Chapter 4
Darcy woke far earlier than the late night of work should have allowed. (It seemed even when she could sleep in she was destined to be deprived of a full eight hours.) She stared at the ceiling miserably. Her thoughts swirled uncomfortably.
She may possibly have a slight tiny problem she realized unpleasantly.
Darcy had known she liked Natasha. She’d been enthralled by the grainy image of her running around the Battle of New York like some exploding jungle gym- strangling aliens with her thighs and brutally ripping through enemies like wet paper.
Like most people who had someone they admired though, that like had always been a distant thing. Intangible and strengthened by the perfection of ignorance and unfamiliarity. A figure on a poster crafted in a mix of reality and Photoshop.
She had never expected to meet the person she admired, let alone get the chance to spend enough time with them to see them as…real.
Beginning to really know Natasha was…different.
She was still gorgeous of course.
Pretty to look at like they all were.
But working and living and generally being around superheroes meant Darcy had grown pretty used to being surrounded by beautiful people.
Heroes all tended to be beings of flawless skin, sculpted muscle, and unnatural grace. Darcy found no shame in saying she enjoyed that part of her crazy life. It was like being surrounded by the most beautiful sculptures brought to life. When she stared at them she sometimes wondered if they aren't a little bit like the elves in Lord of the Rings, so perfect as to be slightly unnatural.
(At least until they did something adorably stupid like that time she found Tony with his hand stuck in a jar or that time Scarlet Witch spilt coffee on her shirt and sat there staring forlornly at it.)
But the Black Widow was no longer that beautiful grainy image being observed from the far side of a screen. Now she was Natasha.
With a bit of a sinking feeling Darcy forcefully hiked the overs higher. She pulled them over her head and tucked them around her chin in a tight cocoon. Then she shut her eyes again and tried to force herself back to sleep. Thoughts kept traitorously surfacing…
The problem was that the more time she spent with Natasha the more little things she noticed. Like how, when presented with a choice between things, Natasha sometimes didn't seem to know what she wanted...or, no, that wasn't it. It was more that she seemed surprised to realize that she had a preference. There was this …vulnerability when those moments happened. Like Natasha was letting Darcy really see her.
Natasha was skilled and deadly and secretly liked the color pink. She had an insatiable sweet tooth, a fondness for theater, and a dark slightly sardonic type of humor. Whenever Darcy managed to get Natasha to smile it was that 'paw in the hand' type feeling. Which was nice because not a lot of people choose Darcy.
(God she didn’t want to think about that. Didn't matter now anyway.)
So she liked Natasha she realized gloomily. Was even standing on the very dangerous precipice of really liking her.
And she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do about it.
-….-….-…-
A few hours later Darcy finally gave up the pretense of sleep and rolled herself out of bed.
She dragged a hand through her tangled hair and grabbed her phone from her nightstand. Jane must not have been sleeping well either because she had a few texts from her friend that had come in during the early hours of the morning.
Thankfully it seemed that not only did she have the day off, but that Captain America, Falcon, and The Black Widow had all disappeared from the building on a mission. An embarrassing amount of relief flooded through her at the thought that she wasn’t going to have to face Natasha immediately. Hopefully they would be gone long enough for her to pull herself together.
She spent the morning stress knitting in her pajamas. Darcy got half way done with a hat, hated it, took it apart, and remade it better following a pattern she found on the depths of the internet.
Darcy knit the best damn beanie she'd ever made. Pink on one side, black on the other, with a little red spider that shown through either way it was worn. She still finished in record time. A quick glance at her phone told her it was still only 10.
Nerves faded somewhat, she jammed on a pair of slippers and shuffled off in search of breakfast.
Hair a mess, rocking her cat-face pajamas, Darcy stumbled into the kitchen to find the Scarlet Witch and Vision sitting at the island counter together. Darcy hadn't interacted much with either of them before as she saw them only sparingly around the building. Presumably they spent much of their time training in the complexes various gyms. Still, she offered a somewhat bleary greeting they quietly returned as Darcy grabbed some cereal.
Tony swaggered into the kitchen just as she was finishing up her bowl.
Dressed in what she would classify as ‘business casual’ with the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, he looked a little better than the last time she’d seen him but not by much. His eyes swept over Wanda, passed over Vision entirely, and honed in in Darcy. "Lewis! Nice hair, very 80's glam rock." He told her with a flashy grin.
She gave him a withering look he completely ignored, puttering around the blender and fridge.
"Well you would know wouldn't you, old man?" She shot back with no real bite.
Tony threw some green thing into the blender and scowled at her. "Rude."
She raised an eyebrow at his suspiciously healthy looking smoothie in retort, "Gross."
