Chapter Text
Darcy is four years old the first time her mother catches her with her pudgy little hands inside the VCR. Her favorite Elmo tape is stuck and Darcy is so worried that she won’t be able to get it out and then she’ll never get to watch it again and then she won’t get to watch it on Friday nights when she has to stay with Gertie, because Gertie is mean and her hair is blue and it isn’t even that cool shade of blue like cousin Penny. So, she decides to just fix it.
“What are you doing?” Darcy’s mom yells and she’s very angry.
Realizing that her mom probably thinks she broke the VCR, Darcy smiles and proudly holds up the newly freed tape. “It was stuck. I’m fixing it.”
“Darcy Ann Lewis get up from there and go to your room.”
Darcy stares, confused. Her mom is using the I-am-so-mad voice and that voice only gets used sometimes when Darcy has lied or that one time she punched Timmy Roscoe, but he deserved it.
“Now!” Her mom says and Darcy scrambles to her feet and runs to her room, clutching the tape to her chest.
She is crying, sprawled on her Scooby-Doo sheets, when her mom finds her later. She isn’t mad anymore, but she looks very serious. Darcy doesn’t like the serious face. Darcy likes the fun and happy face.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” she says. “I was scared you would electrocute yourself.”
“I unplugged it,” Darcy says, because duh and she rubs a sleeve across her snotty nose.
“Baby, I need you to do something for me, okay? If something is broken, tell me and we’ll have it fixed. I don’t want you taking things apart, okay? “
Darcy nods solemnly. “Okay.”
Her promise lasts all of three weeks, but this time she’s got the old radio parts hidden in her closet so her mom doesn’t see and get mad, because it really isn’t anything to get mad over. Besides, the radio is already old and they don’t need to have it fixed. She just wants to see how it works.
***
She’s seven when she builds a little robot cat that obeys commands. It’s for the science fair and she feels a little like she’s cheating because it’s really only a remote controlled car that she’s fiddled with, but everyone is so impressed that she decides it’s okay.
Her teacher tells her mom how smart she is and how very clever her project is, but there are tight lines around her mom’s mouth and she never once tells Darcy that she did a good job.
That’s okay though, because Darcy didn’t do it for her. Darcy did it just to do it.
Years later, she’ll pinpoint that moment as when she unknowingly packed about a hundred suitcases full of mommy issues and started her emotional baggage collection.
***
They skip her ahead in math and science and computers and when she starts sixth grade, she has to go from the middle school to the high school for half of her day. It’s scary as hell and she hates it a little. It’s confusing to be so good at something and resent it because she’s so good at it. It makes her different and the only people who seem to think that’s a good thing are her teachers. She doesn’t want to be good at it and thinks about failing some tests just to get sent back, but she can’t help tinkering, she can’t stop seeing the patterns and the connections in her head and some part of her just refuses to lie about it. So she finds a better hiding spot than her closet (Mr. Isenhart devotes a corner of the auto shop garage to her) and she loiters there most of the time.
The unforeseen and awesome side effect to this is that, of course, auto shop adopts her as their mascot and she picks up a frightening amount of vocabulary, culture and attitude from them. Darcy’s mother is less thrilled.
It’s raining (of course) the day she’s caught in the auto shop, half inside the old Buick she suspects Mr. Isenhart is secretly sabotaging just to test her ability to fix it.
“Darcy!”
She jumps, smacks her head on the hood and groans. “What?”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m working on a project for class. Why?”
Vanessa Lewis scowls and scrunches her nose and Darcy knows she’s done for. “I talked with Mr. Isenhart. He gushed and gushed about how brilliant you are and how nice it is to have someone so talented in his shop.”
“Wow. That’s rude,” she says, defaulting to sarcasm.
“You’re not taking his class!” She’s yelling and Darcy can just feel her whole system crumble. There is no way her mother is letting this go, no way she’s going to get to keep her time in the shop.
“What’s the big deal? Most parents are stoked if their kid’s a genius.” She hates the g word. She’s always hated the g word. It isn’t right and it isn’t accurate. There are many things Darcy is thoroughly average at. Navigating her relationship with her mother is apparently the top of that list.
She isn’t great at English or History, but she likes them, maybe because she isn’t as good at them. Her brain doesn’t just fill the blank spaces when she’s learning about Roman mythology or the correct use of the semicolon. These subjects are harder, trickier, they’re based on things like people and emotion and rules that follow no discernable line of logic (Seriously, that whole i before e, but only sometimes thing is crap.) and some obstinate, stubborn part of her wants to conquer these subjects more than she wants to lean on what she’s good at.
It will take her years to learn that she’s lying to herself.
***
“Political Science. At Berkeley,” she tells her mother, holding a breath, hoping for a positive reaction. She gets one. Vanessa Lewis is so proud of her daughter’s choice that she throws a party and doesn’t even complain when a bunch of Darcy’s friends from auto shop show up.
She’s sixteen when she leaves home and finds herself in California. It’s not as ridiculous and wild as she’s been told and she settles into a life of studying and partying and finally feeling like she’s in some way the same as the people around her. Word starts to spread that she’s a wizard with electronics and math and somehow she starts making so much cash on the side from tutoring gigs that she can take some of the financial pressure off her mom.
