Chapter Text
“She really wants you there, Darcy. Would you please at least consider it?”
Darcy bit her bottom lip, keeping the automatic 'no' inside. If anyone else asked her, she would have said it flat out, but this wasn't anyone. “I’ll think about it,” she said at last.
“Honestly?”
She frowned, eyes on her house shoes. “I promise I’ll think about it. Seriously, for like... at least twenty minutes.” The problem was that she would, for Ginger. She liked her aunt, even though she only saw her once or twice a year when she came down from Alberta.
“Thank you.” The older woman sounded relieved.
“Is something happening?”
“No.” Her aunt sounded like she was hedging, and Aunt Ginger never hedged. “It’s just been such a long time since we’ve seen you. You skipped last Thanksgiving and Christmas entirely.”
And yeah, maybe those weren’t her finest moments, but she had reasons damn it, and they trumped trying not to choke her mother with the wishbone. “I was working.” Which she was, at a coffee shop in Albuquerque that barely paid her enough to rent couch space. The tradeoff was she could make coffee capable of luring Jane away from her equations, something that counted as a superpower in her book.
“I know, Deedee, doesn’t mean you weren’t missed.”
It was statements like that that made warm fuzzies take up residence in her chest. Conversations with her aunt were calming, just short of soothing, for Darcy. “Are you coming down?”
There was the sound of pounding feet in the background followed by a muffled scream. “Tania! Shelly!” Aunt Ginger sighed. “The whole clan. We’re taking the RV. Are you staying at home, or-“
“Probably at a La Quinta, if I come.” Because if she had to come home for Thanksgiving, something she managed to avoid for the past two years, there was no way she was staying in the house. She and her mother would kill each other after a few hours. Previously she would have put her money on her mom, but with the self-defense lessons Phil was giving her she'd put it on a fifty-fifty split.
By the time they finished talking Darcy was spread across her couch, snuggie firmly wrapped around her and electric teapot going. She had all of the windows open so it was cold in the apartment. It was also going to rain, and she wanted to enjoy every bit of the smell she could before the pounding water made her close them. She loved the weather where she lived; sunny, not really getting super hot or super cold, but sometimes she missed the smell of wet.
The first sprinkles were beginning to fall when Secret Agent Man chimed through the apartment.
“Hello Agent Sexy Pants.” She turned on her television, closed her window and set her phone on speaker. “How’s the weather in New York?”
“Cold.”
She sighed. “Is Mr. Angry making everyone tremble with fear again?”
There was rustling over the phone, the sound of a body hitting a couch. “It’s been interesting.” Which was Phil for something happened that he didn’t expect, but since no one was dead (she thought) he was okay with it.
She turned her attention to the matter at hand. “Popcorn?”
“Popped and waiting. Tea?”
“Gettin’ steamy.”
They quieted when the parental warning flashed on the screen. “Think anyone’ll figure out what Shane did?” she asked as she poured hot tea into her mug.
“I think they’re more interested in making sure Carl pulls through.”
Darcy snorted. “The kid’ll outlast all of them,” she grumbled as she blew on her tea. “Probably because they’ll all die trying to save him.” She took a drink. “So… how will you rescue the lovely Dr. Jane Foster and I when the zombies emerge with brain cravings?”
There was crunching over the line. “Mandatory airlift to White Sands, then evacuation to the helicarrier. We’ve done simulations. Five hours after the initial outbreak at most.”
“You are so lying.” She winced at the screen as a body part was separated from a screaming extra. “Anyway. Thanksgiving is coming.”
“Will hot pincers and acid be involved?”
“Depends. Got plans?”
“Usually I spend three days with my sister and her family. She’s stationed in Germany at the moment.” Air whistled over the phone. “He ran out of bullets four shots ago.”
Darcy hummed in agreement. “You’d think they’d realize a Colt Python only holds six rounds.”
“Amateurs. What were you planning for the holidays?”
“Nothing. Cook. Eat. Pass out from turkey overdose. The usual." Except this year she was able to cook in her own kitchen. "Jane’s talking about heading back to California to see her mom, so it’ll be me by my lonesome.”
They watched the show for ten minutes in silence. “My sister has never made a moist turkey in her life,” Phil sighed.
She fought the urge to snicker. “That is the worst invitation to a family function I’ve ever heard, Agent.”
“Who said I was inviting you?”
Darcy flinched as her stomach dropped and prickles flashed along her arms. He sounded so dismissive. It's a joke, she told the uncomfortable flutters in her chest. “Harsh, dude,” she covered, taking a too-hot swallow of tea. “So harsh.”
“I have two first class tickets to Luxembourg…” he trailed off. “That… was probably the most accurate depiction of what happens to a submerged corpse I’ve ever seen.”
“Wait, wait, wait… So I am invited?” He wants me to meet his family!!! Somewhere inside her chest a five-year-old was dancing.