Darcy watched him chug the smoothie down, his body angled away from the two Avengers sitting at the counter. His eyes were dark and face a little pinched.
Perfect, she decided.
What better way to avoid her own problems then to fix someone else's?
The billionaire's phone rang and he fished it from his pocket as he placed his glass in the dishwasher. He gave her a tight wave farewell and disappeared from the kitchen in a rush, shoulders a little hunched as he passed by Vision, as Darcy got up to clear her own bowl.
Hands on her hips in a move stolen from Jane, Darcy rounded on the two Avengers still sitting at the island. "Okay," she asked, "What the hell was that?"
The Sokovian woman gave her a surprised look but Vision looked nonplussed. "I believe Mr. Stark is still struggling to reconcile me existence with the loss of his A.I." he told her blandly.
"You killed his A.I.?"
The Scarlet Witch shook her head. "He is not the same." She said like that cleared everything up.
Which it didn't.
She stared at the pair.
The two looked at each other for a moment before conceding to tell her the story of Ultron and the birth of Vision. Turned out the whole thing with Sokovia was more complicated then she had thought. Sometimes Darcy thought her own life was strange but man, nope. Whole new level of crazy. "So Ultron is dead and you are like the half ghost son of Tony Starks A.I. combined with a glowing rock from outer space?"
Vision tilted his head in consideration. "Your phrasing is imprecise but essentially correct."
"So what about Jarvis?" Darcy wondered and the two gave her confused looks.
Vision’s unnatural eyes tracked her curiously. Darcy vaguely wondered if his pupils worked like a camera lens. "As you said, J.A.R.V.I.S is gone." Vision told her.
Scarlet Witch was frowning.
Yeah, OK but that didn't really answer her question. Darcy frowned while the Scarlet Witch turned purposefully back towards Vision as though the cut Darcy out of their conversation.
Discussion apparently over Darcy stalked from the kitchen in a bit of a huff.
She wondered why no one else seemed concerned about what was going on with Tony. Did they just not notice? It seemed pretty obvious to Darcy at least that something was, yeah know, wrong.
If the loss of Jarvis was what had caused that melt down she had witnessed then the A.I. was more important to Tony then any of his teammates seemed to realize.
Darcy’s brows furrowed uneasily in though. She paused in the middle of the hallway then turned on her heels back in the opposite direction. Natasha may be out on a mission but there was someone else Darcy might still be able to get help from.
Darcy went in search of Clint.
-….-….-…-
Still dressed in the pajamas and slippers Darcy crept nervously down the empty hallway.
She has only been to this section of the building once before, on the complimentary tour of the building right after she and Jane had moved in. Even though she was technically allowed to be there it felt weird. This was where the Avengers trained after all, definitely not her usual territory.
The air in this part of the building felt more recycled and sterile, smelling of disinfectant and sweat. Darcy passed by the wide set of windows that looked down into the large obstacle course room that was used for team exercises. She brushed her hand against the glass. It was huge, two stories tall, utilizing both ground and aerial space, but dark and empty now. She walked on down towards the smaller rooms intended for more individualized training.
Seeing light from one of the wall windows, Darcy hurried along over. Through the glass she could see a target range and, finally, Hawkeye.
He was tearing through arrows at a literally blinding speed. Pulling from his quiver, shooting, and pulling another almost before the first arrow left the string.
Holy crap.
Not being a complete idiot, she stood and waited until his quiver ran dry before knocking and opening the door. "Hey Clint!" Darcy called as the man headed to collect his perfectly clustered arrows.
"Clint?" she asked, following behind him. He turned sharply on his heel, muscles tense, then blinked at her face and shook his head exasperatedly.
Tapping a finger to his ear he made his way over to the table by the wall as Darcy flushed a little behind him.
Right. duh, Lewis.
The man stuffed a tiny hearing aid into one of his ears than leaned back casually against the table. "What's up?" Clint he asked easily.
Stealing herself Darcy told him, "I have a mission for you." At his expression she amended, "Well, I have a mission. Personal mission. And it’s probably going to require some skills…a very particular set of skills. Skills you have acquired over a very long career..."
"Nice," Clint smirked in approval as his strangely intense eyes gave her a look over. "Depends on what you want done."
"Just some information and maybe a little help breaking and entering. Do you know if there are any computers that were part of the lab that made Vision in the building?"
By his expression, whatever he had been expecting it hadn't been that.
"Yes," he confirmed slowly.
"Do you know where they are?"
He nodded, sharp eyes focused on her. Darcy gave a cheeky smile, "Think you could get me into one?"
