The Bar
Eliot slumped in the back corner of the bar, nursing his beer and peering at the crowd through his hair. The atmosphere was just what he needed - sparse lighting, a well used wooden bar, a jukebox, and a couple of pool tables. Places like this helped him unwind after a job, and the last one had been tough. They had been collecting information on a shady insurance adjuster, and were trapped by security on the 78th floor in the middle of the day. With tempers heightened and security tightened after the whole alien-portal thing a couple years ago, and again with the SHIELD/HYDRA fiasco last month (which may have been mostly in DC, but that shit happened everywhere), extraction was extremely difficult. They made it out this time, whole and with the information, but work in this city was getting more complicated and he was going to have to convince Parker and Hardison they needed to stay out of New York.
Things were different without Sophie and Nate. Not that he missed them, with their awful flirting, and Sophie’s terrible acting, and Nate’s drunken stupidity, and.. well. He did miss having two more people he trusted at his back. He and Parker and Hardison worked well together, but there were days when he felt the empty spaces in the team. Not to mention that since Hardison had pulled his head out of his ass about Parker, there was the more than occasional ‘third-wheel’ feeling.
Tonight Parker and Hardison were off celebrating their win - either jumping off of something, or rolling in money, or playing video games (it depended on whose turn it was to choose the activity). So he sat alone with his beer, back to the corner, and let the murmur of the low key crowd wash over him.
His eyes moved over the fairly scant patronage. Mostly people dressed like him - boots, denim, tee shirts, flannel - who looked like they worked construction. That made sense; even two and a half years later, New York was still rebuilding. The bulk of them were grouped around the pool tables, typical after-work decompressing. There were a few others dotted near the bar and nearby tables, but no one who really grabbed his focus.
He was trying to decide whether he wanted another beer when he heard her.
“Hey Harry, give me another one?” He hadn’t really registered her initially, she was seated on the far side of the bar in a grey cardigan and square black framed glasses. His subconscious dismissed her as a threat and he wasn’t really looking for company, so it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t seen her earlier. While the bartender pulled her another beer, she hopped up to fiddle with the jukebox. Tight dark denim and black converse sneakers, long dark waves of hair and apparently an appreciation for Johnny Cash. She made her way back to her seat while ignoring the several leers and a couple of half-hearted catcalls from a knot of construction guys in their late twenties.
Once she was settled with her beer, Eliot made his way toward the bartender, signaling for a refill. He thought about sitting at the bar and chatting the girl (woman?) but she had her eyes closed and her head tilted back against the wall. He got that. So he threw some cash on the bar and took his beer back to his corner. While his eyes didn’t close, the combination of decent beer and good music lulled him enough that he almost startled when he heard her voice again.
“Thanks Harry. See you in a couple days.” She swung a canvas messenger bag across her body, draped a cord around her neck (earbuds?), and headed for the door. Eliot was about to go back to his beer when he noticed one of the guys near the bar lock eyes with one of the construction workers at the next table. The three guys at the table got up and walked out the front door, while two from the bar went toward the back exit.
Shit.
This week was awful, and it was only Wednesday. To be fair, the last few weeks had been awful, and she was just thankful to make it to this one.
After the whole London with Space Aliens thing, she and Jane had hightailed it back to the States with Eric in tow. Thor showed up in New Mexico about a week later, Eric just sort of freaked out (again) and left for the mountains, and they sort of laid low and crunched numbers and ate Pop-Tarts. Ian called a week after Christmas from the airport in Santa Fe and asked if he could crash with Darcy for a while. ‘Thank you for saving me from Alien-Elf-Things’ kiss or not, she was not going to give up any of her hard won trailer space to Ian, but she convinced Jane to let him crash in a hammock at the gas station.
Ian had apparently thought their kiss was some sort of epic romance thing.. and not the thank-fuck-we’re-alive thing that Darcy had decided it was, but he did coffee and pastry runs when she and Jane were busy crunching numbers, and managed to dial down the puppy eyes so that Thor didn’t turn him into a paste with Myuh-Myuh. Everybody wins.
Then it all went to shit.
She heard Jane’s confused shouts and saw Ian trying to shove her into the car.. so Darcy tased the shit out of him and they both started screaming for Thor. In the course of about 2 hours, they found out that (a) most of SHIELD was actually HYDRA, (b) Captain America and Black Widow had foiled some sort of mass-murdering HYDRA plot by putting SHIELD onto wikileaks, and (c) Ian was HYDRA. Yeah. Jane, Darcy, and Thor shoved what they could into the truck and the trailer and bugged out. Two days later Jane gets a call from Pepper Fucking Potts saying the three of them need to get to Stark Tower asap.
So they drive across the country, and end up in the tower with the fucking Avengers. It was great in the whole ‘rent free apartment in Stark Tower with a stocked kitchen’ way of thinking, but it was a bit.. stifling. Jane had her SCIENCE and Thor, everyone else was a freaking superhero, and Darcy just kinda.. kept on being an intern. She got to do absurd things like watch movies with Captain America, and Black Widow was teaching her some moves that did not involve her taser. She started cooking in huge quantities to feed whoever managed to make it to the kitchen while the food was hot, and brought sandwiches down to the labs when Jane and the Science Bros went on a Science bender.
She just felt.. adrift. A couple times a week she would head out to Harry’s and drink decent beer and commandeer the jukebox and pretend that her life wasn’t completely confusing.
This week was bad in particular, because Barton had just gotten back from some drama with his brother, and Natasha was expressing her unhappiness in a direct and emotionally honest manner.. by hitting him a lot. ‘Sparring.’ Whatever. There was a lot of swearing in Russian. Cap was broody because he was positive that Bucky had saved him from drowning and was now running free who knows where, and Sam was trying to keep him from spending all day walking through the city yelling “BUCKY” and putting up Lost Bestie posters or whatever he thought of next. ‘Star-Spangled Man-with-a-Plan, my ass.’ Jane and the Science Bros were deep in science land, but they had all slept last night, so she legit had no use in the lab today.
