“So then we had to pause for, like, half an hour while Banner explained to Rogers where Carmen Sandiego and Where's Waldo fit in--”
Rhodey's arm across his chest stopped Tony in his tracks, and a good thing, too: what looked like an entire filing cabinet's-worth of papers had splashed across the hallway, spilling a good ten feet down the corridor. The epicenter of the mess seemed to be a pair of women; one of them, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, was gesturing wildly while yammering out something that could have been English but seemed way too fast to follow. The other was already down on her hands and knees, trying to retrieve the papers and spit back witty retorts at her companion at the same time.
“Doctor Foster,” Tony called down the hall, “may we be of assistance?”
The standing brunette looked across to them, and scowled. “Thank you, Mister Stark, but we've got this,” she snapped, finally stooping to help the other woman scoop up sheets and folders.
“No, really, it's no problem. Please,” Rhodey said, and began stacking the papers nearest him in what he hoped was a logical order.
“Bad day, Foster?” Tony grinned, handing her the last of the now-empty file folders. Jane foster snatched them from his grip, shuffling them against her abdomen before setting them on top of the stack that her companion held.
“It was an accident, Tony, not the end of the world,” she replied, but Rhodey got the feeling the words were directed at the other woman. Her companion was glowering at the now-unsorted mess of data in her hands and refusing to look at anyone else.
“I'd be happy to lend you JARVIS so you can digitize all of this, Lewis,” Tony offered, flicking the other woman's shoulder with the back of his hand. Lewis--ah, so this is Darcy Lewis, Rhodey thought—sniffed, tossed her hair out of her eyes, and gave Tony a tight smile.
“Thank you, Mister Stark, but we have all of this in digital form already,” she replied. “Computer files don't survive the trip across the Bifrost, and Jane wants to share some of her findings with Frigga. Thus,” she shrugged, indicating the pile of paperwork.
“Looks like you've got your afternoon laid out for you,” Rhodey quipped.
“Yeah, not like I had anything else to do,” Darcy muttered, but gave him a tight smile in return.
“You can't go over there while he's home, Darce, so you might as well not brood over it til tonight,” Jane said wearily. “If you want to wait til we get back from Asgard, you can ask Thor to go over with you--”
Darcy hissed (actually hissed) at Jane, then snapped, “Could we talk about this never again, please? Evidently I have to get back to the lab and sort out all of your data tables. Again. I don't have time for this.” She spun on one heel and stormed back the way they'd come, leaving Foster, Stark, and Rhodey in an awkward cluster in the middle of the hallway.
“Your assistant is, um, charming,” Rhodey volunteered, once Darcy was around the corner and out of sight.
“Don't mind her,” Jane murmured, rubbing the back of her neck. “She's not normally like this, but she's going through a bad breakup and--”
“Oh thank Christ she dumped the dumbass,” Tony interrupted. “Banner's been shades of green for weeks over the stories she tells in the lab about that guy. Hell, I've been ready to Hulk out on him. If she'd ever tell us where he lived he'd be so much street pizza by dinnertime.”
“Well, I'm sure he's fair game at this point,” Jane replied. “He sent her the break-up text Monday, and when she tried to go home Monday night he'd already had the locks on the apartment changed. Told the super that one of her friends tried to rob them for heroin money.”
Rhodey gaped at her. “What...a ...douche,” he managed finally.
“Yeah, he is. Now she's staying with me, but all her stuff is held hostage back at their old apartment and she's got no way to get in to get it. She's planning to go tonight after he goes to work and try to convince the super to let her in to get at least a couple bags of clothes and her toothbrush and stuff.”
“She's not going by herself,” Tony said. “I mean, she's smarter than that. Right? She's smarter than that?”
Jane sighed. “You'd think, but she's so paranoid about maintaining cover that she doesn't want to ask for help from anyone who's face is on a t-shirt at Target. Or a book jacket,” she added darkly.