-….-….-…-
As Darcy shuffled painfully along she could just make out the bottom of Clint's shoes in the darkness. She pulled herself along on her forearms, laptop bag tucked under her chin, wondering how the hell she had let him talk her into this. 'If we're doing this, we're doing it my way'. Yeah fucking right. She vowed to never again trust Clint. Never ever again. Her arms were aching and definitely going to be bruised tomorrow and a drip of sweat clung uncomfortably right above her right eye.
Now she knew the secret to his gigantic stupid arms. They didn't come from his stupid compound bow but from scuttling along air vents all day like a lunatic.
Finally, finally, she heard the clattering of Clint removing a vent cover that meant she was almost free. She awkwardly shoved her laptop out the opening and dragged herself through, elbow scratching against the side of the metal opening. Flopping on the floor bonelessly she glared up at the infuriatingly composed Hawkeye. "I think I hate you." She panted, dragging in breaths of cool fresh air.
He had the gall to laugh.
"Got you here didn't I?" he asked easily and offered her a callused hand. Clasping it, she hoisted herself to her feet. They were in a lab somewhere in the medical facility of the compound; she hadn't had much occasion to be here before but the hospital like aesthetic was unmistakable. Darcy cast her gaze around with laptop bag held hopefully in her arms. Medical equipment, some kind of weird chamber coffin like thing (probably better to just ignore that), a bed in the corner, and yes, a regular computer on the desk. "Not to stress you out or anything but you're ganna want to work fast if you really don't want anyone else knowing." Clint warned her as he hopped up on the bed.
"Right." She agreed. Darcy marched over to the computer and unzipped her laptop bag. She dug through one of the pockets for her USB connector cable and got to work.
"Remind me again why you don't want anyone knowing what you’re doing?"
Darcy scoffed as she hooked up her laptop to the computer. "What I'm trying to do. That's the point. I want to know if I even have anything to work with before I go bringing it up with Tony."
Bypassing the login screen, Darcy got to work searching through files and history; she was really hoping to find some kind of autosave. Something local to the computer rather than the server she was sure Tony would have already scoured through...
Darcy was good with computers. She had spent a lot of her childhood playing with code; decorating her Neopets page back in the day with basic HTML had launched her interest in C++ which had, in turn, eventually got her into hacking. Her enjoyment of the subject and her penchant for pushing limits had made her quite good over the years. Hacking S.H.I.E.L.D. for Thor was her most crowning achievement.
Still she was certainly not deluded enough to think herself better with computers then Tony Stark and he had at least been acting like this was a lost cause…
And yet…twenty minutes in, just as she began to lose hope….
'Holy shit.'
Darcy stared at the screen for a moment then she let her fingers fly over the keys. She copied everything she could find onto her laptop; thanking Stark Technologies that download speeds were so fast. Finishing up she glanced over to find Clint watching her closely. "What?" she asked, closing her laptop gently and removing the USB connector cord.
He shook his head and hopped down from the bed. "Nothing. Good to go?"
At her agreement he went over to the key padded door and punched in a code. The door beeped and slid open. Darcy stared in disbelief at the doorway. "Are you serious? You could have opened that this whole time?"
Clint smirked at her. "Of course. I am an Avenger." He waggled an eyebrow at her. "Good luck Lewis!" he called and bolted off like a coward.
(He's experiences with Natasha had well taught him when it was time to retreat.)
"Oh you little shit! Least favorite Avenger ever!" She avowed angrily. Storming into the hall she looked one way then the other down the empty unfamiliar corridors. He had vanished. "Your bow is stupid!" she yelled into the void.
With a mighty sigh she turned and glared back at the loose vent cover. There would be retribution for this she promised herself.
-….-….-…-
Darcy sat on her bed that night, laptop open, pouring over code. She dragged a hand through her tangled dark hair. The code was a mess and also really, really complicated. She felt like she was looking at an all-white jigsaw puzzle missing half its pieces. Darcy got up to grab some cookie dough from the freezer.
This was going to take awhile. A long while.
For the next few days Darcy went to work in the lab with Jane and then went straight back to her laptop, trying to force the code into some semblance of order. It was painfully slow going, working with huge chunks of data missing.
When a knock came to her door Darcy tumbled out of bed. Electric like tingles shot up and down her toes. She tapped her foot repeatedly as she made her way to the door, trying to return feeling to it before pulling the heavy door open with a sigh.
It was Natasha.
Out of her typical catsuit and dressed in a pair of dark blue jeans and a black jersey top. Her hair was straightened today and she had a pair of small dangling rose-gold earrings on. Darcy ran her hands over self-consciously the sides of her little-mewmew pajama pants she'd had custom made before then Avengers had saved New York and official merchandise became available.
