back at Darcy.

Darcy imagines the files spontaneously combusting in a cloud of flames, the paper turning black and crinkling as they fly into the air and float way.

The files don’t do anything like that, because they’re files, and for some reason this fact isn’t making its way fully into Darcy’s brain.

When Darcy had recovered from her (completely understandable) breakdown on the carpet in front of her door, she dragged herself into her tiny kitchen where she promptly opened her cupboard and dug out her Emergency Supplies. There was a stash for any occasion. Fail a major exam? Have some Girl Scout cookies. Terrible night at work and no tips? Godiva is really the only way to go. Accidentally kiss a cute guy who wasn’t as into you as you thought (it happens)? There’s a wonderfully expensive and chug-worthy Burgundy in the back.

Take part in a robbery of a government facility and end up confronting the world’s most wanted super villain while simultaneously stealing top-secret files belonging to a covert shadow organization that employs superheroes?

Well, that’s really a tequila type situation. Lots and lots of tequila. And ice cream.

Darcy collapsed on the floor in front of her couch, tequila bottle in one hand and a pint of Phish Food in the other, and resisted the urge to turn on her television. She put up a pretty good fight for about ten minutes, but eventually the combination of sugar and alcohol had her inhibitions being lowered enough that she barely fought herself when she clicked it on the news. Thankfully, said sugar and alcohol also made her less anxious (or less prone to caring about being anxious, same difference) so she didn’t completely freak out when the only thing on the news channel (on any local channel, and a few national ones) was the explosion at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Eventually she gave up flipping through channels and settled in on the local KOB-TV news. An anchorwoman is standing in front of the Base, well down the street from that Base actually, its outline visible in the distance along with a plume of grey smoke drifting towards the sky.

“Authorities are still not saying what happened inside the Base, but they are urging everyone to stay as far away from the scene as possible. You can see that they’ve made us move farther back, and we’ve been told that police have been setting up road blocks at major intersections.”

Darcy has been holding out some small measure of hope that whatever caused the explosion inside the Base was really a freak accident, that Loki was just a figment of her imagination, and that she’d actually only accidentally been drugged and had a wicked acid trip or something. The pain in her legs, the bruising on her hip and the nasty red hand-print on her wrist beg to differ, but it’s worth a shot, and Darcy will go with self-denial in a pinch if it helps ease the clenching in her gut and the welling of tears in her eyes.

“No one is saying for certain whether the explosion is from an attack, but one can’t help but wonder. Viewers will of course remember that the last time the State mandated the lock-down of all military Bases was during the alien attack on New York City, where countless innocent people were killed and billions of dollars in property damage sustained…”

It’s all too real, unfortunately.

Darcy looks again at the files scattered across the floor just inside her doorway. It’s almost unbelievable, how those pieces of paper are more deadly than anything inside that entire room that they were in. It’s her fault, she knows, for picking up the files. If she hadn’t, they wouldn’t have caught her interest, wouldn’t have caught Vincent’s and eventually Shannon and Mark’s, and they wouldn’t have landed her in the situation she’s in now – not knowing if SHIELD will be coming to kick down her door any second to take them back.

The mysterious explosion, Loki showing up, and creepy office ladies are just the icing on a really f*cked up cake at this point.

Which leads Darcy back to where she’s at in this most unfortunate turn of events. At the very least she has the U.S. Government to worry about, and once the feds start looking at all the evidence from the explosion they’ll no doubt want to question the mysterious group of “interns” who happened to show up right before it went off. So there’s that.

But there’s also SHIELD, who may or may not already be on their trail, may or may not already know that Vincent, Mark, Shannon and she have gotten their hands on these files that they no doubt want to keep hidden. If SHIELD does know, then that means that they have only a limited window of opportunity to make whatever escape attempts they can. If SHIELD doesn’t, the files being inside the Base that just had a major freaking explosion will turn them on to it any minute, so a quick escape is still the best option.

Assuming, of course, that escape is really the best choice.

Darcy likes to think that she’s a pragmatist on her best days, and taking part in insane plans to rob the U.S. government aside, she’s usually pretty practical. She was inside a secure government facility at the same time as a mysterious explosion that’s since drawn national attention, the same time as a notorious super villain who hasn’t been seen since he showed up riding into New York on the back of a giant scaly space whale, and is now in possession of one-fourth of a set of files belonging to a very shady pseudo-government organization who caught said super villain and has since dropped off the radar. Math wasn’t Darcy’s best subject in school, but deductive reasoning is a well-learned art of a waitress whose tips depend as much on scheming as service, and she knows that the most logical outcome to this scenario is that she will end up being caught.

The question placed before her now, as she sits on the floor in front of her couch, ice cream melting into the carpet and a less-heavy bottle of Don Julio balanced precariously on her coffee table, is whether or not she wants to know what’s inside the files before they catch her.

That choice can go either way, Darcy thinks. If she doesn’t know what’s inside the files then she can plausibly deny that she knows anything about them when SHIELD questions her (and yes, she’s thinking of a torture-type scenario, and she doesn’t plan on trying to hold out longer than necessary, or at all actually). Maybe ignorance will save her from getting her fingers broken or ending up floating in a river somewhere.

On the other hand, knowing what’s in the files could be used as leverage, and there’s a simultaneously stupid and dangerous thought if she’s ever had one. Entertaining the very idea of playing the ‘I know something you don’t know’ game with SHIELD is definitely very, very stupid. And yet…knowledge is power. If she knows what SHIELD is trying to keep hidden, maybe she can use it as a bargaining chip when the time comes and beg for leniency. Like a “see, I saw all your super secret information and I still didn’t rat you out, doesn’t that warrant jail time instead of a painful death?” That option is slightly more appealing than the former, but Darcy knows that it’s probably due less to her awesome reasoning skills and more to the fact that she’s already seen a little bit of what’s inside the files and they’re tugging at her brain and nearly driving her crazy with interest.

Resigned, Darcy drags herself off the floor and starts half-crawling, half-walking towards the scattered files, determination solidifying with each step and a persistent ignoring of the little voice in the back of her mind that’s whispering:

‘Curiosity killed the cat’

---

Two hours later and Darcy is still sitting on the floor by her couch, though this time the files are arranged in a neat pile on the coffee table in front of her. The tequila bottle is still there too, but Darcy had given up on drinking from it a while ago, and it’s safe to say that her apathy-induced buzz has fled the building along with her appetite for self-pity appeasers of sugar and alcohol.

It’s been replaced by a strange combination of wonder and fear, though overall shadowed by utter self-resignation.

The files had been interesting (understatement of the f*cking century), and Darcy’s mind is still reeling with what little bit of information she had been able to understand.

Apparently the attack on New York six months ago and change had all been because of something called the Tesseract.

What is the Tesseract? Darcy has no f*cking clue, but she does know that it looks to be some sort of infinite power source that SHIELD was studying. Why they were studying it? Again, no f*cking clue, but apparently their conclusions were (in her layman understanding of all things science-y and math-ish) that it was super freaking powerful. There were reports in the files from scientists who appeared as if they were having some sort of nerdy wet dream all over the page, talking about the Tesseract’s potential to be harnessed as a source of energy for everything from weapons to environmental control, to speculations on how the existence of the device could potentially uproot the current balance between the United States and countries with large oil reserves, and how its use should both simultaneously be implemented right away and after a more thorough exploration of its potential.

One of the reports with a dissenting opinion of using the Tesseract right away made Darcy jump about five feet in the air when she saw that it had been written by Dr. Erik Selvig. Clutching the report with shaking hands, Darcy read how Dr. Selvig first came into contact with the Tesseract about a week after when he and Jane had disappeared off the face of the earth, and it looked like he had been in direct contact with it ever since. Until, it seems, he went AWOL for no apparent reason and hooked up with Mr. Leather and Buckles and tried to use it to destroy New York City.

The reports stopped suddenly right after that, and Darcy was left holding the set of files like an unfinished chapter at the end of a completely unsatisfying finale to a story.

So Erik was with SHIELD.

Darcy remembered Erik during her internship and had always thought he was kind of a dick. Of course, she had thought at the time that it may have been because he was actually expecting a legit science intern to show up and instead got Darcy, but now that she knows he’s working with SHIELD and they stole her iPod, it makes total freaking sense. As to why he went and hooked up with Loki to use the Tesseract against New York…well that’s another dead end.

So now Darcy is left with a pile of SHIELD reports and diagrams that tell a small part in a clearly long, convoluted, and f*cked up account of the alien attack on New York. Is she better for the experience? Not really, actually, unless her account of the Tesseract and SHIELD is somehow damning evidence, which it’s probably not. She seriously doubts that her testimony regarding ‘some kind of super box-thingy with magic powers’ and ‘lots of scientists saying science-y things about what could happen but not actually what happened’ would be taken too seriously.

Darcy sighs and runs her fingers through her now wig-less hair. Only she would be lucky enough to get saddled with the portion of covert files that contain absolutely f*cking useless information.

She considers taking another drink from the bottle of tequila, even though that’s not what she really wants to do, and is in the midst of reaching for it when her cell phone rings. She falls forward into the table, crashing into the cornered edge with her hurt hip.

“Son of a f*cking bitch!” she yells. The phone continues to ring despite her profanity, and she looks at the screen and sees that the call is from Shannon.

Darcy hesitates. Should she answer the phone? Isn’t not talking to each other the best thing to do right now, since they’re split up and all? But what if it’s an emergency - like, more of an emergency than the situation they’re already in? Would Shannon really call her unless it was absolutely necessary?

Darcy thinks that no, she wouldn’t, and resists the urge to heave a melodramatic sigh when she answers the phone and Shannon’s shrieking voice confirms how right she is.

“Shannon, calm the hell down! I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” Darcy says.

“Oh Darcy,” Shannon cries. “They got Vincent!”

Darcy feels her stomach clench in cold dread, and she fears that she already knows the answer even as she asks, “Who got Vincent?”

“I don’t know!” Shannon sobs. “Mark and I took Vincent home after you, and Mark told me to go and start packing my stuff, and he was gone for a long time but he just showed up now, and Darcy you should see how he looks, I’ve never seen him like this.” She pauses, coming up for air before continuing at breakneck speed. “He looks like sh*t, Darcy, his lip is bloody and he’s got a broken arm or something. He said that these guys in black suits showed up and wanted to arrest Vincent, but that they fought and beat him up when he wouldn’t go with them. Mark only just got away, but he says they’re coming here…”

Darcy is holding the phone far away from her ear, but she can hear as Shannon breaks her composure entirely into incoherent heaves and snivels.

“Shannon,” Darcy says tightly, her chest compressing so she feels like she can’t breathe. “You guys need to leave right away. Get out of Albuquerque, out of New Mexico, and just go…just go to New Orleans. Go get married, do what you were gonna do in the first place –“

“But…” Shannon begins.

“Just...Shannon, you have to try to do what you wanted. Otherwise all this sh*t is for nothing.”

Shannon doesn’t say anything for a long time, and if Darcy couldn’t hear her heavy breathing on the other end of the phone she would have thought Shannon had hung up.

Finally Shannon speaks, in a voice so quiet that Darcy has to press the phone closer to her ear to hear her.

“I don’t want leave you Darce.”

Darcy feels the tears as they start to fill her eyes, her cheeks heating up and she worries her bottom lip between her teeth. The pressure in her chest is suffocating, and she has to pull out every last trick in her book and years worth of practice in not caring to stop herself from breaking down completely.

“I’ll be fine,” she says with a conviction she doesn’t really feel. “Just go. Please.”

Silence fills Darcy’s head, from the stillness of her apartment to Shannon’s subtle breathing on the other end of the phone.

I’ll be fine, she repeats to herself. I’ll be fine.

Shannon sighs and mutters a quiet “okay”. But before Darcy is about to hang up the phone, Shannon says “Darcy, we’re going to the Nouvelle Vie chapel…in five days, if we can…we’ll be there.”

Shannon hangs up before Darcy can say anything.

And really, what is she going to say?

Darcy hesitates maybe for five minutes as she wrings her hands and suddenly can’t decide what possessions are important, what’s worth leaving behind or what would look suspicious if (when) someone comes to her apartment and searches through her belongings. The files go with her of course, as does a small duffel bag with toiletries, her taser, pajamas and a pair of jeans and a few t-shirts. Her pictures of her family go with her too, along with a staff-party photo of her and Shannon from last year’s Halloween party.

Anything that Darcy has ever heard can be used to track a person – her phone, her computer, everything electronic stays behind.

She locks the door to her apartment and looks back in the rear viewer one time as she gets in her car and drives. She drives until she hits I-25 and keeps going south until long past the red and orange sunset have faded into a dark New Mexico night and the only thing lighting her way as she speeds past open fields of spotted shrubs and endless plateaus is the moon shining bright above.

---

See, here’s the thing about crazy super villains from outer space. They’re crazy.

Usually Darcy would be totally okay with it. She understands. Things are really sh*tty for everyone right now, economy and politics and all, and for a man who’s put a lot of time and energy into holding the number one spot of SHIELD’s Most Wanted, you really can’t expect that he’d take the (totally accidental) usurping of his coveted spot lying down. Or standing up, as it were.

“Can I say I’m sorry one more time? Or is it totally old by this point?”

She’s sitting on a bed, a really sh*tty bed in a cheap motel room that she rented on a whim a few hours ago. Driving cross-country is hard, and while she probably would never have stopped at a place like this before, the overwhelming desire not to crash her car and die made her decision to pull over that much easier.

Plus (and she’d be lying if she didn’t acknowledge that this factored in a little bit) it does look like the kind of place that people in the movies stay at when they’re on the run from the law.

The Rose Hill Motel, aesthetically reminiscent of an old Spanish mission with adobe walls and chipping red paint, still has Christmas ornaments hanging along the top of the roof even though it’s been months. She was first drawn to it coming down I-10, the first sign of civilization that she’d seen since Fort Hanco*ck. Gigantic flashing neon sign that keeps flickering the “No” in “No Vacancy” on and off, electric green cactus with waving arms wearing a sombrero (it’s Texas so she’s not going to ask too many questions), located in the totally inconspicuous town of La Cueva. The room was cheap and the little elderly man behind the counter didn’t look too Norman Bates-y. All in all it seemed like the perfect place for her to crash for the night.

Her room is terrible, with tearing turquoise blue carpeting and pink walls. Pink. When she closed the door to the room the door stuck and she had to slam it to get it to shut properly. The window rattled when she did, and a baby in the next room started crying, and of course the walls are paper thin. The bed was a queen and obviously too big for the room, so she had to edge her way around it to look out the window. She could see the highway, cars and semi-trucks occasionally moving past, and her car parked under the only streetlamp on the far corner of the parking lot.

Room thoroughly explored, the first thing she did after she unpacked her bag was look in the bathroom and test the shower. To her utter surprise and after a hefty five minute warm-up, it actually appeared to work. She was completely stoked. Life on the road, even if only twelve hours, was staring to make her feel dusty. Her arm was sunburned in the worst kind of farmer’s tan, her hair was starting to tangle at the ends and desperately needed to be washed, and she knew it was bad when it got to the point when she could start to smell her own B.O. It’s not the best place she’s ever slept, by far worse than the trailer she lived in for weeks with Jane, but for anonymity and fifty bucks she’ll deal with it.

In retrospect, she’s kind of glad that she decided to take that shower immediately after getting unpacked. If she hadn’t there’s a chance that she would have been in the middle of it when Loki showed up, and she didn’t think that she wanted to be having this conversation while being naked. She didn’t want to be having it at all, but hey, silver linings.

She was sitting on the bed brushing her hair, freshly showered and pajama’d in her vintage Captain America boxers and a black tank top, when he’d just appeared in the doorway, like a gigantic, tall, pale, angry bat.

Unfortunately, little things like walls and knocking don’t seem to be a part of super villain manners.

“Because I am sorry,” Darcy continues when he doesn’t answer, “Really really sorry.” She's not sure what she's apologizing for, but it seems like the right thing to do when a vengeful Norse God shows up randomly in your motel room.

He continues to stare at her, thin lips drawn tight in a scowl and green eyes bright with menace and just a hint of unstable insanity. She’s legitimately scared and also not an idiot so she doesn’t think running is a good idea. Not like she could run anywhere anyway, or fight for that matter (her taser is unfortunately on the table by the TV, which would require moving past the crazy guy to get to it), and begging for her life doesn’t seem very appropriate so she’s decided to keep apologizing until he either kills her or tells her to stop and hope that it takes.

“Look dude –“

“Silence,” he hisses.

Oh, well, there we go.

“Shutting up,” says Darcy. Then immediately “Oh sh*t, sorry. I should tell you right now that I tend to get all talkish when I’m nervous. Which I am, and I’m totally not afraid to admit that. This isn’t one of those pretending to be tougher than I am shticks because I really don’t think I’d be convincing at it…”

Loki’s eyes somehow get more menacing and Darcy realizes she’s babbling. “Dammit, sorry. Okay, now I’m shutting up.”

Staying silent is easier said than done, however, as Loki draws himself up to his full height, which is really freaking tall and the fact that her room is tiny makes him look even bigger by comparison. He’s got his Asgard armor on, sans helmet. The black leather ensemble is even more terrifying in person and in good lighting than it was on the news, all sharp angles and buckles with a hint of fabric that was once probably a deep forest green but now looks a bit mossy. Even though it’s got scuff marks, jagged tears running through the leather and pale sand muting the rich black to a tacky grey, it only makes it look rougher. Darcy sees it in his face when he realizes that she’s noticed how dirty his clothing is, and hey, not judging! He should have been here forty minutes ago and seen how filthy she looked.

Loki brandishes his arms out to the side, cape rising behind him in a green flutter. She’s not too proud to admit that she squeaks a little bit. There’s a swirl of green mist and his clothing is suddenly perfectly clean again, metal fastening glinting in the fluorescent lighting and hair perfectly slicked back. He seems totally fine with her barely-repressed shudder, and she actually thinks she sees the corner of his mouth quirk up in a faint little smirk before he’s back to tall and brooding once again.

“I will only ask you this one time, mortal. Who do you work for?” His voice is both not at all what she was expecting and yet surprisingly fitting. Not light, but not deep either, and every word enunciated with the firm conviction of someone delivering lines in a play. It's not a surprise either that he's British (thank you every Disney villain ever).

Darcy blinks. “Um,” she says, “The Velvet Rabbit?” She says it like a question because she’s definitely sure his visit isn’t related to her being a waitress at a strip club. “My boss’s name is Shannon, so technically I work for Shannon…at the Velvet Rabbit.”

Apparently this was the wrong answer, because Loki is suddenly right in front of her, leaning over the bed and causing her to shrink back as far into it as she can, which isn’t much.

“Don’t toy with me.” He says, his voice dripping with disdain. “I am of limited patience and even less time. I will make this much harder on you if need be.”

Darcy blinks again, and again. “Hey dude,” she says hurriedly and holds her arms up palms out in a gesture of surrender, being careful not to touch him. “It’s cool. No need to be all threatening and stuff. I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding or something. You know…like a failure to communicate.” Because she just can’t help herself even when her life is being threatened.

The reference goes right over Loki’s head, which is probably a good thing, and he reaches out lightning-quick and grabs her upper arms in a death grip to end all death grips.

“Hey!” she yells, “What the hell?”

“You presume to lie to me? Me, the God of Lies?”

“I’m not lying!” she says, and yeah okay he’s probably not here because of her being a waitress and this probably has something to do with her small role in a robbery gone wrong, but technically it’s true.

He narrows his eyes then closes them, hands tightening their grip a little bit more. Darcy’s confused, and a spike of panic shoots through her, muscles tensing in anticipation and putting more strain on her arms. She thinks about moving away when he reaches out his hand to touch the side of her face, because she’s seen Star Trek and she knows it’s not exactly the same thing but alien dudes touching your temples with their fingers can only mean that one thing is about to happen, and there is no way in hell she wants Loki to do some freaky mind-meld thing on her.

Her struggling is moot at this point because he is really, really strong and he probably wouldn’t listen to her anyway.

Then, suddenly but very naturally, she’s floating. Her stomach registers the equilibrium shift before her brain does, flip-flopping a bit before settling into a wonderful numbness that steals over her entire body. She feels her breath as it leaves her in a big huff and her eyes slip closed. Distantly she feels her head fall back and her arms fall uselessly at her sides. It feels right though, like dreaming and endorphins at the same time, like Jello and chocolate cake (totally a feeling), like the afterglow of an amazing org*sm and a bunch of other metaphors that she can’t really think of right now because, floating.

The tingling starts as a pinprick behind her left eye then travels throughout her skull, moving across her scalp like rolling water. It’s searching and teasing but gentle so she doesn’t really mind it at first. Then it’s prodding and insistent and without even knowing why she’s suddenly thinking about the morning of the robbery, remembering everything all at once in an overwhelming heap. It’s too much too fast, like the pages of a book trying to be read all at once. Instinctively she tries to shut that train of thought down but can’t, and now this has gone from nice and peaceful to f*cking scary. The memory of that morning runs through her brain a dozen times, each focusing on a different aspect with intense scrutiny from various angles before she’s suddenly right back in the bed and drawing a huge gasping breath as Loki releases his hold on her arm and stands back harshly.

“The f*ck?” she mumbles articulately, blinking hazily up at his fuzzy silhouette, before her head tumbles forwards and she smashes face-first into the bed.

Chapter 8: Count Your Blessings

Chapter Text

When Darcy wakes up, she does so with all the grace of a drooling toddler.

Her glasses are skewed terribly on her face, the lenses crooked and the metal arms bent awkwardly so that they immediately fall off when she sits up.

"Damn it," she says aloud to her empty motel room. "Those were my spares too.”

It's light outside now, the early morning Texas sunlight filtering into the room through the grimy windows. The walls are pale pink in the light, not quite as garish as they appeared the night before. Her bag is still lying open at the foot of the bed, her taser still sitting on the table near the door and all her pajamas are still on, the girls are still safely hidden inside her tank top. The door is shut, the lock in place, and the only sounds she can hear are the chirping of birds and the faint hum of highway traffic outside.

It's like nothing happened.

Which isn't right, can't be right, because Darcy distinctly remembers being paid a visit by a very tall, very angry black and green wraith with an ensemble right out of Road Warrior meets Goth music video. She has a pretty active imagination and she's pretty damn creative (she’s won The Velvet Rabbit best-costume contest three times already) but if she's going to spend time inventing vivid fantasies, they're going to be fantasies and she's going to remember every delicious bit of it, thank you very much.

Waking up in a pool of her own drool is not part of the fantasy package.

Loki had wanted to know who she was working for. She'd answered him honestly, he'd gotten pissed, and then he'd done some sort of Norse God Vulcan mind-meld thing on her and she fell asleep.

This, this was her life.

Darcy changes into the only other pair of clean street clothes she has as quickly as possible, not daring to spend any more time here than necessary. She's not getting the hell out of dodge fast because she's afraid that Loki might come back (apparently, if he wanted to he could find her anywhere). She's thinking more from the premise that Mr. Subtle-In-Freakin’-Armor was not too long ago just on the news, national news, riding a scaly monster alien army through the streets of Manhattan. He obviously got away from wherever SHIELD had put his ass after they'd stopped him and that means that they’re most likely looking for him. She's not a criminal mastermind, like at all, and she’s already got enough on her plate with running from the government and from SHIELD for her own sh*t, but she does know that putting miles between herself and Loki's last known location is definitely a good idea.

Sure enough, when Darcy steps outside the hotel, wearing her jeans, an Aerosmith t-shirt and a Lobos baseball cap with the brim pulled low over her eyes, she sees two nondescript black vehicles pull off the highway and park in front of the Motel's office. Two men in black suits and sunglasses step out of the first car, looking around as they do so, and Darcy doesn't even need that criminal sixth sense to know that these guys are part of some super top-secret government organization. Seriously, you'd think they'd be less obvious about it.

Thankfully, Darcy's car is parked on the other side of the parking lot from the Motel’s office so she won't have to walk past the Men in Black in order to get out of here. Hefting her duffel bag on her shoulder, studiously ignoring the pain in her hip and the tweak in her wrist as she pulls the brim of her cap lower over her face, she starts walking towards her car.

Trying to be nonchalant is harder than it looks and Darcy, not one for being subtle on a regular basis, is having kind of a hard time not just saying "f*ck it" and running to her car. She's almost there, literally five freaking feet away, when she hears one of the suited men call out to her.

"Excuse me, ma'am?"

"God dammit," Darcy curses under her breath. She briefly entertains the idea of simply pretending that she didn't hear him, of getting in her car and peeling out in a blaze of smoke and glory, but she's already stopped moving so that plan won't work.

"Ma'am,” Suit Guy says again. "I'm from the United States Secret Service. I'd like to speak with you for a minute."

He says it like it’s up to her whether she wants to stop and talk, but Darcy senses she doesn't really have a choice on this one.

