Five
Darcy doesn't know what happens when breaking news flash at her on a lazy Wednesday, customers at the Diner leaving out, that Captain America should be Enemy Number One and before she knows what is really happening, the shop is closed – Han has his Spa-Day; she doesn’t know why it always has to be during upheavals – and she is running along the streets like a woman possessed.
The pit of her stomach roils and swims in her as if it were a ship at the mercy of a tempest and her breath comes short with every wave of nausea that threatens to grab her just thinking about her people, defenseless, and the turmoil lengthens her strides and bends her body through the mass of fucking stagnant people that can’t decide whether or not to move from the boardwalk they can see the news from.
Her Curious Georges are a-flurry around her, the younger folk tagging along at her speed over the roof-tops and giving signs to the older folk about her whereabouts – because she’s learned these streets by now; she knows what back-alleys to take, which dogs to trust and what fire-escapes to avoid and she is quicker than many of their old bones can still cooperate. It has never occurred to her, until now, that she has become a regular little vigilante of her own.
Another, powerful, pang of fear grips her when she thinks about the young faces that follow her and she wants to yell at them, loud, angry and scared, to find a hidey-hole and stay there until the storm has passed because if Captain Flarking America is being accused of treason then shit was about to go down heavy and she’s not certain she wants any of them out in the open while it happened.
But when she reaches the run-down apartment complex and shoulders her way through the door, she turns in the entryway only to find that the roof-tops are empty and there are no eyes on her.
She’s not gentle when she systematically ushers the tenants into the mob-bunker she had discovered during her days of sleeping rough under this roof and when the door closes, Lucky is the last to be kicked inside, a tinge of regret biting at her when she listens to his confused yap just as the lead-door falls shut.
But Darcy Lewis has work to do.
She hasn’t really tampered with codes since Puente Antigua and the mystical appearance of the mighty áss that was Thor Odinson (now her brod) but she is well aware that whatever has gotten Captain America into a pinch might cost his former team-mate just as dearly, especially if the red-head on screen, keeping a close eye on The Stars And Spangles, is who she thinks she is.
Whatever is happening, and by then she’s not even certain what is happening, could cost Clint.
And what costs Clint could cost the tenants – could cost her people.
Like hell is she going to let that happen.
Nuh-uh.
So she sits herself down as the first line of defense – second, technically, considering the door – and plops the mostly legal fire-weapon she’s been permitted to carry since Tromsø into her lap, perching her notepad on her knees and gets to work like she hasn’t in what feels like ages.
She thinks she can hear the unused, dusty synapses creak in her head and smoke away the cobwebs – but she could have had a perfectly good seat in an IT-university if she hadn’t butchered her chance when she was seven and too curious for her own good, and her fingers remember sooner than she would have anticipated and her mind’s gears soon run like a well-oiled machine.
So much so that the entirety of what is happening outside of the flimsy wooden door in front of her is at her literal fingertips.
Clint splinters through the frame at a mostly opportune moment because in any other case she would not be able to attest for her reflexes in these situations, but she has been pausing, taking in the magnitude of what this means and what it will mean in the near future – for her, for Clint, for her Jane and for the Avengers Initiative in large – when the door opens and her fingers have already grabbed for the gun, firing a shot before her brain has caught up on the situation and computes the movement properly.
In hindsight, she is probably lucky that the blond does not snap her wrist – because, boy did she need it.
It takes Clint all of five minutes to make certain that all the tenants are indeed where she has told him they are and to fetch the entirety of his gear, barreling past her just as the door opens a second time and her hand is already closing around the gun, shot about to lose itself, when his hand snaps against hers from behind and stops her from shooting Matthew Murdock, bringing along a bewildered looking group of young people.
“Keep them safe and I have your back.”
And because Darcy knows that Clint is about to go out – damn the consequences – she stands before the Archer can argue the point and ushers the four people into the same bunker that the rest of the tenants is in, before turning toward the man who has become the Daredevil.
“You watch him, Murdock, or I swear to all that was holy to my Grandmother, I will spit on your grave after I’ve buried you.”
He doesn’t answer her outright, but nods and bounds after Clint when the archer brushes past them with brisk steps and a grim visage she doesn’t precisely see.