"Can I come in?" Natasha asked.
Darcy moved aside with a gesture, "Oh, sure!" Her voice was thankfully only a little higher pitched then normal.
Moving back over to her bed Darcy sat gingerly on the mattress and Natasha hesitated a moment before sitting beside her. "Clint told me what you were doing." She said eyeing Darcy's open glowing laptop.
Darcy nodded and bit her lip.
She had asked Clint to keep the mission to himself but she'd known before she'd even asked that Natasha would be the exception to that. The two spies were like half of each other’s brains. Darcy doubted there was much they kept from each other.
Despite Darcy’s nerves it was good to see Natasha again, looking just as flawless and healthy as the last time they had seen each other. (So maybe she had been getting a little worried.) Darcy had missed the Widow’s presence in the kitchen. Their little game of ‘offerings’, Natasha’s calming presence when she got lost in a book, staying up with her and Clint and watching stupid movies and television together…
The spy and the intern sat in contemplative silence for a while before Natasha finally asked, "Why?" Her voice low and steady. Perhaps vaguely curious.
With a sigh Darcy flopped heavily back on the bed, head just narrowly missing her laptop.
That was a question she was wrestling with herself so naturally it would be the question Natasha honed in on. "I don't know man. Maybe because I eat all his food and mooch off his Wi-Fi?"
"You don't mooch, you work here." Natasha refuted easily with a raised eyebrow.
Darcy groaned. "Look, I just… I learned a lot about his company and the crazy number of charities he runs in my political science classes. And it's more than a little insane. Which I didn't think was possible because all the others corporations are basically giant conglomerate monsters. And Stark Industries used to be that way too. I remember watching all the scandals on TV and Tony was kind of an asshole…but after he got back from Afghanistan things went crazy. He basically rewrote the book on everything... After-school programs, helping fund refugee NGOs, all sorts of stuff. God, my professor never shut up about him…And cuz I'm mixed up in all of this insanity here too, I know that he's also basically funding all of this Avengers stuff out of his own pocket. And that got to mean even more press work and politic maneuverings. And you guys can't be making it easy when you go off and explode stuff in other sovereign countries. Tony does all this work, right? More than I think you guys' maybe appreciate? Or maybe you just don't know?"
Darcy trailed off for a moment listening to Natasha soft breathing.
"The guy can be a bit of a dick sometimes I'm sure. But, like, dudes been through some crazy shit and he keeps trying to do the right thing. And you all are his teammates so maybe you know something I don't, but I feel like…I don’t know….like, losing his A.I. was a bigger deal than you guys know."
Darcy jerked a little in surprise as Natasha flopped back beside her. Her hair was growing out Darcy noticed. The red locks curled to brush Natasha's shoulders. "Okay." Natasha said quietly as her eyes scanned Darcy's face, "Let me know if there is anything I can do to help."
For a quiet moment they just looked at each other.
Looking at Natasha's fathomless green eye, Darcy wondered at the sort of life this woman must have lived. People didn't just become assassins. It wasn’t something you could just wake up one morning and decide to do…or at least, not well. She’d read the press releases about Tony’s time in Afghanistan and seen how that one terrifying, horrifying experience had reshaped the man. She was suddenly horribly curious about that lay in Natasha’s past. What had made her who she was? How did she become The Black Widow? Did she have family? Was her real name actually Natasha? How had she come to work for S.H.I.E.L.D.?
Whatever had happened she knew with sobering clarity that there had to be unthinkable pain and tragedy there.
To be able to pull yourself from that kind of darkness…that was truly incredible.
She must have been staring too long because Natasha arched an eyebrow at her.
A smile crept over Darcy's face and she remembered suddenly the finished beanie she had tucked away at the bottom of her knitting bag. "I've got something for you." Darcy proclaimed. Jumping off the bed, she went over to her knitting bag and removed a few balls of yarn, digging around in the bottom until she found the beanie. "I finished it." she said, offering the hat to Natasha.
“Already?” The other woman pushed herself off the bed and stood to accept it. She turned the soft beanie over in her hands, turning the knitting from pink over to black and back again. She ran a finger over the tiny red spider and smiled. "Thank you Darcy."
Darcy desperately hoped she wasn't visibly blushing, "Uh…yeah. Anytime."
In a moment of typical Darcy stupidity, she awkwardly stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Natasha. The other woman froze for a moment and she felt a bolt of fear that she may have crossed an unwanted boundary. Then Natasha's arms slowly pressed around her in return, squeezing softly, before gently pushing Darcy away.
"I'll see you tomorrow?" the Russian confirmed before heading for the door. Natasha slipped from the room with a wish goodnight and Darcy stood staring at the door far longer than she had any right to.
