Eight
Luke has been hearing about the steady rise of Meta-Human beings around New York; lured by the presence of The Avengers into thinking that they might find some semblance of acceptance and he can't deny that it has been a reason for him to stay around rather than leave after... after.
He's found himself a niche he could work in, he's found himself a hole to crawl back into at the end of the day and that is all that he'd felt like he needed.
Enter one Darcy Lewis.
Now don't get him wrong, he has enough female trouble – more than a man can really need – and while he has been looking for a bar-aide, he has not exactly been thinking about that support in terms of 'of the other sex'. But the young woman comes with good recommendations.
"You will want to take her."--Katie-Too lets him know when he closes up shop. Literally the last chair is in his hands, turned around and put on the table, when she melds out of the shadows as he's gotten used to her from his days and nights on the streets. She's lucky she doesn't show up on the Troublesome Women List. Kind of too young for that.
“Because you say so, Little Bishop?”
But the slip of a girl has never been one to easily fall for bait; she’s emotional sometimes – yes – but more in the sense that she finds herself a cause and fully dives into it, loses herself in it. He’s been one such cause once; he’s never understood how it came that she stayed on the streets when she managed to help him off them. So she just shakes her head and almost clucks at him in a way that should make him mad, maybe, he doesn’t like being looked down upon by white folk; he’s had that all of his life.
Kate Bishop is like… a sister though. She gets away with bull-crap a lot of people don’t.
“Because she needs the job to feed us little critters.”--the girl replies with a soft smirk on her face. “You remember the pizza left behind only for us?”--she sing-songs and she does it in a cadence that shouldn’t befit her, it’s Harlem Street and she does not, usually, have the countenance for it. But this is her Street-Smart-Self and that side wears Harlem like a well-loved coat.
“How could I forget Paco’s Pizza Cart and their hot as fudge cheese. Filled our bellies on the coldest nights.”--it did. Luke doesn’t know where it came from but the other people fell over the food like the offering it was and didn’t look back. When it turned out that it was clean, Luke, too, filled up.
“Well, the girl who buys it needs the cash to do so.”--and Katie-Too, the sneaky little devil points at the door through which Darcy Lewis, her application is still in his kitchen, has passed through just five minutes ago.
And so Darcy Lewis comes to work for him.
--
She is Texan and, having grown up in the South, he has never been too certain about that famed Southern Hospitality once he's realized at a relatively young age that it extended only to a certain percentage of people with certain characteristics. And Darcy Lewis… well, if she hadn’t had Katie-Too’s vouch of trust she wouldn’t have set foot in his bar often, he’d have made certain of that.
But he can read.
And he reads best between the lines, where the words leave out, which is – incidentally – where Katie-Too finds the most sentences to speak and because he doesn’t doubt his little sister he takes what he would call a calculated risk.
And promptly pushes Good Old Fashioned Sasparillas into her direction when Darcy Lewis’ hospitality fills his Bar and his pockets.
“She is good.”--he praises the young Texan as he takes a rest next to Katie-Too, relishing in the obnoxious sound of her slurping. He’s happy that she actually allows herself inside his Bar more often than not; appreciates her getting her weight back to her bones.
“Told ya you’ll wanna take ‘er.”--he snorts and shoots her an incredulous look.
“Stop the Harlem, little Bishop. An’ help me do the taxes.”
Because Katie-Too has done her daddy’s taxes and he’s going to take advantage of it until he can pay her legally for it and write her proper recommendation letters. Until then he’s going to have to have learned how to do them and Darcy Lewis is playing him free for about two hours of work until the going gets tough.
--
He’s never been comfortable about being what he is; honestly as a black man one has enough trouble being a mere human, but a Strong-Man Meta-Human at that? He understands why people do not know, most of the time, what to think about a Human whose genetic make-up makes them more than merely homo sapiens – he understands the suspiciousness because hell, he himself is suspicious about his own abilities.