Her hands shake a little more when she sits down, again, to go over the data she has on her screen. She doesn’t know what it means – but she’s well aware of what it could mean (The Red Scare; The Red Winter; The Black Ghost – my lord but the man has had a lot of names in her studies and lectures) and when pawns pop up on the playing field around New Triskelion like mushrooms after rain, Darcy’s fingers fly like the USS Enterprise – Warp speed – to catch and siphon the important tidbits of Natalia Romanovna, of Steven Grant Rogers, of Clint Barton, of Nicolas Fury, of Thor Odinson – and by relation herself and Jane. The rapid in-pour of information is almost impossible to dilute and secure, but Darcy manages, by some grace, to store and safe-guard the heavy load of it within the course of several hours, fighting, at the end of the day, not only with fatigue setting in from a lowering adrenaline level, but over this or that additional morsel of information that she has to pry out of the cybernetic fingers of one very clever little thing that she’s decided to piggy-back in order to surprise at the most inopportune moments and collect the information for herself.
She doesn’t know who EdWyN is but the old coot sure has some tricks up his sleeve. Kudos to you.
Whatever has happened – and she’s not quite certain what it is that has transpired, just that SHIELD blew a gasket or something – it is slowly coming to a halt; leaving New Triskelion in rubble and ashes, with Captain America as the perpetrator who fought tooth and nail to protect the innocent inhabitants of America from The Winter Soldier – if that is his current name – and from what appears to have been SHIELD itself. Not, granted, that the general populace is aware of the last little tidbit; luckily for them.
It doesn’t make sense is the thing.
Now that she has the time to actually process what has been happening, none of the puzzle pieces seem to fit in with one another; they don’t make a whole.
There’s the sudden announcement of Captain America being Enemy Number One;
There’s the appearance of the Man Who Doesn’t Die;
There’s Carriers rising from SHIELD;
There’s Captain America going up against SHIELD carriers with company;
There’s the sudden Data Dump;
There’s SHIELD carriers crashing;
And now there’s silence.
She has kept herself back from looking for Clint and Murdock – mostly because she knows, even know, that she can’t allow herself to go looking for them; otherwise she might unearth something in the ensuing frenzy of not immediately finding them, and she doubts she would, and call unwanted attention to them. Given how hard she’s worked on preventing exactly that, even sitting on pins and needles stealing a dwindling number of data from Ed, is more productive than to alert whatever scoundrels lurked out there, declaring Mister Apple-Pie a wanted fugitive, to their current position.
And so Darcy steels herself and waits.
Not something she is very good at, but she prevails.
Because it’s always in the lull after the rush of battle that most mistakes happen.
Thor taught her that.
Darcy has no room for error here.
--
Come the morning, Clint returns with Matt on his side. They limp through deserted streets, littered with trash from the day before and when she gets the announcement that somebody is getting too close around the perimeter she’s set – might be a few traffic cameras are at her beck and call – she almost jerks up from that sweet, cotton dimension in-between sleep and wakefulness. Neither of them look good – Matt is limping and has an arm around Clint’s shoulders that looks as if it’s holding the blond together at the seams – but the fact alone that they have returned and she has not needed to lift her weapon a third time indicates that they are as well as they can be.
There hasn’t been any word from the bunker all night while Darcy buried incriminating documents and data all over the globe – she doesn’t even know what it is that she buried; just that she did. And that she did it well.
Both of them are eerily quiet when they reach the door she’s opened to them – Clint either ignores or doesn’t see the weapon she’s hidden in the kangaroo-bag of the hoodie she’s stolen from him for tonight – and they don’t even try to appear to be standing on their own two feet and she wonders, briefly, if they even could. But that is good, she thinks, it means nothing too bad happened. Matt wouldn’t stand for repeat performances of horror and she doesn’t think Clint would want him to; in a way those two have very much found each other.
“They’re okay?”--Matt asks her when she closes the door behind her; nodding at one of her Curious Georges, giving her a questioning look through yellow-stained eyes.
“Sleeping like a bunch-a-babies.”--she replies before she turns around, giving them a cursory once over. “You should be too.”
Matt looks like he wants to say something; probably something about her own sleepless night – and he would be right, so she shuts him up with a well-aimed push of her thumb into a sore muscle. It’s a gently push, mind you, but it’s enough to let the man know that he better not say a thing.
Clint is giving her tired eyes.
You gonna be okay, cowboy?
The blond nods – a little too careful about the motion of his head and she checks his eyes shortly to see that, indeed, she might be needed still to wake up her human disaster every hour; if only to make certain he stays alive.
