Day 7- Writer!AU/Castle Crossover
Day 7
Writer AU-Castle Crossover
Darcy & Tony
Rated G
New York City, Abode of Tony Stark- Present Day
“Knock knock!”
The voice broke through the haze of his extreme creative focus and his fingers spasmed on his keyboard leaving the text “-lowered the tip of the Berretjkgdsfs” next to the flashing cursor on the bottom line of his open word document.
“In here!” he called absently as he backspaced over the erroneous letters and finished typing Berretta.
A smiling head with long dark hair swinging out from under a dark green cashmere beanie and bright blue eyes flashing from behind thick-framed glasses peeked around the edge of the door. “Like, duh, Dad. As if I expected you to be anywhere else, doing anything besides what you’re doing.” She pushed the door open and entered, her arms loaded down with stuffed-full paper bags. “I’m going to go put these down in the kitchen and then we can commence with your daily reality check, how’s that sound?”
“Condescending and a bit insulting, oh spawn of mine. I’ll have you know reality and I are totes BFF’s. We do brunch.” He snarked defensively as he hit the save button and stood to stretch his arms and crack his knuckles.
“Uh huh,” he heard his daughter’s offensively dismissive voice drift back to him from the kitchen.
He pouted as he skulked around the desk and out of his office. “I’ll have you know that I am perfectly capable of checking my own reality, thank you very much! I can dress myself, make my own coffee, and I’m even house broken.”
“Ew, gross,” Darcy said as she wrinkled her nose in a way reminded him of her mother. “I know, Dad, under normal circumstances I completely agree, but you and I both know this isn’t a normal circumstance.” She was pulling various food items, (fruit, vegetables, a bag of egg noodles, etc.) out of one of the large paper bags as she chatted to him in her usually cheery way. “How’s the book coming along, anyway?”
He shrugged and reached for the bag of craisins she’s set on the counter, tearing open the top with relish before extracting a handful. “Good. Only another 80 pages or so to go, probably,” he said around a mouthful of the chewy red berries.
She snorted and pulled the bag out of his hands and shot him a ‘you know you’ll spoil your dinner’ look before she deposited the bag inside the walk-in-pantry and shut the door. “So, knowing you, it’ll really be, like, 150 pages, right?”
“Now that’s just hurtful, Sassy McMeaniepants. Don’t you have any respect for your elders? Didn’t your parents teach you any better?” He pouted harder.
Darcy just gave him her widest grin. “Where do you think I learned my feisty fu from?”
“Well, you were never supposed to turn against me, my young padawan. You still have so much to learn.” He put a hand on her shoulder and gave her his most gravest, most very sincerest Obi Wan face.
“Awwwwe,” she said making one of those noises that only teenage girls and patronizing daughters could make without sounding totally pathetic. “Of course I do!” She wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him reassuringly. “I’m sure it’ll be weeks, maybe even months until the student surpasses the master.” Her words were muffled against his chest as she held him.
“Months?!” he railed, doing his most outraged impression. “It’s taken me a lifetime to perfect this level of verbal jocularity.”
She pulled back from him then, her face doing that nose wrinkle thing again. “Sure, but how long before you master personal hygiene? When was the last time you showered?” She stepped back and gave him a disapproving eyebrow lift. “You said you were gonna do that after I left last night.”
He cringed and walked around the island to put some distance between them. “I was.”
“So what happened? ‘Cause you’ve got at least a three-day funk going on there, old man.”
“Old man!”
“Don’t change the subject!”
He huffed indignantly and then withered under her impenetrable guilt bestowing glare. “It’s no big deal. I just got… distracted by a solution to a story problem that needed to be put down on paper right away.” He picked up a magazine from a side table, and leaned against the arm of one of the sofas, hoping his causal attitude would bleed over to her and diffuse some of her actual facts irritation. He could see it in the tightness of her mouth and the little crease she got in her forehead.
After of moment of tension, she rolled her eyes and turned back to pulling things out of her paper bag like a cross between Mary Poppins and Gordon Ramsay. “Well, it’s going to take me a little bit to get dinner put together, so why don’t you go shower while I do that.”
“I will,” he capitulated; relieved she’d decided to let it go. He tossed the magazine back on the side table with a careless toss and flashed her his brightest grin. “First, you should tell me about your day. What have you been up to besides keeping your poor, stressed-out dad from starving to death or, worse, become a recluse who will probably begin making questionable life choices, like wearing socks with sandals or getting a tattoo of a comic book superhero on his ankle.
She lost the battle to suppress an answering grin as she started rinsing off a bundle of asparagus. “Well, I had class this morning, of course, and met with my study group afterwards to go over the material for the final next week.”
“Mm hm, mm hm, tell me more, dearie,” he said with an affected lisp, crossing his legs and clasping his knee with both hands.
She laughed out loud and shook her head at him. “Not much else, I guess. Had to pick up this stuff for dinner, went to a cafe for a while to use the wi-fi… oh!” She clapped her hands excitedly. “I almost forgot to tell you! I saw Detective Potts and the gang down at the station.”
Tony frowned slightly,” What were you doing down at the station?”
