Chapter 13
They were going to die.
Well, Thor would probably live.
But Darcy was totally dead.
“Heimdall said that this was the place she was being held?” Thor whispered in the dark, his murmur still sounding thunderous in the deserted street. Thankfully, it wasn’t raining on them, a small mercy in London, but it was still cold as balls. Nodding in the affirmative, Darcy was this close to freezing her tits off . Even Thor looked chilled in his wool coat.
“Are we sure we shouldn’t be calling your super friends for back up? Heimdall said these dudes were seriously packing. Anyone that can modify Chitauri tech means business, right?” Darcy asked not for the first time, eyes nervously darting to the warehouse with its ominously barred windows.
Heimdall’s exact words had been “impressively formidable”. She understood Thor was on supremely thin ice with Daddy Dearest, but it was way not cool for Odin to forbid Asgardian aid to them. Jane had been kidnapped from their apartment by a small army dressed in black riot gear. Kind of a big deal, but the All-Father’s reasoning, that they needed to keep out of Midgardian affairs, was weak.
She and Thor had been out on their bi-monthly pub crawl, a tradition born shortly after Darcy’s return to Earth which had evolved into an excuse to see who could outdrink the other. Jane usually played referee, when not actively participating and losing, but she had been close to cracking Einstein-Rosen Bridge travel (without the help of the Bifrost) and thus had stayed home to work. Ian, still in the dog house to Darcy because of his treachery but becoming more and more useful to Jane for his knowledge, had been assisting her research.
Thor and she’d been at their fourth bar when Ian had come rushing in, eyes purpled and lip split, yelling for them to come quick, that Jane had been kidnapped.
SHIELD hadn’t been able to find a single lead, a fuck up so monumental for a supposedly omniscient spy agency that Darcy wondered how they ever got anything done. As a last resort, they’d gone to Asgard, a risky maneuver. Thor, when he had come to collect Darcy after she had healed enough from the Convergence incident, had not parted with Odin on the best of terms. He’d never told Darcy exactly what had been said, though she hoped he’d confided in Jane for his emotional well-being, but Darcy had heard the prince and the king’s shrieking from a whole wing away. Odin had been polite and even warm in his goodbye to her, going so far as to declare that she could always find safe haven in Asgard, but the Thunder God had been waved off with steely silence.
Thor showing up in Asgard for the first time in months only to ask for a favor had not gone over well. While the prince went to face off with his papa, Darcy, showing great foresight, had cut out the middleman and asked Heimdall to use his sight before Odin could do something dumb like refuse Thor help.
Good thing she had because that’s exactly what Odin had done. As he showed them the metaphorical door, Heimdall threw her a wink before activating the Bifrost, his conscience clear from having already told Darcy where Jane was being held and information on who was holding her.
So here she and Thor were, about to perform a two person rescue mission in a scary building full of dangerous enemy combatants. All Darcy was saying was that having Captian America at their back couldn’t hurt.
“Do you really think we have the time to wait for my comrades to get here?” Thor asked, not unkindly.
Darcy thought about tiny Jane inside, most likely yelling at her captors and taking swings at guys twice her size with guns.
“No,” she sighed, “I really don’t.”
She grabbed his hand and hummed.
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The plan had been simple. While she couldn’t find Jane’s aura over a long distance in MSS, she’d tried when Jane had first gone missing, Darcy knew she’d feel her over a short range.
She and Thor were going to get inside via MSS, scope the scene for the best place to drop Thor so he could do what he did best, and then Darcy would get Jane out in the ensuing chaos.
Meet back at the apartment for celebratory cupcakes.
There were a lot of cupcakes in their kitchen. Darcy was a stress baker.
The plan was going swimmingly right up to Darcy depositing the big guy in a large control room full of a couple dozen soldiers milling about with a few white coated science types intermixed.
Thor started zapping and smashing on cue, but as Darcy rematerialized in MSS, something was different about the air. She figured out what that something was real quick.