She turns around and Suit Guy is standing right in front of her. He looks like he might be younger on the scale of professional-types, and definitely has that trim athletic body type and straight-backed posture. He's smiling, but with the combination of a crisp black suit and mirrored aviators it comes across less ‘friendly’ and more ‘I could kill you with my pinky finger’.

Darcy clears her throat. "Yeah, okay. What's up?"

Suit Guy doesn't move his head, but Darcy can feel how he looks her over. The girls are a little bit more exposed than usual in that they're not hidden behind a sweatshirt, and her t-shirt is a little tighter than the ones she usually wears (it's been a rough month, okay?) and she knows her figure is the kind that any emphasis in that particular area is like a homing beacon. She's kind of glad actually. Not that she's glad to be objectified per se, but working at The Velvet Rabbit has taught Darcy more valuable lessons about the power of undisguised femininity than a mountain of books on female empowerment could. If she plays her cards right, she might be able to play this cool without actually being cool.

Suit Guy, while still being a guy, is a professional, and his once-over of Darcy is over in a second. Then he's pulling out a notebook from his suit pocket along with a pen, flipping over the cover and clicking the pen poised over the first page.

"What's your name?"

Darcy swallows, and can practically hear the voice inside her head yelling at her don't be an idiot! when she responds, "Why?"

Suit Guy doesn't answer right away, and Darcy thinks he might be surprised, which hey, so is she.

His jaw ticks a little bit before he responds. "The United States government suspects that a wanted criminal was last spotted in this area approximately six hours ago. This individual is believed to be extremely dangerous and poses a serious threat."

Oh. "Oh," she says.

That sucks. "That sucks.”

Suit Guy continues, "Have you seen anyone matching this description?" He pulls out a photograph from his suit pocket and hands it to Darcy, who promptly drops it to the dusty Texas ground when she looks at it.

It's her. Well, not her her, but a picture of her from the morning of the robbery, head covered in that ridiculous retro wig and assets on much more of a display than she’d thought her blouse had actually allowed. From the angle the security camera obviously captured things, her outfit has been showing off a lot more skin and va-voom curves than she’d thought.

"Sorry,” she mumbles, and bends down to pick up the picture. She stares at Suit Guy's shiny polished dress shoes, growing progressively dirtier by the second as the slight breeze kicks up dust, and wonders if he'd mind very much if she threw up on them.

He's looking at her strangely when she gets back up to eye-level, his head tilted slightly to the side and mouth set in a tight line that’s revealing nothing, but it's enough to let her know that her moment of shock was probably the equivalent of waving a gigantic red flag while jumping up and down yelling "It's me!"

"Ma'am,” he says slowly, "Do you have any identification with you?"

Darcy stalls, not sure if breaking down in tears would either help or hinder her chances of getting out of this without being arrested. She can try the puppy dog eyes, but if he didn't fluster at the girls (when he’s clearly already seen more of them than he probably knows) then Suit Guy probably won't fall for those either.

She could run away, but there's no way she'd get very far. She'd probably end up tackled to the ground like those crazy people on Cops who think that running from the police ever works out. And with her luck it would end up on YouTube with a million hits, but she'd be so far locked in a windowless prison cell to ever see it.

A part of her wonders why she’s handling this so badly. Wasn’t it just yesterday when she was debating the merits of reading top-secret files while knowing that the end of the road was going to lead right here? Well, not here, here, standing in the middle of f*cking nowhere Texas after having been mind-f*cked by an alien super villain, but getting arrested was a distinct possibility. Darcy guesses that she can’t really say she didn’t have this coming.

A light spatter of water rolls down Darcy's cheek and she thinks that her eyes have started the crying thing without her permission, but when she reaches up to wipe it away another drop falls on her hand, then another one on her glasses. More drops fall in quick succession, spattering her glasses and drenching her hair and the photograph alike as it drops to the ground, and suddenly she and Suit Guy are standing in the middle of a rain storm of epic proportions.

She's beyond grateful, even cracking a small smile, because any delay of the inevitable is a reprieve and it's oddly fitting that her last minutes as a free woman wound be spent in a rainstorm that ruins the last of her clean clothes.

Darcy breathes in deep, inhaling the scent of dust and rain, a mixture of salt from the tears that have nonetheless crept from her eyes, and lets it out in a shaking breath. The smile is still plastered stupidly on her face and shows no sign of leaving as she closes her eyes and tips her head backwards to catch the torrent as it falls.

Her bittersweet levity is short-lived however, as a blinding flash of lightening splits the sky and is instantly followed by the loudest clap of thunder Darcy has ever heard.

---

Trying to explain to your former “friend”/boss, a God of Thunder, a mysterious science dude, and a government agent how you ended up becoming one of the country's most wanted criminals is, honestly, kind of hilarious.

It's uber-scary too, because now Darcy is smack in the middle of a pissing contest between what appears to be the actual U. S. government and a shadowy pseudo-organization pretending to be an even higher-ranking branch of said U.S. government.

"I have already told you, she is no threat to this Realm. She is a mere girl!"

The minute Thor had shown up he didn't quite recognize her, which was a little insulting because she had though they bonded better than that (she tased him, for crying out loud), but she will admit that she probably does look a little different since the last time he'd seen her over a year ago. When he finally did remember who she was (mostly because she yelled at him and said something along the lines of "I'd totally fry your ass again if I had my taser with me, you asshole") he grabbed her and pulled her into a bear hug of epic proportions.

"Lady Darcy!" Thor boomed. "I had hopes I would see you again during my time on Midgard!"

Darcy, at a loss for anything to say (most likely along the lines of “what the f*ck are you doing here?”) and spine re-aligned somewhere in the shape of two massive arms, squeaked "You too big guy."

Thor had clapped her on the back hard enough that she'd fallen forward in an ungrateful stumble, her ears ringing and vision blacking just slightly. When she came back up, Thor was explaining in a very haughty royal-Prince-ish way to Suit Guy that Darcy was a friend of the Royal Court of Asgard and was therefore under his immediate protection. Suit Guy, bless him, hadn't argued (probably less because he wanted to avoid a confrontation with a gigantic dude about a foot taller than him and more because said dude just fell out of the freaking sky) and promptly called his superiors. Thor in turn called Jane, who, after making several high-pitches noises from the other end of Thor's cell phone, immediately hung up.

So, about fifteen minutes after Thor's apparel-ruining reemergence into Darcy's life, a black helicopter touched down in the Rose Hill Motel parking lot, scaring the sh*t out of the owner and the hotel's other occupants and causing traffic on I-10 to crawl to an almost complete standstill. Sensing that they were making more of a spectacle than they probably should, and being pretty obvious about the fact that they were from a super-secret organization (again, someone really needed to write a Memo about inconspicuous yet obvious black vehicles) the party had moved itself inside Darcy's motel room.

She's sitting on her bed, almost in the same spot where Loki had cornered her not but seven or eight hours ago, staring at Thor and Suit Guy as they bring the black helicopter's new arrivals up to speed on the situation at hand.

Jane is here, looking as elegant and delicately perfect as Darcy remembers her being, brown hair swept over one shoulder and teeth catching her bottom lip as her wide doe-brown eyes sweep between Thor and Suit Guy with the swings in conversation. She hasn't said anything to Darcy yet, which, hey, whatever. Darcy gave up on that train a long time ago, somewhere around when Jane stopped answering her phone and all her emails came back ‘undeliverable’. She didn't delude herself into thinking that brilliant and beautiful Jane had actually considered her a friend, despite the fact that Darcy had done all the stuff friends are supposed to do, like organize a drinking/ice cream binge when Thor disappeared after Puente Antiguo and played the role of hair-holder when Jane couldn't handle her liquor.

She had actually kind of hoped that Thor would forget about Jane, that going back to being a freaking God would overshadow a two-day crush on a mortal astrophysicist with a severe caffeine dependency. That Darcy's (she hesitates even now to call it jealousy) would have turned out to be an amazing sense of clairvoyance and not the result of angsty self-esteem issues. Seeing her here now, still with Thor after all this time, Darcy feels a clenching in her gut and is really, really disgusted with herself.

The man with fluffy dark hair standing next to Jane isn't as tall as Thor or Suit Guy, but he's got a quick eye that is belied by the rumpled nature of his appearance. He's taken off his glasses at least three times already and rubbed them between his fingers and the wrinkled red and black plaid shirt he's wearing, breathing deeply and exhaling through his nose in gentle yet exaggerated sighs. Darcy doesn't think he looks like a secret agent, although if he is, his cover as an anxious nerd is perfect.

"She's a wanted criminal, and here in this Realm, that means she needs to come with me," Suit Guy says. He's not backing down, which is pretty brave, and also pretty stupid.

"A criminal? Darcy?" Thor asks incredulously. "She is no more a criminal than I a frolicking minstrel.” (And thank you, Thor, for the mental image).

"She and a group of her friends robbed a highly-secured underground facility and caused thousands of dollars in property damage!"

"Darcy did what?" Jane speaks up for the first time, chin up and blinking her eyes at Suit Guy. "Are you sure? Darcy?"

Darcy snorts before she can help herself, "Gee thanks Jane."

The three people standing in her doorway turn to look at her.

"Oh no," she waves her hand at them in a dismissive gesture; "Please continue talking about me like I'm not here. I'll wait while you figure out whether I'm a dangerous terrorist or an incapable invalid who needs babysitting."

"Darcy..." Jane says, and the tone is that mix of disapproving with a hint of shy amusem*nt that brings Darcy back to those weeks during her internship, just the two of them and sometimes Erik, bullsh*tting and talking about stupid B-movies and old TV shows, and suddenly the room has gotten as lot smaller and stuffier and her eyesight has gotten all blurry for some reason.

She didn’t ask for these f*cking people to show up out of the blue. She was perfectly fine on her own, and yeah okay she might have been arrested if they hadn’t shown up, but still. It doesn’t give anyone, especially Jane, the right to act like she’s handling the situation badly. Just how is she supposed to handle it, exactly? Not everyone can run to their Norse god boyfriend for help, or use their super-brain smarts. Some people have to use (mostly) common sense and their instincts, which admittedly are a little lacking right now, but Darcy thinks she’s doing a pretty freaking good job, all things considered.

"Look guys," Darcy says, taking a deep breath and taking off her glasses (fuzzy people are easier to deal with than in-focus people). "I don't know what you want me to do here. I mean, if I'm being arrested or something, don't I need, like, a lawyer? Or am I free to go because I was kind of on my way to see someone before he showed up." She waves her hand at Suit Guy.

"Where were you going?" Thor, Suit Guy, and Jane all say at the same time.

Darcy sighs, "I’m not going to tell you exactly where I'm going, but trust me it’s not anywhere devious or dangerous...mostly."

Jane has that look on her face that means she's about to say Darcy in her Mom-tone, so Darcy, in the interest of getting this over with as fast as possible, quickly hedges with "I probably would be there already if I didn't stop for the night. You should be proud of me, Jane - I actually stopped the car before I ran over anyone." Ha!

Jane purses her lips and Thor smiles slightly as Darcy continues. "I got here, paid for my room, took a shower, then Loki showed up, and -"

"What?" Jane and Science Nerd this time, and the atmosphere in the room changes instantly from what Darcy thinks is funny bickering to sober and edgy.

Oops. Bad Darcy.

"Loki was here.” Thor sighs in resignation, bowing his head gravely. “I had hopes the reports of his magic being used in this location to be false. It appears that I was wrong.” He stares at Darcy for a moment, fixing her with piercing eyes, before quickly narrowing his eyes and tensing. “But he was in this room, with you?" Thor demands, his tone suddenly very, very serious, his face twisting into a severe frown coupled with a gaze of such intense focus and what Darcy thinks must be a warrior's threat that it makes Darcy shrink back a little bit.

Oh sh*t, she thinks.

"Yeah," she says meekly, and clears her throat. "He…um…showed up out of the blue last night, or I guess this morning actually. Don't ask me why because I don't know. He just…appeared, without knocking by the way, and grabbed me and asked me 'who are you working for'," which she says in a totally spot-on approximation of Loki's voice.

Thor doesn't look amused by her impersonation skills. In fact, he looks dangerous.

Suit Guy must have really good self-preservation instincts because he flips out his cell phone, dials it up, and mutter something about ‘not getting paid enough to deal with this sh*t’ before opening the door and leaving the room.

Nobody really notices him leave, and Thor is suddenly standing right in front of Darcy and towering over her in almost the same exact way that Loki did that it makes her flinch. To his credit, Thor seems to notice that his sudden move has freaked her out, because he makes a little rueful smile and kneels down gently in front of her, placing his large hands hesitantly on either side of her legs on the bed. It’s weird being this close to him again, Darcy thinks, and to be honest even before she hadn’t been this close to him. At least not close enough to see the small plays of emotions as they flicker across his face, the rough stubble of his beard catching the light in golden hues. Where Loki's eyes were green and full of anger, loathing, and what Darcy assumes must be bat-sh*t insanity, Thor's are blue and full of a righteous mixture anger and concern.

"Did he hurt you?" he asks her softly.

"No," Darcy says quickly, simultaneously wanting to reassure him and to break this freaky interaction that they’re having. "I mean, he grabbed me pretty hard and I yelled at him, then he touched my face and I got all sleepy and my head started hurting..." She trails off as Thor rights himself and moves purposefully back towards the room's other occupants, bowing his head to speak with Science Nerd.

"Bruce...I would request that you examine my friend to determine if her injuries are severe," Thor tells him, sounding much more sheepish and in a voice much softer than Darcy would have ever thought possible.

Science Nerd (Bruce, apparently) is already pulling out a flashlight from his back pocket and says "Already ahead of you.”

"Hey," Darcy says, panic filling her at all the sudden commotion, "I told you that I'm fine. He didn't hurt me, see?" She waves her arms around for emphasis and tries to downplay how the motion jars her hip and makes her wince.

"They're not looking for external injuries, Darcy," Jane says quietly.

It's the tone of Jane’s voice, the widened brightness of her eyes combined with Thor's stoic silence as he wraps a big arm around Jane's small shoulders that really, for the first time in all of this, in the second most f*cked-up morning of her life, makes Darcy afraid.

---

Darcy doesn’t understand what the big freaking deal is.

“I don’t understand what the big freaking deal is,” she says.

She’s doing that thing where she says exactly what’s on her mind, literally, and there’s less of a filter in place at the moment than usual. Normally she will make small adjustments, a “frick” for “f*ck” as it were, but right now she’s having a hard time controlling the part of her brain in charge of those little things.

This is mostly because she’s currently really pissed off, and a little bit terrified.

Jane and Thor are huddled together by the motel room door, Jane with her face buried into Thor’s chest, which with their height difference means that she’s got her nose pressed somewhere around his sternum. He’s holding her shoulders with his gigantic hands and gently rubbing them up and down her arms in apparently soothing motions. They look like a couple who’s paid a visit to the vet and has just been told that they have to put their dog down.

Darcy is the dog in that metaphor, and hence their behavior is freaking her the f*ck out.

Bruce has shined his little flashlight into her eyes three times already and asked her to look up, down, and all around at different points in the room. He’s not saying anything as he does it, just maintaining that steady breathe in breathe out mantra that she’s sure is intentional.

“Do you do yoga?” she asks him.

Bruce’s eyebrow goes up in surprise, his mouth dropping open a little, and he stops the flashlight’s movement poised in the air somewhere above her head. He looks at her slowly, confusion creasing his brows and a distinct look of apprehension crossing his face, and Darcy thinks that making random comments when someone is checking you for a head injury is probably not the best thing to do.

“You have rhythmic breathing,” she explains. “You keep going in and out in too much perfect timing for it to be an accident.” Darcy breathes in and out to match Bruce’s cadence for emphasis. “I knew a girl once who went to yoga all the time, I mean she was a yoga freak, and she did that a lot when she was trying to not get pissed off about something. She did it a lot around me, for some reason.”

Bruce still looks slightly confused, but his mouth quirks in a charmingly modest self-deprecating smile. Science Nerd is adorable, Darcy decides, as he shuts off the flashlight and pockets it, giving her a small little pat on the arm as he stands up.

“She looks fine,” he tells Jane and Thor. “I don’t see any evidence of neurological damage.”

Jane un-wraps her arms from around Thor and moves to stand in front of Bruce. She clasps her hands in front of her and sucks in a giant breath. “Are you sure, Bruce?” she asks him breathlessly.

“There aren’t any signs of anything resembling a concussion, which was the case in the last victim,” Bruce assures her.

Jane and Thor look relieved, both physically relaxing with their sighs of relief, which hey, their concern is great and all, but Darcy is hung up on the last bit of what Bruce said.

“Victim?” she says, “Last victim? What the hell are you talking about?”

Darcy must have a knack for asking uncomfortable questions, because Jane and Bruce are suddenly looking anywhere but at her.

Thor, bless him, either doesn’t understand the concept of ‘awkward silence’ or just doesn’t care, as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone. Darcy is still trying to wrap her brain around the idea that Thor has a cell phone and apparently has mastered how to use it, when he places it in front of her and queues up a video.

“It would appear that my brother has inflicted great damage across Midgard as of late,” he says solemnly. “When you spoke of his visit, I was concerned that you had been among the latest of those upon whom he has tried his hand, but it appears that we are lucky and that is not the case.”

Darcy doesn’t know what to say, and she opens her mouth like she’s about to, but then closes it and subsequently drops it open again when Thor hits play on the screen.

It’s a view of what appears to be a bank from a security camera installed somewhere over what must be the front door. It looks like a bank in that the floors are marble and the desk at which the receptionist sits is elevated off the ground by about three feet, making the little woman appear like a judge towering over court. She’s sitting in front of a sliding metal door with a very large and very secure looking keypad on one side as well as a large sign with lots of symbols that interpretively mean ‘Stay the f*ck out’ in any language.

Obviously this isn’t a bank, despite the architecture.

The little woman on the screen is minding her own boring business for a few minutes, before a flash of light interrupts the scene and Loki is suddenly right there, wearing his full armor and helmet ensemble and standing in front of the woman’s desk.

There’s no sound on the video, but Darcy doesn’t need it to know that the poor thing screams bloody murder, jumping/falling out of her chair and clutching her hands to her heart while simultaneously trying to crawl on her hands and knees as far away from Loki as possible. The man in question doesn’t move for a minute, but Darcy sees his head co*ck slightly the side in a gesture that is uncomfortably reminiscent of a cat thinking of the best way to torture a mouse.

The little woman is saved, apparently, by the opening of a door off to the left of the camera’s angle and the sudden appearance of a heavily-armed man who springs into action immediately upon seeing Loki. ‘Springs into action’ is probably what he intended to do anyway, because he doesn’t actually get anywhere near Loki before said evil dude has him gripped by the neck with one hand and the other one coming up to grab the man’s face.

Watching the video, especially this part, is making Darcy distinctly more and more uncomfortable. She flicks her eyes up to Thor standing above her, and he nods minutely for her to keep watching.

Loki’s Vulcan mind-meld doesn’t last as long as Darcy remembers hers being, but then again her recollection of the experience is probably overshadowed by being scared sh*tless at the time. When it’s over, Loki releases the man and stands back, holding an arm out elegantly and expectantly towards the locked security door.

The man doesn’t hesitate, simply walks forwards like he hasn’t got a care in the world, like he hasn’t just been man-handled and apparently brain-washed by a Norse god, and swipes his badge across the keycard access panel and steps inside. Loki follows, and (it makes Darcy clench her hands into fists in the bed sheets as she watches) before leaving the room, he bows to the little receptionist where she’s huddled behind her desk.

The video over, Thor stands up and returns his cell phone to his pocket, looking at Darcy with an expression of mixed pity and sobriety.

Darcy tries valiantly, she really does, for about ten seconds to control the rapidity with which her stomach is trying to make its way into her throat, the turning of her stomach and the rapid-fire beating of her heart.

She blinks a few times, turns away from Thor to see Jane and Bruce staring at her somewhat expectantly across the room, before she launches herself from the bed and into the bathroom where she promptly throws up.

Chapter 9: Speak Softly

Chapter Text

When Darcy returns from her impromptu, but totally justified, trip to the bathroom, she comes back to an empty motel room.

People really need to stop mysteriously disappearing from her room, she thinks, as she checks the corners to see if any of her visitors are hiding somewhere out of sight. A shadow of movement across the window draws her attention and she moves towards it to lift the shudders and peek outside. Jane and Bruce are standing right in front of the door talking to one another, Jane bouncing on the balls of her feet with her arms crossed in front of her chest and Bruce with his fingers running through his fluffy hair. Thor is off to the side, out in the parking lot near Darcy’s car, walking back and forth with a look on his face of such supreme concentration it looks like it might hurt. Which, Darcy supposes, it probably does.

Darcy sighs and lets the slatted blinds fall back against the window with a clang and turns on her heel to dive headfirst into the bed, the comforter ruffling and pulling up around her legs as they catch on her slightly damp clothes. She buries her head in a pillow, and even though it’s one of those crappy motel ones that are too fluffy and too scratchy, she finds herself rubbing her cheek into it like a cat as she rolls onto her stomach and tries to block out all light by shoving her face further down. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, feeling the pressure build and flow outward it as it releases through all her sore muscles and aching shoulders.

She’s so tired.

You’d think that she wouldn’t be, given that she just woke up not too long ago after having been passed out for about seven hours. Maybe alien mind-meld sleep and regular sleep aren’t the same thing, she muses, dragging her hands around the pillow to cradle the edges closer to her ears. It would certainly explain why she’s feeling so damn sick, sudden bouts of video-induced nausea notwithstanding, and why she can’t stop the pounding in her head or the aching in the various injured spots all over her body.

It’s got to be something that Loki did. Definitely. And that crazy mother f*cker did something to her, she’s sure of it. He had to have, otherwise there’s no excuse for why she can’t stop seeing the video playback in her head; the way the little receptionist recoiled in fear and slunk away to hide under her desk, the way Loki grabbed and handled the mystery man just before he slowly reached out and gripped his head, did that thing to him. And Loki just looked so calm about the whole event, never moving like he was surprised or shocked or scared to be confronted with two people, one of whom had lots of high-powered weapons.

He didn’t look concerned at all, which Darcy can understand. He is a crazy super villain after all – not being scared of getting caught and doing bad things is kind of his job.

No, what’s really scaring her is how the man in the video acted after Loki touched him. How his entire body went slack, how the will to fight or flee or just do anything other than what Loki told him to do went right out of his head. Loki had apparently only wanted him to open the door, but what if that wasn’t it? What if he told him to kill someone? The receptionist? Himself? Would self-preservation override whatever mind control crap Loki worked on him? There’s no way of knowing, but as Darcy’s hands come around and thread through her hair to hold the back of her head, her shaking fingers running along the same path that Loki’s cool dry ones had taken along her face so many hours ago, she can’t help but wonder if she’s supposed to be feeling this way right now, thinking these thoughts right now. What if Loki wanted her to be doubtful, to worry about whether she was still her own person, so that she wouldn’t know that she really wasn’t?

It’s not a radical theory apparently. He could have turned her into some sort of sleeper spy-agent-thingy without her knowing. He could be listening to her right now, hearing her twisted thoughts while smiling evilly and rubbing his hands together Monty Burns style. It’s a terrifying thought, the knowledge that these kinds of concerns, normally reserved for the most insane of mental patients, might very well be a distinct possibility.

The only question is why. Why would Loki want to invade her mind, to use her to spy on people? What could she possibly offer him that he wouldn’t be able to get from someone else, and that’s assuming she would even know what he wanted in the first place (which she totally doesn’t). It makes no sense, and while Darcy usually isn’t one to devolve into ‘why me?’ hypotheticals, in this case it’s a legitimate question.

Instead of asking why he would do it, maybe she should be asking why he wouldn’t.

She can only think of one answer: she’s not important enough. She doesn’t know anything that would make Loki want to have control over her, has no connections to anyone significant enough that he would want to get close to (until right now it would seem, with Thor standing right outside, but they showed up after the whole thing went down). She’s not some Senator’s daughter, some high-ranking agent in an organization with useful intel, hell even some important person’s secret lover. She’s Darcy Lewis, a 24 year old waitress by profession and bull-sh*tter by trade with an unhealthy obsession with British actors, a mild addiction to sugar, and a Bachelors of Science from University of New Mexico in Political Science. She’s barely able to manage balancing her own checkbook, let alone some super top-secret government information about alien attacks and super heroes.

Darcy heaves a dramatic sigh into the pillow, wiggling further down as if doing so will force her position to become more comfortable.

Truth be told, it’s hard for Darcy to admit, but right now she’s really glad that she’s not that important.

Darcy’s not sure how long she’s been lying here, drifting between what wants to be sleep and the persistent nagging of not-quite-thoughts running through her mind, when she hears a soft tap on the door.

She flops herself over just as the door opens and Jane enters, peeking sheepishly into the room.

