Chapter Text
First apartment! I’m like officially an adult… kinda. Remind me to thank you for the reference when you get back because getting paid for my insanity totally rocks.
Darcy texted a series of pictures to Phil, most of them showing off her new, if still mostly empty apartment. The studio apartment was once a factory so the walls were old brick and the elevator could double as a death trap, but it had enough room for a bed, couch, and desk. So far she had the bed covered. Finally, after three years of living with roommates and dreading the eventual sexile, she had her own space. If she wanted to do a cartwheel naked in the middle of the living room, she could.
Speaking of.
“Okay, you can do this,” she prepped herself as she stripped; triple checking to make sure the blinds were drawn. There was only one audience she wanted for this video, and he was somewhere on the east coast. Darcy propped her cell phone up, using several books to get it at the right angle, then hit record.
“Excelsior!”
Look at this video later. Here’s a preview.
Phil glanced at his phone, scrolling down. Darcy sent him a picture of herself. She was upside down, he could tell that much from the fall of her hair towards the floor, but other than that all he could see was her face. He smiled, and then clicked the phone off the pay attention to the meeting.
Phil was moving to New Mexico.
Darcy stared at the text and nibbled on her bottom lip. The transfer he put in, the one he was skeptical about had gone through. He was officially moving to New Mexico at the end of the month for some top secret assignment that she wasn’t technically supposed to know about (not that she knew anything other than it was in New Mexico). He was coming back, and their long-distance relationship was soon to be a short distance one. She shifted in her chair as her stomach flipped, competing with the warm feeling in her chest. Phil was coming back.
Two weeks after Thor, giant killer robots, and flirty Asgardians Phil had gone back to wherever SHIELD headquarters was located. “For debriefing,” was his explanation. Between then and now they’d started a relationship based on talking all night, trading likes and dislikes (sushi was a plus for both of them, he hated bar-b-q, and she couldn’t believe the man actually had a Twisted Sister greatest hits album), phone chattering during shows (Dexter and Walking Dead. When she asked if SHIELD actually had a zombie protocol he’d gone quiet, then assured her that she and Jane would be evacuated immediately in the event. Over a month later and he still hadn’t admitted that it was a joke), and discussing how SHIELD, for such a large, covert government agency, could have some of the dumbest people working for it. Case in point, the man who was supposed to replace her that Jane reduced to tears in less than a week, which was why Darcy was back in Puente Antiguo. She was breaking her own rule, allowing a one night stand (an awesome, awe-inspiring, fucking amazing one-night stand) to become a semi-relationship, but it was just so easy. Talking to Phil was like talking to someone she’d known all her life and she hoped that wasn’t because he’d run a thorough background check on her beforehand.
Still, Darcy Lewis didn’t do relationships.
There was the disastrous fifth-grade boyfriend, and nine was really too young to learn about the emotional damage caused by cheating. Then the Junior High Incident, where she learned that large breasts didn’t equal maturity on the part of either party. High school was a collection of hit and misses, as well as discovering that chicks could be just as much a bag of dicks as guys. All in all, no relationship she entered in to lasted more than a month, two on the outside. Except for He Who Must Not Be Named, and that was next-level fucked up. By the time she started New Mexico State Darcy determined that maybe she just wasn’t the relationship kind. She could be fun, quirky, good for a great time, but not someone you tried to build something more solid than a few hours of half-drunk partying with.
She looked at her phone. Transfer went through, plan on being back next week, stared back.
“Earth to Darcy! You still with me?”
“Hmmm?” Darcy rolled her shoulders. Jane was staring at her, which meant the scientist had been talking for a long time and she hadn’t heard a word. “Alive and kicking, boss.”
Jane wasn’t convinced. “You haven’t heard anything I said,” she accused.
“Of course I…” Jane raised the Eyebrow of Doom, and really, that was totally uncalled for. “All right, I didn’t hear anything.”
“Missing Agent Coulson?”
Darcy ducked her head. Jane was the last person she wanted to know about her…thing, but living in close quarters meant there was little room to hide anything. Just talking about him made her feel like The Worst Friend Ever. It wasn’t fair to Jane, complaining about the fact that her boyfriend was across the country when Jane’s was somewhere in the far reaches of space. At least she could call. “He said something about some kind of assignment out here.” She muttered to her hands.