Maybe, though, it’s because of how he came by them. About the rape it implied; the hate that brought it about; the blatant disregard for every human right he had once possessed and could now no longer hope to call on to because, technically, he was no longer human.
And long before he’s known Pop, long before his own personal Harlem Shake went down, he met Katherine Bishop – tender seventeen years old, freezing her bony ass off on the corner across the street from his bridge; his abode that people didn’t bother to come close to.
Because trust him, he was volatile.
“You’re an idiot.”--she told him when he tried to curse her away, threaten with physical abuse she wouldn’t even be able to properly call in. “What is keeping you safe is keeping me safe.”
So they started out by calling each other Flea Bag and Leech and it was the start of something he has not regretted one bit. Not because Katie-Too helped him out of his hole; she was in too deep herself; can’t get there from there. But because Luke found, in her, a reason to not be what everyone else thought he should be. And became a sort of brother to a young woman with too big a mouth and too posh an accent.
This is how he levered himself out of his own hole; with a lot of help from Pop and a few well-placed grafiti signs at the purple hands of a slip of a Bishop. He owes her in a way that he owes Pop – because their lips are sealed and their hearts are big and accepting.
But no, he’s never been comfortable about being what he is; and hasn’t, before, been comfortable being who he was. And even after his rise in his part of town… even now that his name bears the weight that, in some sorts, Pop’s did before, he’s not comfortable using his weight to throw it around.
So when talk comes around of the Devil or when Jessica leaves his corner or when some lunatic in a yellow bandana is sighted he doesn’t go looking.
He keeps his head down.
And tries to not listen to the voice in his head that sounds like Pop, telling him to go forward, telling him – yelling at him – that this is his opportunity, his time. He keeps his head down and over his counter.
And doesn’t think about Jessica and her sleek black hair running through his fingers. Or her sturdy, indestructible skin and…
He’s not thinking about her.
--
“Oh God Flarking Darn It!”
He’s never once heard Darcy swear; not out loud anyway and he’s a little surprised that she manages to keep her composure even now – in the face of him being bent over a person he’s sworn to himself to keep away from. She throws her towel, literally and, yes, he realizes she’s just swiped down the counters but this is life or death.
Probably. He’s not a nurse.
Oh, nurse… yes, Claire!
He doesn’t notice what it is that Darcy is doing, but he’s still trying to stop the bleeding chest wound from the man under his hands and is surprised when Darcy’s black, whispy hair appears in his field of vision, pulling his hands away.
The life that is constantly slipping from between them… the blood that is constantly darkening them…
“You, Cage,”--she starts as she pushes him away and bends over the man that has stilled so eerily sudden, “you could’a told me you’re a Strongman and Devil damn it if he ain’t told the truth I’m-a undo the stitches we had done the last time ‘round.”
And the air sweeps from both of their lungs because Darcy Damn Lewis she knows the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen and she’s done him up before. His head swims a little at this, because he does not know what he should think of that – he does not know what that could possibly mean and what it means for her employment in his Bar, but right now it means that the man might just survive; live to fight another day.
But there is something off about the woman, he thinks he’s somewhat gotten to know during the last months of working side-by-side with her, slipping into a rough Texan accent now that almost takes him back to Georgia, as he stumbles away from the counter and finds rest against a table that supports him. There is something off when her hands become frantic first, divesting the Devil with aptitude that has to come from a former run in, before the pale chest is bared – wound and all – and her hands fall very still around the puncture.
The reddish-yellow light of his neon signs lighting up the somber bar catch something in her eyes that makes them seem startingly silver despite the darkness she stands in and the hair on Luke’s neck raises as if catching a cold draft that he rationally knows is impossible, because the heating is up and isolation has always been paramount to him. It doesn’t compute until his tired brain realizes his eyes have been drifting, trying to find a reason for the breeze and he refocuses them on Darcy and the Devil, watching the shallow-breathing man slowly meld into a state of relaxation that is worrying, watching as the breeze – it has to be – that catches his neck also catches onto the tips of Darcy’s hair and twists the few strands in its hold, tugging them upwards.