"Hey Darce," Jane calls softly from the doorway.

"Ugh, what do you want?" Darcy asks, and yes she knows that it sounds rude and yes her stomach flip-flops a little built guiltily when she sees Jane's eyebrows draw together and the other woman flinches a little bit.

Jesus Christ, Darcy thinks. How does she do that?

It's completely f*cking unfair, for her to be so smart and beautiful and pitiful at the same time. Like a giant freaking puppy that everyone wants to pet and tell it's adorable. And then said puppy goes and becomes a world-renowned astrophysicist, but still the gist of the metaphor is there and the bottom line is that Darcy really just wants to wallow in self-pity for a while. It's kind of hard to do that while simultaneously trying to impress someone.

Even though she totally doesn't want to impress Jane, never wanted to really.

She sighs. This must be the morning for lying to herself, it seems, and her usual powers of delusion aren't sticking the way they normally do. Why couldn't Loki's meddling around in her brain have knocked that particular screw loose instead? She could use his level of superiority complex right about now. It would be a hell of an ego boost.

Darcy throws her hands over her eyes and rolls backwards onto her bed, mumbling something incoherent into her hands somewhere along the lines of 'go away' and 'just please understand that I can't do this right now'.

Amazingly, Jane seems to get it.

"Darcy," she says soothingly. "I understand. A lot of stuff has happened to you lately, and you need to be alone. I'll make sure nobody bothers you." Jane turns away to walk out the door and hesitates before adding. "I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry for what happened...after Thor, with SHIELD, all of it. Just...I'm sorry."

She walks out, and Darcy is left groaning pathetically into her hands as she tries half-heartedly to suffocate herself. Seriously, and here she thought she had the manipulation and guilt-trippy thing down one hundred percent.

Apparently, Darcy thinks as she calls out "Jane, wait!” this woman is the master.

---

Jane's sitting at the foot of the bed, almost exactly in the same place that Darcy had been earlier when both Loki and Thor towered over her. Seeing that position, the arrangement of someone in that spot from the perspective of an outsider, especially someone as slight and fragile as Jane, makes Darcy's brain latch on to a vision of the events of Loki's visit in a whole new light.

The motel room's small size is suddenly more obvious; as is the way the pink walls capture the shadows in crawling figures that grow like trees, stretching towards the ceiling where they crowd the light. If she hadn't been so distracted at the time, she might have thought that maybe Loki wasn't the only scary thing in the room, that his shining metal armor was like glittering stars in the black, how he was utterly alien despite his appearance.

And he is, she thinks. He is alien; strange, otherworldly, supernatural. He is larger than life in the most literal sense, his problems are problems, and he has f*cking superpowers and can invade people's minds. And she met him, she f*cking talked to him, and survived.

She's still alive, and yeah what Loki did was really messed up, but she's here, and that's a lot more than what most of the people who have met him can say.

So, with that thought in mind, Darcy doesn't really feel like she's bluffing when she tells Jane that she'll be okay.

"Seriously Jane," Darcy says. "I feel better. I just needed to get it out of my system. You know how it is."

Jane smiles a little ruefully. "Yeah," she chuckles, "I do..."

And yeah, Darcy has to admit, she really does.

Darcy remembers when they were running around the desert, frantically chasing storms that flitted past the cracked screen of Jane's little NOVA radio, adjusting flimsy antennae and scrawling notes on the sides of Styrofoam cups that would be later transcribed with painstaking detail into one of the several cheap notebooks Jane carried with her constantly. She was a woman possessed on those trips, flying by the seat of her pants through the world in pursuit of something that nobody took seriously but that she knew was right. And when Thor came crashing into their lives (well, she crashed into him) it was the ultimate confirmation that everything she had worked for was worth it. It was vindication and relief, and she was ecstatic.

Thor showing up was really the only thing that Darcy thought might have saved Jane from a total meltdown after SHIELD took all her files and equipment. She was still upset, vengeful and definitely hurt, but having him there must have been like a salve for the ultimate burn. It must have been such an overwhelming burden, to have fallen in love with the very epitome of your life’s work and then stood powerlessly by as he saved you (again) and then disappeared without a trace. And though Darcy is really hesitant to believe in such things, she can recognize now, in the presence of the two of them after all this time, it must have really been true love.

There aren’t many things that Darcy will admit that she’s wrong about, and she’s not convinced that she’s entirely wrong about this either, but she can see how Jane might have been excused for her sh*tty friend behavior.

“Darcy…” Jane says, placing her hand on the bedspread between the two of them and looking at Darcy out of the corner of her eyes. “We didn’t leave you at the lab on purpose. Things were just so hectic back then, and well…”

It’s amazing sometimes how some people can be so perceptive about the things that are bothering others. It’s a true talent, Darcy thinks, to be able to be the focus of over a year’s worth of someone’s ire and frustration and then be able to point out the obvious crux of that person’s argument with only one statement, to be able to condense all that built up anger down into a simple sentence.

Darcy is at a loss for what to say. She looks away from Jane, out the window where she can see the top of Bruce’s head, the sunlight catching in the dark waves of his hair going back and forth as he paces.

She rubs her eyes underneath her glasses and sighs, feeling the weight of everything become suddenly heavier with her one-time friend’s apology. “What are you doing here, Jane?” she asks tiredly, her voice darker than she intended, but still managing to convey just how defeated she’s feeling right now.

Jane doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and Darcy resists the urge to look back at her to check if she’s still in the room. She knows she is, can hear her breathing and feel the dip in the bed from her weight, but Jane’s act of silence is conjuring up all sorts of unbidden thoughts in Darcy’s mind of why she really might be here. It’s disconcerting, having someone she used to be so close to (at least she thought that she was close to) in a contest such as this, a baring of souls and open expressions of honesty.

Darcy doesn’t do open expressions of honesty, at least not on her part anyway. Sure, she’ll tell you what she’s thinking if you ask (Shannon only made that mistake once) but this? The heart-to-heart conversations with people that you used to know where you have to fight really freaking hard not to just jump down their throat and rip them a new one for how badly they screwed you over? These ones are the hardest, and for every one that she’s ever had Darcy can honestly say they’ve left her feeling worse than before.

So no, Darcy isn’t really looking forward to what Jane is going to say about why she’s here.

“When Thor told me you were here…” Jane says slowly, “I felt like I had to come, to see you. I had to know that you were okay, and…” she stops and sighs. “I had to know if you really did all those things they said that you did.”

And that’s the truth, Darcy knows, as she purses her lips, eyebrows creasing into a frown. Jane would interrupt everything; she would come all the way out here to the middle of nowhere just to make sure that Darcy wasn’t carrying a year-old grudge against her. Just to make sure that the reason someone she used to know and was maybe friends with went off the deep end and committed highly dangerous criminal activity wasn’t because of something that she did. Just to make sure that any guilt she felt about what might have happened didn’t actually affect what happened.

She’s concerned for Darcy, but it’s not out of some selfless altruism, it’s not out of love, and it’s certainly not out of devotion.

Darcy will accept a guilty apology, but they’re the hardest ones to swallow.

“And if I did?” Darcy counters.

She looks at Jane and finds her staring right at her, wide chocolate eyes sad and bright, the look on her face one of mixed pleading and desperate hesitancy.

“If you did…then…” Jane doesn’t finish. And she doesn’t need to, because Darcy’s question wasn’t really a question at all, and the weight of Darcy’s not-quite confession hangs in the air, heavy like a shroud as it settles between them and separates whatever repairs could have been made during this brief conversation.

“Thanks for coming to see me,” Darcy says finally. And she means it. It wasn’t exactly nice to see Jane again (it was rather like the icing on a really f*cked up cake actually) but it was…educational.

Jane looks for a minute like she wants to reach out and place her hand on Darcy’s leg only inches away. She looks down at her hand for a few seconds and opens her mouth as if to say something, before closing it soundly and nodding quickly to Darcy as she gets off the bed.

“You’re welcome,” Jane says. Darcy looks back out the window and doesn’t let out the sigh she’s been holding until she hears the soft click of the door closing as Jane leaves.

---

Darcy’s sitting in the same spot on the bed when Bruce comes in, her knees drawn up to her chest and she blinks at him over the tops of them.

“Hey,” Bruce says. He didn’t knock before opening the door and now he’s standing in the doorway with one hand on the doorknob and the other running sheepishly through his hair, like he’s suddenly not sure if he did a bad thing by coming in here uninvited.

She mumbles something like a ‘hello’ from behind her knees and watches as he carefully makes his way to the bed. He takes a second to decide where to sit, finally choosing the space where Jane had been. As he settles himself, running his fingers along the edge of the bed and smoothing the covers, Darcy decides that, for however long she’s going to be in this motel room, she’s never sitting in that spot again. This time it has less to do with triggering memories of Loki’s visit and more to do with the fact that that spot is obviously cursed. Nothing good comes from anyone sitting there, and with that thought in mind she’s really not looking forward to whatever it is Bruce wants to discuss.

“There’s something we need to talk about,” Bruce says.

“I figured,” Darcy mumbles, her face still hidden behind her knees, but Bruce seems to understand her if his little half-smile is any indication.

“I think you deserve to know why Thor was so concerned about what Loki did…or didn’t…do to you.”

He stares at her for a second, but when she doesn’t say anything and only offers him a raised eyebrow for him to continue, he sighs and clears his throat.

“I don’t know how much you understand about what happened during the New York attack…” he begins, looking at Darcy expectantly. She raises her eyebrow again.

“The short version is that New York was attacked by Loki and his army of aliens called the Chitauri. A few people – Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and…well…this group was called the ‘Avengers’ –“

“I know who the Avengers are,” Darcy interrupts. Duh, it was all over the news.

“Right, well, the Avengers –“

“Wait,” she interrupts again. “Isn’t the Hulk one of the Avengers?”

Bruce’s face shuts down, his hand coming up to rub the back of his neck so quickly that Darcy thinks she might have pissed him off by interrupting him so much. That is, until she realizes that Bruce takes another deep breath and she sees that his expression isn’t one of anger but instead of discomfort. Then she has a thought, and tired-and-pissed-off-Darcy doesn’t keep her thought to herself.

“Hold on…Bruce…Bruce Banner?” She looks at him, eyes wide. “Holy sh*t, you’re Bruce Banner! The f*cking Hulk?”

Okay, so maybe it was a little tactless to practically shout someone’s secret identity right in their face, especially if said secret identity is a giant green rage monster with serious anger management problems. But Darcy didn’t mean any disrespect by it, quite the opposite in fact.

“I’m sorry, “she says, “It’s just that…you’re totally freaking awesome! On the news they showed you beating the crap out of those aliens and getting shot but the bullets just bounced off you like you didn’t even feel it. Then General Ross came on and told everyone who you were and talked about how dangerous you are after what happened to you, but he seems like such a dick so nobody really paid any attention. You helped during the New York thing, so whatever. And talk about twists of fate, dude: you turn yourself into the very thing you’re studying? Serious sci-fi sh*t.”

Bruce looks seriously taken aback by Darcy’s little rant, and he blinks a few times in apparent confusion, so Darcy decides that she’s done enough hero-worship/damage for one day, and decides to get this conversation back on track, where Bruce was telling her something that she’s definitely sure she isn’t going to want to hear.

“So, you were saying? New York, Loki, sh*take alien thingies, Avengers…” she prompts.

Bruce blinks a few more times, still looking like she has whiplash, before he clears his throat.

“Right,” he says, “Well, when Loki attacked New York, he was using a weapon that was powered by an ancient artifact called the Tesseract. He used it to overpower people’s minds, to get them to do what he wanted, and he used it to open the portal to the Chitauri forces to invade Earth. It’s an unlimited source of power, which was being kept in Asgard after Thor’s father Odin…”

Yep, Darcy thinks, as she tunes out the rest of what Bruce is saying. Definitely not what she wanted to hear.

She remembers reading about the Tesseract in the SHIELD files. She didn’t understand everything that was being written about it because she doesn’t speak science or math, but the basic gist of what she read pretty much said that this thing is seriously freaking dangerous and powerful, so don’t f*ck with it and definitely don’t let crazy super villains f*ck with it. The scientists didn’t know exactly what it did or what it was supposed to do, but they thought it had a lot of potential. It didn’t look like SHIELD had been able to study it for very long, and they were super-secret about whatever information they found. She’d be willing to be that the files that they found at Kirtland were pretty rare, and again, yay for Darcy and her perpetual habit for wrong-place, wrong-time. According to Bruce, after Loki’s attack on New York failed, the Tesseract was taken back to Asgard for safe-keeping, where it is still safely located. Loki was taken back along with it apparently, and Darcy can see how well that’s worked out.

So, wait a minute.

“You’re telling me that the same guy who attacked New York, who tried to destroy the world with an alien monster army, is looking for information that will help him get the same weapon he used for that attack back again? And he’s looking for any SHIELD files with information about the weapon to help him do that, some of which just so happen to be the ones that went missing from Kirtland Air Force Base?”

She looks at him incredulously for a moment, her heart beating so hard in her chest that it might hurt if her mind hadn’t just exploded.

In a move so sudden that it startles Bruce, who hadn’t exactly gotten to that part of his story yet, Darcy leaps from the bed and half-runs, half-trips to her duffle bag where it’s lying on the floor by the bathroom. She kneels down and zips it open, rummaging through it and throwing articles of clothing out haphazardly in her bid to reach the bottom.

When she does, she stands and turns towards Bruce, clutching the SHIELD files close to her chest.

Bruce is still sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching the ends like he might jump up and try to run away at any second (which is a little funny, because he’s the freaking Hulk). She moves towards him slowly, regretting her mad dash but mind still reeling from what Bruce had obviously been about to tell her.

Loki wanted the information about the Tesseract that’s in the files, she has a portion of said files, he did a weird mind-meld thing on her (the same thing he’s done on others with worse outcomes apparently) presumably to get the information. For some reason she didn’t get as hurt by it as she might have, and with the way her luck has been lately, Darcy will gladly take it. That’s the story as far as Darcy knows it, and she’s pretty sure that her earlier question of whether or not she’s in her own mind is confirmed by her next question to Bruce as she gingerly hands him the stack of files.

“I guess this means that I’m turning myself in,” she says softly.

Bruce hesitates a moment before extending his hand. He accepts the files and looks at her silently, his face betraying nothing as he runs his fingers along the spine of file pages in his hands.

“Not necessarily,” he says after a while, moving to stand in front of Darcy.

Darcy looks up at him, shocked because surely he didn’t just say what she thought he said.

“But…” she chokes, then clears her throat and tries again. “But…”

Bruce smiles and looks behind towards the window, where Jane has now moved to stand with Thor, the two of them holding hands and being so gag-worthy cute it’s a little ridiculous. When he looks back at Darcy, there’s a tiny glint in his eyes that looks like kindness and sympathy but might be steeled resolution.

“Darcy, you’re young. You did a really stupid and dangerous thing and somehow you got out of it in one piece. If I take these files back to SHIELD, that’s all they’ll really care about, as long as none of the information that’s in them gets out, which it didn’t. You have a chance to start over and move on with your life. Just…” he stops for a second, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes briefly. When he opens them, there’s a slightly pleading note in how he looks at her.

“You shouldn’t have to pay the rest of your life for your mistakes Darcy,“ he says with a hint of sadness. “Just take this chance and get out. Start over somewhere new. Do something good with your life.”

There’s a silence that follows Bruce’s statement that is anything but awkward for Darcy.

His expression is one of stony resolve, but as Darcy reaches up to wipe away some tiny specks of beginning tears, she has to seriously restrain herself from launching into him for a hug. She settles instead for a frantic nodding of her head and, okay, there are tears too because she’s so freaking grateful. She’s lighter and happier than she’s been in what has really only been a few days but feels like forever, because there is light at the end of this tunnel now. There is a way out, a good way out, and Bruce has just given it to her. He’s given her the chance to be Darcy again, to forget about her temporary detour into insanity and move on with her life, a new life.

“Bruce…” she says (and man, she really wants to hug him right now). “I don’t know what to…I, just…thank you.”

Bruce smiles softly and grips the files harder in his hands.

“You’re welcome” he says, and gives her a curt nod as he walks towards the door.

When he’s gone, Darcy stands in the same spot for almost a full minute. She stands there and looks out the window, at the figure of Bruce getting smaller as he makes his way towards Jane and Thor, at Thor’s puzzled expression when Bruce shows him the SHIELD files and he turns to look at the window to Darcy’s room, at Jane’s slumping shoulders and heaving sigh.

She sees it all through the film of hazy sunlight and dirty windows, of afternoon Texas dirt and stuffy motel dust bunnies that float through the air and the loud click of an ancient air conditioner turning over as it tries to keep up with the stifling desert heat.

She sees it all, takes it all in wearing her moist clothes and crooked glasses, her hair tangled and fraying and her shirt too tight, and can’t help the smile that breaks out on her face.

Chapter 10: Start Over (Part 1)

Chapter Text

After Bruce left, Darcy decided that she was going stay at the Texas motel for a little while longer before going back to New Mexico.

Her body was tingling with nervous energy, little shivers of happiness and excitement making her giddy as she paced back and forth across the hard carpet floor. Several times she went to the window and peeked outside, spying on Jane and Thor as they talked and hovered near her car and at Bruce who was speaking on his cell phone while running his fingers through his hair. The sun was getting higher in the sky, making the metal slats of the window shades hot to touch. The glare from the passing cars on Highway 10 caused her to wince and shut her eyes. She let the blinds fall back against the window with a clang and resumed her nervous pacing.

Her mind was running in circles, plans and possibilities forming like mist but never taking hold before being dismissed and slipping away with the next one, a flood of hypothetical scenarios and potentialities for where she could be this time tomorrow.

She could be anywhere, really. Back in New Mexico sure, but on her way to wherever she wanted (within reason of course). She could go back to her apartment and pack another suitcase, a real suitcase this time, with essentials and good clothes and important stuff like her laptop and cell phone. She could stand in front of her closet, eyeing her wardrobe that was a haphazard mixture of Halloween costumes and t-shirts with rock bands and sarcastic sayings, her faded denim jeans and too-big sweaters, and actually pick and choose what she wanted to bring with her.

Will she go somewhere that’s warm all the time? Having some humidity might be nice in the winter. Will she need to buy more sweaters? She hates the cold, but snow is pretty. And what about somewhere with water? Like real water, not Elephant Butte or Rio Grande ‘water’, but honest-to-god water, with salt and sharks and the whole shebang. Does she need to buy a swimsuit? Should she buy a swimsuit?

Darcy sighs and runs her fingers through her hair, tension crowning her shoulders and causing a ghostly shudder of pain to run down her body. Her hip is still hurting from where the heavy metal door inside Kirtland's warehouse had banged into it during their escape and her wrist still throbs a little angrily whenever she twists it the wrong way. The marks are fading though, only bluish-grey instead of the nasty red they were before, and the outline of Loki’s fingers can’t even really be seen anymore. Over what could have happened, Darcy will gladly take it.

Resigned to calm herself the f*ck down and stop pacing like a maniac, Darcy flips on the television and peruses through the selection of three channels and static to settle on a daytime Spanish soap opera. The woman on the screen is crying, but it’s one of those beautiful crying things where her dark eyes are bright and brimming with unshed tears and her desperate movements and pleading moans are somehow graceful instead of pathetic like they are when anyone cries in real life.

“Don’t leave me, Miguel. Please!” The little closed captioning ticker at the bottom reads.

Darcy begins to rummage through the little drawer by the TV, looking for something to occupy herself with. As she pulls out a packet of what is most likely year-old motel coffee, she spares a glance to the television. 'Miguel', a beautifully tall olive-skinned man with killer cheekbones, is giving the woman a look that is half smolder, half disinterest, as he grabs her hands from where they are fisted in the front of his shirt and throws them down.

“You leave me no choice! Everyone knows what you did. They laugh at me!” he hisses.

“I’m sorry!” the woman sobs, reaching out to grab the hem of his sleeve as he turns away, the music deepening and the camera panning to a view of her face over his shoulder as he stares off into not-quite-the-camera. “I made a mistake! You’ve made them too, Miguel, and I forgave you! Why are you forgiven and I am not?”

“Amen, sister” Darcy mutters, struggling to tear open the little packet while simultaneously admiring the hotness that is Miguel’s exaggerated tight-lipped grimace and closing of his eyes, his face turned away from the camera just-so, the light enhancing his handsome features. Darcy reasons that she’s not exactly sure what’s going on, but from just the few minutes that she’s been watching she can probably piece together what’s happened, and it most likely involves someone’s sister, brother, and/or evil twin that’s back from the dead.

The coffee pot in the room is terribly ancient and Darcy decides at the last minute after having spilled a good amount of the coffee grounds onto the floor that maybe she should just sit down. She’s obviously too nervous to do anything that requires manual dexterity or motor skills, and drinking ancient coffee would probably be another thing to add to her list of things she shouldn’t have done lately. She sits on the bed, away from that spot at the front, and leans back on her hands as she stares at the television.

She’s staring at the screen but she’s not really paying attention. Her mind keeps wandering back to what she’s going to do once she leaves here. Maybe that’s why she’s having a hard time, why she’s so reluctant to leave the room, get in her car and go. She’s essentially been given a free pass, with Bruce promising to give SHIELD the files and not to turn her in. The U.S. government had given up on pursuing her (if the hasty exit of Suit Guy is any indication) once they found out SHIELD was involved, and her only other ties to what happened are Shannon, Mark and Vincent. Shannon and Mark are hopefully on their way to New Orleans, ready to get married and then disappear. Vincent, well…Darcy is pretty sure (she’s really hoping, anyway) that the black suits that Shannon told her took him are going to be satisfied with obtaining his portion of the files and not decide that he needs to be tortured or beaten into submission or anything.

Things could be worse, that’s for damn sure, Darcy thinks as she absently watches Miguel pull the woman to him and kiss her harshly before she widens her eyes in feigned shock and slaps him. Darcy could have been taken by Suit Guy to God knows where, and if Thor hadn’t shown up she would have been. Bruce didn’t have to give her a free pass on the files either, and Darcy thinks the fact that she’s so obviously pathetic at any of this crime stuff must have earned her a few pity points with him. That and he has a history all his own, complete with dangerous secrets and life-ruining consequences that really put Darcy’s robbery attempt to shame.

She got lucky, she realizes, that Thor showed up when he did. She’s not lucky with what drew him here, of course, because frankly she could have gone without the whole magic alien scare-fest thing, but Thor had declared her under his immediate protection the second he’d shown up. He’s been busy since New York and with the Avengers, and he certainly has more at stake on Earth than he had when she’d first met him. It was risky for him to claim her, still is risky for him to allow Bruce to let her go. And she knows that the only reason he did it was because of Jane, because he thought that she was Jane's friend.

Darcy rubs her temples, sighing heavily. Will he still think that after Jane tells him what they talked about? Or didn’t talk about, actually.

It’s terrible, she decides, how awkward conversations are between people who used to hang out once you realize how far you’ve grown apart. Once you start to look at the person you used to be through the lens of who you are now, it’s hard not to judge the things you once did in a different light. For Darcy, after what she knows happened – coming back to the deserted lab after a truly terrifying encounter with a gigantic space robot – it’s hard to reconcile the friendship she felt she shared with the two people who shared that experience with her. Jane and Erik disappeared without a trace and Darcy, who, granted, was unwilling to admit that she was scared sh*tless about the whole thing, was on her own to sort it out.

Which is totally fine, because it wouldn’t be the first time before or since that she’s had to pick up her own pieces. But it hurt, and though she thinks that it should be pretty freaking obvious, maybe Jane didn’t know how much it hurt.

So, Darcy thinks, watching Miguel and the woman share a passionate kiss while the camera pans over to the hidden-but-obvious mysteriously strange other woman who is watching the scene unfold, it might be slightly unreasonable for her to outright dismiss Jane's...attempt...at reconciling whatever relationship it was they had before. At least Jane had tried to talk to her, and technically she had apologized (Darcy is resolutely not thinking about the sincerity of underlying reasons for said apology).

She's going to be starting off on a new foot, after all. Doing this one 'good' thing right off the bat should at the very least earn her some kind of karma brownie points.

---

Stepping outside the motel room is like walking onto the surface of the sun.

Texas heat is almost exactly like New Mexico heat - dry and dusty. Sure there are some minor differences but it's hot and at some point Darcy doesn't really see the distinction between humid-heat and dry-heat. When her hair is plastered to her forehead, her shirt sticking to her back with sweat and her eyes actually hurting from squinting against the light, Darcy thinks that hot is hot.

She's packed up her duffel bag and turned off the television in the room (turns out Miguel was in a coma and just woke up to find out his wife had been cheating on him with his sister), and she's making her way towards Jane and Thor where they're standing by her car.