“I was going to talk to you about it when I got in, but you pre-empted me.” There was a small hitch to Phil’s voice. “Interested?”
“Yes!” She shrieked, and then cleared her throat. “I mean if it’s not too much trouble.” Holy shit, did she even have her passport?
“No trouble. And I renewed your passport last month.”
“Mind reader.”
He said nothing in response.
“Pregnancy test? Check. Timer? Check. Gloves? Check. Desire to do this?”
Darcy stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. She liked her bathroom. It was small with dark green tiles on the walls and white ones with purple flowers on the floor and outlining the mirror. It was a good bathroom. She turned around and looked at the shower, frowning when she noticed streaks on the glass door. She should clean that. She really…really… needed to clean that.
“Nope. Nope, nope. No dodging.” Darcy turned back to her reflection. “Desire to do this?” She didn’t want to do this. She so didn’t want to do this. But not doing it meant going to an actual doctor, a SHIELD-approved doctor, and she had no illusions to how long it would take to get back to Phil.
She put her money on thirty seconds. Max.
Darcy closed her eyes and counted backward from a hundred. She was three weeks late and that shit couldn’t fly any longer. Phil was coming back from New York tomorrow, so she was as alone as she’d ever be. She needed to know before she went to meet his family... before things got any more serious.
“Check.”
Two minutes later she sat on her toilet staring out the window, willing the test to show only one line. “One minute,” she muttered, eyes darting to her Fat Chef timer as it clicked away. She refused to look at the strip itself, not until time. She imagined a kid with her attitude and hair mixed with Phil’s eyes and terrifying efficiency. Someone she could teach the cello to and have sleepovers with. A kid Phil could take home to his family and show off. When the buzzer went she lunged for the test, zeroed in on the results window.
One line.
“Holy shit.” She breathed in and out slowly. One line. She wasn’t pregnant.
Halle-fucking-lujah.
The pregnancy test was shoved into a plastic bag with as much trash as she could gather (which wasn’t much, since Phil took OCD to new levels when he was around) and tossed it in the dumpster. It wasn’t paranoia, she thought as she debated climbing into the dumpster to bury the bag further. For all she knew SHIELD had flying robots that collected and codified their employee’s trash. She wouldn’t put it past them.
She fished out her cell phone as she climbed the stairs. It was nine in the morning, so she wasn’t surprised when Jane sounded less awake and more pissed. “Unless the world is ending-“
“We’re going shopping.”
That woke her boss up. A little. “Shopping?”
“Yep.” She tucked the phone under her chin and pulled on a pair of jeans. “Shopping. I need feta.”
“Feta.”
“And a leg of lamb. And a grill.” She did a mental check of her bank account. “I need to go to Socorro and you’re coming with me.”
Jane made a groan that faded into a raspberry. “Darcy, I went to sleep four hours ago.”
“I’ll give you my recipe for candied bacon.”
“I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
The first thing Phil noticed as he approached Darcy’s apartment was the smell; roasting meat and vegetables, spices that reminded him of hot weather and blue waters. It was followed by Darcy’s voice and Jane’s quieter tones. The night before she mentioned making him dinner. He assumed it would be something from his list of favorites (which consisted of most of her Italian repertoire). Judging by the smell and the lack of fire alarm Darcy was doing the majority of the cooking.
He'd refused her offer of picking him up in Albuquerque. Phil would never admit it to her, but he needed time. He had to leave four days after coming back from Thailand, and after dealing with Mark Disteffino he never found time to talk to Darcy about the pregnancy test. He was willing to admit that was more by design than by accident, and the fact that he was so willing to put it off was telling. He never brought it up during their phone conversations, and she never mentioned it. The time away gave him something he didn’t know he needed. After New York, after who SHIELD just found, he needed the time to center himself more than ever.
It wasn’t often you got to see your childhood hero.
Never in his life would he have believed they would find Steve Rogers, Captain America himself. Not only find him but find him alive, unchanged after sixty-seven years encased in ice. Nick wouldn’t tell him why he was on a military flight to New York when he called at two in the morning, only that Phil needed to be ready for the pickup. When he got the dossier in-flight he thought it was an elaborate prank. The closer he got to New York, the more he read, the more excited he became. When he left New York the captain was still unconscious, but the doctors believed he would wake. The EEG’s taken since his discovery showed off the chart brain activity, and twenty-four hours after being unfrozen he was off the ventilator.
Thinking about Captain America, about his childhood, brought his thoughts back to the possibility of having a child of his own. Back to Darcy and information he had yet to receive pointing one way or the other.
“I’m telling you, you’ll love it. It’s good.”
“It smells good.”
Phil smiled.
“Jesus, I can’t believe you’ve never had kid before.”
There was a fake gagging sound.
“Oh please, you told me your sister’s Wiccan.”
