Darcy Lewis and Shark Week
Darcy’s a moody bitch on her period. She knows it. The cashier at the bodega right around the corner from the Tower knows it. Everyone knows it.
Pepper and Natasha get it, load her down with Midol and heating pads and give her all of the cuddles that a girl could possibly need to get through the horror of Shark Week.
The boys? Not so much.
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They’re kind of clueless, is the thing.
Bucky and Steve get a bit of a free pass, seeing as how they grew up in the Depression and Darcy knows that menstruation wasn’t exactly a hot topic back then.
But, damn it, sometimes all she wanted to do was wallow in her bed and suffer through her cramps with all the dignity she could muster.
And since she’s hormonal, more prone to irritation because for men so smart they really can be so stupid, she decides it’s time for all of them to suffer with her.
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Sam likes to actually go out and get his groceries instead of having JARVIS order them, leaves a little notepad on the fridge door on the common floor in case anybody has any specific requests.
Darcy takes the little pencil attached to the pad with string and writes tampons: LOLA, regular & super right underneath Bruce’s chicken scratch for ice-cream.
“What’s LOLA?” Sam asks from over her shoulder, and to his credit he doesn’t get a freaked out look in his eyes like some men she knows when confronted with anything related to a uterus.
“It’s the brand,” Darcy explains, frowns at him when he just nods his head.
Sam makes it up to her with a kiss and shoves a waffle in her hands.
She eats it because, well, waffles. And Sam’s never made her any bad food.
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She’s not prepared for the entire kitchen counter to be covered in boxes of tampons when Sam gets back from his shopping trip, though.
“Do you have a fucking harem or something?” Darcy laughs, shaking her head in fondness when Sam just looks at her in confusion.
“You have a harem,” Sam points out, moving to put Bruce’s ice-cream in the freezer. “What? You said you needed tampons, I got tampons.”
Darcy grabs one single box of each size and holds them up for him to see.
“I just needed these, not half the store.”
Sam shrugs his shoulders, but Darcy can see the blush trying to hide under his beautiful dark skin.
“I went a little overboard,” Sam admits, and Darcy grins when he scratches at the back of his neck in embarrassment.
“Baby, seventeen boxes of tampons is a bit more than overboard,” Darcy teases, her mood lifting even more when he flips her off. “I’ll split it up and give some to Pepper and Natasha. Maybe stash some boxes in the bathroom on this floor.”
Sam balls up the plastic bag in his hand and shoves it into the bigger plastic bag they keep under the sink.
“You should put some on my floor, too. Might as well since all three of you are there all the time,” Sam mutters. “And I can buy more next month when you run out.”
Darcy arches an eyebrow at him and looks back at the boxes on the counter.
“Honey, I really don’t think you’ll have to buy more for a hot minute. How many tampons do you think a woman uses?”
Sam shrugs again, a careless movement that makes his shoulders look all that more impressive. Darcy lets herself get distracted for a second before going back to their conversation.
“You know what? It’s better than thinking we use just one for our whole cycle. I’ll just let you know when we run out, and you’ll know better for next time.”
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Clint is a demon straight from the pits of hell and tries to gently bully her in to going to the park with him for some yoga class.
Darcy knows he only wants to go because the flyer said there’d be baby goats, and if she wasn’t currently fucking dying she’d be right there with him. Baby goats are precious.
“Leave me here to die,” Darcy groans, curls up further into a little ball on the couch. She was gonna have fucking words with her uterus after this week was over with.
Clint gets a startled look on his face and the mischief in his eyes is replaced with concern.
“You okay, sweetheart? What happened?”
Darcy shakes her head and presses her fingers hard against the low rise waist band of her pajama pants. “My uterus feels like it’s trying to dig it’s way out of my bellybutton with a plastic spoon.”
“I thought it was normal to have some pain?” Clint asks, reaches up to scratch his head.
“Some pain,” Darcy hisses. “Everyone is different, but my cramps make me want to vomit sometimes, they hurt so bad.”
Clint’s face goes pale and he moves his hands awkwardly in front of himself like he wants to reach for her, but he holds himself back.
“Hold that thought.”
Darcy wallows in her misery while Clint all but runs to the elevator and makes his escape. Or, well, almost escape. He’s back in under two minutes with an electric heating pad that he plugs into the wall and cranks up to high.
“Should help, right? I usually use it on my back when I pull a muscle,” Clint mutters, and Darcy takes it out of his hands; puts in on her abdomen and presses it in.
“Cuddles?” Darcy asks hopefully, already has her arms held out so Clint can lower his body carefully on hers.
He doesn’t make a single complaint about missing the baby goats, but he does make her pet his hair.
Darcy thinks it’s a fair trade.
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Tony, despite being in a long term relationship with Pepper, acts like his honor has been mortally wounded when she makes a comment about her level of pain.
“It’s not even that bad,” Tony scoffs. “Try getting hit in the balls. Much more painful than that whole thing you’ve got goin’ on.”
Darcy narrows her eyes at him and reminds herself that Pepper would miss him if he suddenly went missing.