Jane has her hands cupped over her eyes, looking up at Thor with an expression on her face that says she's trying really hard not to burst out laughing. Thor has the same look on his face, a tilted smile and warm crinkled eyes, and Darcy feels her stomach tighten a little at their easy openness with one another. Coming up next to Jane, Thor looks down at her and smiles.

"Ah, Darcy. I trust you rested well?"

Darcy grins back at Thor, and really how can't she? "Yeah I did, thanks."

She turns to Jane, who is also wearing a smile though it's more wary and tinged with sadness. Darcy resists the urge to sigh heavily and instead offers the other woman a smile.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" she asks Jane.

Jane looks surprised, but recovers quickly and nods her head silently. Darcy gives Thor another grin and moves off towards the back of her car, setting her bag on the trunk before leaning on the back bumper and crossing her arms over her chest. Jane comes around a second later, adopting a similar pose as Darcy, but still slightly wary.

Before she can stop herself, Darcy blurts "I'm sorry."

Jane's eyebrows shoot up to her hairline in surprise. Yeah, Darcy cringes, it was supposed to be more finessed than that, but she's already started so whatever.

"I realize that I might have been a little rude before, in the room," she says slowly. "I appreciate you apologizing for...before...and," Darcy takes her glasses off and fiddles them around in her hands, "I accept your apology."

Jane's eyebrows are still up, and she blinks a few times but doesn't say anything. God, Darcy thinks, is she such a bitch that apologizing for not accepting an apology is out of character? Is it really that hard to believe that she would feel sorry for...well, she didn't really do anything wrong, but surely Jane didn't take it that badly did she?

"I just think you should know," Darcy continues, "that it was really f*cked up for you guys to leave without saying anything. We were a team, and I know that we might not have been 'friends' or anything, but I think I deserved an explanation or something before you just disappeared into thin air. And," Darcy holds a hand up when Jane opens her mouth to interrupt, "I'm sure it was a matter of 'life and death' or 'couldn't be avoided' or whatever, but you still should have told me."

Jane doesn't say anything for a minute after Darcy finishes, and Darcy takes her time rearranging her crooked glasses back in her face to give her time.

"Darcy..." Jane says softly. "I don't know what to say."

Darcy snorts before she can help herself and scoffs, "You can tell me what happened, Jane. You can tell me what was so important that you and Erik up and left me there in bum-f*ck Puente Antiguo, why I came back to the lab after driving an hour to get you more copper wire for whatever the hell it was you were working on to an empty lab and no note about where you guys went, why I had to drive all the way back to Albuquerque by myself and couldn't talk to anybody about how messed up it was to meet f*cking Norse gods and get attacked by a giant robot." Her voice has escalated as she's been ranting and she sees Jane look past her shoulder to where Thor and Bruce are no doubt wondering what the hell is going on.

"I'm sorry Darcy, you have to know that" Jane says hotly. "And I wish I had a good explanation, but..." Jane trails off and runs her fingers across her temples, breathing deeply. "After Thor left, Erik got recruited by SHIELD. At first I said no when he wanted me to come with him, because they were so terrible to us at first, but they promised equipment, Darcy, and funding. They wanted to give me a lab and a team of people who would help me formulate equations. They wanted to pay me to find a way to get Thor back. They wanted me and Erik and they didn't want anyone else to know."

Darcy clenches her hands into fists at her sides to stop herself from shouting at Jane. "And that wasn't suspicious to you?"

"Of course it was suspicious!" Jane says. "It was shifty and secretive and against every instinct I had as a scientist, but it was a chance I couldn't pass up. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I took it!"

Darcy's mouth is hanging open, a little in shock at what Jane is saying but mostly at how Jane is saying it. Not once during their time together could Darcy recall Jane ever raising her voice. Okay, she may have raised her voice a little bit, because living with Darcy for any extended period of time is bound to make anyone do that, but for her to actually be staring Darcy down, one-on-one? It's weird as f*ck, and so different than what Darcy remembers.

Gone apparently is the Jane who Darcy could nag into doing pretty much anything and before her stands this beautiful, confident and smart woman who rides in helicopters with the Hulk and has her sexy Norse god boyfriend on speed dial.

Grudgingly, Darcy is impressed.

"Damn Jane," Darcy says. "You've really grown a pair over the past year, haven't you?"

Jane chuckles, tucking a lock of her brown hair behind her ear. "Yeah, I guess so", she grins. "And you've traded in tasing gods for robbing military bases."

Darcy huffs a laugh. Point taken.

They lapse into silence for a few minutes, each fiddling with little bits of their clothing and not really looking at one another. Irrationally, Darcy actually feels a little better. She's not exactly impressed with Jane's explanation for her behavior, and she still feels like it was really sh*tty thing for her to do, but she gets it. Jane's a scientist, a beautiful and brilliant-as-f*ck woman in a male-dominated field. Leaving Darcy behind to pursue what she felt was best for her career was probably not the first or last time she's had to make hard decisions like that. And with what she herself has done over the past week, Darcy doesn't really think she can pass judgement on her for being impulsive.

Jane breaks the silence, moving closer towards Darcy like she wants to either shake her hand or go for an awkward hug thing.

"Bruce says that you gave him your files." Darcy nods. "And that he told you about Loki?"

"He told me about Loki and the Tesseract, and about what really happened in New York. He didn't go into a lot of detail about the whole mind-meld thing, but from what he said about what Loki did, the mind-control stuff, and from that video, I guess I got pretty lucky."

Jane nods, "You did. Thor's told me about what happened to the other people Loki's done that to since he's been back. It's not pretty Darcy; amnesia, memory loss, personality changes." Jane shudders, "Thor's worried about what SHIELD will try to do to Loki when they find him. That's why he's trying to find him first, to take him back to Asgard before he does any more damage."

Darcy raises an eyebrow in disbelief. "Thor wants to take him home? Seriously, Jane, I get that he's his brother and all, but Loki's trying to start New York all over again. He needs to be locked up in a dark hole somewhere, not taken home to his freaking palace in outer space."

"I know," Jane says and gives Thor a glance over Darcy's shoulder. "Thor thinks that he's desperate. That the Tesseract was too much power for him to handle and that he became dependent on it for his magic. He says that he's sick."

"No sh*t" Darcy says. Jane gives her a look that indicates this has been an obvious point if contention between the happy couple. "Either way, he's been tracking Loki for weeks, always one step behind him. It's frustrating."

Darcy nods, but it's kind of hard to feel bad for Thor when his maniac brother used his magic glow stick to level a major city.

A stillness settles over the two of them, a faint breeze carrying dust and the faded sounds of Thor and Bruce's voices over their heads. Darcy scuffs the ground with her shoe, deciding what the next move should be.

It was good, she thinks, having this conversation. She might not have needed to talk to Jane, and she's not sure that they've made things right, but if she's going to start over on a whole new life she's glad that she did. Darcy hesitates for a moment, looking at the ground between herself and Jane, before reaching out her hand.

"Well..." she says, "it's been real."

Jane hesitates too, but eventually she smiles and takes it, and the two of them shake hands.

"I'm really happy I got to see you again, Darcy" Jane says.

Darcy smiles, and says "Yeah, me too."

---

The helicopter that dropped off Bruce and Jane arrives in a manner slightly less obnoxious than how it first did, only causing a minor slow-down of traffic instead of the near stand-still from before. Darcy thinks this is probably due to the lack of ominous-looking black vehicles parked in front of the motel's office. All things considered, a lone helicopter landing in the middle of a dusty parking lot isn't really worth staring at.

A Norse god of thunder summoning clouds and getting ready for an epic take off? That's worth watching.

She said her goodbyes, waved to Jane when she began boarding the helicopter, resisted the urge to hug Bruce, again, and has begun loading her duffle bag into the front passenger seat of her car when Thor comes up behind her.

"Darcy," Thor says, voice booming over the sounds of the helicopter as it rises into the air. "I would offer you passage to your destination, but Bruce informs me that you have yet to make a decision."

Darcy smiles. That's Thor-speak for 'I know we're not turning you into SHIELD but I still want to know where you're going'. She faces him, large and towering figure blocking the sunlight, but somehow his eyes still shine bright blue even in semi-shadow.

"I haven't," she tells him. "But I promised Jane I would call her if I need anything. Bruce said that he would keep in touch, even though I didn't give him my number. I have a feeling he'd be able to find me anyway." Thor smiles and nods sagely, long blonde hair brushing his armor as it falls over his shoulder.

"Then I will take my leave," he says. "And offer the same sentiment as my friend. Should you ever have need, do not hesitate to summon me. If it be in my power, I will come." He says it with such regality and fey simplicity that Darcy doesn't really feel the need to clarify what she thinks he's saying with what he's actually saying. Of course he can be summoned. He's a freaking god.

"I will," she promises. Then, as Thor turns to leave, brandishing Mjolnir and darkening the sky with clouds, the fading whir of the helicopter being replaced by cracks of thunder, she yells "Thank you!"

She sees him turn his head to look at her over his shoulder, eyes twinkling and a sly smile on his lips as he nods to her before swinging his arms and shooting towards the sky.

---

Darcy drives west on 1-10 for about three hours before she needs to stop and get some gas. Her little car is relatively fuel-efficient, but it's not that fuel-efficient, and she pulls over into a rest area right off the highway about eighty miles from the Texas/New Mexico border. It's a combination gas station and truck stop, complete with 24-hour restaurant and shower rooms for truckers making long commutes cross-country. Darcy heads into the gift shop attached to the restaurant, the smell of greasy hamburgers and frying potatoes making her stomach growl in a way that is completely undignified.

She catches a glimpse of herself in the reflection of a glass case full of novelty shot glasses, her jeans faded and her shirt dirty, her hair frizzy and her glasses skewed. She looks like a mess, and when her stomach growls again she can't help but laugh.

Screw it, she thinks. She deserves a hamburger. And fries. And a milkshake. A chocolate milkshake.

She sits at a booth in the corner of the restaurant, nearly deserted after an afternoon rush of traffic, and orders her meal from a friendly waitress who's name tag says 'Sophie'. Sophie is sweet, a cute older woman with grey hair and vibrant red nails, and she takes one look at Darcy's ragged appearance before deciding, "No honey, you want our death-by-chocolate shake. It's got rum in it."

Sipping on her shake, Darcy closes her eyes and decides that Sophie is the bomb.

She's requisitioned a map from the gift shop and is using the crayons usually reserved for patrons with children to draw routes around the country for where she might want to go. She's in the middle of drawing a line along a highway route up through Colorado when a shadow falls across her light.

Darcy lifts her head, mouth open and ready to tell Sophie that she definitely does want another awesome milkshake, when she sees that the waitress isn't the reason for the sudden shadow.

Instead, it's the leather-clad, totally tall, pale as f*ck dude sitting in the booth across from her.

She might scream, just a little bit, but she definitely does a combination spit-take/arm flail worthy of any comedy film. Loki looks unimpressed, staring at her with an expression that says he's comparing her to something he found on the bottom of his boot. He looks better in the restaurant than he did in the motel room, the natural lighting and afternoon sunlight minimizing the gaunt appearance of his drawn cheekbones and aquiline features. Less sick, more normal, almost like a regular person is sitting across from her, which is even worse because he is so not.

Darcy looks around at the few patrons in the restaurant, finding that nobody seems to have noticed that a notorious supervillain has magically appeared right in front of her. She blinks a few times, thinking that she might have gone insane. Hoping, really. But after about thirty seconds of awkward silence where Darcy has almost given herself a seizure with how much blinking she's done, he's still there.

"Don't kill me," she says.

Loki raises an eyebrow but otherwise doesn't say anything. Darcy falters, her mind running in a thousand different directions at once.

"I don't know anything about the Tesseract," she blurts, and winces when she sees his eyes narrow but soldiers on in a rush, "I don't have the files. They're with SHIELD. Well, technically they're with Bruce, I mean Bruce Banner, the Hulk. He has the files, and I don't know where he took them."

At the mention of the Hulk - or the mention of the Tesseract, she's not sure which - Loki's expression has turned from one of disdain to one of predatory appraisal, his eyes sweeping over Darcy in a way that makes her distinctly uncomfortable. It reminds her of the way he looked on the video, like he's a giant cat trying to figure out the most fun way to rip apart a mouse. She's the mouse, and she forces herself to take a deep breath before she speaks again.

"I don't have your files and I don't know where they are. So, you know, don't kill me..." she finishes lamely.

Darcy thinks it's probably impossible for her to be more terrified than she already is, but she's proven wrong in the next instant when Loki smiles, wide and dangerous, teeth flashing and eyes burning with a maniacal gleam.

"Oh, Darcy," he says, and the tone of his voice sends a cold shiver down her spine. "I don't intend to kill you."

She should be relieved, but she's not.

She clears her throat, gripping the table top so hard her knuckles are turning white.

"Okay...then what do you want?"

Loki smiles at her again, and Darcy gets the distinct impression that he's enjoying her fear. The thought makes her suddenly angry, her hands shifting from their death-grip on the table to come to a rest near the roll of silverware that came with her meal. She looks down at her hand, inches from the serrated blade of the black steak-knife covered in hamburger juice, then back up to Loki who is looking at it too, maniacal smile shifting into one that's more condescending.

Hot anger rushes over her, bristling away her fear and making her brash in typical Darcy-style that is more emotion than common sense.

"Look asshole," she says hotly, taking a small satisfaction in how he looks shocked for a split second but also resigning herself to having just sealed her fate. "I don't know what sick game you're playing, but I am not going to play it with you. If you're not going to kill me then leave me the f*ck alone." She punctuates her sentence by grabbing the knife and tucking it into her lap, pointing it at him under the table for all the good it would do.

Loki looks surprised for a moment, dark eyebrows raised high before he seems to find his inner-crazy zen once again and gives her the look of pissed-off egomaniacal guy she was expecting after her little outburst.

"You insolent little..." Loki begins, anger flaring around him in an energy so intense that Darcy almost shrinks back. "I spared your life, your pathetic mortal life, and you seek to trade barbs with me?" He raises his head high, looking down at her with narrowed eyes and nostrils flared. "Hear me, Darcy Lewis, if I did not require your assistance I would tear your mind apart and visit upon you your greatest fears until you begged for death."

Darcy blinks, successfully scared to the point of silence, the knife dropping from her hands to the restaurant floor.

Loki continues, "As it is, I do require your assistance. I demand your compliance, and if you do not cooperate," Loki pauses and glances around the restaurant, eyeing Sophie who is helping another table of new customers that appears to be a family traveling on vacation, young children hoping up and down in their seats.

He fixes Darcy with a deadly smile.

"I will kill everyone in this establishment."

Chapter 11: Start Over (Part Two)

Chapter Text

Some help here would be nice, please. Seriously; God, Buddha, Oprah...anybody.

Darcy looks around the restaurant, buffeted by an assortment of sounds as they filter through a sudden haze of confusion, like a bomb has just gone off near her ears and everything seems like it’s numb and far away. She hears Sophie's bright red nails tapping on the edge of her plastic order pad, children laughing as they blow the ends of paper straw wrappers at one another, the cute giggles of a couple at a table on the other side of the bar counter - and Darcy finds that her mind has drawn a total blank. She's officially gone brain dead.

Definitely not something you want to do when faced with the arrival of the most wanted person in the world. Especially when said person has literally just told you that he expects your compliance in whatever insane plans he has in store or he'll kill you and everyone around you.

Darcy shakes her head to clear the strain from her mind before fixing Loki with wide eyes, her mouth open in shock. The afternoon Texas sunlight is shifting into evening, tones of red and orange filtering through the large restaurant windows and giving the place a cozy warm feeling completely at odds with the clenching cold that Darcy’s insides have twisted themselves into. Loki settles himself into the booth across from her, resting his folded hands elegantly on the surface and looking every bit the picture of 'egomaniacal supervillain'.

Not that anyone else around here seems to see it.

As she glances around at her fellow restaurant patrons, Darcy wonders if she could live with herself if something happened to them. A small, terrible part of her mind whispers that she doesn't know any of these people, and Sophie really is the only one out of all of them who has shown her any sort of kindness or acknowledged her existence. What sort of obligation does she have to perfect strangers? And that's even assuming that he's not bluffing. Maybe he's just trying to scare her.

Glancing up at him, she sees the dark expression on his face.

Yeah, no - more like he would hurt them anyway, no matter what she says or does.

With that thought in mind, Darcy asks probably the only question she can at this juncture.

"What do you want?"

Loki raises his eyebrow at her again. He frowns, like he'd rather be anywhere else than sitting across from her having this conversation. Yeah, well, her too, buddy.

"I believed that perhaps you might like to thank me for sparing your life," he says.

Darcy blinks rapidly, mind replaying her last few encounters with the man sitting in front of her in vivid, terrifying detail. She tries not to let her shoulders shake as she remembers him breaking and entering into her motel room and the subsequent mind-meld sh*t that followed. At least this time he isn't wearing all his armor like in the Base. Instead it's the same black leather coat and green tunic from the motel, his black hair swept back and curling gently under his ears. There is no battle-worn armor in sight, no rough scratches that hint of destruction past, no golden horns to draw the eye and enhance his otherworldliness. It's…better, but not much.

Darcy swallows heavily. "'Thank' isn't exactly the word I would use. And my life wouldn't have needed sparing if you hadn't shown up in the first place."

He doesn't look sorry. She doesn't expect him to.

"You exaggerate," he says blandly. "Had I wished to harm you I would have."

"You don't think what you did harmed me?" Darcy asks incredulously. "Seriously?"

"You are alive, are you not? You have no great injuries that I can see, nor are you incarcerated. You must know I might have done much worse."

"Yeah, I know, you said. The whole 'visiting upon me my greatest fears' thing," Darcy says. "Why would you want to read my thoughts anyway? I already told you that I don't have the files, I don't know anything about what was in them, and I don't know where they are now."

"So you've said. Many times. That was very foolish of you."

Darcy blinks. "What?"

He gives her a patronizing smile. "You are not nearly as adept at strategy as you think yourself, Miss Lewis," he says.

Darcy pauses, not understanding what he's trying to get at. Her confusion must show on her face because Loki chuckles softly.

"I admit that your presence in the underground facility was intriguing. The sudden appearance of so many young mortals in such a place? I surmised your goal was the same as mine. I was wrong of course, as I later discovered." Darcy feels the beginnings of a flush creep up her neck at his casual dismissal of what he did. “Your true aim, however, was easy enough to attain. Yet here you are - alone, without friends or files." He sighs. "To think I made such haste to intercept you after the fact."

Darcy opens her mouth to respond but is interrupted by Sophie, who chooses that moment to come over to the table, clutching a receipt in her scarlet fingers. Her black mascara-rimmed eyes sweep over Loki and back at Darcy with obvious confusion and a little bit of question.

"Everything okay here, sweetie?" Sophie sets the check down by Darcy's empty plate and digs in her apron for a pen. She sets it down by the folded receipt and leans on one hip, not so subtly eyeing Loki even though she's speaking to Darcy.

Darcy holds her breath, willing herself not to act too strangely or do anything that would make Sophie suspicious of just who exactly is sitting here with her. Loki is looking at Sophie with nearly the same expression he gave Darcy when he appeared before her - like she's a giant bug that he would like to squish but whose guts he doesn't want to get all over his shoe. Sophie, bless her, seems more concerned with making sure that Darcy is okay and not being harassed by a wayward reject from a Hot Topic clearance sale than with potentially being squashed.

"Um, it's cool, Sophie," Darcy says as nonchalantly as possible. "Thanks."

Sophie gives Loki's attire a once-over that almost matches Loki's in disgust and condescension, and while Darcy is impressed with the woman's fortitude, she also definitely doesn't want her to end up as gooey bits on the floor.

"Hey, Sophie, could you get me another shake? You were totally right, it was awesome. And can you tell the bartender to add more rum? Like, lots more rum."

Sophie doesn't drag her eyes away from Loki but nods an affirmative to Darcy. "Sure thing, honey," she says, and picks up the check.

"Thanks, you're amazing," Darcy says quickly. Go away, go away, go away. She lets out a sigh when Sophie leaves. She turns to look at Loki, whose hands are splayed on the table and whose jaw is clenched. Darcy reads his expression like he's almost upset that she made Sophie leave because now he can't dismember her. Totally f*cking creepy.

Darcy looks down at her own hands, which have shifted underneath the table to twist in the hem of her shirt. She's got to think. There's got to be something she can do to get herself - and everyone else - out of this in one piece. She just needs to know what he wants, or at the very least a distraction so she can get help. Loki's right - she doesn't have the files anymore, and her leverage for negotiation with SHIELD is certainly gone, but if getting arrested means that he also gets picked up, it would be worth it.

And then she sees it - the pen that Sophie left on the table, lying right next to her napkin.

It’s desperate and risky, but she's got to try.

She sneaks a peek at Loki, who is looking around the restaurant with an expression of growing disgust. Moving slowly, Darcy inches her hand up to the table and grabs the corner of the napkin with her finger. She slides it towards her, and when he doesn't look at her she covers the entire thing - napkin and pen - with her hand and slides it down into her lap. She hides her sigh of relief.

Okay, now for a distraction. Sophie will be back soon with the shake, so she hasn't got a lot of time to do this.

"You read my mind, so you know I wasn't lying when I said that I have no idea what any of that stuff in those files meant," Darcy brings the conversation back to gain his attention. "And I don't have them anymore, so I can't give them to you. I'm having a hard time figuring out what you think I could do for you."

Her eyes hold Loki's, but under the table Darcy is trying to form letters on the napkin and praying to every conceivable deity and pop icon she can think of that this pen is not like every other pen you get at a restaurant and actually works. She hopes that writing "call 911, Loki, New York" will be sufficient. Now that Loki's back and SHIELD is looking for him, they're probably monitoring everything for any mention of him. They'd have to pick this up if Sophie places the call.

"I want the files your friends have," he says. "The boy, Mark, and the blonde woman, Shannon. You will assist me in finding them, promptly and without drawing undue attention."

Darcy almost drops the pen. He wants her to betray her friends? To him?

He sees her expression and taps a slender finger to his temple. "I know where they're going and what they look like. I will find them, whether you help me or not."

"If you can find them without me then why the hell are you here?" Darcy asks.

"Things are often much simpler when one seeks a path of least resistance." He tilts his head, "I had hoped you would assist me in this very small request."

It's not small. It's so very, very not small. Mark and Shannon got away, they made it out of this whole f*cked up thing unscathed. They deserve their freedom, their happiness, and Darcy isn't sure she can help him with this, even though in the grand scheme of all things she would have ever considered he might want, it really is not at all what she expected. He says it like its so simple a thing he's asking. He isn't asking her to kill anyone or bomb an orphanage or anything super sinister...just to help him find her friends and get their files.

Loki leans towards her. "If I were to find them without your assistance, I would be forced to expend my abilities so as not to draw unwanted attention. Were they to encounter me in such a state, I would have little incentive to be as generous with them as I was with you."

He makes a subtle flicking motion with his fingers, and Darcy yelps when the pen in her hand is suddenly burning hot. She drops it and looks down at her lap, expecting her fingers to be burned, but they aren't. Her note is gone, the napkin empty of any signs she had been writing on it at all. She clenches it in her fist and takes a deep breath, trying hard to stop the urge to scream in frustration.

So, either she agrees to help Loki find Mark and Shannon, plus their files, for ultimately unknown reasons and potential damage on a huge scale, or she refuses and dooms them, herself, and the people around her to certain death. As far as choices go, this one sucks big time.

Since when is she qualified to make these decisions? She's twenty four years old for god's sake, and yeah, she did go to college, but nobody in her Political Science classes ever told her she'd have to be making life-altering decisions for other people, at least not until she ran for office or something. She's a waitress, not a politician, and he wants her to make a choice that could potentially affect millions of people, based on fear and threats of violence against the ones she loves? It's a surreal moment, as Darcy's mind flashes back to all those late-night study sessions, reading theories about dictatorships and crimes against humanity, about leaders of nations during times of war and the sacrifices they made for the good of their people. About choosing participate in something even while knowing it might have greater consequences down the line but taking comfort in the knowledge that you personally didn't get your hands dirty. About rationalizing the sacrifice of lives as something beautiful because it represented what needed to be destroyed to accomplish an even worthier goal. Can she go blindly into the fray, having better knowledge than most about both what history says could happen and what Loki is capable of? She's afraid of what her help might lead to, but the most tangible fear - the one that makes her heart clench and her stomach ache - is stopping whatever chance Shannon and Mark have at a life together, and of living at all.

And suddenly she understands all those clichéd moments in comics or on TV, when the villain kidnaps the hero's family and offers them a "choice". The hero always makes the right one, and everyone is always saved. But this isn't pretend, and her choice will have a very real consequence. Choose life or death, make decisions so far out of the scope of your own power with outcomes you can't control. Save one person or risk a million. Take a chance on the future for the safety of the present. Make a deal with the devil to save innocent people.