Sleep? --she asks.
Wound up. --he spells for her, having only one hand free what with the other being occupied by Matt; she doesn’t think they’re going to be staying long.
Wanna come down after you put him to bed?
Again he nods. Carefully.
She’s going to feel better about protecting the front and taking care of his sleep-cycle if he’s right next to her.
--
Darcy doesn’t ask what happened.
A part of her thinks that she should; especially the part of her that has studied politics and would like to know what the flarking flark The Winter Soldier was doing in DC and how the hell Clint himself managed to get there so fast and why for god’s sake SHIELD is now in ruins.
But she doesn’t ask.
And she should be given a medal for it – just saying.
What she does do is wake Clint Barton up every hour, just for five minutes, just enough to settle him into a new resting position and let him know that nothing has happened and everything is alright. Her stair-buddy takes it with the quiet resignation of someone who’s lived through too many concussions in his life, but he doesn’t complain either so that’s something, she thinks.
The day passes slowly, quietly and keeps Darcy on her toes like nothing before while she squirrels away intel that she hasn’t even had a peek at.
EdWyN tries to ping her once or twice; old coot even goes as far as to attempt to piggy-back her like she did to him in order to recuperate the morsels she’s stolen from him – but Darcy Lewis is made from other stuff and because she’s bored, she sends out a few small data bots with no particular information to elsewhere, giving herself cover for hiding the real data.
Whoever wants the information so badly that they’re falling for her small decoys is currently getting the Top 100 of her iTunes list. She hopes they know to appreciate it.
Matt comes down the stairs five hours later, coffee pot in one hand, three mugs in the other and he sits himself down with them quietly – the door has been opened, letting in the fresh spring air and sun and Darcy is not quite surprised when the scent of the bean rouses their bunker-friends, ensuing in a questing knock against the lead door.
Can I let them out?
Clint nods still with great care, but his eyes are searching the horizon for something – someone – before he nods again, raising himself to his elbows from his awkward position on the stairs.
Get more mugs?
It’s Darcy who nods before moving both her hands in an angled fashion together and apart. Rooftop?
The blond nods.
Rooftop it is.
--
Simone doesn’t feel safe.
Darcy can tell by the way that she keeps calling her boys to her side and her eyes keep looking for something to jump at her from behind, from the side, from god knows where – she’s even searching the skies.
And as much as Darcy wants to tell her that it’s alright, it’s okay, most of the danger has passed… is it really the truth?
They survived another gig, sure, but even with her working through the night to bury Clint’s ownership of this house they are likely to be targets; or become targets one day. She wonders if she, in Simone’s position, would think any different and comes up empty.
So she sits herself down next to the woman with a cup of coffee-cocoa – it’s a Matthew Murdock special apparently, both blonds at his side have sworn so – and lets her eyes glide over the assembled crowd.
Her crowd.
“I’d be sad to see you go.”--she quietly confides in the dark-skinned woman. “I love your kids and I loved doing Kwaanza with you guys.”--she pauses, looks at her mug and then Simone, “But I understand that you have to think about the little ones. And I understand that you want a better place to raise ‘em.”
And Simone, bless her beautiful heart, she gives a tired smile and turtles up; hunches her shoulders until they fight for space with her ears and stares at the ground between her feet. “I don’t want to be ungrateful.”--she admits. And Darcy can see that too – the indecision to leave Clint’s side when she has, from what Darcy has garnered in several talks with the rest of the residents, been the catalyst for Barney Barton to even buy an apartment here, leaving Clint – who got wind of that story only much later – to feel responsible for her even though Simone had not ever considered it that way.
“You’re not.”--Darcy lets her now, slings an arm around her shoulders and pulls her towards herself; Simone needs hugs and she doesn’t get them often enough. “Clint will understand.”
It doesn’t occur to Darcy until much later that Simone has probably not slept a lot even in the relatively safe confines of the bunker – giving, instead, the chance for her boys to catch some Zs while creating as much a comfortable space as she could. By then the older woman is already sleeping next to her and Clint is offering a thick throw to cover her.
--
Clint understands.
Have been thinking of a way to try to propose it to her respectfully—he admits when Darcy comes to talk to him about it and because she loves computers and everything to do with them and Clint is not one to make her halt before the law. Matt is a little dubious about it, but he is at hand when it comes to properly doing the right documents to pass as another person.