It takes him several moments to catch up.
Moments in which Darcy’s Blue Eyes turn white under the fringes of her escaping hair.
Moments in which the breathing of the man under her hands evens out with a soft choke.
Moments in which the blood seems to turn black in the light.
Moments in which the breeze that has tugged on her hair pulls it back and out of her face.
Moments in which the air begins to hum.
Moments which are interrupted by the crude appearance of Katie-Too and a blond man that the slip of his sister buries under her as they fall through his Bar door; but even as the black-haired young woman gives a slightly satisfied smirk, the man is up in a flash, Med Kit in hand as he crosses the room in three large steps and asks without looking:
“What can I do?”
And Luke knows, he realizes the same time that the blond does that something has changed in Darcy, that something not-quite-her has taken over, her hands still pressing down on the puncture-wound in the chest of a probably rather dead Devil, because the familiarity with which the man has addressed her vanishes completely from his posture.
Luke has seen these things.
He knows what it’s like to find a known face and not recognize a single thing about them and he knows… oh shit, he knows that Darcy Lewis might not have been purposefuly holding it back from him, but she’s not human.
###
“Archer.”--they recognize the man; even in this new vessel, even through these new eyes. They recognize the other in several functions – their maðr, the one who gave them home and hearth to keep and not succumb to darkness, the one who holds power he knows not and under other circumstances this should be a joyous occasion.
For the Hearth Keeper has never before met The Archer and they have duties in their regard.
Not that they know. Not that anyone but The Mother knows.
Currently, however, there is a soul to preserve from Hela’s clutches.
The Archer swallows, it’s visible with startling clarity that a part of them knows they should not possess – the contraptions on the bridge of their nose are called glasses and should serve the purpose of sharpening a rather deplorable sight – and it’s this other part that lets them know that The Archer goes by the name of Clint; and that they have noticed something is different.
They does not have the time for this now however; they can’t stay for long – they are still… their connection is still too weak; the anchor to the Mother is still fluctuating and their helmingr might have called onto them, but it has been their experience that helmingr do not often know what they are calling for when such a thing first occurs.
“Hold his.”
And The Archer Clinton opens their hands to hold onto the link they are pushing into his hands and it’s bright and visible to them; stable in his hands; secure but the Midgardian offers a confused gaze as they keep holding on to the link. At least there is that.
“Do not open your hands, Archer, or We are gone.”
And as they bend over The Devil again, they have a handsome face in this vessel, their seiðr pushes past their own confines to greet their pure and bright krellr – in this vessel and any other before – and this, at least, is a reunion as they have wished it.
--
Hela, in the end, is not interested in The Devil – not, as they think, the other should be because it is a slight upon the glory of The Devil that Hela would disregard them in such an open manner. Then again it does make the bargain for the krellr easier on them – The Devil returns to Midgard with them.
Hearth Keeper takes a last look around when the krellr settles back into the chest of the pale Midgardian; they take a look at The Archer, they give the cool face of The Devil a last pat and turn their eyes towards the large stature of The Guard, their eyes low and deep watching like those of an Eagle, they might not want to admit it yet, but their own krellr is already morphing to strand with those of the others.
And then their eyes fall unto the spectacular marvel that is The First Child.
The Archer lets go.
Beautifully foreseeable .
###
The words rude-awakening have never been so true as now. Because all she can remember is the void in her chest that felt as if air wasn’t getting there, she remembers watching herself as she acted and not actually feeling what she was doing, she remembers the panic rising in her and the moment when she started to fight only to notice that Matt was dying under her hands and this was helping him but she had to fight it because there was no air but she couldn’tpossiblediewhiletryingtosavehimandthere’snoairnoairnoairnoair…
“It’s okay. It’s okay.”
The second part of the awakening consists of filling her lungs with as much air as she possibly can. Her mouth tastes as if she’s just thrown up, her head hurts as if she’s bashed it against the counter repeatedly, and she feels clammy – which is mostly cleared up when she tries to leave behind the darkness surrounding her and open her eyes. But even then her vision is blurred and it makes sense, in a far away detached sort, that it should be like this because she is crying.