It's a moment of clarity, and Darcy finds that she doesn't envy any of the Avengers. Not that she did in the first place, but now she definitely has more of an appreciation for the whole 'wounded and brooding hero' shtick. She gets why Captain America never looks comfortable on the news when someone asks him about saving that waitress in New York, why Black Widow and Hawkeye went AWOL after the fight was over, why Iron Man only comes out when Tony Stark can't joke away the severity of a situation...why Bruce seemed like such a lost soul, almost desperate in his attempt to give her a clean shot at a life away from SHIELD’s influence, why Thor always appeared so serious and burdened despite his obvious advantages of being immortal and an alien.

Wait a minute…

Thor!

She hadn't really put much thought into it before when he said he could be 'summoned'. Maybe it's something like praying? But she's been doing a lot of that to a lot of different supposed deities since Loki sat down, and you'd think one of them would sink through to him if they were really gods. Hmm, that also means that Loki would have heard them too, she guesses.

Darcy glances quickly at Loki. He seems unaffected.

Okay, so summoning does not equal praying...or Asgardians aren't really gods? She remembers something about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, except this magic is from outer space but is somehow connected…Damn it, she should have paid more attention when Jane lectured her about this sh*t. But she knows about magic, kind of. Maybe it's like Harry Potter and the Room of Requirement...if you wish it really hard and really specifically, then it will happen.

“Thor…” Darcy mutters under her breath. She waits, listening hard against the soft sounds of eighties music drifting through the restaurant speakers and the distant voices of Sophie and her table of guests.

She waits. Nothing happens.

“Thor?” she tries again, a little louder this time.

Nothing.

“Come on dude, what the f*ck?” Darcy huffs, desperately. “Thor!”

She looks up startled when she hears a soft chuckle from the opposite end of the booth.

Loki is laughing at her, the prick.

“Shut up,” she tells him, and then yells more loudly “Thor!” She bangs her fist on the table and curses, “God damn it, Thor!”

Silence follows her little outburst, and when Darcy chances a glance around at the restaurant she finds that one or two of her fellow clientele have taken to staring at her with looks of bewildered confusion. Yeah, it probably is pretty strange for people to randomly be shouting names of Norse gods in truck stop restaurants, but if only they knew.

She looks up at Loki, who is still definitely taking some sick amusem*nt in her desperate tactic when he asks her, "What are you doing?"

Oh yeah, like she's the strange one.

Darcy rolls her eyes, because seriously, this is really messed up.

“Thor?” she says, a touch of her frustration bleeding through her words. “You know; tall, blonde, totally cut, Mew Mew? Your brother?” His eyes darken at her last words.

"Thor," Loki hisses venomously, "is an oaf. He is a lout, an overbearing blowhard who deserves to be stranded among the mortals he so disgustingly covets."

Darcy’s hands clench in an abrupt wave of annoyance. "Thor's all right," Darcy says hotly. "He might be weird and lacking in social graces, but he helps people." She pushes her glasses up her nose. "He knows that he's more powerful than us but he wants to use his power to protect people, not enslave them." This is taking a dangerous turn, Darcy thinks, and she can see where it’s going to end up if she doesn’t shut her mouth but god help her if she can prevent it. She continues, feeling her face heat up with all the fear and frustration she’s been keeping in since he sat down, "We don't need a ruler, dude. Yeah, we're f*cked up and we do stupid sh*t, but we learn from our mistakes. We mess up and we do better the next time, and you had no right to try and make us any different than we already are.” She pauses before adding, “And if we were going to have someone rule us, it wouldn't be someone who needs an army of space dragon aliens to do it."

Loki's eyes flash. "You speak of that which you do not understand," he hisses . His fingers shift and turn inward, clawing at the table-top so hard that Darcy imagines she can hear the screech. It's that visual, combined with the wave of palpable anger she feels from him, that makes Darcy wish that for just one second she could not put her foot in her mouth.

But the door is already opened, and since he seems like he's probably going to kill her anyway Darcy walks right through it.

"Dude, you lost. However you want to justify it, you got your ass handed to you by a bunch of superheroes. I don't know if they have comic books or Sci-fi movies where you're from, but your odds weren't great from the beginning." Darcy runs her fingers through her hair. "There's nothing that any of us can tell you that's going to change that."

“Failure is for those who lack the conviction of their principles.” Loki fixes her with a penetrating stare that holds her in her seat, fingers itching and legs starting to ache with the intensity of muscles straining to flee.

“But, dude…” Darcy says slowly. “You lost.”

She watches his fingers bend, this time definitely seeing the grooves left in their wake, and Loki tilts his head and glares at her from under his dark brows, bits of inky hair falling forward and framing his face like shadow.

“A temporary setback.” Loki fixes her with an intense stare and continues, “Hear me, mortal. Your race and your world are operating on borrowed time. Whatever comforts you have enjoyed due to the intervention of your precious Avengers are to be repaid tenfold.”

She opens her mouth to speak, but is cut off by the flash in his eyes. He breathes in sharply, “You and your kind will kneel before me, and I care not whether it is in blood or by choice.”

They fall into silence and Darcy thinks that Loki looks suddenly weary. His mouth is drawn into a thin line and his eyes are downcast, deep shadows underscoring a sense of fatigue. He lifts his hands, almost absently runs his fingers along the gouges they have left in the table’s surface with an expression that almost looks like confusion, before he rallies whatever internal crazy juice he uses to get himself pumped up and turns his bright eyes on Darcy.

She can see that his mind is made up without him having to say anything, because if there's one thing that seeing and talking to Loki three times in the last week has taught her, it's that the second he isn't looking like he wants to kill you is probably the most dangerous moment in your entire interaction. It's this new look, when he looks defeated, like he has no other options but to follow through, that is the most frightening.

In a roundabout way he's told her that he plans on staging another attack on Earth, for whatever messed up and convoluted reasons he thinks he has, and he's definitely already told her he will go after Shannon and Mark as his first stop on that crazy train. It's all about the files - those f*cking files - and if Darcy could go back in time she would never have touched or even looked at them. She knows, almost without a doubt, that Shannon and Mark still have theirs if they haven't been caught. When (because if isn't even an option) Loki finds them, he'll kill them, along with anyone else who gets in his way. And once he has the files there's no telling what he'll do with the information inside them, which obviously means a hell of a lot more to him than it did to Darcy. He'll use that information to attack people, he'll kill and maim until he gets his way. And he'll start right here, in this Texas truck stop diner with all these customers, with Sophie and with her.

And, god help her, Darcy doesn't want any of that to happen.

“Look," she says. “I’ll make you a deal.”

She doesn't want to die. If it means that her friends might be safe, that more innocent people won't die in Loki's desperate bid to reclaim his power, and that she might be able to stop (or at least slow down) his plans to start another New York alien party, then she'll do what she has to.

Loki raises his eyebrow at her, and yeah she too is still wondering why she's doing this.

"Let me take you to Mark and Shannon, and let me talk to them - convince them to give you their files - without violence. I'll help you find them and you don't kill or hurt any more people trying to get there. And then...then I will help you with whatever plan you have to get your mojo back."

It’s a lot more than what he was asking her for, she knows, but this is the only way she can think of to make sure that Shannon and Mark will be safe and that he simply won’t kill her after she’s led him to them. He does seem to like minions, she remembers from reading the files, and while she isn’t any old Erik Selvig, she’s better than what he’s got right now, which is apparently nothing.

And if she can get some information from him about his ultimate plans in the meantime and get that intel to Thor or SHIELD…that’s even better.

Loki is silent for a moment, looking thoughtful as his eyes wander around the restaurant. He is still and silent for such a long time that Darcy wonders if maybe he’s already killed her and her mind hasn’t caught up with it yet, but then he turns his eyes on her and smiles, that guiltless smile that is anything but.

He nods his head to Darcy, a regal gesture that is underscored by the corners of his mouth curving upward.

“I accept your proposal, Miss Lewis.”

Darcy swallows, and for a brief moment in the face of Loki’s acquiescence, she wonders why her brilliant and selfless plan suddenly feels like it wasn’t her idea at all.

Chapter 12: Roads, Hell, and Good Intentions

Chapter Text

They’re traveling on I-10, heading towards the Texas/Louisiana border, when Darcy is overcome with the desire to be as bratty as possible.

She decides it would be a good idea to start listening to a country music station. Why? When you’re driving cross-country and you come in and out of those pockets of civilization between major cities the only things on the radio are either news, conservative or religious talk-radio, and local music stations, which this close to deep South means country music. Normally she would leave the radio off and enjoy the silence; the steady crunching of her beat-up car on the Texas highway and the little jolts that riding so low to the ground on an unstable suspension will give you. This time though, she’s got a passenger. A tall, brooding, annoying as f*ck passenger whose murderous expression with each shift from one song to the next indicates that there are people out there who hate country music more than Darcy does.

And Darcy aims to please.

It’s probably not smart to test Loki’s limits like this. But she was more than a little miffed when they left the little truck stop restaurant and he demanded that she “escort him to whatever meager Midgardian contraption she used for transportation.” Their exit was abrupt - his idea not hers. They sky had begun to darken with clouds and she had a fleeting hope that maybe Thor had finally decided to listen to her but also acknowledged that she probably didn’t want to end up in the middle of that confrontation. The prospect of riding the rest of the way to New Orleans in her tiny vehicle with Loki was disheartening, but seeing the look on his face when he stopped short at the passenger door of her car made it worth it. Especially after Darcy made a show of getting into the car, sighing luxuriously and sinking down into the driver’s seat as if it was infinitely more comfortable than it really was, and said to him, “This is how Earth people travel. If you don’t want to ride with me, why don’t you just poof yourself there?”

Loki had opened his mouth when a distant crash of thunder sounded overhead. He looked heavenward for a moment and Darcy saw his fists clench before he heaved a dramatic sigh and opened the door to wedge himself into the car.

After about five seconds of watching him struggle to fit his long frame into the tiny space, Darcy decided not to tell him about the merits of seat adjusters in ‘meager Midgardian contraptions’.

They drove in silence all the way through Houston, the evening sun falling down behind them and bathing the road with sunset. The view off the Texas highway shifted as they drove, vistas and rolling sandy hills like those in New Mexico shifting into grass and flatland as they went farther east, fields of weeds and wildflowers blowing in the breeze and kicking up dirt and pollen that floated in the air like fairy dust from a children’s story. If she hadn’t been distracted, Darcy might have actually considered stopping for a moment on the side of the road, kicking off her shoes and taking the opportunity to stretch her legs among the vast expanse of land that stretched like the ocean on either side of the rapidly-darkening highway. There was a time, when she and Jane were desert-buddies and Erik was off "conducting research in town" (drinking), the two women would sit on the roof of the trailer and stare at the stars. Jane loved it out in the middle of nowhere because she could see everything - no light pollution she said. Darcy liked it because it was peaceful, stillness and privacy in nature, which is always somehow infinitely more grounding than solitude around other people.

Now though, she was distracted – and slightly annoyed – because it was beginning to seem like no matter what, Asgardians were just doomed to be inhumanly attractive all the time. First it was Thor with his eight-pack (she'd counted), and now his brother.

Loki had seemed uncomfortable when he got into the car. She had debated turning on the air conditioner, maliciously thinking of how hot it must be for him in all that leather and metal, before deciding twisting that knife deeper wasn’t worth her own discomfort. Besides, he was already folded like a giant crane in a birdhouse, hands resting on the tops of his knees and staring straight ahead like he wanted the highway before them to burst into flames so he could go dancing in its ashes. They were mutually content to ignore one another for the long drive back through Texas. Darcy hated awkward silences but she was absolutely fine with the one that had settled between the two of them.

The next time Darcy looked at Loki was when she realized that she was actually getting used to him being next to her. It was surprising, because complacency around megalomaniac aliens with a history of blowing sh*t up is a sure fire way to get you killed, but he hadn’t said a single word to her in the three plus hours they’d been driving. It was a dark night and this far outside a major city there were only sparse street lights and emergency call-boxes to light their way along with the occasional vehicle traveling on the highway in the opposite direction. Darcy was making sure to go the speed limit, decidedly not wanting to get pulled over by the Texas State Highway Patrol with SHIELD’s Most Wanted in tow, and also not wanting to test her own ‘wanted-or-not-wanted’ status. The car’s interior was dimly lit, shadows and patches of light dancing across like neon jackrabbits under every light they passed, and Darcy found that when her eyes drifted to Loki that he was sleeping.

She almost didn’t believe it at first. His head was tilted towards the road and angled slightly away from her, one of his hands balanced on the window and the other resting on his knee, long fingers splayed outward. His eyes were closed, and in the pale light cast by the moon and stars she could see shadows under them. He appeared gaunt, sharp cheekbones seeming pronounced with little strands of his black hair falling forward over his eyes. It was absurd, that he looked like nothing more than a young man who was utterly exhausted and hadn’t rested in far too long, his fingers twitching and shifting occasionally on his knee presumably in response to whatever dream he was having. Darcy stole glances at him over the next few miles just to make sure she was seeing right. Apparently she was, and when on one such glance she thought she saw his eyes squeeze shut and his fingers curl into his knee, she had the most irrational thought she’d had since meeting him.

That he looked vulnerable.

Darcy’s hands gripped the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white, and she stared determinedly at the road ahead. So what if he was tired? f*cker deserved to be tired. She was tired too, and he himself had given her enough ammo for nightmares to keep her from a good night’s sleep for the rest of her life. If she couldn’t take a nap then why should he be able to? She was already along for the ride on his crazy road-trip - she wasn’t going to do him any more favors.

Hence the country music. It’s not like she’s listening to it to broaden her cultural horizons.

"We met in the springtime when blossoms unfold. The pastures were green and the meadows were gold. Our love was in flower as summer grew on. Her love like the leaves now has withered and gone.”

Although, Darcy can’t really deny that it is kind of cool. Hank Williams makes an oddly fitting soundtrack for a secret road-trip with a wanted criminal in tow towards what might be the start to the end of the world as she knows it.

Darcy glances at the dashboard clock and sighs. Almost midnight, and they’re still in Texas. She had been hoping to at least make it into Louisiana, maybe even pull a complete all-nighter and make it to New Orleans with as few stops as necessary. She just wanted to get this over with, to find Shannon and Mark and get them the hell out of dodge as quickly as possible. But nature is calling, her back is starting to hurt from sitting in the same position so long and she’s getting hungry again.

She reaches down and fiddles with the radio knob, twisting it so the blaring speakers fill the small car with the twanging sounds of guitar. Sparing a peek at her passenger, who is now apparently awake and definitely disgruntled, Darcy reaches down and turns the volume up even higher.

“Alone and forsaken by fate and by man. Oh, Lord, if you hear me please hold to my hand. Oh, please understand.”

Loki breathes in sharply through his nose and Darcy represses a smirk when from the corner of her eye she sees him shoot her a murderous glance and run his fingers through his hair. He doesn’t comment on the music, which is somewhat disappointing, but Darcy figures that she should probably be grateful. She’s already spending her frequent-flyer good karma miles faster than she can earn them.

It still doesn’t stop her from tapping her fingers on the steering wheel and humming just a little bit loudly when the next song starts.

At almost one o’clock in the morning Darcy is ready to call it quits. She’s made a valiant effort of ignoring both Loki and her body’s protest against an extended period of inactivity, but she’s beginning to notice that the distance between gas stations and rest stops is getting farther and longer. If they’re going to stop they need to do it soon.

She turns down the music. “So I’m thinking we need to pull into the next all-night gas station-slash-McDonalds we see and get food,” Darcy says.

Loki makes a noise that sounds somewhere between a snort and a huff, and Darcy looks to him and raises her eyebrow. Since she turned on the music he’s just been sitting there staring straight ahead.

"Look dude, the car needs gas and I need food. And sleep. And to get out of this f*cking car before my ass melds with the seat and we make little Transformer-style babies."

She doesn't expect him to get the reference and she takes his lack of response for assent. She keeps her eyes peeled on the highway for a rest stop or gas station. After about ten more miles she sees it, a green sign with restaurant brands and motel logos plastered on a fading metal slab half falling from its post. Beggars can't be choosers. She takes the exit, turning under the dark shadow of the concrete wall dividing the highway from the little community where the strip of half-lit sh*tty corporate signs light the way forward like some kind of shabby rendition of the Vegas strip in a war zone. There's no McDonalds, but there's a Dairy Queen that's attached to a 24-hour gas station. There are a few cars and trucks parked out front, and through the windows illuminated from within she can see that the restaurant is still open and serving food.

Darcy pulls in and can’t get out the car fast enough. She fumbles to get the door open at the same time she releases her seatbelt. The result: she barely manages to stop herself from face-planting into the asphalt.

"Shut up," she says quickly, knowing he saw whole thing. When she rights herself he's standing by the passenger door looking like she's somehow inconvenienced him into waiting.

Darcy looks around the empty parking lot, feeling suddenly apprehensive about taking Loki inside the restaurant. He's already proven to have a bad track record when it comes to public appearances, and after spending all those hours in a car with just her he's bound to be a little stir-crazy. Stir-crazy super villains plus traveling tourists plus fast-food restaurant comfort and amenities are not likely to equal a happy ending. And it’s not like he’s a dog she can keep on a leash (if anyone’s on a leash here, it’s her). Except for the tentative promise of mutual cooperation to follow through on their agreement, Darcy isn't naive enough to think that Loki wouldn't turn his back on all that in a heartbeat if the mood struck him. The trick is making sure the mood doesn't strike.

There's nothing in the gas station that she thinks might interest him (renegade alien terrorists are so hard to shop for) but there is a string of motels across the street.

Okay Darce, time to act like a good little minion.

"Hey," Darcy says softly, leaning her arms on the car and facing Loki over the roof, "you don't have to come inside if you don't want to. I can get us food while you go get a room or something." She waves her arm in the direction of the motels across the street.

Loki, who has been eyeing the restaurant with a look of disgust like he dreads the very thought of stepping foot inside, turns his contemptuous look on Darcy, who doesn’t shrink back. Much.

“I certainly don’t have to do anything,” he says. “Least of all anything you suggest.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. And here she was trying to be nice.

“You don’t have to be such an asshole all the time, you know?” she says. “I was just saying that you, obviously, don’t want to go in there. And I’m hungry, and tired, and I don’t want to clean up your mess if you decide that you can’t handle a little exposure to some f*cking tourists.”

“Your suggestion presumes that the presence of these ‘tourists’ could affect me in any way. They are an annoyance, but I pay them no more heed than I do the rest of your kind.”

Which is none at all.

“Let me ask you a question,” Darcy leans forward over the car and fixes Loki with a pointed stare. “How, exactly, were you planning to ‘rule’ us if you can’t even stand to be around us?”

“The burdens of rule, while many, do not imply the necessity of interaction with one’s subjects. Asgard has molded and shaped the workings of various realms for centuries without a single foot stepped upon the surface.” Loki turns to face her fully, eyes shining in the offset fluorescent lights. “A successful intervention is ensured as much by guidance as sheer mass of presence.”

Darcy raises her eyebrow. “Says the guy who brought an entire army with him to try and take out New York City."

Loki waves his hand in dismissal. “The circ*mstances are hardly the same. When one's charge strays from the intended path, corrective action must be taken to eliminate the weak elements."

Wow. Just, wow.

"Those 'weak elements' are people," Darcy says. "Human beings. And even though that might not mean much to you, it's important to us. You can't really think that we would’ve been down with you destroying us for our own good."

"Those in need of the greatest assistance are often the last to realize it."

Darcy digs her nails into the car's roof. "We've been around for a hell of a long time, dude. Maybe not as long as you, but long enough. We've gotten through a lot of sh*t, without 'interference'. If we have a problem, we work it out on our own. Until you and Thor showed up, we were doing just fine."

“’Fine’ is not how I would describe the state of your world, little mortal. The destruction you bring upon yourselves is proof enough that you were granted autonomy too quickly. Asgard is the reason your kind exists, and your conflicting nature a testament to the failure of those who think you better suited to be allies than subjects. I am merely restoring things to their natural order.”

Loki smiles at her, and Darcy sees that it's that patronizing one he's so fond of, but this time it strikes her differently because for how annoying and self-centered he is, he also has a point: he is immortal. Apparently. And he’s basically just told her that he (well, not explicitly him, but his people…his family from Asgard) were somehow responsible for the development of humanity.

Say what?

"Dude...the Vikings were around a really, really long time ago. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of all the hot tall blonde actors they spawned, and I'm sure the ones you guys met back in the day were really into you, but," Darcy sighs, "there were tons of other cultures around before and after them, with gods of their own."

Darcy pauses. Does that mean that there could really be an Isis or a Zeus or a Ganesh? Like, talking animals and talking plants and stuff? That could be cool.

Loki's expression grows dark.

Or not.

"But we've come a long way since then. Hell, my iPod would have probably been amazing to them." Darcy glances towards the string of rundown chain restaurants and cheap motels lining the darkened dusty street. A gust of wind breezes through and she sees a tumbleweed cross the street. "Actually...it probably would be pretty impressive today in some places too..."

She trails off, and when she looks back at Loki she sees his face is stone, his mouth set in a grim line.

Damn it, she pissed him off didn't she?

"It's just that, except for new-age Pagans and maybe ten people living in Iceland, nobody really even thought you all existed until New York. It's kind of hard to believe you would just show up again after all this time because of some grand master plan you guys had for us that we didn't know about."

Darcy watches Loki carefully for his reaction. He doesn't say anything for a long moment, green eyes narrowed at her. She can feel her own start to tear from keeping them open for so long. Finally, he blinks and fixes her with a pitiless expression.

"The greatest folly of your resistance is that the end result is already predetermined," Loki says. "Humanity may cling to the precious notion that you will guide yourselves into the future, but you fail to recognize that every action taken is already foreseen.”

A twisted smile crosses his face. "Do you think that Midgard, which you now know is but one branch of a far greater tree, would have remained untouched for so long without interference? Without protection?"

Darcy's jaw drops. "Protection? You attacked us!"

Loki scoffs. "You continue to display the same short-sighted mindset I speak of!" He takes a step towards the car, the light behind him casting his tall figure in semidarkness and black leather twirling around him like shadow. Darcy braces her feet on the asphalt, lower body tensing in preparation for flight.

Gaze piercing, his eyes bore into hers across the precarious car-length distance between them. "Immediate appearances belie the implications of my actions," Loki says slowly, sweetly condescending, "the perception of harm is truly less than reality. And," he holds his hand up when Darcy opens her mouth to interrupt, "I speak of reality as it is known to those who have true powers of perceiving such things. Not of your beloved Avengers, who themselves threaten to disrupt the safety of this realm with their very existence, and not of your politicians and civil leaders."

Darcy blinks.

"So..." she says slowly. "Let me get this straight. You think it's our own fault that you attacked us?" She rubs her forehead. "Because we didn't go along with the plans you guys supposedly had for us that we knew nothing about? And, by protecting ourselves - from you - we've made ourselves into an even bigger target?"

Loki just smiles.

Riiight. Okay. Well, this is going nowhere.

Darcy doesn't even want tobegin trying to dissect all that crazy sh*t. She's hungry, she's tired, and frankly she's getting really sick of the whole 'humans are the galactic equivalent of pathetic animals’ thing.

“Fine,” she sighs and rubs her eyes wearily. “Whatever. If you want to shoot the sh*t about philosophy and theology and all that realpolitik crap tomorrow, fine, but right now I’m tired and I’m going inside. I’m getting a big freaking Blizzard and then I’m going to the motel across the street and I’m going to bed.”

She turns from the car and starts to walk towards the door when Loki is suddenly right in front of her, startling her by reaching out and catching her upper arm in a vice-like grip.

“Ouch!" she yells. "What the hell, man?”

He looks down at her, shadows obscuring the majority of his expression but she can tell he’s scowling.

“Do you think me naive?” Loki hisses. “That I would allow you to wander away to contact Thor or SHIELD?”

“I won’t!” Really, she has no plans to try and do anything like that yet. At least not until after she makes sure Shannon and Mark are safe. Her stomach clenches and she feels her face heat as her heart starts to race. A wave of adrenaline passes through her and makes her nauseous, no sleep and low blood sugar making her dizzy. Her stomach clenches and she feels her cheeks heat as her heart starts to race. “I promise.”

He leans his head closer to her face, the light catching his eyes and making them seem cat-like. “Your assurances are meaningless,” he says coldly. “I have my own methods of verification.”

She knows what he means and tries to pull away, her frantic gaze landing on the groups of people sitting in the restaurant. They’re right there! How can they not see this?

Loki reaches for her face with his free hand, the arm around her bicep growing tighter as he pulls her towards him to right her position. Cold fear works its way up her spine, throughout her body and freezing in her veins like liquid adrenaline. Fight or flight but she can’t do either, and she closes her eyes when she sees the pale flash of his fingers in her periphery.

“Wait,” she whispers.