Mostly because of the hand that wrapped around hers.
Screaming did nothing in the realm of the dead.
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With the first crack of thunder and flash of white light under her door, Jane was standing at the ready.
It wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that she hadn’t been scared while she’d been imprisoned, but she had learned long ago that anger was a good way to burn through unwanted emotions.
It hadn’t been hard to let rage consume her when weasel faced guys manhandled her into an interrogation room after beating up her would-be research assistant and dragging her out of her home.
It was really easy to be furious when the man sent to question her thought she was nothing more than a girl who had spread her legs to an alien in return for technological advancements to pass off as her own.
Jane didn’t remember what she had yelled at the guy, but she still had blood on her wrists from trying to lunge over the table and claw his face off.
Shackles were surprisingly sharp.
She’d been locked in this room with a depressingly bare cot and a rusty toilet with no seat or lid after that. Honestly, Jane was shocked it had taken Darcy and Thor this long to mount a rescue, but the important thing was that they came through in the end. She’d never doubted that they would find her. The how of it all was unexpected, though.
Darcy, in torn clothes, hair wild and eyes wide, skin white as bone and breathing heavily, suddenly appeared in her cell.
“Uh,” Jane drawled, “Are you okay?”
“No. Definitely not, but it’ll be fine. Probably,” Darcy said, pulling up the arm of her black sweatshirt from where it was hanging by a lone, scraggly strip.
“Not to sound ungrateful,” Jane began while eying her haggard appearance, “But I thought we agreed to leave the fighting to Thor after your run in with the Dark Elves?” She couldn’t help her disapproving tone; Darcy didn’t need any more close calls.
“Believe me,” he friend chuckled, but it was shriller than her normal belly laughs, “The plan only had Thor doing all the violent things. The universe doesn’t like my plans, apparently. You ready to go?”
Jane rolled her eyes.
“Obviously, Darce.”
“Cool,” Darcy took Jane’s hand, her own shaking badly, “When we get to MSS, don’t let go of me. Hold on as tight as you can. We’re going to have to run.”
“What?” Jane had spent a lot of time in MSS. She couldn’t think of a single reason they’d need to run. They’d always been safe there, alone.
Hadn’t they?
The sound of blasts rang through the door.
“No time to explain,” Darcy said, drawing in a gulp of air, “We stick together, and we run like hell.”
Jane nodded and winced at her scream.
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Outside the cell, Thor’s joyous howls echoed throughout the warehouse, accompanied by the thumps of bodies and the crashing of Mjolnir through concrete walls. Calling on enough lightning to level the place, he let it loose just as he rolled through a hole to the street.
Neither he nor the two women who’d escaped seconds before him ever noticed the emblem with the skull and its eight legs painted on the wall of the control room, nor did they see the camera mounted next to it, red light glowing steadily through the smoke.
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Darcy heard the front door being thrown open, followed by raucous laughter. Knowing it was Thor, she focused on the task at hand: holding Jane’s hair back from her face as she vomited. The cool tile was pushing at a bruise she’d gotten on her knee, but she ignored it as she rubbed Jane’s shuddering back.
“Jane? Darcy?” Thor called out from the living room, still lost to the euphoria of victory, “There are cakes to be had!”
At the mention of the sugary food, Jane’s heaving increased tenfold.
“In here!” Darcy yelled through the open door. Thor filled the frame, quickly coming to crouch with them by the toilet. Letting Thor’s hands replace hers, Darcy slipped back to lean against the tub, trusting that he could take the lead in Jane’s care.
“What happened? What did they do to you?” Thor asked, heedless of Jane’s inability to talk. There was nothing left to throw up, but she hadn’t caught her breath.
Darcy clenched her fists in her lap, fingers creaking from the strain. She stared at a chip in the floor as she answered for her friend.
“They didn’t do anything. Not to her, at least.”
