Chapter Text
Darcy’s finger hovered over the touchpad, the mouse pointer in the perfect position to depress the “submit” button. There was no sense in not doing it - it was one of the sixty jobs she had applied for, and wouldn’t get due to varying reasons that she couldn’t even name. This one in particular would’ve been a better shot if she’d majored in engineering, business, or had a minute’s worth of experience. Still, it was the one she wanted, which made it the one she least wanted to know she was unqualified for. Another “thank you for your interest” missive was not something she wanted to face, with the clean lines of “Stark Industries” on the letterhead. Though, to be fair, getting those letters was better than the incredible amount of dead air she received from so many other applications. Apparently it was no longer required to give lip service to undesirable candidates.
“Fuck it, whatever”, she hissed to herself and let her questionnaire, her resume, and her letters of recommendation fly through cyberspace.
Her letters of recommendation were pretty damn good, if she said so herself. But, as she was not applying for jobs in any of the STEM fields, they were pretty much just words on a page, terminated by the signatures of people with lots of letters after their names. Doctor Jane Foster was a big deal in astrophysics, but if one was applying for a paralegal position, a JD after her own name would’ve made the right impact. It might be overkill, but considering the quality of people recruited by Stark Industries, it was probably the absolute minimum.
Thor had offered to compose a letter of her achievements, but that seemed a little nepotic. And kind of weird. She didn’t want to be hired because she knew the guy with the hammer. She wanted to be hired because after New Mexico, London, robots, aliens, and another robot (thankfully she was back in New Mexico for that), she had a nice piece of paper with her name and “B.S.” after it. She snort-laughed at that every time she saw it. B.S. Political science wasn’t a science. It was bullshit, but it was hers, and they let her have it after she turned in a complete nonsense thesis which was mostly about Thor and his immortal family politics. “The Sword and the Hammer: Items of Ascension in the Medieval Monarchy and Modern Asgard” was the biggest joke her department ever had cross their desks. Maybe if she was in the English department. Or Anthropology. As a political science thesis that didn’t deal with African warlords or the Middle East, it was probably only the surprise of it that earned her the B-. It was probably a C paper at best. C+ if she was feeling particularly proud of herself. She called it in, and she knew it, and gratefully accepted their uneasy declaration of her completion with a smile.
Darcy Lewis could do better than that, but it had been a really long time since she really tried.
Looking around her personal island of on-campus en-suite living, there was nothing left except loading her boxes and duffels into her mom’s car. That car would drive them from the dry, red desert of New Mexico (it grew on her - and Virginia felt too foreign; thank Thor for credit transfers) to the dry, brown desert of Las Vegas. The bright light city was the part of town everyone pretended wasn’t really there, trying to huddle in their developments where the night never got really dark, and everything that occurred outside the weirdly planned communities was part of someone else’s life. That’s the desert for you. Only civilization for miles around, and pretending it was just you was preferable to other people.
Boston could be nice, she thought, apropos of nothing. Boston had great public transportation, and the breezes probably smelled like fish, beans, and patriotism instead of vomit, smoke, and broken dreams. Yeah. Boston.
Her phone buzzed with a text from her mother, who was apparently waiting downstairs and not leaving the car. She let out a huff. Carry everything down herself in six trips. Yep. Home. Goody. Closing the top on her laptop, she reached over to the power strip installed in the desk and unplugged everything, sliding it into her messenger bag. Normal life awaited her, and while she ran away from Jane and all that crazy because bombs and terrorists and giant robots were fucking terrifying and more than she could handle, normal life was setting up to be pretty damn boring.
Which of them was worse occupied her mind for exactly thirteen seconds before her phone actually rang. Before she even got a word out, she heard “DIDN’T YOU GET MY TEXT MESSAGE? I’M WAITING DOWNSTAIRS, DARCY,” and almost made up her mind. Almost.
* * * * *
Finding out that her mother had turned her bedroom into a guest room with a daybed, and that all of her things had been boxed up or tossed or sold almost brought her to tears, but they were tears of frustration, of rootlessness, rather than actually caring that she didn’t have any of her shit anymore. The important things, phone, iPod, passport, good sneakers, best hoodie, pack of gum, taser - they were portable. The rest seemed like nothing but stuff.
The daybed had pink ruffles on it. Giant peonies and pink ruffles. The carpet was the same, but the walls had been repainted a delicate grey. Her mother hovered in the doorway, acting as though she had somehow forgotten that she had completely renovated the room and turned it into a place for strangers, not her daughter. Darcy listened to her mother sigh and shift before she put a smile on her face and turned towards her.
“I’m not going to be one of those kids that lives with her parents forever after college, Mom. We’ll just put my stuff in the garage, and I’ve already sent out a ton of resumes.”
Her mother frowned for a moment and then just hugged her. She hadn’t hugged her when she picked her up, but this moment apparently warranted the affection.
“Whatever you need, baby.”
This time the tears tore at her throat, and swallowing them was like swallowing knives. She’d never been a crier unless she was really angry. All this emotional crap was ruining her cool.
“Thanks, Mom,” she said into her mother’s shoulder, and got a pat on the back for her efforts before her mother decided enough was enough and turned away.
“Your dad is putting chicken on the barbeque. Should be ready in half an hour or so,” she informed her daughter, walking away.