“See, this is why we're glad the US Air force holds all marketing rights to WarMachine,” Rhodey grinned, elbowing Tony in the ribs. “My face isn't on a t-shirt anywhere. Tell Miss Lewis that if she'd like someone to go with her, I'd be happy to accompany her. You know, just to carry stuff.”
“No. No no no, screw that,” Tony slapped Rhodey's arm away. “You're not going to leave me out of this. I haven't gotten to ruin a douche bag’s day for a really long time—not legitimately, anyways. And really, no one's face goes on a t-shirt, does it? No, it's my helmet, and Cap's shield, and the hammer, and all that. Icons. Branding. No one cares about our faces. Well, Banner's, but he's usually covered in green anyways so who's going to notice? JARVIS,” Tony brought his Starkwatch up so fast that Rhodey thought he was going to smash his own nose with it, “will you kindly ask all the big, imposing men we can find to meet me at the Tower's helipad in, oh, twenty minutes? Please and thank you.” He turned back to Jane, who was beginning to lose her habitual sour expression in favor of a slowly-spreading grin. “Any chance you've got Darcy's old address handy?”
_____
Darcy made it up to the common room on the living-quarters floor of the Tower by the time the pizza arrived, and was greeted by the sight of Jane sharing out beers and laughing with almost the entire male roster of the Avengers.
There was also a neat stack of cardboard boxes in the middle of the floor.
“Uh, hi, superhero pizza party,” she said, approaching slowly and waving. “What's, um, what's all this?”
“Darcy! Pull up a pepperoni, sweetheart,” Clint Barton opened a pizza carton and wafted the scent theatrically in her general direction. “We were just filling in Doctor Foster about our adventures this afternoon.”
Jane turned her bright smile on Darcy, wiping tears of laughter out of the corner of her eye. “Oh, Thor's going to be so upset that he missed this. You'll love it, Darce, c'mon over. There's cider,” she added, offering a bottle to her bemused assistant. Darcy took it and perched on the edge of the couch next to Jane and Doctor Banner.
“So we heard about your recent relationship troubles,” Tony said, and held up a placating hand when Darcy turned to Jane with outrage writ large on her face. “We pried, Darcy, we pried into your personal life, but it was all for a good cause, and it turned out to be a really fun afternoon, so everyone comes out a winner. Rhodey and Banner voted for a low-key approach first, and they knocked on the door and politely asked your former...roommate...to let them get your belongings out of the apartment.”
“Dude's a douche bag,” Rhodey put in. “He use that kind of language around you? Man, I'd've knocked his teeth out months ago.”
“He slammed the door in our faces,” Banner added, gingerly picking a slice of pizza from the box and blowing on it.
“So naturally they called for backup,” Barton continued, handing Banner a napkin. “Cap and Tony came up the elevator just as the building's super got there--”
“Do you know, I have never seen a man take a bribe so fast?” Tony grinned around his own mouthful of cheese. “I wouldn't have put so many twenties in that wad if I knew he was going to be so easy to get rid of.”
“Took the money and ran.” This confirmation came from Rogers as he settled into an armchair and set a stack of plastic plates on the coffee table next to the pizza. Out of his Cap uniform, Steve looked more relaxed than Darcy could remember seeing him, even as he made significant glances between the picnic plates and the pizza for Banner's and Tony's benefit. (Neither took the hint, so Steve sighed and heaped a slice onto his own plate.)
''So you bribed the building super...?” Darcy said faintly, clutching her still-unopened bottle of cider.
“Yep. Got him out of the way right as the douche bag opened the door again,” Rhodey picked up the thread of the story. “He took one look at the all of us standing there and I swear, I have never seen a man turn that many different colors in my life. I thought dude was gonna have a stroke.”
“I'm sure a stroke would have made the afternoon make more sense to him,” Steve mused, chewing.
“Right, so we told him, we're here to get Darcy's stuff, and he just kind of....backed off,” Rhodey continued. “I mean, what was he gonna do? Even if he doesn't know who we are, you've got four guys storming your front door, even that guy had the sense to back off. He goes, 'fine, take her stuff. I don't give a fuck', like he wasn't about to start peeing his pants right there.”