Thor finally tore his eyes from Jane, seemingly noticing her rough state for the first time.
“Did they,” he asked, confusion coloring his tone, “Did our enemies do something to you?” He nodded to the bloody rip in her jeans.
“No.”
She kept her eyes on that chipped tile.
Thor looked between her and Jane, at a loss.
“They were monsters,” Jane croaked from where she was huddled over the toilet bowl, “They were the worst kind of monsters.”
Darcy closed her eyes at the reminder, but immediately opened them again. She didn’t want to relive the past hour, not ever again.
Never wanted to remember cold hands grabbing at anything they could, of mouths hanging open in pained cries, or the mass of bodies swarming in their fear and confusion, all of them broken, so mutilated and mangled they barely looked human anymore...
She shoved Jane out of the way as her control over her own stomach was lost. Two sets of hands steadied her.
“There were dozens of... people in MSS,” Jane furiously rasped through her sore throat, “Whoever it was that took me, they killed all of those people.”
Thor gathered the stray hair that had fallen out of Darcy’s ponytail and tucked it behind her ear.
“That is obviously a tragedy, but I still do not understand why…” he trailed off.
Darcy wiped her mouth, grimacing at the acidic taste of bile.
“It’s not that they died, Thor, but how. They were totally ravaged...” she thought back to her history class at Culver about the second world war and felt nauseous all over again, “They looked like the old pictures of Mengele’s victims.”
Thor looked at them blankly.
“Human experimentation,” Jane filled in for him “They were experimenting on...I don’t know who they were or why they wanted me, but they were torturing people.”
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No one slept that night. The three of them sat unmoving on the couch, watching shadows play on the walls from the moonlight pouring through the tall windows. Completely silent until sunlight crept up through the glass, the warmth hitting first their toes and then spreading.
An unspoken vigil.
Once the birds were chirping outside and people could be heard beginning their commute on the street below, Thor rose.
“I believe the time to call on the Avengers has come.”
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It was remarkable in its irony. The mad scientist chasing fairy tales, using increasingly far fetched measures to induce greatness in the ordinary, and a miracle happens once Pierce takes over the London base after forcing Strucker to Sokovia.
He had to chuckle at that.
Pierce watched the video again, seeing the mysterious young woman materialize out of thin air with Thor and then disappear once again without the Asgardian, seemingly at her own discretion and without any help.
“Do we know who she is yet?” he asked.
“Sir?” Rumlow raised a brow at him.
“The girl, the one who apparently teleports, do we have any clue who she is?” Pierce asked, annoyed at having to repeat himself.
“We know who she is, sir,” Rumlow spoke, carefully enunciating every word, “Darcy Lewis. She’s Jane Foster’s assistant, the one who kept spotting all of her tails. Barton was sent to asses her. Remember?”
As a point of fact, Pierce did not.
He really should remember that, but none of it sounds even remotely familiar. Given his two lives, he prided himself on being detail oriented to a compulsive degree.
Yet he had absolutely no memory of Darcy Lewis.
Rumlow was still standing at attention, traces of skepticism bleeding onto his face.
“Yes,” Pierce coughed, “Clearly we need a better picture of her on file.”
Nodding, Rumlow looked appeased.
“This needs to be looked into, but it will have to wait,” Pierce began. His lapse in memory would also need to be looked into, but privately. Such a vulnerability could be a tactical advantage to too many. “Right now, we have more pressing concerns.”
“The Lemurian Star,” Rumlow agreed, “Romanoff never made it to the rendezvous point. Heard her and Cap arguing about different missions. She slipped a thumb drive into her belt on the quinjet.”
“Damn,” he sighed. Fury was better than he had given him credit for, even if it was too little, too late, “We’re too close to let anything screw it up. Fury needs to be taken care of.”
Pierce sat down at his desk, pulling out the notes he would need for his meeting with the World Security Council later today.
“Wake the Soldier.”