“Listen to my heartbeat.”--the voice comes again and she knows that voice; she knows the arms around her. “You can hear my heartbeat I know that, come on girl, listen. Just listen.”
And Darcy pushes deeper into the fast embrace of Clint until she can only hear his heart and the rush of blood in her own ears, in his arms and loses herself in the secure sensation of the warmth of his chest, the cradle of his legs around her chilly body. Clint is a surrounding entity and right now that is all she wants to know, all she wants to feel and notice.
So she shuts out everything else.
###
Once Darcy falls into a sort of catatonia Clint moves her to the end of the booth, makes her comfortable and stands – it’s too soon to leave her, but The Devil is still on the make-shift operation-table and they cannot leave him there like this. So he stitches up Matt with the kind of shock-induced steadiness to his hands that comes from years of thriving in situations like these.
The tall dark man has not budged from his position, even when Kate congregates on him, shivering and insecure about what they had all just witnessed. Clint himself is… well, in state of not quite there yet, adrenaline too amped up to properly compute the situation besides the fact that he’s chosen ‘stay’ instead of ‘run’.
But Matt has survived a wound that usually doctors and nurses in hospitals would have fought to treat properly while keeping the man alive – and Darcy… or whatever it is that has pushed… there was something…
He swallows. Breathes out.
Makes another stitch.
Matt will live to fight another day; that is more than he could possibly have expected after a run in with… Thor whatever that thing is on the ground where Not-Darcy yanked it out and left it to fall.
It’s too late when he notices just how badly Darcy is shaking on the edges of his vision and when he turns towards her, stitches done as well as could be hoped for – he’s not a medic, but he has experience – she is already eating half of her hand in an attempt to stifle the sobs that look as if they are heaves of vomit fighting to break from her body; but the blood on her fingers is sticky and she has them in her face for exactly the split of an eye before she notices this and the tears are already running, big, fat and dangerous as she glimpses at her red hands and he’s too late when she vomits on the tiles between her feet.
He cannot hear her but he feels the panic on her skin, the spastic movement of the muscles underneath and he knows that in a matter of seconds, she is likely to try to chop her hands off with the red on them.
Darcy Lewis may be a Trooper when it comes to protecting others but he knows from experience that it is another thing entirely to come to grips with the fact that one’s mind has not been one’s own – and that is another playing field entirely.
Clint knocks her out before she has wiped her hands on her jeans for the fourth time. He feels only remotely sorry about it.
--
Kate tells him that the man is Luke Cage and that he can be trusted – she tells him in a slow fashion, carefully pronouncing the words in order to mitigate any translation errors caused by her shivering lips. She leans heavily against the tall man when Clint has him take a hold of The Devil and heeds them follow him; Kate is vigilant as they step out of the bar and let the shadows of the night swallow them on their quiet procession through back-alleys and secret passages that Darcy’s Curious Georges hold open for them without a word as they move through the dark of the night.
They are back at the apartment complex in under half an hour; under normal circumstances it would take them longer from Greenpoint to Bed-Stuy by foot, but today Clint is carrying Darcy in his arms and Katie-Too is walking a little too close to Loony Luke who, in turn, is holding on to a figure that has two little horns protruding from their forehead.
And thus the streets move them through quicker than wings could have carried them.
--
Because leaving Darcy alone is a one-hundred percent No-Go, he has Kate fetch Lucky and some fresh clothes and only allows Luke Cage to leave with her when she decidedly tugs him along – too shaken to be alone even for the mere amount of ten minutes. Clint thinks that this is precisely what he hasn’t wanted for her – this is precisely why he’s been an ass to her; and apparently this is precisely what happens when you stay too close to him.
He maneuvers Darcy into his bathroom and leans her against his small bathtub. While he is not going to wash her, even though she will need it – and he will make certain that Kate will be in the same room with her lest she rub her skin off or burn herself with overheated water – he can take care of the worst.