Their small family loses its last name and because their paperwork has, apparently, always been a little suspicious Darcy goes full out and creates everything for them – Clint buys them a small house with Barney’s money and by the end of the week one of their apartments is empty.
Darcy finds Clint on the roof that evening and doesn’t bother to think about their competitive streak as they match each other for every bottle of beer. She doesn’t remember much in the morning either, but that’s okay – neither does Clint.
###
Clint doesn’t know what the ever loving fuck is happening, and he doesn’t have the time to question Nat as he seriously wants to – but she’s gone as off grid as is possible during an op and he doesn’t doubt that, at one point, she is going to literally drop from the ceiling in an impressive flip the kinds of which he’s always been jealous of not being able to replicate a hundred percent, never mind the fact that he was – had been, probably – as flexible and acrobatically fluent as her.
Daredevil is next to him as they make their way past the closed doors and through security – heading for the main controls.
Nat indicated there might be lower agents in need of a rescue. Hawkeye might have been out of commission for some time now but he’s good to go; enough to tip a toe back into the fold of what might be SHIELD or might be the remnants of it – he knows what those carriers can do and what the fuck are they doing in the air – and clear the lower levels.
He has, too, absolutely no compunctions about taking Daredevil with him.
Hawkeye might be deaf, but he sure as hell is not dumb.
No matter how much Darcy might argue against that.
The hallways are eerily quiet, orange signal lights turned off and the whole building seems to operate on emergency energy, flooding its insides with sickly-greenish light. They’re in the undergrounds – SHIELD bowels, where work the ‘lower life forms of the agency’.
Darcy’s words.
She knows the ins and outs of SHIELD’s off-mission-work better than he does. Paperwork and the people behind the background-work were never much his thing – not that he is actually alone in this; he’s not making excuses when he says that this hierarchy is a structure promoted by SHIELD. The less people know each other, the less anyone can be compromised.
Fury thinks he’s learned from ‘Phil’s demise’.
He takes Daredevil’s hands into his own in the safety of a small corner.
Meet up point here. Elevator round the corner. Take out bad guys. Get small fries to safety.
The red horns nod at him and splits from his sides on the quietest soles known to mankind. Or at least Clint assumes so – he can’t actually hear squat.
Which bites him in the ass about a click into the corridor of his choosing – somebody clocks him from behind and if his head hadn’t built up the resistance it has, he’d have a concussion. He goes down with the hit, allows the wooziness to ground him before he turns and kicks his attacker in the nuts.
He might not have perfect vision; or incoming sound; but he can gauge the approximate shape above him as its lower half sags in on itself and almost buries him in its ensuing down-fall and Clint rolls away just brief enough to roll back a moment later and bury his elbow in the exposed back-head of his aggressor.
His eyes adjust and he grabs his gear a little faster when he notices just what is drawn on the sleeve around the man’s upper arm.
Fucking skeleton cephalopods.
Devil won’t be able to see ‘em so maybe he won’t be knowin’ what kind’a shit he’s gotten himself into any time soon – but he knows, oh boy he know this ain’t gon’ bring the good kind’a press SHIELD’s wanted.
God this’s gon’ rain hellfire on their asses.
He’s up in a second, quiver safe around his shoulder, projectiles adorning his body; he’s checked his gear – the next agent coming around the corner, they got a buddy-system going, clever, just bad for him, suffers a blow to his jugular on a pressure point that knocks the man out cold despite the fact that it’s a damn lucky shot.
As he steps over him – he’s got all the fancy toys off him, don’t take him for a green-eared hill-billy – Clint has to furtively admit that he might have had a hard time taking the ass out.
He does, however, step into a hornets nest full of HYDRA-agents and SHIELD-hostages.
This looks bad.
--
They make it because they’re stubborn – Clint stands by this. Rollins dislocated his shoulder in a brawl, he can’t quite feel his feet and he’s relatively certain he’s jacked up his knee again. But his hearing hasn’t gotten any worse so that’s that. Right?
Can’t be worse than gone after all.
Murdock hangs off him like a limpet once SHIELD drops them off back in NY but he imagines that he doesn’t look much better – his knee is killing him and his vision sucks what with the pounding in his head. It’s bad if the blind one of a pair has to guide the other around fucking street lanterns. But Matt is a good guy, so they manage.