“Wait, you said four guys at the front door? Where were you, Barton?” Jane asked.
“On the fire escape,” Clint grinned. “Darcy, you really weren't safe there anyways. The locks on your windows are a joke. I was in in under six seconds.”
“Yeah, in in under six, and just grabbing random stuff,” Steve said. “I saw you everywhere, Barton. What all did you get?”
Clint pointed proudly to the stack of boxes. “Miss Lewis, in one of those boxes you will find every single lightbulb your old apartment had to offer, including the spares from your bathroom cabinet. Same with all of the cleaning products from both the bathroom and the kitchen, and as much toilet paper as I could find.”
Darcy goggled at him.
“We got all the clothes we figured were yours,” Steve offered, “and anything else from the bathroom that looked like it belonged to you. Or that looked like something you would like.”
“We didn't bring any furniture, because we couldn't figure out how we were going to get it all back on the subway,” Banner added. “So Steve and Rhodes stacked everything on end in one corner of the bedroom.”
“...You took the subway...?”
“Yep. Supporting the public transportation of the great City of New York,” Tony smiled. “And I don't know about you, but I was surprised at how much furniture your old bedroom could hold. The sofa, the two recliners, the coffee table, plus that tiny kitchen table you had...”
“All those barstools,” Banner reminded him.
“Well, it was a lot easier when we took the bed apart. Kinda like playing that game you're always on, Barton. With the different colored pieces and the hypnotic music?”
Barton snapped his fingers at Steve. “Tetris, right?”
“Yeah, that's it. And here I thought video games wouldn't have any real-world applications at all,” Steve grinned, then held up one finger, as though a thought had just popped into his brain. He dug in one pants pocket and tossed a plastic baggie over to Darcy, who caught it almost absentmindedly.
She held it up: it was full of bolts, screws, nuts, and wooden pegs. “Dare I ask what this is?”
“Hardware,” Tony supplied. “From anything that had loose hardware to take. Bed frame, coffee table, only one of the recliners, and what we could glean from that stupid IKEA dresser of his without it falling down.”
“What 'we' could glean?” Rhodey reached over and popped the top off of the bottle of cider still clutched in Darcy's hand. “You were in the kitchen the whole time. You didn't touch a stick of furniture!”
“Yeah, what were you up to, Stark?” Barton asked, passing a plate of pizza over to Darcy, who laid down the bag of hardware to take it.
Tony grinned, and Darcy knew he was more pleased with his own genius than anything else. “Well, since you asked...My original plan was to take any and all coffee-related items except for the coffee itself, but then I noticed three things: one, that you had not only a coffee maker, but a standard toaster and a toaster oven; two, that there was a full toolbox under the kitchen sink; and three, that your coffee canister was just about empty and I couldn't find any new stuff in the cabinet.”
“Okay,” Darcy said slowly, finally taking a sip from her bottle.
“I mean, toasters, toaster ovens, and coffee makers all rely on the same basic components, they're all just configured a little differently and use different amounts of power, right? So with your toolbox, which made it back in one of those boxes, by the way--”
“Tony,” Jane said warningly.
“Right. I, uh, disassembled the toaster oven and reconfigured the coffee maker and toaster so that neither of them will ever make a decent anything ever again. There's no longer a setting on the toaster that is less than burnt beyond recognition, and the coffee maker spout has been rerouted back into the water hopper. Not my best work by a long shot but I was under a deadline and working with extremely limited resources.”
Smug silence reigned as Darcy stared at the plate of pizza in her lap. Then she sniffled a little, and looked up at Tony.
“Why didn't you take the remaining coffee?”
“Oh, if it was on the shopping list to be replaced anyways, I didn't figure that it would make much of an impact.”
“Gotcha.” Darcy nodded, then held up her free hand in the air, palm out.
“Don't leave me hangin', boys,” she said, and one by one they each leaned in to give her a high five.