Bygone

The alley is suspiciously neat. The breath becomes stuck in her chest, an icy fist of fear gripping her tight. With shaking hands she fumbles for the pouch. Lipstick red. She almost drops the pager, but manages to ping Tony. She does it three times, but it doesn’t make her feel better.

Her face is tingling, and she tries to make herself take deeper, slower breaths before she begins moving towards the mouth of the alley. It’s hot, and despite the cleaner look, the garbage still smells ripe.

The neighborhood has made a comeback. Shops are open, restaurants are quaint, and windows have flower boxes. The bank, she can see it. It’s a coffee shop, with little tables out front.

There are no pay phones. There is no newspaper stand. Darcy tries to date the cars, but she’d never had enough money to care much before she’d gotten zapped out of Jane’s lab. The cars are more bulbous. Swooping lines, as compared to the boxier models of the early nineties.

More deep breaths. She can smell the salt and bread from the pretzel cart. It doesn’t help though. She’s panicking. There is no Howard here, there never will be again. And she’d let Tony down.

She’d seen those pictures of him coming back to the States. He’d been tortured. There had been rumors of involuntary body modification. How could she have left without warning him? Preparing him? For what? To not change some future she may never see again?

Everything is jarringly familiar to her. It makes her sick with anxiety, and she wants to scream. Beg someone to tell her what year it is. She recognizes the billboards from her childhood. People everywhere walk while talking on cell phones. The music that plays on outdoor speakers are songs that she already knows.

There’s a busy café on the corner. Sandwiches. Salads. Business types hurrying around on their lunch breaks. A flat screen television on the wall shows the stocks, and next to that, the date. June 15th, 2004.

She leans against a light pole until a police officer asks her if she’s alright. He offers to call someone, or get her a bottle of water. Darcy waves him off and starts walking.

She’s alive somewhere in this time. She’s nine years old. She’s probably sitting in Mrs. Kreitmeyer’s class, smarting off and earning herself time in the time-out box, which she always pretended was a rocket.

Or she could be sitting on a lunch table bench eating a Lunchable and drinking a Capri Sun. She's asking too many questions and annoying her teachers, the bus driver, and most of all her mother.

It is physically hard for her to not curl up in a ball on the sidewalk. The cars seem too fast and horns are too loud. There are too many lights around her.

She finally sees a payphone and calls SI. She tells them it’s Darcy Lewis.

“Who?” The man asks, and Darcy's sweaty hand tightens around the plastic receiver. “I’m sorry, I don’t see an appointment for you.”

She knows she has fucking Stane to blame for this. It doesn't help much. Stark Industries had been Howard's, and it had been there for her. It's another one of her touchstones gone. Another place that she had belonged that has been made foreign and strange to her by the passing of time. It's the apartment she'd shared with Steve housing a different family and the door slammed in her face. It's the yard behind the old brownstone where John had set Darcy and Rebecca on blankets in shade of trees that are now gone. It's the phone numbers she has memorized that won't connect to the right people anymore.

It's the names on the tip of her tongue, of the people who are gone.

She somehow manages to get to the apartment. Her key still works.

Tony finds her twisted in the bed sheets ten hours later. He drags her into the shower fully clothed, ignoring her protests. He shampoos her hair with no finesse. He ignores her insistence that conditioner is necessary.

After, he pushes her into one of the dining room chairs. “Eat.”

Her plate holds two snickers, a pile of peanuts, and a bag of Doritos. He also brings her a glass of whiskey.

She can’t settle, not even when he brings her back to Malibu. She’s terrified of the next time she leaves.

Tony is on edge with her. He does his best, but he’s not good with emotions. It's okay, because she and Tony speak the same language when they're fucked up. There is comfort in his snark as he works in the labs with her, and when she reaches for a drink he's right there with her. Darcy can't help but wonder if Maria somehow saw this kinship in them, way back then. That they would be able to wade through the other's pain, dodge the attacks, weather the barbs, and somehow cling to the other so that what would be pure and simple self destructive pain, and hurt, and being so fucking lost - instead it's maybe clutching at functioning, it's maybe crawling, but it's fighting, and surviving.