She expects the touch anyway and after a few seconds of not feeling anything she cracks her eyes open. They meet directly with Loki’s green ones, sparkling and tinged with annoyance and anger. But he stopped. She has no idea why, and from the look on his face she thinks that he might not either.

“Just…please don’t make it hurt like last time,” she says quietly.

His expression gives nothing away, no shift or change or any sign of emotion that would indicate that he heard what she said or that her words affected him. From the corner of her eye, she sees his fingers flex, his hand suspended near her temple.

“Then do not resist,” he says finally.

Darcy feels the blood as it leaves her face, heaviness falling down to settle in the pit of her stomach. She nods her head and closes her eyes.

This time the feel of Loki’s fingers on her face is a completely new sensation. Maybe it’s because the previous time he touched her it had been a total surprise and she wasn’t at all prepared to catalogue the myriad of feelings associated with being touched in such a way. It’s more intense than she remembers, anticipation and apprehension making her tense and expecting the absolute worst.

It starts off like it did last time, with a gentle sensation that feels like floating. The sudden shift in balance is confusing and she feels herself start to fall forward. There are endorphins and there is numbness, and like before she feels her control of her body slipping away, her hands falling from their resistant position to her sides. She sees little sparks of light dancing behind her closed eyelids, budding brighter and brighter until they become so bright that Darcy has the urge to squint even though her eyes are closed.

The sensations are less subtle this time and when she feels them growing behind her eyes like roots she has to stamp out the instinctive desire to resist. They get bigger, those rolling waves of feeling, and without the buffer of her resistance she feels them as they reach into her mind, tendrils brushing past her memories and making them play like a grind-house horror film before her eyes, all fast and confusing and exactly what she remembers but worse because its tainted with the impressions of the person watching it. She sees Thor’s face, his golden hair and determined scowl when he came to her rescue, Jane’s sad brown eyes and tentative smile, Bruce’s self-deprecating laugh and gentle expression. It’s her personal memories, laid bare for the judgment of their viewer.

But it doesn’t hurt. Not physically anyway.

When Loki withdraws his fingers from her temple it’s like he pulled the plug from a running appliance; she almost crumples to the ground. Her lack of resistance must have made it better because she doesn’t pass out like last time, but she does reach out with her trapped arm to grasp Loki’s for stability, gripping the leather-clad crook of his elbow in a tight hold. When she regains some of her brain power she launches herself backward so fast that she nearly falls over.

She breathes in heavily, stomach roiling. “Are you happy?”

Loki doesn’t say anything. Darcy looks at the ground, assuring herself that her feet are well and truly planted on it, before casting her gaze up to his legs. He hasn’t moved, but she doesn’t want to look him in the eye.

He didn’t throw her off like she half-expected him to after she collapsed. She shakes her head. Wow, what a gentleman. How nice of him not to let her fall after mind-raping her.

“Whatever,” she sighs and clutches her hands to her chest. She’s not really hungry anymore, but she knows she needs to eat something. She needs to keep her strength up, especially if this little performance is going to be repeated every time he needs to make sure she isn’t lying about something, which is, unfortunately, probably going to be a lot.

She slowly walks to the door of the restaurant, hand shaking as she reaches out to grab the door handle.

"Bastard," she mutters, and doesn’t look back to see if he heard her.

Chapter 13: Inherently Inferior Inconsistencies

Chapter Text

The next morning finds Darcy sitting in the little half-kitchen masquerading as a “dining room” in the hotel lobby, three sets of plastic tables and chairs facing a wall-mounted television that’s streaming some local hunting channel. Breakfast was included in the price for the room, and here that apparently means packaged oatmeal, suspiciously hard bagels, a few apples and bitter coffee.

Darcy drinks it anyway, loaded to the gills with sugar packets and powdered creamer, because there is no way in hell she’s facing whatever is going to come her way today without some caffeine.

She didn’t sleep very well. Surprise, surprise. Last night’s encounter – both the argument and the aftermath – have put her on edge. If she closes her eyes it’s almost as if she can see her nightmare coming back to her; snippets of the visions and memories that Loki pulled from her mind, all of them playing out exactly the way she remembers but with a horrible feeling that they just aren’t right. As if she was watching them for the first time with the expectation that they would turn out different, only to end up severely disappointed with the outcome.

She takes off her glasses and rubs her temples. This disassociation is so f*cking confusing.

Darcy has always prided herself on being comfortable in all aspects of self-acceptance, even the sarcastic self-defense mechanism kind. Say what you will about her looks and attitude, but anyone who knows Darcy cannot deny that she is comfortable in her own skin. If that means admitting that she sometimes hates how easy it is for her to slip on the veil of nonchalance and disinterest in place of tackling the issue at hand, then she will do it – mind, with attitude and a sharp retort, but she’ll do it nonetheless. She’s not perfect; she’s made mistakes and keeps right on making them. But every time she does it’s been for the right reasons.

Odin help her if that isn’t making it any f*cking easier.

She sighs and feels the entire weight of the past few days sink on her shoulders, pressing her down and practically begging for her head to rest on the table in front of her. She never thought it was possible, but her snark meter feels like it’s getting empty. The thought sends a small spike of bittersweet amusem*nt through her. Then where would she be? What’s Darcy without her trademark attitude? A waitress in a strip club with a dusty Bachelor’s degree and a growing list of supernatural secrets that’s almost as long as her arm. Her parents would be so proud to see her now: sitting in dirty clothes at a sh*tty table in a cheap Texas motel, proverbially chained at the hip to the guy who tried to turn New York into a parking lot.

What would her friends say?

Shannon might find some amusem*nt in the whole thing if she herself weren’t running for her life. She’d at least appreciate the irony. Thor and Bruce would be adorably confused, heads co*cking and ruffled hair like giant puppies. What’s wrong Darcy? Can I get super angry and make it better? She snickers at the visual. Jane’s face appears before her. Look what you’ve gotten yourself into now Darce, she might say, and she’d look at her with those sad brown eyes and make her feel ten times worse than she already does.

Although, Darcy amends, this new Jane might actually surprise her. She might arch an eyebrow and give her a look that says ‘I’m sleeping with the God of f*cking thunder bitch’ and tell her to buck up and smack the sh*t out of Loki the next time she sees him.

Darcy snorts a laugh.

“What’s so amusing?”

Speak of the devil.

She spins in her seat to see the dude himself, appearing in the doorway and taking it all up with his towering height and elaborate Asgard wardrobe. She didn’t see him at all last night after their little interaction and took his disappearance to mean that he’d either found himself a room or been captured.

Pity, she was hoping for the latter.

Darcy gives Loki a sardonic smile. “Do you understand the concept of self-deprecating humor?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer, spinning back around and grabbing her coffee cup. “Probably not. That would require you to actually admit that you’ve done something worth deprecating. And to have a sense of humor.”

Loki chuckles darkly. “Oh I have a sense of humor.”

“Yeah, I don’t think our definitions are the same.”

“Understandable. Sophisticated humor requires intelligence to grasp.”

“I think that schadenfreude went out of style in the 1800s. But kudos for the automatic ‘you’re stupid’ thing. That wasn’t obvious at all.” If and when they start devolving into 'your mama' insults, she'll know it's time to gouge her eyes out. The plastic spoon in her hand probably won't do the trick.

Loki moves to the counter and starts imperiously eyeing all the hotel's breakfast items. Yes, she wants to say, this is how human beings eat breakfast, I'm sorry but they don't have any golden plates for your Majesty, boo f*cking hoo. At the same time, though, she can't help but be reminded of Thor when they first met. He really didn't know any better either, and at least Loki hasn't thrown any coffee mugs on the floor. She gets the sense that's not really his style. No, he'd probably manipulate one of the cleaning staff into accidentally stealing something and then demand a refund or a free meal from the hotel's manager.

Still, he does seem kind of...lost. She wonders if she should say something, maybe guide him away from eating the Styrofoam clamshell containers and towards the actual - though not any better tasting - real food.

She blinks, shaking her head to get that out. Was that concern? For him?

As scary as it is to think, it would almost be better to know that Loki’s mind-melds have left an impression on her. That way she would at least know what’s making her go insane.

“You know, you really should think about dressing in something else,” she says instead, eyeing the way his green and black cloak drag along the grimy laminate floor. “You’re being kind of obvious.”

Loki sneers at her, plucking a bagel from the basket on the counter before dropping it to the floor in disgust. “Why would I alter my appearance?” he asks. “I care not for the opinions of mortals, and those who seek to find me would know me regardless.”

Okay, point. “Still…you stick out.” Darcy takes a swig of her coffee and grimaces. “I thought you wanted to blend in and not draw attention to yourself. This,” she gestures to his Asgardian ensemble, “sticks out.”

He raises his eyebrow but actually (surprisingly) appears to be considering her words.

An idea strikes her. A beautiful, brilliant idea full of rainbows and kittens and sunshine.

She decides to take a chance. “We could go shopping. I’m sure there’s a dollar store in this town. Besides,” she says nonchalantly, making her demeanor as unconcerned as she can. “I need clothes and stuff. I feel like I’m going to start growing mold or something if I don’t use legitimate soap anytime soon.”

His eyes narrow. “How long until we arrive in New Orleans?” he asks, lips thinning.

Darcy stalls. “Umm, we can probably get there tomorrow morning? Maybe tonight if we don’t stop at all except for gas and bathroom breaks.” Which they definitely will, and not just because she wants to put off the confrontation with Shannon and Mark as long as possible.

“Then you can wait.”

She scowls and forcefully sets her cup down.

“And what about afterwards?”

She glances at him, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed over his chest and a calculating expression on his face.

“We shall see.”

Darcy is moving out of the seat seat before her brain registers the screech of the chair on the floor, and when she catches up with herself she’s standing about two feet from Loki, hands fisted in anger at her sides and a murderous glare on her face.

“I am not a child!” she yells. “And I am not a f*cking pet! You want me to help you? Then you have to treat me with at least something resembling respect. You don't have to mean it, but you have to at least acknowledge that I am a living, breathing thing that needs -"

She breaks off, inhaling hard through her nose.

She needs...Christ does she need. Needs to get the f*ck out of here, for one. Needs to go back home. Needs to go anywhere that isn't here.

Loki is looking down at her. She can almost hear what he might be thinking. I do not want your help, filthy little meat-sack; I am allowing you to help me. I am benevolent and almighty and you are lucky I see fit to even grace you with my presence blah blah blah.

Yeah, that would fit right along just fine with everything else he's said to her.

"If you go to this...dollar store," he says eventually, the words fitting weird around his tongue. "Then I will need to have assurances you will not try to contact SHIELD or my - Thor."

Darcy definitely notices his almost-slip, and definitely decides not to mention it.

"Let me guess", she says wryly, her stomach already flip-flopping. "You're not just gonna take my word for it."

Loki doesn't answer. Not that he has to.

Darcy takes a deep breath and shakes her head.

"So is this what being a minion is like," she says, mostly to herself but loud enough that she knows he can hear her. "Do I need to ask before I eat, too? How about before I go to the bathroom?" Her voice is rising and she doesn't even care, her hands curling into angry fists. "Would you like me to bow and scrape and call you 'sir'? Would that be enough for you, Your Highness?"

The words are already out of her mouth before she realizes what she just said...and Who The f*ck she just said it to.

Her mind gives her a case of whiplash so bad it almost makes her vision black. "Uh..."

There are no words to describe how desperately she wants to turn around and walk away. Rewind the past five seconds so that they never happened. But she can't, because Loki is staring at her and his face is doing that stupid thing where there's no expression so she can't be sure if what she's reading into it is what's actually there.

They remain in silence for a long moment, could be thirty seconds or an eternity as far as Darcy can tell, and nobody says anything. Not one f*cking word.

Darcy swallows. "So." She realizes that she's still standing really close to him and backs up a few feet, the back of her legs hitting the vacated chair. Sorry I got all up in your business, she feels like saying. When you turn me into an insect, please make it a cute one like a ladybug or a butterfly and not one that people go out of their way to try and kill like a co*ckroach or a spider. But there is another part of her - one that sounds suspiciously, annoyingly, like Jane - telling her to stay silent and stand her ground.

She looks up to find that he is watching her.

"Don't act as if this is some great burden," he says, unfolding his arms and reaching behind his back for the basket of little box cereal. His voice doesn't hold nearly the amount of malice she was expecting it to. "When we both know it could have been much worse."

Darcy snorts. She's exhausted, suddenly. It's getting to be a common feeling after a conversation with him.

"Believe me," she says, sinking back down into her seat at the table. Her coffee has gone cold, now, and she doesn't think she can even try and finish her breakfast. "If you still had the Tesseract I'd almost take the brainwashing any day, pal." She never thought she'd actually prefer being a mindless automaton before. It's scary how her life has become a 'would you rather' zombie apocalypse scenario, only much less amusing.

"Would you," he says quietly.

Darcy gets the sense that she's said something...not wrong, but affecting. She struck a chord, somewhere. It's in his voice, how he doesn't sound like he's mocking her but isn't completely serious, more a whisper to himself than an actual comment directed at her. She wouldn't call it sad, just...resigned, maybe.

But, as is also becoming common every time they talk, when she looks at him she finds nothing there.

-----

As luck (or city planning) would have it, there's a store about half a mile down the road from the motel. Texas Silver Dollar it's called, a surprisingly large blue and white warehouse-type building with a big parking lot, nearly empty except for a few cars that Darcy assumes belong to the employees. The store's windows are dark from the outside and Darcy can see her car's reflection as they approach, her and Loki's silhouettes sticking out like pale blots through the windshield. She pulls into a space right by the front door and puts the car in park.

Her hand lingers on the gearshift. She can't bring herself to turn off the engine just yet.

Darcy swallows. She doesn't want to look sideways at Loki when she asks, "So, you said you needed...assurance."

She hears Loki take a deep breath in, the golden metal clasps on his chest flickering in her peripheral vision with the rise and fall of his chest. "Yes," he says.

So she closes her eyes and waits.

But then he doesn't do anything.

Okay...she might have been expecting something dramatic to happen - like another mind-meld, maybe, or a stern lecturing about superiority and punishment and killing people. So it's all kinds of unnerving when the exact opposite is what's happening instead.

And when she does risk a glance, he's not even looking at her. He's staring out the window, green eyes fixed on nothing in particular. Darcy finds herself noticing the paleness of his skin in direct sunlight, how it shines like a marble statue, all clean lines and sharp angles. He doesn't even really look completely human, if you think about it.

Darcy clears her throat. "Loki?"

His eyes slide to meet hers.

"I will expend magic doing this," he says. "So I suggest haste." As he speaks, he lifts one of his hands and turns it facing palm-up. A green mist begins to seep from between his fingers, and Darcy watches, rapt, as it swirls around his hand and up his arm.

Now, she's seen her fair share of weird sh*t. A legit god of thunder, a giant death-bot with a laser face, and three Renn-faire rejects with awesome weaponry and badass fighting skills. She's watched Thor power up and go flying, Mew-Mew swinging from his fist like a deadly windmill of death.

But she's never been this close to magic before. True magic, just how Harry Potter and Disney said it would be: all green and misty. It actually has a smell to it, too. Bitter and cloying, like lavender.

The smoke has come up and wrapped around Loki's entire torso, now. His jaw is clenched, his free hand curled into his knee as if in pain. Darcy had never considered it before, that magic would cause pain to create. Everyone always seems so happy doing it.

"Hurry, Darcy," he says through gritted teeth. "Unless you wish to explain to your fellow mortals why a serpent is in their midst."

Darcy's eyebrow furrows. "What?"

And then she screams, because right where Loki was sitting there is suddenly a rattlesnake, all curled up and ready to strike, tail bobbing angrily and angled head turning towards where she sits.

"f*ck!" she cries, and flings the car door open so fast she stumbles out and lands hard on her ass. The impact jars her entire body, glasses falling askew from the bridge of her nose. The backs of her arms are scratched from the pavement, but she doesn't give two sh*ts about them or the little rocks digging into her palms as she crab-crawls herself backwards away from the car. The snake - the Loki snake - keeps sliding towards her, over the center console and into the seat where she was just sitting.

"This is your assurance?" she says, breathing hard. "Scare the living bejezzus out of me so I'm dead and can't say anything?"

Darcy gingerly picks herself up off the pavement and wipes her hands down her sides. The Loki-snake is still sitting in the driver's seat, its head (and oh sweet baby Jonas Brothers that head has to be as big as her fist) co*cked so one great green eye can stare at her. She wonders, suddenly - and with a little bit of hysteria - how a snake can manage to look impatient.

"You're following me inside." It's not really a question, but the Loki-snake flicks its tongue out in a series of movements that Darcy takes to mean anything from a simple 'yes' to 'obviously you stupid mortal now hurry up'.

Well, she supposes, it's not like he can follow her in his normal form. And this is better than another mind-meld... A lot better, actually.

But, snakes?

"Okay," she breathes. "I guess, uh, I'm gonna go in now. Don't, you know, draw to much attention to yourself or anything. This is Texas. They shoot snakes here."

Darcy goes to the front door and pulls the handle. She considers letting it swing shut behind her before Loki-snake can get in, but decides against it. Inside the store is almost as brightly lit as outside, the ceiling full of industrial fluorescents and two-feet wide air conditioning vents. For a moment Darcy stands under the grate just inside the door, closing her eyes and letting the cool stream of cool air wash over her face. The scales of the Loki-snake at her feet brush her ankle and she jumps, but when she looks down there's nothing there.

She shivers. God, that is so creepy.

The aisles before her are all food-stuffs - chips and jerky, soft drinks and bottled waters - and off to the side there's a small gap where the cash register is tucked between mountains of cigarettes. The cashier is an attractive young-ish looking redhead, her cheeks and lips smeared with the kind of cheap makeup you'd find just down the aisle, head bent over a copy of People Magazine.

"Excuse me," Darcy approaches the woman, who looks up at her with a bored expression. "Do you, uh, sell any clothes here? Toiletry items?"

The cashier sets down her magazine and nods with her head towards a cut-off section of the store behind the beer-coolers.

"Thanks," says Darcy, looking at the woman's nametag, "Natalie."

Natalie nods absently, already re-absorbed in her magazine.

Darcy heads toward the back of the store, almost coming to a stop when she sees the security camera bolted above the dividing entryway, red light blinking. It's almost ridiculous how she tenses, her entire body freezing for a split second. Yeah, because nothing looks guiltier than when someone stops and stares at the security camera. Move your feet, woman.

Faking a cough, Darcy looks over her shoulder. No Loki-snake in sight. She swallows. Thank god there's just the cashier here, she thinks. There's no telling what could happen if someone saw a giant rattlesnake wandering through the store.

The back room is basically a one-stop tourist shop with shirts and hats in various combinations of red, white, and blue; there are display cases with knives and shot glasses with somewhat-witty slogans about Texas and the West, and little miniature Texas license plates with people's names on them. There isn't one for Darcy (there never is) and on a whim she checks for one that says Loki. Not surprisingly, there isn't one of those either. There is one for Jane (duh), and one for Bruce...

Without thinking too hard about why, she decides to get those. There's even one for Thor. Since he's famous now (along with the rest of the Avengers), it kind of figures that people would start naming babies after the various members. She almost laughs thinking about it, little kids running around seven years from now named Steve Rogers or Tony Stark, and even 'Black Widow' or 'Hawkeye', since nobody knows their real names.

"That's got to piss you off," she says aloud. "You're just as famous as they are but nobody's naming their kids after the guy who attacked New York." She doubts even the people who live in Scandinavian countries - where Norse names are probably still viable choices for selection - would name their child that, now. A month after the invasion she saw a report on the news of people named Loki from all over the world who went to court to change their names, how those who had used it as an online moniker for social media began switching to something else. It felt amazing, at the time, to see everyone come together like that. The entire world, not just the places he directly affected.

On Earth, at least, it seems that there will be no more Loki's.

No remark from the Loki-snake.

Eh, whatever.

Darcy begins to peruse through the clothing options, talking out loud as she always does. It's a nervous habit that she has - that and chewing on pencils and pen caps, and shredding napkins and paper cups - so she doesn't think anything of it, even though she is aware that, this time, there is actually someone who is listening to her.

"This one is really awesome," she says, holding out a grungy-looking brown and black shirt with old-West style letters that read WANTED. "I could probably wear this to work, you know? Add some jeans and cowboy boots and pull off a Wild West vibe. I bet they sell cowboy hats here." Obviously they sell cowboy hats here. She flips over the price tag for one of them and yelps, "Damn, okay never mind. Skip the cowboy hat and pair it with..." She looks around and spots a rack of bandanas. "Aha!"

She picks up a blue one and folds it into a triangle, holding it up to her chest. She presses it against her breasts and brings the ends back as far as she can, but they won't even reach around her torso. "Ever since I saw Eliza Dushku in that movie The New Guy, I've always wanted to wear one this way. But, alas..."

This, of course, is when she notices the guy standing on the other side of the aisle, looking right at her.

Darcy freezes, the bandana held in the same awkward position. She can feel how wide her eyes are getting.

The guy chuckles - she can hear him all the way over here - and starts walking towards her.

When did the store get so quiet? She could swear that it wasn't this quiet before. And who turned off the air conditioner?

"Please, don't let me interrupt," he says. Her cheeks are getting hot.

He has what her grandmother might have described as a pugilist's face, but in Darcy-speak means he looks like he's been in a lot of fights. His nose is shaped like he's broken it a few times and he has scars scratched along his skin where it peeks out from his clothes. Scary looking, overall, but he does have pretty eyes; and she notices that his tank-top under his uniform vest is actually a t-shirt whose sleeves have been ripped off. Not cut: ripped. And not gently, either, as they ends are frayed. But honestly, who cares.

If I had biceps like that, I'd want to world to see them too.

He laughs, and she realizes that she said that out loud.

sh*t. "Uh, hello," she says, putting the bandana back down and frantically searching the store out of the corner of her eye. She has got to pay more attention to her surroundings. "Hello...strange person. Can I - help you?"

She nearly jumps ten feet in the air when she feels a ghost of sensation on the back of her foot. The scary part is that she can't decide whether she wants it to be Loki or not.

"I was going to ask you the same thing," the guy says. His shirt's nametag says 'Buddy', but Darcy is pretty sure that's some ironic branding thing and not actually his real name. He looks her dead in the eye (his are blue-green, by the way, she's now noticing) and asks, "Do you need help?"

It sounds so much more serious than a simple request a store employee would make, and Darcy finds herself thinking a million miles an hour about how she should answer.

She's noticing - no...she realizes, suddenly, that he's letting her see - how his posture is a little too straight, how he's holding himself a little too tightly. His expression is open and friendly but there's a vibe coming off of him like one gets from an undercover cop at a bar, like they just can't smile all the way. There's an intent behind his gaze that says he's one second away from asking her again and winking in all the right places or using air quotes.

Could he be with SHIELD? Did they find her - find Loki, more like? He used his magic, she recalls, and Thor's words from the hotel in La Cueva come back to her.

I had hopes the reports of his magic being used...

Does that mean SHIELD can track Loki's magic? When he turned into a snake - and why did he do that, to keep them off his trail?

He wanted her to hurry up...

God, she hopes she's not wrong; that she's not reading too much into this. But she has to take the chance.

"Actually, yeah, I could use some help," she says, hoping her voice is holding steady. "I - my friend. Boy...friend. My boyfriend," she grimaces when Buddy's eyebrow arches just a tad, "Is, uh, a big guy. Height-wise. Tall."

Buddy nods slowly. "Uh huh."

"And I...was wondering if you have any men's clothing?" She's going to ignore the fact that she can very clearly see said rack of clothing from where she stands. With any luck, Loki is currently a little vertically challenged.

"Of course," says Buddy, turning to the side and gesturing for her to pass him down the aisle. Darcy swallows and takes a step forward. She half expects to be stopped, any minute now, by the Loki-snake or Loki himself, reemerged angry and in full Asgardian battle regalia, but nothing happens. When they get to the end of the aisle, Buddy subtly grabs her arm and maneuvers her to the side.

He leads-slash-pushes her down the small hallway where the restrooms are located, shoving her through a door at the back labeled Employees Only. When they're both inside, he lets her go and turns around to lock the door.

Darcy breathes a sigh of...relief? Nerves? She breathes a sigh of something.

"Please tell me you're with SHIELD."

Chapter 14: Think It Through (Part One)

Chapter Text

"Please tell me you're with SHIELD."

Buddy glances over his shoulder at her. "Got it in one. Good for you." He's a co*cky sh*t, she thinks. It's not like she could be one hundred percent sure of that before she let him lead her to the back of an empty store.

Looking down, Darcy realizes that she still has the vanity license plates in her hands, the edges digging into her palms. It takes some effort to make her fingers loosen their grip.

"Did you see the snake?" she asks.

"Of course we saw the snake." Buddy starts rummaging through one of the employee lockers and pulls out what looks like a black leather swimsuit. Tactical gear, she supposes, as he starts shaking it out and unzipping various zippers. "It's a f*cking snake."