“Nothing bad,” she replied with another eye roll. “I asked Pepper to write me a letter of recommendation for that internship I’m applying for over the summer.”
“The one in New Mexico?” he gaped, “I though you decided you didn’t want to go that far away.”
“No,” she sighed, drawing out the ‘o’, “You decided you didn’t want me to that far away. I’m still excited about it and think it’ll be an awesome opportunity.”
He struggled with his separation anxiety while he stammered and tried to collect his thoughts. “But- but, what about… what about that thing- the one at t-the, the mayor’s office?”
Darcy shook her head and turned her back to fill the bottom of the steam cooker with water. “Let’s just say that after studying for my Race and Ethnicity In American Politics course and finishing my final project for Judicial Politics, the last thing I want is to be stuck in some air conditioned office stuffing mailers and fetching coffee. I know that’s what internships are supposed to be about, but-“ she paused as she turned on the stove top and place the steamer over the heat, “-it just seems so trivial and ineffective.”
“So you’d rather be suck out in the desert, with no air-conditioning, hundreds of miles from your dear old dad while you’re fetching coffee? Probably bad coffee?”
“It would be more than that,” she refuted as she turned to slice open the plastic wrap on a couple of raw chicken breasts and then began rinsing them under the tap carefully. “Dr. Foster said there’ll be some data entry and analysis, as well. Besides, her work sounds really fascinating-“
“But isn’t Dr. Foster some sort of astrologer or some other nonsense?”
“She’s an Astrophysicist studying atmospheric and sub-orbital anomalies and working on developing a practical theory on something called an Einstein Rosen bridge.” She waved hand dismissively in the air over the last few words, but when she turned back to him she could see his interest was peaked. Just as she knew it would be. Her father’s love of all things sci-fi was a well-documented fact.
“So, you’d be helping this Dr. Foster woman study wormholes?” He sounded casual in his inquiry, but Darcy could see the corner of her dad’s eye twitching. It was one of his many tells.
“Well, not studying actual wormholes, they’re only theoretical at this point, but we’d be documenting natural phenomenon that might shed some light on the nature of the universe how the physics of a wormhole might be possible.”
His eyes were growing bigger as he considered the possibilities of all his time and space adventure fantasies coming true, and then, when he looked back at her, she watched his enthusiasm wilt a bit. “But New Mexico,” he whined. “Are you even sure they’ll have indoor plumbing where you’d be staying?”
“Give me a break, Dad,” she groaned at his infantile attempt to discourage her spreading her wings. “I don’t want to argue about it anymore.” She started mixing up the feta cheese, spinach, and garlic filling for the stuffed chicken breasts, but she did feel bad about making her dad’s face look sadder than a three-legged Labrador puppy with one eye.
“Detective Potts wanted me to tell you how much they all missed you down at the station,” she cajoled placatingly, knowing that anything Pepper-related was bound to brighten Tony’s mood.
His brow hitched just a bit as he stepped forward to lean on the counter. “She did?”
“Yep. She doesn’t have anyone to bring her favorite latte to all the crime scenes anymore.”
“Ha ha,” he mocked dryly. “She seemed okay, though?”
Darcy’s face softened. “Yeah, sure. She asked how you were doing, and about the writing. I think she’s really looking forward to you finishing your next book so that you come back to consulting full-time. Even Captain Hill and the other detectives, Barton and Rogers, all mentioned how different things were around there without you.”
“You mean Hill was glad for the peace and quiet and Detectives Barton and Rogers talked smack about how nice it was not to have to babysit the crazy writer, or listen to his ridiculous, crack-pot theories all the time.”
“Well, yeah,” she said with a smile, “that’s what they said, but what they meant was, it’s not the same without you and they miss you, too.”
She looked away shiftily for a second and then started concentrating really hard on jamming cheese and veggies into poultry.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Hm?” she inquired with an innocent hum.
“Spill it!” he ordered not buying her acting bit for a second. Acting has always been his mother’s thing, not his daughter’s.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I just happened to meet a friend of Detective Rogers while I was there, is all. He was nice. I hope you get a chance to be introduced.”
“Was this friend of Rogers’ young, male, and single?” Tony’s eyes had narrowed suspiciously.
“Maybe,” she grinned and bit her lip a little.
Tony groaned and ran his hands through his hair. “Don’t tell me. You thought he was hot, too, right? You always do the lip thing when you think a boy is hot.”
“I do not!” Darcy laughed. But she did. And she knew she did. And he had been hot.
He’d also asked for her number and invited her to go dancing on Saturday. Not clubbing. Actual technique required dancing. She’d told him she didn’t know how, but he’d promised to teach her with a flirty wink.
Her face must have reflected a hint of where her thoughts were because her father groaned and dropped his head against the counter-top of the island across from her.
“He’s already asked you out, hasn’t he?” His voice was muffled under the cover of his arms curled over his head.
“Yes, he has,” she said with a shame free smirk.
He sighed heavily, his back rising and falling in his tortured drama llama fashion.
“Just look at it this way, Dad. If it goes well enough, maybe I’ll decide not to go to New Mexico, after all.”
His response was less than amused.