One night, after they’ve gone forty hours without sleep and Darcy hasn’t once tried to get him to stop, he carries her over to the couch and collapses with her.

“I just need it to stop.” She whispers when the music shuts off. "I can't keeping doing this. I can't - Tony, something bad happens to you.”

“Look-“ He stops, whatever he’d been about to say lost as he takes in what she just said. “Bad.”

“If I tell you, it won’t happen.”

“Do I die?”

“No.” She can't bring herself to care what it says about her, that she'd change it in a heartbeat if she knew Tony would get killed.

“Am I damaged beyond repair? I mean, I’m fine with going into prosthetics. Robot legs might be cool, right?”

“Tony.” Darcy closes her eyes.

“I come out the other side, right?”

“You’re amazing.” Darcy tells him honestly. Because it’s true. She had been aware of Tony Stark. A billionaire scientist? It was super refreshing to watch a scientist do and say what they wanted. And he’d been hilarious. Plus reversing the company’s position on bombs? Clean energy instead? Darcy had been cheering in her seat.

Iron Man? Fuck. Yeah.

“My hero.” She says, lips twitching a little.

“Alright. Alright.” Tony nods, then he shrugs his shoulders. “Something bad happens to me, I kick ass. That’s all I really need to know.”

“Are you sure?”

He turns to face her, his head flopping to the side. The lab is dark and quiet except for the sound of Dum-E and U’s motors. “The lab accident which shall not be spoken of. Would you stop that from happening?”

Darcy feels a little like he kicked her in the stomach. And she does think of the pain. The grief that lurks inside her, ready to well up at the strangest times, when she hears a song she’d danced to with Steve, when she hears a laugh like Rebecca’s out on the street. When she sees a sail boat on the horizon.

She shakes her head silently. She could never take it back. Stop herself from sharing that short time with Steve. From knowing all of the people that she’d known, that had pieces of her heart.

“Fate. If you believe in that. I don’t, but.” Tony shrugs again. “It’s my shitty thing right? You know how I hate it when people take my things.”

Darcy is woken by a woman’s voice the next day. She's curled into the couch, and her mouth is as dry as the Sahara. Why, whiskey? The woman berates Tony, tells him he will be present at the board meeting that day, and he will be showered. And that he needs to eat something.

Darcy peeks her head over the back of the couch and watches Pepper Potts walk away. She’s dressed much like she had been the day Darcy met her. Professional as fuck, as Darcy had told Jane later. It was the first and only time Darcy had been embarrassed by her Iron Man pajamas.

Tony is rubbing the back of his neck when he looks at her.

“I like her.” Darcy says simply.

Tony attends his board meeting, and Darcy goes to visit Peggy. She’s the only one left. Peggy lives at home, but there’s an aide. Peggy seems active, and waves away what she describes as annoying issues with her memory.

Darcy meets Tony back at the mansion. It’s dusty and smells stale, in a way it never had before. Darcy can’t stand it, and spends days opening windows and airing it out.

Though the woman doesn’t know it, Darcy is the bane of Pepper Potts’ existence, because Tony hardly leaves her side.

Obadiah is pushing for something, Tony is resisting in his own way, which means not showing up and never committing, and Pepper is displeased.

And while Tony won’t admit it to Darcy or himself, he cares what Pepper thinks of him. He wants Pepper to be impressed. He just seems to think that would mean working nine to five, running the company, and courting the board.

Darcy isn’t sure how the two of them worked things out so that they were together, but she knows they did. She tries to tell Tony to just be himself, and that earns her the most scathing look she’s received since he was a smart ass twelve year old.

It gets smoothed over because Jim is coming back on leave. He’s a damn Colonel now. Tony is, of course, throwing a party.

Jim is apparently more receptive to Tony’s parties when he’s returning from deployments rather than embarking on them. Tony doesn’t tell Jim that Darcy is present, and lists off increasingly extravagant and frankly, some depraved components of the party. Jim greets every one with some variation of ‘uh-huh.’