"Well, then, did you get it? Get him?"

"No." Buddy looks at her, very intently. "I don't do snakes. It's in my contract."

Darcy has no doubt that he is completely serious.

He begins to undress while Darcy stands there, torn between looking and not looking as each piece of his store clerk uniform is replaced with parts of the black suit...and holy arm muscles, Batman, they're even better fully exposed. She didn't even know biceps could have that many bumps on them. Only his jeans and a similarly-threadbare svelte looking black tank top remain when he's finished, and he reaches behind the locker. She can hear something large being scraped along the wall.

"What are you doing? she asks.

"Getting you out of here."

He lifts his wrist up to his mouth and says, in a deep whispering tone, "Eagle, Eagle, we have the package."

"Clint, don't say Eagle."

Darcy jumps, spinning around to face the newcomer. Natalie - or clearly not Natalie - her hair down and cheap makeup all but disappeared, a look on her face that says she's All Business. She's holding a gun in one hand and wearing a similar leather suit as Buddy (Clint now), only hers is much more form-fitting.

And Darcy realizes, then: These two are Avengers. Holy f*ck balls.

"You're Black Widow," she says to Natalie, who nods curtly (Natasha Romanov, she introduces herself, with a handshake as firm as Thor's). Darcy turns to Clint, "And you're -"

"Hawkeye, ma'am. At your service." He bends into a regal bow, one arm outstretched and arrow quiver held behind his back. He kind of looks like Robin Hood when he does it.

"He's trying to impress you," says Natasha.

Clint rights himself, spluttering, "What did you say that for?!" Darcy notices Natasha's arms folded over her chest, like she's bored and this is something that happens all the time, though she does give a flash-quick smug grin.

"It was working," Darcy admits, turning to Clint. "I was being thoroughly impressed."

Clint groans, "See, Nat! Come on!"

Natasha shakes her head. "I knew I should have brought Rogers instead."

"He would have been even worse." Clint winks at Darcy, "He gets flustered around pretty girls."

Natasha rolls her eyes. Darcy, however, is still processing all that's happening, catching up with the words as they're being said. It's a pretty awesome picture she gets in her head, just now: Steve Rogers - Captain America himself - here, rescuing her...

"Oh Jesus Christ," mutters Clint. "You had to mention Cap, didn't you? Now she's got that look on her face." He starts jamming things into the various pockets of his suit, mumbling under his breath in an exasperated tone.

Darcy shakes her head, torn out of her thoughts and reminded, vehemently, where she is and who she's with.

"So you're...rescuing me? What about..."

He's not Voldemort, she tells herself sternly, you can say his name.

"Loki," Natasha says, "is currently outside the door, trying very hard to turn back into his normal form." There's a beeping sound and she pulls out a cell phone from...well, she doesn't seem to have any pockets, so Darcy's just going to put it down to some super hero trick, and looks at the screen. Her lips quirk. "He is not being successful at it."

"Good," Clint says. "f*ck that guy."

Of course, Darcy thinks, a little thrown (but unsurprised) by the venom in his tone. Loki is at the bottom of a lot of lists these days. Probably the Avengers top among them.

Clint explains to her about the research SHIELD had done after the Chitauri invasion. With some insights from Thor into Asgardian biology, video footage of the New York showdown, and tissue samples from Stark Tower ("Hulk flung him around like a rag doll!" Clint says gleefully) they were able to finagle some sort of Loki-branded magic-detector. It doesn't work on a global scale - not yet, anyway - but if they have a general location of where he might be, they can usually pinpoint it enough to get a signal.

And once they have his magic sourced, they can, what?

"Shut it down," is how Clint describes it.

"Shut it down?" Darcy repeats, frowning. "That doesn't make sense."

"It's not technically shutting it down, it's more interrupting cellular service for a little bit. Think of it like this: you have a magnet with two sides, north and south. You want to pull them together, point the opposite end at it. You want to repel it, point the same side and -"

"- Push it away." Huh. She imagines it like creating a bubble where any magical force or energy (or whatever it is that Loki uses to power his mojo) is hit with an invisible barrier. So they're really, literally, using Loki's magic against him.

"Won't that just...I dunno...make him stronger, though?" That's how it seems in movies, anyway: magic is something that's absorbed, like recharging a battery. At least, that's always how Darcy pictured it.

"Not according to Thor. It was successful on the Helicarrier. Loki was contained...for a little while..." Clint trails off, his eyes going blank for a second.

God, what happened to him, Darcy wonders. But there is no way she's going to ask. She hasn't forgotten that he's a real-life superhero (a freaking Avenger) and she's getting to hear some pretty awesome insights into an Earth-shattering event that she'd only been able to witness of the news.

So...while she is endlessly fascinated by this information, she's also waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"sh*t," Natasha says suddenly.

"sh*t?" Uh oh. "What, sh*t?"

"Our sh*t." Natasha jams the phone back into her non-existent pockets and grabs Darcy by the arm. "We need to go."

"Wha -"

BOOM!

The door to the Employee's Only room is now sporting a large dent, the blue metal caved in like that time Darcy accidentally backing into a mailbox, and there are great chunks of stucco and plaster coming down from the ceiling, showering them with bits of starchy, white flakes. Darcy flinches, instinctively trying to duck and cover, but Natasha has her up and moving towards the other set of lockers. Clint is already braced against one and moving it to the side, and before Darcy knows it she's being shoved though a hole in the wall and emerging in the back of the Silver Dollar's parking lot.

"Move!" Natasha shouts, and they start running towards a van that's parked about ten feet off; concealed, Darcy realizes, by three large black waste dumpsters - which was why she didn't see it before. How long have they been sitting on this place, expecting she and Loki would show up? How did they even know he would be there?

The motel...they must have been watching them the entire time.

sh*t.

Clint throws open the van door, revealing a setup right out of a spy film: a giant satellite dish is mounted on a wheel block, hooked up with blue and red wires to a paneling display with flashing lights. They maneuver themselves around the dish and fall into the hollowed-out backseat of the van. Natasha swings herself around the center console into the driver seat and starts it up.

"This is insane," Darcy says. She expects the awe in her voice comes through pretty strong as she looks around, hands scrambling for a grip while Natasha peels out of the parking lot.

Clint shrugs. He settles himself on the floor opposite her with ease - because he probably does this stuff all the time - and pulls out an arrow to fiddle with. "I have a thing for eighties action movies."

"Dude, who doesn't."

There are no windows in the van, so there's no way for Darcy to look back at the Silver Dollar, but she imagines it in her mind as Natasha drives toward the highway; the blue and white structure getting smaller and smaller, perhaps crumbling into ruin if the angry boom was any indication of things to come. She swallows. That poor building, to be facing the wrath of Loki.

Her heart is pounding as she wonders what he must be thinking.

A sharp beep sounds and Darcy whirls around wildly before realizing it's coming from the van's stereo system.

"What the hell happened?" a man's firm voice comes over the speakers. Natasha grabs a microphone on the dash - one of those with the long loopy cord like old phones - and flips it on, motioning over her shoulder for Darcy and Clint to be silent.

"We don't know, sir," she says, all business. "The trap worked for a while, but we encountered some unexpected resistance after a period of degradation." That's a nice way of saying 'it stopped working', Darcy thinks.

"And Loki?" the man asks.

"Negative. But we did get the girl."

There's a pause on the other end. "Fine. Bring her to Alpha Five, but take precautionary measures to make sure that asshole isn't following you."

"Yes, sir."

"And this time, Agent Romanov, remember rule number one."

Natasha nods. "Don't f*ck it up."

"Fury out."

A heavy silence falls, broken only by the sounds of the van's wheels crunching on the dirt road.

Darcy feels like her head is about to explode with the enormity of the headache she has, adrenaline and stress beginning to finally take their toll on her. She's in a van with legit superheroes though, and she vows to herself that unless she passes out there is no way she's going to admit defeat just yet. Even if a huge gigantic big part of her wants to scream.

"So..."She clears her throat, trying to keep her mind busy. "He seems...friendly."

There's no response from Natasha, but Clint eventually does give her a small grin. "He's not the worst."

"Well that's high praise."

After a moment where he's clearly trying to decide how to put it delicately, Clint says, "He's just -"

"A prick," Natasha interjects.

Clint nods. "Right. A prick. But he's our prick, you know?"

Actually...Darcy does know. She completely gets it. That's how people have referred to her for as long as she can remember. Not as a prick¸ per se (though she does have her moments, more so in recent years, and honestly anyone who works in customer service is completely justified in being a little bitchy at times), but as 'that person'. A way of expressing fondness but also acknowledging that she isn't the greatest either; everyone already knows she's going to do something to embarrass them, so it's easier to wave it off than apologize for her behavior. That's just Darcy.

She's got her head tilted so she can see a little bit of what's outside the windshield, though from this angle all she gets is blue sky and clouds, when she feel something warm on the back of her neck. She tenses, her entire body going taut, before she sees that it's Clint's hand. He has a piece of cloth - a blindfold, she realizes - and he gives her a serious, but gentle smile.

They have to blindfold her. Of course. Duh. It's not like they're just going to let her see how to get to their secret base.

She nods, saying, "I understand." Thinking of Loki's preferred method of assurance, she adds, "I am...surprisingly okay with this."

Clint ties the cloth around her eyes, and she won't lie but the darkness scares her a little bit.

Okay...a lot.

Her heart, which has finally slowed to a somewhat more human beat, starts pounding again and her stomach has decided to try and relocate itself to her throat. But she doesn't say anything, just sits with her back against the wall and tries to control her breathing. Channel your inner Bruce, she thinks. Yoga-style. In and out, in and out...

They continue to drive in silence for a while...could be minutes or an hour for as reliable Darcy's judgment of such things is right now. She can hear it as Clint keeps working his arrows, using a small stone-like object to sharpen them and rhythmically running his thumb over the tips, the telltale scritch scratch as his skin catches on the metal. In the front seat Natasha is silent; the only indications that she's there are the subtle dips and revs of the engine as they drive.

For her part, Darcy is trying not to fall over.

How long have you been following me, she wants to ask. Well, following Loki - because let's be honest, nobody would be following her. Was it before or after the incident at the Air Force base? Before or after his accosting her in the motel at La Cueva? If they've had this ability (granted, a small one) to stop Loki using his magic, why didn't they use it to stop him sooner?

She remembers the video that Thor showed her of the man at that vault, absolutely no control of himself, his limbs pliant and ready like a puppet on a string as Loki made him do whatever he wanted. She remembers Beth, the little receptionist at the air force base, with her eyes glazed over and resembling some creepy voodoo-possessed doll.

And herself.

There is a distinct possibility here, she realizes, that SHIELD has known all along what Loki is doing and has done nothing to stop it. There was a class she took in her senior year of college on crimes against humanity (and yes, there are entire textbooks written on Loki and New York) where they discussed the reasons for the, frankly, pathetic response from the worlds' governments against his attack. As nice as it is to imagine, they were taught, there's just no way for regular people to stop a superpower. Loki wouldn't have been able to do what he did, otherwise, and the Avengers wouldn't be so special...wouldn't be needed like they are, to guard against such terrible things.

One could argue, in a broader philosophical-style context of course, that a single person doesn't have the ability to stop something terrible from happening. And what Darcy had taken away from that class was this one question:

Who is worse: the person who does evil things, or the person who knows about the evil things and does nothing to stop them?

Almost two years later and she still hasn't quite figured out the answer.

She takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly, the tension in her shoulders creeping down her spine to pool where her tailbone digs into the uncomfortable metal of the van's floor.

So, she makes a mental note:

She's being rescued, but may not be any better off.

---

Some indeterminable time later, Darcy is shaken awake by a strong hand on her shoulder.

"Whuuh..." It takes a moment for her brain to catch up to where her body is, and when she does she flinches violently. The blindfold has been removed and Clint is looking down at her, keeping a safe distance from where her fist lashes out (again, clearly something he's used to doing - waking people up when they're put in the back of his weird retro spy-van).

"Wake up sleepy," he says. "We're here."

"The evil lair," Darcy mumbles, rubbing her eyes and grimacing when the back of her hand comes away covered in eye makeup. "Oh sorry, the secret base. My bad." Because it's only one or the other depending on who's telling the story.

"Something like that. Here, let me help you up."

Clint helps her to her feet and together they climb out of the van, which is now satellite-less and equipment-less. It looks like any regular old van now, just without any seats; even the blinking lights and radio speakers on the dashboard are missing, no sign of any wires or switches.

How long was she out?

The van was left in what appears to be your standard underground parking garage, pulled right up against a set of heavy double doors. When she steps out and on to the ground, she's immediately sheltered by a well-placed arm obstructing her vision. She feels like a patient who's contracted some one-in-a-million monkey virus, ushered quickly inside with a protective sheet over her head. They must really not want her to see where she's going.

In spite of her vow not to be nervous, she's finding it pretty hard to do.

She gets one brief glimpse of a hallway - long and pristine white like a hospital, with squeaky-clean tiled floors that shine under the rows of fluorescent lights - and then she's turned bodily around.

"You've got to put it back on again," Clint says, sounding a little apologetic and holding the blindfold.

Darcy grumbles as the cloth comes back down over her eyes, "Why'd you even bother taking it off, then?" and everything is dark once more.

---

They put her in a room that looks like a waiting lobby in a fancy office building. The couch she's sitting on is made of some kind of high quality leather that doesn't squeak or stick to the exposed skin of her arms, which she is inordinately happy about since she is both overheated and filthy; there are several fancy IKEA-looking end tables with flower arrangements; the carpet is a cross between generic plush and shag, and it makes a satisfying swish when she rubs her shoes over it. The walls are pure white...which adds to the creepy feeling she's got rolling in her gut. No paintings, no nothing. Not even electrical outlets, which you might think is a weird thing for her to notice, but Darcy has (well...had) the habit of keeping her phone attached to her hip like a favorite child. She always knows where she can plug-in if need be. It's a skill.

But nope, not here, apparently.

The door through which she was shown in opens and Darcy turns to see a young man enter. He looks, remarkably, like Vincent.

She even calls him that, sounding just as unsure as he comes around in front of her and pulls up a chair. When he sits down and she gets a good look at his face, she still can't decide.

He has the same features - the dark brown hair, the lean build, the not-too-tall stature - but gone is the retro bowl-cut hairstyle, gone are the glasses that made him look like an overeager twelve year old. Before her sits a completely different person. The only thing that is still the same about him are his eyes, which she had never really noticed how sharp they were. She is reminded, viciously and unbidden, of Loki.

The atmosphere suddenly becomes less corporate and more therapy.

"Darcy," says Vincent. He's wearing a well put-together suit and slacks combo outfit, the kind that says SHIELD is probably not letting their...whatever he is to them now...shop at the same off-brand department stores and thrift shops that Darcy shops at.

She just can't get over how different he looks.

"What happened to you?" she asks, finding her voice low and hesitant, like the walls have ears (which they do). She has the urge - suddenly - to reach out to him, but stops herself before her hand can make the move.

He looks puzzled (in that way that stiff spy agency automatons sometimes do), "What do you mean?"

"What do you mean, what do I mean?" Darcy leans forward, voice falling into a whisper that's a little too loud to be effective. "The last time I saw you..." She swallows, remembering the panic of their escape from Kirkland, the phone call at her apartment afterwards and Shannon's terrified voice. "We were worried sick about you, Vincent."

This, it proves, is the wrong thing to say.

"Were you." It isn't a question.

Effectively dismissing her, Vincent pulls out a yellow legal pad and flips the page over. His movements are jerky and harsh, and when he looks back up she gets that same expression from the car before their mission: the one that says he's gone back to that place in his mind where nothing can touch, cold and resigned.

"The Director regrets that he can't be here to question you personally," Vincent says, in such a non-way that it's obvious he isn't even trying to make it seem like that's the truth, "However, he would like to extend his gratitude for you returning the files."

Oh, you mean the files you wanted to steal and I wanted to return but you wouldn't let me?

Darcy grinds her teeth.

"However, in the interest of maintaining the integrity of the sensitive information that is at issue, SHIELD would ask you to relay the events as they occurred since you acquired - and then relinquished - them. Specifically," Vincent fixes her with a hard stare, "whether you have disclosed the information to anyone other than SHIELD personnel."

"You mean Loki?"

She does not miss the way he flinches. She wants to shake her head, then. As if he has any right to flinch at just Loki's name.

"I'm sorry," she says. "Are we pretending that I don't know that they know who we ran into in that base? You're aware that I was brought here by two Avengers, right? They came to get me specifically because of that." She takes her glasses off and starts wiping the ineffectually on her shirt. Vincent is a blurry blob in front of her. Somehow he still manages to look constipated.

She's struck with a thought. The kind that festers and lingers for god knows how long, that tiny tap tap tap that's like Chinese water torture on your brain, picking at you over and over until it snaps; just explodes out of you without you even stopping to think about it.

"How anybody didn't see it in you before is beyond me, Vincent. You're definitely much smarter than people think." She's angry now, beyond angry. Bruce Banner angry. And her tone of voice is a lot more venomous than even she thought she was capable of using. "You're new to the whole brainwashing by a super secret spy agency thing, but let me take a wild guess about what happened when SHIELD picked you up:

"I'm thinking they locked you in a room with no windows and absolutely no personality -" she looks around, waving her arm - "kind of like this one. And then they sent in somebody to talk to you who sort of looked like someone you know - Mark maybe, since he's your brother - to make you comfortable enough to start talking. It was my mom, for me, by the way, who was in the cancer ward as Kaseman at the time. Real classy, right.

"And then they asked you questions about things that didn't have really anything to do with what happened in Albuquerque but you talked, because you're an insufferable know it all ass, and somewhere along the way the conversation took a turn of them making you an offer you couldn't refuse."

She laughs, abruptly, and thinks of Jane. If she lets go of her frustration for a moment, she can actually see where Vincent might be coming from; how this is probably a golden opportunity for him.

She sees the story like it's written before her in glossy pages: super smart person accidentally stumbles upon supernatural information, gets captured by top secret covert organization responsible for investigating said supernatural information, and then at the end of the day is discovered to have a hitherto unknown valuable skill set and is recruited by said top secret covert organization.

Meanwhile...Darcy is cut loose, threatened with silence under threat of death, and gets shipped back to bum-f*ck USA and has to start over.

She wipes an eye with her thumb. "That's the only reason they're interested in people like us, Vincent. Well, maybe not you since you're super smart and stuff, but don't let that fool you into thinking they really give a sh*t about you as a person. There aren't many people in our lives who actually do, and those...those are the ones you fight for."

Chapter 15: Think It Through (Part Two)

Chapter Text

She's breathing like she's just run a marathon. Her body, she realizes, it absolutely aching with the effort of keeping it held still, her spine not even touching the back of the couch. She relaxes, with a conscious effort that is much harder than it should be, and feels...

Actually, she feels a million times better. Emotionally drained, but pleasantly numb. Kind of like how she felt after the conversation with Jane at the hotel in Texas, which just goes to prove that uncomfortable 'come to Jesus' meetings are basically like free psychoanalysis, without all the underhanded sublimations that you want to f*ck your parents.

Vincent is looking at her like she's grown an extra head, his notepad in danger of falling from limp fingers. Ah, there it is, she thinks fondly and self-deprecating. There's the look that she's used to.

She is realizing some other things now, too. For starters, that the air in the room has become stale, as if everyone who is watching has abruptly decided to hold their breath at the same time. You can hear a proverbial pin drop, and even the steady hum of the air conditioner seems to have slowed.

Second, that she is effectively in the box of control (or the Room of Crazy House Fun Mirrors, as she refers to it in her head) where every little piece of information she spits out is going to be fed back to her in different colors and shapes so disorienting it's going to make Loki's mind-meld seem like a fun party trick.

And...she also realizes that she's just played right into SHIELD's hands.

"Why don't we start over and you tell me why you're here."

Vincent is quiet for a moment before he answers her, and at least he has the decency not to pretend he doesn't understand what she's really asking. "The Director thought that you might be more comfortable if you saw someone you were acquainted with."

Darcy can't help her raised eyebrow, even as she wants to smirk at the hint of red-handed shame in his voice. She notes that they didn't sent Jane, or Thor or Bruce, to see her. "Clearly they don't know everything, then, or they wouldn't put you in the same room as me, after the sh*t you pulled."

She should punch him, she thinks abruptly. Square in the face. It won't have the same satisfaction as it would have before, as there are no glasses to break or cheap tie to strangle him with, but at least she'll get something out of all this anger she feels.

"That I pulled," Vincent looks incredulous. "If you had just stuck to the plan -"

"You mean your plan, the one where you led us into a military base full of people who know you by name and where your freaking boss saw us? That genius plan?"

"Everything was under control. We were doing fine."

"Until the little unexpected appearance by a supervillian, yeah, I guess we were. And then we had to improvise -"

"Cutting and running, instead of sticking together to form a new strategy, a new plan -"

"I'm pretty sure that once Loki showed up all plans of any shape and size went out the window. I don't know about you, but I was more focused on not dying than I was on getting any of that super secret information."

"Which you still took, so you must not have been that concerned about it."

"At that point I needed it for security, in case someone wanted it in exchange for my, again, not dying. And that didn't even work, because guess who showed up and decided under threat of painful death that he wanted it and more."

"Well apparently you didn't need to worry," Vincent sneers. "Since you've been with him for two days and you're still alive."

"I -"

She opens her mouth to retort, but finds that she can't.

She...has been with Loki for two days.

It seems silly, suddenly, for the be just recognizing this fact...the significance of it. It isn't something she feel quite up to analyzing, at the moment.

She clears her throat.

"So basically...you want to make sure I'm not going to tell anyone that I've been spending time with Loki. The guy who SHIELD let escape and, despite knowing where he's been and what he's after, have yet to recapture him?" She snorts, bringing her mind back on topic (and on her anger). "Yeah, I don't think I'll be telling anyone about that."

The silence festers.

"Darcy," Vincent says, after a moment. "It doesn't have to be like this."

Yeah is does, she thinks. It definitely does. But there is no way she's going to the trouble of pointing out all the things that would be wrong with her pretending it could be otherwise.

"Well it seems to have worked out just fine for you," she says, looking down at her hands. "Don't see why you care."

She hears a cough and looks up, scowling. But it's not Vincent. Rather, Vincent is looking confused, staring at the wall -

Well, what used to be the wall, but is now a see-through pane of glass.

And standing on the other side is...

"Is that..." she squints, as if that would help anything. "Is that...Tony Stark?"

The voice comes from a speaker overhead,

"Wow, you are bitter."

Yep, it's Tony Stark.

---

Faux-window walls, huh? Interesting. Two years ago when Darcy was briefly interviewed by SHIELD during the Puente Antigo incident, she was put in your standard good-cop-bad-cop interrogation room with the really obvious two-way mirror. Looks like they've upped the game since then. That's good to know, since these people are supposedly in charge of protecting the Earth from otherworldly evil stuff and all.

Apparently, in addition to the swanky fake wall there is also a fake door, because a hissing sound fills the room and a small opening appears in the wall beside the window. Tony Stark walks through it, dressed in a suit and tie that probably cost more than six month's rent on Darcy's apartment, with his trademark goatee and designer sunglasses. It's like watching Lincoln walk right off the penny, Darcy thinks wildly, so bizarre is it to see someone in the flesh who you ever only see on TV. He's surprisingly...shorter than she was expecting.

"Sorry guys," he says. "I was enjoying the back and forth, but we really got to get a move on."

He digs into his pants pocket and retrieves a small pen-looking object, which he points at Vincent.

They wait.

Nothing happens.

Stark looks down at the pen. "Huh. Hold on." He starts fiddling with it, untwisting the cap and pulling out the spring. "This is a new design and I've got to be honest but I didn't bother checking to see if it would work." He begins pressing buttons, the little device emitting sharp beeping sounds. "Pepper's always on me about 'field testing' and 'responsibility' and blah blah blah..." he trails off.

"Ah! Here we go." A flash of blue lightning, not unlike Darcy's beloved taser, flies out and strikes Vincent in the chest. He makes a high-pitched squeaking sounds as he spasms and falls out of the chair onto the floor, his yellow legal pad and papers flying.

Darcy is up and out of her seat in a flash, her heart racing.

Stark gives a little nod of approval and re-pockets the pen. "Knew it." He glances up at Darcy, who is nearly crawling backwards and upside down in her haste to escape. "Oh I'm here to rescue you, by the way."

She pauses, one leg slung over the back of the couch. "Say what now."

"Rescue, like, take you away from bad people. Although, technically, SHIELD isn't bad, per se. They just have a troubling lack of concern for things like honesty and disclosure. Typical pseudo-government bureaucracy bullsh*t."

Darcy is confused. Oh so terribly confused.

"Oh...kay?"