“That’s good,” Jane settled across from her, idly brushing at a pile of crumbs. “He moves back, I don’t have to worry about walking in on you two Skyping again.”
Darcy felt her face flame. “You could have knocked.”
“On what, the floor? You were in the middle of the lab.”
“Yeah, well, the internet in my apartment sucks.”
“I would have helped rewire the building if it meant not seeing that,” Jane countered. “Electrical engineering minor, remember?”
Damn, she had nothing.
Jane was staring at her like she stared at her equations. Then her eyebrows lifted. “Oh, my God… you’re flipping out, aren’t you?”
“No!” Darcy jumped up. “I mean, the whole long distance thing has been working all right. Working great. What if he doesn’t like me when he has to deal with my talking through every movie in existence and my three AM popcorn cravings?” She was pacing, she hated pacing.
Jane reached over and gave her arm a comforting squeeze. “What if he shaves his balls in the kitchen sink?”
She left without another word.
Clint felt like he’d walked into the Twilight Zone.
The facility he’d been shipped to was old, older than anyone was willing to admit despite the shiny new buildings up top. His first thought was an old missile silo that had been retrofitted for Pegasus, but the more he looked, the larger he found the installation, the less he trusted that initial assessment. The facility consisted of three four-story buildings above ground and another twenty stories beneath that extended half a mile underground away from the visible complex in a warren of tunnels and chambers. The map of the place was almost as bad as stereo instructions.
“No place like home,” he muttered, tossing his bag on his rack. The room wasn’t as cramped as his quarters on the Helicarrier, but it was small enough: bed, desk, dresser, and a TV stand took up most of the available space. Maybe once things settled down he’d move into an apartment. Los Felix was less than an hour away; he could get away with renting a car for the commute. He could cover it up as a legitimate expense. He was supposed to be trailing Coulson around, and the man always got to use a company car.
Clint took out his phone. Room sucks, he sent to Natasha. SOB. That done he opened his itinerary. Initial briefing was scheduled at 0800, nine hours from now. Enough time to figure out where Phil was stashed.
The flight over was uneventful: commercial flight into Albuquerque then a two-hour drive to the middle of nowhere. Literally, the middle of nowhere. They were fifty miles from anything, in any direction, and it showed. The few staff they’d run into all looked like they needed a day off, someplace where the most exciting thing wasn’t what the cafeteria was planning for dinner.
A quick glance through the directory and he had was he was looking for. Phil’s room was two floors up, and when Clint didn’t get a response to his knock he went to the motor pool. The car assigned to Agent Coulson was missing. He knew Phil, the man was fanatical about his wheels and the one he chose was the only one he used wherever he was on assignment. If the car was missing, Phil was missing. That confirmed he went back to Phil’s room. His keycard opened the door (at least Fury was kind enough to give him special access, facility doors were a dick to jimmy) and he slid inside.
Coulson’s quarters were larger than his own, but just barely. The carpet was the same slate grey; the standard-issue desk had its own alcove and his TV was a hell of a lot larger than the twenty-two inch in Clint’s room. The bedroom was just as sterile: bed, bedside table, silver lamp. There were clothes in the drawers, a few suits hanging in the closet, but that was all. No sign of Phil, or that he planned on coming back anytime that night.
Barton strolled back to his room and took out the phone Fury gave him before they left New York. Two taps and he had access to the GPS on Phil’s phone. Target checked in, but no longer in facility. Currently moving east along Highway 60.
Phil ran his hand down Darcy’s shoulder, imagining the small birthmark he knew dotted the back of her shoulder blade. The Hello Kitty clock read 5:02. He needed to get up, get dressed, and get back to the research facility before 7:45. He should have stayed at the facility; he’d planned on staying at the facility until he got Darcy’s text. Welcome back. Two words and he packed an overnight bag and drove to Los Felix. He kissed the back of her shoulder and rolled out of bed.
“Phil?” Darcy’s sleepy voice followed him.
“Just getting up,” he said, leaning over to kiss her cheek.
She shifted. “It’s what-the-hell-o’clock.”
Coulson smiled. This was the time he usually got up. “Go back to sleep, I’ll see you tonight.”
“Hmmm…” Darcy burrowed back under the covers.
He was dressed and out of the apartment at six, carrying two warm Poptarts and a mug of coffee, courtesy of Darcy.