Also, but he is not going to say that out loud or even properly admit it to himself, he is acutely aware of the adrenaline still thrumming through his body, still stringing him taut and battle-ready at the smallest show of potential danger.
The washing of his own hands is quick and perfunctory and he dries off efficiently, before he fills a small steel-bowl he has for special after-mission occasions – recently he’s needed it more often than he has while running with The Avengers – with hot water. The lipstick on her face goes with the dried remnants of blood on her chin and her jawbone as he wipes a first, cautious wet towel over her skin, cradling her lulling head with a hand that he only now realizes encompasses her whole head. Clint doesn’t think that Darcy has ever appeared so tiny before.
His hands are shaking a little, he notices, and his breaths come in less regular, but he is used to these changes post-mission; he observes his decompressing in a detached, quiet manner these days. Watching it unfold more than he feels himself unraveling from whatever has happened and return to a state of humanity as it is lived and perpetrated by most people on this earth. There is no worrying hitch in either his pulse or his air-intake and so he allows the shaking of his hands and takes the moments in which he needs to consciously force his breathing into an acceptable rhythm in order for him to not start hyperventilating in a misguided attempt at compensating for a distant memory of child-asthma. But this is a known component by now and when he is done with washing her face, he has mostly retreated from the precipice of fight-or-flight.
Just as he is drying off Darcy’s neck and chin, Lucky’s golden fur enters his field of vision and Clint greets him quietly, moving to scratch at the furry neck of his friend – it grounds him hella quicker than anything should have a right to on this earth – and allows him to sniff on his human but pulls him away when the dog gets too close to her not-yet cleaned hands. Lucky allows it, but takes vigil on Clint’s side as he makes to wash off her hands as well.
Because the presence of Darcy’s companion calms him just as much as it calms the Retriever to see what is happening to his friend and because he’s somewhat certain that, on a subconscious level, Darcy would feel safer with Lucky on her side Clint doesn’t contest this when he stays even though Kate tries to call him once.
She leaves the door open when Lucky stays and gives Clint a tired nod once. He supposes that means that she will be there once he’s done.
Washing hands is trickier than cleaning a face is, considering, additionally, the fact that her fingers have been Lord knows how deep in the open chest of a man currently resting on his couch and blood got into crevices it didn’t like to leave.
Even so he prevails, making certain that the worst is, indeed, gone but deciding that, maybe, it is not such a great idea to bathe Darcy’s fingers in luke-warm water to lure the last remnants of blood out of her bitten-raw nail-beds while she was knocked out. He’s been a troublesome prankster once, no doubt, but this is not the time or the place.
And so when her hands are dried and his own heart-rate has mellowed out, he feels weary to the bone even though he stands, pats Lucky’s head and gives Kate the go-ahead to change Darcy into clothes that would make sleeping in them easier on her.
Luke Cage eyes him with quiet trepidation.
Clint gives him a tired look.
“Please say you don’t mind a vigilante-sleepover.”--because he’s certainly not up to caring for Kate, for Darcy and for Matt all alone; he’s bad enough when he tries to fend for himself.
The tall man looks at something past his shoulder and Clint almost turns before he remembers that he stands in front of the bathroom and he’s been acting almost familiar with Kate.
He receives a nod.
For now that’s enough.
--
Matt wakes some time in the middle of the futzing night, heaving panicked breaths and trying to escape the remnant nightmare of an aggressor and before Clint and Luke get to him, he’s already pulled some of the stitches and Clint is acutely wary of whether or not the man has managed to tear some of the deeper, fresh healing as well. He’s not certain either of them would survive a second incident with Not-Darcy.
“Where am I?”
“Condo.”--Clint replies haltingly, he has trouble reading the man’s lips what with the blood there, he’s done his best to keep the identity of his friend a secret and sometimes such a thing comes with a price.
But The Devil almost immediately slackens, allows the bone-tired weariness Clint is certain he’s still feeling – if only from his near-death experience – to take over and he gives Luke a short nod that lets the other man know it’s okay to back away as he takes the hands of Matt and starts to sign carefully.