“Well, at least your talents can come to some good use,” her mom says and Darcy hangs up on her, because wow… just wow.
***
Tony Stark goes missing on a Tuesday. She only remembers because she was supposed to watch and compare three different news programs and she left it to the last minute, so of course, the world’s richest, smartest train wreck gets himself kidnapped and/or blown up and there’s no way to pretend she didn’t do the assignment the night before it was due, because fuck If anyone is talking about anything else.
It will not be the last time he inconveniences and annoys her, though it is the last time his death does.
Her mother calls three weeks later, after Darcy’s moved on to other media shit storms and train wrecks on the news. Vanessa starts talking and Darcy knows something is wrong. Her mother is babbling and stuttering and it’s starting to scare Darcy a bit, when Vanessa finally just says, “I have to talk to you about your father.”
Here’s the thing: Darcy’s father died when she was very, very small and Vanessa Lewis never actually recovered from his death and Darcy is not so cruel as to bring the subject up. She has one photo of him, grinning at her while her tiny baby hands tug at clumps of his hair. Sometimes, she wishes she had known him, but mostly, Darcy doesn’t think about it. She cannot miss what she never knew.
“Pete wasn’t your father. He was a good man and he loved you, but he wasn’t your father.”
“Oh-kay,” Darcy says because her mother is obviously drunk or insane. Or drunk and insane.
“I had a very short fling with a man I met in Thailand –“
“When the hell were you in Thailand?”
“It was a graduation trip. Anyway, there was this man – complete asshole – but annoyingly charming and I was drunk, so one thing led to another –“
“Ugh, gross.”
“And we spent pretty much the entire ten days in his hotel room and nine months later, there you were.”
“Mom, this is a terrible conversation.”
“It was Tony Stark.”
Darcy makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a snort and then chokes. She doesn’t believe her mother, not even a little, but she’s suddenly very concerned for her mental state. And her blood alcohol level.
“Are you okay?” Her mother asks and Darcy really does laugh now.
“Me? Are you okay? Did you just hear yourself? Did you take some Ambien again, because you’re talking crazy talk.”
“I have not taken anything. He’s dead, Darcy. It’s been three weeks and he’s probably dead and I don’t know… I just feel really horrible for never saying anything to anyone, because maybe he wanted to know or maybe you wanted to know…” She trails off and she sounds so lost that Darcy feels the first little sparks of doubt. Her mother really thinks she had a wild and fertile week with Tony fucking Stark.
“You’re serious.”
“Of course I’m serious! Why the hell would I lie about this?!”
It takes, like, Xena levels of strength not to point out that she lied about it for 21 years, but Darcy manages it. “Okay, okay. Thanks for telling me. I’m going to go process this.”
They hang up and Darcy decides her mother is losing it. There was no way in hell that her mom got knocked up by… she can’t even think it.
So, she makes it a point to check in with her mom more often and she starts calling the neighbor to make sure there isn’t anything weird going on, but she never believes it.
And when Stark shows back up, the returned prodigal son, her mother says nothing, makes no mention of any kind about wild paternity claims, and that’s proof enough for Darcy.
***
The internship in Puente Antiguo is sort of an accident. The truth is, she likes PoliSci on a theoretical level (Or maybe she just likes the idea of it.), but she sucks at it. She doesn’t care enough to remember dates or names well, she loses track of which party wants what, the election process is Greek to her and the very idea of networking makes her want to scream. So she works for it, she struggles to pull the Cs and occasional Bs and she gets passed over for every internship she wants.
Desperate, she branches out, hoping to find something, anything. She happens across the description of Jane’s work and it catches her eye. It’s Astrophysics, which Darcy is so not involved or interested in, so it’s safe from her mother’s scrutiny. Not that she cares. Really.
It isn’t until she gets there and she sees the mountains of machinery cobbled together with paperclips and duct tape that she knows the universe is one twisted bitch.
Jane discovers Darcy’s penchant for machines and electronics and makes crazy eyes at her (which aren’t that different from her normal eyes) that Darcy takes to mean she’s excited. They rebuild a few of the… whatever they are, Darcy’s trying not to dig too deep into the manic explanations and descriptions that Jane launches into, and she finds herself really enjoying Jane and Erik (whenever he’s around) and even the people in this tiny back water town. And if she sometimes supes up the kitchen appliances it’s no one’s business.
***
Thor happens and she’s sort of shocked by how well she handles all of it. She’s lying on the roof after he leaves, Jane curled up next to her and Barton doing that bodyguard thing he does nearby, when she realizes she should probably be hyperventilating or panicking or being generally hysterical, at least.
She nudges Jane’s shoulder. “Are you in shock, because I think we should be in some sort of post life-altering-event shock or something.”
“No,” Jane says miserably, curling in on herself further.
“Hey, GI Joe,” Darcy says, twisting to look at Clint on the other side of the roof. “Shouldn’t we be freaking out?”
He shrugs. “Do you feel like freaking out?”
She thinks about it for a minute. “No.”
“Eh, you’re good,” he replies nonchalantly.
And, terrifyingly enough, for the first time since she was a scrawny kid in the back of an auto shop garage, she really is good. She’s better than good; she’s starting to be great.