Stark is looking at her like she imagines a very impatient pet owner might look at their dog when it failed to do a trick on command. "So I meant now," he says.

She scrambles back down the couch, grimacing as her arms rub on the leather. Gingerly, she steps around Vincent's now-prone figure, his newly styled hair all a mess thanks to the high voltage. It gives her a small bit of satisfaction that she refuses to feel sorry about. Hell, she would have tased him herself if given the chance.

Stark leads her though the hole in the wall door and into the room beyond, which is clearly supposed to be used under normal circ*mstances as a surveillance post, but now has two guys in similar fancy suits as Vincent slumped in their respective chairs, arms dead at their sides and mouths hanging open. She's willing to bet that both of them got a dose of the pen-taser.

She has got to get one of those.

Stark starts fiddling with one of the computer monitors, humming under his breath. It sounds like Smoke on the Water. Meanwhile, Darcy leans forward and braces her forearms on the windowsill looking out into the room that's she's now referring to in her mind as the Ikea snow queen lair. She sighs loudly, blowing a tendril of hair away from her glasses.

She has absolutely no idea what's going on.

It's been a whirlwind - one person after another - all coming to save her. It starts to feel weird after a while, to be told that you're being 'rescued'. She hadn't even known she was in danger - except with Loki, obviously. It's making her wonder what else is going on, and she wants to go back and time and slap herself for even thinking of going along with Vincent's plan. Clearly, these consequences are far more outrageous than any of them had anticipated - and that in itself is even more weird, to think that going to prison is the least strange thing that could happen.

Out of the corner of her eye, Darcy sees a black shadow. A figure all dressed in black, a truly terrifying looking man with no hair and a trench coat and...an eye patch?

She straightens up immediately. "Uh..."

Stark looks at her, then at where she's currently staring, leaning over to get a view out the window. When he's this close to her she can smell his ridiculously good (meaning ridiculously expensive) aftershave, and though it makes her a little like a pervert she can also kind of see down his suit vest to his undershirt, a Van Halen concert tee which is glowing a faint blue.

"Damn," he says under his breath. "Guess I wasn't as subtle as I thought. Oh well." He shrugs, not really concerned at all.

If it's even possible, his fingers are flying faster on the keys now. The hole in the wall door shuts and seals itself with a loud hiss, though the observation window itself is still open, giving them a good view of the look of annoyance that crosses the man's face when he sees he's trapped inside.

The Trench Coat comes walking towards them, brazenly ignoring the scene of chaos and sidestepping Vincent's body. He stops about three feet away from the window.

"Stark," he says, and Darcy recognizes his voice from the radio in Hawkeye's van. Fury, he said his name was, and how apt given the way his voice gives Darcy flashbacks to a particularly trying fifth grade teacher. "Is there a reason you're kidnapping our guest?"

"Technically," Stark says, not even bothering to look up from the computer. "It isn't kidnapping if you kidnapped her first."

"Miss Lewis is here for a standard debrief." Fury's tone is no-nonsense, and he clasps his hands behind his back and glares at them through the window, examining at each of them in turn with an expression that Darcy imagines might be capable of making eight-foot tall Russian mobsters piss themselves. It's a more intimidating gaze than Darcy would have thought a one-eyed person capable of giving.

"Aw come on Nick, you and I both know that's not true."

Darcy's head swivels between both of them so fast it's like watching two gerbils on speed play tennis. "I knew it!" she says triumphantly. She finds herself inching forward, emboldened by Stark's presence and the barrier of glass between her and Fury. "I knew there was something in those files that you didn't want people to see! I mean, yeah, that's why we were gonna steal them, but I knew it was more than that too! I was right!"

Fury...that agonizing, condescending, no-reaction-giving Terminator wannabe - just arches his one eyebrow at her as if to say, Really?

After a moment where it's clear that neither is going to budge, Fury looks at Stark and says, "I'm going to have to let the rest of the team know about this."

Stark shrugs. "Go ahead. And when they come looking for us, I'll tell them the rest of the story."

He punches a few buttons on the keyboard one last time and, suddenly, all the lights go out.

When they come on again, the air is filled with the sound of blaring klaxons. "Emergency, Emergency,"shouts a nearby speaker. "Code Alpha security breach. Code Alpha security brea -"

Stark grabs Darcy by the arm and steers her to the double-locked safety door that leads out into the compound's hallway.

"I've got a schedule to keep," he waves over his shoulder at Fury. "Toodles!"

Darcy nearly trips over herself following him out the door, though he's not that much taller than her. The lights are doing a disorienting strobe thing here as well (which gives her a sickening and entirely unwelcome flashback to the Air Force base right before she ran into you-know-who) and she notices by the fourth door they pass that there at least a dozen SHIELD personnel within mere feet of them, some of them just sitting in their offices and staring, bored, out the window - doing nothing to stop them.

Wildly - as they pass a woman who is literally asleep at her desk with earplugs and a facemask - she gets the impression that security breaches must be pretty standard around here.

Darcy looks over her shoulder at the long expanse of hallway they've already traversed. "Won't they follow us?" she asks.

"Nah," Stark says. "Not for a while. I scrambled all their communications, so right now the only thing they're able to do is listen to hours and hours of glorious Carly Simon."

Darcy snorts. "You're So Vain?"

"That's beside the point. But it's Let the River Run, on a fixed repeat." At the end of the hall, Stark ushers her through a set of double doors and into a large open space with tables and chairs that she suspects is probably used as a cafeteria when the place isn't in Iron Man induced lockdown. Directly above them and imbedded in the ceiling is a sunroof, through which the sun itself is shining through the clouds. Her feet come to a stop when she sees it, staring mesmerized. She hadn't even known it was still daytime. It felt like she was in there for hours.

Stark makes her stand still by pointing to the floor and giving her that pet-owner look again, then moves about ten feet away from her so he's standing directly underneath the sunroof. He stretches out his arms and lifts his head to the sky.

"Garçon, my ride please."

They wait.

Darcy closes her eyes, and thinks, again, What?

She is maybe, sort of, getting an idea about why people make that dead-eyed crazy-face around her sometimes. Being with a person who is this eccentric is exhausting.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"It's not strictly necessary," Stark says, still standing with his arms wid

e. "But it makes me feel fancy." And now Darcy notices the faint buzzing sound, like an airplane going by overhead. "Now watch your eyeballs."

Darcy turns away just in time to avoid a face full of glass as the sunroof collapses. She screams and covers her head with her arms, and when she lowers them, Iron Man - well Stark in the iconic Iron Man suit - is standing before her.

He looks like one of those promotional photoshots, red and gold armor gleaming and his hand outstretched to help her up, the bright light of the sun behind him like a halo and glinting off his suit, smoke billowing from the collapsed ceiling. Accepting his proffered hand, she grumbles, "Some warning would have been nice."

Stark's voice is mechanized now but still dripping with snark. "Uh, do you not remember me saying to watch your eyeballs? How much clearer could I have possibly been?"

"I dunno, maybe like 'I'm about to send my crazy giant robot suit crashing through the window'? That kind of clear."

Iron Man shrugs. "Future reference."

Darcy brushes herself off (like it would do any good at this point - her clothes are ruined) and squints up at him. The suit gives him an extra two feet of height than he normally has, and the chrome metal shines ridiculously bright, like looking at a flashlight head-on, and she has to squint.

He looks up at the sky and back at her. "You ready?"

She nods, "Sure," not even thinking to ask where they're going. As if it would make any difference.

He wraps his arm around her waist - and she wants to laugh, then, at the cliché ridiculous posethey make: the dirty, distressed damsel hanging limply from the superhero's arms - and gives her a small squeeze that tells her to hold on.

They shoot upward with a rush of speed that is reminiscent of the drop on a roller coaster, moving so fast and so quickly that Darcy's hair goes flying, whipping to and fro into her mouth and eyes, making her wish she'd thought to tie it back. They clear the gap in the ceiling with inches to spare, and when she looks down the top of the building is getting smaller and smaller, metal roof blending in with all the other concrete structures in downtown Wherever they are. Abruptly, they spin to the right, narrowly avoiding an incoming building. They pass the windows of a tall office complex, and Darcy envisions the looks on people's faces as they see Iron Man go flying past. She would totally wave at them if she wasn't deathly afraid of letting go.

After they turn several more times, narrowly avoiding building after building, Darcy has a better understanding of just how much control is necessary to be able to fly. It's like she imagines free-running or parkour must be like - so much speed and momentum propelling you forward, your reaction times are reduced to fractions of a second. Thor always made it look so easy. She feels lied to; all those movies with their superheroes and their perfectly-coifed hair, serene expressions on their faces. Please. Her cheeks are so frozen their past the point of painful.

No wonder Stark gave the Iron Man suit a mask. He really is a genius.

Eventually, they get high enough and sufficiently far away from the SHIELD base that the structures below become less city and more rural, swaths of green and brown interspersed with the round circles of farming plots. It reminds her of looking down from the window of a plane, and she finds that her mind is just now starting to truly accept how high up she really is. It's like she's gone from a full-blown panic to some point way beyond that, when you can't make out the shapes of familiar objects and it makes you forget just how far there is for you to drop.

"Uh," she licks her lips and tries to speak but can't make any word come out. Her tongue is too big, puffy and unwieldy. She shakes her head and closes her eyes, but they're already closed and her mouth won't cooperate.

It's hard to breathe all of a sudden, and she vaguely lifts her hand to try and touch her glasses - forgetting for a second that she's supposed to be holding on to Iron Man's arms.

She hears him say something but doesn't understand it. There's something cold on her mouth that tastes faintly of metal, and her whole face feels like it's wrapped in the suction end of a vacuum cleaner, covered in plastic.

She blinks up at the sky - which isn't really blue from all the way up here, more like a mixture of white and grey -

And everything goes black.

When she comes to, the first thing Darcy notices is the softness of the pillow her head is resting on. It's like a shock, actually - the cool feeling that really fancy silk gives you sometimes, especially when you're used to five hundred thread-count Walmart sheets - and the blast of a fan on her bare arms and legs. She blinks up at the ceiling and realizes that her glasses are gone.

"Darcy?"

That's Jane's voice. Or what her mind is imaging to be Jane's voice, which might just be her internal monologue since it's already been established that her insecurities sound annoyingly like a certain astrophysicist.

"Darcy?"

Or not her inner voice, but an outer voice. That actually does belong to a person, specifically the one who is leaning over her, round pixie face and brown eyes getting clearer by the second.

"Oh. Hey Jane." Darcy's voice is a frog-like croak. "Sup?"

Chapter 16: Keep your eyes open

Chapter Text

Jane's currently running a fancy-looking wand thingy over Darcy's extremities, murmuring to herself as she eyes the readout on a large monitor. It's like a makeshift hospital bed set up in someone's fancy bedroom, the decor tasteful and, thankfully, not IKEA snow-queen white or motel pink. Everything here is shades of pastel colors and practically screams Malibu-chíc. Darcy can see a blue sky out the window, and below that...

Holy f*ck. The ocean.

Her heart starts to pound (and the monitor makes some insistent little noises) before she remembers:Oh right. Iron Man.It makes complete sense then, she supposes, that she could start the day in one place and end up, apparently halfway across the country, in another.

She glances up and finds Jane giving her a patient look, like she knows the thoughts that are going through Darcy's mind, letting her figure things out on her own for a few minutes.

Neither of them have said anything for a while. It's starting to become pretty awkward. Clearly, they're both remembering the last time they spoke, which was only a few days ago, remarkably, but feels like so much longer. It's as if the uneasy truce they formed is a thin veil of ice. Neither of them wants to break it.

Darcy licks her lips. "So, what, you're a neuroscientist now?"

It comes out kind of snarky - and a little out of line, she knows - but it's out of there now, hanging between them.
Thankfully, Jane doesn't seem offended.

"Sort of," she says. "When you hang out with guys like Bruce Banner and Tony Stark, you start to feel like to have to up your game."

Darcy huffs a laugh. "Yeah, I noticed your equipment isn't held together by duct-tape and prayers." She squints up at the wand now held over her face, her eyebrows raising. "No sh*t Jane, it's got actual screws in it and stuff!"

Jane laughs. "I know! Can you believe that it's actually custom made for any and all bio-signatures over four parts per molecule? Now we can get scans for any mineral residue the same way we could get sulfurous residue years ago, without having to set probes and calibrate for artificial electrical interference. It's so much more efficient!" She coughs, cheeks reddening. "And, you know, safe for use on humans."

Darcy blinks. "That's..." A relief? "Really awesome."

And the surprising thing is...she means it. Jane's voice is so warm, so fond. It reminds her of a lot of things she made the decision not to remember about her time working for the scientist. Like how they were actually kind of close, for a while. Well, as close as an early-twenties Poly-Sci student and a mid-thirties astrophysicist stranded in the desert could be. But maybe, had things like Norse gods and secret organizations not interfered...maybe, in another time, they could have been really good friends.

She's gone quiet, and Jane must notice it too because she drops the wand. They stare at one another for a long moment. Darcy wants to say a lot of things, so many things that she isn't quite sure how to begin.

They end up speaking at the same time.

"Jane."

"Darcy."

Darcy grins. "Oh god, we're gonna do the awkward romantic comedy thing, aren't we?"

"Probably."

"I guess," Darcy swallows. "I'm...."

That's all she can bring herself to say right now. There's just too much else happening, with Loki and SHIELD and...Tony Stark. Something crazy is going on. Beyond crazy, if the level of interest she's been paid in the past week is anything to go by.
Begrudgingly, she has to admit that it might not be the worst thing to see a familiar face.

"It's good to see you."

Jane gives her a soft smile, running her hand over Darcy's arm. She gives a squeeze.

"You too, Darce."

They stare at one another for a little bit longer. It is surprisingly not that weird.

Abruptly, Darcy opens her mouth and makes a huge obnoxious yawning noise. "Oh damn, what is wrong with me," she murmurs.Apparently flying takes a lot out of a person. The room suddenly gets very sleepy-quiet, the kind where it's warm and you're wrapped up in blankets and everything feels like jello or chocolate pudding. Her eyes are drooping and she fights to keep them open and fixed on Jane's face. Her soft, blurred-shiny face.

"Darcy?" Jane's voice sounds the same, even if it is coming out of a glowing person's mouth. Since when did Jane's face start looking all golden and...

She's already dating a Norse god, now she's got to look like a friggin angel too?

"S'not fair," Darcy slurs. "S'not..."

"It's the sedatives," another voice says, the kind of voice her brain is associating with fluffy hair and plaid shirts. "...knock her out...little bit."

"Yoga," she whispers. A small laugh huffs against her cheek, and she hears the tapping of little plastic things clinking together as someone leans over her to adjust...something.

"That's right, Darcy. Now go to sleep."

Darcy's eyes drift fully closed.

"Okay."

---


"Darcy."

She doesn't scream. She totally deserves points for that.

---

It's not a surprise that when she opens her eyes she sees him standing there, his back turned and facing out the window overlooking the ocean. He's wearing the same armor ensemble from before, right down to the scuffed silver buckles and dirty leather straps. Green and black all over except for his skin, which looks as pale as marble in comparison to the soft peach color of the drapes.

Same house, then. Same everything, except the blankets, the little monitor, and all of Jane's equipment are gone, as is Jane herself. Darcy's clothes are all still on, thank goodness. No flimsy hospital gowns here. The world around her has that soft fuzzy quality that she was admiring not too long ago, and lifting her hand to her face feels like moving through water. Her glasses are gone again but somehow she can see perfectly.

"I'm totally dreaming aren't I." It isn't really a question so she doesn't expect an answer.

Loki hums and folds his arms behind him, hands clasping at the small of his back. He turns his head to the side, presumably watching something pass by out the window. Darcy takes this as an opportunity to examine him. She kind of wants to pinch herself as she thinks about how this makes it an official 'several' times now that she's been close enough to do just that. Even with all the threats of impending death, it's still pretty surreal.

The sun reflects brightly off the windowpane and has that shine that things get when there's too much light to see properly. Everything about Loki is still severe yet simultaneously blurred around the edges, his features muted; his nose, his chin, all the way down to his shoulders, broad but still fairly thin along with the rest of him.

He looks...soft. Dare she say, even...

Pretty?

She groans. "What the hell did you do to me?"

Loki turns fully to look at her.

"Don't give me the robot look. You know exactly what I'm talking about." She can see it now, him using his stupid freaky mind-meld to form some kind of weird one-way psychic hotline right to her brain. She considered the possibility before that he was using her as some sort of spy, but the reality of it didn't sink in until now, when she's actually around people worthy enough to be spied upon.

"I shouldn't think so," Loki says. "I have no interest in becoming immersed in that scattered playroom you call a mind."
Even the reflexive 'ouch' she feels is muted in fuzz-world. She frowns. "Um, me pot, you kettle, pal." As if he has any right to call her crazy.

He arches one of those stupid black eyebrows. She bet she doesn't even have to pluck them.

"In any case, even had I formed a connection between our minds - which I would not do, I can assure you - there appears to be no need for me to expend the effort." His lips curl in what can only, frankly, be called a leering grin. "You've thought me up all on your own."

It takes her a minute to parse his meaning.

"Gross." Darcy wrinkles her nose. Stupid and smirky, that's what he is. Even inside her own brain she can’t catch a break. She doesn't want to examine the implications of her mind apparently dreaming up this weird soft-core version of Loki all on her own, so she pushes the subject firmly aside. Focus, Darcy. The last time she saw Loki he was scaring the ever-loving piss out of her by turning into a giant snake.

“You look better,” she says. “Not so scaley anymore.”

“Hm. No thanks to your assistance.”

“Hey, magically turning people into animals is not my area of expertise. Despite that one T-shirt I own, I did not actually go to Hogwarts."

He doesn't appear to get the reference. Seriously, how could he have thought he'd rule Earth without understand even the most basic of pop-culture?

Anyway. "How was I supposed to know that you’d get stuck there?” Or that SHIELD had two Avengers in there waiting for her? “You’re the Norse god, remember? This one’s on you.”

Loki hums again. “So it seems. If I’d known that agreeing to your terms would lead to such chaos, I wouldn’t have bothered.” He heaves a put-upon sigh. “I likely should have. It’s so hard to find good help in this realm. Everyone is so easily distracted and self-absorbed.”

She can’t help the snort. It literally hurts not to say anything.

“There’s nothing for it, I suppose. We’ll simply have to start over.”

Wait, what?

“What?” she says. “What do you mean, ‘start over’.” Unbidden, she inhales sharply as her heart starts pounding. It's like the worst feedback loop of any sort, and it pisses her off just as much as it terrifies her. One little mention of his trick at the hotel and her anxiety level goes from zero to sixty. She can imagine the feel of his cold fingers sliding over her skin, pressing against her temples. It’s a little less maddening each time she remembers it, but it still scares her. Her fingers clench in the sheets. Is it even possible to have a panic attack when you’re asleep? Apparently it is, because that’s what’s happening.

Loki frowns at her and she wonders how much he can read on her face. A lot, probably.

“Unless you have a suggestion,” he says. He takes a step forward. “However inept, you are still my ‘minion’, as you’ll recall.”

Rolling her eyes feel compulsory, so Darcy forces them closed instead. She makes herself take a deep breath, willing herself to be calm. She can do this. The goal is still the same: stop Loki from hurting Shannon and Mark and keep SHIELD off their backs. Once her friends are in the clear, SHIELD can have their fun (and their f*cking files, for all she cares now), Loki can f*ck off, and she can go do…whatever it is she’ll end up doing.

So that plan is still in place. The only thing that’s changed is now there’s an Iron Man, a Hulk, and a god of thunder in the picture, the other half to a group of superheroes that want to lock Loki up and throw away the key. A half that is going to great lengths to separate themselves and apparently aren’t on SHIELD’s payroll anymore, or at least not for whatever the hell is going on here. And what was it that Iron Man said when he liberated her from their base?

And when they come looking for us, I’ll tell them the rest of the story.

It hits her like a Thor-sized face-palm.

“Bait,” she whispers. Oh sh*t. “I’m f*cking bait.”

SHIELD is going to come looking for her because she was the last known person who was in contact with Loki. She’s an unknown quantity, because unlike that little woman in the video Thor showed her (and god does that feel like forever ago), he hasn’t driven her insane. He hasn’t done any of the things she knows he could do, things he’d probably gleefully do in a heartbeat, and in not doing so he’s painted a target on her back just as big as the one she did for him when she took those files. Everyone keeps pointing it out, but she'd never really considered there may a reason why he was keeping her around.
Darcy learned a long time ago that her instincts may be all over the map but eventually they get her to the right place. There's a connection here, somehow. She can feel it.

She looks up at Loki standing only a few feet away from her at the foot of the bed. Their eyes meet and he takes a few steps towards her, face a perfectly blank mask, and that's when she gets it.

“You need me."

It comes out sounding ridiculous, but really there’s just no other way it could have. It is ridiculous. It’s friggin hilarious. Yet neither of them are laughing. The fuzz-world around them gets a little bit brighter before muting back to its softness, like that time she got new glasses in a stronger prescription. Her head swims just a bit, and she's definitely hallucinating if, for a second, it seems like Loki has positioned himself to - Odin forbid - steady her if she falls.

She looks up at his (suddenly way too close) green eyes.

“How desperate were you when you found me in that diner?” she wonders aloud. It’s almost like reciting a story from memory; looking back for a second time and the things you thought were one way were really something else all along. Their initial encounter now takes on an entirely different meaning. "You told me you wanted to use the path of least resistance, that by helping you I could guarantee you wouldn’t kill my friends, but..."

His expression doesn't give anything away, and honestly she would be disappointed if it did. Even in her dream, he wouldn't be Loki if it was easy to figure out what he's thinking. Every time she sees him (and inevitably gets him to lose his temper) it's like discovering a little chink in his grouchy armor.

In fact...

"You seem like you're much better in here," Darcy says, waving her arm to indicate the room. Well, the dream-room. Score one for her subconscious, if it's letting her pick up on all these subtle nuances in a way her brain-on-reality just can't seem to. Too bad she couldn't knock herself unconscious more in school. Exams would have been a piece of cake.

He actually smirks a little, glancing down at his scuffed ensemble and thin frame. "Your definition of "better" leaves much to be desired."

This time she does roll her eyes. "Whatever. The point is..."

The point was, she's noticing that he doesn't look so batsh*t crazy in here. In the world - the real world - Loki looks...well, sick is the only way to describe it.

"This is not how I remember you," she says abruptly. He arches an eyebrow, which she ignores because she's on to something. She can feel it. "I mean, if this is a dream, then wouldn't you be like how I know you? No offense, but every time I've ever seen you you're a wreck. You don't look that way right now."

Loki narrows his eyes in that familiar expression of mortal-loathing. Somehow even that looks different, like night and day. He opens his mouth but she beats him to it.

"I'm not dreaming," she realizes. This time, he looks less disgusted and a little more...

Nervous. sh*t, she's f*cking right.

"Oh my god," she mutters. "Oh my god!"

"Darcy -"

"What the f*ck! You asshole!" She grabs behind her for a sheet, a blanket, f*ck even a poncho would do. Anything to cover herself up, not for the sake of legitimate modesty but because she suddenly feels so much more vulnerable. How can you cover up the inside of your brain?

"I am asleep. I distinctly remember falling asleep." She glares up at Loki. The bastard is still just standing there watching her. "What did you do to me? After all the sh*t we've been through, if you've just now decided to go Freddy Krueger on me....I swear to everything that is shiny I will find some way to end you, Loki, don't you f*cking doubt it."

Her words apparently fall on deaf ears because he's actually...actually...

"What is so funny."

Loki looks like he's about three seconds away from throwing his head back and howling with laughter. And it's not even the homicidal-slash-maniacal kind she's half-expecting, but true blue amusem*nt.

"Forgive me," he says through a smile. The way it makes his voice sound does unexpected and oh so terrible, oh so unspeakable things to her insides. She blinks at him as he studies her, eyes roving over her face and dipping just a little bit lower than they've ever gone before.

God, she really wishes she had that sheet now.

"I take it back," Darcy says. "I am totally dreaming." There is no way in any conceivable universe that this is actually happening. "None of this is real. My subconscious made all this up in an exhaustion-induced coma and I will wake up any minute now and not remember any of this."

Loki just keep smiling at her, and it gives her another weird belly-jolt when she recognizes it as a somewhat familiar expression to the one Thor uses sometimes, the kind that says 'you precious little mortal, you are so adorable in your mortal-ness'.
Pretty, pretty please let her not remember any of this.

He leans down and places his hands on either side of hers on the mattress, his chest coming so close to hers. She can smell the unmistakeable and unbelievably real tang of leather and even see her reflection in the buckles. His breath gusts over her ear as he whispers and she can't help how she shivers.

"Oh Darcy. I don't think you'll forget that easily."

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A/N: Thank you for the wonderful reviews and kudos! You guys rock!