Guests.--he says first. Hell of a night. Identity safe.
While he doubts that, after tonight, Matt’s identity would much faze either Luke or Kate much any more and he knows from experience that resting is done so much better while in civilian clothing, it’s a choice that is ultimately up to the man himself to make.
You stay.--that one is a statement he’s not about to have an argument about. He’s not letting the blind dolt out of his sight if he can; not after Darcy went transcendental on them to save his life. He needs a few answers.
“I stay.”--Matt agrees as he takes his hands back and moves them to the mask in his face. “Fóc, could I have some water and a wet towel please?”
Five in the morning has Clint help Matt take off his ruined uniform – What the fuck got through your armor? – and mask, lips now easier to read even in their still bloodied state – Cupid’s Jit I think – and Clint helps wash him off much as Matt washes himself off. It strikes him only then, when the cloying red is finally gone, just how close to death his friend really has been. His stitches look almost flimsy in the shivering light of his neon-bulb, barely holding the angrily swollen flesh together.
“God you ass.”
Matt could have died.
“You’re never going out alone again.”
And the lawyer might snort and he might find it absolutely hilarious; but Clint is being brutally honest. Here he’s always thought that he himself was a disaster of a vigilante, incapable of surviving without Darcy but… Boy, Matt could be almost worse than himself.
“I mean it.”--he says then, cautiously wiping over the wound again, careful of the flinch and the slow hissing intake of breath as he does so; he doesn’t want to cause the man any more pain than necessary but cleaning the wound is more important. “We’re getting you a leash you Devil Child.”
He feels a little better when Matt has to grin so widely that he dissolves into tiny giggles that might hurt his chest – but at least Clint feels less solemn and Matt will never know how close he was to crying over a man he hasn’t known for more than three months.
Later, once Matt has been cleaned and given some of Clint’s track-pants and an old, wide and clean shirt – they can be a rarity and the only reason Clint has some is because Darcy has taken to hide about three of these combos around his condo to pull out whenever she needs him to be at least a little presentable and he has nothing to wear – Clint will ask himself why it would never occur to him to cry about Natasha, when he’s known her since she’s been eighteen.
###
Darcy wakes and doesn’t even bother with the pounding of her head. Kate, snuggled into her arms and curled protectively around Lucky barely moves when Darcy rolls onto her back, gropes helplessly for her glasses and rolls again to slither off the mattress in a less impressive maneuver than she would have liked. To be perfectly honest, even as she kneels on the dirty rug that she knows, once her glasses sit on her nose, has to be Clint’s because she’d never condone such a shade of mint green in her own abode, she’s not quite certain she wants to try and live, but she cannot think of a reason why she should possibly have this much of a headache.
Yesterday must have done a number on her. She doesn’t even know how she came home. Probably why she’s at Clint’s.
Come to think of it: it’s probably the reason why Kate is at Clint’s.
Her mouth is dry; tastes like… old socks and something fuzzy but the more she rolls her tongue around, the more she activates her salivatory glands and the less the taste remains, so when she reaches the bottom of the stairs, all that really remains in her mouth is an icky feeling to her teeth and the left-over to a morning-mouth that can definitely be cured with a glass of water.
Or a cup of coffee as it is.
Luke and Clint are both awake, staring at the table-top of Clint’s decrepit kitchen with a pot of what looks like freshly brewed Nectar Of The Gods between them. She’s just going to filch a cup and-
“Darcy-girl?”
She’s just about poured her cup, turning towards her boss, wondering what the hell Luke is doing here when-
góðr morginn, myrkrdóttir
-the cup falls-
-the brown splashes turn red before her eyes, and all she sees is blood.
Blood on the ground, blood on her trousers, blood on her hands. There was blood on her face, sticky and warm and metallic and she remembers the taste of it and the dark figure on the table and suffocation.
No air
no air noair
noairnoair
noairnoairnoairnoairnoair