Darcy sighed, and dropped her duffel, pulling her earbuds out of her hoodie pouch and putting them in her ears, flopping down on the daybed, her feet hanging off the edge. Nothing like a little Fleetwood Mac to cure what ails, and she turned up “Dreams” until she couldn’t hear her mother puttering in the kitchen, couldn’t hear the sound of her father lecturing the barbeque grill, couldn’t hear the television in the living room no one was watching, and closed her eyes.
* * * * *
In an effort to be helpful, her mother got her up at seven a.m. and made her eat breakfast, start her own pot of coffee, and listen to a good lecture on how to apply for jobs. Coffee, breakfast - those things she could do with a tenuous grasp on consciousness. Listening to her mother’s lecture, however well-intentioned, was not a thing she could do, and she’d never been so glad for a doorbell at six after seven in the morning as she was right then.
Her mother frowned in the direction of the door and pulled her housecoat closed. “Better not be any of those Mormons. This is just too much. It’s barely seven a.m.!” With a scowl sure to scare the special underwear off any young man trying to spread the gospel at this early, she watched drowsily as her mother stomped off towards the door.
She’d gotten her mug to her face but hadn’t actually put the sweet nectar of the coffee bean in her mouth when she heard her mother screech her name. She managed to spill hot liquid on her hand and let out a string of cuss words before she got up to go where she was summoned.
So it was clad in tiny purple pajama shorts and a tshirt that depicted a Delorean in a crackle of lightning that she greeted two men in black and a woman in a power suit standing on her mother’s front patio, separated from entry by a screen door.
“Darcy Lewis?”
She considered making a quip, considered any number of smart-ass responses, and forwent all of them with a sigh. “Yep. What.”
The woman in the power suit looked at the screen door, then at her. “My name is Donna Moss, executive assistant to Virginia Potts, CEO of Stark Industries. We received your resume and would like to interview you at Stark Tower in New York. We have a plane waiting at the airport to transport you, and you will be back this evening.”
Darcy barely managed to keep her jaw from dropping, and immediately suspected the Black Brigade of being Lying Liars Who Lied. “Could I see some identifications, please?”
Donna smiled, and the two Mr. Smiths provided Stark Industries IDs in unison, Ms. Moss following close behind.
“Could you guys hold on a second? I need to make a phone call.”
“Of course, Miss Lewis.”
She smiled grimly. “Thanks. Great. Mom, they’re not going to bite, and if they’re going to kill us both, they can do it just as well from out there. Give them coffee, at least,” she muttered, walking back to her bedroom and dialing Jane Foster, hoping against hope she wasn’t in another dimension after months of non communicado.
“Darcy?!”
“Jane. Yes. I’m sure we have a lot to catch up on, but I need a really big favor from you right now. You got an in with Tony Stark, right?”
“You want me to help you-”
“I want you to find out for me, preferably in the next five minutes, whether or not the men in black sitting in my mother’s breakfast nook are actually Stark Goons, or if I’m going to need to tap your Princess of Asgard thing for a rescue or possibly a funeral.”
“Darcy, what?”
“Jane. Just find out for me. Five minutes. I’m hanging up now, okay?”
“Um. Okay.”
Darcy disconnected the call and sat on the daybed, trying desperately to not hyperventilate. She was imagining things, for sure. There was no good reason for anyone to kidnap her or kill her parents, or any of that. An email requesting a phone call to set up an interview were more along the lines of expected behavior, but from accounts (having never actually met him), Tony Stark was a Class A Weirdo with little or no grasp on the behavioral expectations of a normal human being. She breathed deeply through her nose like her therapist had her practice, and tried not to think about how her hands were trembling.
The phone lit up before it rang, and she answered it before it made a sound.
“Darcy?”
“That’s who you dialed. Whatcha got for me, Princess Jane?”
A soft snort came through the line, and Darcy’s heart clenched in her chest. She missed her squirrely scientist. “Apparently there are actual Stark Industries people at your house. They want you to come to New York!” The words “New York” came out in a squeal, because Jane was in New York and therefore it was clearly the superior place to be.
“So not HYDRA spies.”
“Probably not.”
“If wishes were horses, I would have wished you were a little more confident than ‘probably’.”
“Darcy. Get on the plane. Come to New York. Stay for a few days. I miss you.”
“I’m getting this weird fuzzy feeling in my chest right now.”
“It might be mold.”
“Could be,” Darcy replied with a smile. “Alright. Soon as I lower my blood pressure, I will pack a bag and get on a plane. See you in New York, Princess Jane.”
It was a mark of how much Jane really missed her that she didn’t insist Darcy leave the “princess” part out of her name. She disconnected the call, brushed out her hair, rolled her pajamas and tucked them into her duffel (which she hadn’t even unpacked), donned her only pair of dress pants and her only blazer, ran her tongue over her sleep-fuzzy teeth, and shouldered the duffel, re-entering the dining room and heading for the kitchen.
She dumped the duffel and her messenger bag on the floor, and met Donna Moss’s gaze. “I’ve got to brush my teeth. Then I’m ready to go.”
“Darcy,” her mother looked slightly worried and got up from the table, following her into the bathroom.
“Mom, it’s an interview,” she said around her toothbrush. “I’ll be gone for a couple of days.”
“They said you’d be back tonight?”
She spit her toothpaste into the sink, and put her toothbrush back in the rack. “I’m going to see a friend. I’ll call you when I get to New York,” she leaned in and hugged her mom, then went back out into the kitchen, where only Donna waited.
“We put your bags in the car. Ready?”
Darcy straightened her blazer, unbottoning it and rebuttoning it with two quick flicks of her fingers. “As I’ll ever be.”