-….-….-…-
It was 4:07 in the morning and Darcy has lost all control of her life. And she was pretty sure she was becoming Jane. Had to be osmosis or some shit.
It was the only explanation for why she was sitting in the kitchen at, she glanced at the clock, 4:08 am, in the dark, with laptop, still wearing yesterday's clothes. She plonked her head on the island in exhaustion. This was hard. Like crazy extremely difficult. The coding was incredibly complex and nuanced and parts of it she was convinced had to be done in a coding language Tony must have invented. And worst of all, it wasn't doing nearly as much as she had hoped it would to distract her.
"Darcy?"
It wasn't Tony's voice so Darcy didn't see the point in slamming her laptop closed. Instead she just tilted her head on the marble and peered at the two figures standing in the doorway. It was Natasha and Captain America, both looking like they had just emerged from the gym.
God damn it. Of course the superhero of persistence and hard work would show up now.
"Hello Natasha, hello Captain America." She greeted sadly.
Captain America offered a confused, uncertain smile. "You can call me Steve, Darcy."
Oh hey, he knew her name too.
One step closer to a full set.
"Hello Captain Steve."
Natasha sighed but it was one if those breathy ones that meant she was covering a laugh.
Darcy slid a hand up and closed her laptop in at least temporary defeat. The two superheroes moved into the room; Natasha headed straight for a tiny side drawer as Captain Steve grabbed a protein shake from the fridge. He settled awkwardly beside her at the island. "Is something wrong?" he asked sounding like he was barely restraining from tacking a 'ma'am' to the end of his question.
"Oh you know; global warming, the socioeconomic gap between the global north and south, systemic poverty, racism." Darcy fired off without thought. Captain Steve stared at her a little wide-eyed and thrown.
"She's tired." Natasha told him.
A warm glass was pushed into Darcy's hand. She twisted head to look at the glass of warm milk Natasha had given her. With great effort she lifted her head to take a small sip. The Captain and the Widow conversed quietly for a few moments, something about raids in Germany, while Darcy made her way leisurely through the drink. Once the glass was empty Natasha took it and placed it in the dishwasher. She then put Darcy laptop in the brunette's arms and began to steer her from the kitchen.
"Say goodnight, Darcy."
"Goodnight Darcy." Darcy muttered raising a lazy salute to Captain America. Which, hilariously, the man returned.
Being led down to her room was a strange sense of almost reverse déjà vu for Darcy. It was after all typically her leading Jane to bed. The Widow opened Darcy's door and half carried the other woman to her bed. Darcy collapsed on top of the mattress and kicked off her shoes. As Natasha pulled away Darcy curled to her side and instinctively grabbed the spy's fingers loosely. Natasha froze at once. "I don't think I can fix it." Darcy confessed tiredly.
"Why not?" Natasha asked quietly still facing away towards the door.
Natasha's hands were surprisingly small, Darcy observed, the fingers smooth in her feather light grip. "There's just too much missing. There are huge gaps in the data. I can put it in order and maybe sort of fill the gaps but it wouldn't be…the same."
Wouldn't be J.A.R.V.I.S- Darcy knew. She'd been doing her research. There wasn't a whole lot of information available publicly about J.A.R.V.I.S; there was the patent Darcy had managed to find and an article in a tech magazine that described it (him?) as 'an advanced security system' but Visions story about Sokovia, Tony's reaction to his (its?) death, and the code she had managed to salvage, showed he had been a lot more than that.
The bed dipped slightly as Natasha perched on the very edge. "So what are your options?" At Darcy's silence she continued, "I would say you have three. Put it away and forget about it,” Natasha ignored Darcy’s huff at that, “Give him what you've recovered as it is. Let him decide what to do with it."
Darcy considered for a moment. It wasn't such a bad plan. Still- "Or?"
"Or you fill in what you can and make something new."
Darcy nodded.
Natasha's thumb gently caressed Darcy's hand in slow circles.
The last thing Darcy wanted to do was hand Tony some Frankenstein bastardized corpse of his A.I. At the same time though…the idea of returning it unfinished just felt wrong in her gut. Like handing him an open wound rather than the closure she intended.
"I must go, pchelka." Natasha said softly.
Darcy released the woman's fingers and watched as they slid from her grip.
As Natasha reached the door Darcy pushed herself more upright and called out hastily, "Is everything okay with you?"
The shadows masked Natasha's face as she looked back from the open door, light from the hall streaming in. "I'm fine Darcy. Get some sleep."
When the door clicked shut Darcy's heart was still pounding helplessly against her ribs.
Damn it.