Darcy is glad to see the Malibu house again. She’s glad to see her room. It’s like she’s connecting the steps of her life, from the mansion to her new life with Tony. Where Brooklyn had felt like a different world, she’s now constantly reminded that she’s off track in her own world. Quickly encroaching on her own time. And the Malibu house, Tony, is her safe place.

When Jim walks into the Malibu house, there is food, there are streamers and confetti. There is a yacht, and the music is loud enough to vibrate drinks off the coffee table.

But there are no strippers. And no supermodels.

“Disappointed?” Tony asks, walking a drink over to him.

“You look like you’ve been... eating.” Jim says slowly. “You look good.”

“Thank you, thank you.” Darcy walks out of the kitchen. “You flatter me.”

Jim does a double take. “Girl, when you say complicated you mean-“

“Complicated got eaten by a space cat and hacked up into a cluster fuck with turbo boosters.” Darcy smiles. “But I thought we were here to party?”

In public Darcy stays on Jim’s arm, and Tony walks well ahead, keeping the focus of the press on him. They spend four days together out on the coast, two on the yacht. They eat meals that cost more than Darcy’s replacement retainers, all six of them combined.

Darcy gets to witness Jim leading a sexy times friend out of the yacht’s living room to a boat waiting outside, while she loudly crunches her cereal during her morning cartoons.

Just as he comes back inside, a blonde woman stumbles out of Tony’s room, still tying her sarong, with make-up smeared under her eyes. Darcy is almost sad she’s not going to get to talk to this one, she has a massive coral reef tattoo on her left arm. That's gotta have a cool story behind it.

“Yer gonna need a bigger boat, Jim.” Darcy says, still crunching.

“Just in time!” Jim greets the woman, while giving Darcy a quelling look and Darcy smiles happily, thinking how nice it is that people get her pop culture references now. “Tony arranged for a private speed boat to take you back to your hotel.”

Jim has to leave them an hour later, to go be a grown up, he says.

“I resent that!” Darcy is now sitting next to Tony and eating her cereal dry.

“Yeah. We’re grown-ups.” Tony doesn’t look away from Ren & Stimpy. “Not our fault we got a better gig than you.”

“Green isn’t a good color for you, Jim.”

“Both figuratively, jealousy is ugly, and literally, you should stick to the blue family.” Tony points his spoon at Jim.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tony did you talk to her yet?”

“Talk to her? About what? There’s nothing to talk to her about.” Tony chokes on his Lucky Charms, leaning forward and spluttering even as he glares at Jim. “And you’re going to be late. You hate to be late.”

“I told you if you didn’t bring it up yourself I would before I left.” Jim pulls his sunglasses out of his pocket and puts them on. Darcy gives him a thumbs up, because he’s pulling those off for sure. He winks and Tony looks between them before flipping Jim off. “Tony drunk dialed Pepper two nights ago. It was not pretty. I’ll see you two adults later.”

“We’ll show you adult!’ Darcy calls after him before turning on Tony. “You drunk dialed Pepper Potts?”

They bicker about how to fix it for the day it takes the yacht to reach Tony’s port. Darcy thinks he should talk to Pepper. Tony thinks that idea is insane and stupid, and that the obvious course of action is to give Pepper a raise and never speak of any of it again.

When Darcy isn’t exactly on board with that plan, Tony decides he has something important to do in LA. He calls for his helicopter for her and takes off in his red Lamborghini. She’s not surprised. He hates going to see Peggy.

Peggy usually compares him to his father. And calls things like she sees them, so if she has a newspaper handy she’ll point to a picture of Tony drunk at a gala and call him a spoiled child.

So his little tantrum serves two points. It ends the discussion about Pepper, and it gets him out of going with Darcy to check in with Peg. Darcy flies to the airstrip and steals his jet to fly home to the New York apartment. This plane has a crew, a gaudy lounge, a bedroom, and stripper poles. Classy.

Using a clam shell phone for the first time in her life, Darcy calls Tony and has him talk to the crew so they’ll fly her. He's an ass, but he picks up.