“Newly converted, and I worry for her children.”
“They’re baptized, right?”
“Goodbye, Darcy.” The door whipped open, followed by a burst of heat and thin smoke and he dropped the smile, adopting his Agent Face, as Darcy called it.
“Dr. Foster.”
Jane meeped, actually meeped and it was hard not to laugh as she backpedaled to keep from running into him.
“Agent Coulson.”
“Quit if, Phil,” Darcy called from inside. “Jane, have I ever steered you wrong?”
The astrophysicist sighed. “Fine. I die of food poisoning-“
“You can haunt me forever.”
Jane rolled her eyes and hefted a plastic bag before stepping around him. “She’s been cooking since yesterday,” she warned. “And holding me hostage!” The last she yelled into the apartment.
“You loved every second of it!”
Jane skipped down the stairs and Phil gave an internal shake of his head. “You’ve been busy,” he commented.
Darcy emerged from the kitchen, swamped in her Challenge Accepted apron.
“The tie-dye worked out,” he noted as he dropped his back and shrugged out of his coat.
She struck a pose. “Tie-dye is love. Keep the door open.”
Phil did as ordered, leaning his weight against the door to keep it from closing in the sudden cold breeze. Inside the smoke was thicker, and judging by the way Darcy was fanning the fire alarm it had already gone off once. An oversized box with a picture of a grill sat in the middle of the apartment. “Are you bar-b-cueing in-doors?”
“Roasting!” she corrected, skipping to him and giving him a peck on the cheek before leaning out the door. “Because cooking in the parking lot is frowned upon in this establishment!” She yelled down the stairwell. “So I improvised.”
It took another five minutes for the smoke to clear from the apartment enough for Darcy to close the doors and windows. The heat leeched out with the smoke, and she was left shivering in his favorite pair of short shorts and a t-shirt. Normally, he would have paid closer attention to that, but at the moment he was staring at the kitchen.
“It’s not that bad,” Darcy said behind him as she fished out a pair of sweats.
Food was everywhere. Open packages, spilled sauces, chopped vegetables, and cheese spread across the scant counter space. The stove was covered with pots. Half the cabinets were open, and the sink was filled with dishes. He shook his head. “Define bad.”
She blew a raspberry at him. “I was cleaning, but the alarm went off. Besides, it’s your welcome home dinner.” She poked him in his side. “Appreciate.”
“Appreciating.” Phil opened the oven and blinked. Inside was a leg of some kind, and he recalled her assertion about kid. Two roasting pans were side by side under the leg, and what looked like chicken wire kept it suspended above them.
Darcy pressed against his back. “Its stainless steel not galvanized.” She kissed him behind his ear. “Completely safe.” She pulled an oversized platter out of the cabinet. “I’m gonna need help getting it to the table, though.”
Phil rolled up his sleeves.
Darcy sat down with a sigh once the last dish was on the table, head thrown back. “Finally!”
Phil could believe Jane’s comment about the two days of cooking. The table was loaded down with roasted kid and potatoes, feta and tomatoes, salad, stuffed grape leaves, and tzatziki. There was no way they could eat it all, even if they spaced it out over days.
Darcy smirked across the table. “You’re taking home leftovers. Lots of leftovers. There’s some kind of communal fridge there, right?” She poured wine into his glass before topping off her own. “Break rooms are a universal constant.”
“If not I’ll have one requisitioned.” Phil’s eyes went to the glass. She was drinking. He looked at his plate. “It was negative, then.”
Darcy paused in cutting. “Negative?”
“The test,” he pressed, even though he knew from the panicked wideness of her eyes that she knew what he was talking about.
She started cutting again, harder than was strictly necessary, the meat crumbling. “SHEILD does dig through my trash, don’t they?”
Phil shook his head with a weak smile. “No. I saw the test the day Mark stopped by.”
She gave up on cutting and set the knife and fork down gently. “I didn’t want you to worry about it,” she sounded guilty.
He slid the cutlery to himself, shaved off a thin piece with no difficulty, and set it on her plate. She really was a wonderful cook. “I wasn’t worried.”
“I was.” Darcy scratched her head. “I was freaking out. But…false alarm.”
“You didn’t have to go through it alone.”
Darcy looked at him at that, piercing and a little afraid. “You ever think about it? Having kids?”
“Not seriously.” It wasn’t feasible, with his career. He knew agents, good men and women, who died leaving behind children who couldn’t understand. He thought of Agent Esperanza, dead six months after having a little girl. “Fieldwork and families aren’t very compatible. You?”
“I don’t…” she speared a stuffed grape leaf. “Not really mom material.” She dug into the tomatoes.
He could argue that she was mom material, but Phil let it go. “Thanks for the welcome home dinner.”
She smiled at him then, a real one that made her eyes sparkle. “Anytime.”