When they arrive at his front door, the figure that stands in the doorway has got to be Darcy, but Clint needs a double-take, squeezes his eyes and forces them to refocus because he doesn’t think that a person has ever looked so much like home before.
She is dressed in one of his Jumpers, ratty and riddled with holes, but it fits over her curves, loops gently around her neck and falls a little way over her hips; she hasn’t been wearing it when he’d left, but the black skinny-jeans – just as ratty, just as holey – and the black combat boots had been there. He doesn’t know how she manages to look so damn rosy-cheeked and wavy-haired when her eyes let him know that she’s just pulled an all-nighter and her fingers are twitchy as if she’s either trying not to reach for the gun in the kangaroo-pocket of his hoodie or suffering from too much coffee all through the night.
But the sun illuminates her pale skin and paints her lips full and redder than they would have any right to be; she doesn’t wear mascara but behind her glasses her baby-blues look like big, round orbs of polished steel as she takes up the room of the doorway, barring it for intruders, welcoming them home with a critical look, but a small smile tugging at her pouty lips.
He wonders if this is what Thor had meant that his mother had always managed to be a Welcoming Bastion of Home – definitely Point Break’s words.
--
They’re all safe; safe as they can be.
Matt is huddled with his people, two blonds and a mother with her son – nurse judged by the scrubs – allowing them as much calm before their return to the ‘regular life’ as possible. Clint thinks that they are well kept up here, with Darcy and the sturdy rocks that turn out to be his residents.
Deke and Tito are handing out breakfast, Grills is piling blankets on pretty much everyone and Lucky is being the four-legged furry support that everyone needs apparently. Aimee has been making runs for coffee and cocoa at odd intervals and he hasn’t been aware, but apparently the tenants in his house are his people now just as much as they are Darcy’s.
Darcy who is pulling Simone into a hug that the older woman literally sinks into, abandoning both their coffees. He wonders if his people know that Darcy might just have saved them last night; he wonders if she sees it that way.
--
Clint and Barney… had always had a difficult relationship. Aside from the fact that their father was an abusive son of a bitch and their livelihood in the circus was earned by stealing shit they’d grown up hitting each other in order to grow stronger, become better at hurting.
Barney could hurt a lot.
When it turned out that his brother had had an apartment, Clint had bought the house; when it turned out that Barney had bought the apartment to leech on a mother with two kids, Clint had decided to stay and right the wrong.
He’s not surprised that, given recent events, Simone is uncertain about her own willingness to stay. He’s also not surprised that it’s Darcy who comes to him with the topic.
She’s scared for her boys.
And, really, Simone had every reason to be. Not only that Bed-Stuy could be a bad place in and of itself, but Clint’s building seemed to be attracting trouble by way of Clint himself – he can’t fault a mother who truly loves her sons for wanting a better life for them.
Been trying to think of a way to propose it to her respectfully –he admits to Darcy when he finally manages to get some words into her small tirade; god damn it but the woman is more fluent in ASL than he is. It’s almost embarrassing.
Lucky is giving them a tennis-commentator-look, head swinging from one person to the other and back again as they hash out what is going to be Simone’s great break. Now Clint has known, to some extent, about Darcy’s proclivity for the technological – it has been a red flag in her dossier after all – he’s just never really seen her in action until the day of SHIELD’s fall.
Even then he’d only gotten a glimpse of it.
Now though he has a front row seat to her capabilities and, seeing is believing isn’t it? He wants to know how it came that she has such quick fingers and such a clever mind. He wants to know how it came that she wasn’t allowed to study IT – because he knows of a few minds who would have been delighted by a seven-year-old capable of her coding skills.
He doesn’t ask.
And he should be given a medal for it – just saying.
--
What he does do – and what he doesn’t, in the slightest, feel guilty for – is knock back a few beers on the rooftop the day that Simone and her boys leave via plane to a destination he’s been allowed to retain because it’s not going to be their last stop. Not even Darcy knows where they’re going to end up; that has been all Simone. Even though Clint bought her a house there. Wherever it is.
He hopes she has more luck than here.
And when Darcy joins him on the rooftop, Lucky taking his place between them as he has, for some reason, so grown accustomed to do, and warming both their legs as she takes a calculating look at the amount of empty bottles next to him and starts catching up and soon matching him for every bottle.
He hopes Darcy is happy.