“There have literally been studies done on how pain associated with a period is as bad, or worse, than having a heart attack,” Darcy points out.
Tony gets a smug look on his face and Darcy’s tempted to throw a wrench at his head.
“Puh-lease. Heart attack my ass. I think some of you women just like to complain about it and get a free pass.”
(Darcy tells herself that while Pepper would understand once she explained, that murder is still illegal and she’s not cut out for prison.)
“You wouldn’t last three seconds if you had to deal with period cramps,” Darcy says sweetly.
And Tony, well, he’s never backed down from a challenge and that’s how he ends up attached to a simulator, sticky pads attached to his front and lower back.
She cranks it up to level three right off the bat and has the immense pleasure of watching his eyebrow twitch.
“This is baseline,” Darcy explains. “Light cramps, easy to push to the back of your mind.”
She turns the dial until it lands on six and Tony’s fingers spasm before he clenches his fists.
“This is mild cramping. Not so easy to ignore, but we still go about our days. Probably the most common, at least it is for the women I know.”
She lets him sit at level six for a few minutes, watches as he shifts like he’s trying to get away from the electrical currents the simulator uses.
She cranks it to level ten without warning. She wants him to have the most authentic experience possible with cramps and is using her own body as the guide.
Tony’s entire body tenses and then he’s yanking the sticky pads off his body, throwing them in the floor like they’re a particularly offensive magazine.
“And that’s what my cramps feel like,” Darcy says flatly.
“That was fucking horrible,” Tony whispers, and Darcy lets herself laugh at him.
“You only had it for two seconds! Try having them for hours on end and still having the expectation to go about your day like nothing’s wrong. Fuckin’ sucks,” Darcy mutters darkly.
Tony shakes his head in disbelief, but he doesn’t say anything else. Darcy knows he’s learned his lesson.
(Stark Industry rolls out a new policy the next day: menstruation was absolutely accepted as a reason to not come to work, either in the form of paid leave or working from home. Darcy feels a little better about herself knowing that she probably scarred Tony.)
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Bruce is smart. Which is why he betrays Darcy by proving that he really only has two brain cells that he rubs together to get enough friction to power his brain.
“God, you get pissy when you’re on your period,” Bruce mutters darkly, right after Darcy finishes her rant about Sam eating the last of her ice-cream.
“Excuse me?” Darcy demands.
Bruce shakes his head and goes back to looking at something under a microscope.
“No, you don’t get to act like you didn’t just say that!” Darcy growls.
Bruce gives her a pointed look and Darcy reminds herself, again, that she’s not cut out for prison.
“You do not get to diminish any of my feelings just because I’m on my period,” Darcy says icily. “You wouldn’t say a single thing if I weren’t, in fact you’d agree with me. So kindly get your head out of your ass before you decide you want to talk to me again.”
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Bruce finds her on Natasha’s floor three hours later, curled up in a throw blanket and clutching a stuffed otter to her chest.
“You done being mad at me?” Bruce asks, and Darcy raises a single eyebrow at him.
“You done being as asshole?”
Bruce sits on the cushion beside her and tugs her feet in his lap, wraps one of his hands around her ankle while the other shoves through his hair.
“I,” Bruce starts, “am sometimes prone to idiocy. And I’m sorry. You were right, had you complained at any other time I would have agreed with you.”
Darcy runs her fingers over the otters fur before holding her hand out for Bruce to take.
“I accept your apology, but don’t let it happen again. It hurt,” Darcy admits.
And it had hurt, made her feel like he was dismissing her thoughts and emotions simply because she was on her period. She knows she sometimes can get snippy, but she’s not a raging hormone monster that blows things out of proportion just for the hell of it.
“I promise.”
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Steve and Bucky turn an interesting shade of red when they ask her if she’s alright when they find her crying over a soup commercial and she tells them she’s become Aunt Flo’s bitch.
“Women didn’t talk about it,” Steve points out, and to his credit he maintains his eye contact with her.
“And we weren’t stupid enough to ask,” Bucky adds. He’s adorable when he blushes.
“Lots of things have changed since then,” Darcy says with a shrug. “But you need to be aware of certain things. Women, and men, who get their period aren’t scared of it anymore. It’s a natural process and we’re done with being shamed for it.”
“People make you feel bad about having a cycle?” Steve asks, horror written on his face. Darcy is reminded that his mom was a nurse, probably taught Steve, at the bare minimum, that it was normal.
“That’s like makin’ you feel bad for bein’ short,” Bucky grumbles. “Ain’t no point in it.”
Bucky, Darcy remembers, had sisters.
They might be uncomfortable talking about it, but Darcy thinks that it has more to do with being grumpy old men than being grossed out about it; and she’s absolutely certain, deep down in her bones, that they’d be the first ones to bash some heads in when it came to willful ignorance about the subject.
“I’ll have you straight faced about it yet,” Darcy smiles, and they both nod at her.
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She got pretty lucky with her boys, she thinks, because they’re willing to learn about why they’re wrong and the biases they probably didn’t even know they had.
Pepper and Natasha still reign supreme, though.