So, beer’o’clock it was. She left the Tower (it wasn’t sneaking.. no one asked, so she didn’t tell) and made it to Harry’s before sunset. She had Johnny Cash, her favorite seat at the bar, and no one was yelling or sciencing or brooding or even talking in her direction. It was fucking awesome. Two beers and a couple dozen songs, and Darcy felt more like a person. She put some cash down for her tab, put her earbuds around her neck for the walk, and headed back toward the tower.
It wasn’t a long walk, maybe 15 minutes total, but it was dark and this was the city. Darcy wasn’t stupid. She kept one earbud in (with the music on low), and one hand in her bag on her taser while she trooped back to the side entrance of the Tower.
Three minutes into her walk she got that weird itchy feeling on the back of her neck that either meant someone was watching her or she had a bug caught in her hair. She thought she heard footsteps, but this is New York, and even when it’s quiet, it isn’t really quiet.
She pulled her earbud out and stuffed the headphones into her bag, hitching it up a little and walking a little faster. There was no harm in being cautious. She turned right down the next street and crossed the road and stopped short when she saw two guys who looked vaguely familiar from the bar less than a block in front of her. She went to turn back and saw three more.
Shit.
Darcy pulled her taser out of her bag and reached toward her back pocket for her phone as she twisted to put her back to the building next to her. Swiping her thumb across the pattern lock screen on her phone and mashing the red button icon in the center, she screamed.
“MISTER WIZARD! GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” She thought it was a good emergency phrase. The five goons closed in fast, realizing their prey was calling for backup. Darcy swung her taser toward the closest one.
“Back OFF!” They didn’t. She fired her taser into the closest one’s chest and he dropped like a depowered Norse God. Unfortunately, that effectively disarmed her, and there were four more guys. Dropping her taser, Darcy backed closer to the wall behind her as the guys closed in a loose semicircle. She could hear Natasha’s voice echoing in her head. ‘Keep your eyes open. Use what is around you. If you get the chance, run away.’ She shoved her phone into her back pocket and tightened the strap on her bag.
“C’mon, Miss Lewis. You know how this is gonna end.” Oh fuck no. They knew her name. The fleeting hope that this was just normal violence (and isn’t that a fucked up thought) disappeared. Hope that she could get away was also disappearing - four random dudes with misogyny issues she could maybe outrun, but four HYDRA goons who likely had SHIELD training? Fuck.
“Fuck off you Nazi assholes!” Well, at least she was gonna stall and kick and scream in the hopes that JARVIS would get someone from the Tower down here asap.
Chatty Goon dodged her elbow as he moved in closer and grabbed her by the hair. He swung her closer and banded his other arm around her, pinning her arms. She shrieked as she kicked at his shins and ankles, and the hand in her hair let go. Feeling a little vindicated she struggled more, and then felt a sharp pain in her immobilized arm. Fuuuuuck. Then the arm holding her still was gone and she realized she could hear the sounds of punching.
Feeling a little dizzy, she half fell backward into the wall behind her and blinked to focus her eyes. Two of the HYDRA guys were on the ground next to the one she tasered, and the last two were fighting with a new guy. She would have thought it was Barton, he was the right height and build, but New Guy had hair past his chin and was wearing a flannel shirt which contained no purple. He had a bit of a manic smile on his face as he knocked Chatty Goon out cold and stood over the pile of unconscious HYDRA dudes. He looked up at her and held his hands up a bit in a pacifying gesture. He said something that she couldn’t quite make out.
Darcy just stared, confused. Also she wasn’t talking, which was.. unlike her. The dizziness wasn’t getting better.. in fact, her vision was getting a bit swimmy. Oh.
Shit.
Eliot trailed behind the guys from the bar. He kept them just barely in sight, and had to walk slowly as they didn’t seem to be in a hurry and he didn’t want to get any closer. He didn’t know what exactly he was dealing with, which was not a comfortable experience. He saw the three guys turn right and lost sight of them completely, but kept his pace until he heard the woman scream.
“MISTER WIZARD! GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” Okay. Weird. “Back OFF!”
Eliot took off running toward the sound. As he rounded the corner he saw four of them men ranged around the woman, whose back was to the building with one arm outstretched toward a man on the ground. Was that a taser?
He heard one of the men say something. The woman went from spitting mad and flushed to pale and terrified. Her whole body seemed to shudder.
“Fuck off you Nazi assholes!” Okay. Right then.
As Eliot moved forward, the man that spoke grabbed the woman. She flailed and screamed and kicked, which provided a decent distraction as he took down the two men closest to him. He saw the one who had spoken earlier dodging the woman’s kicks, but he didn’t seem to be hurting her, just restraining her.
Eliot growled at the second to last guy as he crashed his forearm into the guy’s throat and kicked the side of his knee. The last guy let go of the woman and came at him. Eliot grinned and ducked under a punch and slammed his elbow hard into the guys face. The sound of the bad guy’s head hitting the pavement had a certain finality to it.
Finally Eliot looked at the woman. She was leaning heavily against the brick wall behind her, shaking her head a little and blinking.
“Are you okay?” Eliot took a half step toward her. “Ma’am?” She looked confused, and hadn’t moved from her spot on the wall. He held his hands up a little to show he didn’t mean any harm. He moved closer and saw that her eyes were unfocused and glassy. She looked like she was trying to shake herself out of it, and that is when he saw the syringe caught in the arm of her cardigan. He moved quickly toward her as she lost the battle with consciousness and started to slide sideways. Eliot caught her against his